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diff --git a/42686-0.txt b/42686-0.txt index 080b692..f0374f4 100644 --- a/42686-0.txt +++ b/42686-0.txt @@ -1,39 +1,4 @@ -The Project Gutenberg EBook of A History of Epidemics in Britain (Volume I -of II), by Charles Creighton - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with -almost no restrictions whatsoever. 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You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org - - -Title: A History of Epidemics in Britain (Volume I of II) - from A.D. 664 to the Extinction of Plague - -Author: Charles Creighton - -Release Date: May 11, 2013 [EBook #42686] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF EPIDEMICS IN BRITAIN *** - - - - -Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at -http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images -generously made available by The Internet Archive.) - - - - - - - - - -A HISTORY OF EPIDEMICS IN BRITAIN. - - - - - London: C. J. CLAY AND SONS, - CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE, - AND - H. K. LEWIS, - 136, GOWER STREET, W.C. - - Cambridge: DEIGHTON, BELL AND CO. - Leipzig: F. A. BROCKHAUS. - New York: MACMILLAN AND CO. - - - - - A HISTORY OF EPIDEMICS IN BRITAIN - - from A.D. 664 to the Extinction of Plague - - - BY CHARLES CREIGHTON, M.A., M.D., - FORMERLY DEMONSTRATOR OF ANATOMY IN THE - UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE. - - - CAMBRIDGE: - AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. - 1891 - - [_All rights reserved._] - - - - - Cambridge: - PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AND SONS, - AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. - - - - -PREFACE. - - -The title and contents-table of this volume will show sufficiently its -scope, and a glance at the references in the several chapters will show -its sources. But it may be convenient to premise a few general remarks -under each of those heads. The date 664 A.D. has been chosen as a -starting-point, for the reason that it is the year of the first pestilence -in Britain recorded on contemporary or almost contemporary authority, that -of Beda's 'Ecclesiastical History.' The other limit of the volume, the -extinction of plague in 1665-66, marks the end of a long era of epidemic -sickness, which differed much in character from the era next following. At -or near the Restoration we come, as it were, to the opening of a new seal -or the outpouring of another vial. The history proceeds thenceforth on -other lines and comes largely from sources of another kind; allowing for a -little overlapping about the middle of the seventeenth century, it might -be continued from 1666 almost without reference to what had gone before. -The history is confined to Great Britain and Ireland, except in Chapter -XI. which is occupied with the first Colonies and the early voyages, -excepting also certain sections of other chapters, where the history has -to trace the antecedents of some great epidemic sickness on a foreign -soil. - -The sources of the work have been the ordinary first-hand sources of -English history in general. In the medieval period these include the -monastic histories, chronicles, lives, or the like (partly in the editions -of Gale, Savile, Twysden, and Hearne, and of the English Historical -Society, but chiefly in the great series edited for the Master of the -Rolls), the older printed collections of State documents, and, for the -Black Death, the recently published researches upon the rolls of manor -courts and upon other records. From near the beginning of the Tudor -period, the Calendars of State Papers (Domestic, Foreign, and Colonial), -become an invaluable source of information for the epidemiologist just as -for other historians. Also the Reports of the Historical Manuscripts -Commission, together with its Calendars of private collections of papers, -have yielded a good many facts. Many exact data, relating more -particularly to local outbreaks of plague, have been found in the county, -borough, and parish histories, which are of very unequal value for the -purpose and are often sadly to seek in the matter of an index. The -miscellaneous sources drawn upon have been very numerous, perhaps more -numerous, from the nature of the subject, than in most other branches of -history. - -Medical books proper are hardly available for a history of English -epidemics until the Elizabethan period, and they do not begin to be really -important for the purpose until shortly before the date at which the -present history ends. These have been carefully sought for, most of the -known books having been met with and examined closely for illustrative -facts. In the latter part of the seventeenth century the best English -writers on medicine occupied themselves largely with the epidemics of -their own time, and the British school of epidemiology, which took a -distinguished start with Willis, Sydenham and Morton, was worthily -continued by many writers throughout the eighteenth century; so that the -history subsequent to the period here treated of becomes more and more -dependent upon medical sources, and of more special interest to the -profession itself. - -Reference has been made not unfrequently to manuscripts; of which the more -important that have been used (for the first time) are a treatise on the -Sweating Sickness of 1485 by a contemporary physician in London, two -original London plague-bills of the reign of Henry VIII., and a valuable -set of tables of the weekly burials and christenings in London for five -years (almost complete) from 1578 to 1583, among the Cecil papers--these -last by kind permission of the Marquis of Salisbury. - -Collecting materials for a British epidemiology from these various sources -is not an easy task; had it been so, it would hardly have been left to be -done, or, so far as one knows, even attempted, for the first time at so -late a period. Where the sources of information are so dispersed and -casual it is inevitable that some things should have been overlooked: be -the omissions few or many, they would certainly have been more but for -suggestions and assistance kindly given from time to time by various -friends. - -The materials being collected, it remained to consider how best to use -them. The existing national epidemiologies, such as that of Italy by -Professor Corradi or the older 'Epidemiologia Espaola' of Villalba, are -in the form of Annals. But it seemed practicable, without sacrificing a -single item of the chronology, to construct from the greater events of -sickness in the national annals a systematic history that should touch and -connect with the general history at many points and make a volume -supplementary to the same. Such has been the attempt; and in estimating -the measure of its success it may be kept in mind that it is the first of -the kind, British or foreign, in its own department. The author can hardly -hope to have altogether escaped errors in touching upon the general -history of the country over so long a period; but he has endeavoured to go -as little as possible outside his proper province and to avoid making -gratuitous reflections upon historical characters and events. The greater -epidemic diseases have, however, been discussed freely--from the -scientific side or from the point of view of their theory. - -It remains to acknowledge the liberality of the Syndics of the Cambridge -University Press in the matter of publication, and the friendly interest -taken in the work by their Chairman, the Master of Peterhouse. - -_November, 1891._ - - - - -CONTENTS. - - - PAGE - - CHAPTER I. - - PESTILENCES PREVIOUS TO THE BLACK DEATH, CHIEFLY FROM FAMINES. - - The plague of 664-684 described by Beda, and its probable relation - to the plague of Justinian's reign, 542- 4 - - Other medieval epidemics not from famine 9 - - Chronology of Famine Sicknesses, with full accounts of those of - 1194-7, 1257-9, and 1315-16 15 - - Few traces of epidemics of Ergotism; reason of England's immunity - from _ignis sacer_ 52 - - Generalities on medieval famines in England 65 - - - CHAPTER II. - - LEPROSY IN MEDIEVAL BRITAIN. - - Medieval meanings of _lepra_ 69 - - Biblical associations of Leprosy 79 - - Medieval religious sentiment towards lepers 81 - - Leprosy-prevalence judged by the leper-houses,--their number in - England, special destination, and duration 86 - - Leper-houses in Scotland and Ireland 99 - - The prejudice against lepers 100 - - Laws against lepers 106 - - Things favouring Leprosy in the manner of life--Modern analogy of - Pellagra 107 - - - CHAPTER III. - - THE BLACK DEATH OF 1348-9. - - Arrival of the Black Death, and progress through Britain, with - contemporary English and Irish notices of the symptoms 114 - - Inquiry into the extent of the mortality 123 - - Antecedents of the Black Death in the East--Overland China - trade--Favouring conditions in China 142 - - The Theory of Bubo-Plague 156 - - Illustrations from modern times 163 - - Summary of causes, and of European favouring conditions 173 - - - CHAPTER IV. - - ENGLAND AFTER THE BLACK DEATH, WITH THE EPIDEMICS TO 1485. - - Efforts to renew the war with France 177 - - Direct social and economic consequences in town and country 180 - - More lasting effects on farming, industries and population 190 - - Epidemics following the Black Death 202 - - Medieval English MSS. on Plague 208 - - The 14th century chronology continued 215 - - The public health in the 15th century 222 - - Chronology of Plagues, 15th century 225 - - Plague &c. in Scotland and Ireland, 1349-1475 233 - - - CHAPTER V. - - THE SWEATING SICKNESS, 1485-1551. - - The First invasion of the Sweat in 1485 237 - - The Second outbreak in 1508 243 - - The Third Sweat in 1517 245 - - The Fourth Sweat in 1528 250 - - Extension of the Fourth Sweat to the Continent in 1529 256 - - The Fifth Sweat in 1551 259 - - Antecedents of the English Sweat 265 - - Endemic Sweat of Normandy 271 - - Theory of the English Sweat 273 - - Extinction of the Sweat in England 279 - - - CHAPTER VI. - - PLAGUE IN THE TUDOR PERIOD. - - Chronology of the outbreaks of Plague in London, provincial - towns, and the country generally, from 1485 to 1556 282 - - The London Plague of 1563 304 - - Preventive practice in Plague-time under the Tudors 309 - - Sanitation in Plantagenet and Tudor times 322 - - The disposal of the dead 332 - - Chronology of Plague 1564-1592--Vital statistics of London - 1578-1583 337 - - The London Plague of 1592-1593 351 - - Plague in the Provinces, 1592-1598 356 - - Plague in Scotland, 1495-1603--Skene on the Plague (1568) 360 - - Plague in Ireland in the Tudor period 371 - - - CHAPTER VII. - - GAOL FEVERS, INFLUENZAS, AND OTHER FEVERS IN THE TUDOR PERIOD. - - The Black Assizes of Cambridge, 1522 375 - - Oxford Black Assizes, 1577 376 - - Exeter Black Assizes, 1586 383 - - Increase of Pauperism, Vagrancy, &c. in the Tudor period 387 - - Influenzas and other "strange fevers" and fluxes, 1540-1597 397 - - - CHAPTER VIII. - - THE FRENCH POX. - - Meagreness of English records 414 - - Evidence of its invasion of Scotland and England, in 1497 and - subsequent years 417 - - English writings on the Pox in the Elizabethan period, with some - notices for the Stuart period 423 - - The circumstances of the great European outbreak in 1494--Invasion - of Italy by Charles VIII. 429 - - - CHAPTER IX. - - SMALLPOX AND MEASLES. - - First accounts of Smallpox in Arabic writings--Nature of the - disease 439 - - European Smallpox in the Middle Ages 445 - - Measles in medieval writings--Origin of the names "measles" and - "pocks" 448 - - First English notices of Smallpox in the Tudor period 456 - - Great increase of Smallpox in the Stuart period 463 - - Smallpox in Continental writings of the 16th century 467 - - - CHAPTER X. - - PLAGUE, FEVER AND INFLUENZA FROM THE ACCESSION OF JAMES I. TO THE - RESTORATION. - - Growth of London in the Tudor and Stuart periods 471 - - The London Plague of 1603 474 - - Annual Plague in London after 1603 493 - - Plague in the Provinces, Ireland and Scotland, in 1603 and - following years 496 - - Malignant Fever preceding the Plague of 1625 504 - - The London Plague of 1625 507 - - Plague in the Provinces in 1625 and following years 520 - - The London Plague of 1636 529 - - Fever in London and in England generally to 1643 532 - - War Typhus in Oxfordshire &c. and at Tiverton, 1643-44 547 - - Plague in the Provinces, Scotland and Ireland during the Civil - Wars 555 - - Fever in England 1651-52 566 - - The Influenzas or Fevers of 1657-59 568 - - - CHAPTER XI. - - SICKNESSES OF EARLY VOYAGES AND COLONIES. - - Scurvy in the early voyages, north and south 579 - - The remarkable epidemic of Fever in Drake's expedition of 1585-6 - to the Spanish Main 585 - - Other instances of ship-fevers, flux, scurvy, &c. 590 - - Scurvy &c. in the East India Company's ships: the treatment 599 - - Sickness of Virginian and New England voyages and colonies 609 - - Early West Indian epidemics, including the first of Yellow - Fever--The Slave Trade 613 - - The epidemic of 1655-6 at the first planting of Jamaica 634 - - - CHAPTER XII. - - THE GREAT PLAGUE OF LONDON, AND THE LAST OF PLAGUE IN ENGLAND. - - Literature of the Great Plague 646 - - Antecedents, beginnings and progress of the London Plague of 1665 651 - - Mortality and incidents of the Great Plague--Characters of the - disease 660 - - Plague near London and in the Provinces, 1665-66 679 - - The Plague at Eyam 1665-66 682 - - The Plague at Colchester, 1665-66, and the last of Plague in - England 688 - - - - -ERRATA. - - -At p. 28 line 4, _for_ "for" _read_ "at." At p. 126 line 2 _for_ "1351" -_read_ "1350;" same change at p. 130, lines 6 and 9. At p. 185 note 1 -_read_ "Ochenkowski." At p. 264 line 18, and at p. 554 line 11 from -bottom, read "_pathognomonicum_." At p. 401, note 3 _for_ "1658" _read_ -"1558." At p. 420, line 17, _for_ "Henry IV.," _read_ "Henry V." At p. -474, line 4, _for_ "more" _read_ "less." At p. 649 line 22 _omit_ -"Hancock." - - - - -CHAPTER I. - -PESTILENCES PREVIOUS TO THE BLACK DEATH, CHIEFLY FROM FAMINES. - - -The Middle Age of European history has no naturally fixed beginning or -ending. The period of Antiquity may be taken as concluded by the fourth -Christian century, or by the fifth or by the sixth; the Modern period may -be made to commence in the fourteenth, or in the fifteenth or in the -sixteenth. The historian Hallam includes a thousand years in the medieval -period, from the invasion of France by Clovis to the invasion of Italy by -Charles VIII. in 1494. We begin, he says, in darkness and calamity, and we -break off as the morning breathes upon us and the twilight reddens into -the lustre of day. To the epidemiologist the medieval period is rounded -more definitely. At the one end comes the great plague in the reign of -Justinian, and at the other end the Black Death. Those are the two -greatest pestilences in recorded history; each has no parallel except in -the other. They were in the march of events, and should not be fixed upon -as doing more than their share in shaping the course of history. But no -single thing stands out more clearly as the stroke of fate in bringing the -ancient civilization to an end than the vast depopulation and solitude -made by the plague which came with the corn-ships from Egypt to Byzantium -in the year 543; and nothing marks so definitely the emergence of Europe -from the middle period of stagnation as the other depopulation and social -upheaval made by the plague which came in the overland track of Genoese -and Venetian traders from China in the year 1347. While many other -influences were in the air to determine the oncoming and the offgoing of -the middle darkness, those two world-wide pestilences were singular in -their respective effects: of the one, we may say that it turned the key of -the medieval prison-house; and of the other, that it unlocked the door -after eight hundred years. - -The Black Death and its after-effects will occupy a large part of this -work, so that what has just been said of it will not stand as a bare -assertion. But the plague in the reign of Justinian hardly touches British -history, and must be left with a brief reference. Gibbon was not -insensible of the part that it played in the great drama of his history. -"There was," he says, "a visible decrease of the human species, which has -never been repaired in some of the fairest countries of the globe." After -vainly trying to construe the arithmetic of Procopius, who was a witness -of the calamity at Byzantium, he agrees to strike off one or more ciphers, -and adopts as an estimate "not wholly inadmissible," a mortality of one -hundred millions. The effects of that depopulation, in part due to war, -are not followed in the history. So far as Gibbon's method could go, the -plague came for him into the same group of phenomena as comets and -earthquakes; it was part of the stage scenery amidst which the drama of -emperors, pontiffs, generals, eunuchs, Theodoras, and adventurers -proceeded. Even of the comets and earthquakes, he remarks that they were -subject to physical laws; and it was from no want of scientific spirit -that he omitted to show how a plague of such magnitude had a place in the -physical order, and not less in the moral order. - -A new science of epidemiology has sprung up since the time of Gibbon, who -had to depend on the writings of Mead, a busy and not very profound Court -physician. More particularly the Egyptian origin of the plague of the -sixth century, and its significance, have been elucidated by the brilliant -theory of Pariset, of which some account will be given at the end of the -chapter on the Black Death. For the present, we are concerned with it only -in so far as it may have a bearing upon the pestilences of Britain. The -plague of the sixth century made the greatest impression, naturally, upon -the oldest civilized countries of Europe; but it extended also to the -outlying provinces of the empire, and to the countries of the barbarians. -It was the same disease as the Black Death of the fourteenth century, the -bubo-plague; and it spread from country to country, and lasted from -generation to generation, as that more familiar infection is known to have -done[1]. - -Renewals of it are heard of in one part of Europe or another until the end -of the sixth century, when its continuity is lost. But it is clear that -the seeds of pestilence were not wanting in Rome and elsewhere in the -centuries following. Thus, about the year 668, the English -archbishop-elect, Vighard, having gone to Rome to get his election -confirmed by the Pope Vitalianus, was shortly after his arrival cut off by -pestilence, with almost all who had gone with him[2]. Twelve years after, -in 680, there was another severe pestilence in the months of July, August -and September, causing a great mortality at Rome, and such panic at Pavia -that the inhabitants fled to the mountains[3]. In 746 a pestilence is said -to have advanced from Sicily and Calabria, and to have made such -devastation in Rome that there were houses without a single inhabitant -left[4]. The common name for all such epidemics is _pestis_ or -_pestilentia_ or _magna mortalitas_, so that it is open to contend that -some other type than bubo-plague, such as fever or flux, may have been at -least a part of them; but no type of infection has ever been so mortal as -the bubo-plague, and a mortality that is distinguished by a chronicler as -causing panic and devastation was presumably of that type. - - -Pestilence in England and Ireland in the Seventh Century. - -It is more than a century after the first great wave of pestilence had -passed over Europe in the reign of Justinian, before we hear of a great -plague in England and Ireland. Dr Willan, the one English writer on -medicine who has turned his erudition to that period, conjectures that the -infection must have come to this country from the continent at an earlier -date. From the year 597, he says, the progress of conversion to the -Christian religion "led to such frequent intercourse with Italy, France -and Belgium, that the epidemical and contagious disease prevailing on the -continent at the close of the sixth century must necessarily be -communicated from time to time through the Heptarchy[5]." Until we come to -the _Ecclesiastical History_ of Beda, the only authorities are the Irish -annals; and in them, the first undoubted entry of a great plague -corresponds in date with that of Beda's history, the year 664. It is true, -indeed, that the Irish annals, or the later recensions of them, carry the -name that was given to the plague of 664 (_pestis ictericia_ or _buide -connaill_) back to an alleged mortality in 543, or 548, and make the -latter the "first _buide connaill_"; but the obituary of saints on that -occasion is merely what might have occurred in the ordinary way, and it is -probable, from the form of entry, that it was really the rumour of the -great plague at Byzantium and elsewhere in 543 and subsequent years that -had reached the Irish annalist[6]. - -The plague of 664 is the only epidemic in early British annals that can be -regarded as a plague of the same nature, and on the same great scale, as -the devastation of the continent of Europe more than a century earlier, -whether it be taken to be a late offshoot of that or not. The English -pestilence of 664 is the same that was fabled long after in prose and -verse as the great plague "of Cadwallader's time." It left a mark on the -traditions of England, which may be taken as an index of its reality and -its severity; and with it the history of epidemics in Britain may be said -to begin. It was still sufficiently recent to have been narrated by -eyewitnesses to Beda, whose _Ecclesiastical History_ is the one authentic -source, besides the entry in the Irish annals, of our information -concerning it. - -The pestilence broke out suddenly in the year 664, and after -"depopulating" the southern parts of England, seized upon the province of -Northumbria, where it raged for a long time far and wide, destroying an -immense multitude of people[7]. In another passage Beda says that the same -mortality occurred also among the East Saxons, and he appears to connect -therewith their lapse to paganism[8]. - -The epidemic is said to have entered Ireland at the beginning of August, -but whether in 664 or 665 is not clear. According to one of those vague -estimates which we shall find again in connexion with the Black Death, the -mortality in Ireland was so vast that only a third part of the people were -left alive. The Irish annals do, however, contain a long list of notables -who died in the pestilence[9]. - -Beda follows his general reference to the plague by a story of the -monastery of Rathmelsigi, identified with Melfont in Meath, which he -heard many years after from the chief actor in it. Egbert, an English -youth of noble birth, had gone to Ireland to lead the monastic life, like -many more of his countrymen of the same rank or of the middle class. The -plague in his monastery had been so severe that all the monks either were -dead of it or had fled before it, save himself and another, who were both -lying sick of the disease. Egbert's companion died; and he himself, having -vowed to lead a life of austerity if he were spared, survived to give -effect to his vow and died in the year 729 with a great name for sanctity -at the age of ninety. - -The plague of 664 is said, perhaps on constructive evidence[10], to have -continued in England and Ireland for twenty years; and there are several -stories told by Beda of incidents in monasteries which show, at least, -that outbreaks of a fatal infection occurred here or there as late as 685. -Several of these relate to the new monastery of Barking in Essex, founded -for monks and nuns by a bishop of London in 676. First we have a story -relating to many deaths on the male side of the house[11], and then two -stories in which a child of three and certain nuns figure as dying of the -pestilence[12]. Another story appears to relate to the plague in a -monastery on the Sussex coast, seemingly Selsea[13]. Still another, in -which Beda himself is supposed to have played a part, is told of the -monastery of Jarrow, the date of it being deducible from the context as -the year 685. - -Of the two Northumbrian monasteries founded by Benedict, that of Wearmouth -lost several of its monks by the plague, as well as its abbot Easterwine, -who is otherwise known to have died in March, 685. The other monastery of -Jarrow, of which Ceolfrith was abbot, was even more reduced by the -pestilence. All who could read, or preach, or say the antiphonies and -responses were cut off, excepting the abbot and one little boy whom -Ceolfrith had brought up and taught. For a week the abbot conducted the -shortened services by himself, after which he was joined by the voice of -the boy; and these two carried on the work until others had been -instructed. Beda, who is known to have been a pupil of Ceolfrith's at -Jarrow, would then have been about twelve years old, and would correspond -to the boy in the story[14]. - -The nature of these plagues, beginning with the great invasion of 664, can -only be guessed. They have the look of having been due to some poison in -the soil, running hither and thither, as the Black Death did seven -centuries after, and remaining in the country to break out afresh, not -universally as at first, but here and there, as in monasteries. The -hypothesis of a late extension to England and Ireland of the great -European invasion of bubo-plague in 543, would suit the facts so far as we -know them. The one medical detail which has been preserved, on doubtful -authority, that the disease was a _pestis ictericia_, marked by yellowness -of the skin, and colloquially known in the Irish language as _buide -connaill_, is not incompatible with the hypothesis of bubo-plague, and is -otherwise unintelligible[15]. - -For the next seven centuries, the pestilences of Britain are mainly the -results of famine and are therefore of indigenous origin. So strongly is -the type of famine-pestilence impressed upon the epidemic history of -medieval England that the chroniclers and romancists are unable to -dissociate famine from their ideas of pestilence in general. Thus Higden, -in his reference to the outbreak of the Justinian plague at -Constantinople, associates it with famine alone[16]; and the metrical -romancist, Robert of Brunne, who had the great English famine of 1315-16 -fresh in his memory, describes circumstantially the plague of 664 or the -plague of Cadwallader's time, as a famine-pestilence, his details being -taken in part from the account given by Simeon of Durham of the harrying -of Yorkshire by William the Conqueror, and in part, doubtless, from his -own recent experience of a great English famine[17]. But before we come to -these typical famine-pestilences of Britain, which fill the medieval -interval between the foreign invasion of plague in Beda's time and the -foreign invasion of 1348, it remains to dispose in this place of those -outbreaks on English soil which do not bear the marks of famine-sickness, -but, on the other hand, the marks of a virulent infection arising at -particular spots probably from a tainted soil. These have to be collected -from casual notices in the most unlikely corners of monastic chronicles; -but it is just the casual nature of the references that makes them -credible, and leads one to suppose that the recorded instances are only -samples of epidemics not altogether rare in the medieval life of England. - - -Early Epidemics not connected with Famine. - -The earliest of these is mentioned in the annals of the priory of Christ -Church, Canterbury. In the year 829, all the monks save five are said to -have died of pestilence, so that the monastery was left almost desolate. -The archbishop Ceolnoth, who was also the abbot of the monastery, filled -up the vacancies with secular clerks, and he is said to have done so with -the consent of the five monks "that did outlive the plague." The incident -comes into the Canterbury MS. of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle[18] under the -year 870, in connexion with the death of Ceolnoth and the action of his -successor in expelling the seculars and completing the original number of -regulars. So far as the records inform us, that great mortality within the -priory of Christ Church two centuries after it was founded by Augustine, -was an isolated event; the nearest general epidemic to it in the -Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was a great mortality of man and beast about the -year 897 following the Danish invasion which Alfred at length repelled. - -That such deadly intramural epidemics in monasteries were not impossible -is conclusively proved by the authentic particulars of a sudden and severe -mortality among the rich monks of Croyland at a much more recent -date--between the years 1304 and 1315. In the appendix to the chronicle of -Ramsey Abbey[19] there is printed a letter from Simon, abbot of Croyland, -without date but falling between the years above given, addressed to his -neighbours the abbots of Ramsey, Peterborough and Thorney, and the prior -of Spalding. The letter is to ask their prayers on the occasion of the -sudden death of thirteen of the monks of Croyland and the sickness of -others; that large number of the brethren had been cut off within fifteen -days--"potius violenter rapti quam fataliter resoluti[20]." The letter is -written from Daddington, whither abbot Simon had doubtless gone to escape -the infection. - -These are two instances of deadly epidemics within the walls of English -monasteries. In the plague-years 664-685, and long after in the Black -Death, the mortalities among the monks were of the same degree, only there -was an easy explanation of them, in one if not in both cases, as being -part of an imported infection universally diffused in English soil. What -the nature of the occasional outbreaks in earlier times may have been, we -can only guess: something almost as deadly, we may say, as the plague -itself, and equally sudden. The experience was not peculiar to England. An -incident at Rome almost identical with that of Vighard in 668 is related -in a letter sent home in 1188, by Honorius the prior of Canterbury, who -had gone with others of the abbey on a mission to Rome to obtain judgment -in a dispute between the archbishop and the abbey, that the whole of his -following was stricken with sickness and that five were dead. John de -Bremble, who being also abroad was ordered to go to the help of the prior, -wrote home to the abbey that when he reached Rome only one of the brethren -was alive, and he in great danger, and that the first thing he had to do -on his arrival was to attend the cook's funeral[21]. - -There is no clue to the type of these fatal outbreaks of sickness within -monastic communities. One naturally thinks of a soil-poison fermenting -within and around the monastery walls, and striking down the inmates by a -common influence as if at one blow. There are in the medieval history -previous to the Black Death a few instances of local pestilences among the -common people also, which differ from the ordinary famine-sicknesses of -the time. The most significant of these is a story told by William of -Newburgh at the end of his chronicle and probably dating from the -corresponding period, about the year 1196[22]. For several years there had -been, as we shall see, famine and fever in England; but the particular -incident does not relate to the famine, although it may join on to it. It -is the story of a ghost walking, and it comes from the village of Annan on -the Solway, having been related to the monk of Newburgh in Yorkshire by -one who had been an actor in it. A man who had fled from Yorkshire and -taken refuge in the village under the castle of Annan, was killed in a -quarrel about the woman whom he had married, and was buried without the -rites of the church. His unquiet ghost walked, and his corpse tainted the -air of the village; pestilence was in every house, so that the place which -had been populous looked as if deserted, those who escaped the plague -having fled. William of Newburgh's informant had been in the midst of -these calamities, and had taken a lead in mitigating them; he had gone to -certain wise men living "in sacra dominica quae Palmarum dicitur," and -having taken counsel with them, he addressed the people: "Let us dig up -that pestilence and let us burn it with fire" (_effodiamus pestem illam et -comburamus igni_). Two young men were, accordingly, induced to set about -the task. They had not far to dig: "repente cadaver non multa humo egesta -nudaverunt, enormi corpulentia distentum, facie rubenti turgentique supra -modum." - -The story, like others of the kind with a mixture of legend in them, is -more symbolical than real. The wise men of Annan may have been in error in -tracing the plague of their village to a single corpse, but they were -probably on the right lines of causation. It is curious to observe in -another chronicler of the same period, Ralph of Coggeshall in Essex, and -in a part of his chronicle which relates to the last years of Richard I., -and first years of John, a comment upon the action of Pope Innocent III. -(about 1200 A.D.) in interdicting all Christian rites save baptism by the -clergy in France: "O how horrible ... to refuse the Christian rite of -burial to the bodies of the dead, so that they infected the air by their -foetor and struck horror into the souls of the living by their ghastly -looks[23]." The same pope's interdict of decent burial and of other -clerical rites extended to England in 1208, the famous Interdict of the -reign of John. It was the papal method of checkmating the kingdoms of this -world; that it was subversive of traditional decency and immemorial -sanitary precaution was a small matter beside the assertion of the -authority of Peter. - -Rightly or wrongly, taught by experience or misled by fancy, the medieval -world firmly believed that the formal and elaborate disposal of the dead -had a sanitary aspect as well as a pious. The infection of the air, of -which we shall hear much more in connexion with the plague, was a current -notion in England for several centuries before the Black Death. Especially -does the dread of it find expression where corpses were unburied after a -battle, massacre, or calamity of nature. The exertions made in these -circumstances to bury the dead, even when all pious and domestic feeling -was hardened to the barest thought of self-preservation, are explained in -set terms as instigated by the fear of breeding a pestilence. The instinct -is as wide as human nature, and there is clear evidence in our own early -writers that its sanitary meaning was recognised. One such instance may be -quoted from the St Albans annalist of the time of John and first years of -Henry III.[24] In the year 1234, an unusually savage raid was made by the -Welsh as far as Shrewsbury; they laid waste the country by fire and sword; -wayfarers were horrified at the sight of naked and unburied corpses -without number by the road sides, preyed on by ravenous beasts and birds; -the foetor of so much corruption infected the air on all sides, so that -even the dead slew the living. The chronicler's language, "quod etiam -homines sanos mortui peremerunt," is marked by the perspicacity or -correctness which distinguishes him. When the bubo-plague came to be -domesticated in English soil more than a century later, the disposal of -the dead became a sanitary question of obvious importance. But even in the -centuries before the Black Death, and most of all in the times when the -traditional practices of decent burial were interdicted by Popes or turned -to mercenary purposes by clergy[25], we shall perhaps not err in looking -for one, at least, of the causes of localised outbreaks of pestilence in -the tainting of the soil and the air by the corruption of corpses -insufficiently buried and coffined. - -There still remains, before we come to famine-sickness as the common type -of pestilence in medieval England, to discover from the records any -evidence of pestilence due to war and invasion. The domestic history from -first to last is singularly free from such calamities. The whole history -of Mohammedan conquest and occupation is a history of infection following -in the train of war; and in Western Europe, at least from the invasion of -Italy by Charles VIII., when the medieval period (according to Hallam) -closes, the sieges, battles, and campaigns are constantly associated with -epidemic sickness among the people as well as among the troops. There is -only one period in the history of England, that of the civil wars of the -Parliament and the Royalists, in which the people had a real taste of the -common continental experience. The civil wars of York and Lancaster, as we -shall see, touched the common people little, and appear to have bred no -epidemics. - -Apart from civil war, there were invasions, by the Welsh and Scots on the -western and northern marches, and by the Danes. One instance of pestilence -following a Welsh raid in the thirteenth century has been given from Roger -of Wendover. A single instance is recorded in the history of the Danish -invasions. It has been preserved by several independent chroniclers, with -some variation in details; and it appears to have been distinguished by so -much notice for the reason that it illustrates the magnanimity, sanctity, -and miraculous power of St Elphege, archbishop of Canterbury. - -In the year 1010 (or 1011 according to some), the Danes had stormed -Canterbury, burnt the fair city, massacred the inhabitants, or carried -them captive to their ships at Sandwich. The archbishop Elphege was put -on board a small vessel and taken (doubtless by the inland channel which -was then open from the Stour to the Thames) to Greenwich, where he was -imprisoned for seven months[26]. A council had assembled in London for the -purpose of raising forty thousand pounds to buy off the invaders. -According to the account used by Higden[27], Elphege refused to sanction -the payment of a ransom of three thousand pounds for his own person: he -was accordingly taken from prison, and on the 13th of the Calends of May, -1010, was stoned to death by the Danes disappointed of his ransom. -Therefore a pestilence fell upon the invaders, a _dolor viscerum_, which -destroyed them by tens and twenties so that a large number perished. The -earlier narrative of William of Malmesbury[28] is diversified by the -introduction of a miracle, and is otherwise more circumstantial. While the -archbishop was held in durance, a deadly sickness broke out among the -Danes, affecting them in troops (_catervatim_), and proving so rapid in -its effects that death ensued before they could feel pain. The stench of -their unburied bodies so infected the air as to bring a plague upon those -of them who had remained well. As the survivors were thrown into a panic, -"sine numero, sine modo," Elphege appeared upon the scene, and having -administered to them the consecrated bread, restored them to health and -put an end to the plague. - -Disregarding what is fabulous, we may take these narratives to establish -the fact that a swift and fatal pestilence did break out among the Danes -in Kent. It had consisted probably of the same forms of camp sickness, -including dysentery (as the name _dolor viscerum_ implies), which have -occurred in later times. It is the only instance of the kind recorded in -the early history. - - -Medieval Famine-pestilences. - -The foregoing are all the instances of pestilence in early English -history, unconnected with famine, that have been collected in a search -through the most likely sources. The history of English epidemics, -previous to the Black Death, is almost wholly a history of famine -sicknesses; and the list of such famines with attendant sickness, without -mentioning the years of mere scarcity, is a considerable one. - -TABLE OF FAMINE-PESTILENCES IN ENGLAND. - - Year Character Authority - - 679 Three years' famine in Sussex Beda, _Hist. Eccles._ 290 - from droughts - - 793 General famine and severe Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, _sub - mortality anno_. Roger of Howden. - Simeon of Durham - - 897 Mortality of men and cattle Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Florence - for three years during and of Worcester. Annales - after Danish invasion Cambriae (_anno_ 896) - - 962 Great mortality: "the great Anglo-Saxon Chronicle - fever in London" - - 976 Famine Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Roger of - Howden - - 984 } Famine. Fever of men and Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Roger of - 986 } murrain of cattle Howden. Simeon of Durham. - 987 } Malmesbury. _Gest. Pontif. - Angl._ p. 171. Flor. of - Worcester. Roger of Wendover, - _Flor. Hist._ Bromton (in - Twysden). Higden - - 1005 Desolation following expulsion Henry of Huntingdon - of Danes - - 1036 } Famine Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Henry of - 1039 } Huntingdon - - 1044 Famine Anglo-Saxon Chronicle - - 1046 Very hard winter; pestilence Anglo-Saxon Chronicle - and murrain - - 1048 } Great mortality of men and Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (_sub - 1049 } cattle anno_ 1049). Roger of Howden. - Simeon of Durham (_sub anno_ - 1048) - - 1069 Wasting of Yorkshire Simeon of Durham, ii. 188 - - 1086 } Great fever-pestilence. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. - 1087 } Sharp famine Malmesbury. Henry of - Huntingdon, and most - annalists - - 1091 Siege of Durham by the Scots Simeon of Durham, ii. 339 - - 1093 } Floods; hard winter; severe Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Annals - 1095 } famines; universal of Winchester. William of - 1096 } sickness and mortality Malmesbury. Henry of - 1097 } Huntingdon. Annals of Margan. - Matthew Paris, and others - - 1103 } General pestilence and Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Roger of - 1104 } murrain Wendover - 1105 } - - 1110 } Famine Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Roger of - 1111 } Wendover - - 1112 "Destructive pestilence" Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Annals - of Osney. Annales Cambriae - - 1114 Famine in Ireland; flight Annals of Margan - or death of people - - 1125 Most dire famine in all Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. William - England; pestilence and of Malmesbury, _Gest. Pont._ - murrain p. 442. Henry of Huntingdon. - Annals of Margan. Roger of - Howden. - - [1130 Great murrain Annals of Margan. Anglo-Saxon - Chronicle (_sub anno_ 1131)] - - 1137 } Famine from civil war; Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Annals - 1140 } mortality of Winchester. Henry of - Huntingdon (1138) - - 1143 Famine and mortality. Gesta Stephani, p. 98. William - of Newburgh. Henry of - Huntingdon - - 1171 Famine in London in Spring Stow, _Survey of London_ - - 1172 Dysentery among the troops Radulphus de Diceto, _Imag. - in Ireland Hist._ i. 348 - - 1173 "Tussis quaedam mala et Chronica de Mailros - inaudita" - - 1175 Pestilence; famine Benedict of Peterborough. Roger - of Howden - - 1189 Famine and mortality Annals of Margan. Giraldus - Cambrensis, _Itin. Walliae_ - - 1194} Effects of a five years' Annals of Burton. William of - 1195} scarcity; great mortality Newburgh. Roger of Howden - 1196} over all England iii. 290. Rigord. Bromton - 1197} (in Twysden col. 1271). - Radulphus de Diceto (_sub - anno_ 1197) - - 1201 Unprecedented plague of Chronicon de Lanercost (probably - people and murrain of relates to 1203) - animals - - 1203 Great famine and mortality Annals of Waverley. Annals of - Tewkesbury. Annals of Margan. - Ralph of Coggeshall (_sub - anno_ 1205) - - 1210 Sickly year throughout Annals of Margan - England - - 1234 Third year of scarcity; Roger of Wendover. Annals of - sickness Tewkesbury - - 1247 Pestilence from September Matthew Paris. Higden - to November; dearth and Annales Cambriae (_sub anno_ - famine 1248) - - 1257} Bad harvests; famine and Matthew Paris. Annals of - 1258} fever in London and the Tewkesbury. Continuator of M. - 1259} country Paris (1259). Rishanger - - 1268 Probably murrain only. Chronicon de Lanercost - ("Lungessouth") - - 1271 Great famine and pestilence Continuator of William of - in England and Ireland Newburgh ii. 560 [doubtful] - - [1274 Beginning of a great imported Rishanger (also _sub anno_ - murrain among 1275). Contin. Fl. of - sheep Worcester _sub anno_ 1276] - - 1285 Deaths from heat and Rishanger - drought - - 1294 Great scarcity; epidemics Rishanger. Continuator of - of flux Florence of Worcester p. 405. - Trivet - - 1315} General famine in England; Trokelowe. Walsingham, _Hist. - 1316} great mortality from fever, Angl._ i. 146. Contin. - flux &c.; murrain Trivet, pp. 18, 27. Rogers, - _Hist. of Agric. and Prices_ - - 1322 Famine and mortality in Higden. Annales Londinenses - Edward II.'s army in - Scotland; scarcity in - London - -The period covered by this long list is itself a long one; and the -intervals between successive famine-pestilences are sometimes more than a -generation. A history of epidemics is necessarily a morbid history. In -this chapter of it, we search out the lean years, saying nothing of the -fat years; and by exclusively dwelling upon the dark side we may form an -entirely wrong opinion of the comforts or hardships, prosperity or -adversity, of these remote times. English writers of the earliest period, -when they use generalities, are loud in praise of the advantages of their -own island; until we come to the fourteenth century poem of 'The Vision of -Piers the Ploughman' we should hardly suspect, from their usual strain, -that England was other than an earthly paradise, and every village an -Auburn, "where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain." There is a -poem preserved in Higden's _Polychronicon_ by one Henricus, who is almost -certainly Henry archdeacon of Huntingdon in the time of Henry I., although -the poem is not included among the archdeacon's extant verse. The subject -is 'De Praerogativis Angliae,' and the period, be it remarked, is one of -the early Norman reigns, when the heel of the conquering race is supposed -to have been upon the neck of the English. Yet this poem contains the -famous boast of 'Merry England,' and much else that is the reverse of -unhappy:-- - - "Anglia terra ferax et fertilis angulus orbis. - Anglia plena jocis, gens libera, digna jocari; - Libera gens, cui libera mens et libera lingua; - Sed lingua melior liberiorque manus. - Anglia terrarum decus et flos finitimarum, - Est contenta sui fertilitate boni. - Externas gentes consumptis rebus egentes, - Quando fames laedit, recreat et reficit. - Commoda terra satis mirandae fertilitatis - Prosperitate viget, cum bona pacis habet[29]." - -Or, to take another distich, apparently by Alfred of Beverley, - - "Insula praedives, quae toto non eget orbe, - Et cujus totus indiget orbis ope." - -Or, in Higden's own fourteenth century words, after quoting these earlier -estimates: "Prae ceteris gulae dedita, in victu et vestitu multum -sumptuosa[30]." - -On the other hand there is a medieval proverbial saying which places -England in a light strangely at variance with this native boast of -fertility, plenty, and abundance overflowing to the famished peoples -abroad: "Tres plagae tribus regionibus appropriari solent, Anglorum fames, -Gallorum ignis, Normannorum lepra"--three afflictions proper to three -countries, famine to England, St Anthony's fire to France, leprosy to -Normandy[31]. Whatever the "lepra Normannorum" may refer to, there is no -doubt that St Anthony's fire, or ergotism from the use of bread containing -the grains of spurred rye, was a frequent scourge of some parts of France; -and, in common repute abroad, famine seems to have been equally -characteristic of England. Perhaps the explanation of England's evil name -for famines is that there were three great English famines in the medieval -history, before the Black Death, separated by generations, no doubt, but -yet of such magnitude and attended by so disgraceful circumstances that -the rumour of them must have spread to foreign countries and made England -a by-word among the nations. These were the famines of 1194-96, 1257-59, -and 1315-16. Of the first we have a tolerably full account by William of -Newburgh, who saw it in Yorkshire; of the second we have many particulars -and generalities by Matthew Paris of St Albans, who died towards the end -of it; and of the third we have an account by one of his successors as -historiographer at St Albans, John Trokelowe. All other references to -famine in England are meagre beside the narratives of these competent -observers, although there were probably two or three famines in the Norman -period equally worthy of the historian's pen. For the comprehension of -English famine-pestilences in general, we ought to take the best recorded -first; but it will be on the whole more convenient to observe the -chronological order, and to introduce, as occasion offers, some -generalities on the types of disease which famine induced, the extent of -the mortalities, and the conditions of English agriculture and food-supply -which made possible occasional famines of such magnitude. - -From the great plague "of Cadwallader's time," which corresponds in -history to the foreign invasion of pestilence in 664, until nearly the end -of the Anglo-Saxon rule, there is little recorded of famines and -consequent epidemic sickness. It does not follow that the period was one -of plenty and prosperity for the people at large. The Anglo-Saxon -Chronicle is at no period detailed or circumstantial on the subject of -famines and pestilences; and although the entries become more numerous in -the last hundred years before the Chronicle came to an end in 1137, their -paucity in the earlier period probably means no more than the imperfection -of the record. Some of the generalities of Malthus might be applied to -help the imagination over a period of history which we might otherwise be -disposed to view as the Golden Age. One of these, originally written for -the South Sea Islands, is applicable to all romantic pictures of "rude -plenty," such as the picture of the Anglo-Saxon household in _Ivanhoe_. It -has been remarked of Scott as a novelist that he always feeds everyone -well; but the picture, grateful to the imagination though it be, is -probably an illusion. "In a state of society," says Malthus, "where the -lives of the inferior order of the people seem to be considered by their -superiors as of little or no value, it is evident that we are very liable -to be deceived with regard to the appearances of abundance"; and again: -"We may safely pronounce that among the shepherds of the North of Europe, -war and famine were the principal checks that kept the population down to -the level of their scanty means of subsistence." The history of English -agriculture is known with some degree of accuracy from the thirteenth -century, and it is a history of prices becoming steadier and crops more -certain. It is not to be supposed that tillage was more advanced before -the Conquest than after it. On the other hand the probabilities are that -England had steadily emerged from a pastoral state. It would be unfair to -judge of the state of rural England at any time by the state of Wales in -the twelfth century, as it is described by Giraldus Cambrensis, or by the -condition of Ireland as described from the same traveller's observations. -But in the absence of any concrete view of primitive England itself, the -picture of the two neighbouring provinces may be introduced here. - -Ireland, says Giraldus, closely following Beda, is a fertile land -neglected; it had no agriculture, industries or arts; its inhabitants were -rude and inhospitable, leading a purely pastoral life, and living more -upon milk than upon meat. At the same time there was little sickness; the -island had little need of physicians; you will hardly ever find people ill -unless they be at the extremity of death; between continuous good health -and final dissolution there was no middle term. The excessive number of -children born blind, or deaf, or deformed, he ascribes to incestuous -unions and other sexual laxities[32]. - -The picture of Wales is that of a not less primitive society[33]. The -Welsh do not congregate in towns, or in villages, or in fortified places, -but live solitary in the woods; they build no sumptuous houses of stone -and lime, but only ozier booths, sufficient for the year, which they run -up with little labour or cost. They have neither orchards nor gardens, and -little else than pasture land. They partake of a sober meal in the -evening, and if there should be little or nothing to eat at the close of -day, they wait patiently until the next evening. They do not use -table-cloths nor towels; they are more natural than neat (_naturae magis -student quam nitori_). They lie down to sleep in their day clothes, all in -one room, with a coarse covering drawn over them, their feet to the fire, -lying close to keep each other warm, and when they are sore on one side -from lying on the hard floor, they turn over to the other. There are no -beggars among this nation. It is of interest, from the point of view of -the "positive checks" of Malthus, to note that Giraldus more than hints at -the practice of a grosser form of immorality than he had charged the Irish -with. Spinning and weaving were of course not unknown, for the hard and -rough blanket mentioned above was a native product. By the time that -Higden wrote (about 1340), he has to record a considerable advance in the -civilization of Wales. Having used the description of Giraldus, he adds: -"They now acquire property, apply themselves to agriculture, and live in -towns[34]." But in the reign of Henry II., it was found easy to bring the -rebellious Welsh to terms by stopping the supplies of corn from England, -upon which they were largely dependent[35]. - -Of the condition of Scotland in the twelfth century we have no such sketch -as Giraldus has left for Wales and Ireland. Uncivilized compared with -England, the northern part of the island must certainly have been, if we -may trust the indignant references by Simeon of Durham and Henry of -Huntingdon to the savage practices of the Scots who swarmed over the -border, with or without their king to lead them, or the remark by William -of Malmesbury concerning the Scots who went on the Crusade leaving behind -them the insects of their native country. - -Giraldus intended to have written an itinerary or topography of England -also, but his purpose does not appear to have been fulfilled. Higden, his -immediate successor in that kind of writing a century and a half later, is -content, in his section on England, to reproduce the generalities of -earlier authors from Pliny downwards. Of these, we have already quoted the -'Prerogatives of England' by Henry of Huntingdon, from which one might -infer that the British Isles, under the Norman yoke, were the Islands of -the Blest. On the other hand, the impression made by the details of the -Domesday survey upon a historian of the soundest judgment, Hallam, is an -impression of poor cultivation and scanty sustenance. "There cannot be a -more striking proof," he says, "of the low condition of English -agriculture in the eleventh century than is exhibited in Domesday book. -Though almost all England had been partially cultivated, and we find -nearly the same manors, except in the north, which exist at present, yet -the value and extent of cultivated ground are inconceivably small. With -every allowance for the inaccuracies and partialities of those by whom -that famous survey was completed, we are lost in amazement at the constant -recurrence of two or three carucates in demesne, with folkland occupied by -ten or a dozen villeins, valued all together at forty shillings, as the -return of a manor which now would yield a competent income to a -gentleman[36]." - - Whether, the population at the Domesday survey were nearer two - millions than one, the people were almost wholly on the land. Of the - size of the chief towns, as the Normans found them, we may form a not - incorrect estimate from the Domesday enumeration of houses held of the - king or of other superiors[37]. London, Winchester and Bristol do not - come at all into the survey. Besides these, the towns of the first - rank are Norwich, York, Lincoln, Thetford, Colchester, Ipswich, - Gloucester, Oxford, Cambridge, and Exeter. - - Norwich had 1320 burgesses in the time of Edward the Confessor; in the - borough were 665 English burgesses rendering custom, and 480 bordarii - rendering none on account of their poverty; there were also more than - one hundred French households. Lincoln had 970 inhabited houses in - King Edward's time, of which 200 were waste at the survey. Thetford - had 943 burgesses before the Conquest, and at the survey 720, with 224 - houses vacant. York was so desolated just before the survey that it is - not easy to estimate its ordinary population; but it may be put at - about 1200 houses. Gloucester had 612 burgesses. Oxford seems to have - had about 800 houses; and for Cambridge we find an enumeration of the - houses in nine of the ten wards of the town in King Edward's time, the - total being about 400. Colchester appears to have had some 700 houses, - Ipswich 538 burgesses, with 328 houses "waste" so far as tax was - concerned. Exeter had 300 king's houses, and an uncertain number more. - Next in importance come such places as Southampton, Wallingford, - Northampton, Leicester, Warwick, Shrewsbury, Nottingham, Coventry, - Derby, Canterbury, Yarmouth, Rochester, Dover, Sandwich (about 400 - houses), and Sudbury. In a third class may be placed towns like - Dorchester, Ilchester, Bridport, Wareham, Shaftesbury, Bath, - Chichester, Lewes, Guildford, Hythe, Romney, Pevensey, Windsor, Bath, - Chester, Worcester, Hereford, Huntingdon, Stamford, Grantham, - Hertford, St Albans, Torchesey, Maldon, each with from 100 to 200 - burgesses. Dover and Sandwich each supplied twenty ships, with crews - of twenty-four men, for King Edward's service during fifteen days of - the year. In Hereford there were six smiths, each rendering one penny - a year for his forge, and making 120 nails of the king's iron. Many of - these houses were exceedingly small, with a frontage of seven feet; - the poorest class were mere sheds, built in the ditch against the - town wall, as at York and Canterbury. - -It would be within the mark to say that less than one-tenth of the -population of England was urban in any distinctive sense of the term. -After London, Norwich, York, and Lincoln, there were probably no towns -with five thousand inhabitants. There were, of course, the simpler forms -of industries, and there was a certain amount of commerce from the Thames, -the East Coast, and the Channel ports. The fertile soil of England -doubtless sustained abundance of fruit trees and produced corn to the -measure of perhaps four or six times the seed. There were flocks of sheep, -yielding more wool than the country used, herds of swine and of cattle. -The exports of wool, hides, iron, lead, and white metal gave occasion to -the importation of commodities and luxuries from Flanders, Normandy, and -Gascony. If there was "rude plenty" in England, it was for a sparse -population, and it was dependent upon the clemency of the skies. A bad -season brought scarcity and murrain, and two bad seasons in succession -brought famine and pestilence. - -Of the general state of health we may form some idea from the Anglo-Saxon -leechdoms, or collections of remedies, charms and divinations, supposed to -date from the eleventh century[38]. The maladies to which the English -people were liable in these early times correspond on the whole to the -everyday diseases of our own age. There were then, as now, cancers and -consumptions, scrofula or "kernels," the gout and the stone, the falling -sickness and St Vitus' dance, apoplexies and palsies, jaundice, dropsies -and fluxes, quinsies and anginas, sore eyes and putrid mouth, carbuncles, -boils and wildfire, agues, rheums and coughs. Maladies peculiar to women -occupy a chief place, and there is evidence that hysteria, the outcome of -hardships, entered largely into the forms of sickness, as it did in the -time of Sydenham. Among the curiosities of the nosology may be mentioned -wrist-drop, doubtless from working in lead. One great chapter in disease, -the sickness and mortality of infants and children, is almost a complete -blank. It ought doubtless to have been the greatest chapter of all. The -population remained small, for one reason among others, that the children -would be difficult to rear. There is no direct evidence; but we may infer -from analogous circumstances, that the inexpansive population meant an -enormous infant mortality. The sounds which fell on the ear of neas as he -crossed the threshold of the nether world may be taken as prophetic, like -so much else in Virgil, of the experience of the Middle Ages: - - "Continuo auditae voces, vagitus et ingens - Infantumque animae flentes, in limine primo: - Quos dulcis vitae exsortes, et ab ubere raptos, - Abstulit atra dies, et funere mersit acerbo." - -We come, then, to the chronology of famine-pestilences, and first in the -Anglo-Saxon period. The years from 664 to 685 are occupied, as we have -seen, by a great plague, probably the bubo-plague, which returned in 1348 -as the Black Death, affecting, like the latter, the whole of England and -Ireland on its first appearance, and afterwards particular monasteries, -such as Barking and Jarrow. But it is clear that famine-sickness was also -an incident of the same years. The metrical romancist of the fourteenth -century, Robert of Brunne, was probably mistaken in tracing the great -plague of "Cadwaladre's time" to famine in the first instance; there is no -such suggestion in the authentic history of Beda. But that historian does -make a clear reference to famine in Sussex about the year 679[39]. -Describing the conversion of Sussex to Christianity by Wilfrid, he says -that the province had been afflicted with famine owing to three seasons of -drought, that the people were dying of hunger, and that often forty or -fifty together, "inedia macerati," would proceed to the edge of the Sussex -cliffs, and, joining hands, throw themselves into the sea. But on the very -day when the people accepted the Christian baptism, there fell a -plenteous rain, the earth flourished anew, and a glad and fruitful season -ensued[40]. - -The anarchy in Northumbria which followed the death of Beda (in 735), with -the decline of piety and learning in the northern monasteries, is said to -have led to famine and plague[41]. It is not until the year 793 that an -entry of famine and mortality occurs in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It is -in keeping with the disappointing nature of all these early records that -Simeon of Durham and Roger of Howden, the two compilers who had access to -lost records, are more particular in enumerating the portents that -preceded the calamity than in describing its actual circumstances. Then a -whole century elapses (but for a vague entry under the year 822) until we -come to the three calamitous years, with 897 as the centre, which followed -Alfred's famous resistance to the Danes. In that mortality, many of the -chief thanes died, and there was a murrain of cattle, with a scarcity of -food in Ireland. Two generations pass before the chronicle contains -another entry of the kind: in 962 there was a great mortality, and the -"great fever" was in London. At no long intervals there are two more -famines, in 976 and 986. That of 986 (or 987) would appear to have been -severe; the church plate at Winchester was melted for the benefit of the -starving[42], and there was "a fever of men and a murrain of cattle[43]." -After the expulsion of the Danes in 1005, says Henry of Huntingdon, there -was such desolation of famine as no one remembered. Then in 1010 or 1011 -comes the incident of St Elphege, already given. From 1036 to 1049 we find -mention of four, or perhaps five, famines, those of the years 1046 and -1049 being marked by a great mortality of men and murrain of cattle. - -Except in Yorkshire, the Norman Conquest had no immediate effects upon the -people of England in the way of famine and pestilence. From the last great -mortality of 1049, a period of nearly forty years elapses until we come to -the great pestilence and sharp famine in the last year of the Conqueror's -reign (1086-7). The harrying of Yorkshire, however, is too important a -local incident to be passed over in this history. Of these ruthless -horrors in the autumn of 1069 we have some particulars from the pen of -Simeon of Durham, who has contemporary authority. There was such hunger, -he says, that men ate the flesh of their own kind, of horses, of dogs, and -of cats. Others sold themselves into perpetual slavery in order that they -might be able to sustain their miserable lives on any terms (like the -Chinese in later times). Others setting out in exile from their country -perished before their journey was ended. It was horrible to look into the -houses and farmyards, or by the wayside, and see the human corpses -dissolved in corruption and crawling with worms. There was no one to bury -them, for all were gone, either in flight or dead by the sword and famine. -The country was one wide solitude, and remained so for nine years. Between -York and Durham no one dwelt, and travellers went in great fear of wild -beasts and of robbers[44]. William of Malmesbury says that the city of -York was so wasted by fire that an old inhabitant would not have -recognized it; and that the country was still waste for sixty miles at the -time of his writing (1125)[45]. In the Domesday survey we find that there -were 540 houses so waste that they paid nothing, 400 houses "not -inhabited," of which the better sort pay one penny and others less, and -only 50 inhabited houses paying full dues. - -The same local chronicler who has left particulars of the devastation of -1069-70, has given also a picture of the siege of Durham by Malcolm -Canmore in 1091, which may serve to realize for us what a medieval siege -was, and what the Scots marches had to endure for intervals during several -centuries:-- - - Malcolm advancing drives the Northumbrians before him, some into the - woods and hills, others into the city of Durham; for there have they - always a sure refuge. Thither they drive their whole flocks and herds - and carry their furniture, so that there is hardly room within the - town for so great a crowd. Malcolm arrives and invests the city. It - was not easy for one to go outside, and the sheep and cattle could not - be driven to pasture: the churchyard was filled with them, and the - church itself was scarcely kept clear of them. Mixed with the cattle, - a crowd of women and children surrounded the church, so that the - voices of the choristers were drowned by the clamour. The heat of - summer adds to the miseries of famine. Every-where throughout the town - were the sounds of grief, 'et plurima mortis imago,' as in the sack of - Troy. The siege is raised by the miraculous intervention of St - Cuthbert[46]. - -The wasting of Yorkshire by William and the five incursions of the Scots -into Northumberland and Durham in the reign of Malcolm Canmore had the -effect of reducing a large part of the soil of England to a comparatively -unproductive state. The effacement of farms (and churches) in Hampshire, -for the planting of the New Forest, had the same effect in a minor degree. -The rigorous enforcement of the forest laws in the interests of the Norman -nobles must have served also to remove one considerable source of the -means of subsistence from the people. Whether these things, together with -the general oppression of the poor, contributed much or little to what -followed, it is the fact that the long period from the last two years of -William to the welcomed advent of Henry II. to the throne in 1154, is -filled with a record of famines, pestilences, and other national -misfortunes such as no other period of English history shows. - -The first general famine and pestilence under Norman rule was in the years -1086 and 1087, the last of the Conqueror's reign. It is probable from the -entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that the aggravation (for which we -must always look in order to explain a historical famine and pestilence) -was due to two bad harvests in succession. The year 1086 was "heavy, -toilsome and sorrowful," through failure of the corn and fruit crops owing -to an inclement season, and through murrain of cattle[47]. Some form of -sickness appears to have been prevalent between that harvest and the next. -Almost every other man, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, was stricken with -fever, and that so sharply that many died of it. "Alas! how miserable and -how rueful a time was then! when the wretched men lay driven almost to -death, and afterwards came the sharp famine and destroyed them quite." It -is probably a careless gloss upon that, by a historian of the next -generation[48], when he says that "a promiscuous fever destroyed more than -half the people," and that famine, coming after, destroyed those whom the -fever had spared[49]. But there can be no question that this was one of -those great periodic conjunctions of famine and fever ([Greek: limon homou -kai loimon]), of which we shall find fuller details in the chronicles of -the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is easy to understand -that England, with all her wealth of fruits and corn in a good season, had -no reserve for the poor at least, and sometimes not even for the rich, to -get through two or more bad seasons with. How much the corn crop in those -days depended on the season is clear from the entry in the chronicle two -years after (1089), that reaping was still in progress at Martinmas (11 -November) and even later. Fields cultivated to yield an average of only -four or six times the seed were, of course, more at the mercy of the -seasons than the highly cultivated corn-land of our own time. - -The next famine with pestilence in England, seven years later, or in the -seventh year of William Rufus, introduces us to a new set of -considerations. It was the time when the exactions of tribute for the -king's wars in Normandy, or for the satisfaction of his greed and that of -his court, were severely felt both by the church and the people. England, -says one[50], was suffocated and unable to breathe. Both clergy and -laity, says another[51], were in such misery that they were weary of life. -But the most remarkable phraseology is that of William of Malmesbury, the -chief historian of the period, who seldom descends from the region of high -political and ecclesiastical affairs to take notice of such things as -famine and pestilence. In the 7th year of Rufus, he says, "agriculture -failed" on account of the tributes which the king had decreed from his -position in Normandy. The fields running to waste, a famine followed, and -that in turn was succeeded by a mortality so general that the dying were -left untended and the dead unburied[52]. The phrase about the lack of -cultivation is a significant and not incredible statement, which places -the England of Rufus in the same light as certain belated feudal parts of -India within recent memory. - - In the villages of Gujerat, when the festival comes round early in - May, the chief of a village collects the cultivators and tells them - that it is time for them to commence work. They say: "No! the - assessment was too heavy last year, you lay too many taxes upon us." - However, after much higgling, and presents made to the more important - men, a day is fixed for cultivation to begin, and the clearing and - manuring of the fields proceeds as before[53]. But while Gujerat was - still possessed by hundreds of petty feudal chiefs under the Mahratta - rule, previous to the establishment of the British Agency in 1821, the - exactions of tribute by the Baroda government were so extreme, and - enforced by so violent means[54], that cultivation was almost - neglected; the towns and villages swarmed with idlers, who subsisted - upon milk and ghee from their cows, while indolence and inactivity - affected the whole community[55]. A dreadful famine had "raged with - destructive fury" over Gujerat and Kattiwar for more than one year - about 1812-13-14, which was followed, not by a contagious fever, but - by the true bubo-plague. - -If the English historian's language, "agricultura defecit," with -reference to the tribute exacted by Rufus, have that fitness which we have -reason to expect from him,--Higden varies it to "ita ut agricultura -cessaret et fames succederet,"--then the famine and mortality about the -years 1094-5 were due to no less remarkable a cause than a refusal to -cultivate the land. It is not to be supposed that the incubus of excessive -tribute passed away with the accession of Henry I. The Anglo-Saxon -Chronicle repeats the complaint of heavy taxation in connexion with bad -harvests and murrains in 1103, 1105 and 1110[56]. Severe winters, or -autumn floods, with murrains and scarcity, are recorded also for the years -1111, 1115, 1116, 1117, 1124 and 1125, the famine of 1125 having been -attended with a mortality, and having been sufficiently great and general -to be mentioned by several chroniclers[57]. In the midst of these years of -scarcity and its effects upon the population, there occurs one singular -entry of another kind in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, under the year 1112: -"This was a very good year, and very abundant in wood and in field; but it -was a very sad and sorrowful one, through a most destructive -pestilence[58]." Under the year 1130, the annalist of the Welsh monastery -of Margan, who is specially attentive to domestic events, records a -murrain of cattle all over England, which lasted several years so that -scarcely one township escaped the pest, the pigsties becoming suddenly -empty, and whole meadows swept of their cattle. It is to the same murrain -that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle refers under the year 1131: in towns where -there had been ten or twelve ploughs going there was not one left, and the -man who had 200 or 300 swine had not one left; after that died the -domestic fowls. - -These things happened from time to time in the comparatively prosperous -reign of Henry I. But with the death of Henry in 1135, there began a state -of misery and lawlessness lasting almost to the accession of Henry II. in -1154, beside which the former state of England was spoken of as "most -flourishing[59]." Besides the barbarities of the Scots and the Welsh on -the northern and western marches[60], there were the civil wars of the -factions of King Stephen and the Empress Maud, and the cruelties and -predations of the unruly nobles under the walls of a thousand newly-built -strongholds. A graphic account of the condition of England remains to us -from the pen of an eyewitness, the observant author of the _Gesta -Stephani_[61]. Under the year 1143 he writes that there was most dire -famine in all England; the people ate the flesh of dogs and horses or the -raw garbage of herbs and roots. The people in crowds pined and died, or -another part entered on a sorrowful exile with their whole families. One -might see houses of great name standing nearly empty, the residents of -either sex and of every age being dead. As autumn drew near and the fields -whitened for the harvest, there was no one to reap them, for the -cultivators were cut off by the pestilent hunger which had come between. -To these home troubles was added the presence of a multitude of barbarous -adventurers, without bowels of pity and compassion, who had flocked to the -country for military service. The occasion was one of those which cause -the archdeacon of Huntingdon to break out into his elegiac verse: - - "Ecce Stygis facies, consimilisque lues[62]." - -"And in those days," says another, "there was no king in Israel[63]." The -Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which comes to an end in this scene of universal -gloom, describes how one might go a day's journey and never find a man -sitting in a town, or the land tilled, and how men who once were rich had -to go begging their bread, concluding with the words, "And they said -openly that Christ and His saints slept." - -Among the penances of Henry II. after the murder of Becket, there is -recorded his charity in feeding during a dearth ten thousand persons daily -from the first of April, 1171, until the harvest[64]. But, apart from a -reference to a flux among the troops in Ireland in 1172, from errors of -diet[65], the long reign of Henry II. is marked by only one record of -general pestilence. It is recorded by the best contemporary writer, -Benedict of Peterborough, and it is the first instance in which the number -of burials in a day (perhaps at Peterborough) is given. In the year 1175, -he says, there was in England and the adjacent regions a pestilential -mortality of men, such that on many days seven or eight corpses were -carried out to be buried. And immediately upon that pestilential mortality -there followed a dire famine[66]. It is to be observed that the famine is -explicitly stated to have come after the pestilence, just as in the great -mortality of 1087; and, as in the latter case, it may be that a hard -winter, with scarcity of food, brought a general sickness, and that the -scarcity had been raised to famine point by a second bad harvest. The -entry in the chronicle of Melrose for 1173 may refer to Scotland only: a -bad kind of cough, unheard of before, affected almost everyone far and -wide, whereof, "or from which pest," many died. This is perhaps the only -special reference to "tussis" as epidemic until the influenzas of the -seventeenth century. - -The comparative freedom of the long reign of Henry II. from famines and -national distress probably arose as much from good government as from the -clemency of the seasons. The country was growing rich by foreign trade. In -1190 the two leading Jews of York, Joyce and Benedict, were occupying -residences in the heart of the town like royal palaces in size and in the -sumptuousness of their furniture. The same historian, William of -Newburgh, who records the king's protection of these envied capitalists, -mentions also his protection of "the poor, the widows and the orphans," -and his liberal charities. That the king's protection of his poorer -subjects was not unneeded, would be obvious if we could trust the -extraordinary account of the keen traders of London which is put by -Richard of Devizes into the mouth of a hostile witness[67]. The peoples of -all nations, it appears, flocked to London, each nationality contributing -to the morals of the capital its proper vices and manners. There was no -righteous person in London, no, not one; there were more thieves in London -than in all France[68]. In the entirely different account, of the same -date, by an enthusiastic Londoner, the monk Fitz-Stephen, the only -"plagues" of London are said to be "the immoderate drinking of fools and -the frequency of fires." The city and suburbs had one hundred and -twenty-six small parish churches, besides thirteen greater conventual -churches; and it was a model to all the world for religious observances. -"Nearly all the bishops, abbots, and magnates of England are, as it were, -citizens and freemen of London; having there their own splendid houses, to -which they resort, where they spend largely when summoned to great -councils by the king or by their metropolitan, or drawn thither by their -own private affairs[69]." The archdeacon of London, of the same date, -Peter of Blois, in a letter to the pope, Innocent III., concerning the -extent of his duties and the smallness of his stipend, gives the parish -churches in the city at one hundred and twenty, and the population at -forty thousand[70]. The Germans who came in the train of Richard I. on -his return to England in 1194, after his release from the hands of the -emperor, were amazed at the display of wealth and finery which the -Londoners made to welcome back the king; if the emperor had known the -riches of England, they said, he would have demanded a heavier ransom[71]. -The ransom, all the same, required a second, or even a third levy before -it was raised, owing, it was said, to peculation; and the ecclesiastics, -who held a large part of the soil, appear to have had so little in hand to -pay their share that they had to pledge the gold and silver vessels of the -altar[72]. - -The year of Richard's accession, 1189, is given by the annalist of the -Welsh monastery of Margan, as a year of severe famine and of a mortality -of men. Probably it was a local famine, and it may well have been the same -in which Giraldus Cambrensis says that he himself saw crowds of poor -people coming day after day to the gates of the monastery of Margan, so -that the brethren took counsel and sent a ship to Bristol for corn[73]. -The great and general famine with pestilence in Richard's time was in the -years 1193, 1194, 1195, 1196 and 1197, and it appears to have been felt in -France, in the basin of the Danube, and over all Europe, as well as in -England. Of the pestilence which came with it in England we have an -exceptionally full account from the pen of William of Newburgh. The -monastery in which William wrote his history was situated among woods by -the side of a stream under the Hambledon hills in Yorkshire, on the road -between York and the mouth of the Tees; so that when he says of this -famine and pestilence, "we speak what we do know, and testify what we have -seen," he may be taken as recording the experience of a sufficiently -typical region of rural England. - -His narrative of the pestilence[74] is given under the year 1196, which -was the fourth year of the scarcity or famine: After the crowds of poor -had been dying on all sides of want, a most savage plague ensued, as if -from air corrupted by dead bodies of the poor. This pestilence showed but -little respect even for those who had abundance of food; and as to those -who were in want, it put an end to their long agony of hunger. The disease -crept about everywhere, always of one type, namely that of an acute fever. -Day after day it seized so many, and finished so many more, so that there -were scarcely to be found any to give heed to the sick or to bury the -dead. The usual rites of burial were omitted, except in the case of some -nobler or richer person; at whatever hour anyone died the body was -forthwith committed to the earth, and in many places great trenches were -made if the number of corpses was too great to afford time for burying -them one by one. And as so many were dying every day, even those who were -in health fell into low spirits, and went about with pale faces, -themselves the living picture of death. In the monasteries alone was this -pestilence comparatively unfelt. After it had raged on all sides for five -or six months, it subsided when the winter cold came. - -Those lean years were doubtless followed by seven fat years; for it is not -until 1203, the fourth year of John, that we again meet with the records -of famine and pestilence. From various monasteries, from Waverley in -Sussex, Tewkesbury in Gloucester and Margan in Glamorgan, we have the same -testimony--"fames magna et mortalitas," "fames valida, et saeva mortalitas -multitudinem pauperum extinguit," "maxima fames." The monks of Waverley -had to leave their own house and disperse themselves through various -monasteries. Two years after, 1205, there came so hard a season that the -winter-sown seed was almost killed by frost. The Thames was crossed on the -ice, and there was no ploughing for many weeks. An Essex annalist says -there was a famine, and quotes the famine prices: a quarter of wheat was -sold for a pound in many parts of England, although in Henry II.'s time it -was often as low as twelve pence; a quarter of beans ten shillings; a -quarter of oats forty pence, which used to be four pence[75]. The annalist -at Margan enters also the year 1210 as a sickly one throughout -England[76]. - -We are now come to the period when we can read the succession of these -events in the domestic life of the people from the more trustworthy -records of the St Albans school of historians. Of the scarcity and -sickness among the poor in 1234 we have some suggestive particulars by -Roger of Wendover[77], and for the series of famines and epidemics from -1257 to 1259 we have a comparatively full account by his famous successor -in the office of historiographer to the abbey, Matthew Paris[78]. The next -St Albans _scriptorius_, Rishanger[79], notes the kind of harvest every -year from 1259 to 1305, and for only one of those years after the scarcity -of 1259 was past, namely the year 1294, does he speak of the people dying -of hunger. His successor, John Trokelowe[80], carries on the annals to -1323, and gives us some particulars, not without diagnostic value, of the -great famine-sickness of 1315-16, and of the succession of dear years of -which the epidemic was an incident. It is on these contemporary accounts -by the St Albans school, together with the record for the year 1196 by -William of Newburgh, that our knowledge of the famine-pestilences of -England must be based. - -With the harvest of 1259 begins the tabulation of agricultural prices from -farm-bailiffs' accounts, by Professor Thorold Rogers, a work of vast -labour in which the economic history of the English people is written in -indubitable characters, and by means of which we are enabled to check the -more general and often rhetorical statements of the contemporary -historians. - -Although the history of the last year or two of John and of the earlier -years of Henry III. is full of turbulence and rapine, yet we hear of no -general distress among the cultivators of the soil. The contemporary -authority, Roger of Wendover, has no entry of the kind until 1234, -excepting a single note under the year 1222, that wheat rose to twelve -shillings the quarter. We hear of king John and his following as -plundering the rich churchmen and laymen all the way from St Albans to -Nottingham, of William Longspe, earl of Salisbury, carrying on the same -practices in the counties of Essex, Middlesex, Hertford, Cambridge and -Huntingdon, of the spoliation of the Isle of Ely, and of the occupation of -towns and villages in Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk by Louis, Dauphin of -France, the king-elect, or broken reed, on whom the Barons of Magna Charta -thought for a time to lean[81]. But the whole of that period, and of the -years following until 1234, is absolutely free from any record of -wide-spread distress among the lower class. We are reminded of the -observation by Philip de Comines, with the civil wars of York and -Lancaster in his mind, a saying which is doubtless true of all the -struggles in England for the settlement of the respective claims of king -and aristocracy: "England has this peculiar grace," says the French -statesman, "that neither the country, nor the people, nor the houses are -wasted or demolished; but the calamities and misfortunes of the war fall -only upon the soldiers and especially the nobility, of whom they are more -than ordinarily jealous: for nothing is perfect in this world." That -cannot apply of course to the barbarous incursions of the Scots and the -Welsh; for the northern marches were often reduced to desolation during a -period of three hundred years after the Conquest and were never more -desolate than in the reign of Richard II.; while the marches of Wales were -subject to not less ruthless spoliations until the concessions to the -Welsh by Edward I. Nor is the immunity of the peasantry from the troubles -of civil war to be taken as absolute; for we find under the year 1264, -when Simon de Montfort was in the field against the king, an explicit -statement that the small peasantry were plundered even to the poor -furniture of their cottages. But on the whole we may take it that the -paralysing effect of civil war seldom reached to the English lower classes -in the medieval period, that the tenour of their lives was seldom -disturbed except by famine or plague, and that kings and nobles were left -to fight it out among themselves. - -We become aware, however, from the time of the Great Charter, and during -the steady growth of the country's prosperity, of a widening chasm between -the rich and the poor within the ranks of the commons themselves, and that -too, not only in the centres of trade (as we shall see), but also in -country districts. The claims of feudal service did not prevent some among -the villagers from adding house to house, and field to field, thereby -marking in every parish the interval between the thriving and comfortable -and a residuum of _pauperes_ composed of the less capable or the less -fortunate. A curious story, told by Roger of Wendover of the village of -Abbotsley near St Neots, will serve as an illustration of a fact which we -might be otherwise well assured of from first principles[82]. - -The year 1234 was the third of a succession of lean years. So sharp was -the famine before the harvest of that year, that crowds of the poor went -to the fields in the month of July, and plucked the unripe ears of corn, -rubbing them in their hands and eating the raw grain. The St Albans monk -is full of indignation against the prevailing spirit of avarice which -reduced some of the people to that sad necessity: Alms had everywhere gone -out of fashion; the rich, abounding in all manner of temporal goods, were -so smitten with blind greed that they suffered Christian men, made in the -image of God, to die for want of food. Some, indeed, were so impious as to -say that their wealth was due to their own industry, and not to the gift -of God. Of that mind seem to have been the more prosperous cultivators of -the village of Abbotsley "who looked on the needy with an eye of -suspicion[83]." - - The following story is told of them. Seeing the poor making free with - their corn in the ear, they assembled in the parish church on a Sunday - in August, and assailed the parson with their clamours, demanding that - he would forthwith pronounce the ban of the Church upon those who - helped themselves to the ears of corn. The parson, notwithstanding a - well-known precedent in the Gospels, was about to yield to their - insistence, when a man of religion and piety rose in the congregation - and adjured the priest, in the name of God and all His saints, to - refrain from the sentence, adding that those who were in need were - welcome to help themselves to his own corn. The others, however, - insisted, and the parson was just beginning to ban the pilferers, when - a thunderstorm suddenly burst, with hail and torrents of rain. When - the storm had passed, the peasants went out to find their crops - destroyed,--all but that one simple and just man who found his corn - untouched. - -We have only to recall the minute subdivisions of the common field, or -fields, of the parish into half-acre strips separated by balks of turf, -and the fact that no two half-acres of the same cultivator lay together, -to realize how nice must have been the discrimination[84]. - -But the moral of the story is obvious. It is an appeal to the teaching and -the sanction of the Gospels, against the rooted belief of the natural man -that he owes what he has to his own industry and thrift, and that it is no -business of his to part with his goods for the sustenance of a helpless -and improvident class. - -The spirit of avarice, according to Wendover, permeated all classes at -this period, from high ecclesiastics downwards. Walter, archbishop of -York, had his granaries full of corn during the scarcity, some of it five -years old. When the peasants on his manors asked to be supplied from these -stores in the summer of 1234, the archbishop instructed his bailiffs to -give out the old corn on condition of getting new for it when the harvest -was over. It need not be told at length how the archbishop's barns at -Ripon were found on examination to be infested with vermin, how the corn -had turned mouldy and rotten, and how the whole of it had to be destroyed -by fire[85]. Of the same import are the raids upon the barns of the alien -or Italian clergy in 1228, in the diocese of Winchester and elsewhere, and -the ostentatious distribution by the raiders of doles to the poor[86]. - -The somewhat parallel course of public morality in the centres of trade, -or, as Wendover would call it, the prevalence of avarice, demands a brief -notice for our purpose. - -In every state of society, there will of course be rich and poor. But a -class of _pauperes_ seems to emerge more distinctly in the life of England -from about the beginning of the thirteenth century. The period corresponds -to the appearance on the scene of St Francis and his friars. Doubtless St -Francis was inspired by a true sense of what the time needed, even if it -be open to contend that his ministrations of charity brought out, -consolidated, and kept alive a helpless class who would have been less -heard of if they had been left to the tender mercies of economic -principles. The mission of the friars was not merely to the poor; it was -also to the rich, whether of the church or of the world, "to soften the -hardness of their hearts by the oil of preaching[87]." It was one of these -interpositions, ever needed and never wanting, to reduce the inequalities -of the human lot, not by preaching down-right theoretical communism, but, -more by force of rhetoric than of logic, to extort from the strong some -concessions to the weak, to mitigate the severity of the struggle for -existence, and to bring the respectable vices of greed and sharp practice -to the bar of conscience. - -As early as 1196 there is the significant incident, in the city of London, -of the rising of the poorer class and the middling class, headed by -Fitzosbert Longbeard, himself one of the privileged citizens, against an -assessment in which the class represented by the mayor and aldermen were -alleged to have been very tender of their own interests[88]. Longbeard was -hailed as "the friend of the poor," and, having lost his life in their -cause (whether in the street before Bow Church, or on a gallows at Tyburn, -or at the Smithfield elms, the narratives are not agreed), he is -celebrated by the sympathetic Matthew Paris as "the martyr of the -poor[89]." That historian continues, after the manner of his predecessor -Wendover, to speak of Londoners as on the one hand the "mediocres, -populares et plebei," and on the other hand the "divites." In 1258 the -latter class overreached themselves: they were caught in actual vulgar -peculation of money raised by assessment for repairing the city walls; -some of them were thrown into prison and only escaped death through the -royal clemency at the instance of the notorious pluralist John Mansel, and -on making restitution of their plunder; but one of them, the mayor, never -recovered the blow to his respectability, and died soon after of -grief[90]. Whether it meant a wide-spread spirit of petty fraud, or some -unadjusted change in value, the young king in 1228, during a journey from -York to London, took occasion along his route to destroy the "false -measures" of corn, ale and wine, to substitute more ample measures, and to -increase the weight of the loaf. - -The scarcity or famine of 1234, to which the Abbotsley incident belongs, -was accompanied, says the St Albans annalist, by a mortality which raged -cruelly everywhere. On the other hand the annalist of Tewkesbury may be -credited when he says that, although the year was one of scarcity, corn -being at eight shillings, yet "by the grace of God the poor were better -sustained than in other years[91]." - -There was an epidemic in 1247, but it is not clear whether it was due to -famine. Although Higden, quoting from some unknown record, says that there -was dearth in England in that year, wheat being at twelve shillings the -quarter, yet he does not mention sickness at all; and Matthew Paris, who -was then living, is explicit that the harvest of 1247 was an abundant one, -and that the mortality did not begin until September of that year. There -does appear, however, to have been a sharp famine in Wales; and it is -recorded that the bishop of Norwich, "about the year 1245," in a time of -great dearth, sold all his plate and distributed it to the poor[92]. All -that we know of this epidemic is the statement of Matthew Paris, that it -began in September and lasted for three months; and that as many as nine -or ten bodies were buried in one day in the single churchyard of St -Peter's at Saint Albans[93]. - -Matthew Paris notes the quality of the harvest and the prices of grain -every year, and his successor Rishanger continues the practice. The prices -noted appear, from comparison with those tabulated by Thorold Rogers from -actual accounts, to have been the lowest market rates of the year. The -harvest of 1248 was plentiful, and wheat sold at two shillings and -sixpence a quarter. In 1249 and 1250 it was at two shillings, oats being -at one shilling. But those years of exceptional abundance were followed at -no long interval by a series of years of scarcity or famine, which brought -pestilential sickness of the severest kind. - -The scarcity or famine in the years 1256-59 was all the more acutely felt -owing to the dearth of money in the country. The burden of the history of -Matthew Paris before he comes to the famine is that England had been -emptied of treasure by the exactions of king and pope. Henry III. was -under some not quite intelligible obligation of money to his brother, the -earl of Cornwall. The English earl was a candidate for the Imperial crown, -and had got so far towards the dignity of emperor as to have been made -king of the Germans. It was English money that went to pay his German -troops, and to further his cause with the electoral princes; but the -circulating coin of England does not appear to have sufficed for these and -domestic purposes also. The harvest of 1256 had been spoiled by wet, and -the weather of the spring of 1257 was wretched in the extreme. All England -was in a state of marsh and mud, and the roads were impassable. Many sowed -their fields over again; but the autumn proved as wet as the rest of the -year. "Whatever had been sown in winter, whatever had germinated in -spring, whatever the summer had brought forward--all was drowned in the -floods of autumn." The want of coins in circulation caused unheard-of -poverty. At the end of the year the fields lay untilled, and a multitude -of people were dead of famine. At Christmas wheat rose to ten shillings a -quarter. But the year 1257 appears to have had "lethal fevers" before the -loss of the harvest of that year could be felt. Not to mention other -places, says the St Albans historian, there was at St Edmundsbury in the -dog-days so great a mortality that more than two thousand bodies were -buried in its spacious cemetery[94]. - -The full effects of the famine were not felt until the spring of 1258. So -great was the pinch in London from the failure of the crops and the want -of money that fifteen thousand[95] are said to have died of famine, and of -a grievous and wide-spread pestilence that broke out about the feast of -the Trinity (19 May). - -The earl of Cornwall (and king of Germany) who had relieved the country of -a great part of its circulating coin, took the opportunity to buy up corn -in Germany and Holland for the supply of the London market. Fifty great -ships, says Matthew Paris, arrived in the Thames laden with wheat, barley, -and other grain. Not three English counties had produced as much as was -imported. The corn was for such as could buy it; but the king interposed -with an edict that, whereas greed was to be discouraged, no one was to buy -the foreign corn in order to store it up and trade in it. Those who had no -money, we are expressly told, died of hunger, even after the arrival of -the ships; and even men of good position went about with faces pinched by -hunger, and passed sleepless nights sighing for bread. No one had seen -such famine and misery, although many would have remembered corn at higher -prices. The price quoted about this stage of the narrative, although not -with special reference to the foreign wheat, is nine shillings the -quarter. Elsewhere the price is said to have mounted up to fifteen -shillings, which may have been the rate before the foreign supply came in. -But such was the scarceness of money, we are told, that if the price of -the quarter of wheat had been less, there would hardly have been found -anyone to buy it. Even those who were wont to succour the miserable were -now reduced to perish along with them. It is difficult to believe that the -historian has not given way to the temptations of rhetoric, and it is -pleasing to be able to give the following complement to his picture. After -some 15,000 had died in London, mostly of the poorer sort, one might hear -a crier making proclamation to the starving multitude to go to a -distribution of bread by this or that nobleman, at such and such a place, -mentioning the name of the benefactor and the place of dole. - -In other passages, which may be taken as picturing the state of matters in -the country, the historian says that the bodies of the starved were found -swollen and livid, lying five or six together in pig-sties, or on -dungheaps, or in the mud of farmyards. The dying were refused shelter and -succour for fear of contagion, and scarcely anyone would go near the dead -to bury them. Where many corpses were found together, they were buried in -capacious trenches in the churchyards. - -We come now to the harvest of 1258. After a bleak and late spring the -crops had come forward well under excessive heat in summer, and the -harvest was an unusually abundant, although a late one. Rains set in -before the corn could be cut, and at the feast of All Saints (1 November) -the heavy crops had rotted until the fields were like so many dungheaps. -Only in some places was any attempt made to carry the harvest home, and -then it was so spoiled as to be hardly worth the trouble. Even the mouldy -grain sold as high as sixteen shillings a quarter. The famishing people -resorted to various shifts, selling their cattle and reducing their -households. How the country got through the winter, we are not told. -Matthew Paris himself died early in 1259, and the annalist who added a few -pages to the _Chronica Majora_ after his death, merely mentions that the -corn, the oil and the wine turned corrupt, and that as the sun entered -Cancer a pestilence and mortality of men began unexpectedly, in which many -died. Among others Fulk, the bishop of London, died of pestilence in the -spring of 1259; and, to say nothing of many other places, at Paris ---- -thousand (the number is left blank) were buried. - -The vagueness of the last statement reminds us that we are now deprived of -the comparatively safe guidance of Matthew Paris. His successor in the -office of annalist at St Albans, Rishanger, is much less trustworthy. He -sums up the year 1259 in a paragraph which repeats exactly the facts of -the notorious year 1258, and probably applies to that alone; for the year -1260 his summary is that it was more severe, more cruel and more terrible -to all living things than the year before, the pestilence and famine being -intolerable. There is, however, no confirmation of that in the authentic -prices of the year collected by Thorold Rogers. Parcels of wheat of the -harvest of 1259 were sold at about five and six shillings, and of the -harvest of 1260 at from three shillings and sixpence to six shillings. For -a number of years, corresponding to the Barons' war and the war in Wales, -the price is moderate or low, the figures of extant bailiffs' accounts -agreeing on the whole with Rishanger's summary statements about the -respective harvests[96]. The years from 1271 to 1273 were dear years, and -for the first of the series we find a doubtful record by the Yorkshire -continuator of William of Newburgh that there was "a great famine and -pestilence in England and Ireland[97]." The harvest of 1288 was so -abundant that the price of wheat in the bailiffs' accounts is mostly about -two shillings, ranging from sixteen pence to four and eightpence. -Rishanger's prices for the year are sufficiently near the mark: in some -places wheat sold at twenty pence the quarter, in others at sixteen pence, -and in others at twelve pence. From that extremely low point, a rise -begins which culminates in 1294. The chronicler's statement for 1289, that -in London the bushel of wheat rose from threepence to two shillings, is -not borne out by the bailiffs' accounts, which show a range of from two -shillings and eightpence to six shillings the quarter. But these accounts -confirm the statement that the years following were dear years, and that -1294 was a year of famine prices, wheat having touched fourteen shillings -at Cambridge, in July. Rishanger's two notes are that the poor perished of -hunger, and that the poor died of hunger on all sides, afflicted with a -looseness (_lienteria_)[98]. The two years following are also given as -hard for the poor, but not as years of famine or sickness; the country was -at the same time heavily taxed for the expenses of the war which Edward I. -was waging against the Scots. Ordinary prosperity attends the cultivators -of the soil until the end of Rishanger's chronicle in 1305; and from the -beginning of Trokelowe's in 1307, the year of Edward II.'s accession, -there is nothing for our purpose until we come to the great famine of -1315[99]. - -It is clear, however, that prices were high in every year from 1309 until -that famine, with the single exception of the harvest of 1311. At the -meeting of Parliament in London before Easter in 1315, the dearth was a -subject of deliberation, and a King's writ was issued attempting to fix -the prices at which fat oxen, cows, sheep, pigs, geese, fowls, capons, -chickens, pigeons and eggs should be sold on demand, subject to -confiscation if the sale were refused. The statute was ineffective (it was -repealed the year after), and provisions became dearer than ever. The -quarter of wheat, beans and peas sold for twenty shillings, of oats for -ten shillings, and of salt for thirty-five. When the king stopped at St -Albans at the feast of St Lawrence, says Trokelowe, it was hardly possible -to buy bread for the use of his household. The scarcity was most felt from -the month of May until the harvest. With the new crop, ruined as it was by -rains and floods, the scarcity lessened somewhat, but not before many had -felt the pinch of hunger, and others were seen (as the St Albans annalist -says he saw them) lying squalid and dead in the villages and by the -road-sides. At Midsummer, 1316, wheat rose to thirty shillings, and after -that as high as forty shillings (the highest price found by Thorold Rogers -is twenty-six shillings and eightpence at Leatherhead in July). The -various forms of famine-sickness are mentioned:--dysentery from corrupt -food, affecting nearly everyone, an acute fever which killed many, or a -putrid sore throat (_pestis gutturuosa_). To show the extremities to which -England was reduced, Trokelowe specially inserts the following: Ordinary -flesh was not to be had, but horse-flesh was eaten, fat dogs were stolen -to eat, and it was rumoured abroad that in many places both men and women -secretly ate the flesh of their own children, or of the children of -others. But the detail which Trokelowe justly thinks posterity will be -most horrified to read, is that prisoners in gaols set upon the thieves -newly brought in and devoured them alive. - -It is probably the same famine and pestilence that we find worked into the -metrical romance of Robert of Brunne (1338), under the guise of the plague -'in Cadwaladre's time,' that is, the pestilence recorded by Beda for the -year 664. The Lincolnshire romancist must have seen the famine and -pestilence of 1315-16, for he was then in the prime of life, and probably -he transferred his own experiences of famine and pestilence to the remote -episode of the seventh century, to which he devotes thirty-eight lines of -his romance. In Cadwaladre's time the corn fails and there is great -hunger. A man may go for three days before he can buy any food in burgh, -or in city, or in upland; he may indeed catch wild creatures, or fishes, -or gather leaves and roots. Worse still, a plague comes, from rotten air -and wicked winds, so that hale men fall down suddenly and die; gentle and -bondmen all go, hardly any are left to till the land, the living cannot -bury the dead, those who try fall dead in the grave. Men leave house and -land, and few are left in the country. Eleven years does Britain lie waste -with but few folk to till the land[100]. - -After the famine of 1315-16, the third and last of the great and, one may -say, disgraceful famines which gave rise to the by-word "Anglorum fames," -prices continued at their ordinary level for several years. But from 1320 -to 1323 they again came to a height. To that period probably belongs a -mortality which is entered, in a chronicle of the next century[101], under -the year 1325. On the contemporary authority of Higden we know that, in -1322, the king went to Scotland about the feast of St Peter ad Vincula, -"and though he met not with resistance, lost many of his own by famine and -disease." After that period of scarcity comes a long succession of cheap -years, covering the interval to the next great event in the annals of -pestilence that concerns us, the arrival of the Black Death in the autumn -of 1348. With that great event the history of English epidemics enters -upon a new chapter. There were, of course, years of dearth and scarcity in -the centuries following, but there were no great famine-pestilences like -those of 1196, 1258 and 1315. - -The period of the great famines ought not to be left without another -reference to the widening gulf between the rich and the poor, and the -keenness of traders which led them sometimes to incur the restraints of -government and the punishments of justice. - -On 26 March, 1269, was issued one of those ordinances against -forestalling, of which many more followed for several centuries: no -citizen to go outside the city of London, either by road or river, to meet -victuals coming to market. In the 7th year of Edward I., clipping or -debasing the coinage was carried on so systematically that nearly three -hundred persons, mostly of the Hebrew race, were drawn and hanged for it. -In the 11th year of Edward I. (1283) a statute had been directed against -cheating by bakers and millers. Meanwhile the nobility retaliated by -plundering the traders and merchants at Boston fair, and the king settled -the account with these marauding nobles by hanging them. A statute of -1316, the second year of the famine, to fix the price of ale, has an -interest on account of its motive--"ne frumentum ulterius per potum -consumeretur." The proportion of the corn of the country turned into malt, -or the amount diverted from bread to beer, may be guessed from the fact -that in London, for which the beer ordinance was first made, there were in -1309, brewhouses to the number of 1334, and taverns to the number of -354[102]. In the very year of great famine, 1316, an ordinance was issued -(in French, dated from King's Langley) against extravagant -housekeeping[103]. In the year of great scarcity and mortality, 1322, -there was such a crowd for a funeral dole at Blackfriars (for the soul of -Henry Fingret) that fifty-five persons, children and adults, were crushed -to death in the scramble[104]. At the same time the prior of Christ -Church, Canterbury, was sitting down to dinners of seventeen dishes, the -cellarer had thirty-eight servants under him, the chamberlain and sacrist -had large numbers of people employed as tailors, furriers, launderers and -the like, and the servants and equipages of the one hundred and forty -brethren were numerous and splendid[105]. The monasteries, on which the -relief of the poor mostly depended, have been thus characterized: - - "From the end of the twelfth century until the Reformation," says - Bishop Stubbs, "from the days of Hubert Walter to those of Wolsey, the - monasteries remained magnificent hostelries: their churches were - splendid chapels for noble patrons; their inhabitants were bachelor - country gentlemen, more polished and charitable, but little more - learned or more pure in life than their lay neighbours; their estates - were well managed, and enjoyed great advantages and exemptions; they - were, in fact, an element of peace in a nation that delighted in war. - But, with a few noble exceptions, there was nothing in the system that - did spiritual service[106]." - -There is little to be said, at this period, of the profession most -directly concerned with sickness, epidemic or other, namely the medical. -We become aware of its existence on rare occasions: as in the account of -the death of William the Conqueror at Rouen on 9 September, 1087, of the -illness and death of Hubert, archbishop of Canterbury, on 13 July, 1205, -at one of his manors on a journey to Rochester[107], or in the reference -by William of Newburgh, to the noted Jewish physician of King's Lynn, -whose honourable repute among the citizens for skill and modesty did not -save him from the murderous fanaticism against his race in 1190[108], or -in occasional letters of the time[109]. There were doubtless benevolent -men among the practitioners of medicine, then as now; but the profession -has never been one in which individuals could rise conspicuously above the -level of their age, and the moral standard of those centuries was a poor -one. It is not surprising, then, that John of Salisbury, indulging a taste -for epigram, should have characterized the profession of medicine in the -twelfth century as follows: "They have only two maxims which they never -violate, 'Never mind the poor; never refuse money from the rich'[110]." - -The one English physician whose writings have come down to us from the -period that we are still engaged with, is John of Gaddesden. There is -every reason to think that he was practising at the time of the famine and -pestilence of 1315-16; but it is not from his bulky treatise on medicine -that we learn the nosological types of the epidemic maladies of those -years. Some account of his _Rosa Anglica_ will be found in the chapter on -Smallpox; it must suffice to say here that he was a verbalist compiler -from other books, themselves not altogether original, and that, according -to Dr Freind, he displays no great knowledge of his profession. - -It is nothing strange, therefore, that Gaddesden throws no light upon the -famine-pestilences of England, such as those of 1315-16, which he lived -through. Dysentery and lientery, he treats of almost in the very words of -Gilbertus Anglicus; but those maladies might have been among the dwellers -in another planet, so far as native experience comes in. He reproduces -whole chapters from his predecessors, on _synochus_ and _synocha_, without -a hint that England ever witnessed such scenes of hunger-typhus as the St -Albans chroniclers have recorded for us from their own observation. The -reference by Trokelowe to the prevalence of _pestis gutturuosa_ in 1316, -is one that a medical writer of the time might well have amplified; but -Gaddesden missed the opportunity of perhaps anticipating Fothergill's -description of putrid sore-throat by more than four hundred years. - - -Epidemics of St Anthony's Fire, or Ergotism. - -One form of epidemic malady, intimately connected with bad harvests and a -poor state of agriculture, namely Ergotism, from the mixture of poisoned -grains in the rye or other corn, is conspicuously missed from English -records of the medieval period, although it plays a great part in the -history of French epidemics of the Middle Ages, under such names as _ignis -sacer_, _ignis S. Antonii_, or _ignis infernalis_. According to the -proverbial saying already quoted, France was as notorious for _ignis_ as -England for famine, and Normandy for lepra: "Tres plagae tribus regionibus -appropriari solent, Anglorum fames, Gallorum ignis, Normannorum -lepra[111]." The malady was of a nature to attract notice and excite pity; -it is entered by chroniclers, and is a frequent topic in French legends of -the Saints. Its occurrence in epidemic form can be traced in France, with -a degree of probability, as far back as 857 (perhaps to 590); six great -outbreaks are recorded in the tenth century, seven in the eleventh, ten in -the twelfth, and three in the thirteenth, the medieval series ending with -one in the year 1373. The estimates of mortality in the several epidemics -of ergotism over a larger or smaller area of France, range as high as -40,000, and 14,000, which numbers may be taken to be the roughest of -guesses; but in later times upwards of 500 deaths from ergotism have been -accurately counted in a single outbreak within a limited district. The -epidemics have been observed in particular seasons, sometimes twenty years -or more elapsing without the disease being seen; they have occurred also -in particular provinces--in the basin of the Loire, in Lorraine, and, -since the close of the medieval period, especially in the Sologne. The -disease has usually been traced to a spoiled rye crop; but there is -undoubted evidence from the more recent period that a poison with -corresponding effects can be produced in some other cereals, even in wheat -itself. - -In a field of rye, especially after a wet sowing or a wet season of -growth, a certain proportion of the heads bear long brown or purple corns, -one or more upon a head, projecting in the shape of a cock's spur, whence -the French name of ergot. The spur appears to be, and probably is, an -overgrown grain of rye; it is grooved like a rye-corn, occupies the place -of the corn between the two chaff-coverings, and contains an abundant -whitish meal. Microscopic research has detected in or upon the spurred rye -the filaments of a minute parasitic mould; so that it is to the invasion -by a parasite that we may trace the enormous overgrowth of one or more -grains on an ear, and it is probably to the ferment-action of the fungus -that we should ascribe the poisonous properties of the meal. The -proportion of all the stalks in a field so affected will vary -considerably, as well as the proportion of grains on each affected head of -corn[112]. Rye affected with ergot is apt to be a poor crop at any rate; -one or more spurred corns on a head tend to keep the rest of the grains -small or unfilled; and if there be many stalks in the field so affected, -the spurred grain will bulk considerably in the whole yield. When the -diseased grains are ground to meal along with the healthy grains, the meal -and the bread will contain an appreciable quantity of the poison of ergot; -and if rye-bread were the staple food, there would be a great risk, after -an unusually bad harvest, of an outbreak of the remarkable constitutional -effects of ergotism. Rye-bread with much ergot in it may be rather blacker -than usual; but it is said to have no peculiar taste. - -It is almost exclusively among the peasantry that symptoms of ergotism -have been seen, and among children particularly. The attack usually began -with intense pains in the legs or feet, causing the victims to writhe and -scream. A fire seemed to burn between the flesh and the bones, and, at a -later stage, even in the bowels, the surface of the body being all the -while cold as ice. Sometimes the skin of affected limbs became livid or -black; now and then large blebs or blisters arose upon it, as in bad kinds -of erysipelas. Gangrene or sloughing of the extremities followed; a foot -or a hand fell off, or the flesh of a whole limb was destroyed down to the -bones, by a process which began in the deeper textures. The spontaneous -separation of a gangrenous hand or foot was on the whole a good sign for -the recovery of the patient. Such was the _ignis sacer_, or _ignis S. -Antonii_ which figures prominently, I am told, in the French legends of -the Saints, and of which epidemics are recorded in the French medieval -chronicles. Corresponding effects of ergotism may or may not have occurred -during the medieval period in other countries of Europe where rye was -grown. - -The remarkable thing is, that when we do begin in the sixteenth and -seventeenth centuries to obtain evidence of agrarian epidemics in Germany, -Sweden and Russia, which have eventually come to be identified, in the -light of more recent knowledge, with ergotism, the type of the disease is -different, not perhaps fundamentally or in the ultimate pathological -analysis, but at all events different as being a functional disorder of -the nervous system, instead of a disorder, on nervous lines, affecting the -nutrition of parts and their structural integrity. This newer form, -distinctive of Germany and north-eastern Europe, was known by the name of -Kriebelkrankheit, from the creeping or itching sensations in the limbs at -the beginning of it; these heightened sensibilities often amounted to -acute pain, as in the beginning of the gangrenous form also; but the -affection of the sensory nerves, instead of leading to a breakdown in the -nutrition of the parts and to gangrene, was followed by disorder of the -motor nerves,--by spasms of the hands and arms, feet and legs, very often -passing into contractures of the joints which no force could unbend, and -in some cases passing into periodic convulsive fits of the whole body like -epilepsy, whence the name of convulsive ergotism[113]. - -Side by side with these German, Swedish and Russian outbreaks of -convulsive ergotism, or Kriebelkrankheit (called by Linnaeus in Sweden by -the Latin name _raphania_), there had been a renewal or continuance of the -medieval epidemics in France, notably in the Sologne; but the French -ergotism has retained its old type of _ignis_ or gangrene. It was not -until the eighteenth century that the learned world became clear as to the -connexion between either of those forms of disease among the peasantry and -a damaged rye-crop, although the country people themselves, and the -observant medical practitioners of the affected districts, had put this -and that together long before. Thus, as late as 1672-75, there were -communications made to the Paris Academy of Medicine[114] by observers in -the Sologne and especially around Montargis, in which ergot of rye is -clearly described, as well as the associated symptoms of gangrenous -disease in the peasantry; but the connexion between the two was still -regarded as open to doubt, and as a question that could only be settled by -experiment; while there is not a hint given that these modern outbreaks -were of the same nature as the notorious medieval _ignis sacer_. According -to Hser, it was not until the French essay of Read (Strasbourg, 1771) -that the identity of the old _ignis_ with the modern gangrenous ergotism -was pointed out. - -The result of the modern study of outbreaks of ergotism, including the -minute record of individual cases, has been to show that there is no hard -and fast line between the gangrenous and convulsive forms, that the French -epidemics, although on the whole marked by the phenomena of gangrene, have -not been wanting in functional nervous symptoms, and that the German or -northern outbreaks have often been of a mixed type. Thus, in the French -accounts of 1676, "malign fevers accompanied with drowsiness and raving," -are mentioned along with "the gangrene in the arms but mostly in the legs, -which ordinarily are corrupted first." - -Again, the observations of Th. O. Heusinger[115] on an outbreak near -Marburg in 1855-56, led him decidedly to conclude for the essential -sameness of _ignis_ and Kriebelkrankheit, and for the existence of a -middle type, although undoubtedly the sensory and motor disorders, -including hyperaesthesia, pain and anaesthesia on the one hand, and -contractures of the joints, choreic movements and convulsions on the -other, were more distinctive of the epidemics of ergotism on German or -northern European soil. - -Thus far the foreign experience of ergotism, both medieval and modern, and -of its several types. We shall now be in a position to examine the English -records for indications of the same effects of damaged grain. - -In the English medieval chronicles an occasional reference may be found to -_ignis_ or wild fire. The reference to wild fire in Derbyshire in the -Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year 1049, probably means some -meteorological phenomenon, elsewhere called _ignis sylvaticus_: "Eac -wilde fyr on Deorbyscire micel yfel dyde[116]." Whatever the _ignis -sylvaticus_ or _ignis aereus_ was, which destroyed houses as well as -crops, there appears to be no warrant for the conclusion of C. F. -Heusinger that it was the same as the _ignis sacer_ of the French -peasantry[117]. An undoubted reference to _ignis infernalis_ as a human -malady occurs in the _Topography of Ireland_ by Giraldus Cambrensis: a -certain archer who had ravished a woman at St Fechin's mill at Fore was -overtaken by swift vengeance, "igne infernali in membro percussus, usque -in ipsum corpus statim exarsit, et nocte eadem exspiravit." Taking the -incident as legendary, and the diagnosis as valueless, we may still -conclude that the name, at least, of _ignis infernalis_ was familiar to -English writers. But in all the accounts of English famines and -wide-spread sicknesses in the medieval period which have been extracted -from the nearest contemporary authorities, I have found no mention of any -disease that might correspond to ergotism[118]. - -The first undoubted instance of ergotism in England belongs to the -eighteenth century. On or about the 10th of January, 1762, a peasant's -family (father, mother, and six children) of Wattisham in Suffolk, were -attacked almost simultaneously with the symptoms of gangrenous ergotism, -several of them eventually losing portions of their limbs. The disease -began with intense pain in the legs, and contractures of the hands and -feet. It was proved that they had not been using rye flour; but their -bread for a short time before had been made exclusively from damaged -wheat, grown in the neighbourhood and kept apart from the farmer's good -corn so as not to spoil his sample. It had been sent to the mill just -before Christmas, and had been used by some others besides the family who -developed the symptoms of ergotism[119]. - -In that authentic instance of ergotism (although not from rye), there was -one symptom, the contractures of the hands and feet, which is distinctive -of the convulsive form; so that the English type may be said to have been -a mixture of the French form and of the form special to the north-eastern -countries of Europe. With that instance as a type, let us now inquire -whether any epidemics in England at earlier periods may not be brought -under the head of ergotism. It is to be kept in mind that none of the -medieval outbreaks were called by their present name, or traced to their -true source, until centuries after; so that our task is, not to search the -records for the name of ergotism, but to scrutinize any anomalous outbreak -of disease, or any outbreak distinguished in the chronicles by some -unusual mark, with a view to discovering whether it suits the hypothesis -of ergotism. I shall have to speak of three such outbreaks in the -fourteenth century, and of one in Lancashire and Cheshire in 1702[120]. - -The first of these is given by Knighton for a period and a locality that -may have been within his own cognizance. In the summer of 1340 there -happened in England generally, but especially in the county of Leicester, -a certain deplorable and enormous infirmity. It was marked by paroxysms or -fits, attended by intolerable suffering; while the fit lasted, the victims -emitted a noise like the barking of dogs. A "great pestilence," or perhaps -a great mortality, is said to have ensued[121]. In that record the salient -points are, firstly the wide or epidemic incidence of the malady, at all -events in Leicestershire, which was Knighton's own county; secondly the -paroxysmal nature of the attacks, and the strange noises emitted -therewith; thirdly the intolerable suffering (_poena_) that attended each -fit (_passio_). Except for the clear indication of pain, one might think -of the strange hysterical outbreaks, extending, by a kind of psychical -contagion, to whole communities, which were observed about the same period -in some parts of the continent of Europe. But of these medieval -psychopathies, as they are called, there is hardly any trace in England. -The Flagellants came over from Zealand to London in 1349, and gave -exhibitions at St Paul's, but that pseudo-religious mania does not appear -to have taken hold among the English. The epidemic recorded by Knighton -had probably a more material cause. To illustrate the somewhat meagre -reference by Knighton to the strange epidemic of 1340, I shall proceed at -once to the remarkable outbreak in Lancashire and Cheshire in 1702, which -was clearly not a psychopathy or hysterical outbreak, and yet had a -seemingly hysterical element in it. An account of it was sent to the Royal -Society by Dr Charles Leigh "of Lancashire[122]." - - "We have this year [1702] had an epidemical fever, attended with very - surprising symptoms. In the beginning, the patient was frequently - attacked with the colica ventriculi; convulsions in various parts, - sometimes violent vomitings, and a dysentery; the jaundice, and in - many of them, a suppression of urine; and what urine was made was - highly saturated with choler. About the state of the distemper, large - purple spots appeared, and on each side of 'em two large blisters, - which continued three or four days: these blisters were so placed - about the spots that they might in some measure be term'd satellites - or tenders: of these there were in many four different eruptions. But - the most remarkable instance I saw in the fever was in a poor boy of - Lymm in Cheshire, one John Pownel, about 13 years of age, who was - affected with the following symptoms:-- - - "Upon the crisis or turn of the fever, he was seized with an aphonia, - and was speechless six weeks [? days], with the following convulsions: - the distemper infested the nerves of both arms and legs which produced - the Chorea Sancti Viti, or St Vitus's dance; and the legs sometimes - were both so contracted that no person could reduce them to their - natural position. Besides these, he had most terrible symptoms, which - began in the following manner: [description of convulsions follows] - ... and then he barked in all the usual notes of a dog, sometimes - snarling, barking, and at the last howling like an hound. After this - the nerves of the mandibles were convulsed, and then the jaws clashed - together with that violence that several of his teeth were beaten out, - and then at several times there came a great foam from his mouth.... - These symptoms were so amazing that several persons about him believed - he was possessed. I told them there was no ground for such - suppositions, but that the distemper was natural, and a species of an - epilepsy, and by the effects I convinced them of the truth of it; for - in a week's time I recovered the boy his speech, his senses returned, - his convulsions vanished, and the boy is now very cheerful. There have - been other persons in this country much after the same manner." - -This epidemic of 1702 in Lancashire and Cheshire was recorded as something -unusual. It had certain intestinal symptoms such as colic, which may well -have followed the use of poisoned food and are indeed described among the -symptoms of ergotism; there were also convulsions, large purple spots with -blisters coming and going on the skin near them, and, in the single case -that is given with details, there were contractures of the legs "so that -no person could reduce them to their natural position," and a continuance -for several days of painful epileptiform fits attended with noises like -the barking of a dog, or the hissing of a goose, "all which different -sounds (I take it) proceed from the different contractions of the lungs -variously forcing out the air." The remarkable case of the boy, certified -by several witnesses, is expressly given as one belonging to the general -epidemic of the locality, others having been affected "much after the same -manner." Whatever suggestion there may be of ergotism in these -particulars, nothing is said of gangrene of the limbs, although the livid -spots and blisters are part of the symptoms of gangrenous ergotism, just -as the convulsions and contractures are of convulsive ergotism. In the -Suffolk cases of 1762 there were both contractures of the limbs and -gangrene. - -Knighton's mention of the barking noises emitted by the sufferers of 1340 -has suggested to Nichols, the author of the _History of -Leicestershire_[123], a comparison of them with the cases investigated by -Dr Freind in the year 1700, at the village of Blackthorn in Oxfordshire. -Having heard a great rumour in the summer of that year that certain girls -at that Oxfordshire village were taken with frequent barkings like dogs, -Dr Freind made a journey to the place to investigate the cases[124]. - - He found that this _pestis_ or plague had invaded two families in the - village, on terms of close intimacy with each other. Two or three - girls in each family are specially referred to: they were seized at - intervals of a few hours with spasms of the neck and mouth, attended - by vociferous cries; the spasmodic movements increased to a climax, - when the victims sank exhausted. The fits had kept occurring for - several weeks, and had appeared in the second family at a considerable - interval after the first. The symptoms, said Freind, were those that - had been described by Seidelius--distortion of the mouth, indecorous - working of the tongue, and noises emitted like barking. He found - nothing in the girls' symptoms that could not be referred to a form of - St Vitus' dance or to hysteria, in which maladies, laughter, howling - and beating of the breast are occasionally seen as well as the - spasmodic working of the neck and limbs. - -The question remains whether the cases of 1700 in the Oxfordshire village, -assuming Dr Freind's reading of them to be correct, were as illustrative -of the outbreak of 1340 as the cases of 1702 in Lancashire and Cheshire, -which were probably too numerous and too much complicated with symptoms -of material toxic disorder to be explained as hysterical. There is, -indeed, a larger question raised, whether the so-called psychopathies of -the medieval and more recent periods may not have had a beginning, at -least, in some toxic property of the staple food. The imagination readily -fixes upon such symptoms as foaming at the mouth and barking noises, -exalts these phenomena over deeper symptoms that a physician might have -detected, and finds a simple explanation of the whole complex seizure as -demoniac possession or, in modern phrase, as a psychopathy. Without -questioning the subjective or imitative nature of many outbreaks which -have been set down to hysteria, it may be well to use some discrimination -before we exclude altogether an element of material poisoning such as -ergot in the staple food, more especially in the case of the wide-spread -hysterical epidemics of Sweden, a country subject to ergotism also[125]. - -These eighteenth-century instances have been brought in to illustrate -Knighton's account of the epidemic of 1340. The next strange outbreak of -the fourteenth century is recorded by the St Albans historian -("Walsingham") under a year between 1361 and 1365, probably the year 1362. -Like so many more of the medieval records of epidemic sickness, it is a -meagre and confused statement: "Numbers died of the disease of lethargy, -prophesying troubles to many; many women also died by the flux; and there -was a general murrain of cattle[126]." Along with that enigmatical entry, -we may take the last of the kind that here concerns us. At Cambridge, in -1389, there occurred an epidemic of "phrensy;" it is described as "a great -and formidable pestilence, which arose suddenly, and in which men were -attacked all at once by the disease of phrensy of the mind, dying without -the _viaticum_, and in a state of unconsciousness[127]." The names of -phrensy and lethargy occur in the manuscript medical treatises of the time -in the chapters upon diseases of the brain and nerves[128]; strictly they -are names of symptoms, and not of forms or types of disease, and they may -be used loosely of various morbid states which have little in common. A -lethargy would in some cases be a name for coma in fever, or for a -paralytic stroke; a phrensy might be actual mania, or it might be the -delirium of plague or typhus fever. The "lethargy" of 1362 is alleged of a -number of people as if in an epidemic, whatever the singular phrase -"prophetantes infortunia multis" may mean; and the "phrensy of the mind" -of which many died suddenly at Cambridge in 1389, does not look as if it -had been a symptom of plague or pestilential fever. The judicious reader -will make what he can of these disappointingly meagre details. But for his -guidance it may be added that the French accounts of ergotism in 1676 give -one of the poisonous effects as being "to cause sometimes malign fevers -accompanied with drowsiness and raving," which terms might stand for -lethargy and phrensy; also that it has not always been easy, in an -epidemic among the peasantry after a bad harvest, to distinguish the cases -of ergotism from the cases of typhus, the contractures of the limbs, which -seem so special to ergotism, having been described also for undoubted -cases of typhus[129]. - -Whether these anomalous epidemics in medieval England were instances of -convulsive ergotism or not, the English records are on the whole wanting -in the evidence of such wide-spread and frequent disasters from a poisoned -harvest as distinguish the French annals of the same period. One reason of -our immunity may have been that the grain was better grown; another reason -certainly is that rye was a comparatively rare crop in England, wheaten -bread being preferred, although bread made from beans and barley was not -uncommon. Thorold Rogers says: "Rye was scantily cultivated. An occasional -crop on many estates, it is habitually sown in few. It is regularly sown -in Cambridgeshire and some other of the eastern counties. As the period -before us passes on [1259-1400], it becomes still more rare, and as will -be seen below, some of the later years of this enquiry contain no entries -of its purchase and sale[130]." But it is clear from the entries in -chronicles, more particularly about the very period of the fourteenth -century to which the three epidemics suggestive of ergotism belong, that -the English peasantry suffered from the poisonous effects of damaged food, -even if they suffered little from spurred rye. Thus, under the year 1383, -in the history known as Walsingham's, there is an unmistakeable reference -to many fatalities, as well as serious maladies, caused by the eating of -damaged fruit[131]. Again, under 1391, it is stated that this was "a hard -and difficult year for the poor owing to a dearth of fruits, which had now -lasted two years; whence it happened that at the time of the nuts and -apples, many of the poor died of dysentery brought on by eating them; and -the pestilence would have been worse had it not been for the laudable -diligence of the Mayor of London, who caused corn to be brought to London -from over sea[132]." - - -Generalities on Medieval Famines in England. - -Summing up the English famine-pestilences of the medieval period, we find -that they included the usual forms of such sickness--spotted fever of the -nature of typhus, dysentery, lientery or looseness (such as has often -subsequently accompanied typhus or famine-fever in Ireland), and putrid -sore-throat. That some of these effects were due to spoiled grain and -fruits, as well as to absolute want, we may reasonably conclude; for -example the harvest of 1258 rotted on the ground, and yet the mouldy corn -was sold at famine prices. With all those records of famines and their -attendant sicknesses in England, it is significant that there is little -indication of ergotism. The immunity of England from ergotism, with such a -record of famines as the annals show, can only have been because little -rye was grown and little black bread eaten. The standard of living would -appear to have been higher among the English peasantry than among the -French. A bad harvest, still more two bad harvests in succession, made -them feel the pinch of famine more acutely, perhaps, than if they had -accommodated themselves to the more sober level of rye bread. Hence the -somewhat paradoxical but doubtless true saying of the Middle -Ages--"Anglorum fames, Francorum ignis." The saying really means, not that -England was a poor country, which would be an absurd repute for foreigners -to have fixed upon her; but that the English were subject to alternating -periods of abundance and scarcity, of surfeit and starvation. The earliest -English work which deals fully and concretely with the social condition of -the country is the fourteenth-century poem of "The Vision of Piers the -Ploughman." A few passages from that poem will be of use as throwing light -upon the famines of England, before we finally leave the period of which -they are characteristic. - -Langland's poem describes the social state of England in peculiar -circumstances, namely, after the upheaval and dislocation of the Great -Mortality of 1349; and in that respect it has an interest for our subject -which comes into a later chapter. But in so far as it illustrates the -alternating periods of abundance and scarcity, the vision of medieval -England concerns us here before we quit the subject of famine-pestilences. -The average industrious ploughman, represented by Piers himself, fares but -soberly until Lammas comes round[133]:-- - - "I have no penny, quod Piers, pullets for to buy, - Ne neither geese nor pigs, but two green cheeses, - A few cruddes and cream, and an haver-cake, - And two loaves of beans and bran ybake for my fauntis. - And yet I say, by my soul, I have no salt bacon, - Nor no cookeney, by Christ, collops for to maken. - And I have percil and porettes and many kole-plantes, - And eke a cow and a calf, and a cart-mare - To draw afield my dung the while the drought lasteth. - And by this lyflode me mot live till lammas time; - And by that I hope to have harvest in my croft; - And then may I digte thy dinner as me dear liketh." - -Some are worse off than the ploughman in the slack time before the -harvest: - - "All the poor people tho pesecoddes fetched, - Beans and baken apples they brought in their lappes, - Chibolles and chervelles and ripe cherries many, - And proferred Piers this present to plead with Hunger. - All Hunger ate in haste, and axed after more. - Then poor folk for fear fed Hunger eagerlie, - With green poret and pesen, to poison Hunger they thought. - By that it nighed near harvest, new corn came to chipping. - Then was folk fain, and fed Hunger with the best, - With good ale, as glutton taught, and gerte Hunger go sleep. - And though would waster not work but wandren about, - Ne no beggar eat bread that beans in were, - But of cocket or clerematyn or else of clean wheat: - Ne no halfpenny ale in none wise drink, - But of the best and of the brownest that in burgh is to sell. - Labourers that have no land to live on, but their hands, - Deigned nought to dine a-day night-old wortes. - May no penny ale them pay ne no piece of bacon, - But if it be fresh flesh other fish fried other bake." - -The waster being now in his season of plenty falls to abusing the Statute -of Labourers: - - "And then cursed he the king and all his council after, - Such laws to loke, labourers to grieve. - But whiles Hunger was their master there would none of them chide, - Nor strive against _his_ statute, so sternly he looked. - And I warn you, workmen, wynneth while ye mowe, - For Hunger hitherward hasteth him fast. - He shall awake with water wasters to chasten. - Ere five year be fulfilled such famine shall arise - Through floods and through foul weathers fruits shall fail. - And so said Saturn, and sent you to warn ... - Then shall death withdraw and dearth be justice, - And Daw the dyker die for hunger, - But if God of his goodness grant us a truce." - -He proposes to feed the lazy wasters on beans: - - "And gif the groomes grudge, bid them go swynk, - And he shall sup the sweeter when he hath deserved." - -The ploughman asks Hunger the reason why both himself and his servants are -unable to work: - - "I wot well, quod Hunger, what sickness you aileth. - Ye have maunged over much, and that maketh you groan ... - Let not sir Surfeit sitten at thy board ... - And gif thy diet be thus, I dare lay mine ears - That Physic shall his furred hoods for his food sell, - And his cloak of calabre with all the knaps of gold, - And be fain, by my faith, his physic to let, - And learn to labour with land, for lyflode is sweet: - For murtherers are many leeches, Lord them amend! - They do men kill through their drinks, or destiny it would. - By Saint Poul, quod Piers, these aren profitable words." - -In another place, Hawkin the minstrel confesses to gluttony: - - "And more meat ate and drank than nature might digest, - And caught sickness some time for my surfeits oft." - -A liking for the best of food, and plenty of it, when it was to be had, -has clearly been an English trait from the earliest times. Conversely -thrift does not appear to have been a virtue or a grace of the labouring -class in England. Thus a bad harvest brought wide-spread scarcity, and two -bad harvests brought famine and famine-pestilences. The contrasts were -sharp because the standard of living was high. And although three, at -least, of the English famines were disgraceful to so rich a country, and -were probably the occasion of the foreign reproach of "Anglorum fames;" -yet the significant fact remains that the disease of the European -peasantry, which is the truest index of an inferior diet, namely ergotism, -has little or no place in our annals of sickness. - - - - -CHAPTER II. - -LEPROSY IN MEDIEVAL BRITAIN. - - -The history of leprosy in Britain can hardly be the history of leprosy -alone, but of that disease along with others which were either mistaken -for it or conveniently and euphemistically included under it. That there -was leprosy in the country is undoubted; but it is just as certain that -there was _lues venerea_; that the latter as a primary lesion led an -anonymous existence or was called _lepra_ or _morphaea_ if it were called -anything; that the remote effects of the lues were not known as such, -being taken for detached or original outcomes of the disordered humours -and therefore in the same general class as leprous manifestations; and -that the popular and clerical notions of leprosy were too superstitious -and inexact, even if the diagnostic intention had been more resolute than -it was, to permit of any clear separation of the leprous from the -syphilitic, to say nothing of their separation from the poor victims of -lupus and cancer of the face, of scrofulous running sores, or of neglected -skin-eruptions more repulsive to the eye than serious in their nature. I -shall give some proof of each of those assertions--as an essential -preliminary to any correct handling of the historical records of British -leprosy. - - -Leprosy in Medieval Medical Treatises. - -The picture given of true leprosy in the medieval treatises on medicine is -unmistakeable. There are two systematic writers about the year 1300 who -have left a better account of it than the Arabian authors from whom they -mostly copied. While the writers in question have transferred whole -chapters unaltered from Avicenna, Rhazes and Theodoric, they have improved -upon their models in the stock chapter 'De Lepra.' It so happens that -those two writers, Bernard Gordonio and Gilbertus Anglicus, bear names -which have been taken to indicate British nationality, and the picture of -leprosy by the latter has actually been adduced as a contemporary account -of the disease observed in England[134]. Gordonio was a professor at -Montpellier, and his experience and scholarship are purely foreign. The -circumstances of Gilbert the Englishman are not so well known; but it is -tolerably certain that he was not, as often assumed, the Gilbert Langley, -Gilbert de l'Aigle, or Gilbertus de Aquila, who was physician to Hubert, -archbishop of Canterbury ([Dagger] 13 July, 1205)[135], having been a -pupil at Salerno in the time of Aegidius of Corbeil (about 1180). The -treatise of Gilbertus Anglicus bears internal evidence of a later century -and school; it is distinguished by method and comprehensiveness, and is -almost exactly on the lines of the _Lilium Medicinae_ by Gordonio, whose -date at Montpellier is known with some exactness to have been from 1285 to -about 1307. Future research may perhaps discover where Gilbert taught or -was taught; meanwhile we may safely assume that his scholarship and system -were of a foreign colour. The medical writer of that time in England was -John of Gaddesden, mentioned in the end of the foregoing chapter; he is -the merest plagiary, and the one or two original remarks in his chapter -'De Lepra' would almost justify the epithet of "fatuous" which Guy de -Chauliac applied to him. - -Although we cannot appeal to Gilbertus Anglicus for native English -experience any more than we can to his _alter ego_, Gordonio, yet we may -assume that the picture of leprosy which they give might have been -sketched in England as well as in Italy or in Provence. The conditions -were practically uniform throughout Christendom; the true leprosy of any -one part of medieval Europe is the true leprosy of the whole. - -Gilbert's picture[136], as we have said, is unmistakeable, and the same -might be said of Bernard's[137]--the eyebrows falling bare and getting -knotted with uneven tuberosities, the nose and other features becoming -thick, coarse and lumpy, the face losing its mobility or play of -expression, the raucous voice, the loss of sensibility in the hands, and -the ultimate break-up or _naufragium_ of the leprous growths into foul -running sores. The enumeration of nervous symptoms, which are now -recognised to be fundamental in the pathology of leprosy, shows that -Gilbert went below the surface. Among the "signa leprae generalia" he -mentions such forms of hyperaesthesia as _formicatio_ (the creeping of -ants), and the feeling of "needles and pins;" and, in the way of -anaesthesia, he speaks of the loss of sensibility from the little finger -to the elbow, as well as in the exposed parts where the blanched spots or -thickenings come--the forehead, cheeks, eyebrows, to which he adds the -tongue. Gilbert's whole chapter 'De Lepra' is an obvious improvement upon -the corresponding one in Avicenna, who says that _lepra_ is a cancer of -the whole body, cancer being the _lepra_ of a single member, and is -probably confusing lupus with leprosy when he describes the cartilages of -the nose as corroded in the latter, and the nostrils destroyed by the same -kind of _naufragium_ as the fingers and toes. All students of the history -or clinical characters of leprosy, from Guy de Chauliac, who wrote about -1350, down to Hensler and Sprengel, have recognised in Gilbert's and -Bernard's account of it the marks of first-hand observation; so that we -may take it, without farther debate, that leprosy, as correctly diagnosed, -was a disease of Europe and of Britain in the Middle Ages. - -Having got so far, we come next to a region of almost inextricable -confusion, a region of secrecy and mystification, as well as of real -contemporary ignorance. We may best approach it by one or two passages -from Gilbert and Gordonio themselves. The systematic handling of _lepra_ -in their writings is one thing, and their more concrete remarks on its -conditions of origin, its occasions, or circumstances are another. What -are we to make of this kind of leprosy?--"In hoc genere, causa est -accessus ad mulierem ad quam accessit prius leprosus; et corrumpit -velocius vir sanus quam mulier a leproso.... Et penetrant [venena] in -nervos calidos et arterias et venas viriles, et inficiunt spiritus et -bubones, et hoc velocius si mulier," etc. Or to quote Gilbert again: "Ex -accessu ad mulieres, diximus superius, lepram in plerisque generari post -coits leprosos[138]." Or in Gordonio: "Et provenit [lepra] etiam ex nimia -confibulatione cum leprosis, et ex coitu cum leprosa, et qui jacuit cum -muliere cum qua jacuit leprosus[139]." That these circumstances of -contracting _lepra_ were not mere verbal theorizings inspired by the -pathology of the day and capable of being now set aside, is obvious from a -_historia_ or case which Gordonio introduces into his text. "I shall tell -what happened," he says; and then proceeds to the following relation:[140] - -"Quaedam comtissa venit leprosa ad Montem Pessulanum [Montpellier], et -erat in fine in cura mea; et quidam Baccalarius in medicina ministrabat -ei, et jacuit cum ea, et impregnavit eam, et perfectissime leprosus factus -est." Happy is he therefore, he adds, who learns caution from the risks of -others. - -Here we have sufficient evidence, from the beginning of the fourteenth -century, of a disease being called _lepra_ which does not conform to the -conditions of leprosy as we now understand them. The same confusion -between leprosy and the _lues venerea_ prevailed through the whole -medieval period. Thus, in the single known instance of a severe edict -against lepers in England, the order of Edward III. to the mayor and -sheriffs of London in 1346[141], the reasons for driving lepers out of the -City are given,--among others, because they communicate their disease "by -carnal intercourse with women in stews and other secret places," and by -their polluted breath. It was pointed out long ago by Beckett in his -paper on the antiquity of the _lues venerea_[142], that the polluted -breath was characteristic of the latter, but not of leprosy. Of course the -pollution of their breath might have meant no more than the theoretical -reasoning of the books (as in Gilbert, where the breath of lepers, as well -as the mere sight of them, is said to give the disease, p. 337), but the -breath was probably obnoxious in a more real way, just as we know, from -Gordonio's case at Montpellier, that the other alleged source of "leprous" -contagion was no mere theoretical deduction. As the medieval period came -to an end the leper-houses (in France) were found to contain a -miscellaneous gathering of cases generically called leprous; and about the -same time, the year 1488, an edict of the same purport as Edward III.'s -London one of 1346, was issued by the provost of Paris against _les -lpreux_ of that city. The year 1488 is so near the epidemic outburst of -the _morbus Gallicus_ during the French campaigns on Italian soil in -1494-95, that the historian has not hesitated to set down that sudden -reappearance of leprous contagion, in a proclamation of the State, to a -real prevalence already in Paris of the contagious malady which was to be -heard of to the farthest corners of Europe a few years after[143]. - -There is no difficulty in producing evidence from medieval English records -of the prevalence of _lues venerea_, which was not concealed under the -euphemistic or mistaken diagnosis of leprosy. Instances of a very bad -kind, authenticated with the names of the individuals, are given in -Gascoigne's _Liber Veritatum_, under the date of 1433[144]. - -In the medieval text-books of Avicenna, Gilbert and others, there are -invariably paragraphs on _pustulae et apostemata virgae_. In the only -original English medical work of those times, by John Ardern, who was -practising at Newark from 1349 to 1370, and came afterwards to London, -appearances are described which can mean nothing else than -condylomata[145]. From a manuscript prescription-book of the medieval -period, in the British Museum, I have collected some receipts (or their -headings) which relate, as an index of later date prefixed to the MS. -says, to "the pox of old[146]." - -Some have refused to see in such cases any real correspondence with the -modern forms of syphilis because only local effects are described and no -constitutional consequences traced. But no one in those times thought of a -primary focus of infection with its remoter effects at large, in the case -of any disease whatsoever. Even in the great epidemic of syphilis at the -end of the fifteenth century, the sequence of primary and secondary -(tertiaries were unheard of until long after), was not at first -understood; the eruption of the skin, which was compared to a bad kind of -variola, the imposthumes of the head and of the bones elsewhere, together -with all other constitutional or general symptoms, were traced, in good -faith, to a disordered liver, an organ which was chosen on theoretical -grounds as the _minera morbi_ or laboratory of the disease[147]. The -circumstances of the great epidemic were, of course, special, but they -were not altogether new. No medieval miracle could have been more of a -suspension of the order of nature than that _luxuria_, _immunditia_, and -_foeditas_, with their attendant _corruptio membrorum_, should have been -free from those consequences, in the individual and in the community, -which are more familiar in our own not less clean-living days merely -because the sequence of events is better understood. That such vices -abounded in the medieval world we have sufficient evidence. They were -notorious among the Norman conquerors of England, especially notorious in -the reign of William Rufus[148]; hence, perhaps, the significance of the -phrase _lepra Normannorum_. That particular vice which amounts to a felony -was the subject of the sixth charge (unproved) in the indictment of the -order of the Templars before the Pope Clement V. in 1307. Effects on the -public health traceable to such causes, for the most part _sub rosa_, have -been often felt in the history of nations, from the Biblical episode of -Baal-peor down to modern times. The evidence is written at large in the -works of Astruc, Hensler and Rosenbaum. We are here concerned with a much -smaller matter, namely, any evidence from England which may throw light -upon the classes of cases that were called leprous if they were called by -a name at all. - -Under the year 1258, Matthew Paris introduces a singular paragraph, which -is headed, "The Bishop of Hereford smitten with polypus." The bishop, a -Provenal, had made himself obnoxious by his treacherous conduct as the -agent of Henry III. at the Holy See in the matter of the English subsidies -to the pope. Accordingly it was by the justice of God that he was deformed -by a most disgraceful disease, to wit, _morphea_, or again, "morphea -polipo, vel quadam specie leprae[149]." According to the medical teaching -of the time, as we find it in Gilbertus Anglicus, _morphaea_ was an -infection producing a change in the natural colour of the skin; it was -confined to the skin, whereas _lepra_ was in the flesh also; the former -was curable, the latter incurable; _morphaea_ might be white, red, or -black[150]. The account of _morphaea_ by Gordonio is somewhat fuller. All -things, he says, that are causes of _lepra_ are causes of _morphaea_; so -that what is in the flesh _lepra_ is _morphaea_ in the skin. It was a -patchy discoloration of the skin, reddish, yellowish, whitish, dusky, or -black, producing _terribilis aspectus_; curable if recent, incurable if of -long standing; curable also if of moderate extent, but difficult to cure -if of great extent[151]. In this description by Gordonio a modern French -writer on leprosy[152] discovers the classical characters of the syphilis -of our own day: "not one sign is wanting." - -No doubt the medical writers drew a distinction between _morphaea_ and -_lepra_, as we have seen in quoting Gilbert and Gordonio. Gaddesden, also, -who mostly copies them, interpolates here an original remark. No one -should be adjudged leprous, he says, and separated from his fellows, -merely because the "figure and form" (the stock phrase) of the face are -corrupted: the disease might be "scabies foeda," or if in the feet, it -might be "cancer." Nodosities or tubercles should not be taken to mean -leprosy, unless they are confirmed (inveterate) in the face[153]. But how -uncertain are these diagnostic indications, as between _lepra_ and -_morphaea_, _lepra_ and "scabies foeda," _lepra_ and "cancer in pedibus!" -If there were any object in calling the disease by one name rather than -another, it is clear that the same disease might be called by a euphemism -in one case and by a term meant to be opprobrious in another. Although -leprosy was not in general a disease that anyone might wish to be credited -with, yet there were circumstances when the diagnosis of leprosy had its -advantages. It was of use to a beggar or tramp to be called a leper: he -would excite more pity, he might get admission to a hospital, and he might -solicit alms, under royal privilege, although begging in ordinary was -punishable. It is conceivable also that the diagnosis of leprosy was a -convenient one for men in conspicuous positions in Church and State. It is -most improbable that the "lepra Normannorum" was all leprosy; it is absurd -to suppose that leprosy became common in Europe because returning -Crusaders introduced it from the East, as if leprosy could be "introduced" -in any such way; and it is not easy to arrive at certitude, that all the -cases of leprosy in princes and other high-placed personages (Baldwin IV. -of Jerusalem who died at the age of twenty-five,[154] Robert the Bruce of -Scotland,[155] and Henry IV. of England[156]) were cases that would now be -diagnosed leprous. - -Instances may be quoted to show that the name of leper was flung about -somewhat at random. Thus, in an edict issued by Henry II., during the -absence of Becket abroad for the settlement of his quarrel with the king, -it was decreed that anyone who brought into the country documents relating -to the threatened papal interdict should have his feet cut off if he were -a regular cleric, his eyes put out if a secular clerk, should be hanged if -a layman, and be burned if a _leprosus_--that is to say, a beggar or -common tramp. Again, in the charges brought for Henry III. against the -powerful minister Hubert de Burg in 1239, one item is that he had -prevented the marriage of our lord the king with a certain noble lady by -representing to the latter and to her guardian that the king was "a -squinter, and a fool, and a good-for-nothing, and that he had a kind of -leprosy, and was a deceiver, and a perjurer, and more of a craven than any -woman[157]" etc. - -There is also a curious instance of the term leprous being applied to the -Scots, evidently in the sense in which William of Malmesbury, and many -more after him, twitted that nation with their cutaneous infirmities. When -the Black Death of 1348-9 had reached the northern counties of England, -the Scots took advantage of their prostrate state to gather in the forest -of Selkirk for an invasion, exulting in the "foul death of England." -Knighton says that the plague reached them there, that five thousand of -them died, and that their rout was completed by the English falling upon -them[158]. But the other contemporary chronicler of the Black Death, -Geoffrey le Baker[159], tells the story with a curious difference. The -Scots, he says, swearing by the foul death of the English, passed from the -extreme of exultation to that of grief; the sword of God's wrath was -lifted from the English and fell in its fury upon the Scots, "et [Scotos] -per lepram, nec minus quam Anglicos per apostemata et pustulos, mactavit." -The _apostemata_ and _pustuli_ were indeed the buboes, boils and -carbuncles of the plague, correctly named; but what was the _lepra_ of the -Scots? It was probably a vague term of abuse; but, if the clerk of Osney -attached any meaning to it, it is clear that he saw nothing improbable in -a disease called _lepra_ springing up suddenly and spreading among a body -of men. - -We conclude, then, that _lepra_ was a term used in a generic sense because -of a real uncertainty of diagnosis, or because there was some advantage to -be got from being called _leprosus_, or because it was flung about at -random. But there is still another reason for the inexact use of the terms -_lepra_ and _leprosus_ in the medieval period, namely, the dominant -influence of religious tradition. The heritage or accretion of religious -sentiment not only perverted the correct use of the name, but led to -regulations and proscriptions which were out of place even for the real -disease. - - -The Biblical Associations of Leprosy. - -Among the synonyms for _leprosi_ we find the terms "pauperes Christi, -videlicet Lazares," the name of "Christ's poor" being given to lepers by -Aelred in the twelfth century and by Matthew Paris in the thirteenth. The -association of ideas with Lazarus is a good sample of the want of -discrimination in all that pertains to medieval leprosy. The Lazarus of St -Luke's Gospel, who was laid at the rich man's gate full of sores, is a -representative person, existing only in parable. On the other hand, the -Lazarus of St John's Gospel, Lazarus of Bethany, the brother of Martha and -Mary, the man of many friends, is both a historical personage and a saint -in the calendar. But there is nothing to show that he was a leper. He had -a remarkable experience of restoration to the light of day, and it was -probably on account of an episode in his life that made so much talk that -he received posthumously the name of Lazarus, or "helped of God[160]." The -name of the man in the parable is also generic, just as generic as that -of his contrast Dives is; but specifically there was nothing in common -between the one Lazarus and the other. Yet St Lazarus specially named as -the brother of Martha and Mary (as in the charter of the leper-house at -Sherburn) became the patron of lepers. The ascription to Lazarus of -Bethany of the malady of Lazarus in the parable has done much for the -prestige of the latter's disease; in the medieval world it brought all -persons full of sores within a nimbus of sanctity, as being in a special -sense "pauperes Christi," the successors at once of him whom Jesus loved -and of "Lazarus ulcerosus." Doubtless the lepers deserved all the charity -that they got; but we shall not easily understand the interest -exceptionally taken in them, amidst abounding suffering and wretchedness -in other forms, unless we keep in mind that they somehow came to be -regarded as Christ's poor. - -Next to the image of Lazarus, or rather the composite image of the two -Lazaruses, the picture of leprosy that filled the imagination was that of -the thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of Leviticus. That picture is even -more composite than the other, and for leprosy in the strict sense it is -absolutely misleading. The word translated "leprosy" is a generic term for -various communicable maladies, most of which were curable within a -definite period, sometimes no longer than a week. It rested with the skill -of the priesthood to discriminate between the forms of communicable -disease, and to prescribe the appropriate ceremonial treatment for each; -the people had one common name for them all, and beyond that they were in -the hands of their priests, who knew quite well what they were about. The -Christian Church dealt with all those archaic institutions of an Eastern -people in a child-like spirit of verbal or literal interpretation, -doubtless finding the greater part of them a meaningless jargon. But some -verses would touch the imagination and call up a real and vivid picture, -such verses, for example, as the following: - - "And the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent, and - his head bare, and he shall put a covering upon his upper lip, and - shall cry, Unclean, unclean. All the days wherein the plague shall be - in him he shall be defiled; he is unclean; he shall dwell alone; - without the camp shall his habitation be." - -Even in that comparatively plain direction, the obvious suggestion that -the unclean person would not always be unclean, and that there was a term -to his stay outside the camp, would go for little in reading the -scripture. The medieval religious world took those parts of the Jewish -teaching that appealed to their apprehension, and applied them to the -circumstances of their own time with as much of zeal as the common sense -of the community would permit. We have clear evidence of the effect of the -Levitical teaching about "leprosy" upon English practice in the ordinances -of the St Albans leper hospital of St Julian, which will be given in the -sequel. - - -The Medieval Religious Sentiment towards Lepers. - -Several incidents told of lepers by the chroniclers bring out that -exaggerated religious view of the disease. Roger of Howden has preserved -the following mythical story of Edward the Confessor. Proceeding one day -from his palace to the Abbey Church in pomp and state, he passed with his -train of nobles and ecclesiastics through a street in which sat a leper -full of sores. The courtiers were about to drive the wretched man out from -the royal presence, when the king ordered them to let him sit where he -was. The leper, waxing bold after this concession, addressed the king, "I -adjure thee by the living God to take me on thy shoulders and bring me -into the church;" whereupon the king bowed his head and took the leper -upon his shoulders. And as the king went, he prayed that God would give -health to the leper; and his prayer was heard, and the leper was made -whole from that very hour, praising and glorifying God[161]. - -It is not the miraculous ending of this incident that need surprise us -most; for the Royal touch by which the Confessor wrought his numerous -cures of the blind and the halt and the scrofulous, continued to be -exercised, with unabated virtue, down to the eighteenth century, and came -at length to be supervised by Court surgeons who were fellows of the Royal -Society. It is the humility of a crowned head in the presence of a leper -that marks an old-world kind of religious sentiment. The nearest approach -to it in our time is the feet-washing of the poor by the empress at Vienna -on Corpus Christi day. - -A similar story, with a truer touch of nature in it, is told of Matilda, -queen of Henry I.; and it happens to be related on so good authority that -we may believe every word of it. Matilda was a Saxon princess, daughter of -Margaret the Atheling, the queen of Malcolm Canmore. The other actor in -the story was her brother David, afterwards king of Scots and, like his -mother, honoured as a saint of the Church. The narrator is Aelred, abbot -of Rievaulx, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, celebrated for his Latin -style and his care for Saxon history. The abbot was a friend of St David, -whose virtues he celebrates at length; the incident of queen Matilda and -the lepers was one that he often heard from David's own lips (quod ex ore -saepe Davidis regis audivi). The princess Matilda, taking more after her -mother than her father, had been brought up in an English convent under -her aunt, the abbess of it. When it came to a marriage between her and -Henry I., an alliance which was meant to reconcile the Saxons to Norman -rule, the question arose in the mind of Anselm whether the princess -Matilda had not actually taken the veil, and whether he could legally -marry her to the king. Questioned as to the fact, the princess made answer -that she had indeed worn the veil in public, but only as a protection from -the licentious insolence of the Norman nobles. She had no liking for the -great match arranged for her, and consented unwillingly although the king -was enamoured of her. Such was her humility that Aelred designates her -"the Esther of our times." The marriage was on the 15th of November, 1100; -and in the next year, according to the usual date given, the young queen -sought relief and effusion for her religious instincts by founding the -leper hospital of St Giles in the Fields, "with a chapel and a sufficient -edifice." Matthew Paris, a century and a half after, saw it standing as -queen Matilda had built it, and made a sketch of it in colours on the -margin of his page, still remaining to us in a library at Cambridge, with -the description, "Memoriale Matild. Regine." - -The story which her brother David told to the abbot of Rievaulx is as -follows: - - When he was serving as a youth at the English Court, one evening he - was with his companions in his lodging, when the queen called him into - her chamber. He found the place full of lepers, and the queen standing - in the midst, with her robe laid aside and a towel girt round her. - Having filled a basin with water, she proceeded to wash the feet of - the lepers and to wipe them with the towel, and then taking them in - both her hands, she kissed them with devotion. To whom her brother: - "What dost thou, my lady? Certes if the king were to know this, never - would he deign to kiss with his lips that mouth of thine polluted with - the soil of leprous feet." But she answered with a smile: "Who does - not know that the feet of an Eternal King are to be preferred to the - lips of a mortal king? See, then, dearest brother, wherefore I have - called thee, that thou mayest learn by my example to do so also. Take - the basin, and do what thou hast seen me do." "At this," said David, - narrating to the abbot, "I was sore afraid, and answered that I could - on no account endure it. For as yet I did not know the Lord, nor had - His Spirit been revealed to me. And as she proceeded with her task, I - laughed--_mea culpa_--and returned to my comrades[162]." - -The example of his sister, however, was not lost upon him; for when he -acquired the earldom and manor of Huntingdon, and so became an opulent -English noble, he founded a leper-hospital there. Aelred sees him in -Abraham's bosom with Lazarus. - -The meaning of all this devotion to lepers is shown in the name which -Aelred applies to them--_pauperes Christi_. In washing their feet the -pious Matilda was in effect washing the feet of an Eternal King; and that, -in her estimation, was better than kissing the lips of a mortal king. - -Again, in the Life of St Hugh of Lincoln we see the good bishop moved to -treat the leprous poor with a sort of attention which they can hardly have -needed or expected, merely because they were, as his biographer says, the -successors of _Lazarus ulcerosus_, and the special _protegs_ of Jesus. -Not a few, says the biographer, were kept in seclusion owing to that -disease, both men and women. Bishop Hugh would take up his abode among -them and speak to them words of good cheer, promising them the flowers of -Paradise and an immortal crown. Having sent the women lepers out of the -way, he would go round among the men to kiss them, and when he came to one -who was more atrociously marked by the disease than another, he would hold -him in a longer and more gracious embrace. It was too much for the -bishop's biographer: "Spare, good Jesus, the unhappy soul of him who -relates these things"--horrified, as he says he was, at seeing the -"swollen and livid faces, deformed and sanious, with the eyelids everted, -the eyeballs dug out, and the lips wasted away, faces which it were -impossible to touch close or even to behold afar off[163]". But these -horrible disfigurements of the face are by no means the distinctive marks -of leprosy. The dragging down of the eyelids is an effect of leprosy but -as likely to happen in lupus or rodent ulcer. The loss of the eyeball may -be a leprous sign, or perhaps from tumour. The wasting of the lips is a -characteristic feature of lupus, after it has scarred, or if there be an -actual loss of substance, of epithelial cancer; in leprosy, on the other -hand, the lips, as well as other prominent folds of the face, undergo -thickening, and will probably remain thickened to the end. The sufferers -who excited the compassion of St Hugh must have merited it; only they were -not all lepers, nor probably the majority of them[164]. - -Two leper-stories are told to the honour of St Francis of Assisi. Seeing -one day a friar of his order named James the Simple, consorting on the way -to church with a leper from the hospital under his care, St Francis -rebuked the friar for allowing the leper to be at large. While he thus -admonished the friar, he thought that he observed the leper to blush, and -was stricken with a sudden remorse that he should have said anything to -hurt the wretched man's feelings. Having confessed and taken counsel, he -resolved, by way of penance, to sit beside the leper at table and to eat -with him out of the same dish, a penance all the greater, says the -biographer, that the leper was covered all over with offensive sores and -that the blood and sanies trickled down his fingers as he dipped them in -the dish. The other story is a more pleasing one. There was a certain -leper among those cared for by the friars, who would appear from the -description of him to have been one of the class of truculent impostors, -made all the worse by the morbid consideration with which his disease, or -supposed disease, was regarded. One of his complaints was that no one -would wash him; whereupon St Francis, having ordered a friar to bring a -basin of perfumed water, proceeded to wash the leper with his own -hands[165]. - -These four tales, all of them told of saints except that of Matilda--she -somehow missed being canonised along with her mother St Margaret and her -brother St David--will serve to show what a halo of morbid exaggeration -surrounded the idea of leprosy in the medieval religious mind. We live in -a time of saner and better-proportioned sentiment; but the critical -spirit, which has set so much else in a sober light, has spared the -medieval tradition of leprosy. Not only so, but our more graphic writers -have put that disease into the medieval foreground as if it had been the -commonest affliction of the time. We are taught to see the figures of -lepers in their grey or russet gowns flitting everywhere through the -scene; the air of those remote times is as if filled with the dull -creaking of St Lazarus's rattle. Our business here is to apply to the -question of leprosy in medieval Britain the same kind of scrutiny which -has been applied to the question of famines and famine-fevers, and remains -to be applied next in order to the great question of plague--the kind of -scrutiny which no historian would be excused from if his business were -with politics, or campaigns, or economics, or manners and customs. The -best available evidence for our purpose is the history of the -leper-houses, to which we shall now proceed. - - -The English Leper-houses. - -The English charitable foundations, or hospitals of all kinds previous to -the dissolution of the monasteries, including almshouses, infirmaries, -Maisons Dieu and lazar-houses, amount to five hundred and nine in the -index of Bishop Tanner's _Notitia Monastica_. In the 1830 edition of the -_Monasticon Anglicanum_, the latest recension of those immense volumes of -antiquarian research, there are one hundred and four such foundations -given, for which the original charters, or confirming charters, or reports -of inquisitions, are known; and, besides these, there are about three -hundred and sixty given in the section on "Additional Hospitals," the -existence and circumstances of which rest upon such evidence as casual -mention in old documents, or entries in monastery annals, or surviving -names and traditions of the locality. Our task is to discover, if we can, -what share of this charitable provision in medieval England, embracing at -least four hundred and sixty houses, was intended for the class of -_leprosi_; what indications there are of the sort of patients reckoned -_leprosi_; how many sick inmates the leper-houses had, absolutely as well -as in proportion to their clerical staff; and how far those refuges were -in request among the people, either from a natural desire to find a refuge -or from the social pressure upon them to keep themselves out of the way. - -It is clear that the endowed hospitals of medieval England were in no -exclusive sense leper-hospitals, but a general provision, under religious -discipline, for the infirm and sick poor, for infirm and ailing monks and -clergy, and here or there for decayed gentlefolk. The earliest of them -that is known, St Peter's and St Leonard's hospital at York, founded in -936 by king Athelstane, and enlarged more especially on its religious side -by king Stephen, was a great establishment for the relief of the poor, -with no reference to leprosy; it provided for no fewer than two hundred -and six bedesmen, and was served by a master, thirteen brethren, four -seculars, eight sisters, thirty choristers and six servitors. When -Lanfranc, the first Norman archbishop of Canterbury, set about organising -the charitable relief of his see in 1084, he endowed two hospitals, one -for the sick and infirm poor in general, and the other for _leprosi_[166]. -The former, St John Baptist's hospital, was at the north gate, a -commodious house of stone, for poor, infirm, lame or blind men and women. -The latter was the hospital of Herbaldown, an erection of timber, in the -woods of Blean about a mile from the west gate, for persons _regia -valetudine fluentibus_ (?), who are styled _leprosi_ in a confirming -charter of Henry II.[167] The charge of both these houses was given to the -new priory of St Gregory, over against St John Baptist's hospital, endowed -with tithes for secular clergy. The leper-house at Herbaldown was divided -between men and women; but in a later reign (Henry II.) a hospital -entirely for women (twenty-five leprous sisters) was founded at -Tannington, outside Canterbury, with a master, prioress and three priests. -There was still a third hospital at Canterbury, St Lawrence's, founded -about 1137, for the relief of leprous monks or for the poor parents and -relations of the monks of St Augustine's. - -London had two endowed leper-hospitals under ecclesiastical government, as -well as certain spitals or refuges of comparatively late date. The -hospital and chapel of St Giles in the Fields was founded, as we have -seen, by Matilda, queen of Henry I., in 1101, and was commonly known for -long after as Matilda's hospital. It was built for forty _leprosi_, who -may or may not all have lived in it; and it was supported in part by the -voluntary contributions of the citizens collected by a proctor. Its staff -was at first exceptionally small for the number of patients,--a chaplain, -a clerk and a messenger; but as its endowments increased several other -clerics and some matrons were added. By a king's charter of 1208 (10th -John), it was to receive sixty shillings annually. It is next heard of, in -the Rolls of Parliament, in connexion with a petition of 1314-15 (8 Ed. -II.), by the terms of which, and of the reply to it, we can see that there -were then some lepers in the hospital but also patients of another kind. -It is mentioned by Wendover, under the year 1222, as the scene of a trial -of strength between the citizens and the _comprovinciales extra urbem -positos_[168]: at that date it stood well in the country, probably near to -where the church of St Giles now stands at the end of old High Holborn. -The drawing of the hospital on the margin of Matthew Paris's manuscript -shows it as a house of stone, with a tower at the east end and a smaller -one over the west porch, and with a chapel and a hall, but probably no -dormitories for forty lepers[169]. - -The other endowed leper-house of the metropolis was the hospital of St -James, in the fields beyond Westminster. It was of ancient date, and -provided for fourteen female patients, who came somehow to be called the -_leprosae puellae_[170], although youth is by no means specially -associated with leprosy. This house grew rich, and supported eight -brethren for the religious services of the sixteen patients[171]. - -It is usual to enumerate five, and sometimes six, other leper-hospitals, -in the outskirts of London--at Kingsland or Hackney, in Kent Street, -Southwark (the Lock), at Highgate, at Mile End, at Knightsbridge and at -Hammersmith. But the earliest of these were founded in the reign of Edward -III. (about 1346) at a time when the old ecclesiastical leper-houses were -nearly empty of lepers. It would be misleading to include them among the -medieval leper-houses proper, and I shall refer to them in a later part of -this chapter. - -The example of archbishop Lanfranc at Canterbury and of queen Matilda in -London was soon followed by other founders and benefactors. The movement -in favour of lepers--there was probably too real an occasion for it to -call it a craze--gained much from the appearance on the scene of the -Knights of the Order of St Lazarus of Jerusalem. Those knights were the -most sentimental of the orders of chivalry, and probably not more -reputable than the Templars or the main body of the Hospitallers from -which they branched off. If we may judge of them by modern instances, they -wanted to do some great thing, and to do it in the most theatrical way, -with everybody looking on. What real services they may have rendered to -the sick poor, leprous or other, there is little to show. The -head-quarters of the order were at Jerusalem, the Grand Master and the -Knights there being all _leprosi_--doubtless in a liberal sense of the -term. We should be doing them no injustice if we take them to have been -Crusaders so badly hit by their vices or their misfortunes as to be marked -off into a separate order by a natural line. However, many others enlisted -under the banner of St Lazarus who were not _leprosi_; these established -themselves in various countries of Europe, acquired many manors and built -fine houses[172]. In England their chief house was at Burton in -Leicestershire; it was not by any means a great leper-hospital, but a -Commandery or Preceptory for eight whole knights, with some provision for -an uncertain number of poor brethren--the real Lazaruses who, like their -prototype, would receive the crumbs from the high table. The house of -Burton Lazars gradually swallowed up the lands of leper-hospitals -elsewhere, as these passed into desuetude, and at the valuation of Henry -VIII. it headed the list with an annual rental of 250. Their -establishment in England dates from the early part of the twelfth century, -and although the house at Burton appears to have been their only -considerable possession, they are said, on vague evidence, to have -enlisted many knights from England, and, curiously enough, still more from -Scotland. A letter is extant by the celebrated schoolman, John of -Salisbury, afterwards bishop of Chartres, written in the reign of Henry -II. to a bishop of Salisbury, from which it would appear that the "Fratres -Hospitales" were regarded with jealousy and dislike by the clerical -profession; "rapiunt ut distribuant," says the writer, as if there were -something at once forced and forcible in their charities[173]. - -Coincidently with the appearance in England of the Knights of St Lazarus, -we find the monasteries, and sometimes private benefactors among the -nobility, beginning to make provision for lepers, either along with other -deserving poor or in houses apart. After the hospitals at Canterbury and -London (as well as an eleventh-century foundation at Northampton, which -may or may not have been originally destined for _leprosi_), come the two -leper-houses founded by the great abbey of St Albans. As these were -probably as good instances as can be found, their history is worth -following. - -In the time of abbot Gregory (1119 to 1146), the hospital and church of St -Julian was built on the London road, for six poor brethren (_Lazares_ or -_pauperes Christi_) governed by a master and four chaplains. The -mastership of St Julian's is twice mentioned in the abbey chronicles as a -valuable piece of preferment. In 1254 the lands of the hospital were so -heavily taxed, for the king and the pope, that the _miselli_, according to -Matthew Paris, had barely the necessaries of life. But a century after, -in 1350, the revenues were too large for its needs, and new statutes were -made; the accommodation of its six beds was by no means in request, the -number of inmates being never more than three, sometimes only two, and -occasionally only one[174]. The fate of the other leper-house of St Albans -abbey, that of St Mary de Pratis for women, is not less instructive. The -date of its foundation is not known, but in 1254 it had a church and a -hospital occupied by _misellae_[175]. A century later we hear of the house -being shared between illiterate sisters and nuns. The former are not -called lepers, but simply poor sisters; whatever they were, the nuns and -they did not get on comfortably together, and the abbot restored harmony -by turning the hospital into a nunnery pure and simple[176]. Similar was -the history of one of the richest foundations of the kind, that of Mayden -Bradley in Wiltshire. It was originally endowed shortly before or shortly -after the accession of Henry II. (1135) by a noble family for an unstated -number of poor women, generally assumed to have been _leprosae_, and for -an unstated number of regular and secular clerics to perform the religious -offices and manage the property. It had not existed long, however, when -the bishop of Salisbury, in 1190, got the charter altered so as to assign -the revenues to eight canons and--poor sisters, and so it continued until -the valuation of Henry VIII., when it was found to be of considerable -wealth. In like manner the hospital of St James, at Tannington near -Canterbury, founded in the reign of Henry II. for twenty-five "leprous -sisters," was found, in the reign of Edward III. (1344), to contain no -lepers, its "corrodies" being much sought after by needy gentlewomen[177]. - -Another foundation of Henry II.'s reign was the leper-hospital of St Mary -Magdalen at Sponne, outside the walls of Coventry. It was founded by an -Earl of Chester, who, having a certain leprous knight in his household, -gave in pure alms for the health of his soul and the souls of his -ancestors his chapel at Sponne with the site thereof, and half a carucate -of land for the maintenance of such lepers as should happen to be in the -town of Coventry. There was one priest to celebrate, and with him were -wont to be also certain brethren or sisters together with the lepers, -praying to God for the good estate of all their benefactors. "But clear it -is," says Dugdale, "that the monks shortly after appropriated it to their -own use." However, they were in time dispossessed by the Crown, to which -the hospital belonged until the 14th of Edward IV[178]. - -One of the most typical as well as earliest foundations was the hospital -of the Holy Innocents at Lincoln, endowed by Henry I. We owe our knowledge -of its charter to an inquisition of Edward III. It was intended for ten -_leprosi_, who were to be of the outcasts (_de ejectibus_) of the city of -Lincoln, the presentation to be in the king's gift or in that of the mayor -or other good men of the city, and the administration of it by a master or -warden, two chaplains and one clerk. In the space of two centuries from -its foundation the character of its inmates had gradually changed. Edward -III.'s commissioners found nine poor brethren or sisters in it; only one -of them was _leprosus_, and he had obtained admission by a golden key; -also the seven poor women had got in _per viam pecuniam_. In Henry VI.'s -time provision was made for the possibility of lepers still requiring its -shelter--_quod absit_, as the new charter said. - -In the same reign (end of Henry I.) the hospital of St Peter was founded -at Bury St Edmunds by abbot Anselm, for priests and others when they grew -old and infirm, leprous or diseased. The other hospital at Bury, St -Saviour's, had no explicit reference to leprosy at all. It was founded by -the famous abbot Samson about 1184, for a warden, twelve chaplain-priests, -six clerks, twelve poor gentlemen, and twelve poor women. About a hundred -years later the poor sisters had to go, in order to make room for old and -infirm priests. - -Sometime before his death in 1139, Thurstan, archbishop of York, founded a -hospital at Ripon for the relief of "all the lepers in Richmondshire;" the -provision was for eighteen patients, a chaplain and sisters. At an -uncertain date afterwards the house was found to contain a master, two or -three chaplains and some brethren, who are not styled _leprosi_; and from -the inquisition of Edward III. we learn that its original destination had -been for the relief as much of the poor as the leprous (_tam pauperum quam -leprosorum_), and that there was no leprous person in it at the date of -the inquisition. - -The mixed character of hospitals commonly reckoned leper-hospitals is -shown by several other instances. St Mary Magdalene's at Lynn (1145) -provided for a prior and twelve brethren or sisters, nine of whom were to -be whole and three leprous. St Leonard's at Lancaster (time of king John) -was endowed for a master, a chaplain, and nine poor persons, three of them -to be leprous. St Bartholomew's at Oxford provided for a master, a clerk, -two whole brethren and six infirm or leprous brethren; but the infirm or -leprous brethren had all been changed into whole brethren by the time of -Edward III[179]. So again the Normans' spital at Norwich was found to be -sheltering "seven whole sisters and seven half-sisters." - -The leper-hospital at Stourbridge, near Cambridge, was founded for lepers -by king John, the one king in English history who cared greatly about his -leprous subjects. It was committed to the charge of the burgesses of -Cambridge, but it was shortly after seized by Hugo de Norwold, bishop of -Ely, and within little more than fifty years from its foundation (7 Ed. -I.) it was found that the bishop of Ely of that day was using it for some -purposes of his own, but "was keeping no lepers in it, as he ought, and as -the custom had been[180]." - -The ostentatious patronage of lepers by king John, of which something more -might be said, was preceded by a more important interposition on their -behalf by the third Council of the Lateran in 1179 (Alexander III.). The -position of _leprosi_ in the community had clearly become anomalous, and -one of the decrees of the Council was directed to setting it right. -Lepers, who were "unable to live with sound persons, or to attend church -with them, or to get buried in the same churchyard, or to have the -ministrations of the proper priest," were enjoined to have their own -presbytery, church, and churchyard, and their lands were to be exempt from -tithe[181]. Within two or three years of that decree, in or near 1181, we -find a bishop of Durham, Hugh de Puiset, endowing the greatest of all the -English leper-hospitals, at Sherburn, a mile or more outside the city of -Durham. The bishop was a noted instance of the worldly ecclesiastic of his -time. He was accused by the king of misappropriating money left by the -archbishop of York, and his defence was that he had spent it on the blind, -the deaf, the dumb, the leprous, and such like deserving objects[182]. -William of Newburgh has left us his opinion of the bishop's charity: it -was a noble hospital lavishly provided for, "but with largess not quite -honestly come by" (_sed tamen ex parte minus honesta largitione_[183]). -The hospital of bishop Hugh, dedicated to the Saviour, the Blessed Virgin, -St Lazarus, and his sisters Mary and Martha, still exists as Christ's -Hospital, a quadrangular building enclosing about an acre in a sunny -valley to the south of the city, with a fine chapel, a great hall (of -which the ancient raftered roof existed into the present century), a -master's lodge, and a low range of buildings on the west side of the -square for the poor brethren, with their own modest hall in the middle of -it. The original foundation was certainly on a princely scale, as things -then went: it was for five "convents" of lepers, including in all -sixty-five persons of both sexes, with a steward or guardian to be their -own proper representative or protector, three priests, four attendant -clerks, and a prior and prioress. We hear nothing more of the hospital for -a century and a half, during which time it had doubtless been filled by a -succession of poor brethren, or sick poor brethren, but whether leprous -brethren, or even mainly leprous, may well be doubted after the recorded -experiences of Ripon, Lincoln and Stourbridge. Its charter was confirmed -by bishop Kellaw about 1311-1316; and in an ordinance of 1349 we still -read, but not without a feeling of something forced and unreal, of the -hospital ministering to the hunger, the thirst, the nakedness of the -leprous, and to the other wants and miseries by which they are incessantly -afflicted. But within ninety years of that time (1434) the real state of -the case becomes apparent; the poor brethren had been neglected, and the -estates so mismanaged or alienated to other uses, that new statutes were -made reducing the number of inmates to thirteen poor brethren and two -lepers, the latter being thrown in, "if they can be found in these parts," -in order to preserve the memory of the original foundation[184]. - -To these samples, which are also the chief instances of English -leper-hospitals, may be added two or three more to bring out another side -of the matter. In the cases already given, it has been seen that the -provision for the clerical staff was either a very liberal one at first or -became so in course of time. The hospitals, whether leprous or other, were -for the most part dependencies of the abbeys, affording occupation and -residence to so many more monks, just as if they had been "cells" of the -abbey. The enormous disproportion of the clerical staff to the inmates of -hospitals (not, however, leprous) is seen in the instances of St Giles's -at Norwich, St Saviour's at Bury and St Cross at Winchester. The provision -was about six for the poor and half-a-dozen for the monks. But even the -purely nosocomial part of these charities was in not a few instances for -the immediate relief of the monasteries themselves. St Bartholomew's at -Chatham, one of the earliest foundations usually counted among the -leper-hospitals, was for sick or infirm monks. The hospital at -Basingstoke, endowed by Merton College, Oxford, was for incurably sick -fellows and scholars of Merton itself. The leper-hospital at Ilford in -Essex was founded about 1180 by the rich abbey of Barking, for the leprous -tenants and servants of the abbey, the provision being for a secular -master, a leprous master, thirteen leprous brethren, two chaplains and a -clerk. St Lawrence's at Canterbury (1137) was for leprous monks or for the -poor parents and relations of monks. St Peter's at Bury St Edmunds, -founded by abbot Anselm in the reign of Henry I., was for priests and -others when they grew old, infirm, leprous, or diseased. - -The instances which have been detailed in the last few pages, perhaps not -without risk of tediousness, have not been chosen to give a colour to the -view of medieval leprosy; they are a fair sample of the whole, and they -include nearly all those leper-hospitals of which the charters or other -authentic records are known[185]. It is possible by using every verbal -reference to leprosy that may be found in connexion with all the five -hundred or more medieval English hospitals in Bishop Tanner's _Notitia -Monastica_ or in Dugdale's _Monasticon_, to make out a list of over a -hundred leper-hospitals of one kind or another. But there are probably not -thirty of them for which the special destination of the charity is known -from charters or inquisitions; and even these, as we have seen, were not -all purely for lepers or even mainly for lepers. As to the rest of the -list of one hundred, the connexion with leprosy is of the vaguest kind. -Thus, four out of the five hospitals in Cornwall are called lazar-houses -or leper-hospitals, but they were so called merely on the authority of -antiquaries subsequent to the sixteenth century. The same criticism -applies almost equally to the eight so-called leper-hospitals, out of a -total of fourteen medieval hospitals of all kinds, in Devonshire. It is -clear that "lazar-house" became an even more widely generic term than the -terms _lepra_ and _leprosus_ themselves[186]. - -Thus our doubts as to the amount of true leprosy that once existed in -England, and was provided for in the access of chivalrous sentiment that -came upon Christendom in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, tend to -multiply in a compound ratio. We doubt whether many of the so-called -leper-houses or lazar-houses in the list of one hundred, more or less, -that may be compiled from the _Monasticon_, were not ordinary refuges for -the sick and infirm poor, like the three or four hundred other religious -charities of the country. We know that, in some instances of -leper-hospitals with authentic charters, the provision for the leprous was -in the proportion of one to three or four of non-leprous inmates. We know -that as early as the end of the thirteenth century the _leprosi_ were -disappearing or getting displaced even from hospitals where the intentions -of the founder were explicit. And lastly we doubt the homogeneity of the -disease called _lepra_ and of the class called _leprosi_. - -As to the foundations of a later age they were no longer under -ecclesiastical management, and they seem to have been mostly rude shelters -on the outskirts of the larger towns. In 1316 a burgess of Rochester, who -had sat in Parliament, left a house in Eastgate to be called St -Katharine's Spital, "for poor men of the city, leprous or otherwise -diseased, impotent and poor"--or, in other words, a common almshouse. The -remarkable ordinance of Edward III. in 1346, for the expulsion of lepers -from London, seems to have been the occasion of the founding of two -so-called lazar-houses, one in Kent Street, Southwark, called "the -Loke[187]," and the other at Hackney or Kingsland. These are the only two -mentioned in the subsequent orders to the porters of the City Gates in -1375; and as late as the reign of Henry VI. they are the only two, besides -the ancient Matilda's Hospital in St Giles's Fields, to which bequests -were made in the will of Ralph Holland, merchant taylor[188]. Another of -the suburban leper-spitals was founded at Highgate by a citizen in -1468[189], and it is not until the reign of Henry VIII. that we hear of -the spitals at Mile End, Knightsbridge and Hammersmith[190]. By that time -leprosy had ceased to be heard of in England; but another disease, -syphilis, had become exceedingly common; and it is known that those -spitals, together with the older leper-hospitals, were used for the poorer -victims of that disease. Stow is unable to give the exact date of any of -these foundations except that at Highgate. He assumes that the others were -all built on the occasion of the ordinance of 20 Edward III.; but it is -probable that only two of them, the Lock and the Kingsland or Hackney -spital were built at that time[191]. - -An early instance of a leper-spital or refuge apparently without -ecclesiastical discipline is mentioned in a charter roll of 1207-8, in -which king John grants to the leprosi of Bristol a croft outside the -Laffard gate, whereon to reside under the king's protection and to beg -with impunity. On the roads leading to Norwich there were four such -shelters, outside the gates of St Mary Magdalene, St Bennet, St Giles and -St Stephen respectively; these houses were each under a keeper, and were -supported by the alms of the townsfolk or of travellers; only one of the -four is alleged to have had a chapel attached. The date of these is -unknown, but they were probably late. On the roads leading from Lynn, -there were three such erections, at Cowgate, Letchhythe and West Lynn, -which are first mentioned in a will of 1432. These non-religious and -unendowed leper-spitals were probably rude erections on the outskirts of -the town, at the door of which, or on the roadside near, one or more -lepers would sit and beg. The liberty of soliciting alms was one of their -privileges, only they were not allowed to carry their importunity too far; -hence the ordinance of most countries that the lepers were not to enter -mills and bake-houses; and hence some ordinances of the Scots parliament -limiting the excursions of the leper folk. One of the most considerable -privileges to lepers was granted to the lepers of Shrewsbury in 1204 by -king John, who did not lose the chance of earning a cheap reputation for -Christian charity by his ostentatious patronage of the _pauperes Christi_: -they were entitled to take a handful of corn or flour from all sacks -exposed in Shrewsbury market. - - -Leper-houses in Scotland and Ireland. - -Most of the leper-spitals of Scotland would appear to have been of the -poorest kind, unendowed and unprovided with priests. The richest -foundation for lepers in Scotland was at Kingcase, near Prestwick in -Ayrshire, endowed with lands and consisting of a hospital of eight beds. -One or more leper-hospitals were built by the rich abbeys on the Tweed (at -Aldcambus in Berwickshire and probably at another place). Another great -ecclesiastical centre in Scotland, Elgin, had a leper-house at Rothfan, -with accommodation for seven lepers, a chaplain, and a servant. After -these, the Scots leper-houses may be taken to have been mere refuges, in -which the lepers supported themselves by begging. One such secular -hospital was in the Gorbals of Glasgow, founded in 1350. Liberton, near -Edinburgh, is supposed to mean Leper-town, and to have been a resort of -the sick on account of its medicinal spring. The hospital at Greenside, -then outside Edinburgh, was built in 1589. There was a leper-spital -outside the Gallow-gate of Aberdeen, on a road which still bears the name -of the Spital. Similar shelters may be inferred to have existed at Perth, -Stirling, Linlithgow and other places. James IV., in his journeys, used to -distribute small sums to the sick folk in the "grandgore" (syphilis), to -the poor folk, and to the lipper-folk, "at the town end[192]." - -There were some leper-hospitals in Ireland, but it is not easy to -distinguish them in every case from general hospitals for the sick poor. -Thus the hospital built by the monks of Innisfallen in 869 is merely -called _nosocomium_, although it is usually reckoned an early foundation -for lepers in Ireland. A hospital at Waterford was "confirmed to the poor" -by the Benedictines in 1185. St Stephen's in Dublin (1344) is specially -named as the residence of the "poor lepers of the city" in a deed of gift -about 1360-70; a locality of the city called Leper-hill was perhaps the -site of another refuge. Lepers also may have been the occupants of the -hospitals at Kilbrixy in Westmeath (St Bridget's), of St Mary Magdalene's -at Wexford (previous to 1408), of the house at "Hospital," Lismore (1467), -at Downpatrick, at Kilclief in county Down, at Cloyne, and of one or more -of four old hospitals in or near Cork. The hospital at Galway, built "for -the poor of the town" about 1543, was not a leper-house, nor is there -reason to take the old hospital at Dungarvan as a foundation specially for -lepers[193]. - - -The Prejudice against Lepers. - -It will have been inferred, from many particulars given, that the -segregation of lepers in the Middle Ages was far from complete, and that -many ministered to them without fear and without risk. The same hospital -received both _leprosi_ and others, the hospitals were served by staffs of -chaplains, clerks and sometimes women attendants; and yet nothing is -anywhere said of contagion being feared or of the disease spreading by -contagion. The experience of these medieval hospitals was doubtless the -same as in the West Indies and other parts of the world in our own day. -It is true that the medical writers pronounce the disease to be -contagious, _ut docet Avicenna_; but the public would seem to have been -unaware of that, and they certainly lost nothing by their ignorance of the -medical dogma, which, in the text-books, is merely the result of a -concatenation of verbalist arguments. At the same time it is clear that -there was a certain amount of segregation of the leprous. The inmates of -the hospital at Lincoln are significantly described as "de ejectibus" of -the city. The third Lateran Council based one of its decrees upon what -must have been a common experience, namely, that lepers were unable to mix -freely with others, and that they were objected to in the same church, and -even as corpses in the same churchyard. There are some particular -indications of that feeling to be gathered from the chroniclers. - -One of the most remarkable histories is that of a high ecclesiastic in the -pre-Norman period. In the year 1044, Aelfward, bishop of London, being -stricken with leprosy (_lepra perfusus_) sought an asylum in the monastery -of Evesham, of which he was the prior. The monks may have had more than -one reason for not welcoming back their prior; at all events they declined -to let him stay, so that he repaired to the abbey of Ramsey, where he had -passed his noviciate and been shorn a monk. He carried off with him from -Evesham certain valuables and relics; and his old comrades at Ramsey, -undeterred by his leprosy or counter-attracted by his treasures, took him -in and kept him until his death. The incident can hardly be legendary for -it is related in the annals of Ramsey Abbey by one who wrote within a -hundred years of the event[194]. - -Another case, which may also be accepted as authentic, is given by Eadmer -in his _Life of Anselm_. Among the penitents who sought counsel and -consolation of Anselm while he was still abbot of Bec in Normandy, with a -great name for sanctity, was a certain powerful noble from the marches of -Flanders. He had been stricken with leprosy in his body, and his grief was -all the greater that he saw himself despised beneath his hereditary rank, -and shunned by his peers _pro obscenitate tanti mali_[195]. - -Besides such notable cases, we find more evidence in the ordinances of the -hospital of St Julian at St Albans, which have been preserved more -completely than those of any other leper-house. Forasmuch as the disease -of leprosy is of all infirmities held the most in contempt, the -unfortunate person who is about to be received into the St Albans house is -directed to work himself up into a state of the most factitious -melancholy; he is reminded, not only of the passage in Leviticus about -"Unclean, unclean!", but also of the blessed Job, who was himself a leper -(in the 14th century his boils became identified with the plague, and in -the end of the 15th century the patriarch was claimed as an early victim -of the _lues venerea_); and further of the verse in the 53rd of Isaiah: -"Et nos putavimus eum leprosum, percussum a Deo, et humiliatum[196]." The -St Albans house, with its six beds, appears to have been carefully -managed, and its inmates well provided for; but the unreal atmosphere of -the place had been too much for the leprous or other patients of the -district; for we find it on record that they could hardly be persuaded to -don its russet uniform, and submit themselves for the rest of their lives -to its discipline. - -There can be no question, then, that persons adjudged leprous were -shunned, driven out or ostracised by public opinion, and even legislated -against. The reality of these practices should not be confounded with a -real need for them. Least of all should they be ascribed to a general -belief in the contagiousness of the disease. In practice no one heeded the -medical dogma of leprous contagion, because no one attached any concrete -meaning to it or had any real experience of it. There was prejudice -against lepers, partly on account of Biblical tradition, and partly -because the "terribilis aspectus" of a leper was repulsive or uncanny. -Further, in genuine leprosy, the most wretched part of the victim's -condition was not his appearance (which in a large proportion of cases -may present little that is noticeable to passing observation), but his -unfitness for exertion, his listlessness, and depression of spirits, owing -to the profound disorganisation of his nerves. A leprous member of a -family would be a real burden to his relatives; and in a hard and cruel -age he would be little better off than the stricken deer of the herd or -the winged bird of the flock. To become a beggar was his natural fate; and -as a beggar he became privileged, by royal patent or by prescription, -while beggars in ordinary were under a ban. - -It is undoubted that the privilege of begging accorded to lepers was -abused, and was claimed by numbers who feigned to be lepers[197]. The one -severe edict against lepers in England was the ordinance of Edward III. -for the exclusion of lepers from London in 1346; it is clear, however, -from the text of the ordinance that the occasion of it was not any fixed -persuasion of the need for isolating leprous subjects, but some -intolerable behaviour of lepers or of those who passed as such. The mayor -and sheriffs are ordered to procure that all lepers should avoid the city -within fifteen days, for the reason that persons of that class, as well by -the pollution of their breath, etc. "as by carnal intercourse with women -in stews and other secret places, detestably frequenting the same, do so -taint persons who are sound, both male and female, to the great injury -etc.[198]" That is the old confusion which we have already noticed in -Bernard Gordonio and Gilbert; it is an edict against _lepra_ in its -generic sense, and against the same class that William Clowes -characterizes so forcibly in his book on the _morbus Gallicus_ in 1579. At -a date intermediate between those two, in 1488, an order was made by the -provost of Paris, that "lepers" should leave the city; but that is too -late a date for leprosy, although not too early for syphilis. On the 24th -August, 1375, the porters of the City Gates were sworn to prevent lepers -from entering the city, or from staying in the same, or in the suburbs -thereof; and on the same date, the foreman at 'Le Loke' (the Lock Hospital -in Southwark) and the foreman at the leper-spital of Hackney took oath -that they will not bring lepers, or know of their being brought, into the -city, but that they will inform the said porters and prevent the said -lepers from entering, so far as they may[199]. - -When all word of leprosy had long ceased in England the porters of the -City Gates had the same duties towards beggars in general. Thus in -Bullein's _Dialogue_ of 1564, the action begins with a whining beggar from -Northumberland saying the Lord's Prayer at the door of a citizen. The -citizen asks him, "How got you in at the gates?" whereupon it appears that -the Northumbrian had a friend at Court: "I have many countrymen in the -city," among the rest an influential personage, the Beadle of the -Beggars[200]. - -While it cannot be maintained that lepers were tolerated or looked upon -with indifference, yet it was for other reasons than fear of contagion -that they were objectionable. The prejudices against them have been -already illustrated from periods as early as the eleventh century. They -were, to say the least, undesirable companions, and in certain occupations -they must have been peculiarly objectionable. Thus, on the 11th June, -1372, in the city of London, John Mayn, baker, who had often times before -been commanded by the mayor and aldermen to depart from the city, and -provide for himself some dwelling without the same, and avoid the common -conversation of mankind, seeing that he the same John was smitten with the -blemish of leprosy--was again ordered to depart[201]. It does not appear -whether the baker departed that time, nor is there any good diagnosis of -his leprosy; there was certainly a prejudice against him, but the occasion -of it may have been nothing more than the eczematous crusts on the hands -and arms, sometimes very inveterate, which men of his trade are subject -to. - -It is clear also from a singular case in the _Foedera_, that a false -accusation of leprosy was sometimes brought against an individual, perhaps -out of enmity, like an accusation of witchcraft. In 1468 a woman accused -of leprosy appealed to Edward IV., who issued a chancery warrant for her -examination. - - The writ of 3rd July, 1468, is to the king's physicians, "sworn to the - safe-keeping of our person," William Hatteclyff, Roger Marschall, and - Dominic de Serego, doctors of Arts and Medicine; and the subject of - the inquisition is Johanna Nightyngale of Brentwood in Essex, who was - presumed by certain of her neighbours to be infected by the foul - contagion of _lepra_, and for whose removal from the common - intercourse of men a petition had been laid in Chancery. She had - refused to remove herself to a solitary place, _prout moris est_; the - physicians are accordingly ordered to associate with themselves - certain legal persons, to inquire whether the woman was leprous, and, - if so, to have her removed to a solitary place _honestiori modo quo - poteris_. On the 1st of November, 1468, the court of inquiry reported - that they found the woman to be in no way leprous, nor to have been. - The woman had been brought before them: they had passed in review - twenty-five or more of the commonly reputed signs of _lepra_, but they - had not found that she could be convicted of leprosy from them, or - from a sufficient number of them; again, passing in review each of the - four species of lepra (_alopecia_, _tinia_, _leonina_, and - _elephantia_) and the forty or more distinctive signs of the species - of _lepra_, they found not that the woman was marked by any of the - species of _lepra_, but that she was altogether free and immune from - every species of _lepra_[202]. - - -Laws against Lepers. - -The ordinance of 21 Edward III. (1346) against the harbouring of lepers in -London is the only one of the kind (so far as I know) in English history; -the Statutes of the realm contain no reference to lepers or leprosy from -first to last; the references in the Rolls of Parliament are to the taxing -of their houses and lands. The laws which deprived lepers of marital -rights and of heirship appear to have been wholly foreign; in England, -leprosy as a bar to succession was made a plea in the law courts. It -appears, however, that a law against lepers was made by a Welsh king in -the tenth century[203]. It is not easy to realize the state of Welsh -society in the tenth century; but we know enough of it in the twelfth -century, from the description of Giraldus Cambrensis, to assert with some -confidence that "leprosy" might have meant anything--perhaps the "lepra -Normannorum[204]." - -In Scotland the laws and ordinances, civil and ecclesiastical, against -lepers have been more numerous. In 1242 and 1269, canons of the Scots -Church were made, ordering that lepers should be separated from society in -accordance with general custom. In 1283-84, the statutes of the Society of -Merchants, or the Guildry, of Berwick provided that lepers should not -enter the borough, and that "some gude man sall gather alms for them." In -1427 the Parliament of Perth authorised ministers and others to search the -parishes for lepers[205]. - -We conclude, then, that little was made of leprosy by English legislators -(rather more by the Scots), just as we have found that in the endowment of -charities, the leprous had only a small share, and that share a somewhat -exaggerated one owing to the morbid sentimentality of the chivalrous -period. The most liberal estimate of the amount of true leprosy at any -time in England would hardly place it so high as in the worst provinces of -India at the present day. In the province of Burdwan, with a population of -over two millions, which may be taken to have been nearly the population -of England in the thirteenth century, there are enumerated 4604 lepers, or -226 in every thousand inhabitants. But even with that excessive -prevalence of leprosy, and with no seclusion of the lepers, a traveller -may visit the province of Burdwan, and not be aware that leprosy is -"frightfully common" in it. In medieval England the village leper may have -been about as common as the village fool; while in the larger towns or -cities, such as London, Norwich, York, Bristol, and Lincoln, true lepers -can hardly have been so numerous as the friars themselves, who are -supposed to have found a large part of their occupation in ministering to -their wants. A rigorous scepticism might be justified, by the absence of -any good diagnostic evidence, in going farther than this. But the -convergence of probabilities does point to a real prevalence of leprosy in -medieval England; and those probabilities will be greatly strengthened by -discovering in the then habits of English living a _vera causa_ for the -disease. - - -Causes of Medieval Leprosy. - -What was there in the medieval manner of life to give rise to a certain -number of cases of leprosy in all the countries of Europe? Granting that -not all who were called _leprosi_ and _leprosae_, were actually the -subjects of _lepra_ as correctly diagnosed, and that the misnomer was not -unlikely to have been applied in the case of princes, nobles and great -ecclesiastics, we have still to reckon with the apparition of leprosy -among the people in medieval Europe and with its gradual extinction, an -extinction that became absolute in most parts of Europe before the Modern -period had begun. - -Of the "importation" of leprosy into Britain from some source outside -there can be no serious thought; the words are a meaningless phrase, which -no one with a real knowledge of the conditions, nature and affinities of -leprosy would care to resort to. The varying types of diseases, or their -existence at one time and absence at another, are a reflex of the -variations in the life of the people--in food and drink, wages, domestic -comfort, town life or country life, and the like. No one doubts that the -birth-rate and the death-rate have had great variations from time to time, -depending on the greater or less abundance of the means of subsistence, on -overcrowding, or other things; and the variation in the birth-rate and -death-rate is only the most obvious and numerically precise of a whole -series of variations in vital phenomena, of which the successions, -alternations, and novelties in the types of disease are the least simple, -and least within the reach of mere notional apprehension or mere -statistical management. The apparition and vanishing of leprosy in -medieval Europe was one of those vital phenomena. It may be more easily -apprehended by placing beside it a simple example from our own times. - -The pellagra of the North Italian peasantry (and of Roumania, Gascony and -some other limited areas) is the nearest affinity to leprosy among the -species of disease. Strip leprosy of all its superficial and sentimental -characters, analyse its essential phenomena, reduce its pathology to the -most correct outlines, and we shall find it a chronic constitutional -malady not far removed in type from pellagra. In both diseases there are -the early warnings in the excessive sensibility, excessive redness and -changes of colour, at certain spots of skin on or about the face or on the -hands and feet. In both diseases, permanent loss of sensibility follows -the previous exaggeration, blanching of the skin will remain for good at -the spots where redness and discoloration were apt to come and go, and -these affections of the end-regions of nerves will settle, in less -definite way, upon the nervous system at large,--the cerebro-spinal -nervous system, or the organic nervous system, or both together. What -makes leprosy seem a disease in a different class from that, is the -formation of nodules, or lumps, in the regions of affected skin in a -certain proportion of the cases. If leprosy were all anaesthetic leprosy, -its affinities to pellagra would be more quickly perceived; it is because -about one-half of it has more or less of the tuberculated character that a -diversion is created towards another kind of pathology. But the fact that -some cases of leprosy develop nodules along the disordered nerves does not -remove the disease as a whole from the class to which pellagra belongs. In -both diseases we are dealing essentially with a profound disorder of the -nerves and nerve-centres, commencing in local skin-affections which come -and go and at length settle, proceeding to implicate the nervous functions -generally, impairing the efficiency of the individual, and bringing him to -a miserable end. The two diseases diverge each along its own path, leprosy -becoming more a hopeless disorder of the nerves of tissue-nutrition, and -so taking on a structural character mainly but not exclusively, and -pellagra becoming more a hopeless disorder of the organic nervous system -(digestion, circulation, etc.) with implication of the higher nervous -functions, such as the senses, the intellect, and the emotions, and so -taking on a functional character mainly but not exclusively. The -correlation of structure and function is one that goes all through -pathology as well as biology; and here we find it giving character to each -of two chronic disorders of the nervous system, according as the -structural side or the functional side comes uppermost. - -What, then, are the circumstances of pellagra, and do these throw light -upon the medieval prevalence of leprosy? Pellagra has been proved with the -highest attainable scientific certainty to be due to a staple diet of -bread or porridge made from damaged or spoilt maize. It followed the -introduction of maize into Lombardy at an interval of two or three -generations, and its distribution corresponds closely to the poorer kinds -of maize on colder soils, and to the class of the peasantry who get the -worst kind of corn or meal for their food. The cases of the disease among -the peasantry of Lombardy and some other maize-growing provinces of -Northern Italy, were about one hundred thousand when last estimated; the -endowed charitable houses and lunatic asylums are full of them. The -connexion of the disease with its causes is perfectly well understood; but -the economic questions of starvation wages, of truck, of large farms with -bailiffs, and of agricultural usage, have proved too much for the chambers -of commerce and the Government; so that there is as yet little or no sign -of the decline of pellagra in the richest provinces of Italy. This disease -is not mentioned in the Bible, therefore it has no traditional vogue; it -is not well suited to knight-errantry, because it is a common evil of -whole provinces; its causes are economic and social, therefore there is no -ready favour to be earned by systematic attempts to deal with them; and -there is absolutely no opening for heroism and self-sacrifice of the more -ostentatious kind. These are among the reasons why this great -object-lesson of a chronic disorder of nutrition, proceeding steadily -before our eyes, has been so little perceived. It is in pellagra, however, -that we find the key to the ancient problem of leprosy. The two diseases -are closely allied in the insidious approach of their symptoms, in their -implicating the tissue-nutrition through the nerves, or the nervous -functions through the nutrition, in their cumulating and incurable -character, and in their transmissibility by inheritance. Thus -nosologically allied, they may be reasonably suspected of having analogous -causes; and as we know the cause of modern pellagra to be something -noxious in the habitual diet of the people, we may look for the cause of -medieval leprosy in something of the same kind. - -The dietetic cause is not far to seek, and it cannot be stated better than -in the following well-known passage by the philosophical Gilbert White in -his _Natural History of Selborne_[206]:-- - - "It must, therefore, in these days be, to a humane and thinking - person, a matter of equal wonder and satisfaction, when he - contemplates how nearly this pest is eradicated, and observes that a - leper is now [1778] a rare sight. He will, moreover, when engaged in - such a train of thought, naturally inquire for the reason. This happy - change perhaps may have originated and been continued from the much - smaller quantity of salted meat and fish now eaten in these kingdoms; - from the use of linen next the skin; from the plenty of bread; and - from the profusion of fruits, roots, legumes, and greens, so common in - every family. Three or four centuries ago, before there were any - enclosures, sown-grasses, field-turnips, or field-carrots, or hay, all - the cattle which had grown fat in summer, and were not killed for - winter use, were turned out soon after Michaelmas to shift as they - could through the dead months; so that no fresh meat could be had in - winter or spring. Hence the marvellous account of vast stores of - salted flesh found in the larder of the eldest Spencer even so late in - the spring as the 3rd of May (600 bacons, 80 carcases of beef, and 600 - muttons)[207]. It was from magazines like these that the turbulent - barons supported in idleness their riotous swarms of retainers, ready - for any disorder or mischief. But agriculture is now arrived at such - pitch of perfection, that our best and fattest meats are killed in the - winter; and no man needs eat salted flesh, unless he prefers it, that - has money to buy fresh. - - "One cause of this distemper might be no doubt the quantity of - wretched fresh and salt fish consumed by the commonalty at all seasons - as well as in Lent, which our poor now would hardly be persuaded to - touch.... The plenty of good wheaten bread that now is found among all - ranks of people in the south, instead of that miserable sort which - used, in old days, to be made of barley or beans, may contribute not a - little to the sweetening their blood and correcting their juices." - -Let us add to this, that the meat diet of the poorer class, whether serfs -or freemen, would be apt to consist of the more worthless portions, the -semi-putrid pieces in the salted sides of bacon, mutton or beef, and that -badly-cured pork was in many parts the usual kind of flesh-food; and we -shall have no difficulty in finding the noxious element in the diet of the -Middle Ages, which the dietetic hypothesis of leprosy requires. Some who -have advocated that hypothesis for modern leprosy, have laid themselves -open, notwithstanding the ability and industry of their research, to -plausible objections which have no bearing if the hypothesis be -sufficiently safe-guarded. Leprosy, like every other _morbus miseriae_, -needs a number of things working together to produce it, its more or less -uniform specific character or distinctive mark being determined by the -presence of one factor in particular. The special factor should be -generalised as much as possible, so as to cover the whole circumstances of -leprosy: it is not only half-cured or semi-putrid fish[208], but -half-cured or semi-putrid flesh of any kind. The most general expression -for leprosy is a semi-putrid or toxic character of animal food, just as -for the allied pellagra, it is a semi-putrid or toxic character of the -bread or porridge. Moreover it is that noxious or unnatural thing in the -food, not once and again, or as a _bonne bouche_, but somewhat steadily -from day to day as a chief part of the sustenance, and from year to year. -As the rain-drops wear the stones, so the poison in the daily diet tells -upon the constitution. Once more, such special causes may be present in a -country generally, among the poor of all the towns, villages and hamlets, -and yet only one person here and there may show specific effects that are -recognisable as a disease to which we give a name. Unless there be present -the aiding and abetting things, the special factor will hardly make itself -felt; and if there be not the special factor, there may be some other -_morbus miseriae_ but there will not be that one. These aiding things are -for the most part the usual concomitants of poverty and hardships, wearing -out the nerves far more than is commonly supposed and producing in -ordinary an excessive amount of nervous affections among the poor. But -among the poor themselves, as well as among the well-to-do, there are -special susceptibilities in individuals and in families. One person may -have the same unwholesome surroundings as another and the same poisonous -element in his diet, but he may fall into no such train of symptoms as his -leprous neighbour because he is not formed in quite the same way, because -he has "no nerves," or is of a hardier stock, or because his unwholesome -manner of life comes out in some other form of disease (scrofula perhaps, -less probably gout), or for some other reason deeply hidden in his -ancestry and his personal peculiarities. The chances would be always -largely against that particular combination of factors needed to make -leprosy. It was a _morbus miseriae_ of the Middle Ages, but on the whole -not a very common one; and it was easily shaken off by the national life -when the conditions changed ever so little. It was all the more easily -shaken off by reason of the facilities for divorce, the prohibition of -marriage, and the monastic discipline. - -The staple diet as a cause of leprosy was suspected in the Middle Ages, -and by writers as ancient as Galen. It is not without significance that -the minute directions for the dieting of the lepers in the rich hospital -of Sherburn, near Durham, urge special caution as to the freshness of the -fish: when fresh fish was not to be had, red herrings might be -substituted, but only if they were well cured, not putrid nor corrupt. -Those directions were in accordance with the best medical teaching of the -time on the dietetics of leprosy, or on how to prevent leprosy, as it is -given with considerable minuteness in Gordonio and Gilbert[209]. - -On the other hand we find a singular ordinance of the Scots Parliament at -Scone in 1386, or some forty years after the date of the Durham -regulations: "Gif ony man brings to the market corrupt swine or salmond to -be sauld, they sall be taken by the Bailie and incontinent without ony -question sall be sent to the lepper-folke; and gif there be na -lepper-folke, they sall be destroyed alluterlie[210]." Nothing could be -more significant for the prevalence and persistence of leprosy in -Scotland[211]. Putrid fish and pork did actually come to market; the -dangers of them as regarded the production of leprosy were unsuspected; -and the lepers (genuine or mistaken) were actually directed to be fed with -them. Such food for "lepers" could only have fed the disease; and if it be -the case that genuine leprosy was met with in Edinburgh and Glasgow more -than two centuries after it ceased to be heard of in England, we need be -at no loss to assign the reason why the disease was more inveterate in the -one country than in the other. - - - - -CHAPTER III. - -THE BLACK DEATH. - - -The most likely of the fourteenth-century English annalists to have given -us a good account of the Black Death was the historian Ranulphus Higden, -author of the _Polychronicon_, who became a monk of St Werburgh's abbey at -Chester about the beginning of the century, and lived to see the -disastrous year of 1349[212]. That part of his history which relates to -his own period he brings down year by year to 1348, with less fulness of -detail in the later years, as if old age were making him brief. Under the -year 1348 he begins the subject of the great mortality, speaks of the -incessant rains of the second half of the year from Midsummer to -Christmas, refers to the ravages of the plague at Avignon, the then -ecclesiastical capital of Christendom, just mentions England and Ireland, -and then lets the pen fall from his hand. Higden is believed to have -resumed his annals after 1352; but he was then a very old man, and the -last entries are unimportant. But the period from 1348 to 1352 is an -absolute blank. He comes to the edge of the great subject of that time, as -if he had intended to deal with it comprehensively, beginning with a -notice of the previous weather, which is by no means irrelevant, and after -two or three lines more he breaks off. Most of the monastic chronicles are -interrupted at the same point; if there is an entry at all under the year -1349 it is for the most part merely the words magna mortalitas. The -prevailing sense of desolation and despair comes out in the record made by -a friar of Kilkenny, who kept a chronicle of passing events, and escaped -the fate of his brethren in the convent only long enough to record a few -particulars of the great mortality[213]: - - "And I, friar John Clyn, of the Order of Friars Minor, and of the - convent of Kilkenny, wrote in this book those notable things which - happened in my time, which I saw with my eyes, or which I learned from - persons worthy of credit. And lest things worthy of remembrance should - perish with time, and fall away from the memory of those who are to - come after us, I, seeing these many evils, and the whole world lying, - as it were, in the wicked one, among the dead waiting for death till - it come--as I have truly heard and examined, so have I reduced these - things to writing; and lest the writing should perish with the writer, - and the work fail together with the workman, I leave parchment for - continuing the work, if haply any man survive, and any of the race of - Adam escape this pestilence and continue the work which I have - commenced." - -There is nothing in the English chronicles so directly personal as that, -but there are some facts recorded of the mortality in four of them which -have contemporary value, or almost contemporary. The best of these -accounts, as a piece of history, is that of Henry Knighton, canon of -Leicester[214], who acknowledges his indebtedness to Higden's -_Polychronicon_ for the events down to 1326, but after that date either -writes from his own observation or takes his facts from some unknown -contemporary source. The next in importance is Geoffrey le Baker[215], a -clerk of the abbey of Osney, near Oxford, whose account of the arrival of -the Black Death in England has obtained wide currency as copied literally -in the 1605 edition of Stow's _Annals_. The third is Robert de -Avesbury[216], whose _History of Edward III._ serves as a chronicle for -the city of London more particularly. The fourth is the Malmesbury monk -who wrote, about 1367, the chronicle known as the _Eulogium_[217]. - -From the systematic paragraphs of those writers, and from various other -incidental notices, an outline of the progress of the pestilence in -England, Scotland and Ireland, may be traced. It entered English soil at a -port of Dorsetshire--said in the _Eulogium_ to have been Melcombe -(Weymouth)--in the beginning of August, 1348. It is said to have spread -rapidly through Dorset, Devon and Somerset, almost stripping those -counties of their inhabitants, and to have reached Bristol by the 15th of -August. The people of Gloucester in vain tried to keep out the infection -by cutting off all intercourse with Bristol; from Gloucester it came to -Oxford, and from Oxford to London, reaching the capital at Michaelmas, -according to one account, or at All Saints (1st November) according to -another. Although the 15th of August is definitely given as the date of -its arrival at Bristol from the Dorset coast, it must not be assumed that -the infection covered the ground so quickly as that in the rest of its -progresses. We have a measure of the rate of its advance south-westward -through Devonshire to Cornwall, in a contemporary entry in the register of -the Church of Friars Minor at Bodmin[218]: confirming the independent -statements that the pestilence entered England at the beginning of August, -the register goes on to record that it reached the town of Bodmin shortly -before Christmas, and that there died in that town about fifteen hundred -persons, as estimated. - -The corporation records of Bridport, a town near to the place in Dorset -where the infection landed, show that four bailiffs held office, instead -of two, in the 23rd of Edward III., _in tempore pestilentiae_; the 23rd of -Edward III. would begin 25 Jan. 1349, but the municipal year would -probably have extended from September 1348, so that Bridport may have had -the infection before the end of that year[219]. It seems probable that the -smaller towns, and the villages, all over the South-west, had been -infected in the end of 1348, but somewhat later than Bristol and -Gloucester. The mandate of Ralph, bishop of Bath and Wells, "On -confessions in the time of the pestilence," is dated Wynchelcomb, 4. id. -Jan. M.CCC.XLVIII. (10 January, 1349) and it speaks of the contagion -spreading everywhere, and of many parish churches and other cures in his -diocese being left without curate and priest to visit the sick and -administer the sacraments[220]. - -The autumn of 1348 may be taken, then, as correct for the South-west; and -there is no doubt that the infection had been severe enough in London -before the end of that year to move the authorities to action. - -"Owing to the increasing severity of the sudden plague day by day at -Westminster and places adjoining," Parliament was prorogued on the 1st of -January, 1349[221]. There was a further prorogation on the 10th of March, -for the reason given that "the pestilence was continuing at Westminster, -in the city of London, and in other places, more severely than before" -(_gravius solito_)[222]. This agrees with Avesbury's statement that the -epidemic in London reached a height (_in tantum excrevit_) after -Candlemas, 1349, and that it was over about Pentecost. One of the best -proofs of the season and duration of the Black Death in London is got from -the number of wills enrolled in the Husting Court of the city in the -successive months. Those who died of the plague leaving wills were, of -course, but a small fraction of the whole mortality; but the wills during -some eight months of 1349 are ten or fifteen times more numerous than in -any other year before or after, excepting perhaps the year of the _pestis -secunda_, 1361. Starting from 3 in November, 1348 (none in December), the -probates rise to 18 in January, 1349, 42 in February, 41 in March, none in -April (owing to paralysis of business, doubtless), but 121 in May, 31 in -June, 51 in July, none in August and September, 18 in October, 27 in -November, and then an ordinary average[223]. Thus it would have had a -duration of some seven or eight months in the capital, with a curve of -increase, maximum intensity, and decrease, just as the great London -epidemics of the same disease in the 16th and 17th centuries are known -from the weekly bills to have had. - -It does not appear to have been felt at all in Norwich and other places in -the Eastern Counties until the end of March, 1349, its enormous ravages in -that part of England falling mostly in the summer. There is a definite -statement that it began at York about the feast of the Ascension, by which -time it had almost ceased in London, and that it lasted in the capital of -the northern province until the end of July. The infection almost emptied -the abbey of Meaux, in Holdernesse, of its monks, and the abbey lands of -their tenants; and the date given in the abbey chronicle is the month of -August, 1349. The spring and summer of that year appear to have been the -seasons of the great mortality all over England, excepting perhaps in the -southern counties where the outbreak began; even at Oxford, which is one -of the towns mentioned as on the route of the pestilence from Dorsetshire -to London, the mortality is entered under the year 1349, which was also -the year of its enormous prevalence among the farmers and peasants on the -manor of Winslow, in the county of Bucks. - -Its invasion of the mountainous country of Wales (by no means exempt from -plague in the 17th century) may have been a season later--_anno sequenti_, -says Le Baker, which may mean either 1349 or 1350. In the Irish annals, -the first mention of the pestilence is under the year 1348; but it was -probably only the rumour of the mortality at Avignon and elsewhere abroad -that caused the alarm in Ireland among ecclesiastics and in gatherings of -the people. It was first seen on the shores of Dublin Bay, at Howth and -Dalkey, and a little farther north on the coast at Drogheda; it raged in -Dublin "from the beginning of August until the Nativity[224]," which may -mean the year 1348, although the year 1349 is the date given for the great -mortality in Ireland in later chronicles. - -The experience of Scotland illustrates still farther the slow progression -of the plague, and its dependence to some extent upon the season of the -year. Two English chroniclers (Le Baker and Knighton) mention that it got -among the Scots assembled in the forest of Selkirk for an invasion at the -time when the mortality was greatest in the northern counties, the autumn -of 1349. But the winter cold must have held it in check as regards the -rest of Scotland; for it is clear from Fordoun that its great season in -that country generally was the year 1350. Thus the Black Death may be said -to have extended over three seasons in the British Islands--a partial -season in the south of England in 1348, a great season all over England, -in Ireland and in the south of Scotland in 1349, and a late extension to -Scotland generally in 1350. The experience of all Europe was similar, the -Mediterranean provinces receiving the infection as early as 1347, and the -northern countries, on the Baltic and North Seas, as late as 1350. - - -Symptoms and Type of the Black Death. - -This sweeping pestilence was part of a great wave of infection which -passed over Europe from the remote East, and of which we shall trace the -antecedents in the latter part of this chapter. The type and symptoms of -the disease are sufficiently well-known from foreign descriptions--by Guy -de Chauliac and Raymond de Chalin, both of Avignon, by Boccaccio, and by -the Villani of Florence. It was the bubo-plague, a disease which is known -to have existed in Egypt in the time of the Ptolemies, and made its first -great incursion from that country into Europe in the reign of Justinian in -the year 543 (see Chapter I.). Its second great invasion, but from a new -direction, was the Black Death of 1347-9; and from that time it remained -domesticated in the soil of Europe for more than three hundred years as -"the plague." The first medical descriptions of it by native British -writers are comparatively late. Manuscript treatises or "ordinances" on -the plague circulated in England from the reign of Richard II., most of -them being copies of a short work of no great value by one John of -Burgoyne or John of Bordeaux. There is also extant an English translation -in manuscript, assigned to the 14th century (but belonging to the end of -it, if not to the 15th), of a really good work on the plague by the bishop -of Aarhus, in Denmark, of which I shall have more to say in the next -chapter. But none of these give English experience; and the earliest of -our 16th century plague-books, by Phaer, is a compilation mostly, if not -entirely, from the Danish bishop's treatise, the latter having been -printed in its English form in or near 1480. It is not until we come to -the work of Dr Gilbert Skene of Edinburgh, printed in 1568, that we find a -treatise on plague showing traces of first-hand observation and -reflection. Then follow the essay of Simon Kellwaye on the London plague -of 1593, and that of the well-known Elizabethan poet and physician Thomas -Lodge, on the plague of 1603. Thus the reign of the plague in Britain was -approaching an end before the native medical profession began to write -upon it. Its eventful history from its arrival in 1348 down to a -comparatively late period has to be constructed from other materials than -the records or systematic writings of the faculty. - -The type of the Black Death in England is sufficiently indicated by Le -Baker, who was probably living at Osney, near Oxford, when the infection -began, and indubitably by friar Clyn of Kilkenny. Le Baker mentions the -_apostemata_ or swellings in diverse parts, their sudden eruption, and -their extreme hardness and dryness, so that hardly any fluid escaped when -they were lanced according to the usual method of treating them[225]. He -speaks also of a peculiarly fatal form, from which few or none recovered; -it was characterised by "small black pustules" on the skin, probably the -livid spots or "tokens" which came to be considered the peculiar mark of -the plague, and were certainly the index of a malignant type of it, just -as the corresponding haemorrhages are in pestilential fever (or typhus) -and in yellow fever. The disease, he adds, was swift in doing its work: -one day people were in high health and the next day dead and buried. -Knighton also says, with special reference to Bristol, that the attack was -fatal sometimes within twelve hours, and usually within three days at the -most. The treatment, which would have been, according to all subsequent -experience, the privilege only of those who could pay for it, would appear -to have consisted in lancing the risings or botches in the armpits, neck, -or groins; these were the lymph-glands enlarged to the size of a walnut or -of a hen's egg, and of a livid colour,--the most striking and certain of -all the plague-signs. - -Clyn's account of the disease, as he saw it at Kilkenny in 1349, is -important for including one remarkable symptom on which great importance -has been laid as distinctive of the Black Death among the epidemics of -bubo-plague, namely haemorrhage from the lungs: "For many died from -carbuncles, and boils, and botches which grew on the legs and under the -arms; others from passion of the head, as if thrown into a frenzy; others -by vomiting blood[226]." It was so contagious, he says, that those who -touched the dead, or even the sick, were incontinently infected that they -died, and both penitent and confessor were borne together to the same -grave. Such was the fear and horror of it that men scarce dared exercise -the offices of pity, namely, to visit the sick and bury the dead. Clyn's -list of symptoms includes all the most prominent features of the plague as -we shall find them described for the great epidemics of the Stuart -period--the botches in the armpits or groins, the carbuncles, the boils -(or blains), and the frenzy or delirium, as well as the special symptom of -the great mortality--vomiting of blood. - -Of the botch, which was the most striking sign of the plague, the -following description, by Woodall (1639), may be introduced here, to -supplement the more meagre accounts of the bubo-plague on its first -appearance. Woodall had himself suffered from the bubo or botch on two -occasions, in its comparatively safe suppurating form; his description -relates to the hard, tense, and dry botch, especially mentioned by Le -Baker for 1349, and always the index of great malignity: - - "But the pestilential bubo or boyle commeth ever furiously on, and as - in a rage of a Feaver, and as being in haste; sometimes it lighteth on - or near the inguen thwart, but more often lower upon the thigh, - pointing downward with one end, the upper end towards the belly being - commonly the biggest or the fullest part of the bubo, the whole thigh - being also inflamed[227]." - -Of this disease, says Le Baker, few of the first rank died, but of the -common people an incalculable number, and of the clergy and the cleric -class a multitude known to God only. It was mostly the young and strong -who were cut off, the aged and weakly being commonly spared. No one dared -come near the sick, and the bodies of the dead were shunned. Both Le Baker -and Knighton speak of whole villages and hamlets left desolate, and of -numbers of houses, both great and small, left empty and falling to ruin. -It was not merely one in a house that died, says friar Clyn of Kilkenny, -but commonly husband, wife, children and domestics all went the same way -of death; the friar himself wrote as one _inter mortuos mortem expectans_. -Without naming the locality, Avesbury says that in a single day, twenty, -forty, sixty or more corpses were buried in the same trench[228]. The -stereotyped phrase in the monastic chronicles is that not more than a -tenth part of the people were left alive. However, the author of the -_Eulogium_, a monk of Malmesbury who brought his history down to 1366, -gives a numerical estimate at the other extreme. He says that the plague -entered England at Melcumbe, destroyed innumerable people in Dorset, Devon -and Somerset, and, having left few alive in Bristol, proceeded northwards, -leaving no city, nor town, nor hamlet, nor scarcely a house, in which it -did not cut off the greater part of the people, or the whole of them; but -he adds, somewhat inconsequently, "so that a fifth part of the men, women -and children in all England were consigned to the grave[229]." These are -the vague contemporary estimates of the mortality--ranging from -nine-tenths to one-fifth of the whole population. It is possible, however, -to come much nearer to precision by the systematic use of documents; and -in that exercise we shall now proceed, in an order from the more general -to the more particular. - - -Estimates of the Mortality. - -There are two State documents the language of which favours the more -moderate kind of estimate. In a letter of the king[230], dated 1 December, -1349, or after the epidemic was over, to the mayor and bailiffs of -Sandwich, ordering them to watch all who took ship for foreign parts so as -to arrest the exit of men and money, the preamble or motive is: "Quia non -modica pars populi regni nostri Angliae praesenti Pestilentia est -defuncta." (Forasmuch as no mean part of the people of our kingdom of -England is dead of the present pestilence.) The Statute of Labourers, 18 -November, 1350, begins: "Quia magna pars populi, et maxim operariorum et -servientium jam in ultima pestilentia est defuncta." (Forasmuch as a great -part of the people, principally of artisans and labourers, is dead in the -late pestilence.) The statute would have emphasized the loss of artizans -and labourers as these were its special subjects, but the _maxim -operariorum et servientium_ may be fairly taken in a literal sense to mean -that the adult and able-bodied of the working class suffered most. One of -the contemporary chronicles says that the women and children were sent to -take the places of the men in field labour[231]. It is also significant -that the "second plague" of 1361 is named by two independent chroniclers -the _pestis puerorum_, or plague of the juveniles, as if it were now their -turn. The _pestis secunda_ was also notable, both in England and on the -Continent, for the numbers of the nobility which it carried off, and in -that respect it was contrasted with the Black Death. - -Next we come to certain numerical statements as to the mortality of 1349, -which have an air of precision. They relate to Leicester, Oxford, Bodmin, -Norwich, Yarmouth and London. In Leicester, according to Knighton, who was -a canon there at the time or shortly after, the burials from the Black -Death were more than 700 in St Margaret's churchyard, more than 400 in -Holy Cross parish (afterwards St Martin's), more than 380 in St Leonard's -parish, which was a small one, and in the same proportion in the other -parishes, which were three or four in number, and none of them so large as -the two first named. Knighton's round numbers for three parishes are not -improbable, considering that Leicester was a comparatively populous town -at the time of the poll-tax of 1377: the numbers who paid the tax were -2101, which would give, by the usual way of reckoning, a population of -3939. The population of the same three parishes in 1558, or shortly after -the period when English towns were described in the statute of 32 Henry -VIII. as being much decayed, would have been about 820 in St Margaret's, -800 in St Martin's (Holy Cross), and 160 in St Leonard's[232]. In 1712, -when the hosiery industry had been flourishing for thirty years, the -population of St Margaret's was about 1900 and of St Martin's about 1750, -the estimated population of the whole town having been 6450, or about -one-half more than we may assume it to have been in 1349. - -In order to realise what the pestilence of 1349 meant to these parishes of -Leicester, let us take the actual burials from the parish register of one -of them, St Martin's, in the comparatively mild plague years of 1610 and -1611, a period when the population, as calculated from the annual averages -of births and deaths, would have been from 3000 to 3500, probably less, -therefore, by some hundreds than it was in the years before the Black -Death. In 1610 there were 82 burials in St Martin's parish, or about twice -the average of non-plague years; in 1611 there were 128 burials, or three -to four times the annual average[233]. Knighton's 400 deaths for the same -parish in 1349 would mean that the ordinary burials were multiplied about -ten times; while his figures for two other parishes would mean a still -greater ratio of increase[234]. - -For Oxford the estimate is not less precise or more moderate. "'Tis -reported," says Anthony Wood, under the year 1349, "that no less than -sixteen bodies in one day were carried to one churchyard[235]." - -The information for Bodmin, in Cornwall, comes from William of -Worcester[236] who read it, about a century after the event, in the -register of the Franciscan church in that town. The entry in the register -was doubtless made at the time, and as made by Franciscans familiar with -burials it deserves some credit for approximate accuracy. The deaths are -put down in round numbers at fifteen hundred, which may seem large for -Bodmin at that date. But the truth is that the Cornish borough was a -place of relatively greater importance then than afterwards. In the king's -writ of 1351, for men-at-arms, in which each town was rated on the old -basis before the Black Death, Bodmin comes fourteenth in order, being -rated at eight men, while such towns as Gloucester, Hereford and -Shrewsbury are rated at ten each. It may well have had a population of -three or four thousand, of which the numbers said to have died in the -great mortality would be less than one-half. - -Perhaps the most satisfactory reckoning of the dead from contemporary -statements is that which can be made for London. The disease, as we know, -reached the capital at Michaelmas or All Souls (1st November), and its -prevalence led to a prorogation of Parliament on the 1st of January, and -again on the 10th of March, the reason assigned for the farther -prorogation being that the pestilence was raging _gravius solito_--more -severely than usual. The winter mortality must have been considerable, -although doubtless the season of the year kept it in check, as in all -subsequent experience. But there is evidence that three more -burying-places became necessary early in the year 1349. One of these, of -no great extent, was on the east side of the City, in the part that is now -the Minories[237]; and two were on the north side, not far apart. Of the -latter, one formerly called Nomansland, in West Smithfield, was also of -small extent[238]; but the other was a field of thirteen acres and a rood, -which became in the course of years the property of the Carthusians and -the site of the Charterhouse (partly covered now by Merchant Taylors -School). The larger burial-ground, called Manny's cemetery after its donor -sir Walter Manny, the king's minister and high admiral, was consecrated by -the bishop of London and opened for use at Candlemas, 1349. Now comes in -the testimony of Avesbury, the only chronicler of good authority for -London in those years. The mortality increased so much, he says (_in -tantum excrevit_), that there were buried in Manny's cemetery from the -feast of the Purification (when it was opened) until Easter more than 200 -in a single day (_quasi diebus singulis_), besides the burials in other -cemeteries[239]. The language of the chronicler implies that the burials -in the new cemetery rose to a maximum of 200 in a day. The Black Death -must have been like the great London plagues of later times in this -respect, at least, that it rose to a height, remained at its highest level -for some two, three or four weeks, and gradually declined. A maximum of -200 in a day, in the cemetery which would have at that stage received -nearly all the dead, would mean a plague-mortality from first to last, or -an epidemic curve, not unlike that of the London plague of 1563, for which -we have the exact weekly totals[240]: the five successive weeks at the -height of that plague (Sept. 3 to Oct. 8) produced mortalities of 1454, -1626, 1372, 1828 and 1262; and the epidemic throughout its whole curve of -intensity from June to December caused a mortality of 17,404. If -Avesbury's figures had been at all near the mark, the Black Death in -London would have been a twenty-thousand plague, or to make a most liberal -allowance for burials in other cemeteries than Manny's when the epidemic -was at its worst, it might have been a thirty-thousand plague. Even at the -smaller of those estimates it would have been a much more severe -visitation upon the London of Edward III. than the plague with 17,404 -deaths was upon the London of the 5th of Elizabeth. - -The mortality of London in the Black Death has been usually estimated at a -far higher figure than 20,000 or 30,000. There was a brass fixed to a -stone monument in the Charterhouse churchyard (Manny's cemetery), bearing -an inscription which was read there both by Stow and Camden. Stow gives -the Latin words, of which the following is a translation: "Anno Domini -1349, while the great pestilence was reigning, this cemetery was -consecrated, wherein, and within the walls of the present monastery, were -buried more than fifty thousand bodies of the dead, besides many more from -that time to the present, on whose souls may God have mercy. Amen." Camden -says the number on the brass was forty thousand, but his memory had -probably misled him[241]. This has been accepted as if trustworthy, -apparently because it was inscribed upon a monument in the cemetery; and -it has been argued that if one cemetery received 50,000 corpses in the -plague, the other cemeteries and parish churchyards of London would have -together received as many more, so that the whole mortality of London -would have been 100,000[242]. - -But that mode of reckoning disregards alike the scrutiny of documents and -the probabilities of the case. The inscription bears upon it that it was -written subsequent to the erection of the Carthusian monastery, which was -not begun until 1371[243]. The round estimate of 50,000 is at least -twenty-two years later than the mortality to which it relates, and may -easily have been magnified by rumour in the course of transmission. Even -if it had contemporary value we should have to take it as the roughest of -guesses. The latter objection applies in a measure to Avesbury's estimate -of 200 burials in a day at the height of the epidemic; but clearly it is -easier to count correctly up to 200 in a day than to 50,000 in the space -of three or four months. On the ground of probability, also, the number of -50,000 in one cemetery (or 100,000 for all London) is wholly incredible. -The evidence to be given in the sequel shows that the mortality was about -one-half the population. Assuming one-half as the death-rate, that would -have brought the whole population of London in the 23rd of Edward III. up -to about 200,000--a number hardly exceeded at the accession of James I., -after a great expansion which had proceeded visibly in the Elizabethan -period under the eyes of citizens like John Stow, had crowded the -half-occupied space between the City gates and the bars of the Liberties, -and had overflowed into the out-parishes to such an extent that -proclamations from the year 1580 onwards were thought necessary for its -restraint[244]. - -Hardly any details of the Black Death in London are known, but the few -personal facts that we have are significant. Thus, in the charter of -incorporation of the Company of Cutlers, granted in 1344, eight persons -are named as wardens, and these are stated in a note to have been all dead -five years after, that is to say, in the year of the Black Death, 1349, -although their deaths are not set down to the plague[245]. Again, in the -articles of the Hatters' Company, which were drawn up only a year before -the plague began (Dec. 13, 1347), six persons are named as wardens, and -these according to a note of the time were all dead before the 7th of -July, 1350[246], the cause of mortality being again unmentioned probably -because it was familiar knowledge to those then living. It is known also -that four wardens of the Goldsmiths' Company died in the year of the Black -Death. These instances show that the plague, on its first arrival, carried -off many more of the richer class of citizens than it did in the -disastrous epidemics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The same -is shown by the number of wills, already given. Perhaps the greatest of -the victims of plague in London was Bradwardine, "doctor profundus," the -newly-appointed archbishop of Canterbury, who died at Lambeth, with the -fatal botch in the armpits, on 26 Aug. 1349, just a week after landing at -Dover from Avignon. - -The often-quoted figures for Norwich, 57,374 deaths in the city from the -pestilence of 1349, are wholly incredible. They are derived from an entry -in the borough records in the Gildhall[247]: "In yis yere was swiche a -Dethe in Norwic that there died of ye Pestilence LVII Mil III C LXXIIII -besyd Relygius and Beggars." We should probably come much nearer the truth -by reading "XVII Mil." for "LVII Mil." It does not appear at what time the -entry was made, nor by what computation the numbers were got. Norwich was -certainly smaller than London; in the king's writ of 1351 for men-at-arms, -London's quota is 100, and that of Norwich 60; the next in order being -Bristol's, 20, and Lynn's, 20. These were probably the old proportions, -fixed before the Black Death, and re-issued in 1351 without regard to what -had happened meanwhile, and they correspond on the whole to the number of -parishes in each city (about 120 in London and 60 in Norwich[248]). -Norwich may have had from 25,000 to 30,000 people before the pestilence, -but almost certainly not more. The city must have suffered terribly in -1349, for we find, by the returns in the Subsidy Roll showing the amount -raised by the poll-tax of 1377 and the numbers in each county and town on -whom it was levied, that only 3952 paid the tax in Norwich, whereas 23,314 -paid it in London[249]. That is a very different proportion from the 60 to -100, as in the writ for men-at-arms; and the difference is the index of -the decline of Norwich down to the year 1377. In that year, the -population, by the usual reckoning from the poll-tax, would have been -about 7410; and it is conceivable that at least twice that number had died -of the plague within the city during the spring and summer of 1349. - -The figures given of the mortality at Yarmouth, 7052, are those inscribed -upon a document or a brass that once stood in the parish church; it was -seen there in the fifteenth century by William of Worcester, a squire of -the Fastolf family connected with Yarmouth, who gives the numbers as 7000, -giving also the exact dimensions of the great church itself[250]. They are -adduced by the burgesses of Yarmouth in a petition of 17 Henry VII. -(1502), as follows: "Buried in the parish church and churchyard of the -said town 7052 men." Yarmouth, like Norwich, suffered unusually from the -Black Death; in 1377, by the poll-tax reckoning, its population was about -3639. It may be assumed to have lost more than half its people; but it -recovered quickly, was made a seat of the wool-staple, and threatened to -rival Norwich. - -Clyn's statement that 14,000 died in Dublin from the beginning of August -until Christmas may also be taken merely as illustrating the inability of -early writers to count correctly up to large numbers. - -The most trustworthy figures of mortality in the Black Death which were -recorded at the time are those given for the inmates of particular -monasteries; and these are such as to give colour to the remark -interpolated in Higden's _Polychronicon_ that "in some houses of religion, -of twenty there were left but twain." - -At St Albans, the abbot Michael died of the common plague at Easter, 1349, -one of the first victims in the monastery. The mortality in the house -increased daily, until forty-seven monks, "eminent for religion," and -including the prior and sub-prior, were dead, besides those who died in -large numbers in the various cells or dependencies of the great religious -house[251]. At the Yorkshire abbey of Meaux, in Holdernesse, the -visitation was in August, although the epidemic in the city of York was -already over by the end of July[252]. The abbot Hugh died at Meaux on the -12th of August, and five other monks were lying unburied the same day. -Before the end of August twenty-two monks and six lay-brethren had died, -and when the epidemic was over there were only ten monks and lay-brethren -left alive out of a total of forty-three monks (including the abbot) and -seven lay-brethren. The chronicler adds that the greater part of the -tenants on the abbey lands died also[253]. In the Lincolnshire monastery -of Croxton, all the monks died save the abbot and prior[254]. In the -hospital of Sandon, Surrey, the master and brethren all died[255]. - -At Ely 28 monks survived out of 43[256]. In the Irish monasteries the -mortality had been equally severe: in the Franciscan convent at Drogheda, -25 friars died; in the corresponding fraternity at Dublin, 23; and in that -of Kilkenny 8 down to the 6th of March[257], with probably others (Clyn -himself) afterwards. - -The following mortalities have been collected for East Anglian religious -houses: At Hickling, a religious house in Norfolk, with a prior and nine -or ten canons ('Monasticon'), only one canon survived. At Heveringham in -the same county the prior and canons died to a man. At the College of St -Mary in the Fields, near Norwich, five of the seven prebendaries died. Of -seven nunneries in Norfolk and Suffolk, five lost their prioress as well -as an unknown number of nuns[258]. At the nunnery of Great Winthorp on the -Hill, near Stamford, all the nuns save one either died of the plague or -fled from it, so that the house fell to ruin and the lands were annexed by -a convent near it[259]. - -The experience of Canterbury appears to have been altogether different, -and was perhaps exceptional. In a community of some eighty monks only four -died of the plague in 1349[260]. It is known, however, that when the new -abbot of St Albans halted at Canterbury on his way to Avignon after his -election at Easter, one of the two monks who accompanied him was there -seized with plague and died[261]. - -These monastic experiences in England were the same as in other parts of -Europe. At Avignon, in 1348, sixty-six Carmelite monks were found lying -dead in one monastery, no one outside the walls having heard that the -plague was amongst them. In the English College at Avignon the whole of -the monks are said to have died[262]. - -What remains to be said of the death-rate in the great mortality of 1349 -is constructive or inferential, and that part of the evidence, not the -least valuable of the whole, has been worked out only within a recent -period. The enormous thinning of the ranks of the clergy was recorded at -the time, in general terms, by Knighton, and the difficulty of supplying -the parishes with educated priests is brought to light by various things, -including the founding of colleges for their education at Cambridge -(Corpus Christi) and at Oxford (Durham College). The first to examine -closely the number of vacancies in cures after the great mortality was -Blomefield in the third volume of the _History of Norfolk_ published in -1741. The Institution Book of the diocese of Norwich, he says (with a -reference to No. IV. of the _Lib. Instit._), shows 863 institutions to -benefices in 1349, "the clergy dying so fast that they were obliged to -admit numbers of youths, that had only devoted themselves for clerks by -being shaven, to be rectors of parishes[263]." A more precise use of -Institution Books, but more to show how zealous the clergy had been in -exposing themselves to infection than to ascertain the death-rate, was -made (1825) for the archdeaconry of Salop. It was found that twenty-nine -new presentations, after death-vacancies, had been made in the single year -of 1349, the average number of death vacancies at the time having been -three in two years[264]. The first systematic attempt to deduce the -mortality of 1349 from the number of benefices vacant through death was -made in 1865 by Mr Seebohm, by original researches for the diocese of York -and by using Blomefield's collections for the diocese of Norwich[265]. In -the archdeaconry of the West Riding there were 96 death vacancies in 1349, -leaving only 45 parishes in which the incumbent had survived. In the East -Riding 60 incumbents died out of 95 parishes. In the archdeaconry of -Nottingham there were deaths of priests in 65 parishes, and 61 survivals. -In the diocese of Norwich there were 527 vacancies by death or transfer, -while in 272 benefices there was no change. Thus the statement made to the -pope by the bishop of Norwich, that two-thirds of the clergy had died in -the great mortality is almost exact for his own diocese as well as for the -diocese of York. These figures of mortality among the Norfolk clergy were -confirmed, with fuller details, by a later writer[266]: the 527 new -institutions in the diocese of Norwich fall between the months of March -and October--23 before the end of April; 74 in May; 39 from 30th May to -10th June; 100 from 10th June to 4th July; 209 in July; and 82 more to -October. According to another enumeration of the same author for East -Anglia, upwards of 800 parishes lost their parsons from March 1349 to -March 1350, 83 parishes having been twice vacant, and 10 three times. - -There is no mistaking the significance of these facts as regards the -clergy: some two-thirds of a class composed of adult males in moderate -circumstances, and living mostly in country villages, were cut off by the -plague in Norfolk and Suffolk, in Yorkshire and Shropshire, and probably -all over England. That alone would suffice to show that the virus of the -Black Death permeated the soil everywhere, country and town alike. It is -this universality of incidence that chiefly distinguishes the Black Death -from the later outbreaks of plague, which were more often in towns than in -villages or scattered houses, and were seldom in many places in the same -year. But there remains to be mentioned, lastly, evidence inferential from -another source, which shows that the incidence in the country districts -was upon the people at large. That evidence is derived from the rolls of -the manor courts. - -It was remarked in one of the earliest works (1852) upon the history of an -English manor and of its courts, that "the real life or history of a -nation is to be gathered from the humble and seemingly trivial records of -these petty local courts[267]," and so the researches of the generation -following have abundantly proved. Much of this curious learning lies -outside the present subject and is unfamiliar to the writer, but some of -it intimately concerns us, and a few general remarks appear to be called -for. - -The manor was the unit of local government as the Normans found it. The -lord of the manor and the cultivators of the soil had respectively their -rights and duties, with a court to exact them. There are no written -records of manor courts extant from a period before the reign of Edward -I., when justice began to be administered according to regular forms. But -in the year 1279 we find written rolls of a manor court[268]. From the -reign of Edward III. these rolls begin to be fairly numerous; for example, -there is extant a complete series of them for the manor of Chedzey in -Somerset from 1329-30 to 1413-14. The court met twice, thrice, or four -times in the year, and the business transacted at each sitting was -engrossed by the clerk upon a long roll of parchment. The business related -to fines and heriots payable to the lord by the various orders of tenants -on various occasions, including changes in tenancy, successions by -heirship, death-duties, the marriages of daughters, the births of -illegitimate children, the commission of nuisances, poaching, and all -matters of petty local government. The first court of the year has usually -the longest roll, the parchment being written on one side, perhaps to the -length of twenty or twenty-four inches; the margin bears the amount of -fines opposite each entry; there are occasionally jury lists where causes -had to be tried. Of the community whose business was thus managed a notion -may be formed from the instance of the Castle Combe manor[269]: in 1340 it -had two open fields, each of about 500 acres, on its hill-slopes, -cultivated by 10 freemen tenants, 15 villeins, 11 other bondsmen -cultivating a half-acre each; 8 tenants of cottages with crofts, 12 -tenants of cottages without crofts, as well as 3 tenants of cottages in -Malmesbury. - -It will be readily understood that an unusual event such as the great -mortality of 1348-49 would leave its mark upon the rolls of the manor -courts; the death-vacancies, with their fines and heriots, and all entries -relating to changes in tenancy, would be unusually numerous. Accordingly -we find in the rolls for that year that there was much to record; at the -first glance the parchments are seen to be written within and without, -like the roll in the prophet's vision; and that is perhaps all that the -inspection will show unless the student be expert in one of the most -difficult of all kinds of ancient handwriting,--most difficult because -most full of contractions and conventional forms. But by a few those -palaeographic difficulties have been surmounted (doubtless at some cost of -expert labour), and the results as regards the great mortality of 1349 -have been disclosed. - -The manor of Winslow, in Buckinghamshire, belonging to the great abbey of -St Albans, was a large and typical one[270]. Besides the principal village -it had six hamlets. At the manor courts held in 1348-9 no fewer than 153 -holdings are entered as changing hands from the deaths of previous -holders, the tenancies being either re-granted to the single heir of the -deceased or to reversioners, or, in default of such, retained by the lord. -Of the 153 deceased tenants, 28 were holders of virgates and 14 of -half-virgates; or, in other words, there died 42 small farmers, -cultivating from forty to fifteen acres each, in half-acre strips -scattered all over the common fields of the manor. These 42 held twice as -much land as all the remaining 111 together; the latter more numerous -class were the crofters, who cultivated one or more half-acre strips: they -would include the various small traders, artisans and labourers of the -village and its hamlets; while the former class represented "the highest -grades of tenants in villenage." - -Of both classes together 153 had died in the great mortality. What -proportion that number bore to the whole body of tenants on the manor may -be inferred from the following: out of 43 jurymen belonging almost -exclusively to the class of larger holders, who had served upon the petty -jury in 1346, 1347 and 1348, as many as 27 had died in 1349; so that we -may reckon three out of every five adult males to have died in the Winslow -district, although it would be erroneous to conclude that the same -proportion of adult women had died, or of aged persons, or of infants and -young children. - -Another more varied body of evidence has been obtained from researches in -the rolls of manor courts in East Anglia[271]. - -In the parish of Hunstanton, in the extreme north of Norfolk, with an area -of about 2000 to 2500 acres, 63 men and 15 women had been carried off in -two months: in 31 of these instances there were only women and children to -succeed, and in 9 of the cases there were no heirs at all; the whole -number of tenants of the manor dead in eight months was 172, of whom 74 -left no heirs male, and 19 others had no blood relations left to claim the -inheritance. The following is the record of the manor court of Cornard -Parva, a small parish in Suffolk: on 31st March, 1349, 6 women and 3 men -reported dead; on 1st May, 13 men and 2 women, of whom 7 had no heirs; at -the next meeting on 3 November, 36 more deaths of tenants, of whom 13 left -no heirs. At Hadeston, a hamlet of Bunwell, twelve miles from Norwich, -which could not possibly have had 400 inhabitants, 54 men and 14 women -were carried off in six months, 24 of them without anyone to inherit. At -the manor court of Croxton, near Thetford, on 24th July, 17 deaths are -reported since last court, 8 of these without heirs. At the Raynham court, -on the same day, 18 tenements had fallen into the lord's hands, 8 of them -absolutely escheated, and the rest retained until the heir should appear. -At other courts, the suits set down for hearing could not be proceeded -with owing to the deaths of witnesses (e.g. 11 deaths among 16 witnesses) -or of principals. The manor court rolls of Lessingham have an entry, 15th -January, 1350, that only thirty shillings of tallage was demanded, -"because the greater part of those tenants who were wont to render tallage -had died in the previous year by reason of the deadly pestilence[272]." - -Further research upon the records of the manor courts will doubtless show -that the experience of Buckinghamshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Lancashire -was not singular. From the Castle Combe rolls nothing has been extracted -as to the mortality in 1348-9, except one entry (Nov. 13, 1357) that a -certain tenement was ruinous, having remained in the lord's hands since -the time of the pestilence for want of a purchaser; but it would be unsafe -to conclude that this sequestered manor of Wiltshire had not shared the -common fate. The accounts of certain manors in Hertfordshire were headed, -for thirty years after the Black Death, with a list of those who had -vacated tenancies by death in that pestilence[273]. A decayed inscription -cut in the stone of the parish church of Ashwell, in the same county, -records the great mortality of 1349 and the great tempest in January, -1362[274]. The tenants of the abbey of Meaux, in the Holdernesse division -of Yorkshire, were nearly all dead, as well as the monks within the -monastery walls. On the manor of Ensham, near Oxford, "there remained -hardly two tenants[275]." - -The immediate effects of the great mortality were not so striking as might -have been supposed. Although it fell upon town and country in one terrific -blow, yet some places had recovered from it before others felt it; it was -over in Bristol (so far as we know) before it came to a height in London, -and nearly over in London before it began in York. The dead were -expeditiously buried in trenches; vacancies among the clergy were promptly -filled; the manor courts met and transacted business, and had their -records engrossed for the most part in the usual clerkly style. So great a -dislocation of society naturally gave rise to some irregularities: -stripping the dead is reported from one district in Norfolk, fights and -quarrels came into court more often than ever in 1349 and 1350, and we -read of two women who each had three husbands in as many months[276]. -Knighton says that sheep and cattle were left to wander about untended, -and that they often perished in ditches by the wayside. A murrain occurred -the same year; at one place five thousand sheep died in the pasture and -were left to putrefy[277]. The price of a horse fell from forty shillings -to half a marc; a fat ox could be bought for four shillings, a cow for -twelve pence, a heifer for sixpence, a fat sheep for four pence, a stone -of wool for nine pence[278]. On the other hand, when the harvest of 1349 -had to be gathered, the price of labour rose enormously. According to -Knighton, a reaper got eightpence a day, with his food, and a mower -twelvepence. The extant accounts tabulated by Thorold Rogers confirm the -contemporary statement: the rates for threshing the harvest of 1349 were -those of panic and compulsion, being unparalleled, whether before or -after, in the Eastern, Midland and Southern counties; the immediate effect -of the scarcity of hands was to nearly double the wages of labour for the -time being. Many villeins or bondsmen took the opportunity of escaping to -the towns or to distant manors, where they could make their own terms. Of -the last kind of incident, probably a very common one, we have an instance -recorded[279]: At an inquest, some years after the Black Death, upon -sundry manors near Oxford belonging to Christ Church, it was ascertained -that, "in the time of the mortality or pestilence, which was in the year -1349, there remained hardly two tenants in the said manor [Ensham], and -these had wished to leave, had not brother Nicholas de Upton, then abbot -of the said manor, compounded anew with them, as well as with other -tenants who came in." - -So far as regards the immediate effects of the great mortality. Its -after-effects, felt within a year or two, upon the economics and morals of -the country, upon the power of the old governing class, upon the -dispersion of industries and the new life of towns, upon the system of -farming, upon the development of the legal profession in London, and upon -various other things, are a much more intricate and disputable subject, -some part of which will be dealt with in the next chapter in connexion -with the subsequent history of plague or its domestication upon the soil -of England. Many things in England were noted as having happened "sithen -the Pestilence," to quote the stock phrase of the 'Vision of Piers the -Ploughman,' and not the least of them was the frequent recurrence of -plague, or a prevalence of sickness so steady that the poet compares it to -the rain coming in through a leaky roof. - -Some historians have doubted whether after all the Black Death made so -very much difference to the course of affairs[280]. It is perhaps -inevitable that scholars, accustomed to deal only with obvious human -causation, should look with some distrust upon the large claims made, in -the way of moral and social consequences, for a phenomenon which has been -apt to be classed with comets and earthquakes. The sudden thinning of the -population may indeed become a subject for economists without any regard -to the causation, and irrespectively of the means by which the numbers -were reduced; and that has been the only historic interest of the great -mortality hitherto. But the operation of pestilence is peculiar; the -thinning of the population is not effected as if in the due course of -nature; the analogy is closer with a decimating or exterminating war. The -invasion of the Black Death was part of the great human drama, just as if -a swarming people or a barbarous conqueror had been visibly present in it. -If things were moving in the fourteenth century towards a particular -issue, as historians find in their retrospect that they were, then the -coming of a great plague was part of that movement, organically bound up -with the other forces of it, and no more arbitrary than they. Thus it -becomes of interest to trace the antecedents of the Black Death before we -attempt to follow out its consequences; and it is not the less of interest -to do so, that the train of events leads us as far eastwards as the soil -of China, and to the incidents that attended the collapse of the greatest -government of the Middle Ages, the empire of the Great Khan. - - -The Antecedents of the Black Death. - -When the Black Death in its progress westwards came to Constantinople in -1347, the emperor-historian, John Cantacuzenes, was present in his capital -to witness the arrival of the pestilence; in his history he wrote that it -came among them from the country of the hyperborean Scythians, that is to -say, the Tartars of the Crimea. The other contemporary Byzantine -historian, Nicephorus Gregoras, says that the pestilence began among the -Scythians in the Crimea and at the mouths of the Don. The Russian annals, -which are an independent source, and likely enough to have a correct -tradition, also say that the plague was God's punishment on the people of -the Don territory and of several other localities with obsolete names, -including the famous city of Sarai on the Volga[281]. The Chersonese, and -the country from the Don to the Volga, or from the Euxine to the Caspian, -are the regions thus clearly indicated as the scene of the first outburst -of the Black Death; but there was no clue to its unaccountable appearance -there, or to the connexion between its outburst on the confines of Europe -and the distant home in the East which the rumour of the day vaguely -assigned to it. The more definite association of the Black Death with -China dates from 1757, when the abb Des Guignes, in his _Histoire des -Huns_[282], took up the old tradition of the Arab historian, Aboel -Mahasin, that the plague began in Tartary, that the smell of corpses -spread on every side, that the infection passed from Cathay or Tartary to -the Tartars of the Kaptchac (Crimea), and from them to Constantinople and -Europe on the one hand, and to Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt and North Africa -on the other. He pointed out also that the overland caravan trade was a -ready means of transport for the infection. That which specially attracted -his attention as the historian of the Mongol power was the other statement -of the Arab historian in the same context, that China had been visited by -floods so disastrous that men, beasts, and even birds perished, and that -the country was almost depopulated. Upon that hint Des Guignes collected -from the Chinese annals of the first half of the fourteenth century a -considerable list[283] of calamities, which had actually happened--floods -causing the loss of millions of lives, earthquakes, and the like, -appending the catalogue without comment as a note to the text where he has -occasion to mention the Black Death. Des Guignes' note was reproduced -verbatim by Hecker in his essay on the Black Death in 1832, and the -unwonted series of phenomena in China was made the basis of certain -mystical speculations as to the effect of earthquakes in causing a -"progressive infection of the zones," a perturbation of "the earth's -organism," a "baneful commotion of the atmosphere," or the like. In that -nebulous and unsatisfactory state the old tradition of the Black Death -originating in China has remained to the present hour; the intuition of -the Peking Jesuit had merely been appropriated and set forth in his own -way by the German "Naturphilosoph[284]." - -Meanwhile, in 1842 a clue to Des Guignes' conjecture of a connexion -between the importation of the Black Death and the China land-route was -found (but not followed up) in the discovery by Henschel of a Latin -manuscript in the Rhediger Library at Breslau[285]. This was a narrative -compiled by one Gabriel de Mussis, a jurist of Piacenza, who had been -practising as a notary or advocate among the Genoese and Venetians trading -around the shores of the Euxine and Caspian, and had been an eyewitness of -the outbreak of the plague in that region. De Mussis has no theory of the -origin of the plague; he merely narrates the events as they unfolded -themselves before his own eyes; so much was he in the midst of them that -he was a passenger on board the very ship which brought the first seeds of -the Black Death direct from the Crimea to Genoa as early as the spring of -1347. - - The substance of this story is that the Italian merchants, who were - then settled in considerable numbers at the various termini or - entrepts of the overland trade from China and Central Asia by the - more northern route, were harassed by the Tartar hordes; that they had - stood a siege in Tana, on the Don, but had been driven out of it, and - had sought refuge for themselves and their merchandise within the - walls of Caffa, a small fortified post on the Crimean Straits (of - Kertch), built by Genoese not long before; that Caffa was besieged in - due course by the Tartar barbarians; that the investment lasted nearly - three years; that the merchants and others, crowded into the narrow - space within the walls, were put to great straits and could hardly - breathe, being only partially relieved by the arrival of a ship with - supplies; that the plague broke out among the besieging Tartar host - and daily destroyed thousands; that the Tartars threw the pestilent - dead bodies inside the walls by their engines of siege, so that the - infection took hold of those within the fort; that the Tartars - dispersed in panic and spread the infection all over the shores of the - Euxine, Caspian and Levant; that such of the Italian traders as were - able, De Mussis himself with them, escaped from Caffa in a ship; and - that the infection appeared in Genoa in its most deadly form a day or - two after the arrival of the ship, although none of those on board - were suffering from the plague. - -These are all the circumstances related by De Mussis of the beginning of -the outbreak as known to himself at first hand: the rest of his narrative -is occupied with various incidents of the plague in Europe, with pious -reflections, and accounts of portents. His single reference to China is as -follows: "In the Orient, about Cathay, where is the head of the world and -the beginning of the earth, horrible and fearful signs appeared; for -serpents and frogs, descending in dense rains, entered the dwellings and -consumed countless numbers, wounding them by their venom and corroding -them with their teeth. In the meridian parts, about the Indies, regions -were overturned by earthquakes, and cities wasted in ruin, tongues of -flame being shot forth. Fiery vapours burnt up many, and in places there -were copious rains of blood and murderous showers of stones." De Mussis -has certainly no scientific intention; nor can it be said that any -scientific use has been made of his manuscript since its discovery. For -Hser, its editor, merely reproduces in his history the passage from -Hecker on the three overland routes between Europe and the East, without -remarking on the fact that De Mussis definitely places the outbreak of the -plague at the European terminus of one of them: its remote origin is -involved in "impenetrable obscurity;" all we can say is that it came from -the East, "the cradle of the human race[286]." - -But the entirely credible narrative by De Mussis of the outbreak of plague -at the siege of Caffa is just the clue that was wanting to unravel the -meaning of the widespread rumour of the time, that the plague came from -China. Let us first examine somewhat closely the source of that rumour. It -finds its most definite expression in an Arabic account of the Black Death -at Granada, by the famous Moorish statesman of that city, -Ibn-ul-Khatib[287]. Besides giving the local circumstances for Granada, he -makes various remarks on the nature of the plague, and on its mode of -spreading, which are not exceeded in shrewdness and insight by the more -scientific doctrines of later times. Its origin in China he repeats on the -authority of several trustworthy and far-travelled men, more particularly -of his celebrated countryman Ibn-Batuta, or "the Traveller," whose story -was that the plague arose in China from the corruption of many corpses -after a war, a famine, and a conflagration. - -The mention of Ibn-Batuta, as the authority more particularly, has a -special interest. That traveller was actually in China from 1342 to 1346. -In his book of travels[288] he tells us how on his way back (he took the -East-Indian sea-route to the Persian Gulf) he came at length to Damascus, -Aleppo and Cairo in the summer of 1348, and was a witness of the Black -Death at each of those places, and of the mixed religious processions at -Damascus of Jews with their Hebrew Scriptures and Christians with their -Gospels. But he says not one word anywhere as to the origin of the plague -in China, whence he was journeying homewards. He continued his journey to -Tangier, his birthplace, and crossed thence to Spain about the beginning -of 1350. At Granada he spent some days among his countrymen, of whom he -mentions in his journal four by name; but the most famous of them, -Ibn-ul-Khatib, he does not mention. However, here was Ibn-Batuta at -Granada, a year or two after the Black Death, discoursing on all manner of -topics with the most eminent Moors of the place; and here is one of them, -Ibn-ul-Khatib, in an account of the Black Death at Granada, quoting the -report of Ibn-Batuta that the pestilence arose in China from the -corruption of unburied corpses. None of the other statements of an Eastern -origin can compare with this in precision or in credibility; they all -indeed confuse the backward extension of the plague from the Euxine -eastwards to Khiva, Bokhara and the like, with its original progress -towards Europe from a source still farther east. The authority of -Ibn-Batuta himself is not, of course, that of historian or observer; -although he was in China during part, at least, of the national calamities -which the Chinese Annals record, he says nothing of them, and probably -witnessed nothing of them. But the traveller was a likely person to have -heard correctly the gossip of the East and to have judged of its -credibility; so that there is a satisfaction in tracing it through him. - -The siege of Caffa, and the general circumstances of it, we may take as -historical on the authority of the Italian notary who was there; but it -may be doubted whether the plague began, as he says, among the nomade -hordes outside the fort. In sieges it has been not unusual for both sides -to suffer from infective disease; and although it is not always easy to -say where the disease may have begun, the presumption is that it arose -among those who were most crowded, most pressed by want, and most -desponding in spirit. It is, of course, not altogether inconceivable that -the Tartar besiegers of Caffa had bred a pestilential disease in their -camp; the nomades of the Cyrenaic plateau have bred bubo-plague itself -more than once in recent years in their wretched summer tents, and plague -has appeared from time to time in isolated or remote Bedouin villages on -the basaltic plateaus of Arabia. There is nothing in the nomade manner of -life adverse to pestilential products, least of all in the life of nomades -encamped for a season. But such outbreaks of bubo-plague or of typhus -fever have been local, sporadic, or non-diffusive. On the other hand the -plague which arose at the siege of Caffa was the Black Death, one of the -two greatest pestilences in the history of the world. Let us then see -whether there is any greater likelihood of finding inside the walls of -Caffa the lurking germs of so great a pestilence. Within the walls of the -Genoese trading fort were the Italian merchants driven in from all around -that region, with their merchandise--as De Mussis says, _fugientes pro -suarum tutione personarum et rerum_. Previous to their three years' siege -in Caffa they, or some of them, had stood a siege in Tana, and had -retreated to the next post on the homeward route. Tana was at the -eastward bend of the Don, whence the road across the steppe is shortest to -the westward bend of the Volga; a little above the bend of the Volga was -the great city of Sarai--whence the caravans started on their overland -journey along northern parallels, across mountain ranges and the desert of -Gobi, to enter China at its north-western angle, just within the end of -the Great Wall[289]. The merchandise of Sarai and Tana was the return -merchandise of China--the bales of silks and fine cloths, spices and -drugs, which had become the articles of a great commerce between China and -Europe since Marco Polo first showed the way, and which continued to reach -Europe by the caravan routes until about 1360: then the route was closed -owing to the final overthrow of the authority of the Great Khan, which had -once secured a peaceful transit from the Yellow Sea to the Black Sea--so -completely closed that men forgot, two hundred years after, that it had -ever existed. - -Did these bales of Chinese stuffs, carried into Caffa for protection, -contain the seeds of the Black Death? There is, at least, nothing -improbable in the seeds of plague lurking in bales of goods; that mode of -transmission was afterwards recognized as highly characteristic of the -plague during its Levantine days. Nor is there anything improbable in the -seeds of an infection being carried thousands of miles across the deserts -of Central Asia; cholera came in that way from India in 1827-8 by the -caravan-route to Cabul, Balkh, Bokhara, Khiva and the Kirghiz Steppe to -Orenburg, and again in 1847 to Astrakhan; and the slow land-borne viruses -of those two great epidemics exceeded in virulence the later importations -of cholera by the sea route from the East. Still farther, there is nothing -improbable in the germs of plague lying latent for a long time, or in the -disease existing as a potency although not manifested in a succession of -cases. The next stage of its progress, from Caffa to Genoa, illustrates -that very point; for we know that there were no cases of plague on board -ship, although the very atmosphere or smell of the new arrival seemed -sufficient to taint the whole air of Genoa, and to carry death to every -part of the city within a couple of days. And lastly the long imprisonment -of a virus in bales of goods, the crowding of merchants and merchandise -into the narrow space of a walled seaport, amidst the almost inevitable -squalor and foetor of a three years' siege, were the very circumstances -needed to raise the potency of the assumed virus to an unusual height, to -give it a degree of virulence that would make it effective, and a power of -diffusion that would spread and continue the liberated infection after the -manner of the greatest of pestilences. - -Thus, if we have to choose between the origin of the plague-virus among -the Tartar hordes besieging the China merchants within the walls of Caffa, -and the pre-existence of that virus, for a long time latent, among the -goods or effects of the besieged, the latter hypothesis must be accorded -the advantage in probability. Accepting it, we follow the virus back to -Tana on the Don, from Tana to Sarai on the Volga, from Sarai by a -well-trodden route which need not be particularized[290], for many weeks' -journey until we come to the soil of China. According to a dominant school -of epidemiologists it is always enough to have traced a virus to a remote -source, to the "roof of the world" or to the back of the east wind, and -there to leave it, in the full assurance that there must have been -circumstances to account for its engendering there, perhaps in an equally -remote past, if only we knew them. If, however, we follow the trail back -definitely to China, it is our duty to connect it there with an actual -history or tradition, immemorial if need be, of Chinese plague. But there -is no such history or tradition to be found. We know something of the -China of Kublai Khan, fifty years before, from the book of Marco Polo; and -the only possible reference to plague there is an ambiguous statement -about "carbuncles" in a remote province, which was probably Yun-nan. Not -only so, but if we scrutinize the Chinese Annals closely, we shall find -that the thirty years preceding the Black Death were indeed marked by many -great calamities and loss of life on a vast scale, by floods, droughts, -earthquakes, famines and famine-fevers, but not by pestilence unconnected -with these; on the other hand, the thirty or forty years after the Black -Death had overrun Europe, beginning with the year 1352, are marked in the -Chinese Annals (as summarized in the _Imperial Encyclopdia_ of Peking, -1726) by a succession of "great plagues" in various provinces of the -Empire, which are not associated with calamitous seasons, but stand alone -as disease-calamities pure and simple[291]. If the Black Death connects at -all with events in China, these events were natural calamities and their -attendant loss of life, and not outbreaks of plague itself; for the -latter, assuming them to have been bubo-plague, were subsequent in China -to the devastation of Europe by the plague. - -We are left, then, to make what we can of the antecedent calamities of -China; and we may now revert to the curious rumour of the time that the -relevant thing in China was the corruption of many corpses left unburied -after inundation, war and conflagration. So far as war and conflagration -are concerned they are quite subordinate; there was no war except an -occasional ineffective revolt in some remote western province, and the -conflagrations were minor affairs, noticed, indeed, in the Annals, but -lost among the greater calamities. The floods, droughts and famines were -events of almost annual recurrence for many years before, so that no -period in the Annals of China presents such a continuous picture of -national calamity, full as Chinese history has at all times been of -disasters of the same kind. It was the decadence of the great Mongol -empire, founded by Genghiz and carried by Kublai to that marvellous height -of splendour and prosperity which we read of in the book of Marco Polo. -The warlike virtues of the earlier Mongol rulers had degenerated in their -successors into sensual vices during the times of peace; and the history -of the country, priest-ridden, tax-burdened, and ruled by women and -eunuchs, neglected in its thousand water-ways and in all the safeguards -against floods and famine which wiser rulers had set up, became from year -to year an illustration of the ancient Chinese maxim, that misgovernment -in the palace is visited by the anger of the sky. - - The following epitome of the calamities in China is taken from De - Mailla's _Histoire gnrale de la Chine_. Paris, 1777, 9 vols. 4to., a - translation of the abridged official annals. - - The year 1308 marks the beginning of the series of bad seasons. - Droughts in some places, floods in others, locusts and failure of the - crops, brought famine and pestilence. The people in Kiang-Hoa were - reduced to live on wild roots and the bark of trees. In Ho-nan and - Chan-tong the fathers ate the flesh of the children. The imperial - granaries were still able to supply grain, but not nearly enough for - the people's wants. The provinces of Kiang-si and Che-kiang were - depopulated by the plague or malignant fever which followed the - famine. The ministers sent in their resignations, which were not - accepted. - - In 1313 the same events recur, including the resignations of - ministers. An epidemic carried off many in the capital, and the whole - empire was desolated by drought. At a council of ministers to devise - remedies and avert further calamities it was proposed by some to copy - the institutions of ancient empires celebrated for their virtue, and - by others to abolish the Bhuddist priesthood of Foh as the cause of - all misfortunes. The throne is now occupied by Gin-tsong, an emperor - of a serious and ascetic disposition. In 1314 he revived the old - Chinese system of competitive examinations and the distinctive dress - among the grades of mandarins, which the earlier Mongol rulers had - been able to dispense with. Next year there is a public distribution - of grain, and a check to the exactions of tax-gatherers in the - distressed districts. In 1317, it appears that the provincial - mandarins, in defiance of express orders, had neglected the laws of - Kublai with reference to the distribution of grain, although it was - dangerous to defer such public aid longer; they had failed also to - relax their rigour in collecting the taxes. One day the emperor found - at Peking a soldier in rags from a distant garrison, and discovered - that a system of embezzlement in the army clothing department had been - going on for five years. Gin-tsong is reported to have said to his - ministers, "My august predecessors have left wise laws, which I have - always had at heart to follow closely; but I see with pain that they - are neglected, and that my people are unhappy." - - In 1318 we read of a great flood in one province, of multitudes - drowned, and of a public distribution of grain. In 1320, forty of the - Censors of the Empire remonstrated against the cruel exactions of - "public leeches," and against a practice of calumniating honest men so - as to get them out of the way. The emperor Gin-tsong died in that - year, aged thirty-three, and with his death the last serious attempt - to check the flood of corruption came to an end. In 1321 there is - drought in Ho-nan, followed by famine. In 1324 we read of droughts, - locusts, inundations and earthquakes. The emperor demanded advice of - the nobles, ministers and wise men, and received the following answer: - "While the palace of the prince is full of eunuchs, astrologers, - physicians, women, and other idle people, whose maintenance costs the - State an enormous sum, the people are plunged in extreme misery. The - empire is a family, and the emperor its father: let him listen to the - cries of the miserable." In 1325 famine follows the disasters of the - year before; and we learn that the people were supplied from the full - granaries of the rich, who were paid, not out of the State treasury, - but by places in the mandarinate! In 1326 the tyranny and - licentiousness of the Bhuddist lamas reaches a climax, and an edict is - issued against them. The year 1327 is marked by a series of calamities - and portents--drought, locusts, ruined crops, earthquakes, - inundations. In 1330, again floods and the harvest destroyed, a cruel - famine in Hou-Kouang, millions of acres of land ruined, and 400,000 - families reduced to beggary. In 1331 the harvest is worse than in the - year before--in Che-kiang there were more than 800,000 families who - did not gather a single grain of corn or rice,--and all the while - enormous taxes were ground out of universal poverty. - - In 1333 begins the long and calamitous reign of Shun-ti, who came to - the throne a weak youth of thirteen. Next year the misfortunes of - China touch their highest point. Inundations ruined the crops in - Chan-tong; a drought in Che-kiang brought famine and pestilence; in - the southern provinces generally, famine and floods caused the deaths - of 2,270,000 families, or of 13,000,000 individuals. In 1336 - inundations in Chan-tong ruined the harvest; in Kiang-nan and - Che-kiang the first harvest was a failure from drought, multitudes - perished of hunger, and a plague broke out. The emperor, insensible to - the misfortunes of his people, abandons himself to his pleasures. Next - year sees the first of those provincial revolts, led by obscure - Chinese peasants, which eventually overthrew the dynasty in 1368. - Floods occurred in more than one river basin, by which multitudes of - men and beasts were drowned; in the valley of the Kiang (a tributary - of the Hoang-ho) four millions perished. For several years we read of - numerous and repeated shocks of earthquakes, in 1341 of a great - famine, in 1342 of a famine so severe that human flesh was eaten, in - 1343 of seven towns submerged, in 1344 of a great tract of country - inundated by the sea in consequence of an earthquake, in 1345 of - earthquakes in Pe-chili, in 1346 of earthquakes for seven days in - Chan-tong, and of a great famine in Chan-si. In 1347 earthquakes in - various provinces, and drought in Ho-tong, followed by many deaths. - The record of disasters in De Mailla's abridged annals, and in Des - Guignes, who had clearly access to fuller narrations, comes to an end - for a time at the year 1347. - -It will be observed that in these records there is comparatively little -said of epidemic sickness. The references to pestilence would in no case -suggest more than the typhus fever which has been the usual attendant upon -Chinese famines, and has never shown the independent vitality and -diffusive properties of plague. But the minor place occupied by actual -pestilence in China, in the years before the Black Death in Europe, is -brought out even more clearly on comparing that period with the section of -the Chinese annals for the generation following. In the chronology of -Chinese epidemics drawn up by Gordon (London, 1884) from the Peking -_Encyclopdia_ of 1726, there are, from 1308-1347, just the same entries -of pestilence as are given above from De Mailla's and Des Guignes' French -adaptation of the Annals. (Gordon makes the obvious mistake of attributing -to pestilence the enormous loss of life which the Annals clearly assigned -to floods and famines, with their attendant sickness.) But with the year -1352 we enter upon a great pestilential period, as clearly marked in the -history of China by the annual recurrence of vast epidemics as the decades -before it were marked by the unusual frequency of floods, famines and -earthquakes. Every year from 1352 to 1363, except 1355, has an entry of -"great pestilence" or "great plague" (yi-li), in one province or another, -although the old tale of floods and famines has come to an end in the -Annals. The last of the nearly continuous series of great pestilences is -in 1369, when there was a great pest in Fukien, and "the dead lay in heaps -on the ground." There is then a break until 1380, and after that a longer -break until 1403. It would thus appear as if the great pestilential period -of China in the fourteenth century had not coincided with the succession -of disastrous seasons, but had followed the latter at a distinct interval. -Conversely the years of plague from 1352 to 1369 do not appear to have -been years of inundations and bad harvests; they stand out in the -chronology, by comparison, as years of plague-sickness pure and simple; -and although nothing is said to indicate the type of bubo-plague, yet the -disease can hardly be assumed to have been the old famine fevers or other -sickness directly due to floods and scarcity, so long as not a word is -said of floods and famines in that context or in the Annals generally. The -suggestion is that the soil of China may not have felt the full effects of -the plague virus, originally engendered thereon, until some few years -after the same had been carried to Europe, having produced there within a -short space of time the stupendous phenomenon of the Black Death. If -there be something of a paradox in that view, it is the facts themselves -that refuse to fall into what might be thought the natural sequence. - -The historian Gaubil thinks that the national Annals make the most of -these recurring calamities, having been written by the official scribes of -the next dynasty, who sought to discredit the Mongol rule as much as -possible[292]; but it is not suggested that the compilers had invented the -series of disasters,--now in one province or river basin, now in another, -at one time with thirteen millions of lives lost, at another with four -hundred thousand families reduced to beggary, this time a drought, and -next time a flood, and in another series of years a succession of -destructive earthquakes. - -We are here concerned with discovering any possible relation that these -disasters, coming one upon another almost without time for recovery, can -have had to the engendering of the plague-virus. According to the rumours -of the time, it was the corruption of unburied corpses in China which -caused the Black Death; and certainly the unburied corpses were there, a -_vera causa_, if that were all. Recent experiences in China make it easy -for us to construct in imagination the state of the shores of rivers after -those fatal inundations of the fourteenth century, or of the roadsides -after the recurring famines. Thus, of the famine of 1878 it is said[293]: -"Coffins are not to be got for the corpses, nor can graves be prepared for -them. Their blood is a dispersed mass on the ground, their bones lie all -about.... Pestilence [it is otherwise known to have been typhus fever] -comes with the famine, and who can think of medicine for the plague or -coffins for the multitude of the dead?" Or, again, according to a memorial -in the official Peking Gazette of 16 January, 1878, "the roads are lined -with corpses in such numbers as to distance all efforts for their -interment[294]." - -There is much of sameness in the history of China from century to century; -what happened in 1878, and again on a lesser scale two or three years -ago, must have happened on an unparalleled scale year after year during -the ill-starred period which ended about 1342; there must have been no -ordinary break-down in the decencies and sanitary safeguards of interment -in such years as 1334, when thirteen millions (two million, two hundred -and seventy thousand families) were swept away by the floods of the -Yang-tsi, or destroyed by hunger and disease. But we are not left -altogether to the exercise of the imagination. A strangely vivid picture -remains to us of a scene in China in those years, which a returning -missionary saw as in a vision. The friar Odoric, of Pordenone, had spent -six years in Northern China previous to 1327 or 1328, when he returned to -Italy by one of the overland routes. The story of his travels[295] was -afterwards taken down from his lips, and it is made to end with one -gruesome scene, which is brought in without naming the time or the place. -It is a vision of a valley of death, invested with the same air of -generality as in Bunyan's allegory of the common lot. - - "Another great and terrible thing I saw. For, as I went through a - certain valley which lieth by the River of Delights (_flumen - deliciarum_) I saw therein many dead corpses lying. And I heard also - therein sundry kinds of music, but chiefly nakers, which were - marvellously played upon. And so great was the noise thereof that very - great fear came upon me. Now, this valley is seven or eight miles - long; and if any unbeliever enter therein, he quitteth it never again, - but perisheth incontinently. Yet I hesitated not to go in that I might - see once for all what the matter was. And when I had gone in I saw - there, as I have said, such numbers of corpses as no one without - seeing it could deem credible. And at one side of the valley, in the - very rock, I beheld as it were the face of a man very great and - terrible, so very terrible indeed that for my exceeding great fear my - spirit seemed to die in me. Wherefore I made the sign of the Cross, - and began continually to repeat _Verbum caro factum_, but I dared not - at all come nigh that face, but kept at seven or eight paces from it. - And so I came at length to the other end of the valley, and there I - ascended a hill of sand and looked around me." - -Narrated as it is of no specified place and of no one year of his journey, -it may stand, and perhaps it was meant to stand, for a common experience -of China in the period of Mongol decadence. Whether he left the country by -the gorges of the Yang-tsi and the Yun-nan route, or along the upper -basin of the Hoang-ho by the more usual northern route to the desert of -Gobi, his vision of a Valley of Corpses is equally significant. - - -The Theory of the Plague-Virus. - -The question that remains is the connexion, in pathological theory, -between the bubo-plague and the corruption of the unburied dead or of the -imperfectly buried dead. Some such connexion was the rumour of the time, -before any scientific theory can well have existed. Also the factor in -question was undoubtedly there among the antecedents, if it were not even -the most conspicuous of the antecedents. But we might still be following a -wandering light if we were to trust the theory of the Black Death to those -empirical suggestions, striking and plausible though they be. It is not -for the Black Death only, but for the great plagues of the Mohammedan -conquests, which preceded the Black Death by many centuries and also -followed that great intercurrent wave until long after in their own strict -succession, for the circumscribed spots of plague in various parts of Asia -and Africa in our own day, and above all for the great plague of -Justinian's reign,--it is for them all that a theory of bubo-plague is -needed. A survey of the circumstances of all these plagues will either -weaken or strengthen, destroy or establish, the theory that the virus of -the Black Death had arisen on the soil of China from the cadaveric poison -present in some peculiar potency, and had been carried to Europe in the -course of that overland trade at whose terminus we first hear of its -virulence being manifested. - -The theory of the origin of the plague-virus from the corruption of the -dead was a common one in the sixteenth century. It was held by Ambroise -Par among others, and it was elaborately worked out for the Egypt of his -day by Prosper Alpinus, physician to the Venetian Consulate at Cairo -towards the end of the same century. But the most brilliant exposition of -it, one of the finest exercises of diction and of reasoning that has ever -issued from the profession of medicine, was that given for the origin in -Egypt of the great plague of Justinian's reign by Etienne Pariset, -secretary to the Acadmie de Mdecine and commissioner from France to -study the plague in Syria and Egypt in 1829[296]. - -In the plague-stricken Egypt of that time, overburdened with population -and still awaiting the beneficent rule of Mehemet Ali, Dr Pariset had his -attention forcibly directed to the same contrast between the modern and -ancient manner of disposing of the dead, and to the insuitability of the -former to the Delta, which had been remarked by Prosper Alpinus in 1591, -and by De Maillet, French consul at Cairo, in 1735, and had been specially -dwelt upon by _philosophes_ of the eighteenth century, such as -Montesquieu, Volney and De Pauw. On the one hand he saw under his eyes -various revolting things in the Delta,--brick tombs invaded by water, an -occasional corpse floating at large, canals choked with the putrefying -bodies of bullocks dead of a murrain, the courtyards of Coptic and Jewish -houses, and the floors of mosques, churches and monasteries filled with -generations of the dead in their flooded vaults and catacombs. On the -other hand he saw, on the slopes of the Libyan range and on the edge of -the desert beyond the reach of the inundation, the occasional openings of -a vast and uncounted series of rock-grottoes in which the Egyptians of the -pre-Christian era had carefully put away every dead body, whether of bird, -or of beast, or of human kind. He was persuaded of the truth of Volney's -remark, "In a crowded population, under a hot sun, and in a soil filled -deep with water during several months of every year, the _rapid_ -putrefaction of bodies becomes a leaven of plague and of other -disease[297]." The remark of De Pauw, although it is not adduced, was -equally to the point: "Neither men nor beasts are any longer embalmed in -Egypt; but the ancient Egyptians seem to have done well in following that -mode, and in keeping the mummies in the deepest recesses of excavated -rocks.... Were we to note here all that those two nations [Arabs and -Turks] have left undone, and everything that they ought not to have done, -it would be easy to understand how a country formerly not altogether -unhealthy, is now become a hotbed of the plague[298]." These -eighteenth-century reflections, casual and discursive after the manner of -the time, were amplified by Pariset to scientific fulness and order, and -set in permanent classical form. Like De Pauw and Volney, he extolled the -ancient sanitary wisdom of Egypt, and excused the priestly mask of -superstition for the implicit obedience that it secured. De Pauw had -pointed out that the towns most remarkable for the worship of -crocodiles,--Coptos, Arsine (Crocodilopolis), and Athribis,--were all -situated on canals at some distance from the Nile; the crocodiles could -never have got to them unless the canals were kept clear; according to -Aelian and Eusebius the crocodile was the symbol of water fit to drink; so -that the superstitious worship of the animal was in effect the motive for -keeping the canals of the Nile in repair. The priests of Egypt, says -Pariset, with their apparatus of fictions and emblems, sought to veil from -the profane eyes of the vulgar and of strangers the secrets of a sublime -philosophy[299]. They made things sacred so as to make them binding, so as -to constrain by the force of religion, as Moses did, their disciple. They -had to reckon with the annual overflow of the Nile, with a hot sun, and a -crowded population. Suppose that all the dead animal matter, human or -other, were to be incorporated with the soil under these rapid changes of -saturation and drying, of diffusion and emanation, what a mass of poison, -what danger to the living! What foresight they showed in avoiding it, what -labour and effort, but what results! Can anyone pretend that a system so -vast, so beautiful, so coherent in all its parts, had been engendered and -conserved merely by an ignorant fanaticism, or that a people who had so -much of wisdom in their actions had none in their thoughts? Looking around -him at the Egypt of the Christian and Mohammedan eras, he asks, What has -become of that hygiene, attentive, scrupulous and enlightened, of that -marvellous police of sepulture, of that prodigious care to preserve the -soil from all admixture of putrescible matters? The ancient learning of -Egypt, the wisdom taught by hard experience in remote ages and perfected -in prosperous times, had gradually been overthrown, first by the Persian -and Greek conquests which weakened the national spirit, then by the Roman -conquest which broke it, then by the prevalence of the Christian -doctrines, and lastly by the Mohammedan domination, more hostile than all -the others to sanitary precaution. - -Pariset's remaining argument was that ancient Egypt, by its systematic -care in providing for a slow mouldering of human and animal bodies beyond -the reach of the inundation, had been saved from the plague; in the -historic period there had been epidemics, but these had been of typhus or -other sickness of prisons, slavery, and famines. According to Herodotus, -Egypt and Libya were the two healthiest countries under the sun. But when -St Paul's vehement argument as to the natural and the spiritual body began -to make way, when men began to ask the question, "How are the dead raised -up, and with what body do they come?" the ancient practice of Egypt was -judged to be out of harmony with Christian doctrine. Embalming was -denounced as sinful by St Anthony, the founder of Egyptian monachism, in -the third century; and by the time that the church of North Africa had -reached its point of highest influence under St Augustine, bishop of -Hippo, the ancient religious rites of Egypt had everywhere given place to -Christian burial[300]. Bubo-plague had already been prevalent in at least -one disastrous epidemic in Lower Egypt at the time of the great massacres -of Christians in the episcopate of Cyprian; and in the year 542 it broke -out at Pelusium, one of the uncleannest spots in the Delta, spread thence -on the one hand along the North African coast, and on the other hand by -the corn ships to Byzantium, and grew into the disastrous world-wide -pestilence which has ever since been associated with the reign of -Justinian. - -After the Mohammedan conquest things went from bad to worse; and from the -tenth century until the year 1846, plague had been domesticated on the -soil of Egypt. - -The theory of Pariset was communicated by him to the Acadmie de Mdecine -on 12 July, 1831, and finally published in a carefully designed and highly -finished essay in 1837. It was received with much disfavour; according to -his colleague Daremberg, the learned librarian of the Academy, nothing but -its brilliant style could have saved it from being forgotten in a week. It -was vigorously opposed by Clot Bey, on behalf of Egyptian officialdom, -because it fixed upon Egypt the stigma of holding in the soil an inherent -and abiding cause of the plague[301]. Besides the general objection that -it was the theorizing of a _philosophe_, exception was taken to particular -parts of the argument. Thus Labat demonstrated by arithmetic that the -mummied carcases of all the generations of men and animals in Egypt for -three thousand years would have required a space as large as the whole of -Egypt, which should thus have become one vast ossuary. And as to the fact, -he added, embalming was the privilege of the rich, and of some sacred -species of animals. Clot Bey asserted that the whole class of slaves were -not thought worthy of embalming. He found also, in the language used by -Herodotus, evidence that the people of Egypt felt themselves to be under -"the continual menace" of some great epidemic scourge and took precautions -accordingly--the very ground on which Pariset based his theory. The -objection which weighed most with Daremberg was the fact that, just about -the time when Pariset had asserted the immunity of Egypt from plague in -her prosperous days, evidence had been found, in the newly-discovered -collections of Oribasius, that a bubonic disease was recorded for Egypt -and Libya by a Greek physician two centuries before the Christian era, and -by another Greek medical writer about the beginning of our era. - -It does not appear to have occurred to the opponents of Pariset's theory -that the two chief objections, first that embalming was far from general, -and second that cases of plague did occur in ancient Egypt, answered each -other. But, as matter of fact, it can be shown that there were cheaper -forms of embalming practised for the great mass of the people. Again, it -was found by De Maillet that bodies not embalmed at all, but laid in -coarse cloths upon beds of charcoal under six or eight feet of sand at an -elevation on the edge of the great plain of mummies at Memphis, and beyond -the reach of the water, were as perfectly preserved from putrid decay as -if they had been embalmed, the dry air and the nitrous soil contributing -to their slow and inoffensive decomposition[302]. These facts tended to -support the notion that it was not ceremony which really determined the -national practice, but utility, into which neither art nor religion -necessarily entered. The existence also of bubonic disease in the period -of the Ptolemies proved that the risk assumed in Pariset's theory was a -real risk, the precautions having been not always sufficient to meet it. - -The plague which overran the known world in Justinian's reign (542) was, -according to this theory, the effect on a grand scale of an equally grand -cause, namely, the final overthrow of a most ancient religion and national -life, which had not been built up for nothing and had a true principle -concealed beneath its superstitions. The parallelism between China and -ancient Egypt has been a favourite subject. In China whatever of religion -there is runs upon the Egyptian lines--reverence for the dead or worship -of ancestors. The Chinese do not indeed embalm their dead, but they -practise an equivalent art of preservation which may be read in almost -identical terms in the book of Marco Polo and in modern works on the -social life of China[303]. To prevent the products of cadaveric decay from -passing into the soil may be said to be the object of their practices. The -pains taken to secure dry burial-places are especially obvious in those -parts of the country, such as the "reed lands" of the Yang-tsi, which are -subject to inundations, annual or occasional[304]. Much of the national -art of Feng-shui is concerned, under the mask of divination, with these -common-sense aims. - -Both Egypt and China are liable to have their river-basins flooded at one -time and parched to dust at another. These extreme fluctuations of the -ground water are now known to scientific research to be the cause of -peculiar and unwholesome products of putrefaction in the soil: given a -soil charged with animal matters, the risk to those living upon it is in -proportion to the range of fluctuation of the ground water. If it happen -as an annual thing that the pores of the ground are now full of water, now -full of air, or if these extreme alternations be a common liability, then -a soil with the products of animal decomposition dispersed through it will -be always unwholesome, and unwholesome on a national scale. It is often -held that even vegetables rotting on the ground are pestiferous; Ambroise -Par believed that the rotting carcase of a stranded whale caused an -outbreak of bubo-plague at Genoa; but human decomposition is something -special--at least for the living of the same species[305]. Most special of -all is it when its gross and crude matters pass rapidly into the ground, -getting carried hither and thither by the movements of the ground water, -and giving off those half-products of oxidation which the extreme -alternations from air to water, or from water to air, in the pores of the -ground are known to favour. There may be nothing offensive to the sense, -but the emanations from such a soil will in all probability be poisonous -or pestilent. In particular circumstances of locality the permeation or -leavening of the soil with the products of organic decomposition produces -Asiatic cholera; in still more special circumstances the result is yellow -fever; in circumstances familiar enough to ourselves the result is typhoid -fever, and probably also summer diarrhoea or British cholera. These are -all soil poisons. Bubo-plague also is a soil poison; and it is claimed as -specially related to the products of _cadaveric_ decomposition, diffused -at large in such a soil as soil-poisons are ordinarily engendered in. - -It is possible to subject that theory of the plague to the test of facts -still further. Thus bubo-plague dogged the steps of Mohammedan conquest -from the first century after the Hegira, now in Syria when Damascus was -the capital, now in Irak when Bagdad was the centre of Mohammedan rule, -now in Egypt when the seat of empire shifted to Grand Cairo; and, over a -great part of the period, simultaneously in all the regions of Islam. That -long series of plague-epidemics has been recorded in Arabic annals, and -has lately been published in an abstract accessible to all, with a summary -of conclusions[306]. - -What are the conclusions of the learned commentator on the Arabic annals, -as to the general causes of the thousand years of Mohammedan -plague?--"War, with the wasting of whole nations, in disregard of all -established rights, with plundering of towns and concentration of great -masses of men ill provided for and unregulated, who developed the seeds of -communicable and malignant diseases. Add to these things the negligent or -wholly neglected burial of those who had fallen in battle, the straits and -privations of the wounded, and the effects of a hot climate, especially in -flooded and swampy tracts of country.... The kind of burial, in very -shallow and often badly covered graves, which used to be practised in most -Eastern towns, and in part is still practised, may also have had -disastrous consequences not unfrequently." - - -The Theory tested by Modern Instances. - -With that general statement for the long succession of plague-epidemics in -Islam during nine centuries from the Hegira, beginning with a Syrian -epidemic in A.D. 628 and ending with a close succession of twelve -epidemics in Egypt from 1410 to 1492, we may pass to the more detailed -accounts of the conditions under which bubo-plague has been found in -various localities, often circumscribed spots far apart and out of the -way, during recent years. These spots are so varied, have so little -apparently in common, and are so capriciously chosen in the midst of -their several regions of the globe, that they do not readily fall into -any order or classification. What are we to make of a few spots of plague -among nomade Arabs of the Cyrenaic plateau; of plague in some stricken -villages high up in the highlands of Kurdistan, or in low-lying towns such -as Resht, near the shore of the Caspian, or amidst the black ooze of -amphibious habitations in the lower valley of Tigris and Euphrates; of -true bubonic disease in some few Bedouin villages or small towns on the -summits of the basaltic plateaus that rise like gigantic warts from the -Arabian desert; of bubo-plague in Yun-nan, at or near the capital Talifoo, -where the Mohammedan and Chinese influences have been struggling for -mastery, as well as among the cabins in the rocky valleys of the Salwen; -of some forty or fifty Himalayan hamlets picked out as plague-spots among -the six thousand villages of Kumaon; and of the now extinct but -comparatively recent centres of the same disease in the walled towns and -walled villages of Kutch, Kattiwar, and Marwar? And lastly what are we to -make of those cases of typhus fever with buboes which have been observed -in villages of the Yusufzai valley, near Peshawur, in 1852; in the Chinese -town of Pakhoi, on the gulf of Tonking, in 1886; occasionally among the -fever-cases in Burdwan since the health of that province underwent so -disastrous a change about the year 1870; and, on credible report, among -the troops in the Russo-Turkish war of 1879? It is surely unnecessary, at -least, to refute the sterile dogmatism that these are all the effects of -one pre-existing virus, carried, we know not how, from point to point of -the globe in an unbroken succession. It is a far cry even on a small-scale -map from Kumaon to Kutch, from Yun-nan to the Gulf of Tonking, from Resht -to the Armenian highlands, from the centre of Arabia to Tripoli, and from -Mesopotamia to North Yemen. And what is the use of assuming that there has -always been bubo-plague in the "cradle of the human race," and concluding -that the Black Death was one of its excursions westwards, so long as the -plagues of Islam were going on from decade to decade, all through the -Middle Ages, at no great distance from Byzantium and from Western Europe? -Are not Damascus, Bagdad and Grand Cairo of more account as plague-foci -than a few villages in the Himalaya or in Kattiwar, even granting that the -plague may have been in the latter at an earlier date than we know? It is -not communication that connects the several seats of plague, scattered -widely in time and place; but it is community of conditions, or of the -causes and associated circumstances which breed the plague in each -separately. Let us take them in some sort of order. - -Among the most remarkable habitats of modern bubo-plague are the villages -on the basalt plateaus of the Arabian desert. We have information of these -plague-spots from Doughty[307], who did not indeed visit Assir, the most -notorious of them, but several others more to the north and east. He -describes the ruined villages of Mogug, Gofar, Hyil and others, where the -people had died of plague some years before. A year of dearth preceded the -plague in some, if not in all of them. The author is struck by the -carelessness of burial, or the difficulties of it in the baked soil, -although he does not directly connect that with the epidemics. Thus, in -passing the graveyard of Hyil, one of the plague-towns, he remarks: -"Aheyd was a man of much might and glory in his day; he lies a yard under -the squalid gravel in his shirt." Of Kheybar, with vague traditions of -plague, he says: "We passed through a burial-ground of black volcanic -mould and salt-warp; the squalid grave heaps are marked with headstones of -wild basalt. That funeral earth is chapped and ghastly, bulging over her -enwombed corses, like a garden soil in spring-time which is pushed by the -new spring plants. All is horror at Kheybar!" He is led to the following -general remarks: "The care of sepulture was beyond measure in the -religions of antiquity, which were without humility. Under the new -religion [of Arabia] the deceased is wound in a shirt-cloth of calico, and -his corse is laid in the shallow pit of droughty earth." Again, of Bedouin -burials in general: "The deceased is buried the same day or on the morrow. -They scrape out painfully with a stick and their hands in the hard-burned -soil a shallow grave. I have seen their graves in the desert ruined by -foul hyenas, and their winding-sheets lay half above ground." - -Of the best known of these Arabian plague-spots the plateau of Assir, to -the south-east of Mecca, we have the following information relating to the -years 1874-79[308]; the chief plague-locality is Namasse, the principal -town of Beny Sheir, with five other villages. - - The site is on a mountain ridge too high for camels, the climate is - cold and moist, the soil fruitful, springs abundant, and no standing - water. The houses are built of stone, and stand close together. The - ground-floor of each house is used as the stable; and as the winter in - these mountains is very severe, so that water freezes, the inhabitants - live with their cattle in a horrible state of filth. According to - information from the district superintendent, there had been plague in - a few villages every two or three years for the previous thirty-five - or forty years. It has seldom extended further than five or six - leagues. The region is a mountain canton, with no trade; it is cut off - from the rest of the world. The disease is mostly attended with buboes - in the groins, armpits, and neck, but not always; sometimes petechial - spots were spoken of; in the sheikh Fak's own household the disease - began with rigors, and developed buboes, petechi, headache and - burning thirst. Dr Nury counted up in six villages, with a population - of eight hundred, cases of plague to the number of 184 (68 men, 45 - women, 50 boys and 21 girls), with 155 deaths and 29 recoveries. - -Let us now place beside this the accounts of the plague in the mountains -village of Kumaon[309]. - -Of the plague-villages of Danpore and Munsharee, near the snow, we read: - - "Their houses are generally built of stone, one storey high. On the - ground-floor herd the cattle; in this compartment the dung is allowed - to accumulate till such time as there is no room left for the cattle - to stand erect; it is then removed and carefully packed close around - all sides, so that the house literally stands in the centre of a - hot-bed.... In many instances we have seen it accumulated above the - level of the floor of the upper story in which the family lives." In - that compartment, four feet high, with no window and a door of some - three feet by eighteen inches, ten or fifteen people live, lying - huddled together with the door shut. Their food is as poor as their - lodging. When plague breaks out, the family ties are rudely loosened: - those who can, flee to the jungle, leaving the stricken to their fate. - - - - The following is by Renny: "Fourteen died at a place in the forest - half a mile or more from Duddoli, respecting which I had the best - description yet given to me of the career of the sickness. Here were - only two houses, or long low huts, occupied by two separate families, - the heads being two brothers, sixteen souls in all. These two huts had - to contain also thirty head of cattle, large and small, at the worst - season of the year. In these two huts the Mahamurree [bubo-plague] - commenced about ten or eleven months ago, corresponding to the time it - appeared in Duddoli. At this place the sixteen residents kept together - till fourteen died, and one adult only, a man of about thirty years of - age, with his female child of six years old, survived. There was no - particular disorder among the cattle, but the outbreak of the plague - was preceded and accompanied by a great mortality among the rats in - their houses." - -Let us now take the accounts, twenty-five years later, of the plague in -the same district in 1876-77[310]. - - Confirming the earlier statements as to the extraordinary filth of the - houses--the cattle under the same roof and the baskets of damp and - unripe grain--he directs attention specially to the disposal of the - dead. The custom of the country is to burn the body beside the most - convenient mountain stream terminating in the Ganges. But from that - good practice the people have deviated in regard to bodies dead of any - pestilence (smallpox, cholera, plague), which are buried. Of all - countries the Himalaya is least suited to the burial of the dead. For, - by reason of the rocky subsoil, it is seldom possible to dig a grave - more than two feet deep; and, as a rule, the pestilent dead are laid - in shallow trenches in the surface soil of the field nearest to the - place of death, or of the terrace facing the house, or even of the - floor of the house itself. This bad practice is begotten of fear to - handle the body, and has been long established. Such mismanagement of - the dead is sufficient to account for the continuous existence of the - active principle of plague-disease, sometimes dormant for want of - opportunity, but ever ready to affect persons suitably prepared by any - cause producing a low or bad state of health. In the houses of - families about to suffer from an outbreak of plague, rats are - sometimes found dead on the floor. Planck had seen them himself; all - that he had seen appeared to have died suddenly, as by suffocation, - their bodies being in good condition, a piece of rag sometimes - clenched in the teeth. He mentions nine villages, all of them endemic - seats of plague, in which the premonitory death of rats in the - infected houses was testified. The affected villages were not one in a - hundred of all the villages of Kumaon, and were widely scattered - throughout the northern half of the province. Even in each of those - few villages, the plague is confined to one house, or one terrace, or - one portion of the village. - -Let us turn next to the small spots of bubo-plague in the remote province -of Yun-nan. Our information comes from members of the British and French -Consular services[311]. - - The plague occurs in towns and villages and is the cause of much - mortality. After ravaging villages scattered about the plains, it - frequently ascends the mountains, and takes off many of the aborigines - inhabiting the high lands. What, in M. Rocher's opinion, aggravates - the evil is the practice of not burying the bodies of those who die of - this disease. Instead of being buried, the body is placed on a bier - and exposed to the sun. As a consequence of this practice the - traveller passing the outskirts of a village where the plague is - raging is nearly choked with the nauseous smell emanating from the - exposed and rotting corpses. Burial is the usual mode of disposal, - although many of the villages are on rocky mountain sides, as in - Kumaon. The rats are first affected; as soon as they sicken, they - leave their holes in troops, and after staggering about and falling - over each other, drop down dead. Mr Baber had the same information - from a French missionary in the upper valley of the Salwen, a long, - low valley about two miles broad, walled in by immense precipices, so - hot in summer that the inhabitants go up the hill sides to live. The - approach of bubo-plague (the buboes may be as large as a hen's or - goose's egg) may often be known from the extraordinary behaviour of - the rats, who leave their holes and crevices and issue on to the - floors without a trace of their accustomed timidity, springing - continually upwards from their hind legs as if they were trying to - jump out of something. The rats fall dead, and then comes the turn of - the poultry, pigs, goats, etc. The good father had a theory of his own - that the plague is really a pestilential emanation slowly rising in an - equable stratum from the ground, the smallest creatures being first - engulfed. The larger plague-centre at or near the capital, Talifoo, - appears to be related to Mohammedan warfare, and possibly to the - neglect to bury the dead, which is an admitted fact, although not - connected by the narrator with the prevalence of plague. - -The other Chinese plague-spot is hundreds of miles away, on the shores of -the Gulf of Tonking. The best known centre of plague is the port of -Pakhoi, the native quarter of which is described as peculiarly filthy. The -houses are little cleaner than the streets, the floors being saturated -with excrement, and the drains being either close to the surface or open -altogether. An outbreak of plague there in 1882 is minutely described by -Dr Lowry[312]. - - It occurred in the hot weather of June (85 Fahr. day, 76 Fahr. - night); for fear of thieves the houses are carefully shut up even on - the hottest night. The epidemic caused about 400 to 500 deaths in a - population of 25,000. The disease does not spread. In nearly every - house where the disease broke out, the rats had been coming out of - their holes and dying on the floors: Dr Lowry dissected several of - them, and found the lungs congested. In the human subject, except for - the buboes, the disease resembled typhus: "anyone going to the bedside - of a patient would certainly at first think it was that disease he had - to deal with." The same disease occurred at Lien-chow, a city twelve - miles off. Another English physician in the service of the China - Maritime Customs heard of a malady with the symptoms of plague in - certain districts of Southern Kiangsi in the autumn of 1886; but no - particulars were to be had. Typhus was prevalent, and very fatal, - every year in the towns, villages and hamlets of Northern Kiangsi. - - One curious piece of evidence as to the death of rats, not associated - with plague in men, comes from a more northern province of China. In - the autumn of 1881, on the opposite side of the Yang-tsi from Nanking - and in the western suburbs of the ancient capital, the rats emerged - from holes in dwellings, jumped up, turned round, and fell dead. - Baskets and boxes filled with their bodies were cast into the canal. - "Here," says Dr Macgowan, "was evidently a subsoil poison which - affected the animals precisely in the same way as the malaria of the - Yun-nan pest. Happily the subterranean miasm at Nanking did not affect - animals that live above ground[313]." - -The evidence from Kutch, Kattiwar, and Marwar relates to the years -1815-20, and 1838. In circumstances peculiar in some respects, namely, of -walled towns and stockaded villages, but the same as those already given -in the matter of filth from cattle crowded into the human dwellings, we -find bubo-plague breaking out so long as the unwholesome state of things -lasted under Mahratta rule and until British rule had been fairly at work. -The causes of the bubo-plague, says Whyte, were the same as of -typhus--walled and crowded towns, cattle housed with human beings, slow -wasting diseases among the cattle, which were not killed for food but -kept for milk and ghee. He questions whether, in shutting out their -enemies, they had not shut in one far more powerful[314]. Here also we -have various independent witnesses[315] testifying to the premonitory -death of the rats; they lay dead in all places and directions--in the -streets, houses, and hiding-places of the walls. This happened in every -town that was affected in Marwar, so that the inhabitants of any house -instantly quitted it on seeing a dead rat. - - -Relation of Typhus to Bubo-plague. - -The smallest and the most easily surveyed of all the recent foci of -bubo-plague, is that among the Bedouin of the Cyrenaic plateau in North -Africa (port of Benghazi), a desert region corresponding to one of the -most famous corn-lands of antiquity. - - There was no difference of opinion that the small outbreak of plague - in 1874 began simultaneously in the tents of Orphas and the tents of - Ferig-el-Hanan, containing together about a hundred souls[316]. These - Arabs keep cows, sheep and goats; some of them also cultivate small - patches of corn. They are subject to periodic famines, and there had - been much want among them in 1869, 1870, 1871, 1872 and 1873, attended - by epidemics of typhus, cholera and smallpox. In the winter they found - employment among the traders of Merdj, and at the end of March, 1873, - had quitted that village to place their animals in the neighbouring - hill-pastures. The ground had been saturated, after long drought, by - the rains of the winter. Their tents are pitched in hollows which may - be filled by water in a few minutes. The encampments, like those of - the Bedouin in Arabia, are excessively filthy and are often the scene - of typhus fever. In April, 1874, the plague began, the first case - being in a child; the buboes were in the groin, armpit or neck. The - other symptoms were bilious vomiting, black vomit, haematemesis, - petechiae, anthraceous boils, pains in the head, collapse, and - delirium. A few cases were mild, but the majority grave and fatal; in - several cases there was a relapse with new buboes. The disease was - brought from the tents to the village of Merdj, in which 270 were - attacked in a population of 310, with 100 deaths. The total known - attacks from 5 April to 24 July were 533 in a population of 734, with - 208 deaths and 325 recoveries, 201 resisting the infection. The - sanitary state of the village was as bad as that of the tents: the - houses, entered by a low door, had windows not to the sun, but to the - courtyard, which is a stable choked with filth; the floors of the - houses are covered with filth. The graveyard is in the centre of the - village, beside a pool of standing water: the graves are shallow, and - the corpses are sometimes unearthed by jackals. Both in the village - and in the encampments a fall of rain was followed by a new series of - attacks. The advice of the sanitary commisioner was to make graves at - least six feet deep, and to cover them with lime. - -These events in 1874 were an exact repetition of those of 1858. In both -years heavy rains followed long drought, giving promise of an abundant -harvest after a period of famine. The dry years, in both instances, were -attended with sickness, typhus and other; the first wet season turned the -sickness to plague, that is to say, it added the complication of buboes -and haemorrhagic symptoms to the characters of typhus. The meaning of that -seems to be that the saturation of the ground generated a soil-poison -where there had previously been the milder aerial poison of typhus. This -view of plague, as a typhus of the soil, or a disease made so much more -malignant than typhus just because of underground fermentation of the -putrescible animal matters, is borne out by the facts already given for -China and for India. The latter country furnishes other illustrations of -typhus fever becoming complicated with buboes, and so becoming something -like plague. Perhaps the best instance is the fever observed in the -Yusufzai valley, near Peshawur, in 1852[317]. - - It arose mostly in the filthy Mohammedan houses, shared by cattle and - human beings; but it invaded some of the cleaner Hindoo houses also. - The disease began in low, marshy situations, which were covered with - water after rain and heavy night dews. It was of the type of typhus, - or relapsing fever, with yellowness of the skin, bleeding from the - gums, and from the bowels, and often from the nose. One of the - observers says: "The only other concomitant affection worthy of note - is swelling of the lymphatic glands over various parts of the body; - this, however, is only met with in a very few instances." The other - authority says: "Inflammation and suppuration of the glands in the - groin, axilla, and neck occurred in some that survived the first or - second relapse." To this outbreak, which is removed only in degree - from the Benghazi plague, the Pakhoi plague, and the Pali plague - (Gujerat), may be added some others, about which the information is - more general. Thus, the fevers which have become notorious in Burdwan - since the health of that province changed so disastrously owing to the - damming of the ground-water, are said to have been attended now and - then with buboes. The typhus fever at Saugor in 1859 was occasionally - complicated with suppuration of the lymphatic glands: "In the Doab, as - in the subsequent gaol attack, the glands in the groin were very - rarely affected; those in the neck were more frequently affected, but - this was not a prominent feature in the disease[318]." Again, General - Loris Melikoff told the correspondent of the _Golos_ that twenty men - died in a day in the Russo-Turkish war in the winter of 1878, with - glandular swellings; everywhere there was Schmutz, Schmutz! And - lastly, in the epidemic of 1878 at Vetlianka, on the Volga, which is - reckoned among the historic occurrences of bubo-plague in Europe, the - first ten cases in November, 1878, had suppurating glands in the - axilla, did not take to bed, and recovered; there had been ordinary - typhus in the filthy fisher cottages in 1877, and there was typhus - concurrent with the disease which at length became, and was at length - recognized as, true bubo-plague in the winter of 1878-79[319]. - -One thing which distinguishes these recent outbreaks of plague from the -great plague of Justinian's reign, in part from the series of Mohammedan -plagues, and from the Black Death, is that they have for the most part -shown no independent vitality and no diffusive power. As in typhus fever -itself (except on great occasions), they have been almost confined to -those who lived in the filthy houses, and to those who came within the -influence of the pestilential emanations. The great plagues of the 6th and -14th centuries had, on the other hand, a diffusive power which carried -them over the whole known world. The buboes of Egypt and of China became -familiar as far as Norway and Greenland. - -But, apart from diffusiveness, the conditions of recent local plagues are -not unlike those of the great historical epidemics. The very same -observation of the rats leaving their holes, which is so abundantly -confirmed from the recent plague-spots of Southern China, of Yun-nan, of -Kumaon, and of Gujerat, was familiar in the plague-books of London and of -Edinburgh in the Elizabethan period. Of the great outbreak in 1603, Thomas -Lodge writes: "And when as rats, moules, and other creatures (accustomed -to live underground) forsake their holes and habitations, it is a token of -corruption in the same, by reason that such sorts of creatures forsake -their wonted places of aboade[320]." That is only one of many proofs that -the virus of plague has its habitat in the soil, although it may be -carried long distances clinging to other things. In its most diffusive -potency it is a soil-poison generated, we may now say with some -confidence, out of the products of cadaveric decay[321]; in its less -diffusive but hardly less malignant potency, it is a soil-poison generated -out of the filth of cattle housed with human beings, or out of domestic -filth generally, and in nearly all the known instances of such generation, -associated with, but perhaps not absolutely dependent upon, carelessness -in the disposal of the dead after famine or fever; in the least malignant -form, when plague is only a small part of an epidemic of typhus and with -the buboes inclined to suppurate, it appears to be still a soil-poison, -and to differ from typhus itself, just because the pestilential product of -decomposing filth has been engendered in the pores of the ground, rather -than in the atmosphere of living-rooms. - - * * * * * - -The Black Death, which here concerns us immediately, is one of the two -great instances of a plague-virus with vast diffusive power, enormous -momentum, and centuries of endurance. So great effects may be said to -postulate adequate causes; and one must assume that the virus had been -bred from cadaveric decomposition in circumstances of peculiar -aggravation and on some vast or national scale. The sequence of events -carries us to China; and the annals of China do furnish evidence that the -assumed cause was there on a vast scale through a long period of national -disaster, while the national customs of China for the disposal of the -dead, like those of ancient Egypt, point to the existence of a real risk -from allowing the soil to be permeated at large by the crude or hasty -products of cadaveric decomposition. - -It is our duty to construct the best hypothesis we can, sparing no labour. -No one really dispenses with theory, whatever his protestations to the -contrary; those who are the loudest professors of suspended judgment are -the most likely to fall victims to some empty verbalism which hangs loose -at both ends, some ill-considered piece of argument which ignores the -historical antecedents and stops short of the concrete conclusions. It has -been so in the case of infective diseases, and of bubo-plague in -particular. The virus of the plague, we are told, is specific; it has -existed from an unknown antiquity, and has come down in an unbroken -succession; we can no more discover how it arose, than we can tell how the -first man arose, or the first mollusc, or the first moss or lichen; its -species is, indeed, of the nature of the lowest vegetable organisms. - -The objection to that hypothesis of plague is that it involves a total -disregard of facts. It is a mere formula, which saves all trouble, -dispenses with all historical inquiry, and appears to be adapted equally -to popular apprehension and to academic ease. The bubo-plagues of history -have not, in fact, been all of the same descent; notably the Black Death -was a wave of pestilence which Mohammedan countries, accustomed as they -had been to native bubo-plagues for centuries before, recognized as an -invasion from a foreign source, as an interruption of the sequence of -their own plagues. Again, the attempt to link in one series the various -scattered and circumscribed spots of plague now or lately existing must -fail disastrously the moment it is seriously attempted. The hypothesis of -one single source of the plague, of a species of disease arising we know -not how, beginning we know not when or where, but at all events reproduced -by ordinary generation in an unbroken series of cases, _ab aevo, ab ovo_, -is the merest verbalism, wanting in reality or concreteness, and dictated -by the curious illusion that a species of disease, because it reproduces -itself after its kind, must resemble in other respects a species of living -things. - -The diffusive power of the virus of the Black Death, which has been -equalled only by that of the plague in Justinian's reign, may seem to have -depended upon the favouring conditions that it met with. But although -favouring conditions count for much, they are not all. The Black Death -raged as furiously as anywhere among the nomade Tartars who were its first -victims; the virus, as soon as it was let loose, put forth a degree of -virulence which must have been native to it, or brought with it from its -place of engendering. None the less the incidence of the Black Death in -Europe had depended in part upon the preparedness of the soil. It came to -Europe in the age of feudalism and of walled towns, with a cramped and -unwholesome manner of life, and inhabited spots of ground choked with the -waste matters of generations. But even amidst these generally fostering -conditions, there would have been more special things that determined its -election. It is a principle exemplified in all importations of disease -from remote sources, in smallpox among the aerial contagions and in -Asiatic cholera among the soil-poisons, that the conditions which favour -diffusion abroad are approximately the same amidst which the infection had -been originally engendered. A soil-poison of foreign origin makes straight -for the most likely spots in the line of its travels; it may not, and -often does not confine itself to these, but it gives them a preference. -Thus, if we conclude on the evidence that the bubo-plague is a soil-poison -having a special affinity to the products of cadaveric decomposition, we -shall understand why the Black Death, when it came to England, found so -congenial a soil in the monasteries, and in the homes of the clergy. -Within the monastery walls, under the floor of the chapel or cloisters, -were buried not only generations of monks, but often the bodies of -princes, of notables of the surrounding country, and of great -ecclesiastics. In every parish the house of the priest would have stood -close to the church and the churchyard. One has to figure the virus of the -Black Death not so much as carried by individuals from place to place in -their persons, or in their clothes and effects, but rather as a leaven -which had passed into the ground, spreading hither and thither therein as -if by polarizing the adjacent particles of the soil, and that not -instantaneously like a physical force, but so gradually as to occupy a -whole twelvemonth between Dorset and Yorkshire. Sooner or later it reached -to every corner of the land, manifesting its presence wherever there were -people resident. Such universality in the soil of England, we have reason -to think, it had. But it appears to have put forth its greatest power in -the walled town, in the monastery, and in the neighbourhood of the village -churchyard. - - - - -CHAPTER IV. - -ENGLAND AFTER THE BLACK DEATH, WITH THE EPIDEMICS TO THE TUDOR PERIOD. - - -The great mortality came to an end everywhere in England by Michaelmas, -1349. The pestilence had lasted some fourteen months, from its first -appearance on the Dorset coast at the beginning of August, 1348, until its -subsidence in the northern counties in the autumn of 1349. It came to an -end, as all devastating epidemics do, through having spent its force, -exhausted its pabulum, run through all the susceptible subjects. A -letter-writer of Charles I.'s reign has put into colloquial language the -corresponding reason for a pause in the ravages of the plague towards the -end of its stay in London: "And I think the only reason why the plague is -somewhat slackened is because the place is dead already, and no bodie left -in it worth the killing[322]." The exhausted state of the country, and of -all Europe, is not easy for us to realize. Petrarch, a witness of the -Black Death in Italy, foresaw the incredulity of after ages, or their -inability to image the state of things--the empty houses, the abandoned -towns, the squalid country, the fields crowded with the dead, the vast and -dreadful solitude over the whole world. If you inquire of historians, he -continues, they are silent; if you consult the physicians, they are at -their wits' end; if you question the philosophers, they shrug their -shoulders, wrinkle their brows, and lay the finger on the lip. Is it -possible that posterity can believe these things? For we who have seen -them can hardly believe them[323]. - -The blow fell upon every country of Europe within a period of two or three -years; and it must have paralysed all trade and industry, war and -politics, for the time being. Edward III.'s wars in France, which had -resulted in the victory of Crecy in 1346 and the conquest of Calais in -1347, had been suspended by a truce, which was renewed from time to time. -Thus, in the very midst of the pestilence, on the 2nd of May, 1349, the -envoys of the English and French kings, "in their tents between Calais and -Guines," agreed upon a form of treaty continuing the truce until -Pentecost, 1350[324]. In the last days of 1349, Edward III. in person, -with a small force, was able to repel an attack upon his new possession of -Calais[325]. It was in the year after the Black Death (1350) according to -both Stow and Selden, that Edward III. held a great feast at Windsor, to -which his heralds invited knights from abroad, to celebrate the -institution of the Order of the Garter, the statutes of the Order having -been drawn up the year before. What is styled "the necessary defence of -the realm," was a chief subject of concern throughout the year 1350. On -the 12th February an order was made to the sheriffs of counties for a -supply of so many arrows from each[326]. On the 20th March the mayors and -bailiffs of 110 towns are ordered to provide their respective quotas of -men-at-arms--London 100, Norwich 60, Bristol 20, and so on--and to send -them to Sandwich "for the necessary defence of our realm[327]." On the 1st -of May a commission was issued to engage mariners for certain ships, and -on the 20th May, an order for ships, pinnaces and barges. - -On the 22nd July and 10th August there are proclamations relating to the -piratical fleet of Spanish ships, intercepting the English traders to -Gascony, and threatening an invasion of England[328]; the Spaniards were -routed, their ships taken, and the Channel cleared, in a famous -engagement off Winchelsea, on 29th August, 1350, which the king directed -in person[329]. On 15th June, three days before the first of the -ordinances against the Labourers, the king issued two orders to counties, -to raise men "for our passage against the parts over sea"--one to the -Welsh lords, and the other to the sheriffs of English counties, the -demands being in all for 4170 bowmen from England, and for 1350 men from -Wales[330]. Whatever these edicts may have resulted in, it was not until -four years after that the king really resumed his wars with France. On the -8th September, 1355, the Black Prince sailed from Plymouth with a fleet of -some three hundred ships carrying an army of knights, men-at-arms, English -bowmen and Welshmen, to the Garonne, for his famous raid across the south -of France[331]. Later in the autumn the king collected at Portsmouth[332] -and Sandwich, and at Calais, a force of three thousand men-at-arms, two -thousand mounted bowmen, and an immense number of bowmen on foot, with -which he took the field on the 2nd November[333]. The same summer, a fleet -of forty great ships was fitted out at Rotherhithe, for a force of foot -under Henry, duke of Lancaster, to aid the king of Navarre; it sailed on -the 10th of July, but was unable to clear the Channel, and for various -reasons did not proceed[334]; next year, however, the duke of Lancaster -crossed from Southampton to Normandy with a force in forty-eight -ships[335]. - -Thus was the war with France resumed six years after the great mortality. -The means for equipping these expeditions had been provided by loans -raised on the security of the enormous subsidy which the Parliament of -1353-54 was induced to vote, in the form of an export duty of fifty -shillings on every sack of wool shipped to foreign countries during the -next six years. According to Avesbury's calculation, Edward had a revenue, -from that source, of a thousand marks a day; it was the common opinion, he -says, that more than 100,000 sacks of wool were exported in a year[336]. -But another and perhaps better authority gives the annual export of wool -in the middle of the fourteenth century at nearly 32,000 sacks[337]. - - -Direct effects of the Black Death. - -Meanwhile internal affairs were demanding the king's attention, although -they occupy less space in the extant State papers than the warlike -preparations. On the 23rd August, while the mortality was raging in the -north, a proclamation was issued to the sheriff of Northumberland against -the migration of people to Scotland, with arms, victuals, goods and -merchandise, the pestilence not being mentioned[338]. The first State -paper which relates to the recent great mortality is the king's -proclamation of 1st December, 1349, to the mayor and bailiffs of Sandwich, -and of forty-eight other English ports, including London[339]. The -proclamation begins: - - "Forasmuch as no mean part of the people of our realm of England is - dead in the present pestilence, and the treasure of the said realm is - mostly exhausted, and (as we have learned) numbers of this our kingdom - are daily passing, or proposing to pass, to parts over sea with money - which they were able to have kept within the realm, Now we, taking - heed that if passage after this manner be tolerated, the kingdom will - in a short time be stripped both of men and of treasure, and so - therefrom grave danger may easily arise to us and to the said realm, - unless a fitting remedy be speedily appointed--do command the mayor - and bailiffs of Sandwich (and of forty-eight other ports) to stop the - passage beyond sea of them that have no mandate, especially if they be - Englishmen, excepting merchants, notaries, or the king's envoys." - -The edict was probably directed more against the drain of treasure than -against the emigration of people; but this not uninteresting question -really belongs to other historians, who do not appear to have dealt with -it[340]. - -On the 18th of June, 1350, the first summer after the mortality, there was -issued the first proclamation, to the sheriffs of counties, on the demands -of the labourers and artificers for higher wages, entitled "De magna parte -populi in ultima pestilentia defuncta, et de servientium salariis proinde -moderandis[341]." The preamble or motive is one that cannot but seem -strange to modern ideas, although it must have been correct and -conventional according to feudal notions: "Forasmuch as some, having -regard to the necessities of lords and to the scarcity of servants, are -unwilling to serve unless they receive excessive wages, while others -prefer to beg in idleness, rather than to seek their living by labour--be -it therefore enacted that any man or woman, bond or free, under the age of -sixty, and not living by a trade or handicraft, nor possessing private -means, nor having land to cultivate, shall be obliged, when required, to -serve any master who is willing to hire him or her at such wages as were -usually paid in the locality in the year 1346, or on the average of five -or six years preceding; provided that the lords of villeins or tenants -shall have the preference of their labour, so that they retain no more -than shall be necessary for them." It was strictly forbidden either to -offer or to demand wages above the old rate. Another clause forbids the -giving of alms to beggars. Handicraftsmen of various kinds are also -ordered to be paid at the old rate. Lastly, victuallers and other traders -are directed to sell their wares at reasonable prices[342]. The same -ordinance, with some added paragraphs, was reissued on the 18th November, -1350, to the county of Suffolk and to the district of Lindsey -(Lincolnshire), the latter being one of the chief sheep-grazing parts of -England; in those two localities, it is stated in so many words, the -labourers had set at nought the ordinance of 18th June[343]. When -Parliament met--for the first time since the mortality--on the 9th of -February, 1351, it was acknowledged that the commissions to sheriffs -issued by the king and his council had been ineffective, and that wages -had been at twice or thrice the old rate[344]. The Parliament, having -legislated for a number of technical matters in connexion with the -enormous number of wills and successions, proceeded next to the labour -question, and passed the famous Statute of Labourers, by which the -generalities of the ordinance of 18th June, 1350, are replaced by an -elaborate schedule of wages for harvest-time and other times[345]. One -clause of the Act is specially directed against the migration of labourers -to other counties. It was the ancient manorial system that was threatened -most of all by the depopulation. The surviving labourers sought work where -they could command the best wages, and at the same time could escape from -the few degrading bonds of servitude which still clung to the _nativi_ or -serfs of a manor. But the Manor Court was still the unit of government, -and the Act would have been inoperative except on that basis. That -fundamental intention of the statute of the 9th February, 1351, comes out, -not only in the explicit clause against migrations, but also by contrast, -in the special permission given to the labourers of the counties of -Stafford, Derby and Lancaster, to the people of Craven, and to the -dwellers in the Marches of Wales and Scotland, to go about in search of -work in harvest "as they were wont to do before this time[346]." - -The immediate effect of the depopulation had been to mobilise, as it were, -the labouring class. Many of them must have taken the road at once; for, -in the first ordinance of 18th June, 1350, before the harvest of that year -had begun, it is stated that certain of the labourers preferred to live by -begging instead of by labour, and it is therefore forbidden to give alms -to beggars. According to Knighton, the effect of the ordinance itself was -to swell the ranks of the wandering poor; when some were arrested, -imprisoned, or fined in terms of the commission to the sheriffs, others -fled to the woods and wastes (_ad silvas et boscos_)[347]. These escapes -continued for years after; the rolls of the Manor Court of Winslow have -entries of many such cases long after the pestilence[348]. Many of these -fugitive villeins formed the class of "wasters," often referred to in the -_Vision of Piers the Ploughman_: "waster would not work, but wander -about," or he would work only in harvest, squander his earnings, and for -the rest of the year feel the pinch of hunger "until both his eyen -watered." But it is clear that others went to distant manors, and settled -down again to steady employment, freed from their bonds as _nativi_; and -it cannot be doubted that some went to the towns[349]. - -In order to realize the causes and circumstances of the labour difficulty -after the enormous thinning of the population, it may be well to recall -the composition of the village communities. In each manor the arable land -was in two portions--on the one hand the immense open fields (two or -perhaps three) in which the villagers had each so many half-acre strips, -and on the other hand the lord's demesne, or home-farm. Part of the latter -would often be let to free tenants, or even to villeins, who would count -for the occasion as free tenants. For the cultivation of his demesne the -lord was dependent on his tenants in villenage, who owed him, in form, so -many days' work in the year, but in reality were often able to commute -their personal services for a money payment and are said to have done so -very generally[350]. Thus the lord of the manor was no longer able to call -upon his serfs to plough or to sow or to reap; he had to hire them for his -occasions. The free tenants would also be dependent to some extent upon -hired labour; and as some even of the villeins cultivated up to forty -acres or more, in the open fields of the manor, these would also have to -hire unless their families were old enough to help. All that labour for -hire would naturally be supplied by the poorer villagers, the cottars and -bordars, who would seldom cultivate more than a few half-acres, and in -some cases perhaps none[351]. The lower order of tenants in villenage -formed accordingly the class of labourers; and it was their demands which -gave occasion for the ordinances of 1350 and the statute of 1351. In each -manor the lord would have been affected more than all the rest by the -scarcity of labour, in respect of the extensive demesne or home-farm -managed by his bailiff. It is conjectured that he tried, in some cases, to -go back to his rights of customary service from his villeins, which had -gradually become commutable for rents paid in money, and that the attempts -to do so led to insubordination[352]. He had to pay wages, notwithstanding -all his rights of lordship. The wages paid in the harvest of 1349 were, -says Rogers, those of panic. In the form of petition which brought the -labour-question before Parliament in February 1351, it is stated that the -wages demanded were at double or treble the old rate; of the year -preceding (1350) it is recorded that the wages paid to labourers for -gathering the harvest on the manor of Ham, belonging to the lord Berkeley, -amounted to 1144 days' work, on the old scale of commutation[353]. - -The labourers, although the lowest order on the manors, were accordingly -masters of the situation. Personal service to the lord, measurable merely -by days, and having no reference to fluctuations in the rate of wages, had -become obsolete; nor do the ordinance of 1350 and the statute of 1351 give -any hint of trying to revive it. If the men refused to be hired at the old -rate, they were to be arrested and imprisoned. - -There were, of course, many things besides the statute, tending to keep -the majority of peasants on the manors where they had been born; so that -the formal abolition of villenage remained to be carried by rebellion in -1381, while many traces of it in practice remained for long after. Those -who stayed on their old manors, or removed to another county or hundred to -become tenants under new lords, were able to get permanently better wages; -the price of labour remained about forty per cent. higher than it had been -before the mortality; so that the statute was on the whole ineffective. -But another large proportion of the labouring class appears to have been -driven to a wandering life. It is not easy to explain on economical -principles why the class of "wasters," of whom we hear so much, should -have been called into existence. Hands were scarce, and wages were high; -the conditions look on the surface to be entirely adverse to the creation -of a class of sturdy beggars and idle tramps. But the economic conditions -were really complex; and when all has been said on the head of economics, -there will remain something to be explained on the side of ethics. - -Not only the labourers but also the employers of labour were cut off in -the mortality. A great part of the capital of the country passed suddenly -into new hands. Before the Parliament of 1351 legislated upon wages, it -was occupied with a number of technical difficulties about wills. Of the -proving of wills and the granting of letters of administration on a great -scale we have had an instance from an archdeaconry in Lancashire. In -Colchester, a town with some four hundred burgesses, one hundred and -eleven wills were proved[354]. In the Husting Court of London, three -hundred and sixty wills were enrolled and proved from 13th January, 1349, -to 13th January, 1350. An immense number of persons came into money who -could not all have had the inclination, even if they had the skill and -aptitude, for employing it as capital. If there were wasters among the -labourers, there were wasters also among the moneyed class. The mortality -produced, indeed, that demoralisation of the whole national life which has -been usually observed to follow in the like circumstances. "Almost all -great epochs of moral degradation are connected with great epidemics," -says Niebuhr, generalizing the evidence which Thucydides gives specially -for the plague of Athens[355]. The fourteenth century was by no means a -period of high morality before the Black Death; but it was undoubtedly -worse after it. Langland's poem of the vision of Piers the Ploughman is -one long diatribe against the vices of the age, and some of the worst of -them he expressly dates "sith the pestilence time." It will be convenient -to take these ethical illustrations, before we proceed with the effects of -the mortality upon material prosperity and population, and with the -domestication of plague on the soil. - -So far from the labouring class being the chief sinners, it is in the -humbler ranks that the root of goodness remains. Langland's hero, the -Ploughman, is obviously chosen to represent "that ingenuous simplicity -and native candour and integrity," which, as Burke says, "formerly -characterized the English nation," and, one may add, have been at all -times its saving grace. It was in that class that the reforming movement, -led by Wyclif twenty years after, had its strength. Lollardy and the -Peasants' Rebellion were closely allied. The grievance of the latter was -that the gulf between the gentleman and the workman had become wider than -in nature it should be. An ultimate and very indirect effect of the great -mortality was to strengthen the middle class by recruits from beneath; it -created the circumstances which produced the English yeoman of the -fifteenth century. But we are here engaged with the immediate effect; and -that was to broaden the contrast between the rich and the poor. - -Luxury had already touched so high a point as to call for a statute -against extravagant living, the curious sumptuary law of 1336 which -prohibited many courses at table. Nothing could be more significant of its -later developments in London than the sarcastic description, which fills -an unusual space in one of the chroniclers, of the fantastic excesses of -dress and ornament among the male sex about the year 1362[356]. Some of -the names of the men's ornaments occur also in Langland's verses: - - "Sir John and Sir Goffray hath a gerdel of silver, - A basellarde or a ballok-knyf with botones overgilt." - -These effeminate fashions actually led to a Statute of Dress in 1363, in -which also the lower class are forbidden to ape their betters. It is -perhaps to these hangers-on of wealth that Langland refers in his bitter -lines: - - "Right so! ye rich, ye robeth that be rich | and helpeth them that - helpeth you, and giveth where no need is. | As who so filled a tun of - a fresh river | and went forth with that water to woke with Thames. | - Right so! ye rich, ye robe and feed | them that have as ye have, them - ye make at ease." - -But, as for the poor, Avarice considers them fair game: - - "I have as moche pite of pore men as pedlere hath of cattes, | that - wolde kill them if he cacche hem myghte, for covetise of their - skynnes." - -In London the preaching clergy are accused of pandering to the avarice of -the rich: - - "And were mercy in mean men no more than in rich | mendicants meatless - might go to bed. | God is much in the gorge of these great masters, | - but among mean men his mercy and his works. | Friars and faitours have - found such questions, | to plese with proud men sithen the pestilence - tyme, | and prechers at Saint Poules, for pure envye of clerkis, | - that folke is nought firmed in the feith ne fill of their goodes. | - ... Ne be plentyous to the pore as pure charitye wolde, | but in - gayness and in glotonye forglotten her goode hem selve, | and breken - noughte to the beggar as the Boke techeth." - -The friars had lost altogether the enthusiasm of their early days: - - "And how that friars followed folk that was rich, | and folk that was - poor at little price they set; | and no corpse in their kirk-yard nor - in their kirk was buried, | but quick he bequeath them aughte or - should help quit their debts." - -As for the monks, the same might have been said of them before; but now -more land had been thrown into their possession by the mortality: - - "Ac now is Religion a ryder, a rowmer bi streetes, - A leader of love-days, and a lond-buyer, - A pricker on a palfrey fro manere to manere, - An heap of houndes at his ers, as he a lord were. - And but if his knave kneel, that shall his cup bringe, - He lowreth on hym, and axeth hym who taught hym curtesye." - -According to Langland's poem, the country clergy left their livings and -came up to London:-- - - "Parsons and parish priests plained them to the bishop | that their - parishes were poor sith the pestilence time; | to have licence and - leave at London to dwell | and syngen there for simony, for silver is - sweet. | Bishops and bachelors, both masters and doctours, | that have - cures under Christ and crowning in token and sign, | that they should - shrive their parishours, preach and pray for them and the poor feed, | - live in London in Lent and all"-- - -some of them serving the king in the offices of Exchequer and Chancery, -and some acting as the stewards of lords. - -It is undoubted that the business of the courts in London received a great -impetus after the mortality, as one can readily understand from the -number of inheritances, successions, and feudal claims that had to be -settled. Several of the Inns of Chancery date from about that time. -Gascoigne, who was "cancellarius" at Oxford about 1430, and had access to -the rolls of former "cancellarii," was struck by the increase of legists -after the commotion of 1349: "Before the great pestilence there were few -disputes among the people, and few pleas; and, accordingly, there were few -legists in the realm of England, and few legists in Oxford, at a time when -there were thirty thousand scholars in Oxford, as I have seen in the -rolls," etc.[357] - -The country clergy, such of them as remained in their cures were a -notoriously illiterate class; according to Knighton, they could read the -Latin services without understanding what they read. Langland makes a -parson confess his poor qualifications to be the spiritual guide of his -flock; on the other hand he was not without skill in the sports of the -field: "But I can fynde in a felde or in a furlonge an hare." At one of -the manor courts in Wiltshire in 1361, a gang of the district clergy were -convicted of night poaching[358]. - -Such being the state of matters among the upper and middle classes, it is -not surprising to find a lax morality among the lower orders. The -ploughman is as severe a satirist of his own class as he is of the rich. -In London we have a picture of the interior of a tavern crowded with -loafers of all sorts "early in the morning." In the country also the -contrast is drawn between the industrious and the idle class: - - "And whoso helpeth me to erie [plough] or sowen here ere I wende | - shall have leve, bi oure Lorde to lese here in harvest, | and make him - merry there-mydde, maugre whoso begruccheth it: | save Jakke the - jogeloure and Jonet of the stewes, | and Danget the dys-playere, and - Denot the bawd, | and Frere the faytoure and folk of his order, | and - Robyn the rybaudoure for his rusty wordes." - -To live out of wedlock was nothing unusual: - - "Many of you ne wedde nought the wimmen that ye with delen, | but as - wilde bestis with wehe worthen up and worchen, | and bryngeth forth - barnes that bastardes men calleth." - -Ill-assorted marriages also appear to have been common: - - "It is an oncomely couple, bi Cryst, as me-thinketh, | to gyven a - yonge wenche to an olde feble, | or wedden any widwe for welth of hir - goodis, | that never shall bairne bere but if it be in armes. | Many a - paire sithen the pestilence have plight hem togiders: | the fruit that - thei brynge forth aren foule wordes: | in jalousye joyeles and - jangling in bedde | have thei no children but cheste and choppyng hem - betweene." - -Chapmen did not chastise their children. Old traditions of weather-lore, -and of reckoning the yield of harvest, were forgotten. - -As a set-off to the uniformly bad picture of the times given by Langland, -we may turn to the gay and good-humoured scenes of the 'Canterbury Tales.' -But Chaucer was emphatically the poet of the cultured class, and it is -proper to his muse to keep within the limits of a well-bred cynicism. -Again, Langland's strictures on the avarice and other vices of the rich -may seem to be a mere echo of a very old cry, which finds equally strong -expression in Roger of Wendover, about the year 1235, and in Robert of -Brunne's 'Handlyng Synne' in the year 1303. But the Vision of the -Ploughman is too consistent, and too concrete, to be considered as a mere -homily on the wickedness of the times, such as might have been written of -almost any age or of any country in which the Seven Mortal Sins were still -called by their plain names. The words "sithen the pestilence" recur so -often, that this contemporary author must be held as sharing the belief -that the Black Death made a marked difference to the morals of the nation -throughout all classes. - - -More lasting effects on Farming, Industries, and Population. - -Turning from things moral to things material, we shall find that the Great -Mortality left its mark on the cultivated area of the country, on rents of -land, on the kind of tenure and the system of farming, on industry, trade -and municipal government, on the population, and, on what chiefly -concerns us, the subsequent health of the country. - -Corn-growing would appear to have met with at least a temporary check. -Three water-mills near Shrewsbury fell in annual value by one half, owing -to the scarcity of corn to grind[359]. Richmond, one of the chief -corn-markets in Yorkshire, is said, on rather uncertain evidence, to have -been permanently reduced for the same reason; besides losing an enormous -number by the plague itself (vaguely stated at 2000), the town lost its -corn-trade through the land around falling out of cultivation, so that -some of the burgesses, being unable to pay rent, had to wander abroad as -mendicants[360]. - -The general statements of Knighton, Le Baker and others for England (not -to mention numerous rhetorical passages of foreign writers), to the effect -that whole villages were left desolate, are borne out by the petitions -recurring in the Rolls of Parliament for many years after. There are also -some references to the continuing desolateness of particular places, which -are probably fair samples of a larger number. - -Thus a rich clergyman in Hertfordshire had given, just before the Black -Death, all his lands and tenements in Braghinge, Herts, to the prior and -convent of Anglesey, Cambridgeshire, in consideration that they should -find at their proper expense a chantry of two priests for ever in the -church of Anglesey, to say masses for the souls of the benefactor and his -family. But on the 10th of May, 1351, he remitted the charge and support -of one of the two said priests, on the ground that, "on account of the -vast mortality, lands lie uncultivated in many and innumerable places, not -a few tenements daily and suddenly decay and are pulled down, rents and -services cannot be levied, but a much smaller profit is obliged to be -taken than usual[361]." An instance of a long-abiding effect is that of -the manor of Hockham belonging to the earl of Arundel, which was not -tenanted for thirty years[362]. - -The history of rents is peculiar. The immediate effect, as we learn from -Knighton, as well as from the rolls of particular manor courts, was a -remission of them by the lords, lest their tenants in villenage should -quit the lands. There was, indeed, a competition among landlords for -tenants to occupy their manors, so that the cultivators could make their -own terms. Of that we have had an instance from the manor of Ensham, -belonging to Christ Church, Oxford[363]. But, after a few years, rents -appear to have come back to near their old level. The following figures -have been compiled from the Tower records of assizes made for the purpose -of taxation[364]: - - 1268 9_d._ - 1348-9 -- - 1417 6_d._ - 1446 8_d._ - 1271 12_d._ - 1359 9-1/4_d._ - 1422 4_d._ - 1336 11-1/2_d._ - 1368 10-1/2_d._ - 1429 4_d._ - 1338 11-1/2_d._ - 1381 9-3/4_d._ - 1432 6_d._ - -The great fall, it will be seen, was in the next century. - -Perhaps the most striking effect upon agriculture of the upheaval produced -by the great mortality was, as Thorold Rogers has shown, in changing the -system of farming and in creating the type of the English yeoman. The -system of farming the lord's demesne or home-farm by a bailiff, never very -profitable, became, says that historian, quite unproductive, owing -especially to the permanent rise in wages. The small men who took the -lord's land to farm--they had been doing so to some extent -before[365]--had not sufficient of their own for stock and seed; but they -got advances from the lord, which were repaid in due course. It was a kind -of _mtairie_ farming. It prevailed for about fifty years, by which time -the ordinary system of farming on lease was becoming general. Finally, and -especially in the Civil Wars of the fifteenth century, much of the land -which had belonged in fee to the feudal lords, passed away by purchase to -the tenant farmers[366]. Thus arose the famous breed of English -yeomen--the "good yeomen whose limbs were made in England." - -The effect of the mortality upon trade and industry was, momentarily, to -paralyse them. Of the great wool-trade, Rogers, the historian of English -prices, says: "Nothing, I think, in the whole history of these prices is -more significant of the terror and prostration induced by the plague than -the sudden fall in the price of wool at this time. It is a long time -before a recovery takes place[367]." But from 1364 to 1380, the price of -wool was uniformly above the average; and, if there be any accuracy in -Avesbury's figures already given for the years following 1355, the export -of bales of wool to the Continent (100,000 sacks in a year, he says, each -sack being a bale of the present colonial size, or weighing about three -hundredweights) meant a very considerable amount of labour, tonnage and -exchange. Among other articles of export, we hear specially of iron, in a -petition to Parliament of 28 Ed. III. (1354); the price of iron had risen -to four times what it was before the plague, and it was desired to stop -the export of it and to fix the price[368]. - -The effect of the mortality upon the industries of the country was shown -most in Norwich. That city was the centre of the Flemish cloth-weaving, -which had been flourishing in Norfolk for some twenty years, under the -direct encouragement of Edward III., and of a protective statute against -foreign-made cloth. Before the pestilence, Norwich was the second city in -the kingdom. In the king's warrant for men-at-arms, which was indeed -issued in 1350, but may be taken as drawn up on the old lines and -irrespective of the pestilence, the quota of Norwich is rated at 60, -London's being 100, Bristol's and Lynn's 20 each, that of Coventry, -Gloucester, Hereford, Shrewsbury, Winchester, Sarum, Oxford, Canterbury -and Bury St Edmund's 10 each, and of other towns from 8 to 1 each, York -not being mentioned. But in the Subsidy Roll of 1377, which shows how many -persons, above the age of fourteen, paid the poll-tax of a groat in each -county and in each principal town, Norwich comes sixth in the list instead -of second, being far surpassed in numbers by York and Bristol, and -surpassed considerably by Coventry and Plymouth. So far from being in a -proportion to London of 60 to 100, it is now in a proportion of 3952 to -23,314, its whole population, as estimated, being 7410 against 44,770 in -the capital which at one time it bade fair to rival. It had lost heavily -in the Black Death, and so had the populous district around it, where the -Flemish industries and trade were planted in numerous villages. By 1368, -ten of the sixty very small parishes of Norwich had disappeared, and -fourteen more disappeared by degrees, the ruins of twenty of them being -still visible[369]. - -There is no mistaking the significance of these figures and facts for the -second city of the kingdom. At least one generation passed before Norwich -recovered something of its old prosperity. In the fifteenth century it was -still the chief seat of the woollen manufactures; the county of Norfolk -kept its old pre-eminence, although rival centres of industry had grown -up. There were, however, causes at work which at length reduced the -capital of East Anglia to a comparatively poor state. One of the -intermediate glimpses that we get of it--they are not many, even in -Blomefield's history--is the statute of 1455, to put down the enormous -number of "pettifogging attorneys" in the city and county[370]. Its real -decline was in the early Tudor reigns. When Henry VII. visited Norwich in -1497, the mayor in presenting the Queen's usual gold cup with a hundred -pieces in it, took occasion to tell the monarch "howbeit that they are -more poor, and not of such wealth as they have been afore these -days[371]." When the town suffered much from fires about the year 1505, -the city of London raised large sums in aid of its rebuilding. To the same -period belongs a municipal order that no one should dig holes in the -market-place to get sand, without the mayor's licence. In 1525, there was -a general decay of work, the clothiers and farmers being unable to employ -the artisans and labourers, who began to rise in revolt against the heavy -taxes. An Act of 33 Hen. VIII. recites that the making and weaving of -worsteds is wholly decayed and taken away from the city of Norwich and -county of Norfolk--by the deceit and crafty practices of the great -multitude of regrators and buyers of the said yarn. These evidences of -decline in prosperity are in part long after the Black Death; but they -seem to have been continuous from that event. - -So far as concerns the other large towns of England, they did not all fare -alike. The capital was more luxurious, and probably not less populous, -after the mortality than before it. The chancery and exchequer business -alone would have served to draw numbers to it; and we may be sure, from -all subsequent experience, that the gaps left by the plague were filled up -by influx from the provinces and from abroad in the course of two or three -years. Nor does it appear from the poll-tax that York had suffered to -anything like the same extent as Norwich; while Bristol and Coventry -became towns of much greater consequence than before the plague. On the -other hand, Lincoln is described, in a petition for relief in 1399 (1 Hen. -IV.) as being "in the greater part empty and uninhabited." In the same -year, Yarmouth has its houses "vacant and void," although, in 1369, it is -said to have "gained so much upon Norwich" that it was made a seat of the -wool-staple. Other towns which figure in petitions to Parliament as -"impoverished and desolate of people," are Ilchester (1407) and Truro -(1410). Camden instances the ancient borough of Wallingford, on the -Thames, as having been permanently reduced by the Black Death, although -the inhabitants, he says, traced the decay of the town to the diversion of -traffic over the new bridges at Abingdon and Dorchester[372]. Some parts -of Cambridge would appear to have borne the traces of the pestilence for a -number of years after. A charter of the bishop of Ely, dated 12 September, -1365, mentions that the parishioners of All Saints (on the north-east -side) are for the most part dead by pestilence, and those that are alive -are gone to the parishes of other churches; that the parishioners of St -Giles's (the adjoining parish, near the Castle) have died; and that the -nave of All Saints is ruinous and the bones of dead bodies are exposed to -beasts; therefore the bishop unites All Saints and St Giles's[373]. At -that time the churches of those parishes would have been small, perhaps -not much larger than the little church of St Peter still standing on the -high ground opposite to the great modern church of St Giles. - -These instances of the chequered history of English towns subsequent to -the great mortality are not altogether favourable to the generality which -has been put forward by an able historian[374], that the great social -revolution produced by that event was to detach the people from the soil, -to drive them into the towns, to increase the urban population -disproportionately to the rural, to plant the germs of commerce and -industry, and to determine that expansion of England which became manifest -in the end of the Elizabethan period and under the Stuarts, the British -nation being "doomed by its economic conditions to take the course which -it has taken." Many things happened between the Black Death and the -expansion of England. The fifteenth century intervened, which was in its -middle period, at least, distinguished as much by the rise of the yeoman -class as by the growth of trade guilds in the town. But that which mars -the generality most of all was the decline of industries and the decay of -towns (London and Bristol always excepted) in the reigns of Henry VII. and -Henry VIII.; the country had to recover from that before the Elizabethan -expansion,--before the nation began "to increase rapidly in population -until at length it should overflow the limits of its island home." - -At the same time, one effect of the great mortality was to mobilise the -class of agricultural labourers, and to drive a certain number of them -into the towns. Proof of that migration comes from the statutes and the -Rolls of Parliament. - - An Act of 34 Edward III. (1360) imposes a fine of ten pounds to the - king on the mayor and bailiffs of any town refusing "to deliver up a - labourer, servant, or artificer" who had absented himself from his - master's service, with a farther fine of five pounds to the lord. In - 1376 the "Good Parliament" makes complaint that servants and labourers - quitted service on the slightest cause, and then led an idle life in - towns, or wandered in parties about the country, "many becoming - beggars, others staff-strikers, but the greater number taking to - robbing." More direct evidence of industries diverting hands from farm - labour is found in the various statutes about apprentices. In the Act - of 12 Ric. II. (1388) it is provided that "he or she which use to - labour at the plough and cart or other labour or service of husbandry - till they be of the age of twelve years, shall abide at that labour - without being put to any mystery or handicraft; and if any covenant or - bond of apprentice be from henceforth made to the contrary, the same - shall be holden for none." A more definite provision of the same kind - was made in 7 Hen. IV. (1405-6): "Notwithstanding the good statutes - aforemade, infants whose fathers and mothers have no land, nor rent, - nor other living, but only their service or mystery, be put to serve - and bound apprentices to divers crafts within cities and boroughs, - sometimes at the age of twelve years, sometimes within the said age, - and that for the pride of clothing and other evil customs which - servants do use in the same" etc.--the result being that farm - labourers were scarce; therefore no one, not having land or rent of - twenty-shillings a year, to bind his son or daughter of whatsoever age - to serve as apprentice within any city or borough. In the 8th of Henry - VI. (1429) this statute was repealed so far as respected London, on - account of the hindrance which the said statute might occasion to the - inhabitants of that city[375]. - -It may be doubted if, after the Black Death, the towns underwent any -marked industrial development, except in such cases as Coventry and -Bristol. On the other hand, the cloth-weaving of East Anglia was dispersed -over the country, more particularly to the western and south-western -counties, so that the west of England gained an industrial character which -it retained until the comparatively modern rise of the cloth-industries of -Yorkshire and Lancashire. But it was in great part a development of -village industries upon the old manorial basis, as well as a migration of -labour to the towns. - -We have an authentic instance, and probably a typical instance, in the -manor and barony of Castle Combe, of which the social history has been -pieced together from the rolls of its manor court by one of the earliest -students of that class of documents. Before the middle of the fifteenth -century this village situated among the Wiltshire hills, difficult of -access and almost secluded from the highways, had grown into a thriving -community of weavers, fullers, dyers, glovers, and the like, with their -attendant tradings and marketings, all upon its old manorial basis, and -with its old agriculture going hand in hand with its new industries. There -were free or copyhold tenants occupying their farms, while several -clothiers and occupiers of fulling-mills held farms also, "driving a -double and evidently a very thriving trade, accumulating considerable -wealth and giving employment to a large number of artizans who had been -attracted to the place for this purpose. Yet, strange to say, some of the -wealthiest and most prosperous of these tradesmen were still subject to -the odious bonds of serfship, adscript the soil[376]." It is clear, -however, that the jury of the manor court took care that the lord should -not have the best of it. The morals of this industrial village were, as -might have been expected, somewhat lax[377]. At the same time the removal -of nuisances was insisted upon by this self-governing community as -effectively, perhaps, as if it had been under the Local Government -Acts[378]. - -Another kind of effect than the industrial, upon the state of the towns, -is exemplified in the case of Shrewsbury. The dislocation of the old -social order had somehow touched the privileges and monopolies of -municipal corporations and guilds, and given power to a hitherto -unenfranchised class. The general question, besides being a somewhat new -one, is foreign to this subject; but the reference to Shrewsbury is given, -as the "late pestilence" is expressly connected with the municipal -changes. A patent of the 35th of Edward III. (1361), relating to the town -of Shrewsbury, recites the grievous debates and dissensions which had -arisen therein, "through the strangers who had newly come to reside in the -said town after the late pestilence, and were plotting to draw to -themselves the government of the said town[379]." - -It has been conjectured that population in the country at large speedily -righted itself, according to the principle that population always tends to -come close to the limit of subsistence. But there is reason to think that -the means of subsistence were themselves reduced. We read of corn-land -running to waste, although most of the references to desolation are -perhaps to be taken as true for only one or two harvests following the -plague. Again, it is undoubted that sheep-farming and the pasturing of -cattle at length took the place of much of the old agriculture. It is not -easy to make out when the change begins; but there are instances of rural -depopulation as early as 1414[380], and the same had become a burning -grievance in the time of cardinal Morton and the early years of sir Thomas -More. It has been assumed, also, that the "positive checks" to population -had been taken off, when they ought in theory so to have been: that is to -say, after the inhabitants had been enormously thinned. The statement of -Hecker, that there was increased fecundity after the pestilence, appears -to be an instance of that author's _a priori_ habit of mind[381]. What we -read in an English chronicle of the time is just the opposite, namely, -that "the women who survived remained for the most part barren during -several years[382]." The authority is not conclusive, but the statement is -in keeping with what we may gather from Langland's poem as to ill-assorted -and sterile marriages, and as to illicit unions, which, as Malthus -teaches, are comparatively unfruitful. The alleged sterility is also in -keeping with, although not strictly parallel to, the experience of crowded -Indian provinces, such as Orissa, where a thinning of the population by -famine and disease has been statistically proved to be followed by a -marked decrease of fecundity. More direct evidence of a permanent loss of -people occurs a generation after the Black Death, at a time when the -circumstances of health were such as would explain it. - -The poll-tax of 1377 was a means of estimating the population. The tax was -levied on every person, male or female, above the age of fourteen. In -estimating the population from the poll-tax returns, it is usual to add -one-fifth for taxable subjects who had evaded it, and to reckon the -taxable subjects above fourteen years as two-thirds of the whole -population. On that basis of reckoning, the population of the whole of -England, except Cheshire and Durham, in the year 1377 would have been -2,580,828 (or 1,376,442 who actually paid their groat each). The -population of the principal towns is calculated, in the second column of -the Table, from the numbers in the first column who actually paid the -poll-tax, according to the Subsidy Roll of 51 Edward III. - - Laity assessed for the Poll-tax of 1377 in each of the following Towns, - being persons of either sex above the age of fourteen years. - - -------------------------------------- - | Taxed |Estimated - | |Population - ------------------|--------|---------- - London | 23,314 | 44,770 - York | 7248 | 13,590 - Bristol | 6345 | 11,904 - Plymouth | 4837 | 9069 - Coventry | 4817 | 9032 - Norwich | 3952 | 7410 - Lincoln | 3412 | 6399 - Sarum | 3226 | 6048 - Lynn | 3127 | 5863 - Colchester | 2955 | 5540 - Beverley | 2663 | 4993 - Newcastle-on-Tyne | 2647 | 4963 - Canterbury | 2574 | 4826 - Bury St Edmunds | 2442 | 4580 - Oxford | 2357 | 4420 - Gloucester | 2239 | 4198 - Leicester | 2101 | 3939 - Shrewsbury | 2082 | 3904 - Yarmouth | 1941 | 3640 - Hereford | 1903 | 3568 - Cambridge | 1722 | 3230 - Ely | 1722 | 3230 - Exeter | 1560 | 2925 - Hull | 1557 | 2920 - Worcester | 1557 | 2920 - Ipswich | 1507 | 2825 - Nottingham | 1447 | 2713 - Northampton | 1447 | 2713 - Winchester | 1440 | 2700 - Stamford | 1218 | 2284 - Newark | 1178 | 2209 - Wells | 1172 | 2198 - Ludlow | 1172 | 2198 - Southampton | 1152 | 2160 - Derby | 1046 | 1961 - Lichfield | 1024 | 1920 - Chichester | 869 | 1630 - Boston | 814 | 1526 - Carlisle | 678 | 1271 - Bath | 570 | 1070 - Rochester | 570 | 1070 - Dartmouth | 506| 949 - -------------------------------------- - -That this indirect census was taken on a declining population may be -inferred from the language of contemporaries. In the year of the poll-tax -(1377), Richard II. addressed certain questions to Wyclif concerning the -papal exactions of tribute; the reformer's reply gives as the second -objection to the tribute "that the people decreases by reason of -(_praetextu_) the withdrawal of this treasure, which should be spent in -England[383]." - -In the political poems of the time there are numerous references to the -pestilences and famines. One of these doggerel productions, "On the -Council of London," 1382, contains a clear reference to a decrease of the -people: - - "In nos pestilentia saeva jam crescit, - Quod virorum fortium jam populus decrescit[384]." - -These general expressions in writings of the time will appear the more -credible after we have carried the history of plague and other forms of -epidemic sickness down through a whole generation from 1349. - - -The Epidemics following the Black Death. - -Not the least of the effects of the Black Death upon England was the -domestication of the foreign pestilence on the soil. For more than three -centuries bubo-plague was never long absent from one part of Britain or -another. The whole country was never again swamped by a vast wave of -plague as in the fourteen months of 1348-49. Nor does it appear that the -succeeding plagues of the fourteenth century, the _pestis secunda_, -_tertia_, _quarta_ and _quinta_ were all of the same type as the first, or -otherwise comparable to it. Disastrous as many subsequent English -epidemics of bubo-plague were, they appear to have been localised in the -North, perhaps, or in Norfolk, or confined to the young; and, above all, -the bubo-plague became, in its later period, peculiarly a disease of the -poor in the towns, although it did not cease altogether in the villages -and country houses until it ceased absolutely in 1666. For three hundred -years plague was the grand "zymotic" disease of England--the same type of -plague that came from the East in 1347-49, continuously reproduced in a -succession of epidemics at one place or another, which, by diligent -search, can be made to fill the annals with few gaps, and, if the records -were better, could probably be made to fill most years. Britain was not -peculiar among the countries of Europe in that respect, although the -chronology of plagues abroad has not been worked out minutely, except for -an occasional province in which some zealous archaeologist had happened to -take up the subject[385]. - -From 1349 to 1361 there is no record of pestilence in England. There was -scarcity or famine in 1353, owing to an unfavourable harvest, but nothing -is said of an unusual amount of sickness. In 1361 came the _pestis -secunda_, which would hardly have been so called had it not presented the -same type as the great bubo-plague. There is little said of it in the -chroniclers; but two of them mention that it was called the _pestis -puerorum_, or plague of the juveniles; and a third gives the names of -several great personages who died of it, including three bishops and -Henry, duke of Lancaster, at his castle of Leicester, in Lent, 1362. This -recrudescence, then, of the seeds of plague in English soil, may be taken -as having cut off the nobles and the young: that is to say, the members of -a class who had, by all accounts, escaped the first plague, and the rising -generation who had either escaped the first plague as infants or had been -born subsequent to it. The same selection of victims was observed, -according to Guy de Chauliac, in the very same year at Avignon; in -contrast to the Black Death, the second plague there cut off the upper and -well-to-do classes, and an innumerable number of children[386]; among the -former, it is said, were five cardinals and a hundred bishops. From -Poland, also, it is reported that the return of the plague, which happened -in 1360, affected mostly, although not exclusively, the upper classes and -children. It is clear from the Continental evidence that the second -pestilence was marked by the same buboes, carbuncles, and other signs as -the first. In some places, at least, it must have been as destructive as -the Black Death itself; thus, in Florence, says Petrarch (with obvious -exaggeration) hardly ten in the thousand remained alive in the city after -the epidemic of 1359, while Boccaccio estimates the mortality of the year -at the equally incredible figure of a hundred thousand. In London many -more wills than usual were enrolled in 1361, but not more than a third of -the number enrolled in 1349: viz. 4 in February, 2 in March, 8 in April, 8 -in May, 12 in June, 39 in July, 28 in October, 15 in November, 11 in -December. - -The _pestis secunda_ is only one of a series of pestilences in the reigns -of Edward III. and Richard II., which the chroniclers number in succession -to the _pestis quinta_ in 1391. The entries in the annals are for the most -part so meagre and colourless that they give us no help in realizing the -share that a continuous infection in the soil, from the Black Death -onwards, may have had in bringing about the disastrous state of the -country in the latter half of the fourteenth century. Edward III. was -ruined in reputation by his French wars, and ended his long reign in -dishonour. His grandson Richard II. found the task of government too much -for him, and was deposed. The history of this period is not complete -without some account of the health of the country; a single line or -sentence in a chronicle, to mark the date of a _pestis tertia_ or _quarta_ -or _quinta_, hardly does justice to the place of national sickness among -the events with which historians fill their pages. The graphic picture of -the times is 'The Vision of Piers the Ploughman,' some passages of which -may help us to realize what the bare enumeration of second, third, fourth -and fifth pestilences meant. Some Latin poems of the time may be cited in -support; and for more particular evidence of the type of pestilence which -remained in England after the Black Death, we shall have to refer to -certain extant manuscript treatises, from the latter part of the -fourteenth century, which had been written in English to meet the wants of -the people. - -The Latin poems of the time of Edward III. and Richard II. need only be -referred to so as to bring out by contrast the immense superiority of the -'Vision of Piers the Ploughman.' The poems of John of Bridlington, which -are the most considerable of the Latin series of verses, contain numerous -references to the epidemics of the time, both at home and abroad. -Curiously, he dwells more upon the effects of famine--flux and fever--than -upon the plague proper, which he nowhere distinguishes. Thus, of France -about the time of the Black Death: - - "Destructis granis, deerit mox copia panis; - Poena fames panis, venter fluxu fit inanis." - -Or again, with specific reference to the _pestis secunda_ of 1361, which -we know to have been bubo-plague: - - "... fluxus nocet, undique febris - Extirpat fluxus pollutos crimine luxus." - -Another reference, in the form of a prophecy, which from the context is -clearly to the pestilence of 1368-69, again dwells exclusively upon -famine: - - "In mensis justi pandetur copia crusti: - Fundis falsorum premet arcta fames famulorum." - -followed by a note in Latin: "from which it appears that the poor in those -days were ill off for want of food[387]." One Latin poem of the end of the -fourteenth century is expressly "On the Pestilence," in the following -manner: - - "Ecce dolet Anglia luctibus imbuta, - Gens tremit tristitia sordibus polluta, - Necat pestilentia viros atque bruta. - Cur? Quia flagitia regnant resoluta[388]." - -Turning to the far more real or observant work of the same date by -Langland, we find among his general references to sickness a most -significant one in which he compares it to the continual dropping of rain -through a leaky roof: "The rain that raineth where we rest should, be -sicknesses and sorrows that we suffer oft." Again, in the allegory of -Conscience and Nature, the former makes appeal to Nature to come forth as -the scourge of evil-living: - - "Nature Conscience heard, and came out of the planets, and sent forth - his fore-goers, fevers and fluxes, coughs and cardiacles, cramps and - toothaches, rheums and radegoundes and roynous scalls, boils and - botches and burning agues, frenzies and foul evils--foragers of Nature - had ypricked and preyed polls of people that largely a legion lose - their life soon. Eld the hoary, he was in the vanguard, and bare the - banner before Death, by right he it claimed. Nature came after, with - many keen sores, as pokkes and pestilences, and much people shent. So - Nature through corruptions killed many. Death came driving after, and - all to dust dashed kings and knights, kaisers and popes, learned and - lewd, he let no man stand that he hit even, that ever stirred after. - Many a lovely lady, and lemans of knights, swooned and swelted for - sorrow of Death's dints." - - But "Conscience of his courtesy to Nature he besought, to cease and - suffer and see whether they would leave pride privily and be perfect - Christens. And Nature ceased then, to see the people amend. Fortune - gan flatter those few that were alive, and promised them long life; - and Lechery he sent among all manner men, wedded and unwedded, and - gathered a great host all against Conscience[389]." - -Next came Avarice, Envy and other of the deadly sins, so that the respite -which Nature had given was of no real avail. - -A clear reference to pestilence continuing in the country comes in where -the pope's exactions are mentioned. The pope did nothing in return for his -English tribute: - - "Had I a clerk that could write, I would cast him a bill - That he send me under his seal a salve for the pestilence, - And that his blessing and his bulls botches might destroy. - For, sith he hath the power that Peter himself had, - He hath the pot with the salve, soothly as me thinketh." - -Among the other consequences "sithen the pestilence," was this: "So is -pride waxen, in religion and in all the realm among rich and poor, that -prayers have no power the pestilence to let; ... ne for dread of the death -withdraw not their pride." - -The _pestis secunda_ of 1361, or _pestis puerorum_, may perhaps be pointed -to in the passage where chapmen are blamed for indulging their children, -"ne for no pouste of pestilence correct them overmuch." The ill-assorted -marriages had doubtless followed the great mortality itself; but the -second pestilence, of 1361, which affected the upper classes especially, -and is said by one chronicler to have cut off more men than women[390], -may have been more specially pointed to in Langland's reference. Of that -pestilence a chronicle of the next century has preserved a curious -reminiscence: among its victims were men, doubtless of the upper class, -"whose wives, as women out of gouvernance, took as well strangers to their -husbands and other lewd and simple people, the which, forgetting their -awe, worship and birth, coupled and married them with them that were of -low degree and low reputation[391]." - -Although Langland, when he speaks of changes "sith the pestilence time," -means the great mortality of 1349, he means in other places, the second, -third, and perhaps also fourth pestilences[392]. The years of the -pestilences down to the fifth are not the same in all the chronicles; -there are indeed some nine outbreaks that might have been enumerated after -the Black Death to the end of the century. Some of these are clearly -associated with scarcity, and may have been of the old type of -famine-sickness; dysentery is, indeed, mentioned in connexion with the -sickness of 1391[393]. Again, an epidemic in London in 1382 is said by a -chronicler to have affected children (boys and girls), while the same -chronicler is explicit that the sickness in Norfolk the year after was -confined to the young of both sexes under a certain age. Lastly, the -epidemic of 1391 was so severe in the North as to recall the great -mortality itself; but under the same year is the reference to sickness of -the type of dysentery due to rotten fruit; and under the year before, -1390, two chroniclers agree that the epidemic was "mostly among children," -or that it cut off "more young than old." It would be unsafe, therefore, -to conclude that all the outbreaks of _pestis_ in England subsequent to -the Black Death, were of bubo-plague itself. The list of sicknesses in -Langland's poem gives, indeed, as much space to fevers and fluxes, burning -agues and frenzies, as to boils and botches, foul evils, pokkes and -pestilences--by which latter group of synonyms the bubo-plague is meant. -_Pestis_, it is well known, was a generic name in the medieval period, -just as pest and pestilence are generic now. So generic was it that some -may doubt whether bubo-plague, of the type of 1349, was included at all -among the _pestes_ of the generations following. Positive evidence of the -continued existence of bubo-plague in England is, at least, not -superfluous, and this will be the best place to bring it in. - - -Medical Evidence of the Continuance of Plague. - -The plague was called "the botch" down to the Elizabethan and Stuart -periods; and the "botches" in Langland's poem, or, as he writes it, -"boches," were the familiar risings, under the arms and elsewhere, which -had given the disease its popular name when it began to recur time after -time. Apart from this verbal or philological evidence, there is a clear -proof of the prevalence of true bubo-plague during the latter part of the -fourteenth century, in the manuscript ordinances or rules of prevention -and treatment which were in circulation. Most of the extant copies bear -the name of one John of Burgoyne, or John of Bordeaux[394]. A fragment in -comparatively late handwriting purports to be the ordinance of "a great -Clark, Mr John Cordewe, at the prayer of King Richard and other the Lords, -for pestilence[395]"; from which it may be concluded that this, the -commonly used ordinance, dates from the time of Richard II. The names used -in the text are "pestilence" and "pestilential sores," and the handling of -the subject is the conventional one for the plague. The ordinance contains -exceedingly little that is of practical interest, and it is difficult to -believe that it can have been of real use to anyone. We are introduced to -the subject with a few empty common-places; but whenever we come to -business, we are plainly told to go and consult those who know--and this, -be it observed, in a disease which was remarkably uniform in its type and -circumstances: - - "Wherefore they that have not dronken of that swete drynke of - Astronomye may putte to these pestilentiall sores no fit remedies; - for, because that they know not the cause and the quality of the - sickness, they may not hele it, as sayeth the prince of physic - Avicenna: 'How shouldest thou hele a sore and yknowe not the cause?' - He that knoweth not the cause, it is impossible that he hele the - sickness." - -If there were any doubt about the date of John of Burgoyne, or John of -Bordeaux[396], it ought to be set at rest by the discovery that he -corresponds in the closest way with the physician in the Prologue of the -_Canterbury Tales_. Chaucer's doctor of physic stands for the -well-grounded practitioner of the time--"grounded in astronomie," it is -true, but at all events academically grounded, in contrast to the -charlatans and pretenders who had not been to Paris or Bologna, probably -knew no Latin, to say nothing of "astronomy," and therefore knew not how -to let a patient die (or recover) _secundum artem_. The doctor of physic -uses his astrological knowledge so much in the manner of John of Bordeaux, -that one suspects Chaucer to have seen the passage quoted above, and to -have condensed it into the two following lines: - - "The cause yknowne, and of his harm the rote, - Anon he gave to the sick man his bote." - -It was in the pestilence that this practitioner had made the money which -he kept so tightly. Richly clad he was; - - "And yet he was but easy of dispense; - He kept that he wan in the pestilence. - For gold in physic is a cordial: - Therefore he loved gold in special." - -This is John of Burgoyne all over; it would have been an anachronism in -England by more than two hundred years to have represented a physician as -caring for any but paying patients, or as regarding an epidemic sickness -from any other point of view than as a source of income. - -Besides the "ordinance" of John of Burgoyne, which may be assigned to the -reign of Richard II., there was another essay on the plague circulating in -England in an English translation, of which the copy among the Sloane -manuscripts is assigned to the fourteenth century[397]. The importance -attached to this manuscript work is shown in the fact that it was chosen -among the very first to be printed at an English press, probably in the -year 1480[398]. It was reprinted in 1536, and the substance of it was -copied into nearly all the English books on plague (from one to another) -as late as the seventeenth century, much of its original matter passing -under the name of one Phaer, or Phayre or Thayre, who was a compiler about -the middle of the sixteenth century. Writers on early English printing -have made much of the printed book of 1480; but they do not appear to have -known of the manuscript which was used as the printer's "copy[399]." If -one happens to use the latter first, and comes later to the printed book, -he will observe the identity not merely in the words and spelling but even -in the very form in which the type had been cut. The authorship of a -manuscript which is thus invested with a various interest may deserve a -few lines of inquiry. - -The author of it describes himself in the (translated) introduction as "I -the bisshop of Arusiens, Doctour of phisike," that is to say, bishop of -Aarhus, in Denmark. In the text, he claims to have practised physic at -Montpellier: - - "In the Mount of Pessulane I might not eschewe the company of people, - for I went from house to house, because of my poverty, to cure sick - folk. Therefore bread or a sponge sopped in vinegar I took with me, - holding it to my mouth and nose, because all aigre things stoppen the - ways of humours and suffereth no venomous thing to enter into a man's - body; and so I escaped the pestilence, my fellows supposing that I - should not live. These foresaid things I have proved by myself[400]." - -The fact that this medieval treatise, whatever its exact date, was turned -into English and circulated in manuscript, and that it was chosen for -printing almost as soon as English printing began, in the reign of Edward -IV., is sufficient evidence, if more were needed, that the English had to -reckon with bubo-plague as one of their standing diseases throughout the -latter part of the medieval period. Before we come to the chronology of -English plagues in that period, from the Black Death to the accession of -the Tudor dynasty in 1485, it will be convenient to consider here, with -the help of the above treatise, how the endemic plague was viewed in those -days,--what it was ascribed to in its origin, in its incidence upon houses -and persons, and in its propagation, what was advised for its avoidance or -prevention, and what was prescribed for its treatment. As the bishop's -essay was the source of most that was taught on these matters in England -for the next two or three hundred years, it will be an economy to give a -brief account of it here once for all. - -The remote causes, or warnings of the approach of pestilence, are given -under seven heads, including the kind of weather, swarms of flies, -shooting stars, comets, thunder and lightning out of the south, and winds -out of the south; this list was reproduced, with little or no change, by -the Elizabethan writers of popular health-manuals. The second section of -the essay is on the "causes of pestilence." There are three causes:-- - - "Sometime it cometh from the root beneath; other while from the root - above, so that we may feel sensibly howwith change of the air - appeareth unto us; and sometime it cometh of both together, as well - from the root above as from the root beneath, as we see a siege or - privy next to a chamber, or of any other particular thing which - corrupteth the air in his substance and quality, which is a thing may - happen every day. And thereof cometh the ague of pestilence (and about - the same many physicians be deceived, not supposing this ague to be a - pestilence). Sometimes it cometh of dead carrion, or corruption of - standing waters in ditches or sloughs and other corrupt places. These - things sometime be universal, sometime particular." Then follow - sentences on the "root above" which are somewhat transcendental. When - both "roots" work together, when, by "th' ynp'ffyons[401]" above, the - air is corrupt and by the putrefaction or rotten carrion of the vile - places beneath,--an infirmity is caused in man. "And such infirmity - sometimes is an ague, sometimes a posthume or a swelling, and that is - in many things. Also the air inspired sometimes is venomous and - corrupt, hurting the heart, that nature many ways is grieved, so that - he perceiveth not his harm.... - - "These things written before are the causes of pestilence. But about - these things, two questions be mooted. The first is, wherefore one - dieth and another dieth not, in a town where men be dead in one house - and in another house there dieth none. The second question is, whether - pestilence sores be contagious. - - "To the first question, I say it may hap to be of two causes: that is - to say, of that thing that doth, and of that thing that suffereth. An - ensample of that thing that doth: The influence of the bodies above - beholdeth that place or that place, more than this place or this - place. And one patient is more disposed to die than another. Therefore - it is to be noted that bodies be more hot disposed, of open pores, - than bodies infect having the pores stopped with many humours. Where - bodies be of resolution or opening, as men which abusen them selfe - with wymmen, or usen often times bathis; or men that be hot with - labour or great anger--they have their bodies more disposed to this - great sickness. - - "To the second question I say, that pestilence sores be contagious by - cause of infect humoures bodies, and the reek or smoke of such sores - is venomous and corrupteth the air. And therefore it is to flee from - such persons as be infect. In pestilence time nobody should stand in - great press of people, because some man of them may be infect. - Therefore wise physicians, in visiting sick folk, stand far from the - patient, holding their face toward the door or window. And so should - the servants of sick folk stand. Also it is good to a patient every - day for to change his chamber, and often times to have the windows - open against the North and East, and to spar the windows against the - South. For the south wind hath two causes of putrefaction. The first - is, it maketh a man, being whole or sick, feeble in their bodies. The - second cause is, as it is written in the Third of Aphorisms, the south - wind grieveth the hearing and hurteth the heart, because it openeth - the pores of man and entereth into the heart. Wherefore it is good to - an whole man in time of pestilence, when the wind is in the South, to - keep within the house all the day. And if it shall need a man to go - out, yet let him abide in his house till the sun be up in the East - passing southward." - -These explanations of the incidence of plague are in part repeated in the -section of the essay where the author gives directions for avoiding it. -After enjoining penance, he proceeds: - - "It is a good remedy to void and change the infect place. But some may - not profitably change their places. Therefore as much as to them is - possible, it is to be eschewed every cause of putrefaction and - stinking, and namely every fleshly lust with women is to be eschewed. - Also the southern wind, which wind is naturally infective: therefore - spar the windows, etc. Of the same cause, every foul stink is to be - eschewed--of stable, stinking fields, ways, or streets, and namely of - stinking dead carrion; and most of stinking waters, where in many - places water is kept two days or two nights, or else there be gutters - of water casten under the earth which caused great stink and - corruption. And of this cause some die in that house where such things - happen, and in another house die none, as it is said afore. Likewise - in that place where the worts and coles putrefied, it maketh noifull - savour and stinking. For in like wise as by the sweet odour of bawme - the heart and spirits have recreation, so of evil savours they be made - feeble. Therefore keep your house that an infect air enter not in. For - an infect air most causeth putrefaction in places and houses where - folk sleep. Therefore let your house be clean, and make clear fire of - wood flaming: let your house be made with fumigation of herbs, that is - to say, with leaves of bay-tree, juniper, yberiorgam--it is in the - apothecary shops--wormwood etc.... For a little crust corrupteth all - the body. - - "Also in the time of the pestilence it is better to abide within the - house; for it is not wholesome to go into the city or town. Also let - your house be sprinkled, specially in summer, with vinegar and roses, - and with the leaves of vine tree. Also it is good to wash your hands - ofttimes in the day with water and vinegar, and wipe your face with - your hands, and smell to them. Also it is good always to savour aigre - things." - -Then follows his own Montpellier experience, already quoted. - -The diagnostics come in casually along with the treatment: - - "But some would understand how may a man feel when he is infect. I say - that a man which is infect, that day eateth not much meat for he is - replenished with evil humours; and forthwith after dinner he hath lust - to sleep, and feeleth great heat under cold. Also he hath great pain - in the forehead.... He shall feel a swelling under the arm, or about - the share, or about the ears.... When a man feeleth himself infect, as - soon as he may, let him be let blood plenteously till he swoon: then - stop the vein. For a little letting of blood moveth or stirreth - venom." - -Then follow directions for bleeding, according to the position of the -bubo--in the armpit, groin or neck, the direction "if on the back" -probably having reference to the carbuncle[402]. The section on treatment, -which is the last, ends with a prescription for a medicine "that the -sooner a swelling be made ripe." - -These are sufficiently clear indications of the bubonic nature of the -disease called pestilence. At the same time the writer includes an ague as -also pestilential, due to similar causes and arising on similar occasions. -This is a use of the name ague which should not be mistaken for its common -application to intermittent fever. Ague was simply (febris) acuta; and -pestilential ague was a name for typhus fever in the sixteenth century (as -in Jones' _Dyall of Agues_), as well as in Ireland until a much later -period. This early association of acute pestilential fever with true -bubo-plague means the same relationship of typhus to plague which was -systematically taught by Sydenham, Willis, and Morton in the seventeenth -century; typhus in their time was the frequent attendant of plague,--a -_pestis mitior_; and it would appear to have been its attendant and -congener in the fourteenth century also. - - -The Fourteenth Century Chronology continued. - -Two epidemics contend in the chronicles for being the _pestis -tertia_--that of 1368-69, and that of 1375. The former is described as a -"great pestilence of men and the larger animals[403]," and it appears to -have been associated with unfavourable seasons and with the beginning of -that scarcity which Langland's poem refers to the month of April, 1370: - - Atte Londoun, I leve, liketh wel my wafres - And louren whan thei lakken hem.--It is nought longe passed, - There was a careful comune whan no cart cam to towne - With bred fro Strethforth, tho gan beggeres wepe - And werkmen were agast a lite. This wole be thought longe - In the date of our Drighte in a drye Aprille, - A thousand and thre hondreth tweis thretty and ten - My wafres there were gesen whan Chichestre was Maire[404]. - -The _pestis_ of 1368 and 1369 may have been primarily a famine-sickness; -but it does not follow that there was no bubo-plague mixed therewith. On -the contrary, seasons of scarcity were often in after experience found to -be the seasons of plague, the lowered vitality probably offering the -opportunity to the plague-virus. Previous to the harvests of 1376 and -1377, which were abundant, there had been an unbroken period of high -prices for many years, of which 1371 was remembered as "the grete dere -yere[405]." But the _pestis tertia_ appears to have been most severe in -the summer of 1368; for, on 23 July of that year, Simon, archbishop of -Canterbury, ordered public prayers for the cessation of the -pestilence[406], and it is under the same year that the wills of deceased -London citizens are enrolled in unusual numbers, although not in such -numbers as in the _pestis secunda_ of 1361[407]. Public prayers for the -cessation of pestilence (without reference to famine) and an unusual -mortality of the richer citizens, point to the plague proper, which may or -may not have been the type of sickness in the country districts in 1369, -the second year of the epidemic[408]. - -There is, furthermore, some indirect evidence that pestilential disease, -and probably bubo-plague, occurred in London subsequent to the scarcity of -the dry April, 1370, to which Langland's verses relate. This evidence lies -in the comparison of the wording of two ordinances of Edward III., one of -1369 and the other of 1371, both relating to nuisances in the city[409]. -In an order of the king in Council (43 Edward III.) for stopping the -carrying of slaughter-house offal from the shambles in St Nicholas parish, -within Newgate, through the streets, lanes, and other places to the banks -of the water of Thames near to Baynard's Castle, where there was a jetty -for throwing the refuse from into the river, the motive assigned is that -divers prelates, nobles, and other persons having houses in the line of -traffic, had complained grievously of these offences to the sight and -smell. But, in an amended order of 28th October, 1371, against the same -nuisance and with a definite (but futile) relegation of all slaughtering -to Stratford on the one side and Knightsbridge on the other, the motive is -differently stated: "Whereas of late, from the putrefied blood of -slaughtered beasts running in the streets, and the entrails thereof thrown -into the water of Thames, the air in the same city has been greatly -corrupted and infected, and whereby the worst of abominations and -stenches have been generated, and sicknesses and many other maladies have -befallen persons dwelling in the same city and resorting thereto:--We, -desiring to take precautions against such perils, and to provide for the -decency of the said city, and the safety of the same our people" etc. - -Up to this date, the Rolls of Parliament contain frequent references to -the wasting and impoverishment of the country by pestilence. A petition of -1362 begs the king "to consider the divers mischiefs that have come to his -commons by divers pestilences of wind and water, and mortality of men and -beasts"--the destructive wind being the tornado-like storm, on the 16th -January, 1362, "on Saturday at even," which was long remembered, and is -commemorated, along with the Black Death itself, in an inscription in the -church of Ashwell, Herts. Next year, another petition states that -"pestilences and great winds have done divers mischiefs"--manors and -tenements held direct from the king having become desolate and ruinous. In -1369 a petition states that "the king's ferms [rents] in every county of -England are greatly abated by the great mortalities." The parliament of -1376, the "good Parliament" so-called, is able to point the moral of its -petitions by frequent references to the pestilences "that have been in the -kingdom one after another," the pestilences "of people and servants," the -murrains of cattle, and "the failure of their corn and other fruits of the -earth." The same language recurs in the second parliament of Richard II. -in 1378 (the year after the poll-tax), and from that time until the end of -his reign, it becomes stereotyped in the petitions deprecating heavy -subsidies or excusing the smallness of the sums voted. - -The pestilence of 1375 would appear to have been considered as one of the -greater sort. The author of the _Eulogium_ reckons it the _pestis tertia_ -(passing over that of 1368-69). The season was one of great heat, there -was "grandis pestilentia" both in England and other countries, an infinity -of both sexes died, the mortality being so swift that the pope, "at the -instance of the cardinal of England" granted plenary remission to all -dying contrite and confessing their sins[410]. That looks like an -epidemic of true bubo-plague,--probably the _pestis quarta_ correctly -so-called[411]. - -In 1379 there was a great plague in the Northern parts, which were -stripped of their best men; the Scots made a raid, with the following -prayer on their lips: "God and Sen Mungo, Sen Ninian and Seynt Andrew -scheld us this day and ilka day fro Goddis grace, and the foule deth that -Ynglessh men dyene upon"--foul death being the name given to plague also -in 1349[412]. The northern counties send a petition to the parliament of -1379-80, that the king would "consider the very great hurt and damage -which they have suffered, and are still suffering, both by pestilence and -by the continual devastations of the Scots enemy[413]." - -In the parliament of 1381-82 there is a petition from the convent of -Salisbury as to want of money to repair the losses caused by the -pestilence, of which the tenants are nearly all dead, and by the murrain -of cattle. This is more than thirty years from the Black Death, and can -hardly refer, as some earlier petitions may have done, to the enduring -effects of that calamity. The sixth parliament of Richard II. (1382), has -two of the stereotyped petitions deprecating a heavy subsidy on the ground -of "the great poverty and disease" of the commons, through pestilence of -people, murrain of cattle, failure of crops, great floods, etc.[414] This -was the year after the Peasant Revolt, which had coincided with troubles -of various kinds. A Norwich chronicle, perhaps of contemporary authority, -enters, under the year 1382, a very pestilential fever in many places of -the country, and very extraordinary inundations of the fens[415]. In -London the epidemic of 1382 is said to have been "chiefly among boys and -girls[416]." A primitive English poem of the time has for its subject the -earthquake of 1382, and with that portent it associates not only the -Peasant's Rebellion but also "the pestilens[417]." - -The year 1383 was a bad one for the fruit, which was spoiled by "foetid -fogs, exhalations and various corruptions of the air": from eating of the -spoiled fruits many died, or incurred serious illness and -infirmities[418]. By another account, a great pestilence in Kent and other -parts of England destroyed many, sparing no age or sex. In Norfolk the -sickness that year is said to have been confined to young persons[419]. -This was only one of the occasions which might have been referred to in -'Piers Ploughman,' when the poor people thought to "poison Hunger" by bad -food. - -The next pestilence, that of 1390 and 1391, was so prolonged and so -serious as to be compared with the Great Mortality itself. It is called -the _pestis quinta_ by two annalists[420], and is described not without -some detail by several. It is clear that the seeds of disease were ready -to burst forth at various parts of the country; for we read that in 1389, -the king was in the south of England, and seeing some of his men -prostrated by sudden death, he returned to Windsor[421]. Another outburst -came the year after. Intense heat began in June and lasted until -September; great mortality ensued, the epidemic continuing in diverse -parts of England, but not everywhere, until Michaelmas; it cut off more -young than old, as well as several famous soldiers[422]. The St Albans -entry confirms this: "A great plague, especially of youths and children, -who died everywhere in towns and villages, in incredible and excessive -numbers[423]." After the epidemic there was scarcity, of which we have -special accounts from Norfolk[424]. But the heaviest mortality fell in the -year 1391. There was first of all scarcity, now in its second year, and -aggravated by six weeks of continual gloom in July and August. At the time -of the nuts, apples and other fruits of the kind, many poor people died of -dysentery, and the sickness would have been worse but for the laudable -care of the mayor of London who caused corn to be brought from over sea. -In Norfolk and many other counties the sickness was compared even to the -Great Mortality, and was probably a mixture of famine-pestilence with -bubo-plague. At York "eleven thousand" were said to have been buried[425]. -Another account says that the North suffered severely, and also the West, -and that the sickness lasted all summer[426]. Under the year 1393 one -annalist states that many died in Essex in September and October, "on the -pestilence setting in[427]." The next evidence comes from the Rolls of -Parliament; in the first parliament of Henry IV. (1399) a petition is -presented "that the king would graciously consider the great pestilence -which is in the northern parts," and send sufficient men to defend the -Scots marches. - -The first great outburst of plague in the fifteenth century falls -somewhere between 1405 and 1407. "So great pestilence," says the St Albans -annalist, under the year 1407, "had not been seen for many years." In -London "thirty thousand men and women" are reported to have died in a -short space; and "in country villages the sickness fell so heavily upon -the wretched peasants that many homes that had before been gladdened by a -numerous family were left almost empty[428]." But it is under the 7th of -Henry IV. (1405) that Hall's chronicle narrates how the king, to avoid the -city on account of the plague, sailed from Queenborough to a port in -Essex, and so to Plashey, "there to pass his time till the plague were -ceased" (p. 36). Another chronicle says that the plague of 1407 was mostly -in the West country. In that year, the 9th of Henry IV., there is a -petition from Ilchester in Somerset for a remission of dues "because the -town is so impoverished and desolate of people that the burgesses are -unable to pay the said ferme," and for the cancelling of all arrears due -since the 43rd year of Edward III. (1369). In the 11th of Henry IV. -(1410-11), the burgesses of Truro represent "that the said town is -impoverished by pestilence and the death of men, and by invasions and loss -by the enemy by sea, and by the surcharge of twelve lives, and by default -of inhabitants in the said town"--a petition apparently similar in terms -to one that had been submitted in the previous reign. In the 1st of Henry -IV. (1399), petitions of the same kind had been presented from Lincoln and -Yarmouth; the former was "in great part empty and uninhabited," while the -latter had "its houses vacant and void, owing to pestilence and other -things." - -For the year 1413 there is a brief entry that "numbers of Englishmen were -struck by plague and ceased to live[429]." A single chronicler mentions a -pestilence in Norfolk in 1420[430]; but the Rolls of Parliament bear -undoubted witness to a very severe prevalence of plague in the North about -the same time: a petition from the Marches in 1421 speaks of "great -numbers of persons dead by the great mortalities and pestilences which -have raged for three years past and still reign; where a hundred men used -to be there are not ten, and these of small account; where people of -position kept twenty men at arms they now keep only themselves"; the enemy -were making raids and food was scarce[431]. Another petition the same year -(9 Henry V.) states that "both by pestilence within the realm and wars -without there are not sufficient men of estate to hold the office of -sheriff[432]." That was shortly after Agincourt and the conquest of -France, when the fortunes of Henry V. were at their highest point. The -horrors of the siege of Rouen (1419) were a favourite subject with poets -of the time[433], but they were of a kind foreign to English experience in -that age, and, indeed, in all periods of our history, save that of the -Danish invasions. The Cromwellian Civil Wars, as we shall see, do indeed -furnish many instances of plague, and some of typhus fever, in besieged or -occupied towns; but, for the middle part of the fifteenth century, -including the period of the wars of York and Lancaster, there is no good -reason to suppose that fevers or other _morbi miseriae_, were rife among -the common people, least of all among the peasantry. - - -The Public Health in the Fifteenth Century. - -Our safest indications are got from the prices of commodities and the -rates of wages, and these, according to the most competent authority, -Thorold Rogers, were more favourable to the working class in the fifteenth -century than at other periods: "As the agriculturist throve in the -fifteenth century, so the mechanic and the artisan was also prosperous. -This was the age in which the property of the guilds was generally -acquired." On famines in particular, I shall quote one other passage, -which entirely confirms the view that I had independently stated in the -first chapter when speaking of Ergotism: - - "Famine, in the strict sense of the word, has rarely occurred in - England, owing to the practice which the inhabitants of this island - have persistently maintained of living mainly on the dearest kind of - corn.... The people lived abundantly, and, except when extraordinary - scarcity occurred, regularly on the best provision which could be - procured[434]." - -One such period of extraordinary scarcity all over England fell in the -years 1438-39. The chronicle of Croyland says that there were three wet -harvests in succession, that famine had been almost constant for two -years, and that the people were reduced to eating dried herbs and -roots[435]. That would have been a famine of the old kind, like those of -1258 and 1315, wheat having touched 20_s._ But it should not lead us to -suppose that the disastrous period of the end of Edward III.'s reign and -of the reign of Richard II. was continued throughout the fifteenth -century. It is true that the records of that century are scantier than for -earlier periods; the monastic chronicles have all ceased, except those of -St Albans and Croyland, and the citizens' diaries, which took their place, -have hardly begun. It is possible that a fuller record would have shown a -greater prevalence of distress throughout the country. It is probably -owing to the scantiness of the history that the views of the fifteenth -century range from the extreme of optimism to the extreme of pessimism. -Where little is known, much may be imagined. Thus, a recent writer on -_England in the Fifteenth Century_[436], says that "all attempts to -specify the years of scarcity would only mislead"; and again: "There is -hardly any period of five years during that time [15th century] without -these ghastly records." Another recent writer[437] remarks upon the -fifteenth century being called a time of rude plenty, and sets against -that "the famines, the plagues, the skin-diseases, the miserable quality -of the food, the insecurity of life and property, the hovels in which the -people lived, and the tyranny and oppression of a time of unsettled -government." It is needless to controvert the merely subjective impression -in an author's mind. But, in order to clear our ideas, let us take these -things one by one. What were firstly the famines? There is no great one -but that of 1438-39, which was due to a succession of wet harvests, and -was equally severe in Scotland and in France, having in them caused -famine-sickness as well as plague. Of the plagues, which were certainly no -worse than in the Elizabethan and Stuart times, I shall speak in detail -almost at once. Of the skin-diseases, there is nowhere a word said: -another writer[438] specifies leprosy as afflicting England "all over the -country" in the fifteenth century, whereas it can be shown that the -prevalence of that disease, such as it had ever been in England, had -almost ceased, and its sentimental vogue passed, in the reign of Edward -III. The miserable quality of the food and the wretched hovels have -certainly no special relevancy to the period[439]; on the contrary, the -picture that we get of the manor of Castle Combe in the fifteenth century -is that of a prosperous community, although not a highly moral one. As to -insecurity of life and property, and oppression of government, there seems -to be some illusion because the time was that of the wars of York and -Lancaster. But we have the significant observation of Philip de Comines, a -contemporary French statesman who kept his eye on the state of other -countries; writing of the effects of civil war, he says:-- - - "England has this peculiar grace that neither the country, nor the - people, nor the houses are wasted or demolished; but the calamities - and misfortunes of the war fall only upon the soldiers and especially - the nobility, of whom they are more than ordinarily jealous: for - nothing is perfect in this world." - -The truth seems to be that the middle part of the fifteenth century was -really the time "ere England's woes began, when every rood of ground -maintained its man," and that the Golden Age came to an end as soon as the -dynastic and aristocratic quarrel was ended, and the nobles left free to -turn their attention to their lapsing feudal rights. It is then that we -begin to hear of enclosures, of adding house to house and field to field, -of huge sheep-farms with no labourers on the soil, and of deserted -villages. Goldsmith meant it of his own time; but Auburn flourishing -belonged to the fifteenth century, and Auburn deserted was a common -English experience in the time of Henry VIII. It is just because the -fifteenth century is bounded on either side by periods of known distress -among the commons, and is itself without a history, that one thinks of it -as happy; and that view of it is borne out by the economic history which -has been laboriously constructed for it. - -So much being premised of the country's well-being at large, we may now -return to the particular records of epidemics of plague. - - -Chronology of Plagues in the Fifteenth Century. - -With the exception of an undoubted reference to influenza epidemic all -over England in 1427 (a year of its prevalence in France also), which I -shall postpone to a future chapter, the history down to the arrival of the -sweating sickness in 1485, is concerned almost exclusively with notices of -plague, and of plague mostly in the towns. It cannot be maintained that -rural districts were exempt, or that some great epidemics of plague did -not fall on town and country alike. Thus, the St Albans annalist, under -the year 1431, has an entry of "pestilence at Codycote and divers places -of this domain in this year." Again, in 1439, the Rolls of Parliament -contain a petition to the king "how that a sickness called the Pestilence -universally through this your realm more commonly reigneth than hath been -usual before this time, the which is an infirmity most infective, and the -presence of such so infect must be eschewed, as by noble Fisisseanes and -wise Philosofors before this time plainly it hath been determined, and as -experience daily showeth"--therefore to omit the ceremony of kissing the -king in doing knightly service, "and the homage to be as though they -kissed you." That may have been a plague both of town and country during -famine, comparable to the epidemic of 1407, which, as "Walsingham" -expressly says, was severely felt in the homes of the peasantry as well as -in London. But plague henceforth is seldom universal; it becomes more and -more a disease of the towns, and when it does occur in the country, it is -for the most part at some few limited spots. A Paston letter of the years -between 1461 and 1466 gives us a glimpse of the sort of the incidence of -plague in country places, and of the avoidance of such infected spots, -which we shall find often mentioned in the documents of the sixteenth and -seventeenth centuries[440]. There is, of course, no means of estimating -the frequency of plague in these almost sporadic circumstances. The -disease must have had its seats of election in the country, but we may -safely conclude that these, after the Black Death and the recurrences -thereof down, say, to 1407, were much fewer than in the towns. One -significant piece of evidence comes from the great monastery of -Canterbury. Among its records is an obituary, on twenty sheets, of all the -monks from 1286 to 1517. Out of a hundred cases taken without selection -from the record, there died, of pestilence, 33; of phthisis, 10; of -chronic diseases, 29. "Pestilence" appears to mean specifically -bubo-plague; for we find besides, among the sample hundred, two deaths -from flux, one of these corpses having been buried immediately _propter -infexionem_. The inference, under correction from further inquiry, would -be that one-third of the deaths in the monastery of Canterbury during the -first half of the reign of plague in England were from that disease. And -that was in a monastery which, in the Black Death itself, is reported, in -the same record, to have lost "only four" out of a membership of about -eighty[441]. - -It remains to enumerate briefly the known instances of plague in London or -other towns, from the last date given (1420) down to the beginning of the -Tudor period (1485). Its prevalence "in England," but more probably in -London only, in 1426, comes out in a letter from the Senate of Venice -cautioning the captain of the Flanders galleys and the vice-captain of the -London galleys[442]. We hear also of that plague in London owing to the -fact that certain Scotsmen of rank, hostages for the ransom of the king of -Scots, died of the plague in London. An envoy who proceeded to Scotland on -12th March, 1427, was instructed to ask that the dead hostages be replaced -by others of equal rank; and if the king of Scots objected on the ground -that they had died because they had been kept in places where the late -pestilence raged, notwithstanding their request to be removed, the envoy -was to say that the hostages had been kept in London, where the dukes of -Bedford and Gloucester and all other lords of the Council remained during -the time; and that the hostages were "neither pinned nor barred up" in any -house, but went at large in the city, and might have taken any measures -they pleased for their own preservation. It appears, however, that the -council removed from the city, and that the courts were adjourned, at a -stage of the epidemic subsequent to the deaths of the Scots. The last plea -of the envoy was that, supposing the pestilence had prevailed throughout -England, the king was not therefore bound to send the hostages out of -England; from which hypothetical construction, we may conclude that the -epidemic was special to London--one of a long series requiring the king's -Court, the Parliament, and the Law Courts to be adjourned[443]. - -In 1433, the Parliament which met at Westminster on the 8th July, was -prorogued on the 15th August, on account of the _gravis pestilentia_ which -began to arise in London and the suburbs[444]. A London chronicler enters, -under the 12th of Henry VI. (1433) "a grete pestilence and a grete frost," -a conjunction that would be interesting if the hard winter had -preceded[445]. The plague revived in London in the following autumn; for, -on the 27th October, 1434, the Privy Council ordered all pleas then -pending to be continued from the morrow of All Souls to the octaves of St -Hilary on account of the epidemic[446]. After three years, in 1437, the -Chief Justice of the Common Pleas paid a visit to St Albans Abbey and -remained there some time, "on account of the epidemic plague which was -then reigning in the city of London[447]." Two years after, 1439, comes -the entry in the Rolls of Parliament, already quoted, with reference to -omitting the ceremony of kissing the king, because "a sickness called the -Pestilence universally through this your realm more commonly reigneth than -hath been usual before this time, the which is an infirmity most -infective[448]." Thus we have in the decade from 1430 to 1440 no fewer -than four distinct outbreaks of plague, three of them confined to the city -of London, and one of them, that of 1439, general throughout the realm. -The last was "a sickness called the pestilence," which should mean the -bubo-plague. The year was one of great distress abroad, many thousands -having died in Paris. It was a year of famine in Scotland, where the -disease was undoubtedly dysentery in part; but the information from -Scotland (given in the sequel) points to the true plague supervening on -the other. There was famine in England at the time when it was in France -and in Scotland, so that the type of sickness may have been, in England -also, fever and dysentery first and plague afterwards. - -In 1444, on the 5th of June, the Rolls contain the entry that grave -pestilence began to arise. A severe pestilence is reported at Oxford in -1448[449]. On the 30th May, 1449, Parliament is adjourned to Winchester -to avoid "the corrupt and infected airs" of Westminster. On the 6th -November of the same year it adjourns to Ludgate, in the city of London, -owing to the infection of the air in Westminster. The infected state of -Westminster and other places around is again the subject of an entry on -the 4th December, with this addition: "it has been sufficiently decreed as -to avoiding and extinguishing the said corrupt and infectious air." About -three months later, on 30th March, 1450, Parliament adjourns to Leicester -on account of the insalubrity of the air at Westminster. In 1452 it -adjourns on 20th November to Reading for the same reason, but is soon -after adjourned to the 11th February, owing to plague in Reading -itself:--"de magna mortalitate in dicta villa de Redyng jam regnante." -These years must have been a really severe plague-period, for we find in -1454, a reference in the Paston Letters to the alarm caused by the plague -in London. Wm. Paston writes to John Paston, 6 September: "Sergeant-at-law -Billing came to London this week. He sent for me and asked me how I fared. -I told him, here is pestilence, and said I fared the better he was in good -hele, for it was noised that he was dead.... Here is great pestilence. I -purpose to flee into the country[450]." - -From 1454 (and the year following in Scotland) there is a clear interval -of ten years without mention of plague in the not very complete records of -the time. With the year 1464 there began a series of outbreaks of plague -which appear to have lasted in one part of the country or another with few -intermissions until 1478. This plague-period is said to have been foretold -in a remarkable prophecy. In the year 1462 a boy at Cambridge, while -walking in a lane between King's College and the adjoining buildings of -Clare and Trinity Halls, met an old man with a long beard, who addressed -him thus: "Go now and tell to anyone that within these two years there -will be such pestilence, and famine, and slaughter of men, as no one -living has seen." Having said this he disappeared. Doubts however, were -at once thrown on the reality of these words; for the boy, on being -questioned by Master Myleton, doctor of theology, and others, said that he -neither saw the old man walking on the ground nor heard him speak[451]. - -The authentic intelligence of plague in England in 1464 is contained in a -letter to the Seignory of Venice from Bruges, dated 5th October, 1464, to -the effect that some Venetian merchants have arrived from London, which -they had quitted on the 26th September. They say the plague is at work -there at the rate of two hundred [deaths] per diem, "and thus writes -[also] Carlo Ziglio." In April next year, 1465, we hear of it still in -London, through a casual reference in a letter written by one of the -Paston family[452]; and as prevailing all over England, through a formal -entry in the chronicle of Croyland, the last of the monastic records which -continued to be kept. There was an infection of the air, we read, in the -whole of England, so that many thousands of people of every age came to -their death suddenly, like sheep slaughtered[453]. - -The very next year, 1466, Parliament is adjourned from Westminster on -account of the infection in London, to meet at Reading. Next summer, 1st -July, 1467, there is another adjournment to Reading (6 November), because -of the heat and because the plague was beginning to reign, by which -certain members of the House of Commons had been cut off. After an -interval of four years we hear of plague, in a Paston letter, and by a -Southwell record. On 2 August, 1471, the residentiary canons of Southwell -Minster vote themselves leave of absence for a month "quia regnat morbus -pestiferus in villa Southwell, et furit excessiv morbus pestiferus[454]." -On 13 September, 1471, Sir John Paston writes from near Winchester: "I -cannot hear by pilgrims that pass the country, nor none other man that -rideth or goeth any country, that any borough town in England is free from -that sickness. God cease it when it please him!" Apart from London the -English town which has the most disastrous record for this period is -Hull[455]. The plague was so severe there, in three epidemics close -together, as almost to ruin the place. It broke out in 1472, and had swept -off a great number of the inhabitants before the end of the year, -including the mayor. In 1476 it broke out afresh, causing a great -mortality. In 1478 it was more violent than ever, the number of its -victims being given as 1580, including the mayor and all his family; the -people fled the town, the church was shut up, and the streets deserted and -grass-grown. The epidemic appears to have been, as usual, an autumnal one, -ceasing at the approach of winter. Meanwhile, in 1474, there is mention of -a serious prevalence of plague in the Royal household, as well as -elsewhere in London. The weather of the previous autumn, 1473, had been -remarkable. Labourers are said to have died in the harvest-field from the -excessive heat, and "fervues, axes, and the bloody flyx" (fevers, agues, -and dysentery) to have been universal in divers parts of England; but -there was no dearth. The unusual character of that season, or of the -season preceding, was indicated by the bursting forth of underground -reservoirs of water[456]. - -The great plague of this period in London should most probably be placed -under the years 1478-9. Merely to show the difficulties of the chronology -it may be worth while citing the various accounts. The Greyfriars' -Chronicle says, under the year 17 Edward IV., that the term was "deferred -from Ester to Michaelmas because of the grete pestylens[457]." The 17th of -Edward IV. was 1477. But Fabyan, who was now a citizen of London -(afterwards sheriff and alderman), enters it under the civic year 1478-79, -or the year which begins for him with the new lord mayor taking office on -30 October. His words are: "This year was great mortality and death in -London and many other parts of this realm, the which began in the latter -end of Senii [September] in the preceding year and continued in this year -till the beginning of November, in the which passed time died innumerable -people in the said city and many places elsewhere[458]." Grafton says, -under the year 1478, that the chief mortality fell in four months of great -heat, during which the pestilence was so fierce and quick that fifteen -years' war had not consumed a third as many people[459]. To reconcile -these dates we should have to take the year of the Greyfriars' Chronicle -as 1478, so that the adjournment of the term from Easter to Michaelmas, -might suit the four months in Grafton. At the same time, Fabyan's -statement that the plague "continued in this year till November," is -correct for 1479. Sir John Paston writes home from London, 29 Oct. 1479, -of his danger from the sickness; he died there on 15th November; and his -brother, who came up from Norfolk to bury him, writes to his mother, who -wished him "to haste out of the air that he was in," that the sickness is -"well ceased" in December. - -The year 1478, the first of two plague-seasons in London, was also a year -of plague at Hull, and at Newcastle and Southwell. The account for -Newcastle, in its annals under 1478, is merely that great numbers died of -the plague[460]. At Southwell, on 5 July, 1478, the canons residentiary -again take leave of absence for the summer, "because it may be probably -estimated that the dire pestilential affliction in the town of Southwell -will continue, and because the venerable men, with their domestics, have a -just fear of incurring the infection of the said pestiferous -affliction[461]." Next year, 1479, an "incredible number" died of plague -at Norwich[462], and at villages like Swainsthorp, where "they have died -and been sick nigh in every house[463]." - -Thus in two years, 1478-79, we hear of an epidemic of plague of the first -rank in London, an epidemic most severe for the size of the place, at -Hull, and epidemics at Southwell, Newcastle and Norwich. This is not -unlike the plague-years that we often find in the centuries following. -Whether it be that we are merely coming to a time of better records, or -that the disease itself was getting worse in English towns, these later -years of Edward IV. are comparable to plague-periods under the Tudors and -the Stuarts. - -The period from the Black Death of 1349 to the reign of Edward IV. -witnesses a considerable change in the habits, so to speak, of plague in -England. In the earlier part of that period, the epidemics of -"pestilence"--although they were not all of plague or wholly of -plague--are general throughout England, like the great mortality itself -but on a smaller scale. As late as 1407, or perhaps 1439, we still hear of -"the disease called the pestilence" being universal and in the homes of -the peasantry. The extent of the sickness in 1465, or even the type of it, -is not sufficiently known. From that time onwards town and country are -contrasted in the matter of plague; it becomes usual to flee to the -country so as to escape the pestilential air in town in the summer heats, -and the unwholesomeness of the London air becomes on numerous occasions a -real reason, or a pretext, for the adjournment of Parliament. All the -while, the plague was the lineal descendant of the Black Death,--a virus -so potent on its first entry into English soil as to overrun every parish -of the land. - - -Plague and other pestilences in Scotland and Ireland, 1349-1475. - -The materials for the history of plague in Scotland, including the Black -Death and subsequent outbreaks down to the end of the medieval period, are -much fewer than for England. From the English chroniclers (Knighton and Le -Baker) we learn that the Black Death in the autumn of 1349 extended from -the northern counties to the Scots army in the Forest of Selkirk. -According to Fordoun, plague would have been general in Scotland in 1350; -but as he includes in his reference "several years before and after" and -"divers parts of the world," his statement that nearly a third part of the -human race paid the debt of nature is perhaps a mere echo of the general -estimate and without reference specially to Scotland[464]. His next -general reference to pestilence is under the year 1362, when the same -kind of disease and the same extent of mortality as in 1350 occurred -throughout all Scotland[465]. But as he says elsewhere that the visit of -David, king of Scots, to Aberdeenshire in 1361, when he took Kildrummy -Castle from the earl of Mar, was determined in the first instance by the -prevalence of plague in the southern part of his kingdom[466], it may be -inferred that the epidemic had begun late in that year in the south, -coincident with the _pestis secunda_ of England, and had been interrupted -by the coming on of winter, as in the first epidemic of 1349 and 1350. The -next mortality recorded by Fordoun he names the fourth (_quarta -mortalitas_) and assigns to 1401[467]. The question arises as to the -third; and it appears that there were indeed two plague-years in Scotland -between 1362 and 1401--namely, 1380 and 1392, both of them corresponding -nearly to great plagues in the north of England. In the former year sir -John Lyon, lord of Glamis, was unable to hold his court as auditor of the -exchequer in certain places owing to the plague[468]. In 1392, also, the -custumars of Haddington, Peebles, and Dumbarton did not attend the -"chamberlain ayres" on account of the pestilence[469]. In 1402 (not in -1401, as Fordoun has it), the custumars of Stirling were absent from the -audit by reason of the plague[470]; and in the same financial year (10 -July, 1402, to 18 July, 1403), only one bailie from Dundee attended the -audit at Perth, the others being dead in the pestilence[471]. - -For a whole generation there is no documentary evidence of plague in -Scotland. But Fordoun has two entries of a disease which he calls -_pestilentia volatilis_--it can hardly have been plague and may have been -influenza--the one in 1430, having begun at Edinburgh in February, and the -other in 1432 at Haddington[472]. - -Under the year 1439, an old chronicle, _Ane Addicioun of Scottis -Cornicklis and Deidis_ records one of those seasons of famine and -dysentery or lientery, with some more sudden sickness, which have been -described for England in a former chapter. "The samen time there was in -Scotland a great dearth, for the boll of wheat was at 40_s._, and the boll -of ait meal 30_s._; and verily the dearth was sae great that there died a -passing [number of] people for hunger. And als the land-ill, the wame-ill, -was so violent, that there died mae that year than ever there died, owther -in pestilence, or yet in ony other sickness in Scotland. And that samen -year the pestilence came in Scotland, and began at Dumfries, and it was -callit the _Pestilence but Mercy_, for there took it nane that ever -recoverit, but they died within twenty-four hours[473]." Here the -"land-ill" or "wame-ill" (dysentery or lientery) is contrasted within "the -pestilence," which latter is said to have supervened the same year, -beginning at Dumfries and proving peculiarly deadly. This was a year of -plague, said to be "universal," in England (where famine also was severe), -and of an enormous mortality in France. - -The continuator of Fordoun records under the year 1455 (James II.) a great -pestilential mortality of men through the whole kingdom, an epidemic which -would be again a year behind the corresponding plague in England[474]. We -hear of it next definitely in the year 1475, which falls within the series -of plague-years at Hull, and elsewhere in the southern part of the island. -On account of an outbreak of pestilence the king of Scots adjourned the -meeting of the estates from September 1475 to the Epiphany following[475], -when the Parliament actually met. The same year there was a -plague-hospital on Inchkeith, in the Firth of Forth, and not for the first -time; ten marts from the Orkneys were landed there for the quarantined -patients[476]. - -The references to plague in Scotland begin again about the year 1498; but -these, according to the division of our subject, will come into another -chapter. - -The references to plagues in Ireland after the invasion of 1349 are -extremely meagre; but they make it probable that outbursts of bubo-plague -recurred at intervals, as well as occasional epidemics of flux and other -diseases brought on by scarcity or bad corn. The continuators of Clyn's -Kilkenny annals enumerate various _pestes_--_secunda_, _tertia_, _quarta_ -and _quinta_--just as the English annalists do. The _secunda_ falls in -1362, its season in Scotland also[477]. The _tertia_ is given under 1373; -but also under 1370[478]. The _quarta_ is in 1382 (or 1385), and the -_quinta_ in 1391. But there is little or no independent evidence that this -chronology, originally made for England, is really good for Ireland also. -The only other entry, until the Tudor period, is "fames magna in Hibernia" -in 1410[479]. - - - - -CHAPTER V. - -THE SWEATING SICKNESS. - - -The strange disease which came to be known all over Europe as _sudor -Anglicus_, or the English Sweat, was a new type or species of infection -first seen in the autumn of 1485. Polydore Virgil, an Italian scholar and -man of affairs, who arrived in England in 1501, became, in effect, the -court historian of Henry VII.'s reign, and of the events which led up to -the overthrow of Richard III. at Bosworth Field on the 22nd of August -1485; his account of the movements of Henry Tudor, from his landing at -Milford Haven on Saturday the 6th of August until his triumphal entry into -London on Saturday the 27th of the same month, is so minute that he must -be assumed to have had access to journals written at the time. Polydore's -account of the sweat begins with the statement that it showed itself on -the first descent of Henry upon the island--_sub primum descensum in -insulam_[480]. The last continuator of the ancient chronicle of Croyland -abbey, who was still making his entries when Bosworth Field was fought, -not far from Croyland, and who closed his annals the year after, records -an incident which seems to show that the sweat had been prevalent before -the battle. Thomas, lord Stanley, lay at Atherstone, not far from -Bosworth, with five thousand men nominally in the service of Richard, and -was summoned by the king to bring up his force before the battle. He -excused himself, says the Croyland annalist, on the ground that he was -suffering from the sweating sickness[481]. I shall examine that evidence, -and the general statement of Polydore Virgil, in a later part of this -chapter. Meanwhile we may take it that the outbreak of the sweat was -somehow associated in popular rumour with the victorious expedition of -Henry Tudor. Writers on the English sweat hitherto have had to depend on -the somewhat meagre and not always consistent statements of annalists for -their knowledge of its first authentic occurrence. I am now able to adduce -the testimony of a manuscript treatise on the new epidemic, written by a -physician while it was still prevalent in London, and elaborately -dedicated to Henry VII., if not composed by his order[482]. The author is -Thomas Forrestier, styled in the title a Doctor of Medicine and a native -of Normandy, tarrying in London. Whatever his relation with the Tudor -court may have been, his name does not occur in the patents as one of the -king's physicians. It appears, indeed, that he had got into trouble in -London some two years after this date; for, on the 28th of January, 1488, -the king granted to him a general pardon, "with pardon for all escapes and -evasions out of the Tower of London or elsewhere, and remissions of -forfeiture of all lands and goods[483]." Probably he went back after this -to his native Normandy: at all events, he is next heard of in practice at -Rouen, where he published, in 1490, a Latin treatise on the plague, one of -the first productions of the printing-press of that city. - -It is in the opening sentences of his printed book on the plague[484], and -not in his manuscript on the sweat, that he fixes the date when the latter -began. The sweating sickness, he says, first unfurled its banners in -England in the city of London, on the 19th of September, 1485; and then -follow in the text certain astrological signs, representing the positions -or conjunctions of heavenly bodies on that date. The London chronicles of -the time assign dates for the beginning of the epidemic which differ -somewhat from Dr Forrestier's. One of them, a manuscript of the Cotton -collection, by an anonymous citizen of London, records the entry of Henry -VII. into the capital on the 27th of August, and proceeds: "And the XXVII -day of September began the sweating syknes in London, whereof died Thomas -Hyll that yer mayor, for whom was chosen sir William Stokker, knyght, -which died within V days after of the same disease. Then for him was -chosen John Warde.... And this yere died of that sickness, besides ii -mayors above rehersed, John Stokker, Thomas Breten, Richard Pawson, Thomas -Norland, aldermen, and many worshipful commoners[485]." In the better -known but not always equally full chronicle of Fabyan, who was then a -citizen, and afterwards sheriff and alderman, the date of Henry's -reception by the mayor and citizens at Hornsey Park is given as the 28th -of August, the reference to the sweat being as follows: "And upon the XI -day of Octobre next following, than beynge the swetynge sykeness of newe -begun, dyed the same Thomas Hylle, mayor, and for him was chosen sir -William Stokker, knyght and draper, which dyed also of the sayd sickness -shortly after." The only other particular date extant for the sweat of -1485 comes from the country: Lambert Fossedike, abbot of Croyland, died -there of the sweating sickness, after an illness of eighteen hours, on the -14th of October[486]. - -Apart from the hitherto unknown manuscript of Forrestier, these are the -only contemporary references. Stow, who must have had access to some -journal of the time, says that the king entered London on the 27th August -and that "the sweating began the 21st September, and continued till the -end of October, of the which a wonderful number died," including the two -mayors and four other aldermen, as above. Hall's chronicle, which has been -the principal source used by Hecker and others, reproduces the account of -the sweat by Polydore Virgil almost word for word; and Polydore's account -was certainly not begun until after 1504 and was not published until 1531. -Bernard Andr, historiographer and poet laureate of Henry VII., was -present at the entry into London on the 27th August; but he gives no -particulars of the sweat of that autumn, in his 'Life of Henry VII.,' -although it is probable that his 'Annals of Henry VII.' would have -furnished some information had they not been lost for the year 1485, as it -is to his extant annals for the year 1508 that we owe almost all that is -known of the second epidemic of the sweat in that year. The state papers -of the time do not contain a single reference to the epidemic, although it -was so active in the city of London as to carry off two mayors and four -aldermen within a few days, and was besides, as Polydore Virgil says, "a -new kind of disease, from which no former age had suffered, as all agree." -London was full of people, including some who had stood by Henry Tudor in -France, others who had joined his standard in Wales, and still others who -came to do homage to the new dynasty; and there is evidence remaining of -hundreds of suitors, great and small, attending the court to receive the -reward of their services in patents and grants, as well as evidence in the -wardrobe accounts of the bustle of preparing for the Coronation on the -30th of October. But in all the extant state records of those busy weeks, -there is not a scrap of writing to show that such a thing as a pestilence -was raging within the narrow bounds of the city and under the walls of the -royal palace in the Tower. It remains, therefore, to make what we can out -of the medical essay which Dr Forrestier wrote for the occasion. - -In his later reference of 1490, he says that more than fifteen thousand -were cut off in sudden death, as if by the visitation of God, many dying -while walking in the streets, without warning and without being confessed. -That number of the dead need not be taken as at all exact: nor does it -appear whether it is meant for London or for the whole country. But the -dramatic suddenness of the attack is illustrated by particular cases in -his original treatise of 1485, although deaths so sudden are unheard of in -any infection:-- - - "We saw two prestys standing togeder and speaking togeder, and we saw - both of them dye sodenly. Also in die--proximi we se the wyf of a - taylour taken and sodenly dyed. Another yonge man walking by the - street fell down sodenly. Also another gentylman ryding out of the - cyte [date given] dyed. Also many others the which were long to - rehearse we have known that have dyed sodenly." Gentlemen and - gentlewomen, priests, righteous men, merchants, rich and poor, were - among the victims of this sudden death. Of the symptoms he says: "And - this sickness cometh with a grete swetyng and stynkyng, with rednesse - of the face and of all the body, and a contynual thurst, with a grete - hete and hedache because of the fumes and venoms." He mentions also - "pricking the brains," and that "some appear red and yellow, as we - have seen many, and in two grete ladies that we saw, the which were - sick in all their bodies and they felt grete pricking in their bodies. - And some had black spots, as it appeared in our frere (?) Alban, a - noble leech on whose soul God have mercy!" - -Both in his pathology and in his copious appendix of formulae he directs -attention to the heart, as the organ that was suddenly overpowered by the -pestilential venoms. Many died, he would have us believe, because they -listened to the false leeches, who professed to know the disease and to -have treated it before. A considerable part of his space is occupied with -the denunciation of these irregular practitioners, their greed and their -ignorance,--a theme which is a common one in the prefaces of Elizabethan -medical works also. It appears that the false leeches wrote and put -letters upon gates and church doors, or upon poles, promising to help the -people in their sickness. They were also injudicious in the choice of -their remedies--some ordaining powders and medicines that are hot until -the thirtieth degree and over, others ale or wine, or hot spices, "and -many other medicines they have, the which, the best of them, is nothing -worth." These false leeches knew not the causes,--their complexions, their -ages, the regions, the times of the year, the climate,--evidently the -astrological lore which gave Chaucer's physician, a century earlier, his -academical standing or his superiority to the vulgar quacks of his day. -Those who fell into the hands of quacks, Forrestier implies, had an -indifferent chance. Many died for want of help and good guiding; whereas -many a one was healed that had received a medicine in due order, "and if -he purge himself before." The clearly written and fully detailed formulae -at the end of his essay are so far evidence that Forrestier did not -traffic in secret remedies. The first part of the essay is occupied with -the doctrine of causes--the nigh causes and the far. The far causes were -astrological; but the nigh causes, although they are altogether inadequate -to account for sweating sickness as a special type, and are indeed little -else than the stock list of nuisances quoted in earlier treatises upon the -plague, are suggestive enough of the condition of London streets and -houses at the time, and will be referred to in a later part of the -chapter. - -The account of the treatment given by Polydore Virgil, and from him copied -into Hall's chronicle, is probably the experience of later epidemics of -the sweat, although it comes into the history under the year 1485. The -evil effects of throwing off the bed-clothes, and of drinking great -draughts of cold water, and, on the other hand, the benefits of lying -still with the hands and feet well covered, are among the topics discussed -in letters during the epidemic of 1517, one of those which came within the -historian's own experience in England. But it is clear from Forrestier's -essay of 1485 that there were great differences in the regimen of patients -in the sweat during its very first season, some adopting the hot and -cordial treatment, others, perhaps, the cooling, just as in the smallpox -long after. Bernard Andr implies that there was a correct and an -incorrect regimen also in the second epidemic of 1508, and there is -evidence of conflicting advice in the letters on the sweats of 1517 and -1528. If there were any better regimen in the later epidemics than in the -earlier, as Polydore Virgil says there was, it was merely the wisdom of -avoiding extremes. Hence the misleading character of his remark that, -after an immense loss of life, "a remedy was found, ready to hand for -everyone." Bacon in his 'Reign of Henry VII.' took from Polydore almost -word for word all that he says of the "remedy" of the sweat; and the -unreal word-spinning thus begun was carried to its full development by -bishop Sprat, the historian of the Royal Society (1667), who mistakes the -"remedy" for some _arcanum_ or potent drug, gives my lord Verulam the -credit of preserving the prescription for the use of posterity, and -adduces it as an encouragement to the Royal Society to seek among the -secrets of nature for an equally efficacious "antidote" to the plague. - -The language of historians is that the sweat of 1485 spread over the whole -kingdom. We hear of it definitely at Oxford[487] where it "lasted but a -month or six weeks" and is said to have cut off many of the scholars -before they could disperse. It is heard of also with equal definiteness at -Croyland abbey. There is also mention of it in a contemporary calendar of -the mayor of Bristol, but without any special reference to that city[488]. -Beyond these notices, there appears to be nothing to show that the sweat -went all through England in the late autumn or early winter of 1485. But -we may take the following passage by Forrestier, in the dedication of his -tract to the king, as expressing the state of matters, with perhaps some -exaggeration: - - "When that thy highness and thy great power is vexed and troubled with - divers sickness, and thy lordships and almost the middle part of thy - realm with the venomous fever of pestilence, and, by the reason of - that, young and old and of all manner of ages, with divers wailings - and sadness they are stricken: therefore, excellent and noble prince, - we are moved with every love and duty, and not for no lucre neither - covetyse, to ordain a short governing against this foresaid - fever[489]." - - -The Second Sweat in 1508. - -After the first outburst of the sweat in 1485 had subsided, probably -before winter was well begun, nothing more is heard of it for twenty-three -years. It reappeared in 1508, a third time in 1517, a fourth time in 1528, -and for the last time in 1551. With each successive outbreak, our -information becomes less meagre, while the epidemic of 1551 actually -called forth an English printed book by Dr Caius, the epidemic of 1528 -having called forth a whole crop of foreign writings on its spreading to -the continent (for the first and only time) in the year following (1529). -As the nature, causes, and favouring circumstances of the sweat cannot -profitably be dealt with except on a review of its whole history, it will -be necessary to take up at once and together the four subsequent epidemics -of it in this country, leaving the intercurrent and probably much more -disastrous epidemics of bubo-plague, during the same period, as well as -the great invasion of syphilis in 1494-6, to be chronicled apart. - -Our knowledge of the second outbreak of the sweat, in 1508[490], comes -almost exclusively from Bernard Andr, whose _Annals of Henry VII._[491] -are fortunately preserved for that year (as they are also for 1504-5). -Under the date of July, 1508, he says that some of the household of the -Lord Treasurer were seized with the sweat, and died of it, "and everywhere -in this city there die not a few." In August public prayers were made at -St Paul's on account of the plague of sweat. In the same month the king's -movements from place to place in the country round London are described as -determined by the prevalence of the sweat. From Hatfield, whither he had -gone to visit his mother on the 9th August, he went to Wanstead, where -certain of his household "sweated;" on that account the king moved to -Barking, and thence to other places about the 14th. He avoided Greenwich -and Eltham, in both which places the chief personages of the royal palaces -"had sweated," so much did the sickness then rage in all places (_per -omnia loca_). Some of the king's personal attendants appear to have caught -the infection; nor did it avail, says Andr, to run away or to follow the -chase, _quoniam mors omnia vincit_. Other visits were paid down to the -17th August, and a strict edict was issued that no one from London was to -come near the court, nor anyone to repair to the city, under penalties -specified. The only one near the king's person who died of it was lord -Graystock, a young Cumberland noble. The Lord Privy Seal and the Lord -Chamberlain were both attacked but recovered; doctor Symeon, the dean of -the Chapel Royal, died of it. There appears to have been a good deal of -the sickness in various places, but many recovered, says Andr, with good -tending. The king occupied himself with hunting the stag in the forests at -Stratford, Eltham and other places round London. - -From the provinces there is one item of information relating to -Chester[492]: in the summer of 1507, it is said, the sweating sickness -destroyed 91 in three days, of whom only four were women. At Oxford in -1508, or the year before Henry VII.'s death, there was a sore pestilence -which caused the dispersion of divers students; but it is not called the -sweat[493]. - - -The Third Sweat in 1517. - -Except for a single reference to the sweat in 1511, nothing is heard of it -between the autumn of 1508 and the summer of 1517. The reference in 1511 -occurs in a letter of Erasmus, from Queens' College, Cambridge, dated 25th -August, in which he says that his health is still indifferent _a sudore -illo_. This may possibly refer to the lingering effects of an attack in -1508, or to the influenza of 1510; and as all the other references in 1511 -are to plague, and to alarms of plague, it may be doubted if the sweating -sickness had really been prevalent in England in that year, or at any time -between 1508 and 1517. We begin to hear of it definitely in the summer of -the latter year. We have now reached a period from which numerous letters, -despatches and other state papers have come down[494]. Among the most -useful of these for our purpose are the despatches of the Venetian -ambassador and the apostolic nuncio from London, the letters of Pace to -Wolsey when Henry VIII. was in the country and the cardinal not with him, -the letters of Erasmus, sir Thomas More and others. - -The first that we hear of sickness in London in 1517 is from a letter of -the 24th June, written by a cardinal of Arragon to Wolsey, from Calais; -the cardinal, who was travelling like a noble, with a train of forty -horses, had intended to visit London, but was waiting on the other side -owing to a rumour that the sickness was prevalent in London. It is -probable that this rumour had referred to the standing infection of -English towns in summer and autumn, the bubo-plague; for it is not until -five weeks later that we hear of the sweating sickness under its proper -name. - -On the 1st of August the nuncio writes from London to the marquis of -Mantua that a disease is broken out here causing sudden death within six -hours; it is called the sweating sickness; an immense number die of it. On -the 6th of August he occupies the greater part of a letter of three pages -with an account of it. To some it proved fatal in twelve hours, to others -in six, and to others in four; it is an easy death. Most patients are -seized when lying down, but some when on foot, and even a very few when -riding out. The attack lasts about twenty-four hours, more or less. It is -fatal to take, during the fit, any cold drink, or to allow a draught of -air to reach the drenching skin; the covering should be rather more ample -than usual, but there was danger in heaping too many bed-clothes on the -patient. A moderate fire should be kept up in the sick chamber; the arms -should be crossed on the patient's breast, and great care should be taken -that no cold air reached the armpits[495]. The disease was on the -increase, and was already spreading over England; it was reported that -more than four hundred students had died of it at Oxford, which was a -small place but for the university there. Burials were occurring on every -side; there had been many deaths in the king's household and in that of -cardinal Wolsey, who was in the country "sweating." Such is the universal -dread of the disease that there are very few who do not fear for their -lives, while some are so terrified that they suffer more from fear than -others do from the sweat itself. - -On the same day (6th August), the Venetian ambassador, Sebastian -Giustinian, who was on friendly terms with the nuncio and often indebted -to him for information, writes to the Doge giving much the same account of -"the new malady." He remarks upon the sudden onset, the rapidity of the -issue when it was to be fatal, and the cessation of the sweat within -twenty-four hours. His secretary had taken it, as well as many of his -domestics. Few strangers are dead, but an immense number of Englishmen. On -going to visit Wolsey, he found that he had the sweat; many of the -cardinal's household had died of it, including some of his chief -attendants; the bishop of Winchester also had taken it. On the 12th of -August, the Venetian envoy writes that he himself and his son have had the -sweat; Wolsey has had it three times in a few days, many of his people -being dead of it, especially his gentlemen[496]. In London "omnes silent." - -Wolsey's attack and relapses are confirmed by his own letter to the king; -about the end of August he went on a pilgrimage to Walsingham, and -remained there most of September, but even after his return he was "vexed -with fever." The relapses of the sweat, which are mentioned by Forrestier -in 1485, by Andr in 1508, and now again in 1517, may have been the origin -of the saying in the form of a proverb, which occurs in an essay of the -time by sir Thomas More,--that the relapse is worse than the original -disease[497]. - -The death of a well-known personage, Ammonio, the Latin secretary of the -king, is the subject of several letters, including one of the 19th August -from More to Erasmus; he died at nine on the morning of the 17th August, -after an illness of twenty hours: he had been congratulating himself on -being safe by reason of his temperate life. More confirms the statement as -to deaths in the university of Oxford, and he adds also at Cambridge. In -London the sweat attacks whole families: "I assure you there is less -danger in the ranks of war than in this city." His own family (? in -Bucklersbury) are safe so far, and he has composed his mind for any -eventuality. He hears that the sweat is now at Calais. On the 27th August, -the Venetian envoy writes again that the disease is now making great -progress; the king keeps out of the way at Windsor, with only three -favourite gentlemen and Dionysius Memo, who is described as his physician, -but in other letters as "the Reverend," and as a musician from Venice. On -the 21st September the envoy has gone to the country to avoid "the plague -_and_ the sweating sickness." A few days later (26th Sept.) he writes that -"the plague" is making some progress, and that the prolonged absence of -the king, the cardinal and other lords from London owing to the sweat, had -encouraged the citizens to a turbulent mood against the foreign traders -and residents; the state of matters was so threatening that three thousand -citizens were under arms to preserve the peace. The references after -September, 1517, are mostly to the "common infection" or plague, which was -an almost annual autumnal event in London. There was probably some -confusion, at the time, between that infection and the sweat, not, of -course as regards symptoms, but in common report; thus it is not clear -whether the fresh alarm in the king's court at or near Windsor on the 15th -October, owing to the deaths of young lord Grey de Wilton and a German -attendant of the king, refers to the sweat or to the plague. As late as -the 2nd November, a letter from the University of Oxford to Wolsey -excuses delay in answering his two letters on the ground of the sweating -sickness. - -The prevalence of "sudor tabificus" at Oxford in 1517 is known from other -sources as well: it is said to have caused "the dispersion and sweeping -away of most, if not all, of the students[498];" and the nuncio, writing -from London on the 6th of August, mentions the current but improbable -statement that more than four hundred students had died in less than a -week. - -Besides these from Oxford, there are hardly any notices of the 1517 sweat -in the country remote from London. A record at Chester mentions an -outbreak of "plague," which is taken to mean sweating sickness; it is said -also to have been "probably more serious than in 1507;" many died, others -fled; and the grass grew a foot high at the Cross[499]. But these are the -marks of true plague, which we know to have broken out in London, and in -country districts as well, in the autumn and winter of 1517, or almost as -soon as the short and sharp outburst of the sweat was past. - -Among the references to prevailing diseases on the continent in 1517, -besides sir Thomas More's rumour of the sweat in Calais, there is none -which would lead us to suppose that the distinctive English malady had -invaded Europe in that year. But there is a significant statement by -Erasmus, hitherto overlooked, which almost certainly points to an epidemic -of influenza on the other side of the North Sea the year after the sweat -was prevalent in England. It is known that there was a suddenly fatal form -of throat disease prevalent in the Netherlands that spring, which has been -taken to be diphtheria; but the malady to which Erasmus refers can hardly -have been the same as that. Writing from Louvain to Barbieri on the 1st -June, 1518, he says that a new plague is raging in Germany, affecting -people with a cough, and pain in the head and stomach, he himself having -suffered from it. The significance of that epidemic, assuming it to have -been influenza, will be dealt with in the sequel. - -By means of the foregoing contemporary notices of the sweat in 1517 we -are able to judge of the general accuracy of the summary of it in Hall's -chronicle, which has been hitherto almost the only source of information. -The sweat killed, he says, in three hours or two hours, which is something -of an exaggeration of the shortest duration mentioned by the nuncio and -the Venetian envoy in their letters of the 1st and 6th August. Another -general statement may be suspected of even greater exaggeration: "For in -some one town half the people died, and in some other town the third part, -the sweat was so fervent and the infection so great." The sweat lasted, he -says, to the middle of December. Stow, in his _Annals_, more correctly -states that the plague came in the end of the year, after the sweat. The -plague was much the more deadly infection of the two; but even plague and -sweat together, and at their worst, would hardly have destroyed one-half -or one-third of the inhabitants of a town. - - -The Fourth Sweat in 1528. - -As the despatches of the nuncio and the Venetian envoy in London give the -best accounts of the sweat of 1517, it is in the despatches of the French -ambassador, Du Bellay, that we find the most serviceable particulars of -the sweat in 1528. Du Bellay, bishop of Bayonne, and a witty diplomatist, -was in London through the whole of it, and during that time sent letters -to Paris, in three of which the sweat is a principal topic. From many -other state letters of the time various particulars may be gathered, and -in one letter by Brian Tuke, one of the king's ministers, we find some -theorizings about the disease. The outbreak befell at the time when Henry -VIII.'s passion for Mistress Anne Boleyn, sister to one of the ladies of -the Court, was waxing strong; it had the effect of parting the lovers for -several weeks, the distance between them having been bridged over by an -interchange of tender notes, of which those of the king remain open to the -prying eyes of posterity. - -The sweat is heard of as early as the 5th of June, 1528, when Brian Tuke -writes to Tunstall, bishop of London, that he had fled to Stepney "for -fear of the infection," a servant being ill at his house. The sickness -must have made little talk for some ten days longer. On the 18th June, Du -Bellay writes that it had made its appearance "within these four -days[500]." On the 16th, the king at Greenwich was alarmed by the -intelligence that a maid of Anne Boleyn's had been attacked by it[501]. He -left in great haste for Waltham, and sent the young lady to her father's -in Kent. "As yet," writes Du Bellay, "the love has not abated. I know not, -if absence and the difficulties of Rome may effect anything." The king -wrote to her at once: "There came to me in the night the most afflicting -news possible.... I fear to suffer yet longer that absence which has -already given me so much pain." He sends his second physician (Dr Butts) -to her. The alarm about her health seems to have been uncalled for just -then, although both she and her father caught the disease within a few -days. By the 18th June, according to the French envoy, some 2000 had -caught the sickness in London. It is, he says, a most perilous disease: -"one has a little pain in the head and heart; suddenly a sweat begins; and -a physician is useless, for whether you wrap yourself up much or little, -in four hours, sometimes in two or three, you are despatched without -languishing as in those troublesome fevers." The day before, on going to -swear the truce, he saw the people "as thick as flies rushing from the -streets or shops into their houses to take the sweat whenever they felt -ill.... In London, I assure you, the priests have a better time than the -doctors, except that the latter do not help to bury. If this thing goes -on, corn will soon be cheap. [The season was one of scarcity.] It is -twelve [eleven] years since there was such a visitation, when there died -10,000 persons in ten or twelve days; but it was not so bad as this has -been." Writing again, twelve days after, on the 30th June, he says that -some 40,000 had been attacked in London, only 2000 of whom had died; "but -if a man only put his hand out of bed during the twenty-four hours, it -becomes as stiff as a pane of glass"--that is to say, by keeping -themselves carefully covered, as we learn also from Polydore Virgil's -history and letters on the sweat of 1517, they greatly increased the -chance of recovery. In his third despatch, 21st July, he says the danger -begins to diminish hereabout and to increase elsewhere; in Kent it is very -great. Anne Boleyn and her father have sweated, but have got over it. The -notaries have had a fine time of it, nearly everyone having made his will, -as those who took the disease in its fatal form "became quite foolish the -moment they fell ill." His estimate of 100,000 wills is, of course, a -humorous exaggeration. The sweat had been at its height in London, -according to its wont, for only a few weeks, mostly in July. On the 21st -of August one writes from London that "the plague at this day is well -assuaged, and little or nothing heard thereof." From other parts of -England there are few particulars of the sweat of 1528. We hear of it at -Woburn on the 26th June, in a nunnery at Wilton on the 18th July, at -Beverley on the 22nd July--it is reported as very serious in Yorkshire -generally,--at Cambridge on the 27th July, and at several places in Kent -about the same date. The "infection" at Dover as late as the 27th -September may not have been the sweat, but the ordinary bubo-plague. But -it is probably to the sweat that the deaths of four priests and two -lay-brothers at Axholme, in Lincolnshire, are to be referred, as well as -the heavy mortality in the Charterhouse, London[502]. - -As in the previous sweat of 1517, the letters of the time give us many -glimpses of the invasion of great households in and around London, -including the king's. - -When the French ambassador was walking with Wolsey in his garden at York -Place (Whitehall) on a day in June, word was brought to the cardinal that -five or six of his household had taken the sweat, and the diplomatic -interview was brought to an abrupt end. Du Bellay writes again in July -that only four men in Wolsey's great house remained well. Among those in -his household who died of it were a brother of lord Derby and a nephew of -the duke of Norfolk. The cardinal, who had suffered from the sweat and its -relapses in 1517, fled from it to Hampton Court on the 30th June, and shut -himself up there with only a few attendants, having previously adjourned -the law courts and stopped the assizes. On the 21st of July, Du Bellay -writes that it was almost impossible to get access to Wolsey, and suggests -that he might have to speak with him at Hampton Court through a trumpet. -In the same letter the French ambassador refers to the circumstances of -his own attack when he was visiting the archbishop of Canterbury (Warham), -probably at Lambeth: "The day I sweated at my lord of Canterbury's, there -died eighteen persons in four hours, and hardly anyone escaped but myself, -who am not yet quite strong again." The bishop of London, Tunstall, writes -to Wolsey from Fulham on the 10th July, that thirteen of his servants were -sick of the sweat at once on St Thomas's day; he had caused the public -processions and prayers to be made, which the king had wished for on the -5th July. The governor of Calais writes on the 10th July: "The sweat has -arrived and has attacked many." Only two were dead, a Lancashire gentleman -and a fisherman; but in a second letter of the same night, four more are -dead, of whom two "were in good health yestereven when they went to their -beds." Various other letters about the same date make mention of personal -experiences of the sweat, or of domestics attacked, at country houses in -the home counties. The most minute accounts are those for the king's -household. - -On the 16th June the king had left Greenwich hurriedly for Waltham. In a -letter to Anne Boleyn, he writes that, when he was at Waltham, two ushers, -two valets-de-chambre, George Boleyn and Mr Treasurer (Fitzwilliam) fell -ill of the sweat, and are now quite well. "The doubt I had of your health -troubled me extremely, and I should scarcely have had any quiet without -knowing the certainty; but since you have felt nothing, I hope it is with -you as with us." He had removed to Hunsdon (on 20th or 21st June) "where -we are very well, without one sick person. I think if you would retire -from Surrey, as we did, you would avoid all danger. Another thing may -comfort you: few women have this illness, and moreover none of our court, -and few elsewhere, have died of it." When Brian Tuke went to Hunsdon on -the 21st June, the king spoke to him "of the advantages of this house, and -its wholesomeness at this time of sickness." Two days after, Tuke having -business with the king, found him "in secret communication with his -physician, Mr Chambre, in a tower where he sometimes sups apart." The king -conversed with his minister about the latter's ill-health (seemingly -stone), and showed him remedies, "as any most cunning physician in England -could do." As to the infection, the king spoke of how folk were taken, how -little danger there was if good order be observed, how few were dead, how -Mistress Anne and my lord Rochford (her father) both have had it, what -jeopardy they have been in by the turning in of the sweat before the time, -of the endeavours of Mr Butts who had been with them, and finally of their -perfect recovery. The king sends advice to Wolsey to use "the pills of -Rhazes" once a week, and, if it come to it, to sweat moderately and to the -full time, without suffering it to run in. But the king's optimist views -of the malady were quickly disturbed. William Cary, married to Anne -Boleyn's sister, died of the sweat suddenly at Hunsdon, having just -arrived from Plashey, and two others of the Chamber, Poyntz and Compton, -died about the same time either there or at Hertford, whither the king -removed. On the evening of the 26th June there fell sick at Hertford, the -marquis and marchioness of Dorset, sir Thomas Cheyney, Croke, Norris and -Wallop. The king hastily left for Hatfield, on the 28th June, where still -others appear to have taken the sickness. Du Bellay, writing on the 30th, -says all but one of the Chamber have been attacked. From Hatfield the king -went at once to Tittenhanger, a country house which belonged to Wolsey as -abbot of St Albans, and there he elected to take his chance of the sweat, -keeping up immense fires to destroy the infection. On the 7th July, Dr -Bell writes from Tittenhanger to Wolsey that "none have had the sweat here -these three days except Mr Butts." Two days later, however, the -marchioness of Exeter "sweated," and the king ordered all who were of the -marquis's company to depart, he himself removing as far as Ampthill, -whence he thought of removing on the 22nd July to Grafton, but was -prevented by the prevalence of the infection there. Shortly after Anne -Boleyn returned to the court. It is clearly to the period of her return -that an undated letter of hers to Wolsey belongs; after writing a few -formal lines to make interest with the cardinal, she took her letter to -the king for him to add a postscript, which was as follows: "Both of us -desire to see you, and are glad to hear you have escaped the plague so -well, trusting the fury of it is abated, especially with those that keep -good diet as I trust you do." - -Although the attacks mentioned in the correspondence of the time are many, -the deaths are few. A letter of Brian Tuke's to Wolsey's secretary, on the -14th July, takes a somewhat sceptical line about the whole matter. His -wife has "passed the sweat," but is very weak, and is broken out at the -mouth and other places. He himself "puts away the sweat" from himself -nightly (directly against the king's advice to him), though other people -think they would kill themselves thereby. He had done that during the last -sweat and this, feeling sure that, as long as he is not first sick, the -sweat is rather provoked by disposition of the time, and by keeping men -close, than by any infection, although the infection was a reality. -Thousands have it from fear, who need not else sweat, especially if they -observe good diet. He believes that it proceeds much of men's opinion. It -has been brought from London to other parts by report; for when a whole -man comes from London and talks of the sweat, the same night all the town -is full of it, and thus it spreads as the fame runs. Children, again, -lacking this opinion, have it not, unless their mothers kill them by -keeping them too hot if they sweat a little. It does not go to Gravelines -when it is at Calais, although people go from the one place to the other. - - -The English Sweat on the Continent in 1529[503]. - -Whether the sweat went at length to Gravelines or other places in that -direction does not appear; but there is abundant evidence that it showed -itself in the course of the following year (1529) in many parts of the -Continent, excepting France, and that its outbreak was often attended with -a heavy mortality. It was observed in Calais, as we have seen, on the 10th -of July, 1528. But it is not until the year after, on the 25th of July, -1529, that we hear of it again,--at Hamburg, where a thousand persons are -said to have died of it within four or five weeks, most of them within -nine days. On the 31st July it was at Lbeck, and about the same time at -Bremen and the neighbouring ancient town of Verden; on 14th August in -Mecklenburg; at Stettin on the 27th August, and at Wismar, Demmin, -Rostock, Stralsund, and Greifswald about the same date; in Danzig on the -1st September; Knigsberg, on the 8th; and so eastwards to Livonia in -1530, and to Lithuania, Poland and Russia, the information for which -countries is vague. Copenhagen also suffered from it, and towns in the -interior of East Prussia, such as Thorn and Kulm. Meanwhile the sweat had -proceeded by way of Hanover and Gttingen, about the middle of August -afflicting also Brunswick, Lneburg, Waldeck, Hadeln, Einbeck, Westphalia, -the valley of the Weser, and East Friesland. It reached Frankfurt on the -11th September, Worms shortly after, and Marburg at the end of the month, -breaking up the conference there between Luther and Zwingli, and their -respective adherents, on the doctrine of the Eucharist. Jlich, Liege and -Cologne were reached about the middle of September, and Speyer about the -24th, Augsburg (where there was a most severe and protracted epidemic) on -the 6th, Strasburg on the 24th. Freiburg in Breisgau, Mhlhausen and -Gebweiler in Alsace, in October. In November, the sickness overran -Wurtemberg, Baden, the Upper Rhine, the Palatinate, and the shores of the -Lake of Constance. Among the other German provinces visited in due order -were Franconia, Thuringia, Saxony, the Saxon Metal Mountains, Meissen, -Mannsfeld, Halberstadt, Magdeburg, Wittenberg, Lusatia, the Mark of -Brandenburg, and Silesia. In Vienna the sweat prevailed during the siege -by Sultan Soliman from the 22nd September to the 14th October. At Berne it -is heard of in December, and at Basle in January 1530. The Low Countries -had not been affected so soon as their nearness to England might have led -one to expect: the sickness is said to have approached them from the Rhine -in the latter half of September. They suffered severely, one of the -heaviest mortalities being reported for the town of Zierikzee, where three -thousand are said to have died subsequent to the 3rd of October, 1529. - -In this remarkable progress over the mainland of Europe, France was -conspicuously avoided. The sweat does not appear to have entered Spain, -nor to have crossed the Alps. But all the rest of the Continent, from the -Rhine to the Oder (if not farther east) and from the Baltic to the Alps, -was reached by the English sweat in much the same way as if it had been an -influenza reversing the order of its usual direction. There need be no -hesitation as to the correctness of the diagnosis; the disease was -described by several foreign writers from their own observation, and their -descriptions agree entirely with those of Forrestier, in 1485, of Polydore -Virgil, perhaps for the epidemics of 1508 and 1517, and of the -letter-writers who were describing the epidemic of the year before (1528), -as they saw it in and around London. The striking thing in the accounts -from the continent is the enormous range of its fatality; in some towns -the proportion of deaths to cases was hardly more than in influenza, while -in others it was the death-rate of a peculiarly pestilential or malignant -typhus; and those differences cannot have depended wholly upon the method -of treatment. - -These full accounts of the English sweat on the continent of Europe in -1529 are in striking contrast to the meagre records of it at home. They -were compiled first in 1805 from the numerous contemporary chronicles, and -printed pamphlets or fly-sheets on the sweat, by Gruner, professor at -Jena, in his _Itinerary of the English Sweat_, and his _Extant writers on -the English Sweat_, published in Latin[504]. In 1834 Hecker went over the -ground again in his well-known essay, improving somewhat upon the positive -erudition of Gruner, but at the same time hazarding a number of doubtful -interpretative statements, especially as to the sweat in England, for -which the meagreness of the English records then available may be his -excuse. The erudition of Gruner, Hecker and Hser deserves every -acknowledgement; but it is of value more especially for the extension of -the sweat to the continent of Europe in 1529, where it had abundant -materials at its service, in chronicles, printed essays, and "regiments." -There are extant no fewer than twenty-one printed essays or sheets of -directions on the English sweat, which were issued from the German, -Netherlands, or Swiss presses between the month of October 1529 and the -month of June 1531, two or three of them being in Latin and most of them -brief summaries in the native tongue for popular use. The corresponding -epidemic in England did not call forth a single piece by any medical man, -so far as is known. Nor does the English treatment appear to have lost -anything thereby; for it was based upon the profitable experience of -previous epidemics as embodied in oral tradition. Down to the fifth -epidemic in 1551, the only English writing on the sweat so far as is known -was the manuscript of 1485, by Forrestier. Almost all that we know of the -epidemics in England in 1508, 1517 and 1528 comes from Bernard Andr's -annals and Polydore Virgil's history, and from the despatches of the -apostolic nuncio, the Venetian ambassador and the French ambassador. The -fifth and last outbreak, in 1551, called forth two native writings, one -for popular use in English in 1552, and another in Latin in 1555, both by -Dr Caius, physician to Henry VIII. and Edward VI.; these are indeed better -than nothing at all, but they are too much occupied with pedantry and -lugubrious rhetoric to be of much service for historical purposes[505]. -The information about the epidemic of 1551 is so scanty as to suggest that -the sickness in that year can hardly have been so severe as in 1528; the -state papers contain hardly anything relating to it, and we owe nearly all -our knowledge of it to the diary of Machyn, a citizen of London, to Edward -VI.'s diary, and to Dr Caius. Bills of mortality had been kept in London -for two or three weeks when the epidemic was at its height, from which -some totals of deaths are extant. - - -The Fifth Sweat in 1551. - -It was not in London that the sweat of 1551 began, but at Shrewsbury--on -the 22nd of March, according to the manuscript chronicle of that -town[506], or on the 15th of April, according to Caius[507]. No record -remains of its prevalence at Shrewsbury; the statement of Caius, that some -900 deaths had occurred in a single city corresponds to the facts for -London, and has no more reference to Shrewsbury (where Caius never -resided) than it has to Norwich (as in Blomefield's county history). The -strange influence in the air or soil advanced from Salop, as we learn from -Caius, by way of Ludlow, Presteign, Westchester, Coventry and Oxford, in -only one of which places is anything known of it except Caius's remark -that it proceeded "with great mortality." The best record of its -prevalence on the way from Shrewsbury to London occurs in the parish -register of Loughborough, in Leicestershire. Under the date of June, 1551, -the register has an entry that "the swat called New Acquaintance, alias -Stoupe! Knave and know thy Master, began on the 24th of this month." Then -follow the names of 12 persons who were buried in four days, and, on the -next page, under the heading of "The Sweat or New Acquaintance," the names -of 7 more, all buried in three days--making a total of 19 in six days, -presumably all dead of the sweat and presumably also the whole mortality -from it in Loughborough, which had far heavier mortalities from the common -plague in after years[508]. - -The date of its arrival at Oxford, on the way to London, is not known; but -a physician then resident there, Dr Ethredge, has left it on record that -it attacked sixty in Oxford in one night, and next day more than a hundred -in the villages around; very few died of it at Oxford, which showed that -the air of that university was more salubrious than at Cambridge, where -the two sons of the duchess of Suffolk died[509]. - -The sweat appeared suddenly in London about the beginning of July, and had -a short but active career of some three weeks. Deaths from it began to be -mentioned on the 7th, and are entered in the king's (Edward VI.'s) diary -as having amounted on the 10th to the number of 120, in the London -district, including "one of my nobles and one of my chamberlains," so that -"I repaired to Hampton Court with only a small company." The royal diarist -says that the victims fell into a delirium and died in that state[510]. On -the 18th July, the king, in Council at Hampton Court, issued an order to -the bishops, that they should "exhort the people to a diligent attendance -at common prayer, and so avert the displeasure of Almighty God, having -visited the realm with the extreme plague of sudden death[511]." - -The diary of a London citizen says that "there died in London many -merchants and great rich men and women, and young men and old, of the new -sweat[512]." On the 12th died Sir Thomas Speke, one of the king's -council, at his house in Chancery Lane; next day died Sir John Wallop "an -old knight and gentle[513]," the same who had survived an attack of the -sweat in 1528 when at Hertford with Henry VIII. It is not clear whether -some other deaths of notables in the same few days were due to the sweat. -Three independent statements are extant of the mortality in London which -had all been taken, doubtless, from the bills regularly compiled. One -gives the deaths "from all diseases" in London from the 8th to the 19th -July as 872, "no more in all, and so the Chancellor is certified[514];" -another gives the deaths "by the sweating sickness" from the 7th to the -20th July as 938[515]; and Caius gives the deaths from the 9th to the 16th -July as 761, "besides those that died on the 7th and 8th days, of whom no -register was kept[516];" by the 30th of July, 142, more had died, by which -time it had practically ceased in London[517]. Caius adds that it next -prevailed in the eastern and northern parts of England until the end of -August, and ceased everywhere before the end of September. The king, in a -letter of the 22nd August, written during his progress, says that the most -part of England at that time was clear of any dangerous or infectious -sickness[518]. Records at York make mention of a great plague in 1551, but -without describing it as the sweat[519]. The event which excited most -attention was the death by the sweat of the two sons of the widowed -duchess of Suffolk, the young duke Henry and his brother lord Charles -Brandon on the 16th of July. They had been taken from Cambridge, for fear -of the sweat, to the bishop of Lincoln's palace at Bugden, in -Huntingdonshire, their mother accompanying them; they fell ill -immediately upon their arrival, the elder dying after an illness of five -hours and his brother half an hour after him[520]. - -Besides the cases of the two noble youths and others at Cambridge[521], -there are no particulars of its prevalence in "the eastern and northern -parts of England" (Caius). But we hear of it in the register of a country -parish in Devonshire, under the same name of "Stup-gallant" as in the -Loughborough register; and it is probable that those two casual notices -indicate its diffusion all over England in the manner of influenza. That -conclusion may find some support in the statement of one Hancocke, -minister of Poole, Dorset, that "God had plagued this realm most justly -with three notable plagues: (1) The Posting Sweat, that posted from town -to town thorow England and was named 'Stop-gallant,' for it spared none. -For there were some dancing in the Court at nine o'clock that were dead at -eleven[522]." Its occurrence in Devonshire is proved by entries in the -parish register of Uffculme: the whole burials in the year 1551 are 38; -and of these no fewer than 27 occur in the first eleven days of August, -and 16 of them in three days, the disease of which those persons died -being named, in the register, "the hote sickness or stup-gallant[523]." - -Comparing these records of the sweat of 1551 with those of the years 1517 -and 1528, we may conclude that the latest of those three outbreaks was not -more severe than the earlier, and that, in the Court circle, it was -probably milder. The gloomy rhetoric of Caius had led Hecker to construct -a picture of its disastrous progress along the valley of the Severn, in -which there is not a single authentic detail. Caius says that he was a -witness of it, but that must have been in London; and the figures for -London, although they indicate a very sharp epidemic while it lasted, do -not suggest a mortality greater at least than that of 1528. The Venetian -ambassador in writing a general memoir on England four years after, says -that all business was suspended in London, the shops closed and nothing -attended to but the preservation of life; but as he makes a gross -exaggeration in stating the deaths in London at 5000 "during the three -first days of its appearance," we may take it that his impressions were -vague or his recollections grown dim[524]. - -Were it not for the isolated notices of the sweat in Leicestershire and -Devonshire, we should hardly have been able to realize that country towns -and villages had been visited by an epidemic which was appalling both by -its suddenness and by its fatality while it lasted. The name of -"Stop-gallant," by which it is called in these parish registers, shows the -sort of impression which it made; but so far as the mortality is -concerned, that was often equalled, if not exceeded, in after years by -forms of epidemic fever which had nothing of the sweating type, although -they might also have been called "stop-gallant," and indeed were so-called -in France (_trousse-galante_). - -Apart from the notices in parish registers, we have the generalities of Dr -Caius, which amount to no more than a funereal essay, in the scholastic -manner, upon the theme of sudden death. It may be doubted whether Caius -really knew the facts about the disease in the country. The 27 deaths -within a few days in a small Devonshire village and the 19 in six days in -a small Leicestershire town, are hardly to be reconciled with the -statement in his Latin treatise of 1555, that "women and serving folk, the -plebeian and humble classes, even the middle class," did not feel it, but -the "proceres" or upper classes did: they fled from it, he says, to -Belgium, France, Ireland and Scotland. It was for these that he was -chiefly concerned; and when he approaches his rhetorical task with the -remark that "nothing is more difficult than to find suitable words for a -great grief," we may take it that he was thinking rather of such moving -cases as that of the widowed duchess of Suffolk, who had lost her two sons -in one day, than of wide-spread sickness and death throughout the homes of -the people. - -Nothing more is heard of the sweat in England after the autumn of 1551, at -least not under that name. Francis Keene, an "astronomer," prophesied in -his almanack for 1575, that the sweat would return, "wherein he erred not -much," says Cogan[525], "as there were many strange fevers and nervous -sickness." Some years before that, in 1558 (a year after influenza -abroad), there prevailed in summer "divers strange and new sicknesses," -among which was a "sweating sickness," so described by Dr John Jones, who -had it at Southampton. We are, indeed, approaching the period of frequent -and widespread epidemics of fever and of influenza, in both which types of -disease sweating was occasionally a notable symptom, as in the influenza -of 1580 abroad, in the fatal typhus of 1644 at Tiverton, in the widespread -English fevers of 1658, and in the London typhus as late as 1750. How -those other types of fever, due as if to a "corruption of the air," are -related generically to the English sweat is a question upon which -something remains to be said before this chapter is concluded. But the -history of the English sweat comes to a definite end with the epidemic of -1551. Sweating sickness of the original sort was never again the _signum -pathognomicum_ of a whole epidemic of fever. The English Sweat became an -extinct species, after a comparatively brief existence on the earth of -sixty-six years. Its successors among the forms of pestilential disease -may have occasionally put forth the sweating character, as if in a sport -of nature; but the most of the travelling, or posting, or universal -fevers, and universal colds, are easily distinguished from the -sweat--_nova febrium terris incubuit cohors_[526]. - - -Antecedents of the English Sweat. - -The history of the English sweat presents to the student of epidemics much -that is paradoxical although not without parallel, and much that his -research can never rescue from uncertainty. Where did this hitherto -unheard of disease come from? Where was it in the intervals from 1485 to -1508, from 1508 to 1517, from 1517 to 1528, and from 1528 to 1551? What -became of it after 1551? Why did it fall mostly on the great houses,--on -the king's court, on the luxurious establishments of prelates and nobles, -on the richer citizens, on the lusty and well fed, for the most part -sparing the poor? Why did it avoid France when it overran the Continent in -1529? No theory of the sweat can be held sufficient which does not afford -some kind of answer to each of those questions, and some harmonizing of -them all. - -The history of Polydore Virgil is so well informed on all that relates to -the arrival in England of Henry VII. that we may accept as the common -belief of the time his two statements about the sweat, the first -associating it in some vague way with the descent of Henry upon Wales, and -the second pronouncing it a disease hitherto unheard of in England. Caius, -who wrote in 1552 and 1555, and can have had no other knowledge of the -events of 1485 than is open to a historical student of to-day, said that -the sweat "arose, so far as can be known, in the army of Henry VII., part -of which he had lately brought together in France, and part of which had -joined him in Wales." Hecker, the modern reconstructer of the history -(1834), has passed from the tradition of Polydore Virgil and of Caius, -clean into the region of conjecture in assuming that the sweat had arisen -among the French mercenaries on the voyage and on the march to Bosworth. -On the other hand, the one contemporary medical writer in 1485, -Forrestier, is explicit enough in his statement that the sweat "first -unfurled its banners in England in the city of London, on the 19th of -September," or some three weeks after Henry's entry into the city. There -is nowhere a hint that it was prevalent among the troops, whether French, -Welsh or English, who won the battle of Bosworth on the 22nd of August, -the only pretext for asserting that it was prevalent in the neighbourhood -before the battle being the gossip of the Croyland chronicle concerning -lord Stanley's excuse to Richard III. for not bringing up his men, which -gossip probably arose soon after when the sweat became notorious. Croyland -was not very far from the camp of the Stanleys; and yet we know for -certain (with the help of the state papers) that the death of the abbot -Lambert Fossedike from the sweat happened there after an illness of -eighteen hours on the 14th October, some seven or eight weeks from the -date of Bosworth Field, and some three or four weeks after the outbreak of -the disease in London. The probabilities of the case are all in favour of -Forrestier's view that the first of the sweat in 1485 was its appearance -in London; and we shall accordingly take that as our point of departure. - -Henry covered the distance between Leicester and London in four days, -having left the former, after a rest of two nights, on the Wednesday, -slept at St Albans on the Friday, and entered London, very tired by his -journey (says Bernard Andr), on Saturday evening, 27th August, three -weeks to a day from his landing at Milford Haven. Whether his whole force -travelled from Leicester at the same pace, and entered the city with him, -does not appear; but it can hardly be doubted that Henry's following, -French, Welsh and English, had found their way to London without loss of -time, to make personal suit for the grants and patents that began to be -issued under the royal seal in immense numbers after the first or second -week in September. London must have been unusually full of people in the -weeks before the Coronation on the 30th October. But the pestilence that -broke out was not the "common infection" or plague, which might -intelligibly have been fanned into a flame by a great concourse of people. -It was the sweat,--a new disease, a stranger not only to England but to -all the world. We shall understand the mysteriousness of the visitation -and the inadequacy of all ordinary explanations, by taking Forrestier's -account of the causes of it, drawn up in the year of its first occurrence. - -Although this earliest writer on the sweat recognized its distinctive type -quite clearly, making no confusion between it and the plague, yet he -referred both diseases to the same set of causes; and in his section on -the causes of the sweat he merely reproduces the conventional list of -nuisances which occurs in nearly all treatises on the plague before and -after his time. There was little variation from that list, as it is given -in the last chapter from a plague-book of the 14th century, down even to -the reign of Elizabeth; thus it is reproduced almost word for word in -Bullein's _Dialogue on the Fever Pestilence_ written in 1564 (the year -after a great plague), and it is so uniform in Elyot's _Castle of Health_, -in Phaer's, and in all the other hygienic manuals of the time, that it -might almost have been stereotyped. This was the causation which -Forrestier transferred bodily to the sweat in his manuscript of 1485; -almost the same causation had been given in the old essay of the bishop of -Aarhus on the plague, actually printed in London in 1480. - - "The causes of this sickness," he says, "be far and nigh. The far - causes--they be the signs or the planets, whose operation is not known - of leeches and of phisitions; but of astronomers they be known.... The - nigh causes be the stynkynge of the erthe as it is in many places.... - For these be great causes of putrefaction: and this corrupteth the - air, and so our bodies are infect of that corrupt air.... And it - happeneth also, that specially where the air is changed into great - heat and moistness, they induceth putrefaction of humours, and namely - in the humours of the heart; and so cometh this pestilence, whose - coming is unknown, as to them that die sodenley, &c." - -Among the causes of the corruption he specially mentions the following, -which probably had a real existence in the London of that time, although -he is merely reproducing a stock paragraph of foreign origin: - - "And of stinking carrion cast into the water nigh to cities or - towns,--as the bellies of beasts and of fishes, and the corruption of - privies--of this the water is corrupt. And when as meat is boiled, and - drink made of the water, many sickness is gendered in man's body; and - [so] also of the casting of stinking waters and many other foul things - in the streets, the air is corrupt; and of keeping of stinking matters - in houses or in latrines long time; and then, in the night, of those - things vapour is lift up into the air, the which doth infect the - substance of the air, by the which substance the air corrupts and - infects men to die suddenly, going by the streets or by the way. Of - the which thing let any man that loveth God and his neighbour amend." - -He then mentions a more distant source of corrupt air, apt to be carried -on the wind--the corruption of unburied bodies after a battle, which -enters into all the plague-writings of the time. - -These things were, of course, insufficient to account for the special type -of the sweat, or for its sudden outbreak, for the first time in history, -in September, 1485. There may have been such favouring conditions in -London at the time; something of the kind is indeed implied in Henry -VII.'s order against the nuisance of the shambles a few years after; but -we require a special factor, without which the unsavoury state of the -streets, lanes, yards, and ditches, or the crowded state of the houses, -would never have come to an issue in so remarkable an infection as the -sweating sickness. Common nuisances were the less relevant to the sweat, -for the reason that it touched the well-to-do classes most, the classes -who suffered least from the "common infection," or "the poor's plague," -and were presumably best housed, or located amidst cleanest surroundings. -Even within the narrow limits of Old London there were preferences of -locality. If the special incidence of the sweat upon the great households -of prelates and nobles, and on the families of wealthy citizens, had -rested only on the testimony of Dr Caius, who has a theory and a moral to -work out, there might have been some reason for the scepticism of -Heberden, who questions whether Caius was not probably in error in saying -that the sweat spared the poor and the wretched, because he knows of no -parallel instance among infective diseases[527]. But the fact is -abundantly illustrated in the details, already given, for each of the five -English epidemics; and it is confirmed for the continental invasion of -1529, e.g. by Kock, a parish priest of Lbeck, who says that "the poor -people, and those living in cellars or garrets were free from the -sickness," and by Renner, of Bremen, who says that it "went most among the -rich people[528]." It was, indeed, owing to its being an affliction -chiefly of the upper classes that the sweat has been so much heard of. So -far as mere numbers went, all the five London epidemics together could not -have caused so great a mortality as the plague caused in a single year of -Henry VII., namely the year 1500, or in a single year of Henry VIII., such -as the year 1513. But these great mortalities from plague, amounting to -perhaps a fifth part of the whole London population in a single season, -fell mainly, although not of course exclusively, upon the poorer class. -The bubo-plague, domesticated on English soil from 1348 to 1666, was -emphatically the "poor's plague," and, as such, it illustrated the usual -law of infective disease, namely that it specially befell those who were -the worst housed, the worst fed, the hardest pressed in the struggle, and -the least able to find the means of escaping to the country when the -infection in the city gave warning of an outbreak on the approach of warm -weather. - -But _morbus pauperum_ is not the only principle of infective disease. -There are pestilent infections which do not come readily under the law of -poor, uncleanly and negligent living, in any ordinary sense of the words; -and there are some communicable diseases which directly contradict the -principle that infection falls upon those who engender it by their mode of -life. Unwholesome conditions of living may be trusted to engender disease, -but it does not follow that the infection so engendered will fall upon -those who lead the unwholesome lives; sometimes it falls upon the class -who are farthest removed from them in social circumstances or domestic -habits, or who are widely separated from them in racial characters. This -principle I believe to be not only a necessary complement to the more -obvious rule, but to be itself one of wide application. It has been an -original theme of my own in former writings, to which I take leave to -refer in a note[529]; and, I have now to try here whether it may not suit -the rather paradoxical and certainly mysterious circumstances of the -sweating sickness on its first outbreak in the autumn of 1485. - -If the insanitary state of London were insufficient to explain the -engendering of the disease, the next thing is to look for a foreign -source. Suspicion falls at once upon the foreign mercenaries who landed -with Henry Tudor at Milford Haven on the 6th of August. Who were these -mercenaries? Did they suffer from any contagious disease? Were they likely -to have engendered the sweat? Can the infection be traced, in matter of -fact, to them? In seeking an answer, it will be necessary to enter -somewhat fully into the history of the expedition. - -The earl of Richmond's successful expedition in 1485 was his second -attempt on the English crown. The first had been made in 1483, when the -duke of Gloucester was hardly seated on the throne and the duke of -Buckingham was in the field against him. Richmond's army on that occasion -had been furnished by the duke of Brittany, and is roughly estimated at -5000 men in 15 ships[530]; the expedition sailed from St Malo in October, -encountered a storm in the Channel which scattered the fleet, and drove -some of the ships back to the harbours of Brittany and Normandy, so that -Richmond, having reached the Dorset coast with only one or two ships, was -unable to land in force. He returned to a Norman port, and nothing more is -heard of his army of Bretons; during the next two years he appears to have -been left with no other following than two or three English nobles, among -them the earl of Oxford, who afterwards led a division of his army at -Bosworth. After repeated solicitation, he obtained in 1485 a small -body-guard (_leve praesidium_) from the regents of Charles VIII. at Paris, -a few pieces of artillery, and money to help pay for the transport of 3000 -or 4000 men. With these resources he betook himself to Rouen in the summer -of 1485 and began to fit out his expedition. It would appear that he found -some difficulty in making up his force to the intended full complement, -and that he was urged by the impatience of his followers and the chance of -a fair wind to leave the Seine with what force he had on the 31st of July. -His force of Frenchmen, under his kinsman de Shand (afterwards earl of -Bath), consisted of only 2000 men, crowded on board a few ships. It is a -fair inference that the men had been recruited in and around Rouen; we -are told, indeed, by Mezeray that Normandy was at that time infested by -bands of _francs-archers_ who had been licensed by Louis XI., and that the -ministers of Charles VIII. gave them to Henry Tudor, to the number of -3000, regarding the proposed expedition of the latter as a good -opportunity of ridding the province of Normandy of a lawless and -disreputable soldiery[531]. - -These, then, were the mercenaries who landed at Milford Haven on the 6th -of August, were at once marched through Wales to Shrewsbury and Lichfield, -and took a principal part in the battle of Bosworth on the 22nd of August. -They were Normans, who had become so great a pest to their own province -that Charles VIII.'s ministers were induced to take up Henry Tudor's cause -partly with the intention of ridding French territory of them. Their -quality is plainly indicated in the speech just before the battle by -Richard III., which had been composed for Hall's chronicle; only they were -not Bretons, as the speech makes out; they were Normans, recruited for the -expedition in Rouen and the surrounding country. - -I have given so much emphasis to the nationality of these mercenaries -because the theory of the English sweat turns upon it[532]. More than two -centuries after Bosworth Field, about the year 1717, when the English -sweat had been long forgotten, an almost identical type of disease began -to show itself among the villages and towns of that very region of France, -the lower basin of the Seine, where the mercenaries of 1485 had been -recruited. - - -A form of Sweat afterwards endemic in Normandy. - -The Picardy sweat, which was first noticed as a disease of the soil about -the year 1717, and has continued off and on down to recent years, was -indigenous to the departments in the basin of the Seine, from the Pas de -Calais to Calvados, with Rouen as a centre. Why that strange form of -sickness should have sprung up there and continued, now in one town or -village now in another, with few blank years for a century and a half, no -one can venture to say. It was not the English sweat in all its -circumstances; on the contrary it was only rarely epidemic over a large -population or a large tract of country at once. It was ordinarily limited -to one or two spots at a time, and in the individuals affected it ran a -longer course than the English sweat had done. But whenever it did become -widely prevalent it also became a short and sharp infection like the -English sweat, causing in some years a very considerable number of deaths. -Distinctively the Picardy sweat was a somewhat mild sickness of a week or -more, seldom fatal, distinctively also of a single town or village, or -small group of villages. It was not unknown in some other parts of France, -such as the Vosges and Languedoc, in Bavaria and in Northern Italy; but in -these other localities it has been much more occasional or even rare. Its -distinctive habitat for a century and a half has been the lower basin of -the Seine; and there it has been so steady at one point or another from -year to year throughout the whole of that period that it may be said to be -a disease of the soil, indigenous or domesticated, and depending for its -periodic manifestations mostly upon vicissitudes of the seasons, as -affecting probably the rise and fall of the ground-water. It has been more -a disease of the well-to-do bourgeois class than of the very poor, and it -has often shown a preference for the cleaner villages. It has been the -subject of a very large number of French writings from the year 1717 down -almost to the present date. Strange as this form of disease is, neither -its circumstances nor its nosological characters are left in any doubt; it -is at once mysterious and perfectly familiar[533]. - - -Theory of the English Sweat. - -I have been at some pains to show that Henry Tudor's mercenaries were -enlisted in and around Rouen, or, in other words, they came from that very -district of France in which the sweat, in a somewhat modified form, began -to make its appearance as an endemic malady two hundred and thirty years -after. If the sweat had not become an endemic or standing disease there, -as if native to the soil, or if it had become equally a disease of all -other parts of Europe, as typhoid fever has, the coincidence would have -been less striking, and might have been made to appear altogether -irrelevant by the long interval of more than two centuries between the one -event and the other. If it were a mere coincidence, we should conclude -that the same causes which established in Normandy in the 18th century a -steady prevalence of a sweating sickness, not unlike the more familiar -prevalence of typhoid, had been at work on English soil more than two -centuries earlier, not indeed to establish a form of sweating sickness -steadily prevalent from year to year in one place or another, like the -plague, but to induce five sharp epidemic outbursts, within a period of -sixty-six years, four of which outbursts began in London and extended -probably over the whole country, while one began in Shrewsbury, travelled -by stages to London, and spread all over England. And, as we are ignorant -of the things which determine the type of the endemic sweat of Normandy or -Picardy down to the present day, we can neither deny nor affirm that there -may have been corresponding factors of disease at work in the England of -Henry VII. By such a line of reasoning we are brought to a view of the -English sweat which precludes all farther inquiry and makes a permanent -blank or maze in our knowledge. Let us try, however, whether the facts of -the case do not better fall in with the view that the English sweat had a -real relation to the seats of the Norman and Picardy sweat, even at a time -when that sweat had not come into existence as a definite form of disease, -and although the French provinces appear to have been spared the invasion -of the epidemic when it overran the rest of Northern Europe in 1529. - -The means of communication in 1485 was not wanting, namely the Norman -soldiery of Henry VII. The tradition of their quality is preserved in the -speech composed in Hall's chronicle for Richard III. before the battle of -Bosworth, and versified somewhat closely by Shakespeare: - - "A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and run-aways, - A scum of Bretagnes, and base lackey peasants: - ... Let's whip these stragglers o'er the seas again; - Lash hence these over-weening rags of France, - These famished beggars, weary of their lives." - -There is nothing incredible in the supposition that these men had brought -a disease into London although they had not themselves presented the -symptoms of that disease. Such importations are not unknown; the mystery -hanging over them does not make them the less real. A well-known instance -is the St Kilda boat-cold, "the wonderful story," as Boswell says, "that -upon the approach of a stranger all the inhabitants catch cold," a story -which Mr Macaulay, the author of the _History of St Kilda_, had been -advised to leave out of his book. "Sir," said Dr Johnson, "to leave things -out of a book merely because people tell you they will not be believed, is -meanness: Macaulay acted with more magnanimity." The St Kilda influenza -has been amply corroborated since then by parallel instances from the more -remote islands of the Pacific, and by striking instances in veterinary -pathology. Among the latter may be quoted the instance which has been -heard of in Shropshire, of "sheep which have been imported from vessels, -although themselves in a healthy condition, if placed in the same fold -with others, frequently producing sickness in the flock[534]." But there -is an instance on a vast scale from the United States, the instance of -Texas cattle-fever, which has recurred so often, and has been so closely -watched on account of the disastrous loss which it causes, that there is -no room left to doubt the reality of that mysterious form of contagion. I -shall have to speak very shortly of the malignant fevers of the assizes, -which spread from prisoners who were not known to be ill of fever; these -incidents are historical from the year 1522, when an epidemic of the kind -arose among the court and grand jury at the gaol delivery in the Castle of -Cambridge. Lastly the history of yellow fever, as expounded in part in -this volume, is an instance of a long-enduring infection arising from the -circumstances of the African slave-trade, the negroes themselves having -been racially exempt from the fever although they had been the source of -the virus. - -In all such cases the sickness which ensued among the healthy from contact -with strangers had a more or less definite type; and that type in each -case must have been determined mainly by the antecedents of the strangers, -their racial characters being reckoned among the antecedents as well as -their special hardships and their personal habits. In the case of the -singular visitation of England in 1485, the strangers were a swarm of -disreputable free-booters from Normandy, natives of a soil which developed -the sweat as an indigenous malady in the long course of generations. If -they themselves had shown the symptoms of the sweat in 1485, one might -have said that the circumstances of their passage in crowded ships, of -their exhausting march from Wales to Leicestershire, and thence to London, -had brought to the definite issue of a specific disease that which was -otherwise no more than a habit of body, a constitutional tendency, a -disease in the making. But there is no reason to suppose that they -themselves incurred the symptoms of the disease at all; it was contact -with them in England, particularly in London, that determined the peculiar -type of disease in others. Those others were of a different national -stock, and for the most part of another manner of life; in their very -differences lay their liability, according to well-known analogies. Of -course there must have been something material, something more than -abstract contact, to cause the sweat in certain Englishmen; and although -we cannot image the form of the virulent matter, we are safe to pronounce, -in this hypothesis, that it must have come from the persons of the foreign -soldiery. - - -The Habitat of the Virus. - -We may go even farther in the way of specific probability, and bring the -virus definitely to a habitat in the soil. The English sweat, like the -Picardy sweat itself, had certain characters of a soil poison, like the -poison of cholera, yellow fever and typhoid fever; only it was not endemic -like the two last, but periodic, as well as somewhat volatile in its -manner of travelling, like dengue, influenza, and others of the "posting" -fevers of former times. This brings us to the singular history of the -epidemics of sweat in England,--to the clear intervals of many years and -the sudden bursting forth anew. What became of the specific virus from -1485 to 1508, to 1517 to 1528, to 1551, and after? - -A fresh importation in each of the epidemic years after 1485 is -improbable; certainly the circumstances of Henry VII.'s expedition never -occurred again, and the traffic between England and her two French -possessions of Calais and Guines had nothing in it at all analogous. -Equally improbable is the continuance of the sweat in isolated or sporadic -cases from year to year throughout the intervals between the epidemics; -the only facts that give any countenance to such a continuous succession -are the occasionally mentioned "hot agues," as in 1518, and, on a more -extensive scale, in 1539. The seeds or germs of the infection which arose -first in London in September, 1485, must have lain dormant in the city -until some favouring conditions came round to call them into life. It is -impossible to figure such dormancy of the virus except on the hypothesis -that it was a soil-poison, having its habitat in the pores of the ground. -The periodic activity of all such poisons depends, as we can now say with -a good deal of certainty, upon the movements of the ground-water, which in -turn depend on the wetness or dryness of seasons. The kind of weather -preceding each of the epidemics of the English sweat has been remarked on -by writers, but somewhat loosely or erroneously. The peculiarity of the -year of the second sweat, 1508, (not 1506 as in Hecker, nor 1507 as in -other writers) was a "marvellous" forwardness of vegetation in the month -of January, unusual heat from the end of May to the 13th of June, much -prized rain on that date, on the 16th, and on the 3rd of July[535], the -sweat being heard of first in the Lord Treasurer's household in July. The -third year of the sweat, 1517, began with a great frost from the 12th -January, so that no boat could go from London to Westminster all the term -time[536], while men crossed with horse and cart from Westminster to -Lambeth[537]. This great frost would appear to have been without snow, the -whole season from September, 1516, to May, 1517, being chronicled as one -of unusual drought, "for there fell no rain to be accounted," so that "in -some places men were fain to drive their cattle three or four miles to -water." The kind of weather following the break-up of the drought is not -mentioned, but there is implied of course a certain amount of rain. It was -about the end of July or first of August, 1517, that the sweat began in -London and the suburbs. The fourth, and perhaps the most severe sweat, -that of 1528, followed upon two wet seasons, with one spoiled harvest in -1527 and bad prospects for that of 1528. The winter of 1526-27 had been -unusually wet from November until the end of January; then dry weather set -in until April; after which the rain began again and continued for eight -weeks[538]. The harvest before that seems to have been a partial failure, -for early in 1527 corn began to run short in London, and for a week or -more there was acute general famine, so that the bread carts coming in -from Stratford had to be guarded by the sheriffs and their men all the way -from Mile End to their proper market. The high price of corn continued -into the summer of 1528. The weather of that summer is not specially -recorded for England; but we learn from a diplomatic letter dated, Paris, -the 4th of July, that much rain had fallen and destroyed the corn and -vines, so that there were fears of universal decay and dearth through all -France[539]. On the 5th July, Henry VIII. requests Wolsey to have general -processions made through the realm "for good weather and for the plague," -the sweat having already been raging for more than a month. The fifth and -last sweat, in 1551, also coincided with an unusually high price of corn, -or, in other words, followed one or more bad harvests. In 1550 wheat was -at 20 shillings the quarter; at Easter in 1551 the price in London was -26_sh._ 8_d._; ten or twelve ship loads of rye and wheat from Holland and -Brittany were sold under the mayor's direction at a stated but very high -price. Meanwhile the sweat was advancing from Shrewsbury to London, where -it broke out on the 7th July. The statements of Dr Caius about stinking -mists carried from town to town are, like most of his statements, so -obviously the product of his uncritical rhetoric that it becomes almost -impossible to trust his narrative for matters of fact. But we may go so -far as to assume that the first half of 1551 was a season of an unusually -moist atmosphere. At all events the fifth season of the sweat, and also -the fourth (1528), stand out in the annals as years of scarcity following -bad harvests, which had probably failed owing to continuous wet weather. - -There is not, on the surface, much uniformity in the weather preceding the -epidemics of the sweat in 1508, 1517, 1528 and 1551. In the first of these -the winter was mild and the early summer excessively hot and dry; in the -second the winter and spring were remarkable for drought, with several -weeks of intense black frost in the middle period; in the remaining two -the antecedent appears to have been an excessive rainfall. But in all the -four we shall find that the law of the sub-soil water, as formulated by -the recent Munich school with reference to epidemic outbursts, was -exemplified. According to that law, the dangerous products of fermentation -arise from the soil when the pores of the ground are either getting filled -with water after having been long filled with air, or are getting filled -with air after having been long filled with water. It is the range of -fluctuation in the ground-water, either downwards or upwards, that -determines the risk to health; and in two of the years of the sweat, 1508 -and 1517, we find that there had been a rise from a very low level of the -wells, while in the other two, 1528 and 1551, the wells had begun to fall -after standing for a length of time at an unusually high level. If this -reading of the somewhat imperfect data can be trusted, it is at one and -the same time an explanation of the outbreak of the sweat in the -respective seasons, and a confirmation of the hypothesis that the virus of -the sweat had its habitat in the ground. That hypothesis is, indeed, -supported by so great a convergence of probabilities, both for the English -sweat and for the endemic sweat of France[540], that it may be used to -explain the seasonal incidence without laying the argument open to the -charge of running in a vicious circle. - -Whatever had been the kind of weather determining the successive outbreaks -of the sweat, it is clear that the favouring circumstances were in general -not the same as those of the bubo-plague. The greater outbursts of plague, -as we shall see, were in 1500, 1509, 1513, 1531, 1535, 1543, 1547, and -other years not sweat-years. It is only in the autumn of 1517 that the -plague overlaps somewhat on the sweat, and even then it becomes noticeable -mostly in the winter following the decline of the sweat. The two poisons -had existed in English soil side by side, but had not come out at the same -seasons; also the sweat had been mostly a disease of the greater houses, -and the plague mostly of the poorer. - - -The Extinction of the Sweat in England. - -The disappearance of the sweat from England after 1551, or its failure to -come out again with the appropriate weather, is one of those phenomena of -epidemic disease which might be made to appear less of a mystery by -finding several more in the like case. A history of all the extinct types -of infective disease would probably bring to light some reason why they -had each and all died out. But an epidemic disease leaves no bones behind -it in the strata; nor has the astonishing progress of science succeeded as -yet in detecting palozoic bacteria, although that discovery cannot be -delayed much longer. Meanwhile we have to make what we can of the ordinary -records. In our own time, so to speak, the sweat became extinct in 1551, -and the plague in 1666; perhaps someone before long may be able to say -that typhus died out (for a time) in Britain in such and such a year, and -smallpox (for good) in such and such another. The surprising thing is that -an infection which came forth time after time should have one day been -missed as if it were dead. If the sweat had five seasons in England, why -not fifty? Perhaps its career was short because the circumstances of its -origin were transient and, as it were, accidental. But it may have been -also subject to the only law of extinct disease-species which our scanty -knowledge points to--the law of the succession, or superseding, or -supplanting of one epidemic type by another. - -Other forms of epidemic fever, in the same pestilential class as the -sweat, were coming to the front in England as well as in other parts of -Europe. Thus, in 1539, a summer of great heat and drought, "divers and -many honest persons died of the hot agues, and of a great laske through -the realm." The hot agues were febrile influenzas, and the great laske was -dysentery. Again, in the autumn of 1557, there died "many of the -wealthiest men all England through by a strange fever," according to one -writer[541], or, according to another[542], there prevailed "divers -strange and new sicknesses, taking men and women in their heads, as -strange agues and fevers, whereof many died." Jones in his _Dyall of -Agues_, describes his own attack near Southampton, in 1558, and calls it -the sweating sickness. - -That epidemic corresponded to a great prevalence of "influenza" on the -continent, which was probably as Protean or composite as the fevers in -England. It would not be correct to say that these new fevers or -influenzas, with more or less of a sweating type, were the sweat somewhat -modified. But they seem to have come in succession to the sweat, if not to -have taken its place, or supplanted it. The prevalent types of disease -somehow reflect the social condition of the population; they change with -the social state of the country or of a group of countries; they depend -upon a great number of associated circumstances which it would be hard to -enumerate exhaustively. As early as 1522 we have the gaol fever at -Cambridge, at a time when Henry VIII.'s attempts to repress crime were -come to the strange pass described in More's _Utopia_. These things remain -for more systematic handling in another chapter; but in concluding the -career of the sweat in England we may pass from it with the remark that it -did not cease until other forms of pestilential fever were ready to take -its place. The same explanation remains to be given of the total -disappearance of plague from England after 1666: it was superseded by -pestilential contagious fever, a disease which was its congener, and had -been establishing itself more and more steadily from year to year as the -conditions of living in the towns were passing more and more from the -medieval type to the modern. Meanwhile we have to take up the thread of -the plague-history where we left it in the reign of Edward IV. - - - - -CHAPTER VI. - -PLAGUE IN THE TUDOR PERIOD. - - -When the town council of York met on the 16th of August, 1485, to take -measures on account of Henry Tudor's landing in Wales, their first -resolution was to despatch the sergeant to the mace to Richard III. at -Nottingham, with an offer of men (they promised 400 for his army at -Bosworth), and their second resolution was to send at once for all such -aldermen and others of the council as were sojourning without the city on -account of "the plague that reigneth[543]." These leading citizens of York -had gone into the country to avoid the infectious exhalations within the -walls in the summer heats; the plague that reigned in York was the old -bubo-plague, which would show itself in a house here or there in any -ordinary season, and on special occasions would rise to the height of an -epidemic, driving away all who could afford to remove from the pestilent -air of the town to the comparatively wholesome country, and taking its -victims mostly among the poorer class who could not afford a "change of -air." In the three centuries following the Black Death, change of air -meant a good deal more than it means now. The infection of the air, or the -"intemperies" of the air, at Westminster occasioned (along with other -reasons) the prorogation or adjournment to country towns of many -parliaments; the infection of the air in and around Fleet Street caused -the breaking up of many law terms; and the infection of the air in Oxford -colleges was so constant an interruption to the studies of the place in -the 15th century that Anthony Wood traces to that cause more than to any -other the total decline of learning, the rudeness of manners and the -prevalence of "several sorts of vice, which in time appeared so notorious -that it was consulted by great personages of annulling the University or -else translating it to another place[544]." From the old college -registers, chiefly that of his own college of Merton, he has counted some -thirty pestilences at Oxford, great and small, during the fifteenth -century. The reason why the Oxford annals of plague are so complete is -that each outbreak, even if only one or two deaths had occurred[545], -meant a dispersion of the scholars and tutors of one or more halls and -colleges, their removal in a body to some country house, alteration of the -dates of terms, and postponement of the public Acts for degrees in the -schools. Experience had taught the necessity of such prompt measures. Thus -the first sweat, that of 1485, came so suddenly that it killed many of the -scholars before they could disperse, "albeit it lasted but a month or six -weeks." Hardly had the halls and colleges begun to fill again after the -dispersion by the sweat of 1485, when "another pestilential disease," that -is to say, the bubo-plague itself, broke forth at the end of August, 1486, -in Magdalen parish, and daily increased so much that the scholars were -obliged to flee again. In 1491 there was another dispersion; and in 1493 -so severe an outbreak of plague from April to Midsummer that many were -swept away, both cleric and laic: Magdalen College removed to Brackley in -Northamptonshire, Oriel to St Bartholomew's hospital near Oxford, and -Merton to Islip, "instead of Cuxham their usual place of retirement." The -disastrous fifteenth century closes with a specially severe plague in -1499-1500, in which perished "divers of this university accounted worthy -in these times;" an accompanying scarcity of grain and consequent failure -of scholarships or exhibitions led many students to betake themselves to -mechanical occupations. In August, 1503, the plague broke out again in St -Alban's Hall; the principal with all but a few of the students went to -Islip, where the pestilence overtook them (three weeks having been spent -first in mirth and jollity), so that several died and were buried, some at -Islip, others at Ellesfield and one at Noke; in October it broke out in -Merton College and drove some of the fellows and bachelors to the lodge in -Stow Wood, others to Wotton near Cumner, where they remained until the -17th December. These interruptions had been so frequent that of fifty-five -halls, only thirty-three were now inhabited, and they "but slenderly, as -may be seen in our registers." The town of Oxford shared in the decline; -streets and lanes formerly populous were now desolate and forsaken. An -epidemic in 1508, which may have been the second sweat, caused another -dispersion; then the old bubo-plague again in 1510, 1511, 1512 and 1513, -filling up the interval until the summer of 1517, when a "sudor -tabificus," the third sweat, "dispersed and swept away most, if not all, -of the students." The bubo-plague followed in the winter and spring, -especially in St Mary Hall and Canterbury College. Meanwhile cardinal -Wolsey had founded Cardinal College (afterwards Christ Church), bringing -to it an infusion of new learning from Cambridge and elsewhere; but in -1525, "while this selected society was busy in preaching, reading, -disputing and performing their scholastic Acts, a vehement plague brake -forth, which dispersed most of them, so that they returned not all the -year following or two years after," and Cardinal College "thus settled, -was soon after left as 'twere desolate." The same outbreak affected -specially the halls or colleges of St Alban, Jesus, St Edmund and -Queen's[546]. - -Oxford was not altogether singular in this experience of plague from year -to year or at intervals of three or four years. What Sir Thomas More says -of the cities of Utopia was true of the towns of England or of any -medieval country in Christendom: "As for their cities, whoso knoweth one -of them, knoweth them all; they be all so like one to another, as far -forth as the nature of the place permitteth." The limitation as to the -nature of the place is not without importance for the frequency and -severity of plague; the quantity of standing water around Oxford would -certainly appear to have made the epidemics there a more regular product -of the soil[547]. But we hear of plague also on the soil of Cambridge, -particularly in 1511, when Erasmus was there: on the 28th November he -writes from Queens' College to Ammonio in London: "Here is great solitude; -most are away for fear of the pestilence," adding rather unkindly, -"although there is also solitude when everyone is in residence." It is -from such chance references in letters of the time that we can infer the -existence of plague throughout England. These references become much more -numerous as the sixteenth century runs on, not perhaps because plague was -more frequent, but because all kinds of documents are better preserved. -The remarkable difference between the reigns of Henry VII. and Henry VIII. -in regard to the quantity of extant materials for the construction of -history is as keenly felt by the student of epidemics as by the student of -high politics. The local records of towns, London included, are still -almost valueless for our purpose: even the skilled antiquaries employed by -the Historical Manuscripts Commission have hitherto extracted nothing -concerning pre-Elizabethan epidemics from the archives of civic -council-chambers, and only a little from muniment-rooms such as that of -Canterbury Abbey. - -The few details that we possess, such as those for the plague at Hull from -1472 to 1478, had been extracted from local records by the authors of town -and county histories. Before the end of the sixteenth century the evidence -of plague epidemic all over England, as well in provincial towns and in -the country as in London, becomes abundant. There may have been really a -great increase, but it is much more probable that the increase is for the -most part only apparent. It is of some consequence to determine the -probability as exactly as possible; and I shall therefore examine with -more minuteness than would otherwise have been necessary the evidence as -to the existence and amount of plague in London and elsewhere year after -year from the accession of the Tudor dynasty in 1485, using chiefly the -Calendars of State Papers for my purpose. As in the case of the sweat, we -happen to hear of plague in London and elsewhere because the Court was -kept away by it; the king's secretaries are informed week after week of -the state of health in London, and foreign ambassadors, especially the -Venetian envoys, have frequently occasion to mention the hindrance to -public business caused by the plague. But for these State papers the -historian of epidemics would have little beyond an occasional parish -register to build upon. The medical profession in England were not -concerned to write or print anything thereon; while there are numerous -foreign printed books on the plague (e.g. Forrestier's at Rouen in 1490) -there is not one original English treatise until that of Skene of -Edinburgh in 1568. That the physicians were well employed by those who -could engage their services, and that they did sustain the credit of their -profession by the liberal scale of their fees, we have every reason to -believe; thus the Venetian envoy writes on 3rd June, 1535, that he had -been ill, and that he had expended seven hundred ducats during his -illness, "and for so many physicians," so that he had only one ducat -remaining. But these thriving practitioners did not write books like their -brethren abroad. One of their number, Linacre, who was also a prebendary -of Westminster, busied himself with editions of certain writings of Galen. -Erasmus mentions him in a letter as one of the Oxford scholars in whose -society he found pleasure; but there is in the _Praise of Folly_ a -reference to a certain grammatical pedant whom Hecker identifies with -Linacre. The other physicians and surgeons of the period whose names are -known, Butts, Chambre, Borde and the rest of the group in Holbein's -picture of Henry VIII. handing the surgeons their charter, have left -nothing in print which illustrates the epidemic diseases of the time, and -little of any kind of writing except some formul of medicines: Borde, who -was patronised by Cromwell, is known only as a humorist or satirist. Thus -the inquiry must proceed without any of those aids from the faculty which -make the history of epidemics on the Continent comparatively easy. - -After the disastrous prevalence of plague in England in the reign of -Edward IV., culminating in the great epidemic of 1479 in London and -elsewhere, we do not hear of the disease again in London until 1487, two -years after the first sweat; in that year, on the 14th April, a king's -writ from Norwich postponed the business of the Common Pleas and King's -Bench until Trinity term, on account of the pestilence in London, -Westminster and neighbouring places[548]. The next reference is to the -great epidemic of 1499-1500, in London and apparently also in the country. -Fabyan, who was then an alderman and likely to know, puts the deaths in -London at twenty thousand[549]; Polydore Virgil says thirty thousand[550]; -and others say thirty thousand deaths from plague and other diseases -together[551]. The smaller total is the more likely to be nearest the -mark. There is reason to think that the population of London a generation -later was little over 60,000; and it will appear in the sequel that a -fourth or a fifth part of the inhabitants was as much as the severest -plagues cut off, although it is entirely credible that the Black Death -itself had cut off one half. - -The enormous mortality in 1499-1500 has left few traces in the records of -the City or of the State. Five great prelates died during the plague-year, -some of them certainly from it: Morton of Canterbury (a very old man), -Langton of Winchester (before he could be transferred to Canterbury), -Rotheram of York, Alcock of Ely and Jane of Norwich[552]. Like some of the -later plagues in London it lasted through the winter. It was at Oxford in -the same years, and casual references in two of the Plumpton letters lead -one to infer that it may have been in remote parts of the country -also[553]. - -The infection was still active as late as October, 1501, at Gravesend, and -it made some difference to the reception of the young princess Catharine -of Arragon, who had come over for her marriage with Prince Arthur, and -became famous in history as the wife of his brother Henry VIII. The -following are Henry VII.'s instructions, dated October, 1501:-- - - "My lord Steward shall shew or cause to be shewed to the said - Princess, that the King's Grace, tenderly considering her great and - long pain and travel upon the sea, would full gladly that she landed - and lodged for the night at Gravesend; but forasmuch as the plague was - there of late, and that is not yet clean purged thereof, the King - would not that she should be put in any such adventure or danger, and - therefore his Grace hath commanded the bark to be prepared and arrayed - for her lodging[554]." - -In 1503 there was plague at Oxford, as we have seen, and at Exeter, where -two mayors died of it in quick succession, and two bailiffs[555]. The -infection was certainly in London in 1504 or 1505 (perhaps in both, and -possibly at its low endemic level in the other years from 1501): for -Bernard Andr mentions casually that he had been absent from the City on -account of it[556]. - -In 1509, the first year of Henry VIII., there was a severe outbreak of -plague in the garrison of Calais, as well as "great plague" in divers -parts of England[557]. In 1511, Erasmus writes from Cambridge on 17th -August, 5th October and 16th October, making reference to the plague in -London; and on the 27th October, 8th November, and 28th November, Ammonio -answers him that the plague has not entirely disappeared, and again that -it is abated, but a famine is feared, and lastly that the plague is -entirely gone. On the 26th of July the Venetian ambassador had written -that the queen-widow (mother of Edward V.) had died of plague and that the -king, Henry VIII., was anxious. - -On the 1st November, 1512, Erasmus, on a visit to London, was so afraid of -the plague that he did not enter his own lodging, and missed a meeting -with Colet. The next year, 1513, was a severe plague-year according to -many testimonies. In the diary of the Venetian envoy from August to 3rd -September it is stated that deaths from plague are occurring constantly; -two of his servants sickened on the 22nd August, but did not recognize the -disease; on the 25th they rose from bed, went to a tavern to drink a -certain beverage called "ale," and died the same day: their bed, sheets -and other effects were thrown into the sea (? Thames). On the 17th -September he writes to Venice that it is perilous to remain in London; the -deaths were said to be 200 in a day, there was no business doing, all the -Venetian merchants in London had taken houses in the country; the plague -is also in the English fleet. In October the deaths are reported by the -envoy at 300 to 400 a day; he has gone into the country. On the 6th -November and 6th December he writes that plague was still doing much -damage. On the 3rd December the rumour of a great prevalence of plague in -England had reached Rome. On the 28th November Erasmus writes from -Cambridge that he does not intend to come to London before Christmas on -account of plague and robbers; and on the 21st December he writes again: -"I am shut up in the midst of pestilence and hemmed in with robbers." - -One year is very like another, but it will be desirable to continue the -narrative a little longer so as to remove any suspicion of constructing -history beyond the facts. In February, 1514, Erasmus writes that he had -been disgusted with London, deeming it unsafe to stay there owing to -plague. In going in procession to St Paul's on the 21st May the king -preferred to be on horseback, for one reason "to avoid contact with the -crowd by reason of the plague;" he had lately recovered from some vaguely -reported "fever" at Richmond. On the 1st July Convocation was adjourned on -account of the epidemic and the heat. - -Next year, 1515, Erasmus writes from London on the 20th April that he is -in much trouble; the plague had broken out and it looked as if it would -rage everywhere. On the 23rd April Wolsey sends advice to the earl of -Shrewsbury in the country (? Wingfield) to "get him into clean air and -divide his household," owing to contagious plague among his servants; on -the 28th the earl received from London one pound of manus Christi,--the -same remedy that Henry VIII. sent to Wolsey for the sweat--with coral, -and half-a-pound of powder preservative. On the same date "they begin to -die in London in divers places suddenly of fearful sickness." One of the -incidents of the plague of 1515 which has fixed the attention of -chroniclers was the death of twenty-seven of the nuns in a convent at the -Minories outside Aldgate[558]. Next year, on 14th May (1516), the sickness -was so extreme in Lord Shrewsbury's house at Wingfield that he has put -away all his horse-keepers and turned his horses out to grass. In London, -on the 21st May, the Venetian ambassador removed to Putney owing to a case -of plague in his house, and he would not be allowed to see Wolsey until -the 30th June, when forty days would have passed since the plague in his -house. - -The next summer, 1517, was the season of the third sweat. It was hardly -over when plague began in London in September. On the 21st the Venetian -envoy speaks of having had to avoid "the plague _and_ the sweating -sickness;" on the 26th he writes that the plague is making some progress -and he has left London to avoid it. On the 15th October the king was at -Windsor "in fear of the great plague." One writes on 25 Oct., "As far as I -can hear, there is no parish in London free[559]." On the 16th November -the envoy begs the seignory of Venice to send someone to replace him as he -thinks it high time to escape from "sedition, sweat and plague." On the -3rd December the king and the cardinal were still absent from London on -account of the plague; on the 22nd their absence was causing general -discontent, the plague being somewhat abated. It was not until March, -1518, that the court approached London; on the 15th the Venetian envoy -rode out to Richmond to see the king, and found him in some trouble, as -three of his pages had died "of the plague." The court withdrew again to -Berkshire, and on the 6th April it was decided by the king's privy council -at Abingdon that London was still infected and must be avoided, the queen -(Catharine of Arragon) having declared the day before that she had perfect -knowledge of the sickness being in London, and that she feared for the -king, although she was no prophet. On the 7th April the report of four or -five deaths at Nottingham ("as appears by a bill enclosed") was made the -ground of postponing a projected visit of the king to the north. The -spring was unusually warm, which made the risk of sickness to be judged -greater. It is clear that public business was suffering by the prolonged -absence of the court from London, and that the existence of infection was -being denied. On the 28th April Master More certified from Oxford to the -king at Woodstock that three children were dead of the sickness, but none -others; he had accordingly charged the mayor and the commissary in the -king's name "that the inhabitants of those houses that be and shall be -infected, shall keep in, put out wispes and bear white rods, according as -your grace devised for Londoners;" this was approved by the king's -council, and the question was discussed whether the fair in the Austin -Friars of Oxford a fortnight later should not be prohibited, as the resort -of people "may make Oxford as dangerous as London, next term" (the law -courts sat at Oxford in Trinity term). However, the interests of traders -had to be kept in view also. On 28th June, 1518, Pace writes from the -court at Woodstock to Wolsey that "all are free from sickness here, but -many die of it within four or five miles, as Mr Controller is informed." -On the 11th July he writes again from Woodstock that two persons are dead -of the sickness, and more infected, one of them a servant to a yeoman of -the king's guard; to-morrow the king and queen lodge at Ewelme, and stop -not by the way, as the place appointed for their lodging is infected. On -the 14th July he writes to Wolsey from Wallingford that the king moves -to-morrow to Bisham "as it is time: for they do die in these parts in -every place, not only of the small pokkes and mezils, but also of the -great sickness." The uncertainty as to what these diseases may have been -will appear from the next letter, on the 18th July, from Sir Thomas More: -"We have daily advertisements here, other of some sweating or the great -sickness from places very near unto us; and as for surfeits and -drunkenness we have enough at home." The king had also heard that one of -my lady Princess's servants was sick of "a hot ague" at Enfield. On the -22nd July, the Venetian ambassador writes from Lambeth asking to be -recalled: two of his servants had died of the plague, and he himself had -the sweating sickness twice in one week. The pope's legate, Campeggio, -made a state entry into London about the first of August, but the king and -Wolsey were not there to receive him, ostensibly for fear of infection. -The king was now at Greenwich, and we hear no more of the fear of -infection for a time. In the end of March, 1519, deaths from plague -occurred on board one of the Venetian galleys at Southampton. On the 4th -August, 1520, the king (at Windsor) has heard that the great sickness is -still prevalent at Abingdon and other villages towards Woodstock, and has -changed his route ("gystes") accordingly; on 8th August, sickness is -reported at Woodstock. The same year some kind of sickness was very -disastrous in Ireland. - -In the winter of 1521 (2nd November), the sickness continues in London: -"it is not much feared, though it is universal in every parish." According -to a vague entry in Hall's chronicle the year 1522 was in like manner, -"not without pestilence nor death," which may refer to the gaol fever at -Cambridge. - -Thus from 1511 to 1521 there is not a single year without some reference -to the prevalence of plague, the autumn and winter of 1513 having been -probably the time of greatest mortality in London. After 1521 or 1522 -there comes a break of four or five years in the plague-references, except -for a vague mention of plague followed by famine at Shrewsbury in -1525[560]. They begin again in 1526 (from Guildford) and go on until 1532 -every year much as in the former period, the year 1528 being mostly -occupied with the fourth epidemic of the sweating sickness. On the 4th -June, 1529, the legate Campeggio writes from London: "Here we are still -wearing our winter clothing, and use fires as if it were January: never -did I witness more inconstant weather. The plague begins to rage -vigorously, and there is some fear of the sweating sickness." On the 31st -August the Venetian ambassador has a person sick of the plague in his -house; on the 9th September he has gone to a village near London on -account of the plague. On the 18th September the French ambassador in -London (Bishop Du Bellay) has plague in his household, and in spite of -repeated changes of lodging his principal servants are dead; he has been -unable to refuse leave to the others to go home, and is now quite alone, -but the danger from the plague is much diminished. - -In 1530 the plague is heard of as early as March 23, previous to which -date two of the Venetian ambassador's servants had died of it; three more -of them died afterwards, and the envoy was forbidden the Court for forty -days. Parliament was prorogued on April 26 to June 22, on account of the -plague in London and the suburbs, and farther, for the same reason, until -October 1. The king was at Greenwich, but even there was not beyond the -infection; in the Privy Purse book, there is an entry of 18. 8_s._ paid -"to Rede, the marshall of the king's hall for to dispose of the king's -charge to such poor folk as were expelled the town of the Greenwiche in -the tyme of the plague." Similar payments are entered on January 13, 1531, -April 10, April 26 and November 8[561]. - -On November 23, 1531, the king was obliged to leave Greenwich on account -of the plague, removing to Hampton Court (now a royal palace since -Wolsey's fall). In London it had somewhat abated, but, according to a -letter of the Venetian ambassador, had been up to 300 or 400 deaths in a -week. In mid-winter, the 15th of January, 1532, Parliament was prorogued -on account of the insalubrity of the air in London and Westminster. The -infection may be assumed to have gone on, according to the analogy of -known years, all through the spring and summer, rising to a greater height -in the autumn. We next hear of it on the 18th September, 1532, when the -Venetian envoy writes from London that the king's journey to Gravesend and -Dover would be by water, "as there is much plague in those parts, and -there is no lack of it in London. Yesterday at the king's court the master -of the kitchen died of it, having waited on his majesty the day before." -On the 24th September, "the plague increases daily in London and well nigh -throughout the country." - -On the 14th October, "the plague increases daily, and makes everybody -uneasy." On the same date the Privy Council write to the king, who had -crossed to Calais accompanied by Mr Secretary Cromwell, for a meeting with -the French king, that there is a rumour of the plague increasing, -especially at the Inns of Court. On the 18th October Hales, one of the -justices, writes to Cromwell that "the plague of sickness is so sore here -that I never saw so thin a Michaelmas term." On the 20th, Audeley the Lord -Chancellor writes that many die of the plague, the sergeants in Fleet -Street have left in consequence, the Inner Temple has broken commons, the -lawyers being in great fear. "_The Council have commanded the mayor to -certify how many have died of the plague._" That is the first known -reference to the London bills of mortality, and was probably the very -first occasion of them[562]. By that time the plague had been active in -London for more than a month, and had clearly begun to alarm the -residents. The result of the Privy Council's order to the mayor of London -was a bill on or before the 21st October, showing that 99 persons had died -of the plague in the city, and 27 from other causes, the number of deaths -from other causes suggesting that this was the bill for a week. On the -23rd the Secretary of State is informed that the sickness is fervent and -many die; those who are not citizens are much afeard. On the 25th Sir John -Aleyn has assurances for Cromwell (at Calais) from all parts of the -country that the whole realm is quiet, but the plague has been more severe -than in London. Cromwell's French gardener was alive and well on Saturday -afternoon, the 12th, and he was dead of the plague and buried on Monday -morning the 14th. On the 27th the death "is quite abated" in London and -Westminster, according to one; but according to the Lord Chancellor, on -the 28th, the plague increases, especially about Fleet Street. On the 31st -October one writes, "I have not seen London so destitute of people as it -was when I came there." On 2nd November the death is assuaged and there is -good rule kept, for Sir Hugh Vaughan takes pains in his office like an -honest gentleman. On the 9th November the plague is abated. There the -correspondence ends, the Court having returned from France. But we may -here bring in a certain weekly bill of mortality which has come down among -the waifs of paper from that period[563]. It is for the week from the 16th -to the 23rd of November, the year not being stated; the experts of the -national collection of manuscripts were at one time inclined to assign it -to "circa 1512;" but the first that we hear of the mayor being called upon -to furnish a bill of plague-deaths is the order by the lords of the -Council on or about the 20th October 1532, the first bill having shown 99 -deaths in the city from plague and 27 deaths (in the week) from other -causes. The extant bill for the week 16th to 23rd November is clearly one -of a series; there are no good grounds for assigning it to an earlier date -than the year 1532, while there are reasons for not placing it later. -There are two other plague-bills extant, for August, 1535, written out in -a more clerkly fashion, and bearing the marks of greater experience. The -bill for the week in November is more primitive in appearance; and we may -fairly take it as one of the series first ordered by the Council in 1532: -for that was the most considerable year of the plague immediately -preceding the outburst of 1535, to which the more finished bills certainly -belong. The week in November, for which it gives the deaths from plague -and other causes in the city parishes is later than the dates of the 2nd -and 9th, when the plague was "suaged" and "abated;" the bill therefore -stands for plague on the decline, or near extinction for the season, its -total of plague deaths being 33, and of other deaths 32, as against 99 and -27 respectively in the corresponding week of October. As this, the -earliest of a great historical series of London bills of mortality, has a -peculiar interest, I transcribe it in full, retaining the original -spelling. - - Syns the XVIth day of November unto the XXIII day of the same moneth - ys dead within the cite and freedom yong and old these many folowyng - of the plage and other dyseases. - - Inprimys benetts gracechurch i of the plage - S Buttolls in front of Bysshops gate i corse - S Nycholas flesshammls i of the plage - S Peturs in Cornhill i of the plage - Mary Woolnerth i corse - All Halowes Barkyng ii corses - Kateryn Colman i of the plage - Mary Aldermanbury i corse - Michaels in Cornhill iii one of the plage - All halows the Moor ii i of the plage - S Gyliz iiii corses iii of the plage - S Dunstons in the West iiii of the plage - Stevens in Colman Strete i corse - All halowys Lumbert Strete i corse - Martins Owut Whiche i corse - Margett Moyses i of the plage - Kateryn Creechurch ii of the plage - Martyns in the Vintre ii corses - Buttolls in front Algate iiii corses - S Olavs in Hart Strete ii corses - S Andros in Holborn ii of the plage - S Peters at Powls Wharff ii of the plage - S Fayths i corse of the plage - S Alphes i corse of the plage - S Mathows in Fryday Strete i of the plage - Aldermary ii corses - S Pulcres iii corses i of the plage - S Thomas Appostells ii of the plage - S Leonerds Foster Lane i of the plage - Michaels in the Ryall ii corses - S Albornes i corse of the plage - Swytthyns ii corses of the plage - Mary Somersette i corse - S Bryde v corses i of the plage - S Benetts Powls Wharff i of the plage - All halows in the Wall i of the plage - Mary Hyll i corse. - - Sum of the plage xxxiiii persons - Sum of other seknes xxxii persons - - The holl sum xx/iii & vi. - - And there is this weke clere xxx/iii and iii paryshes as by this bille - doth appere. - - The exec{n} of corses buryed of the plage within the cite of London - syns &c. - -There does not appear to have been any occasion for a continuance of -plague-bills beyond the date of the one just given until nearly three -years after: we hear, indeed, of a severe epidemic of plague at Oxford in -1533, but nothing of it in London until 1535[564]. It so happens that a -pair of London bills of mortality is extant from the month of August in -that year. Thus, by a singular coincidence, the only original bills of -mortality that have come down (so far as is known) from the sixteenth -century, are one from the end of the series in the first year of their -execution (1532), and another the very first of the series in the second -year of their execution (1535), or in the series ordered on account of the -epidemic of plague next following. Of that epidemic also it may be -permitted to give somewhat full details, for it is only rarely that we -have the chance of realizing the facts in so concrete a way. - -In the summer and autumn of 1535 Henry VIII., with the queen (Anne -Boleyn), was mostly at his manor of Thornbury in Gloucestershire, Cromwell -the principal Secretary of State being either with the king or in his -immediate neighbourhood. The absence of the Court occasions numerous -letters to be sent from and to London, in which we hear of the plague -among other things. Cromwell had four houses in or near London at this -time,--at the Rolls in Chancery Lane, at Austin Friars in the City, at the -fashionable suburb of Stepney, and at Highbury: besides these he had a -fine villa building at Hackney. From his steward or other servants at one -or more of these he was in receipt of letters constantly during his -absence. A letter from the Rolls on the 30th July informs him that twelve -heron-shaws had been sent to him from Kent, and had been received at the -Rolls "as the city of London is sorely infected with the plague." Next day -another writes that the City is infected but Fleet Street is clean. On the -5th August "the common sickness waxeth very busy in London." On the 7th -Lord Chancellor Audeley writes from "my house at Christchurch" -(Creechurch, near Aldgate) that he had been expecting Cromwell in London, -but hears that he will not return for nine or ten days; will therefore go -to his house at Colchester meanwhile, as they are dying of the plague in -divers parishes in London. Cromwell was naturally desirous to know -accurately the state of health in the city, so as to regulate his own -movements and perhaps the king's also; he accordingly makes inquiries of -his various correspondents. Another letter from London on the 7th August -informs him that there is no death at Court, but only in certain places in -the city: "I fear these great humidities will engender pestilence at the -end of the year, rather after Bartholomew tide than before. If you be near -London you must avoid conference of people." On receipt of this Cromwell -would appear to have written to the mayor of London, for on the 13th -August his clerk at the Rolls replies to him that he had delivered the -letter to the lord mayor. On the 16th another of the household at the -Rolls writes that the plague rages in every parish in London, but not so -bad as in many places abroad: "I will send the number of the dead. The -mayor keeps his chamber. Some say he is sick of an ague; others that he -was cut about the brows for the megrims, which vexeth him sore. Few men -come at him, but women." The bill of mortality which Cromwell had asked -for previous to 13th August is extant[565]. It is in two parts: one -showing 31 deaths from plague and 31 deaths from other causes in -thirty-seven out of one hundred parishes from the 5th to the 12th August, -with a list of parishes clear; and the other, headed "14th August" and -probably meant to include the former, showing a much heavier mortality and -a much shorter list of parishes clear, the whole being endorsed by the -mayor, Sir John Champneys, as follows: "So appeareth there be dead within -the city of London of the plague and otherwise from the 6th day of this -month of August to the 14th day, which be eight days complete, the full -number of 152 persons [105 of them from plague]. And this day se'night -your mastership [Mr Secretary Cromwell] shall be certified of the number -that shall chance to depart in the meantime. Yours as I am bound, John -Champeneys." This double bill for certain days in August, 1535, is rather -more elaborate than, but otherwise not unlike, the above bill, for a week -in November, most likely of the year 1532. It will be noticed that the -deaths in all the city parishes from other causes than plague are 47 in -the bill for eight (or nine) days; 31 in the bill, partly the same, for -seven days, and 32 in the earlier bill for seven days, while they are -known to have been 27 in another bill of October, 1532, probably also for -seven days. These figures, the best to be had, are important for -calculating the population of London at the time; they represent quite an -ordinary weekly mortality, the deaths from plague being found to be always -extra deaths, where we can compare the mortality year after year, as in -the London bills of later times. - -The weekly bills of mortality called for in the plague of 1535 were sent -regularly to the Secretary of State until the end of September--on the -22nd and 30th August, and on the 4th, (and 5th), 11th and 27th September. -The one sent on Monday the 30th August showed 157 deaths during the -preceding week, of which 140 were put down to plague, leaving only 17 -deaths in the week from ordinary causes,--a small number owing perhaps to -so many residents having gone to the country. No figures remain from the -other bills, but we know from letters that the plague increased -considerably in September (e.g. 11th Sept. "By the Lord Mayor's -certificate which I send you will see that the plague increases") both in -London and in the country, justifying the prediction that it would be -worse after Bartholomew-tide; it is not until the 28th October that we -hear of the deaths being "well stopped" in London. Some few particulars of -this epidemic, and of its revival in 1536, remain to be added before we -come to speak of the London bills of mortality in general, of the extent -of the City and liberties at this period, of its sanitary condition, and -of the public health from year to year. - -On the 18th August, 1535, one writes to Cromwell from the Temple that the -plague "has visited my house near Stepney where my wife lives." On the -20th August a resident in Lincoln's Inn was seized with plague and -conveyed thence by night to a poor man's house right against the chamber -of one of Cromwell's household at the Rolls, where he died. "Such as -lodge in your gate seldom go out, and will have less occasion if, before -great time pass, you will appoint from Endevill, or elsewhere within your -rule, some venison for the household, that men may be the better contented -with their fare." On the same date Cromwell is informed by his steward at -Austin Friars that "the Frenchman next your house that was in St Peter's -parish [Cornhill] has buried two, but no more." The plague looked -threatening enough to raise the question whether Bartholomew fair should -be held at Smithfield this year. Meanwhile the king and court were at -Thornbury in Gloucestershire, having arrived there on the 18th August. The -town of Bristol was avoided "because the plague of pestilence then reigned -within the said town;" but a deputation of three persons was sent to the -king to present him with ten fat oxen and forty sheep, and to present the -queen, Anne Boleyn, with a gold cup full of gold pieces, an offering known -as "queen gold[566]." On the 25th of August the French ambassador -proceeded to Gloucestershire to inform Henry VIII. "of the interview of -the two queens," but he stopped six miles short of the court, owing to a -"French merchant" who followed him having died of plague on the road. On -the 4th September the plague in London is aggravated by a scarcity of -bread; "what was sold for 1/2_d._ when you were here is now 1_d._," and it -is so musty that it is rather poisonous than nourishing. On the 6th the -season has been unfavourable and there is great probability of famine. On -the 13th the Lord Chancellor will stay at his house at Old Ford beside -Stratford, on account of the plague in London increasing; he will have to -go to Westminster on the 3rd November, with the Speaker and others, to -prorogue Parliament, and advises the prorogation to be until the 4th of -February, and of the law courts until the eve of All Souls, by which time, -by coldness of the weather, the plague should cease. Wheat and rye were at -a mark and 16/- the quarter. A letter from Exeter on the 17th September -shows the danger of famine to have been great there also[567]. On the 23rd -September one of the masons working at Cromwell's house in Austen Friars -is sick of the plague: three corses were buried at Hackney [of men -employed at the new house?] last St Matthew's day. In October the king is -on his way back from Gloucestershire, but changes his route owing to a -death at Shalford and four deaths at Farnham. On the 24th October the -bishop of Winchester, on his way to Paris, lost his servant at Calais by -the great sickness "wherewith he was infected at his late being in London -longer than I would he should:" travelling is cumbrous in the "strange -watery weather" in France. In November the pope has heard that England is -troubled with famine and pestilence. The curate of Much Malvern writes in -November (but perhaps of 1536): "I have buried four persons of pestilence -since Saturday, and I have one more to bury to-day. Yesterday I was in a -house where the plague is very sore." - -The sickness appears to have shown itself again in London as early as -April, 1536. On the 2nd of May two gentlemen of the Inner Temple had died -of the sickness; on the 15th the abbot of York writes to be excused from -attending Parliament "because of the plague which has visited my house -near Powles [St Paul's]." In the same summer the election of knights to -serve in Parliament for Shropshire could not be held at Shrewsbury because -the plague was in the town. In September one of the king's visitors of the -abbeys, previous to their suppression, found hardly any place clear of the -plague in Somerset, and was much impeded in his work. On the 27th -September one of the numerous coronations of new queens in Henry VIII.'s -reign (this time Jane Seymour in succession to Anne Boleyn, beheaded in -May) was like to be postponed "seeing how the plague reigned in -Westminster, even in the Abbey." On the 9th October plague was at Dieppe, -thought to have been brought over from Rye. In Yorkshire also, the duke of -Norfolk, sent to put down the rebellion in November, 1536, came into close -contact with plague; many were dying of it at Doncaster: "Where I and my -son lay, at a friar's, ten or twelve houses were infected within a butt's -length. On Friday night the mayor's wife and two daughters and a servant -all died in one house." Nine soldiers also were dead. At Oxford the -plague was active, and the scholars had gone into the country. In London -on the 27th November it was dangerous to tarry at Lincoln's Inn "for they -die daily in the City." In September, 1536, the small essay on plague by -the 14th century bishop of Aarhus, which had circulated in manuscript in -the medieval period and was first printed in 1480, was reprinted at -London, the regimen, as the title declares, having been "of late practised -and proved in mani places within the City of London, and by the same many -folke have been recovered and cured[568]." In 1537 there appear to have -been a few cases of plague at Shrewsbury, on account of which the town -council paid certain moneys[569]. - -Beyond the year 1538 the domestic records of State are not as yet -calendared in such fulness as to bring to light any references to plague -in them. It may be, therefore, that the clear interval from 1537 to 1542 -is in appearance only. From such sources as are available we can continue -the history of plague down to the great London plague of 1563; but it is a -history meagre and disappointing after the numerous concrete glimpses and -details of the earlier period. - -The summer of 1540 was a sickly one throughout England[570]; it introduces -us to a different and perhaps new type of disease, "hot agues," with -"laskes" or dysenteries, of which a good deal remains to be said in -another chapter. - -It was in 1539 that Parish Registers of the births, marriages and deaths -began to be kept--very irregularly for the most part but in some few -parishes continuously from that year. By their means we can henceforth -trace the existence of epidemic disease in the country, which might not -have been suspected or thought probable. Thus, at Watford from July to -September, 1540, there were 47 burials, of which 40 were from "plague." -Next year, in the month of October, the burials were 14, a number greatly -in excess of the average[571]. In 1543 there was "a great death" in -London, which lasted so far into the winter that the Michaelmas law term -had to be kept at St Albans[572]. Another civic chronicle adds that there -had been a great death the summer before; and from an ordinance of the -Privy Council it appears that the plague was in London as early as May 21, -1543[573]. The next definite proof of plague in the capital is under 1547 -and 1548. On the 15th November in the former year blue crosses were -ordered to be affixed to the door-posts of houses visited by the plague. -In 1548, says Stow, there was "great pestilence" in London, and a -commission was issued to curates that there should be no burials between -the hours of six in the evening and six in the morning, and that the bell -should be tolled for three-quarters of an hour[574]. A letter of July 19 -says that they had been visited by plague in the Temple, and that it still -continued[575]. On August 28, the Common Council adjourned for a fortnight -by reason of the violence of the plague[576]. - -These are the London informations for 1547 and 1548, but it would be -unsafe to conclude that the other years from 1543 were free from plague. -In 1544 it was raging at Newcastle[577], at Canterbury[578] and at -Oxford[579], at which last it continued most of the next year, and was -considered to be "the dregs of that which happened _anno_ 1542." It had -been prevalent in Edinburgh previous to June 24, 1545[580]. In April, -1546, there was a severe mortality on board a Venetian ship at Portsmouth, -which may have been the plague, as in a similar case at Southampton[581]. -In the autumn or early winter of the same year the plague was raging so -fervently in Devonshire that the Commissioners for the Musters were -obliged to put off their work till it ceased[582]. Within the town of -Haddington, which was held by an English garrison against a large -besieging force of French and others, plague broke out in 1547[583]. In -1549 the disease is reported from Lincoln[584]. A letter of November 23, -1550, states that the Princess Mary was driven from Wanstead by one dying -of the plague there[585]. - -The reigns of Edward VI. and Mary, full of trouble as they were in other -ways, furnish hardly a single record of plague. The sweating sickness of -1551 we hear of sufficiently; and the pestilent fevers, or influenzas, in -1557-58 are not altogether without record; but of plague down to the 5th -year of Elizabeth (1563) there is very little said, and that little not -free from ambiguity. Sometime in that interval, or still earlier, must -have fallen the pestilence at Northampton, severe enough to require the -new cemetery which cardinal Pole, in a deed of March 9, 1557, ordered to -be henceforth kept enclosed[586]. Only two of the many centres of sickness -in England in 1558 are said to have had the infection of the type, not of -fever, but of plague,--Loughborough and Chester. In the Leicestershire -town the burials were numerous enough for true plague, and the cause of -mortality is so named[587]. In Chester also the sickness is called the -plague, and it is added that many fled the town, although the deaths were -few[588]. A State paper of February 25, 1559, speaks of the county of -Cheshire as "weakened by the prevalence of plague[589]." - - -The London Plague of 1563. - -The activity of the plague in London in 1563 made up for its dormancy in -the years preceding. The epidemic of that summer and autumn was one of the -most severe in the history of the city, the mortality in proportion to the -population having been tremendous. This is the first London plague for -which we have the authentic weekly deaths. How they were obtained is not -stated, but it was probably by the same means that furnished the -plague-bills of 1532 and 1535. John Stow must have had before him a -complete set of weekly bills from the beginning of June, 1563, to the 26th -of July, 1566, of which series not one is known to be extant; but the -totals of the weekly deaths from plague for the whole of that period are -among Stow's manuscript memoranda in the Lambeth Library[590]. After the -week ending the 31st December, 1563, the weekly deaths are few, many of -the weeks of 1564, 1565 and 1566 having only one death from plague, and -some of them none. The following are the weekly mortalities during the -severe period of the epidemic: - - Week ending Plague-deaths - 1563. 12 June 17 - 19 " 25 - 26 " 23 - 3 July 44 - 10 " 64 - 17 " 131 - 23 " 174 - 30 " 289 - 6 August 299 - 13 " 542 - 20 " 608 - 27 " 976 - 3 September 963 - 10 " 1454 - 17 " 1626 - 24 " 1372 - 1 October 1828 - 8 " 1262 - 15 " 829 - 22 " 1000 - 29 " 905 - 5 November 380 - 12 " 283 - 19 " 506 - 26 " 281 - 3 December 178 - 10 " 249 - 17 " 239 - 24 " 134 - 31 " 121 - 1564. 7 January 45 - 14 " 26 - 21 " 13 - -Stow's summary of this epidemic in his _Annales_ is as follows: "In the -same whole year, i.e. from the 1st January, 1562 [old style] till the last -of December, 1563, there died in the city and liberties thereof, -containing 108 parishes, of all diseases 20,372, and of the plague, being -part of the number aforesaid, 17,404; and in out parishes adjoining to -the same city, being 11 parishes, died of all diseases in the whole year -3288, and of them of the plague 2732." The weekly totals from June 12 to -December 31 which are for the City and liberties, and exclusive of the out -parishes, add up to very nearly Stow's total for the whole year, or to -16,802 as against 17,404. Where the discrepancy arises does not appear; it -is hardly likely that some 600 plague-deaths would have occurred previous -to the second week in June, at which time the weekly mortality had reached -only 17. We are able to check one of the weekly totals from an independent -source. In an extant letter of the time the following figures for the week -from 23rd to 30th July are given, having been taken evidently from the -published or posted weekly bill: "Died and were buried in London and -suburbs, 399, most young people and youths, of which number of the common -plague 320 persons. Number of children born and christened in the same -week, 52[591]." "London and suburbs" would mean the 108 parishes of the -City and liberties together with the 11 out parishes, so that the -difference between Stow's 289 and the above 320 would give the number of -plague-deaths in the out parishes for the particular week. - -The state of matters in the City is thus referred to in Bullein's -_Dialogue_ published in 1564:-- - - _Civis._--"Good wife, the daily jangling and ringing of the bells, the - coming in of the minister to every house in ministering the communion, - the reading of the homily of death, the digging up of graves, the - sparring of windows, and the blazing forth of the blue crosses do make - my heart tremble and quake." A beggar, in the same _Dialogue_, who had - arrived from the country, says: - - "I met with wagones, cartes and horses full loden with yong barnes, - for fear of the blacke Pestilence, with them boxes of medicens and - sweete perfumes. O God! how fast did they run by hundredes, and were - afraied of eche other for feare of smityng." - -We get one or two glimpses of this great plague from the medical point of -view in Dr John Jones's _Dyall of Agues_[592]. The worst locality, he -says, was "S. Poulkar's parish [St Sepulchre's] by reason of many -fruiterers, poor people, and stinking lanes, as Turnagain-lane [so called -because it led down the slope to Fleet Ditch and ended there], -Seacoal-lane, and such other places, there died most in London, and were -soonest infected, and longest continued, as twice since I have known -London I have marked to be true." Jones believed in contagion: "I myself -was infected by reason that unawares I lodged with one that had it running -from him." His other observation is interesting as proving the possibility -of repeated attacks of the buboes in the same person, an observation -abundantly confirmed, as we shall see, in the London plagues of 1603 and -1665: - - "Here now, gentel readers, I think good to admonish all such as have - had the plague, that they flie the trust of ignoraunt persons, who use - to saye that he who hath once had the plague shal not nede to feare - the havinge of it anye more: the whych by this example whyche foloweth - (that chaunced to a certayne Bakers wife without Tempel barre in - London, Anno Do. 1563) you shall find to be worthelye to be repeated: - this sayde wyfe had the plage at Midsommer and at Bartholomewtide, and - at Michaelmas, and the first time it brake, the seconde time it brake, - but ran littell, the thirde time it appeared and brake not: but she - died, notwythstanding she was twyce afore healed." - -Two London physicians of some note died of the plague in 1563. One was Dr -Geynes, who had brought trouble upon himself by impugning the authority of -Galen, perhaps without sufficient reason. Having been cited before the -College of Physicians, to whose discipline he was subject, he preferred to -recant his heresy rather than undergo imprisonment. He died of plague on -23 July, 1563. Another was Dr John Fryer who had suffered twice for -religious heresy, having been imprisoned by queen Mary as a Lutheran, and -by queen Elizabeth as a papist. He regained his liberty in August, 1563, -but only to die of plague on 21 October, his wife and several of his -children having been also victims of the epidemic[593]. - -Stow ascribes the infection of the city of London by plague in the summer -of 1563 to the return of the English troops from Havre, which town queen -Elizabeth had boldly attempted to hold, and did actually hold for ten -months, from September, 1562, as an English fortress in French territory. -Havre was not surrendered until the last days of July, 1563, and no -returning troops could have reached London until August, by which time the -plague had been raging there for two months. There was no doubt frequent -communication between Havre and English ports while the siege lasted; but -the sickness in each place can have been no more than coincident. Thus, -while there were 17 plague-deaths in London in the week from the 5th to -the 12th of June, the 7th of June is the first date on which report was -made of sickness in Havre, although there had been cases of illness -before. On that date the Earl of Warwick wrote to the Privy Council[594]: -"For the want of money the works are hindered and the men discouraged. A -strange disease has come amongst them, whereof nine died this morning (and -many before) very suddenly." On the same day (7th June, 1563), one writes -from Havre to Cecil: "Many of our men have been hurt in these skirmishes, -but more by drinking of their wine, which hath cast down a great number, -of hot burning diseases and impostumations, not unlike the plague." By the -9th June the deaths were from 20 to 30 a day. On the 12th June, 442 were -sick out of a total force (including labourers and seamen) of 7143. On -June 16, Warwick points out to the Privy Council that the sickness was -aggravated by the want of fresh meat and the soldiers' usual beverages: -"therefore their continual drinking of wine, contrary to their custom, has -bred these disorders and diseases." On the 28th June the daily mortality -was 77; from that date it increased somewhat, and was so serious as to -hasten the surrender of the place to the French besieging force in the end -of July. On July 27 there was plague in the castle of Jersey, and on -August 6 it was very sore in Jersey, especially in the Castle[595]. - -It would have seemed the more probable to the people of London that the -plague of 1563 had been imported across the Channel by reason of the -unusually long immunity of the English capital in respect of that -infection. A clear interval of a dozen years without an epidemic, or a -severe epidemic, was enough to make men forget the long tradition of -plague domesticated upon English soil; while there was no scientific -doctrine of epidemics then worked out, from which they might have known -that the seeds of a disease may lie dormant for years, and that their -periodic effectiveness depends upon a concurrence of favouring things, -most of all upon extremes of dryness or wetness of the seasons as -affecting a soil full of corrupting animal matters. - -The plague of 1563 in the capital was accompanied or followed by several -provincial outbreaks, of which few details are known. It is mentioned at -Derby[596] in 1563, at Leicester[597] in 1563 and 1564 (a shut-up house in -1563, the first plague-burial in St Martin's parish on May 11, 1564), at -Stratford-on-Avon, at Lichfield[598] and Canterbury[599] in 1564. But it -is little more than mentioned at all those places. In the parish register -of Hensley, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, a later incumbent, basing -upon "an old writing of 1569," says that the explanation of the year 1563 -being a blank in the register was "because in that year the visitation of -plague was most hot and fearful, so that many died and fled, and the town -of Hensley, by reason of the sickness, was unfrequented for a long -season[600]." - - -Preventive Practice in Plague-time under the Tudors. - -Having now traced the history of plague in London and in the provinces -down to the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth, and having found it -steady from year to year for many years in London, with an occasional -terrific outburst, we are naturally led to ask whether the causes of it, -or its favouring things, were understood, and whether any steps were taken -to deal with it. This will be in effect a review of the earliest -preventive practice. - -That which was most clearly perceived by all was that the plague began to -reign in certain years as the summer heats drew on, that the air of London -or Westminster became "intemperate," or unwholesome, or infectious, and -that it was desirable to get out of such air. Accordingly the one great -rule, admitted by all and acted upon by as many as could, was to escape -from the tainted locality, or as Wolsey expressed it to the earl of -Shrewsbury in 1516, to get them "into clean air." There was no other -sovereign prescription but that, and it remained the one great -prescription until the last of plague in 1665-6. - -Difficult points of casuistry arose out of that steady perception of an -indisputable rule. Could flight from a plague-stricken place be reconciled -with duty to one's neighbour? How ought a Christian man to demean himself -in the plague? The Christian conscience may or may not have been tender on -that ground in the medieval period; there is little to show one way or the -other, except the occasional hints that we get, as in the Danish bishop's -treatise, of an unwillingness to go near the victims of plague. But about -the Reformation time those points of casuistry were debated; and one -elaborate handling of them, in the form of a sermon by a German -ecclesiastic, Osiander, was translated into English in 1537 by Miles -Coverdale[601]. It followed, accordingly, that period of plague in London -which has occupied the first part of this chapter. The translator remarks -that they had been negligent of charity one to another, and he prints this -discourse "to the intent that the ignorant may be taught, the weake -strengthened, and everyone counselled after his callynge to serve his -neighbor." - -Osiander's perplexed Christian is in much the same case as Launcelot Gobbo -in the play: "'Budge,' says the fiend; 'Budge not,' says my conscience. -'Conscience,' say I, 'you counsel well;' 'Fiend,' say I, 'you counsel -well.'" The situation was a naturally complex one, and this is how the -good preacher comes out of it: - - "It is not my meaning to forbid or inhibit any man to fly, or to use - physick, or to avoid dangerous and sick places in these fearful - airs--so far as a man doth not therein against the belief, nor God's - commandment, nor against his calling, nor against the love of his - neighbour." And yet, shortly after: "Out of such fond childish fear it - cometh that not only some sick folk be suffered to die away without - all keeping, help, and comfort; but the women also, great with child, - be forsaken in their need, or else cometh there utterly no man unto - them. Yet a man may hear also that the children forsake their fathers - and mothers, and one household body keepeth himself away from another, - and sheweth no love unto him. Which nevertheless he would be glad to - see shewed unto himself if he lay in like necessity." He then exhorts - the Christian man to remain at the post of duty, by the examples of - the clergy and of "the higher powers of the world, who also abide in - jeopardy"--certainly not the English experience. "Let him not axe his - own reason, how he shall do, but believe, and follow the word of God, - which teacheth him not to fly evil air and infect places (which he may - well do: nevertheless he remaineth yet uncertain whether it helpeth or - no)." The Christian man's perplexities can hardly have been resolved - when all was said; and the following sentence puts the case for - quitting the infected place as strongly as it can be put: "For if it - were in meat or drink, it might be eschewed; if it were an evil taste, - it might be expelled with a sweet savour; if it were an evil wind, the - chamber might with diligence be made close therefore; if it were a - cloud or mist, it might be seen and avoided; if it were a rain, a man - might cover himself for it. But now it is a secret misfortune that - creepeth in privily, so that it can neither be seen nor heard, neither - smelled nor tasted, till it have done the harm." - -In practice the rule was 'Save who can;' so that whenever the infection -promised to become "hot," as the phrase was, there was an adjournment of -Parliament and of the Law Courts, a flight of all who could afford it to -the country, and an interruption of business, diplomatic and other, which -sometimes lasted for months. It was only occasionally, however, that the -infection became really hot; in ordinary years a certain risk was run. -Thus, in 1426, the plague had been severe enough to cut off the Scots -hostages; but it was not until after their death that the king's council -left the city. Again, in 1467, Parliament did not adjourn (on 1st July) -until several members of the House of Commons had died of the plague. - -Although flight was the sovereign preventive in a great plague-season, it -was impracticable in ordinary years when the infection was at its steadier -or more endemic level. The endemic level was tolerated up to a certain -point. In a long despatch to his government, the Venetian ambassador in -London wrote of the plague as follows in 1554[602]: - - "They have some little plague in England well nigh every year, for - which they are not accustomed to make sanitary provisions, as it does - not usually make great progress; the cases for the most part occur - amongst the lower classes, as if their dissolute mode of life impaired - their constitutions." - -Whenever the plague showed signs of overstepping these limits, strenuous -efforts were made to keep it in check. It may be questioned whether all -that was done in that way made any difference; the great outbursts came at -intervals, rose to their height, subsided in a few months, and left the -city more or less free of plague until some concurrence of things, or the -lapse of time, brought about another epidemic of the first degree. None -the less, certain measures were taken to restrain the infection, and these -were put in force with mechanical regularity whenever the Privy Council -informed the Lord Mayor that the occasion required it. A brief account of -them, of their beginnings and their development, will now be given. - -The first that we hear of attempts at isolation and notification is in -1518. In April of that year, the Court being in Berkshire or Oxfordshire, -Sir Thomas More charged the mayor of Oxford, and the commissary, in the -king's name "that the inhabitants of those houses that be, and shall be -infected, shall keep in, put out wispes, and bear white rods, as your -Grace devised for Londoners[603]." By his Grace is to be understood the -king himself; and these measures devised by him--the keeping in, the -putting out of wisps on the houses, and the carrying of white rods,--might -have been tried as early as the epidemic of 1513, which was a severe one. -When two of the Venetian ambassador's servants died of the plague in 1513, -their bed, sheets and other effects were thrown into the river. On the -21st of May, 1516, the ambassador removed to Putney owing to a case of -plague in his house, and he was not allowed to see cardinal Wolsey until -the 30th of June, i.e. until forty days had elapsed. This is perhaps the -first mention of the quarantine which the Court rigorously put in -practice against those who had business with it. On the 22nd July, 1518, -the same ambassador wrote to Venice from Lambeth that two of his servants -had lately died of the plague; and, on the 11th August, again from -Lambeth, that the king and Wolsey would not see him because of the plague; -"but on the expiration of forty days, which had nearly come to an end, he -would not fail to do his duty as heretofore." - -On the 25th August, 1535, Chapuys, in a letter to Charles V., gives an -amusing account of an attempt made by the French ambassador to see Henry -VIII. and Cromwell on diplomatic business. The Court was residing in -Gloucestershire owing to plague in and near London (it was at Bristol -also), and the ambassador journeyed thither to carry his business through. -However he went no nearer than six miles, because a "French merchant" who -followed him died upon the road of the plague, as it was feared. The king -asked him to put his charge in writing, but the ambassador replied that he -had orders to tell it in person, and that he could wait. At length he lay -in wait for Secretary Cromwell in the fields where he went to hunt with -the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, and delivered his charge despite the -manifest unwillingness of Cromwell, who came away from the improvised -diplomatic interview in no good humour. - -The first plague-order of which the full text is extant was issued in the -35th of Henry VIII. (1543). As it contains the germs of all subsequent -preventive practice, I transcribe it in full[604]. - - "35 Hen. VIII. A precept issued to the aldermen:--That they should - cause their beadles to set the sign of the cross on every house which - should be afflicted with the plague, and there continue for forty - days: - - "That no person who was able to live by himself, and should be - afflicted with the plague, should go abroad or into any company for - one month after his sickness, and that all others who could not live - without their daily labour should as much as in them lay refrain from - going abroad, and should for forty days after [illegible] and - continually carry a white rod in their hand, two foot long: - - "That every person whose house had been infected should, after a - visitation, carry all the straw and [illegible] in the night privately - into the fields and burn; they should also carry clothes of the - infected in the fields to be cured: - - "That no housekeeper should put any person diseased out of his house - into the street or other place unless they provided housing for them - in some other house: - - "That all persons having any dogs in their houses other than hounds, - spaniels or mastiffs, necessary for the custody or safe keeping of - their houses, should forthwith convey them out of the city, or cause - them to be killed and carried out of the city and buried at the common - laystall: - - "That such as kept hounds, spaniels, or mastiffs should not suffer - them to go abroad, but closely confine them: - - "That the churchwardens of every parish should employ somebody to keep - out all common beggars out of churches on holy days, and to cause them - to remain without doors: - - "That all the streets, lanes, etc. within the wards should be - cleansed: - - "That the aldermen should cause this precept to be read in the - churches." - -Here we see a development of the measures which had been devised for -London by Henry VIII. or his minister previous to 1518, and probably in -the plague of 1513. The wisps put out on the infected houses are replaced -by crosses, which, in the order of 1543, are simply called "the sign of -the cross." They are next heard of during the plague of 1547, in a -Guildhall record of 15 November[605]: - - "Item, for as moche as my Lord Mayer reported that my Lorde Chauncelar - declared unto hym that my Lorde Protectour's Grace's pleasure ys, and - other of the Lordes of the Counseyll, that certain open tokens and - sygnes shulde be made and sett furth in all such places of the Cytie - as haue of late been vysyted with the plage"--be it therefore ordained - that a certain cross of St Anthony devised for that purpose be affixed - to the uttermost post of the street door, there to remain forty days - after the setting up thereof. - -The cross of St Anthony was a headless cross, and the crutch is supposed -to have been painted (in blue) on canvas or board and fixed to the post of -the street door. The legend under or over the cross was, "Lord have mercy -upon us." Before the plague of 1603, the colour had been changed to red. - -The white rods, which had been devised along with the wisps previous to -1518, are mentioned in the order of 1543 as two foot long; they were to -be carried for forty days by those who must needs go abroad from -plague-stricken houses. We hear of them again, both in France and in -England in 1580 and 1581. On the 20th November, 1580, the Venetian -ambassador to France writes from the neighbourhood of Paris: "This city, I -hear, is in a very fair sanitary condition, notwithstanding that as I -entered a city gate, which is close to where I reside, I met a man and a -woman bearing the white plague wands in their hands and asking alms; but -some believe that this was merely an artifice on their part to gain -money[606]." In the regulations for plague added in 1581 by the mayor of -London to the earlier code, the third is: "That no persons dwelling in a -house infected be suffered to go abroad unless they carry with them a -white wand of a yard long; any so offending to be committed to the Cage." -In the seventeenth-century plagues of London and provincial towns, the -white wand was retained as the peculiar badge of the searchers of infected -houses and of the bearers of the dead. The white rod or wand carried by -inmates of infected houses, had become a red rod in the plague of 1603, -just as the blue cross had been changed to red. - -The other directions in the order of 1543 are heard of from time to time -in the subsequent history of plague--such as the burning of straw, and the -cleansing of the streets. The Guildhall record of 15 November, 1547, after -directing the blue crosses to be affixed to houses, proceeds: - - "And also to cause all the welles and pumpes within their seid wardes - to be drawen iii times euerye weke, that is to say, Monday, Wednesday, - and Friday. And to cast down into the canelles at euerye such drawyng - xii bucketts full of water at the least, to clense the stretes - wythall." - -Under Elizabeth, the orders as to scavenging become much more stringent, -as we shall see. In the plague of 1563, on 29 September, the Common -Council appointed "two poor men to burn and bury such straw, clothes, and -bedding as they shall find in the fields near the city or within the city, -whereon any person in the plague hath lyen or dyed[607]." - -The curious order as to dogs was based upon the belief that they carried -the infection in their hair, just as cats are now believed by some to -carry infection in their fur. Brasbridge, in his _Poor Man's Jewel_ -(1578), gives a case of a glover at Oxford, into whose house a disastrous -plague-infection was supposed to have been brought by means of a dog's -skin bought in London[608]. The plague-regulations contained the clause -against dogs to the last; in the great plagues of 1603, 1625, and 1665, -thousands of them were killed, many of them having been doubtless left -behind in the exodus of the well-to-do classes. In the corporation records -of Winchester[609], there is a minute, undated, but probably belonging to -the end of the 16th century, that dogs shall be kept indoors "if any house -within the city shall happen to be infected with the plague." A -proclamation during the London plague of 1563 is directed against cats as -well as dogs, "for the avoidance of the plague:" officers were appointed -to kill and bury all such as they found at large[610]. - -The great London plague of 1563 had revived the old practices and given -rise to some new ones. Curates and churchwardens were directed to warn the -inmates of houses where plague had occurred not to come to church for a -certain space thereafter[611]. The blue crosses were again in great -request, being ordered by hundreds at a time in readiness to affix to -infected houses[612]. Also it was ordered by the Mayor and Council that -the "filthie dunghill lying in the highway near unto Fynnesburye Courte be -removed and carried away; and not to suffer any such donge or fylthe from -hensforthe there to be leyde[613]." On the 9th of July, 1563, plague -having been already at work for several weeks, a commission was issued by -the queen in Council, that every householder in London should, at seven -in the evening, lay out wood and make bonfires in the streets and lanes, -to the intent that they should thereby consume the corrupt airs, the fires -to be made on three days of the week[614]. On 30th September, 1563, it was -ordered that all such houses as were infected should have their doors and -windows shut up, and the inmates not to stir out nor suffer any to come to -them for forty days. At the same time, a collection was ordered to be made -in the churches for the relief of the poor afflicted with the plague, and -thus shut up. Another order was that new mould should be laid on the -graves of such as die of the plague. Still another, the first of a long -series, was to prohibit all interludes and plays during the -infection[615]. On the 2nd December, when the deaths had fallen to 178 in -the week, an order was issued by the Common Council that houses in which -the plague had been were not to be let. On the 20th January, 1564, there -was an order for a general airing and cleansing of houses, bedding and the -like. By that time the deaths had fallen to 13 in the week. - -The most rigorous measures in this plague were those which queen Elizabeth -took for her own safety at Windsor in September. Stow says that "a gallows -was set up in the market-place of Windsor to hang all such as should come -there from London. No wares to be brought to, or through, or by Windsor; -nor any one on the river by Windsor to carry wood or other stuff to or -from London, upon pain of hanging without any judgment; and such people as -received any wares out of London into Windsor were turned out of their -houses, and their houses shut up[616]." - -In 1568 a more complete set of instructions to the aldermen of the several -wards was drawn up by the Lord Mayor, and a corresponding order for the -city of Westminster by Sir William Cecil, Secretary of State, and by the -Chancellor of the Duchy. In 1581 some additional orders were issued by the -Lord Mayor. The whole of these are here given from a state paper in a -later handwriting, probably of the time of James I. or Charles I[617]. - - A collection of such papers as are found in the office of his - Majesties papers and records for business of state for the preventing - and decreasing of the plague in and about London. - - - A. (City of London, 1568.) - - 1. First a 'tre from the Mayor of London to every alderman of each - warde to charge their Deputys counstables and officers to make search - of all houses infected within each parish. - - 2. To cause all infected houses to bee shutt up and noe person to come - forth in twenty dayes after the infection. - - 3. That some honest discreete person be appoynted to attend each such - infected house to provide them of all necessaries at the cost of the - M{r} of the house if he be able. - - 4. For the poorer houses infected that the Alderman or his deputy doe - cause to make collection for the supply of all necessaries to be - charged upon the wealthyer sorte of the same warde or parish. - - 5. That such as shall refuse to pay what they are assest shall be - committed to warde untill they pay it. - - 6. That all bedding and cloathes and other thinges apt to take - infection which were about infected persons bee burnt or such order - taken that infection may not be increased by them. - - 7. Lastly that a bill with 'Lord have mercy upon us' in greate 'tres - bee sett over the dore of euery infected house and that the - counstables and Beadles have a care to see that the same be not taken - downe. - - These orders were sett downe by the Mayior of London in the yeere - 1568, whereupon queene Elizabeth writeth a letter to S{r} William - Cycill then secretary and S{r} Ambrous Cave, chauncellor of the Duchy - to take the like order or any other that they should thinke fitt in - the citie of Westminster. - - - B. (City of Westminster, 1568.) - - Orders sett down by S{r} William Cycill, Secretary, as High Steward of - Westminster and S{r} Ambrous Cave, chauncellor of the Dutchy to the - Bayleiffes, Hedburroughs, Counstables and other officers of the sayde - Citty. - - 1. That they should follow the good example of the orders devised and - observed by the Mayior and Aldermen of London, and further that all - that haue any houses shops or loggings that hath had any infection in - them by the space of twenty dayes before the making of these orders - shall shutt up all their doares and windoares towards the streetes and - common passages for forty dayes next and not suffer after the tyme of - the sicknes any person to goe forth nor any uninfected to come in upon - payne that euery offender shall sitt seven dayes in the stocks and - after that be committed to the common Goale there to remayne forty - dayes from the first day of his being in the stocks. - - 2. That the officers aforesayde with the curate of euery parish and - churchwardens doe make such collection of the rest of the parishioners - as shall be necessary for the sustenance of such as bee poore infected - and shutt up. - - 3. To discharge all inmates out of all houses that there be noe more - persons in one house then be of one family except they be lodgers for - a small time. - - 4. To cause the streetes lanes and passages and all the shewers sinkes - (?) and gutters thereof dayly to be made sweete and cleane. - - - C. (London, 1581.) - - There were added by the Mayior of London to the former articles these - following in the year 1581. - - 1. That speciall noatis be taken of such houses infected as sell - cloth, silke and other wares and make garments and aparrell for men - and women. - - 2. That euery counstable within his precinct haue at all tymes in - readines two honest and discreete women to attend any house infected. - - 3. That noe person dwelling in a house infected bee suffered to goe - abroade unless they carry with them a white wand of a yarde long. Any - soe offending to bee committed to the Cage there to remayne untill - order shallbe taken by the Mayior or his bretheren. - - 4. That they suffer not any deade corps dying of the plague to be - buryed in tyme of divine service or sermon. - - 5. To appoynt two honest and discreete matrons within euery parish who - shall bee sworne truely to search the body of euery such person as - shall happen to dye within the same parish, to the ende that they make - true reporte to the clerke of the parish church of all such as shall - dye of the plague, that the same clerke may make the like reporte and - certificate to the wardens of the parish clerkes thereof according to - the order in that behalfe heretofore provided. - - If the viewers through favour or corruption shall giue wrong - certificate, or shall refuse to serue being thereto appointed, then to - punish them by imprisonment in such sorte as may serue for the terror - of others. - - 6. That order be taken for killing of dogs that run from house to - house dispersing the plague, and that noe swine be suffered or kept - within the citty[618]. - -Several of these plague-regulations had been in force, as we have seen, -from near the beginning of the century. Others, not hitherto mentioned, -were also of earlier date. Thus the collections for the poor are -mentioned in the diary of a London citizen in 1538 and 1539, but not -specially in connexion with plague. They are heard of often after the -plague of 1563, along with other provisions for the poor which mark the -reign of Elizabeth. If we may trust Bullein's _Dialogue_ of 1564, a -systematic provision became necessary because private charity was no -longer to be depended on. In many country towns and parishes, as we shall -see, the contributions or compensations to the inmates of shut-up houses -in the Elizabethan plagues were paid out of the municipal funds, either -those of the affected place or of some "unvisited" neighbouring town. The -Act of Parliament which most directly provided for "the charitable relief -of persons infected with the plague" was the 1st James I. (1603-4), cap. -31. - -A most essential part of the means for controlling plague was the -institution of searchers[619]. In the orders of 1543, the aldermen of the -wards are directed to send their beadles to affix the sign of the cross to -affected houses. But in due course these duties of inspection, -notification, isolation and registration passed in London into the hands -of the Company of Parish Clerks. The original business of the Parish -Clerks was with church music. In the thirteenth century they received a -charter of incorporation as the Clerks of St Nicholas, and became -associated with that love of choral singing which has always distinguished -the English people. Legacies and endowments fell to them for the -performance of specific services, or for their encouragement in general. -From time to time the Company would appear in a particular parish church -to sing a mass. It was the singular history of a Company which gained its -greatest name as the Registrars of Births and Deaths in London down to the -Registration Act of 1837, to have been not only the first Choral Society -but also the first company of stage players. In 1391, says Stow, a play -was given by the parish clerks of London at the Skinners' Well beside -Smithfield, which continued three days together, the king, queen and -nobles of the realm being present. Another play, in the year 1409, lasted -eight days, "and was of matter from the creation of the world, whereat -was present most of the nobility and gentry of England[620]." - -In the time of Sir Thomas More, a parish clerk meant one who sang in the -church choir. When More was lord chancellor, the duke of Norfolk came one -day to dine with him at his house at Chelsea, and not finding him at home, -went in search of him. He found him, where posterity will long delight to -picture him,--in the church "singing in the choir with a surplice on his -back." As they walked home arm in arm the duke said to Sir Thomas More: "A -parish clerk! a parish clerk! God body, my lord chancellor, you dishonour -the king and his office;" whereon the chancellor answered as if he did not -take the duke altogether seriously. - -The whole strength of the Company of Parish Clerks in those times would -attend the funeral of some rich person, as we may read in the -sixteenth-century diary of Machyn the undertaker (sometimes the Company -chosen to follow the body to the grave was that of the Tallow Chandlers, -as in the case of John Stow's mother). It was no great step from their old -duties to their new. There were, as we have seen, bills of mortality -compiled weekly for all the parishes in the city and liberties as early as -1532 and 1535. It is not said that the Parish Clerks were the collectors -of the information, but they were as likely to have been so as any other -persons whom the mayor would employ. Bills were also drawn up for a few -weeks during the sweating sickness of 1551, and again for an unbroken -series of some two hundred weeks from the beginning of the plague of 1563. -The figures are preserved from a single weekly bill, 22-28 October, 1574, -which must have been one of a series[621]. The next bills known are a -series for five years, 1578-83, a plague-period of which more will have to -be said in its proper place in the chronology. - -The orders of 1581, already given, make mention of the two discreet -matrons within every parish who shall be sworn truly to search the body of -every such person as shall happen to die within the same parish, of their -reporting to the clerk of the parish, and of the clerk making report and -certificate to the wardens of the Parish Clerks, who would send the weekly -certificate for all the parishes to the mayor, and he to the minister of -State. That was said to be "according to the order in that behalf -heretofore provided." It is probable, therefore, that the searchers became -an institution as early as the plague of 1563, or, at all events, at the -beginning of the plague-period of 1578-83. - -The clerk of the Company in 1665 describes how the discreet matrons were -chosen as searchers or viewers of the dead in each parish, and how they -were sworn to discharge their duties faithfully[622]. The swearing in took -place before the Dean of the Arches, that is to say, in St Mary le Bow -church ("St Mary of the Arch") in Cheapside. The motive to bribe them for -a wrong report on the cause of death was to avoid the shutting up and all -other troubles of a household pronounced infected by the plague. In later -times their diagnostic duties became, as we shall see, much more complex; -but down to 1604, when they first brought to the Parish Clerks' Hall "an -account of the diseases and casualties" (which classification and -nomenclature did not begin to be printed until 1629), they had merely to -say whether a death had been from plague or from other cause. - - -Sanitation in Plantagenet and Tudor times. - -Along with all those means, having the object of stopping the spread of -infection, the Elizabethan policy did not neglect what we should now -consider the more radical means of sanitation. It is usual to bring a -sweeping charge of neglect of public hygiene against all old times; there -was so much plague in those times, and so high an average death-rate, that -it is commonly assumed that our ancestors must have been wanting in the -rudimentary instincts of cleanliness. But, in the first place, one might -expect to find that all old periods were not alike; and more generally it -is worth inquiring how far nuisances injurious to the public health were -tolerated. This inquiry will have to be as brief as possible; but it will -take us back to the period of plague covered by a former chapter. - -Nuisances certainly existed in medieval London, but it is equally certain -that they were not tolerated without limit. I have collected in a note the -instances reported in a visitation of 17 Edward III. (1343), and in a -perambulation of the ground outside the walls in 26 Edward III. (1352). -The former related only to the alleys leading down to the river, which -were likely enough places for nuisance, then as now[623]. - -There are several orders of Edward III. relating to the removal of -laystalls and to keeping the town ditch clean, which show, of course, that -there was neglect, but at the same time the disposition to correct it. It -is farther obvious that the connexion between nuisances and the public -health was clearly apprehended. The sanitary doctrines of modern times -were undreamt of; nor did the circumstances altogether call for them. The -sewers of those days were banked-up water courses, or "shores" as the word -was pronounced, which ran uncovered down the various declivities of the -city, to the town ditch and to the Thames. They would have sufficed to -carry off the refuse of a population of some forty or sixty thousand; they -were, at all events, freely open to the greatest of all purifying agents, -the oxygen of the air; and they poisoned neither the water of the town -ditch (which abounded in excellent fish within John Stow's memory) nor the -waters of Thames. In course of time all the brooks of London were covered -in, even the Fleet dyke itself, which used to float barges as far as -Holborn bridge; but who shall say that they were more wholesome -thereafter, although they were underground? Perhaps the poet of the -_Earthly Paradise_ has as true an intuition as any when, in reference to -the city in Chaucer's time, he bids us - - "Dream of London, small, and white, and clean; - The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green." - -The nuisance that gave most trouble in the medieval and Tudor periods was -the blood and offal of the shambles. Several ordinances of Edward III. are -directed against it, in one of which (1371) the connexion between -putrefying blood soaked into the ground and infectious disease is clearly -stated. It is also the principal subject of the first sanitary Act that -appears in the Statutes of the Realm, made by the Parliament of Cambridge -in the 17th of Richard II. (1388), of which I give the preamble and -provisions: - - "Item, For that so much Dung and Filth of the Garbage and Intrails as - well of Beasts killed as of other Corruptions be cast and put in - Ditches, Rivers and other Waters, and also within many other Places - within about and nigh unto divers Cities, Boroughs and Towns of the - Realm, and the Suburbs of them, that the Air there is greatly corrupt - and infect, and many Maladies and other intolerable Diseases do daily - happen," both to the residents and to visitors:--therefore - proclamation is to be made in the City of London, as in other cities, - boroughs and towns "that all they which do cast and lay all such - Annoyances, Dung, Garbages, Intrails and other Ordure in Ditches, - Rivers, Waters and other places shall cause them to be removed, - avoided and carried away betwixt this and the feast of St Michael next - following," under a penalty of twenty pounds, mayors and bailiffs to - compel obedience. Such offences were not to be repeated, and if any - did offend he was liable to be called by writ before the Chancellor - "at his suit that will complain[624]." - -Despite this statute, the shambles in the parish of St Nicholas within -Newgate (adjoining the ground now occupied by Christ's Hospital, and -formerly by the Grey Friars) became an established institution of the -city. They were a subject of petition to Parliament in 1488-9, and they -were still there to give occasion in 1603 to severe remarks by Thomas -Lodge, poet and physician, who practised in Warwick Lane, in their -immediate neighbourhood. The Act of 1388, it will be observed, was to be -set in motion "at his suit that will complain;" so that there was little -more in it than the immemorial remedy from a nuisance at common law. - -The reign of Henry V. appears to have been marked by care for the public -health, perhaps not greater than in Edward III.'s time, but exceptional, -in the records at least, under the later Plantagenets and until the -accession of the Tudor dynasty. Among other evidences (some of which may -be gathered from Stow's _Survey_) is the ordinance of 1415 (3 Hen. V.) -against a nuisance in the Moor, beyond the wall and the ditch on the -Finsbury side. The Moor was, in Fitzstephen's words, "a great fen, which -watereth the walls on the north side." In 1415 there was a "common -latrine" in it, and "sicknesses arose from the horrible, corrupt, and -infected atmosphere," issuing therefrom[625]. Its removal was ordered, and -in the same year (1415) chausses were built across the fen, one to Hoxton -and another to Islington. The ditch all the way round from the Tower to -Blackfriars had been cleansed the year before (1414). - -Another statute, 3 Henry VII. (1488-9) cap. 3, may be quoted to show that -the slaughter-houses were the chief nuisance, that their effects on health -were perceived (as in Edward III.'s time), and that it was necessary to -appeal to the king's personal interest in the matter as a motive for -redress. - - Petition to the King from the parishioners of St Faiths and St - Gregories in London, near St Pauls. - - "That it was soo that grete concourse of peple, as well of his Roial - persone as of other grete Lordes and astates wyth other hys true - subgettes often tymes was had unto the said Cathedrall Chirche, and - for the moost part through oute the parisshe aforesaide, the whiche - often tymes ben gretly ennoyed and invenemed by corrupt eires, - engendered in the said parisshes by occasion of bloode and other - fowler thynges, by occasion of the slaughter of bestes and scaldyng of - swyne had and doon in the bocherie of Seynt Nicholas Flesshamls, whos - corrupcion by violence of unclene and putrified waters is borne down - thrugh the said parishes and compasseth two partes of the Palays where - the Kynges most Roiall persone is wonte to abide when he cometh to the - Cathedrall Chirche for ony acte there to be doon, to the Jubardouse - [jeopardous] abydyng of his most noble persone and to ouer grete - ennoysaunce of the parisshens there, and of other the Kyngis subgettes - and straungers that passe by the same; - - Compleynte whereof at dyverse and many seasons almost by the space of - xvi yeres contynuelly, as well by the Chanons and petty Chanons of the - said Cathedrall Chirche, londlordes there ... made to Mayor and - aldermen of the city; and noo remedie had ne founden. - - ... Considering that in few noble cities or towns or none within - Christendom, where as travellyng men have labored, that the comen - slaughter hous of bestys sholde be kept in ony speciall parte within - the walle of the same lest it myght engender Siknesse to the - destruccion of the peple." - - The King etc. "ordeyned and stablished that no Bocher shall sley - within the said house called the Scaldinghouse or within the walls of - London." - - And the same "in eny citte, Burghe and Towne walled within the Realm - of Englonde and in the Towne of Cambridge, the Townes of Berwyk and - Carlile only except and forprised." - -The popular knowledge of and belief in a high doctrine of contagion are -curiously shown by the terms of the Act touching Upholsterers in 1495 (II -Hen. VII. cap. 19). - - The Act was intended to prevent beds, feather-beds, bolsters and - pillows from being sold in market outside London, "beyond control of - the Craft of Upholders." Outside the craft an inferior article was apt - to be offered, which was at once a lowering of a good and worthy - standard and a danger to health. There were two kinds of corrupt - bed-stuffs "contagious for mannys body to lye on," firstly, scalded - feathers and dry pulled feathers together; and secondly, flocks and - feathers together. Besides these, quilts, mattresses and cushions - stuffed with horse hair, fen down, neat's hair, deer's hair and goat's - hair, "which is wrought in lyme fattes," give out by the heat of man's - body, a savour and taste so abominable and contagious that many of the - King's subjects thereby have been destroyed. These corrupt and - unlawful stuffs and wares might indeed be made by any person or - persons for their own proper use in their houses, so they be not - offered for sale in fairs or markets. - -The reign of Henry VIII. is not marked by any ordinances or Acts for the -restraint of plague or the like sickness by other than quarantine -measures. The common ditch between Aldgate and the postern of the Tower -was cleansed in 1519 at the charges of the city; in 1540 the Moor ditch -was cleansed: and, not long before, the ditch from the Tower to Aldgate. -In 1549 the ditch was again cleansed at the charges of the City -Companies[626]. In April, 1552, John Shakespeare, the poet's father, a -citizen of Stratford-on-Avon in good circumstances and afterwards mayor of -the town, was fined twelve pence (eight to ten shillings present value) -for not removing the heap of household dirt and refuse that had -accumulated in front of his own door[627]. In the records of the borough -of Ipswich[628], scavengers are mentioned in the 32nd of Henry VIII. -(1540): they were elected in every parish, and the gatherings of refuse -ordered to be carried and laid at four places, namely: Warwick Pitts, -College Yard, behind the Ditches next John Herne, and the Dikes in the -Marsh. When queen Elizabeth visited Ipswich (in 1561, 1565 and 1577), she -rated not only the clergy on the laxity of their behaviour, but also the -civic authorities upon the filthy condition of the streets. "A marked -improvement," says the borough historian, "certainly took place in Ipswich -at this period, as is incontestably shown by the constant exhortations and -promulgations of laws for the preservation of cleanliness." - -In the _Description and Account of the City of Exeter_, written by John -Vowell, or Hoker, chamberlain of the city and member of Parliament for it -in the reign of Elizabeth[629], we find the following about the offices -and duties of scavengers "as of old." - - They are "necessary officers who cannot be wanting in any - well-governed city or town, because by them and their service all - things noisome to the health of man, and hurtful to the state of the - body of the commonwealth, are advertised unto the magistrate, and so - they be the means of the redress thereof. And therefore they be called - Scavengers, as who saith Shewers or Advertisers, for so the word - soundeth." Among other duties they had the oversight of pavements, - that they were swept weekly, of slaughter-houses, dunghills and the - like, of dangerous buildings and of encroachments upon the streets, - of chimneys, and of precautions against fires (tubs of water to be in - readiness at the doors to quench fires and cleanse the streets); and - on Sundays they had to attend the mayor of Exeter to the church of St - Peter's. - -These officers of the municipality discharged their duties, says the -Elizabethan writer, "as of old;" from which we may conclude that some such -regulation had existed from quite early times. The scavengers are -mentioned by Stow at the end of his account of each City ward along with -other officers. We have already seen, from the court rolls of the manor of -Castle Combe under the year 1427, that villagers were fined or admonished -for creating nuisances. A sudden revival of zeal in that way at Castle -Combe in the year 1590 may have been due to the vigorous sanitary policy -of Elizabeth's government: - - "And that the inhabitants of the West Strete doe remove the donge or - fylth at John Davis house ende before the feaste of Seynct Andrew - th'apostell next, and that they lay no more there within x foote of - the wey, sub poena iii s iiii d. - - "And that none shall lay any duste or any other fylth in the wey or - pitte belowe Cristopher Besas house, sub poena pro quolibet tempore - xii d. - - "And that none shall soyle in the church yerde nor in any of our - stretes, for every defaulte to lose xii d. - - "And that the glover shall not washe any skynes, nor cast any other - fylth or soyle in the water runnynge by his house, sub poena x - s[630]." - -There is an interval of a century and a half between the two instances of -sanitary vigour adduced from the Castle Combe manor court; but there is no -reason to believe that the tradition of common cleanliness ever lapsed -altogether, in that or in any other village or town of the country. - -Some part of the rather unfair opinion as to the foulness of English life -in former times may be traced to a well-known letter by Erasmus to the -physician of cardinal Wolsey. There are grounds for believing that Erasmus -must have judged from somewhat unfavourable instances. - -"We read of a city," says Erasmus, "which was freed from continual -pestilence by changes made in its buildings on the advice of a -philosopher. Unless I am mistaken, England may be freed in like manner." -He then proceeds to go over the defects of English houses, and to suggest -improvements. The houses were built with too little regard to the aspect -of their doors and windows towards the sun. Again, they have a great part -of their walls filled with panes of glass, admitting light in such wise as -to keep out the wind, and yet letting in at chinks of the windows the air -as if strained or percolated, and so much the more pestilential by being -long stagnant. These defects he would remedy by having two or three sides -of a house exposed to the sky, and all glazed windows so made that they -should open wholly or shut wholly, and so shut that there might be no -access of noxious winds through gaping seams; for if it be sometimes -wholesome to admit the air, it is sometimes wholesome to keep it out. -Inside the houses Erasmus professes to have seen a shocking state of -things--the floors covered with rushes piled, the new upon the old, for -twenty years without a clearance, befouled with all manner of filth, with -spillings of beer and the remains of fish, with expectoration and vomit, -with excrement and urine[631]. Here we have clearly to do with the -intelligent foreigner. On the other hand, as far back as the reign of -Richard I., Englishmen would appear to have contrasted their own personal -habits with those of other nations, much as the summer tourist does now. -English youths, it has been said, go through Europe with one phrase on -their lips: "Foreigners don't wash." Richard of Devizes implies somewhat -the same. A Frankish youth is being advised where to settle in England, -Winchester being chosen by excluding the other towns one by one. Bristol, -for example, was wholly given over to soap-boilers: everyone in Bristol -was either a soap-boiler or a retired soap-boiler; "and the Franks love -soap as much as they love scavengers[632]." We may cry quits, then, with -Erasmus over the rush-strewn floors. It is clear, also, that the glazed -fronts of English houses, which he took exception to, are the very feature -of them that Sir Thomas More prided himself upon; in that as in other -external things the London of his day seemed to him to leave little to be -desired as the capital of Utopia, his chief subjects of remark being the -shambles and the want of hospitals for the sick[633]. - -Thus, when we attempt to clear the sense of our rather mixed notions on -the unwholesome life of former times, we must feel constrained to withdraw -a great part of the accusation as to nuisances tolerated or scavenging -neglected. Most of all was the government of Elizabeth marked by vigour in -its attempts to restrain plague, not only by quarantine measures, but also -by radical sanitation. - -Queen Elizabeth and her Council were baffled by the persistence of plague -in London in 1581-82-83; the infection pursued its own course despite all -efforts to "stamp it out," so that the letters from the lords of the -Council to the mayor begin to assume a somewhat querulous and impatient -tone[634]. To a letter of remonstrance, 21st September, 1581, the mayor -replied next day that every precaution had been taken. On the 22nd March, -1582, the mayor retorted upon the Court that an artificer in leather, -dwelling near Fleet Bridge, had the plague in his house, that his house -had been shut up, and he restrained from going out; nevertheless he had -access to the Court in the things of his art, both for the queen and her -household. On the 1st September, 1582, the plague having greatly increased -as appeared by certificate of the number of the dead during the last week, -the Privy Council informed the mayor that this was in part "by negligence -in not keeping the streets and other places about the city clean, and -partly through not shutting up of the houses where the sickness had been -found, and setting marks upon the doors; but principally through not -observing orders for prevention of the infection heretofore sent to them -by the Council." The mayor sent answer the same day that every care had -been taken: the streets had been cleansed every other day; the parish -clerks had been appointed to see to the shutting up of infected houses, -and putting papers upon the doors; he had also appointed some of his own -officers to go up and down the city to view and inform him whether these -things had been done. - -So much did the Council believe, or affect to believe, that the mayor -could control the plague if he carried out their orders, that they used -the adjournment of the law courts as a threat to the city. On the 15th -October, the Term was announced to be held at Hertford, and all persons -from infected London houses were forbidden to repair thither with -merchandise, victual, &c.[635]. Then follow in January, 1583, letters -touching an impracticable attempt of the Privy Council to have a list -printed of all inns and taverns that had been infected within the last two -months. The mayor made a catalogue which was pronounced too long. On 21st -April, 1583, the infection had much increased, and the lords of the -Council again urged upon the mayor to have infected houses shut up, and -provision made for feeding and maintaining the inmates thereof. They -desired to express her majesty's surprise that no house or hospital had -been built without the city, in some remote place, to which the infected -people might be removed, although other cities of less antiquity, fame, -wealth, and reputation had provided themselves with such places, whereby -the lives of the inhabitants had been in all times of infection chiefly -preserved. The mayor, on 3rd May, wrote that the Court of Aldermen had -published orders for the stay of the plague; but that they were -comparatively powerless so long as crowds of the worst sort of people -resorted to see plays, bear-baiting, fencers, and profane spectacles at -the theatre, and Curtain, and other the like places. - -The plague pursued its own course, wholly unaffected, so far as one can -see, by everything that was tried. One thing that was not touched by the -sanitary policy, was probably more relevant than all else to the -continuance of plague--the disposal of the dead. The theoretical -importance attached to that as an original cause of plague has been avowed -in the chapter on the Black Death. We have here to see how the theory of -it as a favouring thing for the continuance of the infection squares with -the facts in such a city as London under the Plantagenets and Tudors. - - -The Disposal of the Dead. - -Intramural interment was one of the most cherished practices of -Christendom so long as the word "intramural" had a literal meaning. Hence -the correctness of the imagery used of the Spiritual City: - - "To work and watch, until we lie - At rest within thy wall." - -Probably each of the one hundred and twenty small parish churches of -London in the medieval period stood in its small churchyard. In an -exceptional time like the Black Death, these proved insufficient for the -daily burials: three new cemeteries were enclosed and consecrated outside -the walls--two of them in Smithfield and the other at Aldgate. These all -soon passed into the hands of friars, and became the grounds of -monasteries. The churches or churchyards of monasteries were in great -request for burial, but not for common burials, or for burials in a time -of epidemic. The 'Vision of Piers the Ploughman' is clear enough that the -friars took no large view of their duties; they affected the care of the -dead, but only if they were well paid: - - "For I said I nold | be buried at their house but at my parish church. - | For I heard once how conscience it told | that where a man was - christened by kynde [nature] he should be buried, | or where he were - parishen, right there he should be graven. | And for I said this to - friar, a fool they me held | and loved me the less for my lele speech - | ... I have much marveil of you and so hath many another | why your - convent coveteth to confess and to bury | rather than to baptise - bairns that ben catechumens." - -The reason why the friars paid so much attention to burials was that these -rites were the most profitable: - - "And how that freris [friars] folowed folke that was riche | and folke - that was pore at litel price they sette, | and no corps in their - kirk-yerde ne in their kyrke was buried | but quick he bequeath them - aught or should help quit their debts." - -The friars in the towns would appear, then, to have been as much in -request for the disposal of the dead within their precincts as the monks -were in the country, both alike taking a certain part of that duty out of -the hands of the regular parish clergy. Hence we may assign a good many -burials, perhaps mostly of the richer class, as in Stow's long lists of -conventual burials, to the various precincts of Whitefriars, Blackfriars, -Greyfriars (within Newgate) or Friars Minor (Minories), Carthusians, or -other settlements of the religious orders in the city and liberties of -London. It is not unlikely that the narrow spaces for burial in and around -the old churches in the streets and lanes of the city were already getting -crowded, and that the friars naturally acquired a large share of the -business of burial because their consecrated houses and enclosed grounds -were situated where there was most room, namely in the skirt of the -Liberties, or in waste spaces within the walls. - -The parish churchyards within the walls became insufficient, not merely -because of the generations of the dead, but because they were encroached -upon. In 1465 the churchyard of St Mary le Bow in Cheapside was so -encroached upon by building of houses that John Rotham or Rodham, citizen -and tailor, by his will gave to the parson and churchwardens a certain -garden in Hosier-lane to be a churchyard; which, says Stow, so continued -near a hundred years, but now is built on and is a private man's -house[636]. In like manner there was a colony of Brabant weavers settled -in the churchyard of St Mary Somerset, and the great house of the earl of -Oxford stood in St Swithin's churchyard, near London Stone. John Stow's -grandfather directed that his body should be buried "in the little green -churchyard of the parish church of St Michael in Cornhill, between the -cross and the church wall, as nigh the wall as may be." For some years -previous to 1582, as many as 23 of the city parishes were using St Paul's -churchyard for their dead, having parted with their own burial grounds. -But in that year (letter of 3 April, 1582[637]) the number of parishes -privileged to use St Paul's churchyard was reduced to 13, the ten -restrained parishes being provided for in the cemetery gifted to the city -in 1569 by Sir Thomas Roe, outside Bishopsgate, "for the ease of such -parishes in London as wanted ground convenient within the parishes." The -state of St Paul's churchyard may be imagined from the words of a -remonstrance made two years after, in 1584: "The burials are so many, and -by reason of former burials so shallow, that scarcely any grave could be -made without corpses being laid open[638]." Twenty years before, in 1564, -or the year after the last great plague which we have dealt with, Medicus, -one of the speakers in Bullein's _Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence_ brings -in "the multitude of graves in every churchyard, and great heaps of rotten -bones, whom we know not of what degree they were, rich or poor, in their -lives." - -St Paul's churchyard would appear to have received the dead of various -parishes from an early date. There was a large charnel house for the bones -of the dead on the north side, with a chapel over it, dedicated to the -Virgin and endowed in 1282. Stow says that the chapel was pulled down in -1549, and that "the bones of the dead, couched up in a charnel under the -chapel, were conveyed from thence into Finsbury field, by report of him -who paid for the carriage, amounting to more than one thousand cart-loads, -and there laid on a moorish ground, in short space after raised, by -soilage of the city upon them, to bear three windmills. The chapel and -charnel were converted into dwelling-houses, warehouses, and sheds before -them, for stationers, in place of the tombs." Elsewhere he names Reyne -Wolfe, stationer, as the person who paid for the carriage of the bones and -"who told me of some thousands of carry-loads, and more to be conveyed." -From this we may infer that the graves were systematically emptied as each -new corpse came to be buried, according to the principle of a "short -tenancy of the soil" which is being re-advocated at the end of the 19th -century by the Church of England Burial Reform Association. - -The spaces reserved for burial around the newer parish churches in the -liberties, such as St Sepulchre's and St Giles's, Cripplegate, were -gradually pared down and let out for buildings by the parish. Stow, in his -_Survey_ of 1598, says that St Sepulchre's church stands "in a fair -churchyard, although not so large as of old time, for the same is letten -out for buildings and a garden plot." The records of St Giles's, -Cripplegate, show that rents were received by the parish for detached -portions of the churchyard in 1648[639]. - -To take an instance of new city graveyards still remaining: The old -fifteenth-century parishes of St Ewin and St Nicholas in the Flesh -Shambles became united in the parish of Christ Church within Newgate, -which, under that name, buried many, as we may read in Stow's _Survey_. At -length its burial ground was full, and it acquired a not very large plot -next to the churchyard of St Botolph's outside Aldersgate. Its neighbour -parish within the walls, St Leonard's in Foster Lane, acquired the next -conterminous plot for its new burial-ground. All three graveyards are now -thrown into one strip of public garden by the removal of the two cross -walls which originally kept the ground of each parish separate. - -While the graveyards were thus curtailed, and dwelling-houses built close -up to them, the mode of burial was none of the safest. To take the -instance of the great Cripplegate parish again: some few, like John -Milton, would be buried within the church in leaden coffins; others would -be laid in the ground of the churchyard in the same way, full burial dues -being paid; but many more, for whom the dues were remitted, would be -buried in a sheet, with no coffin at all, in the part of the churchyard -reserved for the poor[640]. For the parish of St Saviour's, Southwark, the -scale of burial dues was as follows: "In any churchyard next the church, -with a coffin, 2_s._ 8_d._; without a coffin, 20_d._; for a child with a -coffin, 8_d._; without a coffin, 4_d._ The colledge churchyard, with a -coffin, 12_d._; without a coffin, 8_d._" One of their broadsheets, dated -1580, has a picture of a body ready for burial in a cerecloth, a close -fitting covering tied at the head and feet, and neatly finished[641]. - -It is not to be supposed that no voices were raised against the -overcrowding of the old city churchyards. Intramural burial is one of the -many practical topics in Latimer's sermons: in 1552 he denounced the state -of St Paul's churchyard as an occasion of "much sickness and disease," -appealing to its notorious smells; the citizens of Nain, he said, "had a -good and laudable custom to bury their corses without the city, which -ensample we may follow[642]." Preaching at Paul's Cross on the 8th of -August, 1563, when the plague was already destroying at the rate of five -hundred in a week, Turner, commonly called Turner of Boulogne, made two -solemn petitions to my lord mayor of London: the one was that the dead of -the city should be buried out of the city in the field; the other was that -no bell should be tolled for them when they lay at the mercy of God -departing out of this present life, "for that the tolling of the bell did -the party departing no good, neither afore their death nor after[643]." In -the writings on plague, putrefying animal matters, such as carrion or -offal, are always mentioned among the causes; but it is only rarely that -the ordinary burial of the dead is referred to. In the seventeenth -century, the filling of the soil with products of cadaveric decomposition -played a greater part in the theory of plague, especially in the writings -of Prosper Alpinus, physician to the Venetian consulate at Cairo. Among -English books, the treatise on Plague by Dr Gilbert Skene, of Edinburgh -(1568), is the only one that is at all clear upon the point. In his fourth -chapter, on the places which be most pestilential, he includes the -localities "where many dead are buried," the ground there becoming "fat -and vaporative;" and in his first chapter, on causes in general, he -instances "dead carrions unburied, in special of mankind, which, by -similitude of nature, is most nocent to man, as every brutal is most -infectant and pestilential to their own kind." But even if these truths -had been generally apprehended, religious prescription and usage would -have been too strong to allow of radical measures being adopted. The grand -provocative of plague was no obvious nuisance above ground, but the -loading of the soil, generation after generation, with an immense -quantity of cadaveric matters, which were diffused in the pores of the -ground under the feet of the living, to rise in emanations, more deadly in -one season than in another, according as the level of the ground-water and -the heat of the earth determined the degree of oxidation, or the formation -of the more dangerous half-way products of decomposition. - -So little is known of the great plagues of London in 1406-7, 1464, 1479, -1500, and 1513, that we can only conjecture how the dead, to the number -perhaps of one hundred in a day at the height of the epidemic, were -disposed of--probably in trenches in the fields of Whitechapel, Smithfield -and Finsbury, or in such parishes as St Sepulchre's. The skirts of the -city were used also to deposit the soil upon. Thus it happened that the -ground outside the walls, which came in time to be the densely populated -liberties and out-parishes, and the chief seat of all later plagues, had -for generations before received the refuse of the city and a large -proportion of the bodies of the dead. An instance mentioned by Stow, in -1598, may be taken as standing for many more: "On the right hand, beyond -Shoreditch Church toward Hackney, are some late-built houses upon the -common soil; for it was a lay-stall." - -What remains to be said of localities and circumstances of plague in -London will come in with the history of successive epidemics, which we may -now resume and carry to the end of the Tudor period. - - -Chronology of Plague, 1564-1592. - -The amount of plague in London for the two or three years next following -the great epidemic in the autumn of 1563 is accurately known from Stow's -abstracts of the weekly bills of mortality. It was exceedingly little, the -deaths being but one or two or three in a week, and often none. The -figures come to an end with July, 1566, and it is probable that the bills -may not have been made for a time after that. The proposal made by Sir -Roger Martyn in a letter of 20th October, 1568, to the earl of -Northumberland, that all strangers arriving from over sea should be -quarantined at Gravesend, would have been instigated by the known -prevalence of plague and other malignant types of sickness in Scotland -and at various parts of the continent of Europe. It was just in those -years, before and after the founding of the Royal Exchange in 1566, that -the concourse of merchants to London, especially from the war-troubled Low -Countries and France, was greatest. - -The revival of plague in London, after the great epidemic of 1563, was -probably in 1568. In the city records there are orders relating to -searchers, shutting up of houses, and collections for infected households, -dated 12 October, 1568 (10 Elizabeth), 27 March and 19 October, 1569. But -in 1568 the regulations, like the proposal for quarantine of shipping, may -have been made more against the importation of cases from outside than on -account of cases actually in London. It is in 1569 that we definitely hear -of plague in the capital:-- - -"The plague of pestilence somewhat raging in the city of London, -Michaelmas Term was first adjourned unto the 3rd of November, and after -unto Hillary Term next following[644]." This outbreak of the autumn and -winter of 1569 must have been considerable: for we find the earl of Essex -writing from York on the 30th October to Cecil to say that he would have -come to London before "had not the plague stayed him[645];" and Thomas -Bishop, giving account of his movements to the Council, says that he -remained in London until the 10th October, "when the plague increasing, I -departed[646]." - -The year 1570 was one of the more disastrous plague-years on the -Continent, that now recur somewhat frequently down to the end of the -century. "There was general disease of pestilence," says Stow, "throughout -all Europe, in such sort that many died of God's tokens, chiefly amongst -the Venetians, of whom there died of that cruel sickness about threescore -thousand." In London, on 2nd August, a death in the Tower was put down to -plague; but there is no other evidence of its prevalence in the -capital[647]. In the beginning of next winter, 1571, there was plague at -Cambridge (letter of 18th November)[648]; and at Oxford in the same year -it left such misery, says Anthony Wood, that divers scholars were forced -to beg[649]. In 1573 it reappeared in London, at its usual season, the end -of the year: it raged so violently "that the Queen ordered the new Lord -Mayor not to keep the usual feast upon his inauguration[650]." The -register of St Andrew's parish, at Hertford, bears witness to the flight -of Londoners to that favourite refuge; there were numerous burials of the -plague in 1573, and in subsequent years, many of them being of London -citizens[651]. It was in London again in 1574: a letter of 15 November, to -the sheriff and justices of Surrey, orders that they should not allow the -people to resort to plays and shows [in Southwark] "at that time of -contagion[652]," while the figures from a weekly bill of mortality, which -have been preserved, show that the outbreak had been one of the more -considerable degree--for the week 22-28 October, in the city and liberties -(108 parishes), buried of all diseases, 166, whereof of the plague, -65[653]. - -The known provincial centres in 1574 were Stamford, Peterborough and -Chester. The Stamford visitation was one of a good many that the town -suffered from first to last, and must have been a severe one; in one -month, from 8 August to 7 September, 40 had been buried of the plague, -"and the town is so rudely governed, they have so mixed themselves, that -there is none that is in any hope of being clear. It is in seventeen -houses, and the town is in great poverty; but that the good people of the -country send in victuals, there would many die of famine. St Martin's -parish is clear[654]." The corporation records also bear witness to the -confusion caused, the new bailiffs having been sworn in before the -Recorder in a field outside, instead of in the usual place[655]. -Peterborough, which was not far off, is known to have had a visitation, -from an entry in the parish register, "1574, January. Here began the -plague[656]." At Chester, "plague began, but was stayed with the death of -some few in the crofts[657]." - -The year 1575 is somewhat singular for an epidemic of plague in -Westminster, but none in the city of London: the deaths for one week in -the former are known[658]; and, as regards the immunity of London, Cecil -had removed previous to 16 September, from Westminster to Sir Thomas -Gresham's house in the City to avoid the infection[659]. It had been at -Cambridge in the winter of 1574-5, and was "sore" in Oxford down to -November, 1575. - -The same year, 1575, was a season of severe plague in Bristol and other -places of the west of England. Some 2000 are said (in the Mayor's -Calendar) to have died in Bristol between St James's tide (July 25) when -the infection "began to be very hot," and Paul's tide (January 25)[660]. -As early as the 11th July, the corporation of Wells had ordered measures -against the plague in Bristol; but Wells also appears to have had a -visitation, if the 200 persons buried, according to tradition, in the -"plague-pit" near the north-eastern end of the Cathedral (besides many -more buried in the fields) had been victims of the disease in 1575[661]. -At Shrewsbury in that year the fairs were removed on account of -plague[662]. From a claim of damages which came before the Court of -Requests in 1592, it appears that plague had been in Cheshire in 1576; at -Northwich the house of one Phil. Antrobus was infected and most of the -family died; on which some linens in the house, worth not more than -13_sh._ 4_d._ were put in the river lest they should be used; the son, who -was a tailor, claimed compensation, through the earl of Derby, sixteen -years after[663]. - -At Hull, in 1576, there was an outbreak, small compared with some other -visitations there, in the Blackfriars Gate, the deaths being about one -hundred[664]. It is somewhat remarkable to find the borough of -Kirkcudbright making regulations in the month of January, 1577, a most -unlikely season, to prevent the introduction of the plague then raging on -the Borders[665]. In September, 1577, there were issued orders to be put -in execution throughout the realm in towns and villages infected with the -plague. More definitely it is heard of on 21 October at Rye and Dover, and -on 3 November, 1577, in London. - -We now come to a series of years, 1578 to 1583, for which we have full -particulars of the burials in London, from plague and other causes, and of -the christenings. These valuable statistics, the earliest known, are -preserved among the papers of Lord Burghley, who procured them from the -lord mayor of London[666], and are here given in full, having been copied -from the MS. in the library of Hatfield House[667]. - -_Abstracts of Burials and Baptisms in London, 1578-1583_ - -1578 - - Week Of Of other - ending Dead plague diseases Christened - - Jan. 2 62 7 55 66 - 9 90 12 78 52 - 16 63 14 49 59 - 23 95 33 62 59 - 30 82 25 57 65 - Feb. 6 88 24 64 51 - 13 102 25 77 59 - 20 100 26 74 77 - 27 84 12 72 84 - Mar. 6 79 10 69 58 - 13 66 9 57 53 - 20 75 5 70 57 - 27 63 12 51 60 - Apr. 3 96 19 77 64 - 10 89 25 64 67 - 17 102 31 71 66 - 24 91 37 54 62 - May 1 109 25 84 44 - 8 116 33 83 37 - 15 141 43 98 48 - 22 109 36 73 66 - 29 119 34 85 43 - June 5 99 38 61 51 - 12 91 35 56 41 - 19 76 34 42 54 - 26 75 18 57 48 - July 3 92 34 58 52 - 10 99 35 64 48 - 17 98 39 59 52 - 24 129 63 66 49 - 31 100 41 59 59 - Aug. 7 132 73 59 76 - 14 152 78 74 72 - 21 232 134 98 63 - 28 205 113 92 58 - Sept. 4 257 162 95 84 - 11 297 183 114 64 - 18 308 189 119 68 - 25 330 189 141 72 - Oct. 2 370 230 140 76 - 9 388 234 154 62 - 16 361 234 127 73 - 23 281 175 106 58 - 30 258 130 128 68 - Nov. 6 278 127 151 60 - 13 230 116 114 64 - 20 172 77 95 66 - 27 155 84 71 68 - Dec. 4 160 77 83 60 - 11 161 65 96 69 - 18 129 44 85 62 - 25 94 20 74 68 - ---- ---- ---- ---- - 7830 3568 4262 3150 - -1579 - - Week Of Of other - ending Dead plague diseases Christened - - Jan. 1 100 27 73 54 - 8 67 13 54 68 - 15 75 16 59 74 - 22 63 9 54 81 - 29 79 19 60 75 - Feb. 5 84 23 61 46 - 12 81 16 65 63 - 19 69 15 54 61 - 26 70 10 60 77 - Mar. 5 51 6 45 71 - 12 61 16 45 72 - 19 66 10 56 65 - 26 75 13 62 68 - Apr. 2 81 19 62 53 - 9 82 27 55 79 - 16 77 22 55 53 - 23 58 10 48 44 - 30 71 10 61 57 - May 7 64 12 52 51 - 14 68 14 54 42 - 21 75 12 63 54 - 28 78 13 65 47 - June 4 66 7 59 56 - 11 49 7 42 46 - 18 74 14 60 60 - 25 65 13 52 45 - July 2 57 11 46 50 - 9 62 9 53 66 - 16 73 19 54 52 - 23 72 12 60 63 - 30 72 13 59 67 - Aug. 6 66 12 54 61 - 13 70 18 52 67 - 20 68 12 56 61 - 27 63 10 53 58 - Sept. 3 66 14 52 65 - 10 85 25 60 55 - 17 66 11 55 80 - 24 44 8 36 63 - Oct. 1 60 9 51 42 - 8 56 8 48 75 - 15 68 14 54 70 - 22 49 6 43 71 - 29 52 10 42 76 - Nov. 5 47 8 39 66 - 12 37 2 35 69 - 19 60 2 58 84 - 26 44 6 38 69 - Dec. 3 43 3 40 78 - 10 55 4 51 80 - 17 49 4 45 70 - 24 51 3 48 78 - 31 42 3 39 72 - ---- ---- ---- ---- - 3406 629 2777 3370 - -1580 - - Week Of Of other - ending Dead plague diseases Baptised - - Jan. 7 49 1 48 78 - 14 58 4 54 58 - 21 50 5 45 63 - 28 28 2 26 74 - Feb. 4 54 5 49 81 - 11 49 2 47 91 - 18 47 3 44 81 - 25 48 3 45 68 - Mar. 3 52 0 52 77 - 10 48 2 46 74 - 17 48 1 47 75 - 24 52 3 49 68 - 31 48 2 46 59 - Apr. 7 48 1 47 77 - 14 53 1 52 78 - 21 40 1 39 74 - 28 43 1 42 75 - May 5 58 1 57 72 - 12 54 0 54 69 - 19 40 2 38 75 - 26 44 0 44 72 - June 2 36 1 35 59 - 9 41 0 41 54 - 16 46 2 44 60 - 23 55 2 53 59 - 30 47 4 43 57 - July 7 77 4 73 65 - 14 133 4 129 66 - 21 146 3 143 61 - 28 96 5 91 64 - Aug. 4 78 5 73 71 - 11 51 4 47 53 - 18 49 1 48 72 - 25 63 3 60 62 - Sept. 1 48 0 48 71 - 8 35 2 33 69 - 13 52 1 51 69 - 22 52 1 51 95 - 29 65 2 63 55 - Oct. 6 35 1 34 63 - 13 44 2 42 56 - 20 45 2 43 56 - 27 40 3 37 80 - Nov. 3 60 7 53 75 - 10 59 5 54 67 - 17 57 3 54 75 - 24 45 2 43 70 - Dec. 1 54 3 51 83 - 8 58 1 57 56 - 15 53 8 45 59 - 22 53 4 49 61 - 29 89 3 86 66 - ---- ---- ---- ---- - 2873 128 2745 3568 - -1581 - - Week Of Of other - ending Dead plague diseases Baptised - - Jan. 5 42 5 37 63 - 12 53 4 49 65 - 19 50 1 49 65 - 26 46 1 45 59 - Feb. 2 49 2 47 56 - 9 38 0 38 63 - 16 48 0 48 87 - 23 56 5 51 52 - Mar. 2 56 0 56 62 - 9 60 2 58 74 - 16 52 2 50 80 - 23 41 1 40 89 - 30 44 3 41 74 - Apr. 6 42 2 40 39 - 13 47 1 46 53 - 20 37 1 36 41 - 27 37 2 35 60 - May 4 47 0 47 52 - 11 40 1 39 50 - 18 46 1 45 59 - 25 64 13 51 62 - June 1 48 4 44 60 - 8 57 2 55 56 - 15 65 7 58 62 - 22 57 6 51 73 - 29 56 7 49 52 - July 6 72 9 63 62 - 13 69 9 60 64 - 20 94 19 75 70 - 27 95 24 71 89 - Aug. 3 87 23 64 58 - 10 130 30 100 75 - 17 148 47 101 72 - 24 143 43 100 55 - 31 169 74 95 72 - Sept. 7 186 85 101 54 - 14 180 76 114 59 - 21 203 86 117 55 - 28 218 60 158 88 - Oct. 5 205 107 98 74 - 12 193 74 119 83 - 19 128 42 86 77 - 26 125 35 90 88 - Nov. 2 115 45 70 85 - 9 93 26 67 61 - 16 - 23 - 30 [The figures in part - Dec. 7 wanting, and in part - 14 defaced.] - 21 - 28 - ---- ---- ---- ---- - 3931 987 2954 2949 - (45 weeks) - -1582 - -(74 Parishes clear, week ending Jan. 4.) - - Week Of Of other - ending Dead plague diseases Baptised - - Jan. 4 63 11 52 57 - 11 75 13 62 76 - 18 79 13 66 73 - 25 58 13 45 90 - Feb. 1 73 5 68 66 - 8 71 12 59 77 - 15 76 16 60 88 - 22 82 10 72 74 - Mar. 1 69 11 58 81 - 8 85 13 72 81 - 15 77 11 66 71 - 22 62 11 51 65 - 29 73 16 57 85 - Apr. 5 90 13 77 74 - 12 78 19 59 63 - 19 88 22 66 56 - 26 82 20 62 69 - May 3 95 23 72 55 - 10 68 12 56 62 - 17 62 11 51 59 - 24 61 10 51 61 - 31 57 15 42 65 - June 7 67 15 52 49 - 14 48 11 37 52 - 21 72 11 61 63 - 28 57 9 48 62 - July 5 60 20 40 54 - 12 88 25 63 66 - 19 80 30 50 61 - 26 99 31 68 65 - Aug. 2 101 45 56 68 - 9 116 42 74 77 - 16 142 70 72 64 - 23 148 85 63 67 - 30 205 111 94 70 - Sept. 6 229 139 90 74 - 13 277 189 88 79 - 20 246 151 95 76 - 27 267 145 122 63 - Oct. 4 318 213 105 87 - 11 238 139 99 63 - 18 289 164 125 74 - 25 340 216 124 54 - Nov. 1 290 131 159 66 - 8 248 149 99 77 - 15 202 98 104 70 - 22 227 119 108 74 - 29 263 124 139 63 - Dec. 6 144 58 86 59 - 13 155 68 87 -- - 20 -- -- -- -- - 27 142 68 74 91 - ---- ---- ---- ---- - 6762 2976 3786 3433 - (51 weeks) - -1583 - - Week Of Of other - ending Dead plague diseases Baptised - - Jan. 3 137 50 87 69 - 10 140 57 83 53 - 17 160 72 88 67 - 24 162 59 103 59 - 31 144 40 104 73 - -These tables were compiled from weekly bills furnished to the Court, and -doubtless drawn up like the bills of 1532 and 1535 to show the deaths from -plague and from other causes in each of the several parishes in the City, -Liberties and suburbs. It is clear that the results were known from week -to week, for a letter of January 29, 1578, says that the plague is -increased from 7 to 37 (? 33) deaths in three weeks. But that was not the -beginning of the epidemic in London; it was rather a lull in a -plague-mortality which is known to have been severe in the end of 1577, -and had led to the prohibition of stage-plays in November[668]. - -In that series of five plague-years in London, only two, 1578 and 1582, -had a large total of plague-deaths. The year 1580 was almost clear (128 -deaths from plague), and may be taken as showing the ordinary proportion -of deaths to births in London when plague did not arise to disturb it. The -baptisms, it will be observed, are considerably in excess of the burials; -and as every child was christened in church under Elizabeth, we may take -it that we have the births fully recorded (with the doubtful exception of -still-births and "chrisoms"). But while the one favourable year shows an -excess of some 24 per cent. of baptisms over burials, the whole period of -five years shows a shortcoming in the baptisms of 33 per cent. Thus we may -see how seriously a succession of plague-years, at the endemic level of -the disease, kept down the population; and, at the same time, how the -numbers in the capital would increase rapidly from within, in the absence -of plague. There is reason to think that plague was almost or altogether -absent from London for the next nine years (1583 to 1592); and it is not -surprising to find that the population, as estimated from the births, had -increased from some 120,000 to 150,000. The increase of London population -under Elizabeth was proceeding so fast, plague or no plague, that measures -were taken in 1580 to check it. The increase of London has never depended -solely upon its own excess of births over deaths; indeed, until the -present century, there were probably few periods when such excess occurred -over a series of years. Influx from the country and from abroad always -kept London up to its old level of inhabitants, whatever the death-rate; -and from the early part of the Tudor period caused it to grow rapidly. I -shall review briefly in another chapter the stages in the growth of -London, as it may be reckoned from bills of mortality and of baptisms. But -as the proclamation of 1580, against new buildings, the first of a long -series down to the Commonwealth, has special reference to the plague in -the Liberties, and to the unwholesome condition of those poor skirts of -the walled city, this is the proper place for it: - - "The Queen's Majesty perceiving the state of the city of London and - the suburbs and confines thereof to encrease daily by access of people - to inhabit in the same, in such ample sort as thereby many - inconveniences are seen already, but many greater of necessity like to - follow ... and [having regard] to the preservation of her people in - health, which may seem impossible to continue, though presently by - God's goodness the same is perceived to be in better estate - universally than hath been in man's memory: yet there are such great - multitudes of people brought to inhabit in small rooms, whereof a - great part are seen very poor; yea, such must live of begging, or of - worse means; and they heaped up together, and in a sort smothered with - many families of children and servants in one house or small tenement; - it must needs follow, if any plague or popular sickness should by - God's permission enter among those multitudes, that the same should - not only spread itself and invade the whole city and confines, as - great mortality should ensue the same, where her Majesty's personal - presence is many times required; besides the great confluence of - people from all places of the realm by reason of the ordinary Terms - for justice there holden; but would be also dispersed through all - other parts of the realm to the manifest danger of the whole body - thereof, out of which neither her Majesty's own person can be (but by - God's special ordinance) exempted, nor any other, whatsoever they be. - - For remedy whereof, as time may now serve until by some further good - order, to be had in Parliament or otherwise, the same may be remedied, - Her Majesty by good and deliberate advice of her Council, and being - thereto much moved by the considerate opinions of the Mayor, Aldermen - and other the grave, wise men in and about the city, doth charge and - straitly command all persons of what quality soever they be to desist - and forbear from any new buildings of any new house or tenement within - three miles of any of the gates of the said city, to serve for - habitation or lodging for any person, where no former house hath been - known to have been in memory of such as are now living. And also to - forbear from letting or setting, or suffering any more families than - one only to be placed or to inhabit from henceforth in any house that - heretofore hath been inhabited, etc.... Given at Nonesuch, the 7th of - July, 1580[669]." - -Among the more special suggestions of the mayor, on the causes and -prevention of plague, previous to this proclamation were[670]: - - 1. The avoiding of inmates in places pretending exemption. - - 2. The restraining of the building of small tenements and turning - great houses into small habitations by foreigners. - - 3. The increase of buildings in places exempt. - - 4. The increase of buildings about the Charterhouse, Mile End Fields; - also at St Katherine's along the water side. - - 5. The pestering of exempt places with strangers and foreign - artificers. - - 6. The number of strangers in and about London of no church. - - 7. The haunting of plays out of the Liberties. - - 8. The killing of cattle within or near the city. - -The best glimpses that we get of the plague in London in 1578 are in -letters to Lord Burghley[671]. On October 22, the Recorder of London, Sir -W. Fleetwood, writes to him that he "has been in Bucks since Michaelmas, -because he was troubled every day with such as came to him having plague -sores about them; and being sent by the Lords to search for lewd persons -in sundry places, he found dead corses under the table, which surely did -greatly annoy him." It will be seen by the statistics that the deaths from -all causes had risen to more than three hundred in a week before -Michaelmas--a small mortality compared with that of 1563, or of any other -London epidemic of the first degree. From other letters, relating to -plague at St Albans, Ware and other places near London, it may be -concluded that the citizens had escaped from London to their usual country -resorts in plague-time. On August 30 there were said to be sixty cases of -plague at St Albans, and on October 13 Ware is said to have been "of late" -infected. Plague-deaths are entered also in the Hertford parish registers -in 1577 and 1578[672]. On 14 September the infection was in the "Bull" at -Hoddesdon (Herts), but the landlord refused to close his house against -travellers on their way to the Court. On Oct. 13, 1578, two deaths are -reported from Queens' College, Cambridge, "the infection being taken by -the company of a Londoner in Stourbridge Fair;" these two deaths had -"moved many to depart" from the University[673]. In the same month it was -at Bury St Edmunds. Earlier in the year, a letter from Truro (11 April) -says that the plague was prevalent in Cornwall. - -The epidemic of 1578 at Norwich was relatively a far more serious one than -that of the capital, and was traced to the visit of the queen: "the trains -of her Majesty's carriage, being many of them infected, left the plague -behind, which afterwards increased so and continued as it raged above one -and three-quarter years after." From August 20, 1578, to February 19, -1579, the deaths were 4817, of which 2335 were of English and 2482 of -"alyan strangers," ten aldermen being among the victims[674]. At Yarmouth, -in 1579, two thousand are said to have died of the plague between May-day -and Michaelmas[675]. Colchester had plague from December, 1578 to August, -1579[676]. It was at Ipswich and at Plymouth in 1579; the epidemic at the -latter must have been severe, if the estimate of 600 deaths, given in the -annals of the town, is to be trusted[677]. It was again at Stamford in -1580, as appears from an order of the corporation, September 7, -prohibiting people from leaving the town[678]. Other centres of plague in -1580 were at Rye, which was cut off from intercourse with London[679], at -Leicester, where an assessment for the visited was appointed by the common -hall of the citizens[680], at Gloucester, from Easter to Michaelmas, and -at Hereford and Wellington, the musters in October having been hindered by -"the great infection of the plague[681]." - -On February 4, 1582, six houses were shut up at Dover, and on September 12 -there was plague in Windsor and Eton[682]. In the parish register of -Cranbrooke (Kent), 18 burials are specially marked (as from plague) in -1581, 41 in 1582, and 22 in 1583[683]. It was much dispersed in the Isle -of Sheppey, the year after (1584) from Michaelmas into the winter. - -Although the years from the spring of 1583 to the autumn of 1592 appear to -have been unmarked by plague in London, they witnessed a good many -epidemics along the east coast, and in a few places elsewhere, of which -the particulars are for the most part meagre. - -A casual mention is made of plague at Yarmouth in 1584[684]. The town of -Boston appears to have had plague continuously for four years from 1585 to -1588. In 1585 houses were shut up[685]; in 1586 a case at Southwell was -supposed to have been imported from Boston[686]; in the parish register -the burials from plague and other causes in 1587 reach the high figure of -372, and in 1588 they are 200, the average for eight years before being -122, and for twelve years after, only 84. In 1588 one Williams, of Holm, -in Huntingdonshire, was sent for to cleanse infected houses in St John's -Row, which had been used as pest-houses[687]. Within ten miles round -Boston the plague prevailed; at Leake there were 104 burials from -November, 1587, to November, 1588, the annual average being 24; at -Frampton there were 130 burials in 1586-87, the average being 30; at -Kirton there were 57 burials in 1589, and 102 in 1590[688]. - -Another centre on the east coast was Wisbech. In 1585 it appeared in the -hamlet of Guyhirne. In 1586 it entered Wisbech itself, caused the usual -shutting up of houses, and so increased in 1587 that there were 42 burials -in September and 62 in October[689], being three or four times more than -average. It is mentioned also at Ipswich in 1585, and at Norwich in -1588[690]. At Derby, in 1586, there was plague in St Peter's parish[691]. -At Chesterfield in November, 1586, there were plague-deaths, and again in -May 1587[692]. At Leominster, in 1587, there was an excessive mortality -(209 burials)[693]. - -The other great centre on the east coast in those years was in Durham and -Northumberland[694]. In 1587 the infection began to show at Hartlepool, -and in the parishes of Stranton and Hart; at the latter village 89 were -buried of the plague, one of them an unknown young woman who died in the -street. In 1589 the plague entered Newcastle and raged severely; of 340 -deaths in the whole year in St John's parish, 103 occurred in September; -the total mortality of the epidemic to the 1st January, 1590, was 1727. -Durham also had a visitation in 1589, plague-huts having been erected on -Elvet Moor. Those were years of scarcity, the year 1586 having been one of -famine-prices. - -The great event of the time was the defeat of the Spanish Armada off the -French coast from Calais to Gravelines in the last days of July, 1588. A -southerly gale sprang up, which drove the magnificent Spanish fleet past -the Thames as far as the Orkneys. It was perhaps well for England that the -winds parted the two fleets. The English ships, which had come to anchor -in Margate Roads to guard the mouth of the Thames, were in two or three -weeks utterly crippled by sickness. The disease must have been a very -rapid and deadly infection. Lord Admiral Howard writes to the queen: -"those that come in fresh are soonest infected; they sicken one day and -die the next." In a previous letter to Burghley he writes: "It is a most -pitiful sight to see the men die in the streets of Margate. The Elizabeth -Jonas has lost half her crew. Of all the men brought out by Sir Richard -Townsend, he has but one left alive." The ships were so weak that they -could not venture to come through the Downs from Margate to Dover[695]. It -is doubtful whether any part of this sickness and mortality was due to -plague, which was not active anywhere in the south of England in that -year. Want of food and want of clothes, and in the last resort the -hardness and parsimony of Elizabeth, appear to have been the causes. Lord -Howard begs for 1000 worth of new clothing, as the men were in great -want, and Lord H. Seymour writes that "the men fell sick with cold." -Dysentery and typhus were doubtless the infections which had been bred, -and became communicable to the fresh drafts of men. But in the Spanish -ships, beating about on the high seas and unable to land their men or even -to help each other, the sickness grew into true plague, so that the broken -remnants of the Armada which reached Corunna were like so many floating -pest-houses. - -In 1590 and 1591, at a clear interval from the Armada year, there was -much plague in Devonshire. The evidence of its having been in Plymouth -comes solely from the corporation accounts; at various times in 1590 and -1591 there were paid, "ten shillings to one that all his stuff was burned -for avoiding the sickness," a sum of 5. 19_s._ for houses shut, and a -like sum to persons kept in, and sixteen shillings to four men "to watch -the townes end for to stay the people of the infected places[696]." The -chief epidemics, however, appear to have been at Totness in 1590 and at -Tiverton in 1591. The parish register of Totness enters the "first of the -plague, Margary, the daughter of Mr Wyche of Dartmouth, June 22, 1590," -from which it may be inferred that plague was first at Dartmouth, nine -miles down the river, and had ascended to Totness. The following monthly -mortalities will show how severe the infection became at Totness in the -summer and autumn immediately following[697]: - - July 42 (36 of plague, 6 not), - August 81 (80 of plague, 1 not), - September 39 (all of plague), - October 37 (all of plague), - November 25 (24 of plague, 1 not), - December 19 (all of plague), - January, 1591, 10 of plague, - February 1 of plague. - -This heavy mortality from plague (246 deaths) was hardly over, when the -infection began in March, 1591, at Tiverton. It is said to have been -introduced by one William Waulker "a waulking man or traveller." From 1st -March, 1591, to 1st March, 1592, the deaths from plague and other causes -were 551, or about one in nine of the population[698]. - - -The London Plague of 1592-1593. - -The epidemic of plague, which reached its height in the year 1593, began -to be felt in London in the autumn of 1592[699], and is said to have -caused 2000 deaths before the end of the year. On the 7th September, -soldiers from the north on their way to Southampton to embark for foreign -parts had to pass round London "to avoid the infection which is much -spread abroad" in the city. On the 16th September, the spoil of a great -Spanish carrack at Dartmouth could be brought no farther than Greenwich, -on account of the contagion in London; no one to go from London to -Dartmouth to buy the goods. It was an ominous sign that the infection -lasted through the winter; even in mid winter people were leaving London: -"the plague is so sore that none of worth stay about these places[700]." -On the 6th April, 1593, one William Cecil who had been kept in the Fleet -prison by the queen's command, writes that "the place where he lies is a -congregation of the unwholesome smells of the town, and the season -contagious, so many have died of the plague[701]." From a memorial of -1595, it appears that the neighbourhood of Fleet Ditch had been the most -infected part of the whole city and liberties in 1593; "in the last great -plague more died about there than in three parishes besides[702]." The -epidemic does not appear to have reached its height until summer; on 12th -June, a letter states that "the plague is very hot in London and other -places of the realm, so that a great mortality is expected this summer." -On 3 July the Court "is in out places, and a great part of the household -cut off [? dispensed with]." The infection is mentioned in letters down to -November, after which date its public interest, at least, appears to have -ceased. - -Of that London epidemic a weekly record was kept by the Company of Parish -Clerks, and published by them, beginning with the weekly bill of 21st -December, 1592. The clerk of the Company of Parish Clerks, writing in -1665, had the annual bill for 1593 before him, with the plague-deaths and -other deaths in each of 109 parishes in alphabetical order, and the -christenings as well[703]. For the next two years, 1594 and 1595, he -appears to have had before him not only the annual bills but also a -complete set of the weekly bills of burials and christenings according to -parishes. The same documents were used by Graunt in 1662, and had -doubtless been used by John Stow at the time when they were published. The -originals are all lost, and only a few totals extracted from them remain -on record. To begin with Stow's. The mortality of 17,844 from all causes -in 1593 is given as for the City and Liberties only. But there was already -a considerable population in the parishes immediately beyond the Bars of -the Liberties, which were known as the nine out-parishes, namely those of -St Clement Danes, St Giles in the Fields, St James, Clerkenwell, St -Katharine at the Tower, St Leonard, Shoreditch, St Martin in the Fields, -St Mary, Whitechapel, St Magdalen, Bermondsey, and the Savoy. Besides -these there were important parishes still farther out--the Westminster -parishes, Lambeth, Newington, Stepney, Hackney and Islington. Of these, -Whitechapel, Stepney, Shoreditch, Clerkenwell and some of the western -parishes contributed largely to the plague-bills of the epidemics next -following, in 1603 and 1625, and it is known from the parish registers of -some of them that they contributed to the mortality of 1593. It is -probably to these parishes that we should ascribe the difference between -the above total of 17,844 (for City and Liberties) and the much larger -total of deaths "in and about London," given on the margin of a broadside -of 1603: "And in the last visitation from the 20th of December, 1592 to -the 23rd of the same month in the year 1593, died in all 25,886--of the -plague in and about London 15,003." The addition for the parishes beyond -the Bars would thus be 8,042 deaths from all causes, and from plague -alone 4,541--numbers which will seem not inadmissible if they be compared -with the figures for the corresponding parishes ten years after, in 1603, -Stepney alone having had 2,257 deaths in that plague-year[704]. - -For the two years next following 1593, Graunt's book of 1662 has preserved -the totals of deaths from all causes and from plague in the 97 old -parishes within the walls and in 16 parishes of the Liberties and suburbs; -he has omitted the christenings, although he had the figures before him. -Taking these along with the figures already given for 1593, we get the -following table for three consecutive years: - - ---------------------------------------------- - | Plague | Other | Total | - Year | deaths | deaths | deaths | Christenings - -----|--------|--------|--------|------------- - 1593 | 10,662 | 7,182 | 17,844 | 4,021 - 1594 | 421 | 3,508 | 3,929 | -- - 1595 | 29 | 3,478 | 3,507 | -- - ---------------------------------------------- - -The proportion of mortality in 1593 that fell to the old area within the -walls is known, from Stow's abstract of the figures, to have been about -the same as in the space of the Liberties (8598 in the one, 9295 in the -other), the deaths from other causes than plague having been rather more -in the latter than within the walls. Probably the population in the -Liberties was about equal to that in the City proper, the acreage being -rather less in the former, but the crowding, doubtless, greater. - -The London plague of 1592-93 called forth two known publications, an -anonymous 'Good Councell against the Plague, showing sundry preservatives -... to avoyde the infection lately begun in some places of this Cittie' -(London, 1592), and the 'Defensative' of Simon Kellwaye (April, 1593). The -dates of these two books show that the alarm had really begun in the end -of 1592 and early months of 1593. Kellwaye's book is mostly an echo of -foreign writings, the only part of it with direct interest for English -practice being the 11th chapter, which "teacheth what orders magistrates -and rulers of Citties and townes shoulde cause to be observed." As that -chapter sums up the various Elizabethan and other orders, and constitutes -a short epitome of sanitary practice, I append it in full: - - "Teacheth what orders magistrates and rulers of Citties and townes - shoulde cause to be observed. - - 1. First to command that no stinking doonghills be suffered neere the - Cittie. - - 2. Every evening and morning in the hot weather to cause colde water - to be cast in the streetes, especially where the infection is, and - every day to cause the streets to be kept cleane and sweete, and - clensed from all filthie thinges which lye in the same. - - 3. And whereas the infection is entred, there to cause fires to be - made in the streetes every morning and evening, and if some - frankincense, pitch or some other sweet thing be burnt therein it will - be much the better. - - 4. Suffer not any dogs, cattes, or pigs to run about the streets, for - they are very dangerous, and apt to carry the infection from place to - place. - - 5. Command that the excrements and filthy things which are voided from - the infected places be not cast into the streets, or rivers which are - daily in use to make drink or dress meat. - - 6. That no Chirurgions, or barbers, which use to let blood, do cast - the same into the streets or rivers. - - 7. That no vautes or previes be then emptied, for it is a most - dangerous thing. - - 8. That all Inholders do every day make clean their stables, and cause - the doong and filth therein to be carryed away out of the Cittie; for, - by suffering it in their houses, as some do use to do, a whole week or - fortnight, it doth so putrifie that when it is removed, there is such - a stinking savour and unwholesome smell, as is able to infect the - whole street where it is. - - 9. To command that no hemp or flax be kept in water neere the Cittie - or towne, for that will cause a very dangerous and infectious savour. - - 10. To have a speciall care that good and wholesome victuals and corne - be solde in the markets, and so to provide that no want thereof be in - the Cittie, and for such as have not wherewithall to buy necessary - food, that there to extend their charitable and goodly devotion; for - there is nothing that will more encrease the plague than want and - scarcity of necessary food. - - 11. To command that all those which do visit and attend the sick, as - also all those which have the sickness on them, and do walk abroad: - that they do carry something in their hands, thereby to be known from - other people. - - Lastly, if the infection be in but few places, there to keep all the - people in their houses, all necessaries being brought to them. When - the plague is staid, then to cause all the clothes, bedding, and other - such things as were used about the sick to be burned, although at the - charge of the rest of the inhabitants you buy them all new." - -The letters of the time give us a glimpse of this plague in London. On -November 3, 1593, Richard Stapes writes to Dr Csar, judge of the -Admiralty Court, residing at St Albans (doubtless to escape the -infection): "My next door neighbour and tenant on Sunday last buried his -servant of the plague, and since, on the other side of me, my son-in-law -has buried his servant; but I cannot say his was the sickness because the -visitors reported that the tokens did not appear on him as on the -other[705]." - -The epidemic of 1592-93 continued in London at a low level into the year -1594, when 421 persons died of the plague in the City and Liberties. Next -year the plague-deaths had fallen to 29. Watford and Hertford, two of the -most usual resorts of Londoners in a sickly season, were infected by -plague from 1592 to 1594, many of the deaths being of refugees from the -capital. At Watford there were 124 burials in the first eight months of -1594, a number much above the average, and many of them marked in the -register as plague-deaths[706]. At Hertford plague-deaths appear in the -registers of All Saints and St Andrew's parishes in 1592 and 1594. But the -greatest mortality at Hertford was in 1596; in St Andrew's parish there -were 13 burials in March, the average being one or two in the month; the -mortality declined until July, in which month there were buried, among -others, between the 12th and 26th, five children of one of the chief -burgesses (mayor in 1603)[707]. These may or may not have been -plague-deaths, the year 1596 having been unhealthy, as we shall see, with -other types of sickness. - -Meanwhile, in several provincial towns at a greater distance from the -capital than the summer resorts in Hertfordshire, there was plague in the -end of 1592, at the same time as in London, and in the following years. At -Derby, "the great plague and mortality" began in All Saints parish and in -St Alkmund's, at Martinmas, 1592, and ended at Martinmas, 1593, stopping -suddenly, "past all expectation of man, what time it was dispersed in -every corner of this whole parish, not two houses together being free from -it[708]." At Lichfield in 1593 and 1594 upwards of 1100 are said to have -died of the plague[709]. At Leicester, on the 21st September, 1593, a -contribution was levied for the plague-stricken[710]. At Shrewsbury in -1592-3 there was either plague itself or alarms of it[711]; in the parish -of Bishop's Castle there was the enormous mortality of 135 in July and -August, 1593, and 182 burials for the year, the average being 25[712]. In -the same years the infection was in Canterbury, as appears from entries of -payments "to Goodman Ledes watchying at Anthony Howes dore ... when his -house was first infected with the plague," and, the year after, "to those -ii pore folkes which were appointed to carry such to burial as died of the -plague; and also to the woman that was appointed to sock them[713]." There -are also various references to houses visited and to poor persons -relieved. Nottingham and Lincoln are also mentioned as having been -notoriously afflicted with plague in 1593[714]. - -A solitary record of plague comes from Cornwall in 1595. On 3rd May a -letter from the justices at Tregony to the Privy Council states that the -inhabitants, having been charged by the justices at the General Sessions -to restrain divers infected houses within the borough, were molested in -executing these commands, and had made complaint thereof[715]. - -All that remains to be said of plague in England until the end of the -Tudor period (1603) relates exclusively to the provinces; unless the -records are defective, London was clear of plague for nine years following -1592-94, just as it was clear for nine years preceding. The year 1597 was -one of great scarcity in more than one region of England. At Bristol wheat -is quoted at the incredible figure of twenty shillings the bushel; a civic -ordinance was made that every person of ability should keep in his house -as many poor persons as his income would allow[716]. But it is from the -North of England in 1597 that we have more particular accounts of famine -and of plague in its train. Writing in January, 1597, the dean of Durham -says[717]: - - "Want and waste have crept into Northumberland, Westmoreland and - Cumberland; many have come 60 miles from Carlisle to Durham to buy - bread, and sometimes for 20 miles there will be no inhabitant. In the - bishopric of Durham, 500 ploughs have decayed in a few years, and corn - has to be fetched from Newcastle, whereby the plague is spread in the - northern counties: tenants cannot pay their rents; then whole families - are turned out, and poor boroughs are pestered with four or five - families under one roof." - -On the 16th of January, 1597, he wrote again: "In Northumberland great -villages are depeopled, and there is no way to stop the enemy's attempt; -the people are driven to the poor port towns." On the 26th of May, the -dean again complains that there is great dearth in Durham; some days 500 -horses are at Newcastle for foreign corn, although that town and Gateshead -are dangerously infected. On the 17th September, Lord Burghley, minister -of State, is informed that the plague increases at Newcastle, so that the -Commissioners cannot yet come thither (the Assizes were not held at all on -account of plague about Newcastle and Durham): foreign traders were -selling corn at a high price, until some members of the town council -produced a stock of corn for sale at a shilling a bushel less[718]. There -are no figures extant of the plague-mortality at Newcastle in 1597; but at -Darlington the deaths up to October 17 were 340; and in Durham, up to -October 27, more than 400 in Elvet, 100 in St Nicholas, 200 in St -Margaret's, 60 in St Giles's, 60 in St Mary's, North Bailey, and 24 in the -gaol. The whole mortality in St Nicholas parish from July 11 to November -27 was 215. Many of the burials were on the moor. The infection broke out -again at Darlington and Durham in September, 1598[719]. - -Coincident with this severe plague on the eastern side, there was an -equally disastrous plague in the North Riding of Yorkshire and in -Cumberland and Westmoreland. The plague began at Richmond in the autumn of -1597. In August there were 23 deaths, and in September 42 deaths. The -epidemic appears to have reached its height in the summer of 1598, the -deaths in May having been 93, in June 99, in July 182 and in August 194. -These figures indicate a grievous calamity in so small a place as -Richmond. The outbreak which began on the 17th August, 1597, was over in -December, 1598. The stress of the epidemic is shown by the fact that the -churchyard was insufficient for the burials, many of the dead having been -buried in the Castle Yard and in Clarke's Green[720]. Of this severe -plague in Cumberland and Westmoreland there are few exact particulars. -According to an inscription at Penrith Church, "on the north outside of -the vestry, in the wall, in rude characters[721]," the deaths in 1598 -were:-- - - At Penrith 2260, - " Kendal 2500, - " Richmond 2200, - " Carlisle 1196. - -We are able to measure the accuracy of these round totals by the monthly -burials for Richmond given above; the months of July and August, 1598, -with 182 and 194 deaths respectively, were the most deadly season; and it -is hardly conceivable that there had been as many as 1800 deaths at -Richmond in the months when the epidemic was rising to a height and -declining therefrom according to its usual curve of intensity. - -Again, the parish register of Penrith gives only 583 deaths from the -infection, the inscription on the church wall making them 2260. Perhaps -the discrepancy is to be explained by including the mortality in the -various parishes of which Richmond, Penrith, Kendal and Carlisle were -respectively the centres and market-towns. Thus at Kirkoswald there were -buried, according to the parish register, 42 of the pestilence in 1597, -and no fewer than 583 in 1598[722],--a number which, if correct, means a -death-rate comparable to that of the Black Death itself. Again, in the -small parish of Edenhall, 42 were buried of the pestilence in 1598[723]. -Appleby, also, is known to have had a severe visitation[724], and so had -probably many other parishes. - -The Tudor period of plague closes with a severe epidemic at Stamford, -which began in the end of 1602. On December 2 the corporation resolved to -build a cabin for the plague-stricken, and in January following they -levied a fourth part of a fifteenth for the relief and maintenance of -people visited with the plague. This epidemic is said to have carried off -nearly 600; the parish registers of St George's and St Michael's contain -entries of persons "buried at the cabbin of the White Fryers[725]." - - -Plague in Scotland, 1495-1603. - -The history of plague in Scotland subsequent to the medieval period is of -interest chiefly as affording early illustrations of the practice of -quarantine. We last saw the disease prevailing in or near Edinburgh in -1475, the island of Inchkeith, in the Firth of Forth, being used as a -quarantine station. It was doubtless the possession of convenient islands -near the capital--Inch Colm and Inch Garvie were both used for the same -purpose afterwards--that led the Scots government to follow the example of -Venice and other foreign cities at no long interval of time. When we next -hear of plague in Scotland it is again in connexion with infected persons -on the island of Inchkeith and in the town of Leith, some time between -13th August, 1495, and 4th July, 1496[726]. - -But these quarantine practices were not confined to the Firth of Forth. On -the 17th May, 1498, the town of Aberdeen was warned by proclamation of the -bell of certain measures to be taken so as to preserve the town from the -pestilence "and strange sickness abefore," the principal precaution being -a guard of citizens at each of the four gates during the day, and that the -gates be "lockit with lokis and keis" at night. The "strange sickness -abefore" is doubtless the other invasion (of syphilis) which the aldermen -tried to check by an order of April, 1497; but "the pestilence" in the -order of May 1498 must have been the plague itself[727]. Nothing more is -heard of it at Aberdeen or elsewhere in Scotland in that year. It appears -to have been somewhat general in Scotland in 1499 and 1500. The audit of -burgh accounts, mostly held in June, 1499, was postponed to January 1500 -in some cases, the bailie of North Berwick explaining that he was -prevented by the plague from coming to the Exchequer[728]. An extra -allowance is made to the comptroller, Sir Patrick Hume, in March 1500, -"for his great labour in collecting fermes in different parts of the -kingdom in time of the infection of the plague." At Peebles, hides and -woolfells were destroyed during the plague of 1499. There was a renewal of -it in 1500, the audit being again delayed until November. The custumar of -Aberdeen brings his account of the great customs of that burgh down only -to the 3rd July, 1500, "because after that date the accountant, from dread -of the plague, did not enter the burgh of Aberdeen[729]." - -It is from the same northern city that our information on plague in -Scotland comes exclusively for the next forty-five years, not, of course, -because its experience was singular, but because its borough records are -known[730]. - -On the 24th April, 1514, various orders were made at Aberdeen against a -disease that seems to have been the plague: "for keeping of the town from -strange sickness, and specially this contagious pestilence ringand in all -parts about this burgh;" and, again, watching the gates (as in 1498) -against persons "coming forth of suspect places where this violent and -contagious pestilence reigns." Lodges were erected on the Links and -Gallow-hill, where the infected or suspected were to remain for forty -days. In the following year (1515), sixteen persons were banished from the -town for a year and a day for disobeying the orders "anent the plague." On -the 27th July, 1530, these orders are renewed "for evading this contagious -pestilence reigning in the country." On September 15, 1539 (the year after -a plague in the North of England), the plague is called in the municipal -orders by a distinctive name: the orders are for avoiding the "contagius -infeckand pest callit the boiche, quilk ryngis in diverse partis of the -same [realm] now instantly"--the botch being a name given to plague in -England also as late as the Elizabethan and Stuart periods. - -The years 1545 and 1546 were also plague-years in Scotland. At a council -held at Stirling on the 14th June, 1545, the session of the law courts was -transferred to Linlithgow "because of the fear of the pest that is lately -reigning in the town of Edinburgh[731]." On 10th September, of the same -year, the town council of Aberdeen issued orders for evading the pest. On -September 18 the plague was in the English army at Warkeshaugh, and it is -reported from Newcastle, on 5 October, to be raging on the borders[732]. -On March 21, 1546, a house in Aberdeen was shut up for the pest; and there -are evidences of its continuance in August, October and December both in -that town and "in certain parts of the realm:" on the 11th October the St -Nicholas "braid silver" was given for the sustentation of the sick folk of -the pest; on the 17th December an Aberdonian named David Spilzelaucht was -ordered to be "brint on the left hand with ane het irne" for not showing -the bailies "the seiknes of his barne, quilk was seik in the pest[733]." -In November, 1548, the plague is at St Johnstone (Perth), and the -Rhinegrave, with troops there, sick of it and like to die[734]. - -In 1564 the Scots Privy Council ordered quarantine for arrivals from -Denmark, in the manner that was practised on merchandise for nearly three -centuries after. As these early practices in the Forth are curiously like -those that used to be practised in the Medway in the eighteenth century, I -shall quote a part of the order of the Scots Privy Council, dated, -Edinburgh, September 23, 1564[735]: - - "That is to say, becaus maist danger apperis to be amangis the lynt, - that the samyn be loissit, and houssit in Sanct Colm's Inche, - oppynout, handillet and castin forth to the wynd every uther fair day, - quhill the feist of Martimes nixt to cum, be sic visitouris and - clengearis as sal be appointit and deput thairto be the Provest, - Baillies and Counsall of the burgh of Edinburgh upoun the expensis of - the marchantis, ownaris of the saidis gudis. And as concerning the - uther gudis, pik, tar, irine, tymmer, that the samyn be clengeit be - owir flowing of the sey, at one or twa tydis, the barrellis of asse to - be singit with huddir set on fyre, and that the schippis be borit and - the sey wattir to haif interes into thame, to the owir loft, and all - the partis within to be weschin and clengeit; and siclike that the - marinaris and utheris that sall loase and handill the gudis above - written, be clengeit and kepit apart be thameselffis for ane tyme, at - the discretioun of the saidis visitouris, and licenses to be requirit - had and obtenit of the saidis Provest, Baillies and Counsall before - they presume to resort opinlie or quietlie amangis oure Soverane - Ladeis fre liegis." - -The same autumn another foul ship from the Baltic arrived and entered the -port of Leith in evasion of quarantine; the master and others are to be -apprehended and kept in prison until justice be done upon them for the -offence[736]. - -A severe outbreak of plague in Scotland in the year 1568 gave occasion to -the first native treatise upon the disease in the English tongue, the -essay by Dr Gilbert Skene, at one time lecturer on medicine at King's -College, Aberdeen, but probably removed before 1568 to Edinburgh, where he -became physician to James VI.[737] The author says that the plague has -"lately entered" the country, and he is led to write upon it in the -vulgar tongue for the benefit of those who could not afford to pay for -skilled advice, or could not get it on any terms: "Medecineirs are mair -studious of their awine helthe nor of the common weilthe." The panic -caused by the plague must have been considerable: "Specialie at this time -whan ane abhorris ane other in sic maneir as gif nothing of humanitie was -restand but all consumit, euery ane abydand diffaent of ane other." - -Although Skene's treatise bears numerous traces of the influence of -foreign writers on plague, the same being freely acknowledged in the -section of prescriptions and regimen, yet the book is much better than a -mere compilation. Thus, under the causes of plague, he gives the stock -recital of blazing stars, south-winds, corrupt standing waters, and the -like; but in mentioning, as others do, dead carrion unburied, he adds that -the corrupting human body is most dangerous of all "by similitude of -nature." - - A season favourable to plague is marked by continual wet in the last - part of Spring or beginning of Summer, without wind, and with great - heat and turbid musty air. - - Anticipating a remark by Thomas Lodge in 1603, and a common experience - as regards rats in the recent plagues of various parts of India and - China, he points out that the mole (moudewart) and serpent leave the - earth, being molested by the vapour contained within the bowels of the - same. "If the domesticall fowlis become pestilential, it is ane sign - of maist dangerous pest to follow." Among the spots that are most - pestilential are those near standing water, or where many dead are - buried, the ground being fat and vaporative. Of the duration of - infection: "na pest continuallie induris mair than three yeris," - according to the principle of "rosten ance can not be made raw - againe." - - The diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment are given fully and in - systematic scholarly order. I give the following long extract on the - signs and symptoms of plague, as being the first native account of the - disease in this country: - - _Quhairby corrupt be pest may be knawin._ - - Thair is mony notis quhilkis schawis ane man infectit be pest. First - gif the exteriour partis of the bodie be caulde, and the interiour - partis of the bodie vehement hait. As gif the hoill bodie be heavie - with oft scharpe punctiounis, stinkand sweiting, tyritnes of bodie, - ganting of mowthe, detestable brathe with greit difficultie, at - sumtyme vehement fever rather on nycht nor day. Greit doloure of heid - with heavynes, solicitude and sadnes of mynd: greit displesour with - sowning, quhairefter followis haistelie deth. As greit appetit and - propensnes to sleip albeit on day, raving and walking occupeis the - last. Cruell inspectioun of the ene, quhilkis apperis of sindre - colouris maist variant, dolour of the stomak, inlak of appetite, - vehement doloure of heart, with greit attractioun of Air; intolerable - thirst, frequent vomitting of divers colouris or greit appetit by - daylie accustum to vomit without effecte: Bitternes of mowth and toung - with blaiknit colour thairof and greit drouth: frequent puls small and - profund, quhais urine for the maist part is turbide thik and stinkand, - or first waterie, colourit thairefter of bilious colour, last confusit - and turbide, or at the beginning is zallow inclyning to greine (callit - citrine collour) and confusit, thairefter becummis reid without - contentis. Albeit sum of thir properteis may be sene in haile mennis - water, quhairby mony are deceavit abydand Helth of the patient, quhan - sic water is maist manifest sing of deth, because the haill venome and - cause conjunit thar with, leavand the naturall partis occupeis the - hart and nobillest interioure partis of the body. Last of all and - maiste certane, gif with constant fever, by the earis, under the - oxstaris, or by the secrete membres maist frequentlie apperis - apostumis callit Bubones, without ony other manifest cause, or gif the - charbunkil apperis hastelie in ony other part, quhilk gif it dois, in - the begining, testifies strenthe of nature helth, and the laitter sic - thingis appeir, and apperand, it is the mair deidlie. At sumtym in ane - criticall day mony accidentis apperis--principalie vomiteing, spitting - of blude, with sweit, flux of womb, bylis, scabe, with dyvers others - symptomis maist heavie and detestable." - - The signs of death in pestilential persons are as follow: - - "Sowning, cold sweats, vomiting; excrements corrupt, teuch; urine - black, or colour of lead. Cramp, convulsion of limbs, imperfection of - speech and stinking breath, colic, swelling of the body as in dropsy, - visage of divers colours, red spots quickly discovering and covering - themselves." - -The great plague which was the occasion of Skene's writing, probably the -most severe that Edinburgh experienced, entered that city on the 8th -September, 1568, having been brought, it was said, by "ane called James -Dalgliesh, merchant[738]." A letter of 21st September, from the bishop of -Orkney, then in Edinburgh, to his brother-in-law Sir Archibald Napier of -Merchiston, whose house was near the plague-huts erected on the Muir, -refers to the infection as then active: - - "By the number of sick folk that gaes out of the town, the muir is - liable to be overspread; and it cannot be but, through the nearness of - your place and the indigence of them that are put out, they sall - continually repair about your room, and through their conversation - infect some of your servants." He advises him to withdraw to a house - on the north side. "And close up your houses, your granges, your barns - and all, and suffer nae man come therein while it please God to put - ane stay to this great plague[739]." - -The following account of Edinburgh practices in plague-times is given by -Chambers[740]: - - "According to custom in Edinburgh the families which proved to be - infected were compelled to remove, with all their goods and furniture, - out to the Burgh-moor, where they lodged in wretched huts hastily - erected for their accommodation. They were allowed to be visited by - their friends, in company with an officer, after eleven in the - forenoon; anyone going earlier was liable to be punished with - death--as were those who concealed the pest in their houses. Their - clothes were meanwhile purified by boiling in a large caldron erected - in the open air, and their houses were clensed by the proper officers. - All these regulations were under the care of two citizens selected for - the purpose, and called _Bailies of the Muir_; for each of whom, as - for the cleansers and bearers of the dead, a gown of gray was made, - with a white St Andrew's Cross before and behind. Another arrangement - of the day was 'that there be made twa close biers, with four feet, - coloured over with black, and [ane] white cross with ane bell, to be - hung upon the side of the said bere, which sall mak warning to the - people.'" - -The same writer says that the plague lasted in Edinburgh until February, -1569, and that it was reported to have carried off 2500 of the -inhabitants. The plague-stricken in the Canongate were sent to huts "on -the hill" and money was collected for their support[741]. - -The plague of 1574 was again chiefly along the shores of the Firth of -Forth. It came to Leith on October 14th, it was said by a passenger from -England, and several died in that town before its existence was known at -large. On October 24th it entered Edinburgh, "brought in by ane dochter of -Malvis Curll out of Kirkcaldy[742]." On the 29th October the town council -of Glasgow ordered that no one should be allowed to enter from Leith, -Kirkcaldy, Dysart, Burntisland and Edinburgh (in respect of Bellis Wynd -only), and that no one in Glasgow was to repair to Edinburgh without a -pass[743]. Two days after (October 31st) the Scots Privy Council, at -Dalkeith, issued an order to check the spreading of the plague landwards -"through the departure of sick folk and foul persons:" no one to conceal -the existence of plague, and the infected "to cloise thame selffis -in[744]." On November 14th the sittings of the Court of Session were -suspended owing to pest within some parts of Edinburgh, in Leith, and some -towns and parts of the north coast of Fife[745]. In December the Kirk -session of Edinburgh appointed an eight days' fast for the plague -threatening the whole realm. - -In January, 1577, plague is reported to be raging on the English border, -causing alarm in Kirkcudbright[746]. On the 19th October, 1579, the king -and council are credibly informed that "the infectioun and plague of the -pistolence" is not only in divers towns and parts of the coast of England -frequented by Scots shipping but also in Berwick and sundry other bounds -of the East and Middle Marches of England; the markets at Duns and Kelso -are therefore forbidden, and traders not to repair to infected places or -to break bulk of their wares[747]. Next year, 1580, on September 10th, a -ship laden with lint and hemp from "Danske," with forty persons on board, -including seven Edinburgh merchants, arrived in the Forth, and was -quarantined for many weeks at Inchcolm; the master and several others died -of plague, and the survivors were transferred in November, some to -Inchkeith and some to Inchgarvie, the ship being still at Inchcolm in a -leaky state. On November 22 a vessel which had come down the Tay with -plague-stricken inhabitants of Perth, some of whom were dead, and with -their goods and gear, was ordered to the Isle of May[748]. - -One of the most serious epidemics of plague in Scotland was from 1584 to -1588. It was said to have been brought to Wester Wemyss, in Fife, by a -certain "creare;" but it was in some other places at the same time, and -was probably a revival of old seeds of the disease. On July 28th the Privy -Council issued orders that beggars and tramps should be kept from -wandering about[749]. On the 24th September, 27th October, 4th November, -and the 11th December, the Privy Council issued order after order to stop -all traffic, unless by licence, from Fife, Perth, and other places north -of the Forth; sails were to be taken out of the ferry-boats at all ferries -except Burntisland and Aberdour, and eventually at these also, Leith and -Pettycur being left free[750]. For Perth we have some particulars of this -great outbreak. From the 24th September, 1584, to August, 1585, there died -1437 persons, young and old[751]. It was also in Dysart and other parts of -Fife through the winter of 1584-85[752]. - -The infection appeared at Edinburgh about the 1st of May, 1585, in the -Flesh Mercat Close by the infection of a woman who had been in St -Johnstone (Perth) where the plague was[753]. On the 18th May orders were -issued to Edinburgh to remove all filth, filthy beasts and carrion forth -of the highways, and the same to be cleansed and kept clean. On the 23rd -June the coining-house was removed to Dundee, and the Court of Session -transferred to Stirling[754]. The plague next broke out in Dundee, whence -the mint was removed to Perth. At St Andrews it appeared in August, 1585, -and became a severe epidemic, causing the dispersion of the students, and -continuing so long that the miserable state and poverty of the town are in -part ascribed, in a petition of March 24, 1593, to the plague[755]. -Upwards of four hundred are said to have died of it there[756]. The state -of sickness was much aggravated by wet harvest weather. In Edinburgh it -continued through the winter until January, 1586, sometimes carrying off -twenty-four in a single night: "the haill people, whilk was able to flee, -fled out of the town; nevertheless there died of people which were not -able to flee, fourteen hundred and some odd" (Birell). James Melville, -riding in November from Berwick to Linlithgow, entered Edinburgh by the -Water-Gate of the Abbey at eleven o'clock in the forenoon and rode up -"through the Canongate, and in at the Nether Bow through the great street -of Edinburgh to the West Port, in all whilk way we saw not three persons, -sae that I miskenned Edinburgh, and almost forgot that I had ever seen sic -a town[757]." The same year it was unusually severe at Duns[758]. In the -winter of 1586-7, "the pest abated and began to be strangely and -remarkably withdrawn by the merciful hand of God, so that Edinburgh was -frequented again that winter, and at the entry of the spring all the -towns, almost desolate before, repeopled, and St Andrews among the -rest[759]." - -In the harvest of 1587 "the pest brake up in Leith, by opening up of some -old kists," and in Edinburgh about the 4th November. It continued in those -two towns till Candlemas, 1588[760]. On April 26, 1588, the infection is -reported anew from Edinburgh, threatening the law session[761]. In -October, 1588, it was at Paisley, causing alarm in Glasgow[762]. - -On the 8th August, 1593, a ship from an English port, with persons and -goods suspected of the plague, was quarantined at Inchcolm[763]. Four -years after, on the 6th August, 1597, "the pest began in Leith[764]." -Twelve days after, August 18, the Privy Council declared that divers -inhabitants of sundry towns near Edinburgh were infected, and that the -disease was suspected to be in the capital itself[765]. Many fled from -Edinburgh, but the epidemic was over by the end of harvest[766]. - -In the winter of 1598, the plague which was in Cumberland extended to -Dumfries, and caused great decay of trade, and even scarcity of food[767]. -On the 12th October, 1600, a petition from Dundee declares that the -plague of the pest had "entered and broken up within the town of -Findorne[768]." Findhorn had been only one of several places infected in -that locality; for in December, the Kirk session of Aberdeen ordered a -fast "in respect of the fearful infection of the plague spread abroad in -divers parts of Moray[769]." - -On the 24th November, 1601, the parishes of Eglishawe, Eastwood, and -Pollok, in Renfrewshire, and the town of Crail in Fife are declared -infected, and ordered to be shut up. On the 28th of the same month it was -in the barony of Calderwood, and on the 21st December, in Glasgow. It -increased daily in Crail in January, 1602, and suspects were put out on -the muir, so that they wandered to sundry parts of Fife. It still -continued in Glasgow, and had appeared at Edinburgh before the 4th of -February: the town council built shielings and lodgings for the sick of -the plague in the lands of Schenis (Sciennes) belonging to Napier, of -Merchiston, without his leave, having ploughed up the old plague-muir, and -let it for their profit: against the plague-shelters Napier protested on -the 11th March. By the 1st of May it had ceased in Edinburgh, and a solemn -thanksgiving was held on the 20th (Birell). A ship owned in Crail arrived -in the Forth on 30th July, 1602, from "Danske," with three or four dead of -the plague, and was quarantined at Inchkeith. In April, 1603, James VI. -left for England, to assume the English[770] crown, with which event we -resume in another chapter the eventful history of Plague under the -Stuarts. - -Meanwhile, in the foregoing records of plague in Scotland, the absolute -immunity of Aberdeen in the latter half of the sixteenth century is -remarkable. It does not depend on any imperfection of the records; for, -under the year 1603, the borough register contains this entry[771]: "It -has pleasit the guidness of God of his infinite mercy to withhauld the -said plague frae this burgh this fifty-five years bygane"--that is to say, -since the winter of 1546-47, when David Spilzelaucht was burned on the -left hand with a hot iron for concealing a case of plague in one of his -children. The northern city may have owed its immunity to various causes; -but there can be no question of the Draconian rigour of its decrees -against the plague. Following the example of queen Elizabeth at Windsor in -1563, the magistrates in May, 1585, when Perth, Edinburgh and many other -places in Scotland were suffering severely from plague, erected three -gibbets, "ane at the mercat cross, ane other at the brig of Dee, and the -third at the haven mouth, that in case ony infectit person arrive or -repair by sea or land to this burgh, or in case ony indweller of this -burgh receive, house, or harbour, or give meat or drink to the infectit -person or persons, the man be hangit and the woman drownit." - - -Plague in Ireland in the Tudor period. - -The accounts of plague in Ireland in the Tudor period are not many, but -some of them are of interest. The province of Munster is said to have had -a pestilence raging in it in 1504, evidently not a famine-fever, for the -dearth, and mortality therefrom, came in 1505[772]. There is no doubt as -to the reality of the next plague in Ireland, in 1520. - -The earl of Surrey writes from Dublin to Wolsey, on the 3rd August, 1520: -"There is a marvellous death in all this country, which is so sore that -all the people be fled out of their houses into the fields and woods, -where they in likewise die wonderfully; so that their bodies be dead like -swine unburied." On the 23rd July he had already written that there was -sickness in the English pale; and on the 6th September he wrote again that -the death continued in the English pale[773]. It is perhaps the same -epidemic, or an extension of it, that is referred to as the plague raging -in Munster in 1522[774]. On the same authority, "a most violent plague" is -said to have been in the city of Cork in 1535, and "a great plague" in the -same in 1547. The earlier of those dates corresponds probably to a season -of ill-health in Ireland generally: "1536. This year was a sickly, -unhealthy year, in which numerous diseases, viz. a general plague, and -smallpox [i.e. a disease with an Irish name supposed to be smallpox], and -a flux plague, and the bed-distemper prevailed exceedingly[775]." In a -State letter from Ireland September 10, 1535, the prevalence of "plague" -is mentioned[776]. - -In the winter of 1566-7, a remarkable outbreak of plague occurred among -the English troops quartered around the old monastery of the Derry, at the -head of Loch Foyle, where Londonderry was afterwards built. The men were -landed there in October, and by November "the flux was reigning among them -wonderfully." On December 18 and January 13, many of the soldiers are -dead, the rest are discontented, and provisions are short. On February 16, -the sickness continues, "in this miserable place," and on March 26, the -death at the Derry is said to be by cold and infection: the survivors to -be removed to Strangford Haven[777]. Only 300 men were fit for service out -of 1100, and several officers of rank were dead. The men's quarters had -been built over the graveyard of the ancient abbey, and the infection of -plague was ascribed at the time to the emanations from the soil[778]. The -scarcity was general in Ireland that winter, and was attended by great -mortality. Sir Philip Sydney, the lord deputy, writes to the queen on -April 20, 1567: "Yea the view of the bones and skulls of your dead -subjects who, partly by murder, partly by famine, have died in the fields -is such that hardly any Christian with dry eye could behold[779]." - -In 1575 there was a severe and wide-spread outbreak of plague, the -localities specially named being Wexford, Dublin, Naas, Athy, Carlow, and -Leighlin. The city of Dublin was as if deserted of people, so that grass -grew in the streets and at the doors of churches; no term was held after -Trinity, and prayers were appointed by the archbishop throughout the whole -province[780]. The extremity of the plague in Ireland was such that the -English troops sent by way of Chester and Holyhead had difficulty in -finding a safe place to land[781]. Whether that outbreak had been -connected with the military operations (as afterwards in Cromwell's time), -the information does not enable us to judge; but Chester and other places -near, in direct communication with Ireland, had been visited with plague -the year before (1574). - - - - -CHAPTER VII. - -GAOL FEVERS, INFLUENZAS, AND OTHER FEVERS IN THE TUDOR PERIOD. - - -The Common Gaols of England date from the Council of Clarendon, in 1164, -by the articles of which the limits of civil and ecclesiastical -jurisdiction were fixed, and the quarrel between archbishop Becket and -Henry II. reduced to terms. In obedience to Article VII. of the Council, -gaols were built, the chief among them having been at Canterbury, -Rochester, Huntingdon, Cambridge, Malmesbury, Sarum, Aylesbury, and -Bedford[782]. Little is heard of the unwholesomeness of prison life until -the medieval period is nearly over--not indeed because the prisons were -better managed than they were later. "In the year 1385," says Stow, -"William Walworth gave somewhat to relieve the prisoners in Newgate; so -have many others since." One benefactor brought a supply of water into -Newgate; another, the famous Whittington, left money actually to rebuild -the gaol, which was done in 1422. For several years before that, Newgate -had been notorious. An ordinance of 7 Henry V. (1419) for the -re-establishment of the debtor's prison at Ludgate, so that debtors need -not have to go to Newgate gaol, was made in compliance with a petition -which said that, in "the hateful gaol of Newgate, by reason of the fetid -and corrupt atmosphere, many persons committed to the said gaol are now -dead[783]." The greatest mortality must have been, according to Stow, in -1414, when the gaolers of Newgate and Ludgate died, and sixty-four -prisoners in Newgate[784]. - -More than a century after, in 1522, there occurred the first of a series -of gaol-fever tragedies, which were well calculated to produce the effect -ascribed by Aristotle to scenic tragedy, provided only the workings of -cause and effect had been more apparent. The first of these historical -Black Assizes occurred on the occasion of the gaol delivery at the Castle -of Cambridge in Lent, 1522. The facts, which appear to be given nowhere -but in Hall's _Chronicle_ (of almost contemporary authority), are less -fully related than for some of the later instances of the same strange -visitation; but there is no mistaking the air of reality and the generic -likeness. - - -Cambridge Black Assizes. - -In the 13th year of Henry VIII. at the Assize held in the Castle of -Cambridge in Lent, "the justices and all the gentlemen, bailiffs and -other, resorting thither, took such an infection, whether it were of the -savour of the prisoners, or of the filth of the house, that many -gentlemen, as Sir John Cut, Sir Giles Arlington, Knights, and many other -honest yeomen, thereof died, and almost all which were present were sore -sick, and narrowly escaped with their lives[785]." - -It is to be observed that nothing is said of the prisoners being infected: -they were brought from the dungeons to stand their trial in due course, -and the gentlemen and yeomen attending the court officially or as jurors, -or otherwise, were poisoned by their presence. This early chronicle -indicates as the cause, "the savour of the prisoners, or the filth of the -house;" and Bacon, in touching upon that class of incidents nearly a -century later, indicates "the smell of the gaol," but says nothing of -cases of fever among the prisoners, having no warrant in the evidence for -doing so. - -Before we come to consider the condition of England in the Tudor period, -with the policy of Henry VIII. for the repression of beggary and crime, -and the appearance of "new fevers" or "strange fevers" and "laskes" in the -chronicles and other records of the time, it will be desirable to make out -as accurately as possible the clinical type of the Assizes fever, and its -circumstances. For that purpose we must turn to the next recorded outbreak -on the occasion of the Assizes at Oxford in 1577, which happens to have -been somewhat fully described as a memorable event in the register of -Merton College. The entry in the Merton register appears to have been made -within a few weeks of the event[786]. - - -Oxford Black Assizes. - -The Assizes met on the 5th and 6th July, 1577, in the Castle and Guild -Hall. Those only fell ill, whether in Oxford itself or after leaving, who -had been present at the Assizes. The two judges (Robert Bell, Chief Baron -of the Exchequer and John Barrham, sergeant-at-law), the sheriff of the -county, two knights, eight squires and justices of the peace, several -gentlemen and not a few of their servants, the whole of the grand jury -with one or two exceptions--these all had not long left Oxford when they -were seized with illness and died (_statim post fere relictam Oxoniam -mortui sunt_). In Oxford itself, on the 15th, 16th and 17th July, some ten -or twelve days after the Assizes, about three hundred fell ill; and in the -next twelve days there died ("_ne quid errem_") one hundred scholars, -besides townsmen not a few. Five died in Merton College, including one -fellow, the names of four being given who died on the 24th, 27th, 28th and -29th July. Every college, hall, or house had its dead. Women were not -attacked, nor indeed the poor; nor did the infection spread to those who -waited on the sick or came to prescribe for them. Only those who had been -present at the Assizes caught the fever. The symptoms are described as -follows: - - The patients laboured under pain both of the head and of the stomach; - they were troubled with phrensy, deprived of understanding, memory, - sight, hearing and their other senses. As their malady increased, they - took no food, could not sleep, and would not suffer attendants or - watchers to be near them; their strength was remarkable, even in the - approach of death; but if they recovered they fell into the extreme of - weakness. No complexion or constitution was spared; but those of a - choleric habit were most obnoxious to the disease. The affected - persons suddenly became delirious and furious, overcoming those who - tried to hold them; some ran about in courts and in the streets after - the manner of insane persons; others leapt headlong into the water. - The spirits of all the people were crushed; the physicians fled, and - the wretched sufferers were deserted. Masters, doctors, and heads of - houses left almost to a man. The Master of Merton remained, _longe - omnium vigilantissimus_, ministering sedulously to the sick. The - pharmacies were soon emptied of their conserves, oils, sweet waters, - pixides and every kind of confection. - -This sudden epidemic, which began on the 15th--17th July, did not last -long; within the space of one month the city was restored to its former -health, so that one wonders, says the registrary of Merton, to see already -so many scholars and so many townsmen abroad in the streets and walks. - -The infection was suspected by many, says the same eyewitness, to have -arisen either from the fetid and pestilent air of thieves brought forth -from prison, of whom two or three died in chains a few days before -(_quorum duo vel tres sunt ante paucos dies in vinculis mortui_), or from -the devilishly contrived and obviously papistical spirits called forth "e -Lovaniensi barathro," and let loose upon the court secretly and most -wickedly. - -The latter explanation arose out of the heated feelings of the time -against papist plotters, and has no farther interest. But the statement -that two or three of the prisoners had died in chains a few days before -has a great interest, as showing the kind of treatment to which they had -been subjected while awaiting the gaol delivery. A strange confirmation of -the truth of the statement came to light many years after. When John -Howard visited the Oxford gaol in 1779, in the course of his humane -labours on behalf of the prisoners, he was told by the gaoler that, some -years before, wanting to build a little hovel and digging up stones for -the purpose from the ruins of the court, which was formerly in the Castle, -he found under them a complete skeleton with light chains on the legs, the -links very small. "These," says Howard, "were probably the bones of a -malefactor who died in court of the distemper at the Black Assize[787]." - -Next to the Merton register's account, we may take that of Thomas Cogan, a -graduate in medicine of Oxford, sometime fellow of Oriel, but probably -removed to Manchester previous to 1577. Wherever Cogan got his -information, he acknowledges no source of the following in his _Haven of -Health_, 1589: - - "What kind of disease this should be which was first at Cambridge [in - 1522] and after at Oxford, it is very hard to define, neither hath any - man (that I know) written of that matter. Yet my judgment is, be it - spoken without offence of the learned physicians, that the disease was - _Febris ardens_, a burning fever. For as much as the signes of a - burning ague did manifestly appear in this disease, which after - Hollerius be these: Extreame heate of the body, vehement thirst, - loathing of meate, tossing to and fro, and unquietnesse, dryness of - the tongue rough and blacke, griping of the belly, cholerick laske, - cruell ake of the head, no sound sleepe, or no sleepe at all, raving - and phrensie, the end whereof, to life or death, is bleeding at the - nose, great vomitting, sweate or laske. And this kind of sicknesse is - one of those rods, and the most common rod, wherewith it pleaseth God - to brake his people for sin.... And this disease indeed, as it is - God's messenger, and sometimes God's poaste, because it commeth poaste - haste, and calleth us quickly away, so it is commonly the Pursuivant - of the pestilence and goeth before it.... And certainly after that - sodaine bane at Oxford, the same yeare, and a yeare or two following, - the same kind of ague raged in a manner over all England, and tooke - away very many of the strongest sort, and in their lustiest age, and - for the most part, men and not women nor children, culling them out - here and there, even as you should chuse the best sheepe out of a - flocke. And certaine remedy was none to be found.... And they that - took a moderate sweate at the beginning of their sickness and did rid - their stomachs well by vomit sped much better. Yet thanks be to God - hitherto no great plague hath ensued upon it." - -Besides these medical particulars, he gives certain dates and numbers. It -began, he says, on the 6th of July, from which date to the 12th of August -next ensuing there died of the same sickness five hundred and ten -persons, all men and no women: the chiefest of which were the two judges, -Sir Robert Ball, lord chief baron, and maister Sergeant Baram, maister -Doile the high sheriff, five of the justices, four councillors at law and -an attorney. The rest were jurors and such as repaired thither. - -An account not unlike Cogan's is given by Stow in his _Annales_ (p. 681); - - "The 4, 5 and 6 dayes of July were the assizes holden at Oxford, where - was arraigned and condemned one Rowland Jenkes for his seditious - toung, at which time there arose amidst the people such a dampe, that - almost all were smothered, very few escaped that were not taken at - that instant: the Jurors died presently. Shortly after died Sir Robert - Bell, lord chief baron, Sir Robert de Olie, Sir William Babington, - maister Weneman, maister de Olie, high sheriff, maister Davers, - maister Harcurt, maister Kirle, maister Phereplace, maister Greenwood, - maister Foster, maister Nash, sergeaunt Baram, maister Stevens, and - there died in Oxford 300 persons, and sickned there but died in other - places 200 and odde, from the 6th of July to the 12th of August, after - which died not one of that sicknesse, for one of them infected not - another, nor any one woman or child died thereof." - -Stow's account differs from that of the Merton College register in several -important particulars. The latter is explicit that the sickness appeared -among the scholars and townsmen of Oxford on the 15th, 16th and 17th of -July, or after an interval of ten days or more, and that the deaths -amongst those who had come to Oxford on Assize business did not occur in -Oxford but on their return home. On the other hand, Stow makes out the -Oxford people to have been smothered by the damp which arose in the court -itself: "very few escaped that were not taken ill at that instant;" next -come the deaths of the jurors, and "shortly after" those of the judges and -other high officials, whose names are given by Stow more fully than by -anyone. His total of deaths, the same as Cogan's, is 300 in Oxford and 200 -and odd of persons who had left Oxford, and his dates, "from the 6th of -July to the 12th of August," are also the same as Cogan's. - -Wood's account is for the most part taken from the Merton register and in -part from the very different version in Stow's _Annals_; but he has the -following new matter: "Above 600 sickened in one night, as a physician -that now lived in Oxford attesteth, and the day after, the infectious air -being carried into the next villages, sickened there an hundred -more[788]." That, of course, is very unlike the Merton College account, -which is explicit that no one caught the fever who had not been in the -court. The Oxford physician whose authority is given for the six hundred -cases in Oxford in one night, and the extension next day to villages -around, is Dr George Ethredge, or Ethryg, a physician and learned Greek -scholar living in Oxford at the time and keeping a boarding-house, called -George Hall, for the sons of Catholic gentlemen. In 1588 he published a -small volume of comments upon some books of Paulus Aegineta, which is the -authority given by Wood[789]. On discovering the passage, one finds that -it was not 600 in one night, but "sexaginta" or 60, and that the occasion -on which more than sixty were taken ill at once in a single night at -Oxford, and nearly a hundred next day in the adjacent villages, "whither -the infected air had by chance been borne," was not that of the gaol-fever -in 1577 but of the sweating sickness in 1551. An extension in the -atmosphere to the villages around is just what would have happened in the -sweating sickness, a disease in that as in other respects closely -analogous to influenza. Ethredge says that, on the particular occasion, -"hardly any of the Oxford people died"--a statement which should of itself -have prevented Wood's mistake, even if the reference to the same disease -having "at the same time" cut off the two sons of the duke of Suffolk "at -Cambridge" (therefore a less healthy place than Oxford where hardly any -died) had not quite clearly pointed to the sudor Britannicus, which is -actually named in the context ("sic enim vocant")[790]. - -Although, in the passage quoted, it is the sweating sickness at Oxford in -1551 that Ethredge refers to, he does also refer to the gaol fever of 1577 -in another passage which has hitherto escaped notice. - - In the section of his book next following, entitled "De Curatione - morborum populariter grassantium, et de Peste," he says that he had - used a certain prescription of aloes, ammoniacum and myrrh rubbed - together in wine, for himself as well as for others in a serious - contagion, "quae fuit in martiali sede cum ibi essem," and also, with - happy effect, upon many "in the most cruel pest at Oxford which - carried off Judge Bell and ever so many more; one gentleman, I could - not persuade to try this medicine, whom therefore I commended to God, - and four days after he was dead. Concerning that pestilential fever, - many colloquies took place between me and two most learned physicians; - and, as to the kind of this contagion, we all agreed (_manibus et - pedibus in hanc sententiam itum est_) in a sentence which I quoted - from Valescus, who sayeth thus: Those sicknesses are dangerous in such - wise that the physicians may be for the most part deceived; for we see - a good hypostasis in the urine, and some other good signs, yet the - sick person dies"--a remark which often recurs in the early writings - on plague. - -It has taken longer than usual to determine the matter of fact as to the -fever of the Oxford Black Assizes, because an erroneous version passes -current on respectable authority; but enough has perhaps been said to -enable us to pass from the matter of fact to the matter of theory[791]. - -The theory of the gaol fever at Oxford, in 1577, was not attempted by any -writer at the time, nor indeed has it been so in later times; but the -significance of the outbreak has been recognized and admitted. An Oxford -scholar, Dr Plot, writing just a century after (1677) mentions the -statement that a "poisonous steam" broke forth from the earth, having -probably in his mind Stow's imaginative explanation, that a damp arose -amongst the people and smothered them, very few escaping that were not -taken at that instant. Plot then proceeds:-- - - "But let it not be ascribed to ill fumes and exhalations ascending - from the earth and poysoning the Air, for such would have equally - affected the prisoners as judges, but we find not that they dyed - otherwise than by the halter, which easily perswades me to be of the - mind of my lord Verulam (_Nat. Hist._ cent. X. num. 914) who - attributes it wholly to the smell of the Gaol where the prisoners had - been long, close, and nastily kept." - -We know, indeed, from the register of Merton that "two or three of the -prisoners died in chains a few days before," which is a sufficient -indication of the state they were kept in, but is no warrant for Anthony -Wood's free rendering of the words: "of whom two or three, _being overcome -with it_ [i.e. with the "nasty and pestilential smell of the prisoners"] -died a few days before the Assizes began." Two or three prisoners died in -their chains with symptoms undescribed; and although typhus among the -inmates of gaols has often occurred, it has also been wanting in many -cases where the filth and misery might have bred it in the prisoners -themselves[792]. - -Bacon's judgment on the case, referred to above, was based upon a strict -scrutiny of the evidence, and does not transcend the evidence. He -attributes the infection that arose in the court to "the smell of the -gaol;" and so as not to assume a smell which does not appear to have -attracted any particular notice at the time, he is careful to explain in -what sense he means the smell of the gaol: - - "The most pernicious infection," he says, "next the plague, is the - smell of the jail, when prisoners have been long and close and nastily - kept; whereof we have had in our time experience twice or thrice; when - both the judges that sat upon the jail, and numbers of those that - attended the business or were present, sickened upon it and died. - Therefore it were good wisdom, that in such cases the jail were aired - before they be brought forth.... - - "Leaving out of question such foul smells as be made by art and by the - hand, they consist chiefly of man's flesh or sweat putrefied; for they - are not those stinks which the nostrils straight abhor and expel, that - are most pernicious; but such airs as have some similitude with man's - body, and so insinuate themselves and betray the spirits[793]." - - -Exeter Black Assizes. - -The next Black Assizes occurred at Exeter in 1586, nine years after the -Oxford tragedy. The Exeter incident has had the fortune to be chronicled -by a person as competent as was the writer in the Merton College register -in the former case, namely by John Hoker _alias_ Vowell, chamberlain of -the city, and its representative in Parliament, a lawyer of good -education, who must have been conversant with all the circumstances, and -wrote his account within six months. He is known as the chief contributor -to the second edition of Holinshed's _Chronicle_, in which the history is -brought down to 1586, his name appearing on the title-page. It is in that -work that he inserted his account of the Exeter Black Assizes, written in -October, 1586. The margin bears the words: - - "The note of John Hooker _alias_ Vowell;" and the text of the note is - as follows[794] (III. pp. 1547-8):--"At the assizes kept at the citie - of Excester, the fourteenth daie of March, in the eight and twentieth - yeare of hir majesties reigne, before Sir Edmund Anderson, Knight, - lord chief justice of the common pleas, and sargeant Floredaie, one of - the barons of the excheker, justices of the assises in the Countie of - Devon and Exon, there happened a verie sudden and a strange - sickenesse, first amongst the prisoners of the Gaole and Castell of - Exon, and then dispersed (upon their triall) amongst sundrie other - persons; which was not much unlike to the sickenesse that of late - yeares happened at an assise holden at Oxford, before Sir Robert Bell, - Knight, lord chiefe baron of the excheker, and justice then of that - assise.... - - The origin and cause thereof diverse men are of diverse judgment. Some - did impute it, and were of the mind that it proceeded from the - contagion of the gaole, which by reason of the close aire and filthie - stinke, the prisoners newlie come out of a fresh aire into the same - are in short time for the most part infected therewith; and this is - commonlie called the gaole sickenesse, and manie die thereof. Some did - impute it to certain Portingals, then prisoners in the said gaole. For - not long before, one Barnard Drake, esquire (afterwards dubbed Knight) - had beene at the seas, and meeting with certeine Portingals, come from - New-found-land and laden with fish, he tooke them as a good prize, and - brought them into Dartmouth haven in England, and from thense they - were sent, being in number about eight and thirtie persons, unto the - gaole of the castell of Exon, and there were cast into the deepe pit - and stinking dungeon[795]. - - These men had beene before a long time at the seas, and had no change - of apparell, nor laine in bed, and now lieing upon the ground without - succor or reliefe, were soone infected; and all for the most part were - sicke, and some of them died, and some one of them was distracted; and - this sickenesse verie soone after dispersed itselfe among all the - residue of the prisoners in the gaole; of which disease manie of them - died, but all brought into great extremities and were hardly escaped. - These men, when they were to be brought before the foresaid justices - for their triall, manie of them were so weak and sicke that they were - not able to goe nor stand; but were caried from the gaole to the place - of judgement, some upon handbarrowes, and some betweene men leading - them, and so brought to the place of justice. - - The sight of these men's miserable and pitifull cases, being thought - (and more like) to be hunger-starved than with sickenesse diseased, - moved manie a man's heart to behold and look upon them; but none - pitied them more than the lords justices themselves, and especially - the lord chief justice himselfe; who upon this occasion tooke a better - order for keeping all prisoners thenseforth in the gaole, and for the - more often trials; which was now appointed to be quarterlie kept at - every quarter sessions and not to be posted anie more over, as in - times past, untill the assises. - - These prisoners thus brought from out of the gaole to the judgment - place, after that they had been staied, and paused awhile in the open - aire, and somewhat refreshed therewith, they were brought into the - house, in the one end of the hall near to the judges seat, and which - is the ordinarie and accountable place where they do stand to their - triales and arraignments. And howsoever the matter fell out, and by - what occasion it happened, an infection followed upon manie and a - great number of such as were there in the court, and especially upon - such as were nearest to them were soonest infected. And albeit the - infection was not then perceived, because every man departed, (as he - thought), in as good health as he came thither; yet the same by little - and little so crept into such as upon whom the infection was seizoned, - that after a few daies, and at their home coming to their owne houses, - they felt the violence of this pestilent sicknesse; wherein more died, - that were infected, than escaped. And besides the prisoners, manie - there were of good account, and of all other degrees, which died - thereof; as by name sargeant Floredaie who then was the judge of those - trials upon the prisoners, Sir John Chichester, Sir Arthur Basset, Sir - Barnard Drake, Knight[796]; Thomas Carew of Haccombe, Robert Carie of - Clovelleigh, John Fortescue of Wood, John Waldron of Bradfeeld and - Thomas Risdone, esquires and justices of the peace. - - ... Of the plebeian and common people died verie manie, and - especiallie constables, reeves, and tithing men, and such as were - jurors, and namelie one jurie of twelve, of which there died eleven. - - This sicknesse was dispersed throughout all the whole shire, and at - the writing hereof in the time of October, 1586, it is not altogether - extinguished. It resteth for the most part about fourteene daies and - upwards by a secret infection, before it breake out into his force and - violence." - -Here we have the same incubation-period as in the Oxford fever, about -fourteen days. But in the Exeter case, we have it clearly stated that an -infection arose in the prison from the poor Portuguese sailors or -fishermen who had been thrown into "deep pit and stinking dungeon" after -their capture on the high seas by Sir Bernard Drake, that the infection -attacked the other prisoners, that many of the prisoners died and all were -brought to extremities, and that those who stood their trial were then in -a most feeble state, although they seemed to the pitying spectators to be -more starved than diseased. - -So far as concerned the infection in the Assize Court, among the lawyers, -county gentry, and officials, jurors and others, it was of the same tragic -kind as at Oxford in 1577 and at Cambridge in 1522, and, as we shall see, -on several occasions in the eighteenth century. But the Exeter case has -some features special to itself. Within the gaol were both English felons -and thirty-eight Portugals, who had become subject to capture on their way -home from the banks of Newfoundland with boatloads of stock-fish, and to -treatment as felons, because Spain and England were at war. Within the -gaol there seems to have been also a gradation of misery, a deep pit and -stinking dungeon, "in the lowest deep a lower deep," to which were -consigned the men of foreign breed, the Portugals. It was among them that -deaths first occurred, in what special form we know not. From them an -infection is clearly stated by Hoker to have spread through the gaol at -large, and to have made many of the prisoners so weak that they had to be -carried into court. This is quite unlike what we read of in the Cambridge -and Oxford cases, in neither of which was illness noted in the prisoners -or asserted of them, although at Oxford two or three had died in chains a -few days before. In the Exeter case there were three circles of the damned -instead of two only: nay there were four. Farthest in were the Portugals, -next to them were the native English felons, then came those present on -business or pleasure at the Assizes, and lastly there were the country -people all over Devonshire for many months after. We must take all those -peculiarities of the Exeter gaol-fever together, and explain them one by -another. It was a somewhat elaborated poison. It had passed from the -foreign prisoners to the English, and in the transmission had, as it were, -consolidated its power; hence, when the prisoners did give it to those who -breathed their atmosphere in court, the infection did not limit itself to -them, as it certainly did at Oxford and, so far as anything is said, at -Cambridge also, and as it usually does in typhus-fever; but it became a -volatile poison, it developed wings and acquired staying power, so that -its effects were felt over the county of Devon for at least six months -longer. - - -Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England. - -The Black Assizes of Cambridge (1522), of Oxford (1577), and of Exeter -(1586) cast, in each case, a momentary and vivid light upon the state of -England in the Tudor period as late as the middle of the reign of -Elizabeth. It has been pointed out in a former chapter that prices and -wages were favourable to the cultivators of the soil in the fifteenth -century, that the English yeomanry sprang up in that period, that village -communities and trading towns prospered although their morals were none of -the best, and that the civil wars of York and Lancaster were so far from -injuring the domestic peace of England that they even secured it. It was -the observation of Philip de Comines, more than once quoted before, that -England had the "peculiar grace" of being untroubled at large by the -calamities of her civil wars, because kings and nobles were left to settle -their quarrels among themselves. "Nothing is perfect in this world," says -the French statesman, who did not like independence of spirit among the -lower orders. But he recognizes the fact as peculiar to England in the -fifteenth century; and there can be little doubt about it. - -The civil wars were hardly over when the troubles of the common people -began. Here, if anywhere, is the turning-point brought into Goldsmith's -poem of "The Deserted Village:" - - A time there was, ere England's griefs began, - When every rood of ground maintained its man. - -Deserted villages became a reality in the last quarter of the fifteenth -century, and throughout the century following. We hear of this -depopulation first in the Isle of Wight, where it affected the national -defence and therefore engaged the attention of the State. Two Acts were -passed in 1488-9, cap. 16 and cap. 19 of 4 Henry VII. The first declares -that "it is for the security of the king and realm that the Isle of Wight -should be well inhabited, for defence against our ancient enemies of -France; the which isle is late decayed of people, by reason that many -towns and villages have been let down, and the fields dyked and made -pastures for beasts and cattle." The second relates that - - "Great inconveniences daily doth increase by desolation and pulling - down and wilful waste of houses and towns, and laying to pasture lands - which customably have been used in tilth, whereby idleness, ground and - beginning of all mischiefs, daily do increase; for where in some towns - two hundred persons were occupied and lived by their lawful labours, - now be there occupied two or three herdsmen, and the residue fall into - idleness." The remedy enacted is that no one shall take a farm in the - Isle of Wight which shall exceed ten marks, and that owners shall - maintain, upon their estates, houses and buildings necessary for - tillage. - -An instance of the same depopulation is given by Dugdale in Warwickshire: -seven hundred acres of arable land turned to pasture, and eighty persons -thrown out of employment causing the destruction of sixteen messuages and -seven cottages. An instance of the same kind has already been quoted from -the neighbourhood of Cambridge as early as 1414; but it is not until the -settlement of the dynastic quarrels and jealousies, partly on the -victories of Edward IV. at Barnet and Tewkesbury in 1471, and completely -after the victory of Henry Tudor at Bosworth in 1485, that agrarian -troubles became general. Then began the famous _enclosures_--enclosures -both of the "wastes" of the manors, and of the open cultivated fields of -the manors in which all the orders of villagers had their share of -tenancy. - -A few years after, in 1495, the number of vagabonds and beggars had so -increased, of course in consequence of the enclosures, that a new Act was -required, cap. 2 of the 11th of Henry VII. "Considering the great charges -that should grow for bringing vagabonds to the gaols according to the -statute of 7 Richard II., cap. 5, and the long abiding of them therein, -whereby it is likely many of them would lose their lives:" therefore to -put them in the stocks for three days and three nights upon bread and -water, and after that to set them at large and command them to avoid the -town, and if a vagabond be taken again in the same town or township, then -the stocks for _four_ days, with like diet. The deserving poor, however, -were to be dealt with otherwise, but in an equally futile manner. In -1503-4, by the 19th of Henry VII. cap. 12, the period in the stocks was -reduced to one day and one night (bread and water as before), probably in -order that all vagabonds might have their turn. - -The most correct picture of the state of England under Henry VII. and -Henry VIII. is given by Sir Thomas More. The passages in his _Utopia_, -relating to the state of England may be taken as veracious history. A -discussion is supposed to arise at the table of Morton, archbishop of -Canterbury, who was More's early patron, and who died in 1500. "I durst -boldly speak my mind before the Cardinal," says the foreign observer of -our manners and custom, Raphael Hythloday; and then follows an account of -the state of England which lacks nothing in plainness of speech. - - "But let us consider those things that chance daily before our eyes. - First there is a great number of gentlemen, which cannot be content to - live idle themselves, like drones, of that which other have laboured - for: their tenants I mean, whom they poll and shave to the quick by - raising their rents (for this only point of frugality do they use, men - else through their lavish and prodigal spending able to bring - themselves to very beggary)--these gentlemen, I say, do not only live - in idleness themselves, but also carry about with them at their tails - a great flock or train of idle and loitering serving-men, which never - learned any craft whereby to get their living. These men, as soon as - their master is dead, or be sick themselves, be incontinent thrust out - of doors.... And husbandmen dare not set them a work, knowing well - enough that he is nothing meet to do true and faithful service to a - poor man with a spade and a mattock for small wages and hard fare, - which being daintily and tenderly pampered up in idleness and - pleasure, was wont with a sword and a buckler by his side to strut - through the street with a bragging look, and to think himself too good - to be any man's mate. - - Nay, by Saint Mary, Sir, (quoth the lawyer), not so. For this kind of - men must we make most of. For in them, as men of stouter stomachs, - bolder spirits, and manlier courages than handicraftsmen and ploughmen - be, doth consist the whole power, strength and puissance of our army, - when we must fight in battle." - - So much for the serving-men of the rich, apt to be discarded to swell - the ranks of poverty and crime. But further:-- - - "There is another cause, which, as I suppose, is proper and peculiar - to you Englishmen alone.--What is that? quoth the Cardinal.--Forsooth, - my lord, quoth I, your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, - and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers - and so wild that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves. - They consume, destroy and devour whole fields, houses and cities. For - look in what parts of the realm doth grow the finest and therefore - dearest wool, these noblemen and gentlemen, yea and certain abbots, - (holy men, no doubt), not contenting themselves with the yearly - revenues and profits that were wont to grow to their forefathers and - predecessors of their lands, nor being content that they live in rest - and pleasure, nothing profiting yea much annoying the weal public - leave no ground for tillage; they inclose all into pastures; they - throw down houses; they pluck down towns and leave nothing standing, - but only the church to be made a sheep-house. And as though you lost - no small quantity of ground by forests, chases, lawns, and parks, - these holy men turn all dwelling-places and all glebe-land into - desolation and wilderness. Therefore the one covetous and insatiable - cormorant and very plague of his native country may compass about and - inclose many thousand acres of ground together within one pale or - hedge; the husbandmen be thrust out of their own, or else either by - cunning and fraud, or by violent oppression they be put besides it, or - by wrongs and injuries they be so wearied that they be compelled to - sell all. By one means, therefore, or by other, either by hook or - crook, they must needs depart away, poor silly wretched souls, men, - women, husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, woeful mothers - with their young babes, and their whole household small in substance - and much in number as husbandry requireth many hands. Away they - trudge, I say, out of their known and accustomed houses, finding no - place to rest in. All their household stuff, which is very little - worth, though it might well abide the sale, yet being suddenly thrust - out, they be constrained to sell it for a thing of nought. And when - they have wandered abroad till that be spent, what can they then else - do but steal, and then justly, pardy! be hanged, or else go about a - begging. And yet, then also they be cast in prison as vagabonds, - because they go about and work not; whom no man will set a work, - though they never so willingly profer themselves thereto." - -Thus were the gaols filled. The policy of Henry VIII. was to hang for -petty theft--"twenty together upon one gallows." And yet the lawyer, the -defender of the king's firm rule, "could not choose but greatly wonder and -marvel, how and by what evil luck it should come to pass that thieves -nevertheless were in every place so rife and rank." - -These descriptions of the state of England were written about 1517, and -the recitals in various Acts of Henry VIII. bear them out. Thus, in 1514 -and 1515 (6 Hen. VIII. cap. 5, and 7 Hen. VIII. cap. 1), the towns, -villages and hamlets, and other habitations decayed in the Isle of Wight -are to be re-edified and re-peopled. In 1533-4 (25 Hen. VIII. cap. 13), -there is a more comprehensive Act against the aggrandisements of -pasture-farmers, "by reason whereof a marvellous multitude of the people -of this realm be not able to provide meat, drink and clothes necessary -for themselves, their wives, and children, but be so discouraged with -misery and poverty that they fall daily to theft, robbery, and other -inconvenience, or pitifully die for hunger and cold." Some greedy and -covetous persons have as many as 24,000 sheep: no one to keep above 2,000 -sheep under the penalty of 3_s._ 4_d._ for every sheep kept by him above -that number. Ten years after comes the well-known Act relating to the -decay of towns[797] (35 Hen. VIII. cap. 4). - -Besides these recitals in Acts of Parliament, we have other glimpses of -the causes of agrarian distress. Thus, in a letter of June 24, 1528, from -Sir Edward Guildford to Wolsey: Romney Marsh is fallen into decay; there -are many great farms and holdings in the hands of persons who neither -reside on them, nor till, nor breed cattle, but use them for grazing, -trusting to the Welsh store cattle[798]. - -In Becon's _Jewel of Joy_, written in the reign of Edward VI. the same -condition of things is described: - - "How do the rich men, and specially such as be sheepmongers, oppress - the king's liege-people by devouring their common pastures with their - sheep, so that the poor people are not able to keep a cow for the - comfort of them and of their poor family, and are like to starve and - perish for hunger, if there be not provision made shortly.... Rich men - were never so much estranged from all pity and compassion toward the - poor people as they be at this present time.... They not only link - house to house, but when they have gotten many houses and tenements - into their hands, yea whole townships, they suffer the houses to fall - into utter ruin and decay, so that by this means whole towns are - become desolate and like unto a wilderness, no man dwelling there - except it be the shepherd and his dog." The interlocutor in the - dialogue answers: "Truth it is. For I myself know many towns and - villages sore decayed; for whereas in times past there were in some - town an hundred households, there remain not now thirty; in some - fifty, there are not now ten; yea (which is more to be lamented) I - know towns so wholly decayed that there is neither stick nor stone, as - they say.... And the cause of all this wretchedness and beggary in the - common weal is the greed of gentlemen which are sheepmongers and - graziers[799]." - -Again, in Bullein's _Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence_ (1664), the groom -Roger who accompanies the citizen and his wife to the country, in the -direction of Barnet, points out an estate on which the rents had been -raised; the fields had been turned into large pastures, and all the houses -pulled down save the manor house: "for the carles have forfeited their -leases and are gone a-begging like villaines, and many of them are dead -for hunger." - -Vagabonds, beggars, valiant beggars, sturdy beggars, and ruffelers -continue to occupy the pages of the Statute Book for many years. In -1530-31 (a long and elaborate Act), and in 1535-6, they are to be -repressed by the stocks, by whipping, and ear-cropping; "and if any -ruffeler, sturdy vagabond, or valiant beggar, having the upper part of the -right ear cut off as aforesaid, be apprehended wandering in idleness, and -it be duly proved that he hath not applied to such labours as have been -assigned to him, or be not in service with any master, that then he be -committed to gaol until the next quarter sessions, and be there indicted -and tried, and, if found guilty, he shall be adjudged to suffer death as a -felon." A still more distracted Act was made by the Lord Protector in 1547 -(1 Ed. VI. cap. 3): if the vagabond continue idle and refuse to labour, or -run away from work set him to perform, he is to be branded with the letter -V, and be adjudged a slave for two years to any person who shall demand -him, to be fed on bread and water and refuse-meat, and caused to work in -such labour, "how vile soever it be, as he shall be put unto, by beating, -chaining, or otherwise." If he run away within the two years, he is to be -branded in the cheek with the letter S, and adjudged a slave for life; and -if he run away again he is to suffer death as a felon. Similar provisions -are made for "slave-children;" while the usual exceptions are brought in -for the impotent poor. The above statute remained in force for only two -years, having been from the first a monstrous insult to the intelligence -of the nation, and never applied. It was succeeded by two meek-spirited -Acts, 3 and 4 Ed. VI. cap. 16, and 5 and 6 Ed. VI. cap. 2, in which the -impotent poor are provided for:--collectors in church to "gently ask and -demand alms for the poor." By the 1st of Mary, cap. 13, the collections -for the poor were made weekly. When Elizabeth came to the throne, greater -pressure was put upon the well-to-do to support the poor: by the Act of 5 -Eliz. cap. 3 (1562-3) those who obstinately refused voluntary alms might -be assessed. A more important Act of Elizabeth was that of her 14th year -(1572-3) cap. 5, "For the Punishment of Vagabonds and for Relief of the -Poor and Impotent." A vagabond, as before, is to be whipped, and burnt on -the ear; for a second offence to suffer death as a felon "unless some -honest person will take him into his service for two whole years;" and for -a third offence to suffer death and loss of lands and goods, as a felon, -without allowance of benefit of clergy or sanctuary. Aged and infirm poor, -by the same Act, are to be cared for by "overseers of the poor" in every -parish, and to have abiding places fixed for them. In 1575-6 (18th Eliz. -cap. 3), the Act of 1572-3 was amended and explained: "collectors and -governors of the poor" are to provide a stock of wool, hemp, iron etc. for -the poor to work upon, and "houses of correction," or Bridewells, are to -be built-one, two or more in every county for valiant beggars or such -other poor persons as refuse to work under the overseers or embezzle their -work. The last and greatest poor-laws of Elizabeth's reign were those of -her 39th year (1597-8) caps. 3 and 4 and her 43rd year (1601) cap. 2. -These remained the basis of the English poor-law down to a recent period. -Overseers of the poor are appointed in every parish--the churchwardens _ex -officio_ and four others appointed by the justices in Easter week: the -overseers to meet once a month in the parish church after divine service -on the Sunday: contributions to be levied by the inhabitants of any parish -among themselves, or the parish or hundred to be taxed by the justices, -failing the contributions, or, if the hundred be unable, then the county -to be rated "in aid of" the parishes. - -These being the developments of the poor-law and the law against vagabonds -to the end of the Tudor period, we may now return to our particular -illustrations, and more especially to the illustrations from popular -sickness. - -Under the year 1537, one of the citizen chroniclers of London has an -entry, "Began a collection for the poor, and a great number cured of many -grievous diseases through the charity thereof." Under 1540, he records -that "the collection for the poor people ceased[800]." Preaching before -Edward VI. on the fourth Sunday in Lent, 1550, Thomas Lever, Master of St -John's College, Cambridge, said: "O merciful Lord! what a number of poor, -feeble, halt, blind, lame, sickly--yea with idle vagabonds and dissembling -caitiffs mixed among them, lie and creep, begging in the miry streets of -London and Westminster[801]." In May, 1552, Ridley wrote to Cecil that the -citizens were willing to provide for the poor "both meat, drink, clothing -and firing;" but they lacked lodging, and he wanted the king to give up -Bridewell "to lodge Christ in," or in other words, the poor "then lying -abroad in the streets of London." - -Coming to the middle of Elizabeth's reign, in the year 1579 we find, in an -essay dedicated to the queen by Dr John Jones upon general topics of -health and morals, an account of poverty and crime which reads little -better than Sir Thomas More's for 1517. In his 31st chapter on "The great -cost that the commonwealth is at daily in relieving the poore: Of the -number of them that are yeerly executed," he speaks of the new poor-rate -as "a greater tax than some subsidies," and as a "larger collection than -would maintain yeerly a good army;" and, of the felons as "a mightier -company of miserable captives than would defend a large country, as in the -records of the Clerks of the Peace and of the Assize may easily be seen." - -Even from the outset, the poor-rate does not appear to have met the -difficulty: - - "And yet housekeepers be but little less discharged, if ye note the - continual resort of the needy, especially in the country and towns - that be incorporate, the poor (as they say) not much the more aided, - as by the moan they make to travellers may be easily gathered, nor - theft and wickedness the less practised. For what misery it is to see - condemned at one assize in a little shire thirty-nine, notwithstanding - the clemency of the Judges, and three hundred and odd in one Diocese - to do penance or fine for their loose living in a year. But these be - the meanest sort only, for the others scape as though it were in them - no offence. And in one gaol of prisoners three hundred and upwards at - one time, whereof a great part perhaps may be through negligence of - justice or cruelty, that otherwise might be punished answerably to the - offences lawfully." - -He then refers to the Bridewells "so charitably and politicly appointed by -the late Act of Parliament, although not yet in every shire erected." The -Act of Parliament was that of 1572 and the Bridewells were the houses of -correction for vagrants, the first type of workhouses, and so named after -the Bridewell in Fleet Street, which was given by Edward VI. from being a -royal residence to be a refuge of the poor. So far as fever was concerned, -it mattered little whether the Bridewell were a poor-house or a prison, -for in later times gaol fever and workhouse fever were both synonyms for -typhus. - -It would not have been surprising to find this enormous extent of -pauperism, vagrancy and crime attended by the distinctive _morbus -pauperum_, typhus-fever. But we are here concerned only with the evidence, -and not with antecedent probabilities. The records are, of course, very -imperfect. The gaol-fevers of Cambridge, Oxford and Exeter attracted much -notice because they touched the governing class. There may have been much -more gaol-fever unrecorded. Hoker, in his account of the Exeter fever, -does indeed say: "and this is commonly called the gaol sickness, and many -die thereof;" and, in a petition to the Crown, March, 1579, the Queen's -Bench prison in Southwark is said to contain twice its complement, there -is in it a disease called "sickness of the house," and near a hundred had -died of that sickness in the prison during the previous six years[802]. We -shall not be able to give colour to our epidemiological history by other -such instances from the Tudor period[803]; even for plague itself, the -records of particular outbreaks are meagre and almost certainly only a -part of the whole. The epidemics which shall occupy us for the rest of -this chapter are those that had a general prevalence over the country on -two or three occasions, the same general prevalence of fever that recurs -at shorter intervals in the Stuart period and in the eighteenth century. - -Hitherto we have attempted to work out the history of epidemics in Britain -without reference to the epidemics in other countries, except in the case -of the Black Death, which had remarkable antecedents in the remote East, -and in the case of the English Sweat of 1528, which overran a great part -of the Continent in 1529 and 1530. To have attempted a parallel record of -epidemics abroad would have served inevitably to confuse the vision; for -the annals of pestilence in all Europe would have been from year to year -an unrelieved record of sickness and death, an unnatural continuance or -sequence, from which the mind turns away. The several countries of Europe, -and the several cities, had each their turn of plague; but they had each, -also, their free intervals, sometimes very long intervals, as we have seen -in the case of Aberdeen with no plague for nearly two generations in the -sixteenth century. The epidemiography of each country should therefore be -kept apart; and within a given country care should be taken to prevent -the illusion of universal sickness, which is apt to be created in the -bringing of scattered centres of disease (such as plague) together in the -same page. - -But there are instances of what are called pandemics, or universal -epidemics, of sickness. The Black Death was one such, covering a period of -perhaps four years in Europe, from 1347 to 1350, the curve of the disease -in each locality lasting about six months. With the beginning of the -modern period we come to more frequent pandemics, not of plague, but of -minor or milder forms of pestilential infection. On the continent of -Europe these were in part related to the state of war, which may be taken -as beginning with the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII. of France in -1494. Typhus-fever, or war-fever with famine-fever, now begins to be a -familiar form of sickness--in 1498, 1505, 1510, 1528, and so on. Other -forms are putrid sore throat, dysentery, and varieties of fever included -under influenza. The various forms were apt to occur together or in -succession, so that epidemiography has a "Protean" character. This -epidemic Proteus is at once a great difficulty and a most instructive -fact. It opens up the very old doctrine of "epidemic constitutions" of the -air, which to many moderns savours of unscientific vagueness; and it -brings us face to face with degrees or kinds of infectiveness which are, -in matter of fact, more wonderful or more incomprehensible than the -deadlier infections, such as the plague or Asiatic cholera. The most -familiar instance of the kind is influenza. - - -Influenza. - -Influenza enters undoubtedly into the Protean infections of the sixteenth -century, and is itself no small part of the Proteus. But what is -influenza? The name is comparatively modern--Italian of the 18th -century--and appears to mean defluxion or catarrh, not in the familiar -sense only, but as derived from the comprehensive pathological doctrine of -humours: thus the Venetian envoy in London called the sweat of 1551 an -"influsso." It is open to us to include much or little under influenza; -but the name itself, having its root in an obsolete doctrine of humours, -can never be made exact or scientific. Usage has applied it to all -universal colds and coughs; and it has been applied capriciously to some -universal fevers, but not to others. There are two tolerably clear -references to its prevalence in England before the peculiarly unwholesome -state of Europe began with the modern age. Under the year 1173, the -chronicle of Melrose enters "a certain evil and unheard-of cough" (_tussis -quaedam mala et inaudita_), which affected everyone far and near, and cut -off many. - -One of the St Albans chroniclers, an unknown writer who kept a record from -1423 to 1431 (reign of Henry VI.), has the following entry under the year -1427: "In the beginning of October, a certain rheumy infirmity (_quaedam -infirmitas reumigata_) which is called '_mure_' invaded the whole people, -and so infected the aged along with the younger that it conducted a great -number to the grave[804]." A good deal is said in this brief passage, and -all that is said points to influenza--the rheumy nature of the malady, the -universality of incidence, presumably the suddenness and brief duration, -the deaths among the aged and the more juvenile. It is known also that a -similarly general malady was prevalent the same year in Paris, where it -bore the name of _ladendo_; the particulars given in the French record of -it leave no doubt that it was influenza. - -The singular name of _pestilentia volatilis_ given by Fordoun to two -epidemics in Scotland in his own lifetime, one which began at Edinburgh in -February, 1430 (1431 new style), and the other at Haddington in 1432, -suggests that they may have been influenzas, but there is nothing more -than the name to indicate their nature. Those years are not known to have -been years of influenza in any other country of Europe: the record of the -malady passes direct from 1427 to 1510. There was certainly a great wave -of influenza over Europe in 1510, under the names of _cocqueluche_ and -_coccolucio_. It is said to have come up from the Mediterranean coasts and -to have extended to the shores of the Baltic and North Seas; its -prevalence in Britain is likely enough, and is indeed asserted in one -foreign account, but there is no known native notice of it. Abroad, it had -the usual character of suddenness, simultaneity and universality, and the -symptoms of heaviness, prostration, headache, restlessness, sleeplessness, -and for some time after a violent paroxysmal cough, like whooping-cough. -None died except some children; in some it went off with a looseness, in -others by sweating[805]. The mention of sweating in the influenza epidemic -of 1510 is not without importance. It may serve to explain a remark by -Erasmus, in a letter of 25th August, 1511, from Queens' College, -Cambridge, that his health was still rather doubtful "from that sweat" (_a -sudore illo_[806]); the sweat can hardly have been the sweating sickness -of 1508, three years before, but the still unsettled health of Erasmus in -1511 may perhaps have been the dregs of the influenza of 1510. - -The next great European epidemic of influenza was in 1557, for which I -shall produce medical evidence of England sharing in it, probably during -that year and certainly in the one following. But the intervening years -afford some notices of sickness in England, which was neither so severe as -plague at one end of the pestilential scale nor altogether mild at the -other, being forms of illness which contemporaries pronounced to be "new" -and "strange," and appear to have been of the nature of pestilent fever -and dysentery. - -Neither typhus nor dysentery was really new to England in the sixteenth -century; on the contrary, they were (with putrid sore throat and lientery) -the common types of disease in the great English famines which came at -long intervals, as described in the first chapter. But on the continent of -Europe typhus and dysentery and putrid sore throat (_angina maligna_) -began with the modern age to appear as if capriciously, and independently -of such obvious antecedents as want, although some of the epidemics of -typhus and dysentery were clearly related to the hardships of -warfare[807]. Typhus, indeed, was a disastrous malady on the Continent in -those years, notably in 1528 in Spain, where it was known as "las bubas," -and in France, where it was called "les poches"--both names relating to -the spots on the skin, and both more strictly applicable to the eruptions -of the lues venerea, which was then also rampant. - -Apart from the gaol fever at Cambridge in 1522, the first mention of those -new epidemics in England since the end of the medieval period is under the -year 1540: "This said xxx and two year [of Henry VIII.] divers and many -honest persons died of the hot agues and of a great lask throughout the -realm[808]." The "lask" was dysentery, (Stow, in chronicling the epidemic -in his much later _Annales_ calls it "the bloody flux"), and the "hot -agues," according to later references under that name, appear to have been -influenza in the sense of a highly volatile typhus[809]. All that we know -of the circumstances of this epidemic is that the summer was one of -excessive drought, that wells and brooks were dried up, and that the -Thames ran so low as to make the tide at London Bridge not merely brackish -but salt. - -The spring and summer of 1551 were the seasons of the last outbreak of the -sweat in England, which curiously coincided with another epidemic of -influenza (_cocqueluche_) in France. The years from 1555 to 1558 were a -sickly period for all Europe, the diseases being of the types of -dysentery, typhus, and influenza. The most authentic particulars are given -under the years 1557 and 1558; and those for England, which specially -concern us, are now to be given. Wriothesley, a contemporary, enters under -the year 1557: "This summer reigned in England divers strange and new -sicknesses, taking men and women in their heads; as strange agues and -fevers, whereof many died[810]." Under the year 1558, the continuator of -Fabyan's chronicle says: "In the beginning of this mayor's year died many -of the wealthiest men all England through, of a strange fever[811]." - -Some light is thrown upon the sickness, general throughout England in -1557-8, also by Stow in his _Annales_. Before the harvest of 1557 corn was -at famine prices, but after the harvest wheat fell to an eighth part of -the price (5_s._ the quarter), the penny wheaten loaf being increased from -11 oz. to 56 oz.! In the harvest of 1558, he goes on, the "quartan agues -continued in like manner, or more vehemently than they had done the last -year passed, where-through died many old people and specially priests, so -that a great number of parishes were unserved and no curates to be gotten, -and much corn was lost in the fields for lack of workmen and -labourers[812]." Harrison, canon of Windsor, says that a third part of the -people of the land did taste the general sickness, which points to -influenza[813]. - -The year 1557 was certainly remarkable on the continent of Europe as a -year of widely prevalent "pestiferous and contagious sickness," which was -described by numerous medical writers. That universal epidemic, or -pandemic, is usually counted as one of the great historical waves of -influenza; and in the annals of that wonderful disease it stands the first -which was well recorded by competent foreign observers, including -Ingrassias, Gesner, Rondelet, Riverius, Dodonaeus, and Foreest. The -corresponding sickness in England in 1557 (still more severe in 1558), -which carried off many of the wealthiest men, and made so great an -impression that it is noticed by Stow and Speed, has missed being noticed -by English physicians, with a single exception, and that a casual one. If -the continental physicians had not been copious in writing on several -occasions when our English physicians were silent, such as the epidemic of -syphilis in 1494-6, the English sweat of 1529, and the influenza of -1557-8, it might appear ungracious to remark upon the scanty literary -productiveness of the profession in the Tudor period. Whoever attempts -medical history for England will soon feel our deficiency in materials, -and become disposed to envy the easier task of the foreign historian. The -academical physicians of the time hardly ever wrote. The men who wrote on -medicine were laymen like Sir Thomas Elyot, who justified his interest -therein by the example of men of his own rank like Juba, king of -Mauritania, and Mithridates, king of Pontus; or they were irregular -practitioners desirous to advertise themselves; or booksellers' hacks like -Paynel; or such as Cogan, a schoolmaster and a physician in one. The -modern reader will be surprised at the common burden of the prefaces of -medical (and perhaps other) books in the Tudor period,--the intolerable -nuisance of "pick-faults," "depravers," and cavillers, who sat in their -chairs and criticised; and if the modern reader happen to be in quest of -authentic facts, he can hardly fail to sympathise with Phaer, when he -addresses the academical dog-in-the-manger with the Horatian challenge: -"Si quid novisti rectius istis, candidus imperti; si non, his utere -mecum." - -It is possible, however, to collect a few particulars of the prevalent -sickness of 1558 in England from casual notices of it. Thus, it comes -into a letter to the queen, of September 6, by Lord St John, governor of -the Isle of Wight, from his house at Letley, near Southampton: sickness -affected more than half the people in Southampton, the Isle of Wight and -Portsmouth (those places being filled with troops under St John's -command), and the captain of the fort at Sandown was dead[814]. Curiously -enough we get an intimate glimpse of this epidemic from a book published -some years after, the _Dyall of Agues_ by Dr John Jones. In his chapter -"Of the Sweating Fevers" (chapter xiv), after illustrating from Galen the -proposition that a sweat may not be critical and wholesome, but [Greek: -tuphds] or typhus-like, attending the seizure from its outset and "the -same said sweat little or nothing profiting," he proceeds to point his -remarks by his own experience: - - "I had too good experience of myself in Queen Mary's reign, living at - Lettl in my good lord's house, the right honourable Lord St John, - beside Southampton, the which, notwithstanding the great sweat, it was - long after before I recovered of my health, so that the said sweat did - nothing profit." - -He then proceeds to compare the sweat, almost certainly the epidemic -mentioned in St John's despatch of 6th September, 1558, with the sweating -sickness of 1551: - - "So in our days, even in King Edward VI.'s reign, it brought many to - their long home, as some of the most worthy, the two noble princes of - Suffolk, imps of honour most towardly, with others of all degrees - infinite many; and the more perished no doubt for lack of physical - counsel speedily[815]." - -The next that we hear of this epidemic of the autumn of 1558, is in a -despatch from Dover, 11 p.m. 6th October: the writer has "learnt from the -mayor of Dover that there is no plague there, but the people that daily -die are those that come out of the ships, and such poor people as come out -of Calais, of the new sickness[816]." A despatch of 17th October, 1558, -from one of the commissioners for the surrender of Calais, Sir Thomas -Gresham, at Dunkirk, to the Privy Council, says that he "returned hither -to write his letter to the queen, and found Sir William Pickering very -sore sick of this new burning ague. He has had four sore fits, and is -brought very low, and in danger of his life if they continue as they have -done[817]." - -Here we have the same term "new sickness" and "new burning ague" as in the -two English chronicles under the year before--the "strange and new -sicknesses" which "took men and women in their heads," and the "strange -agues and fevers." The very general prevalence in Southampton, Portsmouth -and the Isle of Wight suggests influenza; the symptom of sweating -described by Jones for his own case during that prevalence is in keeping -with what we hear of the influenzas of the time from foreign writers, and -so is the long and slow convalescence; the fact of one person having had -four sore fits of "this new burning ague" is more like influenza than -typhus. - -The severe mortalities in the autumn of 1558 at Loughborough and Chester -are put down to "plague," and they may, of course, have been circumscribed -outbursts of the old bubo-plague. If, however, they were part of the -general prevalence of hot or burning agues, which we may take to have been -influenza or a very volatile kind of typhus, they would indicate a degree -of fatality in the latter somewhat greater than more recent influenzas -have had. A high death-rate is, indeed, demonstrable for the year 1558, -from parish registers, by comparing the deaths in that year with the -deaths in years near it, and by comparing the deaths with the births in -1558 itself. - -The registers of christenings and burials, which had been ordered first in -1538, were kept in a number of parishes from that date; and from 1558, -when the order for keeping them was renewed by queen Elizabeth, they were -generally kept. Dr Thomas Short, a man of great industry, about the middle -of last century obtained access to a large number of parish registers, and -worked an infinite number of arithmetical exercises upon their -figures[818]. His abstract results or conclusions are colourless and -unimpressive, as statistical results are apt to be for the average -concrete mind; nor can they be made to illustrate the epidemic history of -Britain with the help of his companion volumes, 'A General Chronological -History of the Air, Weather, Seasons, Meteors etc[819].', for these -extraordinary annals are for the most part loosely compiled from foreign -sources, bringing into one focus the most scattered references to disease -in any part of Europe, and that too without criticism of authorities but -often with surprising credulity and inaccuracy. That so much statistical -or arithmetical zeal and exhaustiveness (in the work of 1750) should go -with so total a deficiency of the critical and historical sense, (in the -work of 1749) is noteworthy, and perhaps not unparalleled in modern times. -Short's history is mostly foreign, but his statistics, which are English, -may be used to illustrate and confirm what can be learned of sicknesses in -England in the ordinary way of historical research. - -Thus, the period from 1557 to 1560 stands out in Short's table as one of -exceptional unhealthiness both in country parishes and in market towns, -the unhealthiness being estimated by the excess of burials over -christenings. - -_Country Parishes._ - - Registers Unhealthy Baptised Buried - Year examined Parishes in same in same - - 1557 16 7 62 181 - 1558 26 11 171 340 - 1559 34 12 145 252 - 1560 38 6 100 162 - 1561 41 1 19 32 - -_Market Towns._ - - Registers Unhealthy Baptised Buried - Year examined Towns in same in same - - 1557 4 2 262 381 - 1558 4 2 104 159 - 1559 5 3 102 149 - 1560 8 3 134 201 - 1561 8 3 276 399 - 1562 8 1 58 71 - -Short's collection of parish registers appears to have represented many -English counties, although there is no clue to their identity in the -tables from which these figures are taken. The heavy mortalities in the -registers correspond exactly to the epidemic years as otherwise known, and -may be said to bear witness to the extent or generality of the epidemic -infection. - -The next that we hear of malignant fevers in England is the outbreak at -Oxford in 1577, following the Assizes. Anthony Wood says of it: "Some -thought that this Oxford mortality was the same that Leonard Fuchsius -styles sudor Anglicus." Cogan, a contemporary, says: - - "And certainly after that sudden bane at Oxford, the same year and a - year or two following, the same kind of agues raged in a manner all - over England, and took away very many of the strongest sort in their - lustiest age, and for the most part men and not women nor children, - culling them out here and there, even as you should choose the best - sheep out of a flock. And certain remedy was none to be found.... And - they that took a moderate sweat at the beginning of their sickness, - and did rid their stomachs well by vomit, sped much better." - -This is partly confirmed by Short's abstracts of the parish registers. -Thus in 1580, of sixty registers examined, ten showed unhealthiness, the -births being to the deaths as 248 to 284. In 1582, seven country parishes -were markedly unhealthy, the births being to the deaths as 140 to 244. In -market towns the incidence is not so striking: in 1580, four towns out of -sixteen examined showed an unhealthy birth-rate, 237 births to 276 deaths. -It is in 1583 that the disparity becomes greatest in these towns: three -out of the sixteen in the list were notably unhealthy, the deaths being -1062 and the births 467. But it is the obvious defect of Short's method -that we have no means of knowing whether that mortality may not have been -largely from plague, and not from fever or other form of epidemic -sickness. - -The only year between 1558 and 1580 in Short's tables, which stands out as -decidedly unhealthy both in country parishes and market towns is 1570, -while the years from 1573 to 1575 are less healthy than the average. Those -were years of war, and of war-typhus, on the Continent, as the foreign -writings show, but there are no records of the kind of sickness in -England. - -One glimpse of the prevalence of those fevers of 1580-82 is got from a -letter of the earl of Arundell to Lord Burghley, October 19, 1582. The -earl had left his house in London because it was so "beset and -encompassed" by plague; while, as to his country house: "The air of my -house in Sussex is so corrupt even at this time of the year as, when I -came away, I left xxiv sick of hot agues." He therefore begs the loan of -the bishop of Chichester's house till such time as the vacancy in the see -should be filled up[820]. - -The widespread volatile sicknesses of 1557-8 and 1580-2, which are grouped -under the generic name of influenza, were related in time to great -epidemics of the far more deadly bubo-plague. These plague outbursts were -less noticeable in England than abroad. Thus in 1557 there were most -disastrous epidemics of true bubo-plague in several towns of the Low -Countries, and in 1580 there was at Cairo one of the worst epidemics in -the whole history of plague from its beginning. The years preceding 1580 -were also plague-years in many parts of Europe (Padua, Mantua, Venice, -Messina, Palermo, Lisbon, Brussels). Those years were also the occasion of -the first great and disastrous epidemics of diphtheria (_garottillo_) in -Spain. Then come the epidemics of typhus; and at the far end of the -pestilential scale the flying waves of influenza. A relation of influenza -to other prevalent infections has been one of the theories of its nature, -especially the relation to epidemics of Asiatic cholera. - -In that view influenza looks as if it were a volatile product, a swifter -and more superficial wave on the top of some slower and more deadly -earth-borne virus. As the old writers said, it was a _levis corruptio -aeris_, a diluted virus as it were, mild in proportion to its volatility -and swiftness, but in universality equalling in its own milder way the -universality of the plague of Justinian's reign or of the Black Death. - -Now, the same century and the same state of society which witnessed the -most remarkable of those flying ripples of infection over the whole -surface of Europe witnessed also some waves of infection which did not -travel so far, nor were mere influenzas. The English sweat travelled over -England in that way; it was called the posting sweat, because it posted -from town to town: thus in 1551 it suddenly appeared one day in Oxford, -and next day it was in the villages around, as if carried in the air; in -like manner it posted to Devonshire, to Leicestershire, to Cheshire, and -doubtless all over England, like the influenzas of recent memory. And -while the English sweat was thus flying about in England, influenza was -flying about the same year (1551) in France, a country which never -suffered from any of the five sweating sicknesses of 1485-1551. Again, the -influenza in England in 1558 had the symptom of sweating so marked that it -was compared to the true sweat of 1551 by Dr Jones, who himself suffered -from it. Also the influenza of 1580 all over Europe had so much of a -sweating character that in some places they said the English sweat had -come back. Lastly, the gaol-fever of Oxford in 1577 was thought by some to -present the symptoms described by Leonard Fuchs for _sudor Anglicus_; and -Cogan, an English medical writer then living, specially mentions the -phenomenon of sweating (as well as the intestinal profluvium called a -"lask"), both at Oxford and in the more widely prevalent diseases of that -year and the years following. The gaol-fever of Exeter in 1586 illustrates -still another side of the question; it diffused itself--probably by other -means than contact with the sick--all over the county of Devon, and had -not ceased six months after it began in the month of March at Exeter. The -Devonshire diffusion was like the spreading circles in a still pool. The -spread of influenza was like the flying ripples on a broad surface of -water. The spread of plague, on the occasions when it was universal, was -like the massive rollers of the depths, the onward march of cholera from -the East having, in our own times, illustrated afresh the same momentum. - -In using hitherto the name of influenza for the universal fevers in -England in 1557-58 and in 1580-82, I have done so because those years are -usually reckoned in the annals of influenza. But the name is at best a -generic one, and need not commit us to any nosological definition. I shall -have to deal at more length with this question in the tenth chapter, when -speaking of the fevers of 1657-59 described by Willis and Whitmore, two -competent medical observers; in those years the vernal fever was a -catarrhal fever, or influenza proper, while the fever of the hot and dry -season, autumnal or harvest-fever, was a pestilential fever, a spotted -fever, a burning ague, a contagious malignant fever. There were also -differences in their epidemological as well as in their clinical -characters, the influenza wave being soonest past. But so far as regarded -universality of diffusion and generality of incidence, both types were -much alike. - -Molineux, writing in 1694, a generation after Willis, "On the late general -coughs and colds," brought into comparison with them another epidemic -which he had observed in Dublin in the month of July, 1688: "The transient -fever of 1688 ... I look upon to have been the most universal fever, as -this [1693] the most universal cold, that has ever appeared[821]." - -When we come to the 18th century, to great epidemics not only in connexion -with famine in Ireland, but also in England, we shall find the same -diffusiveness associated with the clear type of disease which we now call -typhus. Influenza is the only sickness familiar to ourselves which shows -the volatile character, and we are apt to conclude that no other type of -fever ever had that character. But, without going farther back than the -18th century we shall find epidemics of spotted typhus resting like an -atmosphere of infection over whole tracts of Britain and Ireland, town and -country alike; and even if we give the name of influenza to the epidemical -"hot agues" with which we are here immediately concerned, in the years -1540, 1557-8, and 1580-82, we may also regard them as in a manner -corresponding to, if not as embracing, the types of fever that prevailed -from time to time over wide districts of country in the centuries -following. - -The term "ague," often used at the time, is no more decisive for the -nosological character than the term "influenza." Ague originally meant a -sharp fever (_febris acuta_, [Greek: oxus]), and in Ireland, from the time -of Giraldus Cambrensis down to the 18th century, it meant the acute fever -of the country, which has not been malarial ague, in historical times at -least, but typhus. "Irish ague" was in later times a well-understood term -for contagious pestilential fever or typhus. In the _Dyall of Agues_ by Dr -John Jones (1564 ?), just as in the writings of Sydenham a century later, -intermittents were mixed up with continued fevers which had nothing -malarial in their cause or circumstances. Thus, Jones has a chapter on -"Hot Rotten Agues," which he identifies with the synochus or continued -fever of the Greeks; in another chapter on "The Continual Rotten Ague," he -locates the continued fevers within the vessels and the "interpolate" -without their walls, and proceeds: - - "It happeneth where all the vessels, but most chiefly in the greatest - which are annexed about the flaps of the lungs and spiritual members, - all equally putrefying, which often happeneth, as Fuchsius witnesseth, - of vehement binding and retaining the filth in the cavity or - hollowness of the vessels, inducing a burning heat. Wherefore, this - kind of fever chanceth not to lean persons, nor to such as be of a - thin constitution and cold temperament, nor an old age (that ever I - saw), but often in them which abound with blood and of sanguine - complexion, replenished with humour, fat and corpulent, solemners of - Bacchus' feasts,--gorge upon gorge, quaff upon quaff--not altogether - with meat or drink of good nourishment but of omnium gatherum, as well - to the destruction of themselves as uncurable to the physician, as by - my prediction came to pass (besides others) upon a gentleman of - Suffolk, a little from Ipswich, who by the causes aforesaid got his - sickness, and thereof died the ninth day, according to my prediction, - as his wife and friend knoweth." - -Again, in his eighth chapter, "Of the Pestilential Fever, or Plague, or -Boche [Botch]," he remarks upon the varying types of pestilential -diseases, mentioning among other national types the English sweat: - - "As we, not out of mind past, with a sweat called stoupe galante, as - that worthy Doctor Caius hath written at large in his book _De - Ephemera Britannica_," adding the remark that here concerns us:--"and - sethence [since then], with many pestilential agues, and, lastly of - all, with the pestilential boche [botch or plague rightly termed]." - These continued fevers, pestilential agues, or hot rotten agues, Jones - distinguishes from quotidians, tertians and quartans. Of the last he - says: "and when quartans reign everywhere, as they did of no long - years past; of the which then I tasted part, besides my experience had - of others,"--probably the fevers of 1558, elsewhere called by him the - sweating sickness, and by Stow called "quartan agues." He mentions - also quintains, which he had never seen in England, "but yet in - Ireland, at a place called Carlow, I was informed by Mr Brian Jones, - then there captain, of a kerne or gentleman there that had the - quintain long." - -Not only the term "ague," but also the terms "intermittent," "tertian," -and more especially "quartan," can hardly be taken in their modern sense -as restricted to malarial or climatic fevers. An intermittent or -paroxysmal character of fevers was made out on various grounds, to suit -the traditional Galenic or Greek teaching; but the paroxysms and -intermissions were not associated specially with rise and fall of the -body-temperature. The curious history of agues, and of the specialist -ague-curers, properly belongs to the time of the Restoration, when -Peruvian bark came into vogue, and will be fully dealt with in the first -chapter of another volume. - -The last years in the Tudor period that stand out conspicuously in the -parish registers for a high mortality, not due to plague, are 1597-8. The -year 1597 was a season of influenza in Italy, and perhaps elsewhere in -Europe; so that the epidemic in England that year may have been the same, -but more probably was famine-fever. In the parish register of Cranbrooke -the deaths for the year are 222, against 56 births; and 181 of the deaths -are marked with the mark which is supposed to mean plague proper. The -register of Tiverton has 277 deaths, against 66 births, but it is almost -certain that the cause of the excess was not plague, of which the nearest -epidemic in that town was in 1591. In a country parish of Hampshire, with -a population of some 2700, the deaths in 1597 were 117, against 48 births, -the mortality being about twice as great as in any year from the -commencement of the register in 1569, and after until 1612[822]. In the -north of England the type of disease in 1597-8 was plague proper. - -The parish register of Finchley has a remarkable entry under the year 1596 -which introduces us to other considerations: "Hoc anno moriebantur de -dysenteria xix," the whole number of burials for the year having been 28. -Next year, 1597, there are 23 deaths from dysentery, the burials in all -having been 48--an enormous mortality compared with the average of the -parish. The year 1597, if not also 1596, was a year of great scarcity, -apparently all over England; in Northumberland, Durham, and Cumberland, -the scarcity was attended by plague proper; but in other parts of England, -it would seem, by other types of sickness, of which dysentery was one. - -One of the 16th century English names used for flux was the obsolete word -lask, which occurs often enough in writings of the period to suggest that -the malady was common; it is sometimes called a choleric lask (cholera -morbus), or a vehement lask, as in Elyot's _Castel of Health_ and in -Cogan's _Haven of Health_. Lasks, or lienteries, or dysenteries have not -been dealt with in a chapter by themselves because the records of them are -too few and meagre, so far as we have gone in the history; but it may be -convenient to bring together here the better known instances. In the -period of famine-sicknesses, dysentery and lientery must have been common -types, the latter being specially mentioned by Rishanger of St Albans for -the year 1294. Trokelowe, another St Albans chronicler, writing of the -famine-sickness of 1315-16, uses the singular phrase "morbus enim -dysentericus ex corruptis cibis fere omnes maculavit" and says it was -followed by "acuta febris vel pestis gutturuosa." Dysentery from corrupt -food is again specially named for the year 1391. The "wame-ill" was the -prevalent type of sickness in the great Scots famine of 1439, a year of -famine in England and France. When we next hear of it in English history -it is among the troops of the marquis of Dorset in Gascony and Biscay in -1512, some 1800 of them having died of "the flix." Then comes the "great -lask throughout the realm" in 1540, associated with "strange fevers." The -sickly years 1557-58 and 1580-82 had probably some dysentery, or lientery, -either as primary maladies or as complications of the fevers: Cogan's -generalities imply as much for 1580-82, and we know that the corresponding -sickly period a century after (1657-59) was so characterised in the -description by Willis. The fatal infection in the fleet after the defeat -of the Spanish Armada, in August, 1588, was probably dysentery and -ship-fever. Many other instances of the kind remain to be given in the -chapter on the sicknesses of voyages and colonial settlements. - -Dysentery begins to be heard of more frequently in the Stuart period, as a -malady of London. It is a prominent item, along with summer diarrhoea, in -the London bills of mortality from the year 1658, under the name "griping -of the guts," and is occasionally mentioned in letters from London about -the same years. The dysentery of London in 1669 was the subject of -Sydenham's observations, who says that it had been rarely seen in the -preceding ten years[823]. On the other hand he speaks of "the endemic -dysentery of Ireland," although he is not sure as to its type or -species[824]. Statements as to the Irish "country disease," are as old as -Giraldus Cambrensis[825]; but as the whole question of dysentery is -intimately bound up with that of typhus-fever, I shall reserve -consideration of its prevalence in Ireland on the great scale, as well as -of the annual mortality from it in the London bills of the 17th century, -until that section of the work in which fevers and the maladies akin to -them come into the first rank as if in lieu of the plague. - - * * * * * - -NOTE. A sweating character in the "hot agues" or fevers of the Elizabethan -period, in those of 1580-82 as well as in those of 1557-58, is asserted in -several passages in the text. It is noteworthy that in _Measure for -Measure_, one of Shakespeare's early comedies, the bawd says: "Thus, what -with the war, what with the sweat, what with the gallows, and what with -poverty, I am custom-shrunk" (Act I. Scene 2). - - - - -CHAPTER VIII. - -THE FRENCH POX. - - -One great epidemic disease of the first Tudor reigns, which brought -consternation and distress to multitudes, makes hardly any appearance in -the English records of the time, and no appearance at all in the writings -of the English profession. Long after, in 1576, William Clowes, surgeon to -St Bartholomew's Hospital, first broke the professional silence about -_lues venerea_ in England, and in his larger work of 1579 he gave a number -of startling facts and figures of its then prevalence in London. But the -great epidemic outburst of that disease in Europe began in the last years -of the 15th century; its ravages on the epidemic scale are supposed to -have lasted for twenty or thirty years from 1494; and its subsequent -prevalence is assumed, not without reason, to have been of a milder type -and within narrower limits. We hear of it, in England, from the political -side, at the time when popular arguments were wanted against the Romish -mass-priests and against the monasteries and the orders of friars. In the -practical reasoning of Englishmen the scandalous lives of priests, monks -and friars made the strongest argument for the policy which the king had -adopted towards Rome; and it so happened in those very years that a -scandalous life was betrayed, and made odious in more than sentiment, by -bearing an outward and visible sign. The epidemic of _morbus Gallicus_ -arose at an unfortunate time for the pretensions of Rome, or, perhaps, it -was itself part of the march of events. In Simon Fish's _Supplication of -Beggars_, which was compiled in 1524 and was read to Henry VIII. shortly -after, the weightiest plea is the charge of scandalous conduct resting -upon the priests. In the inquisitions which preceded the suppression of -the monasteries, the same plea is, justly or unjustly, brought to the -front in the case of one abbey after another. So close did the association -of a scandalous vice and its attendant disease become with the priesthood -that James I., writing long after concerning the sentiments of his mother, -Mary the queen of Scots, represents her as forbidding the archbishop "to -use the spittle" in his own baptism, for the reason that she would not -have "a pokie priest to spet in her child's mouth[826]." These, says king -James, were "her owne very words;" at all events, "a pocky priest" may be -accepted as a phrase of the time. The fact that the epidemic of syphilis -in England was used to discredit Romish priests is one of the few -indications that we have of its existence in this country. Wide and deep -as the commotion must have been which it caused, it found hardly any more -permanent expression than the private talk of the men of those days. It -was otherwise on the Continent. There, indeed, a copious literature sprang -up, of which some thirty works remain, from the essay of Conrad Schellig -of Heidelberg, printed without date or place, but ascribed to the year -1494 or 1495, down to the elaborate survey of the disease by Nicolas Massa -of Venice in 1532. The single work extant in England from that, the -earliest and greatest, period of the disease, is a poor piece of -manuscript in the Sloane collection, translated from some foreign author, -and entitled, "The tretese of the pokkis: and the cure by the nobull -counsell of parris[827]." One of its cases is that of a man, aged forty, -with two broad and deep, corroding and painful sores on his leg; another -is of a bishop of Toledo, who had "pustules" and nocturnal pains "as if -the bones would part from the flesh." The vague meaning of the term pox is -shown in one phrase, "paynes, viz. aches and pokkis." - -It was nothing unusual abroad to give cases, and to authenticate them with -the names of the sufferers. Thus Peter Pinctor, physician to the pope -Alexander Borgia, in a notorious but exceedingly scarce work published in -1500, enters fully into the truly piteous case of the cardinal bishop of -Segovia, major-domo of the Vatican, "qui hunc morbum patiebatur cum -terribilibus et fortissimis doloribus, qui die ac nocte, praecipue in -lecto, quiescere nec dormire poterat," as well as into the case of Peter -Borgia, the pope's nephew, "in quo virulentia materiae pustularum capitis -corrosionem in pellicaneo [pericranio] et in craneo capitis sui manifeste -fecit[828]." - -Contrasted with the copious writing and recording of cases abroad, the -English silence is remarkable. The origin of our first printed book on the -subject is characteristic. A literary hack of the time, one Paynel, a -canon of Merton Abbey, had translated, among other things, the _Regimen -Salernitanum_, a popular guide to health several hundred years old. Going -one day into the city to see the printer about a new edition, he was asked -by the latter to translate the essay on the cure of the French pox by -means of guaiacum (or the West-Indian wood) "written by that great clerke -of Almayne, Ulrich Htten, knyght." For, said the printer, "almost into -every part of this realme this most foul and peynfull disease is crept, -and many soore infected therewith." Ulrich von Htten's personal -experience of the guaiacum cure was accordingly translated from the Latin, -in 1533, and proved a good venture for the printer, several editions -having been called for[829]. The translation has no notes, and throws no -light on English experience. It is not until 1579, when Clowes published -his essay on the morbus Gallicus, that we obtain any light from the -faculty upon the prevalence of the malady in England. Meanwhile it remains -for us to collect what scraps of evidence may exist, in one place or -another, of this country's share in the original epidemic invasion during -the last years of the 15th century. - - -Earliest Notices of the French Pox in Scotland and England. - -The first authentic news of it comes from the Council Register of the -borough of Aberdeen under the date 21st April, 1497[830]:-- - - "The said day, it was statut and ordanit be the alderman and consale - for the eschevin of the infirmitey cumm out of Franche and strang - partis, that all licht weman be chargit and ordaint to decist fra thar - vicis and syne of venerie, and all thair buthis and houssis skalit, - and thai to pas and wirk for thar sustentacioun, under the payne of - ane key of het yrne one thar chekis, and banysene of the towne." - -The next news of it is also from Scotland, from the minutes of the town -council of Edinburgh, wherein is entered a proclamation of James IV., -dated 22 September, 1497[831]:-- - - "It is our Soverane Lords Will and the Command of the Lordis of his - Counsale send to the Provest and Baillies within this bur{t} that this - Proclamation followand be put till execution for the eschewing of the - greit appearand danger of the Infection of his Leiges fra this - contagious sickness callit the _Grandgor_ and the greit uther Skayth - that may occur to his Leiges and Inhabitans within this bur{t}; that - is to say, we charge straitly and commands be the Authority above - writtin, that all manner of personis being within the freedom of this - bur{t} quilks are infectit, or hes been infectit, uncurit, with this - said contagious plage callit the _Grandgor_, devoyd, red and pass - fur{t} of this Town, and compeir upon the sandis of Leith at ten hours - before none, and their sall thai have and fynd Botis reddie in the - havin ordanit to them be the Officeris of this bur{t}, reddely - furneist with victuals, to have thame to the _Inche_ [the island of - Inch Keith in the Firth of Forth], and thair to remane quhill God - proviyd for thair Health: And that all uther personis the quilks taks - upon thame to hale the said contagious infirmitie and taks the cure - thairof, that they devoyd and pass with thame, sua that nane of thair - personis quhilks taks sic cure upon thame use the samyn cure within - this bur{t} in pns nor peirt any manner of way. And wha sa be is - foundin infectit and not passand to the _Inche_, as said is, be - _Mononday_ at the Sone ganging to, and in lykways the said personis - that takis the sd Cure of sanitie upon thame gif they will use the - samyn, thai and ilk ane of thame salle be brynt on the cheik with the - marking Irne that thai may be kennit in tym to cum, and thairafter gif - any of tham remains, that thai sall be banist but favors[832]." - -Sir James Simpson, with his indefatigable research over antiquarian -points[833], has brought together evidence of payments from the king's -purse to persons infected with the "Grantgore" at Dalry, Ayrshire, in -September, 1497, at Linlithgow on 2nd October, 1497, at Stirling on the -21st February, 1498 ("at the tounne end of Strivelin to the seke folk in -the grantgore"), at Glasgow (also "at the tounn end") on 22nd February, -1498, and again at Linlithgow, 11th April, 1498. He quotes also from a -poem of William Dunbar, written soon after 1500, on the conduct of the -Queen's men on Fastern's e'en, the terms "pockis" and "Spanyie pockis." -From Sir David Lyndsay's poems, of much later date, and from other -references, he makes out that "grandgore" or "glengore" was the usual name -in Scotland down to the 17th century. Grandgore means _ la grande gorre_, -which is the same as _ la grande mode_. This name was given for a time in -France to the great disease of the day, but it was soon superseded by -_vrole_. Scotland is the only country where "grandgore" became -established as the common name of the pox. - -Before leaving the Scots evidence, two other ordinances may be quoted -from the town council records of Aberdeen. In a long list of regulations -under date the 8th October, 1507, there occur these two[834]:-- - - "Item, that diligent inquisitioun be takin of all infect personis with - this strange seiknes of Nappillis, for the sauetie of the town; and - the personis beand infectit therwith be chargit to keip thame in ther - howssis and uther places, fra the haile folkis." - - "Item, that nayne infectit folkis with the seiknes of Napillis be - haldin at the common fleschouss, or with the fleschouris, baxteris, - brousteris, ladinaris, for sauete of the toun, and the personis - infectit sall keip thame quyat in thar housis, zhardis, or uther comat - placis, quhill thai be haill for the infectioun of the nichtbouris." - -"Sickness of Naples" is a reference to the well-known diffusion of the -disease all over Europe by the mercenaries of Charles VIII. of France, -dispersing after the Italian war and the occupation of Naples. - -For England the first known mention of the pox is several years later than -the Scots references, although that proves nothing as to its actual -beginning in epidemic form. In the book of the Privy Purse Expenses of -Elizabeth of York, queen of Henry VII., there is an entry under the date -of March 15, 1503, of a sum of forty shillings paid on behalf of John -Pertriche "oon of the sonnes of mad Beale;" which sum appears to have been -what the youth cost her majesty for board, clothes, education, and -incidental expenses, during the year past. The various items making up the -sum of forty shillings are: his diets "for a year ending Christmas last -past," a cloth gown, a fustian coat, shirts, shoes and hose, "item, for -his learning, 20_d._ item for a prymer and saulter 20_d._ And payed to a -surgeon which heled him of the Frenche pox 20_s._ Sm{a.} 40_s._" It will -be observed that the surgeon's bill was as much as all his other expenses -for the year together[835]. - -The London chronicler of the time is alderman Robert Fabyan; but although -Fabyan, writing in the first years of the 16th century, uses the word -"pockys" to designate an illness of Edward IV. during a military -excursion to the Scots Marches in 1463, or long before the epidemic -invasion from the south of Europe, he says nothing of that great event -itself. There is a record, however, of one significant measure taken in -the year 1506, the suppression of the stews on the Bankside in Southwark. -These resorts were of ancient date, and for long paid toll to the bishop -of Winchester. In 1506 there were eighteen of them in a row along the -Surrey side of the river, a little above London Bridge; they were wooden -erections, each with a stair down to the water, and each with its river -front painted with a sign like a tavern, such as the Boar's Head, the -Cross Keys, the Gun, the Castle, the Crane, the Cardinal's Hat, the Bell, -the Swan, etc. These houses, says Stow, were inhibited in the year 1506, -and the doors closed up; but it was not long ere they were set open again, -the number being at the same time restricted to twelve[836]. They had been -suppressed once before, at the earnest demand of the citizens, in the -reign of Henry IV., and it appears from a sermon of Latimer's that they -were again suppressed about the year 1546. Thus Shakespeare had several -precedents in London for the situation which he creates in a foreign city, -in _Measure for Measure_. - -The next reference that I find to it is an oblique one, by Bernard Andr -in his _Annals of Henry VII._ On the occasion of mentioning the sweating -sickness of 1508, he says the latter disease occurred first in England -about four-and-twenty years before, and that it was "followed by a far -more detestable malady, to be abhorred as much as leprosy, a wasting pox -which still vexes many eminent men" ("multos adhuc vexat egregios alioquin -viros tabifica lues[837]"). Bernard Andr's association of the pox with -the sweating sickness, as of one new disease following another, is in the -same manner as the reference to it by Erasmus. In a letter from Basle, in -August, 1525, to Schiedlowitz, chancellor of Poland, he discourses upon -the sickliness of seasons and the mutations of diseases[838]: Until -thirty years ago England was unacquainted with the sweat, nor did that -malady go beyond the bounds of the island. In their own experience they -had seen mutations:--"nunc pestilentiae, nunc anginae, nunc tusses; sed -morbum morbus, velut ansam ansa trahit; nec facil cedunt ubi semel -incubuere." He then proceeds: - - "But if one were to seek among the diseases of the body for that which - ought to be awarded the first place, it seems to my judgment that it - is due to that evil, of uncertain origin, which has now been for so - many years raging with impunity in all countries of the world, but has - not yet found a definite name. Most persons call it the French pox - (_Poscas Galleas_), some the Spanish. What sickness has ever traversed - every part of Europe, Africa and Asia with equal speed? What clings - more tenaciously, what repels more vigorously the art and care of - physicians? What passes more easily by contagion to another? What - brings more cruel tortures? Vitiligo and lichens are deformities of - the skin, but they are curable. This lues, however, is a foul, cruel, - contagious disease, dangerous to life, apt to remain in the system and - to break out anew not otherwise than the gout." - -Whether it was from some mistaken theory of contagiousness or for other -reasons, a fellow of Merton was ordered to leave in 1511 because he had -the French pox[839]. In the English history nothing appears above the -surface until the beginning of the movement against the papal supremacy -and in favour of Reformation. That was a time of public accusations of all -kinds, and among the rest of opprobrious references to the pox. In Simon -Fish's _Supplication of Beggars_[840], which was written in 1524, certain -priests are thus hyperbolically spoken of: - - "These be they that have made an hundred thousande ydel hores in your - realme, which wold have gotten theyr lyvinge honestly in the swete of - their faces had not there superfluous riches illected them to uncleane - lust and ydelnesse. These be they that corrupte the hole generation of - mankynd in your realme, that catch the pockes of one woman and beare - it to another, ye some one of them will boste amonge his felowes that - he hath medled with an hundreth wymen." - -In the year 1529, there is a more painful and most undignified charge. In -the Articles of Arraignment of Wolsey in the House of Peers, the sixth -charge is: - - "The same Lord Cardinall, knowing himself to have the foul and - contagious disease of the great pox, broken out upon him in divers - places of his body, came daily to your Grace [the King], rowning in - your ear, and blowing upon your most noble Grace with his perilous and - infective breath, to the marvellous danger of your Highness, if God of - his infinite goodness had not better provided for your Highness. And - when he was once healed of them, he made your Grace believe that his - disease was an impostume in his head, and of none other thing[841]." - -Among the glimpses of contemporary manners in Bullein's _Dialogue of the -Fever Pestilence_ (1564), there is one referring to the pox; Roger, the -groom, soliloquizes thus: "her first husband was prentice with James -Elles, and of him learned to play at the short-knife and the horn thimble. -But these dog-tricks will bring one to the poxe, the gallows, or to the -devil[842]." Bullein, in his more systematic handbook to health, promises -to treat of the pox fully, but omits to do so. In one place he refers to -the wounds of a young man who fell into a deep coal-pit at Newcastle as -having been healed "by an auncient practisour called Mighel, a Frencheman, -whiche also is cunnynge to helpe his owne countrey disease that now is to -commonly knowen here in England, the more to be lamented: But yet dayly -increased, whereof I entinde to speake in the place of the Poxe." But the -only other reference is (in the section on the "Use of Sicke Men and -Medicine,") to certain drugs "which have vertue to cleanse scabbes, iche, -pox. I saie the pox, as by experience we se there is no better remedy than -sweatyng and the drinkyng of guaiacum," etc[843]. - -A good instance of the oblique mode of reference to the malady occurs in -another dialogue by a surgeon, Thomas Gale[844]. The pupil who is being -instructed tables the subject of "the morbus," which he farther speaks of -as "a great scabbe;" whereupon Gale pointedly takes him to task for the -affectation of "the morbus;" any disease, he says, is the morbus; what you -mean is the morbus Gallicus. - -About the same date, 1563, a casual reference is made to the wide -prevalence of the pox by John Jones in his _Dyall of Agues_. In -illustration of the fact that various countries originate different forms -of pestilence, as the Egyptians the leprosy, the Attics the joint-ache, -the Arabians swellings of the throat and flanks, and the English the -sweating sickness, he instances farther, "the Neapolitans, or rather the -besiegers of Naples, with the pockes, spread hence to far abroad through -all the parts of Europe, no kingdom that I have been in free--the more -pity[845]." - - -English Writings on the Pox in the 16th Century. - -The first original English writer on the pox was William Clowes. In his -treatise[846] of 1579, dedicated to the Society of the Barbers and -Chirurgions, he says that he had been bold "three years since to offer -unto you a very small and imperfect treatise of mine touching the cure of -the disease called in Latine _Morbus Gallicus_, the which, forasmuch as it -was at that time rather wrested from me by the importunitye of some of my -frendes, upon certain occasions then moving, than willingly of my selfe -published, it passed out of my handes so sodeinly and with so small -overlooking or correction," that he now in 1579 reissues it in a revised -and corrected form. - - "The Morbus Gallicus or Morbus Neapolitanus, but more properly Lues - Venera, that is the pestilent infection of filthy lust, and termed for - the most part in English the French Pocks, a sicknes very lothsome, - odious, troublesome and daungerous, which spreadeth itself throughout - all England and overfloweth as I thinke the whole world." He then - characterises the vice "that is the original cause of this infection, - that breedeth it, that nurseth it, that disperseth it." In the cure - of the malady he has had some reasonable experience, and no small - practice for many years. According to the following passage, St - Bartholomew's Hospital, to which Clowes was surgeon, was three parts - occupied by patients suffering from this malady:-- - - "It is wonderfull to consider how huge multitudes there be of such as - be infected with it, and that dayly increase, to the great daunger of - the common wealth, and the stayne of the whole nation: the cause - whereof I see none so great as the licentious and beastly disorder of - a great number of rogues and vagabondes: The filthye lyfe of many lewd - and idell persons, both men and women, about the citye of London, and - the great number of lewd alehouses, which are the very nests and - harbourers of such filthy creatures; By meanes of which disordered - persons some other of better disposition are many tymes infected, and - many more lyke to be, except there be some speedy remedy provided for - the same. I may speake boldely, because I speake truely: and yet I - speake it with very griefe of hart. In the Hospitall of Saint - Bartholomew in London, there hath bene cured of this disease by me, - and three (3) others, within this fyve yeares, to the number of one - thousand and more. I speake nothing of Saint Thomas Hospital and other - howses about this Citye, wherein an infinite multitude are dayly in - cure.... For it hapneth in the house of Saint Bartholomew very seldome - but that among every twentye diseased persons that are taken in, - fiftene of them have the pocks." Like the earlier writers on the - Continent he recognizes that the disease is communicated in more ways - than one; he speaks of "good poor people that be infected by unwary - eating or drinking or keeping company with those lewd beasts, and - which either for shame will not bewray it, or for lack of good - chirurgions know not how to remedy it, or for lack of ability are not - able otherwise to provide for the cure of it." - -In so far as Clowes follows his own experience, he is under no illusion as -to the nature and circumstances of the French pox. But he goes on to -append a pathology of the disease, which is taken from foreign writers and -reflects the bewilderment of the faculty over the constitutional effects -of the malady. As Erasmus said, in the letter quoted, it went all through -the body, "not otherwise than the gout." When it was first observed, it -appeared to be constitutional from the outset. More particularly it -covered the skin with "pustules" or "whelks" as if it had been a primary -eruption like variola, to which it was compared; hence the names "great -pox" and "small pox." It was not until long after that our present -pathology of primary, secondary and tertiary effects was worked out; in -the earliest writings the constitutional effects were referred to an -"inward cause," as Clowes says, to some idiopathic corruption of the -humours having the liver for their place of elaboration, or _minera -morbi_. Thus the learned explanation of the malady, which Clowes adopts -from foreign writers more skilled than himself in such disquisitions, has -no organic unity with his own common-sense observations. In his _Proved -Practice_ he defers still farther to the academical view, as given in the -treatise of John Almenar, a Spanish physician[847]. - -Although Clowes, in 1579, testifies to the very wide prevalence of the -disease, to so great an extent, indeed, that it occupied the hospitals -more than all other diseases put together, yet there is reason to think -that it had by that time lost the terrible severity of its original -epidemic type. The usual statement is that the disease abated both in -extent and in intensity within twenty or thirty years of the Italian -outbreak among the soldiery in 1494-96. A contemporary and ally of Clowes, -John Read, of Gloucester, published in 1588 a volume of translations, from -the Latin manuscript of the English surgeon of the 14th century, John -Ardern, on the cure of fistulas, and from the treatise on wounds, etc. by -the Spanish surgeon Arcaeus (Antwerp, 1574)[848]. In the latter he finds -the following passage, which seems to describe the _morbus Gallicus_ on -its first appearance:-- - - "The French disease did bring with it a kind of universal skabbe, - oftentimes with ring wormes, with the foulness of all the body called - vitiligo and alopecia, running sores in the head called acores, and - werts of both sortes, and many times with flegmatic or melancholic - swellings or ulcers corrosive, filthie and cancrouse, and also running - over the body, together with putrifying of the bone, and many times - also accompanied with all kind of grief, with fevers, consumptions, - and with many other differences of diseases." - -Read's own remarks draw an explicit contrast between the disease on its -first appearance and in his own later experience. Everyone knows now, he -says, how to treat the French pox, "the disease daylie dying and wearing -away by the exquisite cure thereof"--which may be taken to mean, at least, -a notable mitigation of the constitutional effects[849]. The treatment, -however, must have been much less effective then than now. Clowes speaks -of a class who "either for shame will not bewray it, or for lack of good -chirurgions know not how to remedy it, or for lack of ability are not able -otherwise to provide for the cure of it." The expense of a cure would have -been considerable, to judge by the case given above from an account-book -of the year 1503. Unable to employ "good chirurgions," the poorer class -would resort to quacks, of whose practice, in that and other diseases, we -have some glimpses both from Clowes in London and from Read in Gloucester -and Bristol. Of one irregular practitioner Clowes says, "He did compound -for fifteen pound to rid him within three fits of his ague, and to make -him as whole as a fish of all diseases." There was still a lower order of -empirics, whom Clowes disdained to contend with: - - "Yet I do not mean to speak of the old woman at Newington, beyond St - George's Fields, unto whom the people do resort as unto an oracle; - neither will I speak of the woman on the Bankside, who is as cunning - as the horse at the Cross Keys; nor yet of the cunning woman in - Seacole Lane, who hath more skill in her cole-basket than judgment in - urine, or knowledge in physic or surgery"--nor of many others who are - compared to "moths in clothes," to "canker," and to "rust in iron." - -Read gives an account of a travelling mountebank, which is too graphic to -be omitted: - - "In this year, 1587, there came a Fleming into the city of Glocester - named Woolfgange Frolicke, and there hanging forth his pictures, his - flags, his instruments, and his letters of mart with long lybells, - great tossells, broad scales closed in boxes, with such counterfeit - shows and knacks of knavery, cozening the people of their money, - without either learning or knowledge. And yet for money got him a - licence to practise at Bristow. But when he came to Gloceter, and - being called before some being in authority by myself and others, he - was not able to answer to any one point in chirurgerie; which being - perceived, and the man known, the matter was excused by way of - charity, to be good to straungers." - -One of the most systematic and detailed surgical treatises of the time, -John Banister's book on the "general and particular curation of ulcers" -(1575), is significant for the indirect way in which it refers to the lues -venerea. - - Thus at folio 25, "the malignant ulcer called cacoethes" is described - without anything said of a venereal origin, but the specific guaiacum - is given among the remedies. The same is the ease on the 31st and 32nd - leaves, which treat of "filthie and putrefied ulcers," guaiacum being - again prescribed. At folio 51, on ulcers of the mouth, it is said, "If - it proceed a morbo venereo, then first begin with due purgation, and - prescribe the party a thin diet with the decoction of guaiacum, and - use ointments requisite for that disease, strengthening the inner - parts. Use twice a day a sublimated water, as is afore written, to - touch the ulcer with lint rolled therein: - - Rec. Aqua Rosar.} an. two - & Plantag.} ounces, - Sublimati i dragme. - - Boil them in a glass bottel till the sublimate be dissolved." - - On fol. 57, he describes "ulcers of the privie parts," among which are - corroding ulcers, but without reference to the lues. It is in the - section headed, "To prepare the humours" (fol. 61) that the most - explicit reference occurs: "When the ulcers proceed through the French - pockes, a thinne diet must be used, with the decoction of guaiacum or - use universall unctions ex Hydrargyro[850]." - -In 1596 there appeared Peter Lowe's essay on _The Spanish Sickness_[851], -which is purely a product of experience abroad, his own or of others, and -is mainly doctrinal or theoretical. The other properly English works on -the subject are all subsequent to the Restoration, and do not come into -the period of this volume, nor, from an epidemiological point of view, -into this work at all. - -The evidence as to the wide prevalence of the pox in high and low becomes -abundant in the writings and memorials of the reign of James I. The -effects of the disease, as they would have been commonly remarked at this -period, are summed up in a well-known passage in _Timon of Athens_. It -would serve no purpose to collect the numerous references from Puritan -sermons, moral and descriptive essays, plays, and letters of the time. An -anonymous work of the year 1652 actually couples "the plague and the pox," -and shows "how to cure those which are infected with either of them[852]." -One more piece of evidence may be given for London in the year 1662, or -the beginning of the Restoration period,--a date which brings us down a -century and a half from the epidemic invasion with which we are more -immediately concerned; but the information for 1662 will serve to show how -the existence of the disease was still viewed _sub rosa_, and it may help -one to realize what its prevalence and its serious effects on the public -health must have been continuously in the generations before, and most of -all in the generation which experienced the full force of it as an -epidemic[853]. - -The London bills of mortality, setting forth the several causes of death, -were first printed in 1629. The entry of the French pox is in them from -the beginning, and the annual total of deaths set down to it is -considerable, approaching a hundred in the year. But according to Graunt, -who made the bills of mortality the subject of a critical study in -1662[854], they were defective or incorrect in their returns of deaths due -to the pox:-- - - "By the ordinary discourse of the world, it seems a great part of men - have, at one time or other, had some species of this disease ... - whereof many complained so fiercely, etc." He then explains, with - reference to the deaths entered as due to it in the bills of - mortality: "All mentioned to die of the French pox were returned by - the clerks of St Giles' and St Martin's in the Fields only, in which - place I understand that most of the vilest and most miserable houses - of uncleanness were; from whence I concluded that only _hated_ - persons, and such whose very noses were eaten off were reported by the - searchers to have died of this too frequent malady"--the rest having - been included under the head of consumption. - - -Origin of the Epidemic of 1494. - -The French pox, as it was called in England (also the great pox and simply -the pox), or the Spanish pox, as it was called in France, or the sickness -of Naples, or the grandgore, is one of the epidemic diseases concerning -which it seems fitting to say something of the antecedents, in addition to -what has been said of its arrival as an epidemic in this country, and of -its prevalence therein. But this will have to be said very briefly, and -without entering upon the pathology or ultimate nature of the disease. - -The numerous foreign writings upon it during the first years of its spread -over Europe are all singularly at a loss to account for its origin. One of -the earlier guesses was that it arose out of leprosy, as if a graft or -modification of that medieval disease, replacing it among the maladies of -the people. The occasion of that hypothesis seems to have been the lax -diagnosis of leprosy itself, a laxity which goes as far back as Bernard -Gordonio and Gilbert, if not farther back. Many things were called _lepra_ -which were not elephantiasis Graecorum, and among those things the lues -venerea in the Middle Ages was undoubtedly included. At a time when true -leprosy was disappearing or had already disappeared from Europe, a new -form of disease, which came suddenly into universal notice although by no -means then first into existence, seemed to be the successor of leprosy, -evoked out of it, and even caught from the leprous by contagion. That is -the view of Manardus, in a passage quoted in the sequel,--that syphilis -began in certain most particular circumstances at Valencia, in Spain, the -source of all the subsequent contamination of Europe having been a certain -soldier of fortune who was _elephantiosus_ or leprous. In the infancy of a -science it is natural to assign to some such single and definite source a -new phenomenon which was really called forth by a concurrence of -causes[855]. - -Another guess of the same kind was the famous theory, which found a truly -learned defender in Astruc last century and has had supporters more -recently, that the lues venerea came from the New World with the returning -ships of Columbus. There never was any considerable body of facts, -consistent as regards times and places, in support of that theory; and, on -antecedent grounds, the objection to it was that it is as difficult, to -say the least, to conceive of the origin of such a disease among the -savages of Hispaniola as among the natives of Europe. "Here or nowhere is -America" is the proper retort to all such visionary theories put upon the -distant and the unknown. The American theory is now hopelessly dead; the -more that the New World became known, the less did syphilis appear to be -indigenous to it: indeed the disease followed the track of Europeans, and -those parts of the American continent, north and south of the Isthmus, -which were longest in being reached by the civilisation of the Old World, -were also longest in being reached by the lues venerea[856]. - -The name "sickness of Naples," which occurs in the Aberdeen records as -early as 1507, indicates the common opinion of the laity as to the origin -and means of diffusion of the strange malady. In the passage above quoted -from Jones's _Dyall of Agues_, it will be seen that he refers it to "the -besiegers of Naples." The besiegers of Naples were the mercenaries of -Charles VIII. occupying it in the beginning of the year 1495, although -there was no real siege. The new disease was at the time, rightly or -wrongly, traced to them while they occupied Italy, and its diffusion over -Europe was justly traced to their dispersion to their several countries at -the end of the campaign. There is medical testimony that the malady -appeared in 1495 among the Venetian and Milanese troops which were banded -against Charles VIII. at the siege of Novara. Marcellus Cumanus, of -Venice, who was surgeon to the forces, thus speaks of the event, in -certain _Observationes de Lue Venerea_ which he wrote on the margin of -Argelata's work on Surgery[857]: - - "In Italy, in the year 1495, owing to celestial influences, I have - myself seen, and do testify that, while I was in the camp at Novara - with the troops of the Lords of Venice and of the Lords of Milan, many - knights and foot-soldiers suffered from an ebullition of the humours, - producing many pustules in the face and through the whole body; which - pustules commonly began under the prepuce or without the prepuce, like - a grain of millet-seed, or upon the glans, attended by considerable - itching. Sometimes a single pustule began like a small vesicle without - pain, but with itching. Being broken by rubbing, they ulcerated like a - corrosive _formica_, and a few days after, troubles began from pains - in the arms, legs and feet, with great pustules. All the skilled - physicians had difficulty in curing them.... Without medicines, the - pustules upon the body lasted a year or more, like a leprous variola." - He then gives many other details of symptoms and treatment. - -For the year after, 1496, two German writers, who were not surgeons but -occupied with affairs of state, Sebastian Brant (author of the _Ship of -Fools_) and Joseph Grnbeck, have described the disease, apparently in -connexion with the troops serving in Italy under Maximilian I. against the -invading army of Charles VIII. Thus, there is sufficient evidence that the -malady in its first two or three years of epidemic prevalence, was -associated with a state of war on Italian soil, in the persons of French -troops (and mercenaries of all nations), of Venetian and Milanese troops, -and of the German troops of the Emperor. - -But the German writers are clear that the disease did not originate on -Italian soil, at the siege of Naples or elsewhere. Thus Brant in his poem -of 1496 assigns to it an origin in France, and a dispersion within a year -or two over all Europe[858]: - - "Pestiferum in Lygures transvexit Francia morbum, - Quem _mala de Franzos_ Romula lingua vocat. - Hic Latium atque Italos invasit, ab Alpibus extra - Serpens, Germanos Istricolasque premit; - Grassatur mediis jam Thracibus atque Bohemis - Et morbi genus id Sarmata quisque timet. - Nec satis extremo tutantur in orbe Britanni - Quos refluum cingit succiduumque fretum. - Quin etiam fama est, Aphros penetrasse Getasque - Vigue sua utrumque depopulare polum." - -Grnbeck, who wrote briefly on the disease in 1496, returned to the -subject at much greater length in 1503, when he was secretary to the -Emperor Maximilian, his later treatise, _De Mentulagra, alias Morbo -Gallico_, being, indeed, among the best that the epidemic called forth. -Hensler doubts whether Grnbeck was himself in Italy, so as to observe the -ravages of the disease among the troops of the Emperor (including -Venetians and Milanese) at the sieges of Pisa and Leghorn in the summer of -1496, and among the opposing troops of Charles VIII. Be that as it may, -the following is from Grnbeck's description[859]: - - "O! quid unquam terribilius et abominabilius humanis sensibus - occurrit! Difficile est dictu, creditu fere impossibile, quanta - foeditatis, putredinis et sordium colluvione, quantisque dolorum - anxietatibus nonnullorum militum corpora involuerit. Aliqui etiam a - vertice ad usque genua quodam horrido, squalido, continuo, foedo et - nigro _scabiei_ genere, nulla parte faciei, (solis oculis exemtis), - nec colli, cervicis, pectoris vel pubis immuni relicta, percussi, ita - sordidi abominabilesque effecti sunt, qui ab omnibus commilitonibus - derelicti, ac etiam in plano et nudo campo sub dio emarescentes, nihil - magis quam _mortem_ expetiverunt.... At his omnibus nihil vel parum - proficientibus, et morbo ipso non contento hoc hominum numero, ut eos - solos tantis passionum cruciatibus afficeret, venenum contagiosum in - multos spectantes Italos, Teutones, Helveticos, Vindelicos, Rhaetos, - Noricos, Batavos, Morinos, Anglicos, Hispanos, et alios quos belli - occasio in copias conscripserat, transfudit.... Interea temporis, per - clandestinam Gallorum abitionem, exercitus fuerunt - dissoluti,"--Grnbeck himself proceeding with some merchants to - Hungary and thence to Poland[860]. - -How came this terrible infection to be among the troops of all nations on -Italian soil in the years 1494, 1495 and 1496? Sebastian Brant clearly -states that the French brought it with them, and that it spread first over -Liguria. Grnbeck says that it was seen _primo super Insubriam_, or the -Milanese, on which it rested like a dense cloud, until it was scattered by -the winds over the whole of Liguria, and so found its way into the armies -in Italy. Beniveni, of Florence, who wrote in 1498, says that it came to -Italy from Spain, and from Italy was carried to France. Thus we have a -theory of a Spanish origin, of a French origin, and perhaps also of a -native Italian origin--all agreeing that Italy during the state of war -from 1494 to 1496 was the theatre of its first ravages on the great scale, -and the source from which the disease was brought to all the countries of -Europe by the returning soldiery. - -The solution of the difficulty is to be looked for in the inquiries after -still earlier notices of the _lues venerea_. It is beyond the purpose of -this book to enter upon that large subject, farther than has already been -done with the object of proving the generic use of the medieval term -_lepra_. It is now accepted by competent students of medical history that -the same disease, with all varieties or modes of primary, secondary or -tertiary, existed in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, although -secondaries and tertiaries may not have been ascribed to their primary -source. But what specially concerns us here is the question whether the -malady was anywhere beginning to be more noticeable in the years -immediately preceding the great military explosion on Italian soil. On -that point there is some evidence from more than one source, that the -malady was sufficiently prevalent in the south of France to be a subject -of remark previous to the French expedition to Italy, that it had found -its way to the ports of Spain (Barcelona and Valencia), and that the -troops of Charles VIII., if not also that youthful monarch himself, -carried it across the Alps into Liguria, and so gave it that start on -Italian soil which the state of war for the next two years raised to the -power of a virulent and diffusive epidemic[861]. - -The best piece of evidence of its prevalence in Languedoc and its -spreading thence to the adjoining coast of Spain is found in a letter of -the 18th April, 1494 (four months before Charles VIII. entered Italy), -written by Nicolas Scyllatius just after arriving at Barcelona[862]. The -province of Narbonne, he says, a part of France adjoining Spain, now sent -forth another vice. Women felt it most; it infected neighbours by contact; -it has lately invaded Spain, hitherto untouched by it. "I was horrified," -he continues, "on first landing at Barcelona; for I met with many of the -inhabitants who were seized by that contagion. On my inquiring of the -physicians (for with these I held converse during nearly all that -journey), they assured me that the new _lues_ had been derived from -truculent France." In keeping with this entirely credible testimony is the -statement of Torella, a native of Valencia, who wrote one of the earlier -essays on the new disease ("De Pudendagra") in November, 1497. The disease -first broke out, he says, in Auvergne in 1493 (incepit, ut aiunt, haec -maligna aegritudo anno 1493 in Alervnia), and so came in the way of -contagion to Spain and the Islands [to Sardinia, where he was bishop, and -to Corsica], and to Italy, creeping in the end over all Europe, and, if -one may so speak, over the whole globe[863]. - -Torella thus confirms the Barcelona traveller so far as regards -importations from the south of France to the neighbouring ports, the -former writer naming Auvergne as the endemic seat of the malady, whereas -the latter gives Narbonne. Another piece of evidence, that the pox was in -Valencia, as well as in Barcelona, before the expedition of Charles VIII., -is found in a story told by Manardus of Ferrara (1500), a story which is -wholly improbable so far as concerns the origin of syphilis, at a stated -time and place, out of a case of leprosy, but is entirely credible so far -as regards the grossness of its circumstances: - - "Coepisse hunc morbum per id tempus, dicunt, quo Carolus, Francorum - rex, expeditionem Italicam parabat: coepisse, autem, in Valentia, - Hispaniae Taraconensis insigni civitate, a nobili quodam scorto, cujus - noctem elephantiosus quidam, ex equestri ordine miles, quinquaginta - aureis emit; et cum ad mulieris concubitum frequens juventus - accurreret, intra paucos dies supra quadringentos infectos; e quorum - numero nonnulli, Carolum Italiam petentem sequuti, praeter alia quae - adhuc vigent importata mala et hoc addiderunt[864]." - -The evidence that follows is not so explicit, but it has strong -probability. The progress of Charles VIII. from France to Italy in the -autumn of 1494 has been told by Philip de Comines in his _Cronique du Roy -Charles VIII._, first printed at Paris in 1528, nineteen years after the -author's death. De Comines accompanied his master, the French king, as far -as Asti; he was then sent on a mission to Venice, and rejoined the king at -Florence. But De Comines, who was no gossip, omits one interesting fact -near the beginning of the journey to Italy, which has been preserved for -us in a contemporary work (1503) called _La Cronique Martiniane_, or -chronicle of all the popes down to Alexander Borgia lately deceased[865]. -This chronicle relates as follows concerning Charles VIII.'s journey:--"Il -se arresta premierement aucuns jours a Lyon, doubteux s'il passeroit les -mons, car il y estoit detenu pour les delices et plaisances de la cit et -pour les folles amours de aucunes gorrieres lyonnoises. Mais quant l'air -devint pestilent, il s'en tyra Vienne, cit de Daulphin." His great -army had already passed the Alps and arrived in the country of Asti: it is -said to have consisted, in round numbers, of 3600 men-at-arms, 6000 -bowmen, 8000 pikemen, and 8000 with arquebuses, halberds, two-handed -swords, or other arms, together with a heavy artillery train of 8000 -horses. A large part of this force were Swiss; another part were -Gascons[866]. - -Charles VIII. left Vienne on the 23rd of August, and crossed Mont Genvre -on the 2nd September, whence he proceeded direct by Susa and Turin, -joining his army at Asti on September 9. At Asti, says De Comines, he had -an illness, which caused that minister to delay setting out on his mission -to Venice for a few days. The original printed text of De Comines' -_Chronique_ (Paris, 1528), says that the author remained at Asti a few -days longer "because the king was ill of the smallpox (_de la petite -verolle_) and in peril of death, for that the fever was mixed therewith; -but it lasted only six or seven days, and I set out upon my way." The next -edition has no change but "in great peril of death" (_en grant peril de -mort_), instead of merely "in peril." Now, where did this diagnosis of -_petite verolle_ come from? Nothing is said of smallpox being prevalent at -the time among the troops or along their route. The name _petite verolle_ -itself did not exist in 1494; it came into existence with _grosse -verolle_, having being made necessary by the latter; and the first that we -hear of _grosse verolle_ is when the Italian campaign was over and the pox -was raging in Paris, the Parlement of Paris, on the 6th of March, 1497, -having made an ordinance against a certain contagious malady "nomme la -_grosse verole_," which had been in the kingdom and in the city of Paris -since two years. Probably Comines deliberately wrote "_petite verolle_" in -his manuscript, having composed the latter subsequent to 1498, or at a -time when the terms _verolle_, or _grosse verolle_, and _petite verolle_, -were passing current and were known in their respective senses. The causes -or circumstances of the king's malady at Asti are not enlarged upon by De -Comines, farther than that he makes a somewhat disjointed remark, that all -the Italian wines of that year were sour and that the season was hot, -which would have had as little to do with the one kind of pox as with the -other. Nor is anything said of smallpox spreading among those near the -king[867]. - -The whole sequence of events, from the "folles amours" of Lyons to the -sharp sickness at Asti, has suggested to historians, who have no medical -theory to advocate, that it was not really _petite vrole_ that the king -suffered from, but _grosse vrole_. Martin says that Charles VIII. -recommenced at Asti his Lyons follies and that he became violently sick, -"of the smallpox, says one, or, perhaps, of a new malady which began to -show itself in Europe," meaning syphilis. To show that such infection was -already possible, he quotes an ordinance of the provost of Paris April 15, -1488, enjoining "the leprous" to leave the capital. This is very like -Edward III.'s order to the London "lepers" a century and a half earlier, -in which the reasons given (the frequenting of stews, the pollution of -their breath, &c.) point somewhat clearly to the nature of their -"leprosy." An order for the banishment of "lepers" from Paris in 1488 must -have been occasioned by some unusual risk of contamination, just as the -London order of 1346 would have been. It is in that sense that the French -historian regards it; the ordinance, he says, "concernait probablement -dj les syphilitiques confondus avec les lpreux[868]." - -De Comines, who is the authority for the diagnosis of smallpox, had -inserted the word _petite_ before _verolle_ for reasons best known to -himself. I shall show in the next chapter, upon smallpox and measles in -England, that the ambiguous teaching of the faculty as to the nature and -affinities of the pox proper within the first years of its epidemic -appearance gave a ready opportunity of calling the _grosse vrole_ by the -name of _petite vrole_ in circumstances where it was polite, or prudent, -or convenient so to do. The only importance of a correct diagnosis of the -king's malady is that the case of one would have been the case of many. - -The indications all point to a somewhat unusual prevalence of _lues -venerea_ previous to the autumn of 1494, in the luxurious provinces of -southern France as well as in the capital. Beyond doubt, the malady had -already spread by contagion to the great Spanish ports nearest the Gulf of -Lyons. The expedition of Charles VIII. passed through that region on its -route over the Alps. According to Sebastian Brant, it was the French who -brought the disease into Liguria, and, according to Grnbeck, it issued, -_Gallico tractu, ab occidentali sinu_, gathered like a dense cloud _super -Insubriam_ (the Milanese), and was thence dispersed, as if by the winds, -over the whole province of Liguria. - -But for the circumstances of the military expedition of 1494, and the -state of war in Italy for two years after, it is conceivable that the -unusual prevalence in France of a very ancient malady would have had -little interest for Europe at large, although the cities on the nearest -coast of Spain appear to have already shared the infection. That unusual -prevalence in the south of France has in it nothing of mystery; the period -was the end of the Middle Ages, distinguished by a revival of learning, of -trade and commerce,--a revival of most things except morals. But, assuming -that there was such unusual prevalence above the ancient and medieval -level, it may still seem unaccountable that a great European epidemic, of -a most disastrous and fatal type, should have been engendered therefrom. - -There are, however, many parallel cases, on a minor scale from modern -times, of a peculiar severity of type, of inveteracy, and of -communicability by unusual ways, having been cultivated from commonplace -beginnings, among unsophisticated communities about the Baltic and -Adriatic, the people being without resident doctors and unfamiliar with -such a disease and its risks. These have been collected and analyzed by -Hirsch, whose conclusion is that "the mode of origin, and the character of -these endemics of syphilis, appear to me to furnish the key to an -understanding of the remarkable episode of the disease in the 15th -century,--an episode which entirely resembles them as regards its type, -and differs from them only as regards extent[869]." - -Referring the reader for farther particulars to the work quoted, I shall -leave the antecedents of the epidemic of pox in the end of the 15th -century to be judged of according to the probabilities thus far stated. - - - - -CHAPTER IX. - -SMALLPOX AND MEASLES. - - -With our modern habit of seeking out the matter of fact, of going back to -the reality and of reconstructing the theory, it is not easy for us to -understand how completely the medieval world of medicine was enslaved to -authority and tradition even in matters that were directly under their -eyes. It was thought a great thing that Linacre, of Oxford, in the first -years of the 16th century, and Caius, of Cambridge, some fifty years -later, should have gone back to Galen for their authority, passing over -the Arabians who had been the interpreters of classical medicine all -through the Middle Ages. Their editions of forgotten medical works of the -Graeco-Roman school were a step forward in scholarship, and they opened -the way to the first-hand observations of disease which really began some -hundred years after with the writings of Willis, Sydenham and Morton. But -smallpox and measles were not Galenist themes, they were peculiarly -Arabian; and the very moderate share that England took in the medical -Revival of Learning made no difference to the paragraphs or chapters on -those diseases that were circulating in the medieval compends. While the -Arabian or Arabistic writers of Spain, of Salerno, and of Montpellier were -the depositaries and interpreters of the Galenic teaching, they were also -the first-hand authorities upon some matters of specially Arabian -experience, of which smallpox and measles were the chief. Whatever was -said of those two epidemic maladies abroad, in the systematic works of -Gordonio and Gilbert, and in the later compilation of Gaddesden in -England, was not only of Arabian origin, but it was all that was known of -them. Rhazes, the original Arabic writer on smallpox and measles about the -beginning of the 11th century, supplied both the doctrine and the -experience. His observations and reasonings, altered or added to by his -later countrymen, passed bodily into the medical text-books of all Europe. -The interest in the treatise of Rhazes was so great that it was printed in -1766 by Channing, of Oxford, in Arabic with a Latin translation, and in an -English translation from the original by Greenhill, of Oxford, in 1847. - -In the literature we took over smallpox from the Arabians; but had we no -native experiences of the disease itself, and, if so, when did it first -appear in this country? One can hardly attempt an answer to these -questions even now without stirring up prejudice and embittered memories. -It has been the fate of smallpox, as an epidemological subject, to be -invested with bigotry and intolerance. Whoever has maintained that it is -not as old as creation has been suspected in his motives; anyone who shows -himself inclined to put limits to its historical duration and its former -extent in Britain is clearly seeking to belittle the advantages that have -been derived during the present century from vaccination. - -The wish to establish the antiquity of the smallpox in Europe has been as -strong as the wish to overthrow the antiquity of the great pox. While -undoubted traces of the latter in early times have been covered over with -the generic name of leprosy, the vaguest reference to "pustules" or spots -on the skin have been turned by verbalist ingenuity to mean devastating -epidemics of smallpox. I am here concerned only with Britain, and must -pass over the much-debated reference by Gregory of Tours to epidemics in -the 6th century, the period of the Justinian plague. But in England the -epidemic which stands nearest in our annals to the great plague of the 6th -century, the widespread infection described by Beda as having begun in 664 -and as having continued in monasteries and elsewhere for years after, has -been claimed by Willan as an epidemic of smallpox[870]. Willan, with all -his erudition, was a dermatologist, and acted on the maxim that there is -nothing like leather. His contention in favour of smallpox has been -referred to in the first chapter, dealing with the plague described by -Beda, and need not farther concern us. It is not in England that we find -evidence of smallpox in those remote times but in Arabia. - - -Smallpox in the Arabic Annals. - -For our purpose the evidence on the antiquity of smallpox in China and -India may be accepted, and for the rest left out of account. The Arabian -influence is nearer to us, and is the only one that practically concerns -us. Coming, then, to the history of smallpox in its prevalence nearest to -Europe, we find a definite statement of the disease appearing first among -the Abyssinian army of Abraha at the siege of Mecca in what was known as -the Elephant War of A.D. 569 or 571. The best of the Arabic historians, -Tabari[871], writes: "It has been told to us by Ibn Humaid, after Salima, -after Ibn Ischg, to whom Ja'gb b. Otha b. Mughira b. Achnas related that -one had said to him, that in that year the smallpox appeared for the first -time in Arabia, and also the bitter herbs,--rue, colocynth [and another]." -The tradition is by word of mouth through several, after the Semitic -manner, but it need not on that account be set aside as worthless. So far -as concerns the bitter herbs, it is said to be against probability; but as -regards the new form of epidemic sickness, there is no such objection to -it. - -The Arabic legend, as given by Tabari is as follows: "Thereupon came the -birds from the sea in flocks, every one with three stones, in the claws -two and in the beak one, and threw the stones upon them. Wherever one of -these stones struck, there arose an evil wound, and pustules all over. At -that time the smallpox first appeared, and the bitter trees. The stones -undid them wholly. Thereafter God sent a torrent which carried them away -and swept them into the sea. But Abraha and the remnant of his men fled: -he himself lost one member after another." In a former passage, the -calamity of Abraha is thus given: "But Abraha was smitten with a heavy -stroke; as they brought him along in the retreat, his limbs fell off piece -by piece, and as often as a piece fell off, matter and blood came forth." -To illustrate this account by Tabari, his recent editor, Nldeke, cites -the following from an anti-Mohammedan poem: "Sixty thousand returned not -to their homes, nor did their sick continue in life after their return." -One of the elephants which dared to enter the sacred region is said to -have been also wounded and afflicted by the smallpox. - -In this narrative of Abraha's disaster, says Nldeke, there is a mixture -of natural causation and of purely fabulous miracle; a real and sufficient -account of the cause of the Abyssinian leader's discomfiture, namely, an -outbreak of smallpox, had been blended with legendary tales. That the -disease was smallpox is made probable by the continuity of the Arabic -name; under the same name Rhazes, the earliest systematic writer, -describes the symptoms, pathology and treatment of what was unquestionably -the smallpox afterwards familiar in Western Europe. Why it should have -originated on Arabian soil in an invading army from Africa, is a question -that would require much knowledge, now beyond our reach, to answer -conclusively. - - -Theory of the nature of Smallpox. - -The nature of the disease should, however, be borne in mind always in the -front of every speculation as to the origin of its contagious and epidemic -properties. It involves no speculative considerations to pronounce -smallpox a skin-disease, of the nature of lichen turned pustular. It is a -skin-disease first, and a contagious or epidemic malady afterwards; its -place among diseases of the skin is indeed fully acknowledged by -dermatologists. Apart from its contagiousness it conforms to the -characters of other cutaneous eruptions: its outbreak is preceded by -disturbed health, including fever; when the eruption comes out the fever -is so far relieved; and as in some other eruptions which are not -contagious the constitutional disturbance is in proportion to the area of -the skin involved. Even the peculiar scars or pits which it leaves behind -in skins of a certain texture or in the more vascular regions, such as the -face, are not unknown in non-contagious skin-diseases; nor does its other -peculiarity, the offensive odour of many pustules, seem unaccountable in a -skin-disease native to tropical countries. - -Eruptions on the skin are in many cases the outcome of constitutional -ill-health; for example, the eczema of gout. Also where the whole body is -infected, as in syphilis, there are skin-eruptions, which may be pimples -(lichenous) or scales, or rashes, or, as in the first great outburst of -syphilis, "pustules" so general over the body that those who were casting -about for the nosological affinities of the new malady, saw no better -place for it than Avicenna's group of _alhumata_, which included smallpox -and measles. That a skin-eruption of the nature of smallpox should have -come out as a constitutional manifestation, and that a number of persons -should have exhibited it together for the same internal reason, are both -credible suppositions, although necessarily unsupported by historic -evidence. Let us suppose that the Abyssinian army before Mecca endured -some ordinary discomfort of campaigning, that, in the uniformity of their -life, numbers together had fallen into the same constitutional ill-health -just as numbers together have often fallen into scurvy, and that an -eruption of the skin, proper to the tropics, was part of it. What we have -farther to suppose is that the constitutional eruption became catching -from the skin outwards, so to speak,--that it could be detached from its -antecedents in the body, and could exist as an autonomous thing, so that -it would break out upon those who had none of its underlying -constitutional conditions, but had been merely in contact with such as had -developed it constitutionally or from within. Such detachment of a -constitutional eruption from its primary conditions is little more than -constantly happens when a skin-disease like eczema, or acne, persists long -after its provocation, or the disordered health which called it forth, is -removed. The inveteracy or chronicity of some skin-diseases is itself a -form of autonomy, but a form of it which does not transcend the -individual, just as, among infections themselves, cancer does not -transcend the individual or propagate itself by contagion[872]. But there -exists a closer probable analogy for a secondary eruption becoming a -self-existent or independent infective disease. The instance in view is no -more than probable, and may easily be disputed by those who have -sufficient prepossessions the other way; but there is no theory that suits -so well the negro disease of yaws as that it is a somewhat peculiar -secondary of syphilis, which is now able to be communicated as an exanthem -detached from the primary lesions on which it had depended originally for -its existence. - -All the evidence, historical and geographical, points to the several -varieties of the black skin (or yellow skin) as the native tissues of -smallpox. It is not without significance that a disease of the negroes -which was observed by English doctors not long ago in the mining districts -of South Africa led to a sharp controversy whether it was smallpox or not: -according to some, it was a constitutional eruption; according to others -it was a contagious infection. Such phenomena are not likely to be seen in -our latitudes; but the original smallpox itself was not a disease of the -temperate zone[873]. - -I shall not carry farther this line of remark as to the probable -circumstances in which a pustular eruption, among the Abyssinians before -Mecca, or among other Africans or other dark-skinned races in other places -and at other times, had become epidemically contagious in the familiar -way of smallpox. One has to learn by experience that there is at present -no hearing for such inquiries, because a certain dominant fashion in -medicine prefers to relegate all those origins to the remotest parts of -the earth and to the earliest ages (practically _ab aeterno_), and there -to leave them with a complacent sense that they have been so disposed of. -That is not the way in which the study of origins is carried out for all -other matters of human interest. Yet diseases are recent as compared with -the species of living things; some of them are recent even as compared -with civilized societies. Epidemical and constitutional maladies touch at -many points, and depend upon, the circumstances of time and locality, and -upon racial or national characters. Perhaps their origins will one day be -made a branch of historical or archaeological research. - - -European Smallpox in the Middle Ages. - -The present extensive prevalence of smallpox among the Arabs may or may -not date from the Elephant War of A.D. 569. Its prevalence also in -Abyssinia, so widely in modern times that almost everyone bears the marks -of it, may have no continuous history from the return of Abraha's -expedition. But the history of smallpox in the West comes to us through -the Saracens, and there can be no question that the disease is at the -present day peculiarly at home in all African countries, and most of all -in the upper basin of the Nile, where, as Pruner says, "it appears as the -one great sickness[874]." It is a remark of Freind, whose erudition and -judgment should carry weight, that "the Saracens first brought in this -distemper, and wherever their arms prevailed, this spread itself with the -same fury in Africa, in Europe, and through the greatest part of Asia, the -eastern part especially[875]." Our inquiry here does not extend beyond -England, so that the extremely disputable question of the amount and -frequency of smallpox in the European countries conquered or invaded by -the Saracens in the Middle Ages need not be raised[876]. - -So far as concerns England, smallpox was first brought to it, not by the -Saracen arms, but by Saracen pens. The earliest English treatise on -medicine, the _Rosa Anglica_ of Gaddesden, has the same chapter "De -Variolis [et Morbillis]" as all the other medieval compends--in substance -the same as in the earlier work of Gilbert, and in all the other Arabistic -writings earlier or later. The _Rosa Anglica_ was a success in its day, -partly, no doubt, by reason of its style being more boisterous than that -of Gilbert's or Gordonio's treatises, partly, also, on account of its -blunt indecency in certain passages. Guy de Chauliac, of Avignon, one of -the few original observers of the time, had heard of the _Rosa Anglica_, -and was curious to see it; but he found in it "only the fables of -Hispanus, of Gilbert, and of Theodoric," and he rather unkindly fixed upon -it the epithet of "fatuous." What de Chauliac had probably heard of was -Gaddesden's occasional claims to originality; and these we shall now -examine so far as they concern smallpox. - -One of Gaddesden's variations from the stock remarks on smallpox is his -explanation of why the disease was called variola: it is called variola, -says he, because it occurs _in diverse parts of the skin (quia in cute -diversas partes occupant)_. This is an ingenious improvement upon Gilbert, -who says that it is called variola from the variety of colours (_et -dicitur variola a varietate coloris_)--sometimes red, sometimes white, or -yellow, or green, or violet, or black. Another remark attributed (by Hser -at least) to Gaddesden as original, is that a person may have smallpox -twice; but Gaddesden, in a later paragraph, shows where he got that from: -"And thus says Avicenna (_quarto_ Canonis), that sometimes a man has -smallpox twice--once properly, and a second time improperly." The most -famous of Gaddesden's originalities is his treatment by wrapping the -patient in red cloth; for that also Hser ascribes to him. But Peter the -Spaniard, the Hispanus of de Chauliac's reference given above, is before -him with the red-cloth treatment also, while he is candid enough to quote -Gilbert: "Any cloth dyed in purple," says Hispanus, "has the property of -attracting the matter to the outside." - -Gilbert's reference is as follows: "Old women in the country give burnt -purple in the drink, for it has an occult property of curing smallpox. Let -a cloth be taken, dyed _de grano_." Bernard Gordonio, also, says: -"Thereafter let the whole body be wrapped in red cloth." There was -probably Arabic authority for that widely diffused prescription, as for -all the rest of the teaching about smallpox. But Gaddesden does improve -upon his predecessors in boldly appealing to his own favourable experience -of red cloth:--"Then let a red cloth be taken, and the variolous patient -be wrapped in it completely, as I did with the son of the most noble king -of England when he suffered those diseases (_istos morbos_); I made -everything about his bed red, and it is a good cure, and I cured him in -the end without marks of smallpox." - -With reference to this cure, it has to be said, in the first place, that -the object of the red cloth was to draw the matter to the surface[877], -and that it had nothing to do with the prevention of pitting. The means -to prevent pitting was usually to open the pustules with a golden needle; -that is the Arabian advice, and all the Arabists copy it. Gaddesden among -the rest copies it, but he does not say that he practised it on the king's -son. If he had said so, we might have believed that the disease was -actually one bearing pustules which could be opened by a needle. What he -says, in the earliest printed text (Pavia, 1492) is that, while the king's -son was "suffering from those diseases," he caused him to be wrapped in -red cloth, and the bed to be hung with the same, and that he cured him -without the marks of smallpox. Gaddesden was not altogether an honest -practitioner; on the contrary he was an early specimen of the quack _in -excelsis_. According to the learned and judicious Dr Freind, "his -practice, I doubt, was not formed upon any extraordinary knowledge of his -faculty;" and again, "He was, as it appears from his own writings, -sagacious enough to see through the foibles of human nature; he could form -a good judgment how far mankind could be imposed upon; and never failed to -make his advantage of their credulity[878]." The opportunity of diagnosing -variola in the king's son, and of curing it by red cloth, so as to leave -no pits, was one that such a person was not likely to let slip. "It is a -good cure," he says; and we may go so far with him as to admit that it -must have been impressive to the royal household to have heard some sharp -sickness of the nursery called by the formidable name of variola, and to -have seen it cured "_sine vestigiis_." - - -Measles in Medieval Writings. - -In the writings of the Arabians and of their imitators, the so-called -Arabists, measles and smallpox are always taken together. The usual -distinction made between them is that _morbilli_, or measles, come from -the bile, whereas _variolae_, or smallpox, come from the blood, that the -former are small, and that they are less apt to attack the eyes. The -reference in Gaddesden is of the usual kind, but it is complicated by the -introduction of a third term, _punctilli_, which Gruner, however, takes to -be merely a synonym for _morbilli_. As Gaddesden's passage is of some -importance for the history of the familiar name of the disease in England, -I shall translate it at length, so far as it can be made into sense:-- - - "Variolae are so called, as if variously choosing the skin itself, - because in the skin they occupy divers parts, by apostematising and - infecting; they are caused by corruption of blood, and therein they - differ from morbilli and punctilli. - - Morbilli are small apostemata in the skin generated of bile; and they - are a diminutive of apostematous diseases because they occupy less - space by reason of the sharpness of choleric matter. They are in fact - variolae of choleric matter, and the smallest of pustules. But - punctilli are infections commonly sanguineous, as if they had arisen - from a fleabite, only they remain continually. And punctilli are of - two kinds, large and small. Of the small I have already spoken [under - the name of morbilli?]. But the large are broad, red and opaque - infections in the legs of poor and wasting persons, (_pauperum et - consumptuorum_), who sit as if continually at the fire without boots; - and they are called in English _mesles_[879]." - -The rest of Gaddesden's chapter on smallpox and measles contains nothing -that is not to be found in Avicenna or in any medieval compend on -medicine. But the passage quoted is of interest as using the old word -"mesles" to mean one of the two forms of _morbilli_ or _punctilli_. We are -here enabled to see a little way into the confusion of mind which attended -the medievalists in their verbalist dealing with disease. The syntax of -Gaddesden's sentence implies that the broad, red and opaque infections on -the legs of poor and wasted persons were called in English _mesles_. In -other writers, both before and after his date, the name of mesles or -mesels or meseals was given, not to a form of disease, but to a class of -sufferers from disease. It is the name applied to the inmates of -leper-houses by Matthew Paris (circa 1250)--_miselli_ and _misellae_, -being diminutives of _miser_[880]. It is the word used for the same class -in the Norman-French entries in the Rolls of Parliament in the reign of -Edward I. fixing the taxation of leper-houses: if the head of the house -was himself a _meseal_, the hospital was to pay nothing, but if the head -were a whole man, the hospital had to pay[881]. The same use of mesles, as -meaning the leprous, in the generic sense, occurs several times in the -14th century poem, 'The Vision of Piers the Ploughman[882].' Thus, Christ -in His ministrations, - - "Sought out the sick and sinful both, - And salved sick and sinful, both blind and crooked; - And comune women converted, and to good turned. - Both meseles and mute, and in the menysoun bloody, - Oft he heled such. He ne held it for no mystery, - Save tho he leched Lazar that had ylain into grave." - -Or again: - - "Ac old men and hore that helpless ben of strength, - And women with child that worche ne mowe, - Blind and bedred and broken their members, - That taketh their mischief mekely, as meseles and other." - -It is this old English word "mesles," meaning the leprous in the generic -sense, that Gaddesden brings into his Latin text in connexion with -_morbilli_ (or _punctilli_). It is useless to look for precision in such a -writer; but if his introduction of "mesles" in the particular context mean -anything at all, it means that the English word represented a variety of -_morbilli_,--the large, broad and opaque variety. That it should have -occurred to him to bring these blotches or spots on the legs of poor -people even remotely into relation with the _morbilli_ of the Arabians, -probably means that Gaddesden had a merely verbal acquaintance with the -latter, or that he knew them only in books. It is certainly improbable -that anyone, even in the Middle Ages, who had ever seen a case of measles -should bracket that transitory and insubstantial mottling of the skin, -with the large, broad and "obscure" spots (or nodules, or what else) on -the legs of poor and wasted persons, which were called, in the vernacular, -mesles. But Gaddesden, though a verbalist and a plagiary, was a great name -in medicine, a name usually joined (as in Chaucer) with more solid -reputations than his own. If he identified "mesles" with a variety of -_morbilli_ (which variety no one but himself seems to have heard of), it -was an easy transition for the name in English usage to become what it now -is, measles meaning _morbilli_, in the correct and only real sense of the -latter[883]. - - -History of the name "Pocks" in English. - -Gaddesden's case of _variola_ which he cured without pitting by means of -red cloth stands alone in English records until the 16th century; probably -he was as little able to diagnose variola as _morbilli_, and it is more -than probable that he would not have scrupled to call some infantile -malady by the book-name _variola_, on the principle of "omne ignotum pro -terribili," when there was anything to be gained by so doing. There is no -independent evidence that smallpox or measles existed in England in the -14th and 15th centuries. There are extant various medieval -prescription-books, in which remedies are given for all the usual -diseases. If the name of _variola_, or any English form of it, occur -therein, we should draw the same inference as from the prescriptions for -maladies of children such as "the kernels," and "the kink" (or -whooping-cough)[884]. In the Anglo-Saxon "leechdoms," which have been -collected in three volumes, the word _poc_ occurs once in the singular in -the phrase "a poc of the eye" (probably a hordeum or sty of the eyelid), -and once in the plural (_poccan_) without reference to any part of the -body and with no indication that a general eruption was meant. Willan, -indeed, has found in a manuscript of uncertain date a Latin incantation -against disease, in which the words _lues_, _pestis_, _pestilentia_, and -_variola_ occur; at the end of it is written in Anglo-Saxon an invocation -of certain saints to "shield me from the _lathan poccas_ and from all -evil[885]." This looks as if _poccas_ had been the Anglo-Saxon translation -of _variola_. But it remains to be seen in what sense the word "pokkes" -was used in the earliest English writings. - -In the 'Vision of Piers the Ploughman' (passus XX) the retribution of -Nature or "Kynde" upon the wickedness of the times is thus mentioned: - - "Kynde came after with many keen sores, - As pokkes and pestilences, and much people shent; - So kynde through corruptions killed full many." - -In the lines immediately preceding there occur some other names, equally -generic: - - "Byles and boches and brennyng agues - Frensyes and foul evils, foragers of kynde." - -"Boche" is botch,--the name given to the plague as late as the Stuart -period, from its chief external sign, the bubo; and "byles" is merely the -Latin _bilis_ = _ulcus_. "Pokkes" may be the Anglo-Saxon word; but it is -known that many of Langland's colloquialisms are of Norman or French -origin, and in that language there is a term _poche_, which is not far -from the English "boche." Whether "poche" be the same as "boche" or not, -"pokkes and pestilences" may be taken to be synonyms for "byles and -boches." The generic or elastic use of such terms received a striking -illustration in 1528, when spotted fever (typhus), perhaps mixed with -plague, became exceedingly common among French and Spanish troops. Among -the French the disease was called _les poches_ and among the Spaniards -_las bubas_[886], although both names had been assigned to syphilis at the -time of its epidemic outburst in the end of the 15th century. In those -times diseases were called by their external marks; so that diseases -essentially most unlike, but having certain spots, or blemishes, or -botches, or pustules of the skin in common, were called by a common name. -The plague itself was known by certain spots on the breast or back called -tokens: hence the figure of John Stow and others that "many died of God's -tokens." - -There was certainly laxity of naming to that extent in the case of modern -languages. As to Willan's inference from the medieval incantation, it is -by no means clear that _variola_ in medieval Latin may not have been used -generically also; although, in the school of Salerno it appears to have -had its meaning fixed, in the Arabic sense of smallpox, from the time of -Constantinus Africanus, who introduced the teaching of Bagdad into that -school about the year 1060. - -The next use of "pokkes" that I have found is in a manuscript chronicle of -England down to the year 1419[887], one of the series known as the -chronicle of the Brute (from its commencing with the mythical landing of -Brutus in England after the siege of Troy); this manuscript, known as the -"Fruit of Times," was afterwards printed at the St Albans press about -1484[888], the history being carried down to Edward IV., and the passage -in question reproduced exactly as it stands in the handwriting. Under the -40th year of Edward III. (1366) there is the following entry: - - "Ther fell also such a pestalence that never none such was seen in no - man's tyme or lyf, for many men as they were gone to bede hole and in - gude poynte sodanly thei diede. Also that tyme fell a seknes that men - call ye pokkes, slogh both men and women thorgh ther enfectyne." - -It is clearly the same passage that occurs condensed in the chronicle of -William Gregory, mayor of London, which was written probably in -1451-52[889]. Under the 40th of Edward III., after referring to a "grete -batille of sparows" just as the earlier chronicle does, he proceeds: "Also -the same yere men and bestys were grettely infectyd with pockys, wherfore -they dyde, bothe men and bestys." The variation of "men and beasts," -instead of men and women, is curious, and suggests that there may have -been a common source for the story. The chronicle contemporary with 1366, -which is of best authority, was that kept at St Albans Abbey; but it gives -nothing under that year. Shortly after 1361, however, and probably about -1362 or 1363 it has a singular entry, which may have been the source of -these references to "pockys." The Latin may be translated thus: "Numbers -died of the disease of lethargy prophesying troubles to many; many women -also died of the flux; and there was a general murrain of cattle[890]." -Here we have men, women, and cattle; also lethargy, flux, and murrain; and -it is conceivable that later compilers of English chronicles may each have -used this contemporary Latin entry of composite events to put their own -gloss upon it, or to amplify the history into what each conceived to be -the probable meaning. But the most singular enlargement was that made by -Holinshed in his chronicle of 1577. Having copied word for word, sparrows -and all, the entry under the year 1366 in the "Fruit of Times" (as printed -at St Albans about 1484), he takes leave to amend the sense in the part -that chiefly concerns us--he changes "pockys" into "smallpocks," and "men -and women" into "men, women, and children[891]." Holinshed was dealing -with an event two hundred years before his own time, and had no more -first-hand knowledge of it than we have; but his authority has been -accepted for the fatal prevalence of smallpox in 1366 by modern writers on -the history of that disease, such as James Moore[892], who have not sought -for the contemporary authority nor exercised a critical judgment upon the -lax ways of verbalist compilers. Thus is history made--but not so easily -unmade. - -One other reference to "pockys" has to be noticed before we leave the -philological part of the subject and come to the unambiguous history of -the realities. Fabyan, in his _Chronicle_ written not long before his -death in 1512, says that Edward IV. during an expedition to the Scots -Marches "was then vysyted with the syknesse of pockys[893]." It is futile -to conjecture what the king's illness may really have been. The word in -Fabyan's time had already acquired a technical sense, which it has ever -since retained; but that well-understood meaning was some twenty years -later than the year 1474 (although the disease itself doubtless existed -all through the Middle Ages); while, in its earlier generic sense, as in -the 'Vision of Piers the Ploughman,' it seems to have meant botches or -other tokens of pestilential disease. In a Latin glossary of English -words, published a hundred years after[894], "a pocke" is still defined as -_phagedaena_, and "the French pocke" as _morbus Gallicus_, while -"smallpox" is not given at all. - - -Smallpox in England in the 16th Century. - -The earliest references to smallpox in England, apart from the probably -incorrect one by Gaddesden early in the 14th century, occur in letters of -the years 1514 and 1518. Another letter of 1514 will serve to bring out -the ambiguity of the names given to diseases at the time. On June 30, -1514, Gerard de Pleine writes from London to Margaret of Savoy that he had -been asked by the bishop of Lincoln why the marriage between the princess -Mary and Louis XII. had been broken off (it took place shortly after), and -by another great peer whether Louis XII. "avoit eu les pocques," which -last sentence has a marginal note in the printed collection of letters: -"c'est la petite verole[895]." But _les pocques_ in a letter written from -London in 1514 did not mean the smallpox. In a letter of March 3, 1514, -Peter Martyr writing in Latin from Valladolid to Ludovico Mendoza, says -that the King of England has had a fever, and that the physicians were -afraid it would turn to the pustules called _variolae_, but he is now well -again and rises from his bed[896]. This illness of Henry VIII. happened at -Richmond previous to 7th February. Although in the letter quoted there was -only a fear that the illness might have turned to the pustules called -smallpox, yet in the instructions of Henry VIII. to Spinelly, English -ambassador in the Low Countries, sent in February, the twelfth item -instructs him to say that the English king has lately been visited by a -malady "nomme la petitte verolle[897]." - -Four years after, on July 14, 1518, Pace writes to Wolsey from -Wallingford, where the court then was, that the king was to leave next day -for Bisham "as it is time; for they do die in these parts in every place, -not only of the small pokkes and mezils, but also of the great -sickness[898]." - -These are the earliest known instances of the use of the words _pocques_, -_variola_, _petite verolle_, "small pokkes and mezils," as applied to -particular cases of sickness, in correspondence from or relating to -England. The remarks to be made upon the early usage are: first, that the -word _pocques_, as used by one writing in French from London in 1514, did -not mean smallpox, but pox; second, that the first authentic mention of -smallpox happens to have been in the French form--"une maladie nomme la -petitte verolle;" third, that, in the political gossip of the time the -opinion of the physicians regarding the illness of the young king is given -as of a fever which they feared might have turned to the pustules called -"_variolae_;" and fourthly, that in the very first mention of the disease -_variola_ by an English name "small pokkes," the name is modelled on the -French, being coupled with the old English name "mezils." It is impossible -to infer from these references anything as to the amount of smallpox in -England at the time, or even to be sure of the correctness of the -diagnosis. The lax usage as between "pox" and "smallpox" is shown in a -book of the year 1530 called 'Prognosticacions out of Ipocras and Avicen,' -in which a brief reference to _variola_ in the Latin original is -translated "to prognosticate of the pockes." - -In Sir Thomas Elyot's _Castel of Health_, published in 1541, children -after their first infancy are said to suffer from a number of maladies, -and in "England commonly purpyls, meazels and smallpockes." That is -perhaps the first use of the terms in a systematic work on medicine, not -indeed by one of the faculty, but by a layman. About the same time we hear -of smallpocks in an infant of noble family: a letter of May 26, 1537, from -Charles duke of Suffolk to Cromwell, written from Hoxun in Suffolk, -excuses his not repairing to Lincolnshire, as the king had ordered, on the -ground that "his son fell sick of the smallpox and his wife of the -ague[899]." "His son" was Henry Brandon, born September 18, 1535, so that -he was then an infant of some twenty months; he is the same that died, -with his younger brother, of the sweating sickness in July 1551. - -The reference to smallpocks and meazels by Elyot in his _Castel of -Health_ is repeated in the almost contemporary _Book of Children_ by -Thomas Phaer. Whether Phaer translated that also "out of the French -tongue" as he did the _Regiment of Life_, with which it is bound up in the -edition of 1553, we have nowhere any information. In a list of forty -infirmities of children, the 32nd in order is "small pockes and measels." -A later passage in the _Book of Children_ shows how much, or how little, -intelligent meaning Phaer attached to these terms: "Of smallpockes and -measels. This disease is common and familiar, called of the Greeks by the -general name of exanthemata, and of Plinie papulae et pituitae eruptiones. -It is of two kinds:--varioli, ye measils; morbilli, called of us ye smal -pocks. They be but of one nature and proceed of one cause. The signs of -both are so manifest to sight that they need no farther declaration;"--but -he does add some signs, such as "itch and fretting of the skin as if it -had been rubbed with nettles, pain in the head and back etc.: sometimes as -it were a dry scab or lepry spreading over all the members, other whiles -in pushes, pimples and whayls running with much corruption and matter, and -with great pains of the face and throat, dryness of the tongue, hoarseness -of voice, and, in some, quiverings of the heart with sownings." He then -gives the four causes, three of them being intrinsic states of the -humours, and the fourth "when the disease commenceth by the way of -contagion, when a sick person infecteth another, and in that case it hath -great affinity with the pestilence." The treatment is directed towards -bringing out the eruption; all occasions of chill are to be carefully -avoided. More special directions are given for cases in which "the wheales -be outrageous and great;" also, "to take away the spots and scarres of the -small pockes and measils," a prescription of some authors is given, to use -the blood of a bull or of a hare. - -The whole of Phaer's section on smallpox and measles bears evidence of a -foreign source, namely the same stock chapter from which Kellwaye drew -most of his section upon the same two diseases appended to his book on the -plague in 1593. Not only does Phaer speak of smallpox and measles -conjointly as leaving spots and scars, but he actually renders _variolae_ -by measles, and _morbilli_ by smallpox. Phaer was more of a literary -compiler than a physician with original knowlege of diseases and their -pathology. But he is not singular among the Tudor writers in taking -measles to be the equivalent of _variolae_. William Clowes, of St -Bartholomew's Hospital, one of the most experienced practitioners of his -time, does the same. His _Proved Practice for all Young Chirurgeons_ has -an appendix of Latin aphorisms "taken out of an old written coppy," to -each of which aphorisms Clowes has added an English translation: in the -aphorism on _variolae_, that term is translated "measles," the name of -"smallpox" nowhere occurring in the book. Clowes's translation is exactly -in accordance with the English-Latin glossary of the time by Levins -(1570). Levins was an Oxford fellow who had graduated in medicine and -afterwards become a schoolmaster, just as Cogan, of _The Haven of Health_, -had done. He wrote the _Pathway of Health_, and also compiled the -_Manipulus Vocabulorum_. His definitions in the latter may be taken, -therefore, to stand for the medical usage of the time. In this glossary, -"ye maysilles" is rendered by _variole_, while the name of "smallpox" is -omitted altogether, "a pocke" having its Latin equivalent in _phagedaena_, -and "ye French pocke" in _morbus Gallicus_. In the Elizabethan dictionary -by Baret, "the maisils" is defined as "a disease with many reddish spottes -or speckles in the face and bodie, much like freckles in colour;" and that -was the disease which the English profession then understood to be the -same as the _variolae_ of medieval writers. - -I leave readers to draw their own conclusions, whether there was much or -little smallpox or measles in England in the Tudor period. They may be -reminded that Pace, dean of St Paul's, in a letter from Berkshire in 1518, -asserts the fatal prevalence of "smallpox and mezils," and that the duke -of Suffolk called the illness of his infant son by the name of smallpox in -1538. They may be farther helped to a conclusion by the following curious -instance which has been recorded by John Stow. - -Among the miscellaneous collections of that antiquary preserved in the -Lambeth Library[900], there is a narrative of the troubled conscience of -Master Richard Allington, esquire, a gentleman who appears to have lent -money at high interest. Believing himself to be dying on November 22, -1561, he summoned to his bedside at eight in the evening the Master of the -Rolls ("Sir John of the Rolls"), two doctors of the law and two other -lawyers. - - He began: "Maisters, seinge that I muste nedes die, which I assure you - I nevar thought wolde have cum to passe by this dessease, consyderinge - it is but the small pockes, I woulde therefore moste hertely desyre - you in the reuerence of God and for Christes passions sake to suffer - me to speake untyll I be dede, that I may dyscharge my conscens" etc. - He then explains that "no man had so especial tokens of God's singular - grace, and so litele regarded them as I have done," and goes on to - mention particular acts of usury and to offer restitution to the - amount of some hundred pounds or more. It had occurred to him to do so - the second night after he fell sick, being in perfect memory lying in - his bed broad awake, but with puppets dancing around him. After - entrusting the lawyers at his bed side with these restitutions, he - asked the Master of the Rolls to read to him certain of the - penitential Psalms which the sick man had selected as appropriate. - "And then he thought he should have died, but then broth being given - unto him, he revived again and fell to prayer and gave himself wholly - to quietness;" and there the narrative ends. - -It appears from a reference in Stow's _Survey of London_ that he did die -in 1561, and that his widow was left well off: for she afterwards built -one of the finest of the new houses that were now beginning to line the -highway of Holborn almost as far out as St Giles's in the Fields. - -This is the first recorded case of smallpox in English. According to the -patient's own view, smallpox was not usually a formidable disease, nor -does it appear that the Master of the Rolls and four other eminent lawyers -(Dr Caldwell, Dr Good, Mr Garth, and Mr Jones) had been apprehensive of -catching it. One finds no other evidence of the existence of smallpox in -London or elsewhere in England until it is mentioned in a letter of 1591 -and in the essay of Kellwaye, 1593, which asserts the occurrence of -"smallpox and measles" in almost the same language as Phaer's earlier -_Book of Children_ and for the most part under the same foreign -inspiration. From Scotland we have a single reference in Dr Gilbert -Skene's essay on the plague, published in 1568, from the terms of which -one may suppose that he is giving his own experience. The season, he -says, will sometimes foretell the plague, as well as other diseases: - - "Siclyk quhen pokis or sic pustulis are frequent, not onlie amangis - barnis, but also amangis those quha be of constant or declynand - aige--greit frequent south and south-vest vyndis." In a similar - passage on the previous page he couples "pokis, mesillis and siclike - diseisis of bodie[901]." - -In a letter of August 26, 1591, written to a member of queen Elizabeth's -court, it is said: "Hir Higness wold you should remove from that place -where the smalle pocks were, to take the fresh and clere ayre, the better -to purge ye from the infection[902]." - -In 1593 we come to the first systematic English essay on the disease, -appended to the treatise on the plague by Simon Kellwaye[903]. The author -is otherwise unknown as a medical writer, but he is commended in a preface -by George Baker, a court surgeon, for his "good and zealous intent and -sufficiencie in his profession." In appending an essay on smallpox to a -treatise on the plague he follows the example of the Salernian treatise of -Alphanus, which also affords him most of his systematic materials in both -diseases, filtered through Ambroise Par and other writers. Kellwaye -claims, however, to have incorporated native experience: "which work I -have collected and drawn from sundry both auncient and later writers, the -which being shadowed under the calm shroud of auncient consent and -strengthened with the abundant sap of late experience (as well mine own as -others) I here present the same." In the treatise on the plague (fol. 2) -he mentions smallpox as among the forerunners or prognostics of that -disease: - - "When the smalle poxe doth generally abound both in young and old - people." In the separate essay on the smallpox (fol. 38), its interest - is again that of a forerunner or sequel of the plague, according to - the foreign teaching of the time: - - "For that oftentimes those that are infected with the plague are in - the end of the disease sometimes troubled with the smallpockes or - measels, as also by good observation it hath been seen that they are - forerunners or warnings of the plague to come, as Salius and divers - other writers do testify, I have thought good and as a matter - pertinent to my former treatise" etc. - - He proceeds: "I need not greatly to stand upon the description of this - disease because it is a thing well known unto most people." It begins - with a fever; then shortly after there arise small red pustules upon - the skin throughout all the body, which come forth more or less - intermittently; "In some there arise many little pustules with - elevation of the skin, which in one day do increase and grow bigger, - and after have a thick matter growing in them, which the Greeks call - exanthemata or ecthymata; and after the Latins variola, in our English - tongue the smallpockes; and here some writers do make a difference - betwixt variola and exanthemata: for, say they, that is called variola - when many of those pustules do suddenly run into a clear bladder, as - if it had been scalled, but the other doth not so; yet are they both - one in the cure." He recognizes the contagious property of the - disease, calling it "hereditable:" "For we see when one is infected - therewith, that so many as come near him (especially those which are - allied in the same blood) do assuredly for the most part receive the - infection also." His _Practica_ are taken almost entirely from the - Arabian writers, as filtered through Gaddesden, one of them being the - prevention of pitting by opening the pocks with a gold pin or needle. - He had heard, however, "of some which, having not used anything at - all, but suffering them to dry up and fall of themselves without - picking or scratching, have done very well, and not any pits remained - after it." He then refers to complications, such as ulcerations of the - skin, soreness and ulcerations of the mouth (_aphthae_), soreness of - the tonsils, and glueing together of the eyelids, all of which are - stock paragraphs in the foreign writers of the time and are probably - transferred from the latter. Also he goes a considerable way towards - the separation of measles from smallpox, which was not fully effected - in England until the century following: "What the measels or males - are:--many little pimples which are not to be seen but only by feeling - with the hand are to be perceived; they do not maturate as the pocks - doth do, nor assault the eyes" etc. - -About ten years after Kellwaye's essay, there began, in 1604, the -classification of the deaths in London by the Company of Parish Clerks: -but it was not until 1629 that their weekly and annual bills were -regularly printed. In the first printed bills, "Flox, smallpox and -measles" appear as one entry. The meaning of "flox" seems to be explained -by Kellwaye's remark: "And here some writers do make a difference betwixt -variola and exanthemata; for, say they, that is called variola when many -of those pustules do suddenly run into a clear bladder as if it had been -scalled, but the other doth not so." That is the distinction between -confluent smallpox and discrete; and the most probable explanation of -"flox" is that it stands for the confluent kind, or for the pustules that -run together into a clear bladder. - - -Smallpox in the 17th Century. - -The gradual rise of smallpox to prominence in England about the end of the -Elizabethan period and in the first years of the Stuarts cannot fail to -strike anyone who is occupied with the English records of disease as a -whole. Smallpox and measles may have been, and almost certainly were, -observed in England in the earlier part of the 16th century; but they make -no such figure in the records, domestic and other, as they do from the -beginning of the 17th century onwards. Perhaps the first mention of -smallpox, in English literature proper, occurs in a collection of lyrical -poems published in 1602[904]. In some verses "Upon his Ladies sicknesse of -the Small Pocks," the poet, Th. Spilman, apostrophises the "cruel and -impartial sickness" and asks,-- - - Are not these thy steps I trace - In the pure snow of her face? - - Th' heavenly honey thou dost suck - From her rose cheeks, might suffice; - Why then didst thou mar and pluck - Those dear flowers of rarest price? - -In two letters of Dr Donne, dean of St Paul's, written probably a few -years before his death in 1631, reference is made to the smallpox in -London. In the one he says: - - "At my return from Kent to my gate, I found Peg had the pox: so I - withdrew to Prickham and spent a fortnight there. And without coming - home, when I could with some justice hope that it would spread no - farther amongst them (as I humbly thank God it hath not, nor much - disfigured her that had it), I went into Bedfordshire" etc. - -This dread of smallpox infection is quite unlike anything that we meet -with in the earlier 16th-century domestic memorials; in them it is only -the infection of the plague that comes in. Donne's other reference is to -the sickness of my lord Harrington: "a few days since they were doubtful -of him; but he is so well recovered that now they know all his disease to -be the pox and measles mingled[905]." - -Cases of smallpox among the upper classes are occasionally mentioned in -the letters written by Chamberlain to Carleton in the reigns of James I. -and Charles I.[906]. On December 17, 1612, "The Lord Lisle hath lost his -eldest son, Sir William Sidney, by the smallpox, which were well come -out." On December 31, the same year, Carleton, writing from abroad, -mentions that the duke of Mantua had died of the smallpox about three -weeks since, of which he buried his only son not three weeks before. Also -on December 31, Chamberlain writes to him, that the Lady Webbe was sick of -the smallpox, of which, he says in another letter, she died: "She was -grown a very proper woman, but loved the town too well, which in a short -time would have drawn her and her husband dry as well in purse as in -reputation." It is the year 1614 that is given (by Horst) as the worst -season of smallpox all over Europe and the East; England is mentioned by -the foreign writer as among the countries affected, but there is no trace -of an epidemic in our own records. On April 20, 1616, Chamberlain mentions -the case of the duke of Buckingham, the favourite; "he hath been crazy of -late, not without suspicion of the smallpox, which, if it had fallen out, -_actum est de amicitia_. But it proves otherwise." Buckingham's illness, -for which he took much physic, produced an imposthume on his head (an -effect which followed in the more notorious illness of Wolsey), and he is -elsewhere said to be suffering from the _morbus comitialis_. The -suggestion of smallpox appears to be the same euphemism which was resorted -to in the cases of other exalted personages. - -On August 21, 1624, having written of the great mortality from fevers, -Chamberlain adds: "Lady Winwood, hearing that her only daughter was fallen -sick of the smallpox at Ditton and that they came not out currently," had -gone to her. On December 18, 1624, "the Lady Purbeck is sick of the -smallpox, and her husband is so kind that he stirs not from her bed's -feet." In the first week of June, 1625, the famous composer Orlando -Gibbons died at Canterbury, not without suspicion of the plague[907], but -according to another opinion of the smallpox[908]. - -With the year 1629, the causes of death in London began to be published by -Parish Clerks' Hall in a rough classification, smallpox being a regular -item from year to year. For the first eight years the deaths from "flox, -smallpox, and measles" were as follows: - - 1629 72 - 1630 40 - 1631 58 - 1632 531 - 1633 72 - 1634 1354 - 1635 293 - 1636 127 - -The greatest epidemic, it will be seen, was in 1634[909]. For the years -1637-1646, the figures are lost (owing to Graunt's omitting them in his -Table of 1662, for want of room). But it is known from letters that the -autumn of 1641 was a season of severe smallpox as well as plague. Thus on -August 26, "both Houses grow very thin by reason of the smallpox and -plague that is in the town, 133 dying here this week of the plague, and -118 of the smallpox, 610 in the whole of all diseases." On September 9, a -letter from Charing Cross says: "Died this week of the plague 185, and of -the smallpox 101." The plague mortality continues to be mentioned in -subsequent letters, but the references to smallpox cease[910]. On July 16, -1642, one excuses his attendance on some State business because he is sick -of the smallpox[911]. - -About the Restoration the references to smallpox become more -numerous[912]. A letter of January 4, 1658 (1659), speaks of "much -sickness in the town [London], especially fevers, agues and smallpox." On -February 7, 1660, the earl of Anglesey is dead of the smallpox. In -September, 1660, Lord Oxford had a severe attack and recovered; at the -same time the duke of Gloucester, on the 8th September, was diagnosed by -the doctors to have "a disease between the smallpox and the measles; he is -now past danger of death for this bout, as the doctors say." However he -died on 14th September, in the tenth day of the disease, with remarkable -evidences (post mortem) of internal haemorrhage, having bled freely at the -nose a few hours before his death. The eruption had "come out full and -kindly" at the beginning, so that it was not the ordinary haemorrhagic -type. On the 20th December, 1660, the princess Henrietta goes to St -James's for fear of the smallpox. On the 16th January, 1660 (? 1661), "the -princess is recovered of the measles." Letters from a lady at Hambleton to -her husband in London, May 26, 1661, speaks of smallpox raging in the -place, and in the house of her nearest neighbour, her own children having -the whooping-cough. In the bills of mortality of those years the deaths in -London from smallpox and measles were as follows: - - 1647 139 - 1648 401 - 1649 1190 - 1650 184 - 1651 525 - 1652 1279 - 1653 139 - 1654 832 - 1655 1294 - 1656 823 - 1657 835 - 1658 409 - 1659 1523 - 1660 354 - 1661 1246 - 1662 768 - 1663 411 - 1664 1233 - 1665 655 - 1666 38 - -These figures bring us down to the period of Sydenham, who was the first -accurate observer of smallpox in London. With his writings, and with those -of Willis and Morton, we begin a new era in the history of epidemics in -England. We find, for the first time in the history, an adequate -discussion of the epidemiological and clinical facts by the ablest men in -the profession. But, as the new era is at one and the same time marked by -the cessation of plague and by the enormous increase of various fevers, as -well as of smallpox, it falls without the limits of this volume, making, -indeed, the appropriate beginning of the new kind of epidemic history -which is characteristic of England from the Restoration and the Revolution -down to the end of the 18th century. It is clear, from the instances -above given, that smallpox was already at the beginning of the 17th -century becoming a pest among the upper classes. But to anyone who studies -the history over continuous periods it is equally clear that its -prominence was then something new and that the horror and alarm which it -caused became greater as the 17th century approached its close. And so as -not to leave the history of smallpox at this point with a wrong impression -of its general virulence, it may be added that Dr Plot, writing of -Oxfordshire in 1677, says: "Generally here they are so favorable and kind, -that be the nurse but tolerably good, the patient seldom miscarries[913]." - - -Smallpox in Continental Writings of the 16th century. - -It would be beside the purpose of this work to follow the history of -smallpox and measles on the continent of Europe. But it will be necessary -to say a few words on the contemporary foreign writings upon these -diseases, as it is chiefly teaching from a foreign source that we detect -in the English authors of the 16th century. - -It might be inferred from the classical work of Fracastori[914], published -in 1546, that smallpox and measles were frequent and familiar diseases in -the author's experience at Verona. At the same time it is clear that even -he, original observer as he was, is in places merely repeating the old -statements of the Arabian writers. Thus his statement that everyone has -smallpox or measles sooner or later, is the old Arabian tradition or -experience, usually joined to the explanation that the cause of that -universality was the nourishment of the foetus by the retained and impure -menstrual blood, so that all children had to free their constitutions of a -congenital impurity sooner or later. So far as Fracastori's originality -comes in, it is clear that he does not regard smallpox and measles as -serious troubles. In his second chapter he says: - - "First we must treat of those contagious maladies which, although - contagious, are not called pestilential, because, for the most part, - they are salubrious. Of such are variolae and morbilli. By variolae - are understood those which are called also varollae by the common - people, from their likeness, I suppose, to the pustules called vari. - By morbilli are understood those which the common people style fersae, - so-called perhaps from _fervor_. But of these the Greeks do not appear - to have treated under any other name than exanthemata. They happen - principally in children, rarely in men, most rarely in old people. But - they seem to befall all men once in life, or to be apt to befall them - unless a premature death removes the individual. In boys the malady is - more benign than in adults. For the more part, as already said, they - are salubrious, since this ebullition of the blood is something of a - purification of the same. It afflicts more or less according to the - density of the blood and as the vice is apt or not to be separated - from it. If the blood be more pituitous, the pustules are variform, - white, round and full of a kind of mucus; but if it be more bilious - the pustules break forth more of a dry sort. Where the disease has - happened once it is not apt to recur; but there are cases where it has - happened more than once." - -In the brief account by Fracastori, all the points are stated for measles -and smallpox together; and the opinion is twice put forward that an attack -was salubrious as purifying the blood or as freeing it from some vice--an -opinion which is still popularly held. - -It is not until the latter half of the 16th century that we come to real -epidemiological records of smallpox on the Continent,--the works by -Donatus on smallpox and measles at Mantua in 1567, and by Betera upon -epidemics at Brescia in 1570, 1577 and 1588, in which the more malignant -types of smallpox were seen[915]. The treatise most used was that of -Alphanus, published at Naples in 1577[916]; it was on plague and -pestilential fever, with an appendix on smallpox. Either it or Ambroise -Par's chapters seem to have furnished the greater part of the English -essay by Kellwaye on the plague and smallpox. - -In Ambroise Par's references to smallpox there occurs one singular line -of remark which will serve to bring us back to etymology and to the great -pox[917]. The _petite vrole_, he says, has a resemblance to the _grosse -vrole_ as sometimes attacking the bones. He had seen that in smallpox -cases not only in 1568 but on other occasions: and he gives the details of -two cases of smallpox, apparently with periostitis and necrosis, which he -compares to cases of the great pox. To express in one word the meaning of -such cases, he says, the smallpox and _rougeolle_, not having been well -purged, give rise to various troublesome accidents, as the great pox does. -One cannot read Par's chapters on the _grosse vrole_ and the _petite -vrole_ without detecting an inclination to compare them or class them -together in nosological characters. The comparison or classification is by -no means explicit; but it seems to be in his thoughts, and he would seem, -accordingly, to have held until a late period of the 16th century a view -of the two diseases which was not unusual at the beginning of that century -(as in the treatise of Pinctor and in the accounts of the dreadful -mortality of Indians in Hispaniola and Mexico[918]), and was expressed in -the popular names given to each disease in France and in England. - - - - -CHAPTER X. - -PLAGUE, FEVER AND INFLUENZA FROM THE ACCESSION OF THE STUART DYNASTY TO -THE RESTORATION. - - -The last period of plague in England, from 1603 to its extinction in 1666, -was as fatal as any that the capital, and the provincial towns, had known -since the 14th century. The mortalities in London in 1603, 1625, and 1665 -are the greatest in the whole history of the City's epidemics, not, -perhaps, relatively to the population, but in absolute numbers. The -capital was growing rapidly, having now become the greatest trading -community in Europe. The dangers which were foreseen in the proclamation -of 1580, of an extension of the City's borders beyond civic control, had -been realized. The old walled city, like Vienna down to a quite recent -date, remained both the residential quarter and the centre of trade and -commerce: the original suburbs, which were in the Liberties or Freedom of -the City, were the slums--the fringe of poverty covered by the poorest -class of tenements, unpaved and without regular streets, but penetrated by -alleys twisting and turning in an endless maze. The City was not, indeed, -without a good deal of building of the same class, especially in the -parish of St Stephen, Coleman Street, the most populous parish within the -walls. But what was an occasional thing in the City where gardens and -other open spaces had been built upon, was the rule in the parishes beyond -the walls. It was in the Liberties and outparishes that the plague of 1603 -began; its origin in 1625 is less certain; but there can be no question -as to the gradual progress of the Great Plague of 1665 from the west end -of the town down Holborn and the Strand to the City, to the great parishes -on the north-east and east, and across the water to Southwark. From one -point of view we may represent the later plagues as incidents in the -transition from the medieval to the modern state of the capital--a -transition which proceeded slowly and is still unfinished so far as -concerns the forms of municipal government. The history of the public -health of London is, for nearly two centuries, the history of irregular -and uncontrolled expansion, of the failure of old municipal institutions -to overtake new duties. Perhaps if Wren's grand conception of a New London -after the fire of 1666 had been taken up and given effect to by Charles -II., the Liberties and suburbs might have been joined more organically to -the centre and have benefited by the municipal traditions of the latter. -The history of the public health in London during the latter part of the -17th century and the whole of the 18th might in that case have been a less -melancholy record. That history falls within our next volume; but as it -began with the expansion of London under Elizabeth and the Stuarts, this -is the place to review the growth of the City from the time when it broke -through its medieval limits. - - -The Growth of London in the Tudor and Stuart Periods[919]. - -The accession of James I. to the English crown in 1603 corresponds in time -with the pretensions of London to be the first city in Europe. "London," -says Dekker, in _The Wonderfull Yeare_, "was never in the highway to -preferment till now. For she saw herself in better state than Jerusalem, -she went more gallant than ever did Antwerp, was more courted by amorous -and lustie suitors than Venice (the minion of Italy); more lofty towers -stood about her temples than ever did about the beautiful forehead of -Rome; Tyre and Sydon to her were like two thatcht houses to Theobals, the -grand Cairo but a hogsty." That is, of course, in Dekker's manner; but it -can be shown by figures that London took a great start in the end of -Elizabeth's reign and grew still faster under James. - -From Richard I. to Henry VII., London was the medieval walled city, as -Drayton says, "built on a rising bank within a vale to stand," with a -population between 40,000 and 50,000. Without the walls lay a few city -parishes or parts of parishes, including the three dedicated to St Botolph -outside Aldgate, Bishopsgate and Aldersgate, respectively, and St Giles's -without Cripplegate, all of these being at the gates or close to the -walls. On the western side, however, lay an extensive but sparsely -populated suburb, which was erected in 1393 into the Ward of Farringdon -Without; it extended westward from the city wall as far as Temple Bar, -Holborn Bars and West Smithfield, and was divided into the four great -parishes of St Sepulchre's without Newgate; St Andrew's, on the other side -of Holborn valley, St Dunstan's in the West (about Chancery Lane and -Fetter Lane), and St Bride's, Fleet Street. - -The earliest known bills of mortality, in 1532 and 1535, from which a -population of some 62,400 might be deduced, show that the St Botolph -parishes, St Giles's without Cripplegate and the four great parishes in -the western Liberties (or, more correctly, in the ward of Farringdon -Without) had one-third of the whole deaths, and presumably about one-third -of the whole population. In the few memoranda left of the plague-bills of -1563, we find evidence that the population had increased to some 93,276, -of which about a sixth or seventh part, or some 12,000 to 15,000 was in -the "out-parishes," or in the parishes not only beyond the walls, but -beyond the Bars of the Freedom. The most valuable series of statistics for -Elizabethan London are those which give the christenings and burials for -five years from 1578 to 1582; from those of the year 1580, which was -almost free from the disturbing element of plague, a population of some -123,034 may be deduced by taking the birth-rate at 29 per 1000 living and -the death-rate at 23 per 1000, or in each case at a favourable rate -corresponding to the large excess of births over deaths. - -There is not enough left of the introduction to these old manuscript -abstracts of weekly births and deaths to show how many parishes they -relate to, or what is the proportion for each division of the capital. -But, as the earlier series of bills of mortality from 1563 to 1566 -included the City, the Liberties and the out-parishes, it is probable that -the series from 1578 to 1582 had done the same. The crowding of the -Liberties with a poor class of tenements, and the extension of the -out-parishes, are otherwise known from the preamble to the proclamation of -1580, which prohibited all building on new sites within three miles of the -City wall. The next figures are for the years 1593, 1594, and 1595, which -show a population increased to about 152,000. - -From the figures of the plague-year, 1593, it appears that the mortality -within the walls, both from plague and from ordinary causes, had now -become the smaller half, or somewhat less than that "without the walls and -in the Liberties,"--a phrase which is used loosely, even in some official -bills, for both Liberties and suburbs. In 1604 we have the exact -proportions of deaths in the City, in the Liberties and in the -out-parishes respectively: - - |96 parishes |16 parishes |8 parishes out| Total - |within walls|in Liberties|of the Freedom| - --------------|------------|------------|--------------|------ - All deaths | 1798 | 2465 | 956 | 5219 - Plague deaths | 280 | 368 | 248 | 896 - Christenings | -- | -- | -- | 5458 - -The sixteen parishes of the Liberties are now decidedly ahead of the -ninety-six old City parishes, while the eight out-parishes have some 18 -per cent. of the whole mortality. The population is best reckoned from the -6504 baptisms of the year after, 1605, by which time the disturbance of -the enormous mortality in 1603 had ceased to be felt; at a birth-rate of -29 per 1000, the population would be some 224,275. The proportions in -1605, from the bills of mortality for the year, are 338 per cent. in the -City, 50 per cent. in the Liberties, and 162 per cent. in the -out-parishes; so that the City would have contained in that year about -76,000, the Liberties about 114,000, and the out-parishes about 37,000. To -those numbers we should have to add some 20,000 or 30,000 for -Westminster, Stepney, Lambeth, Newington, etc. - -According to Graunt's contemporary estimate for 1662, the population had -grown to 460,000, or to rather more than double that of 1605; and whereas -the proportion in 1605 was two-sixths in the City, three-sixths in the -Liberties and one-sixth in the out-parishes, he makes it in 1662 to have -been one-fifth in the City, three-fifths in the Liberties (including -Southwark) and the out-parishes nearest to the Bars, and one-fifth in the -out-parishes of Stepney, Redriff, Newington, Lambeth, Islington and -Hackney, with the city of Westminster. Thus, whereas in 1535 the City had -two-thirds of the whole estimated population, in 1662 it had one-fifth; -but with its one-fifth in 1662 it was twice as crowded as with its -two-thirds in 1535, the comparatively open appearance given to it by -gardens in various localities, as on Tower Hill, having entirely gone. - -As early as the plague of 1563, the Liberties were observed to be first -infected, and to retain the infection longest; that is alleged of St -Sepulchre's parish by Dr John Jones, from personal knowledge. The history -of the plague of 1593 is imperfectly known; but it is clear from Stow's -summation of the deaths during the year, that more died of plague in the -Liberties and suburbs than in the City. Of the next plague, that of 1603, -we know that it did begin in the Liberties and was prevalent in those -skirts of the City for some time before it entered the gates. "Death," -says _The Wonderfull Yeare_, "had pitcht his tents in the sinfully -polluted suburbs ... the skirts of London were pitifully pared off by -little and little; which they within the gates perceiving," etc. Then the -plague, represented as an invading force, "entered within the walls and -marched through Cheapside," the wealthier inhabitants having escaped -meanwhile. - - -The London Plague of 1603. - -The most useful document for the London plague of 1603 is a printed Bill -of Mortality which is in the Guildhall Library. The bill, which is in the -form of a broadside, is for the week 13-20 October, and purports to be a -true copy, according to the report made to the king by the Company of -Parish Clerks, and printed by John Winder, printer to the honourable City -of London[920]. It is necessary to be thus particular, because the clerk -of the Company of Parish Clerks in the end of 1665 (between the Plague and -the Fire) published an account of all the statistics of former plagues -preserved in his office, and emphatically denied that the Parish Clerks -gave in an accompt for the year 1603; they did not resume their series -after 1595, he says, until 29th December, 1603. But the clerk was -mistaken, as even the most prim of officials will sometimes be. The -printed bill which has come down to us gives the usual weekly return of -deaths from all causes in one column and those from plague in another, for -each of the 96 parishes within their walls, each of the 16 parishes in the -Liberties and each of 8 out-parishes. On the right hand margin it gives -also a summary statement of the deaths in "the first great plague in our -memory" that of 1563, which is the same as in Stow's _Annales_, and of the -deaths in the next great plague, that of 1593, which differs considerably -from Stow's. It then goes on to give the sum of the figures of the year -1603 from 17th December, 1602, and carries the deaths per week from 21st -July down to date, the 20th of October, adding some information for the -parishes which kept separate bills, namely, Westminster, the Savoy, -Stepney, Newington Butts, Islington, Lambeth and Hackney. This extant -weekly bill was probably one of a series; for Graunt, in his book of 1662, -cites various figures of weekly baptisms throughout the year 1603 which -would appear to have been taken from the bills for the respective weeks. -But the returns had not been made regularly from all the parishes within -the Bills from the beginning of the year 1603. The reason why the weekly -figures are not recapitulated farther back than the week ending July 21, -is that the outparishes had not sent in their returns until that week. -From another source, we know the figures for the City and Liberties from -March 10 to July 14, and from the same source we obtain the totals for all -parishes within the Bills from October 19 to the end of the year. By -putting these figures into one table, we may represent the mortality of -1603, not indeed completely, as follows: - -_Weekly Mortalities in London during the plague of 1603._ - - ---------------------------------------------------------- - | City and | - | Liberties. | Out parishes. | Totals. - Week |---------------|---------------|--------------- - ending | All | | All | | All | - |causes.|Plague.|causes.|Plague.|causes.|Plague. - ----------|-------|-------|-------|-------|-------|------- - March 17 | 108 | 3 | | | | - 24 | 60 | 2 | | | | - 31 | 78 | 6 | | | | - April 7 | 66 | 4 | | | | - 14 | 79 | 4 | | | | - 21 | 98 | 8 | | | | - 28 | 109 | 10 | | | | - May 5 | 90 | 11 | | | | - 12 | 112 | 18 | | | | - 19 | 122 | 22 | | | | - 26 | 112 | 30 | | | | - June 2 | 114 | 30 | | | | - 9 | 134 | 43 | | | | - 15 | 144 | 59 | | | | - 23 | 182 | 72 | | | | - 30 | 267 | 158 | | | | - July 7 | 445 | 263 | | | | - 14 | 612 | 424 | | | | - 21 | 867 | 646 | 319 | 271 | 1186 | 917 - 28 | 1312 | 1025 | 398 | 354 | 1710 | 1379 - Aug. 4 | 1700 | 1439 | 537 | 464 | 2237 | 1901 - 11 | 1655 | 1372 | 410 | 361 | 2065 | 1733 - 18 | 2486 | 2199 | 568 | 514 | 3054 | 2713 - 25 | 2343 | 2091 | 510 | 448 | 2853 | 2539 - Sept. 1 | 2798 | 2495 | 587 | 542 | 3385 | 3037 - 8 | 2583 | 2283 | 495 | 441 | 3078 | 2724 - 15 | 2676 | 2411 | 433 | 407 | 3109 | 2818 - 22 | 2080 | 1851 | 376 | 344 | 2456 | 2195 - 29 | 1666 | 1478 | 295 | 254 | 1961 | 1732 - Oct. 6 | 1528 | 1367 | 306 | 274 | 1834 | 1641 - 13 | 1109 | 962 | 203 | 184 | 1312 | 1146 - 20 | 647 | 546 | 119 | 96 | 766 | 642 - 27 | | | | | 625 | 508 - Nov. 3 | | | | | 737 | 594 - 10 | | | | | 545 | 442 - 17 | | | | | 384 | 257 - 24 | | | | | 198 | 105 - Dec. 1 | | | | | 223 | 102 - 8 | | | | | 163 | 55 - 15 | | | | | 200 | 96 - 22 | | | | | 168 | 74 - ---------------------------------------------------------- - -These figures may be accepted as real, so far as they go; and they give a -total (37,192 from all causes, whereof of the plague, 30,519) which is -nearly the same as that usually taken, e.g. by Graunt, for the mortality -of the whole year in all London (37,294 from all causes, whereof of the -plague, 30,561). But it is clear that important additions have to be made. -In the first place, no deaths are included for the weeks previous to March -10. In the second place, no deaths are included from the out-parishes -(within the Bills), previous to July 14. In the third place, no deaths at -all are included from Westminster, Stepney, Newington, Lambeth, etc. These -omissions have to be kept in mind when the plague of 1603 is compared with -those of 1625 and 1665, for which the figures are fully ascertained; and -we possess various data from which to supply them approximately. One great -addition, with nothing conjectural in it, is for the seven parishes -outside the general bill of mortality, Stepney being the largest: they -kept their own bills, and the figures from them, for the principal part of -the year, are given on the margin of the broadside, as quoted below[921]. -Another unconjectural addition is the mortality from all causes in the -City and Liberties from December 17, 1602, to March 10, 1603, which was -1375, having been mostly non-plague deaths. All these deaths, actually -known, bring the total for the year up to 42,945 whereof of the plague -about 33,347. The farther additions, which can only be guessed, are the -mortality from all causes in the eight out-parishes (within the Bills) -previous to July 14, and the mortality in the seven other suburban -localities (Westminster, Stepney, etc.) before and after the dates stated -in the note for each. Only the former of these additions would have been a -considerable figure, the plague being already at 271 deaths a week when -the reckoning begins. Thus the totals, 42,945 burials from all causes, and -from plague alone, 33,347, are well within the reality. - -Some details are extant of the incidence of the disease in particular -parishes at certain dates. Thus, in the great parish of Stepney, which -extended from Shoreditch to Blackwall, 650 plague-deaths, and 24 from -other causes, took place in the single month of September; so that, if the -plague began in Stepney about the 25th of March, it had not come to a head -until autumn. In St Giles's Cripplegate, the burials entered in the parish -register for the whole year are 2879, the highest mortality having been in -the beginning of September, when the burials on three successive days were -36, 26 and 26[922]. In the week 13 to 20 October, for which the printed -bill is extant, the proportions of the City, Liberties and 8 out-parishes -respectively were, for the week, 351, 296, and 119. Of the parishes -without the walls, the most infected were, in their order at that date, St -Sepulchre's, St Saviour's, Southwark, St Andrew's, Holborn, St Giles's, -Cripplegate, St Clement's Danes, St Giles's in the Fields, St Olave's, -Southwark, St Martin's in the Fields, St Mary's, Whitechapel and St -Leonard's, Shoreditch. For St Olave's, Southwark, we have some particulars -of the plague from the minister of the parish. - -In a dialogue conveying various instructions on the plague[923], to his -parishioners of St Olave's, James Bamford states that 2640 had died in -that parish from May 7 to the date of writing (October 13), and that the -burials had fallen from 305 in a week to 51, and from 57 in a day to 4. St -Olave's was a typical parish of the new London. It extended eastwards -along the Surrey bank of the river from London Bridge, and had been -almost all built within the half-century since the purchase of the Borough -of Southwark by the City from the Crown in 1550. In Stow's _Survey_ of -1598 the parish is thus described: "Then from the bridge along by the -Thames eastward is St Olave's Street, having continual building on both -the sides, with lanes and alleys, up to Battle Bridge, to Horsedown and -towards Rotherhithe some good half mile in length from London Bridge"--the -Bermondsey High Street running south from the Horsleydown end of it. St -Olave's Church, he continues, stood on the bank of the river, "a fair and -meet large church, but a far larger parish, especially of aliens or -strangers, and poor people." A mansion of former times, St Leger House, -was now "divided into sundry tenements." Over against the church, the -great house that was once the residence of the prior of Lewes, was now the -Walnut Tree inn, a common hostelry. - -London was now so extensive in area that it becomes of interest to know in -what part of it the plague broke out, and in what course the infection -proceeded. These things are known for the plague of 1665; but for that of -1603 they cannot be ascertained precisely. Dekker is emphatic that it -began in the suburbs. The earliest reference to it in the State papers is -under the date of April 18, when the Lord Mayor wrote to the Lord -Treasurer to inform him of the steps taken to prevent the spread of the -plague in the counties of Middlesex and Surrey. "The parishes in Middlesex -and Surrey" was an expression which afterwards came to mean a group of -twelve out-parishes beyond the Bars of the Freedom, including St Giles's -in the Fields, Lambeth, Newington and Bermondsey, Stepney, Whitechapel, -Shoreditch and Clerkenwell, Islington, Hackney and two others. The phrase -used by the mayor may not have had so definite a meaning in 1603, but he -can hardly have intended it to apply to the City and Liberties of London, -although those were the only divisions of the capital directly under his -own jurisdiction. The parish which is associated with the earliest date, -in the summary of the epidemic in the broadside of 1603, is Stepney, where -the record of deaths from plague and other causes begins from 25th March. -It would perhaps be safe to conclude that the plague of 1603 began at the -extreme east in Stepney, as that of 1665 certainly did at the extreme west -in St Giles's in the Fields. - -An examination of the Table shows that the eight out-parishes had reached -a higher plague mortality relative to their population on July 21, than -the parishes within the bars of the Freedom: but the maximum of deaths -falls in both divisions about the same week. We may take it that the -plague broke out in one of the suburbs; and as Dekker speaks of the flight -having been westwards, the evidence points on the whole to an eastern -suburb, perhaps Whitechapel or Stepney. March is clearly indicated by -various things as a time when plague-deaths began to attract notice; and -that date of commencement is corroborated by the following passage from -the essay of Graunt, based, it would seem, upon a series of weekly -bills:-- - -"We observe as followeth, viz. First, that (when from December 1602 to -March following there was little or no plague) then the christenings at a -medium were between 110 and 130 per week, few weeks being above the one or -below the other; but when the plague increased from thence to July, that -then the christenings decreased to under 90.... (3) Moreover we observe -that from the 21st July to the 12th October, the plague increasing reduced -the christenings to 70 at a medium. Now the cause of this must be flying, -and death of teeming women" &c.--the total christenings of the year 1603 -having been only 4789, as against some 6000 in the year before the plague, -and 5458 in the year after it. - -This prevalence of plague in the suburbs and liberties of the City in the -spring of 1603 coincides with great political events. Queen Elizabeth died -at Richmond on the 24th of March, and was buried at Westminster on the -28th of April; according to Dekker, "never did the English nation behold -so much black worn as there was at her funeral." The approach of king -James from Scotland appears to have caused an outburst of gaiety, his -accession to the crown, according to the same writer, having led to a -marked revival of trade: "Trades that lay dead and rotten started out of -their trance.... There was mirth in everyone's face, the streets were -filled with gallants, tabacconists filled up whole taverns, vintners hung -out spick and span new ivy-bushes (because they wanted good wine), and -their old rain-beaten lattices marched under other colours, having lost -both company and colour before." James made a slow progress from Scotland, -paying visits on the way. He arrived at Theobalds, near Cheshunt, on the -3rd of May, and was at Greenwich before the end of the month. On May 29, a -proclamation was issued commanding gentlemen to depart the court and city -on account of the plague. On June 23, the remainder of Trinity law term -was adjourned. On July 10, a letter (one of the series between J. -Chamberlain and Dudley Carleton) says: "Paul's grows very thin [the church -aisles where people were wont to meet to exchange news], for every man -shrinks away. Our pageants are pretty forward, but most of them are such -small-timbered gentlemen that they cannot last long, and I doubt, if the -plague cease not sooner, they will riot and sink where they stand." The -Coronation was shorn of its full splendour. On July 18, it was announced -that, as the king could not pass through the City--the traditional route -being from the Tower to Westminster--all the customary services by the way -are to be performed between Westminster Bridge and the Abbey. The -ceremony, thus shortened, took place on July 25. On August 8, it was -ordered that all fairs within fifty miles of London should be suspended, -the more important being Bartholomew fair at Smithfield, and Stourbridge -fair near Cambridge. The new Spanish ambassador was unable to approach the -king, who moved from place to place,--Hampton Court, Woodstock and -Southampton. - -These are the traces left by this great epidemic in the state papers of -the time. As in the case of the sweating sickness of 1485, which was in -London while the preparations were going on for Henry VII.'s coronation, -we should hardly have known from public documents that the City was in a -state of panic. But in 1603 we are come to a period when other sources of -information are available. It remains to put together what descriptions -have come down to us of the City of the Plague. - -The most graphic touches are those left by Thomas Dekker, the dramatist, -of whom it has been said that "he knew London as well as Dickens[924]." -To describe first the condition of the "sinfully polluted suburbs," he -takes a walk through the still and melancholy streets in the dead hours of -the night. He hears from every house the loud groans of raving sick men, -the struggling pangs of souls departing, grief striking an alarum, -servants crying out for masters, wives for husbands, parents for children, -children for their mothers. Here, he meets some frantically running to -knock up sextons; there, others fearfully sweating with coffins, to steal -forth dead bodies lest the fatal handwriting of death should seal up their -houses. This would have been an evasion of the order, dating from 1547, -that no bodies were to be buried between six in the evening and six in the -morning--an order which was exactly reversed in the plague of 1665. - -When morning comes, a hundred hungry graves stand gaping, and everyone of -them, as at a breakfast, hath swallowed down ten or eleven lifeless -carcases; before dinner, in the same gulf are twice so many more devoured, -and before the sun takes his rest these numbers are doubled,--threescore -bodies lying slovenly tumbled together in a muck-pit[925]! One gruesome -story he tells of a poor wretch in the Southwark parish of St Mary Overy, -who was thrown for dead upon a heap of bodies in the morning, and in the -afternoon was found gasping and gaping for life. Others were thrust out of -doors by cruel masters, to die in the fields and ditches, or in the common -cages or under stalls. A boy sick of the plague was put on the water in a -wherry to come ashore wherever he could, but landing was denied him by an -army of brown-bill men that kept the shore, so that he had to be taken -whence he came to die in a cellar. The sextons made their fortunes, -especially those of St Giles's, Cripplegate, of St Sepulchre's, outside -Newgate, of St Olave's in Southwark, of St Clement's at Temple Bar, and -of Stepney. Herb-wives and gardeners also prospered; the price of flowers, -herbs, and garlands rose wonderfully, insomuch that rosemary, which had -wont to be sold for twelve pence an armful, went now for six shillings a -handful. - -While plague was thus raging in the poor skirts of the City, "paring them -off by little and little," the well-to-do within the walls took alarm and -fled, "some riding, some on foot, some without boots, some in slippers, by -water, by land, swarm they westwards. Hackneys, watermen and waggons were -not so terribly employed many a year; so that within a short time there -was not a good horse in Smithfield, nor a coach to be set eyes on." But -they might just as well have remained as trust themselves to the -"unmerciful hands of the country hard-hearted hobbinolls." The sight of a -Londoner's flat-cap was dreadful to a lob: a treble ruff threw a whole -village into a sweat. A crow that had been seen on a sunshiny day standing -on the top of Powles would have been better than a beacon on fire, to have -raised all the towns within ten miles of London for the keeping her out. -One Londoner set out for Bristol, thinking not to see his home again this -side Christmas. But forty miles from town the plague came upon him, and he -sought entrance to an inn. When his case was known, the doors of the inn -"had their wooden ribs crushed to pieces by being beaten together; the -casements were shut more close than an usurer's greasy velvet pouch; the -drawing windows were hanged, drawn, and quartered; not a crevice but was -stopt, not a mouse-hole left open." The host and hostess tumbled over each -other in their flight, the maids ran out into the orchard, the tapster -into the cellar. The unhappy Londoner was helped by a fellow-citizen who -appeared on the scene, and was carried to die on a truss of straw in the -corner of a field; but the parson and the clerk refused him burial, and he -was laid in a hole where he had died. According to Stow, Bamford, and -Davies of Hereford, such experiences of fugitive Londoners were repeated -everywhere in the country, and Dekker gives several other tales of the -same sort "to shorten long winter nights." - -Meanwhile, Dekker goes on, the plague had entered the gates of the City -and marched through Cheapside; men, women, and children dropped down -before him, houses were rifled, streets ransacked, rich men's coffers -broken open and shared amongst prodigal heirs and unworthy servants. Every -house looked like St Bartholomew's Hospital and every street like -Bucklersbury: ("the whole street called Bucklersbury," says Stow, "on both -sides throughout is possessed of grocers, and apothecaries towards the -west end thereof"), for poor Mithridaticum and Dragon-water were bought in -every corner, and yet were both drunk every hour at other men's cost. "I -could make your cheeks look pale and your hearts shake with telling how -some have had eighteen sores at one time running upon them, others ten or -twelve, many four and five; and how those that have been four times -wounded by this year's infection have died of the last wound, while -others, hurt as often, are now going about whole." Funerals followed so -close that three thousand mourners went as if trooping together, with rue -and wormwood stuffed into their ears and nostrils, looking like so many -boars' heads stuck with branches of rosemary. A dying man was visited by a -friendly neighbour, who promised to order the coffin; but he died himself -an hour before his infected friend. A churchwarden in Thames Street, on -being asked for space in the churchyard, answered mockingly that he wanted -it for himself, and he did occupy it in three days. - -One more extract from Dekker will bring us back to the strictly medical -history: - - "Never let any man ask me what became of our Phisitions in this - massacre. They hid their synodical heads as well as the proudest, and - I cannot blame them, for their phlebotomies, losinges and electuaries, - with their diacatholicons, diacodions, amulets and antidotes, had not - so much strength to hold life and soul together as a pot of Pinder's - ale and a nutmeg. Their drugs turned to durt, their simples were - simple things. Galen could do no more good than Sir Giles Goosecap. - Hippocrate, Avicen, Paracelsus, Rasis, Fernelius, with all their - succeeding rabble of doctors and water-casters, were at their wits' - end; for not one of them durst peep abroad." - -Only a band of desperadoes, he goes on, some few empirical madcaps--for -they could never be worth velvet caps--clapped their bills upon every -door. But besides the empirical desperadoes, who dared the infection for -the sake of the golden harvest, some few physicians and surgeons remained -at their post, or at least put out essays with prescriptions and rules of -regimen. Three such books on the plague were published in London in 1603, -of which the most notable was one by Dr Thomas Lodge[926], a poet like -Dekker himself, but of the academical school to which Dekker did not -belong. The passage quoted about the impotence of the faculty is perhaps -aimed at these books, which all abound with the sayings and maxims of -Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, and the like, Lodge also quoting the more -obscure name of Fernelius, which Dekker has not failed to seize upon. - -Lodge confirms the statement about the empirical desperadoes clapping -their bills upon every post. One of them, "who underwrit not his bills," -posted them close to Lodge's house in Warwick Lane, so that the physician -was taken by the populace to be himself the advertiser. He was besieged -with applicants for his cordial waters, and wrote his book to make his own -position clear, being "aggrieved because of that loathsome imposition -which was laid upon me to make myself vendible (which is unworthy a -liberal and gentle mind, much more ill-beseeming a physician and -philosopher), who ought not to prostitute so sacred a profession so -abjectly." Farther confirming Dekker about the greed of the quacks as well -as about the strictly business-like attitude of the regular profession, he -speaks of "my poor countrymen left without guide or counsel how to succour -themselves in extremity; for where the infection most rageth, there -poverty reigneth among the commons, which, having no supplies to satisfy -the greedy desires of those that should attend them, are for the most part -left desolate to die without relief." The reader must wonder, he says, -"why, amongst so many excellent and learned physicians of this city, I -alone have undertaken to answer the expectation of the multitude, and to -bear the heavy burthen of contentious critiques and depravers." The -explanation was that the regular faculty had for the most part gone out of -town, along with magistrates, ministers and rich men. Bamford, the -minister of St Olave's, Southwark, who remained at his post, has no excuse -to offer for magistrates or for his clerical brethren, but he is extremely -fair to the doctors: "As for physicians, I only propound this question: -Whether they be bound in conscience to be resident, in regard of their -profession and ability to do good, or they may use their liberty for -themselves and (as they think) for their lives, in regard they are no -public persons and live (not by a common stipend but) by what they can -get." - -Dr Lodge, who dated his book from Warwick Lane on August 19, or when the -epidemic would have been at its height, had already won laurels in the -field of poetry and romance. He was an Oxonian (Trinity College, 1573) and -one of a set with Marlowe and Greene. "At length his mind growing -serious," says Anthony Wood, "he studied physic," travelling abroad for -the purpose and graduating M.D. at Avignon. He had great success in -practice, especially among Catholics, to whom he was suspected of -belonging. He died of the plague, during the next great epidemic of 1625, -at Low Leyton in Essex. His book on the plague would be entitled to a -place in medical literature if only that its style is above the average of -medical compositions. I cannot forbear quoting the following collect for -its structure and euphony: - - "But before I prosecute this my intended purpose, let us invocate and - call upon that divine bounty, from whose fountain head of mercy every - good and gracious benefit is derived, that it will please him to - assist this my labor and charitable intent, and so to order the scope - of my indevour, that it may redound to his eternal glory, our - neighbours' comfort, and the special benefit of our whole country; - which, being now under the fatherly correction of Almighty God, and - punished for our misdeeds by his heavy hand, may through the admirable - effects and fruits of the sacred art of physic, receive prevention of - their danger, and comfort in this desperate time of visitation. To him - therefore, King of kings, invisible and only wise, be all honor, - majesty and dominion, now and for ever. Amen." - -It is only in dealing with the more public aspects of the plague that -Lodge shows any individuality. So far as concerns causes, -prognostications, symptoms, remedies, preventives, and precautions, there -is little in his essay which is not to be found in the older plague-books, -such as the 14th century one of the bishop of Aarhus, his anatomical -directions for blood-letting being word for word the same as the bishop's. -Some of his points are the same as in Skene's Edinburgh essay of 1568, -such as the indication of plague about to begin which is got from rats, -moles and other underground creatures forsaking their holes. To keep off -the infection he advises the wearing of small cakes of arsenic in the -armpits, where the buboes usually came. That Paracelsist practice is known -to have been tried at Zurich in 1564; it was one of the matters of dispute -between the Galenists and the chemical physicians. During the plague of -1603, Dr Peter Turner published a curious tract in defence of it[927]. - -From a Venetian gentleman Lodge obtained also the formula of a -preservative from infection, which contained, among other things, -tormentilla root, white dittany, bole Armeniac and oriental pearl: "The -gentleman that gave me this assured me that he had given it to many in the -time of the great plague in Venice, who, though continually conversant in -the houses of those that were infected, received no infection or prejudice -by them." - -In his chapter on "The Order and Police that ought to be held in a City -during the Plague-time," he advises the removal of the shambles from -within the walls to some remote and convenient place near the river of -Thames, to the end that the blood and garbage of beasts that are killed -may be washed away with the tide. Lodge lived just on the other side of -Newgate Street from the shambles, and could speak feelingly about them, as -many more had done since Edward III.'s time. The nobles of Aries, he says, -had acted so on the advice of Valenolaes, having built their -slaughter-houses to the westward of the city upon the river of Rhone. The -chief interest of the book is in the sections on preventing the spread of -infection. He quotes an instance from Alexander Benedetti of Venice, of a -feather-bed, slept on by one in the plague, having been laid aside for -seven years, "and the first that slept upon the same at the end of the -same term was suddenly surprised with the plague." His directions for the -cleansing of houses, bedding, clothes, &c. are minute and thorough -(Chapter XVII.)[928]. Modern readers will find his views on isolation and -compulsory removal to hospital worth noting. The Pest House, which had -been lately built in the fields towards Finsbury, was then the only -special hospital to which patients in the plague could be removed, and its -accommodation was not great; the burials at it in the nine weeks from July -21 to September 22, 1603, were respectively 18, 18, 12, 21, 12, 6, 5, 10 -and 10. The Bridewell near Fleet Street appears also to have admitted a -small number of plague-cases, the burials from it in the five weeks from -August 18 to September 22, having been respectively 8, 5, 17, 7 and 19. -There was also a pest-house in Tothill fields, for the Westminster end of -the town. Servants appear to have been mostly sent to these refuges. Lodge -saw that the principle of compulsory removal of the sick had no chance -without more hospital accommodation (as Defoe also insisted in reviewing -the plague of 1665), and he proposes a plan for a pest-house with -"twenty-eight to thirty separate chambers on the upper floor, and as many -beneath." He is humanely alive to the hardships of compulsory isolation: - - "For in truth it is a great amazement, and no less horror, to separate - the child from the father and mother, the husband from his wife, the - wife from her husband, and the confederate and friend from his - adherent and friend; and to speak my conscience in this matter, this - course ought not to be kept before that, by the judgment of a learned - physician, the sickness be resolved on. And when it shall be found it - is infectious, yet it is very needful to use humanity towards such as - are seized. And if their parents or friends have the means to succour - them, and that freely, and with a good heart they are willing to do - the same, those that have the charge to carry them to the pest-house - ought to suffer them to use that office of charity towards their sick, - yet with this condition that they keep them apart and suffer them not - to frequent and converse with such as are in health. For, to speak the - truth, one of the chiefest occasions of the death of such sick folks - (besides the danger of their disease) is the fright and fear they - conceive when they see themselves devoid of all succour, and, as it - were, ravished out of the hands of their parents and friends, and - committed to the trust of strangers.... And therefore in this cause - men ought to proceed very discreetly and modestly." - -Another London essay of the same year, by "S. H. Studious in Phisicke" is -a much slighter production. The author writes in a superior strain and -offers advice "unto such Chirurgeons as shall be called or shall adventure -themselves to the care of this so dangerous sickness," one piece of advice -being not to let blood except at the beginning of the seizure, and to take -then five ounces of blood in the morning, and three ounces more at three -in the afternoon, repeating the depletion next day at discretion. He -states also the theory of the plague-bubo: it was a way made by nature to -expel the venomous and corrupt matter which is noisome unto it. He advises -the practice of incising the bubo and of helping it to suppurate, which -was the treatment in the Black Death of 1348-49: if nature be "weak and -not able to expel the venom fast enough, by insensible transpiration the -venom returneth back to the heart and so presently destroyeth -nature[929]." - -It is significant of the state of medical practice and literature in -England at the end of the Elizabethan period that the only other treatise -which the plague of 1603 is known to have called forth was a -mystification[930] under the name of one Thomas Thayre, chirurgian, "for -the benefite of his countrie, but chiefly for the honorable city of -London," elaborately dedicated to the Lord Mayor of the year (by name), -the Sheriffs and the Aldermen, to whom "Thomas Thayre wisheth all -spirituall and temporal blessings." It proves on examination to be a very -close reproduction, with some omissions at the end and a few additions, -of the old Treatise of the Pestilence by Thomas Phayre or Phaer, first -published in 1547, and was probably the venture of some bookseller or -literary hack. The original treatise of Phayre had been reprinted last in -1596, "latelye corrected and enlarged by Thomas Phayre," although that -writer must have been dead many years. A reprint of some of "Dr Phaer's" -remedies and preservatives, without date, is conjecturally assigned to the -year 1601. The original work of Henry VIII.'s time was also a literary -compilation, in some parts copied verbatim from the 14th century book by -the Danish bishop of Arusia, and bears not a trace of first-hand -observation. Yet it had the fortune to be reprinted once more, in 1722, by -a physician W. T., who remarked that, as the writers on plague in his own -time "usually transcribe from others," he wished to set before them a -specimen "of such as have written on a disease of which they were -eye-witnesses." - -Two printed addresses on the plague by London ministers are extant: one by -Henoch Clapham, "to his ordinary hearers," which is merely a sermon, in -the form of an epistle, to improve the occasion[931]; and the other by -James Bamford, rector of St Olave's, Southwark, in the form of a dialogue, -and full of practical and sensible advice[932]. Bamford's tract is -especially directed against "that bloody error which denieth the -pestilence to be contagious; maintained not only by the rude multitude but -by too many of the better sort;" and its chief medical interest lies in -the reasons with which he confutes that deadly heresy:-- - - "Do not the botches, blains and spots (called God's tokens) - accompanied with raving and death, argue a stranger [sic] infection - than that of the leprosy, to be judged by botches and spots? [the - infectiousness of leprosy being proved by revelation, Lev. xiii.]. - Doth not the ordinary experience of laying live pigeons to - plague-sores and taking them presently dead away, and that one after - another, demonstrate mortal infection? In that the plague rageth and - reigneth especially amongst the younger sort, and such as do not - greatly regard clean and sweet keeping, and where many are pestered - together in alleys and houses--is not this an argument of infection? - Thousands can directly tell where, when, and of whom they took the - infection.... Persons of a tender constitution or corrupt humours - sooner take the plague than those of a strong constitution and sound - bodies. The infirmities of many women in travail, and other diseases, - turn into the plague. We see few auncient people die in comparison of - children and the younger sort. - - "Lastly, of those that keep a good diet, have clean and sweet keeping, - live in a good air, use reasonable and seasonable preservatives, and - be not pestered many in one house, or have convenient house-room for - their household--we see few infected in comparison of those that fail - in all these means of preservation and yet will thrust themselves into - danger." - -The plague of London in 1603 called forth also a poem by John Davies, a -schoolmaster of Hereford. It is called "The Triumph of Death; or the -Picture of the Plague, according to the Life, as it was in A.D. -1603[933]." The description is by no means so concrete as the title would -have us believe, and might, indeed, have been taken, most of it, at -second-hand from Dekker:-- - - "Cast out your dead, the carcass-carrier cries, - Which he by heaps in groundless graves inters ... - The London lanes, themselves thereby to save, - Did vomit out their undigested dead, - Who by cart-loads are carried to the grave, - For all those lanes with folk were overfed." - -He mentions that the prisoners in the gaols were comparatively exempt from -plague[934]. One line suggests the great size that the plague-buboes -sometimes reached: - - "Here swells a botch as high as hide can hold." - -Perhaps his particulars of the plague in the provinces, in 1603 and -following years, are from his own knowledge. Both the Universities, he -says, were forsaken. - - "Each village free now stands upon her guard ... - The haycocks in the meads were oft opprest - With plaguy bodies, both alive and dead, - Which being used confounded man and beast." - -One incident he vouches for (in a marginal note) as having occurred at -Leominster: A person with the plague was drowned to prevent infection, by -the order of Sir Herbert Croft, one of the Council of the Marches of -Wales. - - -The Plague of 1603 in the country near London. - -Most of the country parishes nearest to London had plague-burials in 1603, -doubtless from the escape of infected Londoners to them and from the -spreading of the infection. In several of these parish registers[935] the -plague-deaths in 1603 are more than in the time of the Great Plague of -1665: there is a note in the Croydon register that "many died in the -highways near the city." The following table shows the mortalities, great -and small. - - Burials - Burials from from - all causes. plague. - - Barking 381 -- - Battersea 23 -- - Beckenham 24 -- - Bromley 26 -- - Cheam 13 9 - Chigwell 28 -- - Chiselhurst 62 -- - Clapham 20 mostly plague - Croydon -- 158 - Deptford 235 -- - Ealing 136 -- - Edmonton 145 85 - Eltham 52 17 - Enfield 253 129 - Finchley 51 38 - Hackney 321 269 - Hampstead 7 -- - Isleworth 75 -- - Islington 322 -- - Kensington 32 -- - Lambeth 566 -- - Lewisham 117 -- - Romford 122 -- - Stratford 130 89 - Streatham 36 -- - Tottenham 79 44 - Twickenham -- 67 - Wandsworth -- 100 - Wimbledon 21 -- - -A comparison of these figures with those of 1665 will show that the -northern parishes, Islington and Hackney, as well as parishes farther out -in the country, such as Enfield, had more plague-deaths in 1603 than in -the time of the Great Plague. Also Barking, Stratford and Romford on the -one side, and Lewisham, Eltham and Croydon on the other, had heavier -mortalities in the earlier year. It would appear, indeed, that the -infection in the country near London had been attracting notice before the -plague in the capital caused any alarm. On April 18, 1603, the lord mayor -wrote to the Privy Council concerning the steps that had been taken "to -prevent the spread of the plague in the counties of Middlesex and Surrey." -On July 20, 1603, the king issued a warrant to the constables and others -of the hundred of Twyford in Kent, to levy a special rate on certain -parishes to relieve the sufferers by a grievous plague in the villages of -West Malling, East Malling, Offham, and seven others[936]. Such rates were -usually levied when an epidemic was nearly over; so that the outbreak in -Kent must have been at least as early as that in London. - -The towns and villages of Hertfordshire, which were favourite resorts of -Londoners in plague-time, had their share of the visitation in 1603. At -Great Amwell, there were 41 burials in the year, of which 19 were of the -plague between August 19 and November 28, 6 of them in one day. Doubtless -the registers of other parishes in the home counties would show a similar -history if they were searched[937]. - - -Annual Plague in London after 1603. - -Before following the plague of 1603 into the provinces, it will be -convenient to give the history of the infection in London for the next few -years. There was little plague in 1604 and not much in 1605; but in 1606 -the infection again became active, and continued at its endemic level for -some five or six years. The following table, from the weekly bills of -mortality, shows how regularly the infection came to a height in the -autumn year after year, as if it had been a product of the soil[938]: - -_Table, from the Weekly Bills of Mortality (London), showing the increase -of Plague in Autumn, for five successive years._ - - 1606 1607 1608 1609 1610 - - Total deaths from} - plague in the } 2124 2352 2262 4240 1803 - year } - - Weekly deaths in - - { 25 27 16 60 38 - { 33 33 26 57 45 - July { 50 37 24 58 45 - { 46 51 50 91 40 - { 66 43 - - { 67 77 45 100 47 - { 75 69 70 126 50 - August { 85 76 79 101 73 - { 85 71 73 150 60 - { 177 99 - - { 116 105 123 141 96 - { 105 121 136 158 89 - Sept. { 92 114 107 210 86 - { 87 177 143 144 72 - { 147 - - { 141 150 103 154 63 - { 106 113 131 177 79 - Oct. { 117 110 124 131 59 - { 109 82 102 55 49 - { 101 68 - - { 68 66 109 84 58 - { 41 55 72 69 40 - Nov. { 78 46 69 67 22 - { 72 21 70 59 42 - { 51 39 - -In Dekker's _Seven Deadly Sins of London_, published in 1606, he returns -to the subject of the plague. He says that it still slays hundreds in a -week, a statement which will be seen to be an exaggeration by reference to -the Table. But, on another point, Dekker would have been correctly -informed. The playhouses, he says, stand empty, with the doors locked and -the flag taken down. The policy of forbidding plays during plague-time, or -when the infection threatened to be active, was advocated by the Puritan -clergy as early as 1577, and had been in force in the plague of 1563. -"Plaies are banished for a time out of London," says Harrison in 1572, -"lest the resort unto them should ingender a plague, or rather disperse it -being already begonne[939]." In a sermon preached at Paul's Cross on -Sunday, November 3, 1577, in the time of the plague, by T. W., on the text -"Woe to that abominable, filthy and cruel city," the preacher exclaims, -"Behold the sumptuous theatre-houses, a continual monument of London's -prodigal folly! But I understand they are now forbidden because of the -plague[940]." By the year 1581 the lord mayor had become a zealous -supporter of the Puritan demands for the stopping of plays in the City and -in the Liberties[941]. In July (?), 1603, James I. granted a licence to -players for performances in the Curtain and Boar's Head theatres, "as soon -as the plague decreases to 30 deaths per week in London[942]." In the -beginning of winter, 1607, on the subsidence of plague, the theatres were -permitted to be opened, so that the "poor players," might make a living; -but as the plague revived in 1608, and became still more serious in 1609, -it is tolerably certain that the theatres were shut during the whole -summer and autumn of those years. - -Those years, from 1606 to 1610, when the actor's and dramatist's -profession was seriously hindered by the fear of plague, correspond to a -blank period in the personal history of Shakespeare. It has been -conjectured that he retired from London for a time, before his final -retirement to Stratford-on-Avon. At all events his occupation, if not -gone, was greatly interfered with in every one of the years from 1603 to -1610, excepting perhaps the years 1604 and 1605, which would hardly have -come within the limit of 30 plague-deaths in a week. In 1604 his name is -joined in a patent with that of Laurence Fletcher for the Globe theatre. -Plays continued to be acted in the plague-years, before the court or in -the houses of the nobility; but the applause of the pit and gallery would -have been wanting. _Macbeth_, which is supposed, from its subject, to have -been written to celebrate the accession of the king of Scots to the -English crown was not put on the stage until 1610 or 1611. _King Lear_ -was given before the court at Christmas 1606. One of the quartos of -_Troilus and Cressida_, published in 1609, with the author's name, has a -note to say that "this new piece had never been staled with the stage, -never clapper-clawed by the palms of the vulgar;" but another edition of -the same year (1609) omitting the preface, bears on the title that the -piece had been played at the Globe theatre by the king's servants, from -which it is inferred that it had been acted in the interval between the -two editions of 1609. After 1610, and continuously so until 1625, there -was no plague in London to interfere with the business of actors and -play-writers, just as the period from 1594 to 1603 was a clear interval. -The earlier time of freedom was the great period of the drama in London. -The disastrous plague of 1603 and the successive unhealthy summers and -autumns until 1610 seriously interfered with it, and seriously interfered, -also, with Shakespeare's active share in the production of plays on the -stage. Whatever writing he did after that would have been with a less -certain prospect of representation, or, one may say, was not done under -the same direct influence of playhouse atmosphere which inspired his -earlier comedies and historical plays. - - -Plague in the Provinces in 1603 and following years. - -Returning now to 1603, to follow the infection into towns and villages in -the provinces, we find first that the plague had been active in some -provincial parts of England for several months before it broke out -severely in London in 1603. At Chester the great epidemic, referred to in -the sequel, began in September, 1602. At Stamford, an epidemic which -eventually carried off nearly 600 is heard of first on December 2, 1602, -when the corporation resolved to build a "cabbin" for the plague-stricken, -and again in January, 1603, when a fourth part of a fifteenth was levied -for their relief and maintenance[943]. - -At Oxford, which was one of the towns earliest and most severely smitten, -after London, the disease was first seen in July, 1603, and was supposed -to have been spread abroad by the "lewd and dissolute behaviour of some -base and unruly inhabitants." In September the colleges broke up, having -made a collection for the relief of the plague-stricken town's people -before leaving. The Michaelmas term was prorogued until December 5, but -very few came to the congregation, the plague not ceasing until February. -Anthony Wood says: - - "The truth is, the times were very sad, and nothing but lamentation - and bemoanings heard in the streets. Those that had wealth retired - into the country, but those that were needy were, if not taken away by - death, almost starved, and so consequently ready to mutiny against - their superiors for relief." All the gates of colleges and halls were - constantly kept shut day and night, a few persons being left in them - to keep possession. The shops of the town were closed, none but the - attendants on the sick or the collectors for them were to be seen - stirring abroad, the churches were seldom or never open for divine - service. - -The plague having ceased in February most of the scholars came back, and -in April the infection broke out again, but was prevented from spreading. -The court was at Oxford in 1604, and plague broke out after it left, the -infected being sent, as before, to the house in Portmead and to the -cabins. Among the deaths was that of the Principal of Hart Hall, -apparently in August. It broke out once more in March, 1605, but did not -spread, whether owing to the measures that were taken or to natural causes -may remain doubtful[944]. From that date Oxford had a twenty years' -immunity, until 1625. The Cambridge annals are less full, partly, perhaps, -because none of the colleges kept a register on the plan of that of Merton -College; but it appears from a letter assigned to 1608 that the Visitor of -King's College had been unable to come to the college to exercise his -much-needed authority, "in regard of the infection[945]." - -The severity of plague in 1603 among the provincial towns and country -parishes is known accurately for only a few of them. From a considerable -number more there is evidence of outbreaks of one degree or another. Thus -at Canterbury, the accounts of the corporation contain entries of sums -paid for watching shut-up houses, for carrying out the dead, and the like, -during twenty-four weeks in 1603-4[946]. At Exeter, a pest-house had to be -provided, and the fairs were not kept[947]. Similar indications of plague -come from Winchester[948], Colchester[949], Ipswich[950], Norwich[951], -Boston[952], and Newcastle[953]. The register of a parish in Derbyshire -(Brimington) contains plague-deaths in the end of 1602[954]. - -For Chester there are full particulars of a great plague. It began in -September, 1602, in a glover's house in St John's Lane, where 7 died, and -kept increasing until the weekly deaths reached 60. In 1603 there died of -the plague 650, and of other diseases 61. In 1604 the plague-deaths were -986, of which 55 were in one week. From October 14, 1604, to March 20, -1605, 812 died, and about 100 more until the 9th January, 1606, when the -infection ceased for a time. Cabins outside the city were erected for the -plague-stricken. In some houses, especially of sailors, five or six of the -same family died in the course of two or three weeks[955]. - -It appears to have been in Nantwich and Northwych in one or more of the -years 1603-1605, a rate for relief of the poor in them having been ordered -on June 22, 1605. Plague-deaths occur in the registers of Macclesfield and -Congleton in 1603. At Stockport 51 were buried of plague from October 9, -1605, to August 14, 1606, most of them in the latter year[956]. Straggling -epidemics are also reported from Northamptonshire--31 burials from plague -at Merston Trussell in 1604, and 16 at Eydon in 1605[957]. - -One of the severest epidemics of the period occurred at York in 1604. The -markets were closed, the courts adjourned to Ripon and Durham, and the -Minster and Minster-yard closely shut up. The infected were housed in -booths on Hobmoor and Horsefair. The number of those who died is put down -at 3512[958]. Durham also had a visitation in St Giles's parish, but a -minor one[959]. - -At Shrewsbury, however, the plague of 1604 was on the same disastrous -scale as at Chester and York, the deaths in the five parishes from June 2, -1604, to April 6, 1605, having been 667. On October 11, 1604, a -proclamation was issued against buying or receiving apparel, bedding, -etc., as it was suspected that plague spread greatly in the town by such -means[960]. A weekly tax was levied upon the inhabitants of Manchester, -sometime previous to 1606, for the relief of the poor infected, or -suspected of being infected, with the plague[961]. It was in Nottingham in -1604, and in at least one of the parishes in the county (Holme -Pierrepont)[962]. - -There are few parts of England from which evidence of plague does not come -in the years immediately following the great plague in London in 1603. To -those already mentioned we have to add Cranborne, in Dorset, where 71 died -of plague (in a total of 91) from June to December, 1604, six deaths -having occurred in the family first infected and eight in another[963]. -The parish register of Monkleigh in North Devon has the words "cessat -pestis" opposite the entry of a burial on March 30, 1605[964]. In 1606 -Peterborough was visited, the infection lasting "until the September -following[965]." In 1606 Eton also was "visited," as appears from payments -made[966]. - - * * * * * - -In the years 1606-1610, as we have seen, the plague in London occurred as -a regular product of the summer and autumn seasons. The outbreak in 1608 -has left several traces in the state letters[967]. On September 12, Lord -Chancellor Ellesmere writes from Ashridge (Berkhamstead) to the Secretary -of State that he will remain away until he is fully sure of his London -house being clear of the infection. On September 20 the City ditch was -being cleaned out, and Parliament was put off until February. On November -26 a letter from the court at Newmarket states that the king is angry that -my Lord Chamberlain has not sent him the bill of sickness. In 1609 there -were 13 plague-deaths in Enfield parish, and in 1610 some suspicious cases -near Theobalds. - -In the provinces there is no record of plague again until 1608: at -Chester, in that year, 14 died of it "at the Talbot[968]." In 1609 the -infection was at work in a number of provincial centres. On June 1 a -letter from Rochester reports it prevalent in Kent, impeding the work of -the Commissioners for the Aid. On June 15 the Commissioners at Hereford -request farther time on account of the plague. On August 22 the king's -tenants of Long Bennington, near Grantham, are brought to great poverty by -the plague[969]. These accounts relate to the counties of Hereford, -Lincoln and Kent, and with the last may be taken the brief reference to -plague at Sandwich[970]. Other counties affected in 1609, perhaps only at -a few spots, are Derbyshire, Norfolk, Northumberland, and Leicestershire. -In the first, there died at Chesterfield a few persons of the plague from -March 18 until May; at Belper, 51 between May 1 and September 30; and at -Holmesfield, the curate on March 12[971]. At Norwich the outbreak of 1609 -was slight compared with other experiences of that city[972]. Its -existence at Newcastle the same year is known only from the register of St -Nicholas parish[973]. - -The plague in Loughborough was one of the severer kind. The first case of -it appears to have been on the 24th August, 1609, in a woman who had given -birth to a child on the 19th. The last plague entry in the parish register -is on February 19, 1611; so that the epidemic went on for about eighteen -months. During that time the whole mortality was 452, of which by far the -most were plague-burials. Within a mile of Loughborough is a spot of -ground, long after known as the Cabbin Lees, whereon many of the -inhabitants "prudently built themselves huts and encamped to avoid the -infection[974]." - -In Leicester there was a slight amount of plague in 1607, and it -reappeared in 1608 (payments on account of it in the former year, and an -item of "30 hurdells used at the visited houses" in the accounts of 1608). -A more severe outbreak occurred in 1610 and 1611, during and after the -great plague at Loughborough. The streets lying towards the Castle were -exempt; a pest-house was built in Belgrave Gate; the burials for 1610 were -82 in St Martin's parish alone (more than half being from plague), and in -1611 the same parish had 128 burials[975]. - -In 1610 the infection was at work in one or more villages of the county of -Durham; 78 deaths "of the pestilence" occur in the register of Lamesley -parish, and the same year was probably one of the numerous plague seasons -down to 1647 in Whickham parish, where it is said that the people, perhaps -the plague-stricken, lived in huts upon Whickham Fell[976]. At Chester in -1610 "many died of the plague[977]"; and at Evesham there was a visitation -which caused the wealthier inhabitants to leave the town and the -authorities to effect a much-needed improvement in the cleanliness of the -streets (swine found at large to be impounded, stones, timber, dunghills -and carrion to be removed from the streets, and the paving in front of -each house to be repaired and cleansed once a week)[978]. - -Between 1610 and 1625, which was an almost absolutely clear interval for -London, there are few accounts of plague from the provinces. In 1611, -moneys were levied for "the visited" at Sherborne[979], and there was a -local rate for the same class at Canterbury in 1614-15[980]. Accounts of -the same kind for Coventry probably belong to the year 1613[981]. Then, as -we come near the next great plague-period, which began with the new reign -in 1625, we find an entry of 26 plague-deaths at Banbury in 1623, -"recorded in a part of the original register which has not been -transcribed into the parchment copy[982]:" if the date be correct, Banbury -was the first town to break the somewhat prolonged truce with the plague, -which became broken all over the country in 1625. There appears also to -have been distress in Grantham from sickness of some kind in 1623; in -September of that year the corporation of Stamford made a collection "in -this dangerous time of visitation," and sent 10 of it to Grantham, the -rest to go "to London or some other town as occasion offered." But the -years 1623 and 1624 were so much afflicted with fevers that the "dangerous -time of visitation" may not have meant plague. - - -Ireland. - -The accounts for Ireland are so casual that one suspects there may have -been more plague in that country than the records show. Thus, on January -25, 1604, there is a municipal order at Kilkenny, for men to stand at -every gate to keep out all strangers or suspected persons that might come -from any infected place within the kingdom; and on October 24 there is -another order, from which it appears that the plague was then in the town, -that it was needful to have the sick persons removed to remote places, -that no dung should be in the open streets before the doors, and that no -hogs should go or lie in the streets[983]. Towards the end of 1607 and -beginning of 1608 there was a "most dreadful pestilence" in the city of -Cork, which "by degrees ceased of itself[984]." - - -Plague in Scotland, 1603-24. - -The history of the plague in Scotland, which we left in a former chapter -at the year 1603, begins again in that year and goes on at one place or -another continuously until 1609. From June, 1603, until February, 1604, it -continued in the south of Scotland. At Edinburgh, in April, 1604, the -house of Mr John Hall was "clengit," because a servant woman's death was -suspected of the plague: which infection certainly spread in May and -became so severe in July that people fled the city[985]. A letter of July -18 from Codrus Cottage, relating to gold-mining, and making mention of -Closeburn, says that the plague is amongst the men[986]. - -In 1605, towards the end of July, the infection reappeared at Edinburgh, -Leith, and St Andrews[987]. On October 7, the chancellor of Scotland, Lord -Dunfermline, wrote to the earl of Salisbury that the plague was rife in -the small towns about Edinburgh, probably its old favourite seats along -the Firth and on the Fife coast[988]. The chancellor himself, as we know -from another source, had had a sad experience of it in his own house; his -son and niece had died of the plague, and his daughter "had the boils" but -recovered[989]. The next year, 1606, was the worst of this plague-period -in Scotland: "It raged so extremely in all the corners of the kingdoms -that neither burgh nor land in any part was free. The burghs of Ayr and -Stirling were almost desolate, and all the judicatures of the land were -deserted[990]." It is to this epidemic that a curious transaction, -discovered by Chambers, seems to belong. Two houses, on the line of the -great road from the south towards Aberdeen, situated on opposite sides of -the Dee, the one being the house of a proprietor and the other of a -minister, were suspected of having received the infection. The gentlemen -of the county met and resolved to send to Dundee for two professional -"clengers" or disinfectors, giving a bond to the borough of Dundee for 500 -merks for the services of its "clengers[991]." - -In April of the year following, 1607, we hear of the plague in Dundee -itself, despite the experts, as well as in Perth and other places[992]. In -July, 1608, many houses in Dundee were infected, and so many magistrates -dead that new appointments were made by the Privy Council[993]. It broke -out again at Perth on August 29, and continued till May, 1609, "wherein -deit young and auld 500 persons[994]." - -Until 1624 there is no other Scottish reference to plague except an entry, -November 7, 1609, touching the arrival at Leith of a vessel from the -Thames, with some of her crew dead of the plague, and the quarantining of -her at Inchkeith[995]. Edinburgh had a small outbreak the year before the -next great English plague that we come to. On November 23, 1624, the -infection was discovered to be in several houses, and the session of the -law courts was adjourned to January 8[996]; but Scotland appears to have -had no part in the great infection of English soil which immediately -followed. - - -Malignant Fever preceding the Plague of 1625. - -The period of immunity from plague both in London and in the provinces, -which began about 1611, was at length broken in 1625. The health of -London, and of country districts as well, had not been good for two years -before, but plague was not the reigning type of disease. Thus, in London, -the burials rose from 8959 in 1622, to 11,102 in 1623 and to 12,210 in -1624. The letters of the time enable us to see what it was that disturbed -the public health. On August 21, 1624, Chamberlain writes from London to -Dudley Carleton[997]: - - "We had 328 died this week, a greater number than hath been these - fifteen or sixteen years, and yet no mention of plague. God keep it - from among us, for we are in danger. But this spotted fever is - cousin-german to it at least, and makes as quick riddance almost. The - Lady Hatton hath two or three of her children sick of it at her - brother Fanshaw's, in Essex, and hath lost her younger daughter, that - was buried at Westminster on Wednesday night by her father; a pretty - gentlewoman, much lamented." Again, on September 4: "We have here but - a sickly season, which is easily seen by the weekly mounting of our - bill, which is come this last week to 407, and yet we will acknowledge - no infection [i.e., of plague]. Indeed, by the particulars we find - about 250 of them to be children, most of the rest carried away by - this spotted fever, which reigns almost everywhere, in the country as - ill as here.... The mortality is spread far and near, and takes hold - of whole households in many places." On October 9: "The town continues - sickly still, for this week there died 347." On October 23 we hear of - the Lord Keeper being "troubled with the fluent disease of the - time"--the flux, or flix. On December 18 (as well as previously on - August 21) a cure of smallpox is mentioned in a person of quality. - -These, then, were the prevalent types of epidemic sickness, in the houses -of the great as well as among the poor--spotted fever or typhus, dysentery -or flux, and smallpox. Two of these continued into the plague-year, 1625, -as Taylor, the Water-poet, says of that occasion: - - "Thou see'st the fearful plague, the flix and fever, - Which many a soul doth from the body sever." - -An eminent victim of the "pestilent fever" was the marquis of Hamilton, -who died of it while at Moor Park, Rickmansworth, on Ash-Wednesday, -1625[998]. His residence in London was the house called Fisher's Folly -(mentioned by Stow) outside Bishopsgate in a parish which was now -"pestered" with tenements of the poor. - -The fever was not always called the spotted fever. It may have been the -same disease that is often spoken of under the name of ague--"the ague -with a hundred names," as Abraham Holland says (1625). Thus, Mead, of -Christ's College, Cambridge, writes on September 4, 1625: "Agues grow -wonderfully rife both here and everywhere; so that one told me yesterday -that about Royston and Barkway they wanted help to gather their harvest -out of the fields"--perhaps the same sort of "burning fever" which we -shall have to trace a few pages later, both in town and country, in time -of peace as well as in the Civil Wars, the type of sickness which became -the common one in England when the plague had ceased, reaching its highest -point in the 18th century. But here again we meet the old difficulty of -"influenza." - -These historical glimpses of spotted fevers, or pestilent fevers, in the -houses of the great, as well as among the common people, are in -accordance not only with the London bills of mortality for the respective -years, but also with the registers of country parishes and market towns as -abstracted by the laborious Dr Short. Repeating the form of table used in -a former chapter, which dealt with the epidemic years 1557-8 and 1580-82, -we find the years 1623-25 distinguished as follows: - -_Country Parishes._ - - Year. No. of No. of Baptised Buried - registers unhealthy in same in same - examined parishes - - 1622 85 11 177 223 - 1623 84 30 601 836 - 1624 87 19 362 511 - 1625 88 13 246 327 - -_Market Towns._ - - Year. No. of No. of Baptised Buried - registers unhealthy in same in same - examined towns - - 1622 25 4 345 442 - 1623 25 16 439 2254 - 1624 25 9 714 978 - 1625 25 9 563 666 - -The incidence upon the year 1623 is the more noteworthy as there appears -to be no record of plague in England that year in its more usual seats, -except an entry in a parish register at Banbury. Fever, we may take it, -was the prevalent epidemic types both in London and provincial places, -urban and rural. In his other treatise Short calls it "malignant spotted -fever," and refers specially to the parish registers of Keswick, Penrith, -and Wigton for its prevalence in 1623[999]. - -Chamberlain, in the letter of August 21, 1624, says the spotted fever was -cousin-german at least to the plague; and therein he expressed as a layman -an opinion which was afterwards formally expounded by Willis Sydenham and -Morton. Along with the flux and the smallpox it stood for the -unhealthiness of London in 1623 and 1624 and the first months of 1625, -just as the trio were the chief causes of epidemic mortality in the -capital in the latter part of the seventeenth century and throughout the -whole of the eighteenth. But in 1625 London was not yet done with plague. -As the year passed from spring into summer, the spotted fever did not, -indeed, cease (as we may infer from casual references and from the known -facts of the analogous plague-years, 1636 and 1665); but it was soon -overtaken, surpassed, and eclipsed by the greater infection, the old -"common infection" of the sixteenth century, the bubo-plague itself. To -explain the existence of typhus in the Liberties and out-parishes of -London in 1623 and 1624, we find ready to hand the evidence of -overcrowding while the plague was quiet from 1611; the births in 1624 were -about half as many again as immediately before the last great plague of -1603, and the deaths were twice as many. The fringe of poverty had grown -once more, despite the epidemic checks of flux, fever and smallpox: the -harvest was ready for the sickle, and the reaping took place in the summer -and autumn of 1625. The infection of plague was lurking in London, as it -had been for nearly three centuries; but it depended for its activity upon -the times and seasons, and the season of 1625 was a favourable one. - - -The London Plague of 1625. - -The previous summer of 1624 had been unusually hot and dry. The weather in -October was exceptionally fine, and the fruit crop was abundant. In -January the weather was warm and mild. On February 25 there occurred one -of those very high tides that come perhaps once in a generation. Thames -Street was wrecked, Westminster Hall was "full three feet in water all -over. But the greater loss we hear of in the drowning of marshes, and -overthrowing the walls in Kent, Essex, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, and other -places near the sea[1000]." For the first three months of 1625 the deaths -from plague were two or three in a week, some weeks being clear. In the -last week of March they were 11, and in the week after, 10. In the last -week of May they were 69, reported from twenty parishes. The spring is -described by the Water-poet as "wholesome;" but the early summer was -unusually cold. On June 12 Chamberlain writes: "We have had for a month -together the extremest cold weather ever I knew in this season." The whole -month of June was a time of "ceaseless rain in London[1001]." In the -country, the hay-harvest was spoilt, and the corn-harvest was only a half -crop[1002]. Another says (in verse), that the summer sun wore sallow hair -and a languishing complexion; the air was full of black mists and damp, -with no dewdrops at night, but a vaporous smoke[1003]. The following table -of the weekly burials (with christenings) in London will show how the -plague increased after the rains of June. The mortality of May and June -had been a good deal higher for the season than in the moderate endemic -years of plague, such as the last series from 1606 to 1611; but it was not -until July that a plague of the first degree declared itself. - -_A Table of the Christenings and Mortality in London for the year -1625._[1004] - - Of Parishes - Week ending Christened Buried Plague Infected - - Dec. 23 165 183 0 0 - 30 176 211 0 0 - Jan. 6 199 220 1 1 - 13 194 196 1 1 - 20 160 240 0 0 - 27 178 226 0 0 - Feb. 3 178 174 3 1 - 10 161 204 5 2 - 17 181 211 3 1 - 24 190 252 1 1 - Mar. 3 185 207 0 0 - 10 196 210 0 0 - 17 175 262 4 3 - 24 187 226 8 2 - 31 133 243 11 4 - Apr. 7 184 239 10 4 - 14 154 256 24 10 - 21 160 230 25 11 - 28 134 305 26 9 - May 5 158 292 30 10 - 12 140 332 45 13 - 19 182 379 71 17 - 26 145 401 78 16 - June 2 123 395 69 20 - 9 125 434 91 25 - 16 110 510 165 31 - 23 110 640 239 32 - 30 125 942 390 50 - July 7 114 1222 593 57 - 14 115 1741 1004 82 - 21 137 2850 1819 96 - 28 155 3583 2471 103 - Aug. 4 128 4517 3659 114 - 11 125 4855 4115 112 - 18 134 5205 4463 114 - 25 135 4841 4218 114 - Sept. 1 117 3897 3344 117 - 8 112 3157 2550 116 - 15 100 2148 1674 107 - 22 75 1994 1551 111 - 29 78 1236 852 103 - Oct. 6 77 838 538 99 - 13 85 815 511 91 - 20 91 651 331 76 - 27 77 375 134 47 - Nov. 3 82 357 89 41 - 10 85 319 92 35 - 17 88 274 48 22 - 24 88 231 27 16 - Dec. 1 93 190 15 12 - 8 90 181 15 7 - 15 94 168 6 5 - ---- ----- ----- - 6983 54265 35417 - -The deaths from all causes in May and June were so many more than the -reported plague-deaths could account for that those who watched the bills -of mortality (Mead at Cambridge, Salvetti in London) suspected that plague -was being concealed. "It is a strange reckoning," says Mead of the bill -for the week ending June 30: "Are there some other diseases as bad and -spreading as the plague, or is there untrue dealing in the account[1005]?" -Probably there were both; at the end of the year the deaths from all -causes were some 20,000 more than the plague accounted for; and at least -half of that excess was extra to the ordinary mortality. The spotted fever -and the flux doubtless continued side by side with the plague, having -been its forerunners. The parishes most affected were, as in 1603, St -Giles's, Cripplegate, St Olave's, Southwark, St Sepulchre's, without -Newgate, and St Mary's, Whitechapel, corresponding to the mazes of lanes -and twisting passages, "pestered" with the tenements of the poorer class, -of which only a few examples now remain from 18th century London. The -following are the parishes with greatest mortality, in their order (Bell): - - Total Plague - deaths deaths - - St Giles's, Cripplegate 3988 2338 - St Olave's, Southwark 3689 2609 - St Sepulchre's, Newgate 3425 2420 - St Mary's, Whitechapel 3305 2272 - St Saviour's, Southwark 2746 1671 - St Botolph's, Aldgate 2573 1653 - St Botolph's, Bishopsgate 2334 714 - St Andrew's, Holborn 2190 1636 - St Leonard's, Shoreditch 1995 1407 - St George's, Southwark 1608 912 - St Bride's, Fleet St. 1481 1031 - St Martin's in the Fields 1470 973 - St Giles's in the Fields 1333 947 - St Clement's Danes 1284 755 - St James's, Clerkenwell 1191 903 - St Magdalen's, Bermondsey 1127 889 - St Katharine's, Tower 998 744 - St Dunstan's in the West 860 642 - 97 parishes within the walls 14342 9197 - -The original printed bill of the Parish Clerks is extant for the worst -week but one, August 4th to 11th[1006]. Its mortalities for the week in -each of the 122 parishes are almost exactly in the order of the final -summation for the year, so that the details throw no light upon the -question, in what direction the infection spread, or what parishes felt -its incidence most as the season advanced. The total mortalities for the -week within the walls, in the Liberties, and in the nine out-parishes -(within the Bills) are respectively 1144, 2717 and 994. The infection is -said[1007] to have begun in Whitechapel, as we conclude that it did also -in 1603; but the City had its due share at length, the parishes of St -Stephen, Coleman Street (full of tortuous passages), of Allhallows the -Great, and of Christ Church having the largest mortalities. - -In the 97 parishes of the City, the 16 parishes of the Liberties, and 9 -out-parishes, the deaths at the end of the year were 54,265 from all -causes, whereof of the plague 35,417. But that was by no means the whole -mortality. A separate account was kept for the parishes of Stepney, -Newington, Lambeth, Islington, and Hackney, and for the Westminster -parishes, in all of which the deaths from December 30, 1624, to December -22, 1625, were from all causes 8,736, whereof of the plague 5,896[1008]. -The grand total of deaths in 1625 was, accordingly, 63,001, whereof of the -plague 41,313. - -The large parish of Stepney, extending from Shoreditch to Blackwall, was -one of the worst plague-districts in London. It is mentioned as such by -Dekker in 1603; and in the plague of 1665 it headed the list, with 8,598 -deaths, whereof of the plague 6,583. We have some particulars of it for -1625: in the week July 18 to 24, there died in it 184, whereof of the -plague, 144; and from July 25 to 31, 259, of which 241 were -plague-deaths[1009]; and those figures would have been nearly doubled in -the weeks of August. Stepney alone would have had about half the deaths in -the additional bill for the year; the parish register of Lambeth gives 623 -burials, of Islington 213, and of Hackney 170[1010], while Westminster -with St Mary Newington (or Newington Butts, between Lambeth and Southwark) -and Rotherhithe would account for most of the remainder. The parishes -farthest out, and on higher ground, such as Hackney, Islington and Stoke -Newington had fewer burials than in 1603. - -The plague of 1625 was a great national event, although historians, as -usual, do no more than mention it. Coinciding exactly with the accession -of Charles I., it stopped all trade in the City for a season and left -great confusion and impoverishment behind it; in many provincial towns and -in whole counties the plague of that or the following years made the -people unable, supposing that they had been willing, to take up the -forced loan, and to furnish ships or the money for them. The history might -have proceeded just the same without the plague; but historians would -doubtless admit that all causes, moral and physical, should be taken into -the account; and it will not be thought beyond the scope of this history -to enter as fully as possible into these events of sickness. First as to -the sources, other than statistical. Four or more poems were written on -the plague of 1625--an interminable one by George Wither (with other -topics brought in) in eight cantos and about thirty thousand lines[1011], -a piece by John Taylor, the water-poet and Queen's bargeman, not wanting -in graphic touches[1012], a short piece by Abraham Holland[1013], the son -of Philemon Holland, doctor of physic, and another short poem by one -Brewer[1014]. Besides the poems, there were sermons, mostly when the -epidemic was over, and various other moral pieces to improve the occasion. -A broadside called _The Red Crosse_ gives a few details of former plagues. -The letters of Chamberlain to Carleton, those of Mead, at Christ's -College, Cambridge (whose relation Dr Meddus, rector of St Gabriel's, -Fenchurch Street, was in the City during the epidemic), and the diary of -Salvetti, the envoy of the Grand Duke of Tuscany[1015], supply many -particulars; while the _Calendar of State Papers_ brings together other -information both for London and the provinces. I know of no account of the -plague of 1625 from the medical side[1016]. - -James I., prematurely worn out at fifty-seven, died at Theobalds on March -27, from the effects of a tertian ague, for which he preferred to be -treated by the plasters and possets of an obscure ague-curer from Dunmow, -setting aside his physicians, who would have succeeded no better. A great -funeral, for which 14,000 "blacks" were given out, followed on May 7. -Meanwhile the marriage of Charles I. to the princess Henrietta of France -was being arranged. The king met his bride at Dover on June 13, and -entered London with her on the 18th, passing up the river in a state barge -to Denmark House, amidst an immense concourse of people on the houses and -shipping, and in wherries on the water, with salvoes of artillery and -demonstrations of welcome to the Catholic princess. On the 13th the Lord -Keeper had written to Conway, Secretary of State, that cases of plague had -occurred in Westminster, and that he could have wished that his majesty -had determined to come no nearer than Greenwich. The nobility were kept in -town to await the coming of the new queen, and some of them by the summons -to Parliament. The Houses met on June 18, and were advised in the king's -speech to expedite their business on account of the plague. However, those -who were disposed to refuse supplies until grievances were redressed could -make use of the plague as well as the king, and it was proposed by Mallory -and Wentworth to adjourn on that plea until Michaelmas. The Houses sat for -three weeks, until July 11, when they were adjourned to meet at Oxford on -August 1. On a day in June Francis, Lord Russell (afterwards earl of -Bedford), "being to go to Parliament, had his shoemaker to pull on his -boots, who fell down dead of the plague in his presence," so that his -lordship avoided the House. In the first week of July, the court removed -to Hampton Court, and thence to Woodstock and to Beaulieu in the New -Forest. The Coronation was put off until October, for reasons connected -with the queen's religion as well as for the infection, and eventually -until February 2, 1626. - -Before Parliament rose, it obtained the king's sanction to a solemn fast. -"This," says the Tuscan, Salvetti, "is a ceremony which is performed in -all the parishes, and consists in staying in church all day singing -psalms, hearing sermons, the one shortly after the other, and making I -know not how many prayers, imploring God for stoppage of the plague, and -of the ceaseless rain which for a month past has fallen to the detriment -of all kinds of crops." At that date, July 1, he says that plague is now -spread through all the streets and has reached other parts of the kingdom. -A general exodus took place to the country, of all who had the means to -remove. As in 1603, the magistrates, the ministers, the doctors, and the -rich men seem to have left the city to take care of itself. On August 9, -Salvetti, who had himself escaped to Richmond, writes: "The magistrates in -desperation have abandoned every care; everyone does what he pleases, and -the houses of merchants who have left London are broken into and robbed." -On September 1, Dr Meddus, rector of St Gabriel's, Fenchurch Street, -wrote: "The want and misery is the greatest here that ever any man living -knew; no trading at all; the rich all gone; housekeepers and apprentices -of manual trades begging in the streets, and that in such a lamentable -manner as will make the strongest heart to yearn." The city an hour after -noon was the same as at three in the morning in the month of June, no more -people stirring, no more shops open[1017]. This is re-echoed in verse by -Abraham Holland: - - "A noon in Fleet Street now can hardly show - That press which midnight could, not long ago. - Walk through the woeful streets (whoever dare - Still venture on the sad infected air) - So many marked houses you shall meet - As if the city were one Red-Cross Street." - -And by the Water-poet: - - "In some whole street, perhaps, a shop or twain - Stands open for small takings and less gain. - And every closed window, door and stall - Makes every day seem a solemn festival. - All trades are dead, or almost out of breath, - But such as live by sickness and by death." - -The circumstances are so exactly the same as in 1603 that it is needless -to repeat much: the sextons, coffin-makers, bearers, searchers, -apothecaries and quacks are all profitably employed; - - "And last to dog-killers great gain abounds, - For braining brawling curs and foisting hounds." - -The clocks striking the hours are not heard for the constant tolling of -bells. "Strange," says Holland, - - "Strange that the hours should fail to tell the day - When Time to thousands ran so fast away." - -Of the sick, Taylor says there were - - "Some franticke raving, some with anguish crying." - ---delirious ravings and cries of pain (from the buboes) which we know from -the accounts for 1665 to have been no rhetorical exaggeration. There were -the same crowded common graves as in 1603, probably in the same -graveyards: - - "My multitude of graves that gaping wide - Are hourly fed with carcases of men. - Those hardly swallowed, they be fed again." - -Or as Taylor says, - - "Dead coarses carried and recarried still - Whilst fifty corpses scarce one grave doth fill." - -The treatment seems to have been mostly in the hands of quacks. Taylor -says: - - "On many a post I see Quacksalvers' bills - Like fencers' challenges to show their skill." - -The Water-poet, being Queen's bargeman, appears to have had a proper -feeling for all constituted authorities. After denouncing the quacks, as -men who "pick their living out of others' dying," he proceeds to eulogise -the regular practitioners, forgetting to add that they were now -conspicuous by their absence: - - "This sharp invective no way seems to touch - The learned physicians whom I honour much. - The Paracelsists and the Galenists, - The philosophical grave Herbalists,-- - These I admire and reverence, for in those - God doth dame nature's secrets fast inclose, - Which they distribute as occasions serve." - ---the prevalence of plague not being one of the occasions for revealing -the secrets entrusted to them. - -The medical faculty is hardly at all in evidence the whole time. Thayre's -surgical treatise of 1603 was reprinted; while a semi-empiric, one Stephen -Bradwell, the grandson of Banister, a well-known Elizabethan practitioner, -published a poor essay on plague, patched up from the usual stale sources -and plagiarised even from the lay dialogue of the rector of St Olave's in -1603[1018]. Bradwell addressed the reader, on July 15 "from my study in -Mugwell-street, ready to my power to do thee any pleasure." - - "I have two powders. I have also an excellent electuary. I have - likewise lozenges, and rich pomanders to smell of. These are all of my - grandfather's invention, and have been proved to be admirably - effectual both by his and my father's experience. I confess they are - costly; but slight means and cheap medicines (however they promise) - prove as dear as death. The first powder is 12 pence a dram. The - second is 3 pence a grain (the quantity is 10 or 12 grains). The - electuary is 2 shillings and 6 pence an ounce, the quantity is one or - two drams. There is a fellow in Distaff-lane that disperseth his bills - abroad, bragging of a medicine that was my grandfather Bannister's. My - grandfather was very scrupulous of giving any special receipts to - others. But if any man can say he hath any receipt of his, I am sure, - if it were of any value, I have the copy of it. Because many men know - that I have a whole volume of excellent receipts left me both by my - grandfather and my father, and lest they should conceive me as too - strict and covetous in keeping all secret to myself, I have thought - fit for the common good to divulge this excellent antidote - following:"--the ingredients occupying a whole page. - -This enterprising tradesman had been at Oxford, where he failed to take a -degree in medicine, but he was a licentiate of the College of Physicians. -He is the single literary representative of the faculty, so far as -appears, in 1625; and there is nothing in his essay that concerns us, -except the following corroboration of a well-known character of the -epidemic: - - "Poor people, by reason of their great want, living sluttishly, - feeding nastily on offals, or the worst and unwholesomest meats, and - many times, too, lacking food altogether, have both their bodies much - corrupted, and their spirits exceedingly weakened; whereby they - become (of all others) most subject to this sickness. And therefore we - see the plague sweeps up such people in greatest heaps." - -It is impossible to know whether any considerable proportion recovered. It -appears that, as in 1603, the buboes and boils might come out in the same -person more than once, and that the best chance was from their -suppuration: - - "Some with their carbuncles and sores new burst - Are fed with hope they have escaped the worst." - -But the best hope was in flight, as Bradwell was candid enough to say, -although he remained behind with his shilling powders and half-crown -electuaries. _Cito cede, long recede, tard redi_--is the proverbial -advice which he quotes. - -However, the people in their flight, unless they were nobles or squires -with country houses, fared but ill in the provinces. The story of their -reception in country towns and villages is so like that of 1603 that one -might suppose in this, as in other things, that the writers of 1625 were -copying from Dekker. One of the versifiers, Brewer, has a section -specially devoted to a "Relation of the many miseries that many of those -that fly the City do fall into in the country." They are driven back by -men with bills and halberds, passing through village after village in -disgrace until they end their journey; they sleep in stables, barns and -outhouses, or even by the roadside in ditches and in the open fields. And -that was the lot of comparatively wealthy men. Taylor says that when he -was with the queen's barge at Hampton Court and up the river almost to -Oxford, he had much grief and remorse to see and hear of the miserable and -cold entertainment of many Londoners: - - "The name of London now both far and near - Strikes all the towns and villages with fear. - And to be thought a Londoner is worse - Than one that breaks a house, or takes a purse ... - Whilst hay-cock lodging with hard slender fare, - Welcome, like dogs into a church, they are. - For why the hob-nailed boors, inhuman blocks, - Uncharitable hounds, hearts hard as rocks, - Did suffer people in the field to sink - Rather than give or sell a draught of drink. - Milkmaids and farmers' wives are grown so nice - They think a Citizen a cockatrice, - And country dames are waxed so coy and brisk - They shun him as they shun a basilisk." - -Taylor gives various instances in prose: - - "A man sick of an ague lying on the ground at Maidenhead in Berkshire, - with his fit violently on him, had stones cast at him by two men of - the towne (whom I could name), and when they could not cause him to - rise, one of them tooke a hitcher, or long boat-hook, and hitched in - the sick man's breeches, drawing him backward with his face grovelling - on the ground, drawing him so under the bridge in a dry place, where - he lay till his fit was gone, and having lost a new hat, went his - way." - -One at Richmond was drawn naked in the night by his own wife and boy, and -cast into the Thames, where the next day the corpse was found. The village -of Hendon distinguished itself by relieving the sick, burying the dead, -and collecting eight pounds, at the least (being but a small village) for -the poor of St Andrew's, Holborn, besides allowing good weekly wages to -two men to attend and bury such as died. The village of Tottenham appears -to have been equally hospitable; but as it was on the road to Theobalds, -and some of his majesty's servants dwelt there, the Privy Council on July -19, wrote to the justices of Middlesex to order the inhabitants of -Tottenham, who had received into their houses "multitudes of inmates," to -remove the new-comers and not to receive any in future[1019]. Although the -king was not at Richmond, yet as there was a royal residence there, the -inhabitants sought to drive away citizens on the ground of the warrant -forbidding them to approach any of his majesty's houses[1020]. At -Woodstock, where the Court was in August, no one was allowed to go from -thence to London, nor any to come thither, and for contraveners a gibbet -was set up at the Court gate[1021]. It was hardly possible to get a letter -smuggled into London[1022]; in the provinces "no one comes into a town -without a ticket, yet there are few free places." At Southampton on August -27, a stranger died in the fields: "He came from London. He had good store -of money about him, which was taken before he was cold[1023]." Dr Donne, -the dean of St Paul's, confirms these experiences in a letter of November -25, from Chelsea[1024]: - - "The citizens fled away as out of a house on fire, and stuffed their - pockets with their best ware, and threw themselves into the highways, - and were not received so much as into barns, and perished so: some of - them with more money about them than would have bought the village - where they died. A justice of the peace told me of one that died so - with 1400 about him." - -Meddus, rector of St Gabriel's, heard of one sad case of a citizen in -Leadenhall-street who removed to the country with his seven children, "but -having buried all there is come again hither," in July[1025]. In October, -the people began to come back, although the infection was by no means -over; Salvetti, who was himself near Huntingdon, says that many of the -returning artisans caught the infection in the city, which is probable -enough, as it happened also in 1665. On October 15, a correspondent of -Mead's wrote that in his passing through London he found the streets full -of people, and the highways full of passengers, horse and foot. On October -24, we hear of great distress among tradesmen, artificers and farmers -round London, and of discontent at the forced loan[1026]; although the -Court itself was in as great extremity during the plague for want of money -as any private house could have been. On November 22, the lord mayor and -aldermen wrote to the Privy Council that the great mortality, although it -had taken many poor people away, yet had made more poverty by decay of -tradesmen, the want and misery being still very great[1027]. Still, the -effect of this great plague on London, cutting off some fifty thousand in -a year, or more than a fifth part of the population, must have been, like -that of all other great plagues in London, to cut off the fringe of -poverty and broken fortunes, and to raise the general average of -well-being of those that remained. Trade would come back; but the -submerged tenth, or sixth, or fourth, or whatever fraction they made, were -drowned for good. - -London soon filled up the gaps made by the plague, doubtless by fresh -blood from the country. In 1627, the christenings were again at 8,408, -having been at a maximum of 8,299 the year before the plague. In 1629 they -actually exceeded the burials by more than a thousand (9,901 to 8,771), -and continued to be slightly in excess until the next plague of 1636. - - -The Plague of 1625 near London. - -In the immediate neighbourhood of the capital the parishes on the Kentish -chalk below London, such as Deptford, Greenwich, Lewisham, Eltham and -Bromley had more plague in 1625 than in 1603. Kensington, for some unknown -reason, has 80 deaths from all causes in the register, as against 32 in -1603 and 62 (of plague 25) in 1665. The group of parishes in Middlesex, -such as Enfield, Edmonton and Finchley, had each a large number of deaths, -but somewhat less than in 1603 and 1665, and the same holds for Hackney -and Stoke Newington, Islington and Hampstead. Places up the Thames all the -way from Battersea to Windsor were infected, including Wandsworth, Putney, -Isleworth, Richmond, Kingston and Hampton Court. Eton was "visited;" even -the sequestered village of Stoke Pogis had houses shut up "by reason of -the contagion" and a collection made for their impoverished inmates. Among -the Hertfordshire towns to which Londoners resorted in plague-times, -Watford is known to have had plague-deaths in 1625. In Essex,--Stratford, -Tottenham, Romford and Barking had each a large number of plague-deaths, -and, in Surrey, Croydon and Streatham. At Carshalton, oddly enough, the -heavy mortality was the year after (1626) "not from plague, but from a -disease somewhat akin to it[1028]." - - -Plague in the Provinces in 1625 and following years. - -It is stated by Salvetti and other gossips of the time that the infection -of plague in 1625 was carried all over the country from London by the -fleeing citizens, and that few places remained free from it, just as it -was said afterwards for the plague of 1665. So far as records show, one -would not be warranted in inferring a great provincial prevalence of -plague either in 1625 or in 1665. There was plague at Plymouth, and in the -south-western counties, under very special circumstances, as we shall see. -There was plague also at Norwich, said to have been brought from Yarmouth, -and at Colchester the year after. Newcastle, also, which hardly ever -escaped the infection when it was afoot, had one of its minor visitations. -But, on the whole, it is impossible to show by local evidences that the -plague of 1625 was diffused universally over England, either in that or in -the following year, or that it grew to a great epidemic in but a few -provincial centres[1029]. Probably all the plague-deaths in the provinces -together, in 1625 and 1626, would not have made a fifth part of the -mortality in London. - -The interest centres in the plague at Plymouth, with which the outbreaks -at Ashburton, Exeter, Dartmouth, Bridport, and perhaps Portsmouth, Rye and -other places, may be connected, if not causally, yet in neighbourhood. The -first that we hear of sickness at Plymouth is under date July 26, 1625; -some of the ships arrived there had been visited with sickness, and the -sick had been landed and lodged under sails[1030]. It is not called "the -sickness," and it is not clear that it was bubo-plague. There may, indeed, -have been real plague on board ships of war: Stow says that it was in the -fleet in 1603, and there is evidence of its existence now and again in the -Venetian galleys of an earlier day. But we are now come to the period of -the beginnings of ship-fever, as we shall see in the next chapter; and, -for the present, we must not assume that the sickness on board ship in -1625 was all plague, or chiefly plague. - -The ships at Plymouth in July were doubtless a part of the squadron of -ninety sail, which sailed thence in autumn, carrying ten thousand men to -make war on Spain, in accordance with the anti-Catholic policy which had -been forced upon James I. in the last years of his reign, and was now -being carried out by Charles I. and Buckingham. This was not the first -fruit of that policy. The immediate result of it was Mansfeld's English -troops for the recovery of the Palatinate to Protestant rule. That -expedition failing to effect a landing was speedily broken with disease, -and before it had been many days on shore in Holland was burying 40 or 50 -men a day. The fleet eight months later had a similar experience. The -ships were victualled with rotten food, and the men were supplied with -worthless clothing. As the facts were never investigated, the king having -interfered to shield the duke of Buckingham from the attack on him by Sir -John Eliot, peculation and jobbery were never proved, although it was -known to everyone that honesty was the last quality to be looked for in -those about the king and the favourite. The fleet reached the Bay of Cadiz -and made a futile demonstration there. It is in the month of November that -we begin to hear of sickness. On the 9th Viscount Wimbledon writes from on -board the 'Anne Royal' to Secretary Conway that there are not men enough -to keep the watches owing to sickness. On December 22, the Commissioners -at Plymouth write to the Council that about thirty sail had arrived there -with 4,000 soldiers "in such miserable condition as for the most part to -be incapable of such comforts as the country would afford them." Captain -Bolles, who died since their coming in, declared the occasion of his -sickness to be scarcity and corruption of the provisions. Great numbers of -the soldiers are continually thrown overboard. Yesterday seven fell down -in the streets. The rest are weak, and want clothes, for the supply of -which some thousands of pounds were needed. The despatch of December 29, -says, "They stink as they go, and the poor rags they have are rotten and -ready to fall off if they be touched"[1031]. - -So far there is no word of plague; on the other hand there is a strong -probability that the sickness was ship-fever, or typhus. It is not until -the spring of 1626 that the plague is mentioned at Plymouth. On March 18, -sickness increases at Plymouth and the plague is wondrous rife. On March -28, the plague is dispersed about the town. On April 5, the sickness -increases very much. On the 11th, 40 died last week and twenty houses are -shut up; some of the sick died and were buried in less than twenty-four -hours. On 8th June, the plague is very bad in Plymouth, and the town is -destitute of its best inhabitants. The town-council records bear witness -to a rate having been levied for the relief of the plague-stricken, and to -attempts as late as 1628 to collect their share of it from those who had -fled the town in 1626. The deaths at Plymouth are stated in a manuscript -book of the municipal annals to have been 2,000[1032]. - -Meanwhile plague appeared in other parts of Devonshire. In Exeter it had -been prevalent sooner than in Plymouth itself; a letter of November 17, -1625, speaks of the afflicted state of the city, and of the weekly -contributions for the plague-stricken. Some particulars of the state of -Exeter at this time are given in a memorial to the Privy Council by the -mayor and bailiffs of the city, dated October 15, 1627. During the great -sickness which fell on their city, and was not cleared in sixteen months, -all trading was stopped and the inhabitants generally left the town. To -appease a mutiny of the more disordered people, who threatened to burn the -city, a rate was assessed generally on the city, but most of the -inhabitants being absent, the corporation took up the amount at interest -on their own credit. The persons whose names are inclosed, being -inhabitants who have returned to the city, now refuse to pay the rate -assessed in their absence; and the Council is petitioned to summon them -before it[1033]. - -On May 17, 1626, the plague is reported to be rife "in Devonshire," and -specifically, on July 28, at Okehampton and Ashburton. The epidemic at -Ashburton was on the same severe scale as at Plymouth. It began in the end -of 1625, but was most fatal in April and May, 1626. The deaths in a -twelvemonth were 365, "probably a fourth of the inhabitants[1034]." (In -1627 there were only 27 deaths, doubtless from the empty state of the -town.) The same summer it is heard of in Dorsetshire. On September 2, the -deputy lieutenants and justices of the county petition the Privy Council -that the 1000 soldiers who were to be removed from Devon and Cornwall, -should not be quartered in Dorset, but in Somerset, as the former was -visited with the plague[1035]. Perhaps Bridport was the centre of plague -referred to. Sometime later in the year, perhaps in November, the bailiffs -and burgesses of that town explain to the Council that, although they had -subscribed to the loan, yet they were unable to pay the amount subscribed -as the town was destitute by reason of a twenty weeks' visitation of -plague[1036]. - -The last of this series of outbreaks in the south-west appears to have -been at Dartmouth in the summer of 1627. On June 29, it was reported that -the plague was so hot there that the inhabitants had left. The mayor wrote -on July 19 to the Privy Council that it was true the inhabitants were -still away, but the plague had ceased; only 15 houses had been infected, -the inhabitants of which had all been removed to the pest-houses remote -from the town[1037]. - -Farther east on the Channel coast, Portsmouth had a visitation of plague -previous to September 28, 1625, perhaps in connexion with the Cadiz fleet; -the mayor and bailiffs, being at the end of their year's office, had -refused to take steps to sever the infected[1038]. At Southampton, only -one house was infected on August 27. The infection is reported also from -Rye in 1625, and from Canterbury, where the famous composer, Orlando -Gibbons, died in the beginning of June, 1625, "not without suspicion of -the sickness," says Chamberlain, but, according to Anthony Wood, of the -smallpox. The king and queen lodged at Canterbury on June 14; but on July -23 the place had to be avoided "for the great infection." - -From Oxford, where the Parliament met on August 1, the vice-chancellor -wrote on July 27, that Sir John Hussey came thither infected from London, -and died, that Dr Chaloner, being in the same house, was since dead, that -the infection was in other parts of Oxford, and that All Souls College was -shut up. There was a slight revival of it in January, 1626, which caused -the exercises and the sermons at St Mary's to be put off[1039]. Anthony -Wood gives much the same account as for 1603, and blames the great -increase of "cottages" erected by townsmen, to which scholars were -enticed. - -Cambridge kept free in 1625; but on October 3, three deaths are reported -at Trumpington--one Peck, his wife, and maid. On the same date three -houses were shut up at Royston, and the infected "translated into the -fields[1040]." - -The outbreak at Norwich was one of the severer degree[1041]. It was said -to have been brought in the end of June, 1625, from Yarmouth, where -nothing is recorded of it. A king's order to the mayor imposed extensive -cleansings, &c., but the plague increased from 26 deaths in a week in -July, to 40 in September, reaching a maximum of 73 from plague in a week, -besides 18 from other causes. On August 27, Mead, the Cambridge don, -writes that he had met the Norwich carrier, who told him that the number -of burials there the last week was 77, whereof of the plague 67, and but -14 the week before. The infection lingered on until December of the year -after (1626), the total deaths from plague having been 1431. The plague at -Norwich was made the excuse, by the mayor and aldermen writing to the -Privy Council on January 30, 1627, for not contributing towards shipping -for the king's service; the city was distressed from inundations and the -plague, "many hundreds of houses" standing empty. There appears to have -been some plague at Lynn in the end of 1625, a Privy Council order of -January, 1626, authorising the fair to be held there, the disease having -ceased. - -In April, 1627, the bailiffs and aldermen of Colchester offer the same -excuse as Norwich; they are unable to set forth any ships as directed on -account of the heavy visitation of their town by the plague, the decay of -their trade in the new draperies and baize, and the loss of their ships at -sea. - -Leicestershire, also, would appear to have had another visitation in 1626. -On July 28, the muster in that county was respited on account of the shire -town and nine or ten other towns being visited with the plague. Of that -there is no trace in the excellent county history by Nichols. Leicester, -like Bristol and other places, is known to have imposed quarantine against -Londoners in the summer of 1625. It is probable that plague was also in -Warwickshire in 1626[1042]. - -Among other outbreaks in 1625 was one at Newcastle, but it does not -compare in extent with some earlier and later plagues there. On September -10, Lord Clifford writes from Appleby Castle to Secretary Conway that -Newcastle is so infected with plague, so ill fortified, and ill -neighboured, that 500 men would disarm it. In his own county of Cumberland -there was plague in Lord William Howard's house. Sir Francis Howard's lady -took the infection from a new gown she had from London, so as she died the -same day she took it; they are all dispersed most miserably, with the -greatest terror in the world. Cheshire also had the infection in -1625[1043]. - -After a clear interval of two or three years, the history of plague begins -again in London, and in the provinces. The London plague of 1630 was a -small affair (1317 deaths), the city being otherwise so healthy that the -christenings exceeded the total burials (9315 to 9237). In 1630, at the -same time as the small London outbreak, Cambridge had what appears to have -been its most considerable plague, but a very small one at the worst. It -began about February 28, caused the colleges to break up and the midsummer -assizes to be transferred to Royston, and from first to last produced 214 -deaths, known or suspected from plague[1044]. - -Along with it there were a good many cases at Wymondham (Windham), and -some straggling cases at Norwich and Colchester, continuing into 1631, -some 20 or 30 dying at Norwich of plague in the latter year[1045]. The -other centre in 1630 was in the north-west. Shrewsbury, an old-world town -which seldom escaped, had a localised epidemic in St Chad's parish. It -began on May 24 in Frankwell, but was confined to that street by cutting -off the residents therein from the rest of the town, and by removing the -infected to pest-houses in Kingsland[1046]. It continued at Shrewsbury -into 1631, and is heard of also at Preston, Wrexham, and Manchester, -collections having been made in neighbouring places for the -infected[1047]. But the one great outbreak of those years fell upon the -town of Louth, in Lincolnshire, of which the sole particulars are that the -plague from April to the end of November, 1631, swept away 754 persons of -whom nearly 500 in July and August[1048]. - -After four years clear in London and in all parts of England (years -occupied with the growing quarrel between the king and the Parliament), -plague broke out again not far from Louth, where we saw it last, namely at -Hull. A century and a half had passed since Hull's last great devastation -by plague year after year from 1472 to 1478. It was then a medieval town, -with a chain drawn across the mouth of its creek of the Humber, surrounded -by great abbeys, and owing its importance to its trade in stock fish from -Iceland and the North Sea. In the Tudor times it had experienced one small -epidemic about the Blackfriars Gate in 1576, causing about a hundred -deaths. The date of the outbreak in 1635 is not given exactly; but, as in -the 15th century, it was the peculiarity of Hull among provincial towns -that it kept the infection for several years,--down to June, 1638. -Business was paralysed, schools shut up, and the town deserted by the -wealthier classes. The deaths from plague from first to last are counted -at 2730, besides those which occurred in flight to other places. Upwards -of 2,500 persons, once in easy circumstances, are said to have been -reduced to seek relief, to which the county of York contributed[1049]. In -1643 Hull stood a siege, but there is no farther mention of plague; nor -did the town suffer in 1665. - -The year 1635, which saw the beginning of the Hull plague, at a time when -the infection was absolutely quiet in the capital, saw also the beginning -of an outbreak at Sandwich, with accompanying cases at Canterbury, and a -beginning at Yarmouth, Lynn and Norwich[1050], in all which places the -infections lingered at a low endemic level for a year or more. The dates -are important only as showing that these provincial infections were -looking up some months before the sharp outburst in London in the late -autumn of 1636 made any sign. In Sandwich, on the 12th of March, 1637, -there were 78 houses "visited," and 188 persons infected; on June 30, 24 -houses shut up, with 103 persons, some of them lodged in tents; from July -6 to October 5, there were buried of the plague about ten every week in St -Clement's parish. Considerable expenses were incurred (more than 40 a -week), to which the county of Kent and the other Cinque Ports -contributed[1051]. - -Besides these lingering endemics in Kent and Norfolk, the great plague -epidemics of 1636 were in Newcastle and London. The Newcastle epidemic -was both earlier and relatively far more severe than that of the capital. -For a town of some 20,000 inhabitants, the following weekly figures[1052] -indicate a plague of the first degree, comparable to the London -death-rates of 1625 and 1665: - -Died of plague at Newcastle, within the liberties, from May 7 to December -31, 1636: - - Week Plague - ending deaths - - May 14 59 - 21 55 - 28 99 - June 4 122 - 11 99 - 18 162 - 25 133 - July 2 172 - 9 184 - 16 212 - 23 270 - 30 366 - Aug. 7 337 - 14 422 - 21 346 - 28 246 - Sept. 4 520 - 11 325 - To end of Dec. 908 - ---- - Total to 31st Dec. 5027 - -Besides in Garthside, from May 30 to October 17, 515, making a total of -5542. - -This tremendous visitation of Tyneside is said to have begun in October, -1635, at North Shields, where the infection rested during the winter cold, -to begin again at Newcastle in spring. During the height of the epidemic -in summer and autumn all trade was suspended, no one being about in the -streets or in the neighbouring highways. The means tried to check the -infection were fumigations with pitch, rosin, and frankincense. Newcastle -had one other visit from the plague, as we shall see, in 1644 and 1645, -during and after the siege by the Scots Presbyterian army; but in 1665 it -is said to have escaped, although Defoe says that the infection was -introduced by colliers returning from the Thames. - - -The London Plague of 1636. - -The London plague of 1636 was one of the second degree, for the capital, -and was otherwise peculiar as being rather later in the autumnal season -than usual. The following table of the weekly mortalities shows how it -increased, reached a height, and declined. - - Christened Buried Buried of - in all plague - - Dec. 24 231 170 0 - 31 195 174 0 - - 1636 - - Jan. 7 217 189 0 - 14 242 174 0 - 21 220 190 0 - 28 214 171 0 - Feb. 4 227 183 0 - 11 234 160 0 - 18 207 203 0 - 25 198 238 0 - Mar. 3 221 198 0 - 10 231 194 0 - 17 244 187 0 - 24 215 177 0 - 31 193 196 0 - Apr. 7 202 199 2 - 14 221 205 4 - 21 202 205 7 - 28 271 210 4 - May 5 197 206 4 - 12 199 254 41 - 19 171 244 22 - 26 160 263 38 - June 2 189 276 51 - 9 153 275 64 - 16 145 325 86 - 23 149 257 65 - 30 141 273 82 - July 7 152 265 64 - 14 142 298 86 - 21 146 350 108 - 28 183 365 136 - Aug. 4 152 394 181 - 11 166 465 244 - 18 167 546 284 - 25 161 690 380 - Sept. 1 163 835 536 - 8 153 921 567 - 15 166 1106 728 - 22 172 1018 645 - 29 168 1211 796 - Oct. 6 170 1195 790 - 13 164 1117 682 - 20 174 855 476 - 27 133 779 404 - Nov. 3 153 1156 755 - 10 164 966 635 - 17 143 827 512 - 24 162 747 408 - Dec. 1 168 550 290 - 8 175 335 143 - 15 134 324 79 - ----- ------ ------ - 9,522 23,359 10,400 - -The parishes chiefly affected were the same as in 1625 and 1603. Stepney -is still wanting from the general bill; but after 1636 it was included -therein, along with Newington, Lambeth, Westminster, Islington and -Hackney. These omitted parishes doubtless contributed largely, Stepney in -particular, so that the total of plague-deaths would have to be increased -by perhaps two thousand. The following parishes had the severest -mortalities: - - Total Plague-deaths - deaths - - St Giles's, Cripplegate 2374 870 - St Mary's, Whitechapel 1766 1060 - St Olave's, Southwark 1537 847 - St Botolph's, Aldgate 1506 735 - St Sepulchre's, Newgate 1327 566 - St Saviour's, Southwark 1269 742 - St Botolph's, Bishopsgate 1239 515 - St George's, Southwark 1044 514 - St Andrew's, Holborn 922 419 - St Giles's in the Fields 863 428 - -Like the greater plagues of 1603 and 1625, that of 1636 appears to have -begun in the suburbs[1053]. Taylor, the Water-poet, in reprinting his poem -on the plague of 1625, with some notes for 1636, says that of 1076 -plague-deaths from April 7 to July 28 (the summation in the annual bill -comes to 864), only 40 had occurred within the walls, so that the general -infection of the City must have followed that of the Liberties and -out-parishes. As early in the epidemic as 31 May, according to a record of -the Middlesex Sessions, "the plague increases most at Stepney," wherefore -the Greengoose Fair at Stratford was prohibited, (the parish of Stepney -extending as far as Shoreditch)[1054]. From Taylor we learn that Gravesend -and Faversham had calamitous visitations, and that the infection was in -many other towns and villages. - -The epidemic of 1636 was like the plague of 1625 in having been preceded -by much typhus fever in London, and accompanied by the same, as many as -2360 deaths being put down to fever in the plague-year in the classified -causes of death now issued regularly (since 1629) in their printed bills -by the Parish Clerks' Hall. The letters and state papers of the time bear -witness to the usual exodus from the City, the movements of the Court, and -personal incidents, which have no farther interest after the samples given -for 1625. One incident relating to the worst week of the plague in London -in 1636 is preserved: eleven persons were committed to Newgate on 5 -October for going with one Samuel Underhill, a trumpeter, who died of the -plague, to his grave with trumpets and swords drawn in the night time in -Shoreditch[1055]. The profession still makes no appearance in the way of -epidemiological writing; but some "necessary directions" were drawn up by -the College of Physicians, in substance the same as certain statutes -issued on the alarm of plague in 1630[1056]. - -Next year, 1637, the plague continued in London, causing 3082 deaths out -of a total of 11,763 in the bills. In 1638 there were only 363 -plague-deaths, but the total mortality was 13,624, or nearly 2000 more -than in the previous year, when plague alone had claimed its 3000. What -were the epidemic types of disease that caused the high mortality in 1638? - - -Fever in London. - -There ought to have been no difficulty in answering the question. The -causes of death in the metropolis had been assigned in the books kept at -Parish Clerks' Hall since 1604, and had been printed since 1629. The -printed series was in the hands of Graunt, from 1629 down to the date of -his writing, January 1662; and he did abstract the deaths under each head -of disease and casualty from 1629 to 1636 inclusive, and again from 1647 -to 1661; but the ten years from 1637 to 1646 inclusive, he omitted as -presenting nothing of importance and as being "inconsistent with the -capacity" of his sheet of paper[1057]. All the original documents prior to -1658 appear to have been lost in the fire of 1666, so that Graunt's -omission cannot now be made good. One could wish that the worthy citizen -had made no difficulty about the size of his paper. The omitted years are -not only those of great political revolution, which may have had an effect -upon the public health, but they are of special interest for the beginning -of that great period of fever and smallpox in London which continued all -through the 18th century. - -The following section of London mortality, down to the end of our present -period, will show, by reference to the total deaths, how important the -omitted years are for the epidemiological history. - - Year Plague Fever Smallpox Total - deaths - - 1629 0 956 72 8771 - 1630 1317 1091 40 10554 - 31 274 1115 58 8562 - 32 8 1108 531 9535 - 33 0 953 72 8393 - 34 1 1279 1354 10400 - 35 0 1622 293 10651 - 36 10400 2360 127 23359 - 37 3082 -- -- 11763 - 38 363 -- -- 13624 - 39 314 -- -- 9862 - 1640 1450 -- -- 12771 - 41 1375 -- -- 13142 - 42 1274 -- -- 13273 - 43 996 -- -- 13212 - 44 1492 -- -- 10933 - 45 1871 -- -- 11479 - 46 2365 -- -- 12780 - 47 3597 1260 139 14059 - 48 611 884 401 9894 - 49 67 751 1190 10566 - 1650 15 970 184 8754 - 51 23 1038 525 10827 - 52 16 1212 1279 12569 - 53 6 282 139 10087 - 54 16 1371 832 13247 - 55 9 689 1294 11357 - 56 6 875 823 13921 - 57 4 999 835 12434 - 58 14 1800 409 14993 - 59 36 2303 1523 14756 - 1660 13 2148 354 12681 - 61 20 3490 1246 16665 - 62 12 2601 768 13664 - 63 9 2107 411 12741 - 64 5 2258 1233 15453 - 65 68596 5257 655 97306 - 1666 1998 741 38 12738 - -The year 1638, and the four successive years 1640-43, have exceptional -mortalities, which plague alone can by no means account for. In one of -those years, 1641, we know that smallpox was rife, along with plague, in -the autumn; in the third week of August there were 118 deaths from -smallpox (133 from plague), and in the second week of September 101 from -smallpox (185 from plague), the plague continuing at even higher figures -all through September and October, while smallpox ceases to be mentioned -in the letters of the time[1058]. According to earlier and later -experience, the epidemic of smallpox would have been followed by a quiet -interval of that disease; so that the high mortality, beyond what plague -could account for, would have been due to some other epidemic type. There -is little doubt that that type was fever, less heard of in letters of the -society people because it was, in its steady prevalence from year to year, -an infection of the crowded quarters of the poor. - -We begin about this period to find fever, or typhus fever, taking that -place in the medical history of England which it continued to hold down to -the generation before our own. What remains of the history of plague until -its extinction in 1665-66, is so closely interwoven with the history of -malignant fever, that it will be more convenient to carry the latter on -side by side with it instead of in a separate chapter. - -The first medical essay upon the malignant fever which got the name of -typhus at the beginning of the 19th century, was that of a physician, Sir -Edward Greaves, published at Oxford in 1643 in connexion with the sickness -in that city while the king and the Royalist army lay there, and with the -sickness in the Parliamentary army of the earl of Essex which lay at -Reading. Greaves describes the unmistakable characters of spotted fever or -typhus, and calls it, in his title "_Morbus Epidemicus Anni 1643_, or the -New Disease." In his text he speaks of "this so frequently termed the New -Disease." The name of "New Disease" was used also for influenza; but there -can be no doubt that typhus did become common in England during the Civil -Wars, between the Royalists and the Parliamentarians, which were the first -and also the only sieges and campaigns on English soil that really touched -the life of the nation. - -The continent of Europe had been familiar with the same type of fever ever -since the beginning of the 16th century, now in Italy, now in Spain, -another time in the Low Countries, or in Hungary, or in Germany in the -Thirty Years' War. Greaves, our first writer on epidemic typhus, had been -preceded a whole century by Fracastori, whose description of the fever at -Verona in 1505 is perhaps the first account of epidemic sickness free from -subservience to ancient or medieval authority, and based upon direct -observations made in modern Europe. At the same time typhus or spotted -fever was not new to England in 1643. There is always the difficulty -whether some epidemics of fever should be called influenza or typhus; but -the fever of the Black Assizes, as well as the standing "sickness of the -house," was certainly typhus, and so probably was the "new disease" in -1612. - -The history of fever in England has been partly traced in the chapter on -gaol-fevers in the Tudor period and on the Protean "hot agues," "new -sickness," "strange fevers" or influenzas of 1540, 1557-8 and 1580. At a -much earlier period, fevers of the same type (with dysenteries, -lienteries, and pestilent sore throats) have been described, with whatever -details there are, in connexion with the periodic famines, especially -since the Conquest. But we are now come to a time in the history when -typhus fevers appeared in the country unconnected with gaols or with -famines. We are come, indeed, to the new era of epidemics, which is -revealed more clearly after the plague was extinguished for good, but was -really concurrent with the last half-century of plague, preparing, as it -were, to succeed the long reign of that infection. The Civil Wars may be -admitted to have given the new types of sickness an impulse, but the wars -did not originate them, nor did they serve in any way to establish them as -the predominant forms of epidemic sickness for nearly two centuries. -Whatever it was in the condition of England that favoured the prevalence -of fevers, fluxes, and smallpox, that factor was beginning to make itself -felt shortly after the Tudor period ended: it continued in operation -through all political changes of Restoration, Revolution, and Georgian -rule; and if the conditions at length changed, largely for the better so -far as the adult population is concerned, and for the better even as -regards infancy, there has followed the "_nova cohors febrium_" of our own -time, appropriate to its own state of society, as was the old troop -before it. This theme is really the subject with which a new volume should -open; but as the plague-period overlaps its successor the fever-period by -half a century, and as one must pay heed to the chronology, it remains to -insert some facts about fevers in this place. - - -Review of Fever in England to 1643. - -Of the prevalence of malignant fevers in England in the earlier years of -the 17th century we have only occasional glimpses. Thus, in London in -November, 1612, there were several deaths of prominent personages. Prince -Henry, eldest son of James I., died of a fever in the course of that -month, the illness being thus referred to by Chamberlain in one of his -letters to Carleton, written on November 12 from London: - - "It is verily thought that the disease was no other than the ordinary - ague that hath reigned and raged almost all over England since the - latter end of summer, which, by observation, is found must have its - ordinary course, and the less physic the better, but only sweating and - an orderly course of keeping and government. The extremity of the - disease seemed to lie in his head [a sure sign of typhus], for remedy - whereof they shaved him and applied warm cocks and pigeons newly - killed, but with no success." - -Sir Theodore Mayerne, the king's physician (who had been driven from Paris -by the intolerance of the Galenists towards those who used antimony and -other Paracelsist remedies), was a good deal blamed because he had purged -the patient instead of bleeding him. - -Writing again on the 19th November, Chamberlain says: "On Friday Sir Harry -Row, our alderman died, and, same morning, Sir George Carey, master of the -wards, of this new disease." Chamberlain's statement that an epidemic -fever, which he calls "the ordinary ague," had raged all over England from -the end of summer, 1612, is supported by Short's abstracts of the parish -registers for that year, while the following year, 1613, stands out as -still more unhealthy. The next unwholesome year in Short's tables is 1616; -and of that sickly time we have one great personal illustration. -Shakespeare died on April 23 at Stratford-on-Avon, after three days' -illness of a fever (but possibly of a chill) having just completed his -52nd year. So far as is known, he was not in failing health. It is a -singular coincidence that he made his will on March 25 preceding, the -first day of the year, old style; but the customary phrase, "in perfect -health and memory (God be praised!)," would have been perhaps varied a -little if illness had been creeping upon him. Now the year 1616 is the -most unhealthy in Short's tables from the beginning of the century; the -parish registers do not bear witness again to so much sickness until 1623, -which, as we have seen, was a year of typhus. The winter of 1615-16 was -altogether exceptional: warm and tempestuous south-westerly and westerly -winds prevailed from November until February; on the 8th February, there -were East Indiamen lying in the Downs, which had been at anchor there for -ten weeks waiting for a change of wind to take them down the Channel. The -warm winds brought "perpetual weeping weather, foul ways and great -floods," and brought also an early spring. In the last week of January the -archbishop found a nest of young blackbirds in his garden at Lambeth, and -had "another sent to him from Croydon about four days after." That was -proverbially the kind of Christmas to make a fat churchyard; but it is -impossible to say whether one type of sickness, such as fever, -predominated, as in the preceding sickly years, 1612-13, and in the next -following 1616, namely 1623-24. The following figures from Short's tables -will prove, at least, that there was excessive mortality. - -In the year 1616, twenty-one parish registers out of eighty-eight -examined, showed excessive mortality, the burials being 601 and the -baptisms 417, the year 1617 showing a somewhat improved state of health. -In the market towns for the same two years, the excessive proportion of -burials to christenings is equally striking: of sixteen town registers -examined, ten showed a bad state of health in 1616 (714 burials to 568 -baptisms), and in 1617, nine towns had 786 burials to 652 baptisms. But -neither in town nor country do the years 1616-17 stand out so unhealthy as -the years 1623-24. Those two biennial periods are the only very -conspicuous ones in Short's list for the first quarter of the 17th -century, the year 1613 coming next in unhealthiness. - -Let us now seek for any causes such as unwholesome conditions of living -upon which these epidemic fevers might have depended. One of the most -notorious forms of typhus in the 18th century was the ship-fever. The -problem how to destroy its infection in the hulls of transports and ships -of war occupied the attention of the men of science, Stephen Hales among -the rest. Parliament, eager for any cure of so disastrous a pest, voted -some thousands of pounds to a projector whose method, when tried, resulted -in nothing but the burning of three ships to the water's edge. This -ship-fever became notorious early in the 17th century, having occurred -before in 1588. If the Elizabethan naval annals in Hakluyt's collection -were less engrossed than they are with adventures and doughty deeds, we -should probably have had more glimpses of an unwholesome state of things -in the 'tween-decks. At all events there is no doubt that fever infested -the shipping of England as well as of France about the year 1625. The -conditions on board ship are, of course, special; there might have been -ship-fever, when there was no gaol-fever, workhouse-fever, or domestic -typhus in general. But what happened on board ship was no bad index of -what was happening on shore. The nation, both on sea and on land, was -expanding far beyond its old medieval limits, with very crude notions of -the elbow-room that it needed. The ideas of cubic space, ventilation, and -the like, with which we are now so familiar, had then no existence. A few -facts about the shipping, gaols and houses will serve to illustrate this -statement. - -The fleet which sailed from Plymouth to make war on Spain in the autumn of -1625 consisted of 90 sail, and carried 10,000 men. Whether there was -overcrowding would depend, of course, on the size of the ships; and it may -be safely said that the largest ship of the fleet was not a fourth part -the size of a transport that would be allowed to carry five hundred men -today. The expedition came back in a few weeks broken by sickness and -mutiny, just as the expedition of Mansfeld for the relief of the -Palatinate had fared. The wretched state of the thirty ships which arrived -at Plymouth in November, 1625, has been mentioned already. At the same -date we read of French ships of war also throwing overboard two or three -dead men every day. There are some more precise figures for French ships -in 1627, to be given in the next chapter, which will enable us to measure -the provocation to ship-fever afforded by the conditions of a transport -service in those years. - -Besides ship-fever, in the great typhus period of the 18th century, there -used to be named gaol-fever, and workhouse-fever. Of the gaol-fever one -hears little in these years. It was severe in the Queen's Bench prison in -Southwark in March, 1579; a petition of that date complains that the -prison held double the usual number, that "the sickness of the house" was -rife, and that near a hundred had died of it there during the previous six -years, many more having been sick[1059]. "The sickness of the house" is a -name suggestive of what was usual. These events of prison life made little -stir unless they involved the health of classes far removed from the -prison-class, as in the three memorable instances of the Black Assizes at -Cambridge, Oxford and Exeter. But it is not certain that even such cases -have been all recorded, or that instances of gaol-fever spreading to those -outside may not have been more frequent than appears. Whitmore in his book -of 1659 on fevers in London and the country, quotes Bacon's remarks upon -the Black Assizes of the Tudor period and adds: "and within this eight or -nine years there happened the like at Southwark, as I am credibly -informed." That would have been in the King's Bench prison some time about -1650, which is not far from the date we have brought the history down -to[1060]. - -The overcrowding of the ships and of the gaols had its counterpart in the -dwelling-houses of London and other towns such as Portsmouth. The -proclamations against the erection of houses on new sites within three -miles of the city gates continued to be issued to the time of Cromwell. -The effect of them was merely to call into existence a class of poor -tenements in odd corners or to overcrowd the existing houses. Thus, on -June 27, 1602: "The council have spied an inconvenient increase of housing -in and about London by building in odd corners, in gardens and over -stables. They have begun to pull down one here and there, lighting in -almost every parish on the unluckiest, which is far from removing the -mischief[1061]." Again, on February 24, 1623, certain inhabitants of -Chancery Lane were indicted at the Middlesex Sessions for subletting, "to -the great danger of infectious disease with plague and other -diseases[1062]." Again, in May, 1637, there were found in one house eleven -married couples and fifteen single persons; in another the householder had -taken in eighteen lodgers[1063]. The monstrous window-tax, which did more -than anything else to breed typhus and perpetuate smallpox, was not -imposed until after the Revolution; but there was enough in the London of -the Stuarts to explain the great increase of those diseases. - -We have already had evidence of the wide prevalence of spotted fever in -1624, even in the houses of the rich. In the harvest of 1625, Mead, of -Cambridge, heard of much sickness which he calls "ague," about Royston and -Barkway, localities by no means malarious; so many were ill that the -people wanted help to gather the harvest out of the fields. The nature of -these "agues" is a question of great difficulty. The intermissions or -remissions of the country fevers are clearly enough asserted by Willis and -others, whatever they were; at the same time the general characters of the -disease, or diseases, are not those of intermittent malarial fever; and -"influenza" does not help us. Chamberlain calls the fever of 1624 "the -spotted fever," and Sir Theodore Mayerne, physician to James I., in a long -opinion upon the king's state of health and the treatment, dated Aug. 20, -1624, introduces a paragraph "Ad Febrem Purpuream," which, he says, was -prevalent that year, "not so much contagious as common through a universal -disposing cause," seizing upon many in the same house, and destroying -numbers, being most full of malignity etc. These various accounts for town -and country point to a form of typhus; and we find that diagnosis -confirmed for the country fevers which were again widely prevalent a few -years later, about 1638. - -Among other statistics in Graunt's essay of 1662 we find the figures from -the register of "a parish in Hampshire" from 1569 to 1658. There were -several years of excessive mortality in that period just as in Short's -tables, but the worst were 1638 and 1639--the years of high mortality (not -plague) in London also. Of that mortality in the Hampshire parish Graunt -has given a brief account, which he seems to have based on first-hand -information. The parish contained about 2700 inhabitants, and enjoyed -average good health during the period of 90 years covered by the figures, -the births exceeding the deaths by twelve on an average in the year. In -the year 1638 the deaths were 156 and the births 66 (about the average); -in 1639 the deaths were 114 and the births 55. The cause of this great -excess of mortality in a country parish was, says Graunt, not plague, "but -a malignant fever raging so fiercely about harvest that there appeared -scarce hands enough to take in the corn; which argues, considering there -were 2700 parishioners, that 7 might be sick for one that died; whereas of -the plague more die than recover. They lay longer sick than is usual in -plague," and there were no plague-tokens. - -This considerable epidemic of fever, which must have affected some -hundreds of people, occurred in a Hampshire parish. In the very same -season (autumn and winter of 1638) we hear of what is obviously the same -sickness being epidemic all over the county of Monmouth. On April 23, -1639, the sheriff of Monmouthshire thus explained his delay in executing -the king's writ for an assessment: "In January last I sent forth my -warrants for the gathering and levying thereof, but there has been such a -general sickness over all this country, called 'the new disease,' that -they could not possibly be expedited.... Besides, the plague was very hot -in divers parts of the county, as Caerleon, Abergavenny, Bedwelty, and -many other places[1064]." Here the sheriff uses the same name as Greaves -put on his title-page five years after, and he distinguishes clearly -between the fever and the plague. The mayor and others of Northampton, in -a memorial to the Recorder, dated May 1, 1638, touching the exclusion of -Northampton tradesmen from fairs in the vicinity owing to suspicions of -the plague in their town, had been informed by the physicians that some -cases were of the plague, and some of "the spotted fever[1065]." The same -distinction had been made at Norwich, in 1636: in October there was a -suspicion of the plague, "but the physicians say it is some other -contagious disease which die with the spots[1066]." At Northampton, the -coexistence of plague and some other sickness is asserted also by the -sheriff (Sept. 18, 1638), who had to excuse himself, like so many other -sheriffs, for his failure to remit the ship-money: he himself and his -servants had had sickness, and the plague was so great and so long in -Northampton that the county still allowed 148 a week for relief of the -sick. The deaths in that epidemic from March to September were 533[1067]. -The sheriff of Montgomery, making a like excuse on October 25, 1638, -speaks of the plague only: "It pleased God to visit a great part of the -county with the plague, and three of the greatest towns, Machynlleth, -Llanidloes and Newton[1068]." The sheriff of Radnorshire, in his excuse to -the Privy Council, on November 14, says he could not collect the -ship-money at Presteign "by reason of the plague, which continued there -for two years together, and did not cease until the latter end of April -last[1069]." We may take it, then, that there was a great deal of plague -in Wales about 1637 and 1638, that there was also "the new disease," or -spotted fever, all over Monmouth and probably other Welsh counties, that -the same two forms coexisted at Norwich and Northampton, just as they -coexisted in London, and that Graunt's parish in Hampshire in 1638 had -probably the fever only. - -Short's statistical tables again bear out the concrete history. In 1638, -nineteen country parishes, out of ninety-four examined, had 699 burials to -542 baptisms, and in 1639, eighteen parishes had 585 burials to 386 -baptisms. In the market towns the unhealthy period (which may have been -due to plague in great part) is a year earlier. In 1637, ten towns out of -twenty-four whose registers were added up, show 1474 burials to 1008 -baptisms, the proportion in 1638 for the same number of unhealthy towns -being 1438 to 1025. - -It would have been one of the country epidemics of those years that -Boghurst brings into his account of the plague of London in 1665: "I was -told by an ancient woman that in Somersetshire the spotted fever was very -epidemical, so that whole families died; but being told that plantan -[plantain] was very good, all of them almost took it, which wrought an -admirable change, for very few died that took it, whereas before they died -very fast." He thinks plantain was as likely to have effected a cure as -"higher priced medicines." We shall find a corresponding prevalence of -fever described by a competent physician, Whitmore, for rural parts of -Cheshire and Shropshire in 1651 and 1658. Thus we have a remarkable -epidemiological phenomenon, somewhat new to England unless, indeed, we -bring all those spotted fevers and the like under the generic name of -influenza. It was in country districts in 1612-13 and from 1623 to 1625, -it was extensively prevalent in 1638 in places as far apart as Hampshire, -Monmouth and Northampton, it appeared in Berkshire and Oxfordshire in 1643 -in connexion with the military movements of the Royalist and Parliamentary -armies, it caused a disastrous loss of life in Tiverton within a few weeks -of Essex's army passing through the town in 1644; it is heard of again in -Shropshire and Cumberland in 1651-52, and in the same parts in 1658, as -well as in Somerset, and in London steadily from year to year. - -It was in its steadiness from year to year in the poor quarters of towns, -as well as in its more frequent recurrences as a country epidemic, that -the spotted fever deserved the name of "new disease" in the reign of -Charles I. But more than one epidemic fever had been called a "new -disease" in England before; and no fewer than five epidemics were so -called from 1643 to 1685, of which only one or two can be classed among -the influenzas. - -If it had been possible to keep in mind the history of sicknesses from -century to century or even from generation to generation, the "new -disease" might have been recognised as not unlike the type that overran -England in 1087, that was described by William of Newburgh in 1196, by -Matthew Paris in 1258, and by Trokelowe in 1315-16. The conditions -producing it or favouring it were not, indeed, the same in all particulars -in the medieval period, in the Tudor period, and in the Stuart period. In -the medieval period, the extreme want and misery which brought epidemic -sickness were due to occasional sharp famines at long intervals, from -failure of the crops. In the Tudor period epidemics were still so -occasional (so far as is known) that something more special will have to -be blamed for them than the swarms of vagrants and criminals all over -England, which made the reign of Henry VIII. notorious, and were still a -source of trouble until late in the reign of Elizabeth; the four chief -periods were in 1540, 1557-8, 1580-82, and 1596-97 so that some special -cause would have to be assumed in those years to account for their -peculiar "epidemic constitution." Almost from the beginning of the Stuart -period, the seasons of fever (to say nothing of flux and smallpox), seem -to come in quicker succession; they are heard of in 1612-13, 1623-25, -1638, 1643-44, 1651, 1658-9, and 1661-65, and heard of in those years over -wide tracts of rural England as well as in London and other towns. It was -from such experiences that the doctrine arose, so unintelligible to us -now, of an "epidemic constitution of the air," which may be traced, -indeed, to much earlier writings than those of the 17th century, but finds -its most frequent applications in the latter. The fevers were in part -contagious and not contagious; contagion could not explain them all, and -yet there was an undoubted infective element in them. The universality or -generality of their incidence was accounted for by assuming, on the one -hand, something common in the state of the air and, on the other hand, -some common predisposition in the bodies of men, which might itself have -had seasonal causes. We have now only one name for such common infection -of the air, namely influenza; and it is significant that the catarrhal -influenzas of 1658 and 1659 were regarded by some at the time as only the -appropriate vernal form of the fever which in the hot weather of 1657 and -1658 had prevailed almost in the same general way as influenza, but with -the symptoms of typhus. One thing which should not be overlooked, is that -plague was still in the country, not always at the same time as the fever, -and perhaps not usually coincident with it. Another thing, which will come -out in its due order at a later part of the history, is that after the -extinction of plague, fever became far more steady in the towns from year -to year, and in certain years was not less prevalent in influenza-like -epidemics all over the country. One might offer some suggestions as to the -meaning of these epidemiological phenomena; but it will perhaps be more -convenient that critics who have a speculative turn or a craving for -generalities should exercise the one or gratify the other at their own -risk. - -Along with the prevalence of plague in 1637-38 in many towns of Wales, we -may associate the outbreak of 1638 in Gloucester on the one side and in -the small Salopian town of Clun on the other. From a letter of the Privy -Council to the justices of Gloucestershire, it appears that a rate in aid -of the plague-stricken in the city had been imposed upon the county in -December, 1637, and that the infection still continued in Gloucester in -September, 1638. Contributions made in Bridgenorth for the relief of the -visited in Clun appear to belong to the same year. At Reading a tax for -the "visited" had been collected once or oftener between 1638 and 1641. In -1641 the town of Leicester was put to some expense (46. 8_s._ 7_d._) in -watching to keep out the sickness which prevailed in Thurmaston, Birstal, -Whetstone and Oakham. The very severe plague in Stamford the same year -would have been the most intense part of the epidemic in that corner of -England; "Camden," quoting from bishop Sanderson's manuscript, says that -it began at St James's tide, 1641, and ended in March following, whereof -are said to have died between 500 and 600 persons[1070]. - -Another centre of plague in 1641 was Congleton, in Cheshire, if we may -trust the accuracy of the date given in a manuscript written some time -after and seemingly based upon tradition[1071]. The infection was traced -to a box of clothes which had belonged to one dead of the plague in London -and were sent to the dead man's relations at North Rede Hall. The family -who received the box "caught the infection and died." It spread "all over -the country," and came to Congleton, where it made dreadful ravages. The -traditions which the anonymous narrator has put on record are, indeed, -those of a plague of the greater degree--stories of corpses that no one -would bury, of the sick left to their fate, of money dropped into water -before it changed hands. This somewhat doubtful narrative ends with the -statement that "the greatest part of the inhabitants died." - -The period from 1643 to 1650 contains all the outbreaks of plague that -remain, whether in London or the provinces, until we come to the final -explosion of 1665. In London the plague continued at a low endemic level -from the outburst of 1636 until 1648, the deaths in 1647 reaching the -considerable figure of 3597. This series of plague-years has no other -interest than as showing how regularly every season the infection -increased from a few cases in May or June to a maximum in September or -October. One incident, out of many, may find a place. In August, 1647, Sir -Philip Stapleton, one of the Eleven Members, leaders of the Presbyterian -party, who were accused of treason by the Army, went over to Calais with -five more of the accused, and died of the plague almost as soon as he -landed. The people of the house where he died made the rest of the party -pay them 80 before they would let them come forth, for bringing the -sickness into their house[1072]. - -The plagues in provincial towns were in those years much more serious -relatively than those in London. All of them occurred in towns that were -besieged, or had been besieged, or had been occupied by bodies of troops -or by garrisons. At the same time most of them were towns which had -suffered plagues before. But the first effects of the war in the way of -epidemic sickness were not of the type of plague. - - -War-typhus in Oxfordshire and Berkshire. - -It was in the spring and summer of 1643 that England had a first -experience of the war-typhus which had been familiar to the continent of -Europe for a century and a half, having reached perhaps its greatest -prevalence in the Thirty Years' War. It is only in the sense of war-typhus -that Shakespeare's boast, put into the mouth of John of Gaunt, holds good: - - "This fortress, built by nature for herself, - Against infection and the hand of war." - -The medieval civil wars in England do not seem to have bred infection -among the people, unless, perhaps, during the anarchy of Stephen's reign: -there is reason to think that the faction-fights of York and Lancaster had -no such result. But the wars of the Parliament against the Royalists -produced war-sickness in its most characteristic form, and that too, at -the very beginning of the struggle. - -The existence of sickness in 1643 among the troops of the Parliament in -Berkshire and Oxfordshire, under the earl of Essex, is briefly stated by -Rushworth. But, for the first time in the history, we find a medical -account of the type of sickness, of its circumstances, and of the extent -of its prevalence, which is not without interest even for the military -history. It happened that the afterwards celebrated Dr Thomas Willis, -chemist, anatomist, physiologist and physician, was at Christ Church, -Oxford, in 1643, being then aged twenty-one, and intending to enter the -Church. In 1659 he published at the Hague his first medical essays, one on -Fermentation and the other on Fevers[1073]; and in the latter he recalls -many particulars of what he had seen in his earlier years in and around -Oxford. The sickness of 1643 was also the subject of a tract published -that year in Oxford, by his majesty's command, by Sir Edward Greaves, -physician to the king, which appears to have been in sufficient request in -the town to be reprinted within the year[1074]. - -The preceding events may be briefly summarized[1075]. In November, 1642, -the king moved from Oxford with his army towards London and seized -Brentford. The forces of the Parliament, under Essex, concentrated round -the capital, where they were joined by the trainbands of the City, so that -the king recrossed the Thames at Kingston and retired upon Reading and -Oxford. All through the months from January to April 1643, tedious -negociations went on for a treaty, the details largely relating to the -places to be occupied by the Parliamentary troops on the one hand (around -Windsor) and by the Royalist troops on the other (in Oxfordshire and -Bucks). In April the negociations fell through, and Essex came before -Reading on the 15th, with an army of 15,000 foot and 3000 horse. The king -and prince Rupert attempted to raise the siege by a march from Oxford, but -were stopped at Caversham bridge, and on the 26th April, Reading was -surrendered to the Lord General, the garrison marching out the day after. - -The siege had lasted only eleven days; the Royalist commandant was -sentenced to death at Oxford for betraying the town, but was pardoned. -When Essex entered Reading he found the place "infected," and a great -mortality ensued among his men, who were discontented at the want of -plunder and of pay. In June he moved his troops across the chalk downs to -Thame, on the borders of Bucks; but the weather being wet and unseasonable -in the early summer, and afterwards hot, the sickness so increased among -them that "he judged the design upon Oxford impracticable" (Rushworth), -and on July 9, wrote to the Parliament advising a peace. In his letter, -Essex explained that it was impossible to keep the counties from being -plundered, "so that they must suffer much wrong, and the cries of the -people are infinite." Eventually he brought what remained of his army to -the neighbourhood of London, and having received 2000 recruits from the -City, he held a muster on Hounslow Heath, when his whole force amounted to -10,000 men. With his recruited army he marched to the relief of -Gloucester[1076], raised the siege, and on September 20 won the (first) -battle of Newbury. - -The realities of that inactive summer at Reading and Thame may be -conceived from what Willis tells us of the state of things within the -Royalist lines in Oxfordshire. These things, he says, "fell under our own -observation," he being then at Christ Church and not yet entered on the -physic line. - -In the spring of 1643, Reading being held for the king, - - "In both armies there began a disease to arise very epidemical; - however they persisting in that work till the besieged were forced to - a surrender, this disease grew so grievous that in a short time after, - either side left off and from that time for many months fought not - with the enemy, but with the disease; as if there had not been leisure - to turn aside to another kind of death.... - - Essex's camp moving to Thame, pitched in the places adjacent, where he - shortly lost a great part of his men. - - But the king returned to Oxford, where at first the soldiers, being - disposed in the open fields, then afterwards among the towns and - villages, suffered not much less. For his foot (which it chiefly - invaded) being pact together in close houses, when they had filled all - things with filthiness and unwholesome nastiness and stinking odours - (that the very air seemed to be infected) they fell sick by troops, - and as it were by squadrons. At length the fever, now more than a camp - fever, invaded the unarmed and peaceable troops, to wit, the - entertainers of the soldiers, and, generally, all others: yet at first - (the disease being but yet lightly inflicted) though beset with a - heavy and long languishment, however, many escaped. About the summer - solstice this fever began also to increase with worse provision of - symptoms, and to lay hold on the husbandmen and others inhabiting the - country, then afterwards spread through our city and all the country - round for at least ten miles about. In the mean time they who dwelt - far from us in other counties remained free from hurt, being as it - were without the sphere of the contagion. But here this disease became - so epidemical that a great part of the people was killed by it; and - as soon as it had entered a house it ran through the same, that there - was scarce one left well to administer to the sick. Strangers, or such - as were sent to help the sick, were presently taken with the disease; - that at length for fear of the contagion, those who were sick of this - fever were avoided by those who were well, almost as much as if they - had been sick of the plague. - - Nor indeed did there a less mortality or slaughter of men accompany - this disease; because cachectic and phthisical old men, or other ways - unhealthful, were killed by it; also not a few children, young men, - and those of a more mature and robust age. I remember in some villages - that almost all the old men died this year, that there were scarce any - left who were able to defend the manners and privileges of the parish - by the more anciently received traditions[1077]." - -Willis recalls how this epidemic disease changed its type as the season -wore on. At first it was a "putrid synochus," which seemed to be helped by -a sweat or a looseness; a relapse or renewal followed the crisis. Later, -it became a continual fever of six or seven days, with no crisis; when the -fever ceased the sick kept their beds, sometimes raging, more often in a -stupor, great weakness continuing, and sometimes convulsions ensuing. -About midsummer "the disease betrayed its malignancy by the eruption of -whelks and spots." It would often begin with an insidious languishing, the -strength being totally withdrawn. At length buboes appeared in many, as in -the plague. At this time, during the dog-days, the disease began to be -handled, not as a fever, but as a lesser plague--by vomits, purges, and -sudorifics. The autumn coming on, the disease by degrees remitted its -wonted fierceness, so that fewer grew sick of it, and of them many grew -well. At the approach of winter the fever almost wholly vanished, and -health was fully restored to Oxford and the country round about. Among the -victims are mentioned "some belonging to the king's and queen's Court, -with a few scholars[1078]." - -Of the causes, Willis says that, so far as concerned the army, the evident -causes were "errors in the six non-naturals." The spring was very moist -and "flabbery," with almost continual showers, to which a hot summer -succeeded. The tract upon the Oxford fever by Greaves, a short piece of -some 25 pages, which was written for use in the city during the epidemic, -bears out the account by Willis, without developing the doctrine of -increasing malignancy. He is concerned to prove that it was not the plague -"as the relations and hopes of your enemies, and the fears of others, have -suggested." One of his proofs is the insidious mode of invasion, which -Willis ascribes to the sickness in its later type--great weakness without -any manifest cause appearing, such as sweating or looseness, so that even -strong men were prostrated, with a quick, weak and creeping pulse, -sometimes intermittent, with pains in the head, vertigo &c. The most -distinctive thing was the spots; "But what need we any farther signs than -the spots, which appear upon half the number, at least, of those that fall -sick?" Greaves seems to claim that Oxford had some immunity for a time: -"God hath been most merciful to this city in sparing us heretofore, when -our neighbours round about us were visited." - -Among the causes, he mentions putrid exhalations from stinking matters, -dung, carcasses of dead horses and other carrion; "and were there care -taken for the removing of these noisome inconveniences, and keeping the -streets sweet and clean, it would doubtless tend much to the abatement of -the disease." The diet, also, may have had something to do with it; more -particularly the brewers should dry their malt better, boil their beer -longer, and put in a sufficiency of hops. But the great cause was the -presence of the army. - - "We need not look far for a cause where there is an army residing, - which the Athenians called to mind in their calamity, or as Homer - speaks of his Greeks: - - [Greek: ei d homou polemos te dama kai loimos Achaious.] - - --it being seldom or never known that an army, where there is much - filth and nastiness in diet, worse lodging, unshifted apparel, etc., - should continue long without contagious disease." Whole families were - infected, "and seldom in any house where sick soldiers of either side - are quartered, but the inhabitants likewise fall sick of the same - disease." - -There appears to have been the almost inevitable doubt in some minds, -whether the disease were contagious: "But if anyone be yet obstinate, and -will not believe it contagious, let him go near and try." Among the -remedies, he mentions a favourite one of the empiric sort, "Lady Kent's -powder," which Willis also refers to; but Greaves, as became an academical -physician, would not admit that it had any advantage over medicines of -known ingredients. - -This widespread epidemic of typhus, perhaps not without some relapsing -fever, and, according to what Willis says in one of his general chapters, -complicated, in its diffusive form in the villages around, "with squinancy -[sore throat], dysentery, or deadly sweat," is the only one medically -recorded of the Civil Wars. But there was certainly a renewal of it, in -the same circumstances, next year at Tiverton; and it seems probable, from -the heavy mortality which the parish registers witness to in that year -(1644) that some kind of epidemic sickness had spread far and near. Thus, -in Short's abstracts of the burials and christenings in country parishes -and market towns, the years 1643 and 1644, and especially the latter, -stand out as the most unhealthy for a long time before and after, the next -sickly period, as we shall see, being the years 1657-1659. In the year -1643, out of eighty-eight country registers examined, twenty-nine showed a -sickly death-rate, although the disproportion of births to deaths does not -appear great (821 to 847). That was the year of the epidemic fever in -Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Bucks. Next year, which was the year of the -Tiverton epidemic, there are again twenty-nine country registers -indicating unusual sickness (715 baptisms to 938 burials). In nineteen out -of twenty-four market towns, the same two years come out still more -unhealthy (844 births to 1193 deaths in 1643 and 1008 births to 1647 -deaths in 1644). The registers examined by Short were mostly from Northern -and Midland parishes; but they included two or three from Devonshire, and -among his market towns was Tiverton. We shall now see what these bald -figures mean in that concrete instance. - - -War-typhus at Tiverton in 1644. - -Tiverton was then a town of some 8000 inhabitants, mostly occupied in the -weaving industry. On July 5, 1644, Essex arrived with his army on his way -to Cornwall to subdue prince Maurice, and lay there till the 18th. The -diary of one farmer Roberts has an entry that Mr Thomas Lawrence, who came -from Tiverton, reported to him that the earl had 350 and odd carriages, -and of horse belonging thereto for draught 2000[1079]. This would have -been his large artillery train, baggage and ammunition waggons, etc. His -infantry would be some 6000, and his cavalry perhaps 1000. The king's -force meanwhile advanced after Essex, and on July 25 lay in the great -meadow at Crediton. They had advanced by Yeovil and may or may not have -passed through Tiverton. The two armies came to blows in Cornwall, a -prolonged series of encounters in the country around Lostwithiel in wet -August weather ending in the escape of Essex to the coast, the retreat of -his cavalry through the Royalist lines, and the surrender of the infantry -on 1st September. The disarmed foot-soldiers were convoyed back to Poole -and Wareham, and did not trouble Tiverton again. The retreating cavalry -passed that way, but did not enter the town, which was now held by the -Royalists. But the king's army came back by the way of Tiverton, which -they reached on Saturday, the 21st September. They had got no farther than -Chard on the 30th, and may have halted in Tiverton some days. A Royalist -garrison of 200 men was left in it, and held the place until October 1645, -when it was taken by Fairfax after a short siege[1080]. - -Tiverton was thus occupied by both armies in the summer and autumn of -1644, that of Essex having been quartered in and around the town for a -fortnight in July. A serious epidemic followed, especially in the suburb -on the western side of the Exe. The particulars of it are in the parish -register, from which it would appear that the sickness began in August and -lasted until November. The greatest mortality was in October, when 105 -were buried, the whole mortality of the year having been 443. The ordinary -monthly burials would hardly have exceeded a dozen or fifteen; and as the -105 burials in October would have meant some eight or ten times as many -sick, it is not surprising to read that the town was desolate, and that -grass grew in the streets[1081]. Of this epidemic there are no medical -particulars; but it appears from the parish register that it was known as -"the sweating sickness." It would hardly have been so called if sweating -had not been a prominent symptom. Besides the English sweat proper, with -its five epidemics from 1485 to 1551, we have had occasion to notice a -sweating type in several epidemics of fever. That symptom was so marked in -the epidemic of 1558 at Southampton, Portsmouth, and Isle of Wight when -they were full of troops, that Dr John Jones, who had personal experience -of it, compares it to the sweat proper. It was a sufficiently prominent -symptom in the Oxford gaol-fever of 1577 for the _sudor Anglicus_ to be -called to mind. In the English fevers and influenzas of 1580-82, a sweat -or a lask is mentioned by Cogan as a least occasional; but the fevers of -the same years on the Continent had so often the sweating character that -it was sometimes said the English sweat had come back. Lastly for the -war-fevers of 1643 around Reading and Oxford, Willis asserts in more than -one place the occurrence of sweats, critical or giving relief for a time -in the milder form, "deadly sweats" in fevers of an aggravated type. To -anticipate somewhat, it may be mentioned also that a sweating character is -recorded of some cases of the perennial London typhus at its worst period -in the middle of the 18th century. - -Admitting all these facts, we must still hold to the opinion expressed in -the chapter on the Sweating Sickness, that sweating was never again the -_signum pathognomicum_ of a whole epidemic, as it had been of the sudor -Anglicus in its five outbursts. But if there be gradations of type, or -approximations of typhus to sweating sickness (as well as to influenza), -then we may perhaps take the Tiverton epidemic as coming nearer than any -other to the sweating sickness, on the strength of the name given to it in -the parish register. - -Nothing is known of sickness in the army of Essex, which lay at Tiverton -from 5th to 18th July, 1644. It suffered much in the fighting in Cornwall, -and the Parliament on 7 September sent to Portsmouth arms for 6000 foot -and 6000 suits of clothes and shirts for the infantry who had surrendered -and been convoyed back along the coast. The king's troops which occupied -Tiverton on 21 September on their way back, had doubtless suffered also, -from the campaigning in wet fields and miry ways, and are known to have -been discontented for want of pay. Probably the epidemic at Tiverton was -due to aggravation of the usual circumstances of war. It must be classed -as a form of typhus; while its distinctive character of sweating might -find an explanation, on the analogy of the sweat of 1485 in London after -the arrival of Henry VII. from Bosworth Field, if we had sufficient reason -to suppose that the soldiers who successively occupied Tiverton were not -themselves suffering from fever. Contact alone, especially the contact _en -masse_ of men reduced by hardships and disorderly in their habits, will -sometimes serve to breed contagion among a population unlike them in these -respects. The converse of that principle, namely that contagion need not -follow from the introduction of developed sickness _en masse_, finds an -illustration in the case of Tiverton itself within little more than a year -after the epidemic of 1644. In November, 1645, Fairfax lay at Ottery St -Mary with his army, pending the investment of Exeter. On account of much -sickness and heavy mortality among his infantry (not medically described) -he removed them on December 2, to Crediton and ultimately to Tiverton, -which was supposed to be a healthier situation and became his -head-quarters until January 8, 1646[1082]. But no outbreak in the town is -mentioned, and almost certainly none occurred; the health of the place -continued to be good every year of the time that it was under the rule of -the Parliament, as the parish register proves. On the other hand Totness, -which was occupied by the same convalescent force after it left Tiverton, -had a severe epidemic of plague in the end of the year, 1646. - - -Plague in the Provinces during the Civil Wars. - -The type of sickness, after the first two years of the war, does not -appear to have been typhus-fever, but always the old bubo-plague of the -towns. So far as the history is known, the experience of war-sicknesses -upon English soil began in 1643 and ended in 1644, except in the instance -of Fairfax's troops at Ottery St Mary in November, 1645. - -Perhaps the "new model" of the Parliamentary forces, after the pattern of -Cromwell's Ironsides, may have had something to do with the immunity of -England from war-typhus in all the marchings and counter-marchings, -battles, occupations and sieges, from 1645 to the end of the Civil Wars. -Cromwell pointed out to Hampden that the army of Essex was composed of "a -set of poor tapsters and town-apprentices," and gave it as his opinion -that these were not the men to win with. When the original commanders, -Essex, Manchester, Sir W. Waller, and others, had retired in 1645, terms -of the self-denying ordinance, the army of the Parliament acquired a new -character under Fairfax and Cromwell: it contained a large proportion of -"men of religion," especially among the officers; and there is sufficient -evidence that the war was in future carried on so as to produce as few as -possible of those effects of campaigning among the people at large which -had marked the Thirty Years' War in Germany and had attended the -operations of Essex and the Royalists in 1643 and 1644. - -What remains to be said of the epidemics of the Civil Wars relates almost -exclusively to plague, with an occasional reference to the spotted fever -which was widely prevalent in the autumn of 1644. These epidemics of -plague in the English provinces, during the political troubles, more -numerous than usual from 1644 to 1650, are the last on English soil until -we come to the final grand explosion of 1665-66. - -In 1644 there were two principal centres of plague (besides London), -namely Banbury, and the valley of the Tyne. Banbury was near enough to the -Royalist head-quarters to have shared in the fever-epidemic of 1643; in -that year the burials of 58 soldiers are entered in the parish register, -besides a large excess of burials among the civil population (total of 225 -deaths in the year as against an annual mortality in former years ranging -from 30 to 98). The siege by the Parliamentary forces did not begin until -July 19, 1644, and ended in the surrender of the castle in October. The -epidemic of plague may have begun as early as January, a soldier having -"died in the street" on the 16th; but it is not until March 1644, that -plague-deaths appear in the register. In that month there were 10 deaths -from plague, in April 34, and so until November, when there were 2, the -total mortality from plague having been 161. After the plague ceased, the -town remained otherwise unhealthy until 1647[1083]. - -The information as to Newcastle and Tyneside comes from the observant -Scotsman, William Lithgow, who was with the Presbyterian army when -Newcastle was stormed on October 20, 1644[1084]. The town had suffered -heavily from plague, as we have seen, in 1636, and there had been a -slighter outbreak in 1642. Although the state of things during the siege -in 1644 was wretched in the extreme, there does not appear to have been -plague until after the surrender. The infection was already at work, -however, in places near. Thus Tynemouth Castle was surrendered by the -Royalist commander, Sir Thomas Riddell on October 27: "The pestilence -having been five weeks amongst them, with a great mortality, they were -glad to yield, and to scatter themselves abroad; but to the great undoing -and infecting of the country about, as it hath contagiously begun" -(Lithgow). Among the places infected were Gateshead, Sandgate, Sunderland, -and many country villages, the plague being reported in Newcastle itself -in 1645 as well as in Darlington[1085]. - -The year 1645 was one of severe plague in several towns at the same time, -some of them in a state of siege and all of them occupied by troops. The -largest mortality was at Bristol, being proportionate to its size. The -town was taken by prince Rupert on July 22, 1643, and was held by a strong -garrison for two years and some weeks. It was towards the end of the -Royalist occupation that the plague broke out, probably in the spring of -1645[1086]. On the 16th May, Sir John Culpepper wrote to Lord Digby: "The -sickness increases fearfully in this city. There died this week according -to the proportion of 1500 in London[1087]." When it had been stormed by -Fairfax and Cromwell in September 1645, it was found that prince Rupert's -garrison consisted of 2500 foot, and about 1000 horse. The auxiliaries and -the trained bands of the town were reduced in June to about 800, and of -the 2500 families then remaining in the town, 1500 were in a state of -indigence and want[1088]. In Cromwell's despatch of September 14 to Mr -Speaker Lenthall he says: "I hear but of one man that hath died of the -plague in all our army, although we have quartered amongst and in the -midst of infected persons and places[1089]." The deaths from plague in the -whole epidemic approached 3000, according to the MS. calendars[1090]. - -While this was going on within the walls of Bristol, an epidemic of plague -more severe for the size of the town was progressing at Leeds. The town -had been taken by Fairfax on January 23, 1643, and had remained in the -quiet possession of the Parliament, under a military governor. In August, -1644, there were buried 131 persons, "before the plague was perceived," -says the parish register; which means that the excessive mortality was not -from plague, but probably from the spotted fever which reigned that autumn -in other places in the North. The plague proper began with a death in -Vicar-lane on March 11, 1645. The weekly bills of mortality which were -ordered by the military governor showed a total mortality, from March 11 -to December 25, of 1325. It raged most in Vicar-lane and the close yards -adjoining; it was also very prevalent in March-lane, the Calls, Call-lane, -Lower Briggate, and Mill-hill. The largest number of burials in a week -(126) was from July 24 to 31; the mortality kept high all through August -and September (60 to 80 weekly), and declined gradually to 3 in the week -ending Christmas-day. Whitaker estimates that probably the fifth part of -the population died, and he cannot discover any person of name among the -victims. The air was so warm and infectious that dogs, cats, mice and rats -are said to have died (of rats and mice it can well be believed), and that -several birds dropped down dead in their flight over the town[1091]. This -appears to have been the only visitation of plague in Leeds, at least -since the medieval period. - -The plague of Lichfield in 1645-46, like that of Bristol, went on during a -constant state of military turmoil. On April 21, 1643, the Close was taken -by prince Rupert and was held as a Royalist stronghold until July 26, -1646, the king having repaired thither after his defeat at Naseby in June, -1645, and again in September. The plague is said to have been active both -in 1645 and 1646; in twelve streets there occurred 821 deaths, the largest -share (121) falling to Green Hill[1092]. In what way the state of siege -may have contributed to the plague is uncertain. The fosse was drained dry -at one stage, and was choked with rubbish at another. Many of the -inhabitants of the town would appear, from the 4th article of the -capitulation, to have taken refuge with their effects within the fortified -Cathedral Close, which was almost enclosed by water. This was one of -several outbreaks of plague that Lichfield had suffered since early Tudor -times. - -Minor plague outbreaks of 1645 were at Derby and Oxford. Of the latter we -have a glimpse from Willis of Christ Church. - - "Sometime past in this city [Oxford] _viz._, 1645, the plague (tho' - not great) had spread. Doctor Henry Sayer, a very learned physician, - and happy in his practice, many others refusing this province, boldly - visited all the sick, poor as well as rich, daily administered to them - physic, and handled with his own hands their buboes and virulent - ulcers, and so cured very many sick by his sedulous though dangerous - labour. That he might fortifie himself against the contagion, before - he went into the infected houses, he was wont only to drink a large - draught of sack, and then his perambulation about the borders of death - and the very jaws of the grave being finished, to repeat the same - antidote. - - After he had in this city, as if inviolable as to the plague, a long - while taken care of the affairs of the sick without any hurt, he was - sent for to Wallingford Castle, where this disease cruelly raged, as - another sculapius, by the governor of the place. But there, being so - bold as to lie in the same bed with a certain captain (his intimate - companion), who was taken with the plague, he quickly received the - contagion of the same disease; nor were the arts then profitable to - the master which had been helpful to so many others, but there with - great sorrow of the inhabitants, nor without great loss to the - medical science, he died of that disease." He treated the sick, in the - pre-bubonic stages, by a vomit of Crocus Metallorum, and then by - diaphoretics[1093]. - -None of the other localized epidemics of plague in those years would -appear to have been of the first magnitude. Thus, the 22 deaths from -plague at Loughborough from 1645 to May 14, 1646, and the renewed -prevalence, after a year's interval, (83 plague-deaths from July 20, 1647 -to March 25, 1648)[1094], are samples of local mortalities from plague -that other parish registers might bear witness to if they had been -examined by antiquaries as closely as Nichols examined those of -Leicestershire. - -Newark was one of the towns which suffered much during the Civil War. -Besieged time after time, it was at length surrendered to the Parliament -on May 6, 1646. A letter written shortly after the surrender says[1095]: - - "Truly it is become a miserable, stinking, infected town. I pray God - they do not infect the counties and towns adjacent.... By reason of - the sickness in divers places, the officers dare not yet venture to - fetch out the arms.... Tradesmen are preparing to furnish their shops - ... but the market cannot be expected to be much whilst the sickness - is in the town." - -The parish register of Newark bears no witness to deaths from plague; but -that of the adjacent parish of Stoke, in which stood the Castle and the -suburb of Newark surrounding it, has numerous entries of plague-deaths, -beginning with one some three weeks after the surrender, on May 28, 1646, -and continuing through July, August, and September. Several of the same -household are buried in one day, one is "buried in the field," another "in -his croft." The vicar sums up the mortality thus: "There dyed in the towne -of Stoke, 1646, eight score and one, whereof of the plage seven score and -nineteen." The whole deaths in Stoke parish the year before had been nine, -and the year after they were six[1096]. If the plague had been at all -proportionate in Newark town itself, the deaths would have far exceeded -159; but, as the parish register does not record plague-deaths at all, it -may be inferred that the infection lay mostly around the Castle. - -Whitmore speaks of having practised in the plague in Staffordshire in -1647-8, and there is some other evidence, without particulars, of an -epidemic in the town of Stafford. - -One more epidemic of plague is reported from the theatre of Civil War in -the south-west, the outbreak at Totness in 1646-7. In the parish register -there is a burial entered on July 30, 1646, "suspected she died of the -plague." A leaf of the register has the following: "From December 6, 1646, -till the 19th October, 1647, there died in Totness of the plague 262 -persons"--a number greater than the register shows in detail. The -stereotyped remark is added, that the town was deserted and that grass -grew in the streets[1097]. For months before the first suspected case of -plague in 1646, Totness had been occupied by one body of troops after -another. In November or December, 1645, Goring's Royalist cavalry, to the -number of nearly 5000, were quartered at Totness and two or three other -places near. On January 11, 1646, Fairfax came with his army to Totness -for the siege of Dartmouth, which was carried by storm on the 20th. The -Lord General then withdrew to resume the investment of Exeter. Before -doing so he issued warrants to four Hundreds to assemble their men at -Totness on the 24th January. The men came in to the number of about 3000, -and a regiment was formed from them[1098]. What connexion with the plague -in the end of the year all this military stir at Totness may have had, it -would not be easy to determine. There had been a great deal of sickness in -the army of Fairfax while it lay at Ottery St Mary in the latter half of -November, 1645. "By reason of the season," says Rushworth, "and want of -accommodation, abundance of his army, especially the foot, were sick, and -many died, seldom less than seven, eight or nine in a day in the town of -Autree, and amongst the rest Colonel Pickering died and some other -officers. The Royal party had notice of this consumption of Fairfax's -army," and took heart to make a new effort. The type of sickness is -unknown; but it was such as to cause the removal of the head-quarters on -December 2 to Tiverton, for better air. The army lay there until January -8, and came to Totness, for the siege of Dartmouth, on the 11th. Thus -Totness had not only been occupied by an army some months before the -plague, but by an army which had lately had a fatal form of sickness in -it. The troops march away, and the historical interest goes with them; -what they may have left behind them concerns only the domestic history. -Fifty-six years had passed since Totness had the plague before; and on -that occasion the epidemic was equally disastrous. - -Two other centres of plague in 1646-7 are casually mentioned, one at -Reading[1099], which affected "a great number of poor people," and the -other at Carlisle[1100]. Of the latter there are no particulars; but the -circumstances of the town for several years were such as to make an -outbreak of plague in 1646 credible. - -Carlisle suffered much from the war for a series of years. In July, 1644, -it was seized for the Royalists, and was besieged by Lesley in October, -the siege lasting many months. It had a garrison of about 700, including -some of the townsfolk armed. About the end of February, 1645, all the corn -in the town was seized to be served out on short allowance; on June 5, -"hempseed, dogs and rats were eaten." The surrender was on June 25, and -the place was held by a Scots garrison until December, 1646. It was again -seized for the Royalists in April, 1648, was recaptured by Cromwell in -October, and held by a strong garrison of 800 foot and a regiment of -horse, besides dragoons to keep the borders. All Cumberland was in such a -state of destitution that the Parliament ordered a collection for its -relief; numbers of the poor are said to have died in the highways, and -30,000 families were in want of bread[1101]. - - -Plague in Scotland during the Civil Wars. - -Connecting with plagues in the north of England, there was a great -prevalence of the infection in Scotland. After the storming of Newcastle -by the Scots Covenanters in October, 1644, the plague appeared in -Edinburgh, Kelso, Borrowstownness, Perth and other places. On April 1, -1645, Kelso was burned down, the fire having originated in a house that -was being "clengit" or disinfected after plague in it. At Edinburgh the -plague-stricken were housed in huts in the King's park below Salisbury -Crags. Collections were made for the relief of people in Leith -impoverished by the plague. The epidemic in and around Perth is said to -have given rise to the story of Bessie Bell and Mary Gray, who fled from -the plague-tainted ground and built themselves a bower by a burn -side[1102]. At Glasgow the infection was severe in the end of 1646, and -did not cease entirely until the autumn of 1648. There are numerous -references to it in the letters of principal Baillie of Glasgow -University, of which the following are the most important[1103]. - -On September 5, 1645, he writes that the pest has laid Leith and Edinburgh -desolate, and rages in many more places: never such a pest seen in -Scotland (in his time, perhaps). About January, 1646, he writes of "the -crushing of our nation by pestilence and Montrose's victories." At the end -of that year, the plague was in Glasgow: on January 26, 1647, during -winter cold, "all that may are fled out of it." On June 2, the plague had -scattered the St Andrews' students, the principal of St Leonard's College -was dead of it, and it was killing many in the north. The same summer, -principal Baillie was shut up in the town of Kilwinning, cut off, with all -the inhabitants, from communication with the outer world owing to a -suspicion of plague in the place. Edinburgh and Leith, which had suffered -earliest, were almost free in the autumn of 1647, but "Aberdeen, Brechin -and other parts of the north are miserably wasted; the schools and -colleges now in all Scotland, but Edinburgh, are scattered." Glasgow had -its worst experience of plague in the summer and autumn of 1648, which -were wet seasons: on August 23, "our condition for the time is sad; the -plague is also in Edinburgh and Aberdeen.... At this time I grieved for -the state of Glasgow.... My brother's son's house was infected; my -brother's house enclosed many in danger; one night near a dozen died of -the sickness.... The long great rains for many weeks did prognosticate -famine; but these three days past there is also a great change of weather; -the Lord continue it." The infection which began at Glasgow in January, -1647, reached Aberdeen in April, having been carried, it was said, by a -woman from Brechin. It was still raging at Aberdeen in September, and -there were straggling cases as late as November of the following year -(1648). The deaths from plague are put down at 1600, besides 140 in the -adjacent fishing villages of Futtie and Torrie on either side of the Dee -mouth. This enormous mortality ensued despite the usual rigorous -measures--the removal of the infected to huts on the Links and -Woolmanhill, a cordon of soldiers to shut them in, a gibbet for the -disobedient, and "clengers" for the infected houses[1104]. This disastrous -epidemic of 1647-1648 is the last that is heard of plague in Scotland. - - -Plague in Chester &c. and in Ireland, 1647-1650. - -The two remaining English plagues of those years were both in cities that -had suffered much from plague before, and were in a constant state of -turmoil during the war, namely Chester and Shrewsbury. Chester was held -for the king, and surrendered to the Parliament on February 3, 1646, after -a siege of twenty weeks, during the latter part of which there was famine -within the walls. It was not until 1647 that plague broke out. From June -22 until April 20, 1648, the numbers that died of plague are stated in the -MS. of Dr Cowper to have been 2099; all business was suspended, and cabins -for the plague-stricken were built outside the town[1105]. - -The Shrewsbury plague of 1650, like that of Chester, is described as -having been dreadful in its effects upon the town. It broke out during the -occupation by the Parliament's troops, on June 12, 1650, in a house in -Frankwell, and continued until January, 1651. Only one parish, St Chad's, -appears to have kept account of the plague-deaths: in that register from -June 12 to January 16, there are entered 277 burials, whereof of the -plague 250, the highest monthly mortality (76) being in August, 1650. Of -these 250 deaths, 123 took place in the pest-houses. A letter of August 21 -says that 153 died in two months, and that there were near 3000 people in -the town dependent upon common charity[1106]. On November 21, there were -still 200 cases in the pest-houses, most of them being in the way to -recover, as usually happened towards the end of an epidemic through the -greater readiness of the buboes to suppurate. - -From the small number of burials due to ordinary causes in the St Chad's -register, it would appear that many citizens had fled. The severity of -incidence upon certain houses appears from the fact that five servants in -Mr Rowley's house died of it; and that 15 out of 21 burials in St Julian's -parish came from four families[1107]. These are incidents like those of -the great plague of London in 1665, which is the next in time in the -English annals after Shrewsbury's visitation in 1650. - -The plague in Ireland in 1649-50 was connected, directly and indirectly, -with the military operations under Ireton and Cromwell. The previous year, -1648, had been one of famine: at the attack on Kildare by the rebels in -the spring, both the English garrison in the town and the attacking Irish -were half-starved, and there was a great mortality on both sides, as well -as a murrain of cattle. On May 4, corn in all the rebel quarters is said -to be at the incredible price of 8 the quarter, both men and cattle dying -in large numbers[1108]. In 1649 the plague broke out in Kilkenny, obliging -the supreme council of Confederate Catholics to remove to Ennis. Ireton, -"thinking he ought not to meddle with what the Lord had so visibly taken -into his hands, has declined taking Kilkenny into his own." But Cromwell -besieged it on March 23, 1650, by which time the garrison of 200 horse and -1,000 foot had been reduced to 300 men through the ravages of the plague, -the inhabitants having also suffered heavily[1109]. - -The Royalist letters from the Hague speak of the plague in the summer of -1650 as disastrous in Ireland, particularly in Dublin[1110]. On August -5/15: "Lady Inchiquin came hither last night; those with her report that -the plague will devour what the sword has not in Ireland." On September -2/12: "All I hear out of Ireland is that the plague has made a horrid -devastation there; 1100 in a week died in Dublin"--an improbable -estimate[1111]. The ranks of the rebels were so thinned by the sword and -pestilence that "not above 200 suffered by the hands of the executioner," -after trial at the high court of justice held in County Cork in -1651[1112]. The epidemic appears to have ceased in the autumn of 1650, -when the Council of State, in a despatch to the Lord Deputy, take notice -of the goodness of God in stopping the plague[1113]. - - -Fever in England, 1651-2. - -Between those plagues of the years 1644-1650 and the final re-appearance -of the infection on English soil from 1665 to 1666, the interval is -occupied with a good deal of fever both in town and country. The -sicknesses of those years are of interest as having been described by two -competent physicians, Willis and Whitmore. - -There were two principal periods of the epidemics, the years 1651-2 and -1657-9. In the former period the sickness appears to have been mostly in -the north-west. Whitmore, who had seen practice in the Civil War, in -Staffordshire and Shropshire, appears to have been in Chester in 1651, and -was settled in London in 1657. It is from him that our information mostly -comes[1114]. - - "It is well known," he says, "that this disease in the year 1651 [the - same fever that he describes more fully for the years 1658 and 1659] - first broke out by the seaside in Cheshire, Lancashire, and North - Wales.... In Cheshire in the year 1651 this disease seized most upon - the country people who were laborious, the seeds being sooner - dispersed in them through the agitation of the humours and spirits in - their harvest labours, than on those who lead a more sedentary life; - and that might be one reason why we were so free in the city of - Chester, when within three or four miles of us round about, whole - towns were infected with it, there being 80 and 100 sick at a time in - small villages, as at Stanney, Dunham-on-the-hill, Norton and all - there abouts by the water side it extremely raged." - -Whitmore refers to something that he had written, "for my private use," on -the subject of this fever as far back as 1642; he remarks also that it -raged every autumn in some place or other of the kingdom, and mentions his -own experience in Staffordshire and Shropshire during the late war. But it -is the epidemic in Cheshire, Lancashire and North Wales, in 1651 that he -specially describes, side by side with those of 1658 and 1659; and it is -of interest to note his suggestion as to the origin of the fever on both -shores of the Mersey. It was well known that the fever in 1651 first broke -out by the seaside in Cheshire, Lancashire and North Wales: - - "And if it were observed in Holland that on a misty day, that - infectious disease the Sudor Anglicus came into Amsterdam in an - afternoon, five hundred or more dying that night of it, as Lemnius - reports, I know not why we may not as well suppose their opposite - neighbour, Dublin, then visited for two years with the plague, should - not have communicated the same to them though in a more remiss - degree." - -Here the suggestion is that the prevalence of plague on the opposite coast -of Ireland had given rise to a minor and "more remiss" contagion along the -coasts of North Wales, Cheshire and Lancashire. But the plague had been -most severe in Chester itself before it broke out in Ireland, and had been -severe in Shrewsbury at the same time as in Ireland. Whatever the theory, -it is significant that the corner of England which was the worst and -perhaps only seat of plague in 1648 and 1650, was the seat of a malignant -fever in 1651, the former having been in the towns, and the latter in the -country villages. - -We get a glimpse of a heavy mortality among the country people the year -after at Bootle, in Cumberland, just across the border from -Lancashire[1115]. On July 8, 1652, Thomas Wharton writes from Kirkdale to -Edward Moore: - - "There was a boy at widow Robinson's died upon Saturday in Whitsun - week, and upon the Wednesday before he was sawying at the steward - Worsley's house with his wrights. The boy and the steward's man slept - together in Worsley's barn; towards night the boy was not well, and - could work no longer. All this John Wiggan of Kirkdale did see. Next, - John Birch died, and four of his children--all are dead but his wife. - At John Robinson's, one child and his wife died last week, and upon - Wednesday last two children more died; and it was thought by the - constable of Bootle that he would be dead before this day at night. - Upon Wednesday at night last, at James Pye's, there died two, his son - and daughter; and a servant of Thomas Doubie's is dead; and it is this - day broken forth in Bridge's, as we hear." - -On what evidence this country epidemic is called "the plague" by the -antiquary who prints the document does not appear. The fatality of the -disease would suggest plague, rather than fever; but the fever itself -would seem to have been more malignant at one place than another, and at -one time than another, and there may have been at Bootle cases unmentioned -which recovered. If it had been true bubo-plague, it is a solitary -instance, so far as records go, in the fifteen years between the -extinction of plague at Shrewsbury in 1650, and its revival in London and -elsewhere in 1665. The epidemic disease that we ordinarily hear of in that -interval is fever; and of the fever our best accounts, after Whitmore's -reference to 1651, are of the epidemics in 1657, 1658 and 1659. - - -Fever and Influenza, 1657-9. - -The account by Willis of three consecutive epidemics in the autumn of -1657, the spring of 1658, and the autumn of 1658, is of peculiar interest -for the reason that it is the first systematic piece of epidemiology -written in England, and that the middle epidemic of the three was one of -influenza[1116]. On reading the narrative of events by Willis, we can -understand how it was that the physicians of that period were so impressed -by the doctrine of an epidemic constitution of the season, and by its -counterpart doctrine of a seasonal predisposition in the human -constitution. That teaching was afterwards expounded in successive essays -by Sydenham; but it was held generally in those times, and Willis found -apt illustrations of it in the three epidemics one after the other in -1657-58. Let us follow his narrative, and add to it some particulars from -Whitmore. - -The spring and summer of 1657 were extremely dry and hot; but especially -after the summer solstice the heats were so intense for many weeks -following that, day and night, there was none that did not complain of the -heat of the air, and were almost in a continual sweat and were not able to -breathe freely. About the calends of July, the fever which was at first -sporadic and particular, began to break forth in some places, perhaps two -or three cases in the same city or village. The fever fits at this period -occurred every other day, but there was no cold fit or rigor preceding, as -in an ordinary ague, the heat being intense from the outset. Vomiting and -bilious stools occurred plentifully to most, with sweat succeeding, not -however an easy, uninterrupted and critical sweat. The remission of the -fever fit was rarely complete in the intermediate day, weakness, languor, -thirst and restlessness always remaining. In some the type improved after -three or four of these quasi-tertian paroxysms; the later fits were -ushered in with a rigor and a cold stage, so that the fever became an -exact tertian intermittent. But in most the type became worse, which may -have been due to errors of regimen and physicking. The fever became, -indeed, a continued one, and might end in nervous symptoms--lethargy, -delirium, cramps or convulsions. - -In August it was spreading far and near, so that in every region or -village round Oxford, many were sick of it; but it was much more frequent -in the country cottages and in the smaller villages than in cities or -towns. It was called "the new disease," as the war-typhus of 1643 had been -called, and other epidemics both earlier and later. - -Willis continues: It crept from house to house, infecting most of the same -family, and especially those in familiar converse with the sick. "Yea old -men, and men of ripe age, it ordinarily took away." It lasted many days in -an individual, nay even months, attended with much evacuation and almost -daily vomits and sweats. "Scarce one in a thousand died of it, which I -never knew in an epidemical synochus." This singular malady, which -differed from ague not only in its want of clear intervals between the -fits of fever, but also in being propagated by contagion, raged throughout -all England in the autumn of 1657. Only in some few limited localities, -and in these only in some cases, was it accompanied by true dysentery. -Willis is not satisfied with the facile explanation of an infection of the -air, "the little bodies of which infections, being admitted within, did -ferment with the blood and humours." There must have been something -equally general in the human body, a predisposition to be so acted upon; -and of that proneness to fever he finds the cause in the intemperance of -the year, namely the great heat of the summer and autumn. - -But the most remarkable illustration of these doctrines was the epidemic -of the following spring, which was a pure and unmistakeable epidemic of -influenza-cold. After the very hot summer and autumn, there was a long -winter of intense frost. From the ides of December to the vernal equinox -the earth was covered with snow, the wind blowing steadily from the north. -The state of health through the winter was fairly good. The north wind -continued until June. "About the middle of April, suddenly a distemper -arose as if sent by some blast of the stars, which laid hold of very many -together; and in some towns in the space of a week above a thousand fell -sick together." They had a troublesome cough, great spitting, and catarrh -"falling down on the palate, throat, and nostrils." The illness approached -with fever, thirst, want of appetite, weariness, grievous pains in the -head, back, loins and limbs, and heat in the praecordia. Some were very -ill in bed, with hoarseness and almost continual coughing; others had -bleeding at the nose, bloody spittle or bloody flux. Not a few old and -infirm died, but the more strong, and almost all the healthy constitutions -recovered. Those that died "wasted leisurely," like persons sick of a -hectic fever. About the third part of mankind was distempered in a month. -Willis's explanation of it is that the constant north wind checked the -natural action of the blood in spring. The spring blood is more lively, -like the juices of vegetables. The catarrhal fever was a disorder of the -spring blood, like new wine close shut up in bottles. - -This outbreak about the middle of April is evidently described for Oxford -and the country around. Willis then describes his third epidemic, that of -the summer and autumn of 1658, which was the same type of fever as in the -summer and autumn of 1657. The vernal fever of 1658 did not last longer -than six weeks. The wind continued still north, until the summer solstice; -a little before the beginning of July there was a most fierce heat for a -few days, and when the dog-days were begun, the air grew most cruelly hot, -so that one could scarce endure it in the open. The new fever arose mostly -about the end of August, and began to spread through whole regions about -us (at Oxford), and chiefly, like that of 1657, in country houses and -villages; but in the meantime few of the inhabitants of the greater towns -and cities fell sick. The symptoms were much the same as in the previous -autumn. The fever was continual in some; in others it was of an -intermitting type at first; but very many were ill "in their brain and -nervous stock," with cruel headache, noises in the ears, dullness of -hearing, stupor, vertigo, waking, and delirium. In some, on the first or -second day, "little broad and red spots like to the measles have leisurely -broken forth in the whole body, which being shortly vanished, the fever -and headache became worse." The patients lay for a few days as if dying, -without speaking or knowing their friends, after which came lethargy and -delirium. The young men mostly recovered, the old men died. In the fits of -old men, the heat was not very sharp, but there were restlessness, tossing -about, idle and random talking, with dryness of the mouth, surfiness of -the tongue, and viscous sordes. Usually the pulse was strong and equal; a -weak, unequal and intermittent pulse, with contractures of the tendons and -convulsive motions in the wrists, was an omen of death. Those who died -passed away in a stupor, without consciousness to dispose of their goods; -the recovery of others was long and doubtful. One notable thing in this -fever was the exanthem, which reminds one more of the rash of sweating -sickness or dengue (breakbone fever), than of the spots of typhus. - -Willis ends his book on fevers with that account of the autumnal epidemic -of 1658, "taken the 13th of September," his work having been published at -the Hague in 1659. Whitmore, whose short essay is dated from London, -November, 1659, begins with the autumnal epidemic of 1658, which is the -last of Willis's three; and, strangely enough, he also has a vernal -epidemic of influenza to describe--an epidemic clearly belonging to the -spring of 1659. Unless there be some error in Whitmore's dates, it is -impossible to avoid the conclusion that the second autumnal fever, that of -1658, was followed by a spring influenza, just as the first, of 1657, had -been. - -Whitmore's account of the autumnal fever of 1658 agrees in the main with -that given by Willis. He defines it as "a putrid continued and malignant -fever containing in it the seeds of contagion." It raged in the last -autumn through all England, "and now begins again," (his preface being -dated November, 1659), seizing on all sorts of people of different nature, -which shows that it is epidemic. The part affected is chiefly the heart, -and therefore some call it _cordis morbus_. - - "In this, as in the plague at the first catching of it, some seem to - be very pleasant, so far are they from perceiving themselves to be - amiss, when indeed death itself hath set his foot within the threshold - of their earthly houses." There were pains in the head, inclination to - vomit, sudden fainting of spirits, and weakness without any manifest - cause, the pulse feeble and sometimes intermittent, so as very lusty - and strong men in Cheshire (in the year 1651 where this disease then - raged) in a very short space so lost their strength that they were not - able to stand or turn themselves in their beds. Some also are taken - with bleeding, purging, and sweating, and many have the spots. But for - the most part it appears in the livery of some other kind of ague. It - begins to show its malignity after the 5th, 7th, or 9th day, with loss - of appetite, thirst, and a dry black tongue. - -Letters of 1658 from London bear out the prevalence of autumnal sickness. -On August 3, one writes that the weather is hot and dry, the town -extremely empty, and the flux beginning. On January 4, 1659, there is much -sickness, especially fevers, agues and the smallpox. - -A good deal of the interest of Whitmore's essay lies in his arguments -against blood letting in this fever; but that is part of a history which -will have to be dealt with as a whole at a later stage. - -Whitmore then proceeds to the vernal epidemic of 1659, just as Willis had -done to that of 1658. His words are (4 Nov. 1659): - - "Having given an account of the nature and cure of this disease which - now rageth throughout England, I shall briefly describe that which - this spring universally infested London; and show how it agreed and - how it differed from that disease which last fall invaded the whole - nation." He then describes the typical influenza, just as Willis had - done under a date a year earlier--pains in the limbs of some, coughs, - and aguish distempers in others; "so that in a week or a fortnight's - time, when it had fermented and caused a putrefaction of humours, it - quickly tended to a height, and struck many thousands in London down, - scarce leaving a family where any store were, without some being ill - of this distemper, suddenly sweeping very many away, being the same, - in the judgment of no mean physician, with that in autumn last, though - in a new skin." Whitmore then gives a reason "why this should hold - them all with coughs, which it did not in the fall." - -Assuming an affinity to the autumnal epidemic of 1658, he proceeds to -state the circumstance of a reappearance in the spring of 1659: "Upon this -hush it lay all the winter, until the Easter week, and then in two or -three warm days broke loose, having had no warm weather all before, but a -rainy and black week, the sun not appearing for five or six days together -just before the holiday; when on a sudden that warm weather breaking -forth, the citizens in their summer pomp, being thinner clothed many of -them than before (like bees on a glorious day) swarmed abroad, and the -pores etc." - -Both Willis and Whitmore incline to the view that the catarrhal fever of -the spring was akin to the strange fever of the autumn, the differentia of -each being appropriate to the season. Willis, however, keeps the two types -more apart than Whitmore. The latter speaks of both fevers as "this -Protean-like distemper," whose various shapes "render it such a hocus -pocus to the amazed and perplexed people, they being held after most -strange and diverse ways with it." It is "so prodigious in its alterations -that it seems to outvie even Proteus himself." Thus the strangest part of -these narratives is not the catarrhal influenza, which has so often -reappeared as to be familiar, but the prevalence of anomalous fevers, in -some respects like intermittents without the clear interval between the -fits, but in respect of contagion, spots, pains and other symptoms, like -typhus--a volatile typhus of the country and of the towns. Although this -epidemiological phenomenon be a strange one, there is no reason to -question the correctness of Willis's observations, corroborated as they -are by those of Whitmore. But there are, indeed, many more experiences of -the like kind in the years to follow, which fall without the limits of the -present volume. One only of these later observers need be mentioned here. -The third of the famous trio with Sydenham and Willis was Morton. He had a -long experience in London of fever and smallpox, which he made the subject -of a book in 1692-4[1117]. His history goes as far back as -1658--"_historia febris [Greek: sunechs] ab anno 1658 ad annum 1691_." Of -the year 1658 he says the fever was everywhere through England and refers -to Willis; the only facts of his own being that Oliver Cromwell and his -(Morton's) father were carried off by it in September of that year, that -he had it himself (aged 20) and was three months in recovering, and that -the whole household (in Suffolk) were infected. Cromwell's attack came -upon him at Hampton Court on August 21; but it was not the first sickness -of the kind that he had suffered. He was only fifty-nine, but worn out -with many cares, and at that time distressed by the death of his favourite -daughter, Lady Claypole, under his roof on August 6, from some painful -internal female trouble. The Lord Protector's fever was called a "bastard -tertian," which might have been a name for the fever described by Willis. -He was removed on the 24th August to Whitehall, where the air was thought -to be more wholesome; and died between three and four in the afternoon of -September 3, the anniversary at once of "Dunbar field and Worcester's -laureat wreath." - -This prevalence of fevers, Protean in their varying types, all over -England in 1657-59 corresponds to the fever period of 1623-24. In each -case the fever was a minor plague, and in each case it was followed by a -revival of the plague proper, which had been dormant all over the country -for a dozen or fifteen years. The principal difference is that the -fever-period of 1623-24 was followed by the plague in 1625, whereas the -fever-period of 1657-59 was followed by several years not free from fever -and then by the plague in 1665. It is clear that the fevers of 1657-59 -made a great impression all over England, and were afterwards popularly -spoken of as a warning of the Great Plague itself. In the parish register -of Aldenham, Hertfordshire, there is inserted a poem on the Great Plague -of 1665, which has the following verses[1118]: - - "Seven years since a little plague God sent, - He shook his rod to move us to repent. - Not long before that time a dearth of corn - Was sent to us to see if we would turn." - -In Short's abstracts of parish registers, the years preceding 1665 stand -out as sickly in country districts, according to the following figures: - - No. of No. with Baptisms Burials - registers sickness in same in same - examined - - 1657 98 36 991 1305 - 1658 96 33 704 1159 - 1659 101 29 553 825 - 1660 107 17 342 489 - 1661 182(?) 25 448 685 - 1662 105 20 376 504 - 1663 119 15 325 443 - 1664 118 12 328 364 - 1665 117 14 229 446 - -Periods as unhealthy as 1657-59 do not occur again until 1667-71, and -1679-84. - -Willis says, of the autumnal epidemic of 1658: "But in the meantime few of -the inhabitants of the greater towns and cities fell sick." That is -confirmed for London, in a letter of October 26, 1658: "A world of -sickness in all countries round about London. London is now held the -wholesomest place;" but on January 4, 1659: "There is much sickness in the -town, especially feavers, agues, and smallpox[1119]." In Short's tables, -the registers of market towns bear the same traces of much sickness in -1657 and 1658 as those of country parishes. - -A high mortality from fever and spotted fever continued in London every -year from 1658 to the year of the great plague. The largest number of -deaths from fever was in the year of the plague itself, when the bills of -mortality returned them as 5257 (without much certainty, however, owing to -the confusion of the plague). The next highest figures had been in 1661, -when the fever deaths were 3490. We get a glimpse of that epidemic from -Pepys; on August 16, 1661, he writes: "But it is such a sickly time both -in the city and country everywhere (of a sort of fever) that never was -heard of almost, unless it was in plague-time. Among others, the famous -Tom Fuller is dead of it, and Dr Nicholls [Nicholas], dean of St Paul's, -and my Lord General Monk is very dangerously ill." On August 31 he enters -in his diary: "The season very sickly everywhere of strange and fatal -fevers." The same diarist, on October 20, 1663, has an entry that the -queen is ill of a spotted fever and that "she is as full of spots as a -leopard;" on the 24th the queen was in a good way to recovery. - -It is at this period that Sydenham's famous observations of the seasons -and the public health in London begin. The autumnal intermittents, he -says, which had been prevalent some years before, came back in 1661 with -new strength, about the beginning of July, being mostly tertians of a bad -type: they increased so much in August as to sweep away families almost -entirely, but declined with the winter cold coming on. He then draws the -distinction between them and ordinary tertians. In the same years, -1661-2-3-4, a continued fever is described at great length, and then he -comes to the "pestilential fever" and the plague itself of 1665 and -1666[1120]. Taking from Sydenham the single fact, for the present, that -an unusual amount of pestilential fever led up to the plague of 1665 -(which he did not stay in London to witness), we shall proceed in the next -chapter but one to that crowning epidemic of the present section of our -history. Something more remains to be said of the fevers of 1661 -(specially described by Willis as a fever of the brain and nervous stock, -but called "the new disease" in its turn); but as it is the first of -Sydenham's "epidemic constitutions," and as these are recorded -continuously to 1685, when there was another "new fever," it will be -convenient to end the detailed history of fevers for the present with the -remarkable epidemics of 1657-59. - - - - -CHAPTER XI. - -SICKNESSES OF VOYAGES AND COLONIES. - - -(Sea Scurvy, Flux, Fever, and Yellow Fever.) - -The sicknesses of the first voyages and foreign settlements come into the -history of national maladies, both as concerning Britain on the sea and -beyond sea, and as showing forth the disease-producing conditions of those -early times. In the latter respect there is more to be learned from -voyages and colonial experience than the records of domestic life at home -are likely to inform us of otherwise than vaguely. The Englishman of the -time carried his habits with him to sea and to foreign parts, where the -circumstances were more trying and the consequences more obvious. - -This history divides itself at once into several branches. There are the -disease-incidents of ocean voyages, irregular at first but becoming -somewhat uniform after the East India Company's start in 1601, chief among -them being scurvy. There are next the early discouragements from sickness, -both on the voyage and after landing, in the planting of colonies in -Virginia, New England and the West Indies, among which the troubles of -Jamaica were on a sufficiently great scale to deserve minute study. -Lastly, among the larger sections of this chapter, we have to notice the -beginnings and circumstances of the terrible and long-enduring scourge of -West Indian colonies--yellow fever. While we are mainly, in this record of -the sicknesses of voyages and of new colonies, concerned with British -enterprise, we shall have occasion to glance at the similar experiences of -other nations. - - -The first accounts of Sea Scurvy. - -The malady that figures most in the narratives of the long ocean voyages -which began with the modern period is scurvy. In the very first of the -great voyages, that of Vasco de Gama to the Indies by the Cape of Good -Hope in 1498, scurvy appeared when the ships were on the West African -coast, fifty-five deaths occurring within a short period. Of all the known -subsequent occurrences of the kind, there are accounts more or less full -in the collections of Hakluyt and Purchas, from which the facts in the -sequel have been taken. - -In the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan to the Pacific, scurvy is mentioned -first at a late stage; in the year 1520 the ships had passed the straits -called by his name and had been three months and twelve days sailing -westwards from the last land; their provisions had run short, and, "by -reason of this famine and unclean feeding, some of their gums grew so over -their teeth that they died miserably for hunger." Nineteen men, as well as -a giant from Patagonia and an Indian from Brazil, were dead, and some -twenty-five or thirty others were sick, "so that there was in a manner -none without some disease[1121]." - -There were no voyages of the same length by English ships until many years -after: and then we find the same troubles in them from scurvy and other -sickness. While the Portuguese and Spaniards were navigating in tropical -waters, the English and French were sending most of their expeditions to -the North. The French attempted to found a colony on the shores of the -Gulf of St Lawrence, while the English sought to establish a trade with -Muscovy by way of the White Sea, and to open a nearer route to the far -East by way of the polar regions. The voyages in all these enterprises -were short, the ships for the most part returning after an absence of four -or five months, and without any notable experience of sickness: it was -only when the French wintered in Canada that scurvy broke out. Thus the -English voyages for the Muscovy Company have little or no interest for our -subject; while the three voyages of Frobisher in search of the North-West -passage in 1576, 1577, and 1578, and the three of Davis in 1585, 1586, and -1587 (in which last he got to 73 N.) are as nearly as possible free from -records of sickness. - -Jacques Cartier's second expedition to the St Lawrence in 1535 had a -disastrous experience of scurvy. In his first voyage in 1534, with two -ships of sixty tons each and each carrying sixty-one men, he appears to -have had no sickness, having left St Malo on April 20, traded with the -Indians on the Gulf of St Lawrence, and returned on September 5 of the -same year. The expedition of the following year, with three ships, -wintered on the coast, amidst heavy ice, and about mid-winter began to -suffer from scurvy[1122]. The crews appear to have had no lack of stores, -both meat and drink, and the outbreak of scurvy, described as an unknown -disease, was so surprising that it was traced to infection from the -Indians, who are said to have admitted the deaths of some fifty of their -number from "pestilence." - - "The said unknown sickness began to spread itself amongst us after the - strangest sort that ever was either heard of or seen, insomuch as some - did lose all their strength, and could not stand on their feet; then - did their legs swell, their sinewes shrink as black as any coal. - Others also had their skins spotted with spots of blood of a purple - colour; then did it ascend to their ankles, knees, thighs, shoulders, - arms, and neck; their mouth became stinking, their gums so rotten that - all the flesh did fall off even to the roots of the teeth, which did - also almost all fall out. With such infection did this sickness spread - itself in our three ships that about the middle of February, of a - hundred and ten persons that we were, there were not ten whole; so - that one could not help the other.... There were already 8 dead and - more than 50 sick, and, as we thought, past all recovery." The body of - one dead, aged 22, was opened to see what the disease was; he was - found to have his heart white, but rotten, and more than a quart of - red water about it[1123]; his liver was indifferent fair; but his - lungs black and mortified ... his milt toward the back was somewhat - perished, rough as if it had been rubbed against a stone. - - "From the midst of November to the midst of March there died 25 of our - best and chiefest men, and all the rest sick except three or four; - then it pleased God to cast his pitiful eye upon us, and sent us the - knowledge of remedie of our healths, and recovery.... The Captain, - walking upon the ice, asken of Domagaia [an Indian] how he had done to - heal himself; he answered that he had taken the juice and sap of the - leaves of a certain tree, and therewith had healed himself! for it was - a singular remedy against that disease." The Indian's advice was "to - take the bark and leaves and boil them together and to drink of the - said decoction every other day, and to put the dregs of it upon the - legs that is sick."... - - "It is thought to be the sassafras tree. After this medicine was found - and proved to be true there was such strife about it, who should be - first to take of it, that they were ready to kill one another, so that - a tree as big as any oak in France was spoiled and lopped bare, and - occupied all in five or six days, and it wrought so well that if all - the physicians of Montpelier and Lovaine had been there with all the - drugs of Alexandria, they would not have done so much in one year as - that tree did in six days, for it did so prevail that as many as used - of it, by the grace of God recovered their health." - -In 1542, while Cartier was still trading on his own account to the St -Lawrence from Brittany, a more ambitious project, under a Crown patent, -issued from La Rochelle[1124]. With De la Roche, count of Roberval, as -governor, a number of adventurous nobles and gentry, with men, women and -children to the number of two hundred in all, sailed in three ships, and -established themselves in Lower Canada with all the formalities of -occupation. Two of the three ships were sent home in September, the -colonists proper being left to taste the rigours of a Canadian winter: "In -the end many of our people fell sick of a certain disease in their legges, -reynes and stomacke, so that they seemed to bee deprived of all their -lymmes: and there died about fiftie." - -The first English records of scurvy at sea are in connexion with the early -voyages to Guinea for gold-dust[1125]. Mr John Lok sailed on the second -voyage to Guinea, on October 11, 1554, his ships being the 'Trinitie,' 140 -tons, the 'Bartholomew,' 90 tons, and the 'John Evangelist,' 140 tons. -After trading some months on the African coast the ships sailed for home: -"There died of our men at this last voyage about twenty and four, whereof -many died at their return into the clime of the cold regions, as between -the islands of Azores and England." The disease is not named; but it is -probable from what follows that it was scurvy. - -The next voyage to Guinea was Towrson's first, in October 1555, from -Newport, Isle of Wight, in the 'Hart' and the 'Hind;' the death of only -one man is mentioned; he died "in his sleep" on March 29; by the 7th May, -the provisions were so reduced that the ships put in on the coast of -Ireland to purchase milk and two sheep from the wild kernes, paying in -gold-dust. - -In Towrson's second voyage there is no word of sickness; but in his third -voyage in 1577, it is a prominent topic of the narrative. The vessels -'Minion,' 'Christopher' and 'Tiger' left Plymouth on January 30, 1577. On -the 8th of May, "all our cloth in the 'Minion' being sold, I called the -company together to know whether they would tarry the sale of the cloth -taken in the prize at this place or no: they answered that in respect of -the death of some of their men, and the present sickness of 20 more, they -would not tarry, but repair to the other ships, of whom they had heard -nothing since April 27." Having at length bartered for gold until the -natives would barter no longer, the three ships bore up for home. On July -24 the master of the 'Tiger' came aboard the 'Minion' and reported that -"his men were so weak and the ship so leak that he was not able to keep -her above the water." A muster held of all the three crews the same day -showed that there were not above 30 sound men in them. On September 3, -there being only six men in the 'Tiger' who could work, the gold and -stores were taken out of her, and she was abandoned. On October 6, when -off the coast of Portugal, the 'Christopher' reported herself so weak that -she was not able to keep the sea. The 'Minion' promised to attend her into -Vigo; but a fair wind springing up, she signalled that she was off for -home, whereupon the 'Christopher' followed. On October 16, a great -south-westerly storm arose; the men in the 'Minion' were not able, from -weakness, to handle the sails, which were blown away: however, they made -shift to reach the Isle of Wight on October 20, nothing more being said of -the 'Christopher.' - -The English voyages to Guinea for gold-dust were shortly followed by the -three expeditions of John Hawkins in 1562, 1564 and 1567 to the West coast -of Africa for negro slaves to be sold to the Spaniards in Hispaniola and -Cuba and on the Spanish Main[1126]. Only a brief summary remains of the -first voyage, in which nothing is said of sickness; in the second, the -negroes, at least, appear to have suffered on the somewhat long passage -across the tropical belt, especially from want of water; and the third was -so calamitous in various ways that Hawkins himself wrote of it: "If all -the miseries and troublesome affairs of this sorrowful voyage should be -perfectly and thoroughly written, there should need a painful man with his -pen, and as great a time as he had that wrote the lives and deaths of the -martyrs." Little or nothing is said of one class of martyrs in the -business--the negroes, of whom the ships carried four to five hundred. -English lives were lost in the kidnapping raids, from poisoned arrows, it -was thought, the wounded dying "in strange sort with their mouths shut -some ten days before they died, and after their wounds were whole." It was -on the return from the Gulf of Mexico, more than a year out from England, -that the sickness on board was worst. They cleared the Bahamas channel on -November 16, 1568, after which, "growing near to the cold country, our men -being oppressed with famine, died continually, and they that were left -grew into such weakness that we were scarcely able to manage our ship" -(the 'Jesus' of Lubeck, 700 tons). They put in at Ponte Vedra, near Vigo, -on December 31, but the fresh provisions that they got turned to their -hurt: "our men with excess of fresh meat grew into miserable diseases and -died a great part of them." Twelve fresh hands shipped at Vigo enabled the -vessels to reach the nearest English haven at Mount's Bay in Cornwall. - -Meanwhile we obtain some glimpses of seafaring among the Portuguese, who -had now in the middle of the 16th century a regular trade to the Indies, -established by Vasco de Gama's route round the Cape of Good Hope. Perhaps -the most famous of these records is that of the voyage of St Francis -Xavier from Lisbon to Goa in the spring of 1540. The expedition with which -he took passage carried, it is said, a regiment of a thousand men to -reinforce the garrison of Goa; during the voyage the Jesuit apostle -"rendered to the diseased services too revolting to be described, and -lived among the dying and the profligate, the unwearied minister of -consolation and of peace[1127]." After five months the ships arrived at -Mozambique, by which time Xavier and many more were suffering from fever. -Goa was not reached until thirteen months out from the Tagus. A more -familiar narrative of the same voyage of the Portuguese ships a generation -later is given by an English youth, Thomas Stevens, in a letter written -home to his father, a citizen of London, shortly after arriving at Goa. -Both in its generalities and in its particulars this excellent letter will -serve to measure the prevalence of scurvy, flux, and fever in the earlier -period of the East Indian trade by the Cape[1128]. - - The five ships left Lisbon on April 5, 1579, the solemnity being - marked by the firing of ordnance and the braying of trumpets. In the - ships, "besides shipmen and soldiers, there were a great number of - children, which in the seas bear out better than men; and no marvel, - when that many women also pass very well." After a passage along the - Guinea coast, made tedious by calms and head winds, they rounded the - Cape of Good Hope on July 29. From that point in the voyage the - Portugal ships were wont to follow one or other of two routes - according to the lateness of the season--either the route by the - Mozambique Channel, in which case they were able to get fruits and - fresh provisions, or the route along more southern parallels for a - time, and passing to the east of Madagascar[1129]. In the latter case, - "by reason of the long navigation and want of food and water, they - fall into sundry diseases, their gums wax great and swell, and they - are fain to cut them away, their legs swell, and all the body - becometh sore and so benumbed that they cannot stir hand nor foot, and - so they die for weakness. Others fall into fluxes and agues, and so - die thereby. - - "And this way it was our chance to make; and though we had more than - one hundred and fifty sick, there died not past seven-and-twenty, - which loss they esteemed not much in respect of other times." - - The ships went greatly out of their course, having sighted the island - of Socotra at the entrance to the Gulf of Aden, and did not arrive at - Goa until October 24, 202 days from Lisbon without calling anywhere. - -The first of the long English voyages beyond the Line was Sir Francis -Drake's famous circumnavigation from November 15, 1577, to September 26, -1580[1130]. Drake must have lost many of his men in those three years, but -there is nothing in the narrative to show that they perished of disease. -The expedition was by way of the Straits of Magellan, and was mainly given -up to plundering the Spaniards on the coasts of Chili and Peru. Drake set -out for home loaded with treasure by way of the Philippines and the Cape -of Good Hope. It is not until the narrative brings us to a small island -between Ternate and Celebes that we hear of sickness; they graved the ship -there and remained twenty-six days, during which the "sickly, weak and -decayed" recovered their strength, a large species of crayfish found on -the island being "very good and restoring meat, whereof we had -experience." But even Drake, with all his systematic care and resource, -was destined in after years to have a share of the common sickly -experience at sea, and to find disease a more potent enemy than the -Spaniard. - - -Remarkable Epidemic in Drake's Fleet 1585-6. - -Drake's next great expedition after his circumnavigation was in 1585, with -six Queen's ships and some nineteen others, carrying 2,300 men. A large -number of private adventurers had a money interest in the enterprise, -which had for its object to plunder Spanish towns in the West Indies and -the Spanish Main and to capture the treasure at the isthmus of Panama on -its way to Spain. The fleet experienced one of the most remarkable -epidemics in the whole history of sickness[1131]. - - Having left Plymouth on September 14, 1585, they arrived at the island - of St Jago, in the Cape de Verde group, on November 16. More than a - thousand men were landed, and were marched up the steep and broken - ground to a hill overlooking the capital, which stood in a narrow - valley, with high cliffs on the east and west and the Atlantic open - before it at some distance on the south. The place was surrounded by a - wall, and defended by fifty pieces of brass ordnance; but no - resistance was offered, and the English marched in to find the - inhabitants fled farther inland. On the 17th November, the town was - quartered out for the lodging of the whole army, which remained there - for ten days or a fortnight (there are inconsistent dates), taking - such spoils as the place yielded (wine, oil, meal and "trash" of the - Portuguese trade to the Indies). After a week, when no one had come to - ransom the town, Drake set out with 600 men to the village or town of - St Domingo, twelve miles inland, with the hope of finding the governor - and the bishop; but, finding no one, he marched his men back again the - same evening. On November 26 the whole force was re-embarked, all the - houses in the capital as well as in the country round were set fire - to, the port of Playa, a few miles to the westward, was also burned, - and on the same night the ships weighed anchor from the latter, and - stood away to the south-west. They had filled their water-casks from a - pool, near the seashore, formed by the small stream which runs through - the capital and descends the southern declivity. Nothing is said of - sickness during the occupation of St Jago; there seems to have been - some lax discipline, (owing to the mixed character of the expedition), - which Drake quickly remedied. - -The ships were only eighteen days in crossing the Atlantic to Dominica, a -distance of some forty meridians. In the midst of that quick sailing along -the edge of the tropical belt of ocean, with the steady north-east trade -wind behind them, the season the beginning of December and the climate the -most delightful and most refreshing on the globe, the ships were visited -suddenly with the fury of a deadly pestilential fever, of which the -following is the account by a captain of the land-forces on board: - - "We were not many days at sea but there began among our people such - mortality as in a few days there were dead two or three hundred men. - And until some seven or eight days after our coming from St Jago - there had not died any one man of sickness in all the fleet. The - sickness showed not his infection wherewith so many were stroken until - we were departed thence; and then seized our people with extreme hot - burning and continual agues whereof very few escaped with life, and - yet those for the most part not without great alteration and decay of - their wits and strength for a long time after. In some that died were - plainly showed the small spots which are often found upon those that - be infected with the plague." - -From Dominica the ships sailed to St Christopher, on which island Drake -disembarked his whole force, and cleaned and aired his ships, according to -an excellent practice which he had followed also in his great -circumnavigation. Some days of Christmas having been thus spent ashore, -"to refresh our sick people," the voyage was resumed to Hispaniola. Deaths -continued to occur, from the same disease as at first, both among officers -and men, and so continued for many weeks. However, they were able to land -some 1000 or 1200 men on Hispaniola, and to carry the city of San Domingo -by assault. The fleet then sailed southwards along the coast of the -mainland to Cartagena, which was captured in turn, and in like manner held -to ransom. - -It is at this part of the narrative that we next hear of the infection in -the fleet: - - "We stayed here six weeks [from middle of January to end of February, - 1586], and the sickness with mortality, before spoken of, still - continued among us, though not with the same fury as at the first. And - such as were touched with the said sickness, escaping death, very few - or almost none could recover their strength; yea, many of them were - much decayed in their memory, insomuch that it was grown an ordinary - judgment, when one was heard to speak foolishly, to say he had been - sick of the _calentura_, which is the Spanish name of that burning - ague; for, as I told you before, it is a very burning and pestilent - ague." - -Then follows the Spanish theory of the _calentura_, which may or may not -be rightly applied to the deadly epidemic that broke out suddenly in the -English ships in mid ocean: - - "The original cause thereof is imputed to the evening or first night - air, which they term _la serena_, wherein they say, and hold very firm - opinion, that whoso is then abroad in the open air shall certainly be - infected to the death, not being of the Indian or natural race of - those country people. By holding their watch our men were thus - subjected to the infectious air, which at St Jago was most dangerous - and deadly of all other places. With the inconvenience of continual - mortality, we were forced to give over our intended enterprize, etc." - -The land-captains having been consulted by Drake, on February 27, 1586, -advised that the expedition should go home from Cartagena, instead of -attempting to capture the treasure at Panama. In their memorandum they -wrote: "And being further advised of the slenderness of our strength, -whereunto we be now reduced, as well in respect of the small number of -able bodies, as also not a little in regard of the slack disposition of -the greater part of those which remain, very many of the better minds and -men being either consumed by death, or weakened by sickness and hurts, -etc." The voyage to England was accordingly begun; St Augustine in Florida -was captured by the way, and the struggling colony in Virginia, the first -sent out by Raleigh, was taken up and brought back, and Portsmouth reached -on July 28. "We lost some 750 men in the voyage, above three parts of them -only by sickness." The names are given of eight captains, four -lieutenants, and seven masters, who had died; and there were some other -officers dead unnamed. When the ransoms of San Domingo and Cartagena came -to be divided, the venture must have been found as unprofitable to the -shareholders as it had been disastrous to officers and men. - -The Spanish name _calentura_, by which the fever in the fleet is -described, was probably used generically for various kinds of fever in the -tropics. But of this fever in particular, we have some details not without -diagnostic value. It was doubtless contracted at St Jago in the Cape de -Verde islands; it broke out suddenly in mid ocean after some seven or -eight days sailing before the wind, in a delightful climate, which points -to the regular incubation of an infective virus, received by hundreds of -men when they were last ashore; the mortality was enormous; the symptoms -were those of a burning fever; and in some cases there were small spots or -petechiae like those often seen in the plague. It was clearly a febrile -form of pestilential infection, and, as few recovered, it must be -considered to have had a death-rate such as typhus has rarely had, and -such as yellow fever has commonly had. Nothing is said of the black -vomit, the haemorrhages, and the saffron colour of skin and eyes, which -are distinctive of yellow fever[1132]. On the other hand there is a -remarkable after-effect mentioned in both the passages quoted, the loss of -memory, impairment of wits, and appearance of foolishness, which made "the -calenture" a bye-word in the fleet. I shall not venture to say what the -infection was; but it seems tolerably certain that it was contracted by -the English during their occupation of the capital town of St Jago. More -recent visitors to the Cape de Verde islands have remarked upon their -towns and villages as fever-traps, and have pointed to the source of the -fever; it is not malaria, or the mere climatic influence, but a -pestilential emanation from spots of soil long inhabited by mankind, both -black and white, and so situated in cups of the hills as to retain and -multiply the filth-ferment in them. According to all analogy, the -emanations from such a soil would be felt most by strangers not inured to -them, and most of all by men of another stock and from other -latitudes[1133]. - - -Sicknesses of Voyages, continued: Management of Scurvy. - -The expedition to Virginia which returned in 1586 with Drake's ships -homeward bound from the Spanish Main, was the first sent out by Raleigh -with the intention of settling, an earlier voyage in 1584 having been made -to explore the country. It is in connexion with Raleigh's second colony -(and fourth expedition) in 1587 that we hear of disastrous sickness[1134]. -Having left 118 people to inhabit the country, the two larger ships sailed -for home on August 27 of the same year. On board the "fly-boat," the -provisions fell short, the water turned stinking, officers and men died, -and the vessel was navigated with difficulty to the west coast of Ireland. -When they reached Portsmouth, they found the admiral arrived there three -weeks before them, but with an equally disastrous experience: "Ferdinando -the master, with all his company were not only come home without any -purchase, but also in such weakness by sickness of their chiefest men that -they were scarce able to bring their ship into harbour, but were forced to -let fall anchor without." - -The following year, 1588, was made memorable in the English annals of the -sea by the defeat of the Spanish Armada. There was much sickness in both -fleets. As regards the English ships, a writer who has had special access -to original documents says[1135]: - - "We little think, when we peruse the melancholy tale of disease, - starvation and shame, so needlessly undergone by the heroic champions - of England's liberty against the invading might of Spain, from what - obscure and insignificant causes the difficulties and hardships of the - Island seamen may have chiefly arisen"--namely the peculation of - officials, the mouldering rations, empty magazines, and the like. In - the ships of the Spanish fleet the infection was like that of the - plague itself; the main body of the expedition, fifty sail, reached - Corunna, Santander and St Sebastian with such infection among the ten - thousand men on board, that the inhabitants shut their houses against - them. - -Two of the heroes of that fight, Drake and Hawkins, met their death by -sickness off the Spanish Main in 1595-6. The expedition, consisting of -2500 men in six Queen's ships and twenty-one others, left Plymouth on -August 28, 1595[1136]. Only the deaths of officers are mentioned in the -narrative, but of these there seem to have been a good many, when the -ships were in the Caribbean Sea. Hawkins died off Porto Rico on November -12. On December 7, Mr Yorke, captain of the 'Hope,' died of sickness, on -January 15, captain Plat died of sickness, and then Sir Francis Drake -began to keep his cabin and to complain of a scouring or flux: he died on -January 28, off Porto Bello. On the 27th died captain Jonas of the -'Delight,' captain Egerton, and James Wood, chief surgeon of the fleet, -out of the 'Garland.' On the 28th died Abraham Kendall out of the 'Saker.' -Several of the ships were sunk so that their men might go to the Queen's -ships, which were short of hands. A muster on February 6 showed in the -whole fleet "two thousand sick and whole," or five hundred fewer than had -sailed. There was some loss of life in encounters with the enemy, but much -more from disease. - -Of the filibustering cruises or expeditions to the East by the South -American route, there remain to be mentioned two by Thomas Cavendish, and -one at some length by Richard Hawkins, before we come to the establishment -of regular English trade to the East Indies by the Portuguese route round -the Cape of Good Hope. Cavendish's first voyage[1137] by the Straits of -Magellan was from Plymouth, 25 July, 1586, with three ships (240 tons in -all) carrying 125 men. - - Touching on the west coast of Africa, they went ashore and took lemons - from the trees. Off the coast of Brazil in November and December two - men died "of the disease called scorbuto, which is an infection of the - blood and the liver." Arrived at the Straits of Magellan they found - twenty-three Spaniards living on shell-fish, "which were all that - remained of four hundred which were left there [to found a colony] in - these Straits of Magellan, three years before, all the rest being dead - with famine." They were only too glad to hasten from this place, Port - Famine, "for the noysome stench and vile savour wherewith it was - infected through the contagon of the Spaniards' pined and dead - carkeises." In one of Cavendish's own ships, on February 21, 1588, - when among the East Indian islands, Captain Havers died of "a most - severe and pestilent ague, which held him furiously some seven or - eight days. Moreover presently after his death, myself [Pretty, the - narrator] with divers others in the ship fell marvellously sick, and - so continued in very great pain for the space of three weeks or a - month, by reason of the extreme heat and intemperature of the - climate." - -One might guess that these were cases of ship-fever (or calenture); but in -Cavendish's last voyage we meet with a strange sickness which will perhaps -baffle all nosological conjecture. This voyage, like the first, was -intended for the East Indies by way of the Straits of Magellan[1138]. The -three tall ships and two barks, having sailed from Plymouth on August 26, -1591, never got through the Straits; they were still within their recesses -in April, 1592, many men having "died with cursed famine and miserable -cold," and sick men having been put ashore into the woods in the snow. The -narrative (by John Lane), then follows the fortunes of one of the ships, -the 'Desire.' Landing at Port Desire, in Patagonia, they found -scurvy-grass growing, which they ate with oil: "This herb did so purge the -blood that it took away all kind of swellings, of which many [had] died, -and restored us to perfect health of body, so that we were in as good -case as when we came first out of England." There also they took on board -14,000 penguins, which they had dried on the rocks, mostly without salt; -and sailed northwards on December 22. With only 27 men surviving out of -76, they left the coast of Brazil at Cape Frio (near Rio de Janeiro), and -then began their more singular experience of disease. - - "After we came near unto the sun, our dried penguins began to corrupt, - and there bred in them a most loathsome and ugly worm of an inch long. - This worm did mightily increase, and devour our victuals;" it devoured - everything except iron,--clothes, boots, shirts, even the ship's - timbers! "In this woeful case, after we had passed the equinoctial - toward the North, our men began to fall sick of such a monstrous - disease as I think the like was never heard of: for in their ankles it - began to swell, from thence in two days it would be in their breasts, - so that they could not draw their breath, and then fell into their - cods, and their cods and yardes did swell most grievously and most - dreadfully to behold, so that they could neither stand, lie, nor goe. - Whereupon our men grew mad with grief. Our captain [John Davis] with - extreme anguish of his soul was in such woeful case that he desired - only a speedy end, and though he were scarce able to speak for sorrow, - yet he persuaded them to patience.... For all this, divers grew raging - mad, and some died in most loathsome and furious pain. It were - incredible to write our misery as it was; there was no man in perfect - health but the captain, and one boy.... To be short, all our men died - except sixteen [i.e., eleven died of the survivors after Cape Frio] of - which there were but five able to move." Those five worked the ship - into Berehaven (Bantry Bay) on June 11, 1593, and there ran her - ashore. - -The remarkable epidemic on board the 'Desire,' among men living upon dried -penguin infested with worms, was probably not scurvy, or at least not all -scurvy: the dropsy and dyspnoea suggest one of the two forms of beri-beri, -of a peculiarly severe type. The co-existence of worms in the dried food -may lead one to think of a parasitic malady such as that caused by -Anchylostoma duodenale, which has also an anasarcous or oedematous -character. But the diagnosis of beri-beri appears to be far more likely. -That epidemic, however we interpret it, must rank among the curiosities of -the history. But, in the next that we come to, the sickness on board the -'Daintie,' Richard Hawkins master, on a voyage in 1593 through the Straits -of Magellan, the disease is typical scurvy; and the observations on -sea-scurvy by Hawkins himself are among the best that we have for the -period, and, indeed, until long after the Elizabethan period[1139]. - -The 'Daintie,' a nearly new ship of 300 to 400 tons, weighed anchor from -Blackwall on April 8, 1593. She was deeply laden with merchandise for -trade and accompanied by a victualler, of 100 tons, the 'Hawk.' It was not -until June 12, that they got away from Plymouth. They put in at the Cape -de Verde islands, about whose climate and health Hawkins makes some -observations already quoted. Sailing thence they had come within three or -four degrees of the Line, when scurvy broke out: - - "My company within a few days began to fall sick of a disease which - seamen are wont to call the scurvie; and seemeth to be a kind of - dropsie, and raigneth most in this climate of any that I have heard or - read of in the world, though [it is found] in all seas. It possesseth - all those of which it takes hold with a loathsome sloathfulnesse, - _that even to eate_ they would be content to change _with sleepe and - rest_, which is the most pernicious enemie in this sickness that is - known. It bringeth with it a great desire to drink, and causeth a - general swelling of all parts of the body, especially of the legs, and - gums; and many times the teeth fall out of the jaws without pain. The - signs to know this disease in the beginning are divers,--by the - swelling of the gums, by denting of the flesh of the legs with a man's - finger, the pit remaining without filling up in a good space; others - show it with their laziness; others complain of the crick of the back, - etc., all which are for the most part certain tokens of the infection. - The cause is thought to be the stomack's feebleness by change of air - in intemperate climates, of diet in salt meats, boiled also in salt - water, and corrupted sometimes; the want of exercise, also, either in - persons or elements, as in calms." - -Hawkins then recalls the experience of the Queen's fleet in 1590, at the -Azores, the ships being in calm weather for six months: "in which voyage, -towards the end thereof, many of every ship (saving the 'Nonpereli' which -was under my charge and had only one man sick in all the voyage) fell sick -of this disease and began to die apace." - -Hawkins wrote out the account of his 1593 voyage some time after, and did -not print it until 1622; but it may be supposed that the views about -scurvy therein expressed were the same that he held and acted upon in his -earlier life[1140]. Thus his remarks upon the prevention and cure of -scurvy, about to be given, may be taken to stand for the practical wisdom -or sagacity of the Elizabethan period. The ship should be kept clean, -vinegar should be sprinkled and tar burned. In hot latitudes salt meats -should be shunned, and especially salt fish. Salt water should not be used -to dress the meat, nor to wash shirts in; nor should the men sleep in -their wet clothes. The crews should be set to various exercises, and -encouraged to various pastimes. At this point he seems to feel that he is -a layman giving medical advice, and interpolates: - - "And I wish that some learned men would write of it, for it is the - plague of the sea and the spoil of mariners. Doubtless it would be a - work worthy of a worthy man, and most beneficial for our country, for - in twenty years (since I have used the sea) I dare take upon me to - give account of ten thousand men consumed with this disease." - -The learned man was forthcoming in due course, in the person of John -Woodall, surgeon-general to the East India Company; and we shall see what -he made of it. Meanwhile, in default of professional guidance, we may hear -Hawkins himself: - - "That which I have seen most fruitful for this sickness is sour - oranges and lemons, and a water called Dr Stevens his water, of which - I carried but little, and it took end quickly, but gave health to - those that used it. The oyle of vitry [vitriol] is beneficial--two - drops in a draught of water with a little sugar. But the principal of - all is the air of the land; for the sea is natural for fishes, and the - land for men. And the oftener a man can have his people to land, not - hindering his voyage, the better it is and the profitablest course he - can take to refresh them." - -Hawkins, as well as his contemporaries, as we shall see, knew what -lime-juice could do for scurvy, and knew also the limit of its powers; it -was useful, as he had himself found; but much else was needed to ward off -scurvy. After experience showed clearly enough that some commanders with -the same stores as others could carry their crews through a long voyage -without scurvy; Hawkins himself, in the 'Nonpareil' in 1590, had only one -man sick of it, while it was general in the fleet. In the voyage of 1593, -for all his knowledge and resource, he appears to have found circumstances -too hard for him. His crew showed their bad habits while the ship lay at -Plymouth; as in Lancaster's experience two years before, the evil habits -of sailors told upon their constitutions, so that they became an easy prey -to monotonous living at sea. Scurvy broke out when they were within three -or four degrees of the Line: "The sickness was fervent, every day there -died more or less." The ship's course was accordingly turned westward, -although they were too far south to benefit by the north-east trade wind; -and in the end of October they came to the coast of Brazil at Santos, four -months and a half out from Plymouth. At Santos they obtained 200 or 300 -oranges and lemons, and a few hens; there were so many men sick that there -were not above three or four oranges or lemons to a share: "Coming aboard -of our ships there was great joy amongst my company, and many with the -sight of the oranges and lemons seemed to recover heart." It is the great -and unknown virtue of that fruit, he says, to be a certain remedy for this -infirmity. The rest of the voyage possesses no special interest for us. -The scurvy had "wasted more than half of my people;" so that Hawkins took -the crew and provisions out of the 'Hawk,' and burned her. He left the -Brazilian coast on December 18, passed the Straits of Magellan, and after -some filibustering on the Chilian and Peruvian coasts, was captured by a -Spanish ship, and sent home to Spain to be ransomed. - -Hawkins, it will have been remarked, was no bigoted "lime-juicer;" -although he knew the virtues of anti-scorbutic acids, he had a correct -apprehension of the need of cleanliness, dry clothing, exercise, -amusements and discipline, and if he had understood the need of wind-sails -for the ventilation of 'tween-decks, he would have had as scientific a -grasp of the whole question as Blane had two centuries after. But in the -end of the Tudor period, and in the Stuart period, with abounding -enterprise and national expansion, there was little sense of the personal -need of breathing space, whether in ships or in houses. The number of -souls on board, in proportion to a ship's tonnage, was twice or thrice as -great as the Board of Trade now allows. It was not only in long voyages, -or in the monotony of tropical calms, that scurvy was apt to invade a -crew. The following experience, on our own shores, is credible enough: In -1611 Purchas was shown a letter from Newfoundland, giving an account of a -winter spent there, the writer taking credit to himself for the small -amount of scurvy among the men under him: in a company of 39 persons, only -four were wanting in the spring; but, by way of contrast, he recalls what -happened at home in the year 1600[1141]: - - "One Richard Fletcher, that is master pilot here, and a director of - the fishing, reported unto me that he was one of the company, - consisting of forty persons, that went in a drumbler of Ipswich called - the 'Amitie,' to the north of Ireland about eleven years ago from - London in the late Queen's service under the charge of one Captain - Fleming, and continued there the space of two years. In which time two - and thirty died of the scurvie, and that only eight of them returned - home, whereof the said Richard Fletcher was one ... notwithstanding - that there were to be had fresh victuals and many other helps, which - their country [Newfoundland] as yet hath not, but in good time may - have." - -We have not yet come to any deliverance of the faculty on the subject of -scurvy; Hawkins appears to be giving merely his own experience and -reflections. Beside these we may here place the contemporary observations -and practice of the French laymen, which are expressly at variance on some -points with medical teaching. Some time previous to 1609, Marc Lescarbot -wrote an account of 'the voyage of M. de Monts into New France;' the -expedition sailed from Havre in March, 1604. Their first winter in Canada -is thus related[1142]: - - In the meanwhile the cold and snows came upon them.... Many idle, - sluggish companions drank snow-water, not willing to take the pains to - cross the river. "Briefly, the unknown sicknesses like to those - described unto us by James Quartier in his relation, assailed us. For - remedies there was none to be found. In the meanwhile the poor sick - creatures did languish, pining away by little and little for want of - sweet meats, as milk or spoon meat for to sustain their stomachs, - which could not receive the hard meats, by reason of let, proceeding - from a rotten flesh which grew and overabounded within their mouths; - and when one thought to root it out, it did grow again in one night's - space more abundantly than before.... There died of this sickness - thirty-six; and thirty-six or forty more that were stricken with it - recovered themselves by the help of the Spring, as soon as the - comfortable season appeared. But the deadly season for that sickness - is the end of January, the months of February and March, wherein most - commonly the sick do die, every one at his turn, according to the time - when they have begun to be sick; in such sort that he which began to - be ill in February and March may escape, but he that shall overhaste - himself, and betake him to his bed in December and January, he is in - danger to die in February and March, or the beginning of April.... M. - de Poutrincourt made a negro to be opened that died of that sickness - in our voyage, who was found to have the inward parts very sound - except the stomacke, that had wrinkles as though they were ulcerated." - -Then follow Lescarbot's views of the treatment and prevention of scurvy. -After advising to avoid "cold" meats without juices, gross and corrupted, -salted, "smoaky," musty, raw and of an evil scent, including dried fishes, -he proceeds: - - "I would not, for all that, be so scrupulous as the physicians, which - do put in the number of gross and melancholy meats, beeve's flesh, - bear's, wild boar's and hog's flesh (they might as well add unto them - beaver's flesh, which notwithstanding we have found very good), as - they do amongst fishes the tons [tunnies], dolphins, and all those - that carry lard; among the birds the hernes, ducks and all other - water-birds; for, in being an over-curious observator of these things, - one might fall into the danger of starving. They place yet among the - meats that are to be shunned, bisket[1143], beans and pulse, the often - using of milk, cheese, the gross and harsh wine and that which is too - small, white wine, and the use of vinegar" - ---just like our own great masters in prohibitory dietetics. - -Lescarbot's advice agrees on the whole with that of Sir R. Hawkins: the -men should be well shod and clothed, merriment should be encouraged, and -again: - - "Good wine taken according to the necessity of nature, it is a - soveraigne preservative for all sickness, and particularly for this. - The young buds of herbs in the Spring time be also very soveraigne.... - We have had some sick that have been (as it were) raised up from death - to life, for having eaten twice or thrice of a coolice made of a - cock." - -In the voyage of Sir Thomas Smith to Baffin's Bay in 1616, the treatment -of scurvy by vegetable juices is mentioned: "Next day, going ashore on a -little island we found great abundance of scurvie grass, which we boiled -in beer, and so drank thereof, using it also in sallet, with sorrel and -orpen, which here groweth in abundance; by means whereof, and the blessing -of God, all our men within eight or nine days shall gain perfect health, -and so continue till our arrival in England[1144]." - -On the other hand, those who appear to have had the most correct intuition -of the teaching of the schools were the Red Indians. Lescarbot says that, -in the treatment of scurvy, "they use sweating often." Perhaps they had -some dim notion of the doctrine of peccant humours: at all events they -clung to the alterative practice until long after that date, with a -tenacity second only to that of the European faculty itself. - - -Scurvy in the East India Company's Ships: Professional Treatment. - -Until the end of the Tudor period, scurvy had been only an occasional -incident of English voyages. But as soon as the regular trade to the East -begins, we find it a common experience. - -The English voyages to the East Indies by the Cape route really began in -1591, when Captain James Lancaster sailed first in command of ships -belonging to the Company of Merchant Adventurers; but it was not until -1601 that he sailed again to the East Indies in command of the first ships -of the East India Company, which had been formed the year before. - - The three ships in 1591, the 'Penelope,' 'Marchant Royal,' and 'Edward - Bonaventure,' cleared from Plymouth on April 10[1145]. They crossed - the Line on June 6, by which time two men were dead and divers sick. - In the tropics so much rain fell that "we could not keep our men dry - three hours together, which was an occasion of the infection among - them, and their eating of salt victuals, with the lack of clothes to - shift them." On this first voyage, Lancaster began the practice which - was generally followed when the East India trade in English ships - became established; before attempting to double the Cape of Good Hope, - he refreshed his crews, who were weak and sick in all three ships, by - a sojourn ashore at the Bay of Saldanha, a few leagues to the north of - Table Bay. The voyage had already lasted more than three months from - Plymouth, and about six weeks from the Line[1146]. - - At a muster on August 1, in the Bay of Saldanha, Lancaster found that - he had 198 men sound and whole, of whom he assigned 101 to the - 'Penelope,' and 97 to the 'Edward Bonaventure,' sending home 50 more - or less unfit men in the 'Royal Merchant.' Scurvy, he says, was the - disease: - -"Our soldiers, which have not been used to the sea, have best held out, -but our mariners dropt away, which in my judgment, proceedeth of their -evil diet at home." The voyage was continued to the East Indies, the next -that we hear of the state of health being at Penang in the beginning of -June 1592, or some fourteen months out. The men were then very sick and -many fallen; the sick were landed, and twenty-six died there, but not of -scurvy, we may surmise. They had now left but thirty-three men and one -boy, "of which not past twenty-two were found for labour and help." - - The two ships sailed for home from Point de Galle on December 8, 1592, - and reached St Helena on April 3, 1593; one man was sick of the - scurvy, and another had been suffering from the flux for nine months, - but on the island both shortly recovered their perfect health. Instead - of reaching England, the ships were carried to the West Indies, where, - after an attempt to navigate them northwards, they were wrecked, and - the small remnants of their crews dispersed. - -Lancaster's first voyage for the East India Company in 1601[1147] was -"with foure tall shippes, to wit, the Dragon, the Hector, the Ascension, -and Susan, and a victualler called the Guest." The Company, founded in -1600, began with a capital of 72,000, which was laid out in the purchase -and outfit of the ships, and in loading them with merchandise. The crews -were as follow: - - Dragon, 600 tons, 202 men. - Hector, 300 " 108 " - Ascension, 260 " 82 " - Susan, --- " 88 " - --- - 480 - Guest, 130 tons. - -Further, "in every of the said ships, three merchants to succeed one the -other, if any of them should be taken away by death"--a sufficient -indication of the risks of foreign trade. - - The ships, having loaded in the Thames, sailed from Dartmouth on April - 18, 1601, and got clear of Tor Bay on the 22nd. On July 24, two months - from the Channel, they crossed the southern tropic. But they had been - so long under the Line that "many of our men fell sick." On August 1, - in 30 S., they met the south-west wind, "to the great comfort of all - our people. For, by this time very many of our men were fallen sick of - the scurvy in all our ships, and, unless it were in the general's ship - only, the others were so weak of men that they could hardly handle the - sails." Headwinds again hindered their course, and "now the few whole - men we had began also to fall sick, so that our weakness of men was so - great that in some of the ships the merchants took their turn at the - helm and went into the top to take in the top sails, as the common - mariners did." Lancaster at length made Saldanha Bay, where he had - landed to refresh his crews on his first voyage round the Cape ten - years before. The state of three of the ships "was such that they was - hardly able to let fall an anchor to save themselves withall;" but - "the general went aboard of them and carried good store of men, and - hoysed out their boats for them.... And the reason why the general's - men stood better in health than the men of other ships was this: he - brought to sea with him certain bottles of the juice of lemons, which - he gave to each one as long as it would last, three spoonfuls every - morning fasting, not suffering them to eat anything after it till - noon. This juice worketh much the better if the partie keepe short - diet, and wholly refrain salt meat, which salt meat, and long being at - the sea, is the only cause of the breeding of this disease. By this - means the general cured many of his men and preserved the rest, so - that in this ship (having the double of men that was in the rest of - the ships) he had not so many sick, nor lost so many men as they did, - which was the mercie of God to us all." - -At Saldanha Bay they bartered with the natives for an abundant supply of -fresh meat and other provisions, and in due time doubled the Cape of Good -Hope. On Christmas day, eight months out from England, they put in to -Antongil Bay, on the east side of Madagascar. On landing they found a -writing on the rocks that five Dutch ships had sailed thence two months -before, having "lost between 150 and 200 men while they roade in that -place." The English had a similar experience in store for them: on board -Lancaster's ship, the master's mate, the preacher, the surgeon and some -ten others, died; and, in the vice-admiral's ship, the master with other -two. It was mostly the flux that they died of, brought on by the -drinking-water, or by the excessive wetness of the season, or by "going -open and cold in the stomacke, which our men would often do when they were -hot" (Hawkins gives the latter reason for flux at the Cape de Verde -islands). - -The references to scurvy before reaching the Cape, and to dysentery in -Madagascar, are all that is said of sickness in this first venture of the -East India Company. But in the accounts of the voyages which regularly -followed we hear a great deal of the loss of men at the factories, or in -the country trade, or on the voyage home, as well as on the outward -voyage[1148]. The Directors in London were naturally well aware how -greatly their ventures were imperilled and their profits reduced by the -enormous loss of men. Under their own eyes ships would arrive in the mouth -of the Channel with crews so weakened that they had to be met at Scilly -with help to navigate them through the narrow seas to the Thames. By their -correspondence from abroad, they were frequently hearing of artificers -dying in their factories, of ships arriving out with so many men dead, and -of other ships cast away, partly by stress of weather no doubt, but -sometimes from inability of the crews to man them. Accordingly we find -that they were alive to the best means of preventing "flux, scurvy, and -fever." Lancaster, as we have seen, carried lime-juice on his first voyage -for the Company in 1601. In the Court minutes of August 13, 1607, the -following were ordered to be provided with expedition: "Lemon water, -'alligant' from Alicante, a wine very fit for beverage and good against -the flux, and old corn, etc." At the Court of Directors on December 10, -1614, there was considered an "offer of Dr Burgis to present the Company -with an antidote against poison, scurvy, and other diseases to which -people are subject these long voyages: Sir Thomas Roe and Captain Keeling -to confer with him and report their opinions." Trial was also to be made -of baking fresh bread at sea, with the grinding of corn, "an exercise fit -to preserve men in health." The offer of Dr Burgis was accepted; and on -January 26, 1615, the minutes of the Court mention "instructions in -writing, and boxes of such things as are to be used, for prevention of the -flux, scurvy, and fever, prepared by Dr Burgis, to be delivered to each -ship; the cost, about 23, to be paid." In the minutes of the Court, -November 22, 1619, there is reference to another preventive of scurvy: -"The fleet to be supplied with 15 tons of white wine, to be drunk at the -Line, and the Cape, which is used by the Dutch to preserve men from -scurvy, and will refresh the men and scour their maws, and open and cool -as well as lemon water"--the latter having been in all probability -disliked or refused by the men. In 1624, "the death of mariners" is a -topic at the Court of Directors; again, on October 15, 1626, the Court -considers of the great mortality from scurvy in the 'Charles' and 'Hart,' -homeward bound, and how to prevent it. Some were of opinion that lemon -water was very good, but Mr Styles related that tamarind was the -excellentest thing. However, there had been plenty of tamarinds aboard the -ships; and on Lieutenant Hill being called in, he testified that the crews -had all got tamarind, but they were all debauched people. - -John Woodall, surgeon to St Bartholomew's Hospital, was at this time -surgeon-general to the East India Company, having medical charge of their -dockyard at Blackwall; his name appears in the Court minutes as early as -1614. In 1617 he published his 'Surgion's Mate,' "chiefly for the benefit -of young sea-surgions imployed in the East India companies affairs," and -dedicated it to Sir Thomas Smith, himself a navigator, and then chairman -of the Court of Directors. This practical manual is largely occupied with -the management of fractures, dislocations, amputations, and the like, a -part of his subject wherein Woodall was thoroughly competent; but there -appears also in the title, "the cure of the scurvie, the fluxes of the -belly, of the collica and iliaca passio, tenasmus and exitus ani, the -callenture." The section on scurvy, twenty-six pages long, is the one that -here concerns us. This was what Sir Richard Hawkins had desired: "And I -wish that some learned men would write of it, for it is the plague of the -sea and the spoil of mariners." Woodall begins by disclaiming learning: "A -learned treatise befits not my pen." But, at all events, his was the voice -of the faculty, and he plunges boldly into pathology in the very first -lines: "Scurvy is a disease of the spleen, whereby it is sometimes wholly -stopped" etc. Being a man of much good sense, Woodall quickly leaves that -line of remark, for a time at least. He repeats all the familiar -experience of Hawkins, Lancaster, and the numerous captains of East -Indiamen, with whom he must have conversed many times (it does not appear -that he had himself sailed). He mentions the great benefit to the crews -from landing at the Cape, with the fresh air and food, scurvy being -thereby cured "without much other help." He enforces the need of changes -of clothing, and other things in the regimen on board, just as Hawkins and -others were wont to do in practice. He is as clear on the virtues of -lime-juice as Lancaster, and copies somewhat closely the practice of the -latter in 1601: "each morning two or three spoonfuls, and fast after it -two hours"; his originality appearing in the rider, grateful to seamen: -"and if you add one spoonful of aqua vitae thereto, to a cold stomach it -is the better." He mentions that a "good quantity of juice of lemons is -sent in each ship out of England, by the great care of the merchants, and -intended only for the relief of every poor man in his need." The ship's -surgeon is advised to lay in a store of fresh lemons and oranges where -they were to be had on the voyage, and of tamarinds at Bantam. - -So far, Woodall merely sets down what every shipmaster knew as to the -things that bring on scurvy, the best regimen to keep it off, and the -extraordinarily rapid curative effect of lime-juice and of change to land -air and fresh food. But there was a certain professional doctrine of -scurvy, and a treatment of it _secundum artem_, namely the wisdom of -learned men which Hawkins had called for; and we have now to see what -that was, according to Woodall. His pathology is that of "obstructions," -a curious fancy of the learned[1149]. - -The spleen, said Woodall in his opening lines, is the chief seat of -obstruction; but on resuming the pathology, he proceeds to obstructions -also of the liver and brain: - - "But it is plain that this grief is a lazy foul disease with - obstructions of the liver, or spleen, or both; as also it appeareth - that the head is much diseased, and that there is great obstructions - in the brain, for that the eyes not only look evil coloured, but also - the gums putrefy, and the teeth grow loose, and all the sinewy parts - of the body bear their part in the disease, for the shrinking and - withering of the sinews, with the great pains the party hath, - declareth no less" (p. 180). - -This theoretical pathology Woodall supports by an appeal to morbid -anatomy: - - "Also it is manifest that divers of those which have been opened after - death have had their livers utterly rotted"-others having their livers - much swollen, and the spleen swollen, others full of water, others - their lungs putrefied and stunk while they have lived, (which last may - have been an incorrect inference from the foul state of the mouth). - -Such being the pathology of the disease, he comes next to the indications -of cure; and these he takes from "a famous writer, Johannes Echthius." -They are: - - 1. The opening of obstructions. - - 2. The evacuating of offending humours. - - 3. The altering the property of the humours. - - 4. The comforting and corroborating the parts late diseased. - -The order of treatment, _lege artis_, is accordingly as follows: the -administration of a clyster or clysters; the opening of a vein, if strong -("but beware of taking too much blood away at once"); next day after the -bleeding, "if he can bear it," give him pills of euphorbium or gamboge; -and lastly, "if you see cause," certain days after you have given of any -of your former laxatives, you may give a sweat to the patient in his bed. -Thus the indications from the pathology would be fulfilled--opening of -obstructions, evacuating of ill humours, and altering the property of the -humours. It should be said for Woodall that his practice was better than -his theory. Thus, he cautions the young dogmatists who sailed as surgeons -in East Indiamen, not to carry their principles too far; he has heard that -they are somewhat fond of the lancet, and he cautions them not to take too -much blood at sea, as excessive depletion "makes the disease worse;" he -cautions them also as to the use of gamboge. - -We may now proceed with a few more illustrations of what the Company's -ships were actually experiencing during the period that those questions -were before the Court of Directors[1150]. - - In the sixth voyage for the Company, under the command of Sir H. - Middleton, the captain of the 'Darling' and three of his merchants - died at Tecoa, and most of the men were ill. In the eighth voyage, - when homeward bound between the Cape and St Helena in the month of - June, many of the men fell ill with scurvy, and the ship had to come - in to Waterford instead of the Thames. A similar experience befell - Captain Thomas Best in the 'Dragon' and 'Hosiander,' carrying together - 380 persons. Having left Gravesend on February 1, 1612, he completed - his trading in the Indies, and arrived in the Thames on June 15, 1614, - six months from Bantam. The scurvy in this voyage comes in towards the - end. On March 4, 1614, "I did set sail in the roade of Saldanha; yet - notwithstanding our short passage, having been from Santa Helena but - two monethes and nine days, the one half or more of our company are - laid up [on June 4] of the scurvie and two dead of it. Yet we had - plentie of victuals, as beef, bread, wine, rice, oil, vinegar, sugar; - and all these without allowance. Note that all our men that are sick - have taken their sickness since we fell with Flores and Corvo. For - since that time we have had it very cold, especially in two great - storms.... From the Cape of Good Hope to the islands of Flores and - Corvo I had not one man sick." While in the Malay Archipelago they had - buried twenty-five men at one place. - - On November 3, 1618, the Directors have letters from two of their - captains at the Cape, of July 6 and 7, with news of their arrival - there on June 26, and the loss or sickness of many men, partly through - the stinking beer, the tainted beef, the lack of fresh provisions at - the Cape, and the want of warm clothes. A letter of February 25, 1619, - announces the arrival of the 'Peppercorn' in Bantam roads: A great - many men had died in the ten-months' voyage between England and - Bantam; putrefied beef and pork, "not man's meat," the chief cause of - sickness. When they arrived at Bantam, not six men able to work; the - whole fleet in the like distress. Twenty-five men in all dead or - drowned. A letter from Batavia, January 11, 1622, says the master of - the 'Anne' and 14 men of the fleet were dead: "so many men are - deceased that they have not enough to man all the ships now in the - roads." The 'Diamond' sailed from England on October 8, 1621, and - after a "long and tedious voyage" arrived at Jacatra previous to - November 24, 1622: enclosed are the accounts of those men who have - died, and nine wills. Another letter from Batavia, sometime in 1623, - covers an "abstract of the men deceased in the ships." - - On March 28, 1624, the 'Royal James,' with five others, sailed from - the Downs; she called at Saldanha Bay, and arrived on or before - November 15, at Swally bar, Batavia; the bread had been very bad, the - water too little, the beef not fit for men; have enclosed the names of - those deceased. The 'Jonas,' also arrived out at Batavia on November - 15, appears to have been one of the five others; she called at - Saldanha Bay on July 19; "the wholesomeness of the air and the herb - baths caused the most part of their sick men to recover in ten days - from the scurbeck." In June, 1625, the 'Anne' had been at Mocha for - eight months in great distress, with most part of her men dead and the - ship ready to founder. - - Writing on October 13, 1625, from Batavia to the East India Company in - London, Governor Hawley says that the 'London' had arrived out on - August 23, with loss of 36 men, and 80 sick. She reported the - 'Discovery' to have left the Cape for St Helena, having lost 21 men; - two other ships, the 'Moon' and 'Ruby' had their crews "in remarkable - health." On September 14, the 'Swallow' arrived out, having lost only - 3 men. Of 46 men shipped in the 'Abigail' out of England, all were - dead but 5, in her coasting voyages upon Sumatra. Most of the workmen - and soldiers sent in the 'London' had arrived; "but since, by - disorders, are dead, as are those in the 'Swallow.' The smiths are all - dead; of the armourers, only John Speed and a boy alive. Most other - workmen dead or incapable. This is not remissness of government, but - the newcomers, dreaming of nothing but sack and sugar-plums in India, - are with much difficulty brought to obedience." A Dutch ship, the - 'Leyden' arrived out in 1626, with loss of 22 men, having been twelve - months on the passage. - - In the end of October, 1628, the 'Morris' reached the mouth of the - Channel from Bantam, "which was most happily met with near Scilly by - Captain Bickly, who was sent out to relieve any ship from the Indies, - she being in a very weak state by reason of an infectious disease." - She reached the Downs safely with two other East Indiamen; but having - been driven from her anchors in a great storm, was wrecked on the - coast of Holland previous to November 19. Next year, about October 28, - 1629, the 'Mary' of the East India Company was reported to have put - into Scilly having lost most of her men by sickness. Therefore, Sir H. - Mervyn, of H.M.S. 'Lyon,' in the Downs, having got early word of the - 'Mary's' distress, writes to E. Nicholas, to say that if the Company - desire a convoy for the 'Mary' from their lordships of the Admiralty, - "she being rich," he (Mervyn) hopes that Nicholas will remember him. - -But, although it was not unusual for ships to come home with crews -weakened by scurvy, it was not invariable. The 'William' returned to -England in 1628, as rich a ship as the Company ever had from the East -Indies, with not a sick man in her, nor any dead on the way; her lading -was computed to be worth 170,000[1151]. - -In a despatch of February 6, 1626, Hawley gives an account of a truly -disastrous sickness in the factory and among the Company's ships at -Batavia during the previous year, which illustrates another risk than that -of scurvy or flux, and an experience in the East Indies not altogether -exceptional[1152]. - - "On March 12, I dispeeded the 'Diamond' for Japan to fetch boards, - planks, etc. [to repair the 'Bull' with]; but hardly had fourteen days - passed when the 'Bull's' men fell sick and died daily; then the - 'Reformation's' men died by five, six or more in a day; in a short - time the 'Bull's' men all died but the master and one more, who were - dangerously sick, and in the 'Reformation' the master and all the men - lay at God's mercy. We were forced to relieve them by blacks, and hale - the ships to the open bay [they would seem to have been careened] - where they rode like wrecks without other help than some few to - comfort their sick, for more from the other ships might not be spared. - The contagion was so pestilent that their blood, being licked by dog - or cat, caused them to swell, burst and die. It was more moderate on - shore, and was least on the ships in the open bay, though they also - were daily visited.... The 'Diamond' returned on April 11, with planks - etc.; also slaves and 44 Chinamen, which were with no small charge - procured, and who all fell sick, and 10 or 12 died.... Thinking the - mortality was occasioned, not by pestiferous air or soil, nor by any - noxious tree, but by surfeit and the wet monsoon, I enacted orders for - government building, and cleansing the trees to get more air. Wanted - no provisions of fresh victual; could at pleasure command neighbours - to fish and fetch anything needed, and the island itself furnished - deer. On April 12, took general view of all people, as follows: - - English English Portuguese - in health sick sick - - On shore 40 58 5 - In the 'Charles' 32 10 - " 'Roebuck' 16 2 - " 'Bull' 2 8 - " 'Reformation' 23 14 12 - " 'Abigail' 8 3 - " 'Rose' 7 2 5 - ----- ----- ----- - 128 97 22 - - --leaving, of course, an immense proportion dead. - -These are instances from the records of the East India Company during the -first thirty years of its existence. It would be tedious, even if it were -practicable, to follow the history continuously. But meanwhile to show -that its experiences, good and bad, remained much the same until long -after, let us take two voyages in the year 1682. Governor William Hedges, -passenger on board one of the Company's ships, enters in his diary the -25th of May, 1682, being then off the Cape of Good Hope: "Not lost a man -(except Mr Richards) either by sickness or any other accident, since we -left England, which wants but three days of four months, and is just two -months since we passed the Equinoctial Line," nothing being said of -sickness in the rest of the voyage. But another of the Company's ships the -same year fared worse: "December 9, 1682, ship 'Society' arrived at -Balasore. She left the Downs on May 30, and, not touching at any place by -the way, lost seventeen men of the scurvy[1153]." - - -Sickness in the Colonizing of Virginia and New England. - -Leaving now the long voyages of the English beyond the Line, and their -factories in the East, let us see how they fared as regards health when -they merely crossed the Atlantic in their own latitudes. The earliest -series of voyages to Virginia, at Raleigh's instigation, from 1585 to -1590, have been already referred to. The continuous history of Atlantic -voyages, and of the North American colonies, begins with the expedition -of 1609 under Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers[1154]. - -Seven of the ships fitted out in the Thames, and sailed from Woolwich on -May 15, 1609. Having been joined at Plymouth by two more, the fleet sailed -thence on June 2, and from Falmouth on June 8. The expedition included -"many unruly gallants, packed thither by their friends to escape ill -destinies," with the proportion of women and children usual among -emigrants, as well as horses, and probably other live stock. The -navigation, to reach Western land in 37 N., appears to have been somewhat -erratic: - - "We ran a southerly course from the tropic of Cancer, where, having - the sun within six or seven degrees right over our head in July, we - bore away West; so that by the fervent heat and loomes breezes, many - of our men fell sick of the calenture"--Noah Webster takes that to - mean a spotted pestilential fever--"and out of two ships was thrown - overboard thirty-two persons. The vice-admiral [the 'Diamond'] was - said to have the plague in her; but in the 'Blessing' we had not any - sick, albeit we had twenty women and children." - -A storm came on, in which the ships were scattered, the admiral's ship -being driven to the Bermudas and there wrecked[1155]. In the storm "some -lost their masts, some had their sails blown from their yards; the seas -over-raking our ships, much of our provision was spoiled, our fleet -separated, and our men sick, and many died; and in this miserable state we -arrived at Virginia." The 'Blessing,' on board which was Gabriel Archer, -the principal narrator of events, seems to have fared better than the -rest: "The 'Unity' was sore distressed when she came up with us; for, of -seventy landmen [emigrants], she had not ten found, and all her seamen -were down, but only the master and his boy, with one poor sailor; but we -relieved them, and we four consorting, fell into the King's River [James -River] haply the 11th of August." They found the colony "all in health -(for the most part)." There were fourscore living 20 miles from the Fort, -who fed upon nothing but oysters eight weeks' space. "After our four ships -had been in harbour a few days, came in the vice-admiral, having cut her -mainmast overboard, and had many of her men very sick and weak." This was -the ship that was said to have the plague in her. The admiral and his -ship's company, wrecked on the Bermudas, fared in health best of all; the -whole number of 150 persons reached Jamestown in due course, to find only -60 remaining alive of the 350 who had formed the complement of the other -ships. Part of the mortality had happened on board ship, but probably the -most of it after landing; Jamestown "is in a marish ground, low, flat to -the river, and hath no fresh water springs serving the town, but what we -drew from a well six or seven fathom deep, fed by the brackish river -oozing into it, from whence I verily believe the chief causes have -proceeded of many diseases and sicknesses which have happened to our -people, who are indeed strangely afflicted with fluxes and agues." Lord De -La Warre, one of the early governors, had a succession of illnesses--hot -and violent ague, followed by a relapse still more violent and lasting a -month, "then the flux surprised me and kept me many days," then the cramp, -with strong pains, afterwards the gout, and finally the scurvy--which -last, however, might have been the eczema of gout, although it was said to -have been cured by the oranges and lemons of the Western Islands, and by -the voyage thither[1156]. - -Much in these early ventures was put down to climate, which was really due -to other causes. There are, of course, unhealthy climates; but a great -deal of the talk in the 17th and 18th centuries about the "tainted air" of -"foreign climes" was mere confusion of ideas. A more correct view of -events was that of the Governor and Council of Virginia, in a letter of -January 30, 1624, to the Virginia Company in London: - - "The mortality, which is imputed to the country alone, is chiefly - caused by the pestilent ships, which reach Virginia victualled with - musty bread and stinking beer, heretofore so earnestly complained - of.... Robert Benet in his lifetime boasted that the sale of four - butts of wine would clear a voyage. Rotten wines destroy their bodies - and empty their purses[1157]." - -The letter then goes on to relate how sickness had brought down great -numbers "since their last." According to Purchas, the emigration to -Virginia in three years immediately preceding this, the years 1619, 1620 -and 1621, had amounted to 3570 persons in 42 ships. Overcrowding, we may -be sure, was the rule. We shall find particular evidence of it in speaking -of West Indian colonization in the sequel; and for the present, it may -suffice to quote a document of April 24, 1638, a list of 110 passengers -for New England per 'Confidence' of 200 tons. - -If Virginia was settled by a crew of broken gallants and their humbler -followers, the New England colony was officered by strict Puritans, who -were accompanied by men and women sharing, as nearly as might be, the same -beliefs and principles of conduct. The records of the Massachusetts Bay -settlements might be expected, therefore, to show less of sickness and -failure than the Virginian; and so, indeed, they do, although they are by -no means clear of it. The first voyage of the 'Mayflower' in 1620, -carrying the small sect of Brownists who had tried Holland for a time as a -place of refuge, presents nothing for our purpose. Like the settlers along -the shores of Chesapeake Bay before them, these first New Englanders had -to encounter famine and sickness. Famine appears to have been the cause -also of the disastrous epidemics among the Indians along the whole coast -from Cape Cod to Cape Charles, on two occasions, the one previous to 1614 -and the other in 1619[1158]. The emigration to New England really began in -1630, and of one of the expeditions of that year we have authentic -particulars by the leader of it, John Winthrop[1159]. On board the -'Arbella,' under date April 17, 1630, he enters in his journal: - - "This day our captain told me that our landmen were very nasty and - slovenly, and that the gun-deck, where they lodged, was so beastly and - noisome with their victuals and beastliness as would much endanger the - health of the ship. Hereupon, after prayer, we took order, and - appointed four men to see to it, and to keep that room clean for three - days, and then four others should succeed them, and so forth on." - -Nothing more is said of the health on board the 'Arbella.' The 'Mayflower' -and 'Whale' had their passengers all in health, but most of their cattle -and horses dead. The 'Success' lost -- goats, and many of her passengers -were near starved. The 'Talbot' lost fourteen passengers. The colony had -various experiences of sickness in due course. In 1633, smallpox proved -fatal to whole settlements of Indians: "the English came daily and -ministered to them; and yet few, only two families, took any infection by -it[1160]." In 1646 an epidemic of influenza went among the Indians, -English, French and Dutch, "not a family, nor but few persons, escaping -it;" few died, not above 40 or 50 in Massachusetts, and near as many at -Connecticut[1161]. In the spring of 1654, a general fast was appointed by -the government of Connecticut, one reason among others being "the -mortality which had been among the people of Massachusetts." In 1655 there -was another influenza, in 1658 "great sickness and mortality throughout -New England," in 1659 "cynanche trachealis," croup perhaps, and in 1662 -again general sickness, which, along with drought, called for a day of -thanksgiving on their cessation in October[1162]. It is beside the purpose -to follow the epidemics in America minutely; but before quitting the -subject, the following, from a Philadelphia letter of August 24, 1699, -will suffice to keep in mind the conditions of emigration which prevailed -long after the first voyages: "Arrived the 'Britannia' from Liverpool, -which had been 13 weeks on her passage; she had 200 passengers on -board,--had lost 50 by death, and others were sickly[1163]." - - -West Indian Colonization: Yellow Fever and the Slave Trade. - -The other field of English colonial enterprise that concerns us is the -West Indies. The West Indian colonies of Britain play a great part in the -commercial history, in the naval history, and in the legislative history -in connexion with the negro slave-trade and the institution of negro -slavery. From the very first they play a great part, also, in the history -of epidemic sickness; they and the Spanish, French and other colonies -there were the peculiar home of yellow fever for two centuries, having -shared that unenviable distinction, after a generation or two, with -certain ports of the North American continent. The larger part of the -history of yellow-fever epidemics falls outside the period to which I here -limit myself. But the beginnings fall within it; and as the beginnings -raise the whole question of causation, this part of the subject resolves -itself into a somewhat comprehensive discussion of the circumstances of -yellow fever as illustrated by the first English colonizations in the -Caribbean Sea, and the tradings connected therewith. - -By far the most important disease-producing conditions in the West Indies -arose out of the Guinea slave-trade. But, so that we may set down to that -no more than it deserves, we shall have to review also the earlier -experiences of English and French emigrants, both on the voyage and in -their settlements in Barbados and St Christopher, and, at greatest length, -the disastrous first occupation of Jamaica in 1655 by the army of the -Commonwealth. It will be convenient to begin the history, in which there -is so much to disentangle, with a few facts about the negro labour-traffic -to the New World previous to the time when the demands of the -sugar-plantations caused it to be established on a great scale. - -African negroes were brought first to the West Indies by the Spaniards to -work in the mines of Hispaniola. They are heard of as early as 1501, and -are much in evidence after that date. The Christian conscience appears to -have been at first tender. It was the high purpose of Isabella of Spain to -convert the Indies to the Christian faith; and the cruelties of the negro -importation and of the forced labour in the mines were obviously -inconsistent with the humanitarian teaching of the Gospels. The -remonstrances of missionaries were listened to at the Spanish Court, and -licences to trade in negroes were either granted under strict conditions -or withheld altogether. However, there were rapacious pro-consuls to deal -with as well as monarchs at home, and cargoes of slaves found their way -to Cuba, to Hispaniola (St Domingo), and at length to the Spanish Main. -Each importation as late as 1518 was still regulated by special licence; -but soon after that date a powerful minister sold the privilege to the -Genoese, so that it passed somewhat beyond control of the Spanish -Court[1164]. Connected with these importations in the first quarter of the -16th century, were the disastrous epidemics of two diseases with somewhat -similar names and inextricably confused in the records--the great pox and -the small pox; it is not easy to say which did the most harm among the -native population of the islands and mainland occupied by Spain; but it is -said that by disease of one kind or another Mexicans and Caribs on the -main, in Hispaniola, and in Cuba, came near to being exterminated[1165]. - -The first English share in the negro traffic over sea fell to John Hawkins -and partners, who had not even the excuse of an open market for their -wares in the Spanish colonies, and had sometimes to dispose of their -negroes by stealth. It would appear that it was still in part for the -mines that African negroes were in request. In Richard Hawkins' account of -his voyage to the Pacific in 1593, he mentions that he captured a -Portuguese ship of 100 tons shortly after leaving the coast of Brazil; -she was bound for Angola to load negroes to be carried to and sold in the -River Plate: "It is a trade of great profit and much used. The negroes are -carried to work in the mines of Potosi." - -It is not until a generation after that we hear of the English as -slave-owners. On February 16, 1624, there were 22 negroes on the English -settlements in Virginia, the whites numbering 1253[1166]. In somewhat -greater numbers, negroes are next heard of in English possession in the -Bahamas; but, from the correspondence between the Company of Providence -Island in London and their agents in the colonies, it would appear that -the policy of using forced labour was by no means admitted by all, or free -from difficulties. Thus in 1635 the Company condemned as indiscreet and -injurious Mr Rushworth's behaviour concerning the negroes who ran away, -"arising, as it seems, from a groundless opinion [of Rushworth] that -Christians may not lawfully keep such persons in a state of servitude -during their strangeness from Christianity[1167]." - -Whatever negroes the English colonists possessed at this time they got -either by capture or purchase from Dutch and other foreign traders. Thus, -in the instructions to a shipmaster sailing from London, dated March 19, -1636, captured negroes were to be conveyed to the Somers Islands, those -who can dive for pearls to be employed at Providence. Again, the -instructions to the captain of the 'Mary Hope,' bound for the West Indies, -January 20, 1637, refer to the distribution of negroes "if a prize be -taken." And, on June 7, 1643, the earl of Warwick instructs the captain of -the 'Elias,' 400 tons, that captured negroes are "to be left at my island -of Trinidad[1168]." The negro carrying-trade was in those years mostly in -the hands of the Dutch, who not only stocked their own colony of Surinam -on the mainland but used their small island of Curaoa as a slave-depot -for the supply of colonies belonging to other nations. Thus the governor -of Antigua, which had then no negroes, says in a despatch of about the -year 1670: "At Curaoa they [the Dutch] send a vast quantity of negroes to -the Spaniard, and of late four ships from Jamaica for ready -pieces-of-eight carried thence great store. They intend to settle a mart -for negroes at Tortola to engross the trade of Porto Rico." - -The direct share of England in the negro carrying-trade arose out of the -monopoly of the Guinea Company. The history of English interests in Guinea -and "Binney" need not detain us. When the first patent for sole trade was -granted in 1624, it was felt to be a grievance, as "many had been there -almost for fifty years since." The charter was renewed on November 22, -1631; but in course of time, some who had been ousted from their original -share in the monopoly traded on their own account, the rivalries at home -being aggravated by conflicts with Swedes (in 1653) and Dutch at the -factories on the coast. The trade was ostensibly for gold dust and ivory, -but live freight soon found a place in English bottoms as well as in -Dutch, Swedish, Danish, French, Portuguese, Spanish and others. We may now -return to our proper subject--the state of health in the first English and -French plantations in the West Indies. - -The English and French arrived in the West Indies almost at the same -moment. Their experiences were probably not very different, but it happens -that it is of the French emigrants that we have particulars, which it is -important to introduce here. - -In the year 1625, a Norman adventurer of good family, D'Enambuc, sailed -from Dieppe in a brigantine armed with four pieces and manned with 35 or -40 men, on a roving cruise to the West Indies[1169]. Having been battered -by a Spanish galleon at the Kaymans, D'Enambuc made the island of St -Christopher. He found it occupied by the native Caribs and a few stranded -Frenchmen, who were on good terms with the natives. Shortly after, an -English captain ("Warnard") appears upon the scene, who joined D'Enambuc -in the alleged murdering and poisoning of the natives and the plundering -of the island. Loaded with his Carib spoils and a quantity of tobacco, -D'Enambuc set sail for France, and having sold his tobacco and other -things in Normandy, entered Paris with a fine equipage, thus giving -evidence to all men of the fortunes that awaited them in the Indies. In a -short time he had an audience of Richelieu, and on the 31st October 1626 -the charter was signed of the Compagnie des Isles, granting a monopoly of -trade with "les isles situes l'entre du Perou"--namely St Christopher -and Barbados. The Company raised 45,000 livres, of which capital Richelieu -held 10,000 livres in his own name. The money was spent in fitting out and -furnishing with stores three ships--the 'Catholique' at Havre, a craft of -250 tons, and the 'Cardinal' and 'Victoire' at St Malo, two much smaller -vessels. Numerous poor peasants and artisans from Brittany and Normandy -were induced to go out as colonists, the 'Catholique' (250 tons) carrying -322 souls, the 'Cardinal' 70, and the 'Victoire' 140. The two last sailed -from St Malo on February 24, 1627 under the command of Du Rossey. The -passage was long, the provisions both bad and insufficient, and the -mortality terrible. When the 'Cardinal' arrived at the Pointe de Sable of -St Christopher on May 8, only 16 of her 70 souls remained alive, and these -were sick. In the other ships, also, "most of the people died on the -passage out." - -The English experience can hardly have been so bad as that. When the -French colonists landed, they found four hundred Englishmen settled near -the chief anchorage, hale and strong and well stocked with provisions, -having lately come out under Lord Carlisle's patent. Cordial to each other -at first, the two nationalities soon fell out. The French had rather the -worst of it, having lost many of their number by sickness, while the -English kept their health. Help came to the former from home, and a -victory over the English is claimed for them. But they had also a Spanish -fleet to reckon with, and eventually the French colony fell into disorder -and escaped to Antigua, while its leader, Du Rossey, went home to France -and was thrown into the Bastille by Richelieu, one of the largest -shareholders. The refugees to Antigua soon returned to St Christopher, -again suffered from famine, and had the mortification of seeing all the -profits of their monopoly swallowed up by unlicensed Dutch traders. In -1635 they obtained a new charter; at the same time a fortunate capture of -a ship-load of negroes from the Spaniards gave them a supply of labour so -that "the island began to change its face." English usurpation was kept -within limits, and the French colony grew daily, by addition of European -settlers and of "Moorish slaves whom the French and Dutch ships go to buy -in Guinea, or capture from the Spaniards along the coasts of Brazil." The -French on St Christopher were now strong enough to send branch colonies to -Guadeloupe and Martinique (1635). It was then the turn of the English to -have disastrous sickness among their immigrants. Sir Thomas Warner, who -had planted the English colonies in Barbados and St Christopher, and was -now governor of the latter, went to England in 1636 to bring over new -settlers. On his arrival out on 10 September, he wrote home that one of -his two ships, the 'Plough,' was given up for lost, and that in his own -ship there had been "great sickness and mortality, not 20 out of 200 -having escaped and 40 having died, some near to him in blood and many of -especial quality and use." - -Meanwhile Barbados had been the chief scene of English enterprise, from a -date (1624-26) almost the same as that of the joint occupation of St -Christopher by French and English. Its earliest annals contain little else -than the accounts of rivalries under Lord Carlisle's patent and other -patents. So far as regards sickness, the annals were probably uneventful. -In 1643 the island had plantations stocked with no fewer than 6400 negro -slaves, and its prosperity advanced so steadily, that by the year 1666, -the slaves in the island numbered some 50,000: "The buildings in 1643 were -mean; but in 1666 [when Bridgetown was burned], plate, jewels and -household stuff were estimated at 500,000[1170]." It is a date -intermediate between those two that directly concerns us--the year 1647. -In that year, Ligon, the historian of the colony, arrived out from England -about the beginning of September[1171]. The ship in which he came to -Barbados was consigned thence to Cutchew, on the African coast, to trade -for negroes. On their arrival they found twenty-two good ships at anchor -in Carlisle Bay (Bridgetown), a brisk trade going on, and plantations -visible all along the shore. A plantation of 500 acres had 96 negroes and -28 Christians; some plantations contained 10,000 acres. The population was -difficult to estimate, so many ships were arriving with passengers daily; -and Ligon's estimate of 50,000, "besides negroes," is doubtless too much. -About one hundred sail visit the island every year; they bring "servants" -and negro slaves, both men and women. The servants are bound for five -years, and are worse treated than the negroes. The negroes are more than -double the number of the Christians; they come from different parts of -Africa--Bonny, Cutchew, Angola and Gambia--and do not understand each -other's language. They are bought out of the ship naked, being chosen as -horses are in a market, the strongest, youthfullest and most beautiful -yielding the highest price (man 30, woman 25 to 27, children at easier -rates). - -We have to note, also, Ligon's account of the colony's chief -harbour--Bridgetown. The whole of Carlisle Bay is environed by high -ground. Bridgetown is so-called "for that a long bridge was made at first -over a little nook of the sea, which was rather a bog than sea." The -stream which discharges there into the bay is like a lake for want of -outfall. The spring tides fill it, but during the neap tides the salt -water is kept stagnant behind the sea-banks, making a small lagoon. The -spring tides seldom rise above four or five feet, but high enough to flow -over the low ground in front of the houses, making the flat a kind of bog, -which vents out a loathsome savour. - -Ligon landed at Bridgetown about the beginning of September, 1647, in time -to witness the ravages of a deadly epidemic: - - "Yet, notwithstanding all this appearance of trade, the inhabitants of - the island, and shipping too, were so grievously visited with the - plague (or as killing a disease) that before a month was expired after - our arrival, the living were hardly able to bury the dead. Whether it - was brought thither by shipping, (for in long voyages diseases grow at - sea and take away many passengers, and these diseases prove - contagious), or by the distemper of the people of the island"--he - leaves uncertain. For one woman that died, there were ten men. The - ships at anchor in Carlisle Bay were, for the most part, infected with - this disease. - -What was the disease? How came it there? What sort of origin did its -characters, symptoms, or type suggest? On these questions we have some -light thrown by other writings besides Ligon's, relating to the same -epidemic. - -John Winthrop, the Governor of Massachusetts, writes in his journal, under -the year 1647[1172]: - - "It pleased the Lord to open to us a trade with Barbados and other - islands in the West Indies, which as it proved gainful, so the - commodities we had in exchange there for our cattle and provisions, as - sugar, cotton, tobacco and indigo, were a good help to discharge our - engagements in England. And this summer there was so great a drouth as - their potatoes and corn, etc. were burnt up; and divers London ships - which rode there were so short of provisions as, if our vessels had - not supplied them, they could not have returned home.... After the - great dearth of victuals in these islands followed presently a great - mortality (whether it were the plague, or pestilent fever, it killed - in three days), that in Barbados there died six thousand, and in - Christophers, of English and French, near as many, and in other - islands proportionable." - -The mention of the French on St Christopher brings us to the third source -of information, the Jesuit father Dutertre, who was an eye-witness[1173]: - - "During this same year, 1648, the plague (la peste), hitherto unknown - in the islands since they were inhabited by the French, was brought - thither by certain ships. It began in St Christopher, and in the - eighteen months that it lasted, it carried off nearly one-third of the - inhabitants." This plague, or peste, was marked by violent pain in the - head, general debility of all the muscles, and continual vomiting. It - was contagious. A ship, the 'Boeuf' of Rochelle, carried it to - Guadeloupe, the sailors and passengers dying on board of her. A priest - went on board to administer the sacraments, and caught the infection; - he recovered, but [had a relapse and] died on August 4. It was - contagious at Guadeloupe also, and lasted twenty months. - -This testimony of Dutertre is important for several things. He had arrived -at Guadeloupe in 1640 in a small vessel of 100 to 120 tons, crowded with -stores and carrying besides, 200 souls of both sexes and all ages. Much -distress and sickness followed their arrival; he mentions nearly 100 sick -in the quarters of M. de la Vernade, with only the ground to sleep on; -more than three-fourths of the help for the struggling colony that arrived -from St Christopher died, perhaps by infectious disease bred by the -others. Now, with that personal experience in his mind, and with personal -experience also of the epidemic of 1647-8, he describes the latter as a -pestilence "hitherto unknown in the islands since they were inhabited by -the French." Like Ligon and Winthrop, he is led to think of plague itself -by the rapidity and fatality of the infection; but he mentions no signs of -plague proper, and at the same time mentions continual vomiting. The -disease was, in short, the Yellow Fever; and the epidemic in the end of -1647 at Bridgetown, and shortly after at St Christopher and Guadeloupe, -was the first of it, so far as is known, in the West Indies. - -But what then were the earlier epidemics spoken of by Dutertre? The branch -colony to Guadeloupe from St Christopher in 1635 had been only two months -in their new home, when, in September, their experiences of famine began. -The famine or scarcity, says Dutertre, continued for five years, and was -followed by "a mortality almost general." It was part of that mortality -which Dutertre himself saw on his arrival at Guadeloupe in 1640. He calls -the fever _coup de barre_--a name which in the sequel was sometimes given -to yellow fever; and he mentions symptoms which agree, in part at least, -with those of yellow fever--violent pains in the head, throbbing of the -temporal arteries, great distress of breathing, lassitude, pains in the -calf of the legs, as if they had been struck by a _coup de barre_. But in -speaking of the sickness which he found prevalent on landing in 1640, he -does not mention the irrepressible vomiting, which he puts in the first -place when he describes the other fever of 1647-8; and, to repeat, he says -that the latter was a pestilence hitherto unknown since the occupation of -the French Antilles, and as fatal as the plague. It is tolerably certain, -therefore, that the sickness on Guadeloupe sometime between 1635 and 1640, -was of the usual kind incidental to the settlement of a new colony. We -have had to notice it in Virginia ("from pestilent ships," the governor -thought), in St Christopher, and in other new settlements. In a petition -of the Governor and Company of the Somers Islands, July 28, 1639, it is -said that about one hundred and thirty of their colonists had transplanted -themselves last year to St Lucia, where they suffered so much from -sickness that not one was in health[1174]. Any one of those epidemics -among new settlers might be diagnosed yellow fever with as much warrant as -another; but the deadly infection of 1647-8 was something special, -different from all that had preceded, and to be accounted the first -appearance of yellow fever whether in the West Indies or anywhere -else[1175]. - -Yellow fever received much elucidation in after years, both as regards its -symptoms and pathology, and as regards its circumstances and causation. To -get a familiar view of what the disease was like, let us take the -following graphic case recorded by Moseley at Jamaica more than a century -after the date with which we are still engaged[1176]: - - "The last patient I saw, in the last stage of the yellow fever, was - Captain Mawhood of the 85th regt. at Port Royal, in Jamaica on the - 24th Sept., 1780. It was on the fourth day of his illness. He had been - in the island seven weeks. - - I arrived at the lodgings of this much esteemed young man about four - hours before his death. When I entered the room, he was vomiting a - black, muddy cruor; and was bleeding at the nose. A bloody ichor was - oozing from the corners of his eyes, and from his mouth and gums. His - face was besmeared with blood; and with the dulness of his eyes, it - presented a most distressing contrast to his natural visage. His - abdomen was swelled, and inflated prodigiously. His body was all over - of a deep yellow, interspersed with livid spots. His hands and feet - were of a livid hue. Every part of him was cold excepting about his - heart. He had a deep, strong hiccup, but neither delirium nor coma; - and was at my first seeing him, as I thought, in his perfect senses. - He looked at the changed appearance of his skin, and expressed, though - he could not speak, by his sad countenance, that he knew life was soon - to yield up her citadel, now abandoning the rest of his body. - Exhausted with vomiting, he at last was suffocated with the blood he - was endeavouring to bring up, and expired." - -One of the best summaries of its symptoms is that given by the Rev. -Griffith Hughes, rector of one of the Barbados parishes[1177]: - - "The attack begins with a feeling of chill lasting an hour or two. - Then violent fever comes on, with excessive pain in the head, back, - and limbs, loss of strength, great dejection of spirits, insatiable - thirst, restlessness, sometimes vomiting, redness of the eyes, and - that redness in a few days turning to yellow. If the patient turn - yellow soon, he has scarce a chance for life, and, the sooner he does, - the worse. After some days the pain in the head abates, as well as the - fever. A sweat breaks out, and the patient appears to be better; but - on a narrow view a yellowness appears in his eyes and skin, and he - becomes visibly worse. About this time he sometimes spits blood, and - that by mouthfuls; as this continues, he grows cold and his pulse - abates till at last it is quite gone, and the patient becomes almost - as cold as a stone, and continues in that state with a composed sedate - mind. In this condition he may perhaps live twelve hours, without any - sensible pulse or heat, and then expire. Such were the symptoms and - progress of this fever in the year 1715." He adds that the hmorrhage - was sometimes from the nose or rectum. "A loose tooth being drawn from - a person who had the fever very severely, there issued out from the - hole a great quantity of black stinking blood, which still kept oozing - till the third day, on which the patient died in great agonies and - convulsions." The symptoms were not uniform in all, nor in every - visitation. It was most commonly rife and fatal in May, June, July and - August, and then mostly among strangers, though a great many of the - inhabitants died of it in 1696 and a great many at different periods - since. (The next Barbados epidemic after 1647 was in 1671.) - -Now, of that remarkable disease, a pestilent fever with hmorrhages, -having a final stage of collapse not unlike the algid termination of -cholera, and a mortality equalled only by that of plague itself, or, in -after times, by that of cholera, it will be difficult to find instances in -any part of the world previous to the Barbados, St Christopher, and -Guadeloupe epidemics of 1647-48. Not only so, but these and other West -Indian harbours were the distinctive seats of it for long after. From -first to last yellow fever has been an infection of certain harbours--of -the shipping anchored, moored, or careened in them, and of the houses -nearest to the shore. In the Barbados epidemic of 1647, Ligon says, the -ships at anchor in Carlisle Bay were for the most part infected; Dutertre -says that the crew and passengers died of it on board the ship which -brought it to Guadeloupe; he says, also, that it had come to St -Christopher with certain ships; and Ligon clearly suspects that it may -have had an origin on board ship: "for in long voyages diseases grow at -sea and take away many passengers, and these diseases prove contagious." -We have had many instances of the sicknesses of voyages, not only scurvy -but also fevers. But these ship-fevers were not yellow fever; we know more -of them in later periods of the history, when they were recognized as -ship-typhus. For yellow fever we must seek something more distinctive, and -that distinctive thing we shall probably find in a kind of voyage which we -have not hitherto considered from the point of view of its sicknesses--the -Middle Passage, or the voyage with negroes from the African coast across -the tropical belt to one part or another of the New World. Let us then -take that particular kind of voyage, as we have already taken the voyages -of the East India Company's ships, the voyages of emigrant ships from -England to the North-American Colonies, and those from France and England -to the West Indies. - -Dutertre, our authority for the first yellow fever in St Christopher, is -also a witness to the sicknesses and mortality of the Middle Passage. Of -the negroes, he says, more die on the passage than land. He has known -captains who have taken on board up to 700 in one ship and landed only -200; they died of misery and hunger, and the stifling monotony of tropical -calms. Some of the slaves are of high degree; there was one negress, in -particular, whom all the rest looked up to as a princess. - -The African slave-trade was not altogether so reputable as to have had the -incidents of the voyages recorded with anything approaching to scientific -fulness. But within the period that now occupies us, there are four -notices of arrivals of slavers in the West Indies from Guinea, in which -the health of the voyage had called for remark[1178]. In a letter from -Barbados, March 20, 1664, it is said that the 'Speedwell' has arrived with -282 negroes, who have greatly lost in value owing to smallpox breaking out -amongst them; the 'Success' brought 193 blacks; the 'Susan' 230, which -were not allowed to be landed until the officers of the ship had proved -that they had not collected them within the Royal African Company's -limits. Another Barbados letter of March 31, 1664, says that "there has -been a great mortality amongst the negroes [? on St Christopher and Nevis] -which the African Company's physician at Barbados, De La Rouse, assures -them is through a malignant distemper contracted, they think, through so -many sick and decaying negroes being thronged together, and perhaps -furthered by the smallpox in Captain Carteret's ships. Most men refused to -receive any of them, and Philip Fusseires, a surgeon, to whom they sold -twenty at a low rate, lost every one." This is a confused letter, but the -reference to "sick and decaying negroes thronged together," appears to -mean, not a sharp sickness soon over, but a general sickly state and loss -of condition, which had come upon them during the voyage[1179]. The third -letter is from Barbados, June 25, 1667: from Guinea are arrived four -ships, two of the African Company's, and two private; in which had -happened a great mortality of negroes and of the ships' companies. Once -more, to bring out the long imprisonment of negroes under decks while the -slaver was filling up on the coast, T. Barrett writing from Port Royal on -October 17, 1672, to James Littleton, "has heard that Capt. James Tallers -bought the negroes for Littleton from another ship in Guinea which had -them three months aboard, and that they were almost all starved and -surfeycatted [surfeit had come to mean dysentery], he having fed them with -little else but musty corn. There must have been something extraordinary -that so many of them died." - -In one of the letters we hear of sickness and mortality not only of slaves -on the passage but also of the ships' companies. Long after, Clarkson -showed from the muster-rolls of Liverpool slave-ships that the -slave-trade, instead of being a "nursery" of British sailors, was their -grave[1180]. There are, however, few medical particulars; doubtless many -of the deaths among the crews occurred on the coast, from fever, dysentery -and the like brought on by debauchery and during trading excursions up the -rivers in the long-boat; but from the third of the letters quoted it -appears that there had been also deaths on the voyage. Of the sicknesses -among the negroes, more is said of smallpox than of any other malady in -the foregoing records. But smallpox was not in ordinary circumstances a -very fatal or very severe disease among negroes, although it was very -common. An early medical writer on the diseases of the Guinea Coast, both -of white men and negroes, Dr Aubrey, "who resided many years on the coast -of Guinea," may pass as a credible witness in the matter, the more so as -his book shows him to have been competent in his profession[1181]. - -"Measles and smallpox," he says, "are no ways dangerous, nor so -troublesome as in cold climates, neither are they so very sick e'er they -come out, nor remains there any great sign of them after they recover. -Abundance of these poor creatures are lost on board ships, to the great -prejudice of the owners and scandal of the surgeon, merely through the -surgeon's ignorance; because he knows not what they are afflicted with, -but supposing it to be a fever, bleeds and purges or vomits them into an -incurable diarrhoea, and in a very few days they become a feast for some -hungry shark. When they are in the woods sick of these diseases, they take -nothing but cold water, and suck oranges, and yet recover, as I myself -have been an eyewitness many a time; and the grandy-men's children are -treated no otherwise in their sickness, and are very well of the smallpox -in less than half a moon," etc. It is conceivable, however, that smallpox -left to itself would not have run so favourable a course in the hold of a -slaver as in the native huts of the negroes. On board ship the subjects of -smallpox died from a complication of diarrhoea; and, according to the same -writer, diarrhoea or dysentery was the grand cause of mortality on the -voyage, the most inveterate form of it, (according to his fixed belief), -occurring in those who had been constitutionally affected by yaws: "This -(the yawey flux) is the mortal disease that cuts off three parts in four -of the negroes that are commonly lost on board ships." But the same writer -reveals enough to let us understand the prevalence of flux as a primary -malady. The food of the slaves on board ship, to say nothing of the -regimen, was distasteful to them. They missed their palm oil and other -accustomed articles of diet. They were fed, morning and evening, on pease, -beans, and the like, mixed with "rotten salt herrings," with an occasional -meal of salt beef or salt pork, and a stinted allowance of water. - - "These are foods that very few of them will eat. Very often they are - abused by sailors, who beat and kick them to that degree that - sometimes they never recover; and then the surgeon is blamed for - letting the slaves die, when they are murthered, partly by strokes and - partly famished; for if they do not eat such salt things as are enough - to destroy them, they must fast till supper; and then they lose their - appetites, and perhaps fall sick, partly through fasting and partly - with grief to see themselves so treated; and if once they take - anything to heart, all the surgeon's art will never keep them alive; - for they never eat anything by fair means or foul, because they choose - rather to die than be ill-treated.... When they are costive and griped - [by the salt food], they stay betwixt decks and will eat nothing; but - cry _yarry, yarry_, and perhaps creep under one of the platforms and - hide themselves, and die there, and the surgeon can't think what is - the meaning on't..., I am very sensible that it is impossible to - maintain the slaves on board, after one quits the Coast, without salt - provisions; but then care might be taken to water the beef and pork - ere it be boiled, and also to bring a cruce of palm-oil round the deck - from mess to mess, and also pepper, and let everyone take as he - pleaseth.... Another principal cause of their destruction is forcing - them into a tub of cold water every day, and pouring the water on - their heads by buckets-full"--doubtless for the sake of cleanliness, - although they were too ill to stand such washings. - -Whatever else the negroes died of on the voyage from Guinea, they did not -die of yellow fever: there is hardly another generality of pathology so -well based as that Africans of pure blood have been found immune from that -infection in all circumstances ashore or afloat--protected not by -acclimatisation but by some strange privilege of their race. And yet we -have to think of yellow fever as somehow related to the over-sea traffic -in negroes. Two instances from the later history will serve to bring the -problem concretely before us. In 1815, a British transport, the 'Regalia,' -was employed in carrying recruits from the West Coast of Africa to the -black regiments in the West Indies. The health of the ship when on the -African coast had been good; but on the voyage across with the -newly-enlisted negroes, much sickness, chiefly dysenteric, occurred among -the latter, whereupon yellow fever broke out with great malignancy, -attacking all on board except the black soldiers, who were from first to -last untouched by it. From such experiences as that, Sir Gilbert Blane -formulated a somewhat vague doctrine that the causes which produced -dysentery in the negro produced yellow fever in the white race. But it is -more probable that the dysenteric matters of the negroes had themselves in -turn bred an infection of yellow fever for the whites. To take another -case: In 1795, after the capture of Martinique from the French, one of the -frigates 'La Pique,' was manned by a British crew and sent to Barbados. On -the voyage they rescued two hundred negroes from a ship which was about -foundering. The negroes were confined in the hold of 'La Pique;' and in a -short time yellow fever broke out among her English crew, killing one -hundred and fifty of them, although it was not prevalent among the blacks -at all. "Such a mixture of men," says Gillespie, "strangers to each other, -has been often found to occasion sickness in ships; and, together with -other causes, fatally operated here before the arrival of the ship at -Barbados.... This is a melancholy instance of the generation of a fatal -epidemic on board ship at a time when the inhabitants of Barbados and the -crews of the other ships in company remained free from any such -disease[1182]." - -But such instances are comparatively rare, while epidemics of yellow fever -on shore, or among the shipping in an anchorage, have been common. It is -possible that the yellow fever experiences of the 'Regalia' and 'La Pique' -had happened often to the white crews of slavers; we shall never know. -What we do know is that the ports of debarkation of the slave-trade -became the endemic seats of yellow fever. The theory is that the matters -productive of yellow fever were brought to the West Indian harbours, -deposited there, left to ferment and accumulate, and so to taint the soil, -the mud and the water as to become an enduring source of poisonous -miasmata. The facts in support of that view are not far to seek. - -Let us come back to the circumstances of Bridgetown, Barbados, when the -yellow fever broke out first in 1647. A good many slavers had landed their -cargoes at Bridgetown in the years preceding (in 1643 the island had at -least 6400 negroes), and each of them had left behind a material quantity -of the filth of the voyage, having probably been careened for the purpose -of cleaning out and overhauling. There are traditions still extant that -the cleaning of a slave-ship after a voyage from Africa was an exceptional -task, to which Kroomen used to be set. Be that as it may, it needs only a -little reflection to see that a crowd of some hundreds of negroes under -gratings in the hold or 'tween decks of a brig or schooner, suffering at -first from sickness of the sea and, as the voyage across the tropic belt -progressed, from the more distressing flux, must have set all rules of -cleanliness at defiance. The ship's bilges and ballast would be foul -beyond measure: and it was just the contents of her bilges, with or -without the ballast itself, that would be pumped out or thrown out when -the ship was moored in the harbour or careened on the mud. At Bridgetown -there were no plunging tides, such as we watch on our own shores, to carry -the filth out to sea. The spring tides, says Ligon, rose only four or five -feet; the flood tide carried the water over the banks into the lagoon, and -the ebb carried it off; but at neap tides a quantity of water remained -stagnant behind the sea-banks, according to the familiar experience in -such circumstances. The flat shore, says Ligon, became "a kind of bog, -which vents out so loathsome a savour as cannot but breed ill blood, and -is (no doubt) the occasion of much sickness to those that live there." A -brackish estuary, with an impeded outfall, will often smell badly, from -rotting sea-wrack or other decomposing matters; but we have yet to learn -that any so commonplace conditions can breed a deadly pestilence such as -arose at Bridgetown for the first time in the autumn of 1647. Carlisle -Bay was doubtless a leeward harbour, with high land all round it and a -sluggish ebb and flow of the tide, subject to calms and a scorching sun; -but besides all that, the careenage at the head of the bay was the regular -receptacle of the ordure of slave-ships year after year. Travellers and -imaginative writers have sometimes pictured the bays and creeks of the -islands and main of the Caribbean Sea as if the mere decay of tropical -vegetation had made them pestilential[1183]. Risk, of course, there is in -such situations, but chiefly when men are exposed by turns to the noonday -heat and the nocturnal chill. The ill repute of West Indian harbours, with -their sweltering mud, mangrove swamps, and lazy tides, is a composite and -confused idea. It is not so much Nature that has made them unwholesome, as -man. Yellow fever, in particular, is not a miasm of remote and primeval -bays or lagoons into which a boat's crew may come once and again; it is -not a fever of any and every part of the coast of a tropical island; it is -a fever of only a few inhabited spots on the wide shores of the globe; and -those seats of it, so far as it has been steady or periodic in its -prevalence, are all of them harbours distinguished at one time or another -as the resort of slave-ships, and distinguished from many other ports of -either Hemisphere in no other way. Everything in the subsequent history of -yellow fever pointed to its being a poison lurking in the mud or even in -the water of slave-ports, and in the soil of their fore-shores, wharves -and houses along the beach. Miasmata rose from the ground in the latter -situations, to taint the air of the town at certain seasons; the poison -also entered the bilges of ships moored or careened in the harbour, and -rose from the holds as a noxious vapour to infect the crews. The miasmata -were deadly for the most part to new comers, especially to those from the -colder latitudes, although acclimatised residents were not exempt in a -time of epidemic; but there is very general agreement that they carried no -risk for negroes of pure blood. - -What was there special in the circumstances of 1647 to give rise to the -first epidemic explosion of yellow fever? There was, in the first place, -the accretion of the peculiar fermenting filth in the mud and soil, which -had been going on for several years. Secondly, there was the brisk trade, -as indicated by the large number of ships in the harbour, a great -concourse of new arrivals having been often remarked in the later history -as one of the conditions of an outbreak. But more particularly there were -the peculiarities of the season: it was one of those seasons in which the -regular rains of June and following months had failed. What we know on -that head comes exclusively from Winthrop's 'Journal,' already quoted. -There was so great a drouth, he says, that their potatoes, corn, &c., were -burnt up; and after the "great dearth of victuals in these islands -followed presently a great mortality." But the mortality was certainly not -from famine, nor from the effects of famine. It was the parching drought -that the epidemic really followed, and not merely the scarcity, which was, -indeed, relieved by the ships from New England, and was so little felt -that Ligon does not mention it. The rainy season missed, or all but -missed, in a tropical country means a great fall of the ground water; it -means the pores of the ground filled with air to an unusual extent; and -that is a state of any soil, if it be already full of fermenting organic -matters, which breeds the most dangerous half-products of decomposition, -or, in other words, the most poisonous miasmata. There needs always some -such special determining thing to explain the epidemic outbursts of yellow -fever; in the later history we shall see that the first great epidemic of -it at Jamaica followed immediately upon the earthquake that destroyed Port -Royal. - -Illustrations of the ordinary principle that seasonal and periodic -infection is dependent on the state of the ground water, are given at -greater length in the chapters upon the later epidemics of plague in -London. What applies in that respect to one soil-poison applies to -another; and it will be shown in the proper place to apply with least -ambiguity of all to Asiatic cholera, as well as to typhoid fever. Yellow -fever is, in clinical characters, allied more to typhus than to typhoid; -but it is a typhus of the soil, whereas the common and much less fatal -typhus of ordinary domestic life in colder latitudes is an infection -above ground--of the air, walls, floors and furnishings of rooms. There is -the same relation between yellow fever and ordinary typhus in that -respect, as between plague and ordinary typhus. When ordinary typhus has -passed into a soil-poison, by aggravation of conditions, as in the -experience of Arab encampments in North Africa, it has become at the same -time bubonic fever, or, approximately plague proper. Yellow fever had its -habitat essentially in the soil, from the peculiar circumstances -(importation of the crude materials of it by ships engaged in the -slave-trade); and plague in ordinary, or in European experience, had also -its habitat in the soil, from circumstances which have been elsewhere -given as its probable conditions. - -It is perhaps because they are soil-poisons that those two diseases rank -so high in their fatality and quickness of execution, in which respects -they resemble Asiatic cholera, and differ from most other infections. -Winthrop says that the first yellow fever killed in three days, and was -therefore comparable to the plague. Ligon says that it was as killing a -disease as the plague (of which both he and Winthrop would have had old -experience at home), and he uses the stock phrase, that the living were -hardly able to bury the dead. Winthrop says that 6000 died in Barbados: -and one of his correspondents in the island, Vines, writes that "in our -parish there were buried twenty in a week, and many weeks together fifteen -or sixteen." Dutertre says that nearly a third of the colonists of St -Christopher died of it, and that it lingered there for eighteen months, -and for twenty months in Guadeloupe, whither it was believed to have been -brought in the ship 'Le Boeuf.' - -Barbados, St Christopher and Guadeloupe (with minor settlements on -Martinique, Nevis, &c.) were the earliest English and French colonies in -the Caribbean Sea. The Spaniards had occupied the Greater Antilles -(Hispaniola or San Domingo, Cuba, Porto Rico and Jamaica) long before. -Nothing particular is known of the health of these colonies except for the -earlier years of the 16th century, when the native populations were -ravaged by the great pox and the smallpox. But when Jamaica was seized -from the Spaniards by the army of the Commonwealth in 1655 we begin to -have authentic information, the state of health being perhaps the most -prominent thing (although little noticed by historians) in the despatches. -That incident in the expansion of England, relating as it does to the -planting of what was for long our greatest island colony, and illustrating -the risks of those early enterprises more fully than any other of the -kind, may fitly come into this chapter and conclude it. - - -The Great Mortality in the occupying of Jamaica. - -The Lord Protector's design in the year 1654, to acquire one or more of -the Spanish Antilles for an English colony, was more methodically -conceived and more strenuously supported by the resources of the State -than any previous attempt at colonization. It was attended with disasters -on a proportionate scale, and at first with ignominy and failure which -must have added seriously to the burden of Cromwell's later years. The -original design, in the admiral's sealed orders, was to seize upon the old -Spanish colony of Hispaniola or San Domingo[1184]. A fleet had been fitted -out at Portsmouth, which sailed on 19th-21st December, 1654, carrying a -land force of three thousand men. After a favourable voyage, the fleet of -thirty sail, half of them victuallers, arrived at Barbados on February 1, -where they lay until March 31, engaging settlers for the proposed new -colony as well as campaigners, including a troop of cavalry, from the not -very choice class of English subjects in that island. Some twenty Dutch -ships were seized and made victuallers or transports. The expedition -received a draft also from Nevis, and calling at St Christopher they took -up 1300 more, making in all an addition of over 5000 colonial men, besides -women and children, to their original force. On April 13 the fleet arrived -off the harbour of St Domingo. It came out afterwards that the sight of so -many English frigates and other ships had driven the townspeople to -instantaneous flight, so that the capital would have fallen to the -English without a blow. But no landing was attempted in the harbour, -owing to difficulties about piloting, ignorance of the depth of water, and -the like. It was decided to disembark the force in a bay at the mouth of a -river some six or ten miles (two leagues) to the eastward, where Drake had -landed in 1586. Most of the ships, however, were carried past the -appointed place, and came to anchor in another bay thirty miles (ten -leagues) eastwards from St Domingo; there a multitude of some 7000 -soldiers and colonials, with their women and children, were landed on the -beach with three days' rations. Several of the ships landed their men at -the original rendezvous two leagues from St Domingo, to the number of -about 2000 in three regiments. The larger and farther-off force began to -advance on St Domingo through dense woods; their presence in the country -was soon known in all the plantations, whence the people fled to the -capital for safety, so that the San Domingans were able to extemporise a -considerable force for defence. The advance of the English was hindered by -the stifling heat; distressed by thirst, they ate immoderately of oranges -and other fruits, and in one way or another brought on dysentery. General -Venables, in a despatch to Cromwell, says that by these causes they "were -troubled with violent fluxes, hundreds of our men having dropped down by -the way, some sick, others dead." Meanwhile the nearer and smaller force -of some 2000 had advanced on St Domingo; they got over one of the two -leagues between them and the capital, but an old fort, manned for the -occasion, barred the way, and the regiments fell back upon the river -whence they had started, and rested there five days, the main body having -meanwhile come up with them. One attempt after another was made to pass -the half-way fort, but the Spaniards held their ground, and actually -inflicted defeat in the open and a disgraceful rout upon the English, some -of whose gallant officers threw their lives away in a vain attempt to lead -their men. All the while this broken and demoralised mob was without -proper supplies from the fleet, the officers of which were either unable -to communicate with the land force or indifferent as to their duty. The -state of health on the 25th of April, some ten or twelve days after -landing, is thus described in a letter: "And the rains nightly pouring, -with fogs and dews along the river, so soaked our bodies with flux, and -none escaping that violence, that our freshment [by retreat to the river] -proved a weakening instead of support." Another letter of two days' later -date (April 27) says: "The rains increasing, our men weakening, all even -to death fluxing, the seamen aboard neglecting,--that forced us to eat all -our troop horses." An attempt was made to restore discipline; an officer -of high rank was cashiered for a coward, his sword having been broken over -his head; a soldier was shot for desertion; some loose women in men's -clothes from Barbados were chastised, and a sharp look-out kept for other -camp-followers of the kind. At length it was decided by Venables and his -council that the attempt on San Domingo must be abandoned; probably it was -seen that the Barbadian and St Christopher following was a fatal -encumbrance at that stage, the more so as the rainy season was in -progress. By the third of May the whole expedition was re-embarked, the -Spaniards making no attempt to harass the operation. The number reshipped -is said to have been seventeen hundred short of that which landed three -weeks before: a good many had fallen fighting, others were slain by the -Spaniards or negroes in the woods, and some appear to have died of the -flux. The attempt on St Domingo having failed it was decided to make a -descent on Jamaica, the least important of the Spanish Antilles. On the -passage thither, Winslow, one of the three lay commissioners or -"politicals" with the expedition, died "very suddenly of a fever." - -On May 10 the ships entered the bay of Caguya. Admiral Penn, being -resolved not to repeat the mistake they had made at St Domingo, kept sail -on the 'Martin' galley until she was beached under the small fort of the -Passage, at the head of the bay, so as to cover the debarkation with his -guns. However, the few Spaniards living at the shore fled, and the whole -force, to the number of some 7000, was landed by midnight. Venables then -returned to his ship for his usual repose, leaving the men under arms all -night. Not until nine next day, by which hour the cool of the morning was -lost, did the march begin to the capital, St Jago de la Vega ("St James of -the Plain"), situated on an elevation by the river Cobre, in the midst of -an alluvial plain with an amphitheatre of hills behind it, some six miles -from the place of landing. About two in the afternoon they came before the -town, and marched in that night: they found it empty, "nothing but bare -walls, bedsteads, chairs and cowhides." The town is said to have had some -1700 houses (too many for its population), two churches, two chapels, and -an abbey; there all the Spaniards dwelt in ease and indolence, "having -their slaves at their several small plantations, who constantly brought -them store of provisions and fruits." In this great island there were but -about 3000 inhabitants, half of them, if not more, being slaves. There -were no manufactures or native commodities, except a very little sugar and -cocoa. The four ships that came thither in a year traded generally for -hides and tallow only. - -The Spanish colony had removed as much of their property as they could in -their first flight, and shortly sent their head men with their governor, -"an old decrepid seignior full of the French disease" carried by two -bearers in a hammock, to treat for their re-entry into the town. Venables -was afterwards much blamed for returning the politeness of the Spaniards; -he received their presents of fresh provisions and fruit, accepted their -promises of a steady supply for his men, and gave them the free run of -their own houses for a week or so, by which time they are said to have -carried off all their personal belongings of value. They objected to leave -the island, saying that Jamaica was their home, and that they had no -friends either in New Spain or in Old Spain. At length they left their old -settlement, with the avowed purpose of embarking for Cuba from a bay on -the same side to the west. There were divided counsels among the English -as to the treatment of the Spaniards, and Colonel Bullard was sent towards -the bay with a large force to intercept them in their flight. They had, -however, given a false direction, and had in reality crossed the mountains -northwards to the other side of the island, clearing the country as they -went of cattle and produce of every kind. Some of them, including eight -families of the upper class, at length found their way to Cuba, but the -larger number remained on the north of the island, where they were -overtaken by famine and pestilence before a few months, and nearly -exterminated. Their negroes took to the mountains, and became the -maroons, famous in the later history of Jamaica. - -In pursuing the Spaniards, the English troops went roaming over the -country, destroying the hogs and cattle in mere wantonness, and leaving -their carcases to putrefy. In a short time the multitude of English at St -Jago de la Vega (Spanish Town) were on short rations, and before long -"dogs and cats the best part of their diet." The stores from the ships had -been left on the beach exposed to the weather, and soon turned mouldy, the -men refusing to carry them, in the absence of waggons, over the six miles -between the shore and the head-quarters. Two or three victuallers besides -had arrived from England within a week or two of the first landing, but, -for all that, the expedition was starving. Many of the men were suffering -from the flux which they had contracted in St Domingo. Venables, in a -private letter of May 25, or a fortnight after landing, gives the number -of the sick at near 3000; in a despatch to Cromwell, of June 4, he says: - - "The want we have been in hitherto of bread (we not being able to be - suddenly supplied therewith out of the fleet, or our stores, through - want of waggons and other conveniences for the transportation - thereof), joined with the drinking of water, hath already cast both - officers and soldiers into such violent fluxes that they look more - like dead men crept out of their graves than persons living; and this - so generally that we have not above two colonels in health, three - majors, some seven field officers in all; besides many have been - already swept away with this disease. We lost Mr Winslow very - suddenly, in our sailing towards this island, of a fever." - -On June 9 there was a general muster of the land forces, "whose number was -found to be much diminished of late, not so much by any pestilential or -violent disease, as for mere want of natural sustenance; which, in common -reason, may seem strange that of all men soldiers should starve in a -cook's shop, as the saying is[1185]." - -In a despatch of June 13, Venables says that "about 2000 are sick. Our men -die daily, eating roots and fresh fish (when any food is got), without -bread or very little." He was himself ill, having had the flux for five -weeks. Admiral Penn (father of the founder of Pennsylvania) had resolved -to go home with two-thirds of the ships, thinking that his services were -no longer needed, and having been advised that he could be of more service -to Cromwell in England. He sailed on June 21, leaving the frigates and the -Dutch prizes, under Goodson; and Venables followed in four days, with the -surviving "political," leaving the settlement in charge of Fortescue, who -wrote home, "I am left to act without book." - -Meanwhile Cromwell had got ready reinforcements, sparing no trouble or -expense at home. The expedition in aid left Plymouth on July 11, 1655, -under the command of Sedgwick, and arrived at Barbados on August 26-31, -after a fine passage; they left again on September 7, having trimmed their -casks and taken in water with other refreshments. This force was in the -best of health until after leaving Barbados. Sedgwick writes: - - "I think never so many ships sailed together with less trouble, grief - or danger than we did; only God did in a little visit us between this - [Jamaica] and Barbados with some sickness, I apprehend caused by some - distemper taken there [? yellow fever]; in which visitation, I think, - in the whole fleet we lost between 20 and 30 seamen and soldiers." - -Finding the Spanish flag flying at San Domingo, they came on to Jamaica on -October 1, and there found a calamitous state of things. - - "For the army, I found them in as sad and deplorable and distracted - condition as can be thought of: commanders, some left them, some dead, - some sick, and some in indifferent health; the soldiery many dead, - their carcases lying unburied in the highways and among bushes, to and - again; many of them that were alive walked like ghosts or dead men, - who, as I went through the town, lay groaning and crying out, Bread, - for God's sake!" - -Sedgwick brought with him in four victuallers a thousand tons of -provisions, which he secured in a store built for the occasion on the -beach. Among his troops was Colonel Humphry's regiment of 831 "lusty, -healthful, gallant men, who encouraged the whole army." But now we begin -to see that the sickness at St Jago de la Vega had become infective or -pestilential. The new-comers, healthy and well found as they were, began -at once to sicken and to die. Of Humphry's regiment, on November 5: - - "There are at this day 50 of them dead, whereof two captains, a - lieutenant, and two ensigns, the colonel himself very weak, the - lieutenant-colonel at death's door. Soldiers die daily, I believe 140 - every week, and so have done ever since I came hither. It is strange - to see lusty men, in appearance well, and in three or four days in the - grave, snatched away in a moment with fevers, agues, fluxes and - dropsies, a confluence of many diseases. We furnished the army now - with 60 butts of Madeira wine, and to every regiment a butt of brandy, - and a hogshead or two of sweet oil. Our soldiers have destroyed all - sorts of fruits, and provisions and cattle. Nothing but ruin attends - them wherever they go." On January 24, 1656, Sedgwick again writes to - Thurloe: "Did you but see the faces of this poor small army with us, - how like skeletons they look, it would move pity; and when I consider - the thousands laid in the dust in such a way as God hath visited, my - heart mourns. Here hath come down to us from many of the Windward - Islands divers people with intentions of sitting down with us, but at - their coming hither, either fall sick and die, or are so affrighted - and dismayed as that, although to their much impoverishing, yet will - not be persuaded to stay with us." - -The men in the fleet were in better health; but among them also "some die -and some are sick, in so much that we need a good recruit fully to man our -ships as men-of-war." On the same date (January 24, 1656) Admiral Goodson, -writing to Thurloe, estimates the surviving officers and men at 2600, -besides women and children; and in another despatch of that date from -Sedgwick and Goodson jointly to Cromwell it is stated: - - "The numbers of the army are much lessened since our last letters - [November 5]; the whole not extending to 3000, many of them sick and - weak, the best and soundest much abated of their strength and vigor, - and God goes on every day to shorten our number. We die daily, not - less than fifty every week, which is much considering our small - numbers." - -As the season advanced the health of the troops on shore improved. A -letter of March 12 says that the condition of the army is much mended; the -soldiers are far more healthful, but much dejected and averse to the -place. The fleet was in good spirits, and impatient for action; however, -there was sickness also on board the ships; they had lost some fourscore -men since the last despatch; and on April 30 the report is: "our seamen -are indifferently well in health; yet some few are sick, and God is daily -shortening them, so that our fleet will want a recruit of men." Several of -the frigates were wormeaten, and careened for repairs. Sickness is -reported in the ships as late as October 10, 1656. - -The sickness among all ranks had been so general and severe that it was -hardly possible to find senior officers to undertake the government. -Fortescue died in October, 1655, and was succeeded temporarily by D'Oyley -and others, the sole government being at length given by Cromwell to -Sedgwick, who died a few days after receiving his unwelcome commission. -Brayne, transferred from Lochaber to Jamaica, also died, and it fell at -length to D'Oyley, an effective person in whom all on the spot had -confidence, to carry the colony through its troubles. Cromwell spared no -effort at home. Immense quantities of provisions were shipped; planters, -with their families, 'servants' and slaves, to the number of some 1700, -were removed to Jamaica from Nevis, under Stokes, the governor of that -island; the New Englanders were also encouraged to resort to the new -colony; and a thousand or so of young men and marriageable young women -were furnished from Ireland, together with pioneers, described as of a -rougher kind, from Scotland. "And so at length," says Carlyle, "a -West-Indian interest did take root; and bears spices and poisons, and -other produce, to this day." - -The sickness and mortality among the first English colonists of Jamaica -gave the island a bad name, and must have added not a little to the -confusion of ideas already existing as to the pestilent character of -tropical climates[1186]. The older sugar-colonies, such as Barbados, which -saw in Jamaica a formidable competitor, would appear to have encouraged -the notion that climates varied much, that of Jamaica being bad. Soon -after the Restoration, Charles II. was urged to give back Jamaica to -Spain, and is said to have seriously entertained that purpose. Among the -state papers is a document, supposed to have been written in November, -1660, which sets forth the natural advantages of Jamaica, together with -two sets of reasons why England should retain it[1187]: - - "The air here is more temperate than in any of the Caribee Islands, - being more northerly and as sufferable hot as in many places.... The - winds here constantly all day blow easterly, so coolly that it renders - any labour sufferable at midday.... We find here is not such antipathy - between the constitution of the English and the climate that sickness - is not inevitable and contingent; for we have experimentally found - that persons observing a good diet and using moderate exercise, enjoy - a somewhat (?) measure of health. The said causes of the mortality of - the Army at their first arrival were want of provisions, unwillingness - to labour or exercise, and inexcusable discontent to be constrained to - stay here. The diseases that strangers are most incident to are - dropsies (occasioned often by evil diet and slothfulness), calentures - (so frequently produced of surfeit), and fevers and agues, which, - although very troublesome, are never mortal.... Cagway [Port Royal] is - the place where all the merchants reside, being the most healthy place - in the island; whither resort all the men that frequent the Indies, - which makes houses so dear that an ordinary house in this town is - worth 40 or 60 per annum. There are about 200 houses there, all - built by the English. About 50 houses have been built by the English - at the fort of the Passage [at the head of the harbour and the nearest - point to Spanish Town]; of the houses in the old capital, St Jago de - la Vega, about 800 are ruinous. As to the number of English in the - island, the relics of the six regiments do muster 2200, and it is - probable that the planters, merchants, sailors and others may be as - many." - -The above statements about the healthiness of Jamaica in 1660 were -repeated by Dr Trapham, in his work on the climate and diseases of the -colony in 1678[1188]. This earliest medical writer is, indeed, more -optimist than those who followed him, as to contagious or infective -sickness; there was no smallpox, or very rarely, saving sometimes brought -from Guinea by negroes; and "no depopulating plague that ere I have heard -of," saving a pestilential fever brought in by the victorious fleet -returned from the signal Panama expedition in 1670. The experiences of -yellow fever at Port Royal and Kingston were mostly, if not entirely, -subsequent to these dates. But, as there had been yellow fever at -Barbados, St Christopher, and Guadeloupe as early as 1647-48, it has been -thought probable that the enormous mortality in Jamaica in 1655-56 was -from the same endemic cause[1189] Undoubtedly the epidemic at Spanish Town -became at length more than the dysentery which had been brought by some of -the troops from San Domingo, or had been induced among others of them by -bad food and water; it became a virulent specific infection, attacking the -healthy and well-found reinforcements from England and the new arrivals -from the Windward Islands, and destroying them quickly, "in three or four -days." Fevers are specially named, as well as fluxes and dropsies; and the -question arises whether the pestilential fever was not yellow fever. - -There is certainly nothing said of the striking and ghastly symptoms of -the _vomito negro_. Moreover the sickness was nearly all at the town of St -Jago de la Vega, six miles from the bay, situated on a rising of the plain -with a declivity to the Cobre river, a place which was only exceptionally -the seat of yellow fever in after-experience. Thus Judge Long, the able -historian of Jamaica, says[1190]: - - "After a series of hot, dry, and calm weather, eight days of continued - rain succeeded in May, 1761. Spanish Town grew more sickly than ever I - knew it, either before or since. From that period to August there were - buried 29 white inhabitants, of whom 15 were soldiers. Their disorder - had all the appearance of being the true yellow fever, and was - supposed to have been communicated from some ship in Kingston - harbour:" - ---Kingston and Port Royal, or the ships moored near to them, being the -common habitat of the disease, as in the corresponding circumstances at -other West Indian islands. - -But if the infective fever at Spanish Town in 1655-56 was almost certainly -not yellow fever, it was probably allied to it in type. Dysentery had -been almost universal; there was no care of the sick, and, so far as one -hears, no medical attendance, no hospitals, no scavenging, no security -taken to keep the water-supply pure--nothing, in short, of what is now -called sanitation. Sedgwick, arriving on October 1, 1655, found even the -dead unburied by the highways and among the bushes. The correlation -between dysentery and pestilential fever is no new hypothesis: flux first -and fever afterwards has been an experience both in sieges and in ordinary -domestic famines on many occasions. The origin of the yellow fever at -Barbados and elsewhere in 1647-8, which has been outlined in this chapter, -is but a special application of the same principle, the dysenteric matters -which represent the crude source of the infection having been brought in -the bilges and ballast of slave-ships, thrown into the mud of almost -tideless harbours, left to ferment amidst the heat and moisture of the -shore, and so made into a soil-poison which, in due season, would give off -emanations, fatal especially to new-comers. Port Royal and Kingston had -full experience of that endemic influence in after-years, for the first -time in 1692, after the earthquake and disturbance of soil which destroyed -the former town and occasioned the building of the latter on the other -side of the bay. By that time there had been slavers enough in the bay to -bring all the ordure that the hypothesis requires. But, down to 1655, the -Spaniards had traded only with hides and tallow in some four ships every -year, and had the headquarters of their cultivation and stock-raising at -the town in the plain some six miles from the shore. Four or five years -after their expulsion we find the whole aspect of the port changed, -according to the description already given. It does not appear that -Cromwell looked forward to negro labour in his colony, although the Nevis -planters brought their blacks with them. Charles II. had not been many -months on the throne when James, earl of Marlborough, petitioned him to -offer inducements to the Royal African Company to make Jamaica the staple -for the sale of blacks, and to contract with that company for one hundred -negroes to be delivered at the island[1191]. Negroes did begin from that -time to arrive in Jamaica, although Port Royal was at first rather a -general centre of commerce and piracy than a slave-port like Bridgetown, -perhaps because the Windward Islands were strong enough to keep their -privileges undivided. As late as 1670 the negro slaves in Jamaica were -reckoned at no more than 2500, not counting the old Spanish maroons[1192]. -On September 20 of that year, Sir Thomas Modyford, governor of Jamaica, -sent to Secretary Arlington certain proposals for the improvement of the -colony, of which the following bears upon our subject[1193]: - - "That they may have licence gratis or at moderate rates to trade for - negroes in Africa. Did those honourable persons, which make that Royal - [African] Company so glorious, but fall into considerations how much - more it is his Majesty's interest to increase the number of his - subjects than bullion of gold or silver (which by law all nations may - import), they would not only freely consent to this proposal for us - but for the whole nation and foreigners also. Mankind is the - principal, gold the accessory: increase the first considerably, and - the other must follow. Barbados had never risen to its late perfection - had it not been lawful for Dutch, Hamburghers, and our whole nation, - and any other, to bring and sell their blacks or any other servants in - the colony's infancy." - -The harbours of Port Royal and Kingston did, in the event, become the -chief resort of slave-ships in the British West Indies, slaves having been -landed there up to ten thousand in a year throughout the 18th century. -They came also to be among the chief seats of yellow fever, and continued -so until a recent date. The subsequent progress of yellow fever there, and -in other West Indian harbours as well as in the ports of some of the North -American colonies, is not the least important of the subjects that fall to -the second period of this history. - - - - -CHAPTER XII. - -THE GREAT PLAGUE OF LONDON, AND THE LAST OF PLAGUE IN ENGLAND. - - -Literature of the Great Plague. - -The writings called forth directly by the London Plague of 1665 were -hardly more numerous or of better quality than those of 1603 and 1625. At -its beginning in June, or in August, there appeared a number of tracts by -enterprising practitioners, containing a few commonplace remarks on causes -and the like, and advertisements of nostrums--by G. Harvey, Kemp, -Garrencieres ("Plague is one of the easiest diseases in the world to cure, -if" etc.), and Gadbury, an astrologer. The directions drawn up by the -College of Physicians in 1636, for the preservation of the sound and -recovery of the sick were re-issued, and an excellent set of "cautionary -rules" by H. Brooke was published by order of the mayor. The writings -which contain accounts of the Great Plague fall under two periods--the -years immediately following 1665, and the years 1720 to 1723 when there -was a sudden revival of interest in the subject in London owing to the -great plague of Marseilles in 1720. To the latter period belongs the most -famous work on the plague of 1665, Defoe's _Journal of the Plague Year_, -which embodied in a picturesque form the substance of various writings -that preceded it, together with traditions known to Defoe. A brief account -of those writings that preceded Defoe's in both periods will serve at the -same time to show the sources of a great part of his information. - -The weekly bills of mortality issued by Parish Clerks' Hall, which showed -the number of deaths week by week in each of the one hundred and forty -parishes of London, with a rough classification of the causes of death, -were reprinted at the end of the year 1665 in a volume with the title -_London's Dreadful Visitation_[1194]. The bills thus collected in -convenient form were made great use of by Defoe, and became, indeed, the -backbone of his work. Next to them in importance, although it is not -certain that Defoe used it, is a treatise on the medical aspects of the -Great Plague, which has never had the fortune to be published. The author -of it was William Boghurst, a young apothecary practising at the White -Hart in St Giles's-in-the-Fields, who advertised in the _Intelligencer_ on -July 31, 1665, at the height of the plague in his parish, that he had -treated forty, fifty or sixty patients in a day, that he was prepared to -undertake the treatment of cases in the City, the suburbs, or the country, -and that he had a water, a lozenge, and an electuary, as well as an -antidote at eightpence an ounce[1195]. - -After the epidemic was over he employed his spare half-hours in writing a -book upon his experiences, "considering that none hath printed anything -either since this plague, or that forty years since--which I something -wonder at." He professes to have taken nothing from hearsay, or from -books, or from the testimonies of others; he writes in English "for -general readers and sale," and he had omitted many things "so as not to -make the book too tedious and too dear to bie." The manuscript was -completed for the press, with a title-page, at the foot of which is what -appears to be a publisher's name (the surname now torn off); but it was -never published, although the author lived until 1685. It is conceivable -that the printed sheets, or the composed type, may have been destroyed in -the fire of September, 1666, and the enterprise abandoned. The manuscript -came into the possession of Sir Hans Sloane, and is now in the British -Museum[1196]. It gives much fuller clinical details of the plague than any -other English work, although in somewhat aphoristic form; and it may be -allowed the character of originality which the author claims for it, -except in some of the more systematic chapters showing the influence of -Diemerbroek. - -Another medical essay following the plague was that of Dr Hodges, of -Watling Street, first written in English in 1666 (May 8) under the title -_A Letter to a Person of Quality_[1197], and expanded in 1671 into a Latin -treatise[1198]. Besides a few pages at the beginning, giving some general -facts of the London outbreak (which Defoe used), it is mostly a systematic -disquisition, although a few cases are interspersed. One other medical -piece of 1666 (June 16) is known, by Dr George Thomson, of Duke's Place -near Aldgate, a Paracelsist or chemical physician; it contains the account -of a dissection of a plague-body, but is mostly occupied with a polemic -against the Galenists, which the author carried on for a number of years -in numerous other writings[1199]. - -Descriptive pieces, in prose or verse, such as the plagues of 1603 and -1625 elicited, are entirely wanting for that of 1665. But there was the -usual crop of religious and moral exercises to improve the occasion. These -appear to have come mostly, if not exclusively, from Dissenters. "Many -useful and pious treatises," says a Dissenter in 1721, "were published -upon the occasion of the last visitation, as by Mr Zach. Crofton, Mr Shaw, -Mr Doolittle, and others." But the only one that attained popularity, -having gone through five editions at once, and been often reprinted, even -as late as 1851, was _God's Terrible Voice in the City_[1200], by the Rev. -Thomas Vincent, of Christ Church, Oxford, who had been ejected from his -living of St Mary Magdalen, Milk Street, and was then a leader of Dissent. -Vincent preached in several parish churches (deserted by their parsons) -all through the plague, and ministered constantly among the sick. His -book, which moralizes also upon the great fire of 1666, will be drawn upon -in the sequel. - -We come next to the revival of interest in the Great Plague of London, -which was occasioned by the Marseilles epidemic in the summer of 1720, an -event that alarmed Western Europe as if the old recurrences of plague were -about to begin afresh after a long interval. In London, in 1721, several -books were published upon the Marseilles plague itself; and the years from -1720 to 1722 saw a whole crop of writings,--new essays and reprints of old -ones,--upon the last London plague of 1665. Among the books reprinted were -Hodges' _Loimologia_, in an English translation by Quincy, his _Letter to -a Person of Quality_, the _Necessary Directions_ of the College of -Physicians, the _Orders drawn up by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the -City_ (these three in 1721 in a _Collection of very Valuable and Scarce -Pieces relating to the last Plague in 1665_), and Vincent's _God's -Terrible Voice in the City_. The new medical books on the Great Plague -were by Scarborough, Hancock and Browne. - -When Defoe in 1722 wrote his _Journal of the Plague Year_, he had these -recent reprints and original books convenient to his hand. He had to go -back to 1665 for the collection of the weekly bills of mortality in the -plague-year (in a volume called _London's Dreadful Visitation_), and he -may have consulted Boghurst's manuscript, which was probably then in the -possession of Sir Hans Sloane. But it is impossible to trace all his -copious narrative of the Great Plague to these sources, even if we make -due allowance for his legitimate construction of incidents out of the -generalities of contemporary writers. It is possible that he may have had -some unknown manuscript, less technical than Boghurst's, to draw from. At -all events, he was a likely person to have had many stories of the plague -in his memory. He was a child of four when the plague was in London, the -son of a butcher named Foe in St Giles's, Cripplegate, which was one of -the most severely visited parishes. The most graphic parts of his -_Journal_ are those which contain such tales as he might have been told in -boyhood concerning the plague in Cripplegate, the scene of them being -carried round to Aldgate, opposite to the Butchers' Row (still there) in -Whitechapel High Street. He must have had some testimony from which to -construct the visit to Blackwall, the view of the shipping moored all up -and down the Thames, and the other particulars of the river-side -population in the plague-time. The rough experiences of the three Stepney -men in the country near London are in the manner of _Robinson Crusoe_, and -needed only a few hints from Dekker's stories, or from the writers of -1625. His account of the burials by the cart-load in plague-pits is also -suggestive of Dekker. The somewhat meagre references by Hodges might have -sufficed him for his frequent theme of the hardships and horrors of -shut-up houses, even if he had not seen two other tracts, of 1665, on the -same. The accounts of the Marseilles plague, one of the worst in history, -would have kept him right in picturing that of London. - -Whatever materials Defoe took from Hodges, Vincent, or the writers on -other plagues, he enlarged them by his power of circumstantial -construction into a narrative which must be accounted on the whole -veracious. He based upon figures, whenever he could get them; he seems -even to have sought among the archives of the City for accounts of monies -distributed to the poor. He prints in full the orders of the Mayor and -Aldermen, and professes to give the text of a formal resolution which they -passed to remain at their posts throughout the crisis. His table of the -number of plague-deaths in each of twenty-six towns or villages near -London does not, indeed, agree with the figures in the parish registers, -as the table on a later page will show; but it can hardly have been drawn -up at a guess. - -The best instance of Defoe's skilful use of authentic documents is his -description of how the infection invaded one part of London after another -from the western suburbs to the eastern, so that its intensity was nearly -over in one place before it had begun in another. That is the most -interesting epidemiological fact in the whole outbreak; and Defoe has done -ample justice to it. Boghurst had stated it with equal clearness and -emphasis in his manuscript of 1666, which Defoe may or may not have -seen[1201]; however the latter deduced it afresh, and illustrated it by -numerous tables from the bills of mortality, which showed the incidence of -plague upon each of the one hundred and forty parishes from week to week. - - -Antecedents, Beginnings and Progress of the Plague of 1665. - -When the London plague of 1665 had given indications that it would grow to -be one of the great outbreaks of that infection, much was made, in the -retrospect, of a single death from plague which had occurred towards the -end of December, 1664, in a house in or near Long Acre. Connected with -that case was one of those trivial chains of evidence which are so often -produced as the easy solution of a difficult problem. A bale of silks had -come to the house from Holland, and that bale of silks could be traced to -the Levant; therefore the seeds of the great plague of London were -imported Levantine seeds. This was pretty well for a city which had a -continuous record of plague-infection in its soil ever since the Black -Death of 1348. But credulity could ignore facts more recent than the -history for three centuries. The death in Long Acre in December was a -solitary one, and was of no more import for what followed than any of the -five other sporadic plague-deaths in 1664[1202]. Only one more death from -plague occurred in the bills (in the middle of February), until the last -week of April, 1665; even then the progress of the infection was slower -for the next two months than it had been in many former seasons of -moderate plague, such as the five years 1606-1610 and the eight years -1640-1647, or than it had been in the great plague-years of 1603, 1625 and -1636. An importation from abroad had been alleged as early as the great -plague of 1563, namely from Havre, which was then held by an English -garrison. But on that occasion the epidemic in London was gaining ground -before the sickness at Havre had declared itself plague, and was of the -bubonic type while the latter was still a malignant fever. The return of -the whole English garrison from Havre, with the seeds of sickness among -them, might well have introduced infection; but that return was not until -the end of July, by which time the mortality in London had been -progressing for two months. There is equally little reason for Stow's -statement that the plague of 1603 was brought to London from Ostend, or -for the corresponding theory of origin for the plague of 1625. A foreign -source was not thought of unless the plague became one of the greater -degree. Year after year in London there were a few cases of plague, and -sometimes for a succession of years the plague-deaths kept steadily at a -level of from one thousand to three thousand. There are, indeed, few years -from 1348 to 1666 in which the infection did not declare its presence in -London. Whether the few threatening cases in the spring were to rise to a -plague of the greater degree depended upon a concurrence of -circumstances--upon the interval since the last great plague, upon the -number of strangers crowding to the capital, and upon the kind of weather -preceding. In 1665 the various determining things did chance to come -together, and a plague of the first degree ensued. The one singular thing -in the history is that such a concurrence never happened again, or that -the conditions had so far changed (certainly not for the better), that -the type of epidemic disease was no longer the bubo-plague. - -According to precedent, a great plague was somewhat overdue in the year -1665. Its two great predecessors (not reckoning the smaller plague of -1636) had happened each at the beginning of a new reign--in 1603 on the -accession of James I., and in 1625 on the accession of Charles I. The -Restoration of 1660 was the time for the next great outburst; but that was -delayed for five years. Those five years were occupied with a good deal of -fever and other infective disease in London, and the fever in the -beginning of 1665 was, according to Sydenham, of a marked pestilential -type. It may be said to have led up to the plague; but the bubonic disease -itself needed something in addition to the determining causes of spotted -fever. It is generally admitted that London was unusually crowded with the -poorer classes whose work is required by the luxury of the rich (Defoe -says that an enumeration for the Lord Mayor had made out 100,000 -ribbon-weavers in the eastern suburbs, although the number is incredible). -There was also a general relaxation of morals, which may have predisposed -many constitutions to receive the seeds of infection. Another element in -the case was the weather. - -The summer before had been remarkable for the immense number of -house-flies, and of other insects and frogs. From November to the end of -March the earth was held in almost continual black frost. Boghurst says -the wind was westerly for seven months. No rain fell all the time except a -slight sprinkling in the end of April. The dry cold continued after the -frost broke, and produced, says Sydenham, an unusual number of cases of -pleurisy, pneumonia and angina. Richard Baxter says of the seasons -preceding the great plague, that they were "the driest winter, spring and -summer that ever man alive knew, or our forefathers ever heard of; so that -the grounds were burnt like the highways, the meadow ground where I lived -[Acton] having but four loads of hay which before bare forty[1203]." The -hay crop was "pitiful," says Boghurst, in consequence of the long cold and -drought. But the summer was made pleasant by refreshing breezes, and -there was abundance of all kinds of grain, vegetables and fruit. - -It was not until the beginning of June that the deaths from plague in all -London, according to the bills of mortality, reached the sum of 43 in the -week. But the mortality had been excessive from the beginning of the year, -and it was suspected, as in the like circumstances in 1625, that the -searchers had been concealing the existence of plague, or calling cases of -it by other names, so as to save the infected houses from being shut up. -The motive for bribery and concealment doubtless existed; it had been kept -in view by the authorities from the first institution of searchers, who -were solemnly sworn before the Dean of the Arches to make a true return of -the cause of death. In all the great plagues, less so in 1563 and 1603 -than in other years, there was reason to suppose that a large proportion -of deaths put down to other causes than plague were really cases of -plague. However there is no doubt that, in the early months of 1665, just -as in the beginning of 1625, there was a great deal of spotted fever in -London, not to mention smallpox and dysentery. The season was a sickly -one, such a sickly season as often occurred in the latter part of the -seventeenth century and throughout the whole of the eighteenth, when there -could be no longer any question of plague. The weekly bills contain -numerous deaths in the several parishes from "fever" and from "spotted -fever" for months before they contain more than an occasional -plague-death. There was no reason why these and other maladies should not -have swelled the bills to three or four hundred in a week; in the year -1739, when London was probably not a third larger than in 1665, Strother -says that fever brought the weekly bill up to near a thousand. It is -remarkable, however, that Boghurst claims to have been treating cases of -plague from the month of November, 1664; Hodges also says that he was -called in the middle of the Christmas holidays to a young man in a fever -who acquired, two days after, a plague-botch in each groin as large as a -nutmeg, and recovered. Boghurst admits that "tokens," by which he means -the marks of plague other than the botch or bubo, "appeared not much till -about the middle of June, and carbuncles not till the latter end of July." -He suspects that the bills of mortality did not tell the whole truth; -and, as an instance of evasion, he says that there had been plague in St -Giles's, St Martin's, St Clement's, and St Paul's, Covent Garden, for -three or four years before (the bills of mortality give only 12, 9, and 5 -deaths respectively for all London in the years 1662, 1663 and 1664), "as -I have been certainly informed by the people themselves that had it in -their houses in those parishes." - -But, in claiming an earlier beginning for the plague than the bills -recognize, and in setting aside the diagnosis of fever as insufficient, -Boghurst takes what is known, in the controversies upon the nature and -affinities of plague, as the "ontological" view: that is to say, he sees -in plague a fixed and uniform entity, and he sees the same in fever. The -other view is the developmental, which recognizes transitions from the one -type of pestilential disease into the other. The great writers of the -time, Willis, Sydenham, and Morton, were none of them "ontologists." They -all taught the scale of malignity, which had simple continued fever at one -end, then a severer fever with spots and "parotids," then a fever with -buboes, and at the farthest end of the scale the true plague, with its -buboes, carbuncles, and tokens. Nor is it denied by competent observers, -such as Boghurst himself, that an epidemic of plague declined as a whole -in malignity towards the end, so that the buboes suppurated, and three out -of four, or three out of five, patients recovered. If that were the case -in the descent of the curve, why should there not have been something -corresponding in the ascent? If certain cases of the prevailing fever in -the beginning of the year developed buboes which suppurated (as in the -case treated by Hodges at Christmas, 1664), should they be called plague -or fever? Willis would have answered in favour of fever, until such time, -at least, as the "epidemic constitution" of the season changed definitely -to plague[1204]; he does in effect answer so in the particular instance -of the Oxford fever of 1643, which in some cases was bubonic, whereas, in -1645, he makes no doubt that the disease prevailing in Oxford and -Wallingford was true plague. - -The more general discussion of this theme will be found in the concluding -section of the chapter on the Black Death, where illustrations are given -of typhus fever turning to bubonic fever and to plague, from recent and -anomalous outbreaks of plague in Arab villages or encampments, in some -Indian villages, and elsewhere. The conclusion there come to was that the -type of plague, or the bubonic type, prevailed when the infection of the -filthy habitations began with change of season to rise from the soil, -whereas the form of sickness was typhus fever so long as the infection was -primarily in the atmosphere of the dwellings. - -We may admit, then, that there was some ambiguity in the naming and -classifying of pestilential cases in the early months of 1665. If we -follow the bills--and there is nothing else to follow--the plague-deaths -in all the parishes of London for the seven weeks from April 18 to June 6 -were respectively no more than 2, 0, 9, 3, 14, 17 and 43, the deaths from -"fever" and "spotted fever" being much more numerous. - -Having thus far determined the date of beginning, we come next to the line -of advance of the plague of 1665. It was from the western and northern -suburbs towards the City, the eastern suburbs, and Southwark. Boghurst, -who practised in St Giles's-in-the-Fields, says: - - "The plague fell first upon the highest ground, for our parish is the - highest ground about London, and the best air, and was first infected. - Highgate, Hampstead and Acton also all shared in it." From the west - end of the town, Boghurst continues, "it gradually insinuated and - crept down Holborn and the Strand, and then into the City, and at last - to the east end of the suburbs, so that it was half a year at the west - end of the city [in his experience] before the east end and Stepney - was infected, which was about the middle of July. Southwark, being the - south suburb, was infected almost as soon as the west end." But the - same writer farther explains that "it fell upon several places of the - city and suburbs like rain--at the first at St Giles', St Martin's, - Chancery-lane, Southwark, Houndsditch, and some places within the - City, as at Proctor's-houses." - -The slow progress from west to east has been made much of by Defoe, who -used the bills of mortality to ascertain the rise of the infection in the -several districts. His conclusion is the same in the main as Boghurst's -contemporary observation; only that he makes the infection of Southwark -later, and with reason so far as the bills show:-- - - "It was now mid-July, and the plague which had chiefly raged at the - other end of the town, and as I said before, in the parishes of St - Giles's, St Andrew's, Holbourn, and towards Westminster, began now to - come eastward towards the part where I lived. It was to be observed, - indeed, that it did not come straight on toward us; for the City, that - is to say within the walls, was indifferent healthy still; nor was it - got then very much over the water into Southwark; for though there - died that week 1268 of all distempers, whereof it might be supposed - above 900 died of the plague [only 725 in the bill], yet there was but - 28 in the whole City within the walls, and but 19 in Southwark, - Lambeth included; whereas in the parishes of St Giles' and St Martin's - in the Fields alone, there died 421.... We perceived, I say, the - distemper to draw our way; viz. by the parishes of Clerkenwell, - Cripplegate, Shoreditch, and Bishopsgate; which last two parishes - joining to Aldgate, Whitechapel and Stepney, the infection came at - length to spread its utmost rage and violence in those parts, even - when it abated at the western parishes where it began. It was very - strange to observe that in this particular week, from the 4th to the - 13th July, when, as I have observed, there died near 400 of the plague - in the two parishes of St Martin's and St Giles' in the Fields only, - there died in the parish of Aldgate but four, in the parish of - Whitechapel three, and in the parish of Stepney but one." In the - following week of July, with a total of 1761 deaths, whereof of the - plague 1089, only 16 occurred on the Southwark side. Soon, however, - Cripplegate had the infection at its hottest, and at the same time - Clerkenwell, St Sepulchre's parish, St Bride's and Aldersgate. "While - it was in all these parishes, the City and the parishes of the - Southwark side of the water, and all Stepney, Whitechapel, Aldgate, - Wapping and Ratcliff were very little touched; so that people went - about their business unconcerned, carried on their trades, kept open - their shops, and conversed freely with one another in all the City, - the east and north-east suburbs, and in Southwark, almost as if the - plague had not been among us." - -In another passage Defoe brings out the moral of its gradual advance. He -had shown - - "how it began at one end of the town, and proceeded gradually and - slowly from one part to another; and like a dark cloud that passes - over our heads, which as it thickens and overcasts the air at one - end, clears up at the other end: so while the plague went on raging - from west to east, as it went forwards east it abated in the west, by - which means those parts of the town which were not seized, or who were - left, and where it had spent its fury were, as it were, spared to help - and assist the other; whereas had the distemper spread itself all over - the City and suburbs at once, raging in all places alike, as it has - done since in some places abroad, the whole body of the people must - have been overwhelmed" etc. - -That is how Defoe constructs a concrete picture from the dry statistics of -the weekly bills. He has defined the stages, and pointed the moral, with a -firmer hand than the reality would most likely have warranted. But no -scientific writer could have apprehended more correctly the general fact -of a gradual invasion from the west end of the town. - -These striking facts of the gradual advance of the Great Plague of London -from west to east will be found to suit that theory of the plague-virus -which has been illustrated in various parts of this volume. The virus of -plague is a soil-poison, or the ground is its habitat; its quiescence or -activity depends upon whether or not the state of the soil favours the -fermentation of the special organic matters therein, which special organic -matters we here take to be the products of cadaveric decomposition. The -conclusion that the poison of plague lay in the soil, and that it rose -into the air in emanations or effluvia, was forced upon all those who -thought much about the matter from the medieval period onwards. Thus, the -apothecary Boghurst, says in his first chapter: "And therefore my opinion -falls in wholly with those who make the earth the seminary and seed-plot -of these venomous vapours and pestiferous effluvia, which vitiate and -corrupt the air, and consequently induce the pestilence." And again: "The -plague is a most subtle, insinuating, venomous, deleterious exhalation, -arising from the maturation of the ferment of the forces (?) of the earth, -extracted into the air by the heat of the sun." It is true that Boghurst, -like the sixteenth-century writers abroad, such as Ambroise Par, locates -the venom in mysterious cavities and bowels of the earth, and dwells upon -the agency of earthquakes in setting it free. But he comes to more -ordinary causes in his enumeration of favouring things--"dunghills, -excrements, dead bodies lying unburied, putrefying churchyards too full," -and again "breaking up tombs and graves where dead bodies have been long -buried." As telling against the last, however, he adds: "When the -charnel-house at St Paul's was demolished, there was a thousand cart-loads -of dead men's bones carried away to Finsbury, yet no plague followed it." - -The activity of this soil-poison depends upon processes in the soil which -go on so slowly that the link of cause and effect is easily overlooked. In -the last resort, they are dependent on the rise and fall of the -ground-water. It was observed beyond all doubt as the law in Lower Egypt, -that the plague came forth annually after the Nile had begun to fall, and -that it reached its height in the months of March, April and May, when the -soil was driest, or the pores of the ground occupied solely by air after -having been full of water. It was observed, also, that the plague-area and -the inundation-area were co-extensive. Lower Egypt is, of course, somewhat -peculiar (Lower Bengal coming near to it) in these regular alternations of -air alone and water alone in the pores of the ground. But other countries -have the same sharp contrast occasionally, and London had the contrast -very decidedly in the years 1664 and 1665. The months from November 1664 -to June 1665, some of which ought to have brought snow or rain to raise -the wells and springs to their highest periodic water-mark early in the -year, were quite remarkable for drought: Richard Baxter says that no one -remembered the like. The ground-water, instead of rising all through the -winter, must have fallen lower and lower as the spring and summer -advanced. The pores of the ground had been occupied with air to an unusual -depth of the subsoil, and the presence of air in these circumstances had -given occasion to that ferment-activity in the special organic matters of -an old-inhabited soil which produced the virus of plague. The stratum of -subsoil would become dry first in the more elevated parts; and as the -ground-water continued to fall, the air would reach in due course an -unwonted stratum in the lower situations. Defoe says that they came to -water at eighteen feet in digging the Whitechapel plague-pits. The same -seasonal march of a soil-infection from the higher ground to the lower -has been observed in modern times in other cities, and in other diseases -than plague. The drought for seven months from November to June would not, -of itself, have caused a great plague. But it was an essential member of -the co-operating group of things; and it probably determined of itself the -season when the great plague was once more to come and take away the -enormous increase of poor people. - - -Mortality and Incidents of the Great Plague. - -The plague of 1665 was justly called the Great Plague, and is sometimes -spoken of as "the plague of London," as if it were unique. But it was not -much more severe than those of 1603 and 1625 had been for the London of -their generation; and there had been many plagues when London was a small -capital, such as those of 1407, 1479, 1500, 1513 and 1563, which had cut -off as large a proportion (one-fifth to one-sixth) of the population. The -inhabitants in 1665 were not far short of half a million, nearly twice as -many as in 1603, and about a third more than in 1625. The increased -mortality in 1665 was somewhat more than proportionate to the increase of -inhabitants, as the following table shows:-- - - Highest - Year Estimated Total Plague mortality Worst - population deaths deaths in a week week - - 1603 250,000 42,940 33,347 3385 25 Aug.-1 Sept. - 1625 320,000 63,001 41,313 5205 11-18 Aug. - 1665 460,000 97,306 68,596 8297 12-19 Sept. - -Reckoned from the christenings and burials in the bills of Parish Clerks' -Hall, the population in 1605 would have been 224,275, and in 1622, -272,207. But in those years (and until after 1636) certain of the newer -parishes (known as the Seven Parishes), including Stepney and Westminster, -kept separate bills, of which some figures for 1603 and 1625 are given at -p. 477 and p. 511. The population of the Seven Parishes appears to have -been about one-ninth of the whole metropolis in 1603, and about -one-seventh in 1625, while Graunt, a contemporary, makes it one-fifth in -1662. These fractions have been added in the table, so as to make 1603 -and 1625 comparable with 1665. In 1603 and 1625, the highest mortality in -a week does not show the deaths in those parishes (Westminster, Stepney -&c.) which did not send their returns to the general bill until 1636, but -their figures have been included in the totals for those years. It will be -seen that the plague of 1665 fully kept pace with the increase of -population. The old City within the walls had 15,207 deaths in the year -from all causes. It had become crowded since the beginning of Elizabeth's -reign by its gardens and churchyards being built upon, and its mansions -turned into tenement-houses for a poorer class; and yet in 1563 the -mortality from plague and other causes in the City and its Liberties, with -a population hardly exceeding that of the City alone in 1665, was 20,372. -The enormous total of 1665 was largely made up from the populous suburbs -of Cripplegate, Whitechapel, Stepney, St Martin's in the Fields, St -Giles's in the Fields, Southwark and Westminster, which would have -contributed but little to the total down to the middle third of the -sixteenth century. - -The following tables will show the progress of the epidemic from week to -week, the weekly deaths from all causes and from plague, and the incidence -upon the several parts of London. The so-called ordinary deaths are much -in excess of the average, and must have included many that were really -cases of plague. Part of the excess, however, was due to the great -prevalence of fever and spotted fever, which made a heavy mortality in the -early months before the plague began. Bowel complaint also is credited -with a good many deaths. The other more important items in the bills are -consumption and infantile troubles. Boghurst, however, says: "Almost all -other diseases turned into the plague. For five or six months together -there was hardly any other disease seen but the plague and a few -casualties, whatever the Bills say; and Thucydides says the same of the -plague at Athens." As to the total of deaths in the year from all causes -(97,306), Hodges thinks that it does not show the whole mortality. The -largest number of burials in one week is 8297; but he thinks that 12,000 -were buried in that week, and that 4000 were buried in one day and night. -But there seems to be no reason to set aside the tally of the sextons to -that extent; the returns were made weekly from one hundred and forty -parishes, and might easily have been exact to within a few in each. - -_Bill of Mortality of the Plague-year 1665 in London._ - - Week - ending Christened Buried Plague - - Dec. 27 229 291 1 - Jan. 3 239 349 0 - 10 235 394 0 - 17 223 415 0 - 24 237 474 0 - 31 216 409 0 - Feb. 7 221 393 0 - 14 224 462 1 - 21 232 393 0 - 28 233 396 0 - Mar. 7 236 441 0 - 14 236 433 0 - 21 221 363 0 - 28 238 353 0 - Apr. 4 242 344 0 - 11 245 382 0 - 18 287 344 0 - 25 229 398 2 - May 2 237 388 0 - 9 211 347 9 - 16 227 353 3 - 23 231 385 14 - 30 229 400 17 - June 6 234 405 43 - 13 206 558 112 - 20 204 615 168 - 27 199 684 267 - July 4 207 1006 470 - 11 197 1268 725 - 18 194 1761 1089 - 25 193 2785 1843 - Aug. 1 215 3014 2010 - 8 178 4030 2817 - 15 166 5319 3880 - 22 171 5568 4237 - 29 169 7496 6102 - Sept. 5 167 8252 6988 - 12 168 7690 6544 - 19 176 8297 7165 - 26 146 6460 5533 - Oct. 3 142 5720 4929 - 10 141 5068 4327 - 17 147 3219 2665 - 24 104 1806 1421 - 31 104 1388 1031 - Nov. 7 95 1787 1414 - 14 113 1359 1050 - 21 108 905 652 - 28 112 544 333 - Dec. 5 123 428 210 - 12 133 442 243 - 19 147 525 281 - ----- ------ ------ - 9,967 97,306 68,596 - -_Incidence on Parishes of the Plague in 1665._ - -_Ninety-seven Parishes within the Walls._ - - All deaths Plague deaths - 97 City parishes 15,207 9,877 - -(The parishes with heaviest mortalities were St Anne's, Blackfriars; -Christ Church, Newgate; St Stephen's, Coleman St; St Martin's, Vintry; -Allhallows Barking, the Great, and in-the-Wall; St Andrew's, Wardrobe). - -_Sixteen Parishes without the Walls and in the Liberties._ - - St Giles's, Cripplegate 8069 4838 - St Botolph's, Aldgate 4926 4051 - St Olave's, Southwark 4793 2785 - St Sepulchre's 4509 2746 - St Saviour's, Southwark 4235 3446 - St Andrew's, Holborn 3958 3103 - St Botolph's, Bishopsgate 3464 2500 - St Bride's, Fleet Street 2111 1427 - St George's, Southwark 1613 1260 - St Botolph's, Aldersgate 997 755 - St Dunstan's in the West 958 665 - St Bartholomew the Great 493 344 - St Thomas's, Southwark 475 371 - Bridewell Precinct 230 179 - St Bartholomew the Less 193 139 - Trinity, Minories 168 123 - - Pesthouse 159 - -_Twelve Out-parishes in Middlesex and Surrey._ - - Stepney 8598 6583 - Whitechapel 4766 3855 - St Giles's in the Fields 4457 3216 - St Leonard's, Shoreditch 2669 949 - St Magdalen's, Bermondsey 1943 1362 - St James's, Clerkenwell 1863 1377 - St Mary's, Newington 1272 1004 - St Katharine's, Tower 956 601 - Lambeth 798 537 - Islington 696 593 - Rotherhithe 304 210 - Hackney 232 132 - -_Five Parishes in the City and Liberties of Westminster._ - - St Martin's in the Fields 4804 2883 - St Margaret's 4710 3742 - St Clement's Danes 1969 1319 - St Paul's, Covent Garden 408 281 - St Mary's, Savoy 303 198 - - Pesthouse 156 - -The Great Plague brought back all the familiar incidents of 1603 and 1625, -and revealed no new feature. As before, all that could afford to do so -made their escape at the outset. Sydenham, who fled with the rest, says -that two-thirds of the population left; which may be true of the City -proper, but certainly not of the populous Liberties and suburbs on both -sides of the water, as Defoe points out. The poorer classes were left -stranded, and bore the brunt of the calamity, as they had always done. -Flight was, doubtless, the best step to take, the motive being to get -"into clean air," as cardinal Wolsey expressed it in 1515. Those that were -left behind knew that they were in bad air, and knew that it mattered -little whether they came into contact with the sick or not[1205]. Their -employments and wages mostly ceased as the plague extended from suburb to -suburb and to the City, so that with starvation on the one side and plague -on the other, they held their lives cheaply and bore themselves with an -unconcern which was strange to the rich. Their desperate case explains, as -Defoe correctly saw, the ease with which the mayor could always get men to -undertake for pay the disagreeable and risky work of day and night -watchmen to the multitude of shut-up houses, of bearers of the dead, of -buriers, of nurses, and distributors of the public charity. As soon as any -fell in these humble ranks, others were willing to take their place; so -that at no period of the epidemic was there any break-down in the work of -expeditious burial or any failure in good order and decency. To carry the -poor through the great crisis much money was needed; Defoe says that it -was forthcoming from all parts of England and he estimates the -distribution of relief at thousands of pounds weekly, although he failed -to find the exact accounts, which, he thinks, had been destroyed in the -fire of 1666. A thousand pounds a week, he says, was given from the king's -purse. The whole of this great system of relief was under the direction of -the Lord Mayor, Sir John Lawrence, who proved himself worthy of the best -traditions of his office. In the out-parishes there were Justices of the -Peace who discharged the like duties. - -The regular clergy for the most part left the town, but two are honourably -mentioned as having stayed with the plague-stricken people, Dr Anthony -Walker, of St Mary Aldermanbury, and Mr Meriton[1206]. - -Sometime in August Lord Arlington wrote to the bishop of London that the -king was informed of many ministers and lecturers being absent from their -posts during this time of contagion, and that nonconformists had thrust -themselves into their pulpits to preach seditions and doctrines contrary -to the Church. His majesty wishes the bishop to prevent such mischiefs to -Church and State[1207]. The bishop replied, from Fulham, 19 August, that -the sober clergy remain, that he had refused some that offered to supply -vacancies, suspecting them to be of the factious party, though they -promised to conform, that most of his officers had deserted him and gone -into the country, but he could not learn that any nonconformists had -invaded the pulpit[1208]. The bishop, however, was not likely to hear much -within his garden walls at Fulham of what was passing at Aldgate. There -can be no question that Church pulpits were occupied during the plague by -ministers who had been ejected in 1662. Chief among them was Thomas -Vincent, formerly minister of St Magdalen's, Milk Street, who preached in -St Botolph's, Aldgate, Great St Helen's, and Allhallows Staining[1209]. -Vincent says that it was the opportunity of irregular practitioners both -in the Church and in medicine, and he is disposed to say a good word for -the latter from a fellow feeling with them. Besides Vincent, says Richard -Baxter[1210], there were "some strangers that came thither since they were -silenced, as Mr Chester, Mr Janeway, Mr Turner, Mr Grimes, Mr Franklin, -and some others." These all became prominent in London Nonconformity; and -Baxter clearly traces their subsequent power to the opportunity that the -plague gave them: - - "But one great benefit the plague brought to the city, that is, it - occasioned the silenced ministers more openly and laboriously to - preach the Gospel to the exceeding comfort and profit of the people; - in so much that to this day [1670] the freedom of preaching which this - occasioned, cannot, by the daily guards of soldiers, nor by the - imprisonments of multitudes be restrained. The ministers that were - silenced for Nonconformity had ever since 1662 done their work - privately." - -Baxter knew of none among the Nonconformist ministers remaining in London -who fell victims to the plague, except "Mr Grunman, a German, a very -humble, holy, able minister, but being a silenced Nonconformist, was so -poor that he was not able to remove his family." Two others of the sect, -who fled, lost their lives--"Mr Cross, flying from the plague into the -country died with his wife and some children as soon as he came thither, -in the house of that learned worthy man, Mr Shaw, another silenced -minister," and Mr Roberts, "a godly Welsh minister, who also flying from -the plague, fell sick as far off as between Shrewsbury and Oswestry and -died in a little straw, but none durst entertain him." Baxter himself -found refuge in the house of the Hampdens, in Bucks[1211], leaving his -family, as he says, in the midst of plague at Acton. Defoe draws from the -incident of the Nonconformists in Church pulpits a somewhat sentimental -moral; he sees nothing aggressive in it, but merely the levelling of -differences by affliction, and a short-lived prospect of reconciliation. - -The irregular practitioners of physic would appear to have been in great -force, just as in former plagues, when their bills were on every post. -Defoe professes to give specimens of their advertisements, which he might -have adapted from actual advertisements in the news-sheets, the -'Intelligencer' and the 'Newes.' The empirics were of both sexes, and of -foreign extraction as well as native. - -Among the regular physicians who practised for a time, at least, in the -plague were the famous Professor Glisson, Dr Nathan Paget (an intimate -friend of Milton and cousin of Elizabeth Minshull whom the poet, in 1664, -had married for his third wife), Dr Wharton, of St Thomas's Hospital, a -distinguished anatomist, Dr Berwick or Barwick, Dr Brooke, Dr Hodges, and -Dr Conyers. The last was one of two of his order who died of the plague. -Two Paracelsist or chemical physicians, Dr Dey and Dr Starkey, died of it: -and Dr George Thomson says that he survived three several attacks of the -buboes, the first sore lasting for four months. A considerable number of -chirurgeons and apothecaries are said (by Defoe) to have fallen victims. -Pepys says that at the first meeting of Gresham College (the Royal -Society) since the plague, held on January 22, 1666, Dr Goddard "did fill -us with talk in defence of his and his fellow physicians' going out of -town in the plague-time," his plea being that their particular patients -were out of town, and they left at liberty. But that excuse ignores the -fact that the time was a great emergency, and puts the defence upon the -wrong ground. - -Goddard had attended Cromwell in the Irish and Scottish campaigns as -physician to the army. For a short time he had been a member of the -Council of State, and for several years was master of a College at Oxford. -He was Gresham professor of physic, and one of the original council of the -Royal Society. This eminent man of science was the inventor and proprietor -of "Goddard's drop," the secret of which he sold to Charles II. for a -large sum, said to have been 6000. Dr Martin Lister says that the king -showed him the receipt, and that the drops were nothing more than the -volatile spirit of raw silk rectified with oil of cinnamon, and no better -than ordinary spirit of hartshorn. Another writer says that the drops -contained also skull of a person hanged and dried viper. According to -Sydenham, Goddard's drops were preferable to other volatile spirits for -the particular purpose, namely, the recovery of people from faintings of -various kinds. Even if Dr Goddard had remained in town, he would have been -a trafficker in nostrums as much as the empirics; nor is it probable, from -all that we know, that he could have brought epidemiological principles to -bear upon the management of the epidemic among the poor. The best teaching -of the time counselled that which he himself practised, namely, flight. - -Defoe says that the Lord Mayor (Sir John Lawrence), the Sheriffs (Sir -George Waterman and Sir Charles Doe), the Court of Aldermen and certain of -the Common Council, or their deputies, came to a resolution and published -it, viz.: - - "That they would not quit the City themselves, but that they would be - always at hand for the preserving of good order in every place, and - for the doing justice on all occasions; as also for the distributing - the public charity to the poor; and, in a word, for the doing the duty - and discharging the trust reposed in them by the citizens to the - utmost of their power." - -The minutes are extant of numerous meetings of the Mayor and Council, -with the orders made (on May 11, June 17, 19, and 27, July 12, and at -short intervals thereafter)[1212]. Two of the Aldermen died of plague. - -It appears to be admitted by all, that good order was kept, the dead -buried expeditiously, day and night watchmen provided for an immense -number of infected houses (until, as Vincent says, the infected houses -became so many that there was no use shutting them up), bearers of the -dead and grave-diggers engaged to fill the places of those who died, and -applications heard for relief. One of the things that justly excited the -admiration of Defoe was the abundant supply of all the markets, and the -almost unvarying weight of the penny wheaten loaf, which is given every -week at the foot of the bill of mortality. The Parish Clerks brought out -their bill regularly, although Hodges says that the sextons failed at -length to keep an accurate account of the number of corpses. All the dead -were buried at first in coffins and with full ceremony; but when the -infection became hottest in August and September, especially in the -crowded East-end and in Southwark, the bodies are said to have been -brought to the pits in cartloads and thrown in, sometimes without even a -covering[1213]. That is alleged by the writers on the plagues of 1603 and -1625, and the same must have happened to some extent in 1665, but whether -to the extent that Defoe's graphic account implies may be doubted. - -The burials took place over night until, as Vincent says, "now the nights -are too short to bury the dead." This was a reversal of the order, first -issued in 1547 and probably carried out in the plague of 1603, that no -burial was to take place between six in the evening and six in the -morning. Even at the worst time, coffins would seem to have been got for -most. Vincent says, "Now we could hardly go forth but we should meet many -coffins," and he mentions one woman whom he met with a little coffin under -her arm. Evelyn enters in his diary on September 7, the worst week of the -epidemic: "I went all along the City and suburbs from Kent Street to St -James's, a dismal passage and dangerous, to see so many coffins exposed in -the streets now thin of people." Defoe's weird description of the Aldgate -plague-pit at midnight, with seven or eight lanterns set on the heaps of -earth round the edge, and of the constant journeys to and fro of the -dead-carts, has probably made the most of the realities of the case. - -A letter of Pepys to Lady Carteret, written from Woolwich on September 4, -gives us a glimpse of the state of the City: - - "I having stayed in the city till about 7400 died in one week, and of - them above 6000 of the plague, and little noise heard day nor night - but tolling of bells; till I could walk Lumber-Street and not meet - twenty persons from one end to the other, and not fifty upon the - Exchange; till whole families, 10 and 12 together, have been swept - away; till my very physician, Dr Burnet, who undertook to secure me - against any infection, having survived the month of his own being shut - up, died himself of the plague; till the nights, though much - lengthened, are grown too short to conceal the burials of those that - died the day before, people being thereby constrained to borrow - daylight for that service." The butcheries are everywhere visited, his - brewer is shut up, and his baker dead with his whole family. - -On September 20, he writes in his diary: - - "But Lord! what a sad time it is to all: no boats upon the river, and - grass grows all up and down Whitehall Court, and nobody but poor - wretches in the streets." - -Some three weeks later (October 11) Evelyn writes in his diary: "Went -through the whole city, having occasion to alight out of the coach in -several places about business of money, when I was environed with -multitudes of poor pestiferous creatures begging alms. The shops -universally shut up." Vincent says that he would meet "many with sores and -limping in the streets," (from the suppurating buboes in the groins). -Again: - - "It would be endless to speak what we have seen and heard of:--some in - their frenzy rising out of their beds and leaping about their rooms; - others crying and roaring at their windows; some coming forth almost - naked into the streets" - ---the delirium being sometimes of the gentle or foolish kind, and -sometimes violent. These incidents are much enlarged upon by Defoe, who -makes out the cries and groans (mentioned by Dekker and others for the -earlier plagues) to have been from the pain of the hard and tense buboes. -Boghurst says that the treatment by actual cautery and other escharotics -caused more pain than the buboes. - -As a set-off to the more horrible picture given by Defoe of the inmates of -a house all dying together, their bodies being found by the watchmen and -taken away in the dead-cart, we may turn to Vincent's plain account of -what happened in the house where he lodged, probably in the neighbourhood -of Aldgate or Bishopsgate, when he came up from Islington to minister to -the sick. - - "We were eight in the family--three men, three youths, an old woman - and a maid; all which came to me, hearing of my stay in town, some to - accompany me, others to help me [he was a celebrity in the religious - world with a large following]. It was the latter end of September - before any of us were touched.... But at last we were visited.... At - first our maid was smitten; it began with a shivering and trembling in - her flesh, and quickly seized on her spirits.... I came home and the - maid was on her death-bed; and another crying out for help, being left - alone in a sweating fainting-fit. It was on Monday when the maid was - smitten; on Thursday she died full of tokens. On Friday one of the - youths had a swelling in his groin, and on the Lord's day died with - the marks of the distemper upon him. On the same day another youth did - sicken, and on the Wednesday following he died. On the Thursday night - his master fell sick of the disease, and within a day or two was full - of spots, but strangely recovered.... The rest were preserved." - -The two boys appear to have been conscious to the end, and to have died in -the placid mood that often came on in the last hours of plague, as in -other prostrating infections such as yellow fever and cholera. In those -two weeks at the end of September and beginning of October the burials in -all London were 6460 (of plague 5533) and 5720 (of plague 4929). - -The chief preventive measure which the mayor had to give effect to was the -shutting-up of infected houses. Defoe says that he carried out that odious -policy considerately. The policy was a traditional one, and may or may -not have had its origin in medical prescription. It was practised, as we -have seen in a former chapter, early in the reign of Henry VIII., if not -even before that. The doctrine underlying it was the contagiousness of -plague, which was much more a doctrine of the faculty than of the people, -and was most of all a doctrine of the Court. Originally the dogma of -contagiousness, in all its rigour, had been made for the persons of the -Tudor monarchs, and as late as 1665 it was in the atmosphere of the Court -that the contagion of plague was invested with the most powerful -properties. The common people of London gave no heed to it, because they -saw every hour that it was a matter of indifference; the middle classes -held it in a qualified way, knowing that there was less to fear from -plague-bodies than from plague-infected ground; but kings took the -comprehensive view of it, allowing no exceptions or scientific -reservations, and the Court doctors, such as Mead in the 18th century, at -length succeeded in making the high doctrine of plague-contagion to pass -current. Two instances are known from extant petitions, of its rigorous -application upon Court servants in 1665: one in the case of a trumpeter of -the king, and the other in the case of the barber to the household. In the -latter case, apparently when the Court was at Salisbury in the autumn, a -stranger supposed to be visited with the sickness ran into the barber's -tent in his absence; whereon the tent and all his goods and instruments of -livelihood were burnt, he himself confined, and his servants sent away, -according to the orders for the preservation of the Court, "so that he -lost his trade and was utterly ruined[1214]." - -The more discriminating of the profession knew and taught that the seeds -of plague could lurk in a bundle of clothes, or of bedding, or in other -effects, or in bales of goods, and that they became the more virulent -through the fermentation that goes on in these circumstances. The -contagion was understood to be _per fomitem_ and _per distans_; on the -other hand, experience was rather against a contagion from the exhalations -of the sick: the immunity of nurses was as striking as it has been in many -other contagions. The people were instinctively right in their belief -that they mostly caught the plague because the infection was in the air of -the place; so long as they were living on a plague-stricken spot, they -were exposed to the risk; and if there were any difference in safety -between dwelling-houses, and the streets, markets or shops, the preference -seemed to lie with the former. The traditional or official doctrine, -however, was that the plague-stricken were the sources of contagion, that -all who had come near them were suspect, and that the safety of the well -depended upon the rigorous shutting-up of the sick and the suspected -together. The experience of epidemic after epidemic might have shown that -this theoretical reasoning, so attractive to the "thorough" order of mind, -was worthless in practice. A great plague pursued its course until the -infected houses became too many for shutting up; if many plague-years did -not develop epidemics of the first degree, that was in accordance with -some epidemiological law, and not because the preventive measures were one -year effective and another year ineffective. However, a traditional -doctrine will always survive a good deal of adverse experience; and the -shutting-up of houses, which had signally failed in 1563, 1593, 1603, 1625 -and 1636, was resorted to once more in 1665, and perhaps with more rigour -than ever so as to give it a fair chance. Defoe has stated with great -fairness the hardships of it, and he follows Hodges and Boghurst in -pronouncing it a mistake and a failure. Most of the horrible incidents of -the plague came from the shutting-up of houses; those which Defoe -introduces in that connexion do not exceed probability. It is hard to say -whether the condemnation of shutting-up, which found wide currency during -and immediately after the plague of 1665, would have at length made any -difference to the traditional doctrine and practice. The occasion did not -arise again in London except for a few months in 1666, when the old -practice seems to have been enforced. The corresponding doctrine and -practice that arose in its place, was quarantine against foreign -importation; that rested firstly upon the sophistical assertion of the -all-powerful Mead, that plague had been an exotic to England, and secondly -upon the doctrine of plague-contagion in its most comprehensive and least -discriminating form. But the quarantine law dates really from the Queen -Anne period, and the curious history of its rise, progress, and overthrow -belongs to another part of this work. - -The other general preventive measure besides the shutting-up of "visited" -houses was the burning of fires in the streets, which was also a tradition -from Tudor times. The mayor loyally carried out that also; until in the -beginning of autumn a concurrence of things made an end of the practice. -These adverse influences were first, the heavy showers of rain, which put -the fires out; secondly, the differences in medical opinion whether -coal-fires or wood-fires were the better, and whether fires were to be -recommended at all; and thirdly the popular perception that the fires made -no difference to the progress of the epidemic. - -In the way of individual protection and treatment, the College of -Physicians issued a tract full of directions and prescriptions, which -Boghurst says were all old, being taken from De Vigo ([Dagger] 1520). It -is not necessarily against methods of practice that they are old; but one -cannot fail to observe how closely the medieval teaching about plague, -cause and cure together, was followed to the last in England: for two -centuries the writers on plague reproduced the chapters and paragraphs -almost without change that we find in the treatise of the bishop of -Aarhus, which circulated in manuscript in England in the 15th century and -was first printed about 1480. The most popular preventive was something -"to smell to," not sweet but _aigre_. Hence the use of civet-boxes, -pouncet-boxes, and pomanders, which were made to suit all purses. There -were also plague-waters, one of which, "the plague-water of Matthias," -figures among the prescriptions of the College of Physicians both in a -cheap and in an expensive form. The College's prescription "to break the -tumour" is as follows: - - "Take a great onion, hollow it, put into it a fig, rue cut small, and - a dram of Venice treacle; put it close stopt in a wet paper, and roast - it in the embers; apply it hot unto the tumour; lay three or four, one - after another; let one lie three hours." - -The Paracelsist or chemical physician, Thomson, gives a prescription which -brings out the mystical tendencies of that otherwise meritorious sect. It -relates to a method of curing plague by means of a toad. - - "The great difficulty to bring this animal to a true Zenexton lies in - an exquisite preparation of it, the manner whereof that great - investigator of verity, Van Helmont, hath thus delivered, as he - received instructions from Butler, an Irishman who (to Helmont's - knowledge) had cured some thousands of the pest in London. He gave - directions that a large Bufo, taken in the afternoon in the month of - June, should be hung up by the legs, nigh the fire, over a vessel of - yellow wax" etc. - -Tobacco, smoked or chewed, came into great vogue in 1665 as a preservative -from the plague. Hearne, the antiquary, says: - - "I have been told that in the last great plague at London [1665] none - that kept tobacconists shops had the plague. It is certain that - smoaking it was looked upon as a most excellent preservative; in so - much that even children were obliged to smoak. And I remember that I - heard formerly Tom Rogers, who was yeoman beadle, say that when he was - that year, when the plague raged, a schoolboy at Eaton, all the boys - of that school were obliged to smoak in the school every morning, and - that he was never whipped so much in his life as he was one morning - for not smoaking[1215]." - -The best medical details of the Great Plague come from Boghurst, who -claims that the observations were all his own. - - With regard to its incidence he says: "About the beginning most men - got it with fuddling, surfeiting, over heating themselves, and - disorderly living." Again: "Those that married in the heat of the - disease (if they had not had the disease before) almost all fell into - it in a week or a fortnight after it, both in the city and in the - country, of which most died, especially the men." One of Dekker's - stories of the year 1603 is an illustration of the same thing. "It - usually went through a whole kindred, though living in several places; - which was the cause it swept away many whole families.... In some - houses ten out of twelve died, and sixteen out of twenty." Melancholy - for the loss of friends predisposed to it, while cheerfulness and - courage fortified some against it. Old people that had many sores upon - them, especially carbuncles, almost all died. The natural - constitution, disposition, or complexion "did much to make or mar the - disease." People with hollow eyes commonly died. Those who drank - brandy and strong waters grew mad, looked about them wildly, and died - quickly in two days. "All that I saw that were let blood, if they had - been sick two, three, four or five days or more, died the same day." - Teeming women fared miserably; they were not more subject than others: - but scarce one in forty lived (this is enlarged upon by Defoe). Many - people had the spotted fever and the plague both together, and many - the French pox and the plague both together, and yet both sorts - commonly lived (someone says that men caught the French pox of - purpose[1216]). All sorts died, but more of the good than the bad, - more men than women, more of dull complexion than fair. "Of all the - common hackney prostitutes of Luteners-lane, Dog-yard, Cross-lane, - Baldwin-gardens, Hatton-garden and other places, the common criers of - oranges, oysters, fruits etc., all the impudent drunken drabbing - bayles and fellows, and many others of the _rouge route_, there is but - few missing--verifying the testimony of Diemerbroeck that the plague - left the rotten bodies and took the sound[1217]." It fell not very - thick upon old people till about the middle or slake of the disease, - and most in the decrease and declining of the disease. Cats, dogs, - cattle, poultry, etc., were free from infection. - - Some died in twelve or twenty days, but most in five or six. In summer - about one-half that were sick, died; but towards winter, three of four - lived. None died suddenly as stricken by lightning: "I saw none die - under twenty or twenty-four hours." After one rising, or bubo, was - broke and run, commonly another and another would rise in several - parts of the body, so that many had the disease upon them half a year; - some risings would not break under half a year, being so deep in the - flesh. - -This explains Dekker's statement in 1603 that some had buboes repeatedly, -and that one person had eighteen sores. Dr Thomson himself had buboes -thrice. Hodges, also, knew of many cases fatal at the third seizure, the -later attacks being not relapses but new infections; some even fell at the -fifth or sixth time, being before well recovered. In one of the earlier -London plagues, that of 1563, Jones saw a case of a woman near Temple Bar -that ended fatally at the third attack, the buboes having suppurated -twice, but not at the third time. Boghurst goes on: - - Of evil omen was "a white, soft, sudden, puffed up tumour on the neck - behind the ears, in the armpit, or in the flank;" also a "large - extended hard tumour under the chin, swelling downwards upon the - throat and fetching a great compass" (the brawny swelling of the - submaxillary salivary glands and surrounding tissues). Tokens came out - after a violent sweat, which was often induced of purpose by nurses, - who said, 'Cochineal is a fine thing to bring out the tokens.' Nurses - often killed their patients by giving them cold drinks. Many also were - killed by the shutting-up of houses, by wickedness (of nurses ?), by - confident and ignorant mountebanks, by over-hasty cutting and burning - of buboes. Servants and poor people removed to the pest-house or to - other houses in their sickness, took harm therefrom. People using - corrosives, actual cauteries and many intolerable applications put - their patients to more pain than the disease did. - - The botches, or buboes (swollen lymph-glands in the neck, armpits or - groins), were the most distinctive sign of the plague, having given to - it the old name of "the botch." Besides these, there were the "tokens" - (specially limited in meaning to livid spots on the skin), carbuncles - and blains. Carbuncles, says Boghurst, commonly rose upon the most - substantial, gross, firm flesh, as the thighs, legs, backside, - buttock; they never occurred, that he saw, on the head among the hair, - or on the belly. They were not seen until the end of July, were most - rife in September and October, commonly in old people, never in - children. - -Hodges saw one carbuncle on the thigh, the size of two handbreadths, with -a large blister on it, "which being opened by the chirurgeon and -scarification made where the mortification did begin, the patient expired -under the operation." But most commonly carbuncles did not exceed the -breadth of three or four fingers. Boghurst continues: - - "Blains are a kind of diminutive carbuncle, but are not so hard, - black, and fiery; sometimes there is a little core in them. Generally - they are no bigger than a two penny piece, or a groat at the biggest, - with a bladder full of liquor on the top of them, which, if you open - but a little, will come out whitish or of a lemon or straw colour." - "Besides a blain there is a thing you may call a blister, puffing up - the skin, long like one's finger in figure, like a blister raised with - cantharides; and such usually die." The following experience is - remarkable, but it is doubtful whether Boghurst has not taken it from - Diemerbroek: "Towards the latter end of a plague, many people that - stayed, and others that returned, have little angry pustules and - blains rising upon them, especially upon the hands, without being sick - at all. But such never die, nor infect others; and I remember - Diemerbroeck saith, etc." Can this be the meaning of "smallpox" - following the plague, as in the 16th century books by Alphanus, - Kellwaye and others? - -The tokens proper, according to Hodges, were spots on the skin "proceeding -from extravasated blood." The body of the youth dissected by Thomson was -"beset with spots, black and blue," some of which when opened "contained -a coagulated matter." The tokens, as the name implies, were made the most -distinctive sign of the plague; but they were far from being so constant -as the botches or buboes. Boghurst says that "tokens appeared not much -until about the middle of June;" and, according to a letter of September -14, they must have been very variable even at the height of the plague: -"The practitioners in physic stand amazed to meet with so many various -symptoms which they find among their patients; one week the general -distempers are blotches and boils, the next week as clear-skinned as may -be, but death spares neither; one week full of spots and tokens, and -perhaps the succeeding bill none at all[1218]." - -The account of the dissection by Thomson, of a youth dead of the plague, -is perhaps all the morbid anatomy that has come down to us. He found what -appear to have been infarcts in the lungs; the surface was "stigmatised -with several large ill-favoured marks, much tumified and distended," from -which, on section, there issued "sanious, dreggy corruption and a pale -ichor destitute of any blood." The stomach contained a black, tenacious -matter, like ink. The spleen gave out on section an ichorish matter. The -liver was pallid and the kidneys exsanguine. There were "obscure large -marks" on the inner surface of the intestines and stomach. The peritoneal -cavity contained a "virulent ichor or thin liquor, yellowish, or -greenish." There was a decoloured clot in the right ventricle, but "not -one spoonful of that ruddy liquor properly called blood could be obtained -in this pestilential body." In all other cadavers that he ever dissected -he had found that the right ventricle had blackish blood condensed, but -this one had a pale clot "like a lamb-stone cut in twain," which puzzled -him greatly; perhaps it came, he conjectures, from a sumption of mere -crude milk which an indiscreet nurse had given the boy not long before he -died. - -Among the symptoms of a fatal issue, Boghurst mentions the following: -Hiccough, continual vomiting, sudden looseness, or two or three stools in -succession, shortness of breath, stopping of urine, great inward burning -and outward cold, continual great thirst, faltering in the voice, speaking -in the throat and occasionally sighing, with a slight pulling-in one side -of the mouth when they speak, sleeping with the eyes half-open, trembling -of the lips and hands and shaking of the head, staggering in going about -rooms, unwillingness to speak, hoarseness preventing speech, cramp in the -legs, stiffness of one side of the neck, contraction of the jaws, the -vomit running out from the side of the mouth, prolonged bleeding at the -nose, the sores decreasing and turning black on a sudden. - -It is to be remarked that Boghurst says very little of the gentle or the -violent delirium, on which Defoe enlarges picturesquely; nor does he -emphasize the extreme pain of the hard and tense buboes, which is another -of Defoe's themes. Hodges, however, says that "some of the infected run -about staggering like drunken men, and fall and expire in the streets; -while others lie half-dead and comatous.... Some lie vomiting as if they -had drunk poison." - -The progress of the epidemic would seem to have been little influenced by -the weather or by what was done, unless the shutting-up of houses had -helped to intensify the virus. Boghurst says: "If very hot weather -followed a shower of rain, the disease increased much;" and again: "If, in -the heat of the disease the wind blew very sharp and cold, people died -very quickly, many lying sick but one day." We are told, however, by -Hodges that "the whole summer was refreshed with moderate breezes," and -that "the heat was too mild to encourage corruption and fermentation." The -air itself, he says, "remained uninfected." Rain fell from time to time in -the end of summer, copious enough to put out the fires in the streets. -There was at least one very hot day, near the beginning of the epidemic, -the 5th of June, which Pepys says was "the hottest day that I ever felt in -my life." On September 20, however, he says that the increase of the -plague could not have been expected "from the coldness of the late -season." - -The plague lingered in London throughout the year 1666, causing 1998 -deaths in all. In January 1666 it was still at as high a figure as 158 -deaths in a week, and in the week ending September 18 it rose again to the -exceptional height of 104 deaths. In the first three weeks of December, -the deaths were 2, 4, and 3; and from that low level the plague never rose -again in London. A few annual deaths continued to appear in the bills down -to 1679, when they finally disappeared. - - -Plague near London in 1665. - -Meanwhile various parts of England were affected with plague during and -after the great epidemic, and in one or two instances a little before it. -In the immediate neighbourhood of the capital all the towns and villages -usually implicated by the exodus from the City had cases of plague, as the -following table shows. It has been compiled from the parish registers, as -extracted in Lysons' _Environs of London_, Defoe's widely discrepant -figures being given for comparison in the third column. - - All Defoe's - causes Plague list. - Barking 230 200 - Barnes 27 - Barnet and Hadley 43 - Battersea 113 - Beckenham 18 - Brentford 103 432 - Brentwood 70 - Bromley 27 7 - Camberwell 133 - Charlton 7 3 - Chertsey 18 - Chiselhurst 21 - Clapham 28 - Croydon 141 61 - Deptford 548 374 623 - Ealing 286 244 - Edmonton 19 - Eltham 44 32 85 - Enfield 176 32 - Epping 26 - Finchley 38 - Greenwich 416 231 - Hampstead 214 - Heston 48 13 - Hodsdon 30 - Hertford 90 - Hornsey 53 43 85 - Islewort 195 149 - Kensington 62 25 - Kingston 122 - Lewisham 56 - Mortlake 197 170 - Newington, Stoke 17 - Norwood 12 2 - Putney 74 - Romford 90 109 - St Albans 121 - Stratford-Bow 139 - Staines 82 - Tottenham no entries 42 - Twickenham 21 - Uxbridge 117 - Waltham Abbey 23 - Walthamstow 68 - Wandsworth 245 - Ware 160 - Watford 45 - Windsor 103 - Woodford 33 - -The most striking fact that comes out is that most of the parishes around -London had actually fewer deaths from plague in 1665 than in 1603. The -exceptions to this rule in 1665 are the villages on or near the Thames -above London-Battersea, Wandsworth, Putney, Mortlake, Brentford, -Isleworth, and Ealing, which had all a very high mortality, Barnes being -almost exempt. On the lower reaches of the Thames, Barking on the Essex -shore, and Deptford, Greenwich and Lewisham on the other side, had the -infection in them very severely; but these three places in Kent had a -still more severe visitation in 1666, along with other towns in that -county. - -On September 9, Evelyn wrote from his Deptford house, Sayes Court, that -"near thirty houses are visited in this miserable village." The infection -got also among the ships of the navy; on August 29, on board the 'Loyal -Subject' at Deal, Captain Fortescue and six men died suddenly, it was -feared of the plague. - - -Plague in the Provinces in 1665-6. - -The earliest accounts of plague in the provinces come from Yarmouth in -November, 1664. On the 18th it is said to have been brought in a vessel -from Rotterdam; three died in one house, of whom one had the plague. On -November 30, the plague was spreading, if the searchers (drunken women, -however) were to be credited. On February 8, 1665, there was another death -from plague, and as the summer wore on the mortality increased rapidly. On -June 16, thirty had died in the week, the inhabitants had fled, the town -was like a country village, and the poor left behind were lamenting at -once the lack of work and of charity. On August 21, the king wrote from -Salisbury to the bailiffs of Yarmouth concerning the plague. In the weeks -ending August 30 and September 6, there were 117 deaths (96 from plague) -and 110 deaths (100 from plague), and as late as November 6, there had -been 22 plague-deaths in the week. In March, 1666, the epidemic came to an -end[1219]. Smaller outbreaks occurred in the autumn of 1665 and spring of -1666 at Lynn, Norwich, Ipswich and Harwich. The great epidemic at -Colchester began in summer, 1665, but fell mostly in 1666, at a time when -there was little plague elsewhere, so that it practically closes the -history of plague in England, and will come naturally at the end of the -chapter. - -Most of the provincial outbreaks in 1665 were of small extent, and were -probably due to introduction of the virus from London. The valley of the -Tyne, which had often experienced severe plagues, had a slight epidemic, -said to have originated from the colliers returned from the Thames. On -July 18, there were seven houses shut up at Sunderland, one at Wearmouth -and one at Durham[1220]. A paragraph in the 'Newes,' from Durham, October -13, says that the sickness in the north is now much assuaged. Newcastle -remained almost free (although Defoe says different), two houses being -shut up on January 30, 1666, and two at Gateshead. The whole north-west -and west of England, which had suffered most during the last -plague-period, in the Civil Wars, appears to have escaped altogether. - -In the south, there was a good deal of the infection at Southampton in the -summer and autumn of 1665; on July 6, "the poor will not suffer the rich -to quit the town and leave them to starve[1221]." It is heard of, also, at -Poole and Sherborne in Dorset (in November), at Salisbury, where the Court -lay for some weeks, and at Battle[1222] in Sussex; but in none of these -places to any great extent. Various places in Kent had cases in -1665--Rochester, Chatham, Sandwich, Eastry, Westwell, Deal, Dover and -Canterbury[1223]; but it was only the naval stations that had more than a -few cases in 1665; while all of them had it far worse in 1666. Other -centres in 1665 were in Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire. - -At Peterborough, Oundle and Newport Pagnell, there was a visitation of the -severer kind, with flight of the richer inhabitants, and the usual arrest -of work and trade. The parish register of Yardley, Hastings, records that -60 persons died of plague in that town from June 5, 1665, to January 3, -1666. There was also a sharp epidemic in Cambridge and in the country -around, of which we get a glimpse in a letter of October 19, 1665, written -from Clare Hall to one of the fellows of Clare[1224]: - - "Alderman Mynell the brewer and one of his children died of the plague - this last Monday; he hath had four children in all dead of it. - Clayton, the barber in Petty Cury, and one of his children, died last - Saturday of the sickness. It is newly broken out sadly by Christ's - (though they have all fled from the Colledge upon Mr Bunchly, their - manciple, dying of the plague)--where Nicholson the smith, his wife - and two children are dead within three days, his other children being - deadly sick in the house. But it most rageth in St Clement's parish, - where seldom a day passeth without one dead of the sickness.... Poor - Mr Brown, the old man that is one of the University musicians, and Mr - Saunders that sings the deep bass, are shut up in Mr Saunders' house - in Green Street, whose child died last week suspected. Two houses at - Barton are infected by two of Alderman Mynell's children, that are - dead there. Ditton is broke out just by the butcher, from whom we had - our meat, which made us hastily remove to Grantchester. H. Glenton, - the carrier, fled from this town to Shelford, where he died within two - or three days, suspected.... Royston is sadly in two or three places, - the last of which is just in the middle of the town. The infection, - they say, was brought thither by a Cambridge man, whom they caught, - and shut him up; but he hath since made his escape." - - -The Epidemic of Plague at Eyam, 1665-6. - -Another of the English towns visited by plague in 1665 was Derby; whether -the cases were many or few, they caused great alarm, the town being -forsaken, the streets grass-grown, and the market set up on a new stance, -to which the farmers and traders came primed with a plug of tobacco in -their mouths as a preservative. But the epidemic in Derby itself was -totally eclipsed in interest by an extraordinary outbreak of plague in the -small village of Eyam, at the opposite end of the county, in the North -Peak, some twelve miles to the west of Sheffield. The plague of Eyam is, -indeed, the most famous of all English plagues; the story of it has been -told many times in prose and verse, its traditional incidents being well -suited to minor poets and moral writers, and the whole action of the -drama conveniently centered within a circuit of half a mile in a cup of -the heathy hills[1225]. - -Eyam was a village of some three hundred and fifty inhabitants, standing -among meadows around which the hills towered. It had no resident doctor, -but it had two ministers. The one was the rector, the Rev. William -Mompesson, a young man of twenty-seven, with a wife and two children, who -had been settled in Eyam only a year and did not like it; the other was -the former rector, the Rev. Thomas Stanley, who had been ejected for -nonconformity in 1662, and had remained to carry on his ministrations as a -Dissenter among such of his old flock as adhered to him. The wealthier -householders resided at the western and higher end of the village, on the -other side of a brook which crossed under the road; as we shall see, they -escaped the infection almost if not altogether. The annual village wake -had been held in August, 1665, with more than the usual concourse of -people from villages near. On the 2nd or 3rd September a box arrived from -London to the village tailor, who lived in a small house at the western -end of the churchyard; it contained old clothes which someone in London is -supposed to have bought for him cheap, and some tailors' patterns of -cloth. This box is assumed to have been opened by one George Vicars, a -servant, who was certainly the first victim of plague. He found the -contents to be damp and hung them up at the fire to dry. He was quickly -seized with violent sickness, became delirious, developed buboes in his -neck and groin, a plague-token on his breast the third day, and died in a -wretched state on September 6. His body, which is said to have become soon -putrid, was buried in the churchyard on the 7th. Nearly a fortnight passed -before another case occurred, that of a youth supposed to have been the -tailor's son, who was buried on the 22nd September. Before the 30th four -more had died, and in the course of October twenty-two more were buried -of the plague. The deaths in November declined to seven, and in December -they were nine. There was now snow on the ground, with hard frost, and at -the beginning of January, 1666, the plague was confined to two houses. -Four died in January, eight in February, six in March, nine in April, and -only three in May. On June 2, another burial occurred, and then there was -another pause. But in a week or more the epidemic broke out with renewed -power, three having been buried on the 12th of June, three on the 15th, -one on the 16th, three on the 17th, and so on until the total for June -reached nineteen. The wealthier villagers at the west end had taken the -alarm before and had mostly fled in the spring; those who stayed kept -within their houses or at least did not cross the stream. Now that the -infection was revived in the hot weather of June, the rector's wife also -proposed flight, but on her husband's refusal, she resolved to remain with -him, and to send her two children to a relative in Yorkshire. At the same -time the villagers in general were instinctively moved to escape from the -tainted spot; but Mompesson used his authority to prevent them, and a -boundary line was drawn round the village, about half a mile in circuit -and marked by various familiar objects, beyond which no one was to go. -Mompesson's motive appears to have been to prevent the spread of the -infection to the country around, and his parishioners submitted passively. -After the end of June the villagers would have found it difficult to -escape, owing to the terror which the very name of their village caused in -all the country round. Some of them quitted their cottages and took up -their abode in shelters built along the side of a rocky glen within the -cordon. The earl of Devonshire, then at Chatsworth, promised Mompesson -that the village should not be left without supplies; and people from the -villages near brought their market produce to certain stated points on the -boundary, where the Eyam people came to fetch it, the money paid being -dropped into water. Thus shut up in their narrow valley, the villagers -perished helplessly like a stricken flock of sheep. By the end of June -ceremonial burials came to an end, the church and the churchyard were -closed, the dead were carried out wrapped in sheets by one of the -villagers noted for his herculean strength, and laid in shallow graves in -the meadows or on the hill-sides. In July the deaths mounted up to five or -six on some days, and the total for the month to fifty-seven. In August -the dead numbered seventy-eight, among them the rector's wife on the 25th, -after a walk with her husband through the meadows, during which she is -said to have made the ominous remark that the air smelled sweet[1226]. -September added twenty-four to the total, and there were now only about -forty-five left alive in the place. Of these, fifteen died to the 11th -October, when the mortality ceased. Some of the survivors had passed -through an attack of the plague, among them the rector's man, whose buboes -suppurated. Mompesson himself, who had an issue open in his leg all the -time, escaped the infection, as well as his maid-servant. A young woman of -Eyam, married in the village of Corbor, two miles off, came one day to see -her mother, whom she found sick of the plague; on her return home she took -the sickness and died, but no one else in Corbor had it. A man was also at -large in the neighbourhood suspected of plague, to whom the earl of -Devonshire sent a doctor. The doctor and patient met by appointment on the -opposite banks of a stream, and the diagnosis made across the water -acquitted the man of plague; even in these unconventional circumstances -the consultation did not end without a prescription (still extant) for a -bottle of "stuff." Seventy-six households in Eyam were infected, and out -of these two hundred and fifty-nine persons were buried of the plague. -During the time that the infection lasted eight more died from other -causes. When the sickness had ceased Mompesson set about burning the -infected articles in the empty cottages. Three years after, in 1669, he -was presented to the better living of Eakring, in Notts; but on arriving -to enter on his duties he was refused admission by the villagers, and had -to take up his residence in a temporary hut in Rufford Park, until such -time as the prejudices of his new parishioners had been overcome. He -married another wife, and for thirty-nine years held the living of -Eakring, where he died on March 7, 1708. Stanley, his Dissenting colleague -at Eyam, died there a few years after the plague. - -Several things combined to magnify the disaster at Eyam. The story of the -box of clothes from London is entirely credible, and can be matched by -many other instances in the history of plague and of cholera[1227]. -Nothing intensifies the virus of such diseases so much as fermentation -without air in the textures of clothes or linen; a whiff from the opened -box or bundle suffices soon to prostrate the person who breathes it. The -poison at Eyam was a powerful one from the first, and it is credible that -the body of the earliest victim did become quickly putrid. The heavy -mortality, with few recoveries, which followed after a fortnight's -interval, and continued all through the winter, also shows a virus raised -to no ordinary potency. But, for the revival of the infection in June, -1666, we must seek other causes. Eyam was one of those basins which, on a -large scale or on a small, have often been observed to keep infection in -their soil. The virus must have passed into the pores of the ground after -the first sixty or more burials in the churchyard down to the lull of the -epidemic in winter; with the rise of the ground-water in spring, it would -be comparatively inactive; but in June, when the water was again sinking -in the soil and the great heat was raising emanations from the dry ground, -it broke forth with an intensity which poisoned the whole air of the -valley. The burials, after the end of June, without coffins and in shallow -graves in the meadows or on the hill-side, were so much ferment added to a -soil already permeated by it. Flight from such a place was the only -safety, and the rector, with the best motives, counselled the people to -remain. Mompesson's conduct has always been held up as a pattern of -heroism, as if the circumstances had been desperate like those of the -Trojans when the Greeks were in their streets and houses: - - Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem. - -No word of detraction should be spoken of anyone who does manfully what he -conceives to be his duty to his neighbours; but the villagers of Eyam were -sacrificed, all the same, to an idea, and to an idea which we may now say -was not scientifically sound. When the impulse came upon them to flee, -they might have left their tainted soil without much risk to the country -around so long as they did not collect in one spot or carry with them -bedding or the like susceptible articles: those who did flee from the -houses at the upper end of the village are not known to have carried the -infection to other places, and the young woman who brought it to Corbor -gave it to no one else. But the wisdom of flight may be regarded by some -as still disputable; while it will be admitted by all that Mompesson acted -for the best according to his lights. - -The plague in 1666 raged severely in a number of towns, while it lingered -on in London. The information from Winchester is vague; it is said that -the dead were carried out in carts and buried on the downs to the -eastward[1228]; the epidemic was over by the 1st of December, so that the -College resumed[1229]. Pepys enters in his Diary (April 4, 1667): "One at -the table [the duke of Albemarle's] told an odd passage in the late -plague, that at Petersfield (I think he said), one side of the street had -every house almost infected through the town, and the other not one shut -up." There may have been other such centres of plague, and equally -interesting observations made on them; but it appears to be the merest -chance whether anything is recorded of them at all, or whether one has the -luck to come across the record. - -The great centres of plague in 1666 had some connexion with the fleet, and -were mostly in Kent and Essex. Deptford and Greenwich had more plague that -year than the year before, the total deaths at the former having been 715 -(of plague 522) and at the latter 423. Eltham and Lewisham were also -visited in proportion. The other intense centre of infection in Kent was -Deal. On the 26th August, seven died of the plague, and twenty in the -whole week. At that date there were said to be only 16 houses which had -not had plague in them. On December 9, all the houses were clear, although -the crews of ships still avoided the town. Next to Deal, Sandwich, Dover, -Canterbury and Maidstone had considerable outbreaks in the autumn. At -Portsmouth also there was a sharp outbreak in the summer of 1666, -twenty-one having died of plague in a week at the beginning of July. - -In the Eastern Counties, plague revived to a considerable extent in 1666 -at Norwich, Ipswich, Harwich and Woodbridge, the Yarmouth outbreak, which -had been the great one in that quarter the year before, having come to an -end in the spring. But it was at Colchester that the epidemic engrossed -attention in 1666. Colchester had, indeed, two successive seasons of -plague, or rather a continuous prevalence of it from the summer of 1665 to -December, 1666. The plague at Colchester in 1665-66 was the greatest of -all provincial plagues since the Black Death, unless, indeed, we credit -the numbers (11,000 or 12,000) given for a plague at York in 1390. It -reproduced the mortality of the Great Plague of London on a scale more -than proportionate to its size, and it doubtless called forth the same -class of incidents--flight of the wealthier classes, and almost total -extermination of the poor. No documents remain, however, of this plague -except the oaths administered to searchers and bearers of the dead -(printed below) and the weekly totals of deaths from plague and from other -causes[1230]. The weekly bills are, indeed, as eloquent a testimony as -any detailed description could have been; and as they are the most -complete of the kind for a provincial town, I have transcribed them from -the manuscript record in full. The small number of deaths from ordinary -causes points to the emptiness of the better quarters of the town; the -total deaths in seventeen months, 5345, including 4817 plague-deaths and -528 from other causes, must have meant an enormous clearance of the poorer -classes. Colchester was then a place of considerable wealth, with a -thriving Dutch trade and a considerable Dutch colony. Perhaps the -connexion with Holland, where plague had been rife in the years just -before, may explain the origin of the outbreak; but local conditions of -soil, overcrowding, and the like must be looked to for the cause of its -extraordinary persistence and fatality. - -_Weekly mortalities in Colchester, August 14, 1665, to December 14, 1666, -from plague and other diseases._ - -1665 - - Week Plague Other - ending - - Aug. 21 26 2 - 28 62 2 - Sept. 8 122 4 - 15 153 22 - 22 159 25 - 29 100 25 - Oct. 6 161 27 - 13 122 23 - 20 106 15 - 27 60 41 - Nov. 3 104 13 - 10 88 22 - 17 88 18 - 24 62 8 - Dec. 1 38 10 - 8 39 6 - 15 67 4 - 22 53 7 - 29 21 3 - -1666 - - Jan. 5 23 6 - 12 46 8 - 19 36 13 - 26 26 10 - Feb. 2 34 9 - 9 25 3 - 16 23 7 - 23 33 6 - Mar. 2 53 2 - 9 26 11 - 16 37 5 - 23 48 4 - 30 66 1 - Apr. 6 73 2 - 13 90 2 - 20 68 4 - 27 90 4 - May 4 169 8 - 11 167 7 - 18 150 11 - 25 98 12 - June 1 89 10 - 8 110 10 - 15 139 3 - 22 195 6 - 29 176 4 - July 6 167 8 - 13 160 9 - 20 175 3 - 27 109 4 - Aug. 3 109 2 - 10 85 4 - 17 70 1 - 24 51 1 - 31 53 4 - Sept. 7 31 6 - 14 22 2 - 21 16 2 - 28 10 2 - Oct. 5 7 2 - 12 7 0 - 19 7 2 - 26 4 2 - Nov. 2 4 2 - 9 4 2 - 16 2 6 - 23 1 4 - 30 1 8 - Dec. 7 1 7 - 14 0 0 - ---- --- - 4817 528 - -To relieve the poverty caused by this great disaster a tax was levied on -various other parts of the county of Essex, and contributions were made by -private individuals, the London churches collecting 1311. 10_s._ in the -breathing-time between the plague and the fire. Colchester had so far -recovered in the end of 1666 as to be able to contribute in turn about a -hundred pounds for the relief of London after the fire[1231]. - - -The Last of Plague in England. - -The history of plague in England must be made to end with a solitary -epidemic at Nottingham in 1667, but not without some misgivings as to the -correctness of the date. Dr Deering, the historian of the town in 1751, -paid little heed to epidemics, although medicine was his business; but he -mentions one of smallpox in 1736, which had probably come within his own -experience, and proceeds: - - "I question much whether there has been the like since the plague - which visited the town in 1667, and made a cruel desolation in the - higher part of Nottingham, for very few died in the lower; especially - in a street called Narrow Marsh, it was observed that the infection - had no power, and that during the whole time the plague raged, not one - who lived in that street died of it, which induced many of the richer - sort of people to crowd thither and hire lodgings at any price; the - preservation of the people was attributed to the effluvia of the - tanners' ouze (for there were then 47 tanners' yards in that place), - besides which they caused a smoak to be made by burning moist tanners' - knobs[1232]." - -If there had been any reference to the parish registers or to the -corporation minutes, we should have had no reason to doubt that this -epidemic had been correctly assigned to 1667. The last Winchester epidemic -had been given under the year 1668, first by one local historian, and then -by another who copied him; but when a third went to the manuscript -records, he found that the year was 1666, as indeed an incidental -reference to the re-opening of Winchester School on 1st December, 1666, -"the sickness being in all appearance extinguished," might have warranted -one in concluding. It is a singular experience to have brought the history -of plague down through several centuries, not without particulars of times -and numbers, and to be obliged to end it in the latter half of the 17th -century with an unauthenticated date. The Nottingham epidemic may have -been an exception to the generality that all England was finally delivered -from the plague in 1666; it is due, at least, to the local historian, in -the absence of evidence against, to record his date of 1667. The -difficulty of confirming so simple a fact at so late a period may dispose -the readers of this work to be tolerant of any lack of certainty and -precision that they may discover in its history of more remote times. - - - - -INDEX. - - - Aarhus, bishop of, his book on plague, 209, - his identity, 210 _note_ - - Abbotsley, scene in church, 39 - - Aberdeen, leper-spital, 99, - plague at, 361, 362, - long free from plague, 370, - plague at, in 1647, 564, - syphilis arrives at, 417, 419, 361 - - Aelred, his story of queen Matilda and the lepers, 82-3 - - =Agriculture=, state of in Domesday, 22, - neglect of under heavy taxation by Wm, Rufus, 30, - effects of Black Death on, 191-2, - thriving in the 15th cent., 222, - gives place to sheep-farming in Tudor period, 387-392 - - =Agues=, original meaning of 409; - pestilential ague, 214, - "hot ague", 291, 400, 401, 404, 406, - Irish ague, 410; - Jones on, 410, - specialists for, 411, 426, - ambiguous meaning of, 505, 536, 540 - - Allington, Richard, case of smallpox, 459 - - Amwell, Great, plague, 493 - - Andr, Bernard, on sweat of 1508, 244, - on French pox, 420 - - =Anglo-Saxon Leechdoms=, 24, 452 - - Annan, story of a plague at, 11 - - Appleby, plague, 360 - - Arabia, burials in, 165, - plague, 166, - origin of smallpox in 441 - - =Armada, Spanish=, sickness in, 350, 591 - - =Arsenic=, plague-cakes, 487 - - Ashburton, plague, 524 - - Ashwell, inscription at, 139, 217 - - Assir, plague, 166 - - =Assizes, Black=, at Cambridge, 375, - at Oxford, 376, - at Exeter, 383 - - Astruc, on origin of syphilis, 430 - - Aubrey, Dr, on sickness in slave-ships, 627-8 - - Avignon, Black Death at, 133, - _pestis secunda_, 203 - - Axholme, the sweat at, 252 - - Ayr, plague, 503 - - - Baber, Consul, plague in Yun-nan, 168 - - Bacon, Francis, "remedy" of the sweat, 242, - gaol-fever, 382, - sweet odours in plague, 685 _note_ - - Bamford, James, plague of 1603 in St Olave's parish, 478, - on contagion of plague, 490 - - Banbury, plague, 303 _note_, 501, - war-fever and plague, 556-7 - - Banister, John, on syphilis, 427, - his plague-medicines, 516 - - =Bankside stews=, 420 - - Barbados, occupied by English, 619, - yellow fever in, 620, 630-633 - - Barcelona, syphilis at, 434 - - Barking, plague in monastery, 6, - plague, 492, 520, 680 - - =Bartholomew fair=, in plague-time, 300, 481 - - =Bartholomew's, St, Hospital=, filled with cases of pox, 424 - - Basingstoke, hospital at, 95 - - Batavia, epidemic in 1625, 608 - - Baxter, Richard, on the weather before the Great Plague, 653, - on Dissenters in the plague-time, 655 - - Becon, on rural depopulation, 391 - - Beda, on pestilence in, 664-685, 5-7 - - =Beggars=, pretending leprosy, 103, - beadle of, 104, - after Black Death, 183, - statutes for, 392 - - Bellay, Du, letters on the sweat, 250-252 - - Belper, plague, 500 - - Benghazi, plague and typhus in Arab tents, 170 - - =Beri-beri=, supposed in 1593, 593 - - Beverley, the sweat at, 252 - - Birch, Dr T., errors of, on Oxford Black Assizes, 381 _note_, - collects letters of the Stuart period, 504 _note_ - - =Black Death, the=, chroniclers of in England, 114, - arrival and progress, 116-118, - in Ireland, 119, - in Scotland, 119, 233, - symptoms of, 120, - mortality from, 123-139, - direct effects of, 139, 180, - antecedents of, 142-156, 173-4, - favouring conditions for diffusion of, 175. - Its effects on Edward III.'s wars, 178, - on removal of men and treasure, 180, - on price of labour, 181, - on capitalists, 186, - on morals, 186-190, - on area of cultivation, 191, - on system of farming, 192, - on trade and industry, 193, - on town industries, 197, - on village manufactures, 198, - on governing class in towns, 199, - on population, 199. - Infection of, remains in England, 204, 233 - - Bodmin, Black Death at, 116, 125 - - Boghurst, W., spotted fever in Somerset, 543, - his MS. on the Great Plague, 647 _et seq._ - - Boleyn, Anne, in the sweat of 1528, 251, 252, 255 - - Borde, Andrew, 286 - - Borgia, Alexander, pope, 416 _note_ - - Boston, plague at, 349 - - Bosworth, battle of, 265 - - =Botch=, =boche= or =boiche=, early name of plague, 206, 208, 362 - - Bradwardine, archbp, dies of Black Death, 129 - - Bradwell, Stephen, his plague-book, 516 - - Brant, Sebastian, on origin of French pox, 431 - - Brasbridge, on plague in dog's skin, 316 - - Brewer, T., his poem on plague of 1625, 512, 517 - - Bridewell made a hospital, 394, 395 - - Bridgetown, yellow fever at in 1647, 620, 630-33 - - Bridport, Black Death at, 116, - plague at in 1626, 524 - - Brimington, plague, 498 - - Bristol, leper-house, 98, - Black Death, 116, 121, 123, - effects of ditto on trade at, 182 _note_, - plague in 1535, 300, - in 1575, 340, - in 1645, 557 - - Bucklersbury, drug-shops in, 484 - - Bugden, deaths from sweat at, 261 - - Bullein, on plague of 1563, 306, - on London graveyards, 334, - on the French pox, 422 - - Burdwan, number of lepers in, 107 - - =Burial=, interdict of, 11; - neglect of, 12, 13 _note_, - in Chinese famines, 154, - in Islam, 163. - Christian burial in Egypt, 159. - Chinese mode of, 161. - In Arabia, 165, - in Kumaon 167, - neglect of in Yun-nan, 168, - at Merdje, 171; - by the friars, 332, - in St Paul's churchyard, 334, - without coffins, 335, - Latimer on intramural, 336, - relation to plague, 336, - in the great London plagues, 126, 337, 482, 515, 668-9, - hours of in plague-time 303, 482 - - Burton Lazars, 89 - - Bury St Edmunds, burials at in 1257, 44, - hospitals, 92, 96, - plague in 1578, 347 - - Butts, Dr, in the sweat of 1528, 254 - - - Caffa, Black Death at siege of, 144, 147 - - Caius, Dr, on the sweat of 1551, 259, 261, 263, - edits Galen, 439 - - Calais, sweat at 248, 253, 255, - plague in 1509, 288, - "new sickness" in 1558, 403, - plague brought to, 546 - - =Calendar=, the English and the Continental, 256 _note_ - - =Calenture=, 387, 610 - - Cambridge, epidemic of "frenzy" at, 62, - effects of Black Death, 196, - prophecy of pestilence, 229, - sweat of 1517, 248, - of 1528, 252, - of 1551, 262, - plague, 285, 289, 338, 340, 347, 497, 527, 682, - gaol fever, 375, - agues, 505 - - Canterbury, death of monks in 870, 9, - leper-hospitals, 87, 91, - style of living in 14th cent., 50, - Black Death at, 132, - causes of death of monks, 226, - plague in 1544, 303, - in 1564, 309, - in 1593, 357, - in 1603-4, 498, - in 1614-15, 501, - in 1625, 524, - in 1636, 528, - in 1665, 681, - in 1666, 688 - - Cape de Verde islands (St Jago), infection taken from, 586, 589 - - Carlisle, plague, 359, 562 - - Carshalton, mortality in 1626, 520 - - Cartier, Jacques, scurvy in his expedition, 581 - - Castle Combe, records of its manor court, 135, 136, 139, - priests poaching, 189, - village industries, 198, - nuisances removed, 198 _note_, 328 - - Catharine of Arragon, arrives in England in plague-time, 288, - anxious for Henry VIII. on account of plague in 1518, 290 - - =Cats= in plague-time, 316 - - Cavendish, Thomas, sickness in his voyages, 592-3 - - =Cemeteries=, see BURIAL - - Champneys, Sir John, mayor, procures plague-bill in 1535, 298 - - =Chancery=, inquisition on a leper, 105, - business of after Black Death, 188 - - Charles VIII., his invasion of Italy, 430, 433, 435, - his sickness at Asti, 436-7 - - =Charnel-house= of St Paul's, 334, 659 - - Charterhouse, inscription of burials in Black Death, 127, - death of monks in 1528, 252 - - Chatham, leper-hospital, 95, - plague in 1665, 681 - - Chauliac, Guy de, symptoms of _pestis secunda_, 203, - on Gaddesden's _Rosa Anglica_, 446 - - Chester, the sweat, 245, 249, - plague, 304, 339, 498, 500, 501, 564, - smallpox, 465 _note_, - fever in villages near, 567 - - Chesterfield, plague, 349, 500 - - Chesterton depopulated, 199 _note_ - - China, Black Death said to have come from, 143, 145-147, - overland trade to Europe, 148-9, - no record of Black Death in, 149; - great series of floods, famines, &c., 150-152, - followed by a period of plagues, 153; - unburied dead after famines and floods, 154, - Odoric's valley of corpses, 155, - careful mode of burial in, 161. - Plague in modern times, 168-9 - - =Churchyards=, see BURIAL - - Clapham, Henoch, 490 - - =Clarendon, Council of=, 374 - - Clot, Dr, Bey, on plague in Egypt, 160 - - Clowes, William, on the pox in London, 423-5, - on quacks, 426, - his translation of _variola_, 459 - - Clun, plague, 545 - - Clyn, Friar, the Black Death in Ireland, 115, 119, - symptoms of ditto, 121 - - Cogan, Th., on prophesied return of the sweat, 264, - on fever at Oxford Assizes, 378, - on lasks, 412 - - Colchester, wills proved after Black Death, 186, - plague, 348, 498, 525, - plague in 1665-6, 688, - directions to bearers and watchers at, 688 _note_ - - Comines, Philip de, commons of England untouched by Wars of Roses, 38, - 224, 387, - on Charles VIII.'s sickness, 435 - - Congleton, plague, 498, 545 - - Constantinus Africanus applies "variola" to smallpox, 453 - - Cork, leper-hospitals, 100, - alleged sweating sickness, 252, - plague, 371, 502 - - Cornard Parva, Black Death in, 137 - - Coventry, leper-hospital at, 92, - growth of after the Black Death, 194, 195, - plague, 501, 526 _note_ - - Crail, plague, 370 - - Cranborne, plague, 499 - - Cranbrooke, plague, 348 - - Crimea, outbreak of Black Death in, 142, 144 - - Cromwell, O., his death from fever, 574, - colonizes Jamaica, 634, 639 - - Cromwell, T., orders bill of mortality, 297-8 - - =Cross, the blue=, or =red=, 306, 313, 314, 514 - - Croxton, abbey, Black Death in, 131, - ditto in the manor, 138 - - Croydon, plague, 492, 520, 679 - - Croyland abbey, sudden mortality in, 9, - the sweat in, 239, 266 - - Cumanus, Marcellus, the French pox at siege of Novara, 431 - - Cumberland, plague in 1420, 221, - state of in the Civil Wars, 562 - - - Dalry, "grantgore" at, 418 - - =Danes=, camp sickness among, 13 - - Darlington, plague, 359, 557 - - Dartmouth, plague, 351, 524 - - Davison, F., 'Poetical Rapsodie', 463 - - Deal, plague in 1666, 688 - - Defoe, sources of his _Journal of the Plague-Year_, 649, - illustrations of the Great Plague from, 657 _et seq._ - - Dekker, T., on London at accession of James I., 471, 480, - on plague of 1603, 481-4, - theatres closed in plague-time, 494 - - Deptford, plague in 1666, 680, 687 - - Derby, plague at, 309, 349, 357, 559, - plague in 1665, 682 - - Derry, the, plague at in 1566-7, 372 - - =Dogs= in plague-time, 314, 316, 515; - alleged death of in the Leeds plague, 558, - at Batavia from licking pestilent blood, 608 - - =Domesday Survey=, size of towns in, 23, - state of agriculture inferred from, 22 - - Doncaster, plague in 1536, 301 - - Donne, Rev. Dr, his dread of smallpox, 463, - on flight of citizens in 1625, 519 - - Doughty, C., on burials in Arabia, 165 - - Drake, Sir Bernard, at the Exeter Black Assizes, 384, 385 - - Drake, Sir Francis, sickness in his voyage round the world, 585, - great epidemic in his fleet in 1585-6, 585-589, - his death from flux, 591 - - Drogheda, monastery of, Black Death in, 119, 132 - - Dublin, leper-hospitals, 100, - Black Death in, 119, 131, 132, - plague in 1520, 371, - in 1575, 372, - in 1650, 566 - - Dumfries, plague, 235, 369 - - Dunbar, W., "spanyie pockis", 418 - - Dundee, plague, 234, 368, 503 - - Duns, plague, 369 - - Durham, a medieval siege of, 28, - leper-hospital near, 94, 113, - plague, 350, 359, 499, 501, 681, - famine, 358 - - Dysart, plague, 366, 368 - - =Dysentery=, or flux, summary of epidemics, 411-13, - in 1624, 505, - in voyages, 589, 591, 600, 602, 603, - in Virginia, 611, - in slave-ships, 628, - among black troops, 629, - in St Domingo and Jamaica, 635-640 - - - East Indies, Portuguese voyages to, 584, - English voyages to, 599-609 - - =East India Company=, provides against scurvy, 602-3 - - Edenhall, plague, 360 - - Edinburgh, leper-hospital, 99, - _pestilentia volatilis_, 234, - plague, 235, 303, 362, 365-6, 367, 368, 369, 370, 502, 503, 504, 563, - French pox, 417, - mortality of children in 1600, 370 _note_ - - Edward the Confessor and the leper, 81 - - Edward III., his activity after the Black Death, 178-9 - - Edward IV., his illness from "pockys" in 1463, 455 - - Edward VI., on the sweat of 1551, 260 - - Egypt, theory of plague in, 156, 659, - sanitary wisdom of ancient, 158, - embalming in, 159, 160-1, - compared with China, 161-2 - - Elizabeth, Queen, at Windsor in the plague of 1563, 317, - rebukes the uncleanly state of Ipswich, 327, - attempts to stamp out plague in London, 330-331, - her proclamation in 1580 on growth of London, 346, - her trains at Norwich in 1578 carry plague, 348, - her hardness to the sick seamen in the Armada-year, 350, - her precaution against smallpox in 1591, 461 - - Elizabeth of York, in 1502, pays for cure of John Pertriche, 419 - - Elphege, St, stops pestilence in 1011, 13 - - Ely, bishop of, alienates Stourbridge leper-hospital, 93 - - Ely monastery, Black Death in, 132 - - Elyot, Sir Thomas, lay writer on medicine, 402, - mentions smallpox, 457 - - =Emigrants=, mortality of English to Virginia, 610, - to New England &c., 612-13, - to Barbados, 619, - of French to St Christopher, 618, - to Guadeloupe, 621 - - Ensham, manor of, after Black Death, 139, 141 - - Erasmus, still ill from "sweat" in 1511, 245, 399, - ref. to influenza (?) in 1518, 249, - ref. to plague in letters, 288-9, - on English houses, 328, - on the French pox, 420-21 - - =Ergotism=, causes and signs of, 53-55, - two forms, 55, - cases of in England, 57, - possible instances of, 59-63, - reasons of English immunity from, 64, 68 - - Essex, Lord General, typhus in his army, 548-9, - occupies Tiverton, 552-3 - - Ethredge, Dr G., the sweat of 1551 at Oxford, 260, 380, - the gaol-fever at Oxford, 381 - - Eton, plague, 348, 520, - boys compelled to smoke in plague-time, 674 - - Evesham, monastery, fugitives at after wasting of Yorkshire, 27 _note_, - drives out its leprous prior, 101 - - Evesham, town, plague and bad scavenging, 501 - - Exeter, the scavengers of, 327, - plague, 288, - famine and plague, 300, - plague, 498, 523, - Black Assizes, 383-6 - - Eyam, plague at in 1665-6, 682-7 - - Eydon, plague, 498 - - - Fabyan, on the first sweat, 239, - on plague in London, 1478-9, 234, - and 1500, 287, - uses the name "pockys", 420 - - =Famines=, chronology of, to 1322, 15, - in 1370, 215, - about 1383, 219, - in 1391, 220, - in 1438-9, 223, 228, 235, - in 1528, 251, 277, - in 1535, 300, - in 1551, 278, - in 1557, 401, - in 1596-7, 358 - - =Fever=, epidemics of from famine, 15-17 (table), - in 1086-7, 29, - in 1196, 36, - in 1258, 44-45, - in 1315, 48, - in 1438-9, 223, 228, 234-5, - in 1596-7 358, 411; - epidemics of in war, 547, 552; - spotted, 504, 540, 542, 543, 551; - "strange," see INFLUENZA, - Yellow, see YELLOW FEVER, - in gaols, see GAOL-FEVER; - in ships, 350, 538 - - Finchley, dysentery at, 1596-7, 411 - - Findhorn, plague, 370 - - Finsbury, laystalls at, 334 - - Fish, Simon, 'Supplication of Beggars', 421 - - =Fleet Ditch=, unwholesome, 352 - - Forrestier, Dr Thomas, his MS. on the sweat of 1485, 238, - fixes time and place of first outbreak, 238, - his account of the symptoms and treatment, 241, - on extent of first sweat, 243, - on causes of ditto, 266-7 - - =Foul Death=, name used by Scots for plague in 1349, 78, - and in 1379, 218 - - Fracastori, on smallpox, 467, - on typhus, 585 - - Francis, St, of Assisi, and the lepers, 85 - - Freind, Dr J., on a strange chorea, 61, - on diffusion of smallpox, 445, - on Gaddesden, 448 - - =Friars=, their original mission, 41, - their care of lepers, 85, 107, - side with the rich after the Black Death, 188, - bury rather than christen, 332 - - Froude, Mr, on plague at the Derry, 372 _note_, - on "yellow fever" in Drake's fleet, 589 _note_ - - "FRUIT OF TIMES," records "pokkes" for 1366, 453 - - Fryer, Dr John, 307 - - - Gaddesden, John of, fails to describe fever of, 1315 51, - on leprosy, 76, - on smallpox, 446-8, - on morbilli and "mesles", 449-51 - - Gale, Thomas, on "the morbus", 422 - - Galway, "sweating sickness" at, 400 _note_ - - =Gaols=, first built, 374 - - =Gaol Fever=, in Newgate, 374, 395 _note_, - at Cambridge, 375, - at Oxford, 376-382, - at Exeter, 383-386, - referred to in Act, 388, - in the Queen's Bench, Southwark, 395, 539, - Bacon on, 332 - - =Garter, Order of the=, 178 - - Gascoigne T., cases of syphilis, 74, - Henry IV.'s "leprosy", 77 _note_, - "legists" after Black Death, 189 - - Gaubil, abb, on the Chinese annals, 154 - - Geynes, Dr, 307 - - Gibbon, on the Justinian plague, 2, - on a remark by Procopius, 675 _note_ - - Gibbons, Orlando, 465, 524 - - Gilbertus Anglicus, on leprosy, 70-72, - morphaea, 76, - diet to keep off leprosy, 113, - on smallpox, 446, 447 - - Glasgow, leper-house, 99, - keeps out plague, 366, 369, - plague, 370, 563, - syphilis, 418 - - Gloucester, Black Death, 116, 117, - plague in 1580, 348, - in 1638, 545, - a quack at, 426, - relief of siege, 549 - - Goddard, Dr, his excuse for leaving London in the plague, 667 - - Gordonio, Bernard, on leprosy, 70, - case at Montpellier, 72, - on morphaea, 76, - on smallpox, 447 - - =Grandgore=, in Scotland, 417-18, - derivation of, 418 - - Grantham, plague near, 500, - sickness at, 502 - - Graunt, John, syphilis in London, 428, - London mortality, 532 - - Gravesend, plague, 287, 293, 531 - - Greaves, Sir E., fever at Oxford, 547, 551 - - Greenwich, sweat at, 244, 251, - plague at, 293, - plague in 1666, 687 - - Gregory, W. ref. to "pokkes," 454 - - Gruner, on the sweat, 258, - collections on medieval smallpox, 446 _note_ - - Grnbeck, Jos. on syphilis, 432 - - Guignes, Des, on origin of Black Death, 143, 152 - - Guinea, voyages to in 16th cent., 581-3, - slave trade from, 583, 625-9 - - Guy, Dr W., on "parish infection", 396 _note_ - - - Hackney, leper-hospital, 97, 98 _note_, - plague in 1535, 301, - in 1603, 492, - in 1625, 511 - - Haddington, _pestilentia volatilis_, 234, - plague during siege, 303 - - Hall, his Chronicle on the sweat of 1517, 250, - on the mercenaries of Henry VII., 274, - on the Cambridge Black Assizes, 375 - - Hampshire, parish in, statistics of, 411, 541 - - Harrison, W. English houses, 330 _note_, - fever of 1557-8, 401 - - Hartlepool, plague, 349 - - Harwich, plague at in 1665-6 - - Havre de Grace (or "Newhaven"), plague during siege, 307 - - Hawkins, Sir John, in the slave trade, 583 - - Hawkins, Sir Richard, on health of Cape de Verde islands, 589 _note_, - scurvy in his voyage of 1593, 594-6 - - Hecker, antecedents of Black Death, 143-4, - on fecundity after Black Death, 200, - sweating sickness, 240, 244 _note_, 258, 263, 265, 271 _note_, 277 - _note_ - - Hendon, sends help in 1625 plague, 518 - - Henry I., taxation under, 31 - - Henry II., charities of, 33-34 - - Henry III., famine under, 43 - - Henry IV., "leprosy" of, 77 - - Henry V., vigorous sanitation under, 325 - - Henry VII., his expedition of 1485, 237, 240, 265, 270, 275, - in the sweat of 1508, 244, - reception of Catharine of Arragon, 288, - sanitation under, 325-6 - - Henry VIII., in the sweat of 1517, 247-8, - in plague of 1517-18, 290, - in sweat of 1528, 250-53, - in plague of 1535, 297, 300, - measures to check plague, 291, 312, 313-14, - repression of vagrancy &c., 390, - his illness in 1514, 456 - - Henry of Huntingdon, poem by, 18 - - Hensler, his history of syphilis, 416 _note_ - - Hensley, plague, 309 - - Hereford, plague, 348 - - Hereford, bishop of, case of morphaea, 76 - - Herefordshire, plague, 500 - - Hertford, sweat at, 254, - law courts at, 331, - plague, 339, 347, 356 - - Hertfordshire, after the Black Death, 191, - plague in, 493 - - Hirsch, Dr August, on endemics of syphilis, 438 - - Hispaniola, great pox and smallpox, 430, 469, - flux among English troops, 635-6 - - Hoddesdon, plague, 347 - - Hodges, Dr, his _Loimologia_, 648, 654, 675 - - Holinshed, erroneous entry of "small pocks", 454 - - Holland, Abraham, poem on plague of 1625, 512 - - Holme Pierrepont, plague, 499 - - Hniger, effects of Black Death, 141 _note_ - - Howard, John, Oxford gaol, 377, - gaol-fever, 382 _note_ - - Hugh, St, bp. of Lincoln, his care for burials, 13 _note_, - for lepers, 84 - - Hull, plague at, in 1472-8, 231, - in 1576, 340, - in 1635-38, 527 - - Hunstanton, Black Death, 137 - - Htten, Ulrich von, cure of syphilis, 416 - - - Ibn Batuta, his report that Black Death came from China, 146 - - Ibn-ul-Khatib, origin of Black Death, 146 - - Ilchester, decayed, 195, 221 - - Ilford, leper-hospital, 95 - - Inchcolm, quarantine island, 363, 369 - - Inchkeith, quarantine for plague, 235, 360, - for syphilis, 417 - - =Influenza=, meaning of, 397, - early epidemics, 398, - in 1510, 399, - in 1540, 400, - in 1557-8, 401-5, - in 1580, 406, - in 1657-9, 568-574, - many other epidemics might be so called, 408-9, 411, 536, 541, 543-4, - 567, 577 - - =Interdict of burial= &c., 11 - - Ipswich, scavengers of, 327, - plague at, in 1603, 498, - in 1665-6, 688 - - Ireland, plague in A.D. 664, 4-5, - condition in 12th cent., 21, - flux among troops, 33, - leper-houses, 100, - Black Death, 115, 118-19, 132, - succeeding plagues, 236, - alleged sweating sickness, 252 _note_, 400 _note_, - influenza, 398 _note_, - plague in Tudor period, 371-3, - in Cromwellian war, 365 - - Isle of Wight, depopulation of, 387, - influenza or sweat in 1558, 403 - - - Jamaica, English occupation of, 636-642 - - James I., authority for "a pockie priest", 415, - his accession followed by a great plague, 480, - his fatal illness, 512 - - Jarrow, plague in monastery of, 7 - - Jersey, plague in, 308 - - Jessopp, Augustus, on mortalities in the Black Death, 132, 134, 137, - on lawlessness after do., 140, - on panic from do., 181 _note_ - - John of Bridlington, 14th cent. pestilences, 204, 207 - - John of Burgoyne, 14th cent. writer on plague, 208 - - Jones, Dr John, on plague in London in 1563, 306, - on effects of the poor-rate, 394, - on influenza of 1558, 403, - his use of "ague", 410 - - =Justinian, plague in reign of=, 2, - theory of it, 156, 159, 161 - - - Kattiwar, plague in, 165, 169 - - Kellwaye, Simon, on the plague of 1593, 355, - on smallpox and measles, 461 - - Kendal, plague in 1598, 359 - - Kensington, plague in 1603, 492, - in 1625, 520 - - Kheybar, burials in, 165 - - Kilkenny, Black Death, 115, 119, 121, 132, - plague in 1649, 565 - - Kirkcaldy, plague in 1574, 366 - - Kirkoswald, plague in 1598, 360 - - Kremer, A. von, Mohammedan plagues, 163 - - Kumaon, plague in, 166 - - Kutch, plague in, 169 - - - =Labourers, Statute of=, 66, 181-2 - - Lamesley, plague in 1610, 501 - - Lancashire, ergotism? in 1702, 59, - wills after Black Death, 138, - fever in 1651, 567 - - Lancaster, Sir James, scurvy in his ships, 599, - treats scurvy by lime juice, 601 - - Langland, see 'Piers the Ploughman' - - =Lask=, old name of flux, 400, 412 - - Latimer, on intramural burial, 336, - on stews closed, 420 - - =Law=, business of increased after Black Death, 188-9 - - =Lazar=, derivation of, 79 _note_ - - Lazarus, St, 79, 94 - - =Lazarus, St, Knights of the Order of=, 89 - - Leake, plague in 1587-8, 349 - - Leeds, fever in 1644, 558, - plague in 1645, 558 - - Leicester, Black Death, 124 - _pestis secunda_, 203, - plague in 1563-4, 309, - in 1593, 357, - in 1607-11, 125, 501, - in 1626, 526 - - Leicestershire, strange epidemic in 1340, 59, - plague, 526 - - Leith, plague, 235 _note_, 361, 363, 366, 369, 503 - - Leominster, plague or fever in 1578, 349, - in 1597, 358 _note_ - - =Leper-houses=, in England, 86-99, - their mixed inmates, 93, - vogue soon past, 91-95, - the later non-monastic, 97, - in Scotland, 99, - in Ireland, 100 - - =Leprosy=, generic meaning of in medieval books, 70-79, - Biblical associations of, 79-81, - religious view of, 81-86, - prejudice against, 100-105, - laws against, 103-6, - estimated amount of, 107, - a disease akin to pellagra, 108, 110, - Gilbert White on causes of, 110, - dietetic cause of in, Hutchinson on cause of, 111 _note_, - constitutional, 112, - diet for in Scotland, 113 - - Lescarbot, on scurvy, 597-8 - - =Leviticus=, use of "leprosy" in, 80 - - Lichfield, plague, 309, 357, 559 - - Lieu-chow, bubonic disease, 169 - - Linacre, 286, 439 - - Lincoln, leper-hospital at, 92, - decay of, 195, - plague at, 357 - - Lindsey, statute of labourers ineffective in, 182 - - Linlithgow, lepers at, 99, - French pox at, 418 - - Lithgow, W., on plague in Tyneside, 557 - - =Lock, the, hospital=, 97, 98 _note_ - - Lodge, Dr T., on rats and moles in plague-time, 173, - on plague in 1603, 485, - on compulsory removal of the sick, 488 - - London: - fever in 962, 26, - in 1258, 44-45, - according to the bills, 504, 532, 576 - Fitzstephen's account of, 34 - French pox in, 424, 428, 432 _note_ - lepers expelled, 103, - stopped at the Gates, 104 - leper-hospitals of 88, 97-8 - nuisances in, 323-6 - overcrowding of, in 1580, 346, - in 1602 et seq., 539-540 - Parish Clerks of, 320-322 - plagues in: - the Black Death, 117, - mortality of ditto, 126-9, - the plague of 1361, 203, - of 1368-9, 215-16, - of 1407, 220, - of 1426, 227, - of 1434, 227-8, - of 1437, 228, - of 1454, 229, - of 1466, 230, - of 1474, 231, - of 1478-9, 231-2, - of 1487, 287, - of 1499-1500, 287, - of 1504, 288, - of 1511-12, 288, - of 1513, 288-9, - of 1514-16, 289-90, - of 1517-18, 290, 292, - of 1521, 292, - of 1529-31, 292-3, - of 1532, 293-6, - of 1535, 297-300, - of 1536, 301-2, - of 1543, 302, - of 1547-8, 303, - of 1563, 304-7, - of 1568-9, 338, - of 1573-4, 339, - of 1577-83, 341-5, 347, - of 1592-93, 351-4, 356, - of 1594, 356, - of 1603, 474-92, - of 1604-1610, 493-4, - of 1625, 507-520, - of 1630, 527 - of 1636 529-32, - of 1637-48, 532, 546 (table 533), - of 1665, 644-679 - plague-orders, 312-322, 355, 481, 488 - population, - end of 12th cent., 34, - in 1258, 44, - in 1349, 128-9, - in 1377, 201, - in 1535, 299, - in 1580, 345, - in 1593, 354, - in 1603 and before and after, 471-4, - in 1665, 660 - Richard of Devizes, on wickedness of, 34 - sanitary ordinances in 1369 and 1371, 216, 324, - in 1388, 324, - in 1415, 325, - in 1488-9, 325, - in 1543, 314, 315, - in 1568, 319, - in 1582, 330 - theatres closed in plague-time, 494-6 - - Loughborough, sweating sickness at, 259, - plague at, 304, 404, 500, 560 - - Louth, plague in 1587, 349 (_Notitiae Ludae_), - in 1631, 527 - - Lowe, Peter, on "Spanish Sickness", 427 - - Lowry, Dr J. H., on Pakhoi plague, 169 - - Lyndsay, Sir D., "grandgore", 418 - - Lynn, a physician of, 51, - leper-houses at, 93, 98, - plague at, in 1635-6, 528, - in 1665, 681 - - - Macclesfield, plague, 498 - - Macgowan, Dr D. J., on rats poisoned by the soil, 169 - - Magellan, scurvy in his ship, 579 - - Mah, on cadaveric theory of plague, 173 _note_ - - Maidenhead, scene at, 578 - - Maillet, De, on preservation of corpses in Egypt, 161 - - Malpas, plague in 1625, 526 _note_ - - Manardus, origin of syphilis, 434 - - Manchester, plague in 1608, 499, - in 1631, 527 - - Mansfeld, his English troops, 522 - - Margate, sick sailors at after Armada, 350 - - Marshall, John, on "parish infection", 396 _note_ - - Martin, on the illness of Charles VIII., 437 - - Matilda, Queen, and the lepers 82; - her hospital, 88 - - Mayerne, Sir Th., on the fevers of 1624, 540 - - =Measles=, Gaddesden on, 448, - derivation of name, 451, - joined with smallpox, 458-9, 462, 465-6 - - _Measure for Measure_, reference to "the sweat", 413 _note_, - the stews suppressed, 420, - doctrine of "obstruction" in, 605 _note_ - - Meaux, abbey of, Black Death in, 118, 131 - - Meddus, Rev. Dr, in London during plague of 1625, 514 - - =Medicine, profession of=, little in evidence, 51, 258, 402 - - Melcombe, Black Death lands at, 116 - - Merdj, modern plague at, 170 - - Merston Trussell, plague, 498 - - Milton, John, at Chalfont, in 1665, 665 _note_ - - =Moles= in plague-time, 173, 364 - - Molineux on universal fevers and universal colds, 409 - - =Monasteries=, pestilence in, 5-7, 9-10, - Stubbs on, 50, - found hospitals, 95, - Black Death in, 131 - - Monkleigh, plague, 499 - - Monmouthshire, fever and plague in 1638, 541 - - Montgomeryshire, plague in 1638, 542 - - Montpellier, case of _lepra_ at, 72, - practice in the plague at, 210 - - Moorfields, common latrine in, 325 - - More, Sir Thomas, on relapses, 248, - his plague-orders at Oxford, 291, - as "a parish clerk", 321, - describes London as the capital of Utopia, 329, - on pauperism and vagrancy, 389 - - =Morphaea=, a case of, 76 - - Morton, Richard, on the fever of 1658, 574 - - "=Mure=," old name of influenza, 389. - ("Tussis et le Murra." Canterbury MS. in _Hist. MSS. Com._ IX., pt. I. - p. 127). - - =Murrains=, 46 _note_ - - Mussis, De, on origin of Black Death at Caffa, 144 - - - Namasse, modern plague, 166 - - Nanking, death of rats at, 169 - - Nantwich, plague, 498 - - =Naples sickness of= 419, 430 - - "=New Acquaintance=", 260 - - "=New Disease=", 401, 403, 404, 534, 536, 541, 543-4, 570, 577 - - Newark, plague after siege, 560 - - Newcastle, plague in 1420, 222 _note_, - in 1478, 232, - in 1544, 303, - in 1589, 350, - in 1597, 358, - in 1603, 498, - in 1609, 500, - in 1625, 526, - in 1636, 529, - in 1642 and 1645, 557, - in 1666, 681 - - New England, voyages to, 612, - epidemics in, 613 - - Niebuhr, on demoralisation after pestilence, 186 - - Nldeke, Th., on legend of smallpox, 442 - - Normandy, Henry VII.'s troops raised in, 271, 275, - endemic sweat of, 271, 273 - - Northampton, old hospital at, 90, - plague, 304, - fever and plague in 1638, 542 - - Northwych, plague, 340, 498 - - Norwich, hospitals at, 93, 95, - leper-houses at the gates, 98, - the Black Death in, 129, - decline of after ditto, 193-5, - fever in 1382, 218, - plague in 1465, 230 _note_, - in 1479, 232, - in 1578, 348, - in 1603, 498, - in 1609, 500, - in 1625, 525, - in 1630-31, 527, - in 1636 fever or plague, 542, - plague in 1665-6, 681, 688 - - Nottingham, deaths at in 1518, 291, - plague at in 1593, 357, - in 1604, 499, - in 1667, 691 - - =Nuisances=, at Castle Combe, 198, 328, - in London, 216, 323-6, - at Stratford-on-Avon, 327, - at Ipswich, 327, - alleged by Erasmus, 329, - in London suburbs, 337, - at Evesham, 501, - at Kilkenny, 502 - - - Odoric, friar, his vision of unburied dead in China, 155 - - Okehampton, plague at, in 1626, 524 - - Osiander, on Christian duty in the plague, 310 - - Ottery St Mary, camp sickness at in 1645, 555, 561 - - Oundle, plague in 1665, 681 - - Oxford, leper-hospital, 93, - Black Death at, 125, - law students at after ditto, 189, - sweat of 1485, 243, - sweat (?) of 1508, 245, - sweat of 1517, 247, 248, - sweat of 1551, 260, - plague in the 15th cent., 282-3, - in the 16th cent., 283-4, - houses shut up at in 1518, 291, - plague in 1571, 338, - in 1575, 340, - in 1603-5, 496-7, - in 1625, 525, - in 1645, 559, - gaol-fever in 1577, 376-382, - war-typhus in 1643, 549-51, - fellow expelled for French pox, 421, - unwholesomeness of in 15th cent., 285 _note_, - proposal to remove the university from, 283 - - - Pakhoi, modern plague, 168 - - Par, Ambroise, holds cadaveric theory of plague, 156, 162, 658, - on likeness of smallpox to great pox, 468 - - Paris, "lepers" banished from in 1488, 104, 437 - - Pariset, Etienne, his theory of plague, 156-161 - - =Parish Clerks=, company of, 320-322 - - "=Parish infection=," a myth, 396 _note_ - - =Pauperism=, 39, 41, 387-395 - - Pauw, De, Cornelius, on plague in Egypt, 157, - on sanitary practice in ditto, 158 - - Paynel, translates book on French pox, 416 - - Peebles, plague at in 1499, 361 - - =Pellagra=, akin to leprosy, 108, 110, - causes of, 109 - - Penrith, plague at in 1598, 359-60 - - Perth, plague at in 1548, 363, - in 1580, 367, - in 1584-5, 368, - in 1608-9, 503-4, - in 1645, 563 - - _Pestilentia volatilis_ in Scotland, 398 - - Peterborough, burials at in 1175, 35, - plague in 1574, 339, - in 1606, 449, - in 1665, 681 - - Petrarch, on effects of Black Death, 177 - - Phaer, Th., or Phayre, or Thayre, writer on plague, 210, 489, - on smallpox and measles, 458 - - =Picardy Sweat=, 271-3 - - 'Piers the Ploughman,' quoted on surfeit and want, 65-67, - on moral effects of Black Death, 187-190, - on continuance of pestilence, 205-207, - on London famine of 1371, 215, - on burials by friars, 332, - use of "meseles", 450, - of "pokkes", 452-3 - - Pinctor, Peter, relates cases of French pox in the Vatican, 416 - - =Plague=, symptoms or characters of, in the Black Death, 120-122, - in medieval manuscripts, 208, 212-214, - in Skene's treatise, 364-5, - in the plague of 1665 (Boghurst), 674; - cadaveric theory of, 156 _et seq._, - relation of to typhus, 170. - General epidemics of: - Black Death, 116-141, - _pestis secunda_ (1361), 203, - _tertia_ (1368-9), 215, - _quarta_ (1375), 217, - _quinta_ (1382), 218, - of 1390-91, 219, - of 1407, 220, - of 1438-9, 225, 228, - of 1465, 230, - of 1471, 230. - Epidemics of in the Northern Marches, in 1379, 218, - in 1399, 220, - in 1421, 221. - See also under London and other places - - Planck, Dr, on causes of plague in Kumaon, 167 - - Plot, Dr, on Oxford Black Assizes, 382, - on mildness of smallpox, 467 - - Plymouth, plague in 1579, 348, - in 1590-91, 351, - sickness in the fleet in 1625, 521-2, - plague in 1626, 523 - - =Poll-tax= of 1377, population reckoned from, 200 - - =Poor-laws=, origin of, 362-3, - Jones on, 394 - - =Population= of towns in Domesday, 23-24, - kept small by death of infants, 25, - after the Black Death, 200-204. - See also "London," "Norwich." - - Portsmouth, plague in Venetian galley 1546, 303, - plague 1625, 524, - 1666, 688 - - =Posting sweat=, 260, - posting fever, 378 - - =Pox, the French=, in Scotland, 417, - in England, 419, - Erasmus on, 421, - meagre writings on, 415, 422, - Clowes on, 423, - Read on, 425, - Banister on, 427, - Graunt on, 428, - origin of epidemic, 429-438 - - Presteign, the sweat of 1551, 259, - plague in 1638, 542 - - Preston, wills proved after Black Death, 138 _note_, - plague at in 1631, 527 - - Procopius, on a plague-immunity, 675 _note_ - - - =Quarantine=, (forty days) for the Court in 1516, 290, 312, - in 1518, 313, - of persons in 1543, 313, - houses in 1563, 317, - in 1568, 318, - proposed for shipping at Gravesend in 1568, 337, - at Inchkeith in 1475, 235, 360, - details of at Inchcolm in 1564, 363, - case of at ditto, 367, - 18th cent. law of, 672 - - - Radnorshire, plague in 1638, 542 - - =Rats=, death of in plague-time, in Kumaon, 167, - in Yun-nan, 168, - in China, 169, - in Gujerat, 170, - ref. to by Lodge (1603), 173 - - Read, John, of Gloucester, on pox grown milder, 425, - describes mountebank, 426 - - Renfrewshire, plague in in 1601, 370 - - Renny, on plague in Garhwal, 167 - - Rhazes, "the pills of", 254, - source of medieval teaching on smallpox, 440 - - _Richard II._, "infection and the hand of war", 547 - - Richard of Devizes, on London in 12th cent., 34, - on dislike of the Franks to soapboilers and scavengers, 329 - - Richmond, Yorks, reduced by Black Death, 191, - plague in 1597-8, 359 - - Ripon, corn at in famine, 40, - leper-hospital at, 93 - - Robert of Brunne, describes effects of famine, 48 - - Rocher, M., on plague in Yun-nan, 168 - - Rochester, late leper foundation at, 97, - plague at in 1665, 681 - - Roger of Wendover, stories of avarice, 39, 40, - on the friars, 41 - - Rogers, Thorold, on prices of corn 13th century, 37, 43, - on rye in England, 64, - on villenage, 184 _note_, - wages after the Black Death, 185, - on new system of farming after ditto, 192, - paralysis of wool-trade after ditto, 193, - on good diet of the English in 15th cent., 222, - introduction of inferior bread, 224 _note_ - - Rome, medieval epidemics at, 3, 10 - - Rouen, siege of, 222 - - Royston, fevers in 1625, 505, - plague in 1625, 525, - in 1665, 682 - - =Rye-corn=, spurred, 53, - little grown in England, 64 - - - St Albans, school of annalists, 37, - burials at in 1247, 42, - famine in 1315, 48, - leper-hospitals at, 90, - admission to ditto, 102, - Black Death in the abbey, 131, - pestilence in 1431, 225, - plague in 1578, 347 - - St Andrews, plague at in 1585, 368, - in 1605, 503, - in 1647, 563 - - St Christopher, the French in, 618, - yellow fever in 1648, 621, 633 - - St Domingo, English attempt on, 634-6 - - St Giles's, Cripplegate, - churchyard, 334, - modes of burial, 335, - populous parish, 472, - the Great Plague in, 649 - - St Giles's-in-the-Fields, leper-hospital of, 83, 88, - Great Plague begins at, 656 - - St Johnstone, see Perth - - St Kilda, boat-cold, 274 - - St Olave's parish, plague of 1603, 478, - description of, 479 - - St Paul's, churchyard, state of in 1582, 333, - the charnel-house of, 334 - - St Sepulchre's parish, plague of 1563 in, 306, - churchyard of, 334 - - Salvetti, on the plague of 1625, 512, 519, - describes a fast, 513 - - Sandwich, plague in 1609, 500, - in 1635-37, 528, - in 1665, 681, 688 - - =Sanitary Act=, the first, 324 - - Sayer, Dr H., treats plague at Oxford in 1645, 559 - - =Scavengers=, at Ipswich, 327, - duties of at Exeter, 327, - in London, 328 - - =Scurvy=, in voyages, 579, 581-5, 594-6, 599-609, - among the French in Canada, 580, 597, - in a coaster, 597, - lime-juice for, 595, 601, 602-3, - pericarditis in, 580 _note_ - - Scyllatius, Nicolas, on French pox at Barcelona in 1494, 434 - - =Searchers=, at Shrewsbury in 1539, 320 _note_, - in London, 319, 321, - oath taken by in St Mary-le-Bow, 322, - at Colchester, 689 _note_ - - Seebohm, F., on mortality of Black Death among clergy, 134, - ditto in manor of Winslow, 136, - on remote effects of Black Death, 196 - - Shakespeare, John, fined, 327 - - Shakespeare, Wm., his business interfered with by plague, 495, - dies in a sickly year, 536. - See also titles of plays. - - =Shambles=, a nuisance in London, 216, 324, 325, 330, 487 - - Sheppey, plague, 348 - - Sherborne, plague in 1611, 501, - in 1665, 681 - - Sherburn, leper-hospital at, 94 - - Short, Dr Thomas, his epidemiological works, 57 _note_, 404 - - Shrewsbury, privilege of lepers at, 99, - new civic class after Black Death, 199, - sweat of 1551, 259, - plague at in 1525, 292, - in 1536-7, 301, 302, - in 1575, 340, - in 1592-3, 357, - in 1604, 499, - in 1630, 527, - in 1650, 564 - - Simpson, Sir James, on leprosy in Scotland, 106 _note_, - on syphilis in Scotland, 418 - - Skeat, Dr, on the derivation of "measles", 451 _note_ - - Skene, Dr Gilbert, on moles in plague-time, 173 _note_, - on cadaveric cause of plague, 336, - his book on plague (1568), 363-5 - - "=Slaedan=," Irish name supposed of influenza, 398 _note_ - - =Slave-ships=, ordure of, 630 - - =Slave-trade=, early history of, 614-17, - mortality of, 625-28 - - =Smallpox=, originally an Arabic subject, 439, - in the Elephant War, 441, - nature and affinities of, 442-4, - in medieval compends, 446 and _note_, - Gaddesden's alleged case, 447-8, - erroneously chronicled in 1366, 455, - in England 16th cent., 456-62, - case of in 1561, 459, - in 17th cent., 463, - Fracastori on, 467, - among American Indians (immunity of English), 613, - in Hispaniola, 615, - type of in Africans, 627, - in slave-ships 625, 627, - confused with great pox, 436-7, 456, 464, 468 - - Somersetshire, Black Death in, 117, - spotted fever in, 543 - - Southampton, plague in Venetian galley in 1519, 292, - plague in 1625, 524, - in 1665, 681 - - Southwell Abbey, plague in 1471, 230, - in 1478, 232 - - Spanish Main, sickness of English ships off, 588, 591 - - Spanish Town, mortality at in 1655, 638-642 - - Sprat, Bishop, on "remedy" of the sweat, 243 - - Stamford, plague in 1574, 339, - in 1580, 348, - in 1602-3, 360, 496, - in 1641, 545 - - Stapleton, Sir Ph., dies of plague at Calais, 546 - - Stepney, plague begins at in 1603, 477, 480, - plague of 1625 in, 511 - - =Stews= suppressed, 420 - - Stirling, grandgore at in 1498, 418, - plague at in 1606, 503 - - Stockport, plague, 498 - - Stoke (Newark), plague after siege, 560 - - Stoke Pogis, plague at in 1625, 520 - - "=Stop-gallant=," "=Stop-knave=," names of the sweat, 260, 262, 263 - - Stourbridge, leper-hospital, 93 - - Stratford, bread-carts, 215 _note_ - - Stratford-on-Avon, plague at, 309, - nuisance at, 327 - - Swainsthorpe, plague in 1479, 232 - - =Sweat, the English=, 1st epidemic, 235-243, - 2nd epidemic, 243-5, - 3rd epidemic, 245-250, - 4th epidemic, 250-255, - 5th epidemic, 259-263, - the epidemic of 1529 on the Continent, 256-259, - supposed sweats in England after 1551, 264, 280, 403, 413 _note_, - at Tiverton, 554, - supposed sweat in Flanders in 1551, 264 _note_, - supposed sweat in Ireland, 252 _note_, 400 _note_, - antecedents of in 1485, 265, 270, 273, - causes of (supposed) in London, 267, - a disease of the well-to-do, 263, 268, - extinction of, 279, - favouring conditions of the outbreaks, 276-9, - mortality from, 250, 251, 260-262, - abroad, 257, - symptoms of, 241, 246, 251, - theory of, 273, - treatment of, 242 - - =Sweat of Picardy=, 271 - - =Sweating= in influenza, 403, 554, - in war-typhus, 554 - - =Syphilis=, probably included under _lepra_, 72-75, 434, 437. - See also POX, THE FRENCH - - - Talifoo, modern plague, 168 - - Tana, 144, 147 - - Taylor, John, "water-poet", 512 - - =Texas fever=, 274 - - Thame, war-fever at, 548-9 - - Thayre, Th., see Phaer - - Thomson, Dr G., dissection of plague-body, 677 - - _Timon of Athens_, the pox described (Act IV. sc. 3), 428 - - Tittenhanger, Henry VIII. at, 254 - - Tiverton, plague at in 1591, 351, - sickness in 1597, 411, - war-typhus ("sweating sickness") at in 1644, 552-5 - - =Tobacco= in plague-time, 674, 682 - - Torella, on origin of French pox, 434 - - Totness, plague at in 1590, 351, - in 1647, 561 - - Tottenham, in plague of 1625, 518, 520 - - Tregony, plague at in 1595, 357 - - Tripe, Andrew, his poem on the pox, 432 _note_ - - Trumpington, plague in 1625, 525 - - Truro, decayed, 221, - plague in 1578, 347 - - Tuke, Brian, on the sweat of 1528, 255 - - Turner, Mrs Anne, 487 _note_ - - Turner, Dr P., arsenic in plague, 487 - - Turner, of Boulogne, preaches against burials in the city, 336 - - Twyford, plague in 1603, 493 - - Tynemouth, plague during siege, 557 - - - Uffculme, sweat at in 1551, 262 - - - Valencia, cases of French pox at, 434-5 - - Vasco da Gama, scurvy in his ships, 579 - - Vatican, the French pox in the, 416 - - Vetlianka, modern plague at, 172 - - Vincent, Rev. Thomas, his experiences of the Great Plague, 648, 664, 670 - - Virgil, Polydore, on the sweat, 237, 240, - on treatment of ditto, 242 - - Virginia, voyages to, 590, 609-612 - - - Wales, pestilence in the marches of in 1234, 12, - Giraldus on, 21, - famine in 1189, 35, - leper-law of, 106, - Black Death in, 118, - plague and fever in 1638, 541 - - Wallingford, after Black Death, 195, - small pox, measles and plague, 291, - plague at, 559 - - "=Wame-ill=," Scots famine-sickness in 1438-9, 235 - - =Wands= carried in plague time, 314-5 - - Wells, Black Death in diocese of, 117, - plague at in 1575, 340 - - West Indies, colonization of, 617 _et seq._ - - Whickham, plague, 501 - - White, Gilbert, on causes of leprosy, 110 - - Whitmore, H., on fever in 1651, 566, - on fever and influenza in 1658-9, 572-4 - - =Whooping-cough=, or the kink, 459 - - Willan, Dr, 4, 440 - - William of Newburgh, story of plague at Annan, 11, - famine-fever of 1196, 35, - Durham leper-hospital, 94 - - Willis, Dr T., on the war typhus of 1643, 547, 549, - on plague at Oxford &c., 559, - on the fevers and (or) influenzas of 1657-8, 568-572 - - =Wills=, in Black Death, in London, 117-18, 186, - in Lancashire, 138 _note_, - in Colchester, 186; - in London in 1361, 203, - in 1368, 216 - - Wilton, sweat at 252 - - Winchester, plague at in 1603, 489, - in 1625, 521 _note_, - in 1666, 687, 691 - - Winslow, manor of, 136 - - Wisbech, plague at in 1586, 349 - - Wither, George, on plague of 1625, 512 - - Woburn, sweat at, 252 - - Wolsey, the sweat in his household, 247, 252, 253, - letter from Anne Boleyn to, 255, - charged with the great pox, 422 - - Woodall, John, describes the plague-bubo, 122, - on scurvy, 603-6 - - Woodstock, sickness near, 291, - plague, 292 - - Wool trade after Black Death, 179, 193 - - Wyclif, on decrease of population, 201 - - - Yarmouth, Black Death in, 130, - decline of, 195, 221; - plague in 1579, 348, - in 1625, 525, - in 1635-6, 528, - in 1664-5, 680 - - =Yellow Fever=, epidemic of at Bridgetown in 1647, 620, - in St Christopher, 621, - case of described, 623, - characters of, 624, - in "Regalia" and "La Pique", 629, - theory of in slave-ports, 630-31, - as a soil-poison, 632-3, - question of, in Drake's fleet, 518-9 - - York, wasting of, 27, - hospital at, 87, - Black Death at, 118, 131, - ditto in diocese of, 134, - size of after ditto, 201, - plague in 1391, 220, - in 1485, 282, - plague or sweat in 1551, 261, - plague in 1604, 489 - - Yun-nan, modern plague, 168 - - Yusufzai, bubonic typhus in, 171 - - -CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AND SONS, AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. - - - - -FOOTNOTES: - -[1] The references to the Justinian plague by contemporary and later -historians have been collected, together with partly irrelevant matter -about portents and earthquakes, by Val. Seibel, _Die grosse Pest zur Zeit -Justinian's I._ Dillingen, 1857. The author, a layman, throws no light -upon its origin. - -[2] Beda, _Hist. Eccles._ Eng. Hist. Society's ed. p. 243: "qui ubi Romam -pervenit, cujus sedi apostolicae tempore illo Vitalianus praeerat, -postquam itineris sui causam praefato papae apostolico patefecit, non -multo post et ipse et omnes pene, qui cum eo advenerant, socii, -pestilentia superveniente, deleti sunt." - -[3] _Flores Histor._ by Roger of Wendover. Eng. Hist. Society's ed. I. -180. - -[4] _Ibid._ I. 228. - -[5] _Miscellaneous Works of the late Robert Willan, M.D., F.R.S., F.A.S._ -Edited by Ashby Smith, M.D. London, 1831. 'An Enquiry into the Antiquity -of the Smallpox etc.' p. 108. - -[6] _Annals of the Four Masters_, ed. O'Donovan, Dublin, 1851, I. 183. -"A.D. 543. There was an extraordinary universal plague through the world, -which swept away the noblest third part of the human race." - -p. 187. "A.D. 548. Of the mortality which was called Cron Chonaill--and -that was the first Buide Chonaill [_flava ictericia_],--these saints -died," several names following. The entries of that plague are under -different years in the various original Annals. - -[7] "Eodem anno dominicae incarnationis sexcentesimo sexagesimo quarto, -facta erat eclipsis solis die tertio mensis Maii, hora circiter decima -diei; quo etiam anno subita pestilentiae lues, depopulatis prius -australibus Brittaniae plagis, Nordanhymbrorum quoque provinciam -corripiens, atque acerba clade diutius longe lateque desaeviens, magnam -hominum multitudinem stravit. Qua plaga praefatus Domini sacerdos Tuda -raptus est de mundo, et in monasterio, quod dicitur Paegnalaech, -honorifice sepultus. Haec autem plaga Hiberniam quoque insulam pari clade -premebat. Erant ibidem eo tempore multi nobilium simul et mediocrium de -gente Anglorum, qui tempore Finani et Colmani episcoporum, relicta insula -patria, vel divinae lectionis, vel continentioris vitae gratia, illo -secesserant.... Erant inter hos duo juvenes magnae indolis, de nobilibus -Anglorum, Aedilhun et Ecgberct," etc. Beda's _Hist. Eccles._ ed. -Stevenson. Engl. Hist. Soc. I. p. 231. - -[8] _Ibid._ p. 240. - -[9] _Annals of the Four Masters_, I. 275. - -[10] Thorpe, in his edition of Florence of Worcester, for the Eng. Hist. -Society, I. 25. - -[11] The first of Beda's incidents of the Barking monastery relates to a -miraculous sign in the heavens showing where the cemetery was to be. It -begins: "Cum tempestas saepe dictae cladis, late cuncta depopulans, etiam -partem monasterii hujus illam qua viri tenebantur, invasisset, et passim -quotidie raperentur ad Dominum." - -[12] "Erat in eodem monasterio [Barking] puer trium circiter, non amplius -annorum, sica nomine, qui propter infantilem adhuc aetatem in virginum -Deo dedicatarum solebat cella nutriri, ibique medicari. Hic praefata -pestilentia tactus ubi ad extrema pervenit clamavit tertio unam de -consecratis Christo virginibus, proprio eam nomine quasi praesentem -alloquens 'Eadgyd, Eadgyd, Eadgyd'; et sic terminans temporalem vitam -intravit aeternam. At virgo illa, quam moriens vocabat, ipso quo vocata -est die de hac luce subtracta, et ilium qui se vocavit ad regnum coeleste -secuta est." Beda, p. 265. Then follows the story of a nun dying of the -pestilence in the same monastery. - -[13] Beda, Lib. IV. cap. 14. In addition to the instances in the text, -which I have collected from Beda's _Ecclesiastical History_, I find two -mentioned by Willan in his "Inquiry into the Antiquity of the Smallpox," -(_Miscell. Works_, London, 1821, pp. 109, 110): "About the year 672, St -Cedda, Bishop of the East Saxons, being on a visitation to the monastery -of Lestingham, was infected with a contagious distemper, and died on the -seventh day. Thirty monks, who came to visit the tomb of their bishop, -were likewise infected, and most of them died" (_Vita S. Ceddae_, VII. -Jan. p. 375. Cf. Beda, IV. 3). Again: "In the course of the year 685, the -disease re-appeared at Lindisfarne, (Holy Island), St Cuthbert's abbacy, -and in 686 spread through the adjoining district, where it particularly -affected children" (_Vita S. Cuthberti_, cap. 33). Willan's erudition has -been used in support of a most improbable hypothesis, that the pestilence -of those years, in monasteries and elsewhere, was smallpox. - -[14] _Historia Abbatum Gyrvensium, auctore anonymo_, 13 and 14. (App. -to vol. II. of Beda's works. Eng. Hist. Society's edition, p. 323.) - - 13. Qui dum transmarinis moraretur in locis [Benedict] ecce subita -pestilentiae procella Brittaniam corripiens lata nece vastavit, in qua -plurimi de utroque ejus monasterio, et ipse venerabilis ac Deo dilectus -abbas Eosterwini raptus est ad Dominum, quarto ex quo abbas esse coeperat -anno. - - 14. Porro in monasterio cui Ceolfridus praeerat omnes qui legere, vel -praedicare, vel antiphonas ac responsoria dicere possent ablati sunt -excepto ipso abbate et uno puerulo, qui ab ipso nutritus et eruditus. - -In the Article "Baeda," _Dict. Nat. Biog._, the Rev. W. Hunt points out -that the boy referred to in the above passage would have been Beda -himself. - -[15] The history of the name _pestis flava ictericia_ is given by -O'Donovan in a note to the passage in the _Annals of the Four Masters_, I. -275: "Icteritia vel aurigo, id est abundantia flavae bilis, per corpus -effusae, hominemque pallidum reddentis," is the explanation of P. O'S. -Beare. The earliest mention of "yellow plague" appears to have been in an -ancient life of St Gerald of Mayo, in Colgan's _Acta Sanctorum_, at the -calendar date of 13th March. - -[16] _Polychronicon_, Rolls edition, V. 250. - -[17] _The Story of England_, Rolls series, ed. Furnivall, II. 569. - -[18] Rolls series, ed. Thorpe, I. 136, 137 (Transl. II. 60). Also in -Gervase of Canterbury, Rolls series, ed. Stubbs, II. 348. - -[19] _Chronicon Abbatiae Ramesiensis_, Rolls ed. 1886, p. 397. - -[20] According to an inquisition of 2 Edward III., the abbey of Croyland -contained in 1328, forty-one monks, besides fifteen "corrodiarii" and -thirty-six servitors. _Chronicle of Croyland_ in Gale, I. 482. - -[21] _Epistolae Cantuarienses_, Rolls series, No. 38, ed. Stubbs, Epist. -CCLXXII. p. 254, and Introduction, p. lxvii. - -[22] William of Newburgh, Rolls ed. p. 481. - -[23] Ralph of Coggeshall, Rolls series, No. 66, p. 112. - -[24] Roger of Wendover, III. 72. - -[25] In the Life of St Hugh of Lincoln, who died in 1200, or eight years -before the Papal Interdict, there is a clear reference to difficulties -thrown by the priests in the way of burial, especially for the poor, and -perhaps in a time of epidemic sickness such as the years 1194-6. See _Vita -S. Hugonis Lincolnensis_, Rolls series, No. 37, pp. 228-233. - -[26] Eadmer, _l. c._ - -[27] _Polychronicon_, Rolls ed. VII. 90. - -[28] _Gesta Pontificum_, Rolls ed. p. 171. Another narrator of the story -of St Elphege and the Danes is Henry of Huntingdon (Rolls ed. p. 179); he -says nothing of the pestilence, but describes the sack of Canterbury. -Eadmer also (_Historia Novorum in Anglia_, Rolls ser. 81, p. 4) omits the -pestilence. - -[29] Quoted by Higden, _Polychronicon_, Rolls ed. II. 18. This may have -been one of Henry of Huntingdon's poems which were extant in Leland's -time, but are now lost. - -[30] _Polychronicon_, II. 166. - -[31] Marchand, _tude sur quelques pidmies et endmies du moyen ge_ -(Thse), Paris, 1873, p. 49, with a reference to Fuchs, "Das heilige Feuer -im Mittelalter" in Hecker's _Annalen_, vol. 28, p. 1, which journal I have -been unable to consult. - -[32] Giraldus Cambrensis, _Topographia Hiberniae_, in Rolls edition of his -works, No. 21, vol. V. - -[33] "Itinerarium Walliae" and "Descriptio Kambriae," _Opera_, vol. VI. - -[34] _Polychronicon_, I. 410. - -[35] William of Newburgh, _sub anno_ 1157, I. 107. - -[36] _Europe during the Middle Ages_, chap. IX. - -[37] I have used for this purpose Merewether and Stephens' _History of -Boroughs_, 3 vols. 1835. - -[38] _Leechdoms, Wort-cunning and Starcraft of Early England._ Edited by -Cockayne for the Rolls Series, 3 vols. 1864-66. - -[39] It is illustrative of the confusion which arises from careless -copying by later compilers of history that Roger of Wendover, in his -_Flores Historiarum_ (Eng. Hist. Society's edition I. 159), takes Beda's -Sussex reference to famine and makes it do duty, under the year 665, for -the great general plague of 664, having apparently overlooked Beda's -entirely distinct account of the latter. - -[40] _Hist. Eccles._ 290:--"Siquidem tribus annis ante adventum ejus in -provinciam, nulla illis in locis pluvia ceciderat, unde et fames -acerbissima plebem invadens inopia nece prostravit. Denique ferunt quia -saepe quadraginta simul aut quinquaginta homines inedia macerati -procederent ad praecipitium aliquod sive ripam maris, et junctis misere -manibus pariter omnes aut ruina perituri, aut fluctibus absorbendi -deciderent. Verum ipso die, quo baptisma fidei gens suscepit illa, -descendit pluvia serena sed copiosa, refloruit terra, rediit viridantibus -arvis annus laetus et frugifer." - -[41] Green _Short History of the English People_, p. 39: "The very fields -lay waste, and the land was scourged by famine and plague." I have missed -this reference to plague in the original authorities. A passage in -Higden's _Polychronicon_ (V. 258) may relate to that period, although it -is referred to the mythical time of Vortigern. - -[42] Stow, in enumerating the instances of public charity in his _Survey -of London_, ascribes the melting of the church plate to Ethelwald, bishop -of Winchester in the reign of King Edgar, about the year 963. - -[43] The murrain was a flux, _anglic_ "scitha" (Roger of Howden) or -"schitta" (Bromton). - -[44] Simeon of Durham, in Rolls series, II. 188. As to fugitives, see Chr. -Evesham, p. 91. - -[45] _Gesta Pontif. Angl._ p. 208. - -[46] Simeon of Durham, "On the Miracles of St Cuthbert," _Works_, II. -338-40. - -[47] Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Malmesbury adds "a mortality of men." - -[48] William of Malmesbury, _Gest. Reg._ Eng. Hist. Soc. II. 452. - -[49] Malmesbury's construction is repeated by Henry of Huntingdon, Rolls -ed. p. 209. Florence of Worcester merely says: "primo febribus, deinde -fame." - -[50] Henry of Huntingdon, p. 232. - -[51] Annals of Winchester, _sub anno_ 1096. - -[52] "Septimo anno propter tributa quae rex in Normannia positus edixerat, -agricultura defecit; qua fatiscente fames e vestigio; ea quoque -invalescente mortalitas hominum subsecuta, adeo crebra ut deesset -morituris cura, mortuis sepultura." _Gest. Reg._ II. 506. Copied in the -Annals of Margan, Rolls ed. II. 506. - -[53] _Rs Ml_, by A. Kinloch Forbes, 2nd ed. p. 543. - -[54] _Ibid._ - -[55] Thomas Whyte, "Report on the disease which prevailed in Kattywar in -1819-20." _Trans. Med. Phys. Soc. Bombay_, I. (1838), p. 169. See also -Gilder, _ibid._ p. 192; Frederick Forbes _ibid._ II. 1, and Thesis on -Plague, Edin. 1840. - -[56] In 1110 the tax was for the dower of the king's daughter on her -marriage. That also was parallel with a feudal right in Gujerat: "When a -chief has to portion a daughter, or to incur other similar necessary -expense, he has the right of imposing a levy upon the cultivators to meet -it." A. Kinloch Forbes, _Rs Ml_, 2nd ed. p. 546. Refusal to plough, -_temp._ Henry I. is stated by Pearson, I. 442. - -[57] Malmesbury, _Gest. Pont._ p. 442; H. of Huntingdon; Annals of Margan; -Roger of Howden. - -[58] Also in the Annals of Osney: "Mortalitas maxima hominum in Anglia." - -[59] "Attenuata est Anglia, ut ex regno florentissimo infelicissimum -videretur." William of Newburgh, Rolls ed. p. 39. - -[60] Henry of Huntingdon, _sub anno_ 1138. - -[61] _Gesta Stephani_, Rolls series, No. 82, vol. III. p. 99. The author -is conjectured to have been a foreigner in the service of the bishop of -Winchester, brother of the king. - -[62] - - "Affluit ergo fames; consumpta carne gementes - Exhalant animas ossa cutisque vagas. - Quis tantos sepelire queat coetus morientium? - Ecce Stigis facies, consimilisque lues." - -[63] William of Newburgh, _sub anno_ 1149. - -[64] Stow's _Survey of London_, Popular ed. (1890) p. 116. - -[65] "Recentium esus carnium et haustus aquae, tam insolitus quam -incognitus, plures de regis exercitu panis inedia laborantes, fluxu -ventris afflixit in Hybernia." Radulphus de Diceto, _Imagines Historiar._ -I. 350. - -[66] Benedict of Peterborough, I. 104, and, in identical terms, in Roger -of Howden. - -[67] The speaker is represented as a Jew in France. It is significant that -the massacre of the Jews at Lynn in 1190 is stated by William of Newburgh -to have been instigated by the _foreign_ traders. - -[68] Ricardus Divisiensis. Eng. Hist. Society's ed. p. 60. - -[69] Description of London, prefixed to Fitzstephen's Life of Becket. -Reproduced in Stow's _Survey of London_. - -[70] _Petri Blesensis omnia opera_, ed. Giles, Epist. CLI. The number of -churches may seem large for the population; but it should be kept in mind -that these city parish churches were mere chapels or oratories, like the -side-chapels of a great church. Indeed, at Yarmouth, they were actually -built along the sides of the single great parish church; whereas, at -Norwich, there were sixty of them standing each in its own small parish -area, the Cathedral, as well as the other conventual churches, being the -greater places of worship. Lincoln is said to have had 49 of these small -churches, and York 40. An example of them remains in St Peter's at -Cambridge. - -[71] William of Newburgh, p. 431. - -[72] _Ibid._ - -[73] "His quoque nostris diebus, ingruente famis inedia, et maxima -pauperum turba quotidie ad januam jacente, de communi patrum consilio, ad -caritatis explendae sufficientiam, propter bladum in Angliam navis -Bristollum missa est." _Itiner. Walliae_, Rolls ed. VI. 68. The itinerary -of Bishop Baldwin, which the author follows, was in 1188; but the "his -quoque nostris diebus" clearly refers to a later date, which may have been -the year after, or may have been the more severe famine of 1195-7 or of -1203. - -[74] _Histor. Rer. Angl._, Rolls series, No. 82, vol. I. pp. 460, 484. - -[75] Ralph of Coggeshall, _sub anno_. - -[76] "Variis infirmitatibus homines per Angliam vexantur et quamplures -moriuntur," Annals of Margan, Rolls series, No. 36. - -[77] Roger of Wendover, _Fl. Hist._ Rolls ed. - -[78] Matthew Paris, _Chronica Majora_, Rolls series, No. 57, ed. Luard, -vol. V. - -[79] Rishanger in _Chron. Monast. S. Albani_, Rolls series, No. 28. - -[80] John Trokelowe, _ibid._ - -[81] Wendover, II. 162, 171, 190, 205. - -[82] Wendover, III. 95, 98. - -[83] "Qui ex avaritia inopiam semper habent suspectam." - -[84] Alboldslea, or Abbotsley, was the parish of which the famous -Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, was rector (perhaps non-resident) down to -1231, or to within three years of the date of the above anecdote. The -existing church is of great age, and may well have been the actual edifice -in which the scene was enacted. - -[85] Wendover, III. 96. - -[86] _Ibid._ III. 19, 27. - -[87] Wendover, III. 381. - -[88] William of Newburgh, _sub anno_ 1196. - -[89] On the other hand John Stow seems to have acquired, from some -unstated source, an extraordinary prejudice against him. - -[90] Matthew Paris, _Chron. Maj._ ed. Luard, V. 663, 675. - -[91] Annals of Tewkesbury in _Annales Monastici_, Rolls series, No. 36. - -[92] _Chronica Majora_, IV. 647; Stow, _Survey of London_. - -[93] _Chron. Maj._ IV. 654. - -[94] _Chr. Maj._ V. 660. Other details occur here and there to the end of -the chronicle. - -[95] This is the number given by Matthew Paris. It suggests a larger -population in the capital than we might have been disposed to credit. The -same writer says that London was so full of people when the parliament was -sitting the year before (1257) that the city could hardly hold them all in -her ample bosom. The Annals of Tewkesbury put the whole mortality from -famine and fever in London in 1258 at 20,000. But the whole population did -not probably exceed 40,000. - -[96] The year 1274 was the beginning of so exceptional a murrain of sheep -that it deserves mention here, although murrains do not come within the -scope of the work. It is recorded by more than one contemporary. Rishanger -(p. 84) says: "In that year a disastrous plague of sheep seized upon -England, so that the sheep-folds were everywhere emptied through the -spreading of it. It lasted for twenty-eight years following, so that no -farm of the whole kingdom was without the infliction of that misery. Many -attributed the cause of this disease, which the inhabitants had not been -acquainted with before, to a certain rich man of the Frankish nation, who -settled in Northumberland, having brought with him a certain sheep of -Spanish breed, the size of a small two year old ox, which was ailing and -contaminated all the flocks of England by handing on its disease to them." -Under the year following, 1275, he enters it again, using the term -"scabies." Thorold Rogers (_Hist. of Agric. and Prices_, I. 31) has found -"scab" of sheep often mentioned in the bailiffs' accounts from about 1288; -it is assumed to have become permanent from the item of tar occurring -regularly in the accounts; but tar was used ordinarily for marking. It may -have been sheep-pox, which Fitzherbert, in his _Book of Husbandry_ -(edition of 1598), describes under the name of "the Poxe," giving a clear -account of the way to deal with it by isolation. For murrains in general, -the reader may consult Fleming's _Animal Plagues_, 2 vols. 1871--1884, a -work which is mostly compiled (with meagre acknowledgment for -"bibliography" only) from the truly learned work of Heusinger, _Recherches -de Pathologie Compare_, Cassel, 1844. Fleming has used only the "pices -justificatives," and has not carried the history beyond the point where -Heusinger left it. - -[97] Continuation of Wm. of Newburgh, Rolls series No. 82, vol. II. p. -560: "Facta est magna fames per universam Angliam et maxime partibus -occidentalibus. In Hibernia vero tres pestes invaluerunt, sc. mortalitas, -fames, et gladius: per guerram mortalem praevalentibus Hybernicis et -Anglicis succumbentibus. Qui vero gladium et famem evadere potuerunt, -peste mortalitatis praeventi sunt, ita ut vivi mortuis sepeliendis vix -sufficere valerent." - -[98] See also the continuation of the chronicle of Florence of Worcester, -Bohn's series, p. 405. - -[99] Rishanger's annals, 1259-1305, and Trokelowe's, 1307-1323, are -printed in the volumes of _Chronica Monast. S. Albani_, No. 28 of the -Rolls series. - -[100] Furnivall's ed. Rolls series, No. 87, vol. II. 569, 573. - -[101] Chronicle of William Gregory, Camden Society, ed. Gairdner, 1876. - -[102] _Annales Londonienses_, Rolls series, No. 76, ed. Stubbs. -Introduction, p. lxxvi. - -[103] _Ibid._ (_Annales Paulini_), p. 238. - -[104] _Ibid._ p. 304. - -[105] _Epistolae Cantuarienses_, Rolls series, No. 38, II. Introduction by -Stubbs, p. xxxii. - -[106] _Epistolae Cantuarienses_, Rolls series, No. 38, II. Introduction by -Stubbs, p. cxix. - -[107] Ralph of Coggeshall, Rolls series, No. 66, p. 156. - -[108] He might have been, and probably was, the prototype of the physician -Nathan Ben Israel, in the 35th Chapter of _Ivanhoe_. - -[109] Adam de Marisco to Grosseteste, _Mon. Francisc._ ed. Brewer, I. 113. - -[110] I have not succeeded in finding this in the author's writings, and -quote it at second hand. - -[111] Quoted, without date, by Marchand, _tude historique et -nosographique sur quelques pidmies et endmies du moyen ge_. Paris, -1873. - -[112] I give this account of the obvious characters of spurred rye from a -recent observation of a growing crop of it. - -[113] One of the greatest epidemics was in Westphalia and the Cologne -district in 1596 and 1597. It fell to be described by two learned writers, -Sennert and Horst, of whose accounts a summary is given by Short, _Air, -weather, seasons, etc._ I. 275-285. - -[114] Translated into the _Philosophical Transactions_, No. 130, vol. XII. -p. 758 (14 Dec. 1676) from the _Journal des Savans_. - -[115] _Studien ber den Ergotismus_, Marburg, 1856. - -[116] Simeon of Durham and Roger of Howden have the following, under the -year 1048: "Mortalitas hominum et animalium multas occupavit Angliae -provincias, et ignis aereus, vulgo dictus sylvaticus, in Deorbensi -provincia et quibusdam aliis provinciis, villas et segetes multas -ustulavit." - -[117] "Je crois qu'ils ont voulu indiquer l'ignis sacer ou de St Antoine, -qui dans ces annes et surtout 1044 svit en France." _Recherches de -Pathologie Compare_, vol. II. p. cxlviii. - -[118] On the other hand, Short, in his _General Chronological History of -the Air, Weather, Seasons, Meteors etc._ (2 vols. London, 1749) says that -the epidemic of 1110 consisted of "especially an epidemic erysipelas, -whereof many died, the parts being black and shrivelled up;" and that in -1128, "St Anthony's fire was fatal to many in England." He gives no -authority in either case. But the one error is run to earth in a French -entry of 1109, "membris instar carbonum nigrescentibus" (Sig. Gembl. -auctar. p. 274, Migne); the other, most likely, in the _ignis_ around -Chartres, 1128 (Stephen of Caen, Bouquet, xii. 780). - -Perhaps this is the best place to express a general opinion on the work by -Short, which is the only book of the kind in English previous to my own. -It is everywhere uncritical and credulous, and often grossly inaccurate in -dates, sometimes repeating the same epidemic under different years. It -appears to have been compiled, for the earlier part, at least, from -foreign sources, such as a Chronicle of Magdeburg, and to a large extent -from a work by Colle de Belluno (fl. 1631). Many of the facts about -English epidemics are given almost as in the original chronicles, but -without reference to them. English experience of sickness is lost in the -general chronology of epidemics for all Europe, and is dealt with in a -purely verbalist manner. So far as this volume extends (1667) I have found -Short's book of no use, except now and then in calling my attention to -something that I had overlooked. His other work, _New Observations on -City, Town and County Bills of Mortality_ (London, 1750) shows the author -to much greater advantage, and I have used his statistical tables for the -sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. - -[119] The facts were communicated to the Royal Society by Charlton -Wollaston, M.D., F.R.S., then resident in Suffolk, and by the Rev. James -Bones. They were referred by Dr G. Baker to Tissot of Lausanne, who -replied that they corresponded to typical gangrenous ergotism. See _Phil. -Trans._ vol. LII. pt. 2 (1762) p. 523, p. 526, p. 529; and vol. LX. (1768) -p. 106. - -[120] An erroneous statement as to an epidemic of gangrenous ergotism, or -of Kriebelkrankheit, in England in 1676, has somehow come to be current in -German books. It has a place in the latest chronological table of ergotism -epidemics, that of Hirsch in his _Handbuch der historisch-geographischen -Pathologie_, vol. II. 1883 (Engl. Transl. II. p. 206), the reference being -to Birch, _Philos. Transact._ This reference to ergotism in England in -1676 is given also in Th. O. Heusinger's table (1856), where it appears in -the form of "Schnurrer, nach Birch." On turning to Schnurrer's _Chronik -der Seuchen_ (II. 210), the reference is found to be, "Birch, _Phil. -Trans._ vols. XI. and XII."; and coming at length to the _Philosophical -Transactions_, it appears that vols. X., XI. and XII. are bound up -together, that vol. XII. (1676) p. 758, contains an extract from the -_Journal des Savans_ about ergot of rye in certain parts of France, and -that there is nothing about ergotism in England in either vol. XI. or vol. -XII. So far as concerns Dr Birch, he was secretary to the Royal Society in -the next century. - -[121] Knighton, _De Eventibus Angliae_ in Twysden, col. 2580: "In aestate -scilicet anno Gratiae 1340 accidit quaedam execrabilis et enormis -infirmitas in Anglia quasi communis, et praecipue in comitatu Leicestriae -adeo quod durante passione homines emiserunt vocem latrabilem ac si esset -latratus canum; et fuit quasi intolerabilis poena durante passione: ex -inde fuit magna pestilentia hominum." - -[122] _Phil. Trans._ XXIII. p. 1174 (June 26, 1702). - -[123] _Op. cit._ I. pt. 2, p. 366. - -[124] _Phil. Trans._ XXII. (1700-1701), p. 799, a Letter in Latin from -Joh. Freind dated Christ Church, Oxford, 31 March. - -[125] The earliest religious hysterias of Sweden fall in the years 1668 to -1673, which do not correspond to years of ergotism in that country, -although there was ergotism in France in 1670 and in Westphalia in 1672. -The later Swedish psychopathies have been in 1841-2, 1854, 1858, and -1866-68, some of which years do correspond closely to periods of ergotism -in Sweden. - -[126] "Moriebantur etiam plures morbo litargiae, multis infortunia -prophetantes; mulieres insuper decessere multae per fluxum, et erat -communis pestis bestiarum." Walsingham, _Hist. Angl._, _sub anno_; and in -identical terms in the _Chronicon Angliae_ a Monacho Sancti Albani. - -[127] "Magna et formidabilis pestilentia extemplo subsecuta est -Cantabrigiae, qua homines subito, prout dicebatur, sospites, invasi mentis -phrenesi moriebantur, sine viatico sive sensu." Walsingham, _Hist. Angl._ -II. 186. Under the same year, 1389, the continuator of Higden's -_Polychronicon_ (IX. 216) says that the king being in the south and -"seeing some of his prostrated by sudden death, hastened to Windsor." - -[128] For example in the Sloane MS. 2420 (the treatise by Constantinus -Africanus of Salerno), there are chapters "De Litargia," "De Stupore -Mentis," and "De Phrenesi." - -[129] Th. O. Heusinger, _Studien ber den Ergotismus_, Marburg, 1856, p. -35: "Es werden freilich in den Beschreibungen einiger frheren Epidemieen -fter typhse Erscheinungen erwhnt; die Beschreiber behaupten aber auch -dann meist die Contagiositt der Krankheit, und es liegt die Vermuthung -nahe, dass die Krankheit dann eigentlich ein Typhus war, bei dem die -Erscheinungen des Ergotismus ebenso constant vorkommen, wie sie sonst in -vereinzelteren Fllen dem Typhus sich beigesellen" (cf. 'Dorf Gossfelden,' -in Appendix). - -[130] _History of Agriculture and Prices_, I. 27. - -[131] "Sed in fructibus arborum suspicio multa fuit, eo quod per nebulas -foetentes, exhalationes, aerisque varias corruptiones, ipsi fructus, puta -poma, pyra, et hujusmodi sunt infecta; quorum esu multi mortales hoc anno -[1383] vel pestem letalem vel graves morbos et infirmitates incurrerunt." -Walsingham, _Hist. Angl._ II. 109. The continuator of Higden records under -the same year, in one place a "great pestilence in Kent which destroyed -many, and spared no age or sex" (IX. 27), and on another page (IX. 21) a -great epidemic in Norfolk, which attacked only the youth of either sex -between the ages of seven and twenty-two! - -[132] Walsingham, II. 203; Stow's _Survey of London_, p. 133. - -[133] The spelling, and a few whole words, have been altered from Skeat's -text, so as to make the meaning clear. - -[134] Simpson, _Edin. Med. and Surg. Journ._ 1842, vol. LVII. p. 136. - -[135] Ralph of Coggeshall (Rolls ed. p. 156) describes the death of Hubert -on 13 July, 1205, but does not mention the name of his physician. - -[136] Gilberti Anglici _Compendium Medicinae_, ed. Michael de Capella. -Lugduni, 1512, Lib. VII. cap. "De Lepra," pp. 337-345. - -[137] Bernardi Gordonii _Lilium Medicinae_. Lugd. 1551, p. 88. - -[138] _Compend. Med._ _Ed. cit._ p. 344. - -[139] _Lilium Medicinae._ Lugd. 1551, p. 89. - -[140] _Ibid._ p. 89. - -[141] For fuller reference, see p. 103. - -[142] _Philos. Trans. of Royal Society_, XXXI. 58: "Now in a true leprosy -we never meet with the mention of any disorder in those parts, which, if -there be not, must absolutely secure the person from having that disease -communicated to him by coition with leprous women; but it proves there was -a disease among them which was not the leprosy, although it went by that -name; and that this could be no other than venereal because it was -infectious." - -He then quotes from Trevisa's translation of Bartholomew Glanvile, _De -proprietatibus rerum_, passages which he thinks relate to syphilis, -although they are obviously the distinctive signs of lepra taken almost -verbatim from Gilbertus Anglicus. He implies that the later so-called -leper-houses of London were really founded for syphilis when it became -epidemic. In the will of Ralph Holland, merchant taylor, mention is made -of three leper-houses, the Loke, Hackenay and St Giles beyond Holborn -Bars, as if these were all that existed in the year 1452. But in the reign -of Henry VIII. there were six of them besides St Giles's,--Knightsbridge, -Hammersmith, Highgate, Kingsland, the Lock, and Mile End; and these, says -Beckett, were used for the treatment of the French pox, which became -exceedingly common after 1494-6. - -[143] Martin, _Histoire de France_, VII. 283. - -[144] One of Gascoigne's references was copied by Beckett (_Phil. Trans._ -XXXI. 47), beginning: "Novi enim ego, Magister Thomas Gascoigne, licet -indignus, sacrae theologiae doctor, qui haec scripsi et collegi, diversos -viros, qui mortui fuerunt ex putrefactione membrorum suorum et corporis -sui, quae corruptio et putrefactio causata fuit, ut ipsi dixerunt, per -exercitium copulae carnalis cum mulieribus. Magnus enim dux in Anglia, -scil. J. de Gaunt, mortuus est ex tali putrefactione membrorum genitalium -et corporis sui, causata per frequentationem mulierum. Magnus enim -fornicator fuit, ut in toto regno Angliae divulgabatur," etc. In the _Loci -e Libro Veritatum_, printed by Thorold Rogers (Oxford, 1881), the -following consequences are mentioned: "Plures viri per actum libidinosum -luxuriae habuerunt membra sua corrupta et penitus destructa, non solum -virgam sed genitalia: et alii habuerunt membra sua per luxuriam corrupta -ita quod cogebantur, propter poenam, caput virgae abscindere. Item homo -Oxoniae scholaris, Morland nomine, mortuus fuit Oxoniae ex corruptione -causata per actum luxuriae." p. 136. - -[145] _A most excellent and compendious method of curing woundes in the -head and in other partes of the body; translated into English by John -Read, Chirurgeon; with the exact cure of the Caruncle, treatise of the -Fistulae in the fundament, out of Joh. Ardern, etc._ London, 1588. - -[146] MS. Harl. 2378:--No. 86 is: "Take lynsed or lynyn clothe and brene -it & do ye pouder in a clout, and bynd it to ye sore pintel." Also, "Take -linsed and stamp it and a lytel oyle of olyf and a lytl milk of a cow of a -color, and fry them togeder in a panne, and ley it about ye pyntel in a -clout." No. 87 is "for bolnyng of pyntel." No. 88 is "For ye kank' on a -manys pyntel." On p. 103 is another "For ye bolnyng of a manys yerde.... -Bind it alle abouten ye yerde, and it salle suage." On folio 19: "For ye -nebbe yt semeth leprous ... iii dayes it shall be hole." "For ye kanker" -might have meant cancer or chancre. The prescriptions in Moulton's _This -is the Myrour or Glasse of Helth_ (? 1540) correspond closely with these -in the above Harleian MS. The printed book gives one (cap. 63), "For a man -that is Lepre, and it lake in his legges and go upwarde." There is also a -prescription for "morphewe." - -[147] Nicolas Massa, in Luisini. - -[148] Freeman, _The Reign of William Rufus_. App. vol. II. p. 499. - -[149] _L. c._ V. 679, "Episcopus Herefordensis polipo -percutitur.--Episcopus Herefordensis turpissimo morbo videlicet morphea, -Deo percutiente, merito deformatur, qui totum regnum Angliae proditiose -dampnificavit;" and again V. 622. - -[150] _Compend. Med._ _Ed. cit._ p. 170. - -[151] _Lilium Med._ _Ed. cit._ p. 108. - -[152] Brassac, Art. "Elephantiasis" (p. 465) in _Dict. Encycl. des -Sciences Mdicales_. - -[153] _Rosa Anglica._ Papiae, 1492. - -[154] That Baldwin IV.'s disease excited interest in him is clear from the -reference of William of Newburgh, who calls him (p. 242) "princeps -Christianus lepram corporis animi virtute exornans." - -[155] Chronicon de Lanercost (Bannatyne Club, p. 259): "Dominus autem -Robertus de Brus, quia factus fuerat leprosus, illa vice [anno 1327] cum -eis Angliam non intravit." The rubric on folio 228 of the MS. has -"leprosus moritur." - -[156] The original account is by Gascoigne, _Loci etc._ ed. Rogers, Oxon. -p. 228. - -[157] "Item matrimonium inter dominum regem et quandam nobilem mulierem -nequiter impedivit, dum clanculo significavit eidem mulieri et suo generi, -quod rex strabo et fatuus nequamque fuerat, et speciem leprae habere, -fallaxque fuerat et perjurus, imbellis plusquam mulier, in suos tantum -sacvientem, et prorsus inutilem complexibus alicujus ingenuae mulieris -asserendo." Matthew Paris, _Chron. Maj._, Rolls ed., III. 618-19. - -[158] _Chronicon Angliae_ in Twysden, col. 2600. - -[159] _Chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker_, edited by E. Maunde Thompson. -Oxford, 1889, p. 100. - -[160] Professor Robertson Smith has kindly written for me the following -note: "The later Jews were given to shorten proper names; and in the -Talmud we find the shortening _La'zar_ (with a guttural, which the Greeks -could not pronounce, between the _a_ and the _z_), for Eliezer or Eleazar. -[Greek: Lazaros] is simply _La'zar_ with a Greek ending, and occurs, as a -man's name, not only in the New Testament but in Josephus (_B. Jud._ V. -13, 7). This was quite understood by early readers of the Gospels; the -Syriac New Testament, translated from the Greek, restores the lost -guttural, and uses the Syriac form, as employed in _1 Macc._ viii. 17 to -render the Greek [Greek: Eleazaros]. Moreover the Latin and Greek -_onomastica_ explain Lazarus as meaning 'adjutus,' which shows that they -took it from (Hebrew) 'to help'--the second element in the compound -Eliezer. The etymology 'adjutus' (or the like) 'helped by God,' would no -doubt powerfully assist in the choice of the designation lazars (for -lepers). Suicer, in his _Thesaurus_, quotes a sermon of Theophanes, where -it is suggested that every poor man who needs help from those who have -means might be called a Lazarus." - -Hirsch (_Geog. and Hist. Path._ II. 3) says that the Arabic word for the -falling sickness comes from the same root (meaning "thrown to the ground") -as the Hebrew word "sraat," which is the term translated "leprosy" in -Leviticus xiii. and xiv. In Isaiah liii. 4, the Vulgate has "et nos -putavimus eum quasi leprosum," where the English Bible has "yet we did -esteem him stricken." - -[161] Roger of Howden. Edited by Stubbs. Rolls series, No. 51, vol. I. p. -110. Aelred, the chief collector of the miraculous cures by Edward the -Confessor, appears to have omitted this one. - -[162] Ailredi Abbatis Rievallensis _Genealogia Regum Anglorum_. In -Twysden's _Decem Scriptores_, col. 368. "Cum, inquit [David], adolescens -in curia regia [Anglica] servirem, nocte quadam in hospicio meo cum sociis -meis nescio quid agens, ad thalamum reginae ab ipsa vocatus accessi. Et -ecce domus plena leprosis, et regina in medio stans, deposito pallio, -lintheo se precinxit, et posita in pelvi aqua, coepit lavare pedes eorum, -et extergere, extersosque utrisque constringere manibus et devotissime -osculari. Cui ego: 'Quid agis,' inquam, 'O domina mea? Certe si rex sciret -ista, nunquam dignaretur os tuum, leprosorum pedum tabe pollutum, suis -labiis osculari.' Et illa surridens ait: 'Pedes,' inquit, 'Regis aeterni -quis nescit labiis regis morituri esse praeferendos? Ecce, ego idcirco -vocavi te, frater carissime, ut exemplo mei talia discas operari. Sumpta -proinde pelvi, fac quod me facere intueris.' Ad hanc vocem vehementer -expavi, et nullo modo id me pati posse respondi. Necdum enim sciebam -Dominum, nec revelatus fuerat mihi Spiritus ejus. Illa igitur coeptis -insistente, ego--mea culpa--ridens ad socios remeavi." - -[163] _Vita S. Hugonis Lincolnensis._ Rolls series, 39, p. 163-4. - -[164] The bishop left by his will 100 marks to be distributed "per domos -leprosorum" in his diocese and a like sum "per domos hospitales," and -three marks each to the leper-houses at Selwood and outside Bath and -Ilchester. _Hist. MSS. Commiss._ X. pt. 3, p. 186. - -[165] _Monumenta Franciscana._ Rolls series, No. 4. Introd. by Brewer, p. -xxiv. - -[166] William of Malmesbury, _Gesta pontificum_, Rolls ed., p. 72. - -[167] In 1574 it was found providing indoor relief for fifteen brethren -and fifteen sisters, and outdoor relief for as many more. - -[168] Roger of Wendover. Rolls ed. II. 265. - -[169] In the MS. of Matthew Paris's _Chronica Majora_ in the library of -Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, No. 26 in the Parker Collection, p. -220. The late Rev. S. S. Lewis, fellow and librarian of the College, who -most liberally had a fac-simile of the drawing made for me, would date it -a little before 1250. (Rolls edition, by Luard, II. 144.) - -[170] _Rotuli Chartarum_, 1199-1216. Charter of confirmation, 1204 (5 -Joh.) p. 117 b. - -[171] In the _Valor Ecclesiasticus_ of Henry VIII. its revenue is put at -100. - -[172] The commanderies of the Knights of St Lazarus were numerous in every -province of France. For an enumeration of them see _Les Lepreux et les -Chevaliers de Saint Lazare de Jerusalem et de Notre Dame et de Mont -Carmel_. Par Eugene Vignat, Orleans, 1884, pp. 315-364. - -[173] _Joannis Sarisburiensis Opera omnia_, ed. Giles 1, 141 (letter to -Josselin, bishop of Salisbury). - -[174] "Vix seu raro inveniuntur tot leprosi volentes vitam ducere -observantiis obligatam ad dictum hospitale concurrentes." Walsingham, -_Gesta Abbatum_, Rolls ed. II. 484. - -[175] Matthew Paris, _Chron. Maj._ V. 452. - -[176] Walsingham, _Gesta Abbatum_, II. 401. - -[177] "The sisters of St James's were bound by no vows, and at this period -[1344] were not all, or even any of them, lepers; and in consequence a -place in the hospital was much sought after by needy dependents of the -Court." Report on MSS. of the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury, in _Hist. -MSS. Commission Reports_, IX. p. 87. - -[178] Dugdale's _History of Warwickshire_, p. 197. - -[179] On Nov. 24, 1200, king John signed at Lincoln letters of simple -protection to the _leprosi_ of St Bartholomew's, Oxford (_Rot. Chart. -1199-1216_, p. 99). - -[180] _Rotuli Hundredorum_, II. 359-60. The famous Stourbridge Fair -originally grew out of a right of market-toll granted in aid of the -leper-hospital. - -[181] The decrees of the Third Lateran Council are given by several -historians of the time, among others by William of Newburgh, pp. 206-223. - -[182] Roger of Howden, Rolls edition, II. 265. - -[183] William of Newburgh, Rolls edition, p. 437. - -[184] See the various charters and memorials in Surtees' _History of -Durham_. - -[185] Two of the larger houses for lepers not mentioned in the text were -St Nicholas's at Carlisle and the hospital at Bolton in Northumberland, -each with thirteen beds. - -[186] By collecting every reference to lepers or lazar-houses in Tanner's -_Notitia Monastica_ or in Dugdale's _Monasticon_ Sir J. Y. Simpson has -made out a table of some hundred leper-houses in Britain (_Edin. Med. and -Surg. Journ._ 1841 and 1842). Simpson's table has been added to by Miss -Lambert in the _Nineteenth Century_, Aug.-Sept. 1884, by the Rev. H. P. -Wright (_Leprosy_ etc. 1885), who says at the end of his long list: "There -were hundreds more," and by Mr R. C. Hope (_The Leper in England_, -Scarborough, 1891), whose list runs to 172. - -Perhaps the most remarkable development of that verbalist handling of the -matter has been reserved for a recent medical writer, who has constructed, -from the conventional list of leper-hospitals, a map of the _geographical -distribution of leprosy_ in medieval Britain. (_British Medical Journal_, -March 1, 1890, p. 466.) - -[187] The Lock was doubtless the house of the "Leprosi apud Bermondsey" -who are designated in the Royal Charter of 1 Hen. IV. (1399) as -recipients, along with the _leprosi_ of Westminster (St James's), of "five -or six thousand pounds." (_Rotuli Chartarum_, 1 Hen. IV.) - -[188] Beckett, _Phil. Trans._, vol. 31, p. 60. - -[189] Stow, _Survey of London_, ed. of 1890, p. 437. - -[190] Beckett, _l. c._ The Knightsbridge house was earlier. See next note. - -[191] _Survey of London_, pop. ed. p. 436. Bequests to lepers occur in -various wills of London citizens, in Dr Sharpe's _Calendar of Wills_, vol. -II. Lond. 1890. In a will dated 21 April, 1349, the bequest is to "the -poor lazars without Southwerkebarre and at Hakeney" (p. 3). On 1 July, -1371, another bequeaths money to "the three colleges of lepers near -London, viz. at _le loke_, at St Giles de Holbourne, and at Hakeney" (p. -147). On 7 April, 1396, bequests are made to "the lepers at le loke near -Seynt Georges barre, of St Giles without Holbournebarre, and le meselcotes -de Haconey" (p. 341). The "lazar house at Knyghtbrigge" appears, for the -first time, in a will dated 21 Feb. 1485, along with "the sick people in -the lazercotes next about London" (p. 589). - -[192] _Accounts of the Lord High-Treasurer of Scotland._ Rolls series I. -1473-1498, pp. 337, 356, 361, 378, 386. - -[193] These are all the so-called "medieval leper-hospitals" collected by -Belcher (_Dubl. Quart. Journ. of Med. Sc._ 1868, August, p. 36) chiefly -from Archdall's _Monasticon Hibernicum_. He points out that the very early -references to leprosy in the _Annals of the Four Masters_ included various -kinds of cutaneous maladies. - -[194] _Chronicon Abbatiae Rameseiensis._ Rolls series, 1886, p. 157. The -chronicler has nothing farther to say as to the cause of the leprosy, than -the opinion of "a certain philosopher," that whatever turns us from health -to the vices of disease acts by the weight of too much blood, by -superfluous heat, by humours exuding in excess, or by the spirits flowing -with unwonted laxity through silent passages. - -[195] Eadmer, _Vita S. Anselmi_, Rolls edit., p. 355. - -[196] Walsingham, _Gesta Abbatum_, Rolls edit. II. Appendix C. p. 503. - -[197] Brassac, Art. "lphantiasis," in _Dict. Encycl. des Sc. Md._ p. -475, says: "Il y avait aussi des vagabonds et des paresseux qui, sans -nulle crainte de la contagion, et dsireux de vivre sans rien faire, -simulaient la lpre pour tre admis aux lproseries. On y trouvait encore -des personnes qui s'imposaient une rclusion perptuelle pour vivre avec -les lpreux et faire leur salut par une vie de soumission aux rgles de -l'glise." - -[198] The ordinance is translated in full from the City archives by H. T. -Riley, _London in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries_, pp. -230-231. The following is the preamble of it:-- - -"Edward, by the grace of God, etc. Forasmuch as we have been given to -understand that many persons, as well of the city aforesaid as others -coming to the said city, being smitten with the blemish of leprosy, do -publicly dwell among the other citizens and sound persons, and there -continually abide and do not hesitate to communicate with them, as well in -public places as in private; and that some of them, endeavouring to -contaminate others with that abominable blemish (that so, to their own -wretched solace, they may have the more fellows in suffering,) as well in -the way of mutual communications, and by the contagion of their polluted -breath, as by carnal intercourse with women in stews and other secret -places, detestably frequenting the same, do so taint persons who are -sound, both male and female, to the great injury of the people dwelling in -the city aforesaid, and the manifest peril of other persons to the same -city resorting:--We" etc. - -[199] Riley, p. 384. - -[200] _Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence._ Early Eng. Text Soc. - -[201] Riley, p. 365. - -[202] Rymer's _Foedera_, v. pt. 2, p. 166. - -[203] Wharton's _Anglia Sacra_, 11. Praef. p. 32. - -[204] The expression "leprosa Sodomorum" occurs in a Latin poem from a -medieval MS. found in Switzerland. The verses are printed in full by -Hensler, _Geschichte der Lustseuche_, p. 307. - -[205] These and other particulars relating to lepers in Scotland are given -in Simpson's _Antiquarian Notices of Leprosy in Scotland and England_ -(_Edin. Med. and Surg. Journ._ Oct. 1841, Jan. and April 1842), a series -of excellent papers which have been for many years the source of most that -has been written of medieval leprosy in this country. - -[206] Letter to Barrington, 8 January, 1778. - -[207] These numbers seem to stand for the contents of the larders in all -the various manors of De Spenser. - -[208] Mr Jonathan Hutchinson has been adding, year after year, to the -evidence that semi-putrid fish, eaten in that state by preference or of -necessity, is the chief cause of modern leprosy, and he has successfully -met many of the apparent exceptions. Norway has had leprosy in some -provinces for centuries; and it is significant that William of Malmesbury, -referring to those who went on the first Crusade, says: "Scotus -familiaritatem pulicum reliquit, Noricus cruditatem piscium." (_Gesta -Regum_, Eng. Hist. Soc. II. 533.) - -[209] In his section _De preservatione a lepra_ (p. 345) Gilbert advises -to avoid, among other things, all salted fish and meat, and dried bacon. - -[210] Acts of Robert III. in the _Regiam Majestatem_, p. 414 (quoted by -Simpson, _Ed. Med. and Surg. Journ._ vol. 57, p. 416). - -[211] Dr Gilbert Skene, of Aberdeen, and afterwards of Edinburgh, in his -book on the plague (1568), has an incidental remark about "evil and -corrupt meats" which may be taken in a literal sense: "As we see dailie -the pure man subject to sic calamitie nor the potent, quha are constrynit -be povertie to eit evill and corrupte meittis, and diseis is contractit, -heir of us callit pandemiall." (Bannatyne Club edition, p. 6.) - -[212] Higden's _Polychronicon_. Edited for the Rolls series by Babington -and Lumby, vol. VIII. - -[213] _The Annals of Ireland._ By Friar John Clyn, of the Convent of -Friars Minor, Kilkenny, and Thady Dowling, Chancellor of Leighlin. Edited -from the MSS. etc. by R. Butler, Dean of Clonmacnois. Dublin, 1849 (Irish -Archological Society). The last entry by Clyn himself appears to be the -words "magna karistia" etc., under 1349. There is added "Videtur quod -author hic obiit;" and then two entries of pestilence made in 1375 in -another hand. - -[214] Henricus de Knighton, _Chronicon Angliae_, in Twysden's _Decem -Script. Angl._ col. 2598 _et seq._ An edition of Knighton's _Chronicle_, -by Lumby, is in progress for the Rolls series. - -[215] _Chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker._ Edited by E. Maunde Thompson, -Oxford, 1889. - -[216] Robertus de Avesbury, _Historia de Mirabilibus Gestis Regis Ed. -III._, Oxon. 1720. Also in the Rolls series. Edited by E. Maunde Thompson. - -[217] _Eulogium Historiarum._ Rolls series, No. 9. Edited by Haydon, III. -213. - -[218] _Itineraria Symonis Simeonis et Willelmi de Worcestre._ Edited by -Nasmith from the MSS. in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. -Cantab. 1778, p. 113: "parum ante nativitatem Domini intravit villam -Bodminiae, ubi mortui fuerunt circa mille quingentos per estimacionem." - -[219] Histor. MSS. Commission, vi. 475. - -[220] Wilkins, _Concilia_ II. 745: "Contagium pestilentiae moderni -temporis undique se dilatans etc." - -[221] Rymer's _Foedera_, V. 655:--"Quia tamen subita plaga Pestilentiae -Mortalis in loco praedicto et aliis partibus circumvicinis adeo indies -invalescit, quod de securo accessu Hominum ad locum illum formidatur -admodum hiis diebus." - -[222] _Ibid._--"Et quia dicta Pestilentia Mortalis in dicto loco -Westmonasteriensi ac in civitate Londoniae, ac alis locis circumvicinis, -gravius solito invalescit (quod dolenter referimus) per quod accessus -Magnatum et aliorum nostrorum Fidelium ad dictum locum nimis periculosus -foret," &c. This second prorogation was _sine die_. - -[223] _Calendar of Wills_ (Husting Court, London), ed. Sharpe, Lond. 1889, -I. 506-624. - -[224] Clyn. But his account for Kilkenny, where he lived, makes the -epidemic either earlier or later there than at Dublin: "Ista pestilencia -apud Kilkenniam in XL{a} invaluit; nam VIto die Marcii viii fratres -predicatores infra diem Natalem obierunt," the Lent referred to being -either that of 1349 or of 1350. The difficulty about assigning the landing -of the infection near Dublin in the beginning of August to the year 1348 -is that the English importation had only then taken place. But of course -Ireland may have got it direct from abroad. - -[225] _Op. cit._ p. 98: "Torserunt illos apostemata e diversis partibus -corporis subito irrumpencia, tam dura et sicca quod ab illis decisis vix -liquor emanavit; a quibus multi per incisionem aut per longam pacienciam -evaserunt. Alii habuerunt pustulos parvos nigros per totam corporis cutem -conspersos, a quibus paucissimi, immo vix aliquis, vit et sanitati -resilierunt." - -[226] "Nam multi ex anthrace et ex apostematibus, et pustulis quae -creverunt in tibiis et sub asellis, alii ex passione capitis, et quasi in -frenesim versi, alii spuendo sanguinem, moriebantur," p. 36. - -[227] _A Treatise faithfully and plainely declaring the way of preventing, -preserving from and curing that most fearfull I and contagious disease -called the Plague. With the Pestilential Feaver and other the fearful -symptomes and accidents incident thereto._ By John Woodall, surgeon to St -Bartholomew's Hospital, &c. London, 1639. - -[228] Robertus de Avesbury, Rolls ed., p. 177. - -[229] _Eulogium Historiarum._ Rolls ser. No. 9, III. 213. - -[230] Rymer's _Foedera_, V. 668. - -[231] "Pro quorum defectu [referring to the fugitive villeins] mulieres et -parvuli invise missi sunt ad carucas et ad plaustra fuganda." _Eulogium._ -Rolls ed. III. 214. - -[232] Nichols, _History Of Leicestershire_, I. 534. - -[233] Nichols, _l. c._ - -[234] For a series of years the burials in the St Martin's register are as -follow: - - 1610 82 - 1611 128 - 1612 39 - 1613 25 - 1614 34 - 1615 60 - 1616 41 - 1617 31 - 1618 37 - 1619 28 - 1620 25 - 1621 43 - 1622 27 - 1623 37 - 1624 24. - -[235] _History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford._ Ed. Gutch I. -449. He says also: "The school doors were shut, colleges and halls -relinquished, and none scarce left to keep possession or make up a -competent number to bury the dead." The rest of his account of the Black -Death is copied from Le Baker's Chronicle of Osney. - -[236] _Itinerarium_, _l. c._ - -[237] Stow's _Survey_. "Portsoken Ward." - -[238] "Lying without the walls on the north part of the city between the -land of the abbot of Westminster and the prior of St John of Jerusalem." -French Chronicle of London (p. 56), as quoted by Stubbs, in preface (p. -lxxxi) to _Annales Londonienses_, Rolls series, No. 76. - -[239] Robertus de Avesbury, _Historia Edwardi III._ Rolls ed. p. 407. -"Quotidie multos vita privavit, et in tantum excrevit quod a festo -Purificationis usque post Pascha, in novo tunc facto cimiterio juxta -Smithfeld plus quam cc corpora defunctorum, praeter corpora quae in aliis -cimiteriis civitatis ejusdem sepeliebantur, quasi diebus singulis sepulta -fuerunt.... In festo Pentecostes cessavit Londoniis." - -[240] Stow's _Memoranda_. Camden Soc., 1880. - -[241] Camden's _Britannia_, ed. Gough, II. 9. - -[242] Rickman, _Abstract of the Population Returns of 1831_. London, 1832. -Introduction, p. 11. - -[243] Stow's _Survey_, p. 392. - -[244] The population of London is stated on good authority, that of its -archdeacon, in a letter to Pope Innocent III. (_Petri Blessensis Opera -omnia_, ed. Giles, vol. II. p. 85), to have been 40,000 about the years -1190-1200, a period of great expansion or activity. By the usual reckoning -of the poll-tax in 1377 the population would have been 44,770; and in the -year 1349 it was probably not far from those numbers. This matter comes up -again in the next chapter. - -[245] _Memorials of London in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries_, edited -from the Archives of the City, A.D. 1246-1419, by H. T. Riley. Lond. 1868, -p. 219. - -[246] _Ibid._, pp. 239-40. - -[247] Blomefield, _History of Norfolk_, III. 93. - -[248] Peter of Blois, who as archdeacon of London was in a position to -know, gives in his letter to the pope the number of parish churches in the -City at 120. - -[249] Popham, "Subsidy Roll of 51 Edward III.," in _Archologia_, VII. -(1785) p. 337. - -[250] _Itineraria, et cet._ ed. Nasmith, Cantab. 1778, p. 344. See also -Weever, _Funeral Monuments_, p. 862, according to whom the record of the -great mortality was on a chronological table hanging up in the church. - -[251] Walsingham, _Gesta Abbatum_. Rolls ed. II. 370. Abbot Michael, he -says, "tactus est communi incommodo inter primos de suis monachis qui illo -letali morbo percussi sunt." - -[252] Th. Stubbs' _Chronicle of York_ in Twysden, col. 1732. - -[253] _Chronicon Monasterii de Melsa_, Rolls ed. III. 36. - -[254] Rymer's _Foedera_. - -[255] Lowth, _Life of William of Wykeham_, p. 93, with a ref. to Regist. -Edyngdon, pt. 1. fol. 49. - -[256] Bentham, _Hist. of Ely_. - -[257] Clyn. - -[258] Jessopp, "The Black Death in East Anglia" in _Nineteenth Century_, -April 1885, p. 602. The sources of these interesting particulars are not -given. - -[259] Peck's _Antiquarian Annals of Stamford_, Bk. XI. p. 47. - -[260] _Hist. MSS. Commission's Reports_, IX. p. 127: "Hi quatuor tantum -moriebantur de pestilencia." The reporter on the MSS. of the Dean and -Chapter conjectures that the monastery may have owed its comparative -immunity to the fact that it was supplied with water brought by closed -pipes from the hills on the north-east of the city. - -[261] Walsingham, _Gesta Abbatum_. - -[262] Knighton. - -[263] _History of Norfolk_, III. 94. - -[264] Owen and Blakeway, _History of Shrewsbury_, I. 166:--"The average -number of institutions to benefices on vacancies by death in the -archdeaconry of Salop, for ten years before 1349, and ten years after, is -one and a half per annum, or fifteen in the whole; in that year alone the -number of institutions on vacancies by death is twenty-nine, besides other -institutions the cause of whose vacancies is not specified and therefore -may also have been the same." - -[265] F. Seebohm, "The Black Death and its Place in English History," -_Fortnightly Review_, Sept. 1 and 15, 1865:--"In the library of the Dean -and Chapter, at York Minster, are voluminous MSS., known by the name of -_Torr's MSS._, which contain the clergy list of every parish in the -diocese of York, and which, in by far the greater number of instances, -state not only the date of each vacancy, but whether it was caused by -death, resignation or otherwise of the incumbent." _L. c._ p. 150. - -[266] Jessopp, "The Black Death in East Anglia," _Nineteenth Century_, -April 1885, pp. 600-602. This author remarks that the evidence from manor -court rolls and from the Institution Books of the clergy "has hardly -received any attention hitherto, its very existence being entirely -overlooked, nay, not even suspected." - -[267] G. Poulett Scrope, M.P., F.R.S., _The Manor and Barony of Castle -Combe_. London, 1852, p. 168. - -[268] The court rolls of the Manor of Snitterton, Norfolk, in the British -Museum. Professor Maitland has lately edited some of the earliest rolls of -manor courts for the Selden Society. - -[269] G. Poulett Scrope, _op. cit._ pp. 151-2. - -[270] F. Seebohm, _The English Village Community_, London, 1882. The Manor -Court Rolls of Winslow, upon which Mr Seebohm bases his work, are in the -library of the University of Cambridge. - -[271] Rev. Augustus Jessopp, D.D. "The Black Death in East Anglia," -_Nineteenth Century_, Dec. 1884. - -[272] Under the heading "The Black Death in Lancashire," Mr A. G. Little -has printed, with remarks, in the _English Historical Review_, July, 1890, -p. 524, the data submitted to a jury of eighteen who had been empannelled -to settle a dispute between the archdeacon of Richmond and Adam de -Kirkham, dean of Amounderness, touching the account rendered by the dean, -as proctor for the archdeacon, of fees received for instituting to vacant -livings, for probates of wills, and for administration of the goods of -intestates. The dean's account to the archdeacon is said to run "from the -Feast of the Nativity of our Lady [8 September] in the year of our Lord -1349 unto the eleventh day of January next following;" but it may not -imply, and almost certainly does not, that the vacancies in benefices, the -probates and the letters of administration, or the corresponding deaths of -individuals, fell between those dates. The archdeacon alleges what fees -Adam de Kirkham had received, but had not accounted for, and the jury find -what Adam did actually receive. Nine benefices of one kind or another are -mentioned as vacant, three of them twice. The numbers said to have died in -the several parishes, with the number of wills and of intestate estates, I -have extracted from the data and tabulated as follows: - - +--------------------------------------------------------------+ - | Parish | Men & Women | With wills | Intestate | - | | dead | (above 100 sh.) | (above 100 sh.) | - |------------|-------------|-----------------|-----------------| - | Preston | 3000 | 300 | 200 | - | Kirkham | 3000 | -- | 100 | - | Pulton | 800 | -- | 40 | - | Lancaster | 3000 | 400 | 80 | - | Garestang | 2000 | 400 | 140 | - | Cokram | 1000 | 300 | 60 | - | Ribchestre | [illegible] | 70 | 40 | - | Lytham | 140 | 80 | 80 | - | St Michel | 80 | 50 | 40 | - | Pulton | 60 | 40 | 20 | - +--------------------------------------------------------------+ - -Of the alleged 300 who died in Preston parish, leaving wills, five married -couples are named, the probate fees being respectively 1/2 marc, 6 sh., 40 -d., 4 sh., and 40 d. The archdeacon's whole claim for the 300 was 20 -marcs, which the jury reduced to 10 pounds. Of the alleged 200 intestates -in the same parish, two married couples, one woman, and "Jakke o e hil" -are named. In the parish of Garstang, the executors of 6 deceased are -named, whose probate fees in all amounted to 16 sh. 10 d., the whole claim -of the archdeacon for 400 deceased leaving wills being 10, and the award -of the jury 40 sh. In the parish of Kirkham, on a claim of 20 marcs for -probate fees not accounted for, "the jury say that he received 4;" on a -claim of 10 for quittance, the jury say 20 sh. This was a parish in which -3000 are said to have died, the number of wills being not stated. The -numbers had obviously been put in for a forensic purpose, and are, of -course, not even approximately correct for the actual mortality, or the -actual number of wills proved, or of letters of administration granted. -The awards of the jury amounted in all to 48. 10_s._ See also _Eng. Hist. -Review_, Jan. 1891. - -[273] Thorold Rogers, _History of Agriculture and Prices_, I. 296-7. - -[274] Cussan's _Hertfordshire_, vol. I. Hundred of Odsey, p. 37. - -[275] _Sat. Rev._ 16 Jan. 1886, p. 82. - -[276] Jessopp, _l. c._ April 1885, p. 611-12. - -[277] The priory of Christ Church, Canterbury, lost the following live -stock in the murrain of 1349: oxen, 757, cows and calves, 511, sheep, -4585. (_Hist. MSS. Commission_, V. 444.) - -[278] The author of the _Eulogium_, who wrote not later than 1367, and is -for his own period an authority like Knighton, gives the following prices: -wheat, 12 pence a quarter, barley 9 pence, beans 8 pence; a good horse 16 -shillings (used to be 40 sh.), a large ox 40 pence, a good cow 2 sh. or 18 -pence. Of the scarcity of servants he says: "Pro quorum defectu mulieres -et parvuli invise missi sunt ad carucas et ad plaustra fuganda." - -[279] "The English Manor;" two articles in the _Saturday Review_, 9th and -16th Jan. 1886, p. 82 [by Professor Sir Frederick Pollock], the sources of -information being as yet unpublished. He says: "The prospect of better -terms brought in new tenants." - -[280] Stubbs, _Constitutional History of England_, 1875, II. 434. Hniger, -dealing with the German evidence of the Black Death, concludes that the -great mortality was almost without significance for the political course -of affairs; that the great loss of life was unable to check the revival of -trade and industry which had already begun or to retard the splendid -development of the German free towns; that the low state of morals -belonged to the period and was no worse after the epidemic than before; -that no new impulse was given or point of view brought out, unless, -perhaps, the idea of sanitary regulation; and that the scarcity of labour -was merely an incident to be taken advantage of in the struggle against -the existing order which was already going on. (_Der schwarze Tod in -Deutschland._ Berlin, 1882, p. 133.) - -[281] Richter, _Geschichte der Medicin in Russland_, I. 215. - -[282] _Histoire des Huns_, V. 223-4. - -[283] _Ib._ p. 226, note. - -[284] _Der schwarze Tod im vierzehnten Jahrhundert_, Berlin, 1832. Engl. -Transl. by Babington, Lond. 1833. This well-known work presents the more -picturesque aspects of the Black Death in various countries, without -thoroughness for any. England has a large space in the book; but the -author has not gone for his information farther than the chapter on the -Black Death in Barnes's _Life of Edward III._ - -[285] Printed in Hser's _Archiv fr die gesammte Medicin_, 1842, II. pp. -26-59; and reprinted in his _Geschichte der Med. u. epid. Krankheiten_, -III. 157, 3d ed., Jena, 1882. - -[286] _Geschichte der Medicin_, Bd. III. "Epidemische Krankheiten." Jena, -1882, p. 139. He gives point to this phrase by an account of the local -plagues of recent times in Gujerat and Kumaon. - -[287] His essay is one of the Escurial MSS., and has been printed, with a -German translation, by M. H. Mller, in the _Sitzungsberichte der -Mnchener Akad. der Wissensch_. 1863. - -[288] _Voyages d'Ibn Batoutah_ in 4 vols., for the Socit Asiatique, -Paris, 1853, I. 227-9, and IV. 309. - -[289] See Sir Henry Yule's _Cathay and the Way Thither_ (2 vols. Hakluyt -Society) and his edition of _The Book of Marco Polo_, for numerous -particulars of the overland trade to China by the northern parallels, in -the 14th century. - -[290] The stages, distances, expenses, &c. from Tana to Peking are given -in Pegolotti's mercantile handbook (written about 1340), in Yule's _Cathay -and the Way Thither_, vol. II. - -[291] C. A. Gordon, M.D. in _Reports of Med. Officers to the Imperial -Maritime Customs of China_, London, 1884. - -[292] Gaubil, _Histoire de Gentchiscan_, Paris, 1739. - -[293] _The Famine in China_, London, 1878--a translation of a Chinese -appeal for charity, with illustrations. - -[294] Parliamentary Papers, 1878, China, No. 4. - -[295] In Yule's _Cathay and the Way Thither_ (Hakluyt Society), I. 156. - -[296] Etienne Pariset, _Causes de la Peste_. Paris, 1837. - -[297] Volney, _Voyages en Syrie et en Egypte_. Paris, 1792. - -[298] Cornelius de Pauw, _Philosophical Reflections on the Egyptians and -Chinese_, Engl. Transl. Lond. 1795, 2 vols. - -[299] It is noteworthy that Herodotus represents the question of disposal -of the dead as having been raised by the Egyptians: they decided in favour -of embalming and rock entombment, as against cremation or burial, the -reason given for the preference being that fire was "a savage beast," in -the one case, while in the other case, the devouring beast was the worm. -Bk. III. 16. - -[300] Curiously enough it was among the Christians of Egypt that the -controversy as to the _corruptibles_ and the _incorruptibles_ raged most -furiously. See Gibbon. - -[301] Clot Bey, _Peste en Egypte_. Paris, 1840. - -[302] Benoit de Maillet, _Description de l'Egypte_. Paris, 1735, p. 281. -See also Wilkinson, _Ancient Egyptians_, III. 456, 465. - -[303] Justus Doolittle, _Social Life of the Chinese_, 2 vols. New York, -1867, I. 33, 198, 213. - -[304] T. T. Cooper, _Travels of a Pioneer of Commerce_, Lond. 1871, p. 23, -33. - -[305] This is one of the remarks in Dr Gilbert Skene's treatise on the -Plague, Edinburgh, 1568 (reprinted for the Bannatyne Club, 1840):--Among -the causes are "deid cariounis unbureit, in speciale of mankynd, quhilkis -be similitude of nature is maist nocent to man, as everie brutall is maist -infectand and pestilentiall to thair awin kynd," p. 6. - -[306] A. von Kremer, "Ueber die grossen Seuchen des Orients nach -arabischen Quellen." _Sitzungsber. der Wien. Akad._, Philos.-histor. -Classe, Bd. 96 (1880), p. 69. - -[307] Ch. M. Doughty, _Travels in Arabia Deserta_, 2 vols. Cambridge, -1888. - -[308] Communicated to Herr von Kremer (_l. c._) by Nury Effendi, who -visited Assir, and wrote a report preserved in MS. in the Archives at -Constantinople. - -[309] "Report regarding Mahamurree in Kumaon and Garhwal in 1851-52." By -F. Pearson and Mookerjee. Agra, 1852 (Extracts in _Ind. Annals of Med. -Sc._, I. 358). Also extracts (_Ib._) from Renny's Report, 1851. - -[310] Planck, _Ninth Report of the Sanitary Commissioner, N. W. Prov._ -Allahabad, 1877, pp. 40-95. (Extracts, p. 39, of _Papers relating to the -Plague, Parl. Papers_, 1879.) - -[311] Baber, in _Parliamentary Papers_, 1878, "China." No. 6. Rocher -(_Province Chinoise de Yun-nan_) quoted, without the reference, in _Med. -Reports of Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs_, No. 15, 1878, Shanghai, p. -25. - -[312] J. H. Lowry, _Med. Rep. Chinese Mar. Customs_, No. 24, 1882, p. 27. - -[313] D. J. Macgowan, _Ib._ 1882. Report for Wenchow. - -[314] Thomas Whyte, "Report on the Disease which prevailed in Kattywar, -etc. in 1819-20." _Trans. Med. Phys. Soc. Bombay_, I. 155. Bombay, 1838. - -[315] I have curtailed the evidence from Gujerat; it will be found at -large in the following writers: Gilder, _Bombay Med. Trans._ I. 193; -McAdam, _ib._ 183; F. Forbes, _ib._ II. |I, and Thesis on Plague, Edin. -1840; Glen, _Quart. Journ. Cal. Med. Soc._ I. 433; Ranken, _Report on Pali -Plague_, Calcutta, 1838; and Whyte, as above. - -[316] L. Arnaud, _Peste de Benghazi_, Constantinople, 1875; _Essai sur la -Peste_, Paris, 1888; _Une Mission pour la Peste_, Paris, 1888. - -[317] T. Farquhar, M.D., "Typhus Fever in the Eusofzai," _Ind. Annals of -Med. Sc._ II. 504; R. Lyell, M.D., "Fever of the Yusufzai Valley," _Ib._ -II. p. 16. - -[318] Surgeon-General J. Murray, M.D., at Epidemiological Society, 11 May, -1878. _Med. Times and Gaz._ I. 1878, p. 597. - -[319] Alex. Rittmann, _Chronik der Pest._ Brnn, 1879. - -[320] Thomas Lodge, _Treatise of the Plague_, Lond. 1603, chap. III. -Skene, in his Edinburgh essay on plague in 1568, gives as a sign of -impending plague the moles and "serpents" leaving their holes: "As when -the moudewart and serpent leavis the eird, beand molestit be the vapore -contenit within the bowells of the samin." He adds what agrees still -farther with modern experience in Yun-nan: "If the domesticall fowls -become pestilential, it is ane signe of maist dangerous pest to follow." -(Bannatyne Club ed. p. 9). - -[321] The writer of the article "Peste" in the _Dict. Encycl. des Sc. -Med._, Dr Mah, inclines on the whole to the view that the poison of -plague is somehow related to cadaveric products: "Parmi ces accusations -d'insalubrit publique, il en est une qui repose sur un objectif plus -positif en apparance" viz. the "miasme des cadavres." - -[322] Sir Tobie Matthews' _Letters_. Lond. 1660, p. 110. - -[323] _Epist. de rebus familiar._ Lib. viii. epist. 7. The citation of -these contemporary illustrations of the Black Death was begun in the last -century by Sprengel (_Beitrge_, &c., p. 37). - -[324] _Foedera_, III. 184; it was renewed on 30th June for a year longer. - -[325] Avesbury. - -[326] _Foedera_, III. 192. - -[327] _Ib._ 193. - -[328] _Ib._ 200, 201. - -[329] Le Baker's _Chronicle of Osney_. Avesbury. - -[330] _Foedera_, III. 221. - -[331] Avesbury, Rolls ed. 425. - -[332] Blomefield (_Hist. of Norfolk_, III.) says that the writ to Norwich -in 1355 was for 120 men-at-arms to be sent to Portsmouth by Sunday in -mid-Lent. - -[333] Avesbury, pp. 427-8. - -[334] _Ib._ p. 425. - -[335] _Ib._ p. 461. - -[336] Avesbury, p. 431. - -[337] Thorold Rogers, _Hist. of Agric. and Prices_, I. 367, "according to -an account quoted by Misselden in his _Circle of Commerce_." The sack of -wool contained 52 cloves of 7 lbs. each, or 364 lbs. It appears from a -statute of 5 Ric. II. that 240 wool-fells were equivalent, for duty, to -one sack of wool. In Rogers' tables, the wool-fell is usually priced at -about the value of 1-1/2 lbs. of wool, which was at the same time about -the average clip of a sheep. The present average clip would be at least -four times as much. The colonial bale of wool is of the same weight as the -medieval sack, but would represent 40 to 60 fleeces, instead of about 240. -At the smallest of the estimates in the text, the wool of 7,680,000 sheep -would have been exported in a year. Avesbury's estimate would mean an -annual export to foreign countries of the clip of about 24,000,000 sheep. -The average price of a sack of wool just before the Black Death was about -4 in money of the time; the period immediately following the plague was -one of low prices; but from 1364 to 1380, the price was uniformly high. - -[338] _Foedera_, III. 186. - -[339] _Ib._ III. 191. - -[340] Jessopp (_l. c._) giving a general reference to the _Foedera_, and -probably having the Sandwich letter in view, says there was "mad, -unreasoning, insensate panic among well-to-do classes--the trader and the -moneyed man, the _bourgeoisie_ of the towns," and "a stampede," -(presumably to foreign parts). But the mortality was all over by 1st -December, 1349; and the exodus, whatever motive it may have had, was -almost certainly deliberate. - -[341] _Foedera_, III. 198. - -[342] The last clause of the ordinance implies that not only the labourers -but also the employers of labour were taking the natural advantage of the -situation. There appears to be some particular evidence of this for -Bristol (Rev. W. Hunt, _Bristol_, p. 77): the masters in various crafts -and trades were so reduced in numbers that the survivors could charge what -they pleased. Thus, the attempt to coerce labourers and skilled workmen -was a one-sided affair; although, in practice, it related mostly to -farm-labour, where the one-sidedness did not appear. - -[343] _Foedera_, III. 210. - -[344] _Rot. Parl._ II. 225. - -[345] This was the first parliamentary Statute of Labourers (25 Ed. III. -cap 2). The king's ordinance of 18th June, 1350 (re-issued for Suffolk and -Lindsey on 18th Nov.), is usually reckoned the first Statute of Labourers, -and is invariably assigned to the 23rd year of Edward III., being so -entered in the _Statutes of the Realm_. It is clear, however, from the -text of the ordinance in the _Foedera_ that it belongs to the 24th of -Edward III., its exact date being 18th June, 1350. Longman, in his -_History of the Life and Times of Edward III._, correctly states in one -place (I. 309) that the ordinance of 18th June, 1350, was "the first -step," but on the very next page, after stating that the ordinance failed, -he proceeds, according to the usual chronology of 23 Ed. III. and 25 Ed. -III., to say that "therefore, two years afterwards," the statute of 25 Ed. -III. was made in Parliament. The interval was only some eight months. - -[346] _Rot. Parl._ II. 234. - -[347] Knighton, in Twysden's _Decem Scriptores_, _l. c._ - -[348] Seebohm, _The English Village Community_. Chapter I. - -[349] The Statute of Labourers was re-enacted with increased stringency -six years after (31 Ed. III.), and again in 1360 and 1368. All the labour -statutes were confirmed in the 12th year of Richard II. (cap. 34). -Legislative attempts of the same kind continued to be made as late as the -5th of Elizabeth (1562-3), with particular reference to sturdy beggars. -See copious extracts from the Statutes in Sir George Nicholls's _History -of the English Poor Law_, vol. I. Lond. 1854. "An Act for regulating -Journeymen Tailors" was made in 7 Geo. I. (cap. 13). - -[350] "There is no trace of the villenage described in Glanville and -Bracton, among the tenants of a manor 500 years ago. All customary -services were commutable for money payments; all villein tenants were -secure in the possession of their lands; and the only distinction between -socage and villein occupation lay in the liberation of the former from -certain degrading incidents which affected the latter." Thorold Rogers, -"Effects of the Black Death, &c." _Fort. Rev._ III. (1865) p. 196. - -[351] Seebohm, _The English Village Community_. Lond. 1882. Chapter I. - -[352] Seebohm, p. 31. Such attempts by landowners, to go back to personal -service from their villein tenants, appear to have become more systematic -in the generation following, and to have been a cause of the Peasants' -Rebellion in 1381. See v. Oschenkowski, _England's wirthschaftliche -Entwickelung_, Jena, 1879, confirming the opinion of Thorold Rogers. - -[353] Smith, _Lives of the Berkeleys_, p. 128: "in 24 Edward III." (Cited -by Denton, _England in the 15th Century_.) - -[354] Morant, _Hist. of Essex_. - -[355] Niebuhr, _Lectures on Ancient History_. Engl. transl. London, 1852, -II., p. 53. - -[356] _Eulogium Historiarum._ Rolls ed. III. 230. - -[357] _Loci e Libro Veritatum_, ed. Rogers. Oxon. 1880, p. 202; and, from -Gascoigne's MS., in Anthony Wood, _Hist. and Antiq. Univ. Oxford_, Ed. -Gutch, I. 451: "What I shall farther observe is that before it began there -were but few complaints among the people, and few pleas; as also few -Legists in England, and very few at Oxford." - -[358] _Manor and Barony of Castle Combe_, sub anno 1361. - -[359] Owen and Blakeway, _op. cit._ I. 165. - -[360] Clarkson's _History of Richmond_. Richmond, 1821 (authority not -quoted). - -[361] Hailstone, _History of Bottisham and the Priory of Anglesey_. Camb. -1873. (Transact. Camb. Antiq. Soc. 8vo. series, vol. XIV.) - -[362] Cited by Jessopp, _l. c._ - -[363] See p. 141. - -[364] Clutterbuck, _History of Hertfordshire_. - -[365] Seebohm, for the Manor of Winslow, _op. cit._, p. 34. - -[366] Thorold Rogers, _Fort. Rev._ III. (1865), p. 196. In his _History of -Agriculture and Prices_, IV., the same learned and sagacious student of -English developments thus sums up the agrarian consequences of the Black -Death:--"The indirect effects of this great event were even more -remarkable. The great landowner ceases to carry on agriculture with his -own capital, and farmers' rents of a fixed and almost invariable amount -take the place of the lord's cultivation by bailiffs. Attempts were made -for varying periods of time to continue the old system, especially by -corporations. It is possible that the system of stock and land leasing, -which became very general after the change commenced, may have been -suggested by the hope that the old state of things might be restored.... -In the end all the great landowners conformed to the inevitable change, -and let their land on short leases, and as a rule at low and almost fixed -rents, to capitalist farmers." - -[367] Thorold Rogers, _op. cit._, I. 376. - -[368] _Rot. Parl._, II. 260. a. - -[369] Seebohm, _l. c._ _Fort. Rev._, II. (1865), p. 157. - -[370] Blomefield, III. _sub anno_. - -[371] Blomefield, III. _sub anno_. - -[372] Camden's _Britannia_. Gough's ed. II. 9. - -[373] _Hist. MSS. Commission_, VI. 299. Register of Ely Priory, in Lord -Leconfield's MSS. - -[374] Seebohm, "The Black Death and its Place in English History." _Fort. -Rev._ II. (1865), p. 278. - -[375] These and other labour-statutes are collected in _A History of the -English Poor Law_, by Sir George Nicholls, 2 vols. London, 1854, I. 37-77. - -[376] G. Poulett Scrope, _op. cit._ - -[377] From 1416 to 1424, three different persons were fined at the manor -court for keeping a common brothel in their houses. Forestalling of -butter, cheese and eggs, on the way to market, came before the court in -1418. - -[378] At the manor court in 1417, Thomas Selwin, a butcher, was convicted -of throwing offal and other offensive matters into the common street and -of making his dung-heap there, to the common hurt; also the said Thomas -Selwin "tarde et de novo erexit unam latrinam foetidam in shopa sua ad -commune nocumentum. Ideo ipse in misericordia." The next entry of -nuisances, so far as extracts are given, is as late as 1590--various -offences in the street and churchyard, and the glover washing his skins in -the stream or otherwise befouling the water running by his house. - -[379] Cited in Owen and Blakeway's _History of Shrewsbury_, II. 524: "per -advenas qui in dicta villa post ultimam pestilenciam de novo sunt -inhabitati ... at regimen dictae ville ad se attrahere ... machinantes." -By the "ultima pestilencia" could hardly have been meant the pestis -secunda of 1361, the year of the patent, as the learned antiquaries -suppose. - -[380] _Rotul. Parl._ IV. 60. 7. The petition of Chesterton, near -Cambridge: "And also they seiden that there was made gret waste in the -same Manor of Chesterton of Housing, that is to say of Halles and of -Chambers, and of other houses of office, that were necessary in the same -Manor, and none housinge left standing therein, but gif it were a Shepcote -or a Berne or a Swynsty and a few houses byside to putte in bestes." - -[381] "After the cessation of the Black Plague a greater fecundity in -women was everywhere remarkable--a grand phenomenon which, from its -occurrence after every destructive pestilence, proves to conviction, if -any occurrence can do so, the prevalence of a higher power in the -direction of general organic life. Marriages were almost without exception -prolific," etc. - -[382] _Eulogium Historiarum_, III. 213. - -[383] _Fasciculi Zizan._ Rolls series, No. 5, ed. Shirley, p. 263: -"Dimitto alias rationes palpabiles: quod exhinc regnum nostrum -sensibiliter depauperetur pecunia; quod, praetextu subtractionis hujus -thesauri, qui expenderetur in Anglia, decrescit populus;" etc. - -[384] _Political Songs and Poems, Ed. II.-Ric. II._ Rolls series, No. 14, -ed. T. Wright, I. 2. 53. - -[385] The only monograph that I know is Peinlich's _Pest in Steiermark_, 2 -Bde. Graz, 1877-78. From 1349 to 1716, seventy years are marked in the -annals of Styria as plague-years. Corradi gives the plague-years in Italy -in his _Annali_. - -[386] Guy de Chauliac for Avignon, in Hser, III. 176. Other foreign -references in the same work. - -[387] _Political Songs and Poems. Ed. II.-Ric. II._ Rolls series, No. 14, -ed. T. Wright, I. 173, 190, &c. - -[388] _Ibid._ I. 229, from a MS. in the library of Cambridge University. - -[389] The spelling has been modernized, a few old words changed, and the -division into verses omitted. - -[390] _Chronicon Angliae_, by a monk of St Albans. Rolls ed. - -[391] Harleian MS. No. 1568, "Chronicle of England to A.D. 1419." (Printed -with additions at the St Albans press about 1484.) - -[392] Skeat, whose great edition of 'The Vision of Piers the Ploughman,' -has been brought out by the Early English Text Society, thinks that the -ironical reference (Passus XIII. 248) to the pope sending a salve for the -pestilence applies particularly to the "Fourth Pestilence" of 1375 and -1376, which was the _pestis tertia_ of some chronicles. - -[393] Flux and fever from famine are alone mentioned in the poems of John -of Bridlington, which cover the period from the Black Death to the reign -of Richard II. - -[394] Egerton MS. No. 2572, Sloane MS. 443 ("xiv. cent."), as well as -several copies of the 15th century. - -[395] Lansdowne MS. 285, fol. 220. - -[396] Mr Warner identifies him with the person who invented "Sir John -Mandeville" and the travels of Sir John. See an article in the _Quarterly -Review_, April, 1891. - -[397] Sloane MS. (British Museum) No. 2276, fol. 191-199. - -[398] 'A passing gode lityll boke necessarye and behouefull azenst the -Pestilence.' British Museum, case 31, e. 13, 4to, twelve leaves. The MS. -begins as follows: "Here begynneth a lytell boke necessary and behouefull -azens the pestylence." - -[399] Dibdin (_Antiq. Typogr._ II. 19) assigns the printing to Machlinia, -and reproduces a page as a sample of his common type. Bliss (_Reliquiae -Hearnianae_, II. 117) says that this sample page does not correspond with -that of the British Museum copy. He adds that there is a fragment of the -printed book in the library of St Peter's College, Cambridge, "pasted -within the wooden covers of the binding of an edition (1499) of _Discipuli -Sermones_." - -[400] In the earliest printed Latin texts of this work (Antwerp, 1485? -Leipzig, 1495? and versified in Albertus Magnus, 'De Virtute Herbarum,' -1500?) he is named Kamitus, bishop of Arusia, a city in the realm of -Denmark. In the copy of the English version in the British Museum, someone -has called him Ramicius, having written on a leaf, "Ramicius Episcopus -Arusiensis civitatis Daciae Regimen contra pestem," with the date 1698. -The name of Kamitus, being judged improbable on the face of it, has been -changed in the catalogue of the British Museum library into Canutus. But -there was no Canutus among the bishops of Aarhus, nor a Kamitus, nor a -Ramicius. The two bishops that appear to suit best are Olaus, or Olaf, who -was bishop from 1371 to 1388, and Ulricus or Udalricus, or Olric Stycka, -who succeeded in 1425 and held the see until 1449. Curiously enough, the -latter, when he went to Rome in 1425 to represent Eric, king of Pomerania -in a suit with the dukes of Sleswig, figures throughout the records of the -suit as "Olaus, episcopus Arosiensis," although Olaus, bishop of Arusia, -belonged to a former generation. It is, of course, the merest guessing; -but I am inclined to think that the author of the essay on plague was -either bishop Olaus, of 1371-1388, or bishop Udalricus, of 1425-1449, a -man of character and ability, who also went by the name of Olaus; and that -in any case the manuscript version of the essay in the English tongue is -more likely to have been of the early part of the fifteenth century than -of the fourteenth. The above facts are collected from various parts of -Langbeck's _Script. Rer. Dan._: the "Series Episcoporum Arhusiorum" is in -vol. VII. p. 212. Nothing is there said of any bishop of Aarhus having -written a book, or having been a physician at Montpellier. - -[401] These words ("the impressions") are contracted in the printed book, -exactly as in the manuscript. I have modernised the spelling for the most -part. - -[402] "When a man feeleth himself infect, as soon as he may, let him be -let blood plenteously till he swoon: then stop the vein. For a little -letting of blood moveth or stirreth venom.... Let him blood on the side of -the body where the swelling appeareth. Therefore if a swelling appear -under the right arm, let blood in the middle of the same arm, in the vein -called _mediana_. If it appear under the left arm, let him blood in midst -of the same, or in the vein of the liver which is about the little finger. -And if it be about the share, let him blood about the heel upon the same -side. If the swelling be in the neck, let him blood in the vein called -_cephalica_, about the thumb in the hand of the same side; or in the vein -the which is called _mediana_ of the same arm, or in the hand of the same -side about the little finger. And, overmore, if the swelling appear about -the ear, let him blood in the vein called _cephalica_ of the same side, or -in the vein which is between the long finger and the thumb, lest many -venomous things go into the brain." If the swelling is in the shoulders, -bleed from the _mediana_: if on the back from _pedica magna_, and so on. - -[403] Walsingham, _Hist. Angl._ I. 309. Adam of Murimuth, Engl. Hist. Soc. - -[404] The Stratford bread-carts are explained in Stow's _Survey of London_ -("Lime Street Ward"). In the famines of 1512 and 1527, they were besieged -on the way by hungry citizens and had to be guarded. The same phrase of -bread being "gesen" or scarce, occurs in a letter of 4 September, 1535, -from Thomas Broke to Cromwell, secretary of State: "never knew good bread -so geason in London at this time of the year; it is so musty, and of so -evil wheat, that it is rather poisonous than nourishing; what was sold for -a halfpenny, when you were here, is now a penny." (_Cal. State Papers_, -Henry VIII. vol. IX. 274.) - -[405] Thorold Rogers. _A Short English Chronicle_, Camden Soc. 1880:--"45 -Edward III. This yere was called the grete dere yere, and that same yere -was a quarter of whete at iiii nobles." - -[406] Wilkins, _Concilia_, III. 74: "De orando pro cessatione -pestilentiae," dated Slyndon, 10 Cal. Aug. A.D. MCCCLXVIII. - -[407] Sharpe, _Cal. of Wills_, vol. II. - -[408] Otterbourne (ed. Hearne, p. 133) says that the _pestis tertia_ was -in 1368, and that it lasted two years. Nicolas (_Chronol. of History_, p. -389) gives from a Lansdowne MS. (no. 863, fol. 107) of the time of Charles -I., the duration of the _pestis tertia_ as 2 July--29 Sept., 1369, which -should probably read "2 July, 1368--29 Sept. 1369." - -[409] _Memorials of London_, etc. from the Council Records. Edited by H. -T. Riley. Lond. 1867, p. 339 and p. 356. - -[410] Walsingham, _Hist. Angl._ I. 319; Adam of Murimuth. - -[411] The chroniclers are not agreed as to the chronology of the various -14th century plagues from the first (the Black Death) to the fifth. Some -of the enumerations are clearly erroneous. Thus in _A Short English -Chronicle_ from the Lambeth MS. (ed. Gairdner for the Camden Society, -1880), the plague of 1361 is erroneously called "the threde pestilence," -while the fourth is assigned to 1369 and the fifth to 1377 (for 1375). -Otterbourne places the _quarta_ in 1374 (for 1375), and the _quinta_ (as -others do) in 1391; but in the _Life of Richard II._, by a monk of -Evesham, the pestilence of 1382 is more correctly reckoned the fifth from -the Black Death. - -[412] Walsingham, _Hist. Angl._ I. 409. _Chronicon Angliae_, p. 239. - -[413] _Rot. Parl._ IV. 806. - -[414] _Ibid._ III. pp. 139 a, 147 a. - -[415] Blomefield's _History of Norfolk_, III. p. 111. - -[416] Continuator of Higden, IX. 14. - -[417] _Political Songs and Poems._ Rolls series, No. 14, I. p. 252:-- - - "The rysyng of the comuynes in londe, - The pestilens, and the eorthe-quake-- - Theose three thinges I understonde." - -[418] Walsingham, _Hist. Angl._ II. 109. - -[419] Continuator of Higden, IX. 21, 27. - -[420] _Eulogium Historiarum_, III. 369. Otterbourne, ed. Hearne: "From the -nativity of St John Baptist to the feast of St Luke," 1391. - -[421] Continuator of Higden, IX. 216. - -[422] _Ibid._ 237. - -[423] Walsingham, _Hist. Angl._ II. 186. - -[424] Blomefield's _History of Norfolk_, III. 113:--"1390. A great -mortality increased in Norfolk and in many other counties in England, and -it seemed not unlike the season of the great pestilence: it was occasioned -by a great want of victuals, that forced many people to eat unwholesome -food, and so brought distempers upon them. This dearth began under the -sickle, and lasted to the following harvest [1391], but was not so much -for want of corn, as money to purchase it, occasioned by the law made in -relation to wool, by which wool became dog-cheap; for a stone of chosen -and picked wool of the best sort was sold for 3 sh. and some for 22 pence -or 2 sh., so that in these times the woollen manufacture was the great -support of the nation." According to Thorold Rogers, these high prices of -wool obtained from 1364 to 1380. - -[425] Walsingham, II. 203. The Continuator of Higden (IX. 259) says -12,000. These estimates are, of course, the merest guesses, and extreme -exaggerations. The whole population of York would have been under 15,000. - -[426] Higden, _ibid._ - -[427] Walsingham, II. 213; St Albans Annals of Ric. II. and Hen. IV. - -[428] Walsingham, II. 276. The Chronicle of William Gregory (Camden -Society, ed. Gairdner) enters under the year 1407, a great frost, for -twenty-five weeks. It would be of real scientific interest to know the -chronology exactly, whether the plague followed or preceded the long cold -drought; but the year of the plague is disputable, if any heed be paid to -the date of 1406, given by later compilers. - -[429] Walsingham, II. 297. Otterbourne, under 1411, says plague in -Gascony. - -[430] Annals of Bermondsey, in _Annales Monast._ Rolls ed. III. 485. - -[431] _Rot. Parl._ IV. 143 a. It is probably under 1420 that the "great -plague" at Newcastle, given in so many words in Brand's _History_ under -1410, should be placed. - -[432] _Ibid._ 148 b. - -[433] _Histor. Collec. of a Citizen of London, 15th cent._ Camden Soc. ed. -Gairdner, 1876: - - "They dyde faster every day - Thenn men myght them in erthe lay." - -[434] _History of Agriculture and Prices in England_, IV. 105. - -[435] Chronicle of Croyland, in Gale, I. 518; Rogers, IV. 233. - -[436] Denton. London, 1886, p. 92. - -[437] Mackay, _The English Poor_. London, 1890, p. 40. - -[438] W. Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_. 2nd ed. -Camb. 1890, p. 105. He reproduces Denton's statement that "there was -chronic typhoid in the towns." Denton professes to have found this in -Hecker, who had certainly no knowledge of English towns in the 15th -century, and is, in general, more entertaining as a _philosophe_ than -trustworthy for erudition. - -[439] In 1741, during a prevalence of fever all over England, we hear of -bread made of horse-beans, pease, and coarse unsound barley as the chief -food of the poor. (_Gent. Magaz._ letters of 27 Nov. 1741 and 11 Jan. -1742). Thorold Rogers (_Agric. and Prices_, v. Preface) thinks that the -staple food of the English labourer, wheaten bread, had first been -changed, especially in the North, to rye, barley and oat bread, in the -17th century during the Civil Wars. - -[440] _Paston Letters._ Ed. Gairdner, 1872, II. 254: John Wymondham of -Fellbrigg to John Paston, 10th Nov. "And forasmuch as there was a child -dead at Asteleys, and one other like to be dead in the same place, what -time I rode out about my little livelihood, my lady and I both thought -pity on my mistress your wife to see her abide there, and desired her to -come to my poor house, unto such time as you should be otherwise avised." - -[441] _Histor. MSS. Commission_, IX. 127 b. - -[442] _Calendar of State Papers._ Venetian, vol. I. 236. - -[443] _Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council._ Ed. Nicolas, III. -p. xlv. - -[444] _Rot. Parl._ IV. 420 b. - -[445] _Arnold's Chronicle_, p. xxxii. - -[446] _Proc. and Ord. Privy Council_, IV. p. lxxx. Sir Harris Nicolas, in -this connexion, remarks that Fabyan and all other chroniclers (he had -overlooked Arnold) omit to mention pestilence, while they mention much -less important things; but he is hardly warranted in his inference that -plagues were so common-place as to be left unrecorded. A low level of -plague would not be noticed, but a great epidemic certainly would. - -[447] Johannes Amundesham (of St Albans), _Annales_. Rolls ed. II. 127. - -[448] _Rot. Parl._ V. 31 b. - -[449] This is the only plague in the first half of the fifteenth century -that Anthony Wood records; but he says, under the year 1500, that "no less -than about thirty pests, both great and small, happened in this last -century"--i.e. in the University of Oxford. I shall speak of their general -effects in another chapter. - -[450] _Paston Letters._ Ed. Gairdner, 1872, I. 302-3. - -[451] _Three Fifteenth Century Chronicles._ Ed. Gairdner, for the Camden -Society, 1880, from the Lambeth MSS., p. 163. - -[452] Sir J. Paston to John Paston, 30 April, 1465. Another letter, of -18th August, has: "For the pestilence is so fervent in Norwych, that they -dare no longer abyde there, so God help!" (_Paston Letters_, ed. Gairdner, -II. 226), which probably refers to 1465 also. It is not mentioned by -Blomefield. - -[453] _Chronicle of Croyland_, in Gale, I. 541. - -[454] Communicated to me by the Rev. W. Hunt, from a new volume of the -Camden Society, edited by A. F. Leach, _Visitations and Memorials of -Southwell Minster_, p. 11. - -[455] Tickell, _History of Kingston upon Hull_, 1798. - -[456] _Warkworth's Chronicle._ Camden Society, p. 23 (under the year 13 -Ed. IV.). - -[457] _Chronicle of the Greyfriars._ Camden Society, No. 53, 1852, p. 22. - -[458] Robert Fabyan's _Chronicle of England_, (editions in 1516 and 1533, -and by Ellis, 1808), _sub anno_. - -[459] _Grafton's Chronicle_, p. 742. - -[460] Brand's _History of Newcastle_. - -[461] _Visitations and Memorials_, p. 41. - -[462] Blomefield. - -[463] Paston, 6 Nov. 1479. - -[464] Fordoun, _Scotichronicon_, ed. Hearne, Oxon. 1722, p. 1039. - -[465] _Scotichronicon_, p. 1056: "eadem ... sicut prius jubileo ... in -toto regno Scotiae mirabiliter saeviebat." - -[466] _Exchequer Rolls of Scotland._ Introduction to vol. II. p. xlviii. - -[467] _Scotichronicon_, p. 1141. - -[468] _Exchequer Rolls of Scotland_, III. 650. - -[469] _Ibid._ III. 310. - -[470] _Ibid._ III. 553. - -[471] _Ibid._ III. 579. - -[472] _Scotichronicon_, p. 1287 and p. 1298. - -[473] Cited by R. Chambers (_Domestic Annals of Scotland_, I. 57) from the -Chronicle as printed by Thomas Thomson. - -[474] _Scotichronicon_, p. 1565. Hearne's edition. - -[475] Ferrerius, f. 393, cited in _Excheq. Rolls of Scot._ VIII. p. lx. - -[476] _Excheq. Rolls of Scot._ VIII. 364. Accounts of William, bishop of -Orkney, from 5 Aug. 1475 to 3 Aug. 1476: "et decem martis liberatis, de -tempore pestis, egrotantibus in Incheskeith." Another item (30. 13_s._ -4_d._) is for forty-six marts destroyed "propter longam moram" in the -lairs at Leith, "anno pestis, videlicet anno ultimo." - -[477] But MS. annals are cited for the date 1361, in _The ancient and -present State of the County and City of Cork_. By Charles Smith, M.D. 2 -vols. Dublin, 1774. 2nd ed. II. p. 23. - -[478] Thady Dowling [Elizabethan] "1370. Pestilentia magna in Hibernia, -adeo quod propter immensitatem mortalitatis vocabatur ab antiquis tertia," -p. 24. - -[479] Dowling, p. 27. - -[480] _Angl. Hist._ Basil. 1555, p. 567. - -[481] In Gale, _Script. Angl._ I. 573. - -[482] British Museum Addit. MS., No. 27,582. - -[483] _Materials illustrative of the Reign of Henry VII._ Rolls series, -No. 60, s. d. - -[484] _Tractatus contra pestilentiam thenasmonem et dissinteriam_ [Rouen, -1490]:--"Causae pestilentiae ut alias scripsimus: in quodam opusculo quod -composuimus de quadam rabiosa febre pestilentiali, quae in duodecim horis -patientes cum calore et sudore continuo interficiebat. Cujus febris -adventus incepit sua vexilla extendere in Anglia in civitate Londoniarum -decima nova die mensis Septembris 1485, in qua die [planetary signs] -posuerunt. Ex qua febre pestilentiali plus quam quindecim millia hominum -ab hoc seculo morte repentina, tanquam ex pugnitione divina, recesserunt, -multique sine mora per vicos deambulantes absque confessione obierunt." - -[485] MSS. Cotton. Vitellius A. XVI. _A Chronicle of England from 1st -Henry III. to 1st Hen. VIII._ - -[486] The Croyland Chronicle (in Gale's _Script. Angl._ I. 570 and 576) -gives the 14th November in one place and the 14th October in another. But -it is clear that the latter is the correct date, the letter from the prior -of Croyland to Henry VII., announcing the death of the abbot and praying -for a _cong d'lire_, being dated the 14th of October. (_Materials -illustrative of the Reign of Henry VII._ vol. I. s.d. 21 Oct. 1485, Rolls -series, No. 60.) - -[487] Anthony Wood, I. 462. - -[488] _The Maire of Bristowe is Kalendar_ (by Robert Ricart, town-clerk of -Bristol, 18 Ed. IV.). Camden Society, 1872, p. 46. - -[489] The Bristol calendar says: "This yere Hary, Erle of Richmond landed -at Milford Haven.... And sone after there was a sodeyn sikenes in all -places of Englond called the sweting syknes, whereof moche people dyed." - -[490] The date of 1506 in Hecker is erroneous, having been taken from the -very loose entry in Hall's chronicle (copied by Grafton), which might -equally well belong to the year 1507. Bernard Andr's date of 1508 is -unmistakeable; his annals go on continuously until the death of Henry VII. -in April following. - -[491] Bernard Andr's _Works_. Rolls series, No. 10, pp. 126-8. - -[492] Hemingway's _History of Chester_, I. 142. - -[493] Anthony Wood's _History and Antiquities of the Univ. of Oxford_. I. -665. - -[494] Calendared for the Rolls series by Brewer for the greater part of -the reign of Henry VIII. (1509-1530), and after him by Gairdner, at -present as far as 1538. The facts given in the next few pages may be taken -as coming from the Calendar of State Papers, under their respective dates, -unless it is otherwise stated in the notes. - -[495] This appears to have been a common direction. In a letter of 12 -August, 1517, dated from the Fleet Prison by Thomas Leeke to his brother -sir John Leeke (_Hist. MSS. Commission Reports_, X. pt. 4, p. 447), the -writer says he has been sore vexed with the sweat and in danger of life: -"If any of you have it, pray you to keep well and close about your breasts -and your heart for twenty-four hours and then with God's grace there is no -danger in it: there has been a marvellous great death for so short a -time." - -[496] In the letter of 12 August from the Fleet Prison, already quoted -(_Hist. MSS. Reports_, _l. c._), it is stated that fifteen are dead in the -Cardinal's house, including Mr Cowper, the steward, Talboys, lord of Kyme, -young Wastness, and one Grenell. In my lord of Durham's house, Dr Port and -Dr Fysche are dead, with divers others. Of the Court, my lord Clinton, Mr -Morgan, steward to the Queen, and one Mat. Jones, of the King's wardrobe, -were buried at Richmond on Friday last, and divers more of the Court are -dead. - -[497] _The Pitiful Life of King Edward the Fifth_: "Considering there is, -as physicians say, and as we also find, double the peril in the relapse -that was in the first sickness," p. 230. Camelot edition. - -[498] Anthony Wood, _Hist. and Antiq._, _sub anno_ 1517. - -[499] Hemingway's _History of Chester_, I. 142. - -[500] The letter bears the date of 8 June, which would make the first of -the sweat the same as in Tuke's letter; but Brewer says the date should be -the 18th June. - -[501] Brewer (_Cal. State Papers_) reads the letter, "On Tuesday one of -the ladies of the chamber, Mlle de Boulan, was infected with the sweat." -But P. Friedmann (_Anne Boleyn_, Lond. 1884, I. 72) says the correct -reading is a fille-de-chambre of Mlle de Boulan; and it is known that Anne -Boleyn did not take the sweat until some days after. - -[502] In the _History of Cork_ by C. Smith, M.D. (2nd ed., 1774) there is -an entry under 1528: "a malignant disorder called the sweating sickness in -Cork," with a reference to "MS. annals." It has been generally supposed -that the sweat did not enter Ireland or Scotland in any of its five -outbreaks. - -[503] The German writers have assumed that the sweat was prevalent abroad -really in the same summer or autumn as in England, explaining the -discrepant dates by the difference in the English calendar. But it was -only the months of January and February, and March to the 24th, that were -counted in the old year in England; the months of June, July, August, etc. -in which the sweat occurred, are the same in the English and foreign -calendar-years. In the English chronology of the sweat, those months -belong quite clearly to the year 1528; and, in the German, Swiss, and -Netherlands chronology of the sweat, just as clearly to the year 1529. The -sweat on the Continent was a year later than in England. - -[504] Gruner's _Scriptores de sudore Anglico superstites_ was reprinted by -Hser, with additional citations and notes, in 1847. Hecker (_Der -Englische Schweiss_, 1834) refers to the work by Gruner, _Itinerarium -sudoris Anglici ex actis designatum_, Jena, 1805, which I have been unable -to see. The account of the German invasion in the text is accordingly at -second-hand. - -[505] _A boke or counseill against the Sweate_, London, 1552. _De Ephemera -Britannica_, London, 1555. - -[506] "This yere the swetinge sycknes raignyd in England, and began first -in this towne of Shrowsbery the xxii of Marche, and ran through the -realme, and began in London the ixth of July." Quoted from MS. Chronicle, -in Owen and Blakeway's _History of Shrewsbury_, p. 345. - -[507] _Op. cit._ 1552, fol. 10. In the Latin work the date at "Salopia" is -"17 Kal. May." - -[508] Nichols, _Leicestershire_, III. 891. - -[509] Edrichus, _In libros aliquot Pauli ginetae_, &c. London, 1588 (not -paged). - -[510] "Diary of Edward VI." in Burnet's _Hist. of Reformation_. Stow -(_Annales_) says it began on the 9th July and was most vehement on the -12th. - -[511] _Calendar of State Papers._ Domestic (under the date). - -[512] _Machyn's Diary._ Camden Society, No. 42, edited by J. Gough -Nichols, p. 7. Machyn was an undertaker, and records deaths and funerals. - -[513] Machyn. - -[514] _Ibid._ p. 8. - -[515] Letter from London, in Harl. MS. No. 353, f. 107, cited by Nichols -in notes to Machyn. - -[516] Caius, _Boke or Counseill_, 1552, ff. 10-11. - -[517] The Venetian ambassador (_Cal. S. P._ Venetian, v. 541) says that -the sweat was at an end in London in twenty days. He says, also, that -children under ten years were not subject "questo influsso." The -excitement caused by the London epidemic is shown in an entry of money in -the corporation records of Canterbury: "1551. To one of the King's -servants that brought word how many were dede in the swett." (_Hist. MSS. -Commiss._ IX. 154 b.) - -[518] Edward VI. to Fitzpatrick. - -[519] Drake's _Eboracum_, p. 128. - -[520] Nichols, notes to Machyn, giving a reference to _Gent. Magaz._ 1825, -II. 206. - -[521] Fuller (ed. Nichols, p. 183) says, under 1551: "Many in Cambridge -died of this sweating sickness, patients mending or ending in twenty-four -hours." The death of the two young noblemen was made an occasion for -copies of verses by members of the University. - -[522] Strype, _Memorials_, III. chap. 7 (cited in notes to Machyn). - -[523] Lysons, _Magna Britannia_, VI. 539. - -[524] _Calendar of State Papers._ Venetian, V. 541, under the date of 18 -Aug. 1554. - -[525] Thomas Cogan, 'The Haven of Health: chiefly made for the comfort of -students, and consequently for all those that have a care of their health, -amplified uppon fiue wordes of Hippocrates, written Epid. 6. Labour, -Meate, Drinke, Sleepe, Venus.... Hereunto is added a Preseruation from the -Pestilence: with a short Censure of the late sicknesse at Oxford.' London, -1589. New ed. 1596, p. 272. - -[526] There is a single reference to a sweat on the Continent in 1551, -which may really have been one of those epidemics of typhus (or -influenza), with a sweating character, that were observed in 1557-8 and -1580. Brassavolus, writing _de morbo Gallico_, and illustrating the fact -that epidemics were sometimes generated by drought (though mostly by -humidity), says that the sweat in England, in former years, came with -drought, and that at the time of his writing, the 15th September, 1551, -that disease was vexing Flanders,--the season being extremely dry,--and -had attacked many thousands. This was first noticed by Hser, _Op. cit._ -III. (1882), p. 332. The reference to Brassavolus is Luisini's _Script. de -lue venerea_. Lugd. Bat. 1728, f. p. 671. - -[527] _Increase and Decrease of Diseases._ London, 1801, p. 70. - -[528] See the references in Gruner, pp. 444, 448. - -[529] "The Autonomous Life of the Specific Infections," in _Brit. Med. -Journ._, 4 August, 1883; "The Origin of Yellow Fever," in _North American -Review_, Sept. 1884; _Illustrations of Unconscious Memory in Disease_, -London, 1885, Chapter XIII. "Vicarious Infection." - -[530] Polydore Virgil, p. 553. Philip de Comines says "three large ships -and a considerable body of land forces." (Chroniques du Roy Louis XI. Eng. -transl. II. 674.) - -[531] Mezeray, II. 762. He adds: "the Bretons boast of having also lent -aid to this prince." His first expedition was purely with Bretons, but the -second was composed mostly if not altogether of Normans. - -[532] This point, which is essential to the theory, was originally stated -in an article on "Epidemics" in the _Quarterly Review_, Jan. 1887, and -there claimed as original. The writer on "Sweating Sickness" in the -_Encycl. Brit._ has adopted it as a common-place; it is obvious enough -when pointed out, but Hecker had not done so. - -[533] The above account is summarised from the chapter in Hirsch, _Geog. -and Histor. Path._ Eng. transl. I. 88. - -[534] Darwin, _Naturalist's Voyage round the World_, pp. 435-6. - -[535] Bernard Andr's _Annales Henrici VII._ Rolls series, No. 10, p. 120. -Under a date in January, 1508, he writes: "Quo quidem die nuncius ab urbe -incredibilia dictu, hoc est de primis verni fructibus temporis floridoque -frumento visis, referebat." Both Fabyan and the anonymous author of MS. -Cotton, Vitellius, A. XVI. (_Chronicle of England from 1 Hen. III. to 1 -Hen. VIII._) give the winter of 1506-7 as "a wonderful [easy] and soft -winter without storms or frost," but fail to remark on the weather of -1507-8. - -[536] Wriothesley's Chronicle. - -[537] Fabyan, Stow. - -[538] Stow's Annals. Hecker, in error, makes out this exceptional season -to have been the one immediately preceding the sweat in the summer of -1528. - -[539] _Cal. State Papers_, under the date. - -[540] Summary in Hirsch, _l. c._ - -[541] Continuator of Fabyan. - -[542] Wriothesley, II. 139. - -[543] Drake's _Eboracum_, (from the town council records). - -[544] _Hist. and Antiq. Univ. Oxford_, I. 651. - -[545] At Cambridge, in October, 1578, two deaths from plague in Queens' -College "moved many to depart." _Cal. Cecil MSS._ II. under date 13 -October. - -[546] Anthony Wood, under the respective years. - -[547] With reference to a pestilence at Oxford in 1448, Wood says: -"occasioned, as 'twas thought, by the overflowing of waters, and the want -of a quick passage for them from the ground. Also by the lying of many -scholars in one room or dormitory in almost every Hall, which occasioned -nasty air and smells, and consequently diseases." _Op. cit._ I. 596. - -[548] _Materials Illustrative of the Reign of Henry VII._ Rolls ser. 60, -II. p. 136. - -[549] _Chronicle of England_, sub anno. - -[550] _Hist. Angl._, p. 609 (Basil, 1546). - -[551] Stow, _Annales_. - -[552] In Rymer's _Foedera_ all these vacancies of bishoprics are entered -under the year 1501, beginning with the see of Canterbury (Morton's) on -9th January, 1501. - -[553] _Plumpton Correspondence_, Camden Soc. No. 4, p. 138: Letter of ? -1499, R. Leventhorpe, of Leventhorpe Hall, Yorkshire, to Sir R. Plumpton: -"And sithe I hard say that a servant of yours was decesed of the sicknes, -which hath bene to your disease, I am right sorry therefore;" he advises -fasting, and trusts "ye sal be no more vexed with that sicknes." In the -next letter (cviii) to Sir R. Plumpton from his son:--"Also, sir, I am -very sorry that the death seaseth not at Plompton." - -[554] _Hardwicke Papers_, London, 1778, I. 2 (from Harl. MSS.). - -[555] Freeman, _Exeter_, in "English Towns" series, p. 99. - -[556] _Annales Henrici VII._ Rolls series, p. 88. - -[557] The information in the next few pages comes from the _Calendar of -State Papers, Henry VIII._, _Domestic_, unless otherwise referred to in the -notes. - -[558] _Chronicle of the Grey Friars_, Camden Society, No. liii. 1852, p. -29. Stow puts the mortality under the year 1513. - -[559] Letter from the Fleet prison, assigned to 1517. _Hist. MSS. Com._ X. -pt. 4. p. 447. - -[560] Phillips, _History of Shrewsbury_, p. 17. - -[561] _Privy Purse of Henry VIII._, p. 79. - -[562] The reference on p. 290 (note 2) to "no parish in London free," -under the date of 25 October, 1517, may imply that bills of mortality had -been kept in that epidemic, which was certainly an occasion when Henry -VIII. interposed in other ways to check the progress of plague. - -[563] Lately purchased for the Egerton Collection. No. 2603, fol. 4. - -[564] There was, however, an English translation of a small foreign essay -on the plague, of unacknowledged authorship, published at London in 1534 -by Thomas Paynel, canon of Merton, a literary hack of the time. - -[565] In the Record Office. State Papers, Henry VIII., No. 4633. It has -been erroneously calendared by Brewer as a bill of mortality of the -sweating sickness in 1528. - -[566] _The Maire of Bristowe, his Kalendar._ Camden Society, 1872, p. 53. - -[567] The plague is said to have been in Exeter in 1535 (Freeman, -_Exeter_, in English Towns Series). - -[568] There is a copy in the Lambeth Library, No. 432. - -[569] Owen and Blakeway, I. 311. - -[570] Continuator of Fabyan. - -[571] Cussan's _History of Hertfordshire_. - -[572] _A London Chronicle of Hen. VII. and Hen. VIII._ Camden Miscellany, -1859. - -[573] _Acts of the Privy Council._ New series, 1542-1547, p. 136. - -[574] Stow's _Annales_. - -[575] _Cal. Cecil MSS._, I. 15. - -[576] Guildhall Records (Extracts by Furnivall in Appendix to Vicary's -_Anatomy_. Early English Text Society). - -[577] Brand's _History of Newcastle_. - -[578] Hasted's _History of Canterbury_, p. 130 (from parish registers). - -[579] Anthony Wood, _op. cit._ II. 74. At Banbury probably about the same -year. Beesley's _History of Banbury_ (from Brasbridge). - -[580] _Register of the Privy Council of Scotland_, I. 5. - -[581] _Acts of the Privy Council._ New series, 1542-1547, 28 April, 1546, -p. 397. - -[582] _Ibid._, Nov. 13, 1546, p. 552. - -[583] Camden's _Britannia_, ed. Gough, I. 262. - -[584] _Ibid._ II. 265. - -[585] _Calendar of State Papers._ Domestic series, Vol. X. - -[586] _Notes and Queries_, 6th series, III. 477. - -[587] Nichols, _Leicestershire_, III. 891 (295 deaths from plague &c. -1555-59.) - -[588] Ormerod's _Cheshire_, I. under 1558, with a reference to "Harl. -MSS." The Harleian MSS. relating to Chester fill many pages of the -catalogue. - -[589] _Calendar of State Papers_, Eliz. I. p. 122. - -[590] _Three Fifteenth Century Chronicles._ Camden Society, ed. Gairdner, -1880, pp. 123, 144. - -[591] Letter from London to the Earl of Shrewsbury, _Hist. MSS. Com._ VI. -455, a. - -[592] Without date, but probably 1564. Watt conjectures 1556, but the book -contains references to the fever-epidemic of 1558, and, as above, to the -plague of 1563. - -[593] Munk, _Roll of the College of Physicians_, I. pp. 32, 63. - -[594] This and other information immediately following are from _Cal. -State Papers_. Foreign series. - -[595] _Calendar of Cecil MSS._, under the dates. - -[596] Glover's _Hist. of Derbyshire_ (21 plague deaths in St Michael's -register, May-Aug. 1563). - -[597] Nichols; Kelly, in _Trans. Hist. Soc._ VI. 395. - -[598] Harwood's _Hist. of Lichfield_, p. 304. - -[599] Hasted's _Hist. of Canterbury_, p. 130 (parish registers). - -[600] _Notes and Queries_, 2nd series, XI. 69. - -[601] 'How and whether a Christen man ought to flye the horrible plage of -the Pestilence. A sermon out of the Psalme "Qui habitat in adjutorio -altissimi," by Andrewe Osiander. Translated out of Hye Almayn into -Englishe, 1537.' Copy in the British Museum. The initials M.C. are taken -to be those of Miles Coverdale. - -[602] Soranzo to the Senate of Venice. _Calendar of State Papers_, -Venetian, V. 541 (18 Aug. 1554). - -[603] _Cal. State Papers_, Henry VIII. Domestic. - -[604] From _Abstract of several orders relating to the Plague_. MS. Addit. -(Brit. Museum), No. 4376. Probably the originals of these abstracts are -among the Guildhall records. I quote from the most accessible source. - -[605] Extracts from the Guildhall Records, by Furnivall, in Appendix to -Vicary's _Anatomy of the Body of Man_. Early English Text Society. - -[606] _Cal. State Papers_, Venetian, VII. 649. - -[607] _Abstract_, &c. in Brit. Mus. MSS., as above. - -[608] The following is the case by which he supports the recommendation to -kill dogs in plague-time: "Not many years since, I knew a glover in Oxford -who with his family, to the number of ten or eleven persons, died of the -plague, which was said to be brought into the house by a dogge skinne that -his wife bought when the disease was in the Citie" (_Poor Man's Jewel_, -Chapter VIII. London, 1578). - -[609] _Transcripts from the MS. Archives_, ed. Bayley, 1856. - -[610] News-letter to the Earl of Shrewsbury, _Hist. MSS. Commis._ VI. 455. - -[611] _Machyn's Diary_, ed. J. Gough Nichols. Camden Soc., No. 42, p. 310. - -[612] _Ibid._ p. 396 (note by Nichols); and Guildhall Records, in -Furnivall, _l. c._ - -[613] _Abstract_, &c. as above. - -[614] Stow's _Memoranda_ (Lambeth MS.), Camden Soc., 1880, p. 123. - -[615] _Abstract_, &c. as above. - -[616] Stow, _ibid._ - -[617] Record Office. _State Papers_, Elizabeth, vol. XLVIII., No. 70. - -[618] Endorsed "An abstract of such orders as have been heretofore for the -preventing and decreasing of the plague in and about London." - -[619] The searchers are mentioned at Shrewsbury as early as 1539 -(Phillips). - -[620] _Survey of London_, _ed. cit._ p. 119. - -[621] Holinshed, III. p. 1260. - -[622] John Bell, _London's Remembrancer_. Lond. 1665. - -[623] _Liber Albus Londinensis._ Rolls series, ed. Riley. The following -instances occur in the report of the commissioners of 1343: P. 446: A -water-gate "obturatur ratione unius gutturi exeuntis de una latrina," etc. -P. 449: the Ebbegate obstructed by certain persons named, "qui fecerunt in -eadem venella latrinas supra dentes, quarum putredo cadit supra capita -hominum transeuntium." Same page: Wendegoslane "obturatur per fimos et -garderobas." Same page: Rethersgate obstructed "per fimos et alia -hujusmodi foetida." Same page: Dowgate. Two householders named "in eisdem -aedificiis diversas latrinas fecerunt, pendentes ultra vicum ejusdem -venellae; quarum putredines cadunt supra homines per eandem venellam -transeuntes." P. 450: at Queenhithe a "communis latrina." P. 451: at -Saltwharf the way to the river obstructed "pulvere et aliis putredinibus -in eadem projiciendis." P. 452: Lekynggeslane has two latrinae and is -impassable owing to want of paving. Same page: Another venel obstructed by -the Earl Marshall; three latrinae in it. In a perambulation of the ground -outside the walls, 26 Ed. III. (1552), the following encroachments are -noted among others: Outside Ludgate, one has erected a shed (_camera_) 16 -ft. 12-3/4 ft., and made there "unum profundum puteum et quadratum pro -latrina"--a deep well and a latrine-pit together. Also outside Ludgate, -William of Wircestre has a house there and two shelters for beasts, and a -latrine, and part of the said house is 14 ft. 7-1/2 ft. - -[624] _Statutes of the Realm_, 17 Ric. II. - -[625] Riley, _op. cit._, p. 614. - -[626] Stow's _Survey_. - -[627] Art. "Shakespeare," _Encycl. Britan._ - -[628] Wodderspoon's _Memorials of Ipswich_, p. 285, p. 259. - -[629] "Now first printed." Exeter, 1765, p. 181. - -[630] Poulett Scrope, _op. cit._ p. 333. - -[631] _D. Erasmi Epistolar. lib. XXX._ London, 1642, Lib. xxii. Epist. 12 -(without date). - -[632] Richard of Devizes. Eng. Hist. Soc. p. 60: "Apud Bristolliam nemo -est qui non sit vel fuerit saponarius; et omnis Francus saponarios amat ut -stercorarios." - -[633] William Harrison's _Description of England_ (in Holinshed) gives -proof enough that the filthy floors described by Erasmus had no existence -two generations later, even among the poorer classes. - -[634] The correspondence is in _Remembrancia_, under the head of "Plague." - -[635] From a memorandum of Lord Burghley's, dated Hertford Castle, 21 Nov. -1582, it appears that a survey had shown 577 beds available for strangers -in one parish of Hertford, and 451 in another, "so that there are lying -two a bed above 2000 people." _Cal. State Papers._ Domestic series, -Elizabeth 1581-90, p. 75. - -[636] Stow's _Survey_. - -[637] _Remembrancia_, p. 332. - -[638] _Remembrancia._ - -[639] Baddeley, _Parish of St Giles, Cripplegate_. Lond. 1888. - -[640] _Ibid._, under date August, 1672, p. 193. - -[641] Broadsheets in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries. Cited -by W. Rendle, F.R.C.S., _Old Southwark and its People_. London, 1878, p. -198. Mr Rendle, in one place, seems to imply disapproval of this mode of -coffinless burial; but in another (p. 225, note) he says it was "a sort of -forecast of Mr Seymour Haden's wise proposals." His first thoughts appear -to have been the best. - -[642] Sermon on Third Sunday in Advent, 1552. - -[643] Stow's _Memoranda_. Camden Society, N. S. XXVIII., 1880, p. 125. - -[644] Stow, _Annales_, p. 662. - -[645] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[646] _Cat. Cecil MSS._ - -[647] On July 15, 1570, the Duke of Norfolk craved his release from the -Tower, on account of the great risk to his bodily health and the infection -of the pestilence in that part of the city. (_Calendar of Cecil MSS._) - -[648] _Report Hist. MSS. Commis._ - -[649] Anthony Wood, _op. cit._ - -[650] _Remembrancia_, p. 38. - -[651] Turnor's _History of Hertford_, pp. 236, 268. - -[652] _The Loseley Manuscripts_, ed. Kempe. London, 1836, p. 280. - -[653] Holinshed, III. p. 1240. - -[654] Letter to Cecil, _Cal. Cecil MSS._, II. 106 (under the year 1575). - -[655] Corporation records, in _Notes and Queries_, 6th series, II. 524. - -[656] _Notes and Queries_, 6th series, II. 390. - -[657] Ormerod's _Hist. of Cheshire_, I. Harl. MS. 2177 (a death from -plague, 3 Nov. 1574). - -[658] _Cal. Cecil MSS._, II. 107:--For the week ending 9 September, 1575, -in St Margaret's, 25 deaths (of plague 13), St Martin's 3 of plague, -Savoy, none, St Clement's 3 (2 of plague). - -[659] Cecil to Earl of Lincoln. _Ibid._ 10 September, 1575. - -[660] _The Maire of Bristowe, is Kalendar._ Camden Soc. 1872, p. 59. - -[661] Wells corporation MSS., _Hist. MSS. Com._, I. 107. - -[662] Owen and Blakeway. - -[663] _Calendar of State Papers_, Domestic, 1591-94, p. 269. - -[664] Tickell's _Hist. of Kingston upon Hull_, 1798. - -[665] Records of the Burgh of Kirkcudbright. _Hist. MSS. Commiss._, IV. -539. - -[666] _Remembrancia_, p. 333 (27 Nov. and 6 Dec. 1582). - -[667] By permission of the Marquis of Salisbury. The contents of this -small volume have not been included in the published Calendar of the Cecil -MSS. - -[668] 'A sermon preached at Powles Crosse on Sunday, the third of -November, 1577, in the time of the Plague' by T. W. London, 1578 (February -20). - -[669] Strype's ed. of Stow's _Survey_, Bk. IV. p. 34. Nonsuch was near -Epsom. - -[670] _Remembrancia of the City of London_, p. 331. - -[671] _Calendar of Cecil MSS._, Part II. under the dates. - -[672] Turnor's _Hist. of Hertford_, p. 236. - -[673] _Cal. Cecil MSS._ - -[674] Blomefield, vol. III. ("Norwich," under the date). - -[675] _Ibid._ "Yarmouth." - -[676] Morant's _Hist, of Essex_, I. 50. - -[677] _Hist. MSS. Commission_, IX. 277 b. - -[678] _Notes and Queries_, 6th series, II. 524. - -[679] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[680] Nichols, _Hist. of Leicestershire_. - -[681] _Cal. S. P._ - -[682] _Cal. State Papers._ Eliz. 1581-90 (Lemon), pp. 45, 70. - -[683] Graunt's _Reflections on Bills of Mortality_. 3rd ed., Lond. 1665, -p. 135. - -[684] _Hist. MSS. Com._ - -[685] Saunders, _Hist. of Boston_, p. 228. - -[686] Duke of Rutland's MSS. _Hist. MSS. Com._, May 24, 1586. - -[687] Saunders, _l. c._ - -[688] _Notes and Queries_, 2nd series, XI. 497. - -[689] Blomefield's _Norfolk_. - -[690] _Ibid._ and Gawdy MSS. _Hist. MSS. Com._ - -[691] Glover's _Hist. of Derby_, p. 613. - -[692] _Archaeologia_, VI. 80. - -[693] Townsend's _Hist. of Leominster_, p. 59. - -[694] Sykes, _Local Records of Northumberland and Durham_, p. 80. - -[695] _Cal. S. P._, Domestic, Eliz. ed. Lemon. - -[696] Corporation MSS. of Plymouth. _Hist. MSS. Com._ X. pt. 4, p. 539. - -[697] _Notes and Queries_, 6th series, III. 477. - -[698] Dunsford's _Historical Memoirs of Tiverton_, p. 38. - -[699] _Bill of Mortality for the week ending October 20, 1603._ Broadside -in Guildhall Library, with summary, on margin, of the mortalities in 1563 -and 1592-93. - -[700] _Cal. State Papers_, 1591-94, p. 312. - -[701] _Ibid._ p. 340. - -[702] _Ibid._ 1595-97, p. 45, May 26, 1595: - -"Arguments in proof of the advantages to be derived by the City of London -from stopping up the town ditch:--It is the origin of infection, and the -only noisome place in the city. In the last great plague, more died about -there than in three parishes besides; these fields are the chiefest walks -for recreation of the cityzens, and though the ditch were cast every -second year, yet the water coming from the kennel and slaughter-houses -will be very contagious. It is no material defence for the city, and half -the ditch has been stopped these many years." - -[703] _London's Remembrancer_, by John Bell, Clerk of the Company of -Parish Clerks. London, 1665. He says: "I shall begin with the year 1593, -being the first year in which any account of the christenings and burials -was kept. I cannot find any record of more antiquity than that of this -year in the Company of Parish Clerks Hall." However we can now point to -original weekly bills of mortality of 1532 and 1535, to abstracts of -weekly plague-burials in 1563-66, to the figures from one weekly bill of a -series in 1574, and to abstracts of 1578-83. - -[704] The total of 25,886 was copied, probably from the broadside of 1603, -into an anonymous essay of 1665, called _Reflections on the Bills of -Mortality_, the total of plague alone being given as 11,503, evidently by -a misprint for 15,003. At the same time a table was given, professing to -be of the weekly deaths from all causes, in one column, and from plague in -another, from March 13 to December 18, 1593. The column of plague-deaths -sums up to 11,110, but the total of 11,503 (which originated in a -misprint) is printed at the foot of the column as if that were the -summation. The column of deaths from all causes is made to sum up to -25,886, the actual sum being 25,817. But the weekly mortalities in it for -those weeks that had little plague are an absurdity for 1593. Whatever the -source of this table, it is not genuine for 1593, and was disclaimed by -Bell, the clerk of Parish Clerks' Hall, whose essay was written in 1665 to -correct that and other errors about former plagues in London. - -[705] _Cal. State Papers._ Addenda. Elizabeth. - -[706] Cussan's _Hist. of Hertfordshire_. - -[707] Turner's _Hist. of Hertford_, p. 268. - -[708] Glover's _Hist. of Derby_, p. 613. - -[709] Harwood's _Hist. of Lichfield_, p. 304. - -[710] Nichols, _Leicestershire_ (Town records of Leicester); Kelly, in -_Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc._ VI. (1877), p. 391 (at least 20 houses shut up). - -[711] Owen and Blakeway. - -[712] Parish registers in Townsend's _Leominster_, p. 59. - -[713] Corporation MSS. Canterbury, in 9th Report of _Hist. MSS. -Commission_, pp. 159 a, 160 a, b. "This plague continued from the end of -September to the month of January." - -[714] Parish Register of Penrith: "A sore plage was in London, -Nottinghome, Derbie and Lincolne in the year 1593" (Jefferson's -_Cumberland_, I. 19). - -[715] _Cal. Stale Papers._ Addenda. Elizabeth. - -[716] Syer's _Memorials of Bristol_. The excessive mortality at Leominster -(41 burials in September, 1597) may have been an effect of the famine. -(Townsend's _History_, p. 59.) - -[717] _Cal. State Papers_, Domestic, 1597, 10, p. 347. - -[718] _Cal. State Papers_, Domestic, 1597, p. 501. - -[719] Sykes, _Local Records_, p. 82. - -[720] Clarkson's _Hist. of Richmond_. - -[721] Camden's _Britannia_, p. 175. - -[722] Jefferson's _Cumberland_, I. 273. But these are the same figures as -for Penrith. - -[723] _Ibid._ I. 391. - -[724] Parish register of Penrith, in Jefferson, _l. c._ - -[725] _Notes and Queries._ 6th series, II. 524. - -[726] _Exchequer Rolls of Scotland_, X. 594. Edin. 1887. - -[727] _Burgh Records of Aberdeen_ (Spalding Club), I. 66. - -[728] _Exchequer Rolls Scot._, XI. p. lxviii. - -[729] _Ibid._ - -[730] _Burgh Records_, pp. 88, 90, 130, 165. - -[731] _Register of the Privy Council, Scotland_, I. 5. - -[732] _Cal. S. P._ Scot. (Thorpe). - -[733] _Burgh Records_, pp. 222, 231, 244, 246. - -[734] _Cal. S. P._ Scot. 18 Nov. 1548. The Rhinegrave recovered, and came -to Edinburgh on the 26th. - -[735] _Reg. P. C. Scot._ I. 279-81. - -[736] _Ibid._ I. 281-2. - -[737] _Ane Breve Description of the Pest_, Edin. 1568. Reprinted, for the -Bannatyne Club, by James Skene of Rubislaw. Edin. 1840. - -[738] _Diurnall of Occurrences_, in Chambers. - -[739] Cited by R. Chambers (_Domestic Annals of Scotland_, I.) from M. -Napier's notes to the Spottiswoode Club edition of Spottiswoode's History. - -[740] _Op. cit._ I. 53. - -[741] _Burgh Records of Canongate._ Maitland Club, Miscellany, II. 313 (in -Chambers). - -[742] Chambers, I. 94. - -[743] _Burgh Records of Glasgow, 1573-1581._ Maitland Club, p. 27. - -[744] _Reg. P. C. Scot._, II. 415. - -[745] _Ibid._ p. 419. - -[746] _Hist. MSS. Com._, IV. 539. - -[747] _Reg. Scots P. C._, III. 229. - -[748] _Ibid._ - -[749] _Ibid._ III. 679. - -[750] _Reg. Scots P. C._ s. d. - -[751] _Chronicle of Perth_, Bannatyne Club, p. 4, and Chambers, I. 154. - -[752] _Reg. Scots P. C._, III. 727. - -[753] Calderwood's _Hist. of Kirk of Scotland_, IV. 366: "It was first -known to be in Simon Mercerbank's house." Birell's _Diary_ (1532-1605) in -Chambers, I. 157. - -[754] _Scots P. C._, III. 746. - -[755] _Ibid._ V. 56. - -[756] Moysie, in Chambers, I. 157. - -[757] _The Diary of Mr James Melville, 1556-1601._ Bannatyne Club. Edin. -1829, p. 153. - -[758] Marioreybank's _Annals_, in Chambers. - -[759] Melville's _Diary_, p. 162. - -[760] Melville, p. 173; Calderwood, cited by Chambers; _Cal. Cecil -Papers_, III. 298, 310. - -[761] _Cal. Cecil Papers_, III. 321. - -[762] _Memorabilia of Glasgow_, in Chambers. - -[763] _Scots Privy Council._ - -[764] Birell, in Chambers. - -[765] _Scots P. C._ - -[766] Calderwood, V. 655. - -[767] Two men sent to buy nolt in Galloway for the needs of the borough of -Dumfries were stopped, with 38 head of cattle, by the provost and others -of Wigton, at the Water of Crie, the cattle being impounded at Wigton for -eight days so that they became lean. A hundred merks compensation was -demanded. _Scots Privy Council_, V. - -[768] _Scots P. C._, VI. 164. - -[769] _Aberdeen Kirk Session Records_, Spalding Club, 1846, Calderwood -(cited by Chambers, I. 319) says that the year 1600 was one of famine, and -that there was also a great death of young children, six or seven being -buried in Edinburgh in a day. - -[770] _Scots Privy Council_, VI. under the respective dates. - -[771] _Burgh Records._ - -[772] Smith's _Cork_, II. 34. - -[773] _Cal. State Papers._ Domestic. - -[774] Smith's _Cork_, on the authority of MS. annals. - -[775] _Annals of Loch C._ Rolls ed., II. 289. - -[776] Brabazon to T. Cromwell. _Cal. State Papers._ Irish. - -[777] _Cal. State Papers._ Irish, 1566-7. - -[778] _State Papers_ (Record Office), Irish, 1567, No. 54. Letter from -Lord Treasurer Winchester and Ed. Baeshe, to the Lord Deputy. Mr Froude's -summary of it is that "the clammy vapour had stolen into their lungs and -poisoned them," and again, "the reeking vapour of the charnel house." I -have had difficulty in deciphering the letter, but I can make out "being a -graveyard where all their buriall," etc. - -[779] _Cal. State Papers._ Irish. - -[780] Thady Dowling, p. 41. - -[781] _Cal. State Papers._ Domestic. Sept. 1, 1575. - -[782] Stubbs, in his edition of Roger of Howden (Rolls series, No. 51, II. -249), on the evidence of the Pipe Roll of 1166. - -[783] _Memorials of London in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries_, ed. -Riley. - -[784] Stow's _Survey of London_, pop. ed. (1890), p. 66. - -[785] Hall's _Chronicle_, ed. of 1809, p. 632. - -[786] This account of the Black Assizes at Oxford in 1577 was brought to -light, like so many other things from the register of Merton, first by -Anthony Wood in his _Hist. and Antiq. of the Univ. of Oxford_ (ed. Gutch, -II. 189). It was copied in full, from the original Latin text, in 1758, by -John Ward, LL.D., and sent to the Royal Society, in whose _Phil. Trans._ -(vol. L. p. 699) it is printed, with remarks, by Tho. Birch, D.D., Sec. R. -S. - -[787] Howard, _The State of the Prisons in England and Wales_. 3rd ed., -Warrington, 1784, p. 342. - -[788] _Hist, and Antiq. Univ. Oxford_, ed. Gutch, II. 188-192. - -[789] Georgius Edrichus, 'In Libros aliquot pauli Aeginetae Hypomnemata -quaedam.' Londini apud Tomam East 1588 (without pagination). - -[790] The passage which Anthony Wood thought to relate to the gaol fever -at Oxford in 1577 is the following, under the heading "De morbis public -grassantibus:" "Publice grassari morbos vidimus Oxonii, et una nocte simul -plus sexaginta agrotasse (_sic_) novimus, et in vicinis postridie pagis, -eo forte are delato, fere centum. Quod etiam eodem tempore, regnante tum -Edwardo sexto, Cantabrigiae evenit, cum duo simul liberi ducis inclyti -Suffolchiae ibi morerentur. Nec tamen Oxonienses ulli fere interierunt, -quod coeli constitutio apud nos quam ibi salubrior sit. Sed iis ita -succurrendum morbis putamus, ut Brittanico sudore (sic enim vocant) -opitulari solemus." - -[791] Anthony Wood, as we have seen in the text, put together his version -of the fever of 1577 from the Merton College register, from Stow's -_Annals_, and from Ethredge's reference to the sweat of 1551. In 1758, -John Ward, LL.D., copied the passage in the Merton register and sent it to -the Royal Society; whose secretary, the Rev. Dr Thomas Birch, appended to -it in the _Philosophical Transactions_ some annotations--"copying," as -Carlyle said of him with reference to some Cromwell matter, "from Wood's -_Athenae_; and has committed--as who does not?--several errors," his -annotations being "sedulous but ineffectual"--to the extent of fixing on -the original correct narrative an accretion of mistakes (600 for 60, -sweating sickness for gaol fever, &c.). Trusting to the respectable Birch, -Bancroft in his _Essay on the Yellow Fever, with observations concerning -febrile contagion &c._ (Lond., 1811) has based a theory that the Oxford -epidemic was not typhus at all. Murchison (_Continued Fevers of Great -Britain_, 2nd ed. 1873, p. 103) has also been misled, and has found -himself therefore at a disadvantage in answering Bancroft's empty -verbalisms about the invariable reproduction of typhus from some previous -case. F. C. Webb, in a paper "An Historical Account of the Gaol Fever," -_Trans. Epidem. Soc._ for 1857, p. 63, has not used the Oxford case for -any argumentative purpose, but he has, like the others, given the facts -erroneously. He gives no particulars of the Exeter Black Assize. - -[792] Howard, _On Lazarettos in Europe_, &c. Warrington, 1789, p. 231: -"But as I have found, in some prisons abroad, cells and dungeons as -offensive and dirty as any I have observed in this country, where however -the distemper was unknown, I am obliged to look out for some additional -cause of its production. I am of opinion that the sudden change of _diet_ -and lodging so affects the _spirits_ of _new_ convicts that the general -causes of putrid fever exert an immediate effect upon them. Hence it is -common to see them sicken and die in a short time with very little -apparent illness." The last words are important. - -[793] _Sylva Sylvarum, or A Natural History._ In ten centuries. Cent. 10, - 914-15. Spedding's ed. II. 646. - -[794] Holinshed's _Chronicle_. New edition by Hoker, London, 1587, pp. -1547-8. - -[795] These statements by Hoker, chamberlain of Exeter, are sufficiently -circumstantial; but they do not quite suit the theory of a writer in the -_Dict. Nat. Biog._, under "Drake, Sir Bernard" that the ship was "a great -Portugal ship," called the Lion of Viana, with an English master, taken by -Bernard Drake in Brittany. No doubt such a capture is stated in the _Cal. -State Papers_, 1585, p. 295 (the reference given), Sir W. Raleigh's ship -the "Jobe" being included in the same petition; but nothing is said of -Dartmouth as the port to which the two vessels were brought, or of Exeter -as the place where their captains were imprisoned. It is of importance for -the theory of the Exeter gaol fever to know whether Drake's prisoners were -Portuguese fishermen or not, and Hoker may be supposed to have known. - -[796] The author of the misadventure. He succeeded in getting home to -Crediton, where he died on the 12th April, four weeks after the Assizes -began. - -[797] Sir George Nicholls, in his _History of the English Poor Law_, 1854, -I. 113, threw out the suggestion that the decay was in the old walled -towns, and that it was compensated by the rise of populations on less -hampered sites. This theory has been adopted by some later writers. - -[798] _Calendar of State Papers._ Domestic, Hen. VIII. - -[799] Becon's _Works_, 3 vols. II. fol. 15-16. - -[800] Continuation of Fabyan's _Chronicle_. - -[801] Greyfriars _Chronicle_, Camden Soc. LIII., 1852. Preface by J. G. -Nichols, xxiv. - -[802] Strype's ed. of Stow's _Survey of London_. - -[803] In the Rolls of the Middlesex Sessions (Middlesex Record Society), -there occur numerous entries of inquests on deaths in the gaol of Newgate -from the 25th year of Elizabeth: a few of these are from plague; but by -far the larger number are from "the pining sickness," a malady which -sometimes cut off several prisoners in the same few days and after a brief -illness. In one of these epidemics (Dec. 1586-Feb. 1587), a single case is -called "pestilent fever," the other seven being "pining sickness." Next -year, June 19, there is a case of bloody flux, and, on June 24, a case of -"pining sickness." The other periods when the disease so named was -epidemic in Newgate were Feb.-May, 1595, June and July, 1597, March, 1598, -and March-April, 1602. The pining sickness was probably a generic term, -and may have included chronic disease; there is a solitary case entered as -ailing for as long a period as eight months, the usual duration of the -sickness being one, two, or three days up to three or four weeks. - -This place will serve to notice the strange teaching about "parish -infection" which has received currency among the writers of good repute as -authorities. Guy (_Public Health_, Lectures, 1870, I. 23) says the gaol -distemper was an old offender known as the _sickness of the house_: "I -think I recognize it in the London Bills from 1606 to 1665 as the _Parish -Infection_." The column of figures in the London Bills which has been -taken to show the weekly prevalence of a disease, otherwise unheard of, -"parish infection," really shows the number of "parishes infected." The -earlier bills showed, in the corresponding column, the number of parishes -clear ("parish.clere" or "paroch.clere"). By adding up the number of -parishes infected in each of the 52 weeks of a bad plague-year, a total of -some thousands is got, and that total has been taken to be the annual -mortality from "parish infection"--a pure myth. The original author of -this singular mistake appears to have been Marshall, in his _Mortality of -the Metropolis_, London, 1832, p. 67. Of the "parish infection," he says: -"The disease below is specified by Mr Bell in his _Remembrancer_ [1665]; -it is probably the same as exhibited under the name of spotted fever." -What Bell "specifies" is not another disease, but the number of parishes -in the City and suburbs infected with the plague in each week of the year. - -[804] _Annales Monastici_, Rolls series, No. 19. Chronicle by an unknown -author (St Albans) temp. Hen. VI., 1422-31:--"Quaedam infirmitas reumigata -invasit totum populum, quae _mure_ dicitur: et sic senes cum junioribus -inficiebat quod magnum numerum ad funus letale deducebat." - -In the Report of the Irish Local Government Board, Medical Department, -1890, influenza is identified under the name "slaedan," or prostration, -which was epidemic in Ireland in 1326 or 1328, the same epidemic being -called "murre" in the _Annals of Clonmacnoise_. The use of the word "mure" -in the St Albans Chronicle is just a century later. Murrain (or _morena_ -in Latin chronicles) is probably the modern survival of "mure" or "murre." - -[805] I take this summary from Short (_Chronology_, etc. I. 204), who -omits his authority, probably the foreign writers to whom he is usually -indebted in the earlier period. The first part of Theophilus Thompson's -_Annals of Influenza_ (Sydenham Society) is little else than extracts from -Short, and therefore of foreign origin. - -[806] _Cal. State Papers._ Domestic, _sub dato_. - -[807] Thus in the continuation of Fabyan's Chronicle under the year 1512, -the Marquis of Dorset, sent into Spain with 10,000 men, is said to have -"returned in winter by reason of the flix (dysentery)." And in Hall's -_Chronicle_ (ed. of 1807, p. 523), we have particulars of the very serious -sickness in his army in Biscay; owing to their diet being largely of -garlic and fruits, and their drink being hot wines in hot weather, "there -fell sick 3000 of the flix, and thereof died 1800 men." - -[808] Continuator of Fabyan's _Chronicle_, sub anno. There is an almost -identical entry in _A London Chronicle of Henry VII. and Henry VIII._ -(Camden Miscellany, vol. V. 1859), but under the year 1539, in a hot and -dry summer. The most discrepant date and designation of the epidemic of -those years are those given in Hardiman's _History of Galway_ (p. 40): -"This charitable institution [St Bridget's Hospital] was fortunately -completed in the year 1543, when the sweating sickness broke out, and -raged with great violence, destroying multitudes of the natives, and -particularly the tradesmen of the town." - -[809] The term "hot ague" occurs as early as 1518, in a letter of 18 July -(_Cal. State Papers_). - -[810] Wriothesley, _A Chronicle of England during the reigns of the -Tudors_ (1457-1559). Camden Society, II. 139. - -Anthony Wood also enters for Oxford, under 1557, "A pestilential disease -to the settling of some and the driving away of many; the causes of which -proceeding from the eating of green fruit, the Commissary commanded that -none should be sold in the market or elsewhere in Oxford." - -[811] Fabyan's _Chronicle_, p. 711. - -[812] Stow's _Annales_, ed. Howse, p. 631. Speed also has a paragraph, -unusual with him, on the state of health in the year of Queen Mary's death -(1658), in which the mortality among the clergy is specially mentioned. - -[813] Extracts from Harrison's MS. _Chronologie_ by Furnivall, in Appendix -to _Elizabethan England_. Camelot series, 1890, p. 267. His famine prices, -and the enormous fall of them after harvest, are the same as given by -Stow. - -[814] _State Papers_, Record Office. - -[815] John Jones, M.D. _The Dyall of Ague_, London, 1564? - -[816] _Calendar of State Papers._ Foreign, II. 1558, p. 398. - -[817] _Calendar of State Papers._ Foreign, II. 1558, p. 400. - -[818] _New Observations, Natural, Moral, Civil, Political and Medical, on -City, Town and Country Bills of Mortality._ By Thomas Short, M.D., London, -1750. - -[819] 2 vols. London, 1749. - -[820] _Calendar of Cecil MSS._, II. 525. - -[821] _Phil. Trans._ XVIII. 105 - -[822] Graunt, _Reflections on the Bills of Mortality_, 3rd ed. 1665. - -[823] _Opera_, ed. Greenhill, p. 160. - -[824] _Ibid._ p. 169. - -[825] Giraldus Cambrensis, Rolls series, No. 21, vol. V. _Topogr. -Hiberniae_, p. 67:--"Advenarum, tamen, una his fere est passio et unica -vexatio. Ob humida namque nutrimenta, immoderatum ventris fluxum vix in -primis ullus evadit." Flux among the English troops in Ireland in 1172 is -mentioned by Radulphus de Diceto, _Imag. Histor._ I. 348. - -[826] _Works of James I._, p. 301. - -[827] _Sloane MS._ (Brit. Mus.) No. 389, folios 147-153. It bears no date, -but is marked in the catalogue "xv and xvi cent.," as if belonging either -to the end of the fifteenth century or the beginning of the sixteenth. - -[828] Hensler, who reproduced in 1783 (_Geschichte der Lustseuche_, App. -p. 53) these and other particulars from one of the two remaining copies of -Pinctor's work (in the possession of Professor Cotunni of Naples), -collated with the other copy in the Garelli library at Vienna, finds in -the concluding dedication of the book to Alexander Borgia a sinister -meaning, as if the supreme pontiff had been himself a victim of the -_grande maladie la mode_; it is easier, he says, to extricate the sense -than the syntax of the passage. - -[829] There was another edition in 1539, and several more following. -Paynel also added a short section, "A Remedy for the Frenche pockes," to -his book entitled, _A Moche Profitable Treatise against the Pestilence_. -Translated into English by Thomas Paynel, chanon of Martin [Merton] Abbey, -London, 1534. - -[830] _Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, -1398-1570._ Edited for the Spalding Club [by Dr John Stuart], vol. I. -1844, p. 425. - -[831] _Phil. Trans._, vol. 42 (1743), p. 420: "Part of a Letter from Mr -Macky, professor of History, to Mr Mac Laurin, professor of Mathematics in -the University of Edinburgh, and by him communicated to the President of -the Royal Society; being an Extract from the Books of the Town Council of -Edinburgh, relating to a Disease there, supposed to be Venereal, in the -year 1497." - -[832] Simpson (_l. c._) quotes the Proclamation from the original -minute-book, almost in the above spelling; it is in Vol. I. of the _Town -Council Records_, fol. 33-34, and is entitled in the rubric "Ane Grangore -Act." - -[833] "On Syphilis in Scotland in the Fifteenth Century," _Trans. Epidem. -Soc._ N. S. 1. (1862), p. 149. Two of the entries are published in the -_Criminal Trials of Scotland_, 1. 117; the others were collected for -Simpson by Mr Joseph Robertson from the High-Treasurer's Accounts in the -Register House, Edinburgh. These accounts have since been published in the -Rolls series (vol. I. 356, 361, 378 (_bis_), 386). - -[834] _Op. cit._ I. 437. - -[835] _Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York._ Edited by Nicolas, -London, 1830, p. 104. - -[836] Stow's _Survey of London_, "Bridge Ward Without." He ascribes these -informations to "Robert Fabian," both in the text and in the margin. The -statement is certainly not made in Fabyan's _Chronicle of England_ under -the year 1506, or other year of the decade, nor is it indexed as occurring -in some earlier connexion. - -[837] Bernard Andr's Works. Rolls series, No. 10. - -[838] _Erasmi Epistolae_, folio. London, 1642, p. 1789 e. - -[839] Anthony Wood, _Hist. Univ. Oxford_, ed. Gutch, I. 514. Freind -(_Hist. of Physic_, Pt. II. p. 345) says that the French pox is mentioned -in the will of Colet, dean of St Paul's, 1518. - -[840] _The Supplication of Beggers_ compyled by Symon Fyshe. Anno -MCCCCCXXIIII. Lond. 1546. - -[841] _Parliamentary History_, I. 494. - -[842] Bullein's _Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence, 1564_. Early English -Text Society, Extra series, 1888, p. 122. - -[843] Bullein's _Bulwarke of Defence against all Sicknes, Sornes, and -Woundes_, etc., 1562, foll. 2, 68. - -[844] _Certain Works of Chirurgerie newly compiled and published by T. -Gale._ London, 1563. - -[845] _Dyall of Agues_, cap. VIII. "Of the Pestilential fever, or plage, -or boche." - -[846] William Clowes, _A short and profitable Treatise touching the cure -of the disease called (Morbus Gallicus) by unctions_, London, 1579. - -[847] 'A Prooved Practice for all young Chirurgeons, concerning burning -with gunpowder, and woundes made with Gunshot, Sword, Halbard, Pike, -Launce or such other. Hereto is adjoyned a Treatise of the French or -Spanish Pocks, written by John Almenar, a Spanish Phisician. Also a -commodious collection of Aphorismes, both English and Latine, taken out of -an old written coppy. Published for the benefit of his country by William -Clowes, Maister in Chirurgery.' New ed., 1591. - -[848] _A most excellent and compendious Method_, etc. London, 1588. - -[849] Read uses, among other terms, one that has played a great part in -the modern pathology of syphilis. Among the points to be noticed are,--"if -recent or old, if the ulcers or whelks be many, whether pustulous matter -or _gummie_ substance appear." - -[850] John Banister, 'A needefull new and necessarie treatise of -Chyrurgerie, briefly comprehending the generall and particular curation of -ulcers ... drawen forth of sundrie worthy writers.... Hereunto is annexed -certaine experimentes of mine owne invention.' London, 1575. - -[851] Peter Lowe, _An easie, certaine and perfect method to cure and -prevent the Spanish sicknes_, Lond. 1596. For an account of the book see -_The Life and Works of Maister Peter Lowe_. By James Finlayson, M.D. -Glasgow, 1889. - -[852] _A Treatise concerning the plague and the pox, discovering as well -the means how to preserve from the danger of these infectious contagions, -or how to cure those which are infected with either of them._ London, -1652. - -[853] Burnet (_History of his own Time_, I. 395-6, Oxford, 1823) retails a -good deal of unsavoury gossip concerning the disease in noble and princely -personages after the Restoration. - -[854] _Natural and Political Observations upon the Bills of Mortality._ By -Captain John Graunt, F.R.S. Preface dated from Birchin Lane, January, -1662. - -[855] The origin of syphilis from leprosy has been maintained in a modern -work by Friedr. Alex. Simon, _Kritische Geschichte des Ursprungs, der -Pathologie und Behandlung der Syphilis, Tochter und widerum Mutter des -Aussatzes_. Hamburg, 1857-8. - -[856] Hirsch, _Geographical and Historical Pathology_ (Translated), II. -67, 68, 81. - -[857] In Hensler, p. 14, and Appendix, p. 11. - -[858] _Ibid._, App. p. 15. - -[859] In Hensler, Appendix, p. 66. - -[860] The rise of the pox in the Italian wars, with its dispersion over -all Europe, comes into "The Smallpox, a Poem" by "Andrew Tripe, M.D.," -London, 1748: - - "Whip! thro' both camps, halloo! it ran, - Nor uninfected left a man ... - Hence soon thro' Italy it flew - Veiled for a while from mortal view, - When suddenly in various modes, - It shone display'd in shankers, nodes, - Swell'd groins, and pricking shins, and headaches - And a long long long string of dread aches ... - From thence with every sail unfurl'd - It traversed almost all the world ... - Until at length this Stygian fury - Worked its foul way to our blest Drury, - Where still Lord Paramount it reigns, - Pregnant with sharp nocturnal pains," etc. - -[861] I do not include among the good evidence the often quoted letter of -Peter Martyr to a professor of Greek at Salamanca, under the date of -"nonis Aprilis, 1488," in which "morbus Gallicus" is used as well as the -Spanish name "las bubas." It seems to me certain that the date should be -1498, or something else than 1488, the correspondence having gone on until -1525. The same kind of misdating occurs among the printed letters of -Erasmus. - -[862] This letter is printed in his _Opuscula_, Papiae, 1496. Attention -was first called to it by Thiene, in his essay confuting the doctrine of -the West-Indian origin of syphilis. - -[863] In Hensler, App. p. 108. - -[864] Manardus, _Epist. Med._ lib. VII. epist. 2. Basil, 1549, p. 137 (as -cited by Hirsch). The first letter of Manardus "de erroribus Sym. Pistoris -de Lypczk circa morbum Gallicum," was printed in 1500 (Hensler, p. 47). - -[865] I quote it from Hensler, _Geschichte der Lustseuche die zu ende des -xv Jahr hunderts in Europa ausbrach_. Altona, 1783, Appendix, p. 109. - -[866] Mezeray, _Histoire de France_, II. 777. - -[867] The diagnosis in De Comines' text appears to have struck the editors -of the chief edition of his work, that of 1747; for they have appended a -footnote to the passage, which is a superfluity unless it be meant to -express surprise: "Charles VIII. malade de la petite vrole l'age de -vingt-deux ans." - -[868] Martin, _Histoire de France_, VII. 257, 283. - -[869] _Handbook of Geographical and Historical Pathology._ Translated by -C. Creighton, 3 vols. London, 1883-86, II. 92-98. - -[870] _Miscellaneous Works of the late Robert Willan, M.D., F.R.S., -containing an Inquiry into the Antiquity of the Smallpox, Measles, and -Scarlet Fever, etc._ Edited by Ashby Smith, M.D., London, 1821. - -[871] Th. Nldeke, _Geschichte der Araber und Perser, nach Tabari_. -Leyden, 1879, pp. 218, 219. - -[872] The term "autonomy" in the foregoing is used according to the -exposition which I originally gave of it in an address to the British -Medical Association (1883) on "The Autonomous Life of the Specific -Infections" (_Brit. Med. Journ._, Aug. 4, 1883). The semi-independence of -constitutional states has been dealt with in my book, _Illustrations of -Unconscious Memory in Disease_. London, 1885. - -[873] The South-African controversy, which became acute, was carried on in -journals of the colony (the _South African Medical Journal_ about 1883 and -1884 is a likely source of information), but some echoes of it were heard -in letters to the _British Medical Journal_, 1884. A few years ago a -similar diagnostic difficulty arose, not in an African race, but among the -inmates of a Paris hospital. In the smallpox wards of the Hpital St -Antoine, a number of cases occurred, one of them in a nurse, another in an -assistant physician, of a particular skin-disease, which was either -discrete or confluent, lasted about ten days, and was attended by fever up -to 40 C. or 41 C. Yet these cases were discriminated from smallpox; they -were diagnosed, and have been recorded, as an epidemic of ecthyma. (Du -Castel, _Gazette des Hpitaux_, 1881, No. 122, quoted in the -_Jahresbericht_.) - -[874] _Krankheiten des Orients._ Erlangen, 1847, p. 127. - -[875] _History of Physic_, II. 190. - -[876] Gruner, a learned professor of Jena, who made collections of works -or passages relating to syphilis and to the English sweat, published also -in 1790 a collection of medieval chapters or sentences on smallpox, "De -Variolis et Morbillis fragmenta medicorum Arabistarum," including the -whole of Gaddesden's chapter but omitting the earlier and more important -chapter from Gilbert. Gruner correctly says at the end of his extracts: -"while the Arabists write thus, they seem to have followed their Arabic -guides, and to have repeated what they received from the latter." This is -obvious from the text of the chapters themselves: some quote more often -than others from Avicenna, Rhazes and Isaac; but it is clear that they all -base upon the Arabians. The substance is the same in them all; it is a -merely verbal handling of Arabic observation and theory. There are no -concrete experiences or original additions, from which one might infer -that they were familiar at first hand with smallpox and measles. Hser, -however, seems to take these chapters in the medieval compends as evidence -of the general prevalence of smallpox in Europe in the Middle Ages. As he -finds little writing about smallpox when modern medical literature began, -he is driven into the paradox that epidemics of smallpox had actually -become rarer again in the sixteenth century (III. p. 69). But the -sixteenth-century references to smallpox, although they are indeed scanty, -are at the same time the earliest authentic accounts of it in Western -Europe. - -[877] This intention is most clearly expressed by Valescus de Tharanta: -"Then let him be wrapped in a woollen cloth of Persian, or at least of -red, so that by the sight of the red cloth the blood may be led to the -exterior and so be kept at no excessive heat, according to the tenour of -the sixth canon [of Avicenna]." _Apud_ Gruner, p. 46. - -[878] _History of Physic_, Pt. II. p. 280. - -[879] _Rosa Anglica._ Papiae, 1492. - -[880] _Chronica Majora._ Rolls ed. V. 452. - -[881] _Rolls of Parliament._ - -[882] Early English Text Society's edition by Skeat. Passus xvi. (108), -and Passus vii. - -[883] Trench, in his _Select Glossary_, has adopted the derivation of -measles from _misellus_, without apparently knowing that John of Gaddesden -had actually used "mesles" for a form of _morbilli_. The derivation of -measles from _misellus_ has been summarily rejected by Skeat, who thinks -that "the spelling with the simple vowel _e_, instead of _ae_ or _ea_, -makes all the difference. The confusion between the words is probably -quite modern." Perhaps I ought not to contradict a philologist on his own -ground; but there is no help for it. I know of four instances in which the -simple vowel _e_ is used in spelling the name of the disease that is -associated with smallpox, the English equivalent of _morbilli_. In a -letter of July 14, 1518, from Pace, dean of St Paul's to Wolsey (_Cal. -State Papers_, Henry VIII. II. pt. 1), it is said, "They do die in these -parts [Wallingford] in every place, not only of the small pokkes and -mezils, but also of the great sickness." In the _Description of the Pest_ -by Dr Gilbert Skene, of Edinburgh (Edin. 1568, reprinted for the Bannatyne -Club, 1840, p. 9), he mentions certain states of weather "quhilkis also -signifeis the Pokis, Mesillis and siclik diseisis of bodie to follow." And -if a Scotsman's usage be not admitted, an Oxonian, Cogan, says, "when the -small pockes and mesels are rife," and another Oxonian, Thomas Lodge, in -his _Treatise of the Plague_ (London, 1603, Cap. iii.) says: "When as -Fevers are accompanied with Small Poxe, Mesels, with spots," etc. On the -other hand, Elyot, in the _Castel of Health_ (1541), Phaer in the _Book of -Children_, (1553), Clowes in his _Proved Practice_, and Kellwaye (1593) -write the word with _ea_. There is, indeed, no uniformity, just as one -might have expected in the sixteenth century. Again, Shakespeare -(_Coriolanus_, Act III., scene I) spells the word with _ea_ where it is -clearly the same word that is used in _The Vision of Piers the Ploughman_ -in a generic sense and in the spelling of "meseles:"--"Those meazels which -we disdain should tetter us." Lastly, there are not two words in the -Elizabethan dictionaries, one with _e_ signifying lepers, and another with -_ea_ signifying the disease of _morbilli_. In Levins' _Manipulus -Vocabulorum_, we find "ye Maysilles" = _variolae_, but there is no word -"mesles" = _leprosi_. There was only one word, with the usual varieties of -spelling; and in course of time it came to be restricted in meaning to -_morbilli_, Gaddesden's early use of "mesles" in that sense having -doubtless helped to determine the usage. - -[884] _Harl. MS._, No. 2378. So far as I have observed, there is no -prescription for "mesles," or for smallpox under its Latin name or under -any English name that might correspond thereto. Moulton's _This is The -Myrror or Glasse of Helth_ (? 1540), which reproduces these medieval -prescriptions with their headings, is equally silent about smallpox and -measles. - -[885] Willan's _Miscellaneous Works_. "An Inquiry into the Antiquity of -the Smallpox, Measles, and Scarlet Fever." London, 1821, p. 98. The MS. is -Harleian, No. 585. - -[886] Sandoval, cited by Hecker, _Der Englische Schweiss_. Berlin, 1834, -p. 80. - -[887] MS. Harl., 1568. - -[888] There is a fine copy of the earliest printed version in the British -Museum, with "Sanctus Albanus" for colophon. The same text was reprinted -often in the years following by London printers--in 1498, 1502, 1510, 1515 -(twice), and 1528. - -[889] Camden Society, ed. Gairdner, 1876, p. 87. - -[890] Walsingham, _Hist. Angliae_, I. 299. Also _Chronicon Angliae a -quodam Monacho_, _sub anno_ 1362. - -[891] "Also manie died of the smallpocks, both men, women and children." - -[892] _History of the Smallpox_, 1817. Blomefield, also, in his _History -of Norfolk_, quotes the passage about "pockys" correctly from the "Fruit -of Times," applies it to Norwich, to which city it had no special -relation, and then says that this is the first mention of "small pocks." - -[893] Fabyan's _Chronicle_. Ed. Ellis, p. 653. - -[894] Levins, _Manipulus Vocabulorum_, 1570. Camden Society's edition, -column 158. - -[895] _Lettres du Roy Louis XII._ Brusselle, 1712, IV. 335. - -[896] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[897] "Item, que son grand desplaisir il ait est naguaires mal dispos -d'une maladie nomme la petitte verolle, dont present, graces Dieu, il -est recouvert et pass tout dangier." _Lettres du Roy Louis XII._, IV. -260. Brusselle, 1712. - -[898] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[899] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[900] Edited by Gairdner for the Camden Society, 1880. - -[901] Bannatyne Club's reprint, 1840, pp. 9-10. - -[902] _The Loseley Manuscripts._ Edited by Kempe. London, 1836, p. 315. - -[903] _A Defensative against the Plague ... whereunto is annexed a short -treatise of the small Poxe, how to govern and help those that are infected -therewith._ London, 1593. - -[904] Francis Davison's _Poetical Rapsodie_. The poem of Spilman occurs at -p. 189 of the edition of 1611. In the piratical edition of 1621, after -Davison's death, "small" is left out before "Pocks," and Spilman's name -omitted at the foot of the verses. The printer's error has had the -singular effect of leading Dr Farmer, the writer on Shakespeare, to -conclude that the word "pox" in the Elizabethan period meant smallpox even -in imprecations such as "a pox on it." - -[905] Sir Tobie Matthews' _Letters (1577-1655)_, London, 1660. (1) Donne -to Mrs Cockaine, p. 342; (2) Donne to Sir R. D----, both without date. - -[906] _Court and Times of James I._ - -[907] _Court and Times of Charles I._ (Chamberlain to Carleton), I. 28. - -[908] Anthony Wood. - -[909] For Chester also, in the parish register of Trinity Church (Harl. -MS. 2177) there is a note opposite 1636: "for this two or three years -divers children died of smallpox in Chester." - -[910] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[911] _Ibid._ - -[912] _Hist. MSS. Commission_, V. 146, 151, 156, 168, 174, 201. See also -the Diaries of Pepys and Evelyn. - -[913] _Natural History of Oxfordshire._ Oxford, 1677, p. 23. - -[914] _De contagione et contagiosis morbis_, etc. Venet. 1546. - -[915] Titles in Hser, III. 383. - -[916] _Opus de peste ... necnon de variolis_, Neap. 1577. - -[917] _Les oeuvres de M. Ambroise Par._ 5th ed., Paris, 1598, Books XIX. -and XX. The chapters on Plague, Smallpox, etc., were originally published, -according to Hser, in 1568. - -[918] See Purchas, _Pilgrimes_, III. 996, where syphilis and smallpox are -included together as "infectious or pestilentiall pocks," Ramusio being -given as the authority for the smallpox and Oviedo for the great pox. - -[919] For details of the increase of London population, with the sources -of evidence, I beg to refer to my essay, "The Population of Old London," -_Blackwood's Magazine_, April, 1891. - -[920] Broadside in the Guildhall Library, bound up in a volume labelled -_Political Tracts_, 1680. - -[921] "The time when it began in the City of Westminster and these places -following: - -"Buried in Westminster from 14 July to 20 October, in the whole number -832, whereof of the plague 723. Buried in the Savoy from the 1st of June -to the 20th of October, in the whole number 182, whereof of the plague, -171. Buried in the parish of Stepney from the 25th of March to the 20th of -October, in all 1978, whereof of the plague, 1871. Buried at -Newington-buts from the 14th of June to the 20th of October, in all 626, -whereof of the plague, 562. Buried at Islington 201 in all, 170 of plague; -at Lambeth 373 in all, 362 of plague; at Hackney 192 in all, 169 of -plague. Buried in all within the 7 several places last aforenamed 4378, -whereof of the plague, 3997. The whole number that hath been buried in all -[to 20th October], both within London and the Liberties, and the 7 other -severall places last before mentioned is 39,380, whereof of the number of -the plague, 32,609." - -From the parish registers the burials for the whole year are known: -Stepney, 2257; Lambeth, 566; Islington, 322; Hackney, 321 (of plague 269). - -In Stow's _Annales_, the mortality of 1603 is given as follows:--"There -died in London and the liberties thereof from the xxiii day of December -1602 unto the xxii day of December 1603, of all diseases 38,244, whereof -of the plague 30,578." - -[922] Baddeley, _l. c._ - -[923] _A short Dialogue concerning the Plague Infection._ Published to -preserue Bloud through the blessing of God. London, 1603. - -[924] _The Wonderfull Yeare 1603, wherein is shewed the picture of London -lying sicke of the Plague._ London, 1603. - -[925] In his _Seven Deadly Sins of London_ (1606) he returns to the mode -of burial in the plague: "All ceremonial due to them was taken away, they -were launched ten in one heap, twenty in another, the gallant and the -beggar together, the husband saw his wife and his deadly enemy whom he -hated within a pair of sheets." As an after effect of this mode of -interment, "What rotten stenches and contagious damps would strike up into -thy nostrils!" - -[926] _A Treatise of the Plague._ By Thomas Lodge, Doctor in Phisicke. -London, 1603. It has been reprinted, among Lodge's other works, by the -Hunterian Club of Glasgow, 1880. - -[927] _The opinion of Peter Turner, Doctor in Physicke, concerning Amulets -or Plague-Cakes, whereof perhaps some hold too much and some too little._ -London, 1603, p. 10. Turner held high offices at the College of -Physicians, and died in 1614. There was another physician of the name, -also a dignitary of the College, Dr George Turner, whose widow was the -notorious Mrs Anne Turner, executed for having been an instrument in the -poisoning of Sir T. Overbury. Scott has drawn from her the character of -Mrs Suddlechop, in _The Fortunes of Nigel_, a work invaluable for -realizing the London of King James. The reference in the Earl of -Northumberland's accounts, under date Feb. 6, 1607, to a Dr Turner, who -was paid ten shillings for a "pomander" against the plague, would suit -either Dr Peter or Dr George (_Hist. MSS. Commis._ VI. 2, 29). - -[928] A letter from Hampstead, August 27, 1603, speaks of "the imprudent -exposure of infected beds in the streets." (_Cal. State Papers._) - -[929] _A New Treatise of the Pestilence, etc. the like not before this -time published, and therefore necessarie for all manner of persons in this -time of contagion._ By S. H. Studious in Phisicke. London, 1603. - -[930] This mystification was pointed out in a note to "Thayre" (the 1625 -edition) in the printed Catalogue of the Library of the Royal Medical and -Chirurgical Society. - -[931] _An Epistle discoursing upon the present Pestilence, teaching what -it is and how the people of God should carrie themselves towards God and -their neighbours therein._ Reprinted, with some Additions, by Henoch -Clapham. London, 1603. - -[932] _A Short Dialogue, etc._, _ut supra_. - -[933] In a volume with other pieces. London, 1605. - -[934] But several warders in the Tower died of it. (_Cal. State Papers_, -Sept. 16, 1603.) - -[935] In Lysons, _Environs of London_. - -[936] _Hist. MSS. Com._ X. pt. 4, p. 5. - -[937] E.g. plague at Datchet (_Notes and Queries_, 3rd ser. VI. 217). - -[938] John Bell, _London's Remembrancer_. London, 1665 [1666]. - -[939] Extracts from _Harrison's MS. Chronologie_ by Furnivall in Appendix -(p. 268) to _Elizabethan England_. Camelot Series, 1890. - -[940] _A Sermon preached at Powles Crosse_, etc. London, 1578. - -[941] _Remembrancia_ (numerous extracts from the City records, under -"Plays"). - -[942] _Cal. State Papers_, Addenda, James I. p. 534. - -[943] _Notes and Queries_, 6th series, II. 524. The mortality is stated on -the authority of the parish registers of St George's and St Michael's, the -dead having been "buried at the cabbin of Whitefryers." - -[944] There is _An Account of the Plague at Oxford, 1603_, in the Sloane -MS. No. 4376 (14), extracted from the register of Merton College, which -had also been the source of Anthony Wood's account, as summarised in the -text. - -[945] _Cal. State Papers._ Addenda, 1580-1625. - -[946] _Hist. MSS. Commis._ IX. 160. - -[947] Izacke's 'Memorials of Exeter' (in _N. and Q._, 3rd ser. VI. 217). - -[948] Bailey, _Transcripts from the MS. Archives of Winchester, 1856_, p. -109. - -[949] Cromwell. - -[950] _Hist. MSS. Commis._ IX. - -[951] _Ibid._ X. pt. I, p. 89. - -[952] Thompson's _Boston_. - -[953] _Hist. MSS. Com._ IX. - -[954] _Archologia_, VI. 80. - -[955] Rogers' MS. in Hemingway's _Hist. of Chester_. Harl. MS. 2177. - -[956] Earwaker, _East Cheshire_, II. 471; I. 406. - -[957] Bridges and Whalley, II. 53; I. 124. - -[958] Drake's _Eboracum_. Lond. 1736, p. 121. - -[959] Sykes, _Local Records of Northumberland and Durham_. - -[960] Phillips, Owen and Blakeway. - -[961] _Cal. State Papers._ Addenda, 1580-1625. - -[962] Parish Register (in a local history). - -[963] _Notes and Queries_, 6th ser. II. 390. - -[964] _Ib._ - -[965] _Ib._ - -[966] _Ib._ - -[967] _Cal. State Papers_, 1608-9. - -[968] Hemingway. - -[969] _Cal. S. P._ - -[970] _Hist. MSS. Com._ V. 570. - -[971] _Archologia_, VI. 80. - -[972] Blomefield. - -[973] Sykes. - -[974] Nichols, III. 892-3. - -[975] Nichols (parish registers); Kelly, _Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc._, 1877, -VI. 395. - -[976] Sykes. - -[977] Hemingway. - -[978] May, _Hist. of Evesham_, 1845; p. 371. - -[979] Add. MS. 29,975. f. 25. - -[980] _Hist. MSS. Com._ IX. 162. - -[981] _Ib._ I. 101. - -[982] Beesley, _Hist. of Banbury_. - -[983] Dean Butler's notes to Clyn's and Dowling's _Annals_. - -[984] Smith's _Cork_, from MS. Annals. - -[985] Chambers, _Domestic Annals_. - -[986] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[987] Chambers. - -[988] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[989] Balfour's _Annals of Scotland_ (in Chambers, I. 399). - -[990] _Ibid._ - -[991] Chambers. - -[992] _Aberdeen Burgh Records._ - -[993] Chambers. - -[994] _Chron. of Perth._ - -[995] Chambers. - -[996] _Ibid._ - -[997] The invaluable letters of Chamberlain, as well as those of Mead (of -Cambridge) and others, were collected by Dr Thomas Birch in the last -century, and printed in 1848 under the titles _The Court and Times of -James I._, and _C. and T. Charles I._, without an index but with some -useful notes. - -[998] Chamberlain to Carleton, _C. and T. James I._, II. 504. - -[999] _Chronological History of the Air, Weather, Seasons, Meteors, etc._ -2 vols. Lond. 1749, I. 306:--"This fever began, and raged terribly in -England in 1623; was little, if at all, short of the plague." - -[1000] Chamberlain to Carleton, in _Court and Times of Charles I._, I. 28. - -[1001] Salvetti's Diary, in _Hist. MSS. Com._ XI. pt. I, p. 26. - -[1002] _Cal. S. P._ 15 Sept. - -[1003] Holland. - -[1004] Bell, _London's Remembrancer_. - -[1005] _C. and T. Charles I._, letter of 2 July, 1625. - -[1006] In a volume of Topographical Papers in the British Museum, 1298, m -(18). - -[1007] W. Heberden, Junr., _Increase and Decrease of Diseases_. Lond. -1801, p. 66. He gives no authority; "1626" is clearly a misprint. - -[1008] _Calendar of State Papers_, 1625-26, p. 184. - -[1009] _The Red Crosse_ (broadside). London, 1625. - -[1010] Parish Histories, and in Lysons' _Environs of London_. - -[1011] _Britain's Remembrancer, containing a Narrative of the Plague -lately past._ London, 1628. - -[1012] _The Fearfull Summer, or London's Calamitie._ Printed at Oxford, -1625 (reprinted with additions, Lond. 1636). - -[1013] Holland's _Posthuma_. Cantab. 1626. - -[1014] _The Weeping Lady, or London like Ninivie in Sackcloth._ By T. B. -London, 1625. - -[1015] _Hist. MSS. Commission_, XI. pt. I, p. 6. - -[1016] Bradwell's book, to be mentioned in the sequel, was written for -practice during the plague. There is a reference to something of Sir -Theodore Mayerne's on the plague of 1625, which I have not succeeded in -finding. His _Opera Medica_ contain ordinary cases treated by him in -London in December, 1625, but there is no mention of plague-cases. -Woodall's essay on plague, published in 1639, thus refers to his -experience in the epidemic of 1625: "In anno 1625 we had many signes -contrarie to the plagues in other times; yea, and many did dye dayly -without any signes or markes on their bodies at all." - -[1017] _C. and T. Charles I._ I. 48. - -[1018] _A Watchman for the Pest, teaching the true Rules of Preservation -from the Pestilent Contagion, at this time fearfully overflowing this -famous Cittie of London. Collected out of the best authors, mixed with -auncient experience, and moulded into a new and most plaine method._ By -Steven Bradwell, of London, Physition. 1625. - -[1019] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[1020] _Ib._ - -[1021] Th. Locke to Carleton, _Cal. S. P._, 14 Aug. - -[1022] Salvetti. - -[1023] Locke to Carleton, 27 Aug. - -[1024] _Cal. S. P._ - -[1025] Mead, letter in _C. and T. Ch. I._ I. 43. - -[1026] _Cal. S. P._ - -[1027] _Ibid._ - -[1028] Mostly from parish registers in Lysons' _Environs of London_. - -[1029] Winchester was probably a fair sample. In the city archives under -the year 1625 there is this entry: "Item, it is also agreed that the -decayed cottage where Lenord Andrews did dwell, he lately dying of the -plague, shall be burned to the grounde for fear of the daunger of -infection that might ensue if it should stande." (Bailey, _Transcripts_, -etc. Winchester, 1856, p. 110.) In a petition relating to Farnham, Jan. -1628, the town is described as being "impoverished through the plague and -many charges," which may mean that plague had been diffused in Surrey and -Hampshire. - -[1030] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[1031] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[1032] MSS. of the Corporation of Plymouth. _Hist. MSS. Commis._ IX. 278. -Accounts are given (p. 280) of the monies collected for the relief of the -poor and sick people of Plymouth "in the time of the infection of the -pestilence from Sept. 29, 1625, to that day A.D. 1627." But that does not -imply that the infection lasted all that time. The civic year began with -September 29, and the accounts are those that fall within two complete -financial years. - -[1033] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[1034] _Notes and Queries_, 6 ser. III. 477. - -[1035] _Cal. S. P._ - -[1036] _Ib._ - -[1037] _Cal. S. P._ - -[1038] _Ib._ - -[1039] _Cal. S. P._ - -[1040] Letter from Mead in _C. and T. Charles I._ I. 51. - -[1041] Blomefield. - -[1042] At Coventry in 1626, 20 was paid to the poor in lieu of a feast at -Lammas, by reason of the infection. (Dugdale, _Warwickshire_.) - -[1043] The following curious extract was sent by J. A. Picton to _Notes -and Queries_, 6th ser. I. 314 from the parish register of Malpas, -Cheshire, 1625: - -"Richard Dawson (brother of the above-named Thomas Dawson of Bradley) -being sick of the plague and perceiving he must die, at that time arose -out of his bed and made his grave, and caused his nephew John Dawson to -cast straw into the grave, which was not far from the house, and went and -laid him down in the said grave and caused clothes to be laid upon, and so -departed out of this world. This he did because he was a strong man and -heavier than his said nephew and another wench were able to bury. He died -about the 24th of August. Thus much was I credibly tould. He died 1625. - -"John Dawson, son of the above-mentioned Thomas, came unto his father when -his father sent for him being sick, and having laid him down in a ditch -died in it the 29th day of August, 1625, in the night. - -"Rose Smyth, servant of the above-named Thomas Dawson, and last of that -household, died of the plague and was buried by Wm. Cooke the 5th day of -September, 1625, near unto the said house." - -[1044] Memoranda of Rev. Thomas Archer, of Houghton Conquest. MSS. Addit. -Brit. Museum. - -[1045] Blomefield. - -[1046] Phillips' _Hist. of Shrewsbury_. _Hist. MSS. Com._ X. pt. 4. p. -498. - -[1047] _Hist. MSS. Com._ II. 258. - -[1048] _Hist. of County of Lincoln_, II. 187. _Notitiae Ludae_, p. 41. - -[1049] Tickell's _Hist. of Kingston-upon-Hull_. Hull, 1798. - -[1050] Gawdy MSS. (_Hist. MSS. Com._ X. pt. 2), various letters from Sept. -14, 1636, to Nov. 26, 1638, relating chiefly to Norwich. - -[1051] Boys, _Hist. of Sandwich_, pp. 707-8. - -[1052] R. Jenison, D.D., _Newcastle's Call to her Neighbor and Sister -Towns_. London, 1637. - -[1053] Heberden says that it began in Whitechapel, but does not say where -he got the information. - -[1054] _Middlesex County Records_, III. 62. - -[1055] _Ibid._ - -[1056] The College of Physicians reported also in May, 1637, on the causes -of plague--overcrowding, nuisances, &c.; among the causes assigned the -following is noteworthy: Those who died of the plague were buried within -the City, and some of the graveyards were so full that partially -decomposed bodies were taken up to make room for fresh interments. (Cited -by S. R. Gardiner, _History, &c._, VIII. 237-9, from the State Papers.) - -[1057] _Natural and Political Reflections on the Bills of Mortality._ -London, 1662. - -[1058] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[1059] Strype's ed. of Stow's _Survey of London_. - -[1060] Rendle (_Old Southwark_, 1878, p. 96) quotes the following from a -letter written in 1618 by Geoffrey Mynshall from the King's Bench prison: -"As to health, it hath more diseases predominant in it than the pest-house -in the plague time ... stinks more than the Lord Mayor's dog-house or -Paris Garden in August ... three men in one bed." - -[1061] _Cal. S. P._ 1601-3, p. 209. - -[1062] _Middlesex County Records_, II. - -[1063] Cited by Gardiner, _History_, VIII. 289. - -[1064] _Calendar of State Papers._ - -[1065] _Cal. S. P._ - -[1066] _Ibid._ - -[1067] _Ibid._ The coexistence of malignant fever with plague at -Northampton in 1638 is decisively shown by particulars of cases published -by Woodall, _Op. cit._ 1639. See also Freeman, _Hist. of Northampton_, p. -75 (but under the year 1637). - -[1068] _Ibid._ - -[1069] _Ibid._ - -[1070] Camden's _Britannia_, ed. Gough, II. 244. - -[1071] _Notes and Queries_, 6th series, IV. 199. - -[1072] _Hist. MSS. Com._ V. 173. - -[1073] _Diatribae duae de Fermentatione et de Febribus._ Hagae, 1659. - -[1074] _Morbus Epidemicus anni 1643; or the New Disease._ Published by -command of his Majesty. Oxford, 1643. - -[1075] From Rushworth. - -[1076] "The City, with much emotion, ranks its trained bands under Essex: -making up an Army for him, despatches him to relieve Gloucester. He -marches on the 26th [August]; steadily along, in spite of rainy weather -and Prince Rupert; westward, westward; on the night of the tenth day, -September 5th, the Gloucester people see his signal-fire flame up, amid -the dark rain, 'on the top of Presbury Hill;'--and understand that they -shall live and not die. The King 'fired his huts,' and marched off without -delay. He never again had any real chance of prevailing in this war.... -The steady march to Gloucester and back again, by Essex, was the chief -feat he did during the war; a considerable feat, and very characteristic -of him, the slow-going inarticulate, indignant, somewhat elephantine man." -Carlyle, _Letters and Speeches of Cromwell_. - -[1077] From the translation by S. Pordage. London, 1681. - -[1078] Anthony Wood, II. pt I. p. 469. - -[1079] Dunsford's _Histor. Mem. of Tiverton_, p. 184. - -[1080] The military events from Rushworth. - -[1081] Dunsford, _Histor. Memoirs of Tiverton_. Harding, _Hist. of -Tiverton_. - -[1082] Rushworth. Moore, _Hist. of Devonshire_, I. 149. - -[1083] Beesley's _Hist. of Banbury_, p. 387. - -[1084] In Somers's _Tracts_. Scott's ed. V. 294. - -[1085] Sykes. - -[1086] Clarendon, referring to a proposed Royal visit to Bristol in April -says: "The plague began to break out there very much for the time of the -year." - -[1087] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[1088] Rushworth. - -[1089] _Letters and Speeches_, I. - -[1090] Seyer's _Memorials of Bristol_, II. 466. - -[1091] Whitaker, _History of Leeds_, p. 75. - -[1092] Harwood, _Hist. of Lichfield_, p. 306. - -[1093] Pordage's translation of Willis's _Remaining Works_, p. 131. - -[1094] Nichols, III. 893. - -[1095] Cornelius Brown, _Annals of Newark_. London, 1879, p. 164. - -[1096] _Ibid._ - -[1097] _Notes and Queries_, 6th ser., III. 477. - -[1098] Rushworth. - -[1099] _Histor. MSS. Com._ XI. 7, p. 190. - -[1100] _Ibid._ IX. 1, p. 201. - -[1101] _Hist. of Carlisle_, 1838. - -[1102] Chambers, _Domestic Annals of Scotland_. - -[1103] Baillie's _Letters_. 3 vols. Edited by D. Laing for the Bannatyne -Club. - -[1104] Kennedy, _Annals of Aberdeen_, I. 270 (expenses of the epidemic -from the Council Register, vol. LIII. p. 130). - -[1105] Hemingway, Ormerod. _The Report of the Hist. MSS. Commission_ (V. -339) notes that Dr Cowper's MS. contains details of 2,099 deaths, but -reproduces none of them. - -[1106] _Hist. MSS. Commiss._ V. 342. - -[1107] Owen and Blakeway. - -[1108] Rushworth, Pt. 4, vol. II., pp. 1100, 1109. - -[1109] _Annals of Ireland_ by Clyn and Dowling, Dean Butler's notes pp. -64, 65 (ref. to Carte's _Life of the Duke of Ormonde_). - -[1110] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[1111] The weekly bills of mortality for Dublin, July 20--Aug. 2, 1662, -showed only 14 baptisms and 20 burials in ten parishes; but these can -hardly have been all the births and deaths in the city. - -[1112] Smith's _Cork_, vol. II. from Cox MSS. - -[1113] _Cal. S. P._ Sept. 21, 1650. - -[1114] H. Whitmore, M.D. _Febris Anomala; or the New Disease that now -rageth throughout England, with a brief description of the Disease which -this Spring most infested London._ London, 1659 (4 November). - -[1115] _Hist. MSS. Commission_, X. pt. 4, p. 106. - -[1116] Willis, _Diatribae duae_. Hagae, 1659. - -[1117] _Pyretologia._ 2 vols. London, 1692-4. Appendix to 1st volume, p. -415. - -[1118] Sent to _Notes and Queries_, 1st ser. XII. 281, by Mr H. Hucks -Gibbs. - -[1119] _Hist. MSS. Commiss._ V. 146 (Sutherland letters). - -[1120] Greenhill's edition (Sydenham Society, 1844), pp. 37, 93, 95-98. - -[1121] Purchas, _His Pilgrimes_. 4 vols., folio. London, 1625, vol. I. -Book II. p. 36. - -[1122] Hakluyt, _The Principal Navigations_, &c. 3 vols. London, 1599, -III. 225-6. - -[1123] Pericarditis scorbutica--a condition which has been observed mostly -in Russia in recent times. The whiteness of the heart would have been due -to the fibrinous layer of lymph on its surface, from the pericarditis. - -[1124] Hakluyt, III. 241. - -[1125] Hakluyt, II. Part II., pp. 22, 36, 48. - -[1126] Hakluyt, III. 501. - -[1127] Sir James Stephen's _Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography_, pop. ed. -p. 125. - -[1128] Hakluyt, II. pt. 2, p. 99. - -[1129] The famous figure in _Paradise Lost_ (IV. 159) is taken from the -route to India passing within Madagascar--a poetic colouring of dreary and -painful realities:-- - - As when to them who sail - Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past - Mozambik, off at sea north-east winds blow - Sabean odours from the spicy shore - Of Araby the blest; with such delay - Well pleas'd they slack their course, and many a league - Cheer'd with the grateful smell old Ocean smiles: - -[1130] _The World Encompassed_ &c., Hakluyt Society, ed. Vaux, p. 149, and -Hakluyt, III. 740. - -[1131] _A summarie and true discourse of Sir Francis Drake's West Indian -voyage begun in the year 1585._ Published by M. Thomas Cates. Shortened in -Hakluyt, III. 542. The earlier part of the narrative is by Captain Bigges, -and, after his death in the West Indies, by his lieutenant, Croftes. - -[1132] Mr Froude (_History_, XII. 150) must be pronounced somewhat happy -in his bold guess of "yellow fever." At the same time the enthymeme by -which he had reached his conclusion is altogether wrong: first, in -assuming that the infection "broke out" after the capture of Cartagena, -ignoring the fact of its disastrous prevalence in mid-ocean two or three -months before, shortly after leaving the Cape de Verde islands; and -secondly in assuming that the yellow fever for which Cartagena and other -harbours of the Spanish Main became notorious in later times had existed -as an infection there in the 16th century. - -[1133] Sir Richard Hawkins, who commanded the galliot 'Duck' in Drake's -expedition of 1585, thus refers to the Cape de Verde islands, on the -occasion of touching there in his own expedition to the Pacific in 1593 -(Purchas, IV. 1368): - -These islands are "one of the most unhealthiest climates in the world. In -two times that I have been in them, either cost us the one half of our -people, with fevers and fluxes of sundry kinds, some shaking, some -burning, some partaking of both; some possesst with frensie, others with -slouth; and in one of them it cost me six months' sickness, with no small -hazard of life." He then gives a reason for the great risk to health: the -north-east breeze about four in the afternoon seldom faileth, "coming cold -and fresh, and finding the pores of the body open and for the most part -naked, penetrateth the very bones, and so causeth sudden distemperature, -and sundry manners of sickness, as the subjects are divers whereupon they -work. Departing out of the calmes of the Islands, and coming into the -fresh breeze, it causeth the like; and I have seen within two days after -that we have partaked of the fresh air, of two thousand men above an -hundred and fifty have been crazed in their health." This seems to refer -to the epidemic in Drake's fleet, as given in the text; but it is clearly -an imperfect account of the facts, and in theory altogether improbable, as -a trade wind within the tropic cannot be credited with such effects, even -if the forms of sickness were conceivably due at all to chill. - -Darwin (_Naturalist's Voyage in the Beagle_, p. 366) says: "The island of -St Jago, at the Cape de Verde, offers another strongly-marked instance of -a country, which anyone would have expected to find most healthy, being -very much the contrary. I have described the bare and open plains as -supporting, during a few weeks after the rainy season, a thin vegetation, -which directly withers away and dries up; at this period the air appears -to become quite poisonous; both natives and foreigners often being -affected with violent fevers. On the other hand, the Galapagos -Archipelago, in the Pacific, with a similar soil, and periodically subject -to the same process of vegetation, is perfectly healthy." But the -Galapagos have been uninhabited, except in recent times by two or three -hundred people banished from Ecuador. On the other hand the Cape de Verde -islands are believed to have been at one time well wooded and not -unfertile; and the Portuguese settlements in them, to say nothing of the -native negro villages, had a fair population. It is not easy to understand -the pernicious character of their fevers without assuming that spots of -soil had become pestilential by human occupancy; but it is at the same -time clear that a degree of befouling of the soil which would be innocuous -in ordinary, would there engender deadly miasmata owing to the remarkable -alternations of drought and wetness under a tropical sun. - -[1134] Hakluyt, III. 286. - -[1135] Mr Hubert Hall, of the Record Office, in _Society in the -Elizabethan Age_. London, 1886, p. 120. - -[1136] Hakluyt, III. 583. - -[1137] Hakluyt, III. 804, 820; and other details in the 1st ed. (1589) pp. -809, 810. - -[1138] Hakluyt, III. 842-52. - -[1139] Purchas, IV. Bk. 7, Chap. 5, (reprinted from Hawkins's own -narrative of the voyage, published a few months after the author's death -in 1622). - -[1140] Mr J. K. Laughton (_Dict. of National Biography._ Art. "Hawkins, -Sir Richard") points out that Hawkins's narrative of the 'Daintie's' -voyage had not always been authenticated by reference to notes or -documents. It seems probable also, from his remarks on the epidemic in -Drake's fleet after leaving the Cape de Verde islands in 1585, that he -trusted his memory too much. But that objection of writing from memory has -no force as against his general observations and reflections on scurvy. - -[1141] Purchas, part IV. p. 1877. - -[1142] _Ibid._ p. 1623. - -[1143] Woodall defends the use of biscuit in his _Surgeon's Mate_, -published in 1617. - -[1144] Purchas, III. 847. - -[1145] _The Voyages of Sir James Lancaster, Knight, to the East Indies._ -Hakluyt Society, ed. Clements Markham, 1878; and in Hakluyt's _Principal -Navigations_, II. pt. 2, p. 102. - -[1146] The slowness of the passage round the Cape of Good Hope in old -times was due less to the build or rig of the ships than to the course -shaped: instead of steering southwest from Madeira across the Atlantic -almost to the coast of Brazil at Cape San Roque, so as to get the -north-east trade wind, and thence on another tack in a wide sweep round to -the Cape with the south-east trade wind, the earlier navigators sailed -past the Cape de Verde islands and along the Guinea coast, keeping within -meridians 20 degrees to the eastward of the modern track, and so falling -into the tropical calms at one part, and at another part of the voyage -into the baffling south-east trades, varying in force according to the -season. - -[1147] Purchas, I. 147. - -[1148] _Calendar of State Papers._ East Indies (under the respective -dates). - -[1149] It seems to have passed into common usage, as "to lie in cold -obstruction and to rot" (_Meas. for Meas._ III. 1), and to have been kept -up therein after the faculty had dropped it--if indeed Byron's line, -"Where cold Obstruction's apathy" be a survival of medical terminology. -There is an instance of the same kind of survival in the use of -"scorbutic;" at one time land-scurvy was detected (under the influence of -theory) in many forms, and we find in the _Pickwick Papers_ a late -reminiscence of that singular dogma in the "young gentleman with the -scorbutic countenance." - -[1150] The three earlier instances from Purchas, I. 248, 466, the later -from the _Cal. State Papers_, East Indies. - -[1151] _Cal. S. P._ Colonial. East Indies. Dec. 24, 1628. - -[1152] _Ibid._ Feb. 6, 1626, p. 146. - -[1153] _William Hedges' Diary._ Hakluyt Society, 1887, I. 24, 54. - -[1154] _A Letter of M. Gabriel Archar_, in Purchas, pt. IV. p. 1733; -Smith's _Virginia_, in Pinkerton, XIII. 99; W. Strachey, in Purchas, pt. -IV. p. 1753. - -[1155] Theobald makes this the storm and shipwreck which Shakespeare -brings into the _Tempest_. - -[1156] Purchas, IV. p. 1762. - -[1157] _Cal. S. P._ America and West Indies. - -[1158] Dermer, in Purchas, IV. p. 1778: Belknap's _American Biography_ -("Life of Gorges"), I. 355. - -[1159] John Winthrop's _Journal_, p. 11. - -[1160] Winthrop, I. pp. 119, 123. - -[1161] _Ibid._ II. 310. - -[1162] Refs. in Noah Webster's _Hist. of Epid. and Pestil. Diseases_. -Hartford, 1799, I. 189, 191, 193. - -[1163] Letter of Norris, in _Hist. of S. Carolina_, I. 142. - -[1164] Saco, _History of African Slavery in the New World_ (Spanish). -Barcelona, 1879. - -[1165] Oviedo, in Purchas, III. 996:--"Extract of Gonzalo Ferdinando de -Oviedo:--'I had acquaintance with divers which went in the first and -second voyages of Columbus; of which was Peter Margarite, commendator in -the second voyage, of most respect with the king and queen, who complained -of those paines. [Syphilis was prevalent in Barcelona and Valencia -previous to 1494. See Chapter VIII.] Soon after, in the year 1496, began -the disease to arrest some courtiers; but in those beginnings it was only -amongst baser persons of small authority; and it was thought that they got -it by having to do with common women. But afterwards it extended to -principal persons, and the physicians could not tell what to think of it, -so that many died.'... But indeed it came from Hispaniola, where it is -ordinary, and the remedy also [guaiacum]. _Our author_ (_l. c._ civ.), and -Ramusio in his preface to his third Tome, say that the souldiers of -Pamfilo de Nuney, having the small pocks, infected the Indians which never -before heard of that disease; in so much that of 1,600,000 soules in that -island there are so few left, as by and by you shall hear.... The -covetousnesse of the mine-workers, neglect of diet, change of gouvernours -growing worse and worse, caused them to poison, kill and hang themselves, -besides those which were consumed by infectious or pestilentiall pocks -(those before mentioned out of Ramusio) and other diseases." - -[1166] _Calendar of State Papers._ Amer. & W. I., I. 57. - -[1167] _Ibid._ - -[1168] _Cal. S. P._ Amer. & W. I., under the respective dates. - -[1169] The account that follows is taken from Father Dutertre's _Histoire -generale des Antilles habites par les Franois_, 4 vols., Paris, -1667-1671, which superseded his earlier work of 1654. - -[1170] _Cal. S. P._ Amer. & W. I., II. 529. - -[1171] Ligon, _Hist. of Barbadoes_. London, 1657. - -[1172] Winthrop's _Journal_, II. 312. - -[1173] Dutertre, _Hist. gen. des Antilles habites par les Franois_. 4 -vols. Paris, 1667-1671. - -[1174] _Cal. State Papers_, Amer. and W. I., I. 301. - -[1175] The chronology of yellow-fever epidemics in Hirsch (I. 318) is made -to begin with Guadeloupe, 1635 and 1640, on the authority of Dutertre (as -above), the epidemic of 1647 at Bridgetown being the third in order. - -[1176] Benjamin Moseley, M.D., _Treatise on Tropical Diseases, and on the -Climate of the West Indies_, 3rd ed. (1803), p. 476. - -[1177] Hughes, _The Natural History of Barbados_. London, 1750, p. 37. - -[1178] _Cal. S. P._ Amer. and W. I., under the dates. - -[1179] In Sir John Hawkins' second voyage as a slaver (1565), he was -allowed to trade on the Spanish Main only for his "lean negroes," which -were within the purchasing means of the poorer Spaniards. The voyage had -been tedious, and the supply of water short "for so great a company of -negroes.... Many never thought to have reached to the Indies without great -death of negroes and of themselves; but the Almighty God, who never -suffereth His Elect to perish," etc. Hakluyt, III. 501. - -[1180] Clarkson, _History of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade_. -New ed., Lond. 1839, pp. 307, 352. He showed his prepared document to -Pitt:-- - -"Mr Pitt turned over leaf after leaf, in which the copies of the -muster-rolls were contained, with great patience; and when he had looked -over about a hundred pages accurately, and found the name of every seaman -inserted, his former abode or service, the time of his entry, and what had -become of him, either by death, discharge, or desertion, he expressed his -surprise at the great pains which had been taken in this branch of the -inquiry; and confessed, with some emotion, that his doubts were wholly -removed with respect to the destructive nature of this employ." (p. 273.) - -[1181] T. Aubrey, M.D., _The Sea-Surgeon, or the Guinea Man's Vade Mecum_. -London, 1729, p. 107. - -[1182] Gillespie, _Obs. on the Diseases in H. M.'s Squadron on the Leeward -Island Station in 1794-6_. Lond. 1800. - -[1183] For example, Mr R. L. Stevenson in a striking passage of _Treasure -Island_. - -[1184] Thurloe's _State Papers_, III. IV. and V.; _Harl. Miscell._ III. -513; Long's _History of Jamaica_, 3 vols. London, 1774; _Cal. S. P._, -Amer. and W. I. - -[1185] _Harl. Miscel._ _l. c._ - -[1186] Sir Anthony Shirley touched at Jamaica in 1596, and reported, "we -have not found in the Indies a more pleasant and wholesome place." -Hakluyt, III. 601. Long (_History of Jamaica_, 1774, II. 221) states the -case very fairly with reference to the unfortunate expedition of Venables -in 1655: "The climate of the island has unjustly been accused by many -writers on the subject, the one copying from the other, and represented as -almost pestilential, without an examination into the real sources of this -mortality, which being fairly stated, it will appear that the same men -carrying the like thoughtless conduct and vices into any other uninhabited -quarter of the globe, must infallibly have involved themselves in the like -calamitous situation." - -[1187] _MS. State Papers_, _Colonial_ (Record Office), Vol. XIV. No. 57 -(1660). - -[1188] Thomas Trapham, M.D., _Discourse of the State of Health in -Jamaica_. Lond. 1679. - -[1189] Moseley, _op. cit._ p. 421, without reasons given; followed by -Hirsch. _Geog. and Hist. Pathol._ (English transl.), I. 318. - -[1190] _Hist. of Jamaica_, III. 615. - -[1191] _Cal. S. P._ Amer. and W. I. - -[1192] _Cal. S. P._ Amer. and W. I. 1669-74, 144. - -[1193] _Ibid._ 264, III. - -[1194] With a preface by the Printer to the Reader, beginning "The -reprinting of these sad sheets." Printed and are to be sold by E. Cotes, -living in Aldersgate Street, printer to the said Company. - -[1195] The advertisement is cited in Brayley's edition of Defoe's _Journal -of the Plague Year_. - -[1196] Sloane MS. no. 349. [Greek: Loimographia], _or, An experimental -Relation of the Plague, of what happened remarkable in the last Plague in -the City of London_, etc. By William Boghurst, Apothecary in St Giles' in -the Fields. London, 1666. - -[1197] Reprinted in _A Collection of very Valuable and Scarce Pieces -relating to the last Plague in the year 1665_. London, 1721. - -[1198] [Greek: Loimologia]. London, 1671. Translation by Quincy, 1720. - -[1199] [Greek: Loimotomia], _or, the Pest Anatomized_. By George Thomson, -M.D. London, 1666. - -[1200] London, 1667. - -[1201] Among the crop of books brought up by the Plague of Marseilles, in -1720 (the immediate cause of Defoe's book also) was one by Richard -Bradley, F.R.S., a writer upon botany, on _The Plague of Marseilles. Also -Observations taken from an original Manuscript of a graduate physician, -who resided in London during the whole time of the late plague, anno -1665._ London 1721 (and two more editions the same year). The title-page -of this astute gentleman is of the catch-penny order. All that is said of -the original manuscript occupies about the same number of lines in the -text as in the title, and might have been extracted in the course of five -minutes' research; it consists merely of a list of a few things supposed -to be distinctive signs of plague--extraordinary inward heat, difficulty -of breathing, pain and heaviness in the head, inclination to sleep, -frequent vomiting, immoderate thirst, dryness of the tongue and palate, -and then the risings, swellings, or buboes. Boghurst's third chapter is -occupied with twenty-one such signs, and his fourth chapter with a hundred -more signs and circumstances, in numbered paragraphs. It is possible that -his was the manuscript out of which the botanist made capital in his -title-page; but his meagre list of signs might have been got from almost -any work on almost any febrile disorder, and is not sufficient to identify -Boghurst by, although a word or phrase here and there is the same. -However, Defoe would have seen Bradley's title-page, and might have -inquired after the Sloane MS. - -[1202] Of the six plague-deaths in 1664, three were in Whitechapel parish, -and one each in Aldgate, Cripplegate and St Giles's-in-the-Fields. - -[1203] _Reliquiae Baxterianae._ London, 1696, I. 448. This entry in his -journal is dated September 28, 1665, at Hampden, Bucks. - -[1204] _Ed. cit._ Chap. XIV. p. 131:--"Diseases which seem to be nearest -like its (plague's) nature; which chiefly are fevers, called pestilent and -malignant; for 'tis commonly noted that fevers sometimes reign popularly, -which for the vehemency of symptoms, the great slaughter of the sick, and -the great force of contagion, scarce give place to the pestilence; which, -however, because they imitate the type of putrid fevers, and do not so -certainly kill the sick as the plague, or so certainly infect others, they -deserve the name, not of the plague, but by a more minute appellation of a -pestilential fever." - -[1205] In a letter from London, 9 May, 1637 (Gawdy MSS. at Norwich, _Hist. -MSS. Commis._ X. pt. 2. p. 163) it is said: "There is a strange opinion -here amongst the poorer sort of people, who hold it a matter of conscience -to visit their neighbours in any sickness, yea though they know it to be -the infection." - -[1206] Evans, in preface to 1721 edition of Vincent's book. - -[1207] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[1208] _Ibid._ - -[1209] Evans, _l. c._ - -[1210] _Reliquiae Baxterianae._ London, 1696, II. 1. 2. - -[1211] Milton, with his wife and daughters, spent the summer and autumn in -the same quiet neighbourhood, at Chalfont St Giles, in a cottage which -Ellwood had secured for him, still remaining with its low ceilings and -diamond window-panes. He there showed Ellwood the manuscript of _Paradise -Lost_, which was published in 1667. The poem contains no reference to the -plague, unless, indeed, the flight to the country had given point to the -lines in the 9th book: - - "As one who long in populous city pent, - Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air, - Forth issuing on a summer's morn, to breathe - Among the pleasant villages and farms,"-- - -An opportunity arises in the 12th book, where the Plagues of Egypt come -into the prophetic vision of events after the Fall; but the movement is -too rapid to allow of delay, and we have no more than-- - - "Botches and blains must all his flesh emboss, - And all his people." - -Gibbon thought that the comet of 1664 (which was generally remarked upon -as a portent of the plague that followed) might have suggested the lines, -II. 708-11 - - "and like a comet burn'd, - That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge - In the arctic sky, and from his horrid hair - Shakes pestilence and war." - -Gibbon seems to make a slip in taking these as "the famous lines which -startled the licenser;" those are usually taken to have been I. 598-9, the -figure of the sun's eclipse, which - - "with fear of change - Perplexes monarchs." - -[1212] _Brit. Mus. Addit. MS._ 4376 (8). "Abstract of several orders -relating to the Plague," from 35 Hen. VIII. to 1665. - -[1213] In excavating the foundations of the Broad Street terminus of the -North London Railway, the workmen came upon a stratum four feet below the -surface and descending eight or ten feet lower, which was full of -uncoffined skeletons. Some hundreds of them were collected and -re-interred. (_Notes and Queries_, 3rd Ser. IV. 85.) The ground was part -of the old enclosure of Bethlem Hospital (St Mary's Spital outside -Bishopsgate), and was acquired for a cemetery, to the extent of an acre, -by Sir Thomas Roe, in 1569. Probably there were plague-pits dug in it -during more than one of the great epidemics, from 1593 to 1665. - -[1214] _Cal. State Papers_, Domestic, 1665, p. 579. - -[1215] _Reliquiae Hearnianae._ Ed. Bliss, 1869, II. 117 (under the date of -Jan. 21, 1721). - -[1216] _The City Remembrancer._ London, 1769 (professing to be Gideon -Harvey's notes). - -[1217] Procopius (_De Bello Persico_, II. cap. 23, Latin Translation) says -the same of the great Justinian plague in A.D. 543 at Byzantium: "ut vere -quis possit dicere, pestem illam, seu casu aliquo seu providentia, quasi -delectu diligenter habito, sceleratissimos quosque reliquisse. Sed haec -postea clarius patuerunt." On this Gibbon remarks: "Philosophy must -disdain the observation of Procopius, that the lives of such men were -guarded by the peculiar favour of fortune or Providence;" and most men -will agree with Gibbon. But, if we could be sure of the fact of immunity -(and Boghurst's testimony is a little weakened by his deference to -Diemerbroek, who knew the classical traditions of plague), it might be -possible to explain it on merely pathological grounds. - -[1218] John Tillison to Dr Sancroft, September 14, 1665. Harl. MSS. cited -by Heberden, _Increase and Decrease of Diseases_. London, 1801. Woodall, -writing in 1639, and basing on his experience of London plague in 1603, -1625, and 1636, is in like manner emphatic that the symptoms varied much -in individuals and in seasons. - -[1219] _Cal. State Papers._ _Hist. MSS. Com._ IX. 321. - -[1220] _Cal. State Papers._ _Cal. Le Fleming MSS._ p. 37 (also for -Cockermouth). - -[1221] _Ibid._ - -[1222] Mead seems to have known that there were plague-cases at Battle in -1665. - -[1223] _Cal. S. P._ - -[1224] _Hist. MSS. Com._ II. 115. - -[1225] _The History and Antiquities of Eyam, with a full and particular -account of the Great Plague which desolated that village A.D. 1666._ By -William Wood, London, 1842. This small volume, which owes its interest -solely to the plague-incident, has gone through at least five editions. -Among those who have written, in prose or verse, upon the same theme, Wood -mentions Dr Mead, Miss Seward, Allan Cunningham, E. Rhodes, S. T. Hall, -William and Mary Howitt, S. Roberts, and J. Holland. The story is also in -the _Book of Golden Deeds_. - -[1226] Bacon (_Sylva Sylvarum_, Cent. X. 912. Spedding II. 643) says: -"The plague is many times taken without a manifest sense, as hath been -said. And they report that, where it is found, it hath a scent of the -smell of a mellow apple; and (as some say) of May-flowers; and it is also -received that smells of flowers that are mellow and luscious are ill for -the plague: as white lilies, cowslips and hyacinths." - -[1227] Sir Thomas Elyot, in _The Castle of Health_ (1541), says that -"infected stuff lying in a coffer fast shut for two years, then opened, -has infected those that stood nigh it, who soon after died." (Cited by -Brasbridge, _Poor Man's Jewel_, 1578, Chapter VIII.) - -[1228] Milner's _Hist. of Winchester_. - -[1229] _The City Remembrancer_, Lond. 1769, vol. I.--an account of the -plague, fire, storm of 1703, etc., said to have been "collected from -curious and authentic papers originally compiled by the late learned Dr -[Gideon] Harvey." But the section on the plague is almost purely Defoe and -Vincent, with a few things from Mead. - -[1230] These figures, with the two oaths, had been copied by the antiquary -Morant for his _History of Essex_, and are preserved in No. 87. ff. 55 and -56, of the Stowe MSS. in the British Museum, where Mr J. A. Herbert, of -the Manuscript Department, pointed them out to me. In his printed -_History_ Morant has summarized the plague-deaths in monthly periods. - -The Bearers' Oath, fol. 57:-- - -"Ye shall swear, that ye shall bear to the ground and bury the bodys of -all such persons as, during these infectious times, shall dye of the -pestilence within this Towne or the Liberties thereof, or so many of them -as ye shall have notice of, and may be permitted to bury, carrying them to -burials always in the night time, unless it be otherwise ordered by the -Mayor of this Towne; And ye shall be always in readiness for that purpose -at your abode, where you shall be appointed, keeping apart from your -families together with the searchers, and not to be absent from thence -more than your office of Bearers requires. Ye shall always in your walk, -as much as may be, avoid the society of people, keeping as far distant -from them as may bee, and carrying openly in your hands a white wand, by -which people may know you, and shun and avoid you. And shall do all other -things belonging to the office of Bearers, and therein shall demean -yourselves honestly and faithfully, discharging a good conscience; So etc. - - _August 1665._ - - JAMES BARTON and JOHN COOKE:--sworn, who are to have for their pains - 10 sh. a week a piece; and 2d for every one to be buried, taking the - 2d out of the estate of the deceased. If there be not wherewithal, the - parish to bear it. - -Oath 6. p. 44. - -The Oath for the Searchers of the Plague, 1665. - -"Yee and either of You shall sweare, that ye shall diligently view and -search the corps of all such persons, as during these infectious times, -shall dye within this Towne or the Liberties thereof, or so many of them -as you shall or may have access unto, or have notice of; And shall -according to the best of your skill, determine of what disease every such -dead corps came to its death. And shall immediately give your judgment -thereof to the Constables of the parish where such corps shall be found, -and to the Bearers appointed for the burial of such infected corps. You -shall not make report of the cause of any one's death better or worse than -the nature of the disease shall deserve. Yee shall live together where you -shall be appointed, and not walk abroad more than necessity requires, and -that only in the execution of your office of Searchers. Ye shall decline -and absent yourselves from your families, and always avoid the society of -people. And in your walk shall keep as far distant from men as may be, -always carrying in your hands a white wand, by which the people may know -you, and shun and avoid you. And ye shall well and truly do all other -things belonging to the office of Searchers, according to the best of your -skill, wisdom, knowledge, and power, in all things dealing faithfully, -honestly, unfeignedly and impartially. So help" etc. - -[1231] Morant, _Hist. of Essex_, I. 74. - -[1232] Deering, _Nottingham_, vetus et nova, 1751, pp. 82-83. Copied in -Thoresby's edition of Thoroton's _History of Nottingham_, II. 60. - - - - -Transcriber's Notes: - -Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_. - -Passages in bold are indicated by =bold=. - -Superscripted characters are indicated by {superscript}. - -The original text contains letters with diacritical marks that are not -represented in this text version. - -The original text includes Greek characters that have been replaced with -transliterations in this text version. - -The original text includes a dagger symbol that is represented as [Dagger] -in this text version. - - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A History of Epidemics in Britain -(Volume I of II), by Charles Creighton - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF EPIDEMICS IN BRITAIN *** - -***** This file should be named 42686-8.txt or 42686-8.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/4/2/6/8/42686/ - -Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at -http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images -generously made available by The Internet Archive.) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions -will be renamed. - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no -one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation -(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without -permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org - - -Title: A History of Epidemics in Britain (Volume I of II) - from A.D. 664 to the Extinction of Plague - -Author: Charles Creighton - -Release Date: May 11, 2013 [EBook #42686] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF EPIDEMICS IN BRITAIN *** - - - - -Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at -http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images -generously made available by The Internet Archive.) - - - - - - -</pre> - - - +<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42686 ***</div> <p class="figcenter"><img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="" /></p> <p> </p><p> </p> @@ -36997,386 +36956,7 @@ honestly, unfeignedly and impartially. So help” etc.</p> <p><a name='f_1232' id='f_1232' href='#fna_1232'>[1232]</a> Deering, <i>Nottingham</i>, vetus et nova, 1751, pp. 82-83. 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You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org - - -Title: A History of Epidemics in Britain (Volume I of II) - from A.D. 664 to the Extinction of Plague - -Author: Charles Creighton - -Release Date: May 11, 2013 [EBook #42686] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: ASCII - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF EPIDEMICS IN BRITAIN *** - - - - -Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at -http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images -generously made available by The Internet Archive.) - - - - - - - - - -A HISTORY OF EPIDEMICS IN BRITAIN. - - - - - London: C. J. CLAY AND SONS, - CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE, - AND - H. K. LEWIS, - 136, GOWER STREET, W.C. - - Cambridge: DEIGHTON, BELL AND CO. - Leipzig: F. A. BROCKHAUS. - New York: MACMILLAN AND CO. - - - - - A HISTORY OF EPIDEMICS IN BRITAIN - - from A.D. 664 to the Extinction of Plague - - - BY CHARLES CREIGHTON, M.A., M.D., - FORMERLY DEMONSTRATOR OF ANATOMY IN THE - UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE. - - - CAMBRIDGE: - AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. - 1891 - - [_All rights reserved._] - - - - - Cambridge: - PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AND SONS, - AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. - - - - -PREFACE. - - -The title and contents-table of this volume will show sufficiently its -scope, and a glance at the references in the several chapters will show -its sources. But it may be convenient to premise a few general remarks -under each of those heads. The date 664 A.D. has been chosen as a -starting-point, for the reason that it is the year of the first pestilence -in Britain recorded on contemporary or almost contemporary authority, that -of Beda's 'Ecclesiastical History.' The other limit of the volume, the -extinction of plague in 1665-66, marks the end of a long era of epidemic -sickness, which differed much in character from the era next following. At -or near the Restoration we come, as it were, to the opening of a new seal -or the outpouring of another vial. The history proceeds thenceforth on -other lines and comes largely from sources of another kind; allowing for a -little overlapping about the middle of the seventeenth century, it might -be continued from 1666 almost without reference to what had gone before. -The history is confined to Great Britain and Ireland, except in Chapter -XI. which is occupied with the first Colonies and the early voyages, -excepting also certain sections of other chapters, where the history has -to trace the antecedents of some great epidemic sickness on a foreign -soil. - -The sources of the work have been the ordinary first-hand sources of -English history in general. In the medieval period these include the -monastic histories, chronicles, lives, or the like (partly in the editions -of Gale, Savile, Twysden, and Hearne, and of the English Historical -Society, but chiefly in the great series edited for the Master of the -Rolls), the older printed collections of State documents, and, for the -Black Death, the recently published researches upon the rolls of manor -courts and upon other records. From near the beginning of the Tudor -period, the Calendars of State Papers (Domestic, Foreign, and Colonial), -become an invaluable source of information for the epidemiologist just as -for other historians. Also the Reports of the Historical Manuscripts -Commission, together with its Calendars of private collections of papers, -have yielded a good many facts. Many exact data, relating more -particularly to local outbreaks of plague, have been found in the county, -borough, and parish histories, which are of very unequal value for the -purpose and are often sadly to seek in the matter of an index. The -miscellaneous sources drawn upon have been very numerous, perhaps more -numerous, from the nature of the subject, than in most other branches of -history. - -Medical books proper are hardly available for a history of English -epidemics until the Elizabethan period, and they do not begin to be really -important for the purpose until shortly before the date at which the -present history ends. These have been carefully sought for, most of the -known books having been met with and examined closely for illustrative -facts. In the latter part of the seventeenth century the best English -writers on medicine occupied themselves largely with the epidemics of -their own time, and the British school of epidemiology, which took a -distinguished start with Willis, Sydenham and Morton, was worthily -continued by many writers throughout the eighteenth century; so that the -history subsequent to the period here treated of becomes more and more -dependent upon medical sources, and of more special interest to the -profession itself. - -Reference has been made not unfrequently to manuscripts; of which the more -important that have been used (for the first time) are a treatise on the -Sweating Sickness of 1485 by a contemporary physician in London, two -original London plague-bills of the reign of Henry VIII., and a valuable -set of tables of the weekly burials and christenings in London for five -years (almost complete) from 1578 to 1583, among the Cecil papers--these -last by kind permission of the Marquis of Salisbury. - -Collecting materials for a British epidemiology from these various sources -is not an easy task; had it been so, it would hardly have been left to be -done, or, so far as one knows, even attempted, for the first time at so -late a period. Where the sources of information are so dispersed and -casual it is inevitable that some things should have been overlooked: be -the omissions few or many, they would certainly have been more but for -suggestions and assistance kindly given from time to time by various -friends. - -The materials being collected, it remained to consider how best to use -them. The existing national epidemiologies, such as that of Italy by -Professor Corradi or the older 'Epidemiologia Espanola' of Villalba, are -in the form of Annals. But it seemed practicable, without sacrificing a -single item of the chronology, to construct from the greater events of -sickness in the national annals a systematic history that should touch and -connect with the general history at many points and make a volume -supplementary to the same. Such has been the attempt; and in estimating -the measure of its success it may be kept in mind that it is the first of -the kind, British or foreign, in its own department. The author can hardly -hope to have altogether escaped errors in touching upon the general -history of the country over so long a period; but he has endeavoured to go -as little as possible outside his proper province and to avoid making -gratuitous reflections upon historical characters and events. The greater -epidemic diseases have, however, been discussed freely--from the -scientific side or from the point of view of their theory. - -It remains to acknowledge the liberality of the Syndics of the Cambridge -University Press in the matter of publication, and the friendly interest -taken in the work by their Chairman, the Master of Peterhouse. - -_November, 1891._ - - - - -CONTENTS. - - - PAGE - - CHAPTER I. - - PESTILENCES PREVIOUS TO THE BLACK DEATH, CHIEFLY FROM FAMINES. - - The plague of 664-684 described by Beda, and its probable relation - to the plague of Justinian's reign, 542- 4 - - Other medieval epidemics not from famine 9 - - Chronology of Famine Sicknesses, with full accounts of those of - 1194-7, 1257-9, and 1315-16 15 - - Few traces of epidemics of Ergotism; reason of England's immunity - from _ignis sacer_ 52 - - Generalities on medieval famines in England 65 - - - CHAPTER II. - - LEPROSY IN MEDIEVAL BRITAIN. - - Medieval meanings of _lepra_ 69 - - Biblical associations of Leprosy 79 - - Medieval religious sentiment towards lepers 81 - - Leprosy-prevalence judged by the leper-houses,--their number in - England, special destination, and duration 86 - - Leper-houses in Scotland and Ireland 99 - - The prejudice against lepers 100 - - Laws against lepers 106 - - Things favouring Leprosy in the manner of life--Modern analogy of - Pellagra 107 - - - CHAPTER III. - - THE BLACK DEATH OF 1348-9. - - Arrival of the Black Death, and progress through Britain, with - contemporary English and Irish notices of the symptoms 114 - - Inquiry into the extent of the mortality 123 - - Antecedents of the Black Death in the East--Overland China - trade--Favouring conditions in China 142 - - The Theory of Bubo-Plague 156 - - Illustrations from modern times 163 - - Summary of causes, and of European favouring conditions 173 - - - CHAPTER IV. - - ENGLAND AFTER THE BLACK DEATH, WITH THE EPIDEMICS TO 1485. - - Efforts to renew the war with France 177 - - Direct social and economic consequences in town and country 180 - - More lasting effects on farming, industries and population 190 - - Epidemics following the Black Death 202 - - Medieval English MSS. on Plague 208 - - The 14th century chronology continued 215 - - The public health in the 15th century 222 - - Chronology of Plagues, 15th century 225 - - Plague &c. in Scotland and Ireland, 1349-1475 233 - - - CHAPTER V. - - THE SWEATING SICKNESS, 1485-1551. - - The First invasion of the Sweat in 1485 237 - - The Second outbreak in 1508 243 - - The Third Sweat in 1517 245 - - The Fourth Sweat in 1528 250 - - Extension of the Fourth Sweat to the Continent in 1529 256 - - The Fifth Sweat in 1551 259 - - Antecedents of the English Sweat 265 - - Endemic Sweat of Normandy 271 - - Theory of the English Sweat 273 - - Extinction of the Sweat in England 279 - - - CHAPTER VI. - - PLAGUE IN THE TUDOR PERIOD. - - Chronology of the outbreaks of Plague in London, provincial - towns, and the country generally, from 1485 to 1556 282 - - The London Plague of 1563 304 - - Preventive practice in Plague-time under the Tudors 309 - - Sanitation in Plantagenet and Tudor times 322 - - The disposal of the dead 332 - - Chronology of Plague 1564-1592--Vital statistics of London - 1578-1583 337 - - The London Plague of 1592-1593 351 - - Plague in the Provinces, 1592-1598 356 - - Plague in Scotland, 1495-1603--Skene on the Plague (1568) 360 - - Plague in Ireland in the Tudor period 371 - - - CHAPTER VII. - - GAOL FEVERS, INFLUENZAS, AND OTHER FEVERS IN THE TUDOR PERIOD. - - The Black Assizes of Cambridge, 1522 375 - - Oxford Black Assizes, 1577 376 - - Exeter Black Assizes, 1586 383 - - Increase of Pauperism, Vagrancy, &c. in the Tudor period 387 - - Influenzas and other "strange fevers" and fluxes, 1540-1597 397 - - - CHAPTER VIII. - - THE FRENCH POX. - - Meagreness of English records 414 - - Evidence of its invasion of Scotland and England, in 1497 and - subsequent years 417 - - English writings on the Pox in the Elizabethan period, with some - notices for the Stuart period 423 - - The circumstances of the great European outbreak in 1494--Invasion - of Italy by Charles VIII. 429 - - - CHAPTER IX. - - SMALLPOX AND MEASLES. - - First accounts of Smallpox in Arabic writings--Nature of the - disease 439 - - European Smallpox in the Middle Ages 445 - - Measles in medieval writings--Origin of the names "measles" and - "pocks" 448 - - First English notices of Smallpox in the Tudor period 456 - - Great increase of Smallpox in the Stuart period 463 - - Smallpox in Continental writings of the 16th century 467 - - - CHAPTER X. - - PLAGUE, FEVER AND INFLUENZA FROM THE ACCESSION OF JAMES I. TO THE - RESTORATION. - - Growth of London in the Tudor and Stuart periods 471 - - The London Plague of 1603 474 - - Annual Plague in London after 1603 493 - - Plague in the Provinces, Ireland and Scotland, in 1603 and - following years 496 - - Malignant Fever preceding the Plague of 1625 504 - - The London Plague of 1625 507 - - Plague in the Provinces in 1625 and following years 520 - - The London Plague of 1636 529 - - Fever in London and in England generally to 1643 532 - - War Typhus in Oxfordshire &c. and at Tiverton, 1643-44 547 - - Plague in the Provinces, Scotland and Ireland during the Civil - Wars 555 - - Fever in England 1651-52 566 - - The Influenzas or Fevers of 1657-59 568 - - - CHAPTER XI. - - SICKNESSES OF EARLY VOYAGES AND COLONIES. - - Scurvy in the early voyages, north and south 579 - - The remarkable epidemic of Fever in Drake's expedition of 1585-6 - to the Spanish Main 585 - - Other instances of ship-fevers, flux, scurvy, &c. 590 - - Scurvy &c. in the East India Company's ships: the treatment 599 - - Sickness of Virginian and New England voyages and colonies 609 - - Early West Indian epidemics, including the first of Yellow - Fever--The Slave Trade 613 - - The epidemic of 1655-6 at the first planting of Jamaica 634 - - - CHAPTER XII. - - THE GREAT PLAGUE OF LONDON, AND THE LAST OF PLAGUE IN ENGLAND. - - Literature of the Great Plague 646 - - Antecedents, beginnings and progress of the London Plague of 1665 651 - - Mortality and incidents of the Great Plague--Characters of the - disease 660 - - Plague near London and in the Provinces, 1665-66 679 - - The Plague at Eyam 1665-66 682 - - The Plague at Colchester, 1665-66, and the last of Plague in - England 688 - - - - -ERRATA. - - -At p. 28 line 4, _for_ "for" _read_ "at." At p. 126 line 2 _for_ "1351" -_read_ "1350;" same change at p. 130, lines 6 and 9. At p. 185 note 1 -_read_ "Ochenkowski." At p. 264 line 18, and at p. 554 line 11 from -bottom, read "_pathognomonicum_." At p. 401, note 3 _for_ "1658" _read_ -"1558." At p. 420, line 17, _for_ "Henry IV.," _read_ "Henry V." At p. -474, line 4, _for_ "more" _read_ "less." At p. 649 line 22 _omit_ -"Hancock." - - - - -CHAPTER I. - -PESTILENCES PREVIOUS TO THE BLACK DEATH, CHIEFLY FROM FAMINES. - - -The Middle Age of European history has no naturally fixed beginning or -ending. The period of Antiquity may be taken as concluded by the fourth -Christian century, or by the fifth or by the sixth; the Modern period may -be made to commence in the fourteenth, or in the fifteenth or in the -sixteenth. The historian Hallam includes a thousand years in the medieval -period, from the invasion of France by Clovis to the invasion of Italy by -Charles VIII. in 1494. We begin, he says, in darkness and calamity, and we -break off as the morning breathes upon us and the twilight reddens into -the lustre of day. To the epidemiologist the medieval period is rounded -more definitely. At the one end comes the great plague in the reign of -Justinian, and at the other end the Black Death. Those are the two -greatest pestilences in recorded history; each has no parallel except in -the other. They were in the march of events, and should not be fixed upon -as doing more than their share in shaping the course of history. But no -single thing stands out more clearly as the stroke of fate in bringing the -ancient civilization to an end than the vast depopulation and solitude -made by the plague which came with the corn-ships from Egypt to Byzantium -in the year 543; and nothing marks so definitely the emergence of Europe -from the middle period of stagnation as the other depopulation and social -upheaval made by the plague which came in the overland track of Genoese -and Venetian traders from China in the year 1347. While many other -influences were in the air to determine the oncoming and the offgoing of -the middle darkness, those two world-wide pestilences were singular in -their respective effects: of the one, we may say that it turned the key of -the medieval prison-house; and of the other, that it unlocked the door -after eight hundred years. - -The Black Death and its after-effects will occupy a large part of this -work, so that what has just been said of it will not stand as a bare -assertion. But the plague in the reign of Justinian hardly touches British -history, and must be left with a brief reference. Gibbon was not -insensible of the part that it played in the great drama of his history. -"There was," he says, "a visible decrease of the human species, which has -never been repaired in some of the fairest countries of the globe." After -vainly trying to construe the arithmetic of Procopius, who was a witness -of the calamity at Byzantium, he agrees to strike off one or more ciphers, -and adopts as an estimate "not wholly inadmissible," a mortality of one -hundred millions. The effects of that depopulation, in part due to war, -are not followed in the history. So far as Gibbon's method could go, the -plague came for him into the same group of phenomena as comets and -earthquakes; it was part of the stage scenery amidst which the drama of -emperors, pontiffs, generals, eunuchs, Theodoras, and adventurers -proceeded. Even of the comets and earthquakes, he remarks that they were -subject to physical laws; and it was from no want of scientific spirit -that he omitted to show how a plague of such magnitude had a place in the -physical order, and not less in the moral order. - -A new science of epidemiology has sprung up since the time of Gibbon, who -had to depend on the writings of Mead, a busy and not very profound Court -physician. More particularly the Egyptian origin of the plague of the -sixth century, and its significance, have been elucidated by the brilliant -theory of Pariset, of which some account will be given at the end of the -chapter on the Black Death. For the present, we are concerned with it only -in so far as it may have a bearing upon the pestilences of Britain. The -plague of the sixth century made the greatest impression, naturally, upon -the oldest civilized countries of Europe; but it extended also to the -outlying provinces of the empire, and to the countries of the barbarians. -It was the same disease as the Black Death of the fourteenth century, the -bubo-plague; and it spread from country to country, and lasted from -generation to generation, as that more familiar infection is known to have -done[1]. - -Renewals of it are heard of in one part of Europe or another until the end -of the sixth century, when its continuity is lost. But it is clear that -the seeds of pestilence were not wanting in Rome and elsewhere in the -centuries following. Thus, about the year 668, the English -archbishop-elect, Vighard, having gone to Rome to get his election -confirmed by the Pope Vitalianus, was shortly after his arrival cut off by -pestilence, with almost all who had gone with him[2]. Twelve years after, -in 680, there was another severe pestilence in the months of July, August -and September, causing a great mortality at Rome, and such panic at Pavia -that the inhabitants fled to the mountains[3]. In 746 a pestilence is said -to have advanced from Sicily and Calabria, and to have made such -devastation in Rome that there were houses without a single inhabitant -left[4]. The common name for all such epidemics is _pestis_ or -_pestilentia_ or _magna mortalitas_, so that it is open to contend that -some other type than bubo-plague, such as fever or flux, may have been at -least a part of them; but no type of infection has ever been so mortal as -the bubo-plague, and a mortality that is distinguished by a chronicler as -causing panic and devastation was presumably of that type. - - -Pestilence in England and Ireland in the Seventh Century. - -It is more than a century after the first great wave of pestilence had -passed over Europe in the reign of Justinian, before we hear of a great -plague in England and Ireland. Dr Willan, the one English writer on -medicine who has turned his erudition to that period, conjectures that the -infection must have come to this country from the continent at an earlier -date. From the year 597, he says, the progress of conversion to the -Christian religion "led to such frequent intercourse with Italy, France -and Belgium, that the epidemical and contagious disease prevailing on the -continent at the close of the sixth century must necessarily be -communicated from time to time through the Heptarchy[5]." Until we come to -the _Ecclesiastical History_ of Beda, the only authorities are the Irish -annals; and in them, the first undoubted entry of a great plague -corresponds in date with that of Beda's history, the year 664. It is true, -indeed, that the Irish annals, or the later recensions of them, carry the -name that was given to the plague of 664 (_pestis ictericia_ or _buide -connaill_) back to an alleged mortality in 543, or 548, and make the -latter the "first _buide connaill_"; but the obituary of saints on that -occasion is merely what might have occurred in the ordinary way, and it is -probable, from the form of entry, that it was really the rumour of the -great plague at Byzantium and elsewhere in 543 and subsequent years that -had reached the Irish annalist[6]. - -The plague of 664 is the only epidemic in early British annals that can be -regarded as a plague of the same nature, and on the same great scale, as -the devastation of the continent of Europe more than a century earlier, -whether it be taken to be a late offshoot of that or not. The English -pestilence of 664 is the same that was fabled long after in prose and -verse as the great plague "of Cadwallader's time." It left a mark on the -traditions of England, which may be taken as an index of its reality and -its severity; and with it the history of epidemics in Britain may be said -to begin. It was still sufficiently recent to have been narrated by -eyewitnesses to Beda, whose _Ecclesiastical History_ is the one authentic -source, besides the entry in the Irish annals, of our information -concerning it. - -The pestilence broke out suddenly in the year 664, and after -"depopulating" the southern parts of England, seized upon the province of -Northumbria, where it raged for a long time far and wide, destroying an -immense multitude of people[7]. In another passage Beda says that the same -mortality occurred also among the East Saxons, and he appears to connect -therewith their lapse to paganism[8]. - -The epidemic is said to have entered Ireland at the beginning of August, -but whether in 664 or 665 is not clear. According to one of those vague -estimates which we shall find again in connexion with the Black Death, the -mortality in Ireland was so vast that only a third part of the people were -left alive. The Irish annals do, however, contain a long list of notables -who died in the pestilence[9]. - -Beda follows his general reference to the plague by a story of the -monastery of Rathmelsigi, identified with Melfont in Meath, which he -heard many years after from the chief actor in it. Egbert, an English -youth of noble birth, had gone to Ireland to lead the monastic life, like -many more of his countrymen of the same rank or of the middle class. The -plague in his monastery had been so severe that all the monks either were -dead of it or had fled before it, save himself and another, who were both -lying sick of the disease. Egbert's companion died; and he himself, having -vowed to lead a life of austerity if he were spared, survived to give -effect to his vow and died in the year 729 with a great name for sanctity -at the age of ninety. - -The plague of 664 is said, perhaps on constructive evidence[10], to have -continued in England and Ireland for twenty years; and there are several -stories told by Beda of incidents in monasteries which show, at least, -that outbreaks of a fatal infection occurred here or there as late as 685. -Several of these relate to the new monastery of Barking in Essex, founded -for monks and nuns by a bishop of London in 676. First we have a story -relating to many deaths on the male side of the house[11], and then two -stories in which a child of three and certain nuns figure as dying of the -pestilence[12]. Another story appears to relate to the plague in a -monastery on the Sussex coast, seemingly Selsea[13]. Still another, in -which Beda himself is supposed to have played a part, is told of the -monastery of Jarrow, the date of it being deducible from the context as -the year 685. - -Of the two Northumbrian monasteries founded by Benedict, that of Wearmouth -lost several of its monks by the plague, as well as its abbot Easterwine, -who is otherwise known to have died in March, 685. The other monastery of -Jarrow, of which Ceolfrith was abbot, was even more reduced by the -pestilence. All who could read, or preach, or say the antiphonies and -responses were cut off, excepting the abbot and one little boy whom -Ceolfrith had brought up and taught. For a week the abbot conducted the -shortened services by himself, after which he was joined by the voice of -the boy; and these two carried on the work until others had been -instructed. Beda, who is known to have been a pupil of Ceolfrith's at -Jarrow, would then have been about twelve years old, and would correspond -to the boy in the story[14]. - -The nature of these plagues, beginning with the great invasion of 664, can -only be guessed. They have the look of having been due to some poison in -the soil, running hither and thither, as the Black Death did seven -centuries after, and remaining in the country to break out afresh, not -universally as at first, but here and there, as in monasteries. The -hypothesis of a late extension to England and Ireland of the great -European invasion of bubo-plague in 543, would suit the facts so far as we -know them. The one medical detail which has been preserved, on doubtful -authority, that the disease was a _pestis ictericia_, marked by yellowness -of the skin, and colloquially known in the Irish language as _buide -connaill_, is not incompatible with the hypothesis of bubo-plague, and is -otherwise unintelligible[15]. - -For the next seven centuries, the pestilences of Britain are mainly the -results of famine and are therefore of indigenous origin. So strongly is -the type of famine-pestilence impressed upon the epidemic history of -medieval England that the chroniclers and romancists are unable to -dissociate famine from their ideas of pestilence in general. Thus Higden, -in his reference to the outbreak of the Justinian plague at -Constantinople, associates it with famine alone[16]; and the metrical -romancist, Robert of Brunne, who had the great English famine of 1315-16 -fresh in his memory, describes circumstantially the plague of 664 or the -plague of Cadwallader's time, as a famine-pestilence, his details being -taken in part from the account given by Simeon of Durham of the harrying -of Yorkshire by William the Conqueror, and in part, doubtless, from his -own recent experience of a great English famine[17]. But before we come to -these typical famine-pestilences of Britain, which fill the medieval -interval between the foreign invasion of plague in Beda's time and the -foreign invasion of 1348, it remains to dispose in this place of those -outbreaks on English soil which do not bear the marks of famine-sickness, -but, on the other hand, the marks of a virulent infection arising at -particular spots probably from a tainted soil. These have to be collected -from casual notices in the most unlikely corners of monastic chronicles; -but it is just the casual nature of the references that makes them -credible, and leads one to suppose that the recorded instances are only -samples of epidemics not altogether rare in the medieval life of England. - - -Early Epidemics not connected with Famine. - -The earliest of these is mentioned in the annals of the priory of Christ -Church, Canterbury. In the year 829, all the monks save five are said to -have died of pestilence, so that the monastery was left almost desolate. -The archbishop Ceolnoth, who was also the abbot of the monastery, filled -up the vacancies with secular clerks, and he is said to have done so with -the consent of the five monks "that did outlive the plague." The incident -comes into the Canterbury MS. of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle[18] under the -year 870, in connexion with the death of Ceolnoth and the action of his -successor in expelling the seculars and completing the original number of -regulars. So far as the records inform us, that great mortality within the -priory of Christ Church two centuries after it was founded by Augustine, -was an isolated event; the nearest general epidemic to it in the -Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was a great mortality of man and beast about the -year 897 following the Danish invasion which Alfred at length repelled. - -That such deadly intramural epidemics in monasteries were not impossible -is conclusively proved by the authentic particulars of a sudden and severe -mortality among the rich monks of Croyland at a much more recent -date--between the years 1304 and 1315. In the appendix to the chronicle of -Ramsey Abbey[19] there is printed a letter from Simon, abbot of Croyland, -without date but falling between the years above given, addressed to his -neighbours the abbots of Ramsey, Peterborough and Thorney, and the prior -of Spalding. The letter is to ask their prayers on the occasion of the -sudden death of thirteen of the monks of Croyland and the sickness of -others; that large number of the brethren had been cut off within fifteen -days--"potius violenter rapti quam fataliter resoluti[20]." The letter is -written from Daddington, whither abbot Simon had doubtless gone to escape -the infection. - -These are two instances of deadly epidemics within the walls of English -monasteries. In the plague-years 664-685, and long after in the Black -Death, the mortalities among the monks were of the same degree, only there -was an easy explanation of them, in one if not in both cases, as being -part of an imported infection universally diffused in English soil. What -the nature of the occasional outbreaks in earlier times may have been, we -can only guess: something almost as deadly, we may say, as the plague -itself, and equally sudden. The experience was not peculiar to England. An -incident at Rome almost identical with that of Vighard in 668 is related -in a letter sent home in 1188, by Honorius the prior of Canterbury, who -had gone with others of the abbey on a mission to Rome to obtain judgment -in a dispute between the archbishop and the abbey, that the whole of his -following was stricken with sickness and that five were dead. John de -Bremble, who being also abroad was ordered to go to the help of the prior, -wrote home to the abbey that when he reached Rome only one of the brethren -was alive, and he in great danger, and that the first thing he had to do -on his arrival was to attend the cook's funeral[21]. - -There is no clue to the type of these fatal outbreaks of sickness within -monastic communities. One naturally thinks of a soil-poison fermenting -within and around the monastery walls, and striking down the inmates by a -common influence as if at one blow. There are in the medieval history -previous to the Black Death a few instances of local pestilences among the -common people also, which differ from the ordinary famine-sicknesses of -the time. The most significant of these is a story told by William of -Newburgh at the end of his chronicle and probably dating from the -corresponding period, about the year 1196[22]. For several years there had -been, as we shall see, famine and fever in England; but the particular -incident does not relate to the famine, although it may join on to it. It -is the story of a ghost walking, and it comes from the village of Annan on -the Solway, having been related to the monk of Newburgh in Yorkshire by -one who had been an actor in it. A man who had fled from Yorkshire and -taken refuge in the village under the castle of Annan, was killed in a -quarrel about the woman whom he had married, and was buried without the -rites of the church. His unquiet ghost walked, and his corpse tainted the -air of the village; pestilence was in every house, so that the place which -had been populous looked as if deserted, those who escaped the plague -having fled. William of Newburgh's informant had been in the midst of -these calamities, and had taken a lead in mitigating them; he had gone to -certain wise men living "in sacra dominica quae Palmarum dicitur," and -having taken counsel with them, he addressed the people: "Let us dig up -that pestilence and let us burn it with fire" (_effodiamus pestem illam et -comburamus igni_). Two young men were, accordingly, induced to set about -the task. They had not far to dig: "repente cadaver non multa humo egesta -nudaverunt, enormi corpulentia distentum, facie rubenti turgentique supra -modum." - -The story, like others of the kind with a mixture of legend in them, is -more symbolical than real. The wise men of Annan may have been in error in -tracing the plague of their village to a single corpse, but they were -probably on the right lines of causation. It is curious to observe in -another chronicler of the same period, Ralph of Coggeshall in Essex, and -in a part of his chronicle which relates to the last years of Richard I., -and first years of John, a comment upon the action of Pope Innocent III. -(about 1200 A.D.) in interdicting all Christian rites save baptism by the -clergy in France: "O how horrible ... to refuse the Christian rite of -burial to the bodies of the dead, so that they infected the air by their -foetor and struck horror into the souls of the living by their ghastly -looks[23]." The same pope's interdict of decent burial and of other -clerical rites extended to England in 1208, the famous Interdict of the -reign of John. It was the papal method of checkmating the kingdoms of this -world; that it was subversive of traditional decency and immemorial -sanitary precaution was a small matter beside the assertion of the -authority of Peter. - -Rightly or wrongly, taught by experience or misled by fancy, the medieval -world firmly believed that the formal and elaborate disposal of the dead -had a sanitary aspect as well as a pious. The infection of the air, of -which we shall hear much more in connexion with the plague, was a current -notion in England for several centuries before the Black Death. Especially -does the dread of it find expression where corpses were unburied after a -battle, massacre, or calamity of nature. The exertions made in these -circumstances to bury the dead, even when all pious and domestic feeling -was hardened to the barest thought of self-preservation, are explained in -set terms as instigated by the fear of breeding a pestilence. The instinct -is as wide as human nature, and there is clear evidence in our own early -writers that its sanitary meaning was recognised. One such instance may be -quoted from the St Albans annalist of the time of John and first years of -Henry III.[24] In the year 1234, an unusually savage raid was made by the -Welsh as far as Shrewsbury; they laid waste the country by fire and sword; -wayfarers were horrified at the sight of naked and unburied corpses -without number by the road sides, preyed on by ravenous beasts and birds; -the foetor of so much corruption infected the air on all sides, so that -even the dead slew the living. The chronicler's language, "quod etiam -homines sanos mortui peremerunt," is marked by the perspicacity or -correctness which distinguishes him. When the bubo-plague came to be -domesticated in English soil more than a century later, the disposal of -the dead became a sanitary question of obvious importance. But even in the -centuries before the Black Death, and most of all in the times when the -traditional practices of decent burial were interdicted by Popes or turned -to mercenary purposes by clergy[25], we shall perhaps not err in looking -for one, at least, of the causes of localised outbreaks of pestilence in -the tainting of the soil and the air by the corruption of corpses -insufficiently buried and coffined. - -There still remains, before we come to famine-sickness as the common type -of pestilence in medieval England, to discover from the records any -evidence of pestilence due to war and invasion. The domestic history from -first to last is singularly free from such calamities. The whole history -of Mohammedan conquest and occupation is a history of infection following -in the train of war; and in Western Europe, at least from the invasion of -Italy by Charles VIII., when the medieval period (according to Hallam) -closes, the sieges, battles, and campaigns are constantly associated with -epidemic sickness among the people as well as among the troops. There is -only one period in the history of England, that of the civil wars of the -Parliament and the Royalists, in which the people had a real taste of the -common continental experience. The civil wars of York and Lancaster, as we -shall see, touched the common people little, and appear to have bred no -epidemics. - -Apart from civil war, there were invasions, by the Welsh and Scots on the -western and northern marches, and by the Danes. One instance of pestilence -following a Welsh raid in the thirteenth century has been given from Roger -of Wendover. A single instance is recorded in the history of the Danish -invasions. It has been preserved by several independent chroniclers, with -some variation in details; and it appears to have been distinguished by so -much notice for the reason that it illustrates the magnanimity, sanctity, -and miraculous power of St Elphege, archbishop of Canterbury. - -In the year 1010 (or 1011 according to some), the Danes had stormed -Canterbury, burnt the fair city, massacred the inhabitants, or carried -them captive to their ships at Sandwich. The archbishop Elphege was put -on board a small vessel and taken (doubtless by the inland channel which -was then open from the Stour to the Thames) to Greenwich, where he was -imprisoned for seven months[26]. A council had assembled in London for the -purpose of raising forty thousand pounds to buy off the invaders. -According to the account used by Higden[27], Elphege refused to sanction -the payment of a ransom of three thousand pounds for his own person: he -was accordingly taken from prison, and on the 13th of the Calends of May, -1010, was stoned to death by the Danes disappointed of his ransom. -Therefore a pestilence fell upon the invaders, a _dolor viscerum_, which -destroyed them by tens and twenties so that a large number perished. The -earlier narrative of William of Malmesbury[28] is diversified by the -introduction of a miracle, and is otherwise more circumstantial. While the -archbishop was held in durance, a deadly sickness broke out among the -Danes, affecting them in troops (_catervatim_), and proving so rapid in -its effects that death ensued before they could feel pain. The stench of -their unburied bodies so infected the air as to bring a plague upon those -of them who had remained well. As the survivors were thrown into a panic, -"sine numero, sine modo," Elphege appeared upon the scene, and having -administered to them the consecrated bread, restored them to health and -put an end to the plague. - -Disregarding what is fabulous, we may take these narratives to establish -the fact that a swift and fatal pestilence did break out among the Danes -in Kent. It had consisted probably of the same forms of camp sickness, -including dysentery (as the name _dolor viscerum_ implies), which have -occurred in later times. It is the only instance of the kind recorded in -the early history. - - -Medieval Famine-pestilences. - -The foregoing are all the instances of pestilence in early English -history, unconnected with famine, that have been collected in a search -through the most likely sources. The history of English epidemics, -previous to the Black Death, is almost wholly a history of famine -sicknesses; and the list of such famines with attendant sickness, without -mentioning the years of mere scarcity, is a considerable one. - -TABLE OF FAMINE-PESTILENCES IN ENGLAND. - - Year Character Authority - - 679 Three years' famine in Sussex Beda, _Hist. Eccles._ Sec. 290 - from droughts - - 793 General famine and severe Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, _sub - mortality anno_. Roger of Howden. - Simeon of Durham - - 897 Mortality of men and cattle Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Florence - for three years during and of Worcester. Annales - after Danish invasion Cambriae (_anno_ 896) - - 962 Great mortality: "the great Anglo-Saxon Chronicle - fever in London" - - 976 Famine Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Roger of - Howden - - 984 } Famine. Fever of men and Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Roger of - 986 } murrain of cattle Howden. Simeon of Durham. - 987 } Malmesbury. _Gest. Pontif. - Angl._ p. 171. Flor. of - Worcester. Roger of Wendover, - _Flor. Hist._ Bromton (in - Twysden). Higden - - 1005 Desolation following expulsion Henry of Huntingdon - of Danes - - 1036 } Famine Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Henry of - 1039 } Huntingdon - - 1044 Famine Anglo-Saxon Chronicle - - 1046 Very hard winter; pestilence Anglo-Saxon Chronicle - and murrain - - 1048 } Great mortality of men and Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (_sub - 1049 } cattle anno_ 1049). Roger of Howden. - Simeon of Durham (_sub anno_ - 1048) - - 1069 Wasting of Yorkshire Simeon of Durham, ii. 188 - - 1086 } Great fever-pestilence. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. - 1087 } Sharp famine Malmesbury. Henry of - Huntingdon, and most - annalists - - 1091 Siege of Durham by the Scots Simeon of Durham, ii. 339 - - 1093 } Floods; hard winter; severe Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Annals - 1095 } famines; universal of Winchester. William of - 1096 } sickness and mortality Malmesbury. Henry of - 1097 } Huntingdon. Annals of Margan. - Matthew Paris, and others - - 1103 } General pestilence and Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Roger of - 1104 } murrain Wendover - 1105 } - - 1110 } Famine Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Roger of - 1111 } Wendover - - 1112 "Destructive pestilence" Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Annals - of Osney. Annales Cambriae - - 1114 Famine in Ireland; flight Annals of Margan - or death of people - - 1125 Most dire famine in all Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. William - England; pestilence and of Malmesbury, _Gest. Pont._ - murrain p. 442. Henry of Huntingdon. - Annals of Margan. Roger of - Howden. - - [1130 Great murrain Annals of Margan. Anglo-Saxon - Chronicle (_sub anno_ 1131)] - - 1137 } Famine from civil war; Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Annals - 1140 } mortality of Winchester. Henry of - Huntingdon (1138) - - 1143 Famine and mortality. Gesta Stephani, p. 98. William - of Newburgh. Henry of - Huntingdon - - 1171 Famine in London in Spring Stow, _Survey of London_ - - 1172 Dysentery among the troops Radulphus de Diceto, _Imag. - in Ireland Hist._ i. 348 - - 1173 "Tussis quaedam mala et Chronica de Mailros - inaudita" - - 1175 Pestilence; famine Benedict of Peterborough. Roger - of Howden - - 1189 Famine and mortality Annals of Margan. Giraldus - Cambrensis, _Itin. Walliae_ - - 1194} Effects of a five years' Annals of Burton. William of - 1195} scarcity; great mortality Newburgh. Roger of Howden - 1196} over all England iii. 290. Rigord. Bromton - 1197} (in Twysden col. 1271). - Radulphus de Diceto (_sub - anno_ 1197) - - 1201 Unprecedented plague of Chronicon de Lanercost (probably - people and murrain of relates to 1203) - animals - - 1203 Great famine and mortality Annals of Waverley. Annals of - Tewkesbury. Annals of Margan. - Ralph of Coggeshall (_sub - anno_ 1205) - - 1210 Sickly year throughout Annals of Margan - England - - 1234 Third year of scarcity; Roger of Wendover. Annals of - sickness Tewkesbury - - 1247 Pestilence from September Matthew Paris. Higden - to November; dearth and Annales Cambriae (_sub anno_ - famine 1248) - - 1257} Bad harvests; famine and Matthew Paris. Annals of - 1258} fever in London and the Tewkesbury. Continuator of M. - 1259} country Paris (1259). Rishanger - - 1268 Probably murrain only. Chronicon de Lanercost - ("Lungessouth") - - 1271 Great famine and pestilence Continuator of William of - in England and Ireland Newburgh ii. 560 [doubtful] - - [1274 Beginning of a great imported Rishanger (also _sub anno_ - murrain among 1275). Contin. Fl. of - sheep Worcester _sub anno_ 1276] - - 1285 Deaths from heat and Rishanger - drought - - 1294 Great scarcity; epidemics Rishanger. Continuator of - of flux Florence of Worcester p. 405. - Trivet - - 1315} General famine in England; Trokelowe. Walsingham, _Hist. - 1316} great mortality from fever, Angl._ i. 146. Contin. - flux &c.; murrain Trivet, pp. 18, 27. Rogers, - _Hist. of Agric. and Prices_ - - 1322 Famine and mortality in Higden. Annales Londinenses - Edward II.'s army in - Scotland; scarcity in - London - -The period covered by this long list is itself a long one; and the -intervals between successive famine-pestilences are sometimes more than a -generation. A history of epidemics is necessarily a morbid history. In -this chapter of it, we search out the lean years, saying nothing of the -fat years; and by exclusively dwelling upon the dark side we may form an -entirely wrong opinion of the comforts or hardships, prosperity or -adversity, of these remote times. English writers of the earliest period, -when they use generalities, are loud in praise of the advantages of their -own island; until we come to the fourteenth century poem of 'The Vision of -Piers the Ploughman' we should hardly suspect, from their usual strain, -that England was other than an earthly paradise, and every village an -Auburn, "where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain." There is a -poem preserved in Higden's _Polychronicon_ by one Henricus, who is almost -certainly Henry archdeacon of Huntingdon in the time of Henry I., although -the poem is not included among the archdeacon's extant verse. The subject -is 'De Praerogativis Angliae,' and the period, be it remarked, is one of -the early Norman reigns, when the heel of the conquering race is supposed -to have been upon the neck of the English. Yet this poem contains the -famous boast of 'Merry England,' and much else that is the reverse of -unhappy:-- - - "Anglia terra ferax et fertilis angulus orbis. - Anglia plena jocis, gens libera, digna jocari; - Libera gens, cui libera mens et libera lingua; - Sed lingua melior liberiorque manus. - Anglia terrarum decus et flos finitimarum, - Est contenta sui fertilitate boni. - Externas gentes consumptis rebus egentes, - Quando fames laedit, recreat et reficit. - Commoda terra satis mirandae fertilitatis - Prosperitate viget, cum bona pacis habet[29]." - -Or, to take another distich, apparently by Alfred of Beverley, - - "Insula praedives, quae toto non eget orbe, - Et cujus totus indiget orbis ope." - -Or, in Higden's own fourteenth century words, after quoting these earlier -estimates: "Prae ceteris gulae dedita, in victu et vestitu multum -sumptuosa[30]." - -On the other hand there is a medieval proverbial saying which places -England in a light strangely at variance with this native boast of -fertility, plenty, and abundance overflowing to the famished peoples -abroad: "Tres plagae tribus regionibus appropriari solent, Anglorum fames, -Gallorum ignis, Normannorum lepra"--three afflictions proper to three -countries, famine to England, St Anthony's fire to France, leprosy to -Normandy[31]. Whatever the "lepra Normannorum" may refer to, there is no -doubt that St Anthony's fire, or ergotism from the use of bread containing -the grains of spurred rye, was a frequent scourge of some parts of France; -and, in common repute abroad, famine seems to have been equally -characteristic of England. Perhaps the explanation of England's evil name -for famines is that there were three great English famines in the medieval -history, before the Black Death, separated by generations, no doubt, but -yet of such magnitude and attended by so disgraceful circumstances that -the rumour of them must have spread to foreign countries and made England -a by-word among the nations. These were the famines of 1194-96, 1257-59, -and 1315-16. Of the first we have a tolerably full account by William of -Newburgh, who saw it in Yorkshire; of the second we have many particulars -and generalities by Matthew Paris of St Albans, who died towards the end -of it; and of the third we have an account by one of his successors as -historiographer at St Albans, John Trokelowe. All other references to -famine in England are meagre beside the narratives of these competent -observers, although there were probably two or three famines in the Norman -period equally worthy of the historian's pen. For the comprehension of -English famine-pestilences in general, we ought to take the best recorded -first; but it will be on the whole more convenient to observe the -chronological order, and to introduce, as occasion offers, some -generalities on the types of disease which famine induced, the extent of -the mortalities, and the conditions of English agriculture and food-supply -which made possible occasional famines of such magnitude. - -From the great plague "of Cadwallader's time," which corresponds in -history to the foreign invasion of pestilence in 664, until nearly the end -of the Anglo-Saxon rule, there is little recorded of famines and -consequent epidemic sickness. It does not follow that the period was one -of plenty and prosperity for the people at large. The Anglo-Saxon -Chronicle is at no period detailed or circumstantial on the subject of -famines and pestilences; and although the entries become more numerous in -the last hundred years before the Chronicle came to an end in 1137, their -paucity in the earlier period probably means no more than the imperfection -of the record. Some of the generalities of Malthus might be applied to -help the imagination over a period of history which we might otherwise be -disposed to view as the Golden Age. One of these, originally written for -the South Sea Islands, is applicable to all romantic pictures of "rude -plenty," such as the picture of the Anglo-Saxon household in _Ivanhoe_. It -has been remarked of Scott as a novelist that he always feeds everyone -well; but the picture, grateful to the imagination though it be, is -probably an illusion. "In a state of society," says Malthus, "where the -lives of the inferior order of the people seem to be considered by their -superiors as of little or no value, it is evident that we are very liable -to be deceived with regard to the appearances of abundance"; and again: -"We may safely pronounce that among the shepherds of the North of Europe, -war and famine were the principal checks that kept the population down to -the level of their scanty means of subsistence." The history of English -agriculture is known with some degree of accuracy from the thirteenth -century, and it is a history of prices becoming steadier and crops more -certain. It is not to be supposed that tillage was more advanced before -the Conquest than after it. On the other hand the probabilities are that -England had steadily emerged from a pastoral state. It would be unfair to -judge of the state of rural England at any time by the state of Wales in -the twelfth century, as it is described by Giraldus Cambrensis, or by the -condition of Ireland as described from the same traveller's observations. -But in the absence of any concrete view of primitive England itself, the -picture of the two neighbouring provinces may be introduced here. - -Ireland, says Giraldus, closely following Beda, is a fertile land -neglected; it had no agriculture, industries or arts; its inhabitants were -rude and inhospitable, leading a purely pastoral life, and living more -upon milk than upon meat. At the same time there was little sickness; the -island had little need of physicians; you will hardly ever find people ill -unless they be at the extremity of death; between continuous good health -and final dissolution there was no middle term. The excessive number of -children born blind, or deaf, or deformed, he ascribes to incestuous -unions and other sexual laxities[32]. - -The picture of Wales is that of a not less primitive society[33]. The -Welsh do not congregate in towns, or in villages, or in fortified places, -but live solitary in the woods; they build no sumptuous houses of stone -and lime, but only ozier booths, sufficient for the year, which they run -up with little labour or cost. They have neither orchards nor gardens, and -little else than pasture land. They partake of a sober meal in the -evening, and if there should be little or nothing to eat at the close of -day, they wait patiently until the next evening. They do not use -table-cloths nor towels; they are more natural than neat (_naturae magis -student quam nitori_). They lie down to sleep in their day clothes, all in -one room, with a coarse covering drawn over them, their feet to the fire, -lying close to keep each other warm, and when they are sore on one side -from lying on the hard floor, they turn over to the other. There are no -beggars among this nation. It is of interest, from the point of view of -the "positive checks" of Malthus, to note that Giraldus more than hints at -the practice of a grosser form of immorality than he had charged the Irish -with. Spinning and weaving were of course not unknown, for the hard and -rough blanket mentioned above was a native product. By the time that -Higden wrote (about 1340), he has to record a considerable advance in the -civilization of Wales. Having used the description of Giraldus, he adds: -"They now acquire property, apply themselves to agriculture, and live in -towns[34]." But in the reign of Henry II., it was found easy to bring the -rebellious Welsh to terms by stopping the supplies of corn from England, -upon which they were largely dependent[35]. - -Of the condition of Scotland in the twelfth century we have no such sketch -as Giraldus has left for Wales and Ireland. Uncivilized compared with -England, the northern part of the island must certainly have been, if we -may trust the indignant references by Simeon of Durham and Henry of -Huntingdon to the savage practices of the Scots who swarmed over the -border, with or without their king to lead them, or the remark by William -of Malmesbury concerning the Scots who went on the Crusade leaving behind -them the insects of their native country. - -Giraldus intended to have written an itinerary or topography of England -also, but his purpose does not appear to have been fulfilled. Higden, his -immediate successor in that kind of writing a century and a half later, is -content, in his section on England, to reproduce the generalities of -earlier authors from Pliny downwards. Of these, we have already quoted the -'Prerogatives of England' by Henry of Huntingdon, from which one might -infer that the British Isles, under the Norman yoke, were the Islands of -the Blest. On the other hand, the impression made by the details of the -Domesday survey upon a historian of the soundest judgment, Hallam, is an -impression of poor cultivation and scanty sustenance. "There cannot be a -more striking proof," he says, "of the low condition of English -agriculture in the eleventh century than is exhibited in Domesday book. -Though almost all England had been partially cultivated, and we find -nearly the same manors, except in the north, which exist at present, yet -the value and extent of cultivated ground are inconceivably small. With -every allowance for the inaccuracies and partialities of those by whom -that famous survey was completed, we are lost in amazement at the constant -recurrence of two or three carucates in demesne, with folkland occupied by -ten or a dozen villeins, valued all together at forty shillings, as the -return of a manor which now would yield a competent income to a -gentleman[36]." - - Whether, the population at the Domesday survey were nearer two - millions than one, the people were almost wholly on the land. Of the - size of the chief towns, as the Normans found them, we may form a not - incorrect estimate from the Domesday enumeration of houses held of the - king or of other superiors[37]. London, Winchester and Bristol do not - come at all into the survey. Besides these, the towns of the first - rank are Norwich, York, Lincoln, Thetford, Colchester, Ipswich, - Gloucester, Oxford, Cambridge, and Exeter. - - Norwich had 1320 burgesses in the time of Edward the Confessor; in the - borough were 665 English burgesses rendering custom, and 480 bordarii - rendering none on account of their poverty; there were also more than - one hundred French households. Lincoln had 970 inhabited houses in - King Edward's time, of which 200 were waste at the survey. Thetford - had 943 burgesses before the Conquest, and at the survey 720, with 224 - houses vacant. York was so desolated just before the survey that it is - not easy to estimate its ordinary population; but it may be put at - about 1200 houses. Gloucester had 612 burgesses. Oxford seems to have - had about 800 houses; and for Cambridge we find an enumeration of the - houses in nine of the ten wards of the town in King Edward's time, the - total being about 400. Colchester appears to have had some 700 houses, - Ipswich 538 burgesses, with 328 houses "waste" so far as tax was - concerned. Exeter had 300 king's houses, and an uncertain number more. - Next in importance come such places as Southampton, Wallingford, - Northampton, Leicester, Warwick, Shrewsbury, Nottingham, Coventry, - Derby, Canterbury, Yarmouth, Rochester, Dover, Sandwich (about 400 - houses), and Sudbury. In a third class may be placed towns like - Dorchester, Ilchester, Bridport, Wareham, Shaftesbury, Bath, - Chichester, Lewes, Guildford, Hythe, Romney, Pevensey, Windsor, Bath, - Chester, Worcester, Hereford, Huntingdon, Stamford, Grantham, - Hertford, St Albans, Torchesey, Maldon, each with from 100 to 200 - burgesses. Dover and Sandwich each supplied twenty ships, with crews - of twenty-four men, for King Edward's service during fifteen days of - the year. In Hereford there were six smiths, each rendering one penny - a year for his forge, and making 120 nails of the king's iron. Many of - these houses were exceedingly small, with a frontage of seven feet; - the poorest class were mere sheds, built in the ditch against the - town wall, as at York and Canterbury. - -It would be within the mark to say that less than one-tenth of the -population of England was urban in any distinctive sense of the term. -After London, Norwich, York, and Lincoln, there were probably no towns -with five thousand inhabitants. There were, of course, the simpler forms -of industries, and there was a certain amount of commerce from the Thames, -the East Coast, and the Channel ports. The fertile soil of England -doubtless sustained abundance of fruit trees and produced corn to the -measure of perhaps four or six times the seed. There were flocks of sheep, -yielding more wool than the country used, herds of swine and of cattle. -The exports of wool, hides, iron, lead, and white metal gave occasion to -the importation of commodities and luxuries from Flanders, Normandy, and -Gascony. If there was "rude plenty" in England, it was for a sparse -population, and it was dependent upon the clemency of the skies. A bad -season brought scarcity and murrain, and two bad seasons in succession -brought famine and pestilence. - -Of the general state of health we may form some idea from the Anglo-Saxon -leechdoms, or collections of remedies, charms and divinations, supposed to -date from the eleventh century[38]. The maladies to which the English -people were liable in these early times correspond on the whole to the -everyday diseases of our own age. There were then, as now, cancers and -consumptions, scrofula or "kernels," the gout and the stone, the falling -sickness and St Vitus' dance, apoplexies and palsies, jaundice, dropsies -and fluxes, quinsies and anginas, sore eyes and putrid mouth, carbuncles, -boils and wildfire, agues, rheums and coughs. Maladies peculiar to women -occupy a chief place, and there is evidence that hysteria, the outcome of -hardships, entered largely into the forms of sickness, as it did in the -time of Sydenham. Among the curiosities of the nosology may be mentioned -wrist-drop, doubtless from working in lead. One great chapter in disease, -the sickness and mortality of infants and children, is almost a complete -blank. It ought doubtless to have been the greatest chapter of all. The -population remained small, for one reason among others, that the children -would be difficult to rear. There is no direct evidence; but we may infer -from analogous circumstances, that the inexpansive population meant an -enormous infant mortality. The sounds which fell on the ear of AEneas as he -crossed the threshold of the nether world may be taken as prophetic, like -so much else in Virgil, of the experience of the Middle Ages: - - "Continuo auditae voces, vagitus et ingens - Infantumque animae flentes, in limine primo: - Quos dulcis vitae exsortes, et ab ubere raptos, - Abstulit atra dies, et funere mersit acerbo." - -We come, then, to the chronology of famine-pestilences, and first in the -Anglo-Saxon period. The years from 664 to 685 are occupied, as we have -seen, by a great plague, probably the bubo-plague, which returned in 1348 -as the Black Death, affecting, like the latter, the whole of England and -Ireland on its first appearance, and afterwards particular monasteries, -such as Barking and Jarrow. But it is clear that famine-sickness was also -an incident of the same years. The metrical romancist of the fourteenth -century, Robert of Brunne, was probably mistaken in tracing the great -plague of "Cadwaladre's time" to famine in the first instance; there is no -such suggestion in the authentic history of Beda. But that historian does -make a clear reference to famine in Sussex about the year 679[39]. -Describing the conversion of Sussex to Christianity by Wilfrid, he says -that the province had been afflicted with famine owing to three seasons of -drought, that the people were dying of hunger, and that often forty or -fifty together, "inedia macerati," would proceed to the edge of the Sussex -cliffs, and, joining hands, throw themselves into the sea. But on the very -day when the people accepted the Christian baptism, there fell a -plenteous rain, the earth flourished anew, and a glad and fruitful season -ensued[40]. - -The anarchy in Northumbria which followed the death of Beda (in 735), with -the decline of piety and learning in the northern monasteries, is said to -have led to famine and plague[41]. It is not until the year 793 that an -entry of famine and mortality occurs in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It is -in keeping with the disappointing nature of all these early records that -Simeon of Durham and Roger of Howden, the two compilers who had access to -lost records, are more particular in enumerating the portents that -preceded the calamity than in describing its actual circumstances. Then a -whole century elapses (but for a vague entry under the year 822) until we -come to the three calamitous years, with 897 as the centre, which followed -Alfred's famous resistance to the Danes. In that mortality, many of the -chief thanes died, and there was a murrain of cattle, with a scarcity of -food in Ireland. Two generations pass before the chronicle contains -another entry of the kind: in 962 there was a great mortality, and the -"great fever" was in London. At no long intervals there are two more -famines, in 976 and 986. That of 986 (or 987) would appear to have been -severe; the church plate at Winchester was melted for the benefit of the -starving[42], and there was "a fever of men and a murrain of cattle[43]." -After the expulsion of the Danes in 1005, says Henry of Huntingdon, there -was such desolation of famine as no one remembered. Then in 1010 or 1011 -comes the incident of St Elphege, already given. From 1036 to 1049 we find -mention of four, or perhaps five, famines, those of the years 1046 and -1049 being marked by a great mortality of men and murrain of cattle. - -Except in Yorkshire, the Norman Conquest had no immediate effects upon the -people of England in the way of famine and pestilence. From the last great -mortality of 1049, a period of nearly forty years elapses until we come to -the great pestilence and sharp famine in the last year of the Conqueror's -reign (1086-7). The harrying of Yorkshire, however, is too important a -local incident to be passed over in this history. Of these ruthless -horrors in the autumn of 1069 we have some particulars from the pen of -Simeon of Durham, who has contemporary authority. There was such hunger, -he says, that men ate the flesh of their own kind, of horses, of dogs, and -of cats. Others sold themselves into perpetual slavery in order that they -might be able to sustain their miserable lives on any terms (like the -Chinese in later times). Others setting out in exile from their country -perished before their journey was ended. It was horrible to look into the -houses and farmyards, or by the wayside, and see the human corpses -dissolved in corruption and crawling with worms. There was no one to bury -them, for all were gone, either in flight or dead by the sword and famine. -The country was one wide solitude, and remained so for nine years. Between -York and Durham no one dwelt, and travellers went in great fear of wild -beasts and of robbers[44]. William of Malmesbury says that the city of -York was so wasted by fire that an old inhabitant would not have -recognized it; and that the country was still waste for sixty miles at the -time of his writing (1125)[45]. In the Domesday survey we find that there -were 540 houses so waste that they paid nothing, 400 houses "not -inhabited," of which the better sort pay one penny and others less, and -only 50 inhabited houses paying full dues. - -The same local chronicler who has left particulars of the devastation of -1069-70, has given also a picture of the siege of Durham by Malcolm -Canmore in 1091, which may serve to realize for us what a medieval siege -was, and what the Scots marches had to endure for intervals during several -centuries:-- - - Malcolm advancing drives the Northumbrians before him, some into the - woods and hills, others into the city of Durham; for there have they - always a sure refuge. Thither they drive their whole flocks and herds - and carry their furniture, so that there is hardly room within the - town for so great a crowd. Malcolm arrives and invests the city. It - was not easy for one to go outside, and the sheep and cattle could not - be driven to pasture: the churchyard was filled with them, and the - church itself was scarcely kept clear of them. Mixed with the cattle, - a crowd of women and children surrounded the church, so that the - voices of the choristers were drowned by the clamour. The heat of - summer adds to the miseries of famine. Every-where throughout the town - were the sounds of grief, 'et plurima mortis imago,' as in the sack of - Troy. The siege is raised by the miraculous intervention of St - Cuthbert[46]. - -The wasting of Yorkshire by William and the five incursions of the Scots -into Northumberland and Durham in the reign of Malcolm Canmore had the -effect of reducing a large part of the soil of England to a comparatively -unproductive state. The effacement of farms (and churches) in Hampshire, -for the planting of the New Forest, had the same effect in a minor degree. -The rigorous enforcement of the forest laws in the interests of the Norman -nobles must have served also to remove one considerable source of the -means of subsistence from the people. Whether these things, together with -the general oppression of the poor, contributed much or little to what -followed, it is the fact that the long period from the last two years of -William to the welcomed advent of Henry II. to the throne in 1154, is -filled with a record of famines, pestilences, and other national -misfortunes such as no other period of English history shows. - -The first general famine and pestilence under Norman rule was in the years -1086 and 1087, the last of the Conqueror's reign. It is probable from the -entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that the aggravation (for which we -must always look in order to explain a historical famine and pestilence) -was due to two bad harvests in succession. The year 1086 was "heavy, -toilsome and sorrowful," through failure of the corn and fruit crops owing -to an inclement season, and through murrain of cattle[47]. Some form of -sickness appears to have been prevalent between that harvest and the next. -Almost every other man, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, was stricken with -fever, and that so sharply that many died of it. "Alas! how miserable and -how rueful a time was then! when the wretched men lay driven almost to -death, and afterwards came the sharp famine and destroyed them quite." It -is probably a careless gloss upon that, by a historian of the next -generation[48], when he says that "a promiscuous fever destroyed more than -half the people," and that famine, coming after, destroyed those whom the -fever had spared[49]. But there can be no question that this was one of -those great periodic conjunctions of famine and fever ([Greek: limon homou -kai loimon]), of which we shall find fuller details in the chronicles of -the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is easy to understand -that England, with all her wealth of fruits and corn in a good season, had -no reserve for the poor at least, and sometimes not even for the rich, to -get through two or more bad seasons with. How much the corn crop in those -days depended on the season is clear from the entry in the chronicle two -years after (1089), that reaping was still in progress at Martinmas (11 -November) and even later. Fields cultivated to yield an average of only -four or six times the seed were, of course, more at the mercy of the -seasons than the highly cultivated corn-land of our own time. - -The next famine with pestilence in England, seven years later, or in the -seventh year of William Rufus, introduces us to a new set of -considerations. It was the time when the exactions of tribute for the -king's wars in Normandy, or for the satisfaction of his greed and that of -his court, were severely felt both by the church and the people. England, -says one[50], was suffocated and unable to breathe. Both clergy and -laity, says another[51], were in such misery that they were weary of life. -But the most remarkable phraseology is that of William of Malmesbury, the -chief historian of the period, who seldom descends from the region of high -political and ecclesiastical affairs to take notice of such things as -famine and pestilence. In the 7th year of Rufus, he says, "agriculture -failed" on account of the tributes which the king had decreed from his -position in Normandy. The fields running to waste, a famine followed, and -that in turn was succeeded by a mortality so general that the dying were -left untended and the dead unburied[52]. The phrase about the lack of -cultivation is a significant and not incredible statement, which places -the England of Rufus in the same light as certain belated feudal parts of -India within recent memory. - - In the villages of Gujerat, when the festival comes round early in - May, the chief of a village collects the cultivators and tells them - that it is time for them to commence work. They say: "No! the - assessment was too heavy last year, you lay too many taxes upon us." - However, after much higgling, and presents made to the more important - men, a day is fixed for cultivation to begin, and the clearing and - manuring of the fields proceeds as before[53]. But while Gujerat was - still possessed by hundreds of petty feudal chiefs under the Mahratta - rule, previous to the establishment of the British Agency in 1821, the - exactions of tribute by the Baroda government were so extreme, and - enforced by so violent means[54], that cultivation was almost - neglected; the towns and villages swarmed with idlers, who subsisted - upon milk and ghee from their cows, while indolence and inactivity - affected the whole community[55]. A dreadful famine had "raged with - destructive fury" over Gujerat and Kattiwar for more than one year - about 1812-13-14, which was followed, not by a contagious fever, but - by the true bubo-plague. - -If the English historian's language, "agricultura defecit," with -reference to the tribute exacted by Rufus, have that fitness which we have -reason to expect from him,--Higden varies it to "ita ut agricultura -cessaret et fames succederet,"--then the famine and mortality about the -years 1094-5 were due to no less remarkable a cause than a refusal to -cultivate the land. It is not to be supposed that the incubus of excessive -tribute passed away with the accession of Henry I. The Anglo-Saxon -Chronicle repeats the complaint of heavy taxation in connexion with bad -harvests and murrains in 1103, 1105 and 1110[56]. Severe winters, or -autumn floods, with murrains and scarcity, are recorded also for the years -1111, 1115, 1116, 1117, 1124 and 1125, the famine of 1125 having been -attended with a mortality, and having been sufficiently great and general -to be mentioned by several chroniclers[57]. In the midst of these years of -scarcity and its effects upon the population, there occurs one singular -entry of another kind in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, under the year 1112: -"This was a very good year, and very abundant in wood and in field; but it -was a very sad and sorrowful one, through a most destructive -pestilence[58]." Under the year 1130, the annalist of the Welsh monastery -of Margan, who is specially attentive to domestic events, records a -murrain of cattle all over England, which lasted several years so that -scarcely one township escaped the pest, the pigsties becoming suddenly -empty, and whole meadows swept of their cattle. It is to the same murrain -that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle refers under the year 1131: in towns where -there had been ten or twelve ploughs going there was not one left, and the -man who had 200 or 300 swine had not one left; after that died the -domestic fowls. - -These things happened from time to time in the comparatively prosperous -reign of Henry I. But with the death of Henry in 1135, there began a state -of misery and lawlessness lasting almost to the accession of Henry II. in -1154, beside which the former state of England was spoken of as "most -flourishing[59]." Besides the barbarities of the Scots and the Welsh on -the northern and western marches[60], there were the civil wars of the -factions of King Stephen and the Empress Maud, and the cruelties and -predations of the unruly nobles under the walls of a thousand newly-built -strongholds. A graphic account of the condition of England remains to us -from the pen of an eyewitness, the observant author of the _Gesta -Stephani_[61]. Under the year 1143 he writes that there was most dire -famine in all England; the people ate the flesh of dogs and horses or the -raw garbage of herbs and roots. The people in crowds pined and died, or -another part entered on a sorrowful exile with their whole families. One -might see houses of great name standing nearly empty, the residents of -either sex and of every age being dead. As autumn drew near and the fields -whitened for the harvest, there was no one to reap them, for the -cultivators were cut off by the pestilent hunger which had come between. -To these home troubles was added the presence of a multitude of barbarous -adventurers, without bowels of pity and compassion, who had flocked to the -country for military service. The occasion was one of those which cause -the archdeacon of Huntingdon to break out into his elegiac verse: - - "Ecce Stygis facies, consimilisque lues[62]." - -"And in those days," says another, "there was no king in Israel[63]." The -Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which comes to an end in this scene of universal -gloom, describes how one might go a day's journey and never find a man -sitting in a town, or the land tilled, and how men who once were rich had -to go begging their bread, concluding with the words, "And they said -openly that Christ and His saints slept." - -Among the penances of Henry II. after the murder of Becket, there is -recorded his charity in feeding during a dearth ten thousand persons daily -from the first of April, 1171, until the harvest[64]. But, apart from a -reference to a flux among the troops in Ireland in 1172, from errors of -diet[65], the long reign of Henry II. is marked by only one record of -general pestilence. It is recorded by the best contemporary writer, -Benedict of Peterborough, and it is the first instance in which the number -of burials in a day (perhaps at Peterborough) is given. In the year 1175, -he says, there was in England and the adjacent regions a pestilential -mortality of men, such that on many days seven or eight corpses were -carried out to be buried. And immediately upon that pestilential mortality -there followed a dire famine[66]. It is to be observed that the famine is -explicitly stated to have come after the pestilence, just as in the great -mortality of 1087; and, as in the latter case, it may be that a hard -winter, with scarcity of food, brought a general sickness, and that the -scarcity had been raised to famine point by a second bad harvest. The -entry in the chronicle of Melrose for 1173 may refer to Scotland only: a -bad kind of cough, unheard of before, affected almost everyone far and -wide, whereof, "or from which pest," many died. This is perhaps the only -special reference to "tussis" as epidemic until the influenzas of the -seventeenth century. - -The comparative freedom of the long reign of Henry II. from famines and -national distress probably arose as much from good government as from the -clemency of the seasons. The country was growing rich by foreign trade. In -1190 the two leading Jews of York, Joyce and Benedict, were occupying -residences in the heart of the town like royal palaces in size and in the -sumptuousness of their furniture. The same historian, William of -Newburgh, who records the king's protection of these envied capitalists, -mentions also his protection of "the poor, the widows and the orphans," -and his liberal charities. That the king's protection of his poorer -subjects was not unneeded, would be obvious if we could trust the -extraordinary account of the keen traders of London which is put by -Richard of Devizes into the mouth of a hostile witness[67]. The peoples of -all nations, it appears, flocked to London, each nationality contributing -to the morals of the capital its proper vices and manners. There was no -righteous person in London, no, not one; there were more thieves in London -than in all France[68]. In the entirely different account, of the same -date, by an enthusiastic Londoner, the monk Fitz-Stephen, the only -"plagues" of London are said to be "the immoderate drinking of fools and -the frequency of fires." The city and suburbs had one hundred and -twenty-six small parish churches, besides thirteen greater conventual -churches; and it was a model to all the world for religious observances. -"Nearly all the bishops, abbots, and magnates of England are, as it were, -citizens and freemen of London; having there their own splendid houses, to -which they resort, where they spend largely when summoned to great -councils by the king or by their metropolitan, or drawn thither by their -own private affairs[69]." The archdeacon of London, of the same date, -Peter of Blois, in a letter to the pope, Innocent III., concerning the -extent of his duties and the smallness of his stipend, gives the parish -churches in the city at one hundred and twenty, and the population at -forty thousand[70]. The Germans who came in the train of Richard I. on -his return to England in 1194, after his release from the hands of the -emperor, were amazed at the display of wealth and finery which the -Londoners made to welcome back the king; if the emperor had known the -riches of England, they said, he would have demanded a heavier ransom[71]. -The ransom, all the same, required a second, or even a third levy before -it was raised, owing, it was said, to peculation; and the ecclesiastics, -who held a large part of the soil, appear to have had so little in hand to -pay their share that they had to pledge the gold and silver vessels of the -altar[72]. - -The year of Richard's accession, 1189, is given by the annalist of the -Welsh monastery of Margan, as a year of severe famine and of a mortality -of men. Probably it was a local famine, and it may well have been the same -in which Giraldus Cambrensis says that he himself saw crowds of poor -people coming day after day to the gates of the monastery of Margan, so -that the brethren took counsel and sent a ship to Bristol for corn[73]. -The great and general famine with pestilence in Richard's time was in the -years 1193, 1194, 1195, 1196 and 1197, and it appears to have been felt in -France, in the basin of the Danube, and over all Europe, as well as in -England. Of the pestilence which came with it in England we have an -exceptionally full account from the pen of William of Newburgh. The -monastery in which William wrote his history was situated among woods by -the side of a stream under the Hambledon hills in Yorkshire, on the road -between York and the mouth of the Tees; so that when he says of this -famine and pestilence, "we speak what we do know, and testify what we have -seen," he may be taken as recording the experience of a sufficiently -typical region of rural England. - -His narrative of the pestilence[74] is given under the year 1196, which -was the fourth year of the scarcity or famine: After the crowds of poor -had been dying on all sides of want, a most savage plague ensued, as if -from air corrupted by dead bodies of the poor. This pestilence showed but -little respect even for those who had abundance of food; and as to those -who were in want, it put an end to their long agony of hunger. The disease -crept about everywhere, always of one type, namely that of an acute fever. -Day after day it seized so many, and finished so many more, so that there -were scarcely to be found any to give heed to the sick or to bury the -dead. The usual rites of burial were omitted, except in the case of some -nobler or richer person; at whatever hour anyone died the body was -forthwith committed to the earth, and in many places great trenches were -made if the number of corpses was too great to afford time for burying -them one by one. And as so many were dying every day, even those who were -in health fell into low spirits, and went about with pale faces, -themselves the living picture of death. In the monasteries alone was this -pestilence comparatively unfelt. After it had raged on all sides for five -or six months, it subsided when the winter cold came. - -Those lean years were doubtless followed by seven fat years; for it is not -until 1203, the fourth year of John, that we again meet with the records -of famine and pestilence. From various monasteries, from Waverley in -Sussex, Tewkesbury in Gloucester and Margan in Glamorgan, we have the same -testimony--"fames magna et mortalitas," "fames valida, et saeva mortalitas -multitudinem pauperum extinguit," "maxima fames." The monks of Waverley -had to leave their own house and disperse themselves through various -monasteries. Two years after, 1205, there came so hard a season that the -winter-sown seed was almost killed by frost. The Thames was crossed on the -ice, and there was no ploughing for many weeks. An Essex annalist says -there was a famine, and quotes the famine prices: a quarter of wheat was -sold for a pound in many parts of England, although in Henry II.'s time it -was often as low as twelve pence; a quarter of beans ten shillings; a -quarter of oats forty pence, which used to be four pence[75]. The annalist -at Margan enters also the year 1210 as a sickly one throughout -England[76]. - -We are now come to the period when we can read the succession of these -events in the domestic life of the people from the more trustworthy -records of the St Albans school of historians. Of the scarcity and -sickness among the poor in 1234 we have some suggestive particulars by -Roger of Wendover[77], and for the series of famines and epidemics from -1257 to 1259 we have a comparatively full account by his famous successor -in the office of historiographer to the abbey, Matthew Paris[78]. The next -St Albans _scriptorius_, Rishanger[79], notes the kind of harvest every -year from 1259 to 1305, and for only one of those years after the scarcity -of 1259 was past, namely the year 1294, does he speak of the people dying -of hunger. His successor, John Trokelowe[80], carries on the annals to -1323, and gives us some particulars, not without diagnostic value, of the -great famine-sickness of 1315-16, and of the succession of dear years of -which the epidemic was an incident. It is on these contemporary accounts -by the St Albans school, together with the record for the year 1196 by -William of Newburgh, that our knowledge of the famine-pestilences of -England must be based. - -With the harvest of 1259 begins the tabulation of agricultural prices from -farm-bailiffs' accounts, by Professor Thorold Rogers, a work of vast -labour in which the economic history of the English people is written in -indubitable characters, and by means of which we are enabled to check the -more general and often rhetorical statements of the contemporary -historians. - -Although the history of the last year or two of John and of the earlier -years of Henry III. is full of turbulence and rapine, yet we hear of no -general distress among the cultivators of the soil. The contemporary -authority, Roger of Wendover, has no entry of the kind until 1234, -excepting a single note under the year 1222, that wheat rose to twelve -shillings the quarter. We hear of king John and his following as -plundering the rich churchmen and laymen all the way from St Albans to -Nottingham, of William Longspee, earl of Salisbury, carrying on the same -practices in the counties of Essex, Middlesex, Hertford, Cambridge and -Huntingdon, of the spoliation of the Isle of Ely, and of the occupation of -towns and villages in Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk by Louis, Dauphin of -France, the king-elect, or broken reed, on whom the Barons of Magna Charta -thought for a time to lean[81]. But the whole of that period, and of the -years following until 1234, is absolutely free from any record of -wide-spread distress among the lower class. We are reminded of the -observation by Philip de Comines, with the civil wars of York and -Lancaster in his mind, a saying which is doubtless true of all the -struggles in England for the settlement of the respective claims of king -and aristocracy: "England has this peculiar grace," says the French -statesman, "that neither the country, nor the people, nor the houses are -wasted or demolished; but the calamities and misfortunes of the war fall -only upon the soldiers and especially the nobility, of whom they are more -than ordinarily jealous: for nothing is perfect in this world." That -cannot apply of course to the barbarous incursions of the Scots and the -Welsh; for the northern marches were often reduced to desolation during a -period of three hundred years after the Conquest and were never more -desolate than in the reign of Richard II.; while the marches of Wales were -subject to not less ruthless spoliations until the concessions to the -Welsh by Edward I. Nor is the immunity of the peasantry from the troubles -of civil war to be taken as absolute; for we find under the year 1264, -when Simon de Montfort was in the field against the king, an explicit -statement that the small peasantry were plundered even to the poor -furniture of their cottages. But on the whole we may take it that the -paralysing effect of civil war seldom reached to the English lower classes -in the medieval period, that the tenour of their lives was seldom -disturbed except by famine or plague, and that kings and nobles were left -to fight it out among themselves. - -We become aware, however, from the time of the Great Charter, and during -the steady growth of the country's prosperity, of a widening chasm between -the rich and the poor within the ranks of the commons themselves, and that -too, not only in the centres of trade (as we shall see), but also in -country districts. The claims of feudal service did not prevent some among -the villagers from adding house to house, and field to field, thereby -marking in every parish the interval between the thriving and comfortable -and a residuum of _pauperes_ composed of the less capable or the less -fortunate. A curious story, told by Roger of Wendover of the village of -Abbotsley near St Neots, will serve as an illustration of a fact which we -might be otherwise well assured of from first principles[82]. - -The year 1234 was the third of a succession of lean years. So sharp was -the famine before the harvest of that year, that crowds of the poor went -to the fields in the month of July, and plucked the unripe ears of corn, -rubbing them in their hands and eating the raw grain. The St Albans monk -is full of indignation against the prevailing spirit of avarice which -reduced some of the people to that sad necessity: Alms had everywhere gone -out of fashion; the rich, abounding in all manner of temporal goods, were -so smitten with blind greed that they suffered Christian men, made in the -image of God, to die for want of food. Some, indeed, were so impious as to -say that their wealth was due to their own industry, and not to the gift -of God. Of that mind seem to have been the more prosperous cultivators of -the village of Abbotsley "who looked on the needy with an eye of -suspicion[83]." - - The following story is told of them. Seeing the poor making free with - their corn in the ear, they assembled in the parish church on a Sunday - in August, and assailed the parson with their clamours, demanding that - he would forthwith pronounce the ban of the Church upon those who - helped themselves to the ears of corn. The parson, notwithstanding a - well-known precedent in the Gospels, was about to yield to their - insistence, when a man of religion and piety rose in the congregation - and adjured the priest, in the name of God and all His saints, to - refrain from the sentence, adding that those who were in need were - welcome to help themselves to his own corn. The others, however, - insisted, and the parson was just beginning to ban the pilferers, when - a thunderstorm suddenly burst, with hail and torrents of rain. When - the storm had passed, the peasants went out to find their crops - destroyed,--all but that one simple and just man who found his corn - untouched. - -We have only to recall the minute subdivisions of the common field, or -fields, of the parish into half-acre strips separated by balks of turf, -and the fact that no two half-acres of the same cultivator lay together, -to realize how nice must have been the discrimination[84]. - -But the moral of the story is obvious. It is an appeal to the teaching and -the sanction of the Gospels, against the rooted belief of the natural man -that he owes what he has to his own industry and thrift, and that it is no -business of his to part with his goods for the sustenance of a helpless -and improvident class. - -The spirit of avarice, according to Wendover, permeated all classes at -this period, from high ecclesiastics downwards. Walter, archbishop of -York, had his granaries full of corn during the scarcity, some of it five -years old. When the peasants on his manors asked to be supplied from these -stores in the summer of 1234, the archbishop instructed his bailiffs to -give out the old corn on condition of getting new for it when the harvest -was over. It need not be told at length how the archbishop's barns at -Ripon were found on examination to be infested with vermin, how the corn -had turned mouldy and rotten, and how the whole of it had to be destroyed -by fire[85]. Of the same import are the raids upon the barns of the alien -or Italian clergy in 1228, in the diocese of Winchester and elsewhere, and -the ostentatious distribution by the raiders of doles to the poor[86]. - -The somewhat parallel course of public morality in the centres of trade, -or, as Wendover would call it, the prevalence of avarice, demands a brief -notice for our purpose. - -In every state of society, there will of course be rich and poor. But a -class of _pauperes_ seems to emerge more distinctly in the life of England -from about the beginning of the thirteenth century. The period corresponds -to the appearance on the scene of St Francis and his friars. Doubtless St -Francis was inspired by a true sense of what the time needed, even if it -be open to contend that his ministrations of charity brought out, -consolidated, and kept alive a helpless class who would have been less -heard of if they had been left to the tender mercies of economic -principles. The mission of the friars was not merely to the poor; it was -also to the rich, whether of the church or of the world, "to soften the -hardness of their hearts by the oil of preaching[87]." It was one of these -interpositions, ever needed and never wanting, to reduce the inequalities -of the human lot, not by preaching down-right theoretical communism, but, -more by force of rhetoric than of logic, to extort from the strong some -concessions to the weak, to mitigate the severity of the struggle for -existence, and to bring the respectable vices of greed and sharp practice -to the bar of conscience. - -As early as 1196 there is the significant incident, in the city of London, -of the rising of the poorer class and the middling class, headed by -Fitzosbert Longbeard, himself one of the privileged citizens, against an -assessment in which the class represented by the mayor and aldermen were -alleged to have been very tender of their own interests[88]. Longbeard was -hailed as "the friend of the poor," and, having lost his life in their -cause (whether in the street before Bow Church, or on a gallows at Tyburn, -or at the Smithfield elms, the narratives are not agreed), he is -celebrated by the sympathetic Matthew Paris as "the martyr of the -poor[89]." That historian continues, after the manner of his predecessor -Wendover, to speak of Londoners as on the one hand the "mediocres, -populares et plebei," and on the other hand the "divites." In 1258 the -latter class overreached themselves: they were caught in actual vulgar -peculation of money raised by assessment for repairing the city walls; -some of them were thrown into prison and only escaped death through the -royal clemency at the instance of the notorious pluralist John Mansel, and -on making restitution of their plunder; but one of them, the mayor, never -recovered the blow to his respectability, and died soon after of -grief[90]. Whether it meant a wide-spread spirit of petty fraud, or some -unadjusted change in value, the young king in 1228, during a journey from -York to London, took occasion along his route to destroy the "false -measures" of corn, ale and wine, to substitute more ample measures, and to -increase the weight of the loaf. - -The scarcity or famine of 1234, to which the Abbotsley incident belongs, -was accompanied, says the St Albans annalist, by a mortality which raged -cruelly everywhere. On the other hand the annalist of Tewkesbury may be -credited when he says that, although the year was one of scarcity, corn -being at eight shillings, yet "by the grace of God the poor were better -sustained than in other years[91]." - -There was an epidemic in 1247, but it is not clear whether it was due to -famine. Although Higden, quoting from some unknown record, says that there -was dearth in England in that year, wheat being at twelve shillings the -quarter, yet he does not mention sickness at all; and Matthew Paris, who -was then living, is explicit that the harvest of 1247 was an abundant one, -and that the mortality did not begin until September of that year. There -does appear, however, to have been a sharp famine in Wales; and it is -recorded that the bishop of Norwich, "about the year 1245," in a time of -great dearth, sold all his plate and distributed it to the poor[92]. All -that we know of this epidemic is the statement of Matthew Paris, that it -began in September and lasted for three months; and that as many as nine -or ten bodies were buried in one day in the single churchyard of St -Peter's at Saint Albans[93]. - -Matthew Paris notes the quality of the harvest and the prices of grain -every year, and his successor Rishanger continues the practice. The prices -noted appear, from comparison with those tabulated by Thorold Rogers from -actual accounts, to have been the lowest market rates of the year. The -harvest of 1248 was plentiful, and wheat sold at two shillings and -sixpence a quarter. In 1249 and 1250 it was at two shillings, oats being -at one shilling. But those years of exceptional abundance were followed at -no long interval by a series of years of scarcity or famine, which brought -pestilential sickness of the severest kind. - -The scarcity or famine in the years 1256-59 was all the more acutely felt -owing to the dearth of money in the country. The burden of the history of -Matthew Paris before he comes to the famine is that England had been -emptied of treasure by the exactions of king and pope. Henry III. was -under some not quite intelligible obligation of money to his brother, the -earl of Cornwall. The English earl was a candidate for the Imperial crown, -and had got so far towards the dignity of emperor as to have been made -king of the Germans. It was English money that went to pay his German -troops, and to further his cause with the electoral princes; but the -circulating coin of England does not appear to have sufficed for these and -domestic purposes also. The harvest of 1256 had been spoiled by wet, and -the weather of the spring of 1257 was wretched in the extreme. All England -was in a state of marsh and mud, and the roads were impassable. Many sowed -their fields over again; but the autumn proved as wet as the rest of the -year. "Whatever had been sown in winter, whatever had germinated in -spring, whatever the summer had brought forward--all was drowned in the -floods of autumn." The want of coins in circulation caused unheard-of -poverty. At the end of the year the fields lay untilled, and a multitude -of people were dead of famine. At Christmas wheat rose to ten shillings a -quarter. But the year 1257 appears to have had "lethal fevers" before the -loss of the harvest of that year could be felt. Not to mention other -places, says the St Albans historian, there was at St Edmundsbury in the -dog-days so great a mortality that more than two thousand bodies were -buried in its spacious cemetery[94]. - -The full effects of the famine were not felt until the spring of 1258. So -great was the pinch in London from the failure of the crops and the want -of money that fifteen thousand[95] are said to have died of famine, and of -a grievous and wide-spread pestilence that broke out about the feast of -the Trinity (19 May). - -The earl of Cornwall (and king of Germany) who had relieved the country of -a great part of its circulating coin, took the opportunity to buy up corn -in Germany and Holland for the supply of the London market. Fifty great -ships, says Matthew Paris, arrived in the Thames laden with wheat, barley, -and other grain. Not three English counties had produced as much as was -imported. The corn was for such as could buy it; but the king interposed -with an edict that, whereas greed was to be discouraged, no one was to buy -the foreign corn in order to store it up and trade in it. Those who had no -money, we are expressly told, died of hunger, even after the arrival of -the ships; and even men of good position went about with faces pinched by -hunger, and passed sleepless nights sighing for bread. No one had seen -such famine and misery, although many would have remembered corn at higher -prices. The price quoted about this stage of the narrative, although not -with special reference to the foreign wheat, is nine shillings the -quarter. Elsewhere the price is said to have mounted up to fifteen -shillings, which may have been the rate before the foreign supply came in. -But such was the scarceness of money, we are told, that if the price of -the quarter of wheat had been less, there would hardly have been found -anyone to buy it. Even those who were wont to succour the miserable were -now reduced to perish along with them. It is difficult to believe that the -historian has not given way to the temptations of rhetoric, and it is -pleasing to be able to give the following complement to his picture. After -some 15,000 had died in London, mostly of the poorer sort, one might hear -a crier making proclamation to the starving multitude to go to a -distribution of bread by this or that nobleman, at such and such a place, -mentioning the name of the benefactor and the place of dole. - -In other passages, which may be taken as picturing the state of matters in -the country, the historian says that the bodies of the starved were found -swollen and livid, lying five or six together in pig-sties, or on -dungheaps, or in the mud of farmyards. The dying were refused shelter and -succour for fear of contagion, and scarcely anyone would go near the dead -to bury them. Where many corpses were found together, they were buried in -capacious trenches in the churchyards. - -We come now to the harvest of 1258. After a bleak and late spring the -crops had come forward well under excessive heat in summer, and the -harvest was an unusually abundant, although a late one. Rains set in -before the corn could be cut, and at the feast of All Saints (1 November) -the heavy crops had rotted until the fields were like so many dungheaps. -Only in some places was any attempt made to carry the harvest home, and -then it was so spoiled as to be hardly worth the trouble. Even the mouldy -grain sold as high as sixteen shillings a quarter. The famishing people -resorted to various shifts, selling their cattle and reducing their -households. How the country got through the winter, we are not told. -Matthew Paris himself died early in 1259, and the annalist who added a few -pages to the _Chronica Majora_ after his death, merely mentions that the -corn, the oil and the wine turned corrupt, and that as the sun entered -Cancer a pestilence and mortality of men began unexpectedly, in which many -died. Among others Fulk, the bishop of London, died of pestilence in the -spring of 1259; and, to say nothing of many other places, at Paris ---- -thousand (the number is left blank) were buried. - -The vagueness of the last statement reminds us that we are now deprived of -the comparatively safe guidance of Matthew Paris. His successor in the -office of annalist at St Albans, Rishanger, is much less trustworthy. He -sums up the year 1259 in a paragraph which repeats exactly the facts of -the notorious year 1258, and probably applies to that alone; for the year -1260 his summary is that it was more severe, more cruel and more terrible -to all living things than the year before, the pestilence and famine being -intolerable. There is, however, no confirmation of that in the authentic -prices of the year collected by Thorold Rogers. Parcels of wheat of the -harvest of 1259 were sold at about five and six shillings, and of the -harvest of 1260 at from three shillings and sixpence to six shillings. For -a number of years, corresponding to the Barons' war and the war in Wales, -the price is moderate or low, the figures of extant bailiffs' accounts -agreeing on the whole with Rishanger's summary statements about the -respective harvests[96]. The years from 1271 to 1273 were dear years, and -for the first of the series we find a doubtful record by the Yorkshire -continuator of William of Newburgh that there was "a great famine and -pestilence in England and Ireland[97]." The harvest of 1288 was so -abundant that the price of wheat in the bailiffs' accounts is mostly about -two shillings, ranging from sixteen pence to four and eightpence. -Rishanger's prices for the year are sufficiently near the mark: in some -places wheat sold at twenty pence the quarter, in others at sixteen pence, -and in others at twelve pence. From that extremely low point, a rise -begins which culminates in 1294. The chronicler's statement for 1289, that -in London the bushel of wheat rose from threepence to two shillings, is -not borne out by the bailiffs' accounts, which show a range of from two -shillings and eightpence to six shillings the quarter. But these accounts -confirm the statement that the years following were dear years, and that -1294 was a year of famine prices, wheat having touched fourteen shillings -at Cambridge, in July. Rishanger's two notes are that the poor perished of -hunger, and that the poor died of hunger on all sides, afflicted with a -looseness (_lienteria_)[98]. The two years following are also given as -hard for the poor, but not as years of famine or sickness; the country was -at the same time heavily taxed for the expenses of the war which Edward I. -was waging against the Scots. Ordinary prosperity attends the cultivators -of the soil until the end of Rishanger's chronicle in 1305; and from the -beginning of Trokelowe's in 1307, the year of Edward II.'s accession, -there is nothing for our purpose until we come to the great famine of -1315[99]. - -It is clear, however, that prices were high in every year from 1309 until -that famine, with the single exception of the harvest of 1311. At the -meeting of Parliament in London before Easter in 1315, the dearth was a -subject of deliberation, and a King's writ was issued attempting to fix -the prices at which fat oxen, cows, sheep, pigs, geese, fowls, capons, -chickens, pigeons and eggs should be sold on demand, subject to -confiscation if the sale were refused. The statute was ineffective (it was -repealed the year after), and provisions became dearer than ever. The -quarter of wheat, beans and peas sold for twenty shillings, of oats for -ten shillings, and of salt for thirty-five. When the king stopped at St -Albans at the feast of St Lawrence, says Trokelowe, it was hardly possible -to buy bread for the use of his household. The scarcity was most felt from -the month of May until the harvest. With the new crop, ruined as it was by -rains and floods, the scarcity lessened somewhat, but not before many had -felt the pinch of hunger, and others were seen (as the St Albans annalist -says he saw them) lying squalid and dead in the villages and by the -road-sides. At Midsummer, 1316, wheat rose to thirty shillings, and after -that as high as forty shillings (the highest price found by Thorold Rogers -is twenty-six shillings and eightpence at Leatherhead in July). The -various forms of famine-sickness are mentioned:--dysentery from corrupt -food, affecting nearly everyone, an acute fever which killed many, or a -putrid sore throat (_pestis gutturuosa_). To show the extremities to which -England was reduced, Trokelowe specially inserts the following: Ordinary -flesh was not to be had, but horse-flesh was eaten, fat dogs were stolen -to eat, and it was rumoured abroad that in many places both men and women -secretly ate the flesh of their own children, or of the children of -others. But the detail which Trokelowe justly thinks posterity will be -most horrified to read, is that prisoners in gaols set upon the thieves -newly brought in and devoured them alive. - -It is probably the same famine and pestilence that we find worked into the -metrical romance of Robert of Brunne (1338), under the guise of the plague -'in Cadwaladre's time,' that is, the pestilence recorded by Beda for the -year 664. The Lincolnshire romancist must have seen the famine and -pestilence of 1315-16, for he was then in the prime of life, and probably -he transferred his own experiences of famine and pestilence to the remote -episode of the seventh century, to which he devotes thirty-eight lines of -his romance. In Cadwaladre's time the corn fails and there is great -hunger. A man may go for three days before he can buy any food in burgh, -or in city, or in upland; he may indeed catch wild creatures, or fishes, -or gather leaves and roots. Worse still, a plague comes, from rotten air -and wicked winds, so that hale men fall down suddenly and die; gentle and -bondmen all go, hardly any are left to till the land, the living cannot -bury the dead, those who try fall dead in the grave. Men leave house and -land, and few are left in the country. Eleven years does Britain lie waste -with but few folk to till the land[100]. - -After the famine of 1315-16, the third and last of the great and, one may -say, disgraceful famines which gave rise to the by-word "Anglorum fames," -prices continued at their ordinary level for several years. But from 1320 -to 1323 they again came to a height. To that period probably belongs a -mortality which is entered, in a chronicle of the next century[101], under -the year 1325. On the contemporary authority of Higden we know that, in -1322, the king went to Scotland about the feast of St Peter ad Vincula, -"and though he met not with resistance, lost many of his own by famine and -disease." After that period of scarcity comes a long succession of cheap -years, covering the interval to the next great event in the annals of -pestilence that concerns us, the arrival of the Black Death in the autumn -of 1348. With that great event the history of English epidemics enters -upon a new chapter. There were, of course, years of dearth and scarcity in -the centuries following, but there were no great famine-pestilences like -those of 1196, 1258 and 1315. - -The period of the great famines ought not to be left without another -reference to the widening gulf between the rich and the poor, and the -keenness of traders which led them sometimes to incur the restraints of -government and the punishments of justice. - -On 26 March, 1269, was issued one of those ordinances against -forestalling, of which many more followed for several centuries: no -citizen to go outside the city of London, either by road or river, to meet -victuals coming to market. In the 7th year of Edward I., clipping or -debasing the coinage was carried on so systematically that nearly three -hundred persons, mostly of the Hebrew race, were drawn and hanged for it. -In the 11th year of Edward I. (1283) a statute had been directed against -cheating by bakers and millers. Meanwhile the nobility retaliated by -plundering the traders and merchants at Boston fair, and the king settled -the account with these marauding nobles by hanging them. A statute of -1316, the second year of the famine, to fix the price of ale, has an -interest on account of its motive--"ne frumentum ulterius per potum -consumeretur." The proportion of the corn of the country turned into malt, -or the amount diverted from bread to beer, may be guessed from the fact -that in London, for which the beer ordinance was first made, there were in -1309, brewhouses to the number of 1334, and taverns to the number of -354[102]. In the very year of great famine, 1316, an ordinance was issued -(in French, dated from King's Langley) against extravagant -housekeeping[103]. In the year of great scarcity and mortality, 1322, -there was such a crowd for a funeral dole at Blackfriars (for the soul of -Henry Fingret) that fifty-five persons, children and adults, were crushed -to death in the scramble[104]. At the same time the prior of Christ -Church, Canterbury, was sitting down to dinners of seventeen dishes, the -cellarer had thirty-eight servants under him, the chamberlain and sacrist -had large numbers of people employed as tailors, furriers, launderers and -the like, and the servants and equipages of the one hundred and forty -brethren were numerous and splendid[105]. The monasteries, on which the -relief of the poor mostly depended, have been thus characterized: - - "From the end of the twelfth century until the Reformation," says - Bishop Stubbs, "from the days of Hubert Walter to those of Wolsey, the - monasteries remained magnificent hostelries: their churches were - splendid chapels for noble patrons; their inhabitants were bachelor - country gentlemen, more polished and charitable, but little more - learned or more pure in life than their lay neighbours; their estates - were well managed, and enjoyed great advantages and exemptions; they - were, in fact, an element of peace in a nation that delighted in war. - But, with a few noble exceptions, there was nothing in the system that - did spiritual service[106]." - -There is little to be said, at this period, of the profession most -directly concerned with sickness, epidemic or other, namely the medical. -We become aware of its existence on rare occasions: as in the account of -the death of William the Conqueror at Rouen on 9 September, 1087, of the -illness and death of Hubert, archbishop of Canterbury, on 13 July, 1205, -at one of his manors on a journey to Rochester[107], or in the reference -by William of Newburgh, to the noted Jewish physician of King's Lynn, -whose honourable repute among the citizens for skill and modesty did not -save him from the murderous fanaticism against his race in 1190[108], or -in occasional letters of the time[109]. There were doubtless benevolent -men among the practitioners of medicine, then as now; but the profession -has never been one in which individuals could rise conspicuously above the -level of their age, and the moral standard of those centuries was a poor -one. It is not surprising, then, that John of Salisbury, indulging a taste -for epigram, should have characterized the profession of medicine in the -twelfth century as follows: "They have only two maxims which they never -violate, 'Never mind the poor; never refuse money from the rich'[110]." - -The one English physician whose writings have come down to us from the -period that we are still engaged with, is John of Gaddesden. There is -every reason to think that he was practising at the time of the famine and -pestilence of 1315-16; but it is not from his bulky treatise on medicine -that we learn the nosological types of the epidemic maladies of those -years. Some account of his _Rosa Anglica_ will be found in the chapter on -Smallpox; it must suffice to say here that he was a verbalist compiler -from other books, themselves not altogether original, and that, according -to Dr Freind, he displays no great knowledge of his profession. - -It is nothing strange, therefore, that Gaddesden throws no light upon the -famine-pestilences of England, such as those of 1315-16, which he lived -through. Dysentery and lientery, he treats of almost in the very words of -Gilbertus Anglicus; but those maladies might have been among the dwellers -in another planet, so far as native experience comes in. He reproduces -whole chapters from his predecessors, on _synochus_ and _synocha_, without -a hint that England ever witnessed such scenes of hunger-typhus as the St -Albans chroniclers have recorded for us from their own observation. The -reference by Trokelowe to the prevalence of _pestis gutturuosa_ in 1316, -is one that a medical writer of the time might well have amplified; but -Gaddesden missed the opportunity of perhaps anticipating Fothergill's -description of putrid sore-throat by more than four hundred years. - - -Epidemics of St Anthony's Fire, or Ergotism. - -One form of epidemic malady, intimately connected with bad harvests and a -poor state of agriculture, namely Ergotism, from the mixture of poisoned -grains in the rye or other corn, is conspicuously missed from English -records of the medieval period, although it plays a great part in the -history of French epidemics of the Middle Ages, under such names as _ignis -sacer_, _ignis S. Antonii_, or _ignis infernalis_. According to the -proverbial saying already quoted, France was as notorious for _ignis_ as -England for famine, and Normandy for lepra: "Tres plagae tribus regionibus -appropriari solent, Anglorum fames, Gallorum ignis, Normannorum -lepra[111]." The malady was of a nature to attract notice and excite pity; -it is entered by chroniclers, and is a frequent topic in French legends of -the Saints. Its occurrence in epidemic form can be traced in France, with -a degree of probability, as far back as 857 (perhaps to 590); six great -outbreaks are recorded in the tenth century, seven in the eleventh, ten in -the twelfth, and three in the thirteenth, the medieval series ending with -one in the year 1373. The estimates of mortality in the several epidemics -of ergotism over a larger or smaller area of France, range as high as -40,000, and 14,000, which numbers may be taken to be the roughest of -guesses; but in later times upwards of 500 deaths from ergotism have been -accurately counted in a single outbreak within a limited district. The -epidemics have been observed in particular seasons, sometimes twenty years -or more elapsing without the disease being seen; they have occurred also -in particular provinces--in the basin of the Loire, in Lorraine, and, -since the close of the medieval period, especially in the Sologne. The -disease has usually been traced to a spoiled rye crop; but there is -undoubted evidence from the more recent period that a poison with -corresponding effects can be produced in some other cereals, even in wheat -itself. - -In a field of rye, especially after a wet sowing or a wet season of -growth, a certain proportion of the heads bear long brown or purple corns, -one or more upon a head, projecting in the shape of a cock's spur, whence -the French name of ergot. The spur appears to be, and probably is, an -overgrown grain of rye; it is grooved like a rye-corn, occupies the place -of the corn between the two chaff-coverings, and contains an abundant -whitish meal. Microscopic research has detected in or upon the spurred rye -the filaments of a minute parasitic mould; so that it is to the invasion -by a parasite that we may trace the enormous overgrowth of one or more -grains on an ear, and it is probably to the ferment-action of the fungus -that we should ascribe the poisonous properties of the meal. The -proportion of all the stalks in a field so affected will vary -considerably, as well as the proportion of grains on each affected head of -corn[112]. Rye affected with ergot is apt to be a poor crop at any rate; -one or more spurred corns on a head tend to keep the rest of the grains -small or unfilled; and if there be many stalks in the field so affected, -the spurred grain will bulk considerably in the whole yield. When the -diseased grains are ground to meal along with the healthy grains, the meal -and the bread will contain an appreciable quantity of the poison of ergot; -and if rye-bread were the staple food, there would be a great risk, after -an unusually bad harvest, of an outbreak of the remarkable constitutional -effects of ergotism. Rye-bread with much ergot in it may be rather blacker -than usual; but it is said to have no peculiar taste. - -It is almost exclusively among the peasantry that symptoms of ergotism -have been seen, and among children particularly. The attack usually began -with intense pains in the legs or feet, causing the victims to writhe and -scream. A fire seemed to burn between the flesh and the bones, and, at a -later stage, even in the bowels, the surface of the body being all the -while cold as ice. Sometimes the skin of affected limbs became livid or -black; now and then large blebs or blisters arose upon it, as in bad kinds -of erysipelas. Gangrene or sloughing of the extremities followed; a foot -or a hand fell off, or the flesh of a whole limb was destroyed down to the -bones, by a process which began in the deeper textures. The spontaneous -separation of a gangrenous hand or foot was on the whole a good sign for -the recovery of the patient. Such was the _ignis sacer_, or _ignis S. -Antonii_ which figures prominently, I am told, in the French legends of -the Saints, and of which epidemics are recorded in the French medieval -chronicles. Corresponding effects of ergotism may or may not have occurred -during the medieval period in other countries of Europe where rye was -grown. - -The remarkable thing is, that when we do begin in the sixteenth and -seventeenth centuries to obtain evidence of agrarian epidemics in Germany, -Sweden and Russia, which have eventually come to be identified, in the -light of more recent knowledge, with ergotism, the type of the disease is -different, not perhaps fundamentally or in the ultimate pathological -analysis, but at all events different as being a functional disorder of -the nervous system, instead of a disorder, on nervous lines, affecting the -nutrition of parts and their structural integrity. This newer form, -distinctive of Germany and north-eastern Europe, was known by the name of -Kriebelkrankheit, from the creeping or itching sensations in the limbs at -the beginning of it; these heightened sensibilities often amounted to -acute pain, as in the beginning of the gangrenous form also; but the -affection of the sensory nerves, instead of leading to a breakdown in the -nutrition of the parts and to gangrene, was followed by disorder of the -motor nerves,--by spasms of the hands and arms, feet and legs, very often -passing into contractures of the joints which no force could unbend, and -in some cases passing into periodic convulsive fits of the whole body like -epilepsy, whence the name of convulsive ergotism[113]. - -Side by side with these German, Swedish and Russian outbreaks of -convulsive ergotism, or Kriebelkrankheit (called by Linnaeus in Sweden by -the Latin name _raphania_), there had been a renewal or continuance of the -medieval epidemics in France, notably in the Sologne; but the French -ergotism has retained its old type of _ignis_ or gangrene. It was not -until the eighteenth century that the learned world became clear as to the -connexion between either of those forms of disease among the peasantry and -a damaged rye-crop, although the country people themselves, and the -observant medical practitioners of the affected districts, had put this -and that together long before. Thus, as late as 1672-75, there were -communications made to the Paris Academy of Medicine[114] by observers in -the Sologne and especially around Montargis, in which ergot of rye is -clearly described, as well as the associated symptoms of gangrenous -disease in the peasantry; but the connexion between the two was still -regarded as open to doubt, and as a question that could only be settled by -experiment; while there is not a hint given that these modern outbreaks -were of the same nature as the notorious medieval _ignis sacer_. According -to Haeser, it was not until the French essay of Read (Strasbourg, 1771) -that the identity of the old _ignis_ with the modern gangrenous ergotism -was pointed out. - -The result of the modern study of outbreaks of ergotism, including the -minute record of individual cases, has been to show that there is no hard -and fast line between the gangrenous and convulsive forms, that the French -epidemics, although on the whole marked by the phenomena of gangrene, have -not been wanting in functional nervous symptoms, and that the German or -northern outbreaks have often been of a mixed type. Thus, in the French -accounts of 1676, "malign fevers accompanied with drowsiness and raving," -are mentioned along with "the gangrene in the arms but mostly in the legs, -which ordinarily are corrupted first." - -Again, the observations of Th. O. Heusinger[115] on an outbreak near -Marburg in 1855-56, led him decidedly to conclude for the essential -sameness of _ignis_ and Kriebelkrankheit, and for the existence of a -middle type, although undoubtedly the sensory and motor disorders, -including hyperaesthesia, pain and anaesthesia on the one hand, and -contractures of the joints, choreic movements and convulsions on the -other, were more distinctive of the epidemics of ergotism on German or -northern European soil. - -Thus far the foreign experience of ergotism, both medieval and modern, and -of its several types. We shall now be in a position to examine the English -records for indications of the same effects of damaged grain. - -In the English medieval chronicles an occasional reference may be found to -_ignis_ or wild fire. The reference to wild fire in Derbyshire in the -Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year 1049, probably means some -meteorological phenomenon, elsewhere called _ignis sylvaticus_: "Eac [thorn] -wilde fyr on Deorbyscire micel yfel dyde[116]." Whatever the _ignis -sylvaticus_ or _ignis aereus_ was, which destroyed houses as well as -crops, there appears to be no warrant for the conclusion of C. F. -Heusinger that it was the same as the _ignis sacer_ of the French -peasantry[117]. An undoubted reference to _ignis infernalis_ as a human -malady occurs in the _Topography of Ireland_ by Giraldus Cambrensis: a -certain archer who had ravished a woman at St Fechin's mill at Fore was -overtaken by swift vengeance, "igne infernali in membro percussus, usque -in ipsum corpus statim exarsit, et nocte eadem exspiravit." Taking the -incident as legendary, and the diagnosis as valueless, we may still -conclude that the name, at least, of _ignis infernalis_ was familiar to -English writers. But in all the accounts of English famines and -wide-spread sicknesses in the medieval period which have been extracted -from the nearest contemporary authorities, I have found no mention of any -disease that might correspond to ergotism[118]. - -The first undoubted instance of ergotism in England belongs to the -eighteenth century. On or about the 10th of January, 1762, a peasant's -family (father, mother, and six children) of Wattisham in Suffolk, were -attacked almost simultaneously with the symptoms of gangrenous ergotism, -several of them eventually losing portions of their limbs. The disease -began with intense pain in the legs, and contractures of the hands and -feet. It was proved that they had not been using rye flour; but their -bread for a short time before had been made exclusively from damaged -wheat, grown in the neighbourhood and kept apart from the farmer's good -corn so as not to spoil his sample. It had been sent to the mill just -before Christmas, and had been used by some others besides the family who -developed the symptoms of ergotism[119]. - -In that authentic instance of ergotism (although not from rye), there was -one symptom, the contractures of the hands and feet, which is distinctive -of the convulsive form; so that the English type may be said to have been -a mixture of the French form and of the form special to the north-eastern -countries of Europe. With that instance as a type, let us now inquire -whether any epidemics in England at earlier periods may not be brought -under the head of ergotism. It is to be kept in mind that none of the -medieval outbreaks were called by their present name, or traced to their -true source, until centuries after; so that our task is, not to search the -records for the name of ergotism, but to scrutinize any anomalous outbreak -of disease, or any outbreak distinguished in the chronicles by some -unusual mark, with a view to discovering whether it suits the hypothesis -of ergotism. I shall have to speak of three such outbreaks in the -fourteenth century, and of one in Lancashire and Cheshire in 1702[120]. - -The first of these is given by Knighton for a period and a locality that -may have been within his own cognizance. In the summer of 1340 there -happened in England generally, but especially in the county of Leicester, -a certain deplorable and enormous infirmity. It was marked by paroxysms or -fits, attended by intolerable suffering; while the fit lasted, the victims -emitted a noise like the barking of dogs. A "great pestilence," or perhaps -a great mortality, is said to have ensued[121]. In that record the salient -points are, firstly the wide or epidemic incidence of the malady, at all -events in Leicestershire, which was Knighton's own county; secondly the -paroxysmal nature of the attacks, and the strange noises emitted -therewith; thirdly the intolerable suffering (_poena_) that attended each -fit (_passio_). Except for the clear indication of pain, one might think -of the strange hysterical outbreaks, extending, by a kind of psychical -contagion, to whole communities, which were observed about the same period -in some parts of the continent of Europe. But of these medieval -psychopathies, as they are called, there is hardly any trace in England. -The Flagellants came over from Zealand to London in 1349, and gave -exhibitions at St Paul's, but that pseudo-religious mania does not appear -to have taken hold among the English. The epidemic recorded by Knighton -had probably a more material cause. To illustrate the somewhat meagre -reference by Knighton to the strange epidemic of 1340, I shall proceed at -once to the remarkable outbreak in Lancashire and Cheshire in 1702, which -was clearly not a psychopathy or hysterical outbreak, and yet had a -seemingly hysterical element in it. An account of it was sent to the Royal -Society by Dr Charles Leigh "of Lancashire[122]." - - "We have this year [1702] had an epidemical fever, attended with very - surprising symptoms. In the beginning, the patient was frequently - attacked with the colica ventriculi; convulsions in various parts, - sometimes violent vomitings, and a dysentery; the jaundice, and in - many of them, a suppression of urine; and what urine was made was - highly saturated with choler. About the state of the distemper, large - purple spots appeared, and on each side of 'em two large blisters, - which continued three or four days: these blisters were so placed - about the spots that they might in some measure be term'd satellites - or tenders: of these there were in many four different eruptions. But - the most remarkable instance I saw in the fever was in a poor boy of - Lymm in Cheshire, one John Pownel, about 13 years of age, who was - affected with the following symptoms:-- - - "Upon the crisis or turn of the fever, he was seized with an aphonia, - and was speechless six weeks [? days], with the following convulsions: - the distemper infested the nerves of both arms and legs which produced - the Chorea Sancti Viti, or St Vitus's dance; and the legs sometimes - were both so contracted that no person could reduce them to their - natural position. Besides these, he had most terrible symptoms, which - began in the following manner: [description of convulsions follows] - ... and then he barked in all the usual notes of a dog, sometimes - snarling, barking, and at the last howling like an hound. After this - the nerves of the mandibles were convulsed, and then the jaws clashed - together with that violence that several of his teeth were beaten out, - and then at several times there came a great foam from his mouth.... - These symptoms were so amazing that several persons about him believed - he was possessed. I told them there was no ground for such - suppositions, but that the distemper was natural, and a species of an - epilepsy, and by the effects I convinced them of the truth of it; for - in a week's time I recovered the boy his speech, his senses returned, - his convulsions vanished, and the boy is now very cheerful. There have - been other persons in this country much after the same manner." - -This epidemic of 1702 in Lancashire and Cheshire was recorded as something -unusual. It had certain intestinal symptoms such as colic, which may well -have followed the use of poisoned food and are indeed described among the -symptoms of ergotism; there were also convulsions, large purple spots with -blisters coming and going on the skin near them, and, in the single case -that is given with details, there were contractures of the legs "so that -no person could reduce them to their natural position," and a continuance -for several days of painful epileptiform fits attended with noises like -the barking of a dog, or the hissing of a goose, "all which different -sounds (I take it) proceed from the different contractions of the lungs -variously forcing out the air." The remarkable case of the boy, certified -by several witnesses, is expressly given as one belonging to the general -epidemic of the locality, others having been affected "much after the same -manner." Whatever suggestion there may be of ergotism in these -particulars, nothing is said of gangrene of the limbs, although the livid -spots and blisters are part of the symptoms of gangrenous ergotism, just -as the convulsions and contractures are of convulsive ergotism. In the -Suffolk cases of 1762 there were both contractures of the limbs and -gangrene. - -Knighton's mention of the barking noises emitted by the sufferers of 1340 -has suggested to Nichols, the author of the _History of -Leicestershire_[123], a comparison of them with the cases investigated by -Dr Freind in the year 1700, at the village of Blackthorn in Oxfordshire. -Having heard a great rumour in the summer of that year that certain girls -at that Oxfordshire village were taken with frequent barkings like dogs, -Dr Freind made a journey to the place to investigate the cases[124]. - - He found that this _pestis_ or plague had invaded two families in the - village, on terms of close intimacy with each other. Two or three - girls in each family are specially referred to: they were seized at - intervals of a few hours with spasms of the neck and mouth, attended - by vociferous cries; the spasmodic movements increased to a climax, - when the victims sank exhausted. The fits had kept occurring for - several weeks, and had appeared in the second family at a considerable - interval after the first. The symptoms, said Freind, were those that - had been described by Seidelius--distortion of the mouth, indecorous - working of the tongue, and noises emitted like barking. He found - nothing in the girls' symptoms that could not be referred to a form of - St Vitus' dance or to hysteria, in which maladies, laughter, howling - and beating of the breast are occasionally seen as well as the - spasmodic working of the neck and limbs. - -The question remains whether the cases of 1700 in the Oxfordshire village, -assuming Dr Freind's reading of them to be correct, were as illustrative -of the outbreak of 1340 as the cases of 1702 in Lancashire and Cheshire, -which were probably too numerous and too much complicated with symptoms -of material toxic disorder to be explained as hysterical. There is, -indeed, a larger question raised, whether the so-called psychopathies of -the medieval and more recent periods may not have had a beginning, at -least, in some toxic property of the staple food. The imagination readily -fixes upon such symptoms as foaming at the mouth and barking noises, -exalts these phenomena over deeper symptoms that a physician might have -detected, and finds a simple explanation of the whole complex seizure as -demoniac possession or, in modern phrase, as a psychopathy. Without -questioning the subjective or imitative nature of many outbreaks which -have been set down to hysteria, it may be well to use some discrimination -before we exclude altogether an element of material poisoning such as -ergot in the staple food, more especially in the case of the wide-spread -hysterical epidemics of Sweden, a country subject to ergotism also[125]. - -These eighteenth-century instances have been brought in to illustrate -Knighton's account of the epidemic of 1340. The next strange outbreak of -the fourteenth century is recorded by the St Albans historian -("Walsingham") under a year between 1361 and 1365, probably the year 1362. -Like so many more of the medieval records of epidemic sickness, it is a -meagre and confused statement: "Numbers died of the disease of lethargy, -prophesying troubles to many; many women also died by the flux; and there -was a general murrain of cattle[126]." Along with that enigmatical entry, -we may take the last of the kind that here concerns us. At Cambridge, in -1389, there occurred an epidemic of "phrensy;" it is described as "a great -and formidable pestilence, which arose suddenly, and in which men were -attacked all at once by the disease of phrensy of the mind, dying without -the _viaticum_, and in a state of unconsciousness[127]." The names of -phrensy and lethargy occur in the manuscript medical treatises of the time -in the chapters upon diseases of the brain and nerves[128]; strictly they -are names of symptoms, and not of forms or types of disease, and they may -be used loosely of various morbid states which have little in common. A -lethargy would in some cases be a name for coma in fever, or for a -paralytic stroke; a phrensy might be actual mania, or it might be the -delirium of plague or typhus fever. The "lethargy" of 1362 is alleged of a -number of people as if in an epidemic, whatever the singular phrase -"prophetantes infortunia multis" may mean; and the "phrensy of the mind" -of which many died suddenly at Cambridge in 1389, does not look as if it -had been a symptom of plague or pestilential fever. The judicious reader -will make what he can of these disappointingly meagre details. But for his -guidance it may be added that the French accounts of ergotism in 1676 give -one of the poisonous effects as being "to cause sometimes malign fevers -accompanied with drowsiness and raving," which terms might stand for -lethargy and phrensy; also that it has not always been easy, in an -epidemic among the peasantry after a bad harvest, to distinguish the cases -of ergotism from the cases of typhus, the contractures of the limbs, which -seem so special to ergotism, having been described also for undoubted -cases of typhus[129]. - -Whether these anomalous epidemics in medieval England were instances of -convulsive ergotism or not, the English records are on the whole wanting -in the evidence of such wide-spread and frequent disasters from a poisoned -harvest as distinguish the French annals of the same period. One reason of -our immunity may have been that the grain was better grown; another reason -certainly is that rye was a comparatively rare crop in England, wheaten -bread being preferred, although bread made from beans and barley was not -uncommon. Thorold Rogers says: "Rye was scantily cultivated. An occasional -crop on many estates, it is habitually sown in few. It is regularly sown -in Cambridgeshire and some other of the eastern counties. As the period -before us passes on [1259-1400], it becomes still more rare, and as will -be seen below, some of the later years of this enquiry contain no entries -of its purchase and sale[130]." But it is clear from the entries in -chronicles, more particularly about the very period of the fourteenth -century to which the three epidemics suggestive of ergotism belong, that -the English peasantry suffered from the poisonous effects of damaged food, -even if they suffered little from spurred rye. Thus, under the year 1383, -in the history known as Walsingham's, there is an unmistakeable reference -to many fatalities, as well as serious maladies, caused by the eating of -damaged fruit[131]. Again, under 1391, it is stated that this was "a hard -and difficult year for the poor owing to a dearth of fruits, which had now -lasted two years; whence it happened that at the time of the nuts and -apples, many of the poor died of dysentery brought on by eating them; and -the pestilence would have been worse had it not been for the laudable -diligence of the Mayor of London, who caused corn to be brought to London -from over sea[132]." - - -Generalities on Medieval Famines in England. - -Summing up the English famine-pestilences of the medieval period, we find -that they included the usual forms of such sickness--spotted fever of the -nature of typhus, dysentery, lientery or looseness (such as has often -subsequently accompanied typhus or famine-fever in Ireland), and putrid -sore-throat. That some of these effects were due to spoiled grain and -fruits, as well as to absolute want, we may reasonably conclude; for -example the harvest of 1258 rotted on the ground, and yet the mouldy corn -was sold at famine prices. With all those records of famines and their -attendant sicknesses in England, it is significant that there is little -indication of ergotism. The immunity of England from ergotism, with such a -record of famines as the annals show, can only have been because little -rye was grown and little black bread eaten. The standard of living would -appear to have been higher among the English peasantry than among the -French. A bad harvest, still more two bad harvests in succession, made -them feel the pinch of famine more acutely, perhaps, than if they had -accommodated themselves to the more sober level of rye bread. Hence the -somewhat paradoxical but doubtless true saying of the Middle -Ages--"Anglorum fames, Francorum ignis." The saying really means, not that -England was a poor country, which would be an absurd repute for foreigners -to have fixed upon her; but that the English were subject to alternating -periods of abundance and scarcity, of surfeit and starvation. The earliest -English work which deals fully and concretely with the social condition of -the country is the fourteenth-century poem of "The Vision of Piers the -Ploughman." A few passages from that poem will be of use as throwing light -upon the famines of England, before we finally leave the period of which -they are characteristic. - -Langland's poem describes the social state of England in peculiar -circumstances, namely, after the upheaval and dislocation of the Great -Mortality of 1349; and in that respect it has an interest for our subject -which comes into a later chapter. But in so far as it illustrates the -alternating periods of abundance and scarcity, the vision of medieval -England concerns us here before we quit the subject of famine-pestilences. -The average industrious ploughman, represented by Piers himself, fares but -soberly until Lammas comes round[133]:-- - - "I have no penny, quod Piers, pullets for to buy, - Ne neither geese nor pigs, but two green cheeses, - A few cruddes and cream, and an haver-cake, - And two loaves of beans and bran ybake for my fauntis. - And yet I say, by my soul, I have no salt bacon, - Nor no cookeney, by Christ, collops for to maken. - And I have percil and porettes and many kole-plantes, - And eke a cow and a calf, and a cart-mare - To draw afield my dung the while the drought lasteth. - And by this lyflode me mot live till lammas time; - And by that I hope to have harvest in my croft; - And then may I digte thy dinner as me dear liketh." - -Some are worse off than the ploughman in the slack time before the -harvest: - - "All the poor people tho pesecoddes fetched, - Beans and baken apples they brought in their lappes, - Chibolles and chervelles and ripe cherries many, - And proferred Piers this present to plead with Hunger. - All Hunger ate in haste, and axed after more. - Then poor folk for fear fed Hunger eagerlie, - With green poret and pesen, to poison Hunger they thought. - By that it nighed near harvest, new corn came to chipping. - Then was folk fain, and fed Hunger with the best, - With good ale, as glutton taught, and gerte Hunger go sleep. - And though would waster not work but wandren about, - Ne no beggar eat bread that beans in were, - But of cocket or clerematyn or else of clean wheat: - Ne no halfpenny ale in none wise drink, - But of the best and of the brownest that in burgh is to sell. - Labourers that have no land to live on, but their hands, - Deigned nought to dine a-day night-old wortes. - May no penny ale them pay ne no piece of bacon, - But if it be fresh flesh other fish fried other bake." - -The waster being now in his season of plenty falls to abusing the Statute -of Labourers: - - "And then cursed he the king and all his council after, - Such laws to loke, labourers to grieve. - But whiles Hunger was their master there would none of them chide, - Nor strive against _his_ statute, so sternly he looked. - And I warn you, workmen, wynneth while ye mowe, - For Hunger hitherward hasteth him fast. - He shall awake with water wasters to chasten. - Ere five year be fulfilled such famine shall arise - Through floods and through foul weathers fruits shall fail. - And so said Saturn, and sent you to warn ... - Then shall death withdraw and dearth be justice, - And Daw the dyker die for hunger, - But if God of his goodness grant us a truce." - -He proposes to feed the lazy wasters on beans: - - "And gif the groomes grudge, bid them go swynk, - And he shall sup the sweeter when he hath deserved." - -The ploughman asks Hunger the reason why both himself and his servants are -unable to work: - - "I wot well, quod Hunger, what sickness you aileth. - Ye have maunged over much, and that maketh you groan ... - Let not sir Surfeit sitten at thy board ... - And gif thy diet be thus, I dare lay mine ears - That Physic shall his furred hoods for his food sell, - And his cloak of calabre with all the knaps of gold, - And be fain, by my faith, his physic to let, - And learn to labour with land, for lyflode is sweet: - For murtherers are many leeches, Lord them amend! - They do men kill through their drinks, or destiny it would. - By Saint Poul, quod Piers, these aren profitable words." - -In another place, Hawkin the minstrel confesses to gluttony: - - "And more meat ate and drank than nature might digest, - And caught sickness some time for my surfeits oft." - -A liking for the best of food, and plenty of it, when it was to be had, -has clearly been an English trait from the earliest times. Conversely -thrift does not appear to have been a virtue or a grace of the labouring -class in England. Thus a bad harvest brought wide-spread scarcity, and two -bad harvests brought famine and famine-pestilences. The contrasts were -sharp because the standard of living was high. And although three, at -least, of the English famines were disgraceful to so rich a country, and -were probably the occasion of the foreign reproach of "Anglorum fames;" -yet the significant fact remains that the disease of the European -peasantry, which is the truest index of an inferior diet, namely ergotism, -has little or no place in our annals of sickness. - - - - -CHAPTER II. - -LEPROSY IN MEDIEVAL BRITAIN. - - -The history of leprosy in Britain can hardly be the history of leprosy -alone, but of that disease along with others which were either mistaken -for it or conveniently and euphemistically included under it. That there -was leprosy in the country is undoubted; but it is just as certain that -there was _lues venerea_; that the latter as a primary lesion led an -anonymous existence or was called _lepra_ or _morphaea_ if it were called -anything; that the remote effects of the lues were not known as such, -being taken for detached or original outcomes of the disordered humours -and therefore in the same general class as leprous manifestations; and -that the popular and clerical notions of leprosy were too superstitious -and inexact, even if the diagnostic intention had been more resolute than -it was, to permit of any clear separation of the leprous from the -syphilitic, to say nothing of their separation from the poor victims of -lupus and cancer of the face, of scrofulous running sores, or of neglected -skin-eruptions more repulsive to the eye than serious in their nature. I -shall give some proof of each of those assertions--as an essential -preliminary to any correct handling of the historical records of British -leprosy. - - -Leprosy in Medieval Medical Treatises. - -The picture given of true leprosy in the medieval treatises on medicine is -unmistakeable. There are two systematic writers about the year 1300 who -have left a better account of it than the Arabian authors from whom they -mostly copied. While the writers in question have transferred whole -chapters unaltered from Avicenna, Rhazes and Theodoric, they have improved -upon their models in the stock chapter 'De Lepra.' It so happens that -those two writers, Bernard Gordonio and Gilbertus Anglicus, bear names -which have been taken to indicate British nationality, and the picture of -leprosy by the latter has actually been adduced as a contemporary account -of the disease observed in England[134]. Gordonio was a professor at -Montpellier, and his experience and scholarship are purely foreign. The -circumstances of Gilbert the Englishman are not so well known; but it is -tolerably certain that he was not, as often assumed, the Gilbert Langley, -Gilbert de l'Aigle, or Gilbertus de Aquila, who was physician to Hubert, -archbishop of Canterbury ([Dagger] 13 July, 1205)[135], having been a -pupil at Salerno in the time of Aegidius of Corbeil (about 1180). The -treatise of Gilbertus Anglicus bears internal evidence of a later century -and school; it is distinguished by method and comprehensiveness, and is -almost exactly on the lines of the _Lilium Medicinae_ by Gordonio, whose -date at Montpellier is known with some exactness to have been from 1285 to -about 1307. Future research may perhaps discover where Gilbert taught or -was taught; meanwhile we may safely assume that his scholarship and system -were of a foreign colour. The medical writer of that time in England was -John of Gaddesden, mentioned in the end of the foregoing chapter; he is -the merest plagiary, and the one or two original remarks in his chapter -'De Lepra' would almost justify the epithet of "fatuous" which Guy de -Chauliac applied to him. - -Although we cannot appeal to Gilbertus Anglicus for native English -experience any more than we can to his _alter ego_, Gordonio, yet we may -assume that the picture of leprosy which they give might have been -sketched in England as well as in Italy or in Provence. The conditions -were practically uniform throughout Christendom; the true leprosy of any -one part of medieval Europe is the true leprosy of the whole. - -Gilbert's picture[136], as we have said, is unmistakeable, and the same -might be said of Bernard's[137]--the eyebrows falling bare and getting -knotted with uneven tuberosities, the nose and other features becoming -thick, coarse and lumpy, the face losing its mobility or play of -expression, the raucous voice, the loss of sensibility in the hands, and -the ultimate break-up or _naufragium_ of the leprous growths into foul -running sores. The enumeration of nervous symptoms, which are now -recognised to be fundamental in the pathology of leprosy, shows that -Gilbert went below the surface. Among the "signa leprae generalia" he -mentions such forms of hyperaesthesia as _formicatio_ (the creeping of -ants), and the feeling of "needles and pins;" and, in the way of -anaesthesia, he speaks of the loss of sensibility from the little finger -to the elbow, as well as in the exposed parts where the blanched spots or -thickenings come--the forehead, cheeks, eyebrows, to which he adds the -tongue. Gilbert's whole chapter 'De Lepra' is an obvious improvement upon -the corresponding one in Avicenna, who says that _lepra_ is a cancer of -the whole body, cancer being the _lepra_ of a single member, and is -probably confusing lupus with leprosy when he describes the cartilages of -the nose as corroded in the latter, and the nostrils destroyed by the same -kind of _naufragium_ as the fingers and toes. All students of the history -or clinical characters of leprosy, from Guy de Chauliac, who wrote about -1350, down to Hensler and Sprengel, have recognised in Gilbert's and -Bernard's account of it the marks of first-hand observation; so that we -may take it, without farther debate, that leprosy, as correctly diagnosed, -was a disease of Europe and of Britain in the Middle Ages. - -Having got so far, we come next to a region of almost inextricable -confusion, a region of secrecy and mystification, as well as of real -contemporary ignorance. We may best approach it by one or two passages -from Gilbert and Gordonio themselves. The systematic handling of _lepra_ -in their writings is one thing, and their more concrete remarks on its -conditions of origin, its occasions, or circumstances are another. What -are we to make of this kind of leprosy?--"In hoc genere, causa est -accessus ad mulierem ad quam accessit prius leprosus; et corrumpit -velocius vir sanus quam mulier a leproso.... Et penetrant [venena] in -nervos calidos et arterias et venas viriles, et inficiunt spiritus et -bubones, et hoc velocius si mulier," etc. Or to quote Gilbert again: "Ex -accessu ad mulieres, diximus superius, lepram in plerisque generari post -coitus leprosos[138]." Or in Gordonio: "Et provenit [lepra] etiam ex nimia -confibulatione cum leprosis, et ex coitu cum leprosa, et qui jacuit cum -muliere cum qua jacuit leprosus[139]." That these circumstances of -contracting _lepra_ were not mere verbal theorizings inspired by the -pathology of the day and capable of being now set aside, is obvious from a -_historia_ or case which Gordonio introduces into his text. "I shall tell -what happened," he says; and then proceeds to the following relation:[140] - -"Quaedam comtissa venit leprosa ad Montem Pessulanum [Montpellier], et -erat in fine in cura mea; et quidam Baccalarius in medicina ministrabat -ei, et jacuit cum ea, et impregnavit eam, et perfectissime leprosus factus -est." Happy is he therefore, he adds, who learns caution from the risks of -others. - -Here we have sufficient evidence, from the beginning of the fourteenth -century, of a disease being called _lepra_ which does not conform to the -conditions of leprosy as we now understand them. The same confusion -between leprosy and the _lues venerea_ prevailed through the whole -medieval period. Thus, in the single known instance of a severe edict -against lepers in England, the order of Edward III. to the mayor and -sheriffs of London in 1346[141], the reasons for driving lepers out of the -City are given,--among others, because they communicate their disease "by -carnal intercourse with women in stews and other secret places," and by -their polluted breath. It was pointed out long ago by Beckett in his -paper on the antiquity of the _lues venerea_[142], that the polluted -breath was characteristic of the latter, but not of leprosy. Of course the -pollution of their breath might have meant no more than the theoretical -reasoning of the books (as in Gilbert, where the breath of lepers, as well -as the mere sight of them, is said to give the disease, p. 337), but the -breath was probably obnoxious in a more real way, just as we know, from -Gordonio's case at Montpellier, that the other alleged source of "leprous" -contagion was no mere theoretical deduction. As the medieval period came -to an end the leper-houses (in France) were found to contain a -miscellaneous gathering of cases generically called leprous; and about the -same time, the year 1488, an edict of the same purport as Edward III.'s -London one of 1346, was issued by the provost of Paris against _les -lepreux_ of that city. The year 1488 is so near the epidemic outburst of -the _morbus Gallicus_ during the French campaigns on Italian soil in -1494-95, that the historian has not hesitated to set down that sudden -reappearance of leprous contagion, in a proclamation of the State, to a -real prevalence already in Paris of the contagious malady which was to be -heard of to the farthest corners of Europe a few years after[143]. - -There is no difficulty in producing evidence from medieval English records -of the prevalence of _lues venerea_, which was not concealed under the -euphemistic or mistaken diagnosis of leprosy. Instances of a very bad -kind, authenticated with the names of the individuals, are given in -Gascoigne's _Liber Veritatum_, under the date of 1433[144]. - -In the medieval text-books of Avicenna, Gilbert and others, there are -invariably paragraphs on _pustulae et apostemata virgae_. In the only -original English medical work of those times, by John Ardern, who was -practising at Newark from 1349 to 1370, and came afterwards to London, -appearances are described which can mean nothing else than -condylomata[145]. From a manuscript prescription-book of the medieval -period, in the British Museum, I have collected some receipts (or their -headings) which relate, as an index of later date prefixed to the MS. -says, to "the pox of old[146]." - -Some have refused to see in such cases any real correspondence with the -modern forms of syphilis because only local effects are described and no -constitutional consequences traced. But no one in those times thought of a -primary focus of infection with its remoter effects at large, in the case -of any disease whatsoever. Even in the great epidemic of syphilis at the -end of the fifteenth century, the sequence of primary and secondary -(tertiaries were unheard of until long after), was not at first -understood; the eruption of the skin, which was compared to a bad kind of -variola, the imposthumes of the head and of the bones elsewhere, together -with all other constitutional or general symptoms, were traced, in good -faith, to a disordered liver, an organ which was chosen on theoretical -grounds as the _minera morbi_ or laboratory of the disease[147]. The -circumstances of the great epidemic were, of course, special, but they -were not altogether new. No medieval miracle could have been more of a -suspension of the order of nature than that _luxuria_, _immunditia_, and -_foeditas_, with their attendant _corruptio membrorum_, should have been -free from those consequences, in the individual and in the community, -which are more familiar in our own not less clean-living days merely -because the sequence of events is better understood. That such vices -abounded in the medieval world we have sufficient evidence. They were -notorious among the Norman conquerors of England, especially notorious in -the reign of William Rufus[148]; hence, perhaps, the significance of the -phrase _lepra Normannorum_. That particular vice which amounts to a felony -was the subject of the sixth charge (unproved) in the indictment of the -order of the Templars before the Pope Clement V. in 1307. Effects on the -public health traceable to such causes, for the most part _sub rosa_, have -been often felt in the history of nations, from the Biblical episode of -Baal-peor down to modern times. The evidence is written at large in the -works of Astruc, Hensler and Rosenbaum. We are here concerned with a much -smaller matter, namely, any evidence from England which may throw light -upon the classes of cases that were called leprous if they were called by -a name at all. - -Under the year 1258, Matthew Paris introduces a singular paragraph, which -is headed, "The Bishop of Hereford smitten with polypus." The bishop, a -Provencal, had made himself obnoxious by his treacherous conduct as the -agent of Henry III. at the Holy See in the matter of the English subsidies -to the pope. Accordingly it was by the justice of God that he was deformed -by a most disgraceful disease, to wit, _morphea_, or again, "morphea -polipo, vel quadam specie leprae[149]." According to the medical teaching -of the time, as we find it in Gilbertus Anglicus, _morphaea_ was an -infection producing a change in the natural colour of the skin; it was -confined to the skin, whereas _lepra_ was in the flesh also; the former -was curable, the latter incurable; _morphaea_ might be white, red, or -black[150]. The account of _morphaea_ by Gordonio is somewhat fuller. All -things, he says, that are causes of _lepra_ are causes of _morphaea_; so -that what is in the flesh _lepra_ is _morphaea_ in the skin. It was a -patchy discoloration of the skin, reddish, yellowish, whitish, dusky, or -black, producing _terribilis aspectus_; curable if recent, incurable if of -long standing; curable also if of moderate extent, but difficult to cure -if of great extent[151]. In this description by Gordonio a modern French -writer on leprosy[152] discovers the classical characters of the syphilis -of our own day: "not one sign is wanting." - -No doubt the medical writers drew a distinction between _morphaea_ and -_lepra_, as we have seen in quoting Gilbert and Gordonio. Gaddesden, also, -who mostly copies them, interpolates here an original remark. No one -should be adjudged leprous, he says, and separated from his fellows, -merely because the "figure and form" (the stock phrase) of the face are -corrupted: the disease might be "scabies foeda," or if in the feet, it -might be "cancer." Nodosities or tubercles should not be taken to mean -leprosy, unless they are confirmed (inveterate) in the face[153]. But how -uncertain are these diagnostic indications, as between _lepra_ and -_morphaea_, _lepra_ and "scabies foeda," _lepra_ and "cancer in pedibus!" -If there were any object in calling the disease by one name rather than -another, it is clear that the same disease might be called by a euphemism -in one case and by a term meant to be opprobrious in another. Although -leprosy was not in general a disease that anyone might wish to be credited -with, yet there were circumstances when the diagnosis of leprosy had its -advantages. It was of use to a beggar or tramp to be called a leper: he -would excite more pity, he might get admission to a hospital, and he might -solicit alms, under royal privilege, although begging in ordinary was -punishable. It is conceivable also that the diagnosis of leprosy was a -convenient one for men in conspicuous positions in Church and State. It is -most improbable that the "lepra Normannorum" was all leprosy; it is absurd -to suppose that leprosy became common in Europe because returning -Crusaders introduced it from the East, as if leprosy could be "introduced" -in any such way; and it is not easy to arrive at certitude, that all the -cases of leprosy in princes and other high-placed personages (Baldwin IV. -of Jerusalem who died at the age of twenty-five,[154] Robert the Bruce of -Scotland,[155] and Henry IV. of England[156]) were cases that would now be -diagnosed leprous. - -Instances may be quoted to show that the name of leper was flung about -somewhat at random. Thus, in an edict issued by Henry II., during the -absence of Becket abroad for the settlement of his quarrel with the king, -it was decreed that anyone who brought into the country documents relating -to the threatened papal interdict should have his feet cut off if he were -a regular cleric, his eyes put out if a secular clerk, should be hanged if -a layman, and be burned if a _leprosus_--that is to say, a beggar or -common tramp. Again, in the charges brought for Henry III. against the -powerful minister Hubert de Burg in 1239, one item is that he had -prevented the marriage of our lord the king with a certain noble lady by -representing to the latter and to her guardian that the king was "a -squinter, and a fool, and a good-for-nothing, and that he had a kind of -leprosy, and was a deceiver, and a perjurer, and more of a craven than any -woman[157]" etc. - -There is also a curious instance of the term leprous being applied to the -Scots, evidently in the sense in which William of Malmesbury, and many -more after him, twitted that nation with their cutaneous infirmities. When -the Black Death of 1348-9 had reached the northern counties of England, -the Scots took advantage of their prostrate state to gather in the forest -of Selkirk for an invasion, exulting in the "foul death of England." -Knighton says that the plague reached them there, that five thousand of -them died, and that their rout was completed by the English falling upon -them[158]. But the other contemporary chronicler of the Black Death, -Geoffrey le Baker[159], tells the story with a curious difference. The -Scots, he says, swearing by the foul death of the English, passed from the -extreme of exultation to that of grief; the sword of God's wrath was -lifted from the English and fell in its fury upon the Scots, "et [Scotos] -per lepram, nec minus quam Anglicos per apostemata et pustulos, mactavit." -The _apostemata_ and _pustuli_ were indeed the buboes, boils and -carbuncles of the plague, correctly named; but what was the _lepra_ of the -Scots? It was probably a vague term of abuse; but, if the clerk of Osney -attached any meaning to it, it is clear that he saw nothing improbable in -a disease called _lepra_ springing up suddenly and spreading among a body -of men. - -We conclude, then, that _lepra_ was a term used in a generic sense because -of a real uncertainty of diagnosis, or because there was some advantage to -be got from being called _leprosus_, or because it was flung about at -random. But there is still another reason for the inexact use of the terms -_lepra_ and _leprosus_ in the medieval period, namely, the dominant -influence of religious tradition. The heritage or accretion of religious -sentiment not only perverted the correct use of the name, but led to -regulations and proscriptions which were out of place even for the real -disease. - - -The Biblical Associations of Leprosy. - -Among the synonyms for _leprosi_ we find the terms "pauperes Christi, -videlicet Lazares," the name of "Christ's poor" being given to lepers by -Aelred in the twelfth century and by Matthew Paris in the thirteenth. The -association of ideas with Lazarus is a good sample of the want of -discrimination in all that pertains to medieval leprosy. The Lazarus of St -Luke's Gospel, who was laid at the rich man's gate full of sores, is a -representative person, existing only in parable. On the other hand, the -Lazarus of St John's Gospel, Lazarus of Bethany, the brother of Martha and -Mary, the man of many friends, is both a historical personage and a saint -in the calendar. But there is nothing to show that he was a leper. He had -a remarkable experience of restoration to the light of day, and it was -probably on account of an episode in his life that made so much talk that -he received posthumously the name of Lazarus, or "helped of God[160]." The -name of the man in the parable is also generic, just as generic as that -of his contrast Dives is; but specifically there was nothing in common -between the one Lazarus and the other. Yet St Lazarus specially named as -the brother of Martha and Mary (as in the charter of the leper-house at -Sherburn) became the patron of lepers. The ascription to Lazarus of -Bethany of the malady of Lazarus in the parable has done much for the -prestige of the latter's disease; in the medieval world it brought all -persons full of sores within a nimbus of sanctity, as being in a special -sense "pauperes Christi," the successors at once of him whom Jesus loved -and of "Lazarus ulcerosus." Doubtless the lepers deserved all the charity -that they got; but we shall not easily understand the interest -exceptionally taken in them, amidst abounding suffering and wretchedness -in other forms, unless we keep in mind that they somehow came to be -regarded as Christ's poor. - -Next to the image of Lazarus, or rather the composite image of the two -Lazaruses, the picture of leprosy that filled the imagination was that of -the thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of Leviticus. That picture is even -more composite than the other, and for leprosy in the strict sense it is -absolutely misleading. The word translated "leprosy" is a generic term for -various communicable maladies, most of which were curable within a -definite period, sometimes no longer than a week. It rested with the skill -of the priesthood to discriminate between the forms of communicable -disease, and to prescribe the appropriate ceremonial treatment for each; -the people had one common name for them all, and beyond that they were in -the hands of their priests, who knew quite well what they were about. The -Christian Church dealt with all those archaic institutions of an Eastern -people in a child-like spirit of verbal or literal interpretation, -doubtless finding the greater part of them a meaningless jargon. But some -verses would touch the imagination and call up a real and vivid picture, -such verses, for example, as the following: - - "And the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent, and - his head bare, and he shall put a covering upon his upper lip, and - shall cry, Unclean, unclean. All the days wherein the plague shall be - in him he shall be defiled; he is unclean; he shall dwell alone; - without the camp shall his habitation be." - -Even in that comparatively plain direction, the obvious suggestion that -the unclean person would not always be unclean, and that there was a term -to his stay outside the camp, would go for little in reading the -scripture. The medieval religious world took those parts of the Jewish -teaching that appealed to their apprehension, and applied them to the -circumstances of their own time with as much of zeal as the common sense -of the community would permit. We have clear evidence of the effect of the -Levitical teaching about "leprosy" upon English practice in the ordinances -of the St Albans leper hospital of St Julian, which will be given in the -sequel. - - -The Medieval Religious Sentiment towards Lepers. - -Several incidents told of lepers by the chroniclers bring out that -exaggerated religious view of the disease. Roger of Howden has preserved -the following mythical story of Edward the Confessor. Proceeding one day -from his palace to the Abbey Church in pomp and state, he passed with his -train of nobles and ecclesiastics through a street in which sat a leper -full of sores. The courtiers were about to drive the wretched man out from -the royal presence, when the king ordered them to let him sit where he -was. The leper, waxing bold after this concession, addressed the king, "I -adjure thee by the living God to take me on thy shoulders and bring me -into the church;" whereupon the king bowed his head and took the leper -upon his shoulders. And as the king went, he prayed that God would give -health to the leper; and his prayer was heard, and the leper was made -whole from that very hour, praising and glorifying God[161]. - -It is not the miraculous ending of this incident that need surprise us -most; for the Royal touch by which the Confessor wrought his numerous -cures of the blind and the halt and the scrofulous, continued to be -exercised, with unabated virtue, down to the eighteenth century, and came -at length to be supervised by Court surgeons who were fellows of the Royal -Society. It is the humility of a crowned head in the presence of a leper -that marks an old-world kind of religious sentiment. The nearest approach -to it in our time is the feet-washing of the poor by the empress at Vienna -on Corpus Christi day. - -A similar story, with a truer touch of nature in it, is told of Matilda, -queen of Henry I.; and it happens to be related on so good authority that -we may believe every word of it. Matilda was a Saxon princess, daughter of -Margaret the Atheling, the queen of Malcolm Canmore. The other actor in -the story was her brother David, afterwards king of Scots and, like his -mother, honoured as a saint of the Church. The narrator is Aelred, abbot -of Rievaulx, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, celebrated for his Latin -style and his care for Saxon history. The abbot was a friend of St David, -whose virtues he celebrates at length; the incident of queen Matilda and -the lepers was one that he often heard from David's own lips (quod ex ore -saepe Davidis regis audivi). The princess Matilda, taking more after her -mother than her father, had been brought up in an English convent under -her aunt, the abbess of it. When it came to a marriage between her and -Henry I., an alliance which was meant to reconcile the Saxons to Norman -rule, the question arose in the mind of Anselm whether the princess -Matilda had not actually taken the veil, and whether he could legally -marry her to the king. Questioned as to the fact, the princess made answer -that she had indeed worn the veil in public, but only as a protection from -the licentious insolence of the Norman nobles. She had no liking for the -great match arranged for her, and consented unwillingly although the king -was enamoured of her. Such was her humility that Aelred designates her -"the Esther of our times." The marriage was on the 15th of November, 1100; -and in the next year, according to the usual date given, the young queen -sought relief and effusion for her religious instincts by founding the -leper hospital of St Giles in the Fields, "with a chapel and a sufficient -edifice." Matthew Paris, a century and a half after, saw it standing as -queen Matilda had built it, and made a sketch of it in colours on the -margin of his page, still remaining to us in a library at Cambridge, with -the description, "Memoriale Matild. Regine." - -The story which her brother David told to the abbot of Rievaulx is as -follows: - - When he was serving as a youth at the English Court, one evening he - was with his companions in his lodging, when the queen called him into - her chamber. He found the place full of lepers, and the queen standing - in the midst, with her robe laid aside and a towel girt round her. - Having filled a basin with water, she proceeded to wash the feet of - the lepers and to wipe them with the towel, and then taking them in - both her hands, she kissed them with devotion. To whom her brother: - "What dost thou, my lady? Certes if the king were to know this, never - would he deign to kiss with his lips that mouth of thine polluted with - the soil of leprous feet." But she answered with a smile: "Who does - not know that the feet of an Eternal King are to be preferred to the - lips of a mortal king? See, then, dearest brother, wherefore I have - called thee, that thou mayest learn by my example to do so also. Take - the basin, and do what thou hast seen me do." "At this," said David, - narrating to the abbot, "I was sore afraid, and answered that I could - on no account endure it. For as yet I did not know the Lord, nor had - His Spirit been revealed to me. And as she proceeded with her task, I - laughed--_mea culpa_--and returned to my comrades[162]." - -The example of his sister, however, was not lost upon him; for when he -acquired the earldom and manor of Huntingdon, and so became an opulent -English noble, he founded a leper-hospital there. Aelred sees him in -Abraham's bosom with Lazarus. - -The meaning of all this devotion to lepers is shown in the name which -Aelred applies to them--_pauperes Christi_. In washing their feet the -pious Matilda was in effect washing the feet of an Eternal King; and that, -in her estimation, was better than kissing the lips of a mortal king. - -Again, in the Life of St Hugh of Lincoln we see the good bishop moved to -treat the leprous poor with a sort of attention which they can hardly have -needed or expected, merely because they were, as his biographer says, the -successors of _Lazarus ulcerosus_, and the special _proteges_ of Jesus. -Not a few, says the biographer, were kept in seclusion owing to that -disease, both men and women. Bishop Hugh would take up his abode among -them and speak to them words of good cheer, promising them the flowers of -Paradise and an immortal crown. Having sent the women lepers out of the -way, he would go round among the men to kiss them, and when he came to one -who was more atrociously marked by the disease than another, he would hold -him in a longer and more gracious embrace. It was too much for the -bishop's biographer: "Spare, good Jesus, the unhappy soul of him who -relates these things"--horrified, as he says he was, at seeing the -"swollen and livid faces, deformed and sanious, with the eyelids everted, -the eyeballs dug out, and the lips wasted away, faces which it were -impossible to touch close or even to behold afar off[163]". But these -horrible disfigurements of the face are by no means the distinctive marks -of leprosy. The dragging down of the eyelids is an effect of leprosy but -as likely to happen in lupus or rodent ulcer. The loss of the eyeball may -be a leprous sign, or perhaps from tumour. The wasting of the lips is a -characteristic feature of lupus, after it has scarred, or if there be an -actual loss of substance, of epithelial cancer; in leprosy, on the other -hand, the lips, as well as other prominent folds of the face, undergo -thickening, and will probably remain thickened to the end. The sufferers -who excited the compassion of St Hugh must have merited it; only they were -not all lepers, nor probably the majority of them[164]. - -Two leper-stories are told to the honour of St Francis of Assisi. Seeing -one day a friar of his order named James the Simple, consorting on the way -to church with a leper from the hospital under his care, St Francis -rebuked the friar for allowing the leper to be at large. While he thus -admonished the friar, he thought that he observed the leper to blush, and -was stricken with a sudden remorse that he should have said anything to -hurt the wretched man's feelings. Having confessed and taken counsel, he -resolved, by way of penance, to sit beside the leper at table and to eat -with him out of the same dish, a penance all the greater, says the -biographer, that the leper was covered all over with offensive sores and -that the blood and sanies trickled down his fingers as he dipped them in -the dish. The other story is a more pleasing one. There was a certain -leper among those cared for by the friars, who would appear from the -description of him to have been one of the class of truculent impostors, -made all the worse by the morbid consideration with which his disease, or -supposed disease, was regarded. One of his complaints was that no one -would wash him; whereupon St Francis, having ordered a friar to bring a -basin of perfumed water, proceeded to wash the leper with his own -hands[165]. - -These four tales, all of them told of saints except that of Matilda--she -somehow missed being canonised along with her mother St Margaret and her -brother St David--will serve to show what a halo of morbid exaggeration -surrounded the idea of leprosy in the medieval religious mind. We live in -a time of saner and better-proportioned sentiment; but the critical -spirit, which has set so much else in a sober light, has spared the -medieval tradition of leprosy. Not only so, but our more graphic writers -have put that disease into the medieval foreground as if it had been the -commonest affliction of the time. We are taught to see the figures of -lepers in their grey or russet gowns flitting everywhere through the -scene; the air of those remote times is as if filled with the dull -creaking of St Lazarus's rattle. Our business here is to apply to the -question of leprosy in medieval Britain the same kind of scrutiny which -has been applied to the question of famines and famine-fevers, and remains -to be applied next in order to the great question of plague--the kind of -scrutiny which no historian would be excused from if his business were -with politics, or campaigns, or economics, or manners and customs. The -best available evidence for our purpose is the history of the -leper-houses, to which we shall now proceed. - - -The English Leper-houses. - -The English charitable foundations, or hospitals of all kinds previous to -the dissolution of the monasteries, including almshouses, infirmaries, -Maisons Dieu and lazar-houses, amount to five hundred and nine in the -index of Bishop Tanner's _Notitia Monastica_. In the 1830 edition of the -_Monasticon Anglicanum_, the latest recension of those immense volumes of -antiquarian research, there are one hundred and four such foundations -given, for which the original charters, or confirming charters, or reports -of inquisitions, are known; and, besides these, there are about three -hundred and sixty given in the section on "Additional Hospitals," the -existence and circumstances of which rest upon such evidence as casual -mention in old documents, or entries in monastery annals, or surviving -names and traditions of the locality. Our task is to discover, if we can, -what share of this charitable provision in medieval England, embracing at -least four hundred and sixty houses, was intended for the class of -_leprosi_; what indications there are of the sort of patients reckoned -_leprosi_; how many sick inmates the leper-houses had, absolutely as well -as in proportion to their clerical staff; and how far those refuges were -in request among the people, either from a natural desire to find a refuge -or from the social pressure upon them to keep themselves out of the way. - -It is clear that the endowed hospitals of medieval England were in no -exclusive sense leper-hospitals, but a general provision, under religious -discipline, for the infirm and sick poor, for infirm and ailing monks and -clergy, and here or there for decayed gentlefolk. The earliest of them -that is known, St Peter's and St Leonard's hospital at York, founded in -936 by king Athelstane, and enlarged more especially on its religious side -by king Stephen, was a great establishment for the relief of the poor, -with no reference to leprosy; it provided for no fewer than two hundred -and six bedesmen, and was served by a master, thirteen brethren, four -seculars, eight sisters, thirty choristers and six servitors. When -Lanfranc, the first Norman archbishop of Canterbury, set about organising -the charitable relief of his see in 1084, he endowed two hospitals, one -for the sick and infirm poor in general, and the other for _leprosi_[166]. -The former, St John Baptist's hospital, was at the north gate, a -commodious house of stone, for poor, infirm, lame or blind men and women. -The latter was the hospital of Herbaldown, an erection of timber, in the -woods of Blean about a mile from the west gate, for persons _regia -valetudine fluentibus_ (?), who are styled _leprosi_ in a confirming -charter of Henry II.[167] The charge of both these houses was given to the -new priory of St Gregory, over against St John Baptist's hospital, endowed -with tithes for secular clergy. The leper-house at Herbaldown was divided -between men and women; but in a later reign (Henry II.) a hospital -entirely for women (twenty-five leprous sisters) was founded at -Tannington, outside Canterbury, with a master, prioress and three priests. -There was still a third hospital at Canterbury, St Lawrence's, founded -about 1137, for the relief of leprous monks or for the poor parents and -relations of the monks of St Augustine's. - -London had two endowed leper-hospitals under ecclesiastical government, as -well as certain spitals or refuges of comparatively late date. The -hospital and chapel of St Giles in the Fields was founded, as we have -seen, by Matilda, queen of Henry I., in 1101, and was commonly known for -long after as Matilda's hospital. It was built for forty _leprosi_, who -may or may not all have lived in it; and it was supported in part by the -voluntary contributions of the citizens collected by a proctor. Its staff -was at first exceptionally small for the number of patients,--a chaplain, -a clerk and a messenger; but as its endowments increased several other -clerics and some matrons were added. By a king's charter of 1208 (10th -John), it was to receive sixty shillings annually. It is next heard of, in -the Rolls of Parliament, in connexion with a petition of 1314-15 (8 Ed. -II.), by the terms of which, and of the reply to it, we can see that there -were then some lepers in the hospital but also patients of another kind. -It is mentioned by Wendover, under the year 1222, as the scene of a trial -of strength between the citizens and the _comprovinciales extra urbem -positos_[168]: at that date it stood well in the country, probably near to -where the church of St Giles now stands at the end of old High Holborn. -The drawing of the hospital on the margin of Matthew Paris's manuscript -shows it as a house of stone, with a tower at the east end and a smaller -one over the west porch, and with a chapel and a hall, but probably no -dormitories for forty lepers[169]. - -The other endowed leper-house of the metropolis was the hospital of St -James, in the fields beyond Westminster. It was of ancient date, and -provided for fourteen female patients, who came somehow to be called the -_leprosae puellae_[170], although youth is by no means specially -associated with leprosy. This house grew rich, and supported eight -brethren for the religious services of the sixteen patients[171]. - -It is usual to enumerate five, and sometimes six, other leper-hospitals, -in the outskirts of London--at Kingsland or Hackney, in Kent Street, -Southwark (the Lock), at Highgate, at Mile End, at Knightsbridge and at -Hammersmith. But the earliest of these were founded in the reign of Edward -III. (about 1346) at a time when the old ecclesiastical leper-houses were -nearly empty of lepers. It would be misleading to include them among the -medieval leper-houses proper, and I shall refer to them in a later part of -this chapter. - -The example of archbishop Lanfranc at Canterbury and of queen Matilda in -London was soon followed by other founders and benefactors. The movement -in favour of lepers--there was probably too real an occasion for it to -call it a craze--gained much from the appearance on the scene of the -Knights of the Order of St Lazarus of Jerusalem. Those knights were the -most sentimental of the orders of chivalry, and probably not more -reputable than the Templars or the main body of the Hospitallers from -which they branched off. If we may judge of them by modern instances, they -wanted to do some great thing, and to do it in the most theatrical way, -with everybody looking on. What real services they may have rendered to -the sick poor, leprous or other, there is little to show. The -head-quarters of the order were at Jerusalem, the Grand Master and the -Knights there being all _leprosi_--doubtless in a liberal sense of the -term. We should be doing them no injustice if we take them to have been -Crusaders so badly hit by their vices or their misfortunes as to be marked -off into a separate order by a natural line. However, many others enlisted -under the banner of St Lazarus who were not _leprosi_; these established -themselves in various countries of Europe, acquired many manors and built -fine houses[172]. In England their chief house was at Burton in -Leicestershire; it was not by any means a great leper-hospital, but a -Commandery or Preceptory for eight whole knights, with some provision for -an uncertain number of poor brethren--the real Lazaruses who, like their -prototype, would receive the crumbs from the high table. The house of -Burton Lazars gradually swallowed up the lands of leper-hospitals -elsewhere, as these passed into desuetude, and at the valuation of Henry -VIII. it headed the list with an annual rental of L250. Their -establishment in England dates from the early part of the twelfth century, -and although the house at Burton appears to have been their only -considerable possession, they are said, on vague evidence, to have -enlisted many knights from England, and, curiously enough, still more from -Scotland. A letter is extant by the celebrated schoolman, John of -Salisbury, afterwards bishop of Chartres, written in the reign of Henry -II. to a bishop of Salisbury, from which it would appear that the "Fratres -Hospitales" were regarded with jealousy and dislike by the clerical -profession; "rapiunt ut distribuant," says the writer, as if there were -something at once forced and forcible in their charities[173]. - -Coincidently with the appearance in England of the Knights of St Lazarus, -we find the monasteries, and sometimes private benefactors among the -nobility, beginning to make provision for lepers, either along with other -deserving poor or in houses apart. After the hospitals at Canterbury and -London (as well as an eleventh-century foundation at Northampton, which -may or may not have been originally destined for _leprosi_), come the two -leper-houses founded by the great abbey of St Albans. As these were -probably as good instances as can be found, their history is worth -following. - -In the time of abbot Gregory (1119 to 1146), the hospital and church of St -Julian was built on the London road, for six poor brethren (_Lazares_ or -_pauperes Christi_) governed by a master and four chaplains. The -mastership of St Julian's is twice mentioned in the abbey chronicles as a -valuable piece of preferment. In 1254 the lands of the hospital were so -heavily taxed, for the king and the pope, that the _miselli_, according to -Matthew Paris, had barely the necessaries of life. But a century after, -in 1350, the revenues were too large for its needs, and new statutes were -made; the accommodation of its six beds was by no means in request, the -number of inmates being never more than three, sometimes only two, and -occasionally only one[174]. The fate of the other leper-house of St Albans -abbey, that of St Mary de Pratis for women, is not less instructive. The -date of its foundation is not known, but in 1254 it had a church and a -hospital occupied by _misellae_[175]. A century later we hear of the house -being shared between illiterate sisters and nuns. The former are not -called lepers, but simply poor sisters; whatever they were, the nuns and -they did not get on comfortably together, and the abbot restored harmony -by turning the hospital into a nunnery pure and simple[176]. Similar was -the history of one of the richest foundations of the kind, that of Mayden -Bradley in Wiltshire. It was originally endowed shortly before or shortly -after the accession of Henry II. (1135) by a noble family for an unstated -number of poor women, generally assumed to have been _leprosae_, and for -an unstated number of regular and secular clerics to perform the religious -offices and manage the property. It had not existed long, however, when -the bishop of Salisbury, in 1190, got the charter altered so as to assign -the revenues to eight canons and--poor sisters, and so it continued until -the valuation of Henry VIII., when it was found to be of considerable -wealth. In like manner the hospital of St James, at Tannington near -Canterbury, founded in the reign of Henry II. for twenty-five "leprous -sisters," was found, in the reign of Edward III. (1344), to contain no -lepers, its "corrodies" being much sought after by needy gentlewomen[177]. - -Another foundation of Henry II.'s reign was the leper-hospital of St Mary -Magdalen at Sponne, outside the walls of Coventry. It was founded by an -Earl of Chester, who, having a certain leprous knight in his household, -gave in pure alms for the health of his soul and the souls of his -ancestors his chapel at Sponne with the site thereof, and half a carucate -of land for the maintenance of such lepers as should happen to be in the -town of Coventry. There was one priest to celebrate, and with him were -wont to be also certain brethren or sisters together with the lepers, -praying to God for the good estate of all their benefactors. "But clear it -is," says Dugdale, "that the monks shortly after appropriated it to their -own use." However, they were in time dispossessed by the Crown, to which -the hospital belonged until the 14th of Edward IV[178]. - -One of the most typical as well as earliest foundations was the hospital -of the Holy Innocents at Lincoln, endowed by Henry I. We owe our knowledge -of its charter to an inquisition of Edward III. It was intended for ten -_leprosi_, who were to be of the outcasts (_de ejectibus_) of the city of -Lincoln, the presentation to be in the king's gift or in that of the mayor -or other good men of the city, and the administration of it by a master or -warden, two chaplains and one clerk. In the space of two centuries from -its foundation the character of its inmates had gradually changed. Edward -III.'s commissioners found nine poor brethren or sisters in it; only one -of them was _leprosus_, and he had obtained admission by a golden key; -also the seven poor women had got in _per viam pecuniam_. In Henry VI.'s -time provision was made for the possibility of lepers still requiring its -shelter--_quod absit_, as the new charter said. - -In the same reign (end of Henry I.) the hospital of St Peter was founded -at Bury St Edmunds by abbot Anselm, for priests and others when they grew -old and infirm, leprous or diseased. The other hospital at Bury, St -Saviour's, had no explicit reference to leprosy at all. It was founded by -the famous abbot Samson about 1184, for a warden, twelve chaplain-priests, -six clerks, twelve poor gentlemen, and twelve poor women. About a hundred -years later the poor sisters had to go, in order to make room for old and -infirm priests. - -Sometime before his death in 1139, Thurstan, archbishop of York, founded a -hospital at Ripon for the relief of "all the lepers in Richmondshire;" the -provision was for eighteen patients, a chaplain and sisters. At an -uncertain date afterwards the house was found to contain a master, two or -three chaplains and some brethren, who are not styled _leprosi_; and from -the inquisition of Edward III. we learn that its original destination had -been for the relief as much of the poor as the leprous (_tam pauperum quam -leprosorum_), and that there was no leprous person in it at the date of -the inquisition. - -The mixed character of hospitals commonly reckoned leper-hospitals is -shown by several other instances. St Mary Magdalene's at Lynn (1145) -provided for a prior and twelve brethren or sisters, nine of whom were to -be whole and three leprous. St Leonard's at Lancaster (time of king John) -was endowed for a master, a chaplain, and nine poor persons, three of them -to be leprous. St Bartholomew's at Oxford provided for a master, a clerk, -two whole brethren and six infirm or leprous brethren; but the infirm or -leprous brethren had all been changed into whole brethren by the time of -Edward III[179]. So again the Normans' spital at Norwich was found to be -sheltering "seven whole sisters and seven half-sisters." - -The leper-hospital at Stourbridge, near Cambridge, was founded for lepers -by king John, the one king in English history who cared greatly about his -leprous subjects. It was committed to the charge of the burgesses of -Cambridge, but it was shortly after seized by Hugo de Norwold, bishop of -Ely, and within little more than fifty years from its foundation (7 Ed. -I.) it was found that the bishop of Ely of that day was using it for some -purposes of his own, but "was keeping no lepers in it, as he ought, and as -the custom had been[180]." - -The ostentatious patronage of lepers by king John, of which something more -might be said, was preceded by a more important interposition on their -behalf by the third Council of the Lateran in 1179 (Alexander III.). The -position of _leprosi_ in the community had clearly become anomalous, and -one of the decrees of the Council was directed to setting it right. -Lepers, who were "unable to live with sound persons, or to attend church -with them, or to get buried in the same churchyard, or to have the -ministrations of the proper priest," were enjoined to have their own -presbytery, church, and churchyard, and their lands were to be exempt from -tithe[181]. Within two or three years of that decree, in or near 1181, we -find a bishop of Durham, Hugh de Puiset, endowing the greatest of all the -English leper-hospitals, at Sherburn, a mile or more outside the city of -Durham. The bishop was a noted instance of the worldly ecclesiastic of his -time. He was accused by the king of misappropriating money left by the -archbishop of York, and his defence was that he had spent it on the blind, -the deaf, the dumb, the leprous, and such like deserving objects[182]. -William of Newburgh has left us his opinion of the bishop's charity: it -was a noble hospital lavishly provided for, "but with largess not quite -honestly come by" (_sed tamen ex parte minus honesta largitione_[183]). -The hospital of bishop Hugh, dedicated to the Saviour, the Blessed Virgin, -St Lazarus, and his sisters Mary and Martha, still exists as Christ's -Hospital, a quadrangular building enclosing about an acre in a sunny -valley to the south of the city, with a fine chapel, a great hall (of -which the ancient raftered roof existed into the present century), a -master's lodge, and a low range of buildings on the west side of the -square for the poor brethren, with their own modest hall in the middle of -it. The original foundation was certainly on a princely scale, as things -then went: it was for five "convents" of lepers, including in all -sixty-five persons of both sexes, with a steward or guardian to be their -own proper representative or protector, three priests, four attendant -clerks, and a prior and prioress. We hear nothing more of the hospital for -a century and a half, during which time it had doubtless been filled by a -succession of poor brethren, or sick poor brethren, but whether leprous -brethren, or even mainly leprous, may well be doubted after the recorded -experiences of Ripon, Lincoln and Stourbridge. Its charter was confirmed -by bishop Kellaw about 1311-1316; and in an ordinance of 1349 we still -read, but not without a feeling of something forced and unreal, of the -hospital ministering to the hunger, the thirst, the nakedness of the -leprous, and to the other wants and miseries by which they are incessantly -afflicted. But within ninety years of that time (1434) the real state of -the case becomes apparent; the poor brethren had been neglected, and the -estates so mismanaged or alienated to other uses, that new statutes were -made reducing the number of inmates to thirteen poor brethren and two -lepers, the latter being thrown in, "if they can be found in these parts," -in order to preserve the memory of the original foundation[184]. - -To these samples, which are also the chief instances of English -leper-hospitals, may be added two or three more to bring out another side -of the matter. In the cases already given, it has been seen that the -provision for the clerical staff was either a very liberal one at first or -became so in course of time. The hospitals, whether leprous or other, were -for the most part dependencies of the abbeys, affording occupation and -residence to so many more monks, just as if they had been "cells" of the -abbey. The enormous disproportion of the clerical staff to the inmates of -hospitals (not, however, leprous) is seen in the instances of St Giles's -at Norwich, St Saviour's at Bury and St Cross at Winchester. The provision -was about six for the poor and half-a-dozen for the monks. But even the -purely nosocomial part of these charities was in not a few instances for -the immediate relief of the monasteries themselves. St Bartholomew's at -Chatham, one of the earliest foundations usually counted among the -leper-hospitals, was for sick or infirm monks. The hospital at -Basingstoke, endowed by Merton College, Oxford, was for incurably sick -fellows and scholars of Merton itself. The leper-hospital at Ilford in -Essex was founded about 1180 by the rich abbey of Barking, for the leprous -tenants and servants of the abbey, the provision being for a secular -master, a leprous master, thirteen leprous brethren, two chaplains and a -clerk. St Lawrence's at Canterbury (1137) was for leprous monks or for the -poor parents and relations of monks. St Peter's at Bury St Edmunds, -founded by abbot Anselm in the reign of Henry I., was for priests and -others when they grew old, infirm, leprous, or diseased. - -The instances which have been detailed in the last few pages, perhaps not -without risk of tediousness, have not been chosen to give a colour to the -view of medieval leprosy; they are a fair sample of the whole, and they -include nearly all those leper-hospitals of which the charters or other -authentic records are known[185]. It is possible by using every verbal -reference to leprosy that may be found in connexion with all the five -hundred or more medieval English hospitals in Bishop Tanner's _Notitia -Monastica_ or in Dugdale's _Monasticon_, to make out a list of over a -hundred leper-hospitals of one kind or another. But there are probably not -thirty of them for which the special destination of the charity is known -from charters or inquisitions; and even these, as we have seen, were not -all purely for lepers or even mainly for lepers. As to the rest of the -list of one hundred, the connexion with leprosy is of the vaguest kind. -Thus, four out of the five hospitals in Cornwall are called lazar-houses -or leper-hospitals, but they were so called merely on the authority of -antiquaries subsequent to the sixteenth century. The same criticism -applies almost equally to the eight so-called leper-hospitals, out of a -total of fourteen medieval hospitals of all kinds, in Devonshire. It is -clear that "lazar-house" became an even more widely generic term than the -terms _lepra_ and _leprosus_ themselves[186]. - -Thus our doubts as to the amount of true leprosy that once existed in -England, and was provided for in the access of chivalrous sentiment that -came upon Christendom in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, tend to -multiply in a compound ratio. We doubt whether many of the so-called -leper-houses or lazar-houses in the list of one hundred, more or less, -that may be compiled from the _Monasticon_, were not ordinary refuges for -the sick and infirm poor, like the three or four hundred other religious -charities of the country. We know that, in some instances of -leper-hospitals with authentic charters, the provision for the leprous was -in the proportion of one to three or four of non-leprous inmates. We know -that as early as the end of the thirteenth century the _leprosi_ were -disappearing or getting displaced even from hospitals where the intentions -of the founder were explicit. And lastly we doubt the homogeneity of the -disease called _lepra_ and of the class called _leprosi_. - -As to the foundations of a later age they were no longer under -ecclesiastical management, and they seem to have been mostly rude shelters -on the outskirts of the larger towns. In 1316 a burgess of Rochester, who -had sat in Parliament, left a house in Eastgate to be called St -Katharine's Spital, "for poor men of the city, leprous or otherwise -diseased, impotent and poor"--or, in other words, a common almshouse. The -remarkable ordinance of Edward III. in 1346, for the expulsion of lepers -from London, seems to have been the occasion of the founding of two -so-called lazar-houses, one in Kent Street, Southwark, called "the -Loke[187]," and the other at Hackney or Kingsland. These are the only two -mentioned in the subsequent orders to the porters of the City Gates in -1375; and as late as the reign of Henry VI. they are the only two, besides -the ancient Matilda's Hospital in St Giles's Fields, to which bequests -were made in the will of Ralph Holland, merchant taylor[188]. Another of -the suburban leper-spitals was founded at Highgate by a citizen in -1468[189], and it is not until the reign of Henry VIII. that we hear of -the spitals at Mile End, Knightsbridge and Hammersmith[190]. By that time -leprosy had ceased to be heard of in England; but another disease, -syphilis, had become exceedingly common; and it is known that those -spitals, together with the older leper-hospitals, were used for the poorer -victims of that disease. Stow is unable to give the exact date of any of -these foundations except that at Highgate. He assumes that the others were -all built on the occasion of the ordinance of 20 Edward III.; but it is -probable that only two of them, the Lock and the Kingsland or Hackney -spital were built at that time[191]. - -An early instance of a leper-spital or refuge apparently without -ecclesiastical discipline is mentioned in a charter roll of 1207-8, in -which king John grants to the leprosi of Bristol a croft outside the -Laffard gate, whereon to reside under the king's protection and to beg -with impunity. On the roads leading to Norwich there were four such -shelters, outside the gates of St Mary Magdalene, St Bennet, St Giles and -St Stephen respectively; these houses were each under a keeper, and were -supported by the alms of the townsfolk or of travellers; only one of the -four is alleged to have had a chapel attached. The date of these is -unknown, but they were probably late. On the roads leading from Lynn, -there were three such erections, at Cowgate, Letchhythe and West Lynn, -which are first mentioned in a will of 1432. These non-religious and -unendowed leper-spitals were probably rude erections on the outskirts of -the town, at the door of which, or on the roadside near, one or more -lepers would sit and beg. The liberty of soliciting alms was one of their -privileges, only they were not allowed to carry their importunity too far; -hence the ordinance of most countries that the lepers were not to enter -mills and bake-houses; and hence some ordinances of the Scots parliament -limiting the excursions of the leper folk. One of the most considerable -privileges to lepers was granted to the lepers of Shrewsbury in 1204 by -king John, who did not lose the chance of earning a cheap reputation for -Christian charity by his ostentatious patronage of the _pauperes Christi_: -they were entitled to take a handful of corn or flour from all sacks -exposed in Shrewsbury market. - - -Leper-houses in Scotland and Ireland. - -Most of the leper-spitals of Scotland would appear to have been of the -poorest kind, unendowed and unprovided with priests. The richest -foundation for lepers in Scotland was at Kingcase, near Prestwick in -Ayrshire, endowed with lands and consisting of a hospital of eight beds. -One or more leper-hospitals were built by the rich abbeys on the Tweed (at -Aldcambus in Berwickshire and probably at another place). Another great -ecclesiastical centre in Scotland, Elgin, had a leper-house at Rothfan, -with accommodation for seven lepers, a chaplain, and a servant. After -these, the Scots leper-houses may be taken to have been mere refuges, in -which the lepers supported themselves by begging. One such secular -hospital was in the Gorbals of Glasgow, founded in 1350. Liberton, near -Edinburgh, is supposed to mean Leper-town, and to have been a resort of -the sick on account of its medicinal spring. The hospital at Greenside, -then outside Edinburgh, was built in 1589. There was a leper-spital -outside the Gallow-gate of Aberdeen, on a road which still bears the name -of the Spital. Similar shelters may be inferred to have existed at Perth, -Stirling, Linlithgow and other places. James IV., in his journeys, used to -distribute small sums to the sick folk in the "grandgore" (syphilis), to -the poor folk, and to the lipper-folk, "at the town end[192]." - -There were some leper-hospitals in Ireland, but it is not easy to -distinguish them in every case from general hospitals for the sick poor. -Thus the hospital built by the monks of Innisfallen in 869 is merely -called _nosocomium_, although it is usually reckoned an early foundation -for lepers in Ireland. A hospital at Waterford was "confirmed to the poor" -by the Benedictines in 1185. St Stephen's in Dublin (1344) is specially -named as the residence of the "poor lepers of the city" in a deed of gift -about 1360-70; a locality of the city called Leper-hill was perhaps the -site of another refuge. Lepers also may have been the occupants of the -hospitals at Kilbrixy in Westmeath (St Bridget's), of St Mary Magdalene's -at Wexford (previous to 1408), of the house at "Hospital," Lismore (1467), -at Downpatrick, at Kilclief in county Down, at Cloyne, and of one or more -of four old hospitals in or near Cork. The hospital at Galway, built "for -the poor of the town" about 1543, was not a leper-house, nor is there -reason to take the old hospital at Dungarvan as a foundation specially for -lepers[193]. - - -The Prejudice against Lepers. - -It will have been inferred, from many particulars given, that the -segregation of lepers in the Middle Ages was far from complete, and that -many ministered to them without fear and without risk. The same hospital -received both _leprosi_ and others, the hospitals were served by staffs of -chaplains, clerks and sometimes women attendants; and yet nothing is -anywhere said of contagion being feared or of the disease spreading by -contagion. The experience of these medieval hospitals was doubtless the -same as in the West Indies and other parts of the world in our own day. -It is true that the medical writers pronounce the disease to be -contagious, _ut docet Avicenna_; but the public would seem to have been -unaware of that, and they certainly lost nothing by their ignorance of the -medical dogma, which, in the text-books, is merely the result of a -concatenation of verbalist arguments. At the same time it is clear that -there was a certain amount of segregation of the leprous. The inmates of -the hospital at Lincoln are significantly described as "de ejectibus" of -the city. The third Lateran Council based one of its decrees upon what -must have been a common experience, namely, that lepers were unable to mix -freely with others, and that they were objected to in the same church, and -even as corpses in the same churchyard. There are some particular -indications of that feeling to be gathered from the chroniclers. - -One of the most remarkable histories is that of a high ecclesiastic in the -pre-Norman period. In the year 1044, Aelfward, bishop of London, being -stricken with leprosy (_lepra perfusus_) sought an asylum in the monastery -of Evesham, of which he was the prior. The monks may have had more than -one reason for not welcoming back their prior; at all events they declined -to let him stay, so that he repaired to the abbey of Ramsey, where he had -passed his noviciate and been shorn a monk. He carried off with him from -Evesham certain valuables and relics; and his old comrades at Ramsey, -undeterred by his leprosy or counter-attracted by his treasures, took him -in and kept him until his death. The incident can hardly be legendary for -it is related in the annals of Ramsey Abbey by one who wrote within a -hundred years of the event[194]. - -Another case, which may also be accepted as authentic, is given by Eadmer -in his _Life of Anselm_. Among the penitents who sought counsel and -consolation of Anselm while he was still abbot of Bec in Normandy, with a -great name for sanctity, was a certain powerful noble from the marches of -Flanders. He had been stricken with leprosy in his body, and his grief was -all the greater that he saw himself despised beneath his hereditary rank, -and shunned by his peers _pro obscenitate tanti mali_[195]. - -Besides such notable cases, we find more evidence in the ordinances of the -hospital of St Julian at St Albans, which have been preserved more -completely than those of any other leper-house. Forasmuch as the disease -of leprosy is of all infirmities held the most in contempt, the -unfortunate person who is about to be received into the St Albans house is -directed to work himself up into a state of the most factitious -melancholy; he is reminded, not only of the passage in Leviticus about -"Unclean, unclean!", but also of the blessed Job, who was himself a leper -(in the 14th century his boils became identified with the plague, and in -the end of the 15th century the patriarch was claimed as an early victim -of the _lues venerea_); and further of the verse in the 53rd of Isaiah: -"Et nos putavimus eum leprosum, percussum a Deo, et humiliatum[196]." The -St Albans house, with its six beds, appears to have been carefully -managed, and its inmates well provided for; but the unreal atmosphere of -the place had been too much for the leprous or other patients of the -district; for we find it on record that they could hardly be persuaded to -don its russet uniform, and submit themselves for the rest of their lives -to its discipline. - -There can be no question, then, that persons adjudged leprous were -shunned, driven out or ostracised by public opinion, and even legislated -against. The reality of these practices should not be confounded with a -real need for them. Least of all should they be ascribed to a general -belief in the contagiousness of the disease. In practice no one heeded the -medical dogma of leprous contagion, because no one attached any concrete -meaning to it or had any real experience of it. There was prejudice -against lepers, partly on account of Biblical tradition, and partly -because the "terribilis aspectus" of a leper was repulsive or uncanny. -Further, in genuine leprosy, the most wretched part of the victim's -condition was not his appearance (which in a large proportion of cases -may present little that is noticeable to passing observation), but his -unfitness for exertion, his listlessness, and depression of spirits, owing -to the profound disorganisation of his nerves. A leprous member of a -family would be a real burden to his relatives; and in a hard and cruel -age he would be little better off than the stricken deer of the herd or -the winged bird of the flock. To become a beggar was his natural fate; and -as a beggar he became privileged, by royal patent or by prescription, -while beggars in ordinary were under a ban. - -It is undoubted that the privilege of begging accorded to lepers was -abused, and was claimed by numbers who feigned to be lepers[197]. The one -severe edict against lepers in England was the ordinance of Edward III. -for the exclusion of lepers from London in 1346; it is clear, however, -from the text of the ordinance that the occasion of it was not any fixed -persuasion of the need for isolating leprous subjects, but some -intolerable behaviour of lepers or of those who passed as such. The mayor -and sheriffs are ordered to procure that all lepers should avoid the city -within fifteen days, for the reason that persons of that class, as well by -the pollution of their breath, etc. "as by carnal intercourse with women -in stews and other secret places, detestably frequenting the same, do so -taint persons who are sound, both male and female, to the great injury -etc.[198]" That is the old confusion which we have already noticed in -Bernard Gordonio and Gilbert; it is an edict against _lepra_ in its -generic sense, and against the same class that William Clowes -characterizes so forcibly in his book on the _morbus Gallicus_ in 1579. At -a date intermediate between those two, in 1488, an order was made by the -provost of Paris, that "lepers" should leave the city; but that is too -late a date for leprosy, although not too early for syphilis. On the 24th -August, 1375, the porters of the City Gates were sworn to prevent lepers -from entering the city, or from staying in the same, or in the suburbs -thereof; and on the same date, the foreman at 'Le Loke' (the Lock Hospital -in Southwark) and the foreman at the leper-spital of Hackney took oath -that they will not bring lepers, or know of their being brought, into the -city, but that they will inform the said porters and prevent the said -lepers from entering, so far as they may[199]. - -When all word of leprosy had long ceased in England the porters of the -City Gates had the same duties towards beggars in general. Thus in -Bullein's _Dialogue_ of 1564, the action begins with a whining beggar from -Northumberland saying the Lord's Prayer at the door of a citizen. The -citizen asks him, "How got you in at the gates?" whereupon it appears that -the Northumbrian had a friend at Court: "I have many countrymen in the -city," among the rest an influential personage, the Beadle of the -Beggars[200]. - -While it cannot be maintained that lepers were tolerated or looked upon -with indifference, yet it was for other reasons than fear of contagion -that they were objectionable. The prejudices against them have been -already illustrated from periods as early as the eleventh century. They -were, to say the least, undesirable companions, and in certain occupations -they must have been peculiarly objectionable. Thus, on the 11th June, -1372, in the city of London, John Mayn, baker, who had often times before -been commanded by the mayor and aldermen to depart from the city, and -provide for himself some dwelling without the same, and avoid the common -conversation of mankind, seeing that he the same John was smitten with the -blemish of leprosy--was again ordered to depart[201]. It does not appear -whether the baker departed that time, nor is there any good diagnosis of -his leprosy; there was certainly a prejudice against him, but the occasion -of it may have been nothing more than the eczematous crusts on the hands -and arms, sometimes very inveterate, which men of his trade are subject -to. - -It is clear also from a singular case in the _Foedera_, that a false -accusation of leprosy was sometimes brought against an individual, perhaps -out of enmity, like an accusation of witchcraft. In 1468 a woman accused -of leprosy appealed to Edward IV., who issued a chancery warrant for her -examination. - - The writ of 3rd July, 1468, is to the king's physicians, "sworn to the - safe-keeping of our person," William Hatteclyff, Roger Marschall, and - Dominic de Serego, doctors of Arts and Medicine; and the subject of - the inquisition is Johanna Nightyngale of Brentwood in Essex, who was - presumed by certain of her neighbours to be infected by the foul - contagion of _lepra_, and for whose removal from the common - intercourse of men a petition had been laid in Chancery. She had - refused to remove herself to a solitary place, _prout moris est_; the - physicians are accordingly ordered to associate with themselves - certain legal persons, to inquire whether the woman was leprous, and, - if so, to have her removed to a solitary place _honestiori modo quo - poteris_. On the 1st of November, 1468, the court of inquiry reported - that they found the woman to be in no way leprous, nor to have been. - The woman had been brought before them: they had passed in review - twenty-five or more of the commonly reputed signs of _lepra_, but they - had not found that she could be convicted of leprosy from them, or - from a sufficient number of them; again, passing in review each of the - four species of lepra (_alopecia_, _tinia_, _leonina_, and - _elephantia_) and the forty or more distinctive signs of the species - of _lepra_, they found not that the woman was marked by any of the - species of _lepra_, but that she was altogether free and immune from - every species of _lepra_[202]. - - -Laws against Lepers. - -The ordinance of 21 Edward III. (1346) against the harbouring of lepers in -London is the only one of the kind (so far as I know) in English history; -the Statutes of the realm contain no reference to lepers or leprosy from -first to last; the references in the Rolls of Parliament are to the taxing -of their houses and lands. The laws which deprived lepers of marital -rights and of heirship appear to have been wholly foreign; in England, -leprosy as a bar to succession was made a plea in the law courts. It -appears, however, that a law against lepers was made by a Welsh king in -the tenth century[203]. It is not easy to realize the state of Welsh -society in the tenth century; but we know enough of it in the twelfth -century, from the description of Giraldus Cambrensis, to assert with some -confidence that "leprosy" might have meant anything--perhaps the "lepra -Normannorum[204]." - -In Scotland the laws and ordinances, civil and ecclesiastical, against -lepers have been more numerous. In 1242 and 1269, canons of the Scots -Church were made, ordering that lepers should be separated from society in -accordance with general custom. In 1283-84, the statutes of the Society of -Merchants, or the Guildry, of Berwick provided that lepers should not -enter the borough, and that "some gude man sall gather alms for them." In -1427 the Parliament of Perth authorised ministers and others to search the -parishes for lepers[205]. - -We conclude, then, that little was made of leprosy by English legislators -(rather more by the Scots), just as we have found that in the endowment of -charities, the leprous had only a small share, and that share a somewhat -exaggerated one owing to the morbid sentimentality of the chivalrous -period. The most liberal estimate of the amount of true leprosy at any -time in England would hardly place it so high as in the worst provinces of -India at the present day. In the province of Burdwan, with a population of -over two millions, which may be taken to have been nearly the population -of England in the thirteenth century, there are enumerated 4604 lepers, or -2.26 in every thousand inhabitants. But even with that excessive -prevalence of leprosy, and with no seclusion of the lepers, a traveller -may visit the province of Burdwan, and not be aware that leprosy is -"frightfully common" in it. In medieval England the village leper may have -been about as common as the village fool; while in the larger towns or -cities, such as London, Norwich, York, Bristol, and Lincoln, true lepers -can hardly have been so numerous as the friars themselves, who are -supposed to have found a large part of their occupation in ministering to -their wants. A rigorous scepticism might be justified, by the absence of -any good diagnostic evidence, in going farther than this. But the -convergence of probabilities does point to a real prevalence of leprosy in -medieval England; and those probabilities will be greatly strengthened by -discovering in the then habits of English living a _vera causa_ for the -disease. - - -Causes of Medieval Leprosy. - -What was there in the medieval manner of life to give rise to a certain -number of cases of leprosy in all the countries of Europe? Granting that -not all who were called _leprosi_ and _leprosae_, were actually the -subjects of _lepra_ as correctly diagnosed, and that the misnomer was not -unlikely to have been applied in the case of princes, nobles and great -ecclesiastics, we have still to reckon with the apparition of leprosy -among the people in medieval Europe and with its gradual extinction, an -extinction that became absolute in most parts of Europe before the Modern -period had begun. - -Of the "importation" of leprosy into Britain from some source outside -there can be no serious thought; the words are a meaningless phrase, which -no one with a real knowledge of the conditions, nature and affinities of -leprosy would care to resort to. The varying types of diseases, or their -existence at one time and absence at another, are a reflex of the -variations in the life of the people--in food and drink, wages, domestic -comfort, town life or country life, and the like. No one doubts that the -birth-rate and the death-rate have had great variations from time to time, -depending on the greater or less abundance of the means of subsistence, on -overcrowding, or other things; and the variation in the birth-rate and -death-rate is only the most obvious and numerically precise of a whole -series of variations in vital phenomena, of which the successions, -alternations, and novelties in the types of disease are the least simple, -and least within the reach of mere notional apprehension or mere -statistical management. The apparition and vanishing of leprosy in -medieval Europe was one of those vital phenomena. It may be more easily -apprehended by placing beside it a simple example from our own times. - -The pellagra of the North Italian peasantry (and of Roumania, Gascony and -some other limited areas) is the nearest affinity to leprosy among the -species of disease. Strip leprosy of all its superficial and sentimental -characters, analyse its essential phenomena, reduce its pathology to the -most correct outlines, and we shall find it a chronic constitutional -malady not far removed in type from pellagra. In both diseases there are -the early warnings in the excessive sensibility, excessive redness and -changes of colour, at certain spots of skin on or about the face or on the -hands and feet. In both diseases, permanent loss of sensibility follows -the previous exaggeration, blanching of the skin will remain for good at -the spots where redness and discoloration were apt to come and go, and -these affections of the end-regions of nerves will settle, in less -definite way, upon the nervous system at large,--the cerebro-spinal -nervous system, or the organic nervous system, or both together. What -makes leprosy seem a disease in a different class from that, is the -formation of nodules, or lumps, in the regions of affected skin in a -certain proportion of the cases. If leprosy were all anaesthetic leprosy, -its affinities to pellagra would be more quickly perceived; it is because -about one-half of it has more or less of the tuberculated character that a -diversion is created towards another kind of pathology. But the fact that -some cases of leprosy develop nodules along the disordered nerves does not -remove the disease as a whole from the class to which pellagra belongs. In -both diseases we are dealing essentially with a profound disorder of the -nerves and nerve-centres, commencing in local skin-affections which come -and go and at length settle, proceeding to implicate the nervous functions -generally, impairing the efficiency of the individual, and bringing him to -a miserable end. The two diseases diverge each along its own path, leprosy -becoming more a hopeless disorder of the nerves of tissue-nutrition, and -so taking on a structural character mainly but not exclusively, and -pellagra becoming more a hopeless disorder of the organic nervous system -(digestion, circulation, etc.) with implication of the higher nervous -functions, such as the senses, the intellect, and the emotions, and so -taking on a functional character mainly but not exclusively. The -correlation of structure and function is one that goes all through -pathology as well as biology; and here we find it giving character to each -of two chronic disorders of the nervous system, according as the -structural side or the functional side comes uppermost. - -What, then, are the circumstances of pellagra, and do these throw light -upon the medieval prevalence of leprosy? Pellagra has been proved with the -highest attainable scientific certainty to be due to a staple diet of -bread or porridge made from damaged or spoilt maize. It followed the -introduction of maize into Lombardy at an interval of two or three -generations, and its distribution corresponds closely to the poorer kinds -of maize on colder soils, and to the class of the peasantry who get the -worst kind of corn or meal for their food. The cases of the disease among -the peasantry of Lombardy and some other maize-growing provinces of -Northern Italy, were about one hundred thousand when last estimated; the -endowed charitable houses and lunatic asylums are full of them. The -connexion of the disease with its causes is perfectly well understood; but -the economic questions of starvation wages, of truck, of large farms with -bailiffs, and of agricultural usage, have proved too much for the chambers -of commerce and the Government; so that there is as yet little or no sign -of the decline of pellagra in the richest provinces of Italy. This disease -is not mentioned in the Bible, therefore it has no traditional vogue; it -is not well suited to knight-errantry, because it is a common evil of -whole provinces; its causes are economic and social, therefore there is no -ready favour to be earned by systematic attempts to deal with them; and -there is absolutely no opening for heroism and self-sacrifice of the more -ostentatious kind. These are among the reasons why this great -object-lesson of a chronic disorder of nutrition, proceeding steadily -before our eyes, has been so little perceived. It is in pellagra, however, -that we find the key to the ancient problem of leprosy. The two diseases -are closely allied in the insidious approach of their symptoms, in their -implicating the tissue-nutrition through the nerves, or the nervous -functions through the nutrition, in their cumulating and incurable -character, and in their transmissibility by inheritance. Thus -nosologically allied, they may be reasonably suspected of having analogous -causes; and as we know the cause of modern pellagra to be something -noxious in the habitual diet of the people, we may look for the cause of -medieval leprosy in something of the same kind. - -The dietetic cause is not far to seek, and it cannot be stated better than -in the following well-known passage by the philosophical Gilbert White in -his _Natural History of Selborne_[206]:-- - - "It must, therefore, in these days be, to a humane and thinking - person, a matter of equal wonder and satisfaction, when he - contemplates how nearly this pest is eradicated, and observes that a - leper is now [1778] a rare sight. He will, moreover, when engaged in - such a train of thought, naturally inquire for the reason. This happy - change perhaps may have originated and been continued from the much - smaller quantity of salted meat and fish now eaten in these kingdoms; - from the use of linen next the skin; from the plenty of bread; and - from the profusion of fruits, roots, legumes, and greens, so common in - every family. Three or four centuries ago, before there were any - enclosures, sown-grasses, field-turnips, or field-carrots, or hay, all - the cattle which had grown fat in summer, and were not killed for - winter use, were turned out soon after Michaelmas to shift as they - could through the dead months; so that no fresh meat could be had in - winter or spring. Hence the marvellous account of vast stores of - salted flesh found in the larder of the eldest Spencer even so late in - the spring as the 3rd of May (600 bacons, 80 carcases of beef, and 600 - muttons)[207]. It was from magazines like these that the turbulent - barons supported in idleness their riotous swarms of retainers, ready - for any disorder or mischief. But agriculture is now arrived at such - pitch of perfection, that our best and fattest meats are killed in the - winter; and no man needs eat salted flesh, unless he prefers it, that - has money to buy fresh. - - "One cause of this distemper might be no doubt the quantity of - wretched fresh and salt fish consumed by the commonalty at all seasons - as well as in Lent, which our poor now would hardly be persuaded to - touch.... The plenty of good wheaten bread that now is found among all - ranks of people in the south, instead of that miserable sort which - used, in old days, to be made of barley or beans, may contribute not a - little to the sweetening their blood and correcting their juices." - -Let us add to this, that the meat diet of the poorer class, whether serfs -or freemen, would be apt to consist of the more worthless portions, the -semi-putrid pieces in the salted sides of bacon, mutton or beef, and that -badly-cured pork was in many parts the usual kind of flesh-food; and we -shall have no difficulty in finding the noxious element in the diet of the -Middle Ages, which the dietetic hypothesis of leprosy requires. Some who -have advocated that hypothesis for modern leprosy, have laid themselves -open, notwithstanding the ability and industry of their research, to -plausible objections which have no bearing if the hypothesis be -sufficiently safe-guarded. Leprosy, like every other _morbus miseriae_, -needs a number of things working together to produce it, its more or less -uniform specific character or distinctive mark being determined by the -presence of one factor in particular. The special factor should be -generalised as much as possible, so as to cover the whole circumstances of -leprosy: it is not only half-cured or semi-putrid fish[208], but -half-cured or semi-putrid flesh of any kind. The most general expression -for leprosy is a semi-putrid or toxic character of animal food, just as -for the allied pellagra, it is a semi-putrid or toxic character of the -bread or porridge. Moreover it is that noxious or unnatural thing in the -food, not once and again, or as a _bonne bouche_, but somewhat steadily -from day to day as a chief part of the sustenance, and from year to year. -As the rain-drops wear the stones, so the poison in the daily diet tells -upon the constitution. Once more, such special causes may be present in a -country generally, among the poor of all the towns, villages and hamlets, -and yet only one person here and there may show specific effects that are -recognisable as a disease to which we give a name. Unless there be present -the aiding and abetting things, the special factor will hardly make itself -felt; and if there be not the special factor, there may be some other -_morbus miseriae_ but there will not be that one. These aiding things are -for the most part the usual concomitants of poverty and hardships, wearing -out the nerves far more than is commonly supposed and producing in -ordinary an excessive amount of nervous affections among the poor. But -among the poor themselves, as well as among the well-to-do, there are -special susceptibilities in individuals and in families. One person may -have the same unwholesome surroundings as another and the same poisonous -element in his diet, but he may fall into no such train of symptoms as his -leprous neighbour because he is not formed in quite the same way, because -he has "no nerves," or is of a hardier stock, or because his unwholesome -manner of life comes out in some other form of disease (scrofula perhaps, -less probably gout), or for some other reason deeply hidden in his -ancestry and his personal peculiarities. The chances would be always -largely against that particular combination of factors needed to make -leprosy. It was a _morbus miseriae_ of the Middle Ages, but on the whole -not a very common one; and it was easily shaken off by the national life -when the conditions changed ever so little. It was all the more easily -shaken off by reason of the facilities for divorce, the prohibition of -marriage, and the monastic discipline. - -The staple diet as a cause of leprosy was suspected in the Middle Ages, -and by writers as ancient as Galen. It is not without significance that -the minute directions for the dieting of the lepers in the rich hospital -of Sherburn, near Durham, urge special caution as to the freshness of the -fish: when fresh fish was not to be had, red herrings might be -substituted, but only if they were well cured, not putrid nor corrupt. -Those directions were in accordance with the best medical teaching of the -time on the dietetics of leprosy, or on how to prevent leprosy, as it is -given with considerable minuteness in Gordonio and Gilbert[209]. - -On the other hand we find a singular ordinance of the Scots Parliament at -Scone in 1386, or some forty years after the date of the Durham -regulations: "Gif ony man brings to the market corrupt swine or salmond to -be sauld, they sall be taken by the Bailie and incontinent without ony -question sall be sent to the lepper-folke; and gif there be na -lepper-folke, they sall be destroyed alluterlie[210]." Nothing could be -more significant for the prevalence and persistence of leprosy in -Scotland[211]. Putrid fish and pork did actually come to market; the -dangers of them as regarded the production of leprosy were unsuspected; -and the lepers (genuine or mistaken) were actually directed to be fed with -them. Such food for "lepers" could only have fed the disease; and if it be -the case that genuine leprosy was met with in Edinburgh and Glasgow more -than two centuries after it ceased to be heard of in England, we need be -at no loss to assign the reason why the disease was more inveterate in the -one country than in the other. - - - - -CHAPTER III. - -THE BLACK DEATH. - - -The most likely of the fourteenth-century English annalists to have given -us a good account of the Black Death was the historian Ranulphus Higden, -author of the _Polychronicon_, who became a monk of St Werburgh's abbey at -Chester about the beginning of the century, and lived to see the -disastrous year of 1349[212]. That part of his history which relates to -his own period he brings down year by year to 1348, with less fulness of -detail in the later years, as if old age were making him brief. Under the -year 1348 he begins the subject of the great mortality, speaks of the -incessant rains of the second half of the year from Midsummer to -Christmas, refers to the ravages of the plague at Avignon, the then -ecclesiastical capital of Christendom, just mentions England and Ireland, -and then lets the pen fall from his hand. Higden is believed to have -resumed his annals after 1352; but he was then a very old man, and the -last entries are unimportant. But the period from 1348 to 1352 is an -absolute blank. He comes to the edge of the great subject of that time, as -if he had intended to deal with it comprehensively, beginning with a -notice of the previous weather, which is by no means irrelevant, and after -two or three lines more he breaks off. Most of the monastic chronicles are -interrupted at the same point; if there is an entry at all under the year -1349 it is for the most part merely the words magna mortalitas. The -prevailing sense of desolation and despair comes out in the record made by -a friar of Kilkenny, who kept a chronicle of passing events, and escaped -the fate of his brethren in the convent only long enough to record a few -particulars of the great mortality[213]: - - "And I, friar John Clyn, of the Order of Friars Minor, and of the - convent of Kilkenny, wrote in this book those notable things which - happened in my time, which I saw with my eyes, or which I learned from - persons worthy of credit. And lest things worthy of remembrance should - perish with time, and fall away from the memory of those who are to - come after us, I, seeing these many evils, and the whole world lying, - as it were, in the wicked one, among the dead waiting for death till - it come--as I have truly heard and examined, so have I reduced these - things to writing; and lest the writing should perish with the writer, - and the work fail together with the workman, I leave parchment for - continuing the work, if haply any man survive, and any of the race of - Adam escape this pestilence and continue the work which I have - commenced." - -There is nothing in the English chronicles so directly personal as that, -but there are some facts recorded of the mortality in four of them which -have contemporary value, or almost contemporary. The best of these -accounts, as a piece of history, is that of Henry Knighton, canon of -Leicester[214], who acknowledges his indebtedness to Higden's -_Polychronicon_ for the events down to 1326, but after that date either -writes from his own observation or takes his facts from some unknown -contemporary source. The next in importance is Geoffrey le Baker[215], a -clerk of the abbey of Osney, near Oxford, whose account of the arrival of -the Black Death in England has obtained wide currency as copied literally -in the 1605 edition of Stow's _Annals_. The third is Robert de -Avesbury[216], whose _History of Edward III._ serves as a chronicle for -the city of London more particularly. The fourth is the Malmesbury monk -who wrote, about 1367, the chronicle known as the _Eulogium_[217]. - -From the systematic paragraphs of those writers, and from various other -incidental notices, an outline of the progress of the pestilence in -England, Scotland and Ireland, may be traced. It entered English soil at a -port of Dorsetshire--said in the _Eulogium_ to have been Melcombe -(Weymouth)--in the beginning of August, 1348. It is said to have spread -rapidly through Dorset, Devon and Somerset, almost stripping those -counties of their inhabitants, and to have reached Bristol by the 15th of -August. The people of Gloucester in vain tried to keep out the infection -by cutting off all intercourse with Bristol; from Gloucester it came to -Oxford, and from Oxford to London, reaching the capital at Michaelmas, -according to one account, or at All Saints (1st November) according to -another. Although the 15th of August is definitely given as the date of -its arrival at Bristol from the Dorset coast, it must not be assumed that -the infection covered the ground so quickly as that in the rest of its -progresses. We have a measure of the rate of its advance south-westward -through Devonshire to Cornwall, in a contemporary entry in the register of -the Church of Friars Minor at Bodmin[218]: confirming the independent -statements that the pestilence entered England at the beginning of August, -the register goes on to record that it reached the town of Bodmin shortly -before Christmas, and that there died in that town about fifteen hundred -persons, as estimated. - -The corporation records of Bridport, a town near to the place in Dorset -where the infection landed, show that four bailiffs held office, instead -of two, in the 23rd of Edward III., _in tempore pestilentiae_; the 23rd of -Edward III. would begin 25 Jan. 1349, but the municipal year would -probably have extended from September 1348, so that Bridport may have had -the infection before the end of that year[219]. It seems probable that the -smaller towns, and the villages, all over the South-west, had been -infected in the end of 1348, but somewhat later than Bristol and -Gloucester. The mandate of Ralph, bishop of Bath and Wells, "On -confessions in the time of the pestilence," is dated Wynchelcomb, 4. id. -Jan. M.CCC.XLVIII. (10 January, 1349) and it speaks of the contagion -spreading everywhere, and of many parish churches and other cures in his -diocese being left without curate and priest to visit the sick and -administer the sacraments[220]. - -The autumn of 1348 may be taken, then, as correct for the South-west; and -there is no doubt that the infection had been severe enough in London -before the end of that year to move the authorities to action. - -"Owing to the increasing severity of the sudden plague day by day at -Westminster and places adjoining," Parliament was prorogued on the 1st of -January, 1349[221]. There was a further prorogation on the 10th of March, -for the reason given that "the pestilence was continuing at Westminster, -in the city of London, and in other places, more severely than before" -(_gravius solito_)[222]. This agrees with Avesbury's statement that the -epidemic in London reached a height (_in tantum excrevit_) after -Candlemas, 1349, and that it was over about Pentecost. One of the best -proofs of the season and duration of the Black Death in London is got from -the number of wills enrolled in the Husting Court of the city in the -successive months. Those who died of the plague leaving wills were, of -course, but a small fraction of the whole mortality; but the wills during -some eight months of 1349 are ten or fifteen times more numerous than in -any other year before or after, excepting perhaps the year of the _pestis -secunda_, 1361. Starting from 3 in November, 1348 (none in December), the -probates rise to 18 in January, 1349, 42 in February, 41 in March, none in -April (owing to paralysis of business, doubtless), but 121 in May, 31 in -June, 51 in July, none in August and September, 18 in October, 27 in -November, and then an ordinary average[223]. Thus it would have had a -duration of some seven or eight months in the capital, with a curve of -increase, maximum intensity, and decrease, just as the great London -epidemics of the same disease in the 16th and 17th centuries are known -from the weekly bills to have had. - -It does not appear to have been felt at all in Norwich and other places in -the Eastern Counties until the end of March, 1349, its enormous ravages in -that part of England falling mostly in the summer. There is a definite -statement that it began at York about the feast of the Ascension, by which -time it had almost ceased in London, and that it lasted in the capital of -the northern province until the end of July. The infection almost emptied -the abbey of Meaux, in Holdernesse, of its monks, and the abbey lands of -their tenants; and the date given in the abbey chronicle is the month of -August, 1349. The spring and summer of that year appear to have been the -seasons of the great mortality all over England, excepting perhaps in the -southern counties where the outbreak began; even at Oxford, which is one -of the towns mentioned as on the route of the pestilence from Dorsetshire -to London, the mortality is entered under the year 1349, which was also -the year of its enormous prevalence among the farmers and peasants on the -manor of Winslow, in the county of Bucks. - -Its invasion of the mountainous country of Wales (by no means exempt from -plague in the 17th century) may have been a season later--_anno sequenti_, -says Le Baker, which may mean either 1349 or 1350. In the Irish annals, -the first mention of the pestilence is under the year 1348; but it was -probably only the rumour of the mortality at Avignon and elsewhere abroad -that caused the alarm in Ireland among ecclesiastics and in gatherings of -the people. It was first seen on the shores of Dublin Bay, at Howth and -Dalkey, and a little farther north on the coast at Drogheda; it raged in -Dublin "from the beginning of August until the Nativity[224]," which may -mean the year 1348, although the year 1349 is the date given for the great -mortality in Ireland in later chronicles. - -The experience of Scotland illustrates still farther the slow progression -of the plague, and its dependence to some extent upon the season of the -year. Two English chroniclers (Le Baker and Knighton) mention that it got -among the Scots assembled in the forest of Selkirk for an invasion at the -time when the mortality was greatest in the northern counties, the autumn -of 1349. But the winter cold must have held it in check as regards the -rest of Scotland; for it is clear from Fordoun that its great season in -that country generally was the year 1350. Thus the Black Death may be said -to have extended over three seasons in the British Islands--a partial -season in the south of England in 1348, a great season all over England, -in Ireland and in the south of Scotland in 1349, and a late extension to -Scotland generally in 1350. The experience of all Europe was similar, the -Mediterranean provinces receiving the infection as early as 1347, and the -northern countries, on the Baltic and North Seas, as late as 1350. - - -Symptoms and Type of the Black Death. - -This sweeping pestilence was part of a great wave of infection which -passed over Europe from the remote East, and of which we shall trace the -antecedents in the latter part of this chapter. The type and symptoms of -the disease are sufficiently well-known from foreign descriptions--by Guy -de Chauliac and Raymond de Chalin, both of Avignon, by Boccaccio, and by -the Villani of Florence. It was the bubo-plague, a disease which is known -to have existed in Egypt in the time of the Ptolemies, and made its first -great incursion from that country into Europe in the reign of Justinian in -the year 543 (see Chapter I.). Its second great invasion, but from a new -direction, was the Black Death of 1347-9; and from that time it remained -domesticated in the soil of Europe for more than three hundred years as -"the plague." The first medical descriptions of it by native British -writers are comparatively late. Manuscript treatises or "ordinances" on -the plague circulated in England from the reign of Richard II., most of -them being copies of a short work of no great value by one John of -Burgoyne or John of Bordeaux. There is also extant an English translation -in manuscript, assigned to the 14th century (but belonging to the end of -it, if not to the 15th), of a really good work on the plague by the bishop -of Aarhus, in Denmark, of which I shall have more to say in the next -chapter. But none of these give English experience; and the earliest of -our 16th century plague-books, by Phaer, is a compilation mostly, if not -entirely, from the Danish bishop's treatise, the latter having been -printed in its English form in or near 1480. It is not until we come to -the work of Dr Gilbert Skene of Edinburgh, printed in 1568, that we find a -treatise on plague showing traces of first-hand observation and -reflection. Then follow the essay of Simon Kellwaye on the London plague -of 1593, and that of the well-known Elizabethan poet and physician Thomas -Lodge, on the plague of 1603. Thus the reign of the plague in Britain was -approaching an end before the native medical profession began to write -upon it. Its eventful history from its arrival in 1348 down to a -comparatively late period has to be constructed from other materials than -the records or systematic writings of the faculty. - -The type of the Black Death in England is sufficiently indicated by Le -Baker, who was probably living at Osney, near Oxford, when the infection -began, and indubitably by friar Clyn of Kilkenny. Le Baker mentions the -_apostemata_ or swellings in diverse parts, their sudden eruption, and -their extreme hardness and dryness, so that hardly any fluid escaped when -they were lanced according to the usual method of treating them[225]. He -speaks also of a peculiarly fatal form, from which few or none recovered; -it was characterised by "small black pustules" on the skin, probably the -livid spots or "tokens" which came to be considered the peculiar mark of -the plague, and were certainly the index of a malignant type of it, just -as the corresponding haemorrhages are in pestilential fever (or typhus) -and in yellow fever. The disease, he adds, was swift in doing its work: -one day people were in high health and the next day dead and buried. -Knighton also says, with special reference to Bristol, that the attack was -fatal sometimes within twelve hours, and usually within three days at the -most. The treatment, which would have been, according to all subsequent -experience, the privilege only of those who could pay for it, would appear -to have consisted in lancing the risings or botches in the armpits, neck, -or groins; these were the lymph-glands enlarged to the size of a walnut or -of a hen's egg, and of a livid colour,--the most striking and certain of -all the plague-signs. - -Clyn's account of the disease, as he saw it at Kilkenny in 1349, is -important for including one remarkable symptom on which great importance -has been laid as distinctive of the Black Death among the epidemics of -bubo-plague, namely haemorrhage from the lungs: "For many died from -carbuncles, and boils, and botches which grew on the legs and under the -arms; others from passion of the head, as if thrown into a frenzy; others -by vomiting blood[226]." It was so contagious, he says, that those who -touched the dead, or even the sick, were incontinently infected that they -died, and both penitent and confessor were borne together to the same -grave. Such was the fear and horror of it that men scarce dared exercise -the offices of pity, namely, to visit the sick and bury the dead. Clyn's -list of symptoms includes all the most prominent features of the plague as -we shall find them described for the great epidemics of the Stuart -period--the botches in the armpits or groins, the carbuncles, the boils -(or blains), and the frenzy or delirium, as well as the special symptom of -the great mortality--vomiting of blood. - -Of the botch, which was the most striking sign of the plague, the -following description, by Woodall (1639), may be introduced here, to -supplement the more meagre accounts of the bubo-plague on its first -appearance. Woodall had himself suffered from the bubo or botch on two -occasions, in its comparatively safe suppurating form; his description -relates to the hard, tense, and dry botch, especially mentioned by Le -Baker for 1349, and always the index of great malignity: - - "But the pestilential bubo or boyle commeth ever furiously on, and as - in a rage of a Feaver, and as being in haste; sometimes it lighteth on - or near the inguen thwart, but more often lower upon the thigh, - pointing downward with one end, the upper end towards the belly being - commonly the biggest or the fullest part of the bubo, the whole thigh - being also inflamed[227]." - -Of this disease, says Le Baker, few of the first rank died, but of the -common people an incalculable number, and of the clergy and the cleric -class a multitude known to God only. It was mostly the young and strong -who were cut off, the aged and weakly being commonly spared. No one dared -come near the sick, and the bodies of the dead were shunned. Both Le Baker -and Knighton speak of whole villages and hamlets left desolate, and of -numbers of houses, both great and small, left empty and falling to ruin. -It was not merely one in a house that died, says friar Clyn of Kilkenny, -but commonly husband, wife, children and domestics all went the same way -of death; the friar himself wrote as one _inter mortuos mortem expectans_. -Without naming the locality, Avesbury says that in a single day, twenty, -forty, sixty or more corpses were buried in the same trench[228]. The -stereotyped phrase in the monastic chronicles is that not more than a -tenth part of the people were left alive. However, the author of the -_Eulogium_, a monk of Malmesbury who brought his history down to 1366, -gives a numerical estimate at the other extreme. He says that the plague -entered England at Melcumbe, destroyed innumerable people in Dorset, Devon -and Somerset, and, having left few alive in Bristol, proceeded northwards, -leaving no city, nor town, nor hamlet, nor scarcely a house, in which it -did not cut off the greater part of the people, or the whole of them; but -he adds, somewhat inconsequently, "so that a fifth part of the men, women -and children in all England were consigned to the grave[229]." These are -the vague contemporary estimates of the mortality--ranging from -nine-tenths to one-fifth of the whole population. It is possible, however, -to come much nearer to precision by the systematic use of documents; and -in that exercise we shall now proceed, in an order from the more general -to the more particular. - - -Estimates of the Mortality. - -There are two State documents the language of which favours the more -moderate kind of estimate. In a letter of the king[230], dated 1 December, -1349, or after the epidemic was over, to the mayor and bailiffs of -Sandwich, ordering them to watch all who took ship for foreign parts so as -to arrest the exit of men and money, the preamble or motive is: "Quia non -modica pars populi regni nostri Angliae praesenti Pestilentia est -defuncta." (Forasmuch as no mean part of the people of our kingdom of -England is dead of the present pestilence.) The Statute of Labourers, 18 -November, 1350, begins: "Quia magna pars populi, et maxime operariorum et -servientium jam in ultima pestilentia est defuncta." (Forasmuch as a great -part of the people, principally of artisans and labourers, is dead in the -late pestilence.) The statute would have emphasized the loss of artizans -and labourers as these were its special subjects, but the _maxime -operariorum et servientium_ may be fairly taken in a literal sense to mean -that the adult and able-bodied of the working class suffered most. One of -the contemporary chronicles says that the women and children were sent to -take the places of the men in field labour[231]. It is also significant -that the "second plague" of 1361 is named by two independent chroniclers -the _pestis puerorum_, or plague of the juveniles, as if it were now their -turn. The _pestis secunda_ was also notable, both in England and on the -Continent, for the numbers of the nobility which it carried off, and in -that respect it was contrasted with the Black Death. - -Next we come to certain numerical statements as to the mortality of 1349, -which have an air of precision. They relate to Leicester, Oxford, Bodmin, -Norwich, Yarmouth and London. In Leicester, according to Knighton, who was -a canon there at the time or shortly after, the burials from the Black -Death were more than 700 in St Margaret's churchyard, more than 400 in -Holy Cross parish (afterwards St Martin's), more than 380 in St Leonard's -parish, which was a small one, and in the same proportion in the other -parishes, which were three or four in number, and none of them so large as -the two first named. Knighton's round numbers for three parishes are not -improbable, considering that Leicester was a comparatively populous town -at the time of the poll-tax of 1377: the numbers who paid the tax were -2101, which would give, by the usual way of reckoning, a population of -3939. The population of the same three parishes in 1558, or shortly after -the period when English towns were described in the statute of 32 Henry -VIII. as being much decayed, would have been about 820 in St Margaret's, -800 in St Martin's (Holy Cross), and 160 in St Leonard's[232]. In 1712, -when the hosiery industry had been flourishing for thirty years, the -population of St Margaret's was about 1900 and of St Martin's about 1750, -the estimated population of the whole town having been 6450, or about -one-half more than we may assume it to have been in 1349. - -In order to realise what the pestilence of 1349 meant to these parishes of -Leicester, let us take the actual burials from the parish register of one -of them, St Martin's, in the comparatively mild plague years of 1610 and -1611, a period when the population, as calculated from the annual averages -of births and deaths, would have been from 3000 to 3500, probably less, -therefore, by some hundreds than it was in the years before the Black -Death. In 1610 there were 82 burials in St Martin's parish, or about twice -the average of non-plague years; in 1611 there were 128 burials, or three -to four times the annual average[233]. Knighton's 400 deaths for the same -parish in 1349 would mean that the ordinary burials were multiplied about -ten times; while his figures for two other parishes would mean a still -greater ratio of increase[234]. - -For Oxford the estimate is not less precise or more moderate. "'Tis -reported," says Anthony Wood, under the year 1349, "that no less than -sixteen bodies in one day were carried to one churchyard[235]." - -The information for Bodmin, in Cornwall, comes from William of -Worcester[236] who read it, about a century after the event, in the -register of the Franciscan church in that town. The entry in the register -was doubtless made at the time, and as made by Franciscans familiar with -burials it deserves some credit for approximate accuracy. The deaths are -put down in round numbers at fifteen hundred, which may seem large for -Bodmin at that date. But the truth is that the Cornish borough was a -place of relatively greater importance then than afterwards. In the king's -writ of 1351, for men-at-arms, in which each town was rated on the old -basis before the Black Death, Bodmin comes fourteenth in order, being -rated at eight men, while such towns as Gloucester, Hereford and -Shrewsbury are rated at ten each. It may well have had a population of -three or four thousand, of which the numbers said to have died in the -great mortality would be less than one-half. - -Perhaps the most satisfactory reckoning of the dead from contemporary -statements is that which can be made for London. The disease, as we know, -reached the capital at Michaelmas or All Souls (1st November), and its -prevalence led to a prorogation of Parliament on the 1st of January, and -again on the 10th of March, the reason assigned for the farther -prorogation being that the pestilence was raging _gravius solito_--more -severely than usual. The winter mortality must have been considerable, -although doubtless the season of the year kept it in check, as in all -subsequent experience. But there is evidence that three more -burying-places became necessary early in the year 1349. One of these, of -no great extent, was on the east side of the City, in the part that is now -the Minories[237]; and two were on the north side, not far apart. Of the -latter, one formerly called Nomansland, in West Smithfield, was also of -small extent[238]; but the other was a field of thirteen acres and a rood, -which became in the course of years the property of the Carthusians and -the site of the Charterhouse (partly covered now by Merchant Taylors -School). The larger burial-ground, called Manny's cemetery after its donor -sir Walter Manny, the king's minister and high admiral, was consecrated by -the bishop of London and opened for use at Candlemas, 1349. Now comes in -the testimony of Avesbury, the only chronicler of good authority for -London in those years. The mortality increased so much, he says (_in -tantum excrevit_), that there were buried in Manny's cemetery from the -feast of the Purification (when it was opened) until Easter more than 200 -in a single day (_quasi diebus singulis_), besides the burials in other -cemeteries[239]. The language of the chronicler implies that the burials -in the new cemetery rose to a maximum of 200 in a day. The Black Death -must have been like the great London plagues of later times in this -respect, at least, that it rose to a height, remained at its highest level -for some two, three or four weeks, and gradually declined. A maximum of -200 in a day, in the cemetery which would have at that stage received -nearly all the dead, would mean a plague-mortality from first to last, or -an epidemic curve, not unlike that of the London plague of 1563, for which -we have the exact weekly totals[240]: the five successive weeks at the -height of that plague (Sept. 3 to Oct. 8) produced mortalities of 1454, -1626, 1372, 1828 and 1262; and the epidemic throughout its whole curve of -intensity from June to December caused a mortality of 17,404. If -Avesbury's figures had been at all near the mark, the Black Death in -London would have been a twenty-thousand plague, or to make a most liberal -allowance for burials in other cemeteries than Manny's when the epidemic -was at its worst, it might have been a thirty-thousand plague. Even at the -smaller of those estimates it would have been a much more severe -visitation upon the London of Edward III. than the plague with 17,404 -deaths was upon the London of the 5th of Elizabeth. - -The mortality of London in the Black Death has been usually estimated at a -far higher figure than 20,000 or 30,000. There was a brass fixed to a -stone monument in the Charterhouse churchyard (Manny's cemetery), bearing -an inscription which was read there both by Stow and Camden. Stow gives -the Latin words, of which the following is a translation: "Anno Domini -1349, while the great pestilence was reigning, this cemetery was -consecrated, wherein, and within the walls of the present monastery, were -buried more than fifty thousand bodies of the dead, besides many more from -that time to the present, on whose souls may God have mercy. Amen." Camden -says the number on the brass was forty thousand, but his memory had -probably misled him[241]. This has been accepted as if trustworthy, -apparently because it was inscribed upon a monument in the cemetery; and -it has been argued that if one cemetery received 50,000 corpses in the -plague, the other cemeteries and parish churchyards of London would have -together received as many more, so that the whole mortality of London -would have been 100,000[242]. - -But that mode of reckoning disregards alike the scrutiny of documents and -the probabilities of the case. The inscription bears upon it that it was -written subsequent to the erection of the Carthusian monastery, which was -not begun until 1371[243]. The round estimate of 50,000 is at least -twenty-two years later than the mortality to which it relates, and may -easily have been magnified by rumour in the course of transmission. Even -if it had contemporary value we should have to take it as the roughest of -guesses. The latter objection applies in a measure to Avesbury's estimate -of 200 burials in a day at the height of the epidemic; but clearly it is -easier to count correctly up to 200 in a day than to 50,000 in the space -of three or four months. On the ground of probability, also, the number of -50,000 in one cemetery (or 100,000 for all London) is wholly incredible. -The evidence to be given in the sequel shows that the mortality was about -one-half the population. Assuming one-half as the death-rate, that would -have brought the whole population of London in the 23rd of Edward III. up -to about 200,000--a number hardly exceeded at the accession of James I., -after a great expansion which had proceeded visibly in the Elizabethan -period under the eyes of citizens like John Stow, had crowded the -half-occupied space between the City gates and the bars of the Liberties, -and had overflowed into the out-parishes to such an extent that -proclamations from the year 1580 onwards were thought necessary for its -restraint[244]. - -Hardly any details of the Black Death in London are known, but the few -personal facts that we have are significant. Thus, in the charter of -incorporation of the Company of Cutlers, granted in 1344, eight persons -are named as wardens, and these are stated in a note to have been all dead -five years after, that is to say, in the year of the Black Death, 1349, -although their deaths are not set down to the plague[245]. Again, in the -articles of the Hatters' Company, which were drawn up only a year before -the plague began (Dec. 13, 1347), six persons are named as wardens, and -these according to a note of the time were all dead before the 7th of -July, 1350[246], the cause of mortality being again unmentioned probably -because it was familiar knowledge to those then living. It is known also -that four wardens of the Goldsmiths' Company died in the year of the Black -Death. These instances show that the plague, on its first arrival, carried -off many more of the richer class of citizens than it did in the -disastrous epidemics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The same -is shown by the number of wills, already given. Perhaps the greatest of -the victims of plague in London was Bradwardine, "doctor profundus," the -newly-appointed archbishop of Canterbury, who died at Lambeth, with the -fatal botch in the armpits, on 26 Aug. 1349, just a week after landing at -Dover from Avignon. - -The often-quoted figures for Norwich, 57,374 deaths in the city from the -pestilence of 1349, are wholly incredible. They are derived from an entry -in the borough records in the Gildhall[247]: "In yis yere was swiche a -Dethe in Norwic that there died of ye Pestilence LVII Mil III C LXXIIII -besyd Relygius and Beggars." We should probably come much nearer the truth -by reading "XVII Mil." for "LVII Mil." It does not appear at what time the -entry was made, nor by what computation the numbers were got. Norwich was -certainly smaller than London; in the king's writ of 1351 for men-at-arms, -London's quota is 100, and that of Norwich 60; the next in order being -Bristol's, 20, and Lynn's, 20. These were probably the old proportions, -fixed before the Black Death, and re-issued in 1351 without regard to what -had happened meanwhile, and they correspond on the whole to the number of -parishes in each city (about 120 in London and 60 in Norwich[248]). -Norwich may have had from 25,000 to 30,000 people before the pestilence, -but almost certainly not more. The city must have suffered terribly in -1349, for we find, by the returns in the Subsidy Roll showing the amount -raised by the poll-tax of 1377 and the numbers in each county and town on -whom it was levied, that only 3952 paid the tax in Norwich, whereas 23,314 -paid it in London[249]. That is a very different proportion from the 60 to -100, as in the writ for men-at-arms; and the difference is the index of -the decline of Norwich down to the year 1377. In that year, the -population, by the usual reckoning from the poll-tax, would have been -about 7410; and it is conceivable that at least twice that number had died -of the plague within the city during the spring and summer of 1349. - -The figures given of the mortality at Yarmouth, 7052, are those inscribed -upon a document or a brass that once stood in the parish church; it was -seen there in the fifteenth century by William of Worcester, a squire of -the Fastolf family connected with Yarmouth, who gives the numbers as 7000, -giving also the exact dimensions of the great church itself[250]. They are -adduced by the burgesses of Yarmouth in a petition of 17 Henry VII. -(1502), as follows: "Buried in the parish church and churchyard of the -said town 7052 men." Yarmouth, like Norwich, suffered unusually from the -Black Death; in 1377, by the poll-tax reckoning, its population was about -3639. It may be assumed to have lost more than half its people; but it -recovered quickly, was made a seat of the wool-staple, and threatened to -rival Norwich. - -Clyn's statement that 14,000 died in Dublin from the beginning of August -until Christmas may also be taken merely as illustrating the inability of -early writers to count correctly up to large numbers. - -The most trustworthy figures of mortality in the Black Death which were -recorded at the time are those given for the inmates of particular -monasteries; and these are such as to give colour to the remark -interpolated in Higden's _Polychronicon_ that "in some houses of religion, -of twenty there were left but twain." - -At St Albans, the abbot Michael died of the common plague at Easter, 1349, -one of the first victims in the monastery. The mortality in the house -increased daily, until forty-seven monks, "eminent for religion," and -including the prior and sub-prior, were dead, besides those who died in -large numbers in the various cells or dependencies of the great religious -house[251]. At the Yorkshire abbey of Meaux, in Holdernesse, the -visitation was in August, although the epidemic in the city of York was -already over by the end of July[252]. The abbot Hugh died at Meaux on the -12th of August, and five other monks were lying unburied the same day. -Before the end of August twenty-two monks and six lay-brethren had died, -and when the epidemic was over there were only ten monks and lay-brethren -left alive out of a total of forty-three monks (including the abbot) and -seven lay-brethren. The chronicler adds that the greater part of the -tenants on the abbey lands died also[253]. In the Lincolnshire monastery -of Croxton, all the monks died save the abbot and prior[254]. In the -hospital of Sandon, Surrey, the master and brethren all died[255]. - -At Ely 28 monks survived out of 43[256]. In the Irish monasteries the -mortality had been equally severe: in the Franciscan convent at Drogheda, -25 friars died; in the corresponding fraternity at Dublin, 23; and in that -of Kilkenny 8 down to the 6th of March[257], with probably others (Clyn -himself) afterwards. - -The following mortalities have been collected for East Anglian religious -houses: At Hickling, a religious house in Norfolk, with a prior and nine -or ten canons ('Monasticon'), only one canon survived. At Heveringham in -the same county the prior and canons died to a man. At the College of St -Mary in the Fields, near Norwich, five of the seven prebendaries died. Of -seven nunneries in Norfolk and Suffolk, five lost their prioress as well -as an unknown number of nuns[258]. At the nunnery of Great Winthorp on the -Hill, near Stamford, all the nuns save one either died of the plague or -fled from it, so that the house fell to ruin and the lands were annexed by -a convent near it[259]. - -The experience of Canterbury appears to have been altogether different, -and was perhaps exceptional. In a community of some eighty monks only four -died of the plague in 1349[260]. It is known, however, that when the new -abbot of St Albans halted at Canterbury on his way to Avignon after his -election at Easter, one of the two monks who accompanied him was there -seized with plague and died[261]. - -These monastic experiences in England were the same as in other parts of -Europe. At Avignon, in 1348, sixty-six Carmelite monks were found lying -dead in one monastery, no one outside the walls having heard that the -plague was amongst them. In the English College at Avignon the whole of -the monks are said to have died[262]. - -What remains to be said of the death-rate in the great mortality of 1349 -is constructive or inferential, and that part of the evidence, not the -least valuable of the whole, has been worked out only within a recent -period. The enormous thinning of the ranks of the clergy was recorded at -the time, in general terms, by Knighton, and the difficulty of supplying -the parishes with educated priests is brought to light by various things, -including the founding of colleges for their education at Cambridge -(Corpus Christi) and at Oxford (Durham College). The first to examine -closely the number of vacancies in cures after the great mortality was -Blomefield in the third volume of the _History of Norfolk_ published in -1741. The Institution Book of the diocese of Norwich, he says (with a -reference to No. IV. of the _Lib. Instit._), shows 863 institutions to -benefices in 1349, "the clergy dying so fast that they were obliged to -admit numbers of youths, that had only devoted themselves for clerks by -being shaven, to be rectors of parishes[263]." A more precise use of -Institution Books, but more to show how zealous the clergy had been in -exposing themselves to infection than to ascertain the death-rate, was -made (1825) for the archdeaconry of Salop. It was found that twenty-nine -new presentations, after death-vacancies, had been made in the single year -of 1349, the average number of death vacancies at the time having been -three in two years[264]. The first systematic attempt to deduce the -mortality of 1349 from the number of benefices vacant through death was -made in 1865 by Mr Seebohm, by original researches for the diocese of York -and by using Blomefield's collections for the diocese of Norwich[265]. In -the archdeaconry of the West Riding there were 96 death vacancies in 1349, -leaving only 45 parishes in which the incumbent had survived. In the East -Riding 60 incumbents died out of 95 parishes. In the archdeaconry of -Nottingham there were deaths of priests in 65 parishes, and 61 survivals. -In the diocese of Norwich there were 527 vacancies by death or transfer, -while in 272 benefices there was no change. Thus the statement made to the -pope by the bishop of Norwich, that two-thirds of the clergy had died in -the great mortality is almost exact for his own diocese as well as for the -diocese of York. These figures of mortality among the Norfolk clergy were -confirmed, with fuller details, by a later writer[266]: the 527 new -institutions in the diocese of Norwich fall between the months of March -and October--23 before the end of April; 74 in May; 39 from 30th May to -10th June; 100 from 10th June to 4th July; 209 in July; and 82 more to -October. According to another enumeration of the same author for East -Anglia, upwards of 800 parishes lost their parsons from March 1349 to -March 1350, 83 parishes having been twice vacant, and 10 three times. - -There is no mistaking the significance of these facts as regards the -clergy: some two-thirds of a class composed of adult males in moderate -circumstances, and living mostly in country villages, were cut off by the -plague in Norfolk and Suffolk, in Yorkshire and Shropshire, and probably -all over England. That alone would suffice to show that the virus of the -Black Death permeated the soil everywhere, country and town alike. It is -this universality of incidence that chiefly distinguishes the Black Death -from the later outbreaks of plague, which were more often in towns than in -villages or scattered houses, and were seldom in many places in the same -year. But there remains to be mentioned, lastly, evidence inferential from -another source, which shows that the incidence in the country districts -was upon the people at large. That evidence is derived from the rolls of -the manor courts. - -It was remarked in one of the earliest works (1852) upon the history of an -English manor and of its courts, that "the real life or history of a -nation is to be gathered from the humble and seemingly trivial records of -these petty local courts[267]," and so the researches of the generation -following have abundantly proved. Much of this curious learning lies -outside the present subject and is unfamiliar to the writer, but some of -it intimately concerns us, and a few general remarks appear to be called -for. - -The manor was the unit of local government as the Normans found it. The -lord of the manor and the cultivators of the soil had respectively their -rights and duties, with a court to exact them. There are no written -records of manor courts extant from a period before the reign of Edward -I., when justice began to be administered according to regular forms. But -in the year 1279 we find written rolls of a manor court[268]. From the -reign of Edward III. these rolls begin to be fairly numerous; for example, -there is extant a complete series of them for the manor of Chedzey in -Somerset from 1329-30 to 1413-14. The court met twice, thrice, or four -times in the year, and the business transacted at each sitting was -engrossed by the clerk upon a long roll of parchment. The business related -to fines and heriots payable to the lord by the various orders of tenants -on various occasions, including changes in tenancy, successions by -heirship, death-duties, the marriages of daughters, the births of -illegitimate children, the commission of nuisances, poaching, and all -matters of petty local government. The first court of the year has usually -the longest roll, the parchment being written on one side, perhaps to the -length of twenty or twenty-four inches; the margin bears the amount of -fines opposite each entry; there are occasionally jury lists where causes -had to be tried. Of the community whose business was thus managed a notion -may be formed from the instance of the Castle Combe manor[269]: in 1340 it -had two open fields, each of about 500 acres, on its hill-slopes, -cultivated by 10 freemen tenants, 15 villeins, 11 other bondsmen -cultivating a half-acre each; 8 tenants of cottages with crofts, 12 -tenants of cottages without crofts, as well as 3 tenants of cottages in -Malmesbury. - -It will be readily understood that an unusual event such as the great -mortality of 1348-49 would leave its mark upon the rolls of the manor -courts; the death-vacancies, with their fines and heriots, and all entries -relating to changes in tenancy, would be unusually numerous. Accordingly -we find in the rolls for that year that there was much to record; at the -first glance the parchments are seen to be written within and without, -like the roll in the prophet's vision; and that is perhaps all that the -inspection will show unless the student be expert in one of the most -difficult of all kinds of ancient handwriting,--most difficult because -most full of contractions and conventional forms. But by a few those -palaeographic difficulties have been surmounted (doubtless at some cost of -expert labour), and the results as regards the great mortality of 1349 -have been disclosed. - -The manor of Winslow, in Buckinghamshire, belonging to the great abbey of -St Albans, was a large and typical one[270]. Besides the principal village -it had six hamlets. At the manor courts held in 1348-9 no fewer than 153 -holdings are entered as changing hands from the deaths of previous -holders, the tenancies being either re-granted to the single heir of the -deceased or to reversioners, or, in default of such, retained by the lord. -Of the 153 deceased tenants, 28 were holders of virgates and 14 of -half-virgates; or, in other words, there died 42 small farmers, -cultivating from forty to fifteen acres each, in half-acre strips -scattered all over the common fields of the manor. These 42 held twice as -much land as all the remaining 111 together; the latter more numerous -class were the crofters, who cultivated one or more half-acre strips: they -would include the various small traders, artisans and labourers of the -village and its hamlets; while the former class represented "the highest -grades of tenants in villenage." - -Of both classes together 153 had died in the great mortality. What -proportion that number bore to the whole body of tenants on the manor may -be inferred from the following: out of 43 jurymen belonging almost -exclusively to the class of larger holders, who had served upon the petty -jury in 1346, 1347 and 1348, as many as 27 had died in 1349; so that we -may reckon three out of every five adult males to have died in the Winslow -district, although it would be erroneous to conclude that the same -proportion of adult women had died, or of aged persons, or of infants and -young children. - -Another more varied body of evidence has been obtained from researches in -the rolls of manor courts in East Anglia[271]. - -In the parish of Hunstanton, in the extreme north of Norfolk, with an area -of about 2000 to 2500 acres, 63 men and 15 women had been carried off in -two months: in 31 of these instances there were only women and children to -succeed, and in 9 of the cases there were no heirs at all; the whole -number of tenants of the manor dead in eight months was 172, of whom 74 -left no heirs male, and 19 others had no blood relations left to claim the -inheritance. The following is the record of the manor court of Cornard -Parva, a small parish in Suffolk: on 31st March, 1349, 6 women and 3 men -reported dead; on 1st May, 13 men and 2 women, of whom 7 had no heirs; at -the next meeting on 3 November, 36 more deaths of tenants, of whom 13 left -no heirs. At Hadeston, a hamlet of Bunwell, twelve miles from Norwich, -which could not possibly have had 400 inhabitants, 54 men and 14 women -were carried off in six months, 24 of them without anyone to inherit. At -the manor court of Croxton, near Thetford, on 24th July, 17 deaths are -reported since last court, 8 of these without heirs. At the Raynham court, -on the same day, 18 tenements had fallen into the lord's hands, 8 of them -absolutely escheated, and the rest retained until the heir should appear. -At other courts, the suits set down for hearing could not be proceeded -with owing to the deaths of witnesses (e.g. 11 deaths among 16 witnesses) -or of principals. The manor court rolls of Lessingham have an entry, 15th -January, 1350, that only thirty shillings of tallage was demanded, -"because the greater part of those tenants who were wont to render tallage -had died in the previous year by reason of the deadly pestilence[272]." - -Further research upon the records of the manor courts will doubtless show -that the experience of Buckinghamshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Lancashire -was not singular. From the Castle Combe rolls nothing has been extracted -as to the mortality in 1348-9, except one entry (Nov. 13, 1357) that a -certain tenement was ruinous, having remained in the lord's hands since -the time of the pestilence for want of a purchaser; but it would be unsafe -to conclude that this sequestered manor of Wiltshire had not shared the -common fate. The accounts of certain manors in Hertfordshire were headed, -for thirty years after the Black Death, with a list of those who had -vacated tenancies by death in that pestilence[273]. A decayed inscription -cut in the stone of the parish church of Ashwell, in the same county, -records the great mortality of 1349 and the great tempest in January, -1362[274]. The tenants of the abbey of Meaux, in the Holdernesse division -of Yorkshire, were nearly all dead, as well as the monks within the -monastery walls. On the manor of Ensham, near Oxford, "there remained -hardly two tenants[275]." - -The immediate effects of the great mortality were not so striking as might -have been supposed. Although it fell upon town and country in one terrific -blow, yet some places had recovered from it before others felt it; it was -over in Bristol (so far as we know) before it came to a height in London, -and nearly over in London before it began in York. The dead were -expeditiously buried in trenches; vacancies among the clergy were promptly -filled; the manor courts met and transacted business, and had their -records engrossed for the most part in the usual clerkly style. So great a -dislocation of society naturally gave rise to some irregularities: -stripping the dead is reported from one district in Norfolk, fights and -quarrels came into court more often than ever in 1349 and 1350, and we -read of two women who each had three husbands in as many months[276]. -Knighton says that sheep and cattle were left to wander about untended, -and that they often perished in ditches by the wayside. A murrain occurred -the same year; at one place five thousand sheep died in the pasture and -were left to putrefy[277]. The price of a horse fell from forty shillings -to half a marc; a fat ox could be bought for four shillings, a cow for -twelve pence, a heifer for sixpence, a fat sheep for four pence, a stone -of wool for nine pence[278]. On the other hand, when the harvest of 1349 -had to be gathered, the price of labour rose enormously. According to -Knighton, a reaper got eightpence a day, with his food, and a mower -twelvepence. The extant accounts tabulated by Thorold Rogers confirm the -contemporary statement: the rates for threshing the harvest of 1349 were -those of panic and compulsion, being unparalleled, whether before or -after, in the Eastern, Midland and Southern counties; the immediate effect -of the scarcity of hands was to nearly double the wages of labour for the -time being. Many villeins or bondsmen took the opportunity of escaping to -the towns or to distant manors, where they could make their own terms. Of -the last kind of incident, probably a very common one, we have an instance -recorded[279]: At an inquest, some years after the Black Death, upon -sundry manors near Oxford belonging to Christ Church, it was ascertained -that, "in the time of the mortality or pestilence, which was in the year -1349, there remained hardly two tenants in the said manor [Ensham], and -these had wished to leave, had not brother Nicholas de Upton, then abbot -of the said manor, compounded anew with them, as well as with other -tenants who came in." - -So far as regards the immediate effects of the great mortality. Its -after-effects, felt within a year or two, upon the economics and morals of -the country, upon the power of the old governing class, upon the -dispersion of industries and the new life of towns, upon the system of -farming, upon the development of the legal profession in London, and upon -various other things, are a much more intricate and disputable subject, -some part of which will be dealt with in the next chapter in connexion -with the subsequent history of plague or its domestication upon the soil -of England. Many things in England were noted as having happened "sithen -the Pestilence," to quote the stock phrase of the 'Vision of Piers the -Ploughman,' and not the least of them was the frequent recurrence of -plague, or a prevalence of sickness so steady that the poet compares it to -the rain coming in through a leaky roof. - -Some historians have doubted whether after all the Black Death made so -very much difference to the course of affairs[280]. It is perhaps -inevitable that scholars, accustomed to deal only with obvious human -causation, should look with some distrust upon the large claims made, in -the way of moral and social consequences, for a phenomenon which has been -apt to be classed with comets and earthquakes. The sudden thinning of the -population may indeed become a subject for economists without any regard -to the causation, and irrespectively of the means by which the numbers -were reduced; and that has been the only historic interest of the great -mortality hitherto. But the operation of pestilence is peculiar; the -thinning of the population is not effected as if in the due course of -nature; the analogy is closer with a decimating or exterminating war. The -invasion of the Black Death was part of the great human drama, just as if -a swarming people or a barbarous conqueror had been visibly present in it. -If things were moving in the fourteenth century towards a particular -issue, as historians find in their retrospect that they were, then the -coming of a great plague was part of that movement, organically bound up -with the other forces of it, and no more arbitrary than they. Thus it -becomes of interest to trace the antecedents of the Black Death before we -attempt to follow out its consequences; and it is not the less of interest -to do so, that the train of events leads us as far eastwards as the soil -of China, and to the incidents that attended the collapse of the greatest -government of the Middle Ages, the empire of the Great Khan. - - -The Antecedents of the Black Death. - -When the Black Death in its progress westwards came to Constantinople in -1347, the emperor-historian, John Cantacuzenes, was present in his capital -to witness the arrival of the pestilence; in his history he wrote that it -came among them from the country of the hyperborean Scythians, that is to -say, the Tartars of the Crimea. The other contemporary Byzantine -historian, Nicephorus Gregoras, says that the pestilence began among the -Scythians in the Crimea and at the mouths of the Don. The Russian annals, -which are an independent source, and likely enough to have a correct -tradition, also say that the plague was God's punishment on the people of -the Don territory and of several other localities with obsolete names, -including the famous city of Sarai on the Volga[281]. The Chersonese, and -the country from the Don to the Volga, or from the Euxine to the Caspian, -are the regions thus clearly indicated as the scene of the first outburst -of the Black Death; but there was no clue to its unaccountable appearance -there, or to the connexion between its outburst on the confines of Europe -and the distant home in the East which the rumour of the day vaguely -assigned to it. The more definite association of the Black Death with -China dates from 1757, when the abbe Des Guignes, in his _Histoire des -Huns_[282], took up the old tradition of the Arab historian, Aboel -Mahasin, that the plague began in Tartary, that the smell of corpses -spread on every side, that the infection passed from Cathay or Tartary to -the Tartars of the Kaptchac (Crimea), and from them to Constantinople and -Europe on the one hand, and to Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt and North Africa -on the other. He pointed out also that the overland caravan trade was a -ready means of transport for the infection. That which specially attracted -his attention as the historian of the Mongol power was the other statement -of the Arab historian in the same context, that China had been visited by -floods so disastrous that men, beasts, and even birds perished, and that -the country was almost depopulated. Upon that hint Des Guignes collected -from the Chinese annals of the first half of the fourteenth century a -considerable list[283] of calamities, which had actually happened--floods -causing the loss of millions of lives, earthquakes, and the like, -appending the catalogue without comment as a note to the text where he has -occasion to mention the Black Death. Des Guignes' note was reproduced -verbatim by Hecker in his essay on the Black Death in 1832, and the -unwonted series of phenomena in China was made the basis of certain -mystical speculations as to the effect of earthquakes in causing a -"progressive infection of the zones," a perturbation of "the earth's -organism," a "baneful commotion of the atmosphere," or the like. In that -nebulous and unsatisfactory state the old tradition of the Black Death -originating in China has remained to the present hour; the intuition of -the Peking Jesuit had merely been appropriated and set forth in his own -way by the German "Naturphilosoph[284]." - -Meanwhile, in 1842 a clue to Des Guignes' conjecture of a connexion -between the importation of the Black Death and the China land-route was -found (but not followed up) in the discovery by Henschel of a Latin -manuscript in the Rhediger Library at Breslau[285]. This was a narrative -compiled by one Gabriel de Mussis, a jurist of Piacenza, who had been -practising as a notary or advocate among the Genoese and Venetians trading -around the shores of the Euxine and Caspian, and had been an eyewitness of -the outbreak of the plague in that region. De Mussis has no theory of the -origin of the plague; he merely narrates the events as they unfolded -themselves before his own eyes; so much was he in the midst of them that -he was a passenger on board the very ship which brought the first seeds of -the Black Death direct from the Crimea to Genoa as early as the spring of -1347. - - The substance of this story is that the Italian merchants, who were - then settled in considerable numbers at the various termini or - entrepots of the overland trade from China and Central Asia by the - more northern route, were harassed by the Tartar hordes; that they had - stood a siege in Tana, on the Don, but had been driven out of it, and - had sought refuge for themselves and their merchandise within the - walls of Caffa, a small fortified post on the Crimean Straits (of - Kertch), built by Genoese not long before; that Caffa was besieged in - due course by the Tartar barbarians; that the investment lasted nearly - three years; that the merchants and others, crowded into the narrow - space within the walls, were put to great straits and could hardly - breathe, being only partially relieved by the arrival of a ship with - supplies; that the plague broke out among the besieging Tartar host - and daily destroyed thousands; that the Tartars threw the pestilent - dead bodies inside the walls by their engines of siege, so that the - infection took hold of those within the fort; that the Tartars - dispersed in panic and spread the infection all over the shores of the - Euxine, Caspian and Levant; that such of the Italian traders as were - able, De Mussis himself with them, escaped from Caffa in a ship; and - that the infection appeared in Genoa in its most deadly form a day or - two after the arrival of the ship, although none of those on board - were suffering from the plague. - -These are all the circumstances related by De Mussis of the beginning of -the outbreak as known to himself at first hand: the rest of his narrative -is occupied with various incidents of the plague in Europe, with pious -reflections, and accounts of portents. His single reference to China is as -follows: "In the Orient, about Cathay, where is the head of the world and -the beginning of the earth, horrible and fearful signs appeared; for -serpents and frogs, descending in dense rains, entered the dwellings and -consumed countless numbers, wounding them by their venom and corroding -them with their teeth. In the meridian parts, about the Indies, regions -were overturned by earthquakes, and cities wasted in ruin, tongues of -flame being shot forth. Fiery vapours burnt up many, and in places there -were copious rains of blood and murderous showers of stones." De Mussis -has certainly no scientific intention; nor can it be said that any -scientific use has been made of his manuscript since its discovery. For -Haeser, its editor, merely reproduces in his history the passage from -Hecker on the three overland routes between Europe and the East, without -remarking on the fact that De Mussis definitely places the outbreak of the -plague at the European terminus of one of them: its remote origin is -involved in "impenetrable obscurity;" all we can say is that it came from -the East, "the cradle of the human race[286]." - -But the entirely credible narrative by De Mussis of the outbreak of plague -at the siege of Caffa is just the clue that was wanting to unravel the -meaning of the widespread rumour of the time, that the plague came from -China. Let us first examine somewhat closely the source of that rumour. It -finds its most definite expression in an Arabic account of the Black Death -at Granada, by the famous Moorish statesman of that city, -Ibn-ul-Khatib[287]. Besides giving the local circumstances for Granada, he -makes various remarks on the nature of the plague, and on its mode of -spreading, which are not exceeded in shrewdness and insight by the more -scientific doctrines of later times. Its origin in China he repeats on the -authority of several trustworthy and far-travelled men, more particularly -of his celebrated countryman Ibn-Batuta, or "the Traveller," whose story -was that the plague arose in China from the corruption of many corpses -after a war, a famine, and a conflagration. - -The mention of Ibn-Batuta, as the authority more particularly, has a -special interest. That traveller was actually in China from 1342 to 1346. -In his book of travels[288] he tells us how on his way back (he took the -East-Indian sea-route to the Persian Gulf) he came at length to Damascus, -Aleppo and Cairo in the summer of 1348, and was a witness of the Black -Death at each of those places, and of the mixed religious processions at -Damascus of Jews with their Hebrew Scriptures and Christians with their -Gospels. But he says not one word anywhere as to the origin of the plague -in China, whence he was journeying homewards. He continued his journey to -Tangier, his birthplace, and crossed thence to Spain about the beginning -of 1350. At Granada he spent some days among his countrymen, of whom he -mentions in his journal four by name; but the most famous of them, -Ibn-ul-Khatib, he does not mention. However, here was Ibn-Batuta at -Granada, a year or two after the Black Death, discoursing on all manner of -topics with the most eminent Moors of the place; and here is one of them, -Ibn-ul-Khatib, in an account of the Black Death at Granada, quoting the -report of Ibn-Batuta that the pestilence arose in China from the -corruption of unburied corpses. None of the other statements of an Eastern -origin can compare with this in precision or in credibility; they all -indeed confuse the backward extension of the plague from the Euxine -eastwards to Khiva, Bokhara and the like, with its original progress -towards Europe from a source still farther east. The authority of -Ibn-Batuta himself is not, of course, that of historian or observer; -although he was in China during part, at least, of the national calamities -which the Chinese Annals record, he says nothing of them, and probably -witnessed nothing of them. But the traveller was a likely person to have -heard correctly the gossip of the East and to have judged of its -credibility; so that there is a satisfaction in tracing it through him. - -The siege of Caffa, and the general circumstances of it, we may take as -historical on the authority of the Italian notary who was there; but it -may be doubted whether the plague began, as he says, among the nomade -hordes outside the fort. In sieges it has been not unusual for both sides -to suffer from infective disease; and although it is not always easy to -say where the disease may have begun, the presumption is that it arose -among those who were most crowded, most pressed by want, and most -desponding in spirit. It is, of course, not altogether inconceivable that -the Tartar besiegers of Caffa had bred a pestilential disease in their -camp; the nomades of the Cyrenaic plateau have bred bubo-plague itself -more than once in recent years in their wretched summer tents, and plague -has appeared from time to time in isolated or remote Bedouin villages on -the basaltic plateaus of Arabia. There is nothing in the nomade manner of -life adverse to pestilential products, least of all in the life of nomades -encamped for a season. But such outbreaks of bubo-plague or of typhus -fever have been local, sporadic, or non-diffusive. On the other hand the -plague which arose at the siege of Caffa was the Black Death, one of the -two greatest pestilences in the history of the world. Let us then see -whether there is any greater likelihood of finding inside the walls of -Caffa the lurking germs of so great a pestilence. Within the walls of the -Genoese trading fort were the Italian merchants driven in from all around -that region, with their merchandise--as De Mussis says, _fugientes pro -suarum tutione personarum et rerum_. Previous to their three years' siege -in Caffa they, or some of them, had stood a siege in Tana, and had -retreated to the next post on the homeward route. Tana was at the -eastward bend of the Don, whence the road across the steppe is shortest to -the westward bend of the Volga; a little above the bend of the Volga was -the great city of Sarai--whence the caravans started on their overland -journey along northern parallels, across mountain ranges and the desert of -Gobi, to enter China at its north-western angle, just within the end of -the Great Wall[289]. The merchandise of Sarai and Tana was the return -merchandise of China--the bales of silks and fine cloths, spices and -drugs, which had become the articles of a great commerce between China and -Europe since Marco Polo first showed the way, and which continued to reach -Europe by the caravan routes until about 1360: then the route was closed -owing to the final overthrow of the authority of the Great Khan, which had -once secured a peaceful transit from the Yellow Sea to the Black Sea--so -completely closed that men forgot, two hundred years after, that it had -ever existed. - -Did these bales of Chinese stuffs, carried into Caffa for protection, -contain the seeds of the Black Death? There is, at least, nothing -improbable in the seeds of plague lurking in bales of goods; that mode of -transmission was afterwards recognized as highly characteristic of the -plague during its Levantine days. Nor is there anything improbable in the -seeds of an infection being carried thousands of miles across the deserts -of Central Asia; cholera came in that way from India in 1827-8 by the -caravan-route to Cabul, Balkh, Bokhara, Khiva and the Kirghiz Steppe to -Orenburg, and again in 1847 to Astrakhan; and the slow land-borne viruses -of those two great epidemics exceeded in virulence the later importations -of cholera by the sea route from the East. Still farther, there is nothing -improbable in the germs of plague lying latent for a long time, or in the -disease existing as a potency although not manifested in a succession of -cases. The next stage of its progress, from Caffa to Genoa, illustrates -that very point; for we know that there were no cases of plague on board -ship, although the very atmosphere or smell of the new arrival seemed -sufficient to taint the whole air of Genoa, and to carry death to every -part of the city within a couple of days. And lastly the long imprisonment -of a virus in bales of goods, the crowding of merchants and merchandise -into the narrow space of a walled seaport, amidst the almost inevitable -squalor and foetor of a three years' siege, were the very circumstances -needed to raise the potency of the assumed virus to an unusual height, to -give it a degree of virulence that would make it effective, and a power of -diffusion that would spread and continue the liberated infection after the -manner of the greatest of pestilences. - -Thus, if we have to choose between the origin of the plague-virus among -the Tartar hordes besieging the China merchants within the walls of Caffa, -and the pre-existence of that virus, for a long time latent, among the -goods or effects of the besieged, the latter hypothesis must be accorded -the advantage in probability. Accepting it, we follow the virus back to -Tana on the Don, from Tana to Sarai on the Volga, from Sarai by a -well-trodden route which need not be particularized[290], for many weeks' -journey until we come to the soil of China. According to a dominant school -of epidemiologists it is always enough to have traced a virus to a remote -source, to the "roof of the world" or to the back of the east wind, and -there to leave it, in the full assurance that there must have been -circumstances to account for its engendering there, perhaps in an equally -remote past, if only we knew them. If, however, we follow the trail back -definitely to China, it is our duty to connect it there with an actual -history or tradition, immemorial if need be, of Chinese plague. But there -is no such history or tradition to be found. We know something of the -China of Kublai Khan, fifty years before, from the book of Marco Polo; and -the only possible reference to plague there is an ambiguous statement -about "carbuncles" in a remote province, which was probably Yun-nan. Not -only so, but if we scrutinize the Chinese Annals closely, we shall find -that the thirty years preceding the Black Death were indeed marked by many -great calamities and loss of life on a vast scale, by floods, droughts, -earthquakes, famines and famine-fevers, but not by pestilence unconnected -with these; on the other hand, the thirty or forty years after the Black -Death had overrun Europe, beginning with the year 1352, are marked in the -Chinese Annals (as summarized in the _Imperial Encyclopaedia_ of Peking, -1726) by a succession of "great plagues" in various provinces of the -Empire, which are not associated with calamitous seasons, but stand alone -as disease-calamities pure and simple[291]. If the Black Death connects at -all with events in China, these events were natural calamities and their -attendant loss of life, and not outbreaks of plague itself; for the -latter, assuming them to have been bubo-plague, were subsequent in China -to the devastation of Europe by the plague. - -We are left, then, to make what we can of the antecedent calamities of -China; and we may now revert to the curious rumour of the time that the -relevant thing in China was the corruption of many corpses left unburied -after inundation, war and conflagration. So far as war and conflagration -are concerned they are quite subordinate; there was no war except an -occasional ineffective revolt in some remote western province, and the -conflagrations were minor affairs, noticed, indeed, in the Annals, but -lost among the greater calamities. The floods, droughts and famines were -events of almost annual recurrence for many years before, so that no -period in the Annals of China presents such a continuous picture of -national calamity, full as Chinese history has at all times been of -disasters of the same kind. It was the decadence of the great Mongol -empire, founded by Genghiz and carried by Kublai to that marvellous height -of splendour and prosperity which we read of in the book of Marco Polo. -The warlike virtues of the earlier Mongol rulers had degenerated in their -successors into sensual vices during the times of peace; and the history -of the country, priest-ridden, tax-burdened, and ruled by women and -eunuchs, neglected in its thousand water-ways and in all the safeguards -against floods and famine which wiser rulers had set up, became from year -to year an illustration of the ancient Chinese maxim, that misgovernment -in the palace is visited by the anger of the sky. - - The following epitome of the calamities in China is taken from De - Mailla's _Histoire generale de la Chine_. Paris, 1777, 9 vols. 4to., a - translation of the abridged official annals. - - The year 1308 marks the beginning of the series of bad seasons. - Droughts in some places, floods in others, locusts and failure of the - crops, brought famine and pestilence. The people in Kiang-Hoai were - reduced to live on wild roots and the bark of trees. In Ho-nan and - Chan-tong the fathers ate the flesh of the children. The imperial - granaries were still able to supply grain, but not nearly enough for - the people's wants. The provinces of Kiang-si and Che-kiang were - depopulated by the plague or malignant fever which followed the - famine. The ministers sent in their resignations, which were not - accepted. - - In 1313 the same events recur, including the resignations of - ministers. An epidemic carried off many in the capital, and the whole - empire was desolated by drought. At a council of ministers to devise - remedies and avert further calamities it was proposed by some to copy - the institutions of ancient empires celebrated for their virtue, and - by others to abolish the Bhuddist priesthood of Foh as the cause of - all misfortunes. The throne is now occupied by Gin-tsong, an emperor - of a serious and ascetic disposition. In 1314 he revived the old - Chinese system of competitive examinations and the distinctive dress - among the grades of mandarins, which the earlier Mongol rulers had - been able to dispense with. Next year there is a public distribution - of grain, and a check to the exactions of tax-gatherers in the - distressed districts. In 1317, it appears that the provincial - mandarins, in defiance of express orders, had neglected the laws of - Kublai with reference to the distribution of grain, although it was - dangerous to defer such public aid longer; they had failed also to - relax their rigour in collecting the taxes. One day the emperor found - at Peking a soldier in rags from a distant garrison, and discovered - that a system of embezzlement in the army clothing department had been - going on for five years. Gin-tsong is reported to have said to his - ministers, "My august predecessors have left wise laws, which I have - always had at heart to follow closely; but I see with pain that they - are neglected, and that my people are unhappy." - - In 1318 we read of a great flood in one province, of multitudes - drowned, and of a public distribution of grain. In 1320, forty of the - Censors of the Empire remonstrated against the cruel exactions of - "public leeches," and against a practice of calumniating honest men so - as to get them out of the way. The emperor Gin-tsong died in that - year, aged thirty-three, and with his death the last serious attempt - to check the flood of corruption came to an end. In 1321 there is - drought in Ho-nan, followed by famine. In 1324 we read of droughts, - locusts, inundations and earthquakes. The emperor demanded advice of - the nobles, ministers and wise men, and received the following answer: - "While the palace of the prince is full of eunuchs, astrologers, - physicians, women, and other idle people, whose maintenance costs the - State an enormous sum, the people are plunged in extreme misery. The - empire is a family, and the emperor its father: let him listen to the - cries of the miserable." In 1325 famine follows the disasters of the - year before; and we learn that the people were supplied from the full - granaries of the rich, who were paid, not out of the State treasury, - but by places in the mandarinate! In 1326 the tyranny and - licentiousness of the Bhuddist lamas reaches a climax, and an edict is - issued against them. The year 1327 is marked by a series of calamities - and portents--drought, locusts, ruined crops, earthquakes, - inundations. In 1330, again floods and the harvest destroyed, a cruel - famine in Hou-Kouang, millions of acres of land ruined, and 400,000 - families reduced to beggary. In 1331 the harvest is worse than in the - year before--in Che-kiang there were more than 800,000 families who - did not gather a single grain of corn or rice,--and all the while - enormous taxes were ground out of universal poverty. - - In 1333 begins the long and calamitous reign of Shun-ti, who came to - the throne a weak youth of thirteen. Next year the misfortunes of - China touch their highest point. Inundations ruined the crops in - Chan-tong; a drought in Che-kiang brought famine and pestilence; in - the southern provinces generally, famine and floods caused the deaths - of 2,270,000 families, or of 13,000,000 individuals. In 1336 - inundations in Chan-tong ruined the harvest; in Kiang-nan and - Che-kiang the first harvest was a failure from drought, multitudes - perished of hunger, and a plague broke out. The emperor, insensible to - the misfortunes of his people, abandons himself to his pleasures. Next - year sees the first of those provincial revolts, led by obscure - Chinese peasants, which eventually overthrew the dynasty in 1368. - Floods occurred in more than one river basin, by which multitudes of - men and beasts were drowned; in the valley of the Kiang (a tributary - of the Hoang-ho) four millions perished. For several years we read of - numerous and repeated shocks of earthquakes, in 1341 of a great - famine, in 1342 of a famine so severe that human flesh was eaten, in - 1343 of seven towns submerged, in 1344 of a great tract of country - inundated by the sea in consequence of an earthquake, in 1345 of - earthquakes in Pe-chili, in 1346 of earthquakes for seven days in - Chan-tong, and of a great famine in Chan-si. In 1347 earthquakes in - various provinces, and drought in Ho-tong, followed by many deaths. - The record of disasters in De Mailla's abridged annals, and in Des - Guignes, who had clearly access to fuller narrations, comes to an end - for a time at the year 1347. - -It will be observed that in these records there is comparatively little -said of epidemic sickness. The references to pestilence would in no case -suggest more than the typhus fever which has been the usual attendant upon -Chinese famines, and has never shown the independent vitality and -diffusive properties of plague. But the minor place occupied by actual -pestilence in China, in the years before the Black Death in Europe, is -brought out even more clearly on comparing that period with the section of -the Chinese annals for the generation following. In the chronology of -Chinese epidemics drawn up by Gordon (London, 1884) from the Peking -_Encyclopaedia_ of 1726, there are, from 1308-1347, just the same entries -of pestilence as are given above from De Mailla's and Des Guignes' French -adaptation of the Annals. (Gordon makes the obvious mistake of attributing -to pestilence the enormous loss of life which the Annals clearly assigned -to floods and famines, with their attendant sickness.) But with the year -1352 we enter upon a great pestilential period, as clearly marked in the -history of China by the annual recurrence of vast epidemics as the decades -before it were marked by the unusual frequency of floods, famines and -earthquakes. Every year from 1352 to 1363, except 1355, has an entry of -"great pestilence" or "great plague" (yi-li), in one province or another, -although the old tale of floods and famines has come to an end in the -Annals. The last of the nearly continuous series of great pestilences is -in 1369, when there was a great pest in Fukien, and "the dead lay in heaps -on the ground." There is then a break until 1380, and after that a longer -break until 1403. It would thus appear as if the great pestilential period -of China in the fourteenth century had not coincided with the succession -of disastrous seasons, but had followed the latter at a distinct interval. -Conversely the years of plague from 1352 to 1369 do not appear to have -been years of inundations and bad harvests; they stand out in the -chronology, by comparison, as years of plague-sickness pure and simple; -and although nothing is said to indicate the type of bubo-plague, yet the -disease can hardly be assumed to have been the old famine fevers or other -sickness directly due to floods and scarcity, so long as not a word is -said of floods and famines in that context or in the Annals generally. The -suggestion is that the soil of China may not have felt the full effects of -the plague virus, originally engendered thereon, until some few years -after the same had been carried to Europe, having produced there within a -short space of time the stupendous phenomenon of the Black Death. If -there be something of a paradox in that view, it is the facts themselves -that refuse to fall into what might be thought the natural sequence. - -The historian Gaubil thinks that the national Annals make the most of -these recurring calamities, having been written by the official scribes of -the next dynasty, who sought to discredit the Mongol rule as much as -possible[292]; but it is not suggested that the compilers had invented the -series of disasters,--now in one province or river basin, now in another, -at one time with thirteen millions of lives lost, at another with four -hundred thousand families reduced to beggary, this time a drought, and -next time a flood, and in another series of years a succession of -destructive earthquakes. - -We are here concerned with discovering any possible relation that these -disasters, coming one upon another almost without time for recovery, can -have had to the engendering of the plague-virus. According to the rumours -of the time, it was the corruption of unburied corpses in China which -caused the Black Death; and certainly the unburied corpses were there, a -_vera causa_, if that were all. Recent experiences in China make it easy -for us to construct in imagination the state of the shores of rivers after -those fatal inundations of the fourteenth century, or of the roadsides -after the recurring famines. Thus, of the famine of 1878 it is said[293]: -"Coffins are not to be got for the corpses, nor can graves be prepared for -them. Their blood is a dispersed mass on the ground, their bones lie all -about.... Pestilence [it is otherwise known to have been typhus fever] -comes with the famine, and who can think of medicine for the plague or -coffins for the multitude of the dead?" Or, again, according to a memorial -in the official Peking Gazette of 16 January, 1878, "the roads are lined -with corpses in such numbers as to distance all efforts for their -interment[294]." - -There is much of sameness in the history of China from century to century; -what happened in 1878, and again on a lesser scale two or three years -ago, must have happened on an unparalleled scale year after year during -the ill-starred period which ended about 1342; there must have been no -ordinary break-down in the decencies and sanitary safeguards of interment -in such years as 1334, when thirteen millions (two million, two hundred -and seventy thousand families) were swept away by the floods of the -Yang-tsi, or destroyed by hunger and disease. But we are not left -altogether to the exercise of the imagination. A strangely vivid picture -remains to us of a scene in China in those years, which a returning -missionary saw as in a vision. The friar Odoric, of Pordenone, had spent -six years in Northern China previous to 1327 or 1328, when he returned to -Italy by one of the overland routes. The story of his travels[295] was -afterwards taken down from his lips, and it is made to end with one -gruesome scene, which is brought in without naming the time or the place. -It is a vision of a valley of death, invested with the same air of -generality as in Bunyan's allegory of the common lot. - - "Another great and terrible thing I saw. For, as I went through a - certain valley which lieth by the River of Delights (_flumen - deliciarum_) I saw therein many dead corpses lying. And I heard also - therein sundry kinds of music, but chiefly nakers, which were - marvellously played upon. And so great was the noise thereof that very - great fear came upon me. Now, this valley is seven or eight miles - long; and if any unbeliever enter therein, he quitteth it never again, - but perisheth incontinently. Yet I hesitated not to go in that I might - see once for all what the matter was. And when I had gone in I saw - there, as I have said, such numbers of corpses as no one without - seeing it could deem credible. And at one side of the valley, in the - very rock, I beheld as it were the face of a man very great and - terrible, so very terrible indeed that for my exceeding great fear my - spirit seemed to die in me. Wherefore I made the sign of the Cross, - and began continually to repeat _Verbum caro factum_, but I dared not - at all come nigh that face, but kept at seven or eight paces from it. - And so I came at length to the other end of the valley, and there I - ascended a hill of sand and looked around me." - -Narrated as it is of no specified place and of no one year of his journey, -it may stand, and perhaps it was meant to stand, for a common experience -of China in the period of Mongol decadence. Whether he left the country by -the gorges of the Yang-tsi and the Yun-nan route, or along the upper -basin of the Hoang-ho by the more usual northern route to the desert of -Gobi, his vision of a Valley of Corpses is equally significant. - - -The Theory of the Plague-Virus. - -The question that remains is the connexion, in pathological theory, -between the bubo-plague and the corruption of the unburied dead or of the -imperfectly buried dead. Some such connexion was the rumour of the time, -before any scientific theory can well have existed. Also the factor in -question was undoubtedly there among the antecedents, if it were not even -the most conspicuous of the antecedents. But we might still be following a -wandering light if we were to trust the theory of the Black Death to those -empirical suggestions, striking and plausible though they be. It is not -for the Black Death only, but for the great plagues of the Mohammedan -conquests, which preceded the Black Death by many centuries and also -followed that great intercurrent wave until long after in their own strict -succession, for the circumscribed spots of plague in various parts of Asia -and Africa in our own day, and above all for the great plague of -Justinian's reign,--it is for them all that a theory of bubo-plague is -needed. A survey of the circumstances of all these plagues will either -weaken or strengthen, destroy or establish, the theory that the virus of -the Black Death had arisen on the soil of China from the cadaveric poison -present in some peculiar potency, and had been carried to Europe in the -course of that overland trade at whose terminus we first hear of its -virulence being manifested. - -The theory of the origin of the plague-virus from the corruption of the -dead was a common one in the sixteenth century. It was held by Ambroise -Pare among others, and it was elaborately worked out for the Egypt of his -day by Prosper Alpinus, physician to the Venetian Consulate at Cairo -towards the end of the same century. But the most brilliant exposition of -it, one of the finest exercises of diction and of reasoning that has ever -issued from the profession of medicine, was that given for the origin in -Egypt of the great plague of Justinian's reign by Etienne Pariset, -secretary to the Academie de Medecine and commissioner from France to -study the plague in Syria and Egypt in 1829[296]. - -In the plague-stricken Egypt of that time, overburdened with population -and still awaiting the beneficent rule of Mehemet Ali, Dr Pariset had his -attention forcibly directed to the same contrast between the modern and -ancient manner of disposing of the dead, and to the insuitability of the -former to the Delta, which had been remarked by Prosper Alpinus in 1591, -and by De Maillet, French consul at Cairo, in 1735, and had been specially -dwelt upon by _philosophes_ of the eighteenth century, such as -Montesquieu, Volney and De Pauw. On the one hand he saw under his eyes -various revolting things in the Delta,--brick tombs invaded by water, an -occasional corpse floating at large, canals choked with the putrefying -bodies of bullocks dead of a murrain, the courtyards of Coptic and Jewish -houses, and the floors of mosques, churches and monasteries filled with -generations of the dead in their flooded vaults and catacombs. On the -other hand he saw, on the slopes of the Libyan range and on the edge of -the desert beyond the reach of the inundation, the occasional openings of -a vast and uncounted series of rock-grottoes in which the Egyptians of the -pre-Christian era had carefully put away every dead body, whether of bird, -or of beast, or of human kind. He was persuaded of the truth of Volney's -remark, "In a crowded population, under a hot sun, and in a soil filled -deep with water during several months of every year, the _rapid_ -putrefaction of bodies becomes a leaven of plague and of other -disease[297]." The remark of De Pauw, although it is not adduced, was -equally to the point: "Neither men nor beasts are any longer embalmed in -Egypt; but the ancient Egyptians seem to have done well in following that -mode, and in keeping the mummies in the deepest recesses of excavated -rocks.... Were we to note here all that those two nations [Arabs and -Turks] have left undone, and everything that they ought not to have done, -it would be easy to understand how a country formerly not altogether -unhealthy, is now become a hotbed of the plague[298]." These -eighteenth-century reflections, casual and discursive after the manner of -the time, were amplified by Pariset to scientific fulness and order, and -set in permanent classical form. Like De Pauw and Volney, he extolled the -ancient sanitary wisdom of Egypt, and excused the priestly mask of -superstition for the implicit obedience that it secured. De Pauw had -pointed out that the towns most remarkable for the worship of -crocodiles,--Coptos, Arsinoee (Crocodilopolis), and Athribis,--were all -situated on canals at some distance from the Nile; the crocodiles could -never have got to them unless the canals were kept clear; according to -Aelian and Eusebius the crocodile was the symbol of water fit to drink; so -that the superstitious worship of the animal was in effect the motive for -keeping the canals of the Nile in repair. The priests of Egypt, says -Pariset, with their apparatus of fictions and emblems, sought to veil from -the profane eyes of the vulgar and of strangers the secrets of a sublime -philosophy[299]. They made things sacred so as to make them binding, so as -to constrain by the force of religion, as Moses did, their disciple. They -had to reckon with the annual overflow of the Nile, with a hot sun, and a -crowded population. Suppose that all the dead animal matter, human or -other, were to be incorporated with the soil under these rapid changes of -saturation and drying, of diffusion and emanation, what a mass of poison, -what danger to the living! What foresight they showed in avoiding it, what -labour and effort, but what results! Can anyone pretend that a system so -vast, so beautiful, so coherent in all its parts, had been engendered and -conserved merely by an ignorant fanaticism, or that a people who had so -much of wisdom in their actions had none in their thoughts? Looking around -him at the Egypt of the Christian and Mohammedan eras, he asks, What has -become of that hygiene, attentive, scrupulous and enlightened, of that -marvellous police of sepulture, of that prodigious care to preserve the -soil from all admixture of putrescible matters? The ancient learning of -Egypt, the wisdom taught by hard experience in remote ages and perfected -in prosperous times, had gradually been overthrown, first by the Persian -and Greek conquests which weakened the national spirit, then by the Roman -conquest which broke it, then by the prevalence of the Christian -doctrines, and lastly by the Mohammedan domination, more hostile than all -the others to sanitary precaution. - -Pariset's remaining argument was that ancient Egypt, by its systematic -care in providing for a slow mouldering of human and animal bodies beyond -the reach of the inundation, had been saved from the plague; in the -historic period there had been epidemics, but these had been of typhus or -other sickness of prisons, slavery, and famines. According to Herodotus, -Egypt and Libya were the two healthiest countries under the sun. But when -St Paul's vehement argument as to the natural and the spiritual body began -to make way, when men began to ask the question, "How are the dead raised -up, and with what body do they come?" the ancient practice of Egypt was -judged to be out of harmony with Christian doctrine. Embalming was -denounced as sinful by St Anthony, the founder of Egyptian monachism, in -the third century; and by the time that the church of North Africa had -reached its point of highest influence under St Augustine, bishop of -Hippo, the ancient religious rites of Egypt had everywhere given place to -Christian burial[300]. Bubo-plague had already been prevalent in at least -one disastrous epidemic in Lower Egypt at the time of the great massacres -of Christians in the episcopate of Cyprian; and in the year 542 it broke -out at Pelusium, one of the uncleannest spots in the Delta, spread thence -on the one hand along the North African coast, and on the other hand by -the corn ships to Byzantium, and grew into the disastrous world-wide -pestilence which has ever since been associated with the reign of -Justinian. - -After the Mohammedan conquest things went from bad to worse; and from the -tenth century until the year 1846, plague had been domesticated on the -soil of Egypt. - -The theory of Pariset was communicated by him to the Academie de Medecine -on 12 July, 1831, and finally published in a carefully designed and highly -finished essay in 1837. It was received with much disfavour; according to -his colleague Daremberg, the learned librarian of the Academy, nothing but -its brilliant style could have saved it from being forgotten in a week. It -was vigorously opposed by Clot Bey, on behalf of Egyptian officialdom, -because it fixed upon Egypt the stigma of holding in the soil an inherent -and abiding cause of the plague[301]. Besides the general objection that -it was the theorizing of a _philosophe_, exception was taken to particular -parts of the argument. Thus Labat demonstrated by arithmetic that the -mummied carcases of all the generations of men and animals in Egypt for -three thousand years would have required a space as large as the whole of -Egypt, which should thus have become one vast ossuary. And as to the fact, -he added, embalming was the privilege of the rich, and of some sacred -species of animals. Clot Bey asserted that the whole class of slaves were -not thought worthy of embalming. He found also, in the language used by -Herodotus, evidence that the people of Egypt felt themselves to be under -"the continual menace" of some great epidemic scourge and took precautions -accordingly--the very ground on which Pariset based his theory. The -objection which weighed most with Daremberg was the fact that, just about -the time when Pariset had asserted the immunity of Egypt from plague in -her prosperous days, evidence had been found, in the newly-discovered -collections of Oribasius, that a bubonic disease was recorded for Egypt -and Libya by a Greek physician two centuries before the Christian era, and -by another Greek medical writer about the beginning of our era. - -It does not appear to have occurred to the opponents of Pariset's theory -that the two chief objections, first that embalming was far from general, -and second that cases of plague did occur in ancient Egypt, answered each -other. But, as matter of fact, it can be shown that there were cheaper -forms of embalming practised for the great mass of the people. Again, it -was found by De Maillet that bodies not embalmed at all, but laid in -coarse cloths upon beds of charcoal under six or eight feet of sand at an -elevation on the edge of the great plain of mummies at Memphis, and beyond -the reach of the water, were as perfectly preserved from putrid decay as -if they had been embalmed, the dry air and the nitrous soil contributing -to their slow and inoffensive decomposition[302]. These facts tended to -support the notion that it was not ceremony which really determined the -national practice, but utility, into which neither art nor religion -necessarily entered. The existence also of bubonic disease in the period -of the Ptolemies proved that the risk assumed in Pariset's theory was a -real risk, the precautions having been not always sufficient to meet it. - -The plague which overran the known world in Justinian's reign (542) was, -according to this theory, the effect on a grand scale of an equally grand -cause, namely, the final overthrow of a most ancient religion and national -life, which had not been built up for nothing and had a true principle -concealed beneath its superstitions. The parallelism between China and -ancient Egypt has been a favourite subject. In China whatever of religion -there is runs upon the Egyptian lines--reverence for the dead or worship -of ancestors. The Chinese do not indeed embalm their dead, but they -practise an equivalent art of preservation which may be read in almost -identical terms in the book of Marco Polo and in modern works on the -social life of China[303]. To prevent the products of cadaveric decay from -passing into the soil may be said to be the object of their practices. The -pains taken to secure dry burial-places are especially obvious in those -parts of the country, such as the "reed lands" of the Yang-tsi, which are -subject to inundations, annual or occasional[304]. Much of the national -art of Feng-shui is concerned, under the mask of divination, with these -common-sense aims. - -Both Egypt and China are liable to have their river-basins flooded at one -time and parched to dust at another. These extreme fluctuations of the -ground water are now known to scientific research to be the cause of -peculiar and unwholesome products of putrefaction in the soil: given a -soil charged with animal matters, the risk to those living upon it is in -proportion to the range of fluctuation of the ground water. If it happen -as an annual thing that the pores of the ground are now full of water, now -full of air, or if these extreme alternations be a common liability, then -a soil with the products of animal decomposition dispersed through it will -be always unwholesome, and unwholesome on a national scale. It is often -held that even vegetables rotting on the ground are pestiferous; Ambroise -Pare believed that the rotting carcase of a stranded whale caused an -outbreak of bubo-plague at Genoa; but human decomposition is something -special--at least for the living of the same species[305]. Most special of -all is it when its gross and crude matters pass rapidly into the ground, -getting carried hither and thither by the movements of the ground water, -and giving off those half-products of oxidation which the extreme -alternations from air to water, or from water to air, in the pores of the -ground are known to favour. There may be nothing offensive to the sense, -but the emanations from such a soil will in all probability be poisonous -or pestilent. In particular circumstances of locality the permeation or -leavening of the soil with the products of organic decomposition produces -Asiatic cholera; in still more special circumstances the result is yellow -fever; in circumstances familiar enough to ourselves the result is typhoid -fever, and probably also summer diarrhoea or British cholera. These are -all soil poisons. Bubo-plague also is a soil poison; and it is claimed as -specially related to the products of _cadaveric_ decomposition, diffused -at large in such a soil as soil-poisons are ordinarily engendered in. - -It is possible to subject that theory of the plague to the test of facts -still further. Thus bubo-plague dogged the steps of Mohammedan conquest -from the first century after the Hegira, now in Syria when Damascus was -the capital, now in Irak when Bagdad was the centre of Mohammedan rule, -now in Egypt when the seat of empire shifted to Grand Cairo; and, over a -great part of the period, simultaneously in all the regions of Islam. That -long series of plague-epidemics has been recorded in Arabic annals, and -has lately been published in an abstract accessible to all, with a summary -of conclusions[306]. - -What are the conclusions of the learned commentator on the Arabic annals, -as to the general causes of the thousand years of Mohammedan -plague?--"War, with the wasting of whole nations, in disregard of all -established rights, with plundering of towns and concentration of great -masses of men ill provided for and unregulated, who developed the seeds of -communicable and malignant diseases. Add to these things the negligent or -wholly neglected burial of those who had fallen in battle, the straits and -privations of the wounded, and the effects of a hot climate, especially in -flooded and swampy tracts of country.... The kind of burial, in very -shallow and often badly covered graves, which used to be practised in most -Eastern towns, and in part is still practised, may also have had -disastrous consequences not unfrequently." - - -The Theory tested by Modern Instances. - -With that general statement for the long succession of plague-epidemics in -Islam during nine centuries from the Hegira, beginning with a Syrian -epidemic in A.D. 628 and ending with a close succession of twelve -epidemics in Egypt from 1410 to 1492, we may pass to the more detailed -accounts of the conditions under which bubo-plague has been found in -various localities, often circumscribed spots far apart and out of the -way, during recent years. These spots are so varied, have so little -apparently in common, and are so capriciously chosen in the midst of -their several regions of the globe, that they do not readily fall into -any order or classification. What are we to make of a few spots of plague -among nomade Arabs of the Cyrenaic plateau; of plague in some stricken -villages high up in the highlands of Kurdistan, or in low-lying towns such -as Resht, near the shore of the Caspian, or amidst the black ooze of -amphibious habitations in the lower valley of Tigris and Euphrates; of -true bubonic disease in some few Bedouin villages or small towns on the -summits of the basaltic plateaus that rise like gigantic warts from the -Arabian desert; of bubo-plague in Yun-nan, at or near the capital Talifoo, -where the Mohammedan and Chinese influences have been struggling for -mastery, as well as among the cabins in the rocky valleys of the Salwen; -of some forty or fifty Himalayan hamlets picked out as plague-spots among -the six thousand villages of Kumaon; and of the now extinct but -comparatively recent centres of the same disease in the walled towns and -walled villages of Kutch, Kattiwar, and Marwar? And lastly what are we to -make of those cases of typhus fever with buboes which have been observed -in villages of the Yusufzai valley, near Peshawur, in 1852; in the Chinese -town of Pakhoi, on the gulf of Tonking, in 1886; occasionally among the -fever-cases in Burdwan since the health of that province underwent so -disastrous a change about the year 1870; and, on credible report, among -the troops in the Russo-Turkish war of 1879? It is surely unnecessary, at -least, to refute the sterile dogmatism that these are all the effects of -one pre-existing virus, carried, we know not how, from point to point of -the globe in an unbroken succession. It is a far cry even on a small-scale -map from Kumaon to Kutch, from Yun-nan to the Gulf of Tonking, from Resht -to the Armenian highlands, from the centre of Arabia to Tripoli, and from -Mesopotamia to North Yemen. And what is the use of assuming that there has -always been bubo-plague in the "cradle of the human race," and concluding -that the Black Death was one of its excursions westwards, so long as the -plagues of Islam were going on from decade to decade, all through the -Middle Ages, at no great distance from Byzantium and from Western Europe? -Are not Damascus, Bagdad and Grand Cairo of more account as plague-foci -than a few villages in the Himalaya or in Kattiwar, even granting that the -plague may have been in the latter at an earlier date than we know? It is -not communication that connects the several seats of plague, scattered -widely in time and place; but it is community of conditions, or of the -causes and associated circumstances which breed the plague in each -separately. Let us take them in some sort of order. - -Among the most remarkable habitats of modern bubo-plague are the villages -on the basalt plateaus of the Arabian desert. We have information of these -plague-spots from Doughty[307], who did not indeed visit Assir, the most -notorious of them, but several others more to the north and east. He -describes the ruined villages of Mogug, Gofar, Hayil and others, where the -people had died of plague some years before. A year of dearth preceded the -plague in some, if not in all of them. The author is struck by the -carelessness of burial, or the difficulties of it in the baked soil, -although he does not directly connect that with the epidemics. Thus, in -passing the graveyard of Hayil, one of the plague-towns, he remarks: -"Aheyd was a man of much might and glory in his day; he lies a yard under -the squalid gravel in his shirt." Of Kheybar, with vague traditions of -plague, he says: "We passed through a burial-ground of black volcanic -mould and salt-warp; the squalid grave heaps are marked with headstones of -wild basalt. That funeral earth is chapped and ghastly, bulging over her -enwombed corses, like a garden soil in spring-time which is pushed by the -new spring plants. All is horror at Kheybar!" He is led to the following -general remarks: "The care of sepulture was beyond measure in the -religions of antiquity, which were without humility. Under the new -religion [of Arabia] the deceased is wound in a shirt-cloth of calico, and -his corse is laid in the shallow pit of droughty earth." Again, of Bedouin -burials in general: "The deceased is buried the same day or on the morrow. -They scrape out painfully with a stick and their hands in the hard-burned -soil a shallow grave. I have seen their graves in the desert ruined by -foul hyenas, and their winding-sheets lay half above ground." - -Of the best known of these Arabian plague-spots the plateau of Assir, to -the south-east of Mecca, we have the following information relating to the -years 1874-79[308]; the chief plague-locality is Namasse, the principal -town of Beny Sheir, with five other villages. - - The site is on a mountain ridge too high for camels, the climate is - cold and moist, the soil fruitful, springs abundant, and no standing - water. The houses are built of stone, and stand close together. The - ground-floor of each house is used as the stable; and as the winter in - these mountains is very severe, so that water freezes, the inhabitants - live with their cattle in a horrible state of filth. According to - information from the district superintendent, there had been plague in - a few villages every two or three years for the previous thirty-five - or forty years. It has seldom extended further than five or six - leagues. The region is a mountain canton, with no trade; it is cut off - from the rest of the world. The disease is mostly attended with buboes - in the groins, armpits, and neck, but not always; sometimes petechial - spots were spoken of; in the sheikh Faik's own household the disease - began with rigors, and developed buboes, petechiae, headache and - burning thirst. Dr Nury counted up in six villages, with a population - of eight hundred, cases of plague to the number of 184 (68 men, 45 - women, 50 boys and 21 girls), with 155 deaths and 29 recoveries. - -Let us now place beside this the accounts of the plague in the mountains -village of Kumaon[309]. - -Of the plague-villages of Danpore and Munsharee, near the snow, we read: - - "Their houses are generally built of stone, one storey high. On the - ground-floor herd the cattle; in this compartment the dung is allowed - to accumulate till such time as there is no room left for the cattle - to stand erect; it is then removed and carefully packed close around - all sides, so that the house literally stands in the centre of a - hot-bed.... In many instances we have seen it accumulated above the - level of the floor of the upper story in which the family lives." In - that compartment, four feet high, with no window and a door of some - three feet by eighteen inches, ten or fifteen people live, lying - huddled together with the door shut. Their food is as poor as their - lodging. When plague breaks out, the family ties are rudely loosened: - those who can, flee to the jungle, leaving the stricken to their fate. - - - - The following is by Renny: "Fourteen died at a place in the forest - half a mile or more from Duddoli, respecting which I had the best - description yet given to me of the career of the sickness. Here were - only two houses, or long low huts, occupied by two separate families, - the heads being two brothers, sixteen souls in all. These two huts had - to contain also thirty head of cattle, large and small, at the worst - season of the year. In these two huts the Mahamurree [bubo-plague] - commenced about ten or eleven months ago, corresponding to the time it - appeared in Duddoli. At this place the sixteen residents kept together - till fourteen died, and one adult only, a man of about thirty years of - age, with his female child of six years old, survived. There was no - particular disorder among the cattle, but the outbreak of the plague - was preceded and accompanied by a great mortality among the rats in - their houses." - -Let us now take the accounts, twenty-five years later, of the plague in -the same district in 1876-77[310]. - - Confirming the earlier statements as to the extraordinary filth of the - houses--the cattle under the same roof and the baskets of damp and - unripe grain--he directs attention specially to the disposal of the - dead. The custom of the country is to burn the body beside the most - convenient mountain stream terminating in the Ganges. But from that - good practice the people have deviated in regard to bodies dead of any - pestilence (smallpox, cholera, plague), which are buried. Of all - countries the Himalaya is least suited to the burial of the dead. For, - by reason of the rocky subsoil, it is seldom possible to dig a grave - more than two feet deep; and, as a rule, the pestilent dead are laid - in shallow trenches in the surface soil of the field nearest to the - place of death, or of the terrace facing the house, or even of the - floor of the house itself. This bad practice is begotten of fear to - handle the body, and has been long established. Such mismanagement of - the dead is sufficient to account for the continuous existence of the - active principle of plague-disease, sometimes dormant for want of - opportunity, but ever ready to affect persons suitably prepared by any - cause producing a low or bad state of health. In the houses of - families about to suffer from an outbreak of plague, rats are - sometimes found dead on the floor. Planck had seen them himself; all - that he had seen appeared to have died suddenly, as by suffocation, - their bodies being in good condition, a piece of rag sometimes - clenched in the teeth. He mentions nine villages, all of them endemic - seats of plague, in which the premonitory death of rats in the - infected houses was testified. The affected villages were not one in a - hundred of all the villages of Kumaon, and were widely scattered - throughout the northern half of the province. Even in each of those - few villages, the plague is confined to one house, or one terrace, or - one portion of the village. - -Let us turn next to the small spots of bubo-plague in the remote province -of Yun-nan. Our information comes from members of the British and French -Consular services[311]. - - The plague occurs in towns and villages and is the cause of much - mortality. After ravaging villages scattered about the plains, it - frequently ascends the mountains, and takes off many of the aborigines - inhabiting the high lands. What, in M. Rocher's opinion, aggravates - the evil is the practice of not burying the bodies of those who die of - this disease. Instead of being buried, the body is placed on a bier - and exposed to the sun. As a consequence of this practice the - traveller passing the outskirts of a village where the plague is - raging is nearly choked with the nauseous smell emanating from the - exposed and rotting corpses. Burial is the usual mode of disposal, - although many of the villages are on rocky mountain sides, as in - Kumaon. The rats are first affected; as soon as they sicken, they - leave their holes in troops, and after staggering about and falling - over each other, drop down dead. Mr Baber had the same information - from a French missionary in the upper valley of the Salwen, a long, - low valley about two miles broad, walled in by immense precipices, so - hot in summer that the inhabitants go up the hill sides to live. The - approach of bubo-plague (the buboes may be as large as a hen's or - goose's egg) may often be known from the extraordinary behaviour of - the rats, who leave their holes and crevices and issue on to the - floors without a trace of their accustomed timidity, springing - continually upwards from their hind legs as if they were trying to - jump out of something. The rats fall dead, and then comes the turn of - the poultry, pigs, goats, etc. The good father had a theory of his own - that the plague is really a pestilential emanation slowly rising in an - equable stratum from the ground, the smallest creatures being first - engulfed. The larger plague-centre at or near the capital, Talifoo, - appears to be related to Mohammedan warfare, and possibly to the - neglect to bury the dead, which is an admitted fact, although not - connected by the narrator with the prevalence of plague. - -The other Chinese plague-spot is hundreds of miles away, on the shores of -the Gulf of Tonking. The best known centre of plague is the port of -Pakhoi, the native quarter of which is described as peculiarly filthy. The -houses are little cleaner than the streets, the floors being saturated -with excrement, and the drains being either close to the surface or open -altogether. An outbreak of plague there in 1882 is minutely described by -Dr Lowry[312]. - - It occurred in the hot weather of June (85 deg. Fahr. day, 76 deg. Fahr. - night); for fear of thieves the houses are carefully shut up even on - the hottest night. The epidemic caused about 400 to 500 deaths in a - population of 25,000. The disease does not spread. In nearly every - house where the disease broke out, the rats had been coming out of - their holes and dying on the floors: Dr Lowry dissected several of - them, and found the lungs congested. In the human subject, except for - the buboes, the disease resembled typhus: "anyone going to the bedside - of a patient would certainly at first think it was that disease he had - to deal with." The same disease occurred at Lien-chow, a city twelve - miles off. Another English physician in the service of the China - Maritime Customs heard of a malady with the symptoms of plague in - certain districts of Southern Kiangsi in the autumn of 1886; but no - particulars were to be had. Typhus was prevalent, and very fatal, - every year in the towns, villages and hamlets of Northern Kiangsi. - - One curious piece of evidence as to the death of rats, not associated - with plague in men, comes from a more northern province of China. In - the autumn of 1881, on the opposite side of the Yang-tsi from Nanking - and in the western suburbs of the ancient capital, the rats emerged - from holes in dwellings, jumped up, turned round, and fell dead. - Baskets and boxes filled with their bodies were cast into the canal. - "Here," says Dr Macgowan, "was evidently a subsoil poison which - affected the animals precisely in the same way as the malaria of the - Yun-nan pest. Happily the subterranean miasm at Nanking did not affect - animals that live above ground[313]." - -The evidence from Kutch, Kattiwar, and Marwar relates to the years -1815-20, and 1838. In circumstances peculiar in some respects, namely, of -walled towns and stockaded villages, but the same as those already given -in the matter of filth from cattle crowded into the human dwellings, we -find bubo-plague breaking out so long as the unwholesome state of things -lasted under Mahratta rule and until British rule had been fairly at work. -The causes of the bubo-plague, says Whyte, were the same as of -typhus--walled and crowded towns, cattle housed with human beings, slow -wasting diseases among the cattle, which were not killed for food but -kept for milk and ghee. He questions whether, in shutting out their -enemies, they had not shut in one far more powerful[314]. Here also we -have various independent witnesses[315] testifying to the premonitory -death of the rats; they lay dead in all places and directions--in the -streets, houses, and hiding-places of the walls. This happened in every -town that was affected in Marwar, so that the inhabitants of any house -instantly quitted it on seeing a dead rat. - - -Relation of Typhus to Bubo-plague. - -The smallest and the most easily surveyed of all the recent foci of -bubo-plague, is that among the Bedouin of the Cyrenaic plateau in North -Africa (port of Benghazi), a desert region corresponding to one of the -most famous corn-lands of antiquity. - - There was no difference of opinion that the small outbreak of plague - in 1874 began simultaneously in the tents of Orphas and the tents of - Ferig-el-Hanan, containing together about a hundred souls[316]. These - Arabs keep cows, sheep and goats; some of them also cultivate small - patches of corn. They are subject to periodic famines, and there had - been much want among them in 1869, 1870, 1871, 1872 and 1873, attended - by epidemics of typhus, cholera and smallpox. In the winter they found - employment among the traders of Merdje, and at the end of March, 1873, - had quitted that village to place their animals in the neighbouring - hill-pastures. The ground had been saturated, after long drought, by - the rains of the winter. Their tents are pitched in hollows which may - be filled by water in a few minutes. The encampments, like those of - the Bedouin in Arabia, are excessively filthy and are often the scene - of typhus fever. In April, 1874, the plague began, the first case - being in a child; the buboes were in the groin, armpit or neck. The - other symptoms were bilious vomiting, black vomit, haematemesis, - petechiae, anthraceous boils, pains in the head, collapse, and - delirium. A few cases were mild, but the majority grave and fatal; in - several cases there was a relapse with new buboes. The disease was - brought from the tents to the village of Merdje, in which 270 were - attacked in a population of 310, with 100 deaths. The total known - attacks from 5 April to 24 July were 533 in a population of 734, with - 208 deaths and 325 recoveries, 201 resisting the infection. The - sanitary state of the village was as bad as that of the tents: the - houses, entered by a low door, had windows not to the sun, but to the - courtyard, which is a stable choked with filth; the floors of the - houses are covered with filth. The graveyard is in the centre of the - village, beside a pool of standing water: the graves are shallow, and - the corpses are sometimes unearthed by jackals. Both in the village - and in the encampments a fall of rain was followed by a new series of - attacks. The advice of the sanitary commisioner was to make graves at - least six feet deep, and to cover them with lime. - -These events in 1874 were an exact repetition of those of 1858. In both -years heavy rains followed long drought, giving promise of an abundant -harvest after a period of famine. The dry years, in both instances, were -attended with sickness, typhus and other; the first wet season turned the -sickness to plague, that is to say, it added the complication of buboes -and haemorrhagic symptoms to the characters of typhus. The meaning of that -seems to be that the saturation of the ground generated a soil-poison -where there had previously been the milder aerial poison of typhus. This -view of plague, as a typhus of the soil, or a disease made so much more -malignant than typhus just because of underground fermentation of the -putrescible animal matters, is borne out by the facts already given for -China and for India. The latter country furnishes other illustrations of -typhus fever becoming complicated with buboes, and so becoming something -like plague. Perhaps the best instance is the fever observed in the -Yusufzai valley, near Peshawur, in 1852[317]. - - It arose mostly in the filthy Mohammedan houses, shared by cattle and - human beings; but it invaded some of the cleaner Hindoo houses also. - The disease began in low, marshy situations, which were covered with - water after rain and heavy night dews. It was of the type of typhus, - or relapsing fever, with yellowness of the skin, bleeding from the - gums, and from the bowels, and often from the nose. One of the - observers says: "The only other concomitant affection worthy of note - is swelling of the lymphatic glands over various parts of the body; - this, however, is only met with in a very few instances." The other - authority says: "Inflammation and suppuration of the glands in the - groin, axilla, and neck occurred in some that survived the first or - second relapse." To this outbreak, which is removed only in degree - from the Benghazi plague, the Pakhoi plague, and the Pali plague - (Gujerat), may be added some others, about which the information is - more general. Thus, the fevers which have become notorious in Burdwan - since the health of that province changed so disastrously owing to the - damming of the ground-water, are said to have been attended now and - then with buboes. The typhus fever at Saugor in 1859 was occasionally - complicated with suppuration of the lymphatic glands: "In the Doab, as - in the subsequent gaol attack, the glands in the groin were very - rarely affected; those in the neck were more frequently affected, but - this was not a prominent feature in the disease[318]." Again, General - Loris Melikoff told the correspondent of the _Golos_ that twenty men - died in a day in the Russo-Turkish war in the winter of 1878, with - glandular swellings; everywhere there was Schmutz, Schmutz! And - lastly, in the epidemic of 1878 at Vetlianka, on the Volga, which is - reckoned among the historic occurrences of bubo-plague in Europe, the - first ten cases in November, 1878, had suppurating glands in the - axilla, did not take to bed, and recovered; there had been ordinary - typhus in the filthy fisher cottages in 1877, and there was typhus - concurrent with the disease which at length became, and was at length - recognized as, true bubo-plague in the winter of 1878-79[319]. - -One thing which distinguishes these recent outbreaks of plague from the -great plague of Justinian's reign, in part from the series of Mohammedan -plagues, and from the Black Death, is that they have for the most part -shown no independent vitality and no diffusive power. As in typhus fever -itself (except on great occasions), they have been almost confined to -those who lived in the filthy houses, and to those who came within the -influence of the pestilential emanations. The great plagues of the 6th and -14th centuries had, on the other hand, a diffusive power which carried -them over the whole known world. The buboes of Egypt and of China became -familiar as far as Norway and Greenland. - -But, apart from diffusiveness, the conditions of recent local plagues are -not unlike those of the great historical epidemics. The very same -observation of the rats leaving their holes, which is so abundantly -confirmed from the recent plague-spots of Southern China, of Yun-nan, of -Kumaon, and of Gujerat, was familiar in the plague-books of London and of -Edinburgh in the Elizabethan period. Of the great outbreak in 1603, Thomas -Lodge writes: "And when as rats, moules, and other creatures (accustomed -to live underground) forsake their holes and habitations, it is a token of -corruption in the same, by reason that such sorts of creatures forsake -their wonted places of aboade[320]." That is only one of many proofs that -the virus of plague has its habitat in the soil, although it may be -carried long distances clinging to other things. In its most diffusive -potency it is a soil-poison generated, we may now say with some -confidence, out of the products of cadaveric decay[321]; in its less -diffusive but hardly less malignant potency, it is a soil-poison generated -out of the filth of cattle housed with human beings, or out of domestic -filth generally, and in nearly all the known instances of such generation, -associated with, but perhaps not absolutely dependent upon, carelessness -in the disposal of the dead after famine or fever; in the least malignant -form, when plague is only a small part of an epidemic of typhus and with -the buboes inclined to suppurate, it appears to be still a soil-poison, -and to differ from typhus itself, just because the pestilential product of -decomposing filth has been engendered in the pores of the ground, rather -than in the atmosphere of living-rooms. - - * * * * * - -The Black Death, which here concerns us immediately, is one of the two -great instances of a plague-virus with vast diffusive power, enormous -momentum, and centuries of endurance. So great effects may be said to -postulate adequate causes; and one must assume that the virus had been -bred from cadaveric decomposition in circumstances of peculiar -aggravation and on some vast or national scale. The sequence of events -carries us to China; and the annals of China do furnish evidence that the -assumed cause was there on a vast scale through a long period of national -disaster, while the national customs of China for the disposal of the -dead, like those of ancient Egypt, point to the existence of a real risk -from allowing the soil to be permeated at large by the crude or hasty -products of cadaveric decomposition. - -It is our duty to construct the best hypothesis we can, sparing no labour. -No one really dispenses with theory, whatever his protestations to the -contrary; those who are the loudest professors of suspended judgment are -the most likely to fall victims to some empty verbalism which hangs loose -at both ends, some ill-considered piece of argument which ignores the -historical antecedents and stops short of the concrete conclusions. It has -been so in the case of infective diseases, and of bubo-plague in -particular. The virus of the plague, we are told, is specific; it has -existed from an unknown antiquity, and has come down in an unbroken -succession; we can no more discover how it arose, than we can tell how the -first man arose, or the first mollusc, or the first moss or lichen; its -species is, indeed, of the nature of the lowest vegetable organisms. - -The objection to that hypothesis of plague is that it involves a total -disregard of facts. It is a mere formula, which saves all trouble, -dispenses with all historical inquiry, and appears to be adapted equally -to popular apprehension and to academic ease. The bubo-plagues of history -have not, in fact, been all of the same descent; notably the Black Death -was a wave of pestilence which Mohammedan countries, accustomed as they -had been to native bubo-plagues for centuries before, recognized as an -invasion from a foreign source, as an interruption of the sequence of -their own plagues. Again, the attempt to link in one series the various -scattered and circumscribed spots of plague now or lately existing must -fail disastrously the moment it is seriously attempted. The hypothesis of -one single source of the plague, of a species of disease arising we know -not how, beginning we know not when or where, but at all events reproduced -by ordinary generation in an unbroken series of cases, _ab aevo, ab ovo_, -is the merest verbalism, wanting in reality or concreteness, and dictated -by the curious illusion that a species of disease, because it reproduces -itself after its kind, must resemble in other respects a species of living -things. - -The diffusive power of the virus of the Black Death, which has been -equalled only by that of the plague in Justinian's reign, may seem to have -depended upon the favouring conditions that it met with. But although -favouring conditions count for much, they are not all. The Black Death -raged as furiously as anywhere among the nomade Tartars who were its first -victims; the virus, as soon as it was let loose, put forth a degree of -virulence which must have been native to it, or brought with it from its -place of engendering. None the less the incidence of the Black Death in -Europe had depended in part upon the preparedness of the soil. It came to -Europe in the age of feudalism and of walled towns, with a cramped and -unwholesome manner of life, and inhabited spots of ground choked with the -waste matters of generations. But even amidst these generally fostering -conditions, there would have been more special things that determined its -election. It is a principle exemplified in all importations of disease -from remote sources, in smallpox among the aerial contagions and in -Asiatic cholera among the soil-poisons, that the conditions which favour -diffusion abroad are approximately the same amidst which the infection had -been originally engendered. A soil-poison of foreign origin makes straight -for the most likely spots in the line of its travels; it may not, and -often does not confine itself to these, but it gives them a preference. -Thus, if we conclude on the evidence that the bubo-plague is a soil-poison -having a special affinity to the products of cadaveric decomposition, we -shall understand why the Black Death, when it came to England, found so -congenial a soil in the monasteries, and in the homes of the clergy. -Within the monastery walls, under the floor of the chapel or cloisters, -were buried not only generations of monks, but often the bodies of -princes, of notables of the surrounding country, and of great -ecclesiastics. In every parish the house of the priest would have stood -close to the church and the churchyard. One has to figure the virus of the -Black Death not so much as carried by individuals from place to place in -their persons, or in their clothes and effects, but rather as a leaven -which had passed into the ground, spreading hither and thither therein as -if by polarizing the adjacent particles of the soil, and that not -instantaneously like a physical force, but so gradually as to occupy a -whole twelvemonth between Dorset and Yorkshire. Sooner or later it reached -to every corner of the land, manifesting its presence wherever there were -people resident. Such universality in the soil of England, we have reason -to think, it had. But it appears to have put forth its greatest power in -the walled town, in the monastery, and in the neighbourhood of the village -churchyard. - - - - -CHAPTER IV. - -ENGLAND AFTER THE BLACK DEATH, WITH THE EPIDEMICS TO THE TUDOR PERIOD. - - -The great mortality came to an end everywhere in England by Michaelmas, -1349. The pestilence had lasted some fourteen months, from its first -appearance on the Dorset coast at the beginning of August, 1348, until its -subsidence in the northern counties in the autumn of 1349. It came to an -end, as all devastating epidemics do, through having spent its force, -exhausted its pabulum, run through all the susceptible subjects. A -letter-writer of Charles I.'s reign has put into colloquial language the -corresponding reason for a pause in the ravages of the plague towards the -end of its stay in London: "And I think the only reason why the plague is -somewhat slackened is because the place is dead already, and no bodie left -in it worth the killing[322]." The exhausted state of the country, and of -all Europe, is not easy for us to realize. Petrarch, a witness of the -Black Death in Italy, foresaw the incredulity of after ages, or their -inability to image the state of things--the empty houses, the abandoned -towns, the squalid country, the fields crowded with the dead, the vast and -dreadful solitude over the whole world. If you inquire of historians, he -continues, they are silent; if you consult the physicians, they are at -their wits' end; if you question the philosophers, they shrug their -shoulders, wrinkle their brows, and lay the finger on the lip. Is it -possible that posterity can believe these things? For we who have seen -them can hardly believe them[323]. - -The blow fell upon every country of Europe within a period of two or three -years; and it must have paralysed all trade and industry, war and -politics, for the time being. Edward III.'s wars in France, which had -resulted in the victory of Crecy in 1346 and the conquest of Calais in -1347, had been suspended by a truce, which was renewed from time to time. -Thus, in the very midst of the pestilence, on the 2nd of May, 1349, the -envoys of the English and French kings, "in their tents between Calais and -Guines," agreed upon a form of treaty continuing the truce until -Pentecost, 1350[324]. In the last days of 1349, Edward III. in person, -with a small force, was able to repel an attack upon his new possession of -Calais[325]. It was in the year after the Black Death (1350) according to -both Stow and Selden, that Edward III. held a great feast at Windsor, to -which his heralds invited knights from abroad, to celebrate the -institution of the Order of the Garter, the statutes of the Order having -been drawn up the year before. What is styled "the necessary defence of -the realm," was a chief subject of concern throughout the year 1350. On -the 12th February an order was made to the sheriffs of counties for a -supply of so many arrows from each[326]. On the 20th March the mayors and -bailiffs of 110 towns are ordered to provide their respective quotas of -men-at-arms--London 100, Norwich 60, Bristol 20, and so on--and to send -them to Sandwich "for the necessary defence of our realm[327]." On the 1st -of May a commission was issued to engage mariners for certain ships, and -on the 20th May, an order for ships, pinnaces and barges. - -On the 22nd July and 10th August there are proclamations relating to the -piratical fleet of Spanish ships, intercepting the English traders to -Gascony, and threatening an invasion of England[328]; the Spaniards were -routed, their ships taken, and the Channel cleared, in a famous -engagement off Winchelsea, on 29th August, 1350, which the king directed -in person[329]. On 15th June, three days before the first of the -ordinances against the Labourers, the king issued two orders to counties, -to raise men "for our passage against the parts over sea"--one to the -Welsh lords, and the other to the sheriffs of English counties, the -demands being in all for 4170 bowmen from England, and for 1350 men from -Wales[330]. Whatever these edicts may have resulted in, it was not until -four years after that the king really resumed his wars with France. On the -8th September, 1355, the Black Prince sailed from Plymouth with a fleet of -some three hundred ships carrying an army of knights, men-at-arms, English -bowmen and Welshmen, to the Garonne, for his famous raid across the south -of France[331]. Later in the autumn the king collected at Portsmouth[332] -and Sandwich, and at Calais, a force of three thousand men-at-arms, two -thousand mounted bowmen, and an immense number of bowmen on foot, with -which he took the field on the 2nd November[333]. The same summer, a fleet -of forty great ships was fitted out at Rotherhithe, for a force of foot -under Henry, duke of Lancaster, to aid the king of Navarre; it sailed on -the 10th of July, but was unable to clear the Channel, and for various -reasons did not proceed[334]; next year, however, the duke of Lancaster -crossed from Southampton to Normandy with a force in forty-eight -ships[335]. - -Thus was the war with France resumed six years after the great mortality. -The means for equipping these expeditions had been provided by loans -raised on the security of the enormous subsidy which the Parliament of -1353-54 was induced to vote, in the form of an export duty of fifty -shillings on every sack of wool shipped to foreign countries during the -next six years. According to Avesbury's calculation, Edward had a revenue, -from that source, of a thousand marks a day; it was the common opinion, he -says, that more than 100,000 sacks of wool were exported in a year[336]. -But another and perhaps better authority gives the annual export of wool -in the middle of the fourteenth century at nearly 32,000 sacks[337]. - - -Direct effects of the Black Death. - -Meanwhile internal affairs were demanding the king's attention, although -they occupy less space in the extant State papers than the warlike -preparations. On the 23rd August, while the mortality was raging in the -north, a proclamation was issued to the sheriff of Northumberland against -the migration of people to Scotland, with arms, victuals, goods and -merchandise, the pestilence not being mentioned[338]. The first State -paper which relates to the recent great mortality is the king's -proclamation of 1st December, 1349, to the mayor and bailiffs of Sandwich, -and of forty-eight other English ports, including London[339]. The -proclamation begins: - - "Forasmuch as no mean part of the people of our realm of England is - dead in the present pestilence, and the treasure of the said realm is - mostly exhausted, and (as we have learned) numbers of this our kingdom - are daily passing, or proposing to pass, to parts over sea with money - which they were able to have kept within the realm, Now we, taking - heed that if passage after this manner be tolerated, the kingdom will - in a short time be stripped both of men and of treasure, and so - therefrom grave danger may easily arise to us and to the said realm, - unless a fitting remedy be speedily appointed--do command the mayor - and bailiffs of Sandwich (and of forty-eight other ports) to stop the - passage beyond sea of them that have no mandate, especially if they be - Englishmen, excepting merchants, notaries, or the king's envoys." - -The edict was probably directed more against the drain of treasure than -against the emigration of people; but this not uninteresting question -really belongs to other historians, who do not appear to have dealt with -it[340]. - -On the 18th of June, 1350, the first summer after the mortality, there was -issued the first proclamation, to the sheriffs of counties, on the demands -of the labourers and artificers for higher wages, entitled "De magna parte -populi in ultima pestilentia defuncta, et de servientium salariis proinde -moderandis[341]." The preamble or motive is one that cannot but seem -strange to modern ideas, although it must have been correct and -conventional according to feudal notions: "Forasmuch as some, having -regard to the necessities of lords and to the scarcity of servants, are -unwilling to serve unless they receive excessive wages, while others -prefer to beg in idleness, rather than to seek their living by labour--be -it therefore enacted that any man or woman, bond or free, under the age of -sixty, and not living by a trade or handicraft, nor possessing private -means, nor having land to cultivate, shall be obliged, when required, to -serve any master who is willing to hire him or her at such wages as were -usually paid in the locality in the year 1346, or on the average of five -or six years preceding; provided that the lords of villeins or tenants -shall have the preference of their labour, so that they retain no more -than shall be necessary for them." It was strictly forbidden either to -offer or to demand wages above the old rate. Another clause forbids the -giving of alms to beggars. Handicraftsmen of various kinds are also -ordered to be paid at the old rate. Lastly, victuallers and other traders -are directed to sell their wares at reasonable prices[342]. The same -ordinance, with some added paragraphs, was reissued on the 18th November, -1350, to the county of Suffolk and to the district of Lindsey -(Lincolnshire), the latter being one of the chief sheep-grazing parts of -England; in those two localities, it is stated in so many words, the -labourers had set at nought the ordinance of 18th June[343]. When -Parliament met--for the first time since the mortality--on the 9th of -February, 1351, it was acknowledged that the commissions to sheriffs -issued by the king and his council had been ineffective, and that wages -had been at twice or thrice the old rate[344]. The Parliament, having -legislated for a number of technical matters in connexion with the -enormous number of wills and successions, proceeded next to the labour -question, and passed the famous Statute of Labourers, by which the -generalities of the ordinance of 18th June, 1350, are replaced by an -elaborate schedule of wages for harvest-time and other times[345]. One -clause of the Act is specially directed against the migration of labourers -to other counties. It was the ancient manorial system that was threatened -most of all by the depopulation. The surviving labourers sought work where -they could command the best wages, and at the same time could escape from -the few degrading bonds of servitude which still clung to the _nativi_ or -serfs of a manor. But the Manor Court was still the unit of government, -and the Act would have been inoperative except on that basis. That -fundamental intention of the statute of the 9th February, 1351, comes out, -not only in the explicit clause against migrations, but also by contrast, -in the special permission given to the labourers of the counties of -Stafford, Derby and Lancaster, to the people of Craven, and to the -dwellers in the Marches of Wales and Scotland, to go about in search of -work in harvest "as they were wont to do before this time[346]." - -The immediate effect of the depopulation had been to mobilise, as it were, -the labouring class. Many of them must have taken the road at once; for, -in the first ordinance of 18th June, 1350, before the harvest of that year -had begun, it is stated that certain of the labourers preferred to live by -begging instead of by labour, and it is therefore forbidden to give alms -to beggars. According to Knighton, the effect of the ordinance itself was -to swell the ranks of the wandering poor; when some were arrested, -imprisoned, or fined in terms of the commission to the sheriffs, others -fled to the woods and wastes (_ad silvas et boscos_)[347]. These escapes -continued for years after; the rolls of the Manor Court of Winslow have -entries of many such cases long after the pestilence[348]. Many of these -fugitive villeins formed the class of "wasters," often referred to in the -_Vision of Piers the Ploughman_: "waster would not work, but wander -about," or he would work only in harvest, squander his earnings, and for -the rest of the year feel the pinch of hunger "until both his eyen -watered." But it is clear that others went to distant manors, and settled -down again to steady employment, freed from their bonds as _nativi_; and -it cannot be doubted that some went to the towns[349]. - -In order to realize the causes and circumstances of the labour difficulty -after the enormous thinning of the population, it may be well to recall -the composition of the village communities. In each manor the arable land -was in two portions--on the one hand the immense open fields (two or -perhaps three) in which the villagers had each so many half-acre strips, -and on the other hand the lord's demesne, or home-farm. Part of the latter -would often be let to free tenants, or even to villeins, who would count -for the occasion as free tenants. For the cultivation of his demesne the -lord was dependent on his tenants in villenage, who owed him, in form, so -many days' work in the year, but in reality were often able to commute -their personal services for a money payment and are said to have done so -very generally[350]. Thus the lord of the manor was no longer able to call -upon his serfs to plough or to sow or to reap; he had to hire them for his -occasions. The free tenants would also be dependent to some extent upon -hired labour; and as some even of the villeins cultivated up to forty -acres or more, in the open fields of the manor, these would also have to -hire unless their families were old enough to help. All that labour for -hire would naturally be supplied by the poorer villagers, the cottars and -bordars, who would seldom cultivate more than a few half-acres, and in -some cases perhaps none[351]. The lower order of tenants in villenage -formed accordingly the class of labourers; and it was their demands which -gave occasion for the ordinances of 1350 and the statute of 1351. In each -manor the lord would have been affected more than all the rest by the -scarcity of labour, in respect of the extensive demesne or home-farm -managed by his bailiff. It is conjectured that he tried, in some cases, to -go back to his rights of customary service from his villeins, which had -gradually become commutable for rents paid in money, and that the attempts -to do so led to insubordination[352]. He had to pay wages, notwithstanding -all his rights of lordship. The wages paid in the harvest of 1349 were, -says Rogers, those of panic. In the form of petition which brought the -labour-question before Parliament in February 1351, it is stated that the -wages demanded were at double or treble the old rate; of the year -preceding (1350) it is recorded that the wages paid to labourers for -gathering the harvest on the manor of Ham, belonging to the lord Berkeley, -amounted to 1144 days' work, on the old scale of commutation[353]. - -The labourers, although the lowest order on the manors, were accordingly -masters of the situation. Personal service to the lord, measurable merely -by days, and having no reference to fluctuations in the rate of wages, had -become obsolete; nor do the ordinance of 1350 and the statute of 1351 give -any hint of trying to revive it. If the men refused to be hired at the old -rate, they were to be arrested and imprisoned. - -There were, of course, many things besides the statute, tending to keep -the majority of peasants on the manors where they had been born; so that -the formal abolition of villenage remained to be carried by rebellion in -1381, while many traces of it in practice remained for long after. Those -who stayed on their old manors, or removed to another county or hundred to -become tenants under new lords, were able to get permanently better wages; -the price of labour remained about forty per cent. higher than it had been -before the mortality; so that the statute was on the whole ineffective. -But another large proportion of the labouring class appears to have been -driven to a wandering life. It is not easy to explain on economical -principles why the class of "wasters," of whom we hear so much, should -have been called into existence. Hands were scarce, and wages were high; -the conditions look on the surface to be entirely adverse to the creation -of a class of sturdy beggars and idle tramps. But the economic conditions -were really complex; and when all has been said on the head of economics, -there will remain something to be explained on the side of ethics. - -Not only the labourers but also the employers of labour were cut off in -the mortality. A great part of the capital of the country passed suddenly -into new hands. Before the Parliament of 1351 legislated upon wages, it -was occupied with a number of technical difficulties about wills. Of the -proving of wills and the granting of letters of administration on a great -scale we have had an instance from an archdeaconry in Lancashire. In -Colchester, a town with some four hundred burgesses, one hundred and -eleven wills were proved[354]. In the Husting Court of London, three -hundred and sixty wills were enrolled and proved from 13th January, 1349, -to 13th January, 1350. An immense number of persons came into money who -could not all have had the inclination, even if they had the skill and -aptitude, for employing it as capital. If there were wasters among the -labourers, there were wasters also among the moneyed class. The mortality -produced, indeed, that demoralisation of the whole national life which has -been usually observed to follow in the like circumstances. "Almost all -great epochs of moral degradation are connected with great epidemics," -says Niebuhr, generalizing the evidence which Thucydides gives specially -for the plague of Athens[355]. The fourteenth century was by no means a -period of high morality before the Black Death; but it was undoubtedly -worse after it. Langland's poem of the vision of Piers the Ploughman is -one long diatribe against the vices of the age, and some of the worst of -them he expressly dates "sith the pestilence time." It will be convenient -to take these ethical illustrations, before we proceed with the effects of -the mortality upon material prosperity and population, and with the -domestication of plague on the soil. - -So far from the labouring class being the chief sinners, it is in the -humbler ranks that the root of goodness remains. Langland's hero, the -Ploughman, is obviously chosen to represent "that ingenuous simplicity -and native candour and integrity," which, as Burke says, "formerly -characterized the English nation," and, one may add, have been at all -times its saving grace. It was in that class that the reforming movement, -led by Wyclif twenty years after, had its strength. Lollardy and the -Peasants' Rebellion were closely allied. The grievance of the latter was -that the gulf between the gentleman and the workman had become wider than -in nature it should be. An ultimate and very indirect effect of the great -mortality was to strengthen the middle class by recruits from beneath; it -created the circumstances which produced the English yeoman of the -fifteenth century. But we are here engaged with the immediate effect; and -that was to broaden the contrast between the rich and the poor. - -Luxury had already touched so high a point as to call for a statute -against extravagant living, the curious sumptuary law of 1336 which -prohibited many courses at table. Nothing could be more significant of its -later developments in London than the sarcastic description, which fills -an unusual space in one of the chroniclers, of the fantastic excesses of -dress and ornament among the male sex about the year 1362[356]. Some of -the names of the men's ornaments occur also in Langland's verses: - - "Sir John and Sir Goffray hath a gerdel of silver, - A basellarde or a ballok-knyf with botones overgilt." - -These effeminate fashions actually led to a Statute of Dress in 1363, in -which also the lower class are forbidden to ape their betters. It is -perhaps to these hangers-on of wealth that Langland refers in his bitter -lines: - - "Right so! ye rich, ye robeth that be rich | and helpeth them that - helpeth you, and giveth where no need is. | As who so filled a tun of - a fresh river | and went forth with that water to woke with Thames. | - Right so! ye rich, ye robe and feed | them that have as ye have, them - ye make at ease." - -But, as for the poor, Avarice considers them fair game: - - "I have as moche pite of pore men as pedlere hath of cattes, | that - wolde kill them if he cacche hem myghte, for covetise of their - skynnes." - -In London the preaching clergy are accused of pandering to the avarice of -the rich: - - "And were mercy in mean men no more than in rich | mendicants meatless - might go to bed. | God is much in the gorge of these great masters, | - but among mean men his mercy and his works. | Friars and faitours have - found such questions, | to plese with proud men sithen the pestilence - tyme, | and prechers at Saint Poules, for pure envye of clerkis, | - that folke is nought firmed in the feith ne fill of their goodes. | - ... Ne be plentyous to the pore as pure charitye wolde, | but in - gayness and in glotonye forglotten her goode hem selve, | and breken - noughte to the beggar as the Boke techeth." - -The friars had lost altogether the enthusiasm of their early days: - - "And how that friars followed folk that was rich, | and folk that was - poor at little price they set; | and no corpse in their kirk-yard nor - in their kirk was buried, | but quick he bequeath them aughte or - should help quit their debts." - -As for the monks, the same might have been said of them before; but now -more land had been thrown into their possession by the mortality: - - "Ac now is Religion a ryder, a rowmer bi streetes, - A leader of love-days, and a lond-buyer, - A pricker on a palfrey fro manere to manere, - An heap of houndes at his ers, as he a lord were. - And but if his knave kneel, that shall his cup bringe, - He lowreth on hym, and axeth hym who taught hym curtesye." - -According to Langland's poem, the country clergy left their livings and -came up to London:-- - - "Parsons and parish priests plained them to the bishop | that their - parishes were poor sith the pestilence time; | to have licence and - leave at London to dwell | and syngen there for simony, for silver is - sweet. | Bishops and bachelors, both masters and doctours, | that have - cures under Christ and crowning in token and sign, | that they should - shrive their parishours, preach and pray for them and the poor feed, | - live in London in Lent and all"-- - -some of them serving the king in the offices of Exchequer and Chancery, -and some acting as the stewards of lords. - -It is undoubted that the business of the courts in London received a great -impetus after the mortality, as one can readily understand from the -number of inheritances, successions, and feudal claims that had to be -settled. Several of the Inns of Chancery date from about that time. -Gascoigne, who was "cancellarius" at Oxford about 1430, and had access to -the rolls of former "cancellarii," was struck by the increase of legists -after the commotion of 1349: "Before the great pestilence there were few -disputes among the people, and few pleas; and, accordingly, there were few -legists in the realm of England, and few legists in Oxford, at a time when -there were thirty thousand scholars in Oxford, as I have seen in the -rolls," etc.[357] - -The country clergy, such of them as remained in their cures were a -notoriously illiterate class; according to Knighton, they could read the -Latin services without understanding what they read. Langland makes a -parson confess his poor qualifications to be the spiritual guide of his -flock; on the other hand he was not without skill in the sports of the -field: "But I can fynde in a felde or in a furlonge an hare." At one of -the manor courts in Wiltshire in 1361, a gang of the district clergy were -convicted of night poaching[358]. - -Such being the state of matters among the upper and middle classes, it is -not surprising to find a lax morality among the lower orders. The -ploughman is as severe a satirist of his own class as he is of the rich. -In London we have a picture of the interior of a tavern crowded with -loafers of all sorts "early in the morning." In the country also the -contrast is drawn between the industrious and the idle class: - - "And whoso helpeth me to erie [plough] or sowen here ere I wende | - shall have leve, bi oure Lorde to lese here in harvest, | and make him - merry there-mydde, maugre whoso begruccheth it: | save Jakke the - jogeloure and Jonet of the stewes, | and Danget the dys-playere, and - Denot the bawd, | and Frere the faytoure and folk of his order, | and - Robyn the rybaudoure for his rusty wordes." - -To live out of wedlock was nothing unusual: - - "Many of you ne wedde nought the wimmen that ye with delen, | but as - wilde bestis with wehe worthen up and worchen, | and bryngeth forth - barnes that bastardes men calleth." - -Ill-assorted marriages also appear to have been common: - - "It is an oncomely couple, bi Cryst, as me-thinketh, | to gyven a - yonge wenche to an olde feble, | or wedden any widwe for welth of hir - goodis, | that never shall bairne bere but if it be in armes. | Many a - paire sithen the pestilence have plight hem togiders: | the fruit that - thei brynge forth aren foule wordes: | in jalousye joyeles and - jangling in bedde | have thei no children but cheste and choppyng hem - betweene." - -Chapmen did not chastise their children. Old traditions of weather-lore, -and of reckoning the yield of harvest, were forgotten. - -As a set-off to the uniformly bad picture of the times given by Langland, -we may turn to the gay and good-humoured scenes of the 'Canterbury Tales.' -But Chaucer was emphatically the poet of the cultured class, and it is -proper to his muse to keep within the limits of a well-bred cynicism. -Again, Langland's strictures on the avarice and other vices of the rich -may seem to be a mere echo of a very old cry, which finds equally strong -expression in Roger of Wendover, about the year 1235, and in Robert of -Brunne's 'Handlyng Synne' in the year 1303. But the Vision of the -Ploughman is too consistent, and too concrete, to be considered as a mere -homily on the wickedness of the times, such as might have been written of -almost any age or of any country in which the Seven Mortal Sins were still -called by their plain names. The words "sithen the pestilence" recur so -often, that this contemporary author must be held as sharing the belief -that the Black Death made a marked difference to the morals of the nation -throughout all classes. - - -More lasting effects on Farming, Industries, and Population. - -Turning from things moral to things material, we shall find that the Great -Mortality left its mark on the cultivated area of the country, on rents of -land, on the kind of tenure and the system of farming, on industry, trade -and municipal government, on the population, and, on what chiefly -concerns us, the subsequent health of the country. - -Corn-growing would appear to have met with at least a temporary check. -Three water-mills near Shrewsbury fell in annual value by one half, owing -to the scarcity of corn to grind[359]. Richmond, one of the chief -corn-markets in Yorkshire, is said, on rather uncertain evidence, to have -been permanently reduced for the same reason; besides losing an enormous -number by the plague itself (vaguely stated at 2000), the town lost its -corn-trade through the land around falling out of cultivation, so that -some of the burgesses, being unable to pay rent, had to wander abroad as -mendicants[360]. - -The general statements of Knighton, Le Baker and others for England (not -to mention numerous rhetorical passages of foreign writers), to the effect -that whole villages were left desolate, are borne out by the petitions -recurring in the Rolls of Parliament for many years after. There are also -some references to the continuing desolateness of particular places, which -are probably fair samples of a larger number. - -Thus a rich clergyman in Hertfordshire had given, just before the Black -Death, all his lands and tenements in Braghinge, Herts, to the prior and -convent of Anglesey, Cambridgeshire, in consideration that they should -find at their proper expense a chantry of two priests for ever in the -church of Anglesey, to say masses for the souls of the benefactor and his -family. But on the 10th of May, 1351, he remitted the charge and support -of one of the two said priests, on the ground that, "on account of the -vast mortality, lands lie uncultivated in many and innumerable places, not -a few tenements daily and suddenly decay and are pulled down, rents and -services cannot be levied, but a much smaller profit is obliged to be -taken than usual[361]." An instance of a long-abiding effect is that of -the manor of Hockham belonging to the earl of Arundel, which was not -tenanted for thirty years[362]. - -The history of rents is peculiar. The immediate effect, as we learn from -Knighton, as well as from the rolls of particular manor courts, was a -remission of them by the lords, lest their tenants in villenage should -quit the lands. There was, indeed, a competition among landlords for -tenants to occupy their manors, so that the cultivators could make their -own terms. Of that we have had an instance from the manor of Ensham, -belonging to Christ Church, Oxford[363]. But, after a few years, rents -appear to have come back to near their old level. The following figures -have been compiled from the Tower records of assizes made for the purpose -of taxation[364]: - - 1268 9_d._ - 1348-9 -- - 1417 6_d._ - 1446 8_d._ - 1271 12_d._ - 1359 9-1/4_d._ - 1422 4_d._ - 1336 11-1/2_d._ - 1368 10-1/2_d._ - 1429 4_d._ - 1338 11-1/2_d._ - 1381 9-3/4_d._ - 1432 6_d._ - -The great fall, it will be seen, was in the next century. - -Perhaps the most striking effect upon agriculture of the upheaval produced -by the great mortality was, as Thorold Rogers has shown, in changing the -system of farming and in creating the type of the English yeoman. The -system of farming the lord's demesne or home-farm by a bailiff, never very -profitable, became, says that historian, quite unproductive, owing -especially to the permanent rise in wages. The small men who took the -lord's land to farm--they had been doing so to some extent -before[365]--had not sufficient of their own for stock and seed; but they -got advances from the lord, which were repaid in due course. It was a kind -of _metairie_ farming. It prevailed for about fifty years, by which time -the ordinary system of farming on lease was becoming general. Finally, and -especially in the Civil Wars of the fifteenth century, much of the land -which had belonged in fee to the feudal lords, passed away by purchase to -the tenant farmers[366]. Thus arose the famous breed of English -yeomen--the "good yeomen whose limbs were made in England." - -The effect of the mortality upon trade and industry was, momentarily, to -paralyse them. Of the great wool-trade, Rogers, the historian of English -prices, says: "Nothing, I think, in the whole history of these prices is -more significant of the terror and prostration induced by the plague than -the sudden fall in the price of wool at this time. It is a long time -before a recovery takes place[367]." But from 1364 to 1380, the price of -wool was uniformly above the average; and, if there be any accuracy in -Avesbury's figures already given for the years following 1355, the export -of bales of wool to the Continent (100,000 sacks in a year, he says, each -sack being a bale of the present colonial size, or weighing about three -hundredweights) meant a very considerable amount of labour, tonnage and -exchange. Among other articles of export, we hear specially of iron, in a -petition to Parliament of 28 Ed. III. (1354); the price of iron had risen -to four times what it was before the plague, and it was desired to stop -the export of it and to fix the price[368]. - -The effect of the mortality upon the industries of the country was shown -most in Norwich. That city was the centre of the Flemish cloth-weaving, -which had been flourishing in Norfolk for some twenty years, under the -direct encouragement of Edward III., and of a protective statute against -foreign-made cloth. Before the pestilence, Norwich was the second city in -the kingdom. In the king's warrant for men-at-arms, which was indeed -issued in 1350, but may be taken as drawn up on the old lines and -irrespective of the pestilence, the quota of Norwich is rated at 60, -London's being 100, Bristol's and Lynn's 20 each, that of Coventry, -Gloucester, Hereford, Shrewsbury, Winchester, Sarum, Oxford, Canterbury -and Bury St Edmund's 10 each, and of other towns from 8 to 1 each, York -not being mentioned. But in the Subsidy Roll of 1377, which shows how many -persons, above the age of fourteen, paid the poll-tax of a groat in each -county and in each principal town, Norwich comes sixth in the list instead -of second, being far surpassed in numbers by York and Bristol, and -surpassed considerably by Coventry and Plymouth. So far from being in a -proportion to London of 60 to 100, it is now in a proportion of 3952 to -23,314, its whole population, as estimated, being 7410 against 44,770 in -the capital which at one time it bade fair to rival. It had lost heavily -in the Black Death, and so had the populous district around it, where the -Flemish industries and trade were planted in numerous villages. By 1368, -ten of the sixty very small parishes of Norwich had disappeared, and -fourteen more disappeared by degrees, the ruins of twenty of them being -still visible[369]. - -There is no mistaking the significance of these figures and facts for the -second city of the kingdom. At least one generation passed before Norwich -recovered something of its old prosperity. In the fifteenth century it was -still the chief seat of the woollen manufactures; the county of Norfolk -kept its old pre-eminence, although rival centres of industry had grown -up. There were, however, causes at work which at length reduced the -capital of East Anglia to a comparatively poor state. One of the -intermediate glimpses that we get of it--they are not many, even in -Blomefield's history--is the statute of 1455, to put down the enormous -number of "pettifogging attorneys" in the city and county[370]. Its real -decline was in the early Tudor reigns. When Henry VII. visited Norwich in -1497, the mayor in presenting the Queen's usual gold cup with a hundred -pieces in it, took occasion to tell the monarch "howbeit that they are -more poor, and not of such wealth as they have been afore these -days[371]." When the town suffered much from fires about the year 1505, -the city of London raised large sums in aid of its rebuilding. To the same -period belongs a municipal order that no one should dig holes in the -market-place to get sand, without the mayor's licence. In 1525, there was -a general decay of work, the clothiers and farmers being unable to employ -the artisans and labourers, who began to rise in revolt against the heavy -taxes. An Act of 33 Hen. VIII. recites that the making and weaving of -worsteds is wholly decayed and taken away from the city of Norwich and -county of Norfolk--by the deceit and crafty practices of the great -multitude of regrators and buyers of the said yarn. These evidences of -decline in prosperity are in part long after the Black Death; but they -seem to have been continuous from that event. - -So far as concerns the other large towns of England, they did not all fare -alike. The capital was more luxurious, and probably not less populous, -after the mortality than before it. The chancery and exchequer business -alone would have served to draw numbers to it; and we may be sure, from -all subsequent experience, that the gaps left by the plague were filled up -by influx from the provinces and from abroad in the course of two or three -years. Nor does it appear from the poll-tax that York had suffered to -anything like the same extent as Norwich; while Bristol and Coventry -became towns of much greater consequence than before the plague. On the -other hand, Lincoln is described, in a petition for relief in 1399 (1 Hen. -IV.) as being "in the greater part empty and uninhabited." In the same -year, Yarmouth has its houses "vacant and void," although, in 1369, it is -said to have "gained so much upon Norwich" that it was made a seat of the -wool-staple. Other towns which figure in petitions to Parliament as -"impoverished and desolate of people," are Ilchester (1407) and Truro -(1410). Camden instances the ancient borough of Wallingford, on the -Thames, as having been permanently reduced by the Black Death, although -the inhabitants, he says, traced the decay of the town to the diversion of -traffic over the new bridges at Abingdon and Dorchester[372]. Some parts -of Cambridge would appear to have borne the traces of the pestilence for a -number of years after. A charter of the bishop of Ely, dated 12 September, -1365, mentions that the parishioners of All Saints (on the north-east -side) are for the most part dead by pestilence, and those that are alive -are gone to the parishes of other churches; that the parishioners of St -Giles's (the adjoining parish, near the Castle) have died; and that the -nave of All Saints is ruinous and the bones of dead bodies are exposed to -beasts; therefore the bishop unites All Saints and St Giles's[373]. At -that time the churches of those parishes would have been small, perhaps -not much larger than the little church of St Peter still standing on the -high ground opposite to the great modern church of St Giles. - -These instances of the chequered history of English towns subsequent to -the great mortality are not altogether favourable to the generality which -has been put forward by an able historian[374], that the great social -revolution produced by that event was to detach the people from the soil, -to drive them into the towns, to increase the urban population -disproportionately to the rural, to plant the germs of commerce and -industry, and to determine that expansion of England which became manifest -in the end of the Elizabethan period and under the Stuarts, the British -nation being "doomed by its economic conditions to take the course which -it has taken." Many things happened between the Black Death and the -expansion of England. The fifteenth century intervened, which was in its -middle period, at least, distinguished as much by the rise of the yeoman -class as by the growth of trade guilds in the town. But that which mars -the generality most of all was the decline of industries and the decay of -towns (London and Bristol always excepted) in the reigns of Henry VII. and -Henry VIII.; the country had to recover from that before the Elizabethan -expansion,--before the nation began "to increase rapidly in population -until at length it should overflow the limits of its island home." - -At the same time, one effect of the great mortality was to mobilise the -class of agricultural labourers, and to drive a certain number of them -into the towns. Proof of that migration comes from the statutes and the -Rolls of Parliament. - - An Act of 34 Edward III. (1360) imposes a fine of ten pounds to the - king on the mayor and bailiffs of any town refusing "to deliver up a - labourer, servant, or artificer" who had absented himself from his - master's service, with a farther fine of five pounds to the lord. In - 1376 the "Good Parliament" makes complaint that servants and labourers - quitted service on the slightest cause, and then led an idle life in - towns, or wandered in parties about the country, "many becoming - beggars, others staff-strikers, but the greater number taking to - robbing." More direct evidence of industries diverting hands from farm - labour is found in the various statutes about apprentices. In the Act - of 12 Ric. II. (1388) it is provided that "he or she which use to - labour at the plough and cart or other labour or service of husbandry - till they be of the age of twelve years, shall abide at that labour - without being put to any mystery or handicraft; and if any covenant or - bond of apprentice be from henceforth made to the contrary, the same - shall be holden for none." A more definite provision of the same kind - was made in 7 Hen. IV. (1405-6): "Notwithstanding the good statutes - aforemade, infants whose fathers and mothers have no land, nor rent, - nor other living, but only their service or mystery, be put to serve - and bound apprentices to divers crafts within cities and boroughs, - sometimes at the age of twelve years, sometimes within the said age, - and that for the pride of clothing and other evil customs which - servants do use in the same" etc.--the result being that farm - labourers were scarce; therefore no one, not having land or rent of - twenty-shillings a year, to bind his son or daughter of whatsoever age - to serve as apprentice within any city or borough. In the 8th of Henry - VI. (1429) this statute was repealed so far as respected London, on - account of the hindrance which the said statute might occasion to the - inhabitants of that city[375]. - -It may be doubted if, after the Black Death, the towns underwent any -marked industrial development, except in such cases as Coventry and -Bristol. On the other hand, the cloth-weaving of East Anglia was dispersed -over the country, more particularly to the western and south-western -counties, so that the west of England gained an industrial character which -it retained until the comparatively modern rise of the cloth-industries of -Yorkshire and Lancashire. But it was in great part a development of -village industries upon the old manorial basis, as well as a migration of -labour to the towns. - -We have an authentic instance, and probably a typical instance, in the -manor and barony of Castle Combe, of which the social history has been -pieced together from the rolls of its manor court by one of the earliest -students of that class of documents. Before the middle of the fifteenth -century this village situated among the Wiltshire hills, difficult of -access and almost secluded from the highways, had grown into a thriving -community of weavers, fullers, dyers, glovers, and the like, with their -attendant tradings and marketings, all upon its old manorial basis, and -with its old agriculture going hand in hand with its new industries. There -were free or copyhold tenants occupying their farms, while several -clothiers and occupiers of fulling-mills held farms also, "driving a -double and evidently a very thriving trade, accumulating considerable -wealth and giving employment to a large number of artizans who had been -attracted to the place for this purpose. Yet, strange to say, some of the -wealthiest and most prosperous of these tradesmen were still subject to -the odious bonds of serfship, adscript the soil[376]." It is clear, -however, that the jury of the manor court took care that the lord should -not have the best of it. The morals of this industrial village were, as -might have been expected, somewhat lax[377]. At the same time the removal -of nuisances was insisted upon by this self-governing community as -effectively, perhaps, as if it had been under the Local Government -Acts[378]. - -Another kind of effect than the industrial, upon the state of the towns, -is exemplified in the case of Shrewsbury. The dislocation of the old -social order had somehow touched the privileges and monopolies of -municipal corporations and guilds, and given power to a hitherto -unenfranchised class. The general question, besides being a somewhat new -one, is foreign to this subject; but the reference to Shrewsbury is given, -as the "late pestilence" is expressly connected with the municipal -changes. A patent of the 35th of Edward III. (1361), relating to the town -of Shrewsbury, recites the grievous debates and dissensions which had -arisen therein, "through the strangers who had newly come to reside in the -said town after the late pestilence, and were plotting to draw to -themselves the government of the said town[379]." - -It has been conjectured that population in the country at large speedily -righted itself, according to the principle that population always tends to -come close to the limit of subsistence. But there is reason to think that -the means of subsistence were themselves reduced. We read of corn-land -running to waste, although most of the references to desolation are -perhaps to be taken as true for only one or two harvests following the -plague. Again, it is undoubted that sheep-farming and the pasturing of -cattle at length took the place of much of the old agriculture. It is not -easy to make out when the change begins; but there are instances of rural -depopulation as early as 1414[380], and the same had become a burning -grievance in the time of cardinal Morton and the early years of sir Thomas -More. It has been assumed, also, that the "positive checks" to population -had been taken off, when they ought in theory so to have been: that is to -say, after the inhabitants had been enormously thinned. The statement of -Hecker, that there was increased fecundity after the pestilence, appears -to be an instance of that author's _a priori_ habit of mind[381]. What we -read in an English chronicle of the time is just the opposite, namely, -that "the women who survived remained for the most part barren during -several years[382]." The authority is not conclusive, but the statement is -in keeping with what we may gather from Langland's poem as to ill-assorted -and sterile marriages, and as to illicit unions, which, as Malthus -teaches, are comparatively unfruitful. The alleged sterility is also in -keeping with, although not strictly parallel to, the experience of crowded -Indian provinces, such as Orissa, where a thinning of the population by -famine and disease has been statistically proved to be followed by a -marked decrease of fecundity. More direct evidence of a permanent loss of -people occurs a generation after the Black Death, at a time when the -circumstances of health were such as would explain it. - -The poll-tax of 1377 was a means of estimating the population. The tax was -levied on every person, male or female, above the age of fourteen. In -estimating the population from the poll-tax returns, it is usual to add -one-fifth for taxable subjects who had evaded it, and to reckon the -taxable subjects above fourteen years as two-thirds of the whole -population. On that basis of reckoning, the population of the whole of -England, except Cheshire and Durham, in the year 1377 would have been -2,580,828 (or 1,376,442 who actually paid their groat each). The -population of the principal towns is calculated, in the second column of -the Table, from the numbers in the first column who actually paid the -poll-tax, according to the Subsidy Roll of 51 Edward III. - - Laity assessed for the Poll-tax of 1377 in each of the following Towns, - being persons of either sex above the age of fourteen years. - - -------------------------------------- - | Taxed |Estimated - | |Population - ------------------|--------|---------- - London | 23,314 | 44,770 - York | 7248 | 13,590 - Bristol | 6345 | 11,904 - Plymouth | 4837 | 9069 - Coventry | 4817 | 9032 - Norwich | 3952 | 7410 - Lincoln | 3412 | 6399 - Sarum | 3226 | 6048 - Lynn | 3127 | 5863 - Colchester | 2955 | 5540 - Beverley | 2663 | 4993 - Newcastle-on-Tyne | 2647 | 4963 - Canterbury | 2574 | 4826 - Bury St Edmunds | 2442 | 4580 - Oxford | 2357 | 4420 - Gloucester | 2239 | 4198 - Leicester | 2101 | 3939 - Shrewsbury | 2082 | 3904 - Yarmouth | 1941 | 3640 - Hereford | 1903 | 3568 - Cambridge | 1722 | 3230 - Ely | 1722 | 3230 - Exeter | 1560 | 2925 - Hull | 1557 | 2920 - Worcester | 1557 | 2920 - Ipswich | 1507 | 2825 - Nottingham | 1447 | 2713 - Northampton | 1447 | 2713 - Winchester | 1440 | 2700 - Stamford | 1218 | 2284 - Newark | 1178 | 2209 - Wells | 1172 | 2198 - Ludlow | 1172 | 2198 - Southampton | 1152 | 2160 - Derby | 1046 | 1961 - Lichfield | 1024 | 1920 - Chichester | 869 | 1630 - Boston | 814 | 1526 - Carlisle | 678 | 1271 - Bath | 570 | 1070 - Rochester | 570 | 1070 - Dartmouth | 506| 949 - -------------------------------------- - -That this indirect census was taken on a declining population may be -inferred from the language of contemporaries. In the year of the poll-tax -(1377), Richard II. addressed certain questions to Wyclif concerning the -papal exactions of tribute; the reformer's reply gives as the second -objection to the tribute "that the people decreases by reason of -(_praetextu_) the withdrawal of this treasure, which should be spent in -England[383]." - -In the political poems of the time there are numerous references to the -pestilences and famines. One of these doggerel productions, "On the -Council of London," 1382, contains a clear reference to a decrease of the -people: - - "In nos pestilentia saeva jam crescit, - Quod virorum fortium jam populus decrescit[384]." - -These general expressions in writings of the time will appear the more -credible after we have carried the history of plague and other forms of -epidemic sickness down through a whole generation from 1349. - - -The Epidemics following the Black Death. - -Not the least of the effects of the Black Death upon England was the -domestication of the foreign pestilence on the soil. For more than three -centuries bubo-plague was never long absent from one part of Britain or -another. The whole country was never again swamped by a vast wave of -plague as in the fourteen months of 1348-49. Nor does it appear that the -succeeding plagues of the fourteenth century, the _pestis secunda_, -_tertia_, _quarta_ and _quinta_ were all of the same type as the first, or -otherwise comparable to it. Disastrous as many subsequent English -epidemics of bubo-plague were, they appear to have been localised in the -North, perhaps, or in Norfolk, or confined to the young; and, above all, -the bubo-plague became, in its later period, peculiarly a disease of the -poor in the towns, although it did not cease altogether in the villages -and country houses until it ceased absolutely in 1666. For three hundred -years plague was the grand "zymotic" disease of England--the same type of -plague that came from the East in 1347-49, continuously reproduced in a -succession of epidemics at one place or another, which, by diligent -search, can be made to fill the annals with few gaps, and, if the records -were better, could probably be made to fill most years. Britain was not -peculiar among the countries of Europe in that respect, although the -chronology of plagues abroad has not been worked out minutely, except for -an occasional province in which some zealous archaeologist had happened to -take up the subject[385]. - -From 1349 to 1361 there is no record of pestilence in England. There was -scarcity or famine in 1353, owing to an unfavourable harvest, but nothing -is said of an unusual amount of sickness. In 1361 came the _pestis -secunda_, which would hardly have been so called had it not presented the -same type as the great bubo-plague. There is little said of it in the -chroniclers; but two of them mention that it was called the _pestis -puerorum_, or plague of the juveniles; and a third gives the names of -several great personages who died of it, including three bishops and -Henry, duke of Lancaster, at his castle of Leicester, in Lent, 1362. This -recrudescence, then, of the seeds of plague in English soil, may be taken -as having cut off the nobles and the young: that is to say, the members of -a class who had, by all accounts, escaped the first plague, and the rising -generation who had either escaped the first plague as infants or had been -born subsequent to it. The same selection of victims was observed, -according to Guy de Chauliac, in the very same year at Avignon; in -contrast to the Black Death, the second plague there cut off the upper and -well-to-do classes, and an innumerable number of children[386]; among the -former, it is said, were five cardinals and a hundred bishops. From -Poland, also, it is reported that the return of the plague, which happened -in 1360, affected mostly, although not exclusively, the upper classes and -children. It is clear from the Continental evidence that the second -pestilence was marked by the same buboes, carbuncles, and other signs as -the first. In some places, at least, it must have been as destructive as -the Black Death itself; thus, in Florence, says Petrarch (with obvious -exaggeration) hardly ten in the thousand remained alive in the city after -the epidemic of 1359, while Boccaccio estimates the mortality of the year -at the equally incredible figure of a hundred thousand. In London many -more wills than usual were enrolled in 1361, but not more than a third of -the number enrolled in 1349: viz. 4 in February, 2 in March, 8 in April, 8 -in May, 12 in June, 39 in July, 28 in October, 15 in November, 11 in -December. - -The _pestis secunda_ is only one of a series of pestilences in the reigns -of Edward III. and Richard II., which the chroniclers number in succession -to the _pestis quinta_ in 1391. The entries in the annals are for the most -part so meagre and colourless that they give us no help in realizing the -share that a continuous infection in the soil, from the Black Death -onwards, may have had in bringing about the disastrous state of the -country in the latter half of the fourteenth century. Edward III. was -ruined in reputation by his French wars, and ended his long reign in -dishonour. His grandson Richard II. found the task of government too much -for him, and was deposed. The history of this period is not complete -without some account of the health of the country; a single line or -sentence in a chronicle, to mark the date of a _pestis tertia_ or _quarta_ -or _quinta_, hardly does justice to the place of national sickness among -the events with which historians fill their pages. The graphic picture of -the times is 'The Vision of Piers the Ploughman,' some passages of which -may help us to realize what the bare enumeration of second, third, fourth -and fifth pestilences meant. Some Latin poems of the time may be cited in -support; and for more particular evidence of the type of pestilence which -remained in England after the Black Death, we shall have to refer to -certain extant manuscript treatises, from the latter part of the -fourteenth century, which had been written in English to meet the wants of -the people. - -The Latin poems of the time of Edward III. and Richard II. need only be -referred to so as to bring out by contrast the immense superiority of the -'Vision of Piers the Ploughman.' The poems of John of Bridlington, which -are the most considerable of the Latin series of verses, contain numerous -references to the epidemics of the time, both at home and abroad. -Curiously, he dwells more upon the effects of famine--flux and fever--than -upon the plague proper, which he nowhere distinguishes. Thus, of France -about the time of the Black Death: - - "Destructis granis, deerit mox copia panis; - Poena fames panis, venter fluxu fit inanis." - -Or again, with specific reference to the _pestis secunda_ of 1361, which -we know to have been bubo-plague: - - "... fluxus nocet, undique febris - Extirpat fluxus pollutos crimine luxus." - -Another reference, in the form of a prophecy, which from the context is -clearly to the pestilence of 1368-69, again dwells exclusively upon -famine: - - "In mensis justi pandetur copia crusti: - Fundis falsorum premet arcta fames famulorum." - -followed by a note in Latin: "from which it appears that the poor in those -days were ill off for want of food[387]." One Latin poem of the end of the -fourteenth century is expressly "On the Pestilence," in the following -manner: - - "Ecce dolet Anglia luctibus imbuta, - Gens tremit tristitia sordibus polluta, - Necat pestilentia viros atque bruta. - Cur? Quia flagitia regnant resoluta[388]." - -Turning to the far more real or observant work of the same date by -Langland, we find among his general references to sickness a most -significant one in which he compares it to the continual dropping of rain -through a leaky roof: "The rain that raineth where we rest should, be -sicknesses and sorrows that we suffer oft." Again, in the allegory of -Conscience and Nature, the former makes appeal to Nature to come forth as -the scourge of evil-living: - - "Nature Conscience heard, and came out of the planets, and sent forth - his fore-goers, fevers and fluxes, coughs and cardiacles, cramps and - toothaches, rheums and radegoundes and roynous scalls, boils and - botches and burning agues, frenzies and foul evils--foragers of Nature - had ypricked and preyed polls of people that largely a legion lose - their life soon. Eld the hoary, he was in the vanguard, and bare the - banner before Death, by right he it claimed. Nature came after, with - many keen sores, as pokkes and pestilences, and much people shent. So - Nature through corruptions killed many. Death came driving after, and - all to dust dashed kings and knights, kaisers and popes, learned and - lewd, he let no man stand that he hit even, that ever stirred after. - Many a lovely lady, and lemans of knights, swooned and swelted for - sorrow of Death's dints." - - But "Conscience of his courtesy to Nature he besought, to cease and - suffer and see whether they would leave pride privily and be perfect - Christens. And Nature ceased then, to see the people amend. Fortune - gan flatter those few that were alive, and promised them long life; - and Lechery he sent among all manner men, wedded and unwedded, and - gathered a great host all against Conscience[389]." - -Next came Avarice, Envy and other of the deadly sins, so that the respite -which Nature had given was of no real avail. - -A clear reference to pestilence continuing in the country comes in where -the pope's exactions are mentioned. The pope did nothing in return for his -English tribute: - - "Had I a clerk that could write, I would cast him a bill - That he send me under his seal a salve for the pestilence, - And that his blessing and his bulls botches might destroy. - For, sith he hath the power that Peter himself had, - He hath the pot with the salve, soothly as me thinketh." - -Among the other consequences "sithen the pestilence," was this: "So is -pride waxen, in religion and in all the realm among rich and poor, that -prayers have no power the pestilence to let; ... ne for dread of the death -withdraw not their pride." - -The _pestis secunda_ of 1361, or _pestis puerorum_, may perhaps be pointed -to in the passage where chapmen are blamed for indulging their children, -"ne for no pouste of pestilence correct them overmuch." The ill-assorted -marriages had doubtless followed the great mortality itself; but the -second pestilence, of 1361, which affected the upper classes especially, -and is said by one chronicler to have cut off more men than women[390], -may have been more specially pointed to in Langland's reference. Of that -pestilence a chronicle of the next century has preserved a curious -reminiscence: among its victims were men, doubtless of the upper class, -"whose wives, as women out of gouvernance, took as well strangers to their -husbands and other lewd and simple people, the which, forgetting their -awe, worship and birth, coupled and married them with them that were of -low degree and low reputation[391]." - -Although Langland, when he speaks of changes "sith the pestilence time," -means the great mortality of 1349, he means in other places, the second, -third, and perhaps also fourth pestilences[392]. The years of the -pestilences down to the fifth are not the same in all the chronicles; -there are indeed some nine outbreaks that might have been enumerated after -the Black Death to the end of the century. Some of these are clearly -associated with scarcity, and may have been of the old type of -famine-sickness; dysentery is, indeed, mentioned in connexion with the -sickness of 1391[393]. Again, an epidemic in London in 1382 is said by a -chronicler to have affected children (boys and girls), while the same -chronicler is explicit that the sickness in Norfolk the year after was -confined to the young of both sexes under a certain age. Lastly, the -epidemic of 1391 was so severe in the North as to recall the great -mortality itself; but under the same year is the reference to sickness of -the type of dysentery due to rotten fruit; and under the year before, -1390, two chroniclers agree that the epidemic was "mostly among children," -or that it cut off "more young than old." It would be unsafe, therefore, -to conclude that all the outbreaks of _pestis_ in England subsequent to -the Black Death, were of bubo-plague itself. The list of sicknesses in -Langland's poem gives, indeed, as much space to fevers and fluxes, burning -agues and frenzies, as to boils and botches, foul evils, pokkes and -pestilences--by which latter group of synonyms the bubo-plague is meant. -_Pestis_, it is well known, was a generic name in the medieval period, -just as pest and pestilence are generic now. So generic was it that some -may doubt whether bubo-plague, of the type of 1349, was included at all -among the _pestes_ of the generations following. Positive evidence of the -continued existence of bubo-plague in England is, at least, not -superfluous, and this will be the best place to bring it in. - - -Medical Evidence of the Continuance of Plague. - -The plague was called "the botch" down to the Elizabethan and Stuart -periods; and the "botches" in Langland's poem, or, as he writes it, -"boches," were the familiar risings, under the arms and elsewhere, which -had given the disease its popular name when it began to recur time after -time. Apart from this verbal or philological evidence, there is a clear -proof of the prevalence of true bubo-plague during the latter part of the -fourteenth century, in the manuscript ordinances or rules of prevention -and treatment which were in circulation. Most of the extant copies bear -the name of one John of Burgoyne, or John of Bordeaux[394]. A fragment in -comparatively late handwriting purports to be the ordinance of "a great -Clark, Mr John Cordewe, at the prayer of King Richard and other the Lords, -for pestilence[395]"; from which it may be concluded that this, the -commonly used ordinance, dates from the time of Richard II. The names used -in the text are "pestilence" and "pestilential sores," and the handling of -the subject is the conventional one for the plague. The ordinance contains -exceedingly little that is of practical interest, and it is difficult to -believe that it can have been of real use to anyone. We are introduced to -the subject with a few empty common-places; but whenever we come to -business, we are plainly told to go and consult those who know--and this, -be it observed, in a disease which was remarkably uniform in its type and -circumstances: - - "Wherefore they that have not dronken of that swete drynke of - Astronomye may putte to these pestilentiall sores no fit remedies; - for, because that they know not the cause and the quality of the - sickness, they may not hele it, as sayeth the prince of physic - Avicenna: 'How shouldest thou hele a sore and yknowe not the cause?' - He that knoweth not the cause, it is impossible that he hele the - sickness." - -If there were any doubt about the date of John of Burgoyne, or John of -Bordeaux[396], it ought to be set at rest by the discovery that he -corresponds in the closest way with the physician in the Prologue of the -_Canterbury Tales_. Chaucer's doctor of physic stands for the -well-grounded practitioner of the time--"grounded in astronomie," it is -true, but at all events academically grounded, in contrast to the -charlatans and pretenders who had not been to Paris or Bologna, probably -knew no Latin, to say nothing of "astronomy," and therefore knew not how -to let a patient die (or recover) _secundum artem_. The doctor of physic -uses his astrological knowledge so much in the manner of John of Bordeaux, -that one suspects Chaucer to have seen the passage quoted above, and to -have condensed it into the two following lines: - - "The cause yknowne, and of his harm the rote, - Anon he gave to the sick man his bote." - -It was in the pestilence that this practitioner had made the money which -he kept so tightly. Richly clad he was; - - "And yet he was but easy of dispense; - He kept that he wan in the pestilence. - For gold in physic is a cordial: - Therefore he loved gold in special." - -This is John of Burgoyne all over; it would have been an anachronism in -England by more than two hundred years to have represented a physician as -caring for any but paying patients, or as regarding an epidemic sickness -from any other point of view than as a source of income. - -Besides the "ordinance" of John of Burgoyne, which may be assigned to the -reign of Richard II., there was another essay on the plague circulating in -England in an English translation, of which the copy among the Sloane -manuscripts is assigned to the fourteenth century[397]. The importance -attached to this manuscript work is shown in the fact that it was chosen -among the very first to be printed at an English press, probably in the -year 1480[398]. It was reprinted in 1536, and the substance of it was -copied into nearly all the English books on plague (from one to another) -as late as the seventeenth century, much of its original matter passing -under the name of one Phaer, or Phayre or Thayre, who was a compiler about -the middle of the sixteenth century. Writers on early English printing -have made much of the printed book of 1480; but they do not appear to have -known of the manuscript which was used as the printer's "copy[399]." If -one happens to use the latter first, and comes later to the printed book, -he will observe the identity not merely in the words and spelling but even -in the very form in which the type had been cut. The authorship of a -manuscript which is thus invested with a various interest may deserve a -few lines of inquiry. - -The author of it describes himself in the (translated) introduction as "I -the bisshop of Arusiens, Doctour of phisike," that is to say, bishop of -Aarhus, in Denmark. In the text, he claims to have practised physic at -Montpellier: - - "In the Mount of Pessulane I might not eschewe the company of people, - for I went from house to house, because of my poverty, to cure sick - folk. Therefore bread or a sponge sopped in vinegar I took with me, - holding it to my mouth and nose, because all aigre things stoppen the - ways of humours and suffereth no venomous thing to enter into a man's - body; and so I escaped the pestilence, my fellows supposing that I - should not live. These foresaid things I have proved by myself[400]." - -The fact that this medieval treatise, whatever its exact date, was turned -into English and circulated in manuscript, and that it was chosen for -printing almost as soon as English printing began, in the reign of Edward -IV., is sufficient evidence, if more were needed, that the English had to -reckon with bubo-plague as one of their standing diseases throughout the -latter part of the medieval period. Before we come to the chronology of -English plagues in that period, from the Black Death to the accession of -the Tudor dynasty in 1485, it will be convenient to consider here, with -the help of the above treatise, how the endemic plague was viewed in those -days,--what it was ascribed to in its origin, in its incidence upon houses -and persons, and in its propagation, what was advised for its avoidance or -prevention, and what was prescribed for its treatment. As the bishop's -essay was the source of most that was taught on these matters in England -for the next two or three hundred years, it will be an economy to give a -brief account of it here once for all. - -The remote causes, or warnings of the approach of pestilence, are given -under seven heads, including the kind of weather, swarms of flies, -shooting stars, comets, thunder and lightning out of the south, and winds -out of the south; this list was reproduced, with little or no change, by -the Elizabethan writers of popular health-manuals. The second section of -the essay is on the "causes of pestilence." There are three causes:-- - - "Sometime it cometh from the root beneath; other while from the root - above, so that we may feel sensibly howwith change of the air - appeareth unto us; and sometime it cometh of both together, as well - from the root above as from the root beneath, as we see a siege or - privy next to a chamber, or of any other particular thing which - corrupteth the air in his substance and quality, which is a thing may - happen every day. And thereof cometh the ague of pestilence (and about - the same many physicians be deceived, not supposing this ague to be a - pestilence). Sometimes it cometh of dead carrion, or corruption of - standing waters in ditches or sloughs and other corrupt places. These - things sometime be universal, sometime particular." Then follow - sentences on the "root above" which are somewhat transcendental. When - both "roots" work together, when, by "th' ynp'ffyons[401]" above, the - air is corrupt and by the putrefaction or rotten carrion of the vile - places beneath,--an infirmity is caused in man. "And such infirmity - sometimes is an ague, sometimes a posthume or a swelling, and that is - in many things. Also the air inspired sometimes is venomous and - corrupt, hurting the heart, that nature many ways is grieved, so that - he perceiveth not his harm.... - - "These things written before are the causes of pestilence. But about - these things, two questions be mooted. The first is, wherefore one - dieth and another dieth not, in a town where men be dead in one house - and in another house there dieth none. The second question is, whether - pestilence sores be contagious. - - "To the first question, I say it may hap to be of two causes: that is - to say, of that thing that doth, and of that thing that suffereth. An - ensample of that thing that doth: The influence of the bodies above - beholdeth that place or that place, more than this place or this - place. And one patient is more disposed to die than another. Therefore - it is to be noted that bodies be more hot disposed, of open pores, - than bodies infect having the pores stopped with many humours. Where - bodies be of resolution or opening, as men which abusen them selfe - with wymmen, or usen often times bathis; or men that be hot with - labour or great anger--they have their bodies more disposed to this - great sickness. - - "To the second question I say, that pestilence sores be contagious by - cause of infect humoures bodies, and the reek or smoke of such sores - is venomous and corrupteth the air. And therefore it is to flee from - such persons as be infect. In pestilence time nobody should stand in - great press of people, because some man of them may be infect. - Therefore wise physicians, in visiting sick folk, stand far from the - patient, holding their face toward the door or window. And so should - the servants of sick folk stand. Also it is good to a patient every - day for to change his chamber, and often times to have the windows - open against the North and East, and to spar the windows against the - South. For the south wind hath two causes of putrefaction. The first - is, it maketh a man, being whole or sick, feeble in their bodies. The - second cause is, as it is written in the Third of Aphorisms, the south - wind grieveth the hearing and hurteth the heart, because it openeth - the pores of man and entereth into the heart. Wherefore it is good to - an whole man in time of pestilence, when the wind is in the South, to - keep within the house all the day. And if it shall need a man to go - out, yet let him abide in his house till the sun be up in the East - passing southward." - -These explanations of the incidence of plague are in part repeated in the -section of the essay where the author gives directions for avoiding it. -After enjoining penance, he proceeds: - - "It is a good remedy to void and change the infect place. But some may - not profitably change their places. Therefore as much as to them is - possible, it is to be eschewed every cause of putrefaction and - stinking, and namely every fleshly lust with women is to be eschewed. - Also the southern wind, which wind is naturally infective: therefore - spar the windows, etc. Of the same cause, every foul stink is to be - eschewed--of stable, stinking fields, ways, or streets, and namely of - stinking dead carrion; and most of stinking waters, where in many - places water is kept two days or two nights, or else there be gutters - of water casten under the earth which caused great stink and - corruption. And of this cause some die in that house where such things - happen, and in another house die none, as it is said afore. Likewise - in that place where the worts and coles putrefied, it maketh noifull - savour and stinking. For in like wise as by the sweet odour of bawme - the heart and spirits have recreation, so of evil savours they be made - feeble. Therefore keep your house that an infect air enter not in. For - an infect air most causeth putrefaction in places and houses where - folk sleep. Therefore let your house be clean, and make clear fire of - wood flaming: let your house be made with fumigation of herbs, that is - to say, with leaves of bay-tree, juniper, yberiorgam--it is in the - apothecary shops--wormwood etc.... For a little crust corrupteth all - the body. - - "Also in the time of the pestilence it is better to abide within the - house; for it is not wholesome to go into the city or town. Also let - your house be sprinkled, specially in summer, with vinegar and roses, - and with the leaves of vine tree. Also it is good to wash your hands - ofttimes in the day with water and vinegar, and wipe your face with - your hands, and smell to them. Also it is good always to savour aigre - things." - -Then follows his own Montpellier experience, already quoted. - -The diagnostics come in casually along with the treatment: - - "But some would understand how may a man feel when he is infect. I say - that a man which is infect, that day eateth not much meat for he is - replenished with evil humours; and forthwith after dinner he hath lust - to sleep, and feeleth great heat under cold. Also he hath great pain - in the forehead.... He shall feel a swelling under the arm, or about - the share, or about the ears.... When a man feeleth himself infect, as - soon as he may, let him be let blood plenteously till he swoon: then - stop the vein. For a little letting of blood moveth or stirreth - venom." - -Then follow directions for bleeding, according to the position of the -bubo--in the armpit, groin or neck, the direction "if on the back" -probably having reference to the carbuncle[402]. The section on treatment, -which is the last, ends with a prescription for a medicine "that the -sooner a swelling be made ripe." - -These are sufficiently clear indications of the bubonic nature of the -disease called pestilence. At the same time the writer includes an ague as -also pestilential, due to similar causes and arising on similar occasions. -This is a use of the name ague which should not be mistaken for its common -application to intermittent fever. Ague was simply (febris) acuta; and -pestilential ague was a name for typhus fever in the sixteenth century (as -in Jones' _Dyall of Agues_), as well as in Ireland until a much later -period. This early association of acute pestilential fever with true -bubo-plague means the same relationship of typhus to plague which was -systematically taught by Sydenham, Willis, and Morton in the seventeenth -century; typhus in their time was the frequent attendant of plague,--a -_pestis mitior_; and it would appear to have been its attendant and -congener in the fourteenth century also. - - -The Fourteenth Century Chronology continued. - -Two epidemics contend in the chronicles for being the _pestis -tertia_--that of 1368-69, and that of 1375. The former is described as a -"great pestilence of men and the larger animals[403]," and it appears to -have been associated with unfavourable seasons and with the beginning of -that scarcity which Langland's poem refers to the month of April, 1370: - - Atte Londoun, I leve, liketh wel my wafres - And louren whan thei lakken hem.--It is nought longe passed, - There was a careful comune whan no cart cam to towne - With bred fro Strethforth, tho gan beggeres wepe - And werkmen were agast a lite. This wole be thought longe - In the date of our Drighte in a drye Aprille, - A thousand and thre hondreth tweis thretty and ten - My wafres there were gesen whan Chichestre was Maire[404]. - -The _pestis_ of 1368 and 1369 may have been primarily a famine-sickness; -but it does not follow that there was no bubo-plague mixed therewith. On -the contrary, seasons of scarcity were often in after experience found to -be the seasons of plague, the lowered vitality probably offering the -opportunity to the plague-virus. Previous to the harvests of 1376 and -1377, which were abundant, there had been an unbroken period of high -prices for many years, of which 1371 was remembered as "the grete dere -yere[405]." But the _pestis tertia_ appears to have been most severe in -the summer of 1368; for, on 23 July of that year, Simon, archbishop of -Canterbury, ordered public prayers for the cessation of the -pestilence[406], and it is under the same year that the wills of deceased -London citizens are enrolled in unusual numbers, although not in such -numbers as in the _pestis secunda_ of 1361[407]. Public prayers for the -cessation of pestilence (without reference to famine) and an unusual -mortality of the richer citizens, point to the plague proper, which may or -may not have been the type of sickness in the country districts in 1369, -the second year of the epidemic[408]. - -There is, furthermore, some indirect evidence that pestilential disease, -and probably bubo-plague, occurred in London subsequent to the scarcity of -the dry April, 1370, to which Langland's verses relate. This evidence lies -in the comparison of the wording of two ordinances of Edward III., one of -1369 and the other of 1371, both relating to nuisances in the city[409]. -In an order of the king in Council (43 Edward III.) for stopping the -carrying of slaughter-house offal from the shambles in St Nicholas parish, -within Newgate, through the streets, lanes, and other places to the banks -of the water of Thames near to Baynard's Castle, where there was a jetty -for throwing the refuse from into the river, the motive assigned is that -divers prelates, nobles, and other persons having houses in the line of -traffic, had complained grievously of these offences to the sight and -smell. But, in an amended order of 28th October, 1371, against the same -nuisance and with a definite (but futile) relegation of all slaughtering -to Stratford on the one side and Knightsbridge on the other, the motive is -differently stated: "Whereas of late, from the putrefied blood of -slaughtered beasts running in the streets, and the entrails thereof thrown -into the water of Thames, the air in the same city has been greatly -corrupted and infected, and whereby the worst of abominations and -stenches have been generated, and sicknesses and many other maladies have -befallen persons dwelling in the same city and resorting thereto:--We, -desiring to take precautions against such perils, and to provide for the -decency of the said city, and the safety of the same our people" etc. - -Up to this date, the Rolls of Parliament contain frequent references to -the wasting and impoverishment of the country by pestilence. A petition of -1362 begs the king "to consider the divers mischiefs that have come to his -commons by divers pestilences of wind and water, and mortality of men and -beasts"--the destructive wind being the tornado-like storm, on the 16th -January, 1362, "on Saturday at even," which was long remembered, and is -commemorated, along with the Black Death itself, in an inscription in the -church of Ashwell, Herts. Next year, another petition states that -"pestilences and great winds have done divers mischiefs"--manors and -tenements held direct from the king having become desolate and ruinous. In -1369 a petition states that "the king's ferms [rents] in every county of -England are greatly abated by the great mortalities." The parliament of -1376, the "good Parliament" so-called, is able to point the moral of its -petitions by frequent references to the pestilences "that have been in the -kingdom one after another," the pestilences "of people and servants," the -murrains of cattle, and "the failure of their corn and other fruits of the -earth." The same language recurs in the second parliament of Richard II. -in 1378 (the year after the poll-tax), and from that time until the end of -his reign, it becomes stereotyped in the petitions deprecating heavy -subsidies or excusing the smallness of the sums voted. - -The pestilence of 1375 would appear to have been considered as one of the -greater sort. The author of the _Eulogium_ reckons it the _pestis tertia_ -(passing over that of 1368-69). The season was one of great heat, there -was "grandis pestilentia" both in England and other countries, an infinity -of both sexes died, the mortality being so swift that the pope, "at the -instance of the cardinal of England" granted plenary remission to all -dying contrite and confessing their sins[410]. That looks like an -epidemic of true bubo-plague,--probably the _pestis quarta_ correctly -so-called[411]. - -In 1379 there was a great plague in the Northern parts, which were -stripped of their best men; the Scots made a raid, with the following -prayer on their lips: "God and Sen Mungo, Sen Ninian and Seynt Andrew -scheld us this day and ilka day fro Goddis grace, and the foule deth that -Ynglessh men dyene upon"--foul death being the name given to plague also -in 1349[412]. The northern counties send a petition to the parliament of -1379-80, that the king would "consider the very great hurt and damage -which they have suffered, and are still suffering, both by pestilence and -by the continual devastations of the Scots enemy[413]." - -In the parliament of 1381-82 there is a petition from the convent of -Salisbury as to want of money to repair the losses caused by the -pestilence, of which the tenants are nearly all dead, and by the murrain -of cattle. This is more than thirty years from the Black Death, and can -hardly refer, as some earlier petitions may have done, to the enduring -effects of that calamity. The sixth parliament of Richard II. (1382), has -two of the stereotyped petitions deprecating a heavy subsidy on the ground -of "the great poverty and disease" of the commons, through pestilence of -people, murrain of cattle, failure of crops, great floods, etc.[414] This -was the year after the Peasant Revolt, which had coincided with troubles -of various kinds. A Norwich chronicle, perhaps of contemporary authority, -enters, under the year 1382, a very pestilential fever in many places of -the country, and very extraordinary inundations of the fens[415]. In -London the epidemic of 1382 is said to have been "chiefly among boys and -girls[416]." A primitive English poem of the time has for its subject the -earthquake of 1382, and with that portent it associates not only the -Peasant's Rebellion but also "the pestilens[417]." - -The year 1383 was a bad one for the fruit, which was spoiled by "foetid -fogs, exhalations and various corruptions of the air": from eating of the -spoiled fruits many died, or incurred serious illness and -infirmities[418]. By another account, a great pestilence in Kent and other -parts of England destroyed many, sparing no age or sex. In Norfolk the -sickness that year is said to have been confined to young persons[419]. -This was only one of the occasions which might have been referred to in -'Piers Ploughman,' when the poor people thought to "poison Hunger" by bad -food. - -The next pestilence, that of 1390 and 1391, was so prolonged and so -serious as to be compared with the Great Mortality itself. It is called -the _pestis quinta_ by two annalists[420], and is described not without -some detail by several. It is clear that the seeds of disease were ready -to burst forth at various parts of the country; for we read that in 1389, -the king was in the south of England, and seeing some of his men -prostrated by sudden death, he returned to Windsor[421]. Another outburst -came the year after. Intense heat began in June and lasted until -September; great mortality ensued, the epidemic continuing in diverse -parts of England, but not everywhere, until Michaelmas; it cut off more -young than old, as well as several famous soldiers[422]. The St Albans -entry confirms this: "A great plague, especially of youths and children, -who died everywhere in towns and villages, in incredible and excessive -numbers[423]." After the epidemic there was scarcity, of which we have -special accounts from Norfolk[424]. But the heaviest mortality fell in the -year 1391. There was first of all scarcity, now in its second year, and -aggravated by six weeks of continual gloom in July and August. At the time -of the nuts, apples and other fruits of the kind, many poor people died of -dysentery, and the sickness would have been worse but for the laudable -care of the mayor of London who caused corn to be brought from over sea. -In Norfolk and many other counties the sickness was compared even to the -Great Mortality, and was probably a mixture of famine-pestilence with -bubo-plague. At York "eleven thousand" were said to have been buried[425]. -Another account says that the North suffered severely, and also the West, -and that the sickness lasted all summer[426]. Under the year 1393 one -annalist states that many died in Essex in September and October, "on the -pestilence setting in[427]." The next evidence comes from the Rolls of -Parliament; in the first parliament of Henry IV. (1399) a petition is -presented "that the king would graciously consider the great pestilence -which is in the northern parts," and send sufficient men to defend the -Scots marches. - -The first great outburst of plague in the fifteenth century falls -somewhere between 1405 and 1407. "So great pestilence," says the St Albans -annalist, under the year 1407, "had not been seen for many years." In -London "thirty thousand men and women" are reported to have died in a -short space; and "in country villages the sickness fell so heavily upon -the wretched peasants that many homes that had before been gladdened by a -numerous family were left almost empty[428]." But it is under the 7th of -Henry IV. (1405) that Hall's chronicle narrates how the king, to avoid the -city on account of the plague, sailed from Queenborough to a port in -Essex, and so to Plashey, "there to pass his time till the plague were -ceased" (p. 36). Another chronicle says that the plague of 1407 was mostly -in the West country. In that year, the 9th of Henry IV., there is a -petition from Ilchester in Somerset for a remission of dues "because the -town is so impoverished and desolate of people that the burgesses are -unable to pay the said ferme," and for the cancelling of all arrears due -since the 43rd year of Edward III. (1369). In the 11th of Henry IV. -(1410-11), the burgesses of Truro represent "that the said town is -impoverished by pestilence and the death of men, and by invasions and loss -by the enemy by sea, and by the surcharge of twelve lives, and by default -of inhabitants in the said town"--a petition apparently similar in terms -to one that had been submitted in the previous reign. In the 1st of Henry -IV. (1399), petitions of the same kind had been presented from Lincoln and -Yarmouth; the former was "in great part empty and uninhabited," while the -latter had "its houses vacant and void, owing to pestilence and other -things." - -For the year 1413 there is a brief entry that "numbers of Englishmen were -struck by plague and ceased to live[429]." A single chronicler mentions a -pestilence in Norfolk in 1420[430]; but the Rolls of Parliament bear -undoubted witness to a very severe prevalence of plague in the North about -the same time: a petition from the Marches in 1421 speaks of "great -numbers of persons dead by the great mortalities and pestilences which -have raged for three years past and still reign; where a hundred men used -to be there are not ten, and these of small account; where people of -position kept twenty men at arms they now keep only themselves"; the enemy -were making raids and food was scarce[431]. Another petition the same year -(9 Henry V.) states that "both by pestilence within the realm and wars -without there are not sufficient men of estate to hold the office of -sheriff[432]." That was shortly after Agincourt and the conquest of -France, when the fortunes of Henry V. were at their highest point. The -horrors of the siege of Rouen (1419) were a favourite subject with poets -of the time[433], but they were of a kind foreign to English experience in -that age, and, indeed, in all periods of our history, save that of the -Danish invasions. The Cromwellian Civil Wars, as we shall see, do indeed -furnish many instances of plague, and some of typhus fever, in besieged or -occupied towns; but, for the middle part of the fifteenth century, -including the period of the wars of York and Lancaster, there is no good -reason to suppose that fevers or other _morbi miseriae_, were rife among -the common people, least of all among the peasantry. - - -The Public Health in the Fifteenth Century. - -Our safest indications are got from the prices of commodities and the -rates of wages, and these, according to the most competent authority, -Thorold Rogers, were more favourable to the working class in the fifteenth -century than at other periods: "As the agriculturist throve in the -fifteenth century, so the mechanic and the artisan was also prosperous. -This was the age in which the property of the guilds was generally -acquired." On famines in particular, I shall quote one other passage, -which entirely confirms the view that I had independently stated in the -first chapter when speaking of Ergotism: - - "Famine, in the strict sense of the word, has rarely occurred in - England, owing to the practice which the inhabitants of this island - have persistently maintained of living mainly on the dearest kind of - corn.... The people lived abundantly, and, except when extraordinary - scarcity occurred, regularly on the best provision which could be - procured[434]." - -One such period of extraordinary scarcity all over England fell in the -years 1438-39. The chronicle of Croyland says that there were three wet -harvests in succession, that famine had been almost constant for two -years, and that the people were reduced to eating dried herbs and -roots[435]. That would have been a famine of the old kind, like those of -1258 and 1315, wheat having touched 20_s._ But it should not lead us to -suppose that the disastrous period of the end of Edward III.'s reign and -of the reign of Richard II. was continued throughout the fifteenth -century. It is true that the records of that century are scantier than for -earlier periods; the monastic chronicles have all ceased, except those of -St Albans and Croyland, and the citizens' diaries, which took their place, -have hardly begun. It is possible that a fuller record would have shown a -greater prevalence of distress throughout the country. It is probably -owing to the scantiness of the history that the views of the fifteenth -century range from the extreme of optimism to the extreme of pessimism. -Where little is known, much may be imagined. Thus, a recent writer on -_England in the Fifteenth Century_[436], says that "all attempts to -specify the years of scarcity would only mislead"; and again: "There is -hardly any period of five years during that time [15th century] without -these ghastly records." Another recent writer[437] remarks upon the -fifteenth century being called a time of rude plenty, and sets against -that "the famines, the plagues, the skin-diseases, the miserable quality -of the food, the insecurity of life and property, the hovels in which the -people lived, and the tyranny and oppression of a time of unsettled -government." It is needless to controvert the merely subjective impression -in an author's mind. But, in order to clear our ideas, let us take these -things one by one. What were firstly the famines? There is no great one -but that of 1438-39, which was due to a succession of wet harvests, and -was equally severe in Scotland and in France, having in them caused -famine-sickness as well as plague. Of the plagues, which were certainly no -worse than in the Elizabethan and Stuart times, I shall speak in detail -almost at once. Of the skin-diseases, there is nowhere a word said: -another writer[438] specifies leprosy as afflicting England "all over the -country" in the fifteenth century, whereas it can be shown that the -prevalence of that disease, such as it had ever been in England, had -almost ceased, and its sentimental vogue passed, in the reign of Edward -III. The miserable quality of the food and the wretched hovels have -certainly no special relevancy to the period[439]; on the contrary, the -picture that we get of the manor of Castle Combe in the fifteenth century -is that of a prosperous community, although not a highly moral one. As to -insecurity of life and property, and oppression of government, there seems -to be some illusion because the time was that of the wars of York and -Lancaster. But we have the significant observation of Philip de Comines, a -contemporary French statesman who kept his eye on the state of other -countries; writing of the effects of civil war, he says:-- - - "England has this peculiar grace that neither the country, nor the - people, nor the houses are wasted or demolished; but the calamities - and misfortunes of the war fall only upon the soldiers and especially - the nobility, of whom they are more than ordinarily jealous: for - nothing is perfect in this world." - -The truth seems to be that the middle part of the fifteenth century was -really the time "ere England's woes began, when every rood of ground -maintained its man," and that the Golden Age came to an end as soon as the -dynastic and aristocratic quarrel was ended, and the nobles left free to -turn their attention to their lapsing feudal rights. It is then that we -begin to hear of enclosures, of adding house to house and field to field, -of huge sheep-farms with no labourers on the soil, and of deserted -villages. Goldsmith meant it of his own time; but Auburn flourishing -belonged to the fifteenth century, and Auburn deserted was a common -English experience in the time of Henry VIII. It is just because the -fifteenth century is bounded on either side by periods of known distress -among the commons, and is itself without a history, that one thinks of it -as happy; and that view of it is borne out by the economic history which -has been laboriously constructed for it. - -So much being premised of the country's well-being at large, we may now -return to the particular records of epidemics of plague. - - -Chronology of Plagues in the Fifteenth Century. - -With the exception of an undoubted reference to influenza epidemic all -over England in 1427 (a year of its prevalence in France also), which I -shall postpone to a future chapter, the history down to the arrival of the -sweating sickness in 1485, is concerned almost exclusively with notices of -plague, and of plague mostly in the towns. It cannot be maintained that -rural districts were exempt, or that some great epidemics of plague did -not fall on town and country alike. Thus, the St Albans annalist, under -the year 1431, has an entry of "pestilence at Codycote and divers places -of this domain in this year." Again, in 1439, the Rolls of Parliament -contain a petition to the king "how that a sickness called the Pestilence -universally through this your realm more commonly reigneth than hath been -usual before this time, the which is an infirmity most infective, and the -presence of such so infect must be eschewed, as by noble Fisisseanes and -wise Philosofors before this time plainly it hath been determined, and as -experience daily showeth"--therefore to omit the ceremony of kissing the -king in doing knightly service, "and the homage to be as though they -kissed you." That may have been a plague both of town and country during -famine, comparable to the epidemic of 1407, which, as "Walsingham" -expressly says, was severely felt in the homes of the peasantry as well as -in London. But plague henceforth is seldom universal; it becomes more and -more a disease of the towns, and when it does occur in the country, it is -for the most part at some few limited spots. A Paston letter of the years -between 1461 and 1466 gives us a glimpse of the sort of the incidence of -plague in country places, and of the avoidance of such infected spots, -which we shall find often mentioned in the documents of the sixteenth and -seventeenth centuries[440]. There is, of course, no means of estimating -the frequency of plague in these almost sporadic circumstances. The -disease must have had its seats of election in the country, but we may -safely conclude that these, after the Black Death and the recurrences -thereof down, say, to 1407, were much fewer than in the towns. One -significant piece of evidence comes from the great monastery of -Canterbury. Among its records is an obituary, on twenty sheets, of all the -monks from 1286 to 1517. Out of a hundred cases taken without selection -from the record, there died, of pestilence, 33; of phthisis, 10; of -chronic diseases, 29. "Pestilence" appears to mean specifically -bubo-plague; for we find besides, among the sample hundred, two deaths -from flux, one of these corpses having been buried immediately _propter -infexionem_. The inference, under correction from further inquiry, would -be that one-third of the deaths in the monastery of Canterbury during the -first half of the reign of plague in England were from that disease. And -that was in a monastery which, in the Black Death itself, is reported, in -the same record, to have lost "only four" out of a membership of about -eighty[441]. - -It remains to enumerate briefly the known instances of plague in London or -other towns, from the last date given (1420) down to the beginning of the -Tudor period (1485). Its prevalence "in England," but more probably in -London only, in 1426, comes out in a letter from the Senate of Venice -cautioning the captain of the Flanders galleys and the vice-captain of the -London galleys[442]. We hear also of that plague in London owing to the -fact that certain Scotsmen of rank, hostages for the ransom of the king of -Scots, died of the plague in London. An envoy who proceeded to Scotland on -12th March, 1427, was instructed to ask that the dead hostages be replaced -by others of equal rank; and if the king of Scots objected on the ground -that they had died because they had been kept in places where the late -pestilence raged, notwithstanding their request to be removed, the envoy -was to say that the hostages had been kept in London, where the dukes of -Bedford and Gloucester and all other lords of the Council remained during -the time; and that the hostages were "neither pinned nor barred up" in any -house, but went at large in the city, and might have taken any measures -they pleased for their own preservation. It appears, however, that the -council removed from the city, and that the courts were adjourned, at a -stage of the epidemic subsequent to the deaths of the Scots. The last plea -of the envoy was that, supposing the pestilence had prevailed throughout -England, the king was not therefore bound to send the hostages out of -England; from which hypothetical construction, we may conclude that the -epidemic was special to London--one of a long series requiring the king's -Court, the Parliament, and the Law Courts to be adjourned[443]. - -In 1433, the Parliament which met at Westminster on the 8th July, was -prorogued on the 15th August, on account of the _gravis pestilentia_ which -began to arise in London and the suburbs[444]. A London chronicler enters, -under the 12th of Henry VI. (1433) "a grete pestilence and a grete frost," -a conjunction that would be interesting if the hard winter had -preceded[445]. The plague revived in London in the following autumn; for, -on the 27th October, 1434, the Privy Council ordered all pleas then -pending to be continued from the morrow of All Souls to the octaves of St -Hilary on account of the epidemic[446]. After three years, in 1437, the -Chief Justice of the Common Pleas paid a visit to St Albans Abbey and -remained there some time, "on account of the epidemic plague which was -then reigning in the city of London[447]." Two years after, 1439, comes -the entry in the Rolls of Parliament, already quoted, with reference to -omitting the ceremony of kissing the king, because "a sickness called the -Pestilence universally through this your realm more commonly reigneth than -hath been usual before this time, the which is an infirmity most -infective[448]." Thus we have in the decade from 1430 to 1440 no fewer -than four distinct outbreaks of plague, three of them confined to the city -of London, and one of them, that of 1439, general throughout the realm. -The last was "a sickness called the pestilence," which should mean the -bubo-plague. The year was one of great distress abroad, many thousands -having died in Paris. It was a year of famine in Scotland, where the -disease was undoubtedly dysentery in part; but the information from -Scotland (given in the sequel) points to the true plague supervening on -the other. There was famine in England at the time when it was in France -and in Scotland, so that the type of sickness may have been, in England -also, fever and dysentery first and plague afterwards. - -In 1444, on the 5th of June, the Rolls contain the entry that grave -pestilence began to arise. A severe pestilence is reported at Oxford in -1448[449]. On the 30th May, 1449, Parliament is adjourned to Winchester -to avoid "the corrupt and infected airs" of Westminster. On the 6th -November of the same year it adjourns to Ludgate, in the city of London, -owing to the infection of the air in Westminster. The infected state of -Westminster and other places around is again the subject of an entry on -the 4th December, with this addition: "it has been sufficiently decreed as -to avoiding and extinguishing the said corrupt and infectious air." About -three months later, on 30th March, 1450, Parliament adjourns to Leicester -on account of the insalubrity of the air at Westminster. In 1452 it -adjourns on 20th November to Reading for the same reason, but is soon -after adjourned to the 11th February, owing to plague in Reading -itself:--"de magna mortalitate in dicta villa de Redyng jam regnante." -These years must have been a really severe plague-period, for we find in -1454, a reference in the Paston Letters to the alarm caused by the plague -in London. Wm. Paston writes to John Paston, 6 September: "Sergeant-at-law -Billing came to London this week. He sent for me and asked me how I fared. -I told him, here is pestilence, and said I fared the better he was in good -hele, for it was noised that he was dead.... Here is great pestilence. I -purpose to flee into the country[450]." - -From 1454 (and the year following in Scotland) there is a clear interval -of ten years without mention of plague in the not very complete records of -the time. With the year 1464 there began a series of outbreaks of plague -which appear to have lasted in one part of the country or another with few -intermissions until 1478. This plague-period is said to have been foretold -in a remarkable prophecy. In the year 1462 a boy at Cambridge, while -walking in a lane between King's College and the adjoining buildings of -Clare and Trinity Halls, met an old man with a long beard, who addressed -him thus: "Go now and tell to anyone that within these two years there -will be such pestilence, and famine, and slaughter of men, as no one -living has seen." Having said this he disappeared. Doubts however, were -at once thrown on the reality of these words; for the boy, on being -questioned by Master Myleton, doctor of theology, and others, said that he -neither saw the old man walking on the ground nor heard him speak[451]. - -The authentic intelligence of plague in England in 1464 is contained in a -letter to the Seignory of Venice from Bruges, dated 5th October, 1464, to -the effect that some Venetian merchants have arrived from London, which -they had quitted on the 26th September. They say the plague is at work -there at the rate of two hundred [deaths] per diem, "and thus writes -[also] Carlo Ziglio." In April next year, 1465, we hear of it still in -London, through a casual reference in a letter written by one of the -Paston family[452]; and as prevailing all over England, through a formal -entry in the chronicle of Croyland, the last of the monastic records which -continued to be kept. There was an infection of the air, we read, in the -whole of England, so that many thousands of people of every age came to -their death suddenly, like sheep slaughtered[453]. - -The very next year, 1466, Parliament is adjourned from Westminster on -account of the infection in London, to meet at Reading. Next summer, 1st -July, 1467, there is another adjournment to Reading (6 November), because -of the heat and because the plague was beginning to reign, by which -certain members of the House of Commons had been cut off. After an -interval of four years we hear of plague, in a Paston letter, and by a -Southwell record. On 2 August, 1471, the residentiary canons of Southwell -Minster vote themselves leave of absence for a month "quia regnat morbus -pestiferus in villa Southwell, et furit excessive morbus pestiferus[454]." -On 13 September, 1471, Sir John Paston writes from near Winchester: "I -cannot hear by pilgrims that pass the country, nor none other man that -rideth or goeth any country, that any borough town in England is free from -that sickness. God cease it when it please him!" Apart from London the -English town which has the most disastrous record for this period is -Hull[455]. The plague was so severe there, in three epidemics close -together, as almost to ruin the place. It broke out in 1472, and had swept -off a great number of the inhabitants before the end of the year, -including the mayor. In 1476 it broke out afresh, causing a great -mortality. In 1478 it was more violent than ever, the number of its -victims being given as 1580, including the mayor and all his family; the -people fled the town, the church was shut up, and the streets deserted and -grass-grown. The epidemic appears to have been, as usual, an autumnal one, -ceasing at the approach of winter. Meanwhile, in 1474, there is mention of -a serious prevalence of plague in the Royal household, as well as -elsewhere in London. The weather of the previous autumn, 1473, had been -remarkable. Labourers are said to have died in the harvest-field from the -excessive heat, and "fervues, axes, and the bloody flyx" (fevers, agues, -and dysentery) to have been universal in divers parts of England; but -there was no dearth. The unusual character of that season, or of the -season preceding, was indicated by the bursting forth of underground -reservoirs of water[456]. - -The great plague of this period in London should most probably be placed -under the years 1478-9. Merely to show the difficulties of the chronology -it may be worth while citing the various accounts. The Greyfriars' -Chronicle says, under the year 17 Edward IV., that the term was "deferred -from Ester to Michaelmas because of the grete pestylens[457]." The 17th of -Edward IV. was 1477. But Fabyan, who was now a citizen of London -(afterwards sheriff and alderman), enters it under the civic year 1478-79, -or the year which begins for him with the new lord mayor taking office on -30 October. His words are: "This year was great mortality and death in -London and many other parts of this realm, the which began in the latter -end of Senii [September] in the preceding year and continued in this year -till the beginning of November, in the which passed time died innumerable -people in the said city and many places elsewhere[458]." Grafton says, -under the year 1478, that the chief mortality fell in four months of great -heat, during which the pestilence was so fierce and quick that fifteen -years' war had not consumed a third as many people[459]. To reconcile -these dates we should have to take the year of the Greyfriars' Chronicle -as 1478, so that the adjournment of the term from Easter to Michaelmas, -might suit the four months in Grafton. At the same time, Fabyan's -statement that the plague "continued in this year till November," is -correct for 1479. Sir John Paston writes home from London, 29 Oct. 1479, -of his danger from the sickness; he died there on 15th November; and his -brother, who came up from Norfolk to bury him, writes to his mother, who -wished him "to haste out of the air that he was in," that the sickness is -"well ceased" in December. - -The year 1478, the first of two plague-seasons in London, was also a year -of plague at Hull, and at Newcastle and Southwell. The account for -Newcastle, in its annals under 1478, is merely that great numbers died of -the plague[460]. At Southwell, on 5 July, 1478, the canons residentiary -again take leave of absence for the summer, "because it may be probably -estimated that the dire pestilential affliction in the town of Southwell -will continue, and because the venerable men, with their domestics, have a -just fear of incurring the infection of the said pestiferous -affliction[461]." Next year, 1479, an "incredible number" died of plague -at Norwich[462], and at villages like Swainsthorp, where "they have died -and been sick nigh in every house[463]." - -Thus in two years, 1478-79, we hear of an epidemic of plague of the first -rank in London, an epidemic most severe for the size of the place, at -Hull, and epidemics at Southwell, Newcastle and Norwich. This is not -unlike the plague-years that we often find in the centuries following. -Whether it be that we are merely coming to a time of better records, or -that the disease itself was getting worse in English towns, these later -years of Edward IV. are comparable to plague-periods under the Tudors and -the Stuarts. - -The period from the Black Death of 1349 to the reign of Edward IV. -witnesses a considerable change in the habits, so to speak, of plague in -England. In the earlier part of that period, the epidemics of -"pestilence"--although they were not all of plague or wholly of -plague--are general throughout England, like the great mortality itself -but on a smaller scale. As late as 1407, or perhaps 1439, we still hear of -"the disease called the pestilence" being universal and in the homes of -the peasantry. The extent of the sickness in 1465, or even the type of it, -is not sufficiently known. From that time onwards town and country are -contrasted in the matter of plague; it becomes usual to flee to the -country so as to escape the pestilential air in town in the summer heats, -and the unwholesomeness of the London air becomes on numerous occasions a -real reason, or a pretext, for the adjournment of Parliament. All the -while, the plague was the lineal descendant of the Black Death,--a virus -so potent on its first entry into English soil as to overrun every parish -of the land. - - -Plague and other pestilences in Scotland and Ireland, 1349-1475. - -The materials for the history of plague in Scotland, including the Black -Death and subsequent outbreaks down to the end of the medieval period, are -much fewer than for England. From the English chroniclers (Knighton and Le -Baker) we learn that the Black Death in the autumn of 1349 extended from -the northern counties to the Scots army in the Forest of Selkirk. -According to Fordoun, plague would have been general in Scotland in 1350; -but as he includes in his reference "several years before and after" and -"divers parts of the world," his statement that nearly a third part of the -human race paid the debt of nature is perhaps a mere echo of the general -estimate and without reference specially to Scotland[464]. His next -general reference to pestilence is under the year 1362, when the same -kind of disease and the same extent of mortality as in 1350 occurred -throughout all Scotland[465]. But as he says elsewhere that the visit of -David, king of Scots, to Aberdeenshire in 1361, when he took Kildrummy -Castle from the earl of Mar, was determined in the first instance by the -prevalence of plague in the southern part of his kingdom[466], it may be -inferred that the epidemic had begun late in that year in the south, -coincident with the _pestis secunda_ of England, and had been interrupted -by the coming on of winter, as in the first epidemic of 1349 and 1350. The -next mortality recorded by Fordoun he names the fourth (_quarta -mortalitas_) and assigns to 1401[467]. The question arises as to the -third; and it appears that there were indeed two plague-years in Scotland -between 1362 and 1401--namely, 1380 and 1392, both of them corresponding -nearly to great plagues in the north of England. In the former year sir -John Lyon, lord of Glamis, was unable to hold his court as auditor of the -exchequer in certain places owing to the plague[468]. In 1392, also, the -custumars of Haddington, Peebles, and Dumbarton did not attend the -"chamberlain ayres" on account of the pestilence[469]. In 1402 (not in -1401, as Fordoun has it), the custumars of Stirling were absent from the -audit by reason of the plague[470]; and in the same financial year (10 -July, 1402, to 18 July, 1403), only one bailie from Dundee attended the -audit at Perth, the others being dead in the pestilence[471]. - -For a whole generation there is no documentary evidence of plague in -Scotland. But Fordoun has two entries of a disease which he calls -_pestilentia volatilis_--it can hardly have been plague and may have been -influenza--the one in 1430, having begun at Edinburgh in February, and the -other in 1432 at Haddington[472]. - -Under the year 1439, an old chronicle, _Ane Addicioun of Scottis -Cornicklis and Deidis_ records one of those seasons of famine and -dysentery or lientery, with some more sudden sickness, which have been -described for England in a former chapter. "The samen time there was in -Scotland a great dearth, for the boll of wheat was at 40_s._, and the boll -of ait meal 30_s._; and verily the dearth was sae great that there died a -passing [number of] people for hunger. And als the land-ill, the wame-ill, -was so violent, that there died mae that year than ever there died, owther -in pestilence, or yet in ony other sickness in Scotland. And that samen -year the pestilence came in Scotland, and began at Dumfries, and it was -callit the _Pestilence but Mercy_, for there took it nane that ever -recoverit, but they died within twenty-four hours[473]." Here the -"land-ill" or "wame-ill" (dysentery or lientery) is contrasted within "the -pestilence," which latter is said to have supervened the same year, -beginning at Dumfries and proving peculiarly deadly. This was a year of -plague, said to be "universal," in England (where famine also was severe), -and of an enormous mortality in France. - -The continuator of Fordoun records under the year 1455 (James II.) a great -pestilential mortality of men through the whole kingdom, an epidemic which -would be again a year behind the corresponding plague in England[474]. We -hear of it next definitely in the year 1475, which falls within the series -of plague-years at Hull, and elsewhere in the southern part of the island. -On account of an outbreak of pestilence the king of Scots adjourned the -meeting of the estates from September 1475 to the Epiphany following[475], -when the Parliament actually met. The same year there was a -plague-hospital on Inchkeith, in the Firth of Forth, and not for the first -time; ten marts from the Orkneys were landed there for the quarantined -patients[476]. - -The references to plague in Scotland begin again about the year 1498; but -these, according to the division of our subject, will come into another -chapter. - -The references to plagues in Ireland after the invasion of 1349 are -extremely meagre; but they make it probable that outbursts of bubo-plague -recurred at intervals, as well as occasional epidemics of flux and other -diseases brought on by scarcity or bad corn. The continuators of Clyn's -Kilkenny annals enumerate various _pestes_--_secunda_, _tertia_, _quarta_ -and _quinta_--just as the English annalists do. The _secunda_ falls in -1362, its season in Scotland also[477]. The _tertia_ is given under 1373; -but also under 1370[478]. The _quarta_ is in 1382 (or 1385), and the -_quinta_ in 1391. But there is little or no independent evidence that this -chronology, originally made for England, is really good for Ireland also. -The only other entry, until the Tudor period, is "fames magna in Hibernia" -in 1410[479]. - - - - -CHAPTER V. - -THE SWEATING SICKNESS. - - -The strange disease which came to be known all over Europe as _sudor -Anglicus_, or the English Sweat, was a new type or species of infection -first seen in the autumn of 1485. Polydore Virgil, an Italian scholar and -man of affairs, who arrived in England in 1501, became, in effect, the -court historian of Henry VII.'s reign, and of the events which led up to -the overthrow of Richard III. at Bosworth Field on the 22nd of August -1485; his account of the movements of Henry Tudor, from his landing at -Milford Haven on Saturday the 6th of August until his triumphal entry into -London on Saturday the 27th of the same month, is so minute that he must -be assumed to have had access to journals written at the time. Polydore's -account of the sweat begins with the statement that it showed itself on -the first descent of Henry upon the island--_sub primum descensum in -insulam_[480]. The last continuator of the ancient chronicle of Croyland -abbey, who was still making his entries when Bosworth Field was fought, -not far from Croyland, and who closed his annals the year after, records -an incident which seems to show that the sweat had been prevalent before -the battle. Thomas, lord Stanley, lay at Atherstone, not far from -Bosworth, with five thousand men nominally in the service of Richard, and -was summoned by the king to bring up his force before the battle. He -excused himself, says the Croyland annalist, on the ground that he was -suffering from the sweating sickness[481]. I shall examine that evidence, -and the general statement of Polydore Virgil, in a later part of this -chapter. Meanwhile we may take it that the outbreak of the sweat was -somehow associated in popular rumour with the victorious expedition of -Henry Tudor. Writers on the English sweat hitherto have had to depend on -the somewhat meagre and not always consistent statements of annalists for -their knowledge of its first authentic occurrence. I am now able to adduce -the testimony of a manuscript treatise on the new epidemic, written by a -physician while it was still prevalent in London, and elaborately -dedicated to Henry VII., if not composed by his order[482]. The author is -Thomas Forrestier, styled in the title a Doctor of Medicine and a native -of Normandy, tarrying in London. Whatever his relation with the Tudor -court may have been, his name does not occur in the patents as one of the -king's physicians. It appears, indeed, that he had got into trouble in -London some two years after this date; for, on the 28th of January, 1488, -the king granted to him a general pardon, "with pardon for all escapes and -evasions out of the Tower of London or elsewhere, and remissions of -forfeiture of all lands and goods[483]." Probably he went back after this -to his native Normandy: at all events, he is next heard of in practice at -Rouen, where he published, in 1490, a Latin treatise on the plague, one of -the first productions of the printing-press of that city. - -It is in the opening sentences of his printed book on the plague[484], and -not in his manuscript on the sweat, that he fixes the date when the latter -began. The sweating sickness, he says, first unfurled its banners in -England in the city of London, on the 19th of September, 1485; and then -follow in the text certain astrological signs, representing the positions -or conjunctions of heavenly bodies on that date. The London chronicles of -the time assign dates for the beginning of the epidemic which differ -somewhat from Dr Forrestier's. One of them, a manuscript of the Cotton -collection, by an anonymous citizen of London, records the entry of Henry -VII. into the capital on the 27th of August, and proceeds: "And the XXVII -day of September began the sweating syknes in London, whereof died Thomas -Hyll that yer mayor, for whom was chosen sir William Stokker, knyght, -which died within V days after of the same disease. Then for him was -chosen John Warde.... And this yere died of that sickness, besides ii -mayors above rehersed, John Stokker, Thomas Breten, Richard Pawson, Thomas -Norland, aldermen, and many worshipful commoners[485]." In the better -known but not always equally full chronicle of Fabyan, who was then a -citizen, and afterwards sheriff and alderman, the date of Henry's -reception by the mayor and citizens at Hornsey Park is given as the 28th -of August, the reference to the sweat being as follows: "And upon the XI -day of Octobre next following, than beynge the swetynge sykeness of newe -begun, dyed the same Thomas Hylle, mayor, and for him was chosen sir -William Stokker, knyght and draper, which dyed also of the sayd sickness -shortly after." The only other particular date extant for the sweat of -1485 comes from the country: Lambert Fossedike, abbot of Croyland, died -there of the sweating sickness, after an illness of eighteen hours, on the -14th of October[486]. - -Apart from the hitherto unknown manuscript of Forrestier, these are the -only contemporary references. Stow, who must have had access to some -journal of the time, says that the king entered London on the 27th August -and that "the sweating began the 21st September, and continued till the -end of October, of the which a wonderful number died," including the two -mayors and four other aldermen, as above. Hall's chronicle, which has been -the principal source used by Hecker and others, reproduces the account of -the sweat by Polydore Virgil almost word for word; and Polydore's account -was certainly not begun until after 1504 and was not published until 1531. -Bernard Andre, historiographer and poet laureate of Henry VII., was -present at the entry into London on the 27th August; but he gives no -particulars of the sweat of that autumn, in his 'Life of Henry VII.,' -although it is probable that his 'Annals of Henry VII.' would have -furnished some information had they not been lost for the year 1485, as it -is to his extant annals for the year 1508 that we owe almost all that is -known of the second epidemic of the sweat in that year. The state papers -of the time do not contain a single reference to the epidemic, although it -was so active in the city of London as to carry off two mayors and four -aldermen within a few days, and was besides, as Polydore Virgil says, "a -new kind of disease, from which no former age had suffered, as all agree." -London was full of people, including some who had stood by Henry Tudor in -France, others who had joined his standard in Wales, and still others who -came to do homage to the new dynasty; and there is evidence remaining of -hundreds of suitors, great and small, attending the court to receive the -reward of their services in patents and grants, as well as evidence in the -wardrobe accounts of the bustle of preparing for the Coronation on the -30th of October. But in all the extant state records of those busy weeks, -there is not a scrap of writing to show that such a thing as a pestilence -was raging within the narrow bounds of the city and under the walls of the -royal palace in the Tower. It remains, therefore, to make what we can out -of the medical essay which Dr Forrestier wrote for the occasion. - -In his later reference of 1490, he says that more than fifteen thousand -were cut off in sudden death, as if by the visitation of God, many dying -while walking in the streets, without warning and without being confessed. -That number of the dead need not be taken as at all exact: nor does it -appear whether it is meant for London or for the whole country. But the -dramatic suddenness of the attack is illustrated by particular cases in -his original treatise of 1485, although deaths so sudden are unheard of in -any infection:-- - - "We saw two prestys standing togeder and speaking togeder, and we saw - both of them dye sodenly. Also in die--proximi we se the wyf of a - taylour taken and sodenly dyed. Another yonge man walking by the - street fell down sodenly. Also another gentylman ryding out of the - cyte [date given] dyed. Also many others the which were long to - rehearse we have known that have dyed sodenly." Gentlemen and - gentlewomen, priests, righteous men, merchants, rich and poor, were - among the victims of this sudden death. Of the symptoms he says: "And - this sickness cometh with a grete swetyng and stynkyng, with rednesse - of the face and of all the body, and a contynual thurst, with a grete - hete and hedache because of the fumes and venoms." He mentions also - "pricking the brains," and that "some appear red and yellow, as we - have seen many, and in two grete ladies that we saw, the which were - sick in all their bodies and they felt grete pricking in their bodies. - And some had black spots, as it appeared in our frere (?) Alban, a - noble leech on whose soul God have mercy!" - -Both in his pathology and in his copious appendix of formulae he directs -attention to the heart, as the organ that was suddenly overpowered by the -pestilential venoms. Many died, he would have us believe, because they -listened to the false leeches, who professed to know the disease and to -have treated it before. A considerable part of his space is occupied with -the denunciation of these irregular practitioners, their greed and their -ignorance,--a theme which is a common one in the prefaces of Elizabethan -medical works also. It appears that the false leeches wrote and put -letters upon gates and church doors, or upon poles, promising to help the -people in their sickness. They were also injudicious in the choice of -their remedies--some ordaining powders and medicines that are hot until -the thirtieth degree and over, others ale or wine, or hot spices, "and -many other medicines they have, the which, the best of them, is nothing -worth." These false leeches knew not the causes,--their complexions, their -ages, the regions, the times of the year, the climate,--evidently the -astrological lore which gave Chaucer's physician, a century earlier, his -academical standing or his superiority to the vulgar quacks of his day. -Those who fell into the hands of quacks, Forrestier implies, had an -indifferent chance. Many died for want of help and good guiding; whereas -many a one was healed that had received a medicine in due order, "and if -he purge himself before." The clearly written and fully detailed formulae -at the end of his essay are so far evidence that Forrestier did not -traffic in secret remedies. The first part of the essay is occupied with -the doctrine of causes--the nigh causes and the far. The far causes were -astrological; but the nigh causes, although they are altogether inadequate -to account for sweating sickness as a special type, and are indeed little -else than the stock list of nuisances quoted in earlier treatises upon the -plague, are suggestive enough of the condition of London streets and -houses at the time, and will be referred to in a later part of the -chapter. - -The account of the treatment given by Polydore Virgil, and from him copied -into Hall's chronicle, is probably the experience of later epidemics of -the sweat, although it comes into the history under the year 1485. The -evil effects of throwing off the bed-clothes, and of drinking great -draughts of cold water, and, on the other hand, the benefits of lying -still with the hands and feet well covered, are among the topics discussed -in letters during the epidemic of 1517, one of those which came within the -historian's own experience in England. But it is clear from Forrestier's -essay of 1485 that there were great differences in the regimen of patients -in the sweat during its very first season, some adopting the hot and -cordial treatment, others, perhaps, the cooling, just as in the smallpox -long after. Bernard Andre implies that there was a correct and an -incorrect regimen also in the second epidemic of 1508, and there is -evidence of conflicting advice in the letters on the sweats of 1517 and -1528. If there were any better regimen in the later epidemics than in the -earlier, as Polydore Virgil says there was, it was merely the wisdom of -avoiding extremes. Hence the misleading character of his remark that, -after an immense loss of life, "a remedy was found, ready to hand for -everyone." Bacon in his 'Reign of Henry VII.' took from Polydore almost -word for word all that he says of the "remedy" of the sweat; and the -unreal word-spinning thus begun was carried to its full development by -bishop Sprat, the historian of the Royal Society (1667), who mistakes the -"remedy" for some _arcanum_ or potent drug, gives my lord Verulam the -credit of preserving the prescription for the use of posterity, and -adduces it as an encouragement to the Royal Society to seek among the -secrets of nature for an equally efficacious "antidote" to the plague. - -The language of historians is that the sweat of 1485 spread over the whole -kingdom. We hear of it definitely at Oxford[487] where it "lasted but a -month or six weeks" and is said to have cut off many of the scholars -before they could disperse. It is heard of also with equal definiteness at -Croyland abbey. There is also mention of it in a contemporary calendar of -the mayor of Bristol, but without any special reference to that city[488]. -Beyond these notices, there appears to be nothing to show that the sweat -went all through England in the late autumn or early winter of 1485. But -we may take the following passage by Forrestier, in the dedication of his -tract to the king, as expressing the state of matters, with perhaps some -exaggeration: - - "When that thy highness and thy great power is vexed and troubled with - divers sickness, and thy lordships and almost the middle part of thy - realm with the venomous fever of pestilence, and, by the reason of - that, young and old and of all manner of ages, with divers wailings - and sadness they are stricken: therefore, excellent and noble prince, - we are moved with every love and duty, and not for no lucre neither - covetyse, to ordain a short governing against this foresaid - fever[489]." - - -The Second Sweat in 1508. - -After the first outburst of the sweat in 1485 had subsided, probably -before winter was well begun, nothing more is heard of it for twenty-three -years. It reappeared in 1508, a third time in 1517, a fourth time in 1528, -and for the last time in 1551. With each successive outbreak, our -information becomes less meagre, while the epidemic of 1551 actually -called forth an English printed book by Dr Caius, the epidemic of 1528 -having called forth a whole crop of foreign writings on its spreading to -the continent (for the first and only time) in the year following (1529). -As the nature, causes, and favouring circumstances of the sweat cannot -profitably be dealt with except on a review of its whole history, it will -be necessary to take up at once and together the four subsequent epidemics -of it in this country, leaving the intercurrent and probably much more -disastrous epidemics of bubo-plague, during the same period, as well as -the great invasion of syphilis in 1494-6, to be chronicled apart. - -Our knowledge of the second outbreak of the sweat, in 1508[490], comes -almost exclusively from Bernard Andre, whose _Annals of Henry VII._[491] -are fortunately preserved for that year (as they are also for 1504-5). -Under the date of July, 1508, he says that some of the household of the -Lord Treasurer were seized with the sweat, and died of it, "and everywhere -in this city there die not a few." In August public prayers were made at -St Paul's on account of the plague of sweat. In the same month the king's -movements from place to place in the country round London are described as -determined by the prevalence of the sweat. From Hatfield, whither he had -gone to visit his mother on the 9th August, he went to Wanstead, where -certain of his household "sweated;" on that account the king moved to -Barking, and thence to other places about the 14th. He avoided Greenwich -and Eltham, in both which places the chief personages of the royal palaces -"had sweated," so much did the sickness then rage in all places (_per -omnia loca_). Some of the king's personal attendants appear to have caught -the infection; nor did it avail, says Andre, to run away or to follow the -chase, _quoniam mors omnia vincit_. Other visits were paid down to the -17th August, and a strict edict was issued that no one from London was to -come near the court, nor anyone to repair to the city, under penalties -specified. The only one near the king's person who died of it was lord -Graystock, a young Cumberland noble. The Lord Privy Seal and the Lord -Chamberlain were both attacked but recovered; doctor Symeon, the dean of -the Chapel Royal, died of it. There appears to have been a good deal of -the sickness in various places, but many recovered, says Andre, with good -tending. The king occupied himself with hunting the stag in the forests at -Stratford, Eltham and other places round London. - -From the provinces there is one item of information relating to -Chester[492]: in the summer of 1507, it is said, the sweating sickness -destroyed 91 in three days, of whom only four were women. At Oxford in -1508, or the year before Henry VII.'s death, there was a sore pestilence -which caused the dispersion of divers students; but it is not called the -sweat[493]. - - -The Third Sweat in 1517. - -Except for a single reference to the sweat in 1511, nothing is heard of it -between the autumn of 1508 and the summer of 1517. The reference in 1511 -occurs in a letter of Erasmus, from Queens' College, Cambridge, dated 25th -August, in which he says that his health is still indifferent _a sudore -illo_. This may possibly refer to the lingering effects of an attack in -1508, or to the influenza of 1510; and as all the other references in 1511 -are to plague, and to alarms of plague, it may be doubted if the sweating -sickness had really been prevalent in England in that year, or at any time -between 1508 and 1517. We begin to hear of it definitely in the summer of -the latter year. We have now reached a period from which numerous letters, -despatches and other state papers have come down[494]. Among the most -useful of these for our purpose are the despatches of the Venetian -ambassador and the apostolic nuncio from London, the letters of Pace to -Wolsey when Henry VIII. was in the country and the cardinal not with him, -the letters of Erasmus, sir Thomas More and others. - -The first that we hear of sickness in London in 1517 is from a letter of -the 24th June, written by a cardinal of Arragon to Wolsey, from Calais; -the cardinal, who was travelling like a noble, with a train of forty -horses, had intended to visit London, but was waiting on the other side -owing to a rumour that the sickness was prevalent in London. It is -probable that this rumour had referred to the standing infection of -English towns in summer and autumn, the bubo-plague; for it is not until -five weeks later that we hear of the sweating sickness under its proper -name. - -On the 1st of August the nuncio writes from London to the marquis of -Mantua that a disease is broken out here causing sudden death within six -hours; it is called the sweating sickness; an immense number die of it. On -the 6th of August he occupies the greater part of a letter of three pages -with an account of it. To some it proved fatal in twelve hours, to others -in six, and to others in four; it is an easy death. Most patients are -seized when lying down, but some when on foot, and even a very few when -riding out. The attack lasts about twenty-four hours, more or less. It is -fatal to take, during the fit, any cold drink, or to allow a draught of -air to reach the drenching skin; the covering should be rather more ample -than usual, but there was danger in heaping too many bed-clothes on the -patient. A moderate fire should be kept up in the sick chamber; the arms -should be crossed on the patient's breast, and great care should be taken -that no cold air reached the armpits[495]. The disease was on the -increase, and was already spreading over England; it was reported that -more than four hundred students had died of it at Oxford, which was a -small place but for the university there. Burials were occurring on every -side; there had been many deaths in the king's household and in that of -cardinal Wolsey, who was in the country "sweating." Such is the universal -dread of the disease that there are very few who do not fear for their -lives, while some are so terrified that they suffer more from fear than -others do from the sweat itself. - -On the same day (6th August), the Venetian ambassador, Sebastian -Giustinian, who was on friendly terms with the nuncio and often indebted -to him for information, writes to the Doge giving much the same account of -"the new malady." He remarks upon the sudden onset, the rapidity of the -issue when it was to be fatal, and the cessation of the sweat within -twenty-four hours. His secretary had taken it, as well as many of his -domestics. Few strangers are dead, but an immense number of Englishmen. On -going to visit Wolsey, he found that he had the sweat; many of the -cardinal's household had died of it, including some of his chief -attendants; the bishop of Winchester also had taken it. On the 12th of -August, the Venetian envoy writes that he himself and his son have had the -sweat; Wolsey has had it three times in a few days, many of his people -being dead of it, especially his gentlemen[496]. In London "omnes silent." - -Wolsey's attack and relapses are confirmed by his own letter to the king; -about the end of August he went on a pilgrimage to Walsingham, and -remained there most of September, but even after his return he was "vexed -with fever." The relapses of the sweat, which are mentioned by Forrestier -in 1485, by Andre in 1508, and now again in 1517, may have been the origin -of the saying in the form of a proverb, which occurs in an essay of the -time by sir Thomas More,--that the relapse is worse than the original -disease[497]. - -The death of a well-known personage, Ammonio, the Latin secretary of the -king, is the subject of several letters, including one of the 19th August -from More to Erasmus; he died at nine on the morning of the 17th August, -after an illness of twenty hours: he had been congratulating himself on -being safe by reason of his temperate life. More confirms the statement as -to deaths in the university of Oxford, and he adds also at Cambridge. In -London the sweat attacks whole families: "I assure you there is less -danger in the ranks of war than in this city." His own family (? in -Bucklersbury) are safe so far, and he has composed his mind for any -eventuality. He hears that the sweat is now at Calais. On the 27th August, -the Venetian envoy writes again that the disease is now making great -progress; the king keeps out of the way at Windsor, with only three -favourite gentlemen and Dionysius Memo, who is described as his physician, -but in other letters as "the Reverend," and as a musician from Venice. On -the 21st September the envoy has gone to the country to avoid "the plague -_and_ the sweating sickness." A few days later (26th Sept.) he writes that -"the plague" is making some progress, and that the prolonged absence of -the king, the cardinal and other lords from London owing to the sweat, had -encouraged the citizens to a turbulent mood against the foreign traders -and residents; the state of matters was so threatening that three thousand -citizens were under arms to preserve the peace. The references after -September, 1517, are mostly to the "common infection" or plague, which was -an almost annual autumnal event in London. There was probably some -confusion, at the time, between that infection and the sweat, not, of -course as regards symptoms, but in common report; thus it is not clear -whether the fresh alarm in the king's court at or near Windsor on the 15th -October, owing to the deaths of young lord Grey de Wilton and a German -attendant of the king, refers to the sweat or to the plague. As late as -the 2nd November, a letter from the University of Oxford to Wolsey -excuses delay in answering his two letters on the ground of the sweating -sickness. - -The prevalence of "sudor tabificus" at Oxford in 1517 is known from other -sources as well: it is said to have caused "the dispersion and sweeping -away of most, if not all, of the students[498];" and the nuncio, writing -from London on the 6th of August, mentions the current but improbable -statement that more than four hundred students had died in less than a -week. - -Besides these from Oxford, there are hardly any notices of the 1517 sweat -in the country remote from London. A record at Chester mentions an -outbreak of "plague," which is taken to mean sweating sickness; it is said -also to have been "probably more serious than in 1507;" many died, others -fled; and the grass grew a foot high at the Cross[499]. But these are the -marks of true plague, which we know to have broken out in London, and in -country districts as well, in the autumn and winter of 1517, or almost as -soon as the short and sharp outburst of the sweat was past. - -Among the references to prevailing diseases on the continent in 1517, -besides sir Thomas More's rumour of the sweat in Calais, there is none -which would lead us to suppose that the distinctive English malady had -invaded Europe in that year. But there is a significant statement by -Erasmus, hitherto overlooked, which almost certainly points to an epidemic -of influenza on the other side of the North Sea the year after the sweat -was prevalent in England. It is known that there was a suddenly fatal form -of throat disease prevalent in the Netherlands that spring, which has been -taken to be diphtheria; but the malady to which Erasmus refers can hardly -have been the same as that. Writing from Louvain to Barbieri on the 1st -June, 1518, he says that a new plague is raging in Germany, affecting -people with a cough, and pain in the head and stomach, he himself having -suffered from it. The significance of that epidemic, assuming it to have -been influenza, will be dealt with in the sequel. - -By means of the foregoing contemporary notices of the sweat in 1517 we -are able to judge of the general accuracy of the summary of it in Hall's -chronicle, which has been hitherto almost the only source of information. -The sweat killed, he says, in three hours or two hours, which is something -of an exaggeration of the shortest duration mentioned by the nuncio and -the Venetian envoy in their letters of the 1st and 6th August. Another -general statement may be suspected of even greater exaggeration: "For in -some one town half the people died, and in some other town the third part, -the sweat was so fervent and the infection so great." The sweat lasted, he -says, to the middle of December. Stow, in his _Annals_, more correctly -states that the plague came in the end of the year, after the sweat. The -plague was much the more deadly infection of the two; but even plague and -sweat together, and at their worst, would hardly have destroyed one-half -or one-third of the inhabitants of a town. - - -The Fourth Sweat in 1528. - -As the despatches of the nuncio and the Venetian envoy in London give the -best accounts of the sweat of 1517, it is in the despatches of the French -ambassador, Du Bellay, that we find the most serviceable particulars of -the sweat in 1528. Du Bellay, bishop of Bayonne, and a witty diplomatist, -was in London through the whole of it, and during that time sent letters -to Paris, in three of which the sweat is a principal topic. From many -other state letters of the time various particulars may be gathered, and -in one letter by Brian Tuke, one of the king's ministers, we find some -theorizings about the disease. The outbreak befell at the time when Henry -VIII.'s passion for Mistress Anne Boleyn, sister to one of the ladies of -the Court, was waxing strong; it had the effect of parting the lovers for -several weeks, the distance between them having been bridged over by an -interchange of tender notes, of which those of the king remain open to the -prying eyes of posterity. - -The sweat is heard of as early as the 5th of June, 1528, when Brian Tuke -writes to Tunstall, bishop of London, that he had fled to Stepney "for -fear of the infection," a servant being ill at his house. The sickness -must have made little talk for some ten days longer. On the 18th June, Du -Bellay writes that it had made its appearance "within these four -days[500]." On the 16th, the king at Greenwich was alarmed by the -intelligence that a maid of Anne Boleyn's had been attacked by it[501]. He -left in great haste for Waltham, and sent the young lady to her father's -in Kent. "As yet," writes Du Bellay, "the love has not abated. I know not, -if absence and the difficulties of Rome may effect anything." The king -wrote to her at once: "There came to me in the night the most afflicting -news possible.... I fear to suffer yet longer that absence which has -already given me so much pain." He sends his second physician (Dr Butts) -to her. The alarm about her health seems to have been uncalled for just -then, although both she and her father caught the disease within a few -days. By the 18th June, according to the French envoy, some 2000 had -caught the sickness in London. It is, he says, a most perilous disease: -"one has a little pain in the head and heart; suddenly a sweat begins; and -a physician is useless, for whether you wrap yourself up much or little, -in four hours, sometimes in two or three, you are despatched without -languishing as in those troublesome fevers." The day before, on going to -swear the truce, he saw the people "as thick as flies rushing from the -streets or shops into their houses to take the sweat whenever they felt -ill.... In London, I assure you, the priests have a better time than the -doctors, except that the latter do not help to bury. If this thing goes -on, corn will soon be cheap. [The season was one of scarcity.] It is -twelve [eleven] years since there was such a visitation, when there died -10,000 persons in ten or twelve days; but it was not so bad as this has -been." Writing again, twelve days after, on the 30th June, he says that -some 40,000 had been attacked in London, only 2000 of whom had died; "but -if a man only put his hand out of bed during the twenty-four hours, it -becomes as stiff as a pane of glass"--that is to say, by keeping -themselves carefully covered, as we learn also from Polydore Virgil's -history and letters on the sweat of 1517, they greatly increased the -chance of recovery. In his third despatch, 21st July, he says the danger -begins to diminish hereabout and to increase elsewhere; in Kent it is very -great. Anne Boleyn and her father have sweated, but have got over it. The -notaries have had a fine time of it, nearly everyone having made his will, -as those who took the disease in its fatal form "became quite foolish the -moment they fell ill." His estimate of 100,000 wills is, of course, a -humorous exaggeration. The sweat had been at its height in London, -according to its wont, for only a few weeks, mostly in July. On the 21st -of August one writes from London that "the plague at this day is well -assuaged, and little or nothing heard thereof." From other parts of -England there are few particulars of the sweat of 1528. We hear of it at -Woburn on the 26th June, in a nunnery at Wilton on the 18th July, at -Beverley on the 22nd July--it is reported as very serious in Yorkshire -generally,--at Cambridge on the 27th July, and at several places in Kent -about the same date. The "infection" at Dover as late as the 27th -September may not have been the sweat, but the ordinary bubo-plague. But -it is probably to the sweat that the deaths of four priests and two -lay-brothers at Axholme, in Lincolnshire, are to be referred, as well as -the heavy mortality in the Charterhouse, London[502]. - -As in the previous sweat of 1517, the letters of the time give us many -glimpses of the invasion of great households in and around London, -including the king's. - -When the French ambassador was walking with Wolsey in his garden at York -Place (Whitehall) on a day in June, word was brought to the cardinal that -five or six of his household had taken the sweat, and the diplomatic -interview was brought to an abrupt end. Du Bellay writes again in July -that only four men in Wolsey's great house remained well. Among those in -his household who died of it were a brother of lord Derby and a nephew of -the duke of Norfolk. The cardinal, who had suffered from the sweat and its -relapses in 1517, fled from it to Hampton Court on the 30th June, and shut -himself up there with only a few attendants, having previously adjourned -the law courts and stopped the assizes. On the 21st of July, Du Bellay -writes that it was almost impossible to get access to Wolsey, and suggests -that he might have to speak with him at Hampton Court through a trumpet. -In the same letter the French ambassador refers to the circumstances of -his own attack when he was visiting the archbishop of Canterbury (Warham), -probably at Lambeth: "The day I sweated at my lord of Canterbury's, there -died eighteen persons in four hours, and hardly anyone escaped but myself, -who am not yet quite strong again." The bishop of London, Tunstall, writes -to Wolsey from Fulham on the 10th July, that thirteen of his servants were -sick of the sweat at once on St Thomas's day; he had caused the public -processions and prayers to be made, which the king had wished for on the -5th July. The governor of Calais writes on the 10th July: "The sweat has -arrived and has attacked many." Only two were dead, a Lancashire gentleman -and a fisherman; but in a second letter of the same night, four more are -dead, of whom two "were in good health yestereven when they went to their -beds." Various other letters about the same date make mention of personal -experiences of the sweat, or of domestics attacked, at country houses in -the home counties. The most minute accounts are those for the king's -household. - -On the 16th June the king had left Greenwich hurriedly for Waltham. In a -letter to Anne Boleyn, he writes that, when he was at Waltham, two ushers, -two valets-de-chambre, George Boleyn and Mr Treasurer (Fitzwilliam) fell -ill of the sweat, and are now quite well. "The doubt I had of your health -troubled me extremely, and I should scarcely have had any quiet without -knowing the certainty; but since you have felt nothing, I hope it is with -you as with us." He had removed to Hunsdon (on 20th or 21st June) "where -we are very well, without one sick person. I think if you would retire -from Surrey, as we did, you would avoid all danger. Another thing may -comfort you: few women have this illness, and moreover none of our court, -and few elsewhere, have died of it." When Brian Tuke went to Hunsdon on -the 21st June, the king spoke to him "of the advantages of this house, and -its wholesomeness at this time of sickness." Two days after, Tuke having -business with the king, found him "in secret communication with his -physician, Mr Chambre, in a tower where he sometimes sups apart." The king -conversed with his minister about the latter's ill-health (seemingly -stone), and showed him remedies, "as any most cunning physician in England -could do." As to the infection, the king spoke of how folk were taken, how -little danger there was if good order be observed, how few were dead, how -Mistress Anne and my lord Rochford (her father) both have had it, what -jeopardy they have been in by the turning in of the sweat before the time, -of the endeavours of Mr Butts who had been with them, and finally of their -perfect recovery. The king sends advice to Wolsey to use "the pills of -Rhazes" once a week, and, if it come to it, to sweat moderately and to the -full time, without suffering it to run in. But the king's optimist views -of the malady were quickly disturbed. William Cary, married to Anne -Boleyn's sister, died of the sweat suddenly at Hunsdon, having just -arrived from Plashey, and two others of the Chamber, Poyntz and Compton, -died about the same time either there or at Hertford, whither the king -removed. On the evening of the 26th June there fell sick at Hertford, the -marquis and marchioness of Dorset, sir Thomas Cheyney, Croke, Norris and -Wallop. The king hastily left for Hatfield, on the 28th June, where still -others appear to have taken the sickness. Du Bellay, writing on the 30th, -says all but one of the Chamber have been attacked. From Hatfield the king -went at once to Tittenhanger, a country house which belonged to Wolsey as -abbot of St Albans, and there he elected to take his chance of the sweat, -keeping up immense fires to destroy the infection. On the 7th July, Dr -Bell writes from Tittenhanger to Wolsey that "none have had the sweat here -these three days except Mr Butts." Two days later, however, the -marchioness of Exeter "sweated," and the king ordered all who were of the -marquis's company to depart, he himself removing as far as Ampthill, -whence he thought of removing on the 22nd July to Grafton, but was -prevented by the prevalence of the infection there. Shortly after Anne -Boleyn returned to the court. It is clearly to the period of her return -that an undated letter of hers to Wolsey belongs; after writing a few -formal lines to make interest with the cardinal, she took her letter to -the king for him to add a postscript, which was as follows: "Both of us -desire to see you, and are glad to hear you have escaped the plague so -well, trusting the fury of it is abated, especially with those that keep -good diet as I trust you do." - -Although the attacks mentioned in the correspondence of the time are many, -the deaths are few. A letter of Brian Tuke's to Wolsey's secretary, on the -14th July, takes a somewhat sceptical line about the whole matter. His -wife has "passed the sweat," but is very weak, and is broken out at the -mouth and other places. He himself "puts away the sweat" from himself -nightly (directly against the king's advice to him), though other people -think they would kill themselves thereby. He had done that during the last -sweat and this, feeling sure that, as long as he is not first sick, the -sweat is rather provoked by disposition of the time, and by keeping men -close, than by any infection, although the infection was a reality. -Thousands have it from fear, who need not else sweat, especially if they -observe good diet. He believes that it proceeds much of men's opinion. It -has been brought from London to other parts by report; for when a whole -man comes from London and talks of the sweat, the same night all the town -is full of it, and thus it spreads as the fame runs. Children, again, -lacking this opinion, have it not, unless their mothers kill them by -keeping them too hot if they sweat a little. It does not go to Gravelines -when it is at Calais, although people go from the one place to the other. - - -The English Sweat on the Continent in 1529[503]. - -Whether the sweat went at length to Gravelines or other places in that -direction does not appear; but there is abundant evidence that it showed -itself in the course of the following year (1529) in many parts of the -Continent, excepting France, and that its outbreak was often attended with -a heavy mortality. It was observed in Calais, as we have seen, on the 10th -of July, 1528. But it is not until the year after, on the 25th of July, -1529, that we hear of it again,--at Hamburg, where a thousand persons are -said to have died of it within four or five weeks, most of them within -nine days. On the 31st July it was at Luebeck, and about the same time at -Bremen and the neighbouring ancient town of Verden; on 14th August in -Mecklenburg; at Stettin on the 27th August, and at Wismar, Demmin, -Rostock, Stralsund, and Greifswald about the same date; in Danzig on the -1st September; Koenigsberg, on the 8th; and so eastwards to Livonia in -1530, and to Lithuania, Poland and Russia, the information for which -countries is vague. Copenhagen also suffered from it, and towns in the -interior of East Prussia, such as Thorn and Kulm. Meanwhile the sweat had -proceeded by way of Hanover and Goettingen, about the middle of August -afflicting also Brunswick, Lueneburg, Waldeck, Hadeln, Einbeck, Westphalia, -the valley of the Weser, and East Friesland. It reached Frankfurt on the -11th September, Worms shortly after, and Marburg at the end of the month, -breaking up the conference there between Luther and Zwingli, and their -respective adherents, on the doctrine of the Eucharist. Juelich, Liege and -Cologne were reached about the middle of September, and Speyer about the -24th, Augsburg (where there was a most severe and protracted epidemic) on -the 6th, Strasburg on the 24th. Freiburg in Breisgau, Muehlhausen and -Gebweiler in Alsace, in October. In November, the sickness overran -Wurtemberg, Baden, the Upper Rhine, the Palatinate, and the shores of the -Lake of Constance. Among the other German provinces visited in due order -were Franconia, Thuringia, Saxony, the Saxon Metal Mountains, Meissen, -Mannsfeld, Halberstadt, Magdeburg, Wittenberg, Lusatia, the Mark of -Brandenburg, and Silesia. In Vienna the sweat prevailed during the siege -by Sultan Soliman from the 22nd September to the 14th October. At Berne it -is heard of in December, and at Basle in January 1530. The Low Countries -had not been affected so soon as their nearness to England might have led -one to expect: the sickness is said to have approached them from the Rhine -in the latter half of September. They suffered severely, one of the -heaviest mortalities being reported for the town of Zierikzee, where three -thousand are said to have died subsequent to the 3rd of October, 1529. - -In this remarkable progress over the mainland of Europe, France was -conspicuously avoided. The sweat does not appear to have entered Spain, -nor to have crossed the Alps. But all the rest of the Continent, from the -Rhine to the Oder (if not farther east) and from the Baltic to the Alps, -was reached by the English sweat in much the same way as if it had been an -influenza reversing the order of its usual direction. There need be no -hesitation as to the correctness of the diagnosis; the disease was -described by several foreign writers from their own observation, and their -descriptions agree entirely with those of Forrestier, in 1485, of Polydore -Virgil, perhaps for the epidemics of 1508 and 1517, and of the -letter-writers who were describing the epidemic of the year before (1528), -as they saw it in and around London. The striking thing in the accounts -from the continent is the enormous range of its fatality; in some towns -the proportion of deaths to cases was hardly more than in influenza, while -in others it was the death-rate of a peculiarly pestilential or malignant -typhus; and those differences cannot have depended wholly upon the method -of treatment. - -These full accounts of the English sweat on the continent of Europe in -1529 are in striking contrast to the meagre records of it at home. They -were compiled first in 1805 from the numerous contemporary chronicles, and -printed pamphlets or fly-sheets on the sweat, by Gruner, professor at -Jena, in his _Itinerary of the English Sweat_, and his _Extant writers on -the English Sweat_, published in Latin[504]. In 1834 Hecker went over the -ground again in his well-known essay, improving somewhat upon the positive -erudition of Gruner, but at the same time hazarding a number of doubtful -interpretative statements, especially as to the sweat in England, for -which the meagreness of the English records then available may be his -excuse. The erudition of Gruner, Hecker and Haeser deserves every -acknowledgement; but it is of value more especially for the extension of -the sweat to the continent of Europe in 1529, where it had abundant -materials at its service, in chronicles, printed essays, and "regiments." -There are extant no fewer than twenty-one printed essays or sheets of -directions on the English sweat, which were issued from the German, -Netherlands, or Swiss presses between the month of October 1529 and the -month of June 1531, two or three of them being in Latin and most of them -brief summaries in the native tongue for popular use. The corresponding -epidemic in England did not call forth a single piece by any medical man, -so far as is known. Nor does the English treatment appear to have lost -anything thereby; for it was based upon the profitable experience of -previous epidemics as embodied in oral tradition. Down to the fifth -epidemic in 1551, the only English writing on the sweat so far as is known -was the manuscript of 1485, by Forrestier. Almost all that we know of the -epidemics in England in 1508, 1517 and 1528 comes from Bernard Andre's -annals and Polydore Virgil's history, and from the despatches of the -apostolic nuncio, the Venetian ambassador and the French ambassador. The -fifth and last outbreak, in 1551, called forth two native writings, one -for popular use in English in 1552, and another in Latin in 1555, both by -Dr Caius, physician to Henry VIII. and Edward VI.; these are indeed better -than nothing at all, but they are too much occupied with pedantry and -lugubrious rhetoric to be of much service for historical purposes[505]. -The information about the epidemic of 1551 is so scanty as to suggest that -the sickness in that year can hardly have been so severe as in 1528; the -state papers contain hardly anything relating to it, and we owe nearly all -our knowledge of it to the diary of Machyn, a citizen of London, to Edward -VI.'s diary, and to Dr Caius. Bills of mortality had been kept in London -for two or three weeks when the epidemic was at its height, from which -some totals of deaths are extant. - - -The Fifth Sweat in 1551. - -It was not in London that the sweat of 1551 began, but at Shrewsbury--on -the 22nd of March, according to the manuscript chronicle of that -town[506], or on the 15th of April, according to Caius[507]. No record -remains of its prevalence at Shrewsbury; the statement of Caius, that some -900 deaths had occurred in a single city corresponds to the facts for -London, and has no more reference to Shrewsbury (where Caius never -resided) than it has to Norwich (as in Blomefield's county history). The -strange influence in the air or soil advanced from Salop, as we learn from -Caius, by way of Ludlow, Presteign, Westchester, Coventry and Oxford, in -only one of which places is anything known of it except Caius's remark -that it proceeded "with great mortality." The best record of its -prevalence on the way from Shrewsbury to London occurs in the parish -register of Loughborough, in Leicestershire. Under the date of June, 1551, -the register has an entry that "the swat called New Acquaintance, alias -Stoupe! Knave and know thy Master, began on the 24th of this month." Then -follow the names of 12 persons who were buried in four days, and, on the -next page, under the heading of "The Sweat or New Acquaintance," the names -of 7 more, all buried in three days--making a total of 19 in six days, -presumably all dead of the sweat and presumably also the whole mortality -from it in Loughborough, which had far heavier mortalities from the common -plague in after years[508]. - -The date of its arrival at Oxford, on the way to London, is not known; but -a physician then resident there, Dr Ethredge, has left it on record that -it attacked sixty in Oxford in one night, and next day more than a hundred -in the villages around; very few died of it at Oxford, which showed that -the air of that university was more salubrious than at Cambridge, where -the two sons of the duchess of Suffolk died[509]. - -The sweat appeared suddenly in London about the beginning of July, and had -a short but active career of some three weeks. Deaths from it began to be -mentioned on the 7th, and are entered in the king's (Edward VI.'s) diary -as having amounted on the 10th to the number of 120, in the London -district, including "one of my nobles and one of my chamberlains," so that -"I repaired to Hampton Court with only a small company." The royal diarist -says that the victims fell into a delirium and died in that state[510]. On -the 18th July, the king, in Council at Hampton Court, issued an order to -the bishops, that they should "exhort the people to a diligent attendance -at common prayer, and so avert the displeasure of Almighty God, having -visited the realm with the extreme plague of sudden death[511]." - -The diary of a London citizen says that "there died in London many -merchants and great rich men and women, and young men and old, of the new -sweat[512]." On the 12th died Sir Thomas Speke, one of the king's -council, at his house in Chancery Lane; next day died Sir John Wallop "an -old knight and gentle[513]," the same who had survived an attack of the -sweat in 1528 when at Hertford with Henry VIII. It is not clear whether -some other deaths of notables in the same few days were due to the sweat. -Three independent statements are extant of the mortality in London which -had all been taken, doubtless, from the bills regularly compiled. One -gives the deaths "from all diseases" in London from the 8th to the 19th -July as 872, "no more in all, and so the Chancellor is certified[514];" -another gives the deaths "by the sweating sickness" from the 7th to the -20th July as 938[515]; and Caius gives the deaths from the 9th to the 16th -July as 761, "besides those that died on the 7th and 8th days, of whom no -register was kept[516];" by the 30th of July, 142, more had died, by which -time it had practically ceased in London[517]. Caius adds that it next -prevailed in the eastern and northern parts of England until the end of -August, and ceased everywhere before the end of September. The king, in a -letter of the 22nd August, written during his progress, says that the most -part of England at that time was clear of any dangerous or infectious -sickness[518]. Records at York make mention of a great plague in 1551, but -without describing it as the sweat[519]. The event which excited most -attention was the death by the sweat of the two sons of the widowed -duchess of Suffolk, the young duke Henry and his brother lord Charles -Brandon on the 16th of July. They had been taken from Cambridge, for fear -of the sweat, to the bishop of Lincoln's palace at Bugden, in -Huntingdonshire, their mother accompanying them; they fell ill -immediately upon their arrival, the elder dying after an illness of five -hours and his brother half an hour after him[520]. - -Besides the cases of the two noble youths and others at Cambridge[521], -there are no particulars of its prevalence in "the eastern and northern -parts of England" (Caius). But we hear of it in the register of a country -parish in Devonshire, under the same name of "Stup-gallant" as in the -Loughborough register; and it is probable that those two casual notices -indicate its diffusion all over England in the manner of influenza. That -conclusion may find some support in the statement of one Hancocke, -minister of Poole, Dorset, that "God had plagued this realm most justly -with three notable plagues: (1) The Posting Sweat, that posted from town -to town thorow England and was named 'Stop-gallant,' for it spared none. -For there were some dancing in the Court at nine o'clock that were dead at -eleven[522]." Its occurrence in Devonshire is proved by entries in the -parish register of Uffculme: the whole burials in the year 1551 are 38; -and of these no fewer than 27 occur in the first eleven days of August, -and 16 of them in three days, the disease of which those persons died -being named, in the register, "the hote sickness or stup-gallant[523]." - -Comparing these records of the sweat of 1551 with those of the years 1517 -and 1528, we may conclude that the latest of those three outbreaks was not -more severe than the earlier, and that, in the Court circle, it was -probably milder. The gloomy rhetoric of Caius had led Hecker to construct -a picture of its disastrous progress along the valley of the Severn, in -which there is not a single authentic detail. Caius says that he was a -witness of it, but that must have been in London; and the figures for -London, although they indicate a very sharp epidemic while it lasted, do -not suggest a mortality greater at least than that of 1528. The Venetian -ambassador in writing a general memoir on England four years after, says -that all business was suspended in London, the shops closed and nothing -attended to but the preservation of life; but as he makes a gross -exaggeration in stating the deaths in London at 5000 "during the three -first days of its appearance," we may take it that his impressions were -vague or his recollections grown dim[524]. - -Were it not for the isolated notices of the sweat in Leicestershire and -Devonshire, we should hardly have been able to realize that country towns -and villages had been visited by an epidemic which was appalling both by -its suddenness and by its fatality while it lasted. The name of -"Stop-gallant," by which it is called in these parish registers, shows the -sort of impression which it made; but so far as the mortality is -concerned, that was often equalled, if not exceeded, in after years by -forms of epidemic fever which had nothing of the sweating type, although -they might also have been called "stop-gallant," and indeed were so-called -in France (_trousse-galante_). - -Apart from the notices in parish registers, we have the generalities of Dr -Caius, which amount to no more than a funereal essay, in the scholastic -manner, upon the theme of sudden death. It may be doubted whether Caius -really knew the facts about the disease in the country. The 27 deaths -within a few days in a small Devonshire village and the 19 in six days in -a small Leicestershire town, are hardly to be reconciled with the -statement in his Latin treatise of 1555, that "women and serving folk, the -plebeian and humble classes, even the middle class," did not feel it, but -the "proceres" or upper classes did: they fled from it, he says, to -Belgium, France, Ireland and Scotland. It was for these that he was -chiefly concerned; and when he approaches his rhetorical task with the -remark that "nothing is more difficult than to find suitable words for a -great grief," we may take it that he was thinking rather of such moving -cases as that of the widowed duchess of Suffolk, who had lost her two sons -in one day, than of wide-spread sickness and death throughout the homes of -the people. - -Nothing more is heard of the sweat in England after the autumn of 1551, at -least not under that name. Francis Keene, an "astronomer," prophesied in -his almanack for 1575, that the sweat would return, "wherein he erred not -much," says Cogan[525], "as there were many strange fevers and nervous -sickness." Some years before that, in 1558 (a year after influenza -abroad), there prevailed in summer "divers strange and new sicknesses," -among which was a "sweating sickness," so described by Dr John Jones, who -had it at Southampton. We are, indeed, approaching the period of frequent -and widespread epidemics of fever and of influenza, in both which types of -disease sweating was occasionally a notable symptom, as in the influenza -of 1580 abroad, in the fatal typhus of 1644 at Tiverton, in the widespread -English fevers of 1658, and in the London typhus as late as 1750. How -those other types of fever, due as if to a "corruption of the air," are -related generically to the English sweat is a question upon which -something remains to be said before this chapter is concluded. But the -history of the English sweat comes to a definite end with the epidemic of -1551. Sweating sickness of the original sort was never again the _signum -pathognomicum_ of a whole epidemic of fever. The English Sweat became an -extinct species, after a comparatively brief existence on the earth of -sixty-six years. Its successors among the forms of pestilential disease -may have occasionally put forth the sweating character, as if in a sport -of nature; but the most of the travelling, or posting, or universal -fevers, and universal colds, are easily distinguished from the -sweat--_nova febrium terris incubuit cohors_[526]. - - -Antecedents of the English Sweat. - -The history of the English sweat presents to the student of epidemics much -that is paradoxical although not without parallel, and much that his -research can never rescue from uncertainty. Where did this hitherto -unheard of disease come from? Where was it in the intervals from 1485 to -1508, from 1508 to 1517, from 1517 to 1528, and from 1528 to 1551? What -became of it after 1551? Why did it fall mostly on the great houses,--on -the king's court, on the luxurious establishments of prelates and nobles, -on the richer citizens, on the lusty and well fed, for the most part -sparing the poor? Why did it avoid France when it overran the Continent in -1529? No theory of the sweat can be held sufficient which does not afford -some kind of answer to each of those questions, and some harmonizing of -them all. - -The history of Polydore Virgil is so well informed on all that relates to -the arrival in England of Henry VII. that we may accept as the common -belief of the time his two statements about the sweat, the first -associating it in some vague way with the descent of Henry upon Wales, and -the second pronouncing it a disease hitherto unheard of in England. Caius, -who wrote in 1552 and 1555, and can have had no other knowledge of the -events of 1485 than is open to a historical student of to-day, said that -the sweat "arose, so far as can be known, in the army of Henry VII., part -of which he had lately brought together in France, and part of which had -joined him in Wales." Hecker, the modern reconstructer of the history -(1834), has passed from the tradition of Polydore Virgil and of Caius, -clean into the region of conjecture in assuming that the sweat had arisen -among the French mercenaries on the voyage and on the march to Bosworth. -On the other hand, the one contemporary medical writer in 1485, -Forrestier, is explicit enough in his statement that the sweat "first -unfurled its banners in England in the city of London, on the 19th of -September," or some three weeks after Henry's entry into the city. There -is nowhere a hint that it was prevalent among the troops, whether French, -Welsh or English, who won the battle of Bosworth on the 22nd of August, -the only pretext for asserting that it was prevalent in the neighbourhood -before the battle being the gossip of the Croyland chronicle concerning -lord Stanley's excuse to Richard III. for not bringing up his men, which -gossip probably arose soon after when the sweat became notorious. Croyland -was not very far from the camp of the Stanleys; and yet we know for -certain (with the help of the state papers) that the death of the abbot -Lambert Fossedike from the sweat happened there after an illness of -eighteen hours on the 14th October, some seven or eight weeks from the -date of Bosworth Field, and some three or four weeks after the outbreak of -the disease in London. The probabilities of the case are all in favour of -Forrestier's view that the first of the sweat in 1485 was its appearance -in London; and we shall accordingly take that as our point of departure. - -Henry covered the distance between Leicester and London in four days, -having left the former, after a rest of two nights, on the Wednesday, -slept at St Albans on the Friday, and entered London, very tired by his -journey (says Bernard Andre), on Saturday evening, 27th August, three -weeks to a day from his landing at Milford Haven. Whether his whole force -travelled from Leicester at the same pace, and entered the city with him, -does not appear; but it can hardly be doubted that Henry's following, -French, Welsh and English, had found their way to London without loss of -time, to make personal suit for the grants and patents that began to be -issued under the royal seal in immense numbers after the first or second -week in September. London must have been unusually full of people in the -weeks before the Coronation on the 30th October. But the pestilence that -broke out was not the "common infection" or plague, which might -intelligibly have been fanned into a flame by a great concourse of people. -It was the sweat,--a new disease, a stranger not only to England but to -all the world. We shall understand the mysteriousness of the visitation -and the inadequacy of all ordinary explanations, by taking Forrestier's -account of the causes of it, drawn up in the year of its first occurrence. - -Although this earliest writer on the sweat recognized its distinctive type -quite clearly, making no confusion between it and the plague, yet he -referred both diseases to the same set of causes; and in his section on -the causes of the sweat he merely reproduces the conventional list of -nuisances which occurs in nearly all treatises on the plague before and -after his time. There was little variation from that list, as it is given -in the last chapter from a plague-book of the 14th century, down even to -the reign of Elizabeth; thus it is reproduced almost word for word in -Bullein's _Dialogue on the Fever Pestilence_ written in 1564 (the year -after a great plague), and it is so uniform in Elyot's _Castle of Health_, -in Phaer's, and in all the other hygienic manuals of the time, that it -might almost have been stereotyped. This was the causation which -Forrestier transferred bodily to the sweat in his manuscript of 1485; -almost the same causation had been given in the old essay of the bishop of -Aarhus on the plague, actually printed in London in 1480. - - "The causes of this sickness," he says, "be far and nigh. The far - causes--they be the signs or the planets, whose operation is not known - of leeches and of phisitions; but of astronomers they be known.... The - nigh causes be the stynkynge of the erthe as it is in many places.... - For these be great causes of putrefaction: and this corrupteth the - air, and so our bodies are infect of that corrupt air.... And it - happeneth also, that specially where the air is changed into great - heat and moistness, they induceth putrefaction of humours, and namely - in the humours of the heart; and so cometh this pestilence, whose - coming is unknown, as to them that die sodenley, &c." - -Among the causes of the corruption he specially mentions the following, -which probably had a real existence in the London of that time, although -he is merely reproducing a stock paragraph of foreign origin: - - "And of stinking carrion cast into the water nigh to cities or - towns,--as the bellies of beasts and of fishes, and the corruption of - privies--of this the water is corrupt. And when as meat is boiled, and - drink made of the water, many sickness is gendered in man's body; and - [so] also of the casting of stinking waters and many other foul things - in the streets, the air is corrupt; and of keeping of stinking matters - in houses or in latrines long time; and then, in the night, of those - things vapour is lift up into the air, the which doth infect the - substance of the air, by the which substance the air corrupts and - infects men to die suddenly, going by the streets or by the way. Of - the which thing let any man that loveth God and his neighbour amend." - -He then mentions a more distant source of corrupt air, apt to be carried -on the wind--the corruption of unburied bodies after a battle, which -enters into all the plague-writings of the time. - -These things were, of course, insufficient to account for the special type -of the sweat, or for its sudden outbreak, for the first time in history, -in September, 1485. There may have been such favouring conditions in -London at the time; something of the kind is indeed implied in Henry -VII.'s order against the nuisance of the shambles a few years after; but -we require a special factor, without which the unsavoury state of the -streets, lanes, yards, and ditches, or the crowded state of the houses, -would never have come to an issue in so remarkable an infection as the -sweating sickness. Common nuisances were the less relevant to the sweat, -for the reason that it touched the well-to-do classes most, the classes -who suffered least from the "common infection," or "the poor's plague," -and were presumably best housed, or located amidst cleanest surroundings. -Even within the narrow limits of Old London there were preferences of -locality. If the special incidence of the sweat upon the great households -of prelates and nobles, and on the families of wealthy citizens, had -rested only on the testimony of Dr Caius, who has a theory and a moral to -work out, there might have been some reason for the scepticism of -Heberden, who questions whether Caius was not probably in error in saying -that the sweat spared the poor and the wretched, because he knows of no -parallel instance among infective diseases[527]. But the fact is -abundantly illustrated in the details, already given, for each of the five -English epidemics; and it is confirmed for the continental invasion of -1529, e.g. by Kock, a parish priest of Luebeck, who says that "the poor -people, and those living in cellars or garrets were free from the -sickness," and by Renner, of Bremen, who says that it "went most among the -rich people[528]." It was, indeed, owing to its being an affliction -chiefly of the upper classes that the sweat has been so much heard of. So -far as mere numbers went, all the five London epidemics together could not -have caused so great a mortality as the plague caused in a single year of -Henry VII., namely the year 1500, or in a single year of Henry VIII., such -as the year 1513. But these great mortalities from plague, amounting to -perhaps a fifth part of the whole London population in a single season, -fell mainly, although not of course exclusively, upon the poorer class. -The bubo-plague, domesticated on English soil from 1348 to 1666, was -emphatically the "poor's plague," and, as such, it illustrated the usual -law of infective disease, namely that it specially befell those who were -the worst housed, the worst fed, the hardest pressed in the struggle, and -the least able to find the means of escaping to the country when the -infection in the city gave warning of an outbreak on the approach of warm -weather. - -But _morbus pauperum_ is not the only principle of infective disease. -There are pestilent infections which do not come readily under the law of -poor, uncleanly and negligent living, in any ordinary sense of the words; -and there are some communicable diseases which directly contradict the -principle that infection falls upon those who engender it by their mode of -life. Unwholesome conditions of living may be trusted to engender disease, -but it does not follow that the infection so engendered will fall upon -those who lead the unwholesome lives; sometimes it falls upon the class -who are farthest removed from them in social circumstances or domestic -habits, or who are widely separated from them in racial characters. This -principle I believe to be not only a necessary complement to the more -obvious rule, but to be itself one of wide application. It has been an -original theme of my own in former writings, to which I take leave to -refer in a note[529]; and, I have now to try here whether it may not suit -the rather paradoxical and certainly mysterious circumstances of the -sweating sickness on its first outbreak in the autumn of 1485. - -If the insanitary state of London were insufficient to explain the -engendering of the disease, the next thing is to look for a foreign -source. Suspicion falls at once upon the foreign mercenaries who landed -with Henry Tudor at Milford Haven on the 6th of August. Who were these -mercenaries? Did they suffer from any contagious disease? Were they likely -to have engendered the sweat? Can the infection be traced, in matter of -fact, to them? In seeking an answer, it will be necessary to enter -somewhat fully into the history of the expedition. - -The earl of Richmond's successful expedition in 1485 was his second -attempt on the English crown. The first had been made in 1483, when the -duke of Gloucester was hardly seated on the throne and the duke of -Buckingham was in the field against him. Richmond's army on that occasion -had been furnished by the duke of Brittany, and is roughly estimated at -5000 men in 15 ships[530]; the expedition sailed from St Malo in October, -encountered a storm in the Channel which scattered the fleet, and drove -some of the ships back to the harbours of Brittany and Normandy, so that -Richmond, having reached the Dorset coast with only one or two ships, was -unable to land in force. He returned to a Norman port, and nothing more is -heard of his army of Bretons; during the next two years he appears to have -been left with no other following than two or three English nobles, among -them the earl of Oxford, who afterwards led a division of his army at -Bosworth. After repeated solicitation, he obtained in 1485 a small -body-guard (_leve praesidium_) from the regents of Charles VIII. at Paris, -a few pieces of artillery, and money to help pay for the transport of 3000 -or 4000 men. With these resources he betook himself to Rouen in the summer -of 1485 and began to fit out his expedition. It would appear that he found -some difficulty in making up his force to the intended full complement, -and that he was urged by the impatience of his followers and the chance of -a fair wind to leave the Seine with what force he had on the 31st of July. -His force of Frenchmen, under his kinsman de Shande (afterwards earl of -Bath), consisted of only 2000 men, crowded on board a few ships. It is a -fair inference that the men had been recruited in and around Rouen; we -are told, indeed, by Mezeray that Normandy was at that time infested by -bands of _francs-archers_ who had been licensed by Louis XI., and that the -ministers of Charles VIII. gave them to Henry Tudor, to the number of -3000, regarding the proposed expedition of the latter as a good -opportunity of ridding the province of Normandy of a lawless and -disreputable soldiery[531]. - -These, then, were the mercenaries who landed at Milford Haven on the 6th -of August, were at once marched through Wales to Shrewsbury and Lichfield, -and took a principal part in the battle of Bosworth on the 22nd of August. -They were Normans, who had become so great a pest to their own province -that Charles VIII.'s ministers were induced to take up Henry Tudor's cause -partly with the intention of ridding French territory of them. Their -quality is plainly indicated in the speech just before the battle by -Richard III., which had been composed for Hall's chronicle; only they were -not Bretons, as the speech makes out; they were Normans, recruited for the -expedition in Rouen and the surrounding country. - -I have given so much emphasis to the nationality of these mercenaries -because the theory of the English sweat turns upon it[532]. More than two -centuries after Bosworth Field, about the year 1717, when the English -sweat had been long forgotten, an almost identical type of disease began -to show itself among the villages and towns of that very region of France, -the lower basin of the Seine, where the mercenaries of 1485 had been -recruited. - - -A form of Sweat afterwards endemic in Normandy. - -The Picardy sweat, which was first noticed as a disease of the soil about -the year 1717, and has continued off and on down to recent years, was -indigenous to the departments in the basin of the Seine, from the Pas de -Calais to Calvados, with Rouen as a centre. Why that strange form of -sickness should have sprung up there and continued, now in one town or -village now in another, with few blank years for a century and a half, no -one can venture to say. It was not the English sweat in all its -circumstances; on the contrary it was only rarely epidemic over a large -population or a large tract of country at once. It was ordinarily limited -to one or two spots at a time, and in the individuals affected it ran a -longer course than the English sweat had done. But whenever it did become -widely prevalent it also became a short and sharp infection like the -English sweat, causing in some years a very considerable number of deaths. -Distinctively the Picardy sweat was a somewhat mild sickness of a week or -more, seldom fatal, distinctively also of a single town or village, or -small group of villages. It was not unknown in some other parts of France, -such as the Vosges and Languedoc, in Bavaria and in Northern Italy; but in -these other localities it has been much more occasional or even rare. Its -distinctive habitat for a century and a half has been the lower basin of -the Seine; and there it has been so steady at one point or another from -year to year throughout the whole of that period that it may be said to be -a disease of the soil, indigenous or domesticated, and depending for its -periodic manifestations mostly upon vicissitudes of the seasons, as -affecting probably the rise and fall of the ground-water. It has been more -a disease of the well-to-do bourgeois class than of the very poor, and it -has often shown a preference for the cleaner villages. It has been the -subject of a very large number of French writings from the year 1717 down -almost to the present date. Strange as this form of disease is, neither -its circumstances nor its nosological characters are left in any doubt; it -is at once mysterious and perfectly familiar[533]. - - -Theory of the English Sweat. - -I have been at some pains to show that Henry Tudor's mercenaries were -enlisted in and around Rouen, or, in other words, they came from that very -district of France in which the sweat, in a somewhat modified form, began -to make its appearance as an endemic malady two hundred and thirty years -after. If the sweat had not become an endemic or standing disease there, -as if native to the soil, or if it had become equally a disease of all -other parts of Europe, as typhoid fever has, the coincidence would have -been less striking, and might have been made to appear altogether -irrelevant by the long interval of more than two centuries between the one -event and the other. If it were a mere coincidence, we should conclude -that the same causes which established in Normandy in the 18th century a -steady prevalence of a sweating sickness, not unlike the more familiar -prevalence of typhoid, had been at work on English soil more than two -centuries earlier, not indeed to establish a form of sweating sickness -steadily prevalent from year to year in one place or another, like the -plague, but to induce five sharp epidemic outbursts, within a period of -sixty-six years, four of which outbursts began in London and extended -probably over the whole country, while one began in Shrewsbury, travelled -by stages to London, and spread all over England. And, as we are ignorant -of the things which determine the type of the endemic sweat of Normandy or -Picardy down to the present day, we can neither deny nor affirm that there -may have been corresponding factors of disease at work in the England of -Henry VII. By such a line of reasoning we are brought to a view of the -English sweat which precludes all farther inquiry and makes a permanent -blank or maze in our knowledge. Let us try, however, whether the facts of -the case do not better fall in with the view that the English sweat had a -real relation to the seats of the Norman and Picardy sweat, even at a time -when that sweat had not come into existence as a definite form of disease, -and although the French provinces appear to have been spared the invasion -of the epidemic when it overran the rest of Northern Europe in 1529. - -The means of communication in 1485 was not wanting, namely the Norman -soldiery of Henry VII. The tradition of their quality is preserved in the -speech composed in Hall's chronicle for Richard III. before the battle of -Bosworth, and versified somewhat closely by Shakespeare: - - "A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and run-aways, - A scum of Bretagnes, and base lackey peasants: - ... Let's whip these stragglers o'er the seas again; - Lash hence these over-weening rags of France, - These famished beggars, weary of their lives." - -There is nothing incredible in the supposition that these men had brought -a disease into London although they had not themselves presented the -symptoms of that disease. Such importations are not unknown; the mystery -hanging over them does not make them the less real. A well-known instance -is the St Kilda boat-cold, "the wonderful story," as Boswell says, "that -upon the approach of a stranger all the inhabitants catch cold," a story -which Mr Macaulay, the author of the _History of St Kilda_, had been -advised to leave out of his book. "Sir," said Dr Johnson, "to leave things -out of a book merely because people tell you they will not be believed, is -meanness: Macaulay acted with more magnanimity." The St Kilda influenza -has been amply corroborated since then by parallel instances from the more -remote islands of the Pacific, and by striking instances in veterinary -pathology. Among the latter may be quoted the instance which has been -heard of in Shropshire, of "sheep which have been imported from vessels, -although themselves in a healthy condition, if placed in the same fold -with others, frequently producing sickness in the flock[534]." But there -is an instance on a vast scale from the United States, the instance of -Texas cattle-fever, which has recurred so often, and has been so closely -watched on account of the disastrous loss which it causes, that there is -no room left to doubt the reality of that mysterious form of contagion. I -shall have to speak very shortly of the malignant fevers of the assizes, -which spread from prisoners who were not known to be ill of fever; these -incidents are historical from the year 1522, when an epidemic of the kind -arose among the court and grand jury at the gaol delivery in the Castle of -Cambridge. Lastly the history of yellow fever, as expounded in part in -this volume, is an instance of a long-enduring infection arising from the -circumstances of the African slave-trade, the negroes themselves having -been racially exempt from the fever although they had been the source of -the virus. - -In all such cases the sickness which ensued among the healthy from contact -with strangers had a more or less definite type; and that type in each -case must have been determined mainly by the antecedents of the strangers, -their racial characters being reckoned among the antecedents as well as -their special hardships and their personal habits. In the case of the -singular visitation of England in 1485, the strangers were a swarm of -disreputable free-booters from Normandy, natives of a soil which developed -the sweat as an indigenous malady in the long course of generations. If -they themselves had shown the symptoms of the sweat in 1485, one might -have said that the circumstances of their passage in crowded ships, of -their exhausting march from Wales to Leicestershire, and thence to London, -had brought to the definite issue of a specific disease that which was -otherwise no more than a habit of body, a constitutional tendency, a -disease in the making. But there is no reason to suppose that they -themselves incurred the symptoms of the disease at all; it was contact -with them in England, particularly in London, that determined the peculiar -type of disease in others. Those others were of a different national -stock, and for the most part of another manner of life; in their very -differences lay their liability, according to well-known analogies. Of -course there must have been something material, something more than -abstract contact, to cause the sweat in certain Englishmen; and although -we cannot image the form of the virulent matter, we are safe to pronounce, -in this hypothesis, that it must have come from the persons of the foreign -soldiery. - - -The Habitat of the Virus. - -We may go even farther in the way of specific probability, and bring the -virus definitely to a habitat in the soil. The English sweat, like the -Picardy sweat itself, had certain characters of a soil poison, like the -poison of cholera, yellow fever and typhoid fever; only it was not endemic -like the two last, but periodic, as well as somewhat volatile in its -manner of travelling, like dengue, influenza, and others of the "posting" -fevers of former times. This brings us to the singular history of the -epidemics of sweat in England,--to the clear intervals of many years and -the sudden bursting forth anew. What became of the specific virus from -1485 to 1508, to 1517 to 1528, to 1551, and after? - -A fresh importation in each of the epidemic years after 1485 is -improbable; certainly the circumstances of Henry VII.'s expedition never -occurred again, and the traffic between England and her two French -possessions of Calais and Guines had nothing in it at all analogous. -Equally improbable is the continuance of the sweat in isolated or sporadic -cases from year to year throughout the intervals between the epidemics; -the only facts that give any countenance to such a continuous succession -are the occasionally mentioned "hot agues," as in 1518, and, on a more -extensive scale, in 1539. The seeds or germs of the infection which arose -first in London in September, 1485, must have lain dormant in the city -until some favouring conditions came round to call them into life. It is -impossible to figure such dormancy of the virus except on the hypothesis -that it was a soil-poison, having its habitat in the pores of the ground. -The periodic activity of all such poisons depends, as we can now say with -a good deal of certainty, upon the movements of the ground-water, which in -turn depend on the wetness or dryness of seasons. The kind of weather -preceding each of the epidemics of the English sweat has been remarked on -by writers, but somewhat loosely or erroneously. The peculiarity of the -year of the second sweat, 1508, (not 1506 as in Hecker, nor 1507 as in -other writers) was a "marvellous" forwardness of vegetation in the month -of January, unusual heat from the end of May to the 13th of June, much -prized rain on that date, on the 16th, and on the 3rd of July[535], the -sweat being heard of first in the Lord Treasurer's household in July. The -third year of the sweat, 1517, began with a great frost from the 12th -January, so that no boat could go from London to Westminster all the term -time[536], while men crossed with horse and cart from Westminster to -Lambeth[537]. This great frost would appear to have been without snow, the -whole season from September, 1516, to May, 1517, being chronicled as one -of unusual drought, "for there fell no rain to be accounted," so that "in -some places men were fain to drive their cattle three or four miles to -water." The kind of weather following the break-up of the drought is not -mentioned, but there is implied of course a certain amount of rain. It was -about the end of July or first of August, 1517, that the sweat began in -London and the suburbs. The fourth, and perhaps the most severe sweat, -that of 1528, followed upon two wet seasons, with one spoiled harvest in -1527 and bad prospects for that of 1528. The winter of 1526-27 had been -unusually wet from November until the end of January; then dry weather set -in until April; after which the rain began again and continued for eight -weeks[538]. The harvest before that seems to have been a partial failure, -for early in 1527 corn began to run short in London, and for a week or -more there was acute general famine, so that the bread carts coming in -from Stratford had to be guarded by the sheriffs and their men all the way -from Mile End to their proper market. The high price of corn continued -into the summer of 1528. The weather of that summer is not specially -recorded for England; but we learn from a diplomatic letter dated, Paris, -the 4th of July, that much rain had fallen and destroyed the corn and -vines, so that there were fears of universal decay and dearth through all -France[539]. On the 5th July, Henry VIII. requests Wolsey to have general -processions made through the realm "for good weather and for the plague," -the sweat having already been raging for more than a month. The fifth and -last sweat, in 1551, also coincided with an unusually high price of corn, -or, in other words, followed one or more bad harvests. In 1550 wheat was -at 20 shillings the quarter; at Easter in 1551 the price in London was -26_sh._ 8_d._; ten or twelve ship loads of rye and wheat from Holland and -Brittany were sold under the mayor's direction at a stated but very high -price. Meanwhile the sweat was advancing from Shrewsbury to London, where -it broke out on the 7th July. The statements of Dr Caius about stinking -mists carried from town to town are, like most of his statements, so -obviously the product of his uncritical rhetoric that it becomes almost -impossible to trust his narrative for matters of fact. But we may go so -far as to assume that the first half of 1551 was a season of an unusually -moist atmosphere. At all events the fifth season of the sweat, and also -the fourth (1528), stand out in the annals as years of scarcity following -bad harvests, which had probably failed owing to continuous wet weather. - -There is not, on the surface, much uniformity in the weather preceding the -epidemics of the sweat in 1508, 1517, 1528 and 1551. In the first of these -the winter was mild and the early summer excessively hot and dry; in the -second the winter and spring were remarkable for drought, with several -weeks of intense black frost in the middle period; in the remaining two -the antecedent appears to have been an excessive rainfall. But in all the -four we shall find that the law of the sub-soil water, as formulated by -the recent Munich school with reference to epidemic outbursts, was -exemplified. According to that law, the dangerous products of fermentation -arise from the soil when the pores of the ground are either getting filled -with water after having been long filled with air, or are getting filled -with air after having been long filled with water. It is the range of -fluctuation in the ground-water, either downwards or upwards, that -determines the risk to health; and in two of the years of the sweat, 1508 -and 1517, we find that there had been a rise from a very low level of the -wells, while in the other two, 1528 and 1551, the wells had begun to fall -after standing for a length of time at an unusually high level. If this -reading of the somewhat imperfect data can be trusted, it is at one and -the same time an explanation of the outbreak of the sweat in the -respective seasons, and a confirmation of the hypothesis that the virus of -the sweat had its habitat in the ground. That hypothesis is, indeed, -supported by so great a convergence of probabilities, both for the English -sweat and for the endemic sweat of France[540], that it may be used to -explain the seasonal incidence without laying the argument open to the -charge of running in a vicious circle. - -Whatever had been the kind of weather determining the successive outbreaks -of the sweat, it is clear that the favouring circumstances were in general -not the same as those of the bubo-plague. The greater outbursts of plague, -as we shall see, were in 1500, 1509, 1513, 1531, 1535, 1543, 1547, and -other years not sweat-years. It is only in the autumn of 1517 that the -plague overlaps somewhat on the sweat, and even then it becomes noticeable -mostly in the winter following the decline of the sweat. The two poisons -had existed in English soil side by side, but had not come out at the same -seasons; also the sweat had been mostly a disease of the greater houses, -and the plague mostly of the poorer. - - -The Extinction of the Sweat in England. - -The disappearance of the sweat from England after 1551, or its failure to -come out again with the appropriate weather, is one of those phenomena of -epidemic disease which might be made to appear less of a mystery by -finding several more in the like case. A history of all the extinct types -of infective disease would probably bring to light some reason why they -had each and all died out. But an epidemic disease leaves no bones behind -it in the strata; nor has the astonishing progress of science succeeded as -yet in detecting palaeozoic bacteria, although that discovery cannot be -delayed much longer. Meanwhile we have to make what we can of the ordinary -records. In our own time, so to speak, the sweat became extinct in 1551, -and the plague in 1666; perhaps someone before long may be able to say -that typhus died out (for a time) in Britain in such and such a year, and -smallpox (for good) in such and such another. The surprising thing is that -an infection which came forth time after time should have one day been -missed as if it were dead. If the sweat had five seasons in England, why -not fifty? Perhaps its career was short because the circumstances of its -origin were transient and, as it were, accidental. But it may have been -also subject to the only law of extinct disease-species which our scanty -knowledge points to--the law of the succession, or superseding, or -supplanting of one epidemic type by another. - -Other forms of epidemic fever, in the same pestilential class as the -sweat, were coming to the front in England as well as in other parts of -Europe. Thus, in 1539, a summer of great heat and drought, "divers and -many honest persons died of the hot agues, and of a great laske through -the realm." The hot agues were febrile influenzas, and the great laske was -dysentery. Again, in the autumn of 1557, there died "many of the -wealthiest men all England through by a strange fever," according to one -writer[541], or, according to another[542], there prevailed "divers -strange and new sicknesses, taking men and women in their heads, as -strange agues and fevers, whereof many died." Jones in his _Dyall of -Agues_, describes his own attack near Southampton, in 1558, and calls it -the sweating sickness. - -That epidemic corresponded to a great prevalence of "influenza" on the -continent, which was probably as Protean or composite as the fevers in -England. It would not be correct to say that these new fevers or -influenzas, with more or less of a sweating type, were the sweat somewhat -modified. But they seem to have come in succession to the sweat, if not to -have taken its place, or supplanted it. The prevalent types of disease -somehow reflect the social condition of the population; they change with -the social state of the country or of a group of countries; they depend -upon a great number of associated circumstances which it would be hard to -enumerate exhaustively. As early as 1522 we have the gaol fever at -Cambridge, at a time when Henry VIII.'s attempts to repress crime were -come to the strange pass described in More's _Utopia_. These things remain -for more systematic handling in another chapter; but in concluding the -career of the sweat in England we may pass from it with the remark that it -did not cease until other forms of pestilential fever were ready to take -its place. The same explanation remains to be given of the total -disappearance of plague from England after 1666: it was superseded by -pestilential contagious fever, a disease which was its congener, and had -been establishing itself more and more steadily from year to year as the -conditions of living in the towns were passing more and more from the -medieval type to the modern. Meanwhile we have to take up the thread of -the plague-history where we left it in the reign of Edward IV. - - - - -CHAPTER VI. - -PLAGUE IN THE TUDOR PERIOD. - - -When the town council of York met on the 16th of August, 1485, to take -measures on account of Henry Tudor's landing in Wales, their first -resolution was to despatch the sergeant to the mace to Richard III. at -Nottingham, with an offer of men (they promised 400 for his army at -Bosworth), and their second resolution was to send at once for all such -aldermen and others of the council as were sojourning without the city on -account of "the plague that reigneth[543]." These leading citizens of York -had gone into the country to avoid the infectious exhalations within the -walls in the summer heats; the plague that reigned in York was the old -bubo-plague, which would show itself in a house here or there in any -ordinary season, and on special occasions would rise to the height of an -epidemic, driving away all who could afford to remove from the pestilent -air of the town to the comparatively wholesome country, and taking its -victims mostly among the poorer class who could not afford a "change of -air." In the three centuries following the Black Death, change of air -meant a good deal more than it means now. The infection of the air, or the -"intemperies" of the air, at Westminster occasioned (along with other -reasons) the prorogation or adjournment to country towns of many -parliaments; the infection of the air in and around Fleet Street caused -the breaking up of many law terms; and the infection of the air in Oxford -colleges was so constant an interruption to the studies of the place in -the 15th century that Anthony Wood traces to that cause more than to any -other the total decline of learning, the rudeness of manners and the -prevalence of "several sorts of vice, which in time appeared so notorious -that it was consulted by great personages of annulling the University or -else translating it to another place[544]." From the old college -registers, chiefly that of his own college of Merton, he has counted some -thirty pestilences at Oxford, great and small, during the fifteenth -century. The reason why the Oxford annals of plague are so complete is -that each outbreak, even if only one or two deaths had occurred[545], -meant a dispersion of the scholars and tutors of one or more halls and -colleges, their removal in a body to some country house, alteration of the -dates of terms, and postponement of the public Acts for degrees in the -schools. Experience had taught the necessity of such prompt measures. Thus -the first sweat, that of 1485, came so suddenly that it killed many of the -scholars before they could disperse, "albeit it lasted but a month or six -weeks." Hardly had the halls and colleges begun to fill again after the -dispersion by the sweat of 1485, when "another pestilential disease," that -is to say, the bubo-plague itself, broke forth at the end of August, 1486, -in Magdalen parish, and daily increased so much that the scholars were -obliged to flee again. In 1491 there was another dispersion; and in 1493 -so severe an outbreak of plague from April to Midsummer that many were -swept away, both cleric and laic: Magdalen College removed to Brackley in -Northamptonshire, Oriel to St Bartholomew's hospital near Oxford, and -Merton to Islip, "instead of Cuxham their usual place of retirement." The -disastrous fifteenth century closes with a specially severe plague in -1499-1500, in which perished "divers of this university accounted worthy -in these times;" an accompanying scarcity of grain and consequent failure -of scholarships or exhibitions led many students to betake themselves to -mechanical occupations. In August, 1503, the plague broke out again in St -Alban's Hall; the principal with all but a few of the students went to -Islip, where the pestilence overtook them (three weeks having been spent -first in mirth and jollity), so that several died and were buried, some at -Islip, others at Ellesfield and one at Noke; in October it broke out in -Merton College and drove some of the fellows and bachelors to the lodge in -Stow Wood, others to Wotton near Cumner, where they remained until the -17th December. These interruptions had been so frequent that of fifty-five -halls, only thirty-three were now inhabited, and they "but slenderly, as -may be seen in our registers." The town of Oxford shared in the decline; -streets and lanes formerly populous were now desolate and forsaken. An -epidemic in 1508, which may have been the second sweat, caused another -dispersion; then the old bubo-plague again in 1510, 1511, 1512 and 1513, -filling up the interval until the summer of 1517, when a "sudor -tabificus," the third sweat, "dispersed and swept away most, if not all, -of the students." The bubo-plague followed in the winter and spring, -especially in St Mary Hall and Canterbury College. Meanwhile cardinal -Wolsey had founded Cardinal College (afterwards Christ Church), bringing -to it an infusion of new learning from Cambridge and elsewhere; but in -1525, "while this selected society was busy in preaching, reading, -disputing and performing their scholastic Acts, a vehement plague brake -forth, which dispersed most of them, so that they returned not all the -year following or two years after," and Cardinal College "thus settled, -was soon after left as 'twere desolate." The same outbreak affected -specially the halls or colleges of St Alban, Jesus, St Edmund and -Queen's[546]. - -Oxford was not altogether singular in this experience of plague from year -to year or at intervals of three or four years. What Sir Thomas More says -of the cities of Utopia was true of the towns of England or of any -medieval country in Christendom: "As for their cities, whoso knoweth one -of them, knoweth them all; they be all so like one to another, as far -forth as the nature of the place permitteth." The limitation as to the -nature of the place is not without importance for the frequency and -severity of plague; the quantity of standing water around Oxford would -certainly appear to have made the epidemics there a more regular product -of the soil[547]. But we hear of plague also on the soil of Cambridge, -particularly in 1511, when Erasmus was there: on the 28th November he -writes from Queens' College to Ammonio in London: "Here is great solitude; -most are away for fear of the pestilence," adding rather unkindly, -"although there is also solitude when everyone is in residence." It is -from such chance references in letters of the time that we can infer the -existence of plague throughout England. These references become much more -numerous as the sixteenth century runs on, not perhaps because plague was -more frequent, but because all kinds of documents are better preserved. -The remarkable difference between the reigns of Henry VII. and Henry VIII. -in regard to the quantity of extant materials for the construction of -history is as keenly felt by the student of epidemics as by the student of -high politics. The local records of towns, London included, are still -almost valueless for our purpose: even the skilled antiquaries employed by -the Historical Manuscripts Commission have hitherto extracted nothing -concerning pre-Elizabethan epidemics from the archives of civic -council-chambers, and only a little from muniment-rooms such as that of -Canterbury Abbey. - -The few details that we possess, such as those for the plague at Hull from -1472 to 1478, had been extracted from local records by the authors of town -and county histories. Before the end of the sixteenth century the evidence -of plague epidemic all over England, as well in provincial towns and in -the country as in London, becomes abundant. There may have been really a -great increase, but it is much more probable that the increase is for the -most part only apparent. It is of some consequence to determine the -probability as exactly as possible; and I shall therefore examine with -more minuteness than would otherwise have been necessary the evidence as -to the existence and amount of plague in London and elsewhere year after -year from the accession of the Tudor dynasty in 1485, using chiefly the -Calendars of State Papers for my purpose. As in the case of the sweat, we -happen to hear of plague in London and elsewhere because the Court was -kept away by it; the king's secretaries are informed week after week of -the state of health in London, and foreign ambassadors, especially the -Venetian envoys, have frequently occasion to mention the hindrance to -public business caused by the plague. But for these State papers the -historian of epidemics would have little beyond an occasional parish -register to build upon. The medical profession in England were not -concerned to write or print anything thereon; while there are numerous -foreign printed books on the plague (e.g. Forrestier's at Rouen in 1490) -there is not one original English treatise until that of Skene of -Edinburgh in 1568. That the physicians were well employed by those who -could engage their services, and that they did sustain the credit of their -profession by the liberal scale of their fees, we have every reason to -believe; thus the Venetian envoy writes on 3rd June, 1535, that he had -been ill, and that he had expended seven hundred ducats during his -illness, "and for so many physicians," so that he had only one ducat -remaining. But these thriving practitioners did not write books like their -brethren abroad. One of their number, Linacre, who was also a prebendary -of Westminster, busied himself with editions of certain writings of Galen. -Erasmus mentions him in a letter as one of the Oxford scholars in whose -society he found pleasure; but there is in the _Praise of Folly_ a -reference to a certain grammatical pedant whom Hecker identifies with -Linacre. The other physicians and surgeons of the period whose names are -known, Butts, Chambre, Borde and the rest of the group in Holbein's -picture of Henry VIII. handing the surgeons their charter, have left -nothing in print which illustrates the epidemic diseases of the time, and -little of any kind of writing except some formulae of medicines: Borde, who -was patronised by Cromwell, is known only as a humorist or satirist. Thus -the inquiry must proceed without any of those aids from the faculty which -make the history of epidemics on the Continent comparatively easy. - -After the disastrous prevalence of plague in England in the reign of -Edward IV., culminating in the great epidemic of 1479 in London and -elsewhere, we do not hear of the disease again in London until 1487, two -years after the first sweat; in that year, on the 14th April, a king's -writ from Norwich postponed the business of the Common Pleas and King's -Bench until Trinity term, on account of the pestilence in London, -Westminster and neighbouring places[548]. The next reference is to the -great epidemic of 1499-1500, in London and apparently also in the country. -Fabyan, who was then an alderman and likely to know, puts the deaths in -London at twenty thousand[549]; Polydore Virgil says thirty thousand[550]; -and others say thirty thousand deaths from plague and other diseases -together[551]. The smaller total is the more likely to be nearest the -mark. There is reason to think that the population of London a generation -later was little over 60,000; and it will appear in the sequel that a -fourth or a fifth part of the inhabitants was as much as the severest -plagues cut off, although it is entirely credible that the Black Death -itself had cut off one half. - -The enormous mortality in 1499-1500 has left few traces in the records of -the City or of the State. Five great prelates died during the plague-year, -some of them certainly from it: Morton of Canterbury (a very old man), -Langton of Winchester (before he could be transferred to Canterbury), -Rotheram of York, Alcock of Ely and Jane of Norwich[552]. Like some of the -later plagues in London it lasted through the winter. It was at Oxford in -the same years, and casual references in two of the Plumpton letters lead -one to infer that it may have been in remote parts of the country -also[553]. - -The infection was still active as late as October, 1501, at Gravesend, and -it made some difference to the reception of the young princess Catharine -of Arragon, who had come over for her marriage with Prince Arthur, and -became famous in history as the wife of his brother Henry VIII. The -following are Henry VII.'s instructions, dated October, 1501:-- - - "My lord Steward shall shew or cause to be shewed to the said - Princess, that the King's Grace, tenderly considering her great and - long pain and travel upon the sea, would full gladly that she landed - and lodged for the night at Gravesend; but forasmuch as the plague was - there of late, and that is not yet clean purged thereof, the King - would not that she should be put in any such adventure or danger, and - therefore his Grace hath commanded the bark to be prepared and arrayed - for her lodging[554]." - -In 1503 there was plague at Oxford, as we have seen, and at Exeter, where -two mayors died of it in quick succession, and two bailiffs[555]. The -infection was certainly in London in 1504 or 1505 (perhaps in both, and -possibly at its low endemic level in the other years from 1501): for -Bernard Andre mentions casually that he had been absent from the City on -account of it[556]. - -In 1509, the first year of Henry VIII., there was a severe outbreak of -plague in the garrison of Calais, as well as "great plague" in divers -parts of England[557]. In 1511, Erasmus writes from Cambridge on 17th -August, 5th October and 16th October, making reference to the plague in -London; and on the 27th October, 8th November, and 28th November, Ammonio -answers him that the plague has not entirely disappeared, and again that -it is abated, but a famine is feared, and lastly that the plague is -entirely gone. On the 26th of July the Venetian ambassador had written -that the queen-widow (mother of Edward V.) had died of plague and that the -king, Henry VIII., was anxious. - -On the 1st November, 1512, Erasmus, on a visit to London, was so afraid of -the plague that he did not enter his own lodging, and missed a meeting -with Colet. The next year, 1513, was a severe plague-year according to -many testimonies. In the diary of the Venetian envoy from August to 3rd -September it is stated that deaths from plague are occurring constantly; -two of his servants sickened on the 22nd August, but did not recognize the -disease; on the 25th they rose from bed, went to a tavern to drink a -certain beverage called "ale," and died the same day: their bed, sheets -and other effects were thrown into the sea (? Thames). On the 17th -September he writes to Venice that it is perilous to remain in London; the -deaths were said to be 200 in a day, there was no business doing, all the -Venetian merchants in London had taken houses in the country; the plague -is also in the English fleet. In October the deaths are reported by the -envoy at 300 to 400 a day; he has gone into the country. On the 6th -November and 6th December he writes that plague was still doing much -damage. On the 3rd December the rumour of a great prevalence of plague in -England had reached Rome. On the 28th November Erasmus writes from -Cambridge that he does not intend to come to London before Christmas on -account of plague and robbers; and on the 21st December he writes again: -"I am shut up in the midst of pestilence and hemmed in with robbers." - -One year is very like another, but it will be desirable to continue the -narrative a little longer so as to remove any suspicion of constructing -history beyond the facts. In February, 1514, Erasmus writes that he had -been disgusted with London, deeming it unsafe to stay there owing to -plague. In going in procession to St Paul's on the 21st May the king -preferred to be on horseback, for one reason "to avoid contact with the -crowd by reason of the plague;" he had lately recovered from some vaguely -reported "fever" at Richmond. On the 1st July Convocation was adjourned on -account of the epidemic and the heat. - -Next year, 1515, Erasmus writes from London on the 20th April that he is -in much trouble; the plague had broken out and it looked as if it would -rage everywhere. On the 23rd April Wolsey sends advice to the earl of -Shrewsbury in the country (? Wingfield) to "get him into clean air and -divide his household," owing to contagious plague among his servants; on -the 28th the earl received from London one pound of manus Christi,--the -same remedy that Henry VIII. sent to Wolsey for the sweat--with coral, -and half-a-pound of powder preservative. On the same date "they begin to -die in London in divers places suddenly of fearful sickness." One of the -incidents of the plague of 1515 which has fixed the attention of -chroniclers was the death of twenty-seven of the nuns in a convent at the -Minories outside Aldgate[558]. Next year, on 14th May (1516), the sickness -was so extreme in Lord Shrewsbury's house at Wingfield that he has put -away all his horse-keepers and turned his horses out to grass. In London, -on the 21st May, the Venetian ambassador removed to Putney owing to a case -of plague in his house, and he would not be allowed to see Wolsey until -the 30th June, when forty days would have passed since the plague in his -house. - -The next summer, 1517, was the season of the third sweat. It was hardly -over when plague began in London in September. On the 21st the Venetian -envoy speaks of having had to avoid "the plague _and_ the sweating -sickness;" on the 26th he writes that the plague is making some progress -and he has left London to avoid it. On the 15th October the king was at -Windsor "in fear of the great plague." One writes on 25 Oct., "As far as I -can hear, there is no parish in London free[559]." On the 16th November -the envoy begs the seignory of Venice to send someone to replace him as he -thinks it high time to escape from "sedition, sweat and plague." On the -3rd December the king and the cardinal were still absent from London on -account of the plague; on the 22nd their absence was causing general -discontent, the plague being somewhat abated. It was not until March, -1518, that the court approached London; on the 15th the Venetian envoy -rode out to Richmond to see the king, and found him in some trouble, as -three of his pages had died "of the plague." The court withdrew again to -Berkshire, and on the 6th April it was decided by the king's privy council -at Abingdon that London was still infected and must be avoided, the queen -(Catharine of Arragon) having declared the day before that she had perfect -knowledge of the sickness being in London, and that she feared for the -king, although she was no prophet. On the 7th April the report of four or -five deaths at Nottingham ("as appears by a bill enclosed") was made the -ground of postponing a projected visit of the king to the north. The -spring was unusually warm, which made the risk of sickness to be judged -greater. It is clear that public business was suffering by the prolonged -absence of the court from London, and that the existence of infection was -being denied. On the 28th April Master More certified from Oxford to the -king at Woodstock that three children were dead of the sickness, but none -others; he had accordingly charged the mayor and the commissary in the -king's name "that the inhabitants of those houses that be and shall be -infected, shall keep in, put out wispes and bear white rods, according as -your grace devised for Londoners;" this was approved by the king's -council, and the question was discussed whether the fair in the Austin -Friars of Oxford a fortnight later should not be prohibited, as the resort -of people "may make Oxford as dangerous as London, next term" (the law -courts sat at Oxford in Trinity term). However, the interests of traders -had to be kept in view also. On 28th June, 1518, Pace writes from the -court at Woodstock to Wolsey that "all are free from sickness here, but -many die of it within four or five miles, as Mr Controller is informed." -On the 11th July he writes again from Woodstock that two persons are dead -of the sickness, and more infected, one of them a servant to a yeoman of -the king's guard; to-morrow the king and queen lodge at Ewelme, and stop -not by the way, as the place appointed for their lodging is infected. On -the 14th July he writes to Wolsey from Wallingford that the king moves -to-morrow to Bisham "as it is time: for they do die in these parts in -every place, not only of the small pokkes and mezils, but also of the -great sickness." The uncertainty as to what these diseases may have been -will appear from the next letter, on the 18th July, from Sir Thomas More: -"We have daily advertisements here, other of some sweating or the great -sickness from places very near unto us; and as for surfeits and -drunkenness we have enough at home." The king had also heard that one of -my lady Princess's servants was sick of "a hot ague" at Enfield. On the -22nd July, the Venetian ambassador writes from Lambeth asking to be -recalled: two of his servants had died of the plague, and he himself had -the sweating sickness twice in one week. The pope's legate, Campeggio, -made a state entry into London about the first of August, but the king and -Wolsey were not there to receive him, ostensibly for fear of infection. -The king was now at Greenwich, and we hear no more of the fear of -infection for a time. In the end of March, 1519, deaths from plague -occurred on board one of the Venetian galleys at Southampton. On the 4th -August, 1520, the king (at Windsor) has heard that the great sickness is -still prevalent at Abingdon and other villages towards Woodstock, and has -changed his route ("gystes") accordingly; on 8th August, sickness is -reported at Woodstock. The same year some kind of sickness was very -disastrous in Ireland. - -In the winter of 1521 (2nd November), the sickness continues in London: -"it is not much feared, though it is universal in every parish." According -to a vague entry in Hall's chronicle the year 1522 was in like manner, -"not without pestilence nor death," which may refer to the gaol fever at -Cambridge. - -Thus from 1511 to 1521 there is not a single year without some reference -to the prevalence of plague, the autumn and winter of 1513 having been -probably the time of greatest mortality in London. After 1521 or 1522 -there comes a break of four or five years in the plague-references, except -for a vague mention of plague followed by famine at Shrewsbury in -1525[560]. They begin again in 1526 (from Guildford) and go on until 1532 -every year much as in the former period, the year 1528 being mostly -occupied with the fourth epidemic of the sweating sickness. On the 4th -June, 1529, the legate Campeggio writes from London: "Here we are still -wearing our winter clothing, and use fires as if it were January: never -did I witness more inconstant weather. The plague begins to rage -vigorously, and there is some fear of the sweating sickness." On the 31st -August the Venetian ambassador has a person sick of the plague in his -house; on the 9th September he has gone to a village near London on -account of the plague. On the 18th September the French ambassador in -London (Bishop Du Bellay) has plague in his household, and in spite of -repeated changes of lodging his principal servants are dead; he has been -unable to refuse leave to the others to go home, and is now quite alone, -but the danger from the plague is much diminished. - -In 1530 the plague is heard of as early as March 23, previous to which -date two of the Venetian ambassador's servants had died of it; three more -of them died afterwards, and the envoy was forbidden the Court for forty -days. Parliament was prorogued on April 26 to June 22, on account of the -plague in London and the suburbs, and farther, for the same reason, until -October 1. The king was at Greenwich, but even there was not beyond the -infection; in the Privy Purse book, there is an entry of L18. 8_s._ paid -"to Rede, the marshall of the king's hall for to dispose of the king's -charge to such poor folk as were expelled the town of the Greenwiche in -the tyme of the plague." Similar payments are entered on January 13, 1531, -April 10, April 26 and November 8[561]. - -On November 23, 1531, the king was obliged to leave Greenwich on account -of the plague, removing to Hampton Court (now a royal palace since -Wolsey's fall). In London it had somewhat abated, but, according to a -letter of the Venetian ambassador, had been up to 300 or 400 deaths in a -week. In mid-winter, the 15th of January, 1532, Parliament was prorogued -on account of the insalubrity of the air in London and Westminster. The -infection may be assumed to have gone on, according to the analogy of -known years, all through the spring and summer, rising to a greater height -in the autumn. We next hear of it on the 18th September, 1532, when the -Venetian envoy writes from London that the king's journey to Gravesend and -Dover would be by water, "as there is much plague in those parts, and -there is no lack of it in London. Yesterday at the king's court the master -of the kitchen died of it, having waited on his majesty the day before." -On the 24th September, "the plague increases daily in London and well nigh -throughout the country." - -On the 14th October, "the plague increases daily, and makes everybody -uneasy." On the same date the Privy Council write to the king, who had -crossed to Calais accompanied by Mr Secretary Cromwell, for a meeting with -the French king, that there is a rumour of the plague increasing, -especially at the Inns of Court. On the 18th October Hales, one of the -justices, writes to Cromwell that "the plague of sickness is so sore here -that I never saw so thin a Michaelmas term." On the 20th, Audeley the Lord -Chancellor writes that many die of the plague, the sergeants in Fleet -Street have left in consequence, the Inner Temple has broken commons, the -lawyers being in great fear. "_The Council have commanded the mayor to -certify how many have died of the plague._" That is the first known -reference to the London bills of mortality, and was probably the very -first occasion of them[562]. By that time the plague had been active in -London for more than a month, and had clearly begun to alarm the -residents. The result of the Privy Council's order to the mayor of London -was a bill on or before the 21st October, showing that 99 persons had died -of the plague in the city, and 27 from other causes, the number of deaths -from other causes suggesting that this was the bill for a week. On the -23rd the Secretary of State is informed that the sickness is fervent and -many die; those who are not citizens are much afeard. On the 25th Sir John -Aleyn has assurances for Cromwell (at Calais) from all parts of the -country that the whole realm is quiet, but the plague has been more severe -than in London. Cromwell's French gardener was alive and well on Saturday -afternoon, the 12th, and he was dead of the plague and buried on Monday -morning the 14th. On the 27th the death "is quite abated" in London and -Westminster, according to one; but according to the Lord Chancellor, on -the 28th, the plague increases, especially about Fleet Street. On the 31st -October one writes, "I have not seen London so destitute of people as it -was when I came there." On 2nd November the death is assuaged and there is -good rule kept, for Sir Hugh Vaughan takes pains in his office like an -honest gentleman. On the 9th November the plague is abated. There the -correspondence ends, the Court having returned from France. But we may -here bring in a certain weekly bill of mortality which has come down among -the waifs of paper from that period[563]. It is for the week from the 16th -to the 23rd of November, the year not being stated; the experts of the -national collection of manuscripts were at one time inclined to assign it -to "circa 1512;" but the first that we hear of the mayor being called upon -to furnish a bill of plague-deaths is the order by the lords of the -Council on or about the 20th October 1532, the first bill having shown 99 -deaths in the city from plague and 27 deaths (in the week) from other -causes. The extant bill for the week 16th to 23rd November is clearly one -of a series; there are no good grounds for assigning it to an earlier date -than the year 1532, while there are reasons for not placing it later. -There are two other plague-bills extant, for August, 1535, written out in -a more clerkly fashion, and bearing the marks of greater experience. The -bill for the week in November is more primitive in appearance; and we may -fairly take it as one of the series first ordered by the Council in 1532: -for that was the most considerable year of the plague immediately -preceding the outburst of 1535, to which the more finished bills certainly -belong. The week in November, for which it gives the deaths from plague -and other causes in the city parishes is later than the dates of the 2nd -and 9th, when the plague was "suaged" and "abated;" the bill therefore -stands for plague on the decline, or near extinction for the season, its -total of plague deaths being 33, and of other deaths 32, as against 99 and -27 respectively in the corresponding week of October. As this, the -earliest of a great historical series of London bills of mortality, has a -peculiar interest, I transcribe it in full, retaining the original -spelling. - - Syns the XVIth day of November unto the XXIII day of the same moneth - ys dead within the cite and freedom yong and old these many folowyng - of the plage and other dyseases. - - Inprimys benetts gracechurch i of the plage - S Buttolls in front of Bysshops gate i corse - S Nycholas flesshammls i of the plage - S Peturs in Cornhill i of the plage - Mary Woolnerth i corse - All Halowes Barkyng ii corses - Kateryn Colman i of the plage - Mary Aldermanbury i corse - Michaels in Cornhill iii one of the plage - All halows the Moor ii i of the plage - S Gyliz iiii corses iii of the plage - S Dunstons in the West iiii of the plage - Stevens in Colman Strete i corse - All halowys Lumbert Strete i corse - Martins Owut Whiche i corse - Margett Moyses i of the plage - Kateryn Creechurch ii of the plage - Martyns in the Vintre ii corses - Buttolls in front Algate iiii corses - S Olavs in Hart Strete ii corses - S Andros in Holborn ii of the plage - S Peters at Powls Wharff ii of the plage - S Fayths i corse of the plage - S Alphes i corse of the plage - S Mathows in Fryday Strete i of the plage - Aldermary ii corses - S Pulcres iii corses i of the plage - S Thomas Appostells ii of the plage - S Leonerds Foster Lane i of the plage - Michaels in the Ryall ii corses - S Albornes i corse of the plage - Swytthyns ii corses of the plage - Mary Somersette i corse - S Bryde v corses i of the plage - S Benetts Powls Wharff i of the plage - All halows in the Wall i of the plage - Mary Hyll i corse. - - Sum of the plage xxxiiii persons - Sum of other seknes xxxii persons - - The holl sum xx/iii & vi. - - And there is this weke clere xxx/iii and iii paryshes as by this bille - doth appere. - - The exec{n} of corses buryed of the plage within the cite of London - syns &c. - -There does not appear to have been any occasion for a continuance of -plague-bills beyond the date of the one just given until nearly three -years after: we hear, indeed, of a severe epidemic of plague at Oxford in -1533, but nothing of it in London until 1535[564]. It so happens that a -pair of London bills of mortality is extant from the month of August in -that year. Thus, by a singular coincidence, the only original bills of -mortality that have come down (so far as is known) from the sixteenth -century, are one from the end of the series in the first year of their -execution (1532), and another the very first of the series in the second -year of their execution (1535), or in the series ordered on account of the -epidemic of plague next following. Of that epidemic also it may be -permitted to give somewhat full details, for it is only rarely that we -have the chance of realizing the facts in so concrete a way. - -In the summer and autumn of 1535 Henry VIII., with the queen (Anne -Boleyn), was mostly at his manor of Thornbury in Gloucestershire, Cromwell -the principal Secretary of State being either with the king or in his -immediate neighbourhood. The absence of the Court occasions numerous -letters to be sent from and to London, in which we hear of the plague -among other things. Cromwell had four houses in or near London at this -time,--at the Rolls in Chancery Lane, at Austin Friars in the City, at the -fashionable suburb of Stepney, and at Highbury: besides these he had a -fine villa building at Hackney. From his steward or other servants at one -or more of these he was in receipt of letters constantly during his -absence. A letter from the Rolls on the 30th July informs him that twelve -heron-shaws had been sent to him from Kent, and had been received at the -Rolls "as the city of London is sorely infected with the plague." Next day -another writes that the City is infected but Fleet Street is clean. On the -5th August "the common sickness waxeth very busy in London." On the 7th -Lord Chancellor Audeley writes from "my house at Christchurch" -(Creechurch, near Aldgate) that he had been expecting Cromwell in London, -but hears that he will not return for nine or ten days; will therefore go -to his house at Colchester meanwhile, as they are dying of the plague in -divers parishes in London. Cromwell was naturally desirous to know -accurately the state of health in the city, so as to regulate his own -movements and perhaps the king's also; he accordingly makes inquiries of -his various correspondents. Another letter from London on the 7th August -informs him that there is no death at Court, but only in certain places in -the city: "I fear these great humidities will engender pestilence at the -end of the year, rather after Bartholomew tide than before. If you be near -London you must avoid conference of people." On receipt of this Cromwell -would appear to have written to the mayor of London, for on the 13th -August his clerk at the Rolls replies to him that he had delivered the -letter to the lord mayor. On the 16th another of the household at the -Rolls writes that the plague rages in every parish in London, but not so -bad as in many places abroad: "I will send the number of the dead. The -mayor keeps his chamber. Some say he is sick of an ague; others that he -was cut about the brows for the megrims, which vexeth him sore. Few men -come at him, but women." The bill of mortality which Cromwell had asked -for previous to 13th August is extant[565]. It is in two parts: one -showing 31 deaths from plague and 31 deaths from other causes in -thirty-seven out of one hundred parishes from the 5th to the 12th August, -with a list of parishes clear; and the other, headed "14th August" and -probably meant to include the former, showing a much heavier mortality and -a much shorter list of parishes clear, the whole being endorsed by the -mayor, Sir John Champneys, as follows: "So appeareth there be dead within -the city of London of the plague and otherwise from the 6th day of this -month of August to the 14th day, which be eight days complete, the full -number of 152 persons [105 of them from plague]. And this day se'night -your mastership [Mr Secretary Cromwell] shall be certified of the number -that shall chance to depart in the meantime. Yours as I am bound, John -Champeneys." This double bill for certain days in August, 1535, is rather -more elaborate than, but otherwise not unlike, the above bill, for a week -in November, most likely of the year 1532. It will be noticed that the -deaths in all the city parishes from other causes than plague are 47 in -the bill for eight (or nine) days; 31 in the bill, partly the same, for -seven days, and 32 in the earlier bill for seven days, while they are -known to have been 27 in another bill of October, 1532, probably also for -seven days. These figures, the best to be had, are important for -calculating the population of London at the time; they represent quite an -ordinary weekly mortality, the deaths from plague being found to be always -extra deaths, where we can compare the mortality year after year, as in -the London bills of later times. - -The weekly bills of mortality called for in the plague of 1535 were sent -regularly to the Secretary of State until the end of September--on the -22nd and 30th August, and on the 4th, (and 5th), 11th and 27th September. -The one sent on Monday the 30th August showed 157 deaths during the -preceding week, of which 140 were put down to plague, leaving only 17 -deaths in the week from ordinary causes,--a small number owing perhaps to -so many residents having gone to the country. No figures remain from the -other bills, but we know from letters that the plague increased -considerably in September (e.g. 11th Sept. "By the Lord Mayor's -certificate which I send you will see that the plague increases") both in -London and in the country, justifying the prediction that it would be -worse after Bartholomew-tide; it is not until the 28th October that we -hear of the deaths being "well stopped" in London. Some few particulars of -this epidemic, and of its revival in 1536, remain to be added before we -come to speak of the London bills of mortality in general, of the extent -of the City and liberties at this period, of its sanitary condition, and -of the public health from year to year. - -On the 18th August, 1535, one writes to Cromwell from the Temple that the -plague "has visited my house near Stepney where my wife lives." On the -20th August a resident in Lincoln's Inn was seized with plague and -conveyed thence by night to a poor man's house right against the chamber -of one of Cromwell's household at the Rolls, where he died. "Such as -lodge in your gate seldom go out, and will have less occasion if, before -great time pass, you will appoint from Endevill, or elsewhere within your -rule, some venison for the household, that men may be the better contented -with their fare." On the same date Cromwell is informed by his steward at -Austin Friars that "the Frenchman next your house that was in St Peter's -parish [Cornhill] has buried two, but no more." The plague looked -threatening enough to raise the question whether Bartholomew fair should -be held at Smithfield this year. Meanwhile the king and court were at -Thornbury in Gloucestershire, having arrived there on the 18th August. The -town of Bristol was avoided "because the plague of pestilence then reigned -within the said town;" but a deputation of three persons was sent to the -king to present him with ten fat oxen and forty sheep, and to present the -queen, Anne Boleyn, with a gold cup full of gold pieces, an offering known -as "queen gold[566]." On the 25th of August the French ambassador -proceeded to Gloucestershire to inform Henry VIII. "of the interview of -the two queens," but he stopped six miles short of the court, owing to a -"French merchant" who followed him having died of plague on the road. On -the 4th September the plague in London is aggravated by a scarcity of -bread; "what was sold for 1/2_d._ when you were here is now 1_d._," and it -is so musty that it is rather poisonous than nourishing. On the 6th the -season has been unfavourable and there is great probability of famine. On -the 13th the Lord Chancellor will stay at his house at Old Ford beside -Stratford, on account of the plague in London increasing; he will have to -go to Westminster on the 3rd November, with the Speaker and others, to -prorogue Parliament, and advises the prorogation to be until the 4th of -February, and of the law courts until the eve of All Souls, by which time, -by coldness of the weather, the plague should cease. Wheat and rye were at -a mark and 16/- the quarter. A letter from Exeter on the 17th September -shows the danger of famine to have been great there also[567]. On the 23rd -September one of the masons working at Cromwell's house in Austen Friars -is sick of the plague: three corses were buried at Hackney [of men -employed at the new house?] last St Matthew's day. In October the king is -on his way back from Gloucestershire, but changes his route owing to a -death at Shalford and four deaths at Farnham. On the 24th October the -bishop of Winchester, on his way to Paris, lost his servant at Calais by -the great sickness "wherewith he was infected at his late being in London -longer than I would he should:" travelling is cumbrous in the "strange -watery weather" in France. In November the pope has heard that England is -troubled with famine and pestilence. The curate of Much Malvern writes in -November (but perhaps of 1536): "I have buried four persons of pestilence -since Saturday, and I have one more to bury to-day. Yesterday I was in a -house where the plague is very sore." - -The sickness appears to have shown itself again in London as early as -April, 1536. On the 2nd of May two gentlemen of the Inner Temple had died -of the sickness; on the 15th the abbot of York writes to be excused from -attending Parliament "because of the plague which has visited my house -near Powles [St Paul's]." In the same summer the election of knights to -serve in Parliament for Shropshire could not be held at Shrewsbury because -the plague was in the town. In September one of the king's visitors of the -abbeys, previous to their suppression, found hardly any place clear of the -plague in Somerset, and was much impeded in his work. On the 27th -September one of the numerous coronations of new queens in Henry VIII.'s -reign (this time Jane Seymour in succession to Anne Boleyn, beheaded in -May) was like to be postponed "seeing how the plague reigned in -Westminster, even in the Abbey." On the 9th October plague was at Dieppe, -thought to have been brought over from Rye. In Yorkshire also, the duke of -Norfolk, sent to put down the rebellion in November, 1536, came into close -contact with plague; many were dying of it at Doncaster: "Where I and my -son lay, at a friar's, ten or twelve houses were infected within a butt's -length. On Friday night the mayor's wife and two daughters and a servant -all died in one house." Nine soldiers also were dead. At Oxford the -plague was active, and the scholars had gone into the country. In London -on the 27th November it was dangerous to tarry at Lincoln's Inn "for they -die daily in the City." In September, 1536, the small essay on plague by -the 14th century bishop of Aarhus, which had circulated in manuscript in -the medieval period and was first printed in 1480, was reprinted at -London, the regimen, as the title declares, having been "of late practised -and proved in mani places within the City of London, and by the same many -folke have been recovered and cured[568]." In 1537 there appear to have -been a few cases of plague at Shrewsbury, on account of which the town -council paid certain moneys[569]. - -Beyond the year 1538 the domestic records of State are not as yet -calendared in such fulness as to bring to light any references to plague -in them. It may be, therefore, that the clear interval from 1537 to 1542 -is in appearance only. From such sources as are available we can continue -the history of plague down to the great London plague of 1563; but it is a -history meagre and disappointing after the numerous concrete glimpses and -details of the earlier period. - -The summer of 1540 was a sickly one throughout England[570]; it introduces -us to a different and perhaps new type of disease, "hot agues," with -"laskes" or dysenteries, of which a good deal remains to be said in -another chapter. - -It was in 1539 that Parish Registers of the births, marriages and deaths -began to be kept--very irregularly for the most part but in some few -parishes continuously from that year. By their means we can henceforth -trace the existence of epidemic disease in the country, which might not -have been suspected or thought probable. Thus, at Watford from July to -September, 1540, there were 47 burials, of which 40 were from "plague." -Next year, in the month of October, the burials were 14, a number greatly -in excess of the average[571]. In 1543 there was "a great death" in -London, which lasted so far into the winter that the Michaelmas law term -had to be kept at St Albans[572]. Another civic chronicle adds that there -had been a great death the summer before; and from an ordinance of the -Privy Council it appears that the plague was in London as early as May 21, -1543[573]. The next definite proof of plague in the capital is under 1547 -and 1548. On the 15th November in the former year blue crosses were -ordered to be affixed to the door-posts of houses visited by the plague. -In 1548, says Stow, there was "great pestilence" in London, and a -commission was issued to curates that there should be no burials between -the hours of six in the evening and six in the morning, and that the bell -should be tolled for three-quarters of an hour[574]. A letter of July 19 -says that they had been visited by plague in the Temple, and that it still -continued[575]. On August 28, the Common Council adjourned for a fortnight -by reason of the violence of the plague[576]. - -These are the London informations for 1547 and 1548, but it would be -unsafe to conclude that the other years from 1543 were free from plague. -In 1544 it was raging at Newcastle[577], at Canterbury[578] and at -Oxford[579], at which last it continued most of the next year, and was -considered to be "the dregs of that which happened _anno_ 1542." It had -been prevalent in Edinburgh previous to June 24, 1545[580]. In April, -1546, there was a severe mortality on board a Venetian ship at Portsmouth, -which may have been the plague, as in a similar case at Southampton[581]. -In the autumn or early winter of the same year the plague was raging so -fervently in Devonshire that the Commissioners for the Musters were -obliged to put off their work till it ceased[582]. Within the town of -Haddington, which was held by an English garrison against a large -besieging force of French and others, plague broke out in 1547[583]. In -1549 the disease is reported from Lincoln[584]. A letter of November 23, -1550, states that the Princess Mary was driven from Wanstead by one dying -of the plague there[585]. - -The reigns of Edward VI. and Mary, full of trouble as they were in other -ways, furnish hardly a single record of plague. The sweating sickness of -1551 we hear of sufficiently; and the pestilent fevers, or influenzas, in -1557-58 are not altogether without record; but of plague down to the 5th -year of Elizabeth (1563) there is very little said, and that little not -free from ambiguity. Sometime in that interval, or still earlier, must -have fallen the pestilence at Northampton, severe enough to require the -new cemetery which cardinal Pole, in a deed of March 9, 1557, ordered to -be henceforth kept enclosed[586]. Only two of the many centres of sickness -in England in 1558 are said to have had the infection of the type, not of -fever, but of plague,--Loughborough and Chester. In the Leicestershire -town the burials were numerous enough for true plague, and the cause of -mortality is so named[587]. In Chester also the sickness is called the -plague, and it is added that many fled the town, although the deaths were -few[588]. A State paper of February 25, 1559, speaks of the county of -Cheshire as "weakened by the prevalence of plague[589]." - - -The London Plague of 1563. - -The activity of the plague in London in 1563 made up for its dormancy in -the years preceding. The epidemic of that summer and autumn was one of the -most severe in the history of the city, the mortality in proportion to the -population having been tremendous. This is the first London plague for -which we have the authentic weekly deaths. How they were obtained is not -stated, but it was probably by the same means that furnished the -plague-bills of 1532 and 1535. John Stow must have had before him a -complete set of weekly bills from the beginning of June, 1563, to the 26th -of July, 1566, of which series not one is known to be extant; but the -totals of the weekly deaths from plague for the whole of that period are -among Stow's manuscript memoranda in the Lambeth Library[590]. After the -week ending the 31st December, 1563, the weekly deaths are few, many of -the weeks of 1564, 1565 and 1566 having only one death from plague, and -some of them none. The following are the weekly mortalities during the -severe period of the epidemic: - - Week ending Plague-deaths - 1563. 12 June 17 - 19 " 25 - 26 " 23 - 3 July 44 - 10 " 64 - 17 " 131 - 23 " 174 - 30 " 289 - 6 August 299 - 13 " 542 - 20 " 608 - 27 " 976 - 3 September 963 - 10 " 1454 - 17 " 1626 - 24 " 1372 - 1 October 1828 - 8 " 1262 - 15 " 829 - 22 " 1000 - 29 " 905 - 5 November 380 - 12 " 283 - 19 " 506 - 26 " 281 - 3 December 178 - 10 " 249 - 17 " 239 - 24 " 134 - 31 " 121 - 1564. 7 January 45 - 14 " 26 - 21 " 13 - -Stow's summary of this epidemic in his _Annales_ is as follows: "In the -same whole year, i.e. from the 1st January, 1562 [old style] till the last -of December, 1563, there died in the city and liberties thereof, -containing 108 parishes, of all diseases 20,372, and of the plague, being -part of the number aforesaid, 17,404; and in out parishes adjoining to -the same city, being 11 parishes, died of all diseases in the whole year -3288, and of them of the plague 2732." The weekly totals from June 12 to -December 31 which are for the City and liberties, and exclusive of the out -parishes, add up to very nearly Stow's total for the whole year, or to -16,802 as against 17,404. Where the discrepancy arises does not appear; it -is hardly likely that some 600 plague-deaths would have occurred previous -to the second week in June, at which time the weekly mortality had reached -only 17. We are able to check one of the weekly totals from an independent -source. In an extant letter of the time the following figures for the week -from 23rd to 30th July are given, having been taken evidently from the -published or posted weekly bill: "Died and were buried in London and -suburbs, 399, most young people and youths, of which number of the common -plague 320 persons. Number of children born and christened in the same -week, 52[591]." "London and suburbs" would mean the 108 parishes of the -City and liberties together with the 11 out parishes, so that the -difference between Stow's 289 and the above 320 would give the number of -plague-deaths in the out parishes for the particular week. - -The state of matters in the City is thus referred to in Bullein's -_Dialogue_ published in 1564:-- - - _Civis._--"Good wife, the daily jangling and ringing of the bells, the - coming in of the minister to every house in ministering the communion, - the reading of the homily of death, the digging up of graves, the - sparring of windows, and the blazing forth of the blue crosses do make - my heart tremble and quake." A beggar, in the same _Dialogue_, who had - arrived from the country, says: - - "I met with wagones, cartes and horses full loden with yong barnes, - for fear of the blacke Pestilence, with them boxes of medicens and - sweete perfumes. O God! how fast did they run by hundredes, and were - afraied of eche other for feare of smityng." - -We get one or two glimpses of this great plague from the medical point of -view in Dr John Jones's _Dyall of Agues_[592]. The worst locality, he -says, was "S. Poulkar's parish [St Sepulchre's] by reason of many -fruiterers, poor people, and stinking lanes, as Turnagain-lane [so called -because it led down the slope to Fleet Ditch and ended there], -Seacoal-lane, and such other places, there died most in London, and were -soonest infected, and longest continued, as twice since I have known -London I have marked to be true." Jones believed in contagion: "I myself -was infected by reason that unawares I lodged with one that had it running -from him." His other observation is interesting as proving the possibility -of repeated attacks of the buboes in the same person, an observation -abundantly confirmed, as we shall see, in the London plagues of 1603 and -1665: - - "Here now, gentel readers, I think good to admonish all such as have - had the plague, that they flie the trust of ignoraunt persons, who use - to saye that he who hath once had the plague shal not nede to feare - the havinge of it anye more: the whych by this example whyche foloweth - (that chaunced to a certayne Bakers wife without Tempel barre in - London, Anno Do. 1563) you shall find to be worthelye to be repeated: - this sayde wyfe had the plage at Midsommer and at Bartholomewtide, and - at Michaelmas, and the first time it brake, the seconde time it brake, - but ran littell, the thirde time it appeared and brake not: but she - died, notwythstanding she was twyce afore healed." - -Two London physicians of some note died of the plague in 1563. One was Dr -Geynes, who had brought trouble upon himself by impugning the authority of -Galen, perhaps without sufficient reason. Having been cited before the -College of Physicians, to whose discipline he was subject, he preferred to -recant his heresy rather than undergo imprisonment. He died of plague on -23 July, 1563. Another was Dr John Fryer who had suffered twice for -religious heresy, having been imprisoned by queen Mary as a Lutheran, and -by queen Elizabeth as a papist. He regained his liberty in August, 1563, -but only to die of plague on 21 October, his wife and several of his -children having been also victims of the epidemic[593]. - -Stow ascribes the infection of the city of London by plague in the summer -of 1563 to the return of the English troops from Havre, which town queen -Elizabeth had boldly attempted to hold, and did actually hold for ten -months, from September, 1562, as an English fortress in French territory. -Havre was not surrendered until the last days of July, 1563, and no -returning troops could have reached London until August, by which time the -plague had been raging there for two months. There was no doubt frequent -communication between Havre and English ports while the siege lasted; but -the sickness in each place can have been no more than coincident. Thus, -while there were 17 plague-deaths in London in the week from the 5th to -the 12th of June, the 7th of June is the first date on which report was -made of sickness in Havre, although there had been cases of illness -before. On that date the Earl of Warwick wrote to the Privy Council[594]: -"For the want of money the works are hindered and the men discouraged. A -strange disease has come amongst them, whereof nine died this morning (and -many before) very suddenly." On the same day (7th June, 1563), one writes -from Havre to Cecil: "Many of our men have been hurt in these skirmishes, -but more by drinking of their wine, which hath cast down a great number, -of hot burning diseases and impostumations, not unlike the plague." By the -9th June the deaths were from 20 to 30 a day. On the 12th June, 442 were -sick out of a total force (including labourers and seamen) of 7143. On -June 16, Warwick points out to the Privy Council that the sickness was -aggravated by the want of fresh meat and the soldiers' usual beverages: -"therefore their continual drinking of wine, contrary to their custom, has -bred these disorders and diseases." On the 28th June the daily mortality -was 77; from that date it increased somewhat, and was so serious as to -hasten the surrender of the place to the French besieging force in the end -of July. On July 27 there was plague in the castle of Jersey, and on -August 6 it was very sore in Jersey, especially in the Castle[595]. - -It would have seemed the more probable to the people of London that the -plague of 1563 had been imported across the Channel by reason of the -unusually long immunity of the English capital in respect of that -infection. A clear interval of a dozen years without an epidemic, or a -severe epidemic, was enough to make men forget the long tradition of -plague domesticated upon English soil; while there was no scientific -doctrine of epidemics then worked out, from which they might have known -that the seeds of a disease may lie dormant for years, and that their -periodic effectiveness depends upon a concurrence of favouring things, -most of all upon extremes of dryness or wetness of the seasons as -affecting a soil full of corrupting animal matters. - -The plague of 1563 in the capital was accompanied or followed by several -provincial outbreaks, of which few details are known. It is mentioned at -Derby[596] in 1563, at Leicester[597] in 1563 and 1564 (a shut-up house in -1563, the first plague-burial in St Martin's parish on May 11, 1564), at -Stratford-on-Avon, at Lichfield[598] and Canterbury[599] in 1564. But it -is little more than mentioned at all those places. In the parish register -of Hensley, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, a later incumbent, basing -upon "an old writing of 1569," says that the explanation of the year 1563 -being a blank in the register was "because in that year the visitation of -plague was most hot and fearful, so that many died and fled, and the town -of Hensley, by reason of the sickness, was unfrequented for a long -season[600]." - - -Preventive Practice in Plague-time under the Tudors. - -Having now traced the history of plague in London and in the provinces -down to the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth, and having found it -steady from year to year for many years in London, with an occasional -terrific outburst, we are naturally led to ask whether the causes of it, -or its favouring things, were understood, and whether any steps were taken -to deal with it. This will be in effect a review of the earliest -preventive practice. - -That which was most clearly perceived by all was that the plague began to -reign in certain years as the summer heats drew on, that the air of London -or Westminster became "intemperate," or unwholesome, or infectious, and -that it was desirable to get out of such air. Accordingly the one great -rule, admitted by all and acted upon by as many as could, was to escape -from the tainted locality, or as Wolsey expressed it to the earl of -Shrewsbury in 1516, to get them "into clean air." There was no other -sovereign prescription but that, and it remained the one great -prescription until the last of plague in 1665-6. - -Difficult points of casuistry arose out of that steady perception of an -indisputable rule. Could flight from a plague-stricken place be reconciled -with duty to one's neighbour? How ought a Christian man to demean himself -in the plague? The Christian conscience may or may not have been tender on -that ground in the medieval period; there is little to show one way or the -other, except the occasional hints that we get, as in the Danish bishop's -treatise, of an unwillingness to go near the victims of plague. But about -the Reformation time those points of casuistry were debated; and one -elaborate handling of them, in the form of a sermon by a German -ecclesiastic, Osiander, was translated into English in 1537 by Miles -Coverdale[601]. It followed, accordingly, that period of plague in London -which has occupied the first part of this chapter. The translator remarks -that they had been negligent of charity one to another, and he prints this -discourse "to the intent that the ignorant may be taught, the weake -strengthened, and everyone counselled after his callynge to serve his -neighbor." - -Osiander's perplexed Christian is in much the same case as Launcelot Gobbo -in the play: "'Budge,' says the fiend; 'Budge not,' says my conscience. -'Conscience,' say I, 'you counsel well;' 'Fiend,' say I, 'you counsel -well.'" The situation was a naturally complex one, and this is how the -good preacher comes out of it: - - "It is not my meaning to forbid or inhibit any man to fly, or to use - physick, or to avoid dangerous and sick places in these fearful - airs--so far as a man doth not therein against the belief, nor God's - commandment, nor against his calling, nor against the love of his - neighbour." And yet, shortly after: "Out of such fond childish fear it - cometh that not only some sick folk be suffered to die away without - all keeping, help, and comfort; but the women also, great with child, - be forsaken in their need, or else cometh there utterly no man unto - them. Yet a man may hear also that the children forsake their fathers - and mothers, and one household body keepeth himself away from another, - and sheweth no love unto him. Which nevertheless he would be glad to - see shewed unto himself if he lay in like necessity." He then exhorts - the Christian man to remain at the post of duty, by the examples of - the clergy and of "the higher powers of the world, who also abide in - jeopardy"--certainly not the English experience. "Let him not axe his - own reason, how he shall do, but believe, and follow the word of God, - which teacheth him not to fly evil air and infect places (which he may - well do: nevertheless he remaineth yet uncertain whether it helpeth or - no)." The Christian man's perplexities can hardly have been resolved - when all was said; and the following sentence puts the case for - quitting the infected place as strongly as it can be put: "For if it - were in meat or drink, it might be eschewed; if it were an evil taste, - it might be expelled with a sweet savour; if it were an evil wind, the - chamber might with diligence be made close therefore; if it were a - cloud or mist, it might be seen and avoided; if it were a rain, a man - might cover himself for it. But now it is a secret misfortune that - creepeth in privily, so that it can neither be seen nor heard, neither - smelled nor tasted, till it have done the harm." - -In practice the rule was 'Save who can;' so that whenever the infection -promised to become "hot," as the phrase was, there was an adjournment of -Parliament and of the Law Courts, a flight of all who could afford it to -the country, and an interruption of business, diplomatic and other, which -sometimes lasted for months. It was only occasionally, however, that the -infection became really hot; in ordinary years a certain risk was run. -Thus, in 1426, the plague had been severe enough to cut off the Scots -hostages; but it was not until after their death that the king's council -left the city. Again, in 1467, Parliament did not adjourn (on 1st July) -until several members of the House of Commons had died of the plague. - -Although flight was the sovereign preventive in a great plague-season, it -was impracticable in ordinary years when the infection was at its steadier -or more endemic level. The endemic level was tolerated up to a certain -point. In a long despatch to his government, the Venetian ambassador in -London wrote of the plague as follows in 1554[602]: - - "They have some little plague in England well nigh every year, for - which they are not accustomed to make sanitary provisions, as it does - not usually make great progress; the cases for the most part occur - amongst the lower classes, as if their dissolute mode of life impaired - their constitutions." - -Whenever the plague showed signs of overstepping these limits, strenuous -efforts were made to keep it in check. It may be questioned whether all -that was done in that way made any difference; the great outbursts came at -intervals, rose to their height, subsided in a few months, and left the -city more or less free of plague until some concurrence of things, or the -lapse of time, brought about another epidemic of the first degree. None -the less, certain measures were taken to restrain the infection, and these -were put in force with mechanical regularity whenever the Privy Council -informed the Lord Mayor that the occasion required it. A brief account of -them, of their beginnings and their development, will now be given. - -The first that we hear of attempts at isolation and notification is in -1518. In April of that year, the Court being in Berkshire or Oxfordshire, -Sir Thomas More charged the mayor of Oxford, and the commissary, in the -king's name "that the inhabitants of those houses that be, and shall be -infected, shall keep in, put out wispes, and bear white rods, as your -Grace devised for Londoners[603]." By his Grace is to be understood the -king himself; and these measures devised by him--the keeping in, the -putting out of wisps on the houses, and the carrying of white rods,--might -have been tried as early as the epidemic of 1513, which was a severe one. -When two of the Venetian ambassador's servants died of the plague in 1513, -their bed, sheets and other effects were thrown into the river. On the -21st of May, 1516, the ambassador removed to Putney owing to a case of -plague in his house, and he was not allowed to see cardinal Wolsey until -the 30th of June, i.e. until forty days had elapsed. This is perhaps the -first mention of the quarantine which the Court rigorously put in -practice against those who had business with it. On the 22nd July, 1518, -the same ambassador wrote to Venice from Lambeth that two of his servants -had lately died of the plague; and, on the 11th August, again from -Lambeth, that the king and Wolsey would not see him because of the plague; -"but on the expiration of forty days, which had nearly come to an end, he -would not fail to do his duty as heretofore." - -On the 25th August, 1535, Chapuys, in a letter to Charles V., gives an -amusing account of an attempt made by the French ambassador to see Henry -VIII. and Cromwell on diplomatic business. The Court was residing in -Gloucestershire owing to plague in and near London (it was at Bristol -also), and the ambassador journeyed thither to carry his business through. -However he went no nearer than six miles, because a "French merchant" who -followed him died upon the road of the plague, as it was feared. The king -asked him to put his charge in writing, but the ambassador replied that he -had orders to tell it in person, and that he could wait. At length he lay -in wait for Secretary Cromwell in the fields where he went to hunt with -the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, and delivered his charge despite the -manifest unwillingness of Cromwell, who came away from the improvised -diplomatic interview in no good humour. - -The first plague-order of which the full text is extant was issued in the -35th of Henry VIII. (1543). As it contains the germs of all subsequent -preventive practice, I transcribe it in full[604]. - - "35 Hen. VIII. A precept issued to the aldermen:--That they should - cause their beadles to set the sign of the cross on every house which - should be afflicted with the plague, and there continue for forty - days: - - "That no person who was able to live by himself, and should be - afflicted with the plague, should go abroad or into any company for - one month after his sickness, and that all others who could not live - without their daily labour should as much as in them lay refrain from - going abroad, and should for forty days after [illegible] and - continually carry a white rod in their hand, two foot long: - - "That every person whose house had been infected should, after a - visitation, carry all the straw and [illegible] in the night privately - into the fields and burn; they should also carry clothes of the - infected in the fields to be cured: - - "That no housekeeper should put any person diseased out of his house - into the street or other place unless they provided housing for them - in some other house: - - "That all persons having any dogs in their houses other than hounds, - spaniels or mastiffs, necessary for the custody or safe keeping of - their houses, should forthwith convey them out of the city, or cause - them to be killed and carried out of the city and buried at the common - laystall: - - "That such as kept hounds, spaniels, or mastiffs should not suffer - them to go abroad, but closely confine them: - - "That the churchwardens of every parish should employ somebody to keep - out all common beggars out of churches on holy days, and to cause them - to remain without doors: - - "That all the streets, lanes, etc. within the wards should be - cleansed: - - "That the aldermen should cause this precept to be read in the - churches." - -Here we see a development of the measures which had been devised for -London by Henry VIII. or his minister previous to 1518, and probably in -the plague of 1513. The wisps put out on the infected houses are replaced -by crosses, which, in the order of 1543, are simply called "the sign of -the cross." They are next heard of during the plague of 1547, in a -Guildhall record of 15 November[605]: - - "Item, for as moche as my Lord Mayer reported that my Lorde Chauncelar - declared unto hym that my Lorde Protectour's Grace's pleasure ys, and - other of the Lordes of the Counseyll, that certain open tokens and - sygnes shulde be made and sett furth in all such places of the Cytie - as haue of late been vysyted with the plage"--be it therefore ordained - that a certain cross of St Anthony devised for that purpose be affixed - to the uttermost post of the street door, there to remain forty days - after the setting up thereof. - -The cross of St Anthony was a headless cross, and the crutch is supposed -to have been painted (in blue) on canvas or board and fixed to the post of -the street door. The legend under or over the cross was, "Lord have mercy -upon us." Before the plague of 1603, the colour had been changed to red. - -The white rods, which had been devised along with the wisps previous to -1518, are mentioned in the order of 1543 as two foot long; they were to -be carried for forty days by those who must needs go abroad from -plague-stricken houses. We hear of them again, both in France and in -England in 1580 and 1581. On the 20th November, 1580, the Venetian -ambassador to France writes from the neighbourhood of Paris: "This city, I -hear, is in a very fair sanitary condition, notwithstanding that as I -entered a city gate, which is close to where I reside, I met a man and a -woman bearing the white plague wands in their hands and asking alms; but -some believe that this was merely an artifice on their part to gain -money[606]." In the regulations for plague added in 1581 by the mayor of -London to the earlier code, the third is: "That no persons dwelling in a -house infected be suffered to go abroad unless they carry with them a -white wand of a yard long; any so offending to be committed to the Cage." -In the seventeenth-century plagues of London and provincial towns, the -white wand was retained as the peculiar badge of the searchers of infected -houses and of the bearers of the dead. The white rod or wand carried by -inmates of infected houses, had become a red rod in the plague of 1603, -just as the blue cross had been changed to red. - -The other directions in the order of 1543 are heard of from time to time -in the subsequent history of plague--such as the burning of straw, and the -cleansing of the streets. The Guildhall record of 15 November, 1547, after -directing the blue crosses to be affixed to houses, proceeds: - - "And also to cause all the welles and pumpes within their seid wardes - to be drawen iii times euerye weke, that is to say, Monday, Wednesday, - and Friday. And to cast down into the canelles at euerye such drawyng - xii bucketts full of water at the least, to clense the stretes - wythall." - -Under Elizabeth, the orders as to scavenging become much more stringent, -as we shall see. In the plague of 1563, on 29 September, the Common -Council appointed "two poor men to burn and bury such straw, clothes, and -bedding as they shall find in the fields near the city or within the city, -whereon any person in the plague hath lyen or dyed[607]." - -The curious order as to dogs was based upon the belief that they carried -the infection in their hair, just as cats are now believed by some to -carry infection in their fur. Brasbridge, in his _Poor Man's Jewel_ -(1578), gives a case of a glover at Oxford, into whose house a disastrous -plague-infection was supposed to have been brought by means of a dog's -skin bought in London[608]. The plague-regulations contained the clause -against dogs to the last; in the great plagues of 1603, 1625, and 1665, -thousands of them were killed, many of them having been doubtless left -behind in the exodus of the well-to-do classes. In the corporation records -of Winchester[609], there is a minute, undated, but probably belonging to -the end of the 16th century, that dogs shall be kept indoors "if any house -within the city shall happen to be infected with the plague." A -proclamation during the London plague of 1563 is directed against cats as -well as dogs, "for the avoidance of the plague:" officers were appointed -to kill and bury all such as they found at large[610]. - -The great London plague of 1563 had revived the old practices and given -rise to some new ones. Curates and churchwardens were directed to warn the -inmates of houses where plague had occurred not to come to church for a -certain space thereafter[611]. The blue crosses were again in great -request, being ordered by hundreds at a time in readiness to affix to -infected houses[612]. Also it was ordered by the Mayor and Council that -the "filthie dunghill lying in the highway near unto Fynnesburye Courte be -removed and carried away; and not to suffer any such donge or fylthe from -hensforthe there to be leyde[613]." On the 9th of July, 1563, plague -having been already at work for several weeks, a commission was issued by -the queen in Council, that every householder in London should, at seven -in the evening, lay out wood and make bonfires in the streets and lanes, -to the intent that they should thereby consume the corrupt airs, the fires -to be made on three days of the week[614]. On 30th September, 1563, it was -ordered that all such houses as were infected should have their doors and -windows shut up, and the inmates not to stir out nor suffer any to come to -them for forty days. At the same time, a collection was ordered to be made -in the churches for the relief of the poor afflicted with the plague, and -thus shut up. Another order was that new mould should be laid on the -graves of such as die of the plague. Still another, the first of a long -series, was to prohibit all interludes and plays during the -infection[615]. On the 2nd December, when the deaths had fallen to 178 in -the week, an order was issued by the Common Council that houses in which -the plague had been were not to be let. On the 20th January, 1564, there -was an order for a general airing and cleansing of houses, bedding and the -like. By that time the deaths had fallen to 13 in the week. - -The most rigorous measures in this plague were those which queen Elizabeth -took for her own safety at Windsor in September. Stow says that "a gallows -was set up in the market-place of Windsor to hang all such as should come -there from London. No wares to be brought to, or through, or by Windsor; -nor any one on the river by Windsor to carry wood or other stuff to or -from London, upon pain of hanging without any judgment; and such people as -received any wares out of London into Windsor were turned out of their -houses, and their houses shut up[616]." - -In 1568 a more complete set of instructions to the aldermen of the several -wards was drawn up by the Lord Mayor, and a corresponding order for the -city of Westminster by Sir William Cecil, Secretary of State, and by the -Chancellor of the Duchy. In 1581 some additional orders were issued by the -Lord Mayor. The whole of these are here given from a state paper in a -later handwriting, probably of the time of James I. or Charles I[617]. - - A collection of such papers as are found in the office of his - Majesties papers and records for business of state for the preventing - and decreasing of the plague in and about London. - - - A. (City of London, 1568.) - - 1. First a 'tre from the Mayor of London to every alderman of each - warde to charge their Deputys counstables and officers to make search - of all houses infected within each parish. - - 2. To cause all infected houses to bee shutt up and noe person to come - forth in twenty dayes after the infection. - - 3. That some honest discreete person be appoynted to attend each such - infected house to provide them of all necessaries at the cost of the - M{r} of the house if he be able. - - 4. For the poorer houses infected that the Alderman or his deputy doe - cause to make collection for the supply of all necessaries to be - charged upon the wealthyer sorte of the same warde or parish. - - 5. That such as shall refuse to pay what they are assest shall be - committed to warde untill they pay it. - - 6. That all bedding and cloathes and other thinges apt to take - infection which were about infected persons bee burnt or such order - taken that infection may not be increased by them. - - 7. Lastly that a bill with 'Lord have mercy upon us' in greate 'tres - bee sett over the dore of euery infected house and that the - counstables and Beadles have a care to see that the same be not taken - downe. - - These orders were sett downe by the Mayior of London in the yeere - 1568, whereupon queene Elizabeth writeth a letter to S{r} William - Cycill then secretary and S{r} Ambrous Cave, chauncellor of the Duchy - to take the like order or any other that they should thinke fitt in - the citie of Westminster. - - - B. (City of Westminster, 1568.) - - Orders sett down by S{r} William Cycill, Secretary, as High Steward of - Westminster and S{r} Ambrous Cave, chauncellor of the Dutchy to the - Bayleiffes, Hedburroughs, Counstables and other officers of the sayde - Citty. - - 1. That they should follow the good example of the orders devised and - observed by the Mayior and Aldermen of London, and further that all - that haue any houses shops or loggings that hath had any infection in - them by the space of twenty dayes before the making of these orders - shall shutt up all their doares and windoares towards the streetes and - common passages for forty dayes next and not suffer after the tyme of - the sicknes any person to goe forth nor any uninfected to come in upon - payne that euery offender shall sitt seven dayes in the stocks and - after that be committed to the common Goale there to remayne forty - dayes from the first day of his being in the stocks. - - 2. That the officers aforesayde with the curate of euery parish and - churchwardens doe make such collection of the rest of the parishioners - as shall be necessary for the sustenance of such as bee poore infected - and shutt up. - - 3. To discharge all inmates out of all houses that there be noe more - persons in one house then be of one family except they be lodgers for - a small time. - - 4. To cause the streetes lanes and passages and all the shewers sinkes - (?) and gutters thereof dayly to be made sweete and cleane. - - - C. (London, 1581.) - - There were added by the Mayior of London to the former articles these - following in the year 1581. - - 1. That speciall noatis be taken of such houses infected as sell - cloth, silke and other wares and make garments and aparrell for men - and women. - - 2. That euery counstable within his precinct haue at all tymes in - readines two honest and discreete women to attend any house infected. - - 3. That noe person dwelling in a house infected bee suffered to goe - abroade unless they carry with them a white wand of a yarde long. Any - soe offending to bee committed to the Cage there to remayne untill - order shallbe taken by the Mayior or his bretheren. - - 4. That they suffer not any deade corps dying of the plague to be - buryed in tyme of divine service or sermon. - - 5. To appoynt two honest and discreete matrons within euery parish who - shall bee sworne truely to search the body of euery such person as - shall happen to dye within the same parish, to the ende that they make - true reporte to the clerke of the parish church of all such as shall - dye of the plague, that the same clerke may make the like reporte and - certificate to the wardens of the parish clerkes thereof according to - the order in that behalfe heretofore provided. - - If the viewers through favour or corruption shall giue wrong - certificate, or shall refuse to serue being thereto appointed, then to - punish them by imprisonment in such sorte as may serue for the terror - of others. - - 6. That order be taken for killing of dogs that run from house to - house dispersing the plague, and that noe swine be suffered or kept - within the citty[618]. - -Several of these plague-regulations had been in force, as we have seen, -from near the beginning of the century. Others, not hitherto mentioned, -were also of earlier date. Thus the collections for the poor are -mentioned in the diary of a London citizen in 1538 and 1539, but not -specially in connexion with plague. They are heard of often after the -plague of 1563, along with other provisions for the poor which mark the -reign of Elizabeth. If we may trust Bullein's _Dialogue_ of 1564, a -systematic provision became necessary because private charity was no -longer to be depended on. In many country towns and parishes, as we shall -see, the contributions or compensations to the inmates of shut-up houses -in the Elizabethan plagues were paid out of the municipal funds, either -those of the affected place or of some "unvisited" neighbouring town. The -Act of Parliament which most directly provided for "the charitable relief -of persons infected with the plague" was the 1st James I. (1603-4), cap. -31. - -A most essential part of the means for controlling plague was the -institution of searchers[619]. In the orders of 1543, the aldermen of the -wards are directed to send their beadles to affix the sign of the cross to -affected houses. But in due course these duties of inspection, -notification, isolation and registration passed in London into the hands -of the Company of Parish Clerks. The original business of the Parish -Clerks was with church music. In the thirteenth century they received a -charter of incorporation as the Clerks of St Nicholas, and became -associated with that love of choral singing which has always distinguished -the English people. Legacies and endowments fell to them for the -performance of specific services, or for their encouragement in general. -From time to time the Company would appear in a particular parish church -to sing a mass. It was the singular history of a Company which gained its -greatest name as the Registrars of Births and Deaths in London down to the -Registration Act of 1837, to have been not only the first Choral Society -but also the first company of stage players. In 1391, says Stow, a play -was given by the parish clerks of London at the Skinners' Well beside -Smithfield, which continued three days together, the king, queen and -nobles of the realm being present. Another play, in the year 1409, lasted -eight days, "and was of matter from the creation of the world, whereat -was present most of the nobility and gentry of England[620]." - -In the time of Sir Thomas More, a parish clerk meant one who sang in the -church choir. When More was lord chancellor, the duke of Norfolk came one -day to dine with him at his house at Chelsea, and not finding him at home, -went in search of him. He found him, where posterity will long delight to -picture him,--in the church "singing in the choir with a surplice on his -back." As they walked home arm in arm the duke said to Sir Thomas More: "A -parish clerk! a parish clerk! God body, my lord chancellor, you dishonour -the king and his office;" whereon the chancellor answered as if he did not -take the duke altogether seriously. - -The whole strength of the Company of Parish Clerks in those times would -attend the funeral of some rich person, as we may read in the -sixteenth-century diary of Machyn the undertaker (sometimes the Company -chosen to follow the body to the grave was that of the Tallow Chandlers, -as in the case of John Stow's mother). It was no great step from their old -duties to their new. There were, as we have seen, bills of mortality -compiled weekly for all the parishes in the city and liberties as early as -1532 and 1535. It is not said that the Parish Clerks were the collectors -of the information, but they were as likely to have been so as any other -persons whom the mayor would employ. Bills were also drawn up for a few -weeks during the sweating sickness of 1551, and again for an unbroken -series of some two hundred weeks from the beginning of the plague of 1563. -The figures are preserved from a single weekly bill, 22-28 October, 1574, -which must have been one of a series[621]. The next bills known are a -series for five years, 1578-83, a plague-period of which more will have to -be said in its proper place in the chronology. - -The orders of 1581, already given, make mention of the two discreet -matrons within every parish who shall be sworn truly to search the body of -every such person as shall happen to die within the same parish, of their -reporting to the clerk of the parish, and of the clerk making report and -certificate to the wardens of the Parish Clerks, who would send the weekly -certificate for all the parishes to the mayor, and he to the minister of -State. That was said to be "according to the order in that behalf -heretofore provided." It is probable, therefore, that the searchers became -an institution as early as the plague of 1563, or, at all events, at the -beginning of the plague-period of 1578-83. - -The clerk of the Company in 1665 describes how the discreet matrons were -chosen as searchers or viewers of the dead in each parish, and how they -were sworn to discharge their duties faithfully[622]. The swearing in took -place before the Dean of the Arches, that is to say, in St Mary le Bow -church ("St Mary of the Arch") in Cheapside. The motive to bribe them for -a wrong report on the cause of death was to avoid the shutting up and all -other troubles of a household pronounced infected by the plague. In later -times their diagnostic duties became, as we shall see, much more complex; -but down to 1604, when they first brought to the Parish Clerks' Hall "an -account of the diseases and casualties" (which classification and -nomenclature did not begin to be printed until 1629), they had merely to -say whether a death had been from plague or from other cause. - - -Sanitation in Plantagenet and Tudor times. - -Along with all those means, having the object of stopping the spread of -infection, the Elizabethan policy did not neglect what we should now -consider the more radical means of sanitation. It is usual to bring a -sweeping charge of neglect of public hygiene against all old times; there -was so much plague in those times, and so high an average death-rate, that -it is commonly assumed that our ancestors must have been wanting in the -rudimentary instincts of cleanliness. But, in the first place, one might -expect to find that all old periods were not alike; and more generally it -is worth inquiring how far nuisances injurious to the public health were -tolerated. This inquiry will have to be as brief as possible; but it will -take us back to the period of plague covered by a former chapter. - -Nuisances certainly existed in medieval London, but it is equally certain -that they were not tolerated without limit. I have collected in a note the -instances reported in a visitation of 17 Edward III. (1343), and in a -perambulation of the ground outside the walls in 26 Edward III. (1352). -The former related only to the alleys leading down to the river, which -were likely enough places for nuisance, then as now[623]. - -There are several orders of Edward III. relating to the removal of -laystalls and to keeping the town ditch clean, which show, of course, that -there was neglect, but at the same time the disposition to correct it. It -is farther obvious that the connexion between nuisances and the public -health was clearly apprehended. The sanitary doctrines of modern times -were undreamt of; nor did the circumstances altogether call for them. The -sewers of those days were banked-up water courses, or "shores" as the word -was pronounced, which ran uncovered down the various declivities of the -city, to the town ditch and to the Thames. They would have sufficed to -carry off the refuse of a population of some forty or sixty thousand; they -were, at all events, freely open to the greatest of all purifying agents, -the oxygen of the air; and they poisoned neither the water of the town -ditch (which abounded in excellent fish within John Stow's memory) nor the -waters of Thames. In course of time all the brooks of London were covered -in, even the Fleet dyke itself, which used to float barges as far as -Holborn bridge; but who shall say that they were more wholesome -thereafter, although they were underground? Perhaps the poet of the -_Earthly Paradise_ has as true an intuition as any when, in reference to -the city in Chaucer's time, he bids us - - "Dream of London, small, and white, and clean; - The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green." - -The nuisance that gave most trouble in the medieval and Tudor periods was -the blood and offal of the shambles. Several ordinances of Edward III. are -directed against it, in one of which (1371) the connexion between -putrefying blood soaked into the ground and infectious disease is clearly -stated. It is also the principal subject of the first sanitary Act that -appears in the Statutes of the Realm, made by the Parliament of Cambridge -in the 17th of Richard II. (1388), of which I give the preamble and -provisions: - - "Item, For that so much Dung and Filth of the Garbage and Intrails as - well of Beasts killed as of other Corruptions be cast and put in - Ditches, Rivers and other Waters, and also within many other Places - within about and nigh unto divers Cities, Boroughs and Towns of the - Realm, and the Suburbs of them, that the Air there is greatly corrupt - and infect, and many Maladies and other intolerable Diseases do daily - happen," both to the residents and to visitors:--therefore - proclamation is to be made in the City of London, as in other cities, - boroughs and towns "that all they which do cast and lay all such - Annoyances, Dung, Garbages, Intrails and other Ordure in Ditches, - Rivers, Waters and other places shall cause them to be removed, - avoided and carried away betwixt this and the feast of St Michael next - following," under a penalty of twenty pounds, mayors and bailiffs to - compel obedience. Such offences were not to be repeated, and if any - did offend he was liable to be called by writ before the Chancellor - "at his suit that will complain[624]." - -Despite this statute, the shambles in the parish of St Nicholas within -Newgate (adjoining the ground now occupied by Christ's Hospital, and -formerly by the Grey Friars) became an established institution of the -city. They were a subject of petition to Parliament in 1488-9, and they -were still there to give occasion in 1603 to severe remarks by Thomas -Lodge, poet and physician, who practised in Warwick Lane, in their -immediate neighbourhood. The Act of 1388, it will be observed, was to be -set in motion "at his suit that will complain;" so that there was little -more in it than the immemorial remedy from a nuisance at common law. - -The reign of Henry V. appears to have been marked by care for the public -health, perhaps not greater than in Edward III.'s time, but exceptional, -in the records at least, under the later Plantagenets and until the -accession of the Tudor dynasty. Among other evidences (some of which may -be gathered from Stow's _Survey_) is the ordinance of 1415 (3 Hen. V.) -against a nuisance in the Moor, beyond the wall and the ditch on the -Finsbury side. The Moor was, in Fitzstephen's words, "a great fen, which -watereth the walls on the north side." In 1415 there was a "common -latrine" in it, and "sicknesses arose from the horrible, corrupt, and -infected atmosphere," issuing therefrom[625]. Its removal was ordered, and -in the same year (1415) chaussees were built across the fen, one to Hoxton -and another to Islington. The ditch all the way round from the Tower to -Blackfriars had been cleansed the year before (1414). - -Another statute, 3 Henry VII. (1488-9) cap. 3, may be quoted to show that -the slaughter-houses were the chief nuisance, that their effects on health -were perceived (as in Edward III.'s time), and that it was necessary to -appeal to the king's personal interest in the matter as a motive for -redress. - - Petition to the King from the parishioners of St Faiths and St - Gregories in London, near St Pauls. - - "That it was soo that grete concourse of peple, as well of his Roial - persone as of other grete Lordes and astates wyth other hys true - subgettes often tymes was had unto the said Cathedrall Chirche, and - for the moost part through oute the parisshe aforesaide, the whiche - often tymes ben gretly ennoyed and invenemed by corrupt eires, - engendered in the said parisshes by occasion of bloode and other - fowler thynges, by occasion of the slaughter of bestes and scaldyng of - swyne had and doon in the bocherie of Seynt Nicholas Flesshamls, whos - corrupcion by violence of unclene and putrified waters is borne down - thrugh the said parishes and compasseth two partes of the Palays where - the Kynges most Roiall persone is wonte to abide when he cometh to the - Cathedrall Chirche for ony acte there to be doon, to the Jubardouse - [jeopardous] abydyng of his most noble persone and to ouer grete - ennoysaunce of the parisshens there, and of other the Kyngis subgettes - and straungers that passe by the same; - - Compleynte whereof at dyverse and many seasons almost by the space of - xvi yeres contynuelly, as well by the Chanons and petty Chanons of the - said Cathedrall Chirche, londlordes there ... made to Mayor and - aldermen of the city; and noo remedie had ne founden. - - ... Considering that in few noble cities or towns or none within - Christendom, where as travellyng men have labored, that the comen - slaughter hous of bestys sholde be kept in ony speciall parte within - the walle of the same lest it myght engender Siknesse to the - destruccion of the peple." - - The King etc. "ordeyned and stablished that no Bocher shall sley - within the said house called the Scaldinghouse or within the walls of - London." - - And the same "in eny citte, Burghe and Towne walled within the Realm - of Englonde and in the Towne of Cambridge, the Townes of Berwyk and - Carlile only except and forprised." - -The popular knowledge of and belief in a high doctrine of contagion are -curiously shown by the terms of the Act touching Upholsterers in 1495 (II -Hen. VII. cap. 19). - - The Act was intended to prevent beds, feather-beds, bolsters and - pillows from being sold in market outside London, "beyond control of - the Craft of Upholders." Outside the craft an inferior article was apt - to be offered, which was at once a lowering of a good and worthy - standard and a danger to health. There were two kinds of corrupt - bed-stuffs "contagious for mannys body to lye on," firstly, scalded - feathers and dry pulled feathers together; and secondly, flocks and - feathers together. Besides these, quilts, mattresses and cushions - stuffed with horse hair, fen down, neat's hair, deer's hair and goat's - hair, "which is wrought in lyme fattes," give out by the heat of man's - body, a savour and taste so abominable and contagious that many of the - King's subjects thereby have been destroyed. These corrupt and - unlawful stuffs and wares might indeed be made by any person or - persons for their own proper use in their houses, so they be not - offered for sale in fairs or markets. - -The reign of Henry VIII. is not marked by any ordinances or Acts for the -restraint of plague or the like sickness by other than quarantine -measures. The common ditch between Aldgate and the postern of the Tower -was cleansed in 1519 at the charges of the city; in 1540 the Moor ditch -was cleansed: and, not long before, the ditch from the Tower to Aldgate. -In 1549 the ditch was again cleansed at the charges of the City -Companies[626]. In April, 1552, John Shakespeare, the poet's father, a -citizen of Stratford-on-Avon in good circumstances and afterwards mayor of -the town, was fined twelve pence (eight to ten shillings present value) -for not removing the heap of household dirt and refuse that had -accumulated in front of his own door[627]. In the records of the borough -of Ipswich[628], scavengers are mentioned in the 32nd of Henry VIII. -(1540): they were elected in every parish, and the gatherings of refuse -ordered to be carried and laid at four places, namely: Warwick Pitts, -College Yard, behind the Ditches next John Herne, and the Dikes in the -Marsh. When queen Elizabeth visited Ipswich (in 1561, 1565 and 1577), she -rated not only the clergy on the laxity of their behaviour, but also the -civic authorities upon the filthy condition of the streets. "A marked -improvement," says the borough historian, "certainly took place in Ipswich -at this period, as is incontestably shown by the constant exhortations and -promulgations of laws for the preservation of cleanliness." - -In the _Description and Account of the City of Exeter_, written by John -Vowell, or Hoker, chamberlain of the city and member of Parliament for it -in the reign of Elizabeth[629], we find the following about the offices -and duties of scavengers "as of old." - - They are "necessary officers who cannot be wanting in any - well-governed city or town, because by them and their service all - things noisome to the health of man, and hurtful to the state of the - body of the commonwealth, are advertised unto the magistrate, and so - they be the means of the redress thereof. And therefore they be called - Scavengers, as who saith Shewers or Advertisers, for so the word - soundeth." Among other duties they had the oversight of pavements, - that they were swept weekly, of slaughter-houses, dunghills and the - like, of dangerous buildings and of encroachments upon the streets, - of chimneys, and of precautions against fires (tubs of water to be in - readiness at the doors to quench fires and cleanse the streets); and - on Sundays they had to attend the mayor of Exeter to the church of St - Peter's. - -These officers of the municipality discharged their duties, says the -Elizabethan writer, "as of old;" from which we may conclude that some such -regulation had existed from quite early times. The scavengers are -mentioned by Stow at the end of his account of each City ward along with -other officers. We have already seen, from the court rolls of the manor of -Castle Combe under the year 1427, that villagers were fined or admonished -for creating nuisances. A sudden revival of zeal in that way at Castle -Combe in the year 1590 may have been due to the vigorous sanitary policy -of Elizabeth's government: - - "And that the inhabitants of the West Strete doe remove the donge or - fylth at John Davis house ende before the feaste of Seynct Andrew - th'apostell next, and that they lay no more there within x foote of - the wey, sub poena iii s iiii d. - - "And that none shall lay any duste or any other fylth in the wey or - pitte belowe Cristopher Besas house, sub poena pro quolibet tempore - xii d. - - "And that none shall soyle in the church yerde nor in any of our - stretes, for every defaulte to lose xii d. - - "And that the glover shall not washe any skynes, nor cast any other - fylth or soyle in the water runnynge by his house, sub poena x - s[630]." - -There is an interval of a century and a half between the two instances of -sanitary vigour adduced from the Castle Combe manor court; but there is no -reason to believe that the tradition of common cleanliness ever lapsed -altogether, in that or in any other village or town of the country. - -Some part of the rather unfair opinion as to the foulness of English life -in former times may be traced to a well-known letter by Erasmus to the -physician of cardinal Wolsey. There are grounds for believing that Erasmus -must have judged from somewhat unfavourable instances. - -"We read of a city," says Erasmus, "which was freed from continual -pestilence by changes made in its buildings on the advice of a -philosopher. Unless I am mistaken, England may be freed in like manner." -He then proceeds to go over the defects of English houses, and to suggest -improvements. The houses were built with too little regard to the aspect -of their doors and windows towards the sun. Again, they have a great part -of their walls filled with panes of glass, admitting light in such wise as -to keep out the wind, and yet letting in at chinks of the windows the air -as if strained or percolated, and so much the more pestilential by being -long stagnant. These defects he would remedy by having two or three sides -of a house exposed to the sky, and all glazed windows so made that they -should open wholly or shut wholly, and so shut that there might be no -access of noxious winds through gaping seams; for if it be sometimes -wholesome to admit the air, it is sometimes wholesome to keep it out. -Inside the houses Erasmus professes to have seen a shocking state of -things--the floors covered with rushes piled, the new upon the old, for -twenty years without a clearance, befouled with all manner of filth, with -spillings of beer and the remains of fish, with expectoration and vomit, -with excrement and urine[631]. Here we have clearly to do with the -intelligent foreigner. On the other hand, as far back as the reign of -Richard I., Englishmen would appear to have contrasted their own personal -habits with those of other nations, much as the summer tourist does now. -English youths, it has been said, go through Europe with one phrase on -their lips: "Foreigners don't wash." Richard of Devizes implies somewhat -the same. A Frankish youth is being advised where to settle in England, -Winchester being chosen by excluding the other towns one by one. Bristol, -for example, was wholly given over to soap-boilers: everyone in Bristol -was either a soap-boiler or a retired soap-boiler; "and the Franks love -soap as much as they love scavengers[632]." We may cry quits, then, with -Erasmus over the rush-strewn floors. It is clear, also, that the glazed -fronts of English houses, which he took exception to, are the very feature -of them that Sir Thomas More prided himself upon; in that as in other -external things the London of his day seemed to him to leave little to be -desired as the capital of Utopia, his chief subjects of remark being the -shambles and the want of hospitals for the sick[633]. - -Thus, when we attempt to clear the sense of our rather mixed notions on -the unwholesome life of former times, we must feel constrained to withdraw -a great part of the accusation as to nuisances tolerated or scavenging -neglected. Most of all was the government of Elizabeth marked by vigour in -its attempts to restrain plague, not only by quarantine measures, but also -by radical sanitation. - -Queen Elizabeth and her Council were baffled by the persistence of plague -in London in 1581-82-83; the infection pursued its own course despite all -efforts to "stamp it out," so that the letters from the lords of the -Council to the mayor begin to assume a somewhat querulous and impatient -tone[634]. To a letter of remonstrance, 21st September, 1581, the mayor -replied next day that every precaution had been taken. On the 22nd March, -1582, the mayor retorted upon the Court that an artificer in leather, -dwelling near Fleet Bridge, had the plague in his house, that his house -had been shut up, and he restrained from going out; nevertheless he had -access to the Court in the things of his art, both for the queen and her -household. On the 1st September, 1582, the plague having greatly increased -as appeared by certificate of the number of the dead during the last week, -the Privy Council informed the mayor that this was in part "by negligence -in not keeping the streets and other places about the city clean, and -partly through not shutting up of the houses where the sickness had been -found, and setting marks upon the doors; but principally through not -observing orders for prevention of the infection heretofore sent to them -by the Council." The mayor sent answer the same day that every care had -been taken: the streets had been cleansed every other day; the parish -clerks had been appointed to see to the shutting up of infected houses, -and putting papers upon the doors; he had also appointed some of his own -officers to go up and down the city to view and inform him whether these -things had been done. - -So much did the Council believe, or affect to believe, that the mayor -could control the plague if he carried out their orders, that they used -the adjournment of the law courts as a threat to the city. On the 15th -October, the Term was announced to be held at Hertford, and all persons -from infected London houses were forbidden to repair thither with -merchandise, victual, &c.[635]. Then follow in January, 1583, letters -touching an impracticable attempt of the Privy Council to have a list -printed of all inns and taverns that had been infected within the last two -months. The mayor made a catalogue which was pronounced too long. On 21st -April, 1583, the infection had much increased, and the lords of the -Council again urged upon the mayor to have infected houses shut up, and -provision made for feeding and maintaining the inmates thereof. They -desired to express her majesty's surprise that no house or hospital had -been built without the city, in some remote place, to which the infected -people might be removed, although other cities of less antiquity, fame, -wealth, and reputation had provided themselves with such places, whereby -the lives of the inhabitants had been in all times of infection chiefly -preserved. The mayor, on 3rd May, wrote that the Court of Aldermen had -published orders for the stay of the plague; but that they were -comparatively powerless so long as crowds of the worst sort of people -resorted to see plays, bear-baiting, fencers, and profane spectacles at -the theatre, and Curtain, and other the like places. - -The plague pursued its own course, wholly unaffected, so far as one can -see, by everything that was tried. One thing that was not touched by the -sanitary policy, was probably more relevant than all else to the -continuance of plague--the disposal of the dead. The theoretical -importance attached to that as an original cause of plague has been avowed -in the chapter on the Black Death. We have here to see how the theory of -it as a favouring thing for the continuance of the infection squares with -the facts in such a city as London under the Plantagenets and Tudors. - - -The Disposal of the Dead. - -Intramural interment was one of the most cherished practices of -Christendom so long as the word "intramural" had a literal meaning. Hence -the correctness of the imagery used of the Spiritual City: - - "To work and watch, until we lie - At rest within thy wall." - -Probably each of the one hundred and twenty small parish churches of -London in the medieval period stood in its small churchyard. In an -exceptional time like the Black Death, these proved insufficient for the -daily burials: three new cemeteries were enclosed and consecrated outside -the walls--two of them in Smithfield and the other at Aldgate. These all -soon passed into the hands of friars, and became the grounds of -monasteries. The churches or churchyards of monasteries were in great -request for burial, but not for common burials, or for burials in a time -of epidemic. The 'Vision of Piers the Ploughman' is clear enough that the -friars took no large view of their duties; they affected the care of the -dead, but only if they were well paid: - - "For I said I nold | be buried at their house but at my parish church. - | For I heard once how conscience it told | that where a man was - christened by kynde [nature] he should be buried, | or where he were - parishen, right there he should be graven. | And for I said this to - friar, a fool they me held | and loved me the less for my lele speech - | ... I have much marveil of you and so hath many another | why your - convent coveteth to confess and to bury | rather than to baptise - bairns that ben catechumens." - -The reason why the friars paid so much attention to burials was that these -rites were the most profitable: - - "And how that freris [friars] folowed folke that was riche | and folke - that was pore at litel price they sette, | and no corps in their - kirk-yerde ne in their kyrke was buried | but quick he bequeath them - aught or should help quit their debts." - -The friars in the towns would appear, then, to have been as much in -request for the disposal of the dead within their precincts as the monks -were in the country, both alike taking a certain part of that duty out of -the hands of the regular parish clergy. Hence we may assign a good many -burials, perhaps mostly of the richer class, as in Stow's long lists of -conventual burials, to the various precincts of Whitefriars, Blackfriars, -Greyfriars (within Newgate) or Friars Minor (Minories), Carthusians, or -other settlements of the religious orders in the city and liberties of -London. It is not unlikely that the narrow spaces for burial in and around -the old churches in the streets and lanes of the city were already getting -crowded, and that the friars naturally acquired a large share of the -business of burial because their consecrated houses and enclosed grounds -were situated where there was most room, namely in the skirt of the -Liberties, or in waste spaces within the walls. - -The parish churchyards within the walls became insufficient, not merely -because of the generations of the dead, but because they were encroached -upon. In 1465 the churchyard of St Mary le Bow in Cheapside was so -encroached upon by building of houses that John Rotham or Rodham, citizen -and tailor, by his will gave to the parson and churchwardens a certain -garden in Hosier-lane to be a churchyard; which, says Stow, so continued -near a hundred years, but now is built on and is a private man's -house[636]. In like manner there was a colony of Brabant weavers settled -in the churchyard of St Mary Somerset, and the great house of the earl of -Oxford stood in St Swithin's churchyard, near London Stone. John Stow's -grandfather directed that his body should be buried "in the little green -churchyard of the parish church of St Michael in Cornhill, between the -cross and the church wall, as nigh the wall as may be." For some years -previous to 1582, as many as 23 of the city parishes were using St Paul's -churchyard for their dead, having parted with their own burial grounds. -But in that year (letter of 3 April, 1582[637]) the number of parishes -privileged to use St Paul's churchyard was reduced to 13, the ten -restrained parishes being provided for in the cemetery gifted to the city -in 1569 by Sir Thomas Roe, outside Bishopsgate, "for the ease of such -parishes in London as wanted ground convenient within the parishes." The -state of St Paul's churchyard may be imagined from the words of a -remonstrance made two years after, in 1584: "The burials are so many, and -by reason of former burials so shallow, that scarcely any grave could be -made without corpses being laid open[638]." Twenty years before, in 1564, -or the year after the last great plague which we have dealt with, Medicus, -one of the speakers in Bullein's _Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence_ brings -in "the multitude of graves in every churchyard, and great heaps of rotten -bones, whom we know not of what degree they were, rich or poor, in their -lives." - -St Paul's churchyard would appear to have received the dead of various -parishes from an early date. There was a large charnel house for the bones -of the dead on the north side, with a chapel over it, dedicated to the -Virgin and endowed in 1282. Stow says that the chapel was pulled down in -1549, and that "the bones of the dead, couched up in a charnel under the -chapel, were conveyed from thence into Finsbury field, by report of him -who paid for the carriage, amounting to more than one thousand cart-loads, -and there laid on a moorish ground, in short space after raised, by -soilage of the city upon them, to bear three windmills. The chapel and -charnel were converted into dwelling-houses, warehouses, and sheds before -them, for stationers, in place of the tombs." Elsewhere he names Reyne -Wolfe, stationer, as the person who paid for the carriage of the bones and -"who told me of some thousands of carry-loads, and more to be conveyed." -From this we may infer that the graves were systematically emptied as each -new corpse came to be buried, according to the principle of a "short -tenancy of the soil" which is being re-advocated at the end of the 19th -century by the Church of England Burial Reform Association. - -The spaces reserved for burial around the newer parish churches in the -liberties, such as St Sepulchre's and St Giles's, Cripplegate, were -gradually pared down and let out for buildings by the parish. Stow, in his -_Survey_ of 1598, says that St Sepulchre's church stands "in a fair -churchyard, although not so large as of old time, for the same is letten -out for buildings and a garden plot." The records of St Giles's, -Cripplegate, show that rents were received by the parish for detached -portions of the churchyard in 1648[639]. - -To take an instance of new city graveyards still remaining: The old -fifteenth-century parishes of St Ewin and St Nicholas in the Flesh -Shambles became united in the parish of Christ Church within Newgate, -which, under that name, buried many, as we may read in Stow's _Survey_. At -length its burial ground was full, and it acquired a not very large plot -next to the churchyard of St Botolph's outside Aldersgate. Its neighbour -parish within the walls, St Leonard's in Foster Lane, acquired the next -conterminous plot for its new burial-ground. All three graveyards are now -thrown into one strip of public garden by the removal of the two cross -walls which originally kept the ground of each parish separate. - -While the graveyards were thus curtailed, and dwelling-houses built close -up to them, the mode of burial was none of the safest. To take the -instance of the great Cripplegate parish again: some few, like John -Milton, would be buried within the church in leaden coffins; others would -be laid in the ground of the churchyard in the same way, full burial dues -being paid; but many more, for whom the dues were remitted, would be -buried in a sheet, with no coffin at all, in the part of the churchyard -reserved for the poor[640]. For the parish of St Saviour's, Southwark, the -scale of burial dues was as follows: "In any churchyard next the church, -with a coffin, 2_s._ 8_d._; without a coffin, 20_d._; for a child with a -coffin, 8_d._; without a coffin, 4_d._ The colledge churchyard, with a -coffin, 12_d._; without a coffin, 8_d._" One of their broadsheets, dated -1580, has a picture of a body ready for burial in a cerecloth, a close -fitting covering tied at the head and feet, and neatly finished[641]. - -It is not to be supposed that no voices were raised against the -overcrowding of the old city churchyards. Intramural burial is one of the -many practical topics in Latimer's sermons: in 1552 he denounced the state -of St Paul's churchyard as an occasion of "much sickness and disease," -appealing to its notorious smells; the citizens of Nain, he said, "had a -good and laudable custom to bury their corses without the city, which -ensample we may follow[642]." Preaching at Paul's Cross on the 8th of -August, 1563, when the plague was already destroying at the rate of five -hundred in a week, Turner, commonly called Turner of Boulogne, made two -solemn petitions to my lord mayor of London: the one was that the dead of -the city should be buried out of the city in the field; the other was that -no bell should be tolled for them when they lay at the mercy of God -departing out of this present life, "for that the tolling of the bell did -the party departing no good, neither afore their death nor after[643]." In -the writings on plague, putrefying animal matters, such as carrion or -offal, are always mentioned among the causes; but it is only rarely that -the ordinary burial of the dead is referred to. In the seventeenth -century, the filling of the soil with products of cadaveric decomposition -played a greater part in the theory of plague, especially in the writings -of Prosper Alpinus, physician to the Venetian consulate at Cairo. Among -English books, the treatise on Plague by Dr Gilbert Skene, of Edinburgh -(1568), is the only one that is at all clear upon the point. In his fourth -chapter, on the places which be most pestilential, he includes the -localities "where many dead are buried," the ground there becoming "fat -and vaporative;" and in his first chapter, on causes in general, he -instances "dead carrions unburied, in special of mankind, which, by -similitude of nature, is most nocent to man, as every brutal is most -infectant and pestilential to their own kind." But even if these truths -had been generally apprehended, religious prescription and usage would -have been too strong to allow of radical measures being adopted. The grand -provocative of plague was no obvious nuisance above ground, but the -loading of the soil, generation after generation, with an immense -quantity of cadaveric matters, which were diffused in the pores of the -ground under the feet of the living, to rise in emanations, more deadly in -one season than in another, according as the level of the ground-water and -the heat of the earth determined the degree of oxidation, or the formation -of the more dangerous half-way products of decomposition. - -So little is known of the great plagues of London in 1406-7, 1464, 1479, -1500, and 1513, that we can only conjecture how the dead, to the number -perhaps of one hundred in a day at the height of the epidemic, were -disposed of--probably in trenches in the fields of Whitechapel, Smithfield -and Finsbury, or in such parishes as St Sepulchre's. The skirts of the -city were used also to deposit the soil upon. Thus it happened that the -ground outside the walls, which came in time to be the densely populated -liberties and out-parishes, and the chief seat of all later plagues, had -for generations before received the refuse of the city and a large -proportion of the bodies of the dead. An instance mentioned by Stow, in -1598, may be taken as standing for many more: "On the right hand, beyond -Shoreditch Church toward Hackney, are some late-built houses upon the -common soil; for it was a lay-stall." - -What remains to be said of localities and circumstances of plague in -London will come in with the history of successive epidemics, which we may -now resume and carry to the end of the Tudor period. - - -Chronology of Plague, 1564-1592. - -The amount of plague in London for the two or three years next following -the great epidemic in the autumn of 1563 is accurately known from Stow's -abstracts of the weekly bills of mortality. It was exceedingly little, the -deaths being but one or two or three in a week, and often none. The -figures come to an end with July, 1566, and it is probable that the bills -may not have been made for a time after that. The proposal made by Sir -Roger Martyn in a letter of 20th October, 1568, to the earl of -Northumberland, that all strangers arriving from over sea should be -quarantined at Gravesend, would have been instigated by the known -prevalence of plague and other malignant types of sickness in Scotland -and at various parts of the continent of Europe. It was just in those -years, before and after the founding of the Royal Exchange in 1566, that -the concourse of merchants to London, especially from the war-troubled Low -Countries and France, was greatest. - -The revival of plague in London, after the great epidemic of 1563, was -probably in 1568. In the city records there are orders relating to -searchers, shutting up of houses, and collections for infected households, -dated 12 October, 1568 (10 Elizabeth), 27 March and 19 October, 1569. But -in 1568 the regulations, like the proposal for quarantine of shipping, may -have been made more against the importation of cases from outside than on -account of cases actually in London. It is in 1569 that we definitely hear -of plague in the capital:-- - -"The plague of pestilence somewhat raging in the city of London, -Michaelmas Term was first adjourned unto the 3rd of November, and after -unto Hillary Term next following[644]." This outbreak of the autumn and -winter of 1569 must have been considerable: for we find the earl of Essex -writing from York on the 30th October to Cecil to say that he would have -come to London before "had not the plague stayed him[645];" and Thomas -Bishop, giving account of his movements to the Council, says that he -remained in London until the 10th October, "when the plague increasing, I -departed[646]." - -The year 1570 was one of the more disastrous plague-years on the -Continent, that now recur somewhat frequently down to the end of the -century. "There was general disease of pestilence," says Stow, "throughout -all Europe, in such sort that many died of God's tokens, chiefly amongst -the Venetians, of whom there died of that cruel sickness about threescore -thousand." In London, on 2nd August, a death in the Tower was put down to -plague; but there is no other evidence of its prevalence in the -capital[647]. In the beginning of next winter, 1571, there was plague at -Cambridge (letter of 18th November)[648]; and at Oxford in the same year -it left such misery, says Anthony Wood, that divers scholars were forced -to beg[649]. In 1573 it reappeared in London, at its usual season, the end -of the year: it raged so violently "that the Queen ordered the new Lord -Mayor not to keep the usual feast upon his inauguration[650]." The -register of St Andrew's parish, at Hertford, bears witness to the flight -of Londoners to that favourite refuge; there were numerous burials of the -plague in 1573, and in subsequent years, many of them being of London -citizens[651]. It was in London again in 1574: a letter of 15 November, to -the sheriff and justices of Surrey, orders that they should not allow the -people to resort to plays and shows [in Southwark] "at that time of -contagion[652]," while the figures from a weekly bill of mortality, which -have been preserved, show that the outbreak had been one of the more -considerable degree--for the week 22-28 October, in the city and liberties -(108 parishes), buried of all diseases, 166, whereof of the plague, -65[653]. - -The known provincial centres in 1574 were Stamford, Peterborough and -Chester. The Stamford visitation was one of a good many that the town -suffered from first to last, and must have been a severe one; in one -month, from 8 August to 7 September, 40 had been buried of the plague, -"and the town is so rudely governed, they have so mixed themselves, that -there is none that is in any hope of being clear. It is in seventeen -houses, and the town is in great poverty; but that the good people of the -country send in victuals, there would many die of famine. St Martin's -parish is clear[654]." The corporation records also bear witness to the -confusion caused, the new bailiffs having been sworn in before the -Recorder in a field outside, instead of in the usual place[655]. -Peterborough, which was not far off, is known to have had a visitation, -from an entry in the parish register, "1574, January. Here began the -plague[656]." At Chester, "plague began, but was stayed with the death of -some few in the crofts[657]." - -The year 1575 is somewhat singular for an epidemic of plague in -Westminster, but none in the city of London: the deaths for one week in -the former are known[658]; and, as regards the immunity of London, Cecil -had removed previous to 16 September, from Westminster to Sir Thomas -Gresham's house in the City to avoid the infection[659]. It had been at -Cambridge in the winter of 1574-5, and was "sore" in Oxford down to -November, 1575. - -The same year, 1575, was a season of severe plague in Bristol and other -places of the west of England. Some 2000 are said (in the Mayor's -Calendar) to have died in Bristol between St James's tide (July 25) when -the infection "began to be very hot," and Paul's tide (January 25)[660]. -As early as the 11th July, the corporation of Wells had ordered measures -against the plague in Bristol; but Wells also appears to have had a -visitation, if the 200 persons buried, according to tradition, in the -"plague-pit" near the north-eastern end of the Cathedral (besides many -more buried in the fields) had been victims of the disease in 1575[661]. -At Shrewsbury in that year the fairs were removed on account of -plague[662]. From a claim of damages which came before the Court of -Requests in 1592, it appears that plague had been in Cheshire in 1576; at -Northwich the house of one Phil. Antrobus was infected and most of the -family died; on which some linens in the house, worth not more than -13_sh._ 4_d._ were put in the river lest they should be used; the son, who -was a tailor, claimed compensation, through the earl of Derby, sixteen -years after[663]. - -At Hull, in 1576, there was an outbreak, small compared with some other -visitations there, in the Blackfriars Gate, the deaths being about one -hundred[664]. It is somewhat remarkable to find the borough of -Kirkcudbright making regulations in the month of January, 1577, a most -unlikely season, to prevent the introduction of the plague then raging on -the Borders[665]. In September, 1577, there were issued orders to be put -in execution throughout the realm in towns and villages infected with the -plague. More definitely it is heard of on 21 October at Rye and Dover, and -on 3 November, 1577, in London. - -We now come to a series of years, 1578 to 1583, for which we have full -particulars of the burials in London, from plague and other causes, and of -the christenings. These valuable statistics, the earliest known, are -preserved among the papers of Lord Burghley, who procured them from the -lord mayor of London[666], and are here given in full, having been copied -from the MS. in the library of Hatfield House[667]. - -_Abstracts of Burials and Baptisms in London, 1578-1583_ - -1578 - - Week Of Of other - ending Dead plague diseases Christened - - Jan. 2 62 7 55 66 - 9 90 12 78 52 - 16 63 14 49 59 - 23 95 33 62 59 - 30 82 25 57 65 - Feb. 6 88 24 64 51 - 13 102 25 77 59 - 20 100 26 74 77 - 27 84 12 72 84 - Mar. 6 79 10 69 58 - 13 66 9 57 53 - 20 75 5 70 57 - 27 63 12 51 60 - Apr. 3 96 19 77 64 - 10 89 25 64 67 - 17 102 31 71 66 - 24 91 37 54 62 - May 1 109 25 84 44 - 8 116 33 83 37 - 15 141 43 98 48 - 22 109 36 73 66 - 29 119 34 85 43 - June 5 99 38 61 51 - 12 91 35 56 41 - 19 76 34 42 54 - 26 75 18 57 48 - July 3 92 34 58 52 - 10 99 35 64 48 - 17 98 39 59 52 - 24 129 63 66 49 - 31 100 41 59 59 - Aug. 7 132 73 59 76 - 14 152 78 74 72 - 21 232 134 98 63 - 28 205 113 92 58 - Sept. 4 257 162 95 84 - 11 297 183 114 64 - 18 308 189 119 68 - 25 330 189 141 72 - Oct. 2 370 230 140 76 - 9 388 234 154 62 - 16 361 234 127 73 - 23 281 175 106 58 - 30 258 130 128 68 - Nov. 6 278 127 151 60 - 13 230 116 114 64 - 20 172 77 95 66 - 27 155 84 71 68 - Dec. 4 160 77 83 60 - 11 161 65 96 69 - 18 129 44 85 62 - 25 94 20 74 68 - ---- ---- ---- ---- - 7830 3568 4262 3150 - -1579 - - Week Of Of other - ending Dead plague diseases Christened - - Jan. 1 100 27 73 54 - 8 67 13 54 68 - 15 75 16 59 74 - 22 63 9 54 81 - 29 79 19 60 75 - Feb. 5 84 23 61 46 - 12 81 16 65 63 - 19 69 15 54 61 - 26 70 10 60 77 - Mar. 5 51 6 45 71 - 12 61 16 45 72 - 19 66 10 56 65 - 26 75 13 62 68 - Apr. 2 81 19 62 53 - 9 82 27 55 79 - 16 77 22 55 53 - 23 58 10 48 44 - 30 71 10 61 57 - May 7 64 12 52 51 - 14 68 14 54 42 - 21 75 12 63 54 - 28 78 13 65 47 - June 4 66 7 59 56 - 11 49 7 42 46 - 18 74 14 60 60 - 25 65 13 52 45 - July 2 57 11 46 50 - 9 62 9 53 66 - 16 73 19 54 52 - 23 72 12 60 63 - 30 72 13 59 67 - Aug. 6 66 12 54 61 - 13 70 18 52 67 - 20 68 12 56 61 - 27 63 10 53 58 - Sept. 3 66 14 52 65 - 10 85 25 60 55 - 17 66 11 55 80 - 24 44 8 36 63 - Oct. 1 60 9 51 42 - 8 56 8 48 75 - 15 68 14 54 70 - 22 49 6 43 71 - 29 52 10 42 76 - Nov. 5 47 8 39 66 - 12 37 2 35 69 - 19 60 2 58 84 - 26 44 6 38 69 - Dec. 3 43 3 40 78 - 10 55 4 51 80 - 17 49 4 45 70 - 24 51 3 48 78 - 31 42 3 39 72 - ---- ---- ---- ---- - 3406 629 2777 3370 - -1580 - - Week Of Of other - ending Dead plague diseases Baptised - - Jan. 7 49 1 48 78 - 14 58 4 54 58 - 21 50 5 45 63 - 28 28 2 26 74 - Feb. 4 54 5 49 81 - 11 49 2 47 91 - 18 47 3 44 81 - 25 48 3 45 68 - Mar. 3 52 0 52 77 - 10 48 2 46 74 - 17 48 1 47 75 - 24 52 3 49 68 - 31 48 2 46 59 - Apr. 7 48 1 47 77 - 14 53 1 52 78 - 21 40 1 39 74 - 28 43 1 42 75 - May 5 58 1 57 72 - 12 54 0 54 69 - 19 40 2 38 75 - 26 44 0 44 72 - June 2 36 1 35 59 - 9 41 0 41 54 - 16 46 2 44 60 - 23 55 2 53 59 - 30 47 4 43 57 - July 7 77 4 73 65 - 14 133 4 129 66 - 21 146 3 143 61 - 28 96 5 91 64 - Aug. 4 78 5 73 71 - 11 51 4 47 53 - 18 49 1 48 72 - 25 63 3 60 62 - Sept. 1 48 0 48 71 - 8 35 2 33 69 - 13 52 1 51 69 - 22 52 1 51 95 - 29 65 2 63 55 - Oct. 6 35 1 34 63 - 13 44 2 42 56 - 20 45 2 43 56 - 27 40 3 37 80 - Nov. 3 60 7 53 75 - 10 59 5 54 67 - 17 57 3 54 75 - 24 45 2 43 70 - Dec. 1 54 3 51 83 - 8 58 1 57 56 - 15 53 8 45 59 - 22 53 4 49 61 - 29 89 3 86 66 - ---- ---- ---- ---- - 2873 128 2745 3568 - -1581 - - Week Of Of other - ending Dead plague diseases Baptised - - Jan. 5 42 5 37 63 - 12 53 4 49 65 - 19 50 1 49 65 - 26 46 1 45 59 - Feb. 2 49 2 47 56 - 9 38 0 38 63 - 16 48 0 48 87 - 23 56 5 51 52 - Mar. 2 56 0 56 62 - 9 60 2 58 74 - 16 52 2 50 80 - 23 41 1 40 89 - 30 44 3 41 74 - Apr. 6 42 2 40 39 - 13 47 1 46 53 - 20 37 1 36 41 - 27 37 2 35 60 - May 4 47 0 47 52 - 11 40 1 39 50 - 18 46 1 45 59 - 25 64 13 51 62 - June 1 48 4 44 60 - 8 57 2 55 56 - 15 65 7 58 62 - 22 57 6 51 73 - 29 56 7 49 52 - July 6 72 9 63 62 - 13 69 9 60 64 - 20 94 19 75 70 - 27 95 24 71 89 - Aug. 3 87 23 64 58 - 10 130 30 100 75 - 17 148 47 101 72 - 24 143 43 100 55 - 31 169 74 95 72 - Sept. 7 186 85 101 54 - 14 180 76 114 59 - 21 203 86 117 55 - 28 218 60 158 88 - Oct. 5 205 107 98 74 - 12 193 74 119 83 - 19 128 42 86 77 - 26 125 35 90 88 - Nov. 2 115 45 70 85 - 9 93 26 67 61 - 16 - 23 - 30 [The figures in part - Dec. 7 wanting, and in part - 14 defaced.] - 21 - 28 - ---- ---- ---- ---- - 3931 987 2954 2949 - (45 weeks) - -1582 - -(74 Parishes clear, week ending Jan. 4.) - - Week Of Of other - ending Dead plague diseases Baptised - - Jan. 4 63 11 52 57 - 11 75 13 62 76 - 18 79 13 66 73 - 25 58 13 45 90 - Feb. 1 73 5 68 66 - 8 71 12 59 77 - 15 76 16 60 88 - 22 82 10 72 74 - Mar. 1 69 11 58 81 - 8 85 13 72 81 - 15 77 11 66 71 - 22 62 11 51 65 - 29 73 16 57 85 - Apr. 5 90 13 77 74 - 12 78 19 59 63 - 19 88 22 66 56 - 26 82 20 62 69 - May 3 95 23 72 55 - 10 68 12 56 62 - 17 62 11 51 59 - 24 61 10 51 61 - 31 57 15 42 65 - June 7 67 15 52 49 - 14 48 11 37 52 - 21 72 11 61 63 - 28 57 9 48 62 - July 5 60 20 40 54 - 12 88 25 63 66 - 19 80 30 50 61 - 26 99 31 68 65 - Aug. 2 101 45 56 68 - 9 116 42 74 77 - 16 142 70 72 64 - 23 148 85 63 67 - 30 205 111 94 70 - Sept. 6 229 139 90 74 - 13 277 189 88 79 - 20 246 151 95 76 - 27 267 145 122 63 - Oct. 4 318 213 105 87 - 11 238 139 99 63 - 18 289 164 125 74 - 25 340 216 124 54 - Nov. 1 290 131 159 66 - 8 248 149 99 77 - 15 202 98 104 70 - 22 227 119 108 74 - 29 263 124 139 63 - Dec. 6 144 58 86 59 - 13 155 68 87 -- - 20 -- -- -- -- - 27 142 68 74 91 - ---- ---- ---- ---- - 6762 2976 3786 3433 - (51 weeks) - -1583 - - Week Of Of other - ending Dead plague diseases Baptised - - Jan. 3 137 50 87 69 - 10 140 57 83 53 - 17 160 72 88 67 - 24 162 59 103 59 - 31 144 40 104 73 - -These tables were compiled from weekly bills furnished to the Court, and -doubtless drawn up like the bills of 1532 and 1535 to show the deaths from -plague and from other causes in each of the several parishes in the City, -Liberties and suburbs. It is clear that the results were known from week -to week, for a letter of January 29, 1578, says that the plague is -increased from 7 to 37 (? 33) deaths in three weeks. But that was not the -beginning of the epidemic in London; it was rather a lull in a -plague-mortality which is known to have been severe in the end of 1577, -and had led to the prohibition of stage-plays in November[668]. - -In that series of five plague-years in London, only two, 1578 and 1582, -had a large total of plague-deaths. The year 1580 was almost clear (128 -deaths from plague), and may be taken as showing the ordinary proportion -of deaths to births in London when plague did not arise to disturb it. The -baptisms, it will be observed, are considerably in excess of the burials; -and as every child was christened in church under Elizabeth, we may take -it that we have the births fully recorded (with the doubtful exception of -still-births and "chrisoms"). But while the one favourable year shows an -excess of some 24 per cent. of baptisms over burials, the whole period of -five years shows a shortcoming in the baptisms of 33 per cent. Thus we may -see how seriously a succession of plague-years, at the endemic level of -the disease, kept down the population; and, at the same time, how the -numbers in the capital would increase rapidly from within, in the absence -of plague. There is reason to think that plague was almost or altogether -absent from London for the next nine years (1583 to 1592); and it is not -surprising to find that the population, as estimated from the births, had -increased from some 120,000 to 150,000. The increase of London population -under Elizabeth was proceeding so fast, plague or no plague, that measures -were taken in 1580 to check it. The increase of London has never depended -solely upon its own excess of births over deaths; indeed, until the -present century, there were probably few periods when such excess occurred -over a series of years. Influx from the country and from abroad always -kept London up to its old level of inhabitants, whatever the death-rate; -and from the early part of the Tudor period caused it to grow rapidly. I -shall review briefly in another chapter the stages in the growth of -London, as it may be reckoned from bills of mortality and of baptisms. But -as the proclamation of 1580, against new buildings, the first of a long -series down to the Commonwealth, has special reference to the plague in -the Liberties, and to the unwholesome condition of those poor skirts of -the walled city, this is the proper place for it: - - "The Queen's Majesty perceiving the state of the city of London and - the suburbs and confines thereof to encrease daily by access of people - to inhabit in the same, in such ample sort as thereby many - inconveniences are seen already, but many greater of necessity like to - follow ... and [having regard] to the preservation of her people in - health, which may seem impossible to continue, though presently by - God's goodness the same is perceived to be in better estate - universally than hath been in man's memory: yet there are such great - multitudes of people brought to inhabit in small rooms, whereof a - great part are seen very poor; yea, such must live of begging, or of - worse means; and they heaped up together, and in a sort smothered with - many families of children and servants in one house or small tenement; - it must needs follow, if any plague or popular sickness should by - God's permission enter among those multitudes, that the same should - not only spread itself and invade the whole city and confines, as - great mortality should ensue the same, where her Majesty's personal - presence is many times required; besides the great confluence of - people from all places of the realm by reason of the ordinary Terms - for justice there holden; but would be also dispersed through all - other parts of the realm to the manifest danger of the whole body - thereof, out of which neither her Majesty's own person can be (but by - God's special ordinance) exempted, nor any other, whatsoever they be. - - For remedy whereof, as time may now serve until by some further good - order, to be had in Parliament or otherwise, the same may be remedied, - Her Majesty by good and deliberate advice of her Council, and being - thereto much moved by the considerate opinions of the Mayor, Aldermen - and other the grave, wise men in and about the city, doth charge and - straitly command all persons of what quality soever they be to desist - and forbear from any new buildings of any new house or tenement within - three miles of any of the gates of the said city, to serve for - habitation or lodging for any person, where no former house hath been - known to have been in memory of such as are now living. And also to - forbear from letting or setting, or suffering any more families than - one only to be placed or to inhabit from henceforth in any house that - heretofore hath been inhabited, etc.... Given at Nonesuch, the 7th of - July, 1580[669]." - -Among the more special suggestions of the mayor, on the causes and -prevention of plague, previous to this proclamation were[670]: - - 1. The avoiding of inmates in places pretending exemption. - - 2. The restraining of the building of small tenements and turning - great houses into small habitations by foreigners. - - 3. The increase of buildings in places exempt. - - 4. The increase of buildings about the Charterhouse, Mile End Fields; - also at St Katherine's along the water side. - - 5. The pestering of exempt places with strangers and foreign - artificers. - - 6. The number of strangers in and about London of no church. - - 7. The haunting of plays out of the Liberties. - - 8. The killing of cattle within or near the city. - -The best glimpses that we get of the plague in London in 1578 are in -letters to Lord Burghley[671]. On October 22, the Recorder of London, Sir -W. Fleetwood, writes to him that he "has been in Bucks since Michaelmas, -because he was troubled every day with such as came to him having plague -sores about them; and being sent by the Lords to search for lewd persons -in sundry places, he found dead corses under the table, which surely did -greatly annoy him." It will be seen by the statistics that the deaths from -all causes had risen to more than three hundred in a week before -Michaelmas--a small mortality compared with that of 1563, or of any other -London epidemic of the first degree. From other letters, relating to -plague at St Albans, Ware and other places near London, it may be -concluded that the citizens had escaped from London to their usual country -resorts in plague-time. On August 30 there were said to be sixty cases of -plague at St Albans, and on October 13 Ware is said to have been "of late" -infected. Plague-deaths are entered also in the Hertford parish registers -in 1577 and 1578[672]. On 14 September the infection was in the "Bull" at -Hoddesdon (Herts), but the landlord refused to close his house against -travellers on their way to the Court. On Oct. 13, 1578, two deaths are -reported from Queens' College, Cambridge, "the infection being taken by -the company of a Londoner in Stourbridge Fair;" these two deaths had -"moved many to depart" from the University[673]. In the same month it was -at Bury St Edmunds. Earlier in the year, a letter from Truro (11 April) -says that the plague was prevalent in Cornwall. - -The epidemic of 1578 at Norwich was relatively a far more serious one than -that of the capital, and was traced to the visit of the queen: "the trains -of her Majesty's carriage, being many of them infected, left the plague -behind, which afterwards increased so and continued as it raged above one -and three-quarter years after." From August 20, 1578, to February 19, -1579, the deaths were 4817, of which 2335 were of English and 2482 of -"alyan strangers," ten aldermen being among the victims[674]. At Yarmouth, -in 1579, two thousand are said to have died of the plague between May-day -and Michaelmas[675]. Colchester had plague from December, 1578 to August, -1579[676]. It was at Ipswich and at Plymouth in 1579; the epidemic at the -latter must have been severe, if the estimate of 600 deaths, given in the -annals of the town, is to be trusted[677]. It was again at Stamford in -1580, as appears from an order of the corporation, September 7, -prohibiting people from leaving the town[678]. Other centres of plague in -1580 were at Rye, which was cut off from intercourse with London[679], at -Leicester, where an assessment for the visited was appointed by the common -hall of the citizens[680], at Gloucester, from Easter to Michaelmas, and -at Hereford and Wellington, the musters in October having been hindered by -"the great infection of the plague[681]." - -On February 4, 1582, six houses were shut up at Dover, and on September 12 -there was plague in Windsor and Eton[682]. In the parish register of -Cranbrooke (Kent), 18 burials are specially marked (as from plague) in -1581, 41 in 1582, and 22 in 1583[683]. It was much dispersed in the Isle -of Sheppey, the year after (1584) from Michaelmas into the winter. - -Although the years from the spring of 1583 to the autumn of 1592 appear to -have been unmarked by plague in London, they witnessed a good many -epidemics along the east coast, and in a few places elsewhere, of which -the particulars are for the most part meagre. - -A casual mention is made of plague at Yarmouth in 1584[684]. The town of -Boston appears to have had plague continuously for four years from 1585 to -1588. In 1585 houses were shut up[685]; in 1586 a case at Southwell was -supposed to have been imported from Boston[686]; in the parish register -the burials from plague and other causes in 1587 reach the high figure of -372, and in 1588 they are 200, the average for eight years before being -122, and for twelve years after, only 84. In 1588 one Williams, of Holm, -in Huntingdonshire, was sent for to cleanse infected houses in St John's -Row, which had been used as pest-houses[687]. Within ten miles round -Boston the plague prevailed; at Leake there were 104 burials from -November, 1587, to November, 1588, the annual average being 24; at -Frampton there were 130 burials in 1586-87, the average being 30; at -Kirton there were 57 burials in 1589, and 102 in 1590[688]. - -Another centre on the east coast was Wisbech. In 1585 it appeared in the -hamlet of Guyhirne. In 1586 it entered Wisbech itself, caused the usual -shutting up of houses, and so increased in 1587 that there were 42 burials -in September and 62 in October[689], being three or four times more than -average. It is mentioned also at Ipswich in 1585, and at Norwich in -1588[690]. At Derby, in 1586, there was plague in St Peter's parish[691]. -At Chesterfield in November, 1586, there were plague-deaths, and again in -May 1587[692]. At Leominster, in 1587, there was an excessive mortality -(209 burials)[693]. - -The other great centre on the east coast in those years was in Durham and -Northumberland[694]. In 1587 the infection began to show at Hartlepool, -and in the parishes of Stranton and Hart; at the latter village 89 were -buried of the plague, one of them an unknown young woman who died in the -street. In 1589 the plague entered Newcastle and raged severely; of 340 -deaths in the whole year in St John's parish, 103 occurred in September; -the total mortality of the epidemic to the 1st January, 1590, was 1727. -Durham also had a visitation in 1589, plague-huts having been erected on -Elvet Moor. Those were years of scarcity, the year 1586 having been one of -famine-prices. - -The great event of the time was the defeat of the Spanish Armada off the -French coast from Calais to Gravelines in the last days of July, 1588. A -southerly gale sprang up, which drove the magnificent Spanish fleet past -the Thames as far as the Orkneys. It was perhaps well for England that the -winds parted the two fleets. The English ships, which had come to anchor -in Margate Roads to guard the mouth of the Thames, were in two or three -weeks utterly crippled by sickness. The disease must have been a very -rapid and deadly infection. Lord Admiral Howard writes to the queen: -"those that come in fresh are soonest infected; they sicken one day and -die the next." In a previous letter to Burghley he writes: "It is a most -pitiful sight to see the men die in the streets of Margate. The Elizabeth -Jonas has lost half her crew. Of all the men brought out by Sir Richard -Townsend, he has but one left alive." The ships were so weak that they -could not venture to come through the Downs from Margate to Dover[695]. It -is doubtful whether any part of this sickness and mortality was due to -plague, which was not active anywhere in the south of England in that -year. Want of food and want of clothes, and in the last resort the -hardness and parsimony of Elizabeth, appear to have been the causes. Lord -Howard begs for L1000 worth of new clothing, as the men were in great -want, and Lord H. Seymour writes that "the men fell sick with cold." -Dysentery and typhus were doubtless the infections which had been bred, -and became communicable to the fresh drafts of men. But in the Spanish -ships, beating about on the high seas and unable to land their men or even -to help each other, the sickness grew into true plague, so that the broken -remnants of the Armada which reached Corunna were like so many floating -pest-houses. - -In 1590 and 1591, at a clear interval from the Armada year, there was -much plague in Devonshire. The evidence of its having been in Plymouth -comes solely from the corporation accounts; at various times in 1590 and -1591 there were paid, "ten shillings to one that all his stuff was burned -for avoiding the sickness," a sum of L5. 19_s._ for houses shut, and a -like sum to persons kept in, and sixteen shillings to four men "to watch -the townes end for to stay the people of the infected places[696]." The -chief epidemics, however, appear to have been at Totness in 1590 and at -Tiverton in 1591. The parish register of Totness enters the "first of the -plague, Margary, the daughter of Mr Wyche of Dartmouth, June 22, 1590," -from which it may be inferred that plague was first at Dartmouth, nine -miles down the river, and had ascended to Totness. The following monthly -mortalities will show how severe the infection became at Totness in the -summer and autumn immediately following[697]: - - July 42 (36 of plague, 6 not), - August 81 (80 of plague, 1 not), - September 39 (all of plague), - October 37 (all of plague), - November 25 (24 of plague, 1 not), - December 19 (all of plague), - January, 1591, 10 of plague, - February 1 of plague. - -This heavy mortality from plague (246 deaths) was hardly over, when the -infection began in March, 1591, at Tiverton. It is said to have been -introduced by one William Waulker "a waulking man or traveller." From 1st -March, 1591, to 1st March, 1592, the deaths from plague and other causes -were 551, or about one in nine of the population[698]. - - -The London Plague of 1592-1593. - -The epidemic of plague, which reached its height in the year 1593, began -to be felt in London in the autumn of 1592[699], and is said to have -caused 2000 deaths before the end of the year. On the 7th September, -soldiers from the north on their way to Southampton to embark for foreign -parts had to pass round London "to avoid the infection which is much -spread abroad" in the city. On the 16th September, the spoil of a great -Spanish carrack at Dartmouth could be brought no farther than Greenwich, -on account of the contagion in London; no one to go from London to -Dartmouth to buy the goods. It was an ominous sign that the infection -lasted through the winter; even in mid winter people were leaving London: -"the plague is so sore that none of worth stay about these places[700]." -On the 6th April, 1593, one William Cecil who had been kept in the Fleet -prison by the queen's command, writes that "the place where he lies is a -congregation of the unwholesome smells of the town, and the season -contagious, so many have died of the plague[701]." From a memorial of -1595, it appears that the neighbourhood of Fleet Ditch had been the most -infected part of the whole city and liberties in 1593; "in the last great -plague more died about there than in three parishes besides[702]." The -epidemic does not appear to have reached its height until summer; on 12th -June, a letter states that "the plague is very hot in London and other -places of the realm, so that a great mortality is expected this summer." -On 3 July the Court "is in out places, and a great part of the household -cut off [? dispensed with]." The infection is mentioned in letters down to -November, after which date its public interest, at least, appears to have -ceased. - -Of that London epidemic a weekly record was kept by the Company of Parish -Clerks, and published by them, beginning with the weekly bill of 21st -December, 1592. The clerk of the Company of Parish Clerks, writing in -1665, had the annual bill for 1593 before him, with the plague-deaths and -other deaths in each of 109 parishes in alphabetical order, and the -christenings as well[703]. For the next two years, 1594 and 1595, he -appears to have had before him not only the annual bills but also a -complete set of the weekly bills of burials and christenings according to -parishes. The same documents were used by Graunt in 1662, and had -doubtless been used by John Stow at the time when they were published. The -originals are all lost, and only a few totals extracted from them remain -on record. To begin with Stow's. The mortality of 17,844 from all causes -in 1593 is given as for the City and Liberties only. But there was already -a considerable population in the parishes immediately beyond the Bars of -the Liberties, which were known as the nine out-parishes, namely those of -St Clement Danes, St Giles in the Fields, St James, Clerkenwell, St -Katharine at the Tower, St Leonard, Shoreditch, St Martin in the Fields, -St Mary, Whitechapel, St Magdalen, Bermondsey, and the Savoy. Besides -these there were important parishes still farther out--the Westminster -parishes, Lambeth, Newington, Stepney, Hackney and Islington. Of these, -Whitechapel, Stepney, Shoreditch, Clerkenwell and some of the western -parishes contributed largely to the plague-bills of the epidemics next -following, in 1603 and 1625, and it is known from the parish registers of -some of them that they contributed to the mortality of 1593. It is -probably to these parishes that we should ascribe the difference between -the above total of 17,844 (for City and Liberties) and the much larger -total of deaths "in and about London," given on the margin of a broadside -of 1603: "And in the last visitation from the 20th of December, 1592 to -the 23rd of the same month in the year 1593, died in all 25,886--of the -plague in and about London 15,003." The addition for the parishes beyond -the Bars would thus be 8,042 deaths from all causes, and from plague -alone 4,541--numbers which will seem not inadmissible if they be compared -with the figures for the corresponding parishes ten years after, in 1603, -Stepney alone having had 2,257 deaths in that plague-year[704]. - -For the two years next following 1593, Graunt's book of 1662 has preserved -the totals of deaths from all causes and from plague in the 97 old -parishes within the walls and in 16 parishes of the Liberties and suburbs; -he has omitted the christenings, although he had the figures before him. -Taking these along with the figures already given for 1593, we get the -following table for three consecutive years: - - ---------------------------------------------- - | Plague | Other | Total | - Year | deaths | deaths | deaths | Christenings - -----|--------|--------|--------|------------- - 1593 | 10,662 | 7,182 | 17,844 | 4,021 - 1594 | 421 | 3,508 | 3,929 | -- - 1595 | 29 | 3,478 | 3,507 | -- - ---------------------------------------------- - -The proportion of mortality in 1593 that fell to the old area within the -walls is known, from Stow's abstract of the figures, to have been about -the same as in the space of the Liberties (8598 in the one, 9295 in the -other), the deaths from other causes than plague having been rather more -in the latter than within the walls. Probably the population in the -Liberties was about equal to that in the City proper, the acreage being -rather less in the former, but the crowding, doubtless, greater. - -The London plague of 1592-93 called forth two known publications, an -anonymous 'Good Councell against the Plague, showing sundry preservatives -... to avoyde the infection lately begun in some places of this Cittie' -(London, 1592), and the 'Defensative' of Simon Kellwaye (April, 1593). The -dates of these two books show that the alarm had really begun in the end -of 1592 and early months of 1593. Kellwaye's book is mostly an echo of -foreign writings, the only part of it with direct interest for English -practice being the 11th chapter, which "teacheth what orders magistrates -and rulers of Citties and townes shoulde cause to be observed." As that -chapter sums up the various Elizabethan and other orders, and constitutes -a short epitome of sanitary practice, I append it in full: - - "Teacheth what orders magistrates and rulers of Citties and townes - shoulde cause to be observed. - - 1. First to command that no stinking doonghills be suffered neere the - Cittie. - - 2. Every evening and morning in the hot weather to cause colde water - to be cast in the streetes, especially where the infection is, and - every day to cause the streets to be kept cleane and sweete, and - clensed from all filthie thinges which lye in the same. - - 3. And whereas the infection is entred, there to cause fires to be - made in the streetes every morning and evening, and if some - frankincense, pitch or some other sweet thing be burnt therein it will - be much the better. - - 4. Suffer not any dogs, cattes, or pigs to run about the streets, for - they are very dangerous, and apt to carry the infection from place to - place. - - 5. Command that the excrements and filthy things which are voided from - the infected places be not cast into the streets, or rivers which are - daily in use to make drink or dress meat. - - 6. That no Chirurgions, or barbers, which use to let blood, do cast - the same into the streets or rivers. - - 7. That no vautes or previes be then emptied, for it is a most - dangerous thing. - - 8. That all Inholders do every day make clean their stables, and cause - the doong and filth therein to be carryed away out of the Cittie; for, - by suffering it in their houses, as some do use to do, a whole week or - fortnight, it doth so putrifie that when it is removed, there is such - a stinking savour and unwholesome smell, as is able to infect the - whole street where it is. - - 9. To command that no hemp or flax be kept in water neere the Cittie - or towne, for that will cause a very dangerous and infectious savour. - - 10. To have a speciall care that good and wholesome victuals and corne - be solde in the markets, and so to provide that no want thereof be in - the Cittie, and for such as have not wherewithall to buy necessary - food, that there to extend their charitable and goodly devotion; for - there is nothing that will more encrease the plague than want and - scarcity of necessary food. - - 11. To command that all those which do visit and attend the sick, as - also all those which have the sickness on them, and do walk abroad: - that they do carry something in their hands, thereby to be known from - other people. - - Lastly, if the infection be in but few places, there to keep all the - people in their houses, all necessaries being brought to them. When - the plague is staid, then to cause all the clothes, bedding, and other - such things as were used about the sick to be burned, although at the - charge of the rest of the inhabitants you buy them all new." - -The letters of the time give us a glimpse of this plague in London. On -November 3, 1593, Richard Stapes writes to Dr Caesar, judge of the -Admiralty Court, residing at St Albans (doubtless to escape the -infection): "My next door neighbour and tenant on Sunday last buried his -servant of the plague, and since, on the other side of me, my son-in-law -has buried his servant; but I cannot say his was the sickness because the -visitors reported that the tokens did not appear on him as on the -other[705]." - -The epidemic of 1592-93 continued in London at a low level into the year -1594, when 421 persons died of the plague in the City and Liberties. Next -year the plague-deaths had fallen to 29. Watford and Hertford, two of the -most usual resorts of Londoners in a sickly season, were infected by -plague from 1592 to 1594, many of the deaths being of refugees from the -capital. At Watford there were 124 burials in the first eight months of -1594, a number much above the average, and many of them marked in the -register as plague-deaths[706]. At Hertford plague-deaths appear in the -registers of All Saints and St Andrew's parishes in 1592 and 1594. But the -greatest mortality at Hertford was in 1596; in St Andrew's parish there -were 13 burials in March, the average being one or two in the month; the -mortality declined until July, in which month there were buried, among -others, between the 12th and 26th, five children of one of the chief -burgesses (mayor in 1603)[707]. These may or may not have been -plague-deaths, the year 1596 having been unhealthy, as we shall see, with -other types of sickness. - -Meanwhile, in several provincial towns at a greater distance from the -capital than the summer resorts in Hertfordshire, there was plague in the -end of 1592, at the same time as in London, and in the following years. At -Derby, "the great plague and mortality" began in All Saints parish and in -St Alkmund's, at Martinmas, 1592, and ended at Martinmas, 1593, stopping -suddenly, "past all expectation of man, what time it was dispersed in -every corner of this whole parish, not two houses together being free from -it[708]." At Lichfield in 1593 and 1594 upwards of 1100 are said to have -died of the plague[709]. At Leicester, on the 21st September, 1593, a -contribution was levied for the plague-stricken[710]. At Shrewsbury in -1592-3 there was either plague itself or alarms of it[711]; in the parish -of Bishop's Castle there was the enormous mortality of 135 in July and -August, 1593, and 182 burials for the year, the average being 25[712]. In -the same years the infection was in Canterbury, as appears from entries of -payments "to Goodman Ledes watchying at Anthony Howes dore ... when his -house was first infected with the plague," and, the year after, "to those -ii pore folkes which were appointed to carry such to burial as died of the -plague; and also to the woman that was appointed to sock them[713]." There -are also various references to houses visited and to poor persons -relieved. Nottingham and Lincoln are also mentioned as having been -notoriously afflicted with plague in 1593[714]. - -A solitary record of plague comes from Cornwall in 1595. On 3rd May a -letter from the justices at Tregony to the Privy Council states that the -inhabitants, having been charged by the justices at the General Sessions -to restrain divers infected houses within the borough, were molested in -executing these commands, and had made complaint thereof[715]. - -All that remains to be said of plague in England until the end of the -Tudor period (1603) relates exclusively to the provinces; unless the -records are defective, London was clear of plague for nine years following -1592-94, just as it was clear for nine years preceding. The year 1597 was -one of great scarcity in more than one region of England. At Bristol wheat -is quoted at the incredible figure of twenty shillings the bushel; a civic -ordinance was made that every person of ability should keep in his house -as many poor persons as his income would allow[716]. But it is from the -North of England in 1597 that we have more particular accounts of famine -and of plague in its train. Writing in January, 1597, the dean of Durham -says[717]: - - "Want and waste have crept into Northumberland, Westmoreland and - Cumberland; many have come 60 miles from Carlisle to Durham to buy - bread, and sometimes for 20 miles there will be no inhabitant. In the - bishopric of Durham, 500 ploughs have decayed in a few years, and corn - has to be fetched from Newcastle, whereby the plague is spread in the - northern counties: tenants cannot pay their rents; then whole families - are turned out, and poor boroughs are pestered with four or five - families under one roof." - -On the 16th of January, 1597, he wrote again: "In Northumberland great -villages are depeopled, and there is no way to stop the enemy's attempt; -the people are driven to the poor port towns." On the 26th of May, the -dean again complains that there is great dearth in Durham; some days 500 -horses are at Newcastle for foreign corn, although that town and Gateshead -are dangerously infected. On the 17th September, Lord Burghley, minister -of State, is informed that the plague increases at Newcastle, so that the -Commissioners cannot yet come thither (the Assizes were not held at all on -account of plague about Newcastle and Durham): foreign traders were -selling corn at a high price, until some members of the town council -produced a stock of corn for sale at a shilling a bushel less[718]. There -are no figures extant of the plague-mortality at Newcastle in 1597; but at -Darlington the deaths up to October 17 were 340; and in Durham, up to -October 27, more than 400 in Elvet, 100 in St Nicholas, 200 in St -Margaret's, 60 in St Giles's, 60 in St Mary's, North Bailey, and 24 in the -gaol. The whole mortality in St Nicholas parish from July 11 to November -27 was 215. Many of the burials were on the moor. The infection broke out -again at Darlington and Durham in September, 1598[719]. - -Coincident with this severe plague on the eastern side, there was an -equally disastrous plague in the North Riding of Yorkshire and in -Cumberland and Westmoreland. The plague began at Richmond in the autumn of -1597. In August there were 23 deaths, and in September 42 deaths. The -epidemic appears to have reached its height in the summer of 1598, the -deaths in May having been 93, in June 99, in July 182 and in August 194. -These figures indicate a grievous calamity in so small a place as -Richmond. The outbreak which began on the 17th August, 1597, was over in -December, 1598. The stress of the epidemic is shown by the fact that the -churchyard was insufficient for the burials, many of the dead having been -buried in the Castle Yard and in Clarke's Green[720]. Of this severe -plague in Cumberland and Westmoreland there are few exact particulars. -According to an inscription at Penrith Church, "on the north outside of -the vestry, in the wall, in rude characters[721]," the deaths in 1598 -were:-- - - At Penrith 2260, - " Kendal 2500, - " Richmond 2200, - " Carlisle 1196. - -We are able to measure the accuracy of these round totals by the monthly -burials for Richmond given above; the months of July and August, 1598, -with 182 and 194 deaths respectively, were the most deadly season; and it -is hardly conceivable that there had been as many as 1800 deaths at -Richmond in the months when the epidemic was rising to a height and -declining therefrom according to its usual curve of intensity. - -Again, the parish register of Penrith gives only 583 deaths from the -infection, the inscription on the church wall making them 2260. Perhaps -the discrepancy is to be explained by including the mortality in the -various parishes of which Richmond, Penrith, Kendal and Carlisle were -respectively the centres and market-towns. Thus at Kirkoswald there were -buried, according to the parish register, 42 of the pestilence in 1597, -and no fewer than 583 in 1598[722],--a number which, if correct, means a -death-rate comparable to that of the Black Death itself. Again, in the -small parish of Edenhall, 42 were buried of the pestilence in 1598[723]. -Appleby, also, is known to have had a severe visitation[724], and so had -probably many other parishes. - -The Tudor period of plague closes with a severe epidemic at Stamford, -which began in the end of 1602. On December 2 the corporation resolved to -build a cabin for the plague-stricken, and in January following they -levied a fourth part of a fifteenth for the relief and maintenance of -people visited with the plague. This epidemic is said to have carried off -nearly 600; the parish registers of St George's and St Michael's contain -entries of persons "buried at the cabbin of the White Fryers[725]." - - -Plague in Scotland, 1495-1603. - -The history of plague in Scotland subsequent to the medieval period is of -interest chiefly as affording early illustrations of the practice of -quarantine. We last saw the disease prevailing in or near Edinburgh in -1475, the island of Inchkeith, in the Firth of Forth, being used as a -quarantine station. It was doubtless the possession of convenient islands -near the capital--Inch Colm and Inch Garvie were both used for the same -purpose afterwards--that led the Scots government to follow the example of -Venice and other foreign cities at no long interval of time. When we next -hear of plague in Scotland it is again in connexion with infected persons -on the island of Inchkeith and in the town of Leith, some time between -13th August, 1495, and 4th July, 1496[726]. - -But these quarantine practices were not confined to the Firth of Forth. On -the 17th May, 1498, the town of Aberdeen was warned by proclamation of the -bell of certain measures to be taken so as to preserve the town from the -pestilence "and strange sickness abefore," the principal precaution being -a guard of citizens at each of the four gates during the day, and that the -gates be "lockit with lokis and keis" at night. The "strange sickness -abefore" is doubtless the other invasion (of syphilis) which the aldermen -tried to check by an order of April, 1497; but "the pestilence" in the -order of May 1498 must have been the plague itself[727]. Nothing more is -heard of it at Aberdeen or elsewhere in Scotland in that year. It appears -to have been somewhat general in Scotland in 1499 and 1500. The audit of -burgh accounts, mostly held in June, 1499, was postponed to January 1500 -in some cases, the bailie of North Berwick explaining that he was -prevented by the plague from coming to the Exchequer[728]. An extra -allowance is made to the comptroller, Sir Patrick Hume, in March 1500, -"for his great labour in collecting fermes in different parts of the -kingdom in time of the infection of the plague." At Peebles, hides and -woolfells were destroyed during the plague of 1499. There was a renewal of -it in 1500, the audit being again delayed until November. The custumar of -Aberdeen brings his account of the great customs of that burgh down only -to the 3rd July, 1500, "because after that date the accountant, from dread -of the plague, did not enter the burgh of Aberdeen[729]." - -It is from the same northern city that our information on plague in -Scotland comes exclusively for the next forty-five years, not, of course, -because its experience was singular, but because its borough records are -known[730]. - -On the 24th April, 1514, various orders were made at Aberdeen against a -disease that seems to have been the plague: "for keeping of the town from -strange sickness, and specially this contagious pestilence ringand in all -parts about this burgh;" and, again, watching the gates (as in 1498) -against persons "coming forth of suspect places where this violent and -contagious pestilence reigns." Lodges were erected on the Links and -Gallow-hill, where the infected or suspected were to remain for forty -days. In the following year (1515), sixteen persons were banished from the -town for a year and a day for disobeying the orders "anent the plague." On -the 27th July, 1530, these orders are renewed "for evading this contagious -pestilence reigning in the country." On September 15, 1539 (the year after -a plague in the North of England), the plague is called in the municipal -orders by a distinctive name: the orders are for avoiding the "contagius -infeckand pest callit the boiche, quilk ryngis in diverse partis of the -same [realm] now instantly"--the botch being a name given to plague in -England also as late as the Elizabethan and Stuart periods. - -The years 1545 and 1546 were also plague-years in Scotland. At a council -held at Stirling on the 14th June, 1545, the session of the law courts was -transferred to Linlithgow "because of the fear of the pest that is lately -reigning in the town of Edinburgh[731]." On 10th September, of the same -year, the town council of Aberdeen issued orders for evading the pest. On -September 18 the plague was in the English army at Warkeshaugh, and it is -reported from Newcastle, on 5 October, to be raging on the borders[732]. -On March 21, 1546, a house in Aberdeen was shut up for the pest; and there -are evidences of its continuance in August, October and December both in -that town and "in certain parts of the realm:" on the 11th October the St -Nicholas "braid silver" was given for the sustentation of the sick folk of -the pest; on the 17th December an Aberdonian named David Spilzelaucht was -ordered to be "brint on the left hand with ane het irne" for not showing -the bailies "the seiknes of his barne, quilk was seik in the pest[733]." -In November, 1548, the plague is at St Johnstone (Perth), and the -Rhinegrave, with troops there, sick of it and like to die[734]. - -In 1564 the Scots Privy Council ordered quarantine for arrivals from -Denmark, in the manner that was practised on merchandise for nearly three -centuries after. As these early practices in the Forth are curiously like -those that used to be practised in the Medway in the eighteenth century, I -shall quote a part of the order of the Scots Privy Council, dated, -Edinburgh, September 23, 1564[735]: - - "That is to say, becaus maist danger apperis to be amangis the lynt, - that the samyn be loissit, and houssit in Sanct Colm's Inche, - oppynout, handillet and castin forth to the wynd every uther fair day, - quhill the feist of Martimes nixt to cum, be sic visitouris and - clengearis as sal be appointit and deput thairto be the Provest, - Baillies and Counsall of the burgh of Edinburgh upoun the expensis of - the marchantis, ownaris of the saidis gudis. And as concerning the - uther gudis, pik, tar, irine, tymmer, that the samyn be clengeit be - owir flowing of the sey, at one or twa tydis, the barrellis of asse to - be singit with huddir set on fyre, and that the schippis be borit and - the sey wattir to haif interes into thame, to the owir loft, and all - the partis within to be weschin and clengeit; and siclike that the - marinaris and utheris that sall loase and handill the gudis above - written, be clengeit and kepit apart be thameselffis for ane tyme, at - the discretioun of the saidis visitouris, and licenses to be requirit - had and obtenit of the saidis Provest, Baillies and Counsall before - they presume to resort opinlie or quietlie amangis oure Soverane - Ladeis fre liegis." - -The same autumn another foul ship from the Baltic arrived and entered the -port of Leith in evasion of quarantine; the master and others are to be -apprehended and kept in prison until justice be done upon them for the -offence[736]. - -A severe outbreak of plague in Scotland in the year 1568 gave occasion to -the first native treatise upon the disease in the English tongue, the -essay by Dr Gilbert Skene, at one time lecturer on medicine at King's -College, Aberdeen, but probably removed before 1568 to Edinburgh, where he -became physician to James VI.[737] The author says that the plague has -"lately entered" the country, and he is led to write upon it in the -vulgar tongue for the benefit of those who could not afford to pay for -skilled advice, or could not get it on any terms: "Medecineirs are mair -studious of their awine helthe nor of the common weilthe." The panic -caused by the plague must have been considerable: "Specialie at this time -whan ane abhorris ane other in sic maneir as gif nothing of humanitie was -restand but all consumit, euery ane abydand diffaent of ane other." - -Although Skene's treatise bears numerous traces of the influence of -foreign writers on plague, the same being freely acknowledged in the -section of prescriptions and regimen, yet the book is much better than a -mere compilation. Thus, under the causes of plague, he gives the stock -recital of blazing stars, south-winds, corrupt standing waters, and the -like; but in mentioning, as others do, dead carrion unburied, he adds that -the corrupting human body is most dangerous of all "by similitude of -nature." - - A season favourable to plague is marked by continual wet in the last - part of Spring or beginning of Summer, without wind, and with great - heat and turbid musty air. - - Anticipating a remark by Thomas Lodge in 1603, and a common experience - as regards rats in the recent plagues of various parts of India and - China, he points out that the mole (moudewart) and serpent leave the - earth, being molested by the vapour contained within the bowels of the - same. "If the domesticall fowlis become pestilential, it is ane sign - of maist dangerous pest to follow." Among the spots that are most - pestilential are those near standing water, or where many dead are - buried, the ground being fat and vaporative. Of the duration of - infection: "na pest continuallie induris mair than three yeris," - according to the principle of "rosten ance can not be made raw - againe." - - The diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment are given fully and in - systematic scholarly order. I give the following long extract on the - signs and symptoms of plague, as being the first native account of the - disease in this country: - - _Quhairby corrupt be pest may be knawin._ - - Thair is mony notis quhilkis schawis ane man infectit be pest. First - gif the exteriour partis of the bodie be caulde, and the interiour - partis of the bodie vehement hait. As gif the hoill bodie be heavie - with oft scharpe punctiounis, stinkand sweiting, tyritnes of bodie, - ganting of mowthe, detestable brathe with greit difficultie, at - sumtyme vehement fever rather on nycht nor day. Greit doloure of heid - with heavynes, solicitude and sadnes of mynd: greit displesour with - sowning, quhairefter followis haistelie deth. As greit appetit and - propensnes to sleip albeit on day, raving and walking occupeis the - last. Cruell inspectioun of the ene, quhilkis apperis of sindre - colouris maist variant, dolour of the stomak, inlak of appetite, - vehement doloure of heart, with greit attractioun of Air; intolerable - thirst, frequent vomitting of divers colouris or greit appetit by - daylie accustum to vomit without effecte: Bitternes of mowth and toung - with blaiknit colour thairof and greit drouth: frequent puls small and - profund, quhais urine for the maist part is turbide thik and stinkand, - or first waterie, colourit thairefter of bilious colour, last confusit - and turbide, or at the beginning is zallow inclyning to greine (callit - citrine collour) and confusit, thairefter becummis reid without - contentis. Albeit sum of thir properteis may be sene in haile mennis - water, quhairby mony are deceavit abydand Helth of the patient, quhan - sic water is maist manifest sing of deth, because the haill venome and - cause conjunit thar with, leavand the naturall partis occupeis the - hart and nobillest interioure partis of the body. Last of all and - maiste certane, gif with constant fever, by the earis, under the - oxstaris, or by the secrete membres maist frequentlie apperis - apostumis callit Bubones, without ony other manifest cause, or gif the - charbunkil apperis hastelie in ony other part, quhilk gif it dois, in - the begining, testifies strenthe of nature helth, and the laitter sic - thingis appeir, and apperand, it is the mair deidlie. At sumtym in ane - criticall day mony accidentis apperis--principalie vomiteing, spitting - of blude, with sweit, flux of womb, bylis, scabe, with dyvers others - symptomis maist heavie and detestable." - - The signs of death in pestilential persons are as follow: - - "Sowning, cold sweats, vomiting; excrements corrupt, teuch; urine - black, or colour of lead. Cramp, convulsion of limbs, imperfection of - speech and stinking breath, colic, swelling of the body as in dropsy, - visage of divers colours, red spots quickly discovering and covering - themselves." - -The great plague which was the occasion of Skene's writing, probably the -most severe that Edinburgh experienced, entered that city on the 8th -September, 1568, having been brought, it was said, by "ane called James -Dalgliesh, merchant[738]." A letter of 21st September, from the bishop of -Orkney, then in Edinburgh, to his brother-in-law Sir Archibald Napier of -Merchiston, whose house was near the plague-huts erected on the Muir, -refers to the infection as then active: - - "By the number of sick folk that gaes out of the town, the muir is - liable to be overspread; and it cannot be but, through the nearness of - your place and the indigence of them that are put out, they sall - continually repair about your room, and through their conversation - infect some of your servants." He advises him to withdraw to a house - on the north side. "And close up your houses, your granges, your barns - and all, and suffer nae man come therein while it please God to put - ane stay to this great plague[739]." - -The following account of Edinburgh practices in plague-times is given by -Chambers[740]: - - "According to custom in Edinburgh the families which proved to be - infected were compelled to remove, with all their goods and furniture, - out to the Burgh-moor, where they lodged in wretched huts hastily - erected for their accommodation. They were allowed to be visited by - their friends, in company with an officer, after eleven in the - forenoon; anyone going earlier was liable to be punished with - death--as were those who concealed the pest in their houses. Their - clothes were meanwhile purified by boiling in a large caldron erected - in the open air, and their houses were clensed by the proper officers. - All these regulations were under the care of two citizens selected for - the purpose, and called _Bailies of the Muir_; for each of whom, as - for the cleansers and bearers of the dead, a gown of gray was made, - with a white St Andrew's Cross before and behind. Another arrangement - of the day was 'that there be made twa close biers, with four feet, - coloured over with black, and [ane] white cross with ane bell, to be - hung upon the side of the said bere, which sall mak warning to the - people.'" - -The same writer says that the plague lasted in Edinburgh until February, -1569, and that it was reported to have carried off 2500 of the -inhabitants. The plague-stricken in the Canongate were sent to huts "on -the hill" and money was collected for their support[741]. - -The plague of 1574 was again chiefly along the shores of the Firth of -Forth. It came to Leith on October 14th, it was said by a passenger from -England, and several died in that town before its existence was known at -large. On October 24th it entered Edinburgh, "brought in by ane dochter of -Malvis Curll out of Kirkcaldy[742]." On the 29th October the town council -of Glasgow ordered that no one should be allowed to enter from Leith, -Kirkcaldy, Dysart, Burntisland and Edinburgh (in respect of Bellis Wynd -only), and that no one in Glasgow was to repair to Edinburgh without a -pass[743]. Two days after (October 31st) the Scots Privy Council, at -Dalkeith, issued an order to check the spreading of the plague landwards -"through the departure of sick folk and foul persons:" no one to conceal -the existence of plague, and the infected "to cloise thame selffis -in[744]." On November 14th the sittings of the Court of Session were -suspended owing to pest within some parts of Edinburgh, in Leith, and some -towns and parts of the north coast of Fife[745]. In December the Kirk -session of Edinburgh appointed an eight days' fast for the plague -threatening the whole realm. - -In January, 1577, plague is reported to be raging on the English border, -causing alarm in Kirkcudbright[746]. On the 19th October, 1579, the king -and council are credibly informed that "the infectioun and plague of the -pistolence" is not only in divers towns and parts of the coast of England -frequented by Scots shipping but also in Berwick and sundry other bounds -of the East and Middle Marches of England; the markets at Duns and Kelso -are therefore forbidden, and traders not to repair to infected places or -to break bulk of their wares[747]. Next year, 1580, on September 10th, a -ship laden with lint and hemp from "Danske," with forty persons on board, -including seven Edinburgh merchants, arrived in the Forth, and was -quarantined for many weeks at Inchcolm; the master and several others died -of plague, and the survivors were transferred in November, some to -Inchkeith and some to Inchgarvie, the ship being still at Inchcolm in a -leaky state. On November 22 a vessel which had come down the Tay with -plague-stricken inhabitants of Perth, some of whom were dead, and with -their goods and gear, was ordered to the Isle of May[748]. - -One of the most serious epidemics of plague in Scotland was from 1584 to -1588. It was said to have been brought to Wester Wemyss, in Fife, by a -certain "creare;" but it was in some other places at the same time, and -was probably a revival of old seeds of the disease. On July 28th the Privy -Council issued orders that beggars and tramps should be kept from -wandering about[749]. On the 24th September, 27th October, 4th November, -and the 11th December, the Privy Council issued order after order to stop -all traffic, unless by licence, from Fife, Perth, and other places north -of the Forth; sails were to be taken out of the ferry-boats at all ferries -except Burntisland and Aberdour, and eventually at these also, Leith and -Pettycur being left free[750]. For Perth we have some particulars of this -great outbreak. From the 24th September, 1584, to August, 1585, there died -1437 persons, young and old[751]. It was also in Dysart and other parts of -Fife through the winter of 1584-85[752]. - -The infection appeared at Edinburgh about the 1st of May, 1585, in the -Flesh Mercat Close by the infection of a woman who had been in St -Johnstone (Perth) where the plague was[753]. On the 18th May orders were -issued to Edinburgh to remove all filth, filthy beasts and carrion forth -of the highways, and the same to be cleansed and kept clean. On the 23rd -June the coining-house was removed to Dundee, and the Court of Session -transferred to Stirling[754]. The plague next broke out in Dundee, whence -the mint was removed to Perth. At St Andrews it appeared in August, 1585, -and became a severe epidemic, causing the dispersion of the students, and -continuing so long that the miserable state and poverty of the town are in -part ascribed, in a petition of March 24, 1593, to the plague[755]. -Upwards of four hundred are said to have died of it there[756]. The state -of sickness was much aggravated by wet harvest weather. In Edinburgh it -continued through the winter until January, 1586, sometimes carrying off -twenty-four in a single night: "the haill people, whilk was able to flee, -fled out of the town; nevertheless there died of people which were not -able to flee, fourteen hundred and some odd" (Birell). James Melville, -riding in November from Berwick to Linlithgow, entered Edinburgh by the -Water-Gate of the Abbey at eleven o'clock in the forenoon and rode up -"through the Canongate, and in at the Nether Bow through the great street -of Edinburgh to the West Port, in all whilk way we saw not three persons, -sae that I miskenned Edinburgh, and almost forgot that I had ever seen sic -a town[757]." The same year it was unusually severe at Duns[758]. In the -winter of 1586-7, "the pest abated and began to be strangely and -remarkably withdrawn by the merciful hand of God, so that Edinburgh was -frequented again that winter, and at the entry of the spring all the -towns, almost desolate before, repeopled, and St Andrews among the -rest[759]." - -In the harvest of 1587 "the pest brake up in Leith, by opening up of some -old kists," and in Edinburgh about the 4th November. It continued in those -two towns till Candlemas, 1588[760]. On April 26, 1588, the infection is -reported anew from Edinburgh, threatening the law session[761]. In -October, 1588, it was at Paisley, causing alarm in Glasgow[762]. - -On the 8th August, 1593, a ship from an English port, with persons and -goods suspected of the plague, was quarantined at Inchcolm[763]. Four -years after, on the 6th August, 1597, "the pest began in Leith[764]." -Twelve days after, August 18, the Privy Council declared that divers -inhabitants of sundry towns near Edinburgh were infected, and that the -disease was suspected to be in the capital itself[765]. Many fled from -Edinburgh, but the epidemic was over by the end of harvest[766]. - -In the winter of 1598, the plague which was in Cumberland extended to -Dumfries, and caused great decay of trade, and even scarcity of food[767]. -On the 12th October, 1600, a petition from Dundee declares that the -plague of the pest had "entered and broken up within the town of -Findorne[768]." Findhorn had been only one of several places infected in -that locality; for in December, the Kirk session of Aberdeen ordered a -fast "in respect of the fearful infection of the plague spread abroad in -divers parts of Moray[769]." - -On the 24th November, 1601, the parishes of Eglishawe, Eastwood, and -Pollok, in Renfrewshire, and the town of Crail in Fife are declared -infected, and ordered to be shut up. On the 28th of the same month it was -in the barony of Calderwood, and on the 21st December, in Glasgow. It -increased daily in Crail in January, 1602, and suspects were put out on -the muir, so that they wandered to sundry parts of Fife. It still -continued in Glasgow, and had appeared at Edinburgh before the 4th of -February: the town council built shielings and lodgings for the sick of -the plague in the lands of Schenis (Sciennes) belonging to Napier, of -Merchiston, without his leave, having ploughed up the old plague-muir, and -let it for their profit: against the plague-shelters Napier protested on -the 11th March. By the 1st of May it had ceased in Edinburgh, and a solemn -thanksgiving was held on the 20th (Birell). A ship owned in Crail arrived -in the Forth on 30th July, 1602, from "Danske," with three or four dead of -the plague, and was quarantined at Inchkeith. In April, 1603, James VI. -left for England, to assume the English[770] crown, with which event we -resume in another chapter the eventful history of Plague under the -Stuarts. - -Meanwhile, in the foregoing records of plague in Scotland, the absolute -immunity of Aberdeen in the latter half of the sixteenth century is -remarkable. It does not depend on any imperfection of the records; for, -under the year 1603, the borough register contains this entry[771]: "It -has pleasit the guidness of God of his infinite mercy to withhauld the -said plague frae this burgh this fifty-five years bygane"--that is to say, -since the winter of 1546-47, when David Spilzelaucht was burned on the -left hand with a hot iron for concealing a case of plague in one of his -children. The northern city may have owed its immunity to various causes; -but there can be no question of the Draconian rigour of its decrees -against the plague. Following the example of queen Elizabeth at Windsor in -1563, the magistrates in May, 1585, when Perth, Edinburgh and many other -places in Scotland were suffering severely from plague, erected three -gibbets, "ane at the mercat cross, ane other at the brig of Dee, and the -third at the haven mouth, that in case ony infectit person arrive or -repair by sea or land to this burgh, or in case ony indweller of this -burgh receive, house, or harbour, or give meat or drink to the infectit -person or persons, the man be hangit and the woman drownit." - - -Plague in Ireland in the Tudor period. - -The accounts of plague in Ireland in the Tudor period are not many, but -some of them are of interest. The province of Munster is said to have had -a pestilence raging in it in 1504, evidently not a famine-fever, for the -dearth, and mortality therefrom, came in 1505[772]. There is no doubt as -to the reality of the next plague in Ireland, in 1520. - -The earl of Surrey writes from Dublin to Wolsey, on the 3rd August, 1520: -"There is a marvellous death in all this country, which is so sore that -all the people be fled out of their houses into the fields and woods, -where they in likewise die wonderfully; so that their bodies be dead like -swine unburied." On the 23rd July he had already written that there was -sickness in the English pale; and on the 6th September he wrote again that -the death continued in the English pale[773]. It is perhaps the same -epidemic, or an extension of it, that is referred to as the plague raging -in Munster in 1522[774]. On the same authority, "a most violent plague" is -said to have been in the city of Cork in 1535, and "a great plague" in the -same in 1547. The earlier of those dates corresponds probably to a season -of ill-health in Ireland generally: "1536. This year was a sickly, -unhealthy year, in which numerous diseases, viz. a general plague, and -smallpox [i.e. a disease with an Irish name supposed to be smallpox], and -a flux plague, and the bed-distemper prevailed exceedingly[775]." In a -State letter from Ireland September 10, 1535, the prevalence of "plague" -is mentioned[776]. - -In the winter of 1566-7, a remarkable outbreak of plague occurred among -the English troops quartered around the old monastery of the Derry, at the -head of Loch Foyle, where Londonderry was afterwards built. The men were -landed there in October, and by November "the flux was reigning among them -wonderfully." On December 18 and January 13, many of the soldiers are -dead, the rest are discontented, and provisions are short. On February 16, -the sickness continues, "in this miserable place," and on March 26, the -death at the Derry is said to be by cold and infection: the survivors to -be removed to Strangford Haven[777]. Only 300 men were fit for service out -of 1100, and several officers of rank were dead. The men's quarters had -been built over the graveyard of the ancient abbey, and the infection of -plague was ascribed at the time to the emanations from the soil[778]. The -scarcity was general in Ireland that winter, and was attended by great -mortality. Sir Philip Sydney, the lord deputy, writes to the queen on -April 20, 1567: "Yea the view of the bones and skulls of your dead -subjects who, partly by murder, partly by famine, have died in the fields -is such that hardly any Christian with dry eye could behold[779]." - -In 1575 there was a severe and wide-spread outbreak of plague, the -localities specially named being Wexford, Dublin, Naas, Athy, Carlow, and -Leighlin. The city of Dublin was as if deserted of people, so that grass -grew in the streets and at the doors of churches; no term was held after -Trinity, and prayers were appointed by the archbishop throughout the whole -province[780]. The extremity of the plague in Ireland was such that the -English troops sent by way of Chester and Holyhead had difficulty in -finding a safe place to land[781]. Whether that outbreak had been -connected with the military operations (as afterwards in Cromwell's time), -the information does not enable us to judge; but Chester and other places -near, in direct communication with Ireland, had been visited with plague -the year before (1574). - - - - -CHAPTER VII. - -GAOL FEVERS, INFLUENZAS, AND OTHER FEVERS IN THE TUDOR PERIOD. - - -The Common Gaols of England date from the Council of Clarendon, in 1164, -by the articles of which the limits of civil and ecclesiastical -jurisdiction were fixed, and the quarrel between archbishop Becket and -Henry II. reduced to terms. In obedience to Article VII. of the Council, -gaols were built, the chief among them having been at Canterbury, -Rochester, Huntingdon, Cambridge, Malmesbury, Sarum, Aylesbury, and -Bedford[782]. Little is heard of the unwholesomeness of prison life until -the medieval period is nearly over--not indeed because the prisons were -better managed than they were later. "In the year 1385," says Stow, -"William Walworth gave somewhat to relieve the prisoners in Newgate; so -have many others since." One benefactor brought a supply of water into -Newgate; another, the famous Whittington, left money actually to rebuild -the gaol, which was done in 1422. For several years before that, Newgate -had been notorious. An ordinance of 7 Henry V. (1419) for the -re-establishment of the debtor's prison at Ludgate, so that debtors need -not have to go to Newgate gaol, was made in compliance with a petition -which said that, in "the hateful gaol of Newgate, by reason of the fetid -and corrupt atmosphere, many persons committed to the said gaol are now -dead[783]." The greatest mortality must have been, according to Stow, in -1414, when the gaolers of Newgate and Ludgate died, and sixty-four -prisoners in Newgate[784]. - -More than a century after, in 1522, there occurred the first of a series -of gaol-fever tragedies, which were well calculated to produce the effect -ascribed by Aristotle to scenic tragedy, provided only the workings of -cause and effect had been more apparent. The first of these historical -Black Assizes occurred on the occasion of the gaol delivery at the Castle -of Cambridge in Lent, 1522. The facts, which appear to be given nowhere -but in Hall's _Chronicle_ (of almost contemporary authority), are less -fully related than for some of the later instances of the same strange -visitation; but there is no mistaking the air of reality and the generic -likeness. - - -Cambridge Black Assizes. - -In the 13th year of Henry VIII. at the Assize held in the Castle of -Cambridge in Lent, "the justices and all the gentlemen, bailiffs and -other, resorting thither, took such an infection, whether it were of the -savour of the prisoners, or of the filth of the house, that many -gentlemen, as Sir John Cut, Sir Giles Arlington, Knights, and many other -honest yeomen, thereof died, and almost all which were present were sore -sick, and narrowly escaped with their lives[785]." - -It is to be observed that nothing is said of the prisoners being infected: -they were brought from the dungeons to stand their trial in due course, -and the gentlemen and yeomen attending the court officially or as jurors, -or otherwise, were poisoned by their presence. This early chronicle -indicates as the cause, "the savour of the prisoners, or the filth of the -house;" and Bacon, in touching upon that class of incidents nearly a -century later, indicates "the smell of the gaol," but says nothing of -cases of fever among the prisoners, having no warrant in the evidence for -doing so. - -Before we come to consider the condition of England in the Tudor period, -with the policy of Henry VIII. for the repression of beggary and crime, -and the appearance of "new fevers" or "strange fevers" and "laskes" in the -chronicles and other records of the time, it will be desirable to make out -as accurately as possible the clinical type of the Assizes fever, and its -circumstances. For that purpose we must turn to the next recorded outbreak -on the occasion of the Assizes at Oxford in 1577, which happens to have -been somewhat fully described as a memorable event in the register of -Merton College. The entry in the Merton register appears to have been made -within a few weeks of the event[786]. - - -Oxford Black Assizes. - -The Assizes met on the 5th and 6th July, 1577, in the Castle and Guild -Hall. Those only fell ill, whether in Oxford itself or after leaving, who -had been present at the Assizes. The two judges (Robert Bell, Chief Baron -of the Exchequer and John Barrham, sergeant-at-law), the sheriff of the -county, two knights, eight squires and justices of the peace, several -gentlemen and not a few of their servants, the whole of the grand jury -with one or two exceptions--these all had not long left Oxford when they -were seized with illness and died (_statim post fere relictam Oxoniam -mortui sunt_). In Oxford itself, on the 15th, 16th and 17th July, some ten -or twelve days after the Assizes, about three hundred fell ill; and in the -next twelve days there died ("_ne quid errem_") one hundred scholars, -besides townsmen not a few. Five died in Merton College, including one -fellow, the names of four being given who died on the 24th, 27th, 28th and -29th July. Every college, hall, or house had its dead. Women were not -attacked, nor indeed the poor; nor did the infection spread to those who -waited on the sick or came to prescribe for them. Only those who had been -present at the Assizes caught the fever. The symptoms are described as -follows: - - The patients laboured under pain both of the head and of the stomach; - they were troubled with phrensy, deprived of understanding, memory, - sight, hearing and their other senses. As their malady increased, they - took no food, could not sleep, and would not suffer attendants or - watchers to be near them; their strength was remarkable, even in the - approach of death; but if they recovered they fell into the extreme of - weakness. No complexion or constitution was spared; but those of a - choleric habit were most obnoxious to the disease. The affected - persons suddenly became delirious and furious, overcoming those who - tried to hold them; some ran about in courts and in the streets after - the manner of insane persons; others leapt headlong into the water. - The spirits of all the people were crushed; the physicians fled, and - the wretched sufferers were deserted. Masters, doctors, and heads of - houses left almost to a man. The Master of Merton remained, _longe - omnium vigilantissimus_, ministering sedulously to the sick. The - pharmacies were soon emptied of their conserves, oils, sweet waters, - pixides and every kind of confection. - -This sudden epidemic, which began on the 15th--17th July, did not last -long; within the space of one month the city was restored to its former -health, so that one wonders, says the registrary of Merton, to see already -so many scholars and so many townsmen abroad in the streets and walks. - -The infection was suspected by many, says the same eyewitness, to have -arisen either from the fetid and pestilent air of thieves brought forth -from prison, of whom two or three died in chains a few days before -(_quorum duo vel tres sunt ante paucos dies in vinculis mortui_), or from -the devilishly contrived and obviously papistical spirits called forth "e -Lovaniensi barathro," and let loose upon the court secretly and most -wickedly. - -The latter explanation arose out of the heated feelings of the time -against papist plotters, and has no farther interest. But the statement -that two or three of the prisoners had died in chains a few days before -has a great interest, as showing the kind of treatment to which they had -been subjected while awaiting the gaol delivery. A strange confirmation of -the truth of the statement came to light many years after. When John -Howard visited the Oxford gaol in 1779, in the course of his humane -labours on behalf of the prisoners, he was told by the gaoler that, some -years before, wanting to build a little hovel and digging up stones for -the purpose from the ruins of the court, which was formerly in the Castle, -he found under them a complete skeleton with light chains on the legs, the -links very small. "These," says Howard, "were probably the bones of a -malefactor who died in court of the distemper at the Black Assize[787]." - -Next to the Merton register's account, we may take that of Thomas Cogan, a -graduate in medicine of Oxford, sometime fellow of Oriel, but probably -removed to Manchester previous to 1577. Wherever Cogan got his -information, he acknowledges no source of the following in his _Haven of -Health_, 1589: - - "What kind of disease this should be which was first at Cambridge [in - 1522] and after at Oxford, it is very hard to define, neither hath any - man (that I know) written of that matter. Yet my judgment is, be it - spoken without offence of the learned physicians, that the disease was - _Febris ardens_, a burning fever. For as much as the signes of a - burning ague did manifestly appear in this disease, which after - Hollerius be these: Extreame heate of the body, vehement thirst, - loathing of meate, tossing to and fro, and unquietnesse, dryness of - the tongue rough and blacke, griping of the belly, cholerick laske, - cruell ake of the head, no sound sleepe, or no sleepe at all, raving - and phrensie, the end whereof, to life or death, is bleeding at the - nose, great vomitting, sweate or laske. And this kind of sicknesse is - one of those rods, and the most common rod, wherewith it pleaseth God - to brake his people for sin.... And this disease indeed, as it is - God's messenger, and sometimes God's poaste, because it commeth poaste - haste, and calleth us quickly away, so it is commonly the Pursuivant - of the pestilence and goeth before it.... And certainly after that - sodaine bane at Oxford, the same yeare, and a yeare or two following, - the same kind of ague raged in a manner over all England, and tooke - away very many of the strongest sort, and in their lustiest age, and - for the most part, men and not women nor children, culling them out - here and there, even as you should chuse the best sheepe out of a - flocke. And certaine remedy was none to be found.... And they that - took a moderate sweate at the beginning of their sickness and did rid - their stomachs well by vomit sped much better. Yet thanks be to God - hitherto no great plague hath ensued upon it." - -Besides these medical particulars, he gives certain dates and numbers. It -began, he says, on the 6th of July, from which date to the 12th of August -next ensuing there died of the same sickness five hundred and ten -persons, all men and no women: the chiefest of which were the two judges, -Sir Robert Ball, lord chief baron, and maister Sergeant Baram, maister -Doile the high sheriff, five of the justices, four councillors at law and -an attorney. The rest were jurors and such as repaired thither. - -An account not unlike Cogan's is given by Stow in his _Annales_ (p. 681); - - "The 4, 5 and 6 dayes of July were the assizes holden at Oxford, where - was arraigned and condemned one Rowland Jenkes for his seditious - toung, at which time there arose amidst the people such a dampe, that - almost all were smothered, very few escaped that were not taken at - that instant: the Jurors died presently. Shortly after died Sir Robert - Bell, lord chief baron, Sir Robert de Olie, Sir William Babington, - maister Weneman, maister de Olie, high sheriff, maister Davers, - maister Harcurt, maister Kirle, maister Phereplace, maister Greenwood, - maister Foster, maister Nash, sergeaunt Baram, maister Stevens, and - there died in Oxford 300 persons, and sickned there but died in other - places 200 and odde, from the 6th of July to the 12th of August, after - which died not one of that sicknesse, for one of them infected not - another, nor any one woman or child died thereof." - -Stow's account differs from that of the Merton College register in several -important particulars. The latter is explicit that the sickness appeared -among the scholars and townsmen of Oxford on the 15th, 16th and 17th of -July, or after an interval of ten days or more, and that the deaths -amongst those who had come to Oxford on Assize business did not occur in -Oxford but on their return home. On the other hand, Stow makes out the -Oxford people to have been smothered by the damp which arose in the court -itself: "very few escaped that were not taken ill at that instant;" next -come the deaths of the jurors, and "shortly after" those of the judges and -other high officials, whose names are given by Stow more fully than by -anyone. His total of deaths, the same as Cogan's, is 300 in Oxford and 200 -and odd of persons who had left Oxford, and his dates, "from the 6th of -July to the 12th of August," are also the same as Cogan's. - -Wood's account is for the most part taken from the Merton register and in -part from the very different version in Stow's _Annals_; but he has the -following new matter: "Above 600 sickened in one night, as a physician -that now lived in Oxford attesteth, and the day after, the infectious air -being carried into the next villages, sickened there an hundred -more[788]." That, of course, is very unlike the Merton College account, -which is explicit that no one caught the fever who had not been in the -court. The Oxford physician whose authority is given for the six hundred -cases in Oxford in one night, and the extension next day to villages -around, is Dr George Ethredge, or Ethryg, a physician and learned Greek -scholar living in Oxford at the time and keeping a boarding-house, called -George Hall, for the sons of Catholic gentlemen. In 1588 he published a -small volume of comments upon some books of Paulus Aegineta, which is the -authority given by Wood[789]. On discovering the passage, one finds that -it was not 600 in one night, but "sexaginta" or 60, and that the occasion -on which more than sixty were taken ill at once in a single night at -Oxford, and nearly a hundred next day in the adjacent villages, "whither -the infected air had by chance been borne," was not that of the gaol-fever -in 1577 but of the sweating sickness in 1551. An extension in the -atmosphere to the villages around is just what would have happened in the -sweating sickness, a disease in that as in other respects closely -analogous to influenza. Ethredge says that, on the particular occasion, -"hardly any of the Oxford people died"--a statement which should of itself -have prevented Wood's mistake, even if the reference to the same disease -having "at the same time" cut off the two sons of the duke of Suffolk "at -Cambridge" (therefore a less healthy place than Oxford where hardly any -died) had not quite clearly pointed to the sudor Britannicus, which is -actually named in the context ("sic enim vocant")[790]. - -Although, in the passage quoted, it is the sweating sickness at Oxford in -1551 that Ethredge refers to, he does also refer to the gaol fever of 1577 -in another passage which has hitherto escaped notice. - - In the section of his book next following, entitled "De Curatione - morborum populariter grassantium, et de Peste," he says that he had - used a certain prescription of aloes, ammoniacum and myrrh rubbed - together in wine, for himself as well as for others in a serious - contagion, "quae fuit in martiali sede cum ibi essem," and also, with - happy effect, upon many "in the most cruel pest at Oxford which - carried off Judge Bell and ever so many more; one gentleman, I could - not persuade to try this medicine, whom therefore I commended to God, - and four days after he was dead. Concerning that pestilential fever, - many colloquies took place between me and two most learned physicians; - and, as to the kind of this contagion, we all agreed (_manibus et - pedibus in hanc sententiam itum est_) in a sentence which I quoted - from Valescus, who sayeth thus: Those sicknesses are dangerous in such - wise that the physicians may be for the most part deceived; for we see - a good hypostasis in the urine, and some other good signs, yet the - sick person dies"--a remark which often recurs in the early writings - on plague. - -It has taken longer than usual to determine the matter of fact as to the -fever of the Oxford Black Assizes, because an erroneous version passes -current on respectable authority; but enough has perhaps been said to -enable us to pass from the matter of fact to the matter of theory[791]. - -The theory of the gaol fever at Oxford, in 1577, was not attempted by any -writer at the time, nor indeed has it been so in later times; but the -significance of the outbreak has been recognized and admitted. An Oxford -scholar, Dr Plot, writing just a century after (1677) mentions the -statement that a "poisonous steam" broke forth from the earth, having -probably in his mind Stow's imaginative explanation, that a damp arose -amongst the people and smothered them, very few escaping that were not -taken at that instant. Plot then proceeds:-- - - "But let it not be ascribed to ill fumes and exhalations ascending - from the earth and poysoning the Air, for such would have equally - affected the prisoners as judges, but we find not that they dyed - otherwise than by the halter, which easily perswades me to be of the - mind of my lord Verulam (_Nat. Hist._ cent. X. num. 914) who - attributes it wholly to the smell of the Gaol where the prisoners had - been long, close, and nastily kept." - -We know, indeed, from the register of Merton that "two or three of the -prisoners died in chains a few days before," which is a sufficient -indication of the state they were kept in, but is no warrant for Anthony -Wood's free rendering of the words: "of whom two or three, _being overcome -with it_ [i.e. with the "nasty and pestilential smell of the prisoners"] -died a few days before the Assizes began." Two or three prisoners died in -their chains with symptoms undescribed; and although typhus among the -inmates of gaols has often occurred, it has also been wanting in many -cases where the filth and misery might have bred it in the prisoners -themselves[792]. - -Bacon's judgment on the case, referred to above, was based upon a strict -scrutiny of the evidence, and does not transcend the evidence. He -attributes the infection that arose in the court to "the smell of the -gaol;" and so as not to assume a smell which does not appear to have -attracted any particular notice at the time, he is careful to explain in -what sense he means the smell of the gaol: - - "The most pernicious infection," he says, "next the plague, is the - smell of the jail, when prisoners have been long and close and nastily - kept; whereof we have had in our time experience twice or thrice; when - both the judges that sat upon the jail, and numbers of those that - attended the business or were present, sickened upon it and died. - Therefore it were good wisdom, that in such cases the jail were aired - before they be brought forth.... - - "Leaving out of question such foul smells as be made by art and by the - hand, they consist chiefly of man's flesh or sweat putrefied; for they - are not those stinks which the nostrils straight abhor and expel, that - are most pernicious; but such airs as have some similitude with man's - body, and so insinuate themselves and betray the spirits[793]." - - -Exeter Black Assizes. - -The next Black Assizes occurred at Exeter in 1586, nine years after the -Oxford tragedy. The Exeter incident has had the fortune to be chronicled -by a person as competent as was the writer in the Merton College register -in the former case, namely by John Hoker _alias_ Vowell, chamberlain of -the city, and its representative in Parliament, a lawyer of good -education, who must have been conversant with all the circumstances, and -wrote his account within six months. He is known as the chief contributor -to the second edition of Holinshed's _Chronicle_, in which the history is -brought down to 1586, his name appearing on the title-page. It is in that -work that he inserted his account of the Exeter Black Assizes, written in -October, 1586. The margin bears the words: - - "The note of John Hooker _alias_ Vowell;" and the text of the note is - as follows[794] (III. pp. 1547-8):--"At the assizes kept at the citie - of Excester, the fourteenth daie of March, in the eight and twentieth - yeare of hir majesties reigne, before Sir Edmund Anderson, Knight, - lord chief justice of the common pleas, and sargeant Floredaie, one of - the barons of the excheker, justices of the assises in the Countie of - Devon and Exon, there happened a verie sudden and a strange - sickenesse, first amongst the prisoners of the Gaole and Castell of - Exon, and then dispersed (upon their triall) amongst sundrie other - persons; which was not much unlike to the sickenesse that of late - yeares happened at an assise holden at Oxford, before Sir Robert Bell, - Knight, lord chiefe baron of the excheker, and justice then of that - assise.... - - The origin and cause thereof diverse men are of diverse judgment. Some - did impute it, and were of the mind that it proceeded from the - contagion of the gaole, which by reason of the close aire and filthie - stinke, the prisoners newlie come out of a fresh aire into the same - are in short time for the most part infected therewith; and this is - commonlie called the gaole sickenesse, and manie die thereof. Some did - impute it to certain Portingals, then prisoners in the said gaole. For - not long before, one Barnard Drake, esquire (afterwards dubbed Knight) - had beene at the seas, and meeting with certeine Portingals, come from - New-found-land and laden with fish, he tooke them as a good prize, and - brought them into Dartmouth haven in England, and from thense they - were sent, being in number about eight and thirtie persons, unto the - gaole of the castell of Exon, and there were cast into the deepe pit - and stinking dungeon[795]. - - These men had beene before a long time at the seas, and had no change - of apparell, nor laine in bed, and now lieing upon the ground without - succor or reliefe, were soone infected; and all for the most part were - sicke, and some of them died, and some one of them was distracted; and - this sickenesse verie soone after dispersed itselfe among all the - residue of the prisoners in the gaole; of which disease manie of them - died, but all brought into great extremities and were hardly escaped. - These men, when they were to be brought before the foresaid justices - for their triall, manie of them were so weak and sicke that they were - not able to goe nor stand; but were caried from the gaole to the place - of judgement, some upon handbarrowes, and some betweene men leading - them, and so brought to the place of justice. - - The sight of these men's miserable and pitifull cases, being thought - (and more like) to be hunger-starved than with sickenesse diseased, - moved manie a man's heart to behold and look upon them; but none - pitied them more than the lords justices themselves, and especially - the lord chief justice himselfe; who upon this occasion tooke a better - order for keeping all prisoners thenseforth in the gaole, and for the - more often trials; which was now appointed to be quarterlie kept at - every quarter sessions and not to be posted anie more over, as in - times past, untill the assises. - - These prisoners thus brought from out of the gaole to the judgment - place, after that they had been staied, and paused awhile in the open - aire, and somewhat refreshed therewith, they were brought into the - house, in the one end of the hall near to the judges seat, and which - is the ordinarie and accountable place where they do stand to their - triales and arraignments. And howsoever the matter fell out, and by - what occasion it happened, an infection followed upon manie and a - great number of such as were there in the court, and especially upon - such as were nearest to them were soonest infected. And albeit the - infection was not then perceived, because every man departed, (as he - thought), in as good health as he came thither; yet the same by little - and little so crept into such as upon whom the infection was seizoned, - that after a few daies, and at their home coming to their owne houses, - they felt the violence of this pestilent sicknesse; wherein more died, - that were infected, than escaped. And besides the prisoners, manie - there were of good account, and of all other degrees, which died - thereof; as by name sargeant Floredaie who then was the judge of those - trials upon the prisoners, Sir John Chichester, Sir Arthur Basset, Sir - Barnard Drake, Knight[796]; Thomas Carew of Haccombe, Robert Carie of - Clovelleigh, John Fortescue of Wood, John Waldron of Bradfeeld and - Thomas Risdone, esquires and justices of the peace. - - ... Of the plebeian and common people died verie manie, and - especiallie constables, reeves, and tithing men, and such as were - jurors, and namelie one jurie of twelve, of which there died eleven. - - This sicknesse was dispersed throughout all the whole shire, and at - the writing hereof in the time of October, 1586, it is not altogether - extinguished. It resteth for the most part about fourteene daies and - upwards by a secret infection, before it breake out into his force and - violence." - -Here we have the same incubation-period as in the Oxford fever, about -fourteen days. But in the Exeter case, we have it clearly stated that an -infection arose in the prison from the poor Portuguese sailors or -fishermen who had been thrown into "deep pit and stinking dungeon" after -their capture on the high seas by Sir Bernard Drake, that the infection -attacked the other prisoners, that many of the prisoners died and all were -brought to extremities, and that those who stood their trial were then in -a most feeble state, although they seemed to the pitying spectators to be -more starved than diseased. - -So far as concerned the infection in the Assize Court, among the lawyers, -county gentry, and officials, jurors and others, it was of the same tragic -kind as at Oxford in 1577 and at Cambridge in 1522, and, as we shall see, -on several occasions in the eighteenth century. But the Exeter case has -some features special to itself. Within the gaol were both English felons -and thirty-eight Portugals, who had become subject to capture on their way -home from the banks of Newfoundland with boatloads of stock-fish, and to -treatment as felons, because Spain and England were at war. Within the -gaol there seems to have been also a gradation of misery, a deep pit and -stinking dungeon, "in the lowest deep a lower deep," to which were -consigned the men of foreign breed, the Portugals. It was among them that -deaths first occurred, in what special form we know not. From them an -infection is clearly stated by Hoker to have spread through the gaol at -large, and to have made many of the prisoners so weak that they had to be -carried into court. This is quite unlike what we read of in the Cambridge -and Oxford cases, in neither of which was illness noted in the prisoners -or asserted of them, although at Oxford two or three had died in chains a -few days before. In the Exeter case there were three circles of the damned -instead of two only: nay there were four. Farthest in were the Portugals, -next to them were the native English felons, then came those present on -business or pleasure at the Assizes, and lastly there were the country -people all over Devonshire for many months after. We must take all those -peculiarities of the Exeter gaol-fever together, and explain them one by -another. It was a somewhat elaborated poison. It had passed from the -foreign prisoners to the English, and in the transmission had, as it were, -consolidated its power; hence, when the prisoners did give it to those who -breathed their atmosphere in court, the infection did not limit itself to -them, as it certainly did at Oxford and, so far as anything is said, at -Cambridge also, and as it usually does in typhus-fever; but it became a -volatile poison, it developed wings and acquired staying power, so that -its effects were felt over the county of Devon for at least six months -longer. - - -Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England. - -The Black Assizes of Cambridge (1522), of Oxford (1577), and of Exeter -(1586) cast, in each case, a momentary and vivid light upon the state of -England in the Tudor period as late as the middle of the reign of -Elizabeth. It has been pointed out in a former chapter that prices and -wages were favourable to the cultivators of the soil in the fifteenth -century, that the English yeomanry sprang up in that period, that village -communities and trading towns prospered although their morals were none of -the best, and that the civil wars of York and Lancaster were so far from -injuring the domestic peace of England that they even secured it. It was -the observation of Philip de Comines, more than once quoted before, that -England had the "peculiar grace" of being untroubled at large by the -calamities of her civil wars, because kings and nobles were left to settle -their quarrels among themselves. "Nothing is perfect in this world," says -the French statesman, who did not like independence of spirit among the -lower orders. But he recognizes the fact as peculiar to England in the -fifteenth century; and there can be little doubt about it. - -The civil wars were hardly over when the troubles of the common people -began. Here, if anywhere, is the turning-point brought into Goldsmith's -poem of "The Deserted Village:" - - A time there was, ere England's griefs began, - When every rood of ground maintained its man. - -Deserted villages became a reality in the last quarter of the fifteenth -century, and throughout the century following. We hear of this -depopulation first in the Isle of Wight, where it affected the national -defence and therefore engaged the attention of the State. Two Acts were -passed in 1488-9, cap. 16 and cap. 19 of 4 Henry VII. The first declares -that "it is for the security of the king and realm that the Isle of Wight -should be well inhabited, for defence against our ancient enemies of -France; the which isle is late decayed of people, by reason that many -towns and villages have been let down, and the fields dyked and made -pastures for beasts and cattle." The second relates that - - "Great inconveniences daily doth increase by desolation and pulling - down and wilful waste of houses and towns, and laying to pasture lands - which customably have been used in tilth, whereby idleness, ground and - beginning of all mischiefs, daily do increase; for where in some towns - two hundred persons were occupied and lived by their lawful labours, - now be there occupied two or three herdsmen, and the residue fall into - idleness." The remedy enacted is that no one shall take a farm in the - Isle of Wight which shall exceed ten marks, and that owners shall - maintain, upon their estates, houses and buildings necessary for - tillage. - -An instance of the same depopulation is given by Dugdale in Warwickshire: -seven hundred acres of arable land turned to pasture, and eighty persons -thrown out of employment causing the destruction of sixteen messuages and -seven cottages. An instance of the same kind has already been quoted from -the neighbourhood of Cambridge as early as 1414; but it is not until the -settlement of the dynastic quarrels and jealousies, partly on the -victories of Edward IV. at Barnet and Tewkesbury in 1471, and completely -after the victory of Henry Tudor at Bosworth in 1485, that agrarian -troubles became general. Then began the famous _enclosures_--enclosures -both of the "wastes" of the manors, and of the open cultivated fields of -the manors in which all the orders of villagers had their share of -tenancy. - -A few years after, in 1495, the number of vagabonds and beggars had so -increased, of course in consequence of the enclosures, that a new Act was -required, cap. 2 of the 11th of Henry VII. "Considering the great charges -that should grow for bringing vagabonds to the gaols according to the -statute of 7 Richard II., cap. 5, and the long abiding of them therein, -whereby it is likely many of them would lose their lives:" therefore to -put them in the stocks for three days and three nights upon bread and -water, and after that to set them at large and command them to avoid the -town, and if a vagabond be taken again in the same town or township, then -the stocks for _four_ days, with like diet. The deserving poor, however, -were to be dealt with otherwise, but in an equally futile manner. In -1503-4, by the 19th of Henry VII. cap. 12, the period in the stocks was -reduced to one day and one night (bread and water as before), probably in -order that all vagabonds might have their turn. - -The most correct picture of the state of England under Henry VII. and -Henry VIII. is given by Sir Thomas More. The passages in his _Utopia_, -relating to the state of England may be taken as veracious history. A -discussion is supposed to arise at the table of Morton, archbishop of -Canterbury, who was More's early patron, and who died in 1500. "I durst -boldly speak my mind before the Cardinal," says the foreign observer of -our manners and custom, Raphael Hythloday; and then follows an account of -the state of England which lacks nothing in plainness of speech. - - "But let us consider those things that chance daily before our eyes. - First there is a great number of gentlemen, which cannot be content to - live idle themselves, like drones, of that which other have laboured - for: their tenants I mean, whom they poll and shave to the quick by - raising their rents (for this only point of frugality do they use, men - else through their lavish and prodigal spending able to bring - themselves to very beggary)--these gentlemen, I say, do not only live - in idleness themselves, but also carry about with them at their tails - a great flock or train of idle and loitering serving-men, which never - learned any craft whereby to get their living. These men, as soon as - their master is dead, or be sick themselves, be incontinent thrust out - of doors.... And husbandmen dare not set them a work, knowing well - enough that he is nothing meet to do true and faithful service to a - poor man with a spade and a mattock for small wages and hard fare, - which being daintily and tenderly pampered up in idleness and - pleasure, was wont with a sword and a buckler by his side to strut - through the street with a bragging look, and to think himself too good - to be any man's mate. - - Nay, by Saint Mary, Sir, (quoth the lawyer), not so. For this kind of - men must we make most of. For in them, as men of stouter stomachs, - bolder spirits, and manlier courages than handicraftsmen and ploughmen - be, doth consist the whole power, strength and puissance of our army, - when we must fight in battle." - - So much for the serving-men of the rich, apt to be discarded to swell - the ranks of poverty and crime. But further:-- - - "There is another cause, which, as I suppose, is proper and peculiar - to you Englishmen alone.--What is that? quoth the Cardinal.--Forsooth, - my lord, quoth I, your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, - and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers - and so wild that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves. - They consume, destroy and devour whole fields, houses and cities. For - look in what parts of the realm doth grow the finest and therefore - dearest wool, these noblemen and gentlemen, yea and certain abbots, - (holy men, no doubt), not contenting themselves with the yearly - revenues and profits that were wont to grow to their forefathers and - predecessors of their lands, nor being content that they live in rest - and pleasure, nothing profiting yea much annoying the weal public - leave no ground for tillage; they inclose all into pastures; they - throw down houses; they pluck down towns and leave nothing standing, - but only the church to be made a sheep-house. And as though you lost - no small quantity of ground by forests, chases, lawns, and parks, - these holy men turn all dwelling-places and all glebe-land into - desolation and wilderness. Therefore the one covetous and insatiable - cormorant and very plague of his native country may compass about and - inclose many thousand acres of ground together within one pale or - hedge; the husbandmen be thrust out of their own, or else either by - cunning and fraud, or by violent oppression they be put besides it, or - by wrongs and injuries they be so wearied that they be compelled to - sell all. By one means, therefore, or by other, either by hook or - crook, they must needs depart away, poor silly wretched souls, men, - women, husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, woeful mothers - with their young babes, and their whole household small in substance - and much in number as husbandry requireth many hands. Away they - trudge, I say, out of their known and accustomed houses, finding no - place to rest in. All their household stuff, which is very little - worth, though it might well abide the sale, yet being suddenly thrust - out, they be constrained to sell it for a thing of nought. And when - they have wandered abroad till that be spent, what can they then else - do but steal, and then justly, pardy! be hanged, or else go about a - begging. And yet, then also they be cast in prison as vagabonds, - because they go about and work not; whom no man will set a work, - though they never so willingly profer themselves thereto." - -Thus were the gaols filled. The policy of Henry VIII. was to hang for -petty theft--"twenty together upon one gallows." And yet the lawyer, the -defender of the king's firm rule, "could not choose but greatly wonder and -marvel, how and by what evil luck it should come to pass that thieves -nevertheless were in every place so rife and rank." - -These descriptions of the state of England were written about 1517, and -the recitals in various Acts of Henry VIII. bear them out. Thus, in 1514 -and 1515 (6 Hen. VIII. cap. 5, and 7 Hen. VIII. cap. 1), the towns, -villages and hamlets, and other habitations decayed in the Isle of Wight -are to be re-edified and re-peopled. In 1533-4 (25 Hen. VIII. cap. 13), -there is a more comprehensive Act against the aggrandisements of -pasture-farmers, "by reason whereof a marvellous multitude of the people -of this realm be not able to provide meat, drink and clothes necessary -for themselves, their wives, and children, but be so discouraged with -misery and poverty that they fall daily to theft, robbery, and other -inconvenience, or pitifully die for hunger and cold." Some greedy and -covetous persons have as many as 24,000 sheep: no one to keep above 2,000 -sheep under the penalty of 3_s._ 4_d._ for every sheep kept by him above -that number. Ten years after comes the well-known Act relating to the -decay of towns[797] (35 Hen. VIII. cap. 4). - -Besides these recitals in Acts of Parliament, we have other glimpses of -the causes of agrarian distress. Thus, in a letter of June 24, 1528, from -Sir Edward Guildford to Wolsey: Romney Marsh is fallen into decay; there -are many great farms and holdings in the hands of persons who neither -reside on them, nor till, nor breed cattle, but use them for grazing, -trusting to the Welsh store cattle[798]. - -In Becon's _Jewel of Joy_, written in the reign of Edward VI. the same -condition of things is described: - - "How do the rich men, and specially such as be sheepmongers, oppress - the king's liege-people by devouring their common pastures with their - sheep, so that the poor people are not able to keep a cow for the - comfort of them and of their poor family, and are like to starve and - perish for hunger, if there be not provision made shortly.... Rich men - were never so much estranged from all pity and compassion toward the - poor people as they be at this present time.... They not only link - house to house, but when they have gotten many houses and tenements - into their hands, yea whole townships, they suffer the houses to fall - into utter ruin and decay, so that by this means whole towns are - become desolate and like unto a wilderness, no man dwelling there - except it be the shepherd and his dog." The interlocutor in the - dialogue answers: "Truth it is. For I myself know many towns and - villages sore decayed; for whereas in times past there were in some - town an hundred households, there remain not now thirty; in some - fifty, there are not now ten; yea (which is more to be lamented) I - know towns so wholly decayed that there is neither stick nor stone, as - they say.... And the cause of all this wretchedness and beggary in the - common weal is the greed of gentlemen which are sheepmongers and - graziers[799]." - -Again, in Bullein's _Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence_ (1664), the groom -Roger who accompanies the citizen and his wife to the country, in the -direction of Barnet, points out an estate on which the rents had been -raised; the fields had been turned into large pastures, and all the houses -pulled down save the manor house: "for the carles have forfeited their -leases and are gone a-begging like villaines, and many of them are dead -for hunger." - -Vagabonds, beggars, valiant beggars, sturdy beggars, and ruffelers -continue to occupy the pages of the Statute Book for many years. In -1530-31 (a long and elaborate Act), and in 1535-6, they are to be -repressed by the stocks, by whipping, and ear-cropping; "and if any -ruffeler, sturdy vagabond, or valiant beggar, having the upper part of the -right ear cut off as aforesaid, be apprehended wandering in idleness, and -it be duly proved that he hath not applied to such labours as have been -assigned to him, or be not in service with any master, that then he be -committed to gaol until the next quarter sessions, and be there indicted -and tried, and, if found guilty, he shall be adjudged to suffer death as a -felon." A still more distracted Act was made by the Lord Protector in 1547 -(1 Ed. VI. cap. 3): if the vagabond continue idle and refuse to labour, or -run away from work set him to perform, he is to be branded with the letter -V, and be adjudged a slave for two years to any person who shall demand -him, to be fed on bread and water and refuse-meat, and caused to work in -such labour, "how vile soever it be, as he shall be put unto, by beating, -chaining, or otherwise." If he run away within the two years, he is to be -branded in the cheek with the letter S, and adjudged a slave for life; and -if he run away again he is to suffer death as a felon. Similar provisions -are made for "slave-children;" while the usual exceptions are brought in -for the impotent poor. The above statute remained in force for only two -years, having been from the first a monstrous insult to the intelligence -of the nation, and never applied. It was succeeded by two meek-spirited -Acts, 3 and 4 Ed. VI. cap. 16, and 5 and 6 Ed. VI. cap. 2, in which the -impotent poor are provided for:--collectors in church to "gently ask and -demand alms for the poor." By the 1st of Mary, cap. 13, the collections -for the poor were made weekly. When Elizabeth came to the throne, greater -pressure was put upon the well-to-do to support the poor: by the Act of 5 -Eliz. cap. 3 (1562-3) those who obstinately refused voluntary alms might -be assessed. A more important Act of Elizabeth was that of her 14th year -(1572-3) cap. 5, "For the Punishment of Vagabonds and for Relief of the -Poor and Impotent." A vagabond, as before, is to be whipped, and burnt on -the ear; for a second offence to suffer death as a felon "unless some -honest person will take him into his service for two whole years;" and for -a third offence to suffer death and loss of lands and goods, as a felon, -without allowance of benefit of clergy or sanctuary. Aged and infirm poor, -by the same Act, are to be cared for by "overseers of the poor" in every -parish, and to have abiding places fixed for them. In 1575-6 (18th Eliz. -cap. 3), the Act of 1572-3 was amended and explained: "collectors and -governors of the poor" are to provide a stock of wool, hemp, iron etc. for -the poor to work upon, and "houses of correction," or Bridewells, are to -be built-one, two or more in every county for valiant beggars or such -other poor persons as refuse to work under the overseers or embezzle their -work. The last and greatest poor-laws of Elizabeth's reign were those of -her 39th year (1597-8) caps. 3 and 4 and her 43rd year (1601) cap. 2. -These remained the basis of the English poor-law down to a recent period. -Overseers of the poor are appointed in every parish--the churchwardens _ex -officio_ and four others appointed by the justices in Easter week: the -overseers to meet once a month in the parish church after divine service -on the Sunday: contributions to be levied by the inhabitants of any parish -among themselves, or the parish or hundred to be taxed by the justices, -failing the contributions, or, if the hundred be unable, then the county -to be rated "in aid of" the parishes. - -These being the developments of the poor-law and the law against vagabonds -to the end of the Tudor period, we may now return to our particular -illustrations, and more especially to the illustrations from popular -sickness. - -Under the year 1537, one of the citizen chroniclers of London has an -entry, "Began a collection for the poor, and a great number cured of many -grievous diseases through the charity thereof." Under 1540, he records -that "the collection for the poor people ceased[800]." Preaching before -Edward VI. on the fourth Sunday in Lent, 1550, Thomas Lever, Master of St -John's College, Cambridge, said: "O merciful Lord! what a number of poor, -feeble, halt, blind, lame, sickly--yea with idle vagabonds and dissembling -caitiffs mixed among them, lie and creep, begging in the miry streets of -London and Westminster[801]." In May, 1552, Ridley wrote to Cecil that the -citizens were willing to provide for the poor "both meat, drink, clothing -and firing;" but they lacked lodging, and he wanted the king to give up -Bridewell "to lodge Christ in," or in other words, the poor "then lying -abroad in the streets of London." - -Coming to the middle of Elizabeth's reign, in the year 1579 we find, in an -essay dedicated to the queen by Dr John Jones upon general topics of -health and morals, an account of poverty and crime which reads little -better than Sir Thomas More's for 1517. In his 31st chapter on "The great -cost that the commonwealth is at daily in relieving the poore: Of the -number of them that are yeerly executed," he speaks of the new poor-rate -as "a greater tax than some subsidies," and as a "larger collection than -would maintain yeerly a good army;" and, of the felons as "a mightier -company of miserable captives than would defend a large country, as in the -records of the Clerks of the Peace and of the Assize may easily be seen." - -Even from the outset, the poor-rate does not appear to have met the -difficulty: - - "And yet housekeepers be but little less discharged, if ye note the - continual resort of the needy, especially in the country and towns - that be incorporate, the poor (as they say) not much the more aided, - as by the moan they make to travellers may be easily gathered, nor - theft and wickedness the less practised. For what misery it is to see - condemned at one assize in a little shire thirty-nine, notwithstanding - the clemency of the Judges, and three hundred and odd in one Diocese - to do penance or fine for their loose living in a year. But these be - the meanest sort only, for the others scape as though it were in them - no offence. And in one gaol of prisoners three hundred and upwards at - one time, whereof a great part perhaps may be through negligence of - justice or cruelty, that otherwise might be punished answerably to the - offences lawfully." - -He then refers to the Bridewells "so charitably and politicly appointed by -the late Act of Parliament, although not yet in every shire erected." The -Act of Parliament was that of 1572 and the Bridewells were the houses of -correction for vagrants, the first type of workhouses, and so named after -the Bridewell in Fleet Street, which was given by Edward VI. from being a -royal residence to be a refuge of the poor. So far as fever was concerned, -it mattered little whether the Bridewell were a poor-house or a prison, -for in later times gaol fever and workhouse fever were both synonyms for -typhus. - -It would not have been surprising to find this enormous extent of -pauperism, vagrancy and crime attended by the distinctive _morbus -pauperum_, typhus-fever. But we are here concerned only with the evidence, -and not with antecedent probabilities. The records are, of course, very -imperfect. The gaol-fevers of Cambridge, Oxford and Exeter attracted much -notice because they touched the governing class. There may have been much -more gaol-fever unrecorded. Hoker, in his account of the Exeter fever, -does indeed say: "and this is commonly called the gaol sickness, and many -die thereof;" and, in a petition to the Crown, March, 1579, the Queen's -Bench prison in Southwark is said to contain twice its complement, there -is in it a disease called "sickness of the house," and near a hundred had -died of that sickness in the prison during the previous six years[802]. We -shall not be able to give colour to our epidemiological history by other -such instances from the Tudor period[803]; even for plague itself, the -records of particular outbreaks are meagre and almost certainly only a -part of the whole. The epidemics which shall occupy us for the rest of -this chapter are those that had a general prevalence over the country on -two or three occasions, the same general prevalence of fever that recurs -at shorter intervals in the Stuart period and in the eighteenth century. - -Hitherto we have attempted to work out the history of epidemics in Britain -without reference to the epidemics in other countries, except in the case -of the Black Death, which had remarkable antecedents in the remote East, -and in the case of the English Sweat of 1528, which overran a great part -of the Continent in 1529 and 1530. To have attempted a parallel record of -epidemics abroad would have served inevitably to confuse the vision; for -the annals of pestilence in all Europe would have been from year to year -an unrelieved record of sickness and death, an unnatural continuance or -sequence, from which the mind turns away. The several countries of Europe, -and the several cities, had each their turn of plague; but they had each, -also, their free intervals, sometimes very long intervals, as we have seen -in the case of Aberdeen with no plague for nearly two generations in the -sixteenth century. The epidemiography of each country should therefore be -kept apart; and within a given country care should be taken to prevent -the illusion of universal sickness, which is apt to be created in the -bringing of scattered centres of disease (such as plague) together in the -same page. - -But there are instances of what are called pandemics, or universal -epidemics, of sickness. The Black Death was one such, covering a period of -perhaps four years in Europe, from 1347 to 1350, the curve of the disease -in each locality lasting about six months. With the beginning of the -modern period we come to more frequent pandemics, not of plague, but of -minor or milder forms of pestilential infection. On the continent of -Europe these were in part related to the state of war, which may be taken -as beginning with the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII. of France in -1494. Typhus-fever, or war-fever with famine-fever, now begins to be a -familiar form of sickness--in 1498, 1505, 1510, 1528, and so on. Other -forms are putrid sore throat, dysentery, and varieties of fever included -under influenza. The various forms were apt to occur together or in -succession, so that epidemiography has a "Protean" character. This -epidemic Proteus is at once a great difficulty and a most instructive -fact. It opens up the very old doctrine of "epidemic constitutions" of the -air, which to many moderns savours of unscientific vagueness; and it -brings us face to face with degrees or kinds of infectiveness which are, -in matter of fact, more wonderful or more incomprehensible than the -deadlier infections, such as the plague or Asiatic cholera. The most -familiar instance of the kind is influenza. - - -Influenza. - -Influenza enters undoubtedly into the Protean infections of the sixteenth -century, and is itself no small part of the Proteus. But what is -influenza? The name is comparatively modern--Italian of the 18th -century--and appears to mean defluxion or catarrh, not in the familiar -sense only, but as derived from the comprehensive pathological doctrine of -humours: thus the Venetian envoy in London called the sweat of 1551 an -"influsso." It is open to us to include much or little under influenza; -but the name itself, having its root in an obsolete doctrine of humours, -can never be made exact or scientific. Usage has applied it to all -universal colds and coughs; and it has been applied capriciously to some -universal fevers, but not to others. There are two tolerably clear -references to its prevalence in England before the peculiarly unwholesome -state of Europe began with the modern age. Under the year 1173, the -chronicle of Melrose enters "a certain evil and unheard-of cough" (_tussis -quaedam mala et inaudita_), which affected everyone far and near, and cut -off many. - -One of the St Albans chroniclers, an unknown writer who kept a record from -1423 to 1431 (reign of Henry VI.), has the following entry under the year -1427: "In the beginning of October, a certain rheumy infirmity (_quaedam -infirmitas reumigata_) which is called '_mure_' invaded the whole people, -and so infected the aged along with the younger that it conducted a great -number to the grave[804]." A good deal is said in this brief passage, and -all that is said points to influenza--the rheumy nature of the malady, the -universality of incidence, presumably the suddenness and brief duration, -the deaths among the aged and the more juvenile. It is known also that a -similarly general malady was prevalent the same year in Paris, where it -bore the name of _ladendo_; the particulars given in the French record of -it leave no doubt that it was influenza. - -The singular name of _pestilentia volatilis_ given by Fordoun to two -epidemics in Scotland in his own lifetime, one which began at Edinburgh in -February, 1430 (1431 new style), and the other at Haddington in 1432, -suggests that they may have been influenzas, but there is nothing more -than the name to indicate their nature. Those years are not known to have -been years of influenza in any other country of Europe: the record of the -malady passes direct from 1427 to 1510. There was certainly a great wave -of influenza over Europe in 1510, under the names of _cocqueluche_ and -_coccolucio_. It is said to have come up from the Mediterranean coasts and -to have extended to the shores of the Baltic and North Seas; its -prevalence in Britain is likely enough, and is indeed asserted in one -foreign account, but there is no known native notice of it. Abroad, it had -the usual character of suddenness, simultaneity and universality, and the -symptoms of heaviness, prostration, headache, restlessness, sleeplessness, -and for some time after a violent paroxysmal cough, like whooping-cough. -None died except some children; in some it went off with a looseness, in -others by sweating[805]. The mention of sweating in the influenza epidemic -of 1510 is not without importance. It may serve to explain a remark by -Erasmus, in a letter of 25th August, 1511, from Queens' College, -Cambridge, that his health was still rather doubtful "from that sweat" (_a -sudore illo_[806]); the sweat can hardly have been the sweating sickness -of 1508, three years before, but the still unsettled health of Erasmus in -1511 may perhaps have been the dregs of the influenza of 1510. - -The next great European epidemic of influenza was in 1557, for which I -shall produce medical evidence of England sharing in it, probably during -that year and certainly in the one following. But the intervening years -afford some notices of sickness in England, which was neither so severe as -plague at one end of the pestilential scale nor altogether mild at the -other, being forms of illness which contemporaries pronounced to be "new" -and "strange," and appear to have been of the nature of pestilent fever -and dysentery. - -Neither typhus nor dysentery was really new to England in the sixteenth -century; on the contrary, they were (with putrid sore throat and lientery) -the common types of disease in the great English famines which came at -long intervals, as described in the first chapter. But on the continent of -Europe typhus and dysentery and putrid sore throat (_angina maligna_) -began with the modern age to appear as if capriciously, and independently -of such obvious antecedents as want, although some of the epidemics of -typhus and dysentery were clearly related to the hardships of -warfare[807]. Typhus, indeed, was a disastrous malady on the Continent in -those years, notably in 1528 in Spain, where it was known as "las bubas," -and in France, where it was called "les poches"--both names relating to -the spots on the skin, and both more strictly applicable to the eruptions -of the lues venerea, which was then also rampant. - -Apart from the gaol fever at Cambridge in 1522, the first mention of those -new epidemics in England since the end of the medieval period is under the -year 1540: "This said xxx and two year [of Henry VIII.] divers and many -honest persons died of the hot agues and of a great lask throughout the -realm[808]." The "lask" was dysentery, (Stow, in chronicling the epidemic -in his much later _Annales_ calls it "the bloody flux"), and the "hot -agues," according to later references under that name, appear to have been -influenza in the sense of a highly volatile typhus[809]. All that we know -of the circumstances of this epidemic is that the summer was one of -excessive drought, that wells and brooks were dried up, and that the -Thames ran so low as to make the tide at London Bridge not merely brackish -but salt. - -The spring and summer of 1551 were the seasons of the last outbreak of the -sweat in England, which curiously coincided with another epidemic of -influenza (_cocqueluche_) in France. The years from 1555 to 1558 were a -sickly period for all Europe, the diseases being of the types of -dysentery, typhus, and influenza. The most authentic particulars are given -under the years 1557 and 1558; and those for England, which specially -concern us, are now to be given. Wriothesley, a contemporary, enters under -the year 1557: "This summer reigned in England divers strange and new -sicknesses, taking men and women in their heads; as strange agues and -fevers, whereof many died[810]." Under the year 1558, the continuator of -Fabyan's chronicle says: "In the beginning of this mayor's year died many -of the wealthiest men all England through, of a strange fever[811]." - -Some light is thrown upon the sickness, general throughout England in -1557-8, also by Stow in his _Annales_. Before the harvest of 1557 corn was -at famine prices, but after the harvest wheat fell to an eighth part of -the price (5_s._ the quarter), the penny wheaten loaf being increased from -11 oz. to 56 oz.! In the harvest of 1558, he goes on, the "quartan agues -continued in like manner, or more vehemently than they had done the last -year passed, where-through died many old people and specially priests, so -that a great number of parishes were unserved and no curates to be gotten, -and much corn was lost in the fields for lack of workmen and -labourers[812]." Harrison, canon of Windsor, says that a third part of the -people of the land did taste the general sickness, which points to -influenza[813]. - -The year 1557 was certainly remarkable on the continent of Europe as a -year of widely prevalent "pestiferous and contagious sickness," which was -described by numerous medical writers. That universal epidemic, or -pandemic, is usually counted as one of the great historical waves of -influenza; and in the annals of that wonderful disease it stands the first -which was well recorded by competent foreign observers, including -Ingrassias, Gesner, Rondelet, Riverius, Dodonaeus, and Foreest. The -corresponding sickness in England in 1557 (still more severe in 1558), -which carried off many of the wealthiest men, and made so great an -impression that it is noticed by Stow and Speed, has missed being noticed -by English physicians, with a single exception, and that a casual one. If -the continental physicians had not been copious in writing on several -occasions when our English physicians were silent, such as the epidemic of -syphilis in 1494-6, the English sweat of 1529, and the influenza of -1557-8, it might appear ungracious to remark upon the scanty literary -productiveness of the profession in the Tudor period. Whoever attempts -medical history for England will soon feel our deficiency in materials, -and become disposed to envy the easier task of the foreign historian. The -academical physicians of the time hardly ever wrote. The men who wrote on -medicine were laymen like Sir Thomas Elyot, who justified his interest -therein by the example of men of his own rank like Juba, king of -Mauritania, and Mithridates, king of Pontus; or they were irregular -practitioners desirous to advertise themselves; or booksellers' hacks like -Paynel; or such as Cogan, a schoolmaster and a physician in one. The -modern reader will be surprised at the common burden of the prefaces of -medical (and perhaps other) books in the Tudor period,--the intolerable -nuisance of "pick-faults," "depravers," and cavillers, who sat in their -chairs and criticised; and if the modern reader happen to be in quest of -authentic facts, he can hardly fail to sympathise with Phaer, when he -addresses the academical dog-in-the-manger with the Horatian challenge: -"Si quid novisti rectius istis, candidus imperti; si non, his utere -mecum." - -It is possible, however, to collect a few particulars of the prevalent -sickness of 1558 in England from casual notices of it. Thus, it comes -into a letter to the queen, of September 6, by Lord St John, governor of -the Isle of Wight, from his house at Letley, near Southampton: sickness -affected more than half the people in Southampton, the Isle of Wight and -Portsmouth (those places being filled with troops under St John's -command), and the captain of the fort at Sandown was dead[814]. Curiously -enough we get an intimate glimpse of this epidemic from a book published -some years after, the _Dyall of Agues_ by Dr John Jones. In his chapter -"Of the Sweating Fevers" (chapter xiv), after illustrating from Galen the -proposition that a sweat may not be critical and wholesome, but [Greek: -tuphodes] or typhus-like, attending the seizure from its outset and "the -same said sweat little or nothing profiting," he proceeds to point his -remarks by his own experience: - - "I had too good experience of myself in Queen Mary's reign, living at - Lettle in my good lord's house, the right honourable Lord St John, - beside Southampton, the which, notwithstanding the great sweat, it was - long after before I recovered of my health, so that the said sweat did - nothing profit." - -He then proceeds to compare the sweat, almost certainly the epidemic -mentioned in St John's despatch of 6th September, 1558, with the sweating -sickness of 1551: - - "So in our days, even in King Edward VI.'s reign, it brought many to - their long home, as some of the most worthy, the two noble princes of - Suffolk, imps of honour most towardly, with others of all degrees - infinite many; and the more perished no doubt for lack of physical - counsel speedily[815]." - -The next that we hear of this epidemic of the autumn of 1558, is in a -despatch from Dover, 11 p.m. 6th October: the writer has "learnt from the -mayor of Dover that there is no plague there, but the people that daily -die are those that come out of the ships, and such poor people as come out -of Calais, of the new sickness[816]." A despatch of 17th October, 1558, -from one of the commissioners for the surrender of Calais, Sir Thomas -Gresham, at Dunkirk, to the Privy Council, says that he "returned hither -to write his letter to the queen, and found Sir William Pickering very -sore sick of this new burning ague. He has had four sore fits, and is -brought very low, and in danger of his life if they continue as they have -done[817]." - -Here we have the same term "new sickness" and "new burning ague" as in the -two English chronicles under the year before--the "strange and new -sicknesses" which "took men and women in their heads," and the "strange -agues and fevers." The very general prevalence in Southampton, Portsmouth -and the Isle of Wight suggests influenza; the symptom of sweating -described by Jones for his own case during that prevalence is in keeping -with what we hear of the influenzas of the time from foreign writers, and -so is the long and slow convalescence; the fact of one person having had -four sore fits of "this new burning ague" is more like influenza than -typhus. - -The severe mortalities in the autumn of 1558 at Loughborough and Chester -are put down to "plague," and they may, of course, have been circumscribed -outbursts of the old bubo-plague. If, however, they were part of the -general prevalence of hot or burning agues, which we may take to have been -influenza or a very volatile kind of typhus, they would indicate a degree -of fatality in the latter somewhat greater than more recent influenzas -have had. A high death-rate is, indeed, demonstrable for the year 1558, -from parish registers, by comparing the deaths in that year with the -deaths in years near it, and by comparing the deaths with the births in -1558 itself. - -The registers of christenings and burials, which had been ordered first in -1538, were kept in a number of parishes from that date; and from 1558, -when the order for keeping them was renewed by queen Elizabeth, they were -generally kept. Dr Thomas Short, a man of great industry, about the middle -of last century obtained access to a large number of parish registers, and -worked an infinite number of arithmetical exercises upon their -figures[818]. His abstract results or conclusions are colourless and -unimpressive, as statistical results are apt to be for the average -concrete mind; nor can they be made to illustrate the epidemic history of -Britain with the help of his companion volumes, 'A General Chronological -History of the Air, Weather, Seasons, Meteors etc[819].', for these -extraordinary annals are for the most part loosely compiled from foreign -sources, bringing into one focus the most scattered references to disease -in any part of Europe, and that too without criticism of authorities but -often with surprising credulity and inaccuracy. That so much statistical -or arithmetical zeal and exhaustiveness (in the work of 1750) should go -with so total a deficiency of the critical and historical sense, (in the -work of 1749) is noteworthy, and perhaps not unparalleled in modern times. -Short's history is mostly foreign, but his statistics, which are English, -may be used to illustrate and confirm what can be learned of sicknesses in -England in the ordinary way of historical research. - -Thus, the period from 1557 to 1560 stands out in Short's table as one of -exceptional unhealthiness both in country parishes and in market towns, -the unhealthiness being estimated by the excess of burials over -christenings. - -_Country Parishes._ - - Registers Unhealthy Baptised Buried - Year examined Parishes in same in same - - 1557 16 7 62 181 - 1558 26 11 171 340 - 1559 34 12 145 252 - 1560 38 6 100 162 - 1561 41 1 19 32 - -_Market Towns._ - - Registers Unhealthy Baptised Buried - Year examined Towns in same in same - - 1557 4 2 262 381 - 1558 4 2 104 159 - 1559 5 3 102 149 - 1560 8 3 134 201 - 1561 8 3 276 399 - 1562 8 1 58 71 - -Short's collection of parish registers appears to have represented many -English counties, although there is no clue to their identity in the -tables from which these figures are taken. The heavy mortalities in the -registers correspond exactly to the epidemic years as otherwise known, and -may be said to bear witness to the extent or generality of the epidemic -infection. - -The next that we hear of malignant fevers in England is the outbreak at -Oxford in 1577, following the Assizes. Anthony Wood says of it: "Some -thought that this Oxford mortality was the same that Leonard Fuchsius -styles sudor Anglicus." Cogan, a contemporary, says: - - "And certainly after that sudden bane at Oxford, the same year and a - year or two following, the same kind of agues raged in a manner all - over England, and took away very many of the strongest sort in their - lustiest age, and for the most part men and not women nor children, - culling them out here and there, even as you should choose the best - sheep out of a flock. And certain remedy was none to be found.... And - they that took a moderate sweat at the beginning of their sickness, - and did rid their stomachs well by vomit, sped much better." - -This is partly confirmed by Short's abstracts of the parish registers. -Thus in 1580, of sixty registers examined, ten showed unhealthiness, the -births being to the deaths as 248 to 284. In 1582, seven country parishes -were markedly unhealthy, the births being to the deaths as 140 to 244. In -market towns the incidence is not so striking: in 1580, four towns out of -sixteen examined showed an unhealthy birth-rate, 237 births to 276 deaths. -It is in 1583 that the disparity becomes greatest in these towns: three -out of the sixteen in the list were notably unhealthy, the deaths being -1062 and the births 467. But it is the obvious defect of Short's method -that we have no means of knowing whether that mortality may not have been -largely from plague, and not from fever or other form of epidemic -sickness. - -The only year between 1558 and 1580 in Short's tables, which stands out as -decidedly unhealthy both in country parishes and market towns is 1570, -while the years from 1573 to 1575 are less healthy than the average. Those -were years of war, and of war-typhus, on the Continent, as the foreign -writings show, but there are no records of the kind of sickness in -England. - -One glimpse of the prevalence of those fevers of 1580-82 is got from a -letter of the earl of Arundell to Lord Burghley, October 19, 1582. The -earl had left his house in London because it was so "beset and -encompassed" by plague; while, as to his country house: "The air of my -house in Sussex is so corrupt even at this time of the year as, when I -came away, I left xxiv sick of hot agues." He therefore begs the loan of -the bishop of Chichester's house till such time as the vacancy in the see -should be filled up[820]. - -The widespread volatile sicknesses of 1557-8 and 1580-2, which are grouped -under the generic name of influenza, were related in time to great -epidemics of the far more deadly bubo-plague. These plague outbursts were -less noticeable in England than abroad. Thus in 1557 there were most -disastrous epidemics of true bubo-plague in several towns of the Low -Countries, and in 1580 there was at Cairo one of the worst epidemics in -the whole history of plague from its beginning. The years preceding 1580 -were also plague-years in many parts of Europe (Padua, Mantua, Venice, -Messina, Palermo, Lisbon, Brussels). Those years were also the occasion of -the first great and disastrous epidemics of diphtheria (_garottillo_) in -Spain. Then come the epidemics of typhus; and at the far end of the -pestilential scale the flying waves of influenza. A relation of influenza -to other prevalent infections has been one of the theories of its nature, -especially the relation to epidemics of Asiatic cholera. - -In that view influenza looks as if it were a volatile product, a swifter -and more superficial wave on the top of some slower and more deadly -earth-borne virus. As the old writers said, it was a _levis corruptio -aeris_, a diluted virus as it were, mild in proportion to its volatility -and swiftness, but in universality equalling in its own milder way the -universality of the plague of Justinian's reign or of the Black Death. - -Now, the same century and the same state of society which witnessed the -most remarkable of those flying ripples of infection over the whole -surface of Europe witnessed also some waves of infection which did not -travel so far, nor were mere influenzas. The English sweat travelled over -England in that way; it was called the posting sweat, because it posted -from town to town: thus in 1551 it suddenly appeared one day in Oxford, -and next day it was in the villages around, as if carried in the air; in -like manner it posted to Devonshire, to Leicestershire, to Cheshire, and -doubtless all over England, like the influenzas of recent memory. And -while the English sweat was thus flying about in England, influenza was -flying about the same year (1551) in France, a country which never -suffered from any of the five sweating sicknesses of 1485-1551. Again, the -influenza in England in 1558 had the symptom of sweating so marked that it -was compared to the true sweat of 1551 by Dr Jones, who himself suffered -from it. Also the influenza of 1580 all over Europe had so much of a -sweating character that in some places they said the English sweat had -come back. Lastly, the gaol-fever of Oxford in 1577 was thought by some to -present the symptoms described by Leonard Fuchs for _sudor Anglicus_; and -Cogan, an English medical writer then living, specially mentions the -phenomenon of sweating (as well as the intestinal profluvium called a -"lask"), both at Oxford and in the more widely prevalent diseases of that -year and the years following. The gaol-fever of Exeter in 1586 illustrates -still another side of the question; it diffused itself--probably by other -means than contact with the sick--all over the county of Devon, and had -not ceased six months after it began in the month of March at Exeter. The -Devonshire diffusion was like the spreading circles in a still pool. The -spread of influenza was like the flying ripples on a broad surface of -water. The spread of plague, on the occasions when it was universal, was -like the massive rollers of the depths, the onward march of cholera from -the East having, in our own times, illustrated afresh the same momentum. - -In using hitherto the name of influenza for the universal fevers in -England in 1557-58 and in 1580-82, I have done so because those years are -usually reckoned in the annals of influenza. But the name is at best a -generic one, and need not commit us to any nosological definition. I shall -have to deal at more length with this question in the tenth chapter, when -speaking of the fevers of 1657-59 described by Willis and Whitmore, two -competent medical observers; in those years the vernal fever was a -catarrhal fever, or influenza proper, while the fever of the hot and dry -season, autumnal or harvest-fever, was a pestilential fever, a spotted -fever, a burning ague, a contagious malignant fever. There were also -differences in their epidemological as well as in their clinical -characters, the influenza wave being soonest past. But so far as regarded -universality of diffusion and generality of incidence, both types were -much alike. - -Molineux, writing in 1694, a generation after Willis, "On the late general -coughs and colds," brought into comparison with them another epidemic -which he had observed in Dublin in the month of July, 1688: "The transient -fever of 1688 ... I look upon to have been the most universal fever, as -this [1693] the most universal cold, that has ever appeared[821]." - -When we come to the 18th century, to great epidemics not only in connexion -with famine in Ireland, but also in England, we shall find the same -diffusiveness associated with the clear type of disease which we now call -typhus. Influenza is the only sickness familiar to ourselves which shows -the volatile character, and we are apt to conclude that no other type of -fever ever had that character. But, without going farther back than the -18th century we shall find epidemics of spotted typhus resting like an -atmosphere of infection over whole tracts of Britain and Ireland, town and -country alike; and even if we give the name of influenza to the epidemical -"hot agues" with which we are here immediately concerned, in the years -1540, 1557-8, and 1580-82, we may also regard them as in a manner -corresponding to, if not as embracing, the types of fever that prevailed -from time to time over wide districts of country in the centuries -following. - -The term "ague," often used at the time, is no more decisive for the -nosological character than the term "influenza." Ague originally meant a -sharp fever (_febris acuta_, [Greek: oxus]), and in Ireland, from the time -of Giraldus Cambrensis down to the 18th century, it meant the acute fever -of the country, which has not been malarial ague, in historical times at -least, but typhus. "Irish ague" was in later times a well-understood term -for contagious pestilential fever or typhus. In the _Dyall of Agues_ by Dr -John Jones (1564 ?), just as in the writings of Sydenham a century later, -intermittents were mixed up with continued fevers which had nothing -malarial in their cause or circumstances. Thus, Jones has a chapter on -"Hot Rotten Agues," which he identifies with the synochus or continued -fever of the Greeks; in another chapter on "The Continual Rotten Ague," he -locates the continued fevers within the vessels and the "interpolate" -without their walls, and proceeds: - - "It happeneth where all the vessels, but most chiefly in the greatest - which are annexed about the flaps of the lungs and spiritual members, - all equally putrefying, which often happeneth, as Fuchsius witnesseth, - of vehement binding and retaining the filth in the cavity or - hollowness of the vessels, inducing a burning heat. Wherefore, this - kind of fever chanceth not to lean persons, nor to such as be of a - thin constitution and cold temperament, nor an old age (that ever I - saw), but often in them which abound with blood and of sanguine - complexion, replenished with humour, fat and corpulent, solemners of - Bacchus' feasts,--gorge upon gorge, quaff upon quaff--not altogether - with meat or drink of good nourishment but of omnium gatherum, as well - to the destruction of themselves as uncurable to the physician, as by - my prediction came to pass (besides others) upon a gentleman of - Suffolk, a little from Ipswich, who by the causes aforesaid got his - sickness, and thereof died the ninth day, according to my prediction, - as his wife and friend knoweth." - -Again, in his eighth chapter, "Of the Pestilential Fever, or Plague, or -Boche [Botch]," he remarks upon the varying types of pestilential -diseases, mentioning among other national types the English sweat: - - "As we, not out of mind past, with a sweat called stoupe galante, as - that worthy Doctor Caius hath written at large in his book _De - Ephemera Britannica_," adding the remark that here concerns us:--"and - sethence [since then], with many pestilential agues, and, lastly of - all, with the pestilential boche [botch or plague rightly termed]." - These continued fevers, pestilential agues, or hot rotten agues, Jones - distinguishes from quotidians, tertians and quartans. Of the last he - says: "and when quartans reign everywhere, as they did of no long - years past; of the which then I tasted part, besides my experience had - of others,"--probably the fevers of 1558, elsewhere called by him the - sweating sickness, and by Stow called "quartan agues." He mentions - also quintains, which he had never seen in England, "but yet in - Ireland, at a place called Carlow, I was informed by Mr Brian Jones, - then there captain, of a kerne or gentleman there that had the - quintain long." - -Not only the term "ague," but also the terms "intermittent," "tertian," -and more especially "quartan," can hardly be taken in their modern sense -as restricted to malarial or climatic fevers. An intermittent or -paroxysmal character of fevers was made out on various grounds, to suit -the traditional Galenic or Greek teaching; but the paroxysms and -intermissions were not associated specially with rise and fall of the -body-temperature. The curious history of agues, and of the specialist -ague-curers, properly belongs to the time of the Restoration, when -Peruvian bark came into vogue, and will be fully dealt with in the first -chapter of another volume. - -The last years in the Tudor period that stand out conspicuously in the -parish registers for a high mortality, not due to plague, are 1597-8. The -year 1597 was a season of influenza in Italy, and perhaps elsewhere in -Europe; so that the epidemic in England that year may have been the same, -but more probably was famine-fever. In the parish register of Cranbrooke -the deaths for the year are 222, against 56 births; and 181 of the deaths -are marked with the mark which is supposed to mean plague proper. The -register of Tiverton has 277 deaths, against 66 births, but it is almost -certain that the cause of the excess was not plague, of which the nearest -epidemic in that town was in 1591. In a country parish of Hampshire, with -a population of some 2700, the deaths in 1597 were 117, against 48 births, -the mortality being about twice as great as in any year from the -commencement of the register in 1569, and after until 1612[822]. In the -north of England the type of disease in 1597-8 was plague proper. - -The parish register of Finchley has a remarkable entry under the year 1596 -which introduces us to other considerations: "Hoc anno moriebantur de -dysenteria xix," the whole number of burials for the year having been 28. -Next year, 1597, there are 23 deaths from dysentery, the burials in all -having been 48--an enormous mortality compared with the average of the -parish. The year 1597, if not also 1596, was a year of great scarcity, -apparently all over England; in Northumberland, Durham, and Cumberland, -the scarcity was attended by plague proper; but in other parts of England, -it would seem, by other types of sickness, of which dysentery was one. - -One of the 16th century English names used for flux was the obsolete word -lask, which occurs often enough in writings of the period to suggest that -the malady was common; it is sometimes called a choleric lask (cholera -morbus), or a vehement lask, as in Elyot's _Castel of Health_ and in -Cogan's _Haven of Health_. Lasks, or lienteries, or dysenteries have not -been dealt with in a chapter by themselves because the records of them are -too few and meagre, so far as we have gone in the history; but it may be -convenient to bring together here the better known instances. In the -period of famine-sicknesses, dysentery and lientery must have been common -types, the latter being specially mentioned by Rishanger of St Albans for -the year 1294. Trokelowe, another St Albans chronicler, writing of the -famine-sickness of 1315-16, uses the singular phrase "morbus enim -dysentericus ex corruptis cibis fere omnes maculavit" and says it was -followed by "acuta febris vel pestis gutturuosa." Dysentery from corrupt -food is again specially named for the year 1391. The "wame-ill" was the -prevalent type of sickness in the great Scots famine of 1439, a year of -famine in England and France. When we next hear of it in English history -it is among the troops of the marquis of Dorset in Gascony and Biscay in -1512, some 1800 of them having died of "the flix." Then comes the "great -lask throughout the realm" in 1540, associated with "strange fevers." The -sickly years 1557-58 and 1580-82 had probably some dysentery, or lientery, -either as primary maladies or as complications of the fevers: Cogan's -generalities imply as much for 1580-82, and we know that the corresponding -sickly period a century after (1657-59) was so characterised in the -description by Willis. The fatal infection in the fleet after the defeat -of the Spanish Armada, in August, 1588, was probably dysentery and -ship-fever. Many other instances of the kind remain to be given in the -chapter on the sicknesses of voyages and colonial settlements. - -Dysentery begins to be heard of more frequently in the Stuart period, as a -malady of London. It is a prominent item, along with summer diarrhoea, in -the London bills of mortality from the year 1658, under the name "griping -of the guts," and is occasionally mentioned in letters from London about -the same years. The dysentery of London in 1669 was the subject of -Sydenham's observations, who says that it had been rarely seen in the -preceding ten years[823]. On the other hand he speaks of "the endemic -dysentery of Ireland," although he is not sure as to its type or -species[824]. Statements as to the Irish "country disease," are as old as -Giraldus Cambrensis[825]; but as the whole question of dysentery is -intimately bound up with that of typhus-fever, I shall reserve -consideration of its prevalence in Ireland on the great scale, as well as -of the annual mortality from it in the London bills of the 17th century, -until that section of the work in which fevers and the maladies akin to -them come into the first rank as if in lieu of the plague. - - * * * * * - -NOTE. A sweating character in the "hot agues" or fevers of the Elizabethan -period, in those of 1580-82 as well as in those of 1557-58, is asserted in -several passages in the text. It is noteworthy that in _Measure for -Measure_, one of Shakespeare's early comedies, the bawd says: "Thus, what -with the war, what with the sweat, what with the gallows, and what with -poverty, I am custom-shrunk" (Act I. Scene 2). - - - - -CHAPTER VIII. - -THE FRENCH POX. - - -One great epidemic disease of the first Tudor reigns, which brought -consternation and distress to multitudes, makes hardly any appearance in -the English records of the time, and no appearance at all in the writings -of the English profession. Long after, in 1576, William Clowes, surgeon to -St Bartholomew's Hospital, first broke the professional silence about -_lues venerea_ in England, and in his larger work of 1579 he gave a number -of startling facts and figures of its then prevalence in London. But the -great epidemic outburst of that disease in Europe began in the last years -of the 15th century; its ravages on the epidemic scale are supposed to -have lasted for twenty or thirty years from 1494; and its subsequent -prevalence is assumed, not without reason, to have been of a milder type -and within narrower limits. We hear of it, in England, from the political -side, at the time when popular arguments were wanted against the Romish -mass-priests and against the monasteries and the orders of friars. In the -practical reasoning of Englishmen the scandalous lives of priests, monks -and friars made the strongest argument for the policy which the king had -adopted towards Rome; and it so happened in those very years that a -scandalous life was betrayed, and made odious in more than sentiment, by -bearing an outward and visible sign. The epidemic of _morbus Gallicus_ -arose at an unfortunate time for the pretensions of Rome, or, perhaps, it -was itself part of the march of events. In Simon Fish's _Supplication of -Beggars_, which was compiled in 1524 and was read to Henry VIII. shortly -after, the weightiest plea is the charge of scandalous conduct resting -upon the priests. In the inquisitions which preceded the suppression of -the monasteries, the same plea is, justly or unjustly, brought to the -front in the case of one abbey after another. So close did the association -of a scandalous vice and its attendant disease become with the priesthood -that James I., writing long after concerning the sentiments of his mother, -Mary the queen of Scots, represents her as forbidding the archbishop "to -use the spittle" in his own baptism, for the reason that she would not -have "a pokie priest to spet in her child's mouth[826]." These, says king -James, were "her owne very words;" at all events, "a pocky priest" may be -accepted as a phrase of the time. The fact that the epidemic of syphilis -in England was used to discredit Romish priests is one of the few -indications that we have of its existence in this country. Wide and deep -as the commotion must have been which it caused, it found hardly any more -permanent expression than the private talk of the men of those days. It -was otherwise on the Continent. There, indeed, a copious literature sprang -up, of which some thirty works remain, from the essay of Conrad Schellig -of Heidelberg, printed without date or place, but ascribed to the year -1494 or 1495, down to the elaborate survey of the disease by Nicolas Massa -of Venice in 1532. The single work extant in England from that, the -earliest and greatest, period of the disease, is a poor piece of -manuscript in the Sloane collection, translated from some foreign author, -and entitled, "The tretese of the pokkis: and the cure by the nobull -counsell of parris[827]." One of its cases is that of a man, aged forty, -with two broad and deep, corroding and painful sores on his leg; another -is of a bishop of Toledo, who had "pustules" and nocturnal pains "as if -the bones would part from the flesh." The vague meaning of the term pox is -shown in one phrase, "paynes, viz. aches and pokkis." - -It was nothing unusual abroad to give cases, and to authenticate them with -the names of the sufferers. Thus Peter Pinctor, physician to the pope -Alexander Borgia, in a notorious but exceedingly scarce work published in -1500, enters fully into the truly piteous case of the cardinal bishop of -Segovia, major-domo of the Vatican, "qui hunc morbum patiebatur cum -terribilibus et fortissimis doloribus, qui die ac nocte, praecipue in -lecto, quiescere nec dormire poterat," as well as into the case of Peter -Borgia, the pope's nephew, "in quo virulentia materiae pustularum capitis -corrosionem in pellicaneo [pericranio] et in craneo capitis sui manifeste -fecit[828]." - -Contrasted with the copious writing and recording of cases abroad, the -English silence is remarkable. The origin of our first printed book on the -subject is characteristic. A literary hack of the time, one Paynel, a -canon of Merton Abbey, had translated, among other things, the _Regimen -Salernitanum_, a popular guide to health several hundred years old. Going -one day into the city to see the printer about a new edition, he was asked -by the latter to translate the essay on the cure of the French pox by -means of guaiacum (or the West-Indian wood) "written by that great clerke -of Almayne, Ulrich Huetten, knyght." For, said the printer, "almost into -every part of this realme this most foul and peynfull disease is crept, -and many soore infected therewith." Ulrich von Huetten's personal -experience of the guaiacum cure was accordingly translated from the Latin, -in 1533, and proved a good venture for the printer, several editions -having been called for[829]. The translation has no notes, and throws no -light on English experience. It is not until 1579, when Clowes published -his essay on the morbus Gallicus, that we obtain any light from the -faculty upon the prevalence of the malady in England. Meanwhile it remains -for us to collect what scraps of evidence may exist, in one place or -another, of this country's share in the original epidemic invasion during -the last years of the 15th century. - - -Earliest Notices of the French Pox in Scotland and England. - -The first authentic news of it comes from the Council Register of the -borough of Aberdeen under the date 21st April, 1497[830]:-- - - "The said day, it was statut and ordanit be the alderman and consale - for the eschevin of the infirmitey cumm out of Franche and strang - partis, that all licht weman be chargit and ordaint to decist fra thar - vicis and syne of venerie, and all thair buthis and houssis skalit, - and thai to pas and wirk for thar sustentacioun, under the payne of - ane key of het yrne one thar chekis, and banysene of the towne." - -The next news of it is also from Scotland, from the minutes of the town -council of Edinburgh, wherein is entered a proclamation of James IV., -dated 22 September, 1497[831]:-- - - "It is our Soverane Lords Will and the Command of the Lordis of his - Counsale send to the Provest and Baillies within this bur{t} that this - Proclamation followand be put till execution for the eschewing of the - greit appearand danger of the Infection of his Leiges fra this - contagious sickness callit the _Grandgor_ and the greit uther Skayth - that may occur to his Leiges and Inhabitans within this bur{t}; that - is to say, we charge straitly and commands be the Authority above - writtin, that all manner of personis being within the freedom of this - bur{t} quilks are infectit, or hes been infectit, uncurit, with this - said contagious plage callit the _Grandgor_, devoyd, red and pass - fur{t} of this Town, and compeir upon the sandis of Leith at ten hours - before none, and their sall thai have and fynd Botis reddie in the - havin ordanit to them be the Officeris of this bur{t}, reddely - furneist with victuals, to have thame to the _Inche_ [the island of - Inch Keith in the Firth of Forth], and thair to remane quhill God - proviyd for thair Health: And that all uther personis the quilks taks - upon thame to hale the said contagious infirmitie and taks the cure - thairof, that they devoyd and pass with thame, sua that nane of thair - personis quhilks taks sic cure upon thame use the samyn cure within - this bur{t} in pns nor peirt any manner of way. And wha sa be is - foundin infectit and not passand to the _Inche_, as said is, be - _Mononday_ at the Sone ganging to, and in lykways the said personis - that takis the sd Cure of sanitie upon thame gif they will use the - samyn, thai and ilk ane of thame salle be brynt on the cheik with the - marking Irne that thai may be kennit in tym to cum, and thairafter gif - any of tham remains, that thai sall be banist but favors[832]." - -Sir James Simpson, with his indefatigable research over antiquarian -points[833], has brought together evidence of payments from the king's -purse to persons infected with the "Grantgore" at Dalry, Ayrshire, in -September, 1497, at Linlithgow on 2nd October, 1497, at Stirling on the -21st February, 1498 ("at the tounne end of Strivelin to the seke folk in -the grantgore"), at Glasgow (also "at the tounn end") on 22nd February, -1498, and again at Linlithgow, 11th April, 1498. He quotes also from a -poem of William Dunbar, written soon after 1500, on the conduct of the -Queen's men on Fastern's e'en, the terms "pockis" and "Spanyie pockis." -From Sir David Lyndsay's poems, of much later date, and from other -references, he makes out that "grandgore" or "glengore" was the usual name -in Scotland down to the 17th century. Grandgore means _a la grande gorre_, -which is the same as _a la grande mode_. This name was given for a time in -France to the great disease of the day, but it was soon superseded by -_verole_. Scotland is the only country where "grandgore" became -established as the common name of the pox. - -Before leaving the Scots evidence, two other ordinances may be quoted -from the town council records of Aberdeen. In a long list of regulations -under date the 8th October, 1507, there occur these two[834]:-- - - "Item, that diligent inquisitioun be takin of all infect personis with - this strange seiknes of Nappillis, for the sauetie of the town; and - the personis beand infectit therwith be chargit to keip thame in ther - howssis and uther places, fra the haile folkis." - - "Item, that nayne infectit folkis with the seiknes of Napillis be - haldin at the common fleschouss, or with the fleschouris, baxteris, - brousteris, ladinaris, for sauete of the toun, and the personis - infectit sall keip thame quyat in thar housis, zhardis, or uther comat - placis, quhill thai be haill for the infectioun of the nichtbouris." - -"Sickness of Naples" is a reference to the well-known diffusion of the -disease all over Europe by the mercenaries of Charles VIII. of France, -dispersing after the Italian war and the occupation of Naples. - -For England the first known mention of the pox is several years later than -the Scots references, although that proves nothing as to its actual -beginning in epidemic form. In the book of the Privy Purse Expenses of -Elizabeth of York, queen of Henry VII., there is an entry under the date -of March 15, 1503, of a sum of forty shillings paid on behalf of John -Pertriche "oon of the sonnes of mad Beale;" which sum appears to have been -what the youth cost her majesty for board, clothes, education, and -incidental expenses, during the year past. The various items making up the -sum of forty shillings are: his diets "for a year ending Christmas last -past," a cloth gown, a fustian coat, shirts, shoes and hose, "item, for -his learning, 20_d._ item for a prymer and saulter 20_d._ And payed to a -surgeon which heled him of the Frenche pox 20_s._ Sm{a.} 40_s._" It will -be observed that the surgeon's bill was as much as all his other expenses -for the year together[835]. - -The London chronicler of the time is alderman Robert Fabyan; but although -Fabyan, writing in the first years of the 16th century, uses the word -"pockys" to designate an illness of Edward IV. during a military -excursion to the Scots Marches in 1463, or long before the epidemic -invasion from the south of Europe, he says nothing of that great event -itself. There is a record, however, of one significant measure taken in -the year 1506, the suppression of the stews on the Bankside in Southwark. -These resorts were of ancient date, and for long paid toll to the bishop -of Winchester. In 1506 there were eighteen of them in a row along the -Surrey side of the river, a little above London Bridge; they were wooden -erections, each with a stair down to the water, and each with its river -front painted with a sign like a tavern, such as the Boar's Head, the -Cross Keys, the Gun, the Castle, the Crane, the Cardinal's Hat, the Bell, -the Swan, etc. These houses, says Stow, were inhibited in the year 1506, -and the doors closed up; but it was not long ere they were set open again, -the number being at the same time restricted to twelve[836]. They had been -suppressed once before, at the earnest demand of the citizens, in the -reign of Henry IV., and it appears from a sermon of Latimer's that they -were again suppressed about the year 1546. Thus Shakespeare had several -precedents in London for the situation which he creates in a foreign city, -in _Measure for Measure_. - -The next reference that I find to it is an oblique one, by Bernard Andre -in his _Annals of Henry VII._ On the occasion of mentioning the sweating -sickness of 1508, he says the latter disease occurred first in England -about four-and-twenty years before, and that it was "followed by a far -more detestable malady, to be abhorred as much as leprosy, a wasting pox -which still vexes many eminent men" ("multos adhuc vexat egregios alioquin -viros tabifica lues[837]"). Bernard Andre's association of the pox with -the sweating sickness, as of one new disease following another, is in the -same manner as the reference to it by Erasmus. In a letter from Basle, in -August, 1525, to Schiedlowitz, chancellor of Poland, he discourses upon -the sickliness of seasons and the mutations of diseases[838]: Until -thirty years ago England was unacquainted with the sweat, nor did that -malady go beyond the bounds of the island. In their own experience they -had seen mutations:--"nunc pestilentiae, nunc anginae, nunc tusses; sed -morbum morbus, velut ansam ansa trahit; nec facile cedunt ubi semel -incubuere." He then proceeds: - - "But if one were to seek among the diseases of the body for that which - ought to be awarded the first place, it seems to my judgment that it - is due to that evil, of uncertain origin, which has now been for so - many years raging with impunity in all countries of the world, but has - not yet found a definite name. Most persons call it the French pox - (_Poscas Galleas_), some the Spanish. What sickness has ever traversed - every part of Europe, Africa and Asia with equal speed? What clings - more tenaciously, what repels more vigorously the art and care of - physicians? What passes more easily by contagion to another? What - brings more cruel tortures? Vitiligo and lichens are deformities of - the skin, but they are curable. This lues, however, is a foul, cruel, - contagious disease, dangerous to life, apt to remain in the system and - to break out anew not otherwise than the gout." - -Whether it was from some mistaken theory of contagiousness or for other -reasons, a fellow of Merton was ordered to leave in 1511 because he had -the French pox[839]. In the English history nothing appears above the -surface until the beginning of the movement against the papal supremacy -and in favour of Reformation. That was a time of public accusations of all -kinds, and among the rest of opprobrious references to the pox. In Simon -Fish's _Supplication of Beggars_[840], which was written in 1524, certain -priests are thus hyperbolically spoken of: - - "These be they that have made an hundred thousande ydel hores in your - realme, which wold have gotten theyr lyvinge honestly in the swete of - their faces had not there superfluous riches illected them to uncleane - lust and ydelnesse. These be they that corrupte the hole generation of - mankynd in your realme, that catch the pockes of one woman and beare - it to another, ye some one of them will boste amonge his felowes that - he hath medled with an hundreth wymen." - -In the year 1529, there is a more painful and most undignified charge. In -the Articles of Arraignment of Wolsey in the House of Peers, the sixth -charge is: - - "The same Lord Cardinall, knowing himself to have the foul and - contagious disease of the great pox, broken out upon him in divers - places of his body, came daily to your Grace [the King], rowning in - your ear, and blowing upon your most noble Grace with his perilous and - infective breath, to the marvellous danger of your Highness, if God of - his infinite goodness had not better provided for your Highness. And - when he was once healed of them, he made your Grace believe that his - disease was an impostume in his head, and of none other thing[841]." - -Among the glimpses of contemporary manners in Bullein's _Dialogue of the -Fever Pestilence_ (1564), there is one referring to the pox; Roger, the -groom, soliloquizes thus: "her first husband was prentice with James -Elles, and of him learned to play at the short-knife and the horn thimble. -But these dog-tricks will bring one to the poxe, the gallows, or to the -devil[842]." Bullein, in his more systematic handbook to health, promises -to treat of the pox fully, but omits to do so. In one place he refers to -the wounds of a young man who fell into a deep coal-pit at Newcastle as -having been healed "by an auncient practisour called Mighel, a Frencheman, -whiche also is cunnynge to helpe his owne countrey disease that now is to -commonly knowen here in England, the more to be lamented: But yet dayly -increased, whereof I entinde to speake in the place of the Poxe." But the -only other reference is (in the section on the "Use of Sicke Men and -Medicine,") to certain drugs "which have vertue to cleanse scabbes, iche, -pox. I saie the pox, as by experience we se there is no better remedy than -sweatyng and the drinkyng of guaiacum," etc[843]. - -A good instance of the oblique mode of reference to the malady occurs in -another dialogue by a surgeon, Thomas Gale[844]. The pupil who is being -instructed tables the subject of "the morbus," which he farther speaks of -as "a great scabbe;" whereupon Gale pointedly takes him to task for the -affectation of "the morbus;" any disease, he says, is the morbus; what you -mean is the morbus Gallicus. - -About the same date, 1563, a casual reference is made to the wide -prevalence of the pox by John Jones in his _Dyall of Agues_. In -illustration of the fact that various countries originate different forms -of pestilence, as the Egyptians the leprosy, the Attics the joint-ache, -the Arabians swellings of the throat and flanks, and the English the -sweating sickness, he instances farther, "the Neapolitans, or rather the -besiegers of Naples, with the pockes, spread hence to far abroad through -all the parts of Europe, no kingdom that I have been in free--the more -pity[845]." - - -English Writings on the Pox in the 16th Century. - -The first original English writer on the pox was William Clowes. In his -treatise[846] of 1579, dedicated to the Society of the Barbers and -Chirurgions, he says that he had been bold "three years since to offer -unto you a very small and imperfect treatise of mine touching the cure of -the disease called in Latine _Morbus Gallicus_, the which, forasmuch as it -was at that time rather wrested from me by the importunitye of some of my -frendes, upon certain occasions then moving, than willingly of my selfe -published, it passed out of my handes so sodeinly and with so small -overlooking or correction," that he now in 1579 reissues it in a revised -and corrected form. - - "The Morbus Gallicus or Morbus Neapolitanus, but more properly Lues - Venera, that is the pestilent infection of filthy lust, and termed for - the most part in English the French Pocks, a sicknes very lothsome, - odious, troublesome and daungerous, which spreadeth itself throughout - all England and overfloweth as I thinke the whole world." He then - characterises the vice "that is the original cause of this infection, - that breedeth it, that nurseth it, that disperseth it." In the cure - of the malady he has had some reasonable experience, and no small - practice for many years. According to the following passage, St - Bartholomew's Hospital, to which Clowes was surgeon, was three parts - occupied by patients suffering from this malady:-- - - "It is wonderfull to consider how huge multitudes there be of such as - be infected with it, and that dayly increase, to the great daunger of - the common wealth, and the stayne of the whole nation: the cause - whereof I see none so great as the licentious and beastly disorder of - a great number of rogues and vagabondes: The filthye lyfe of many lewd - and idell persons, both men and women, about the citye of London, and - the great number of lewd alehouses, which are the very nests and - harbourers of such filthy creatures; By meanes of which disordered - persons some other of better disposition are many tymes infected, and - many more lyke to be, except there be some speedy remedy provided for - the same. I may speake boldely, because I speake truely: and yet I - speake it with very griefe of hart. In the Hospitall of Saint - Bartholomew in London, there hath bene cured of this disease by me, - and three (3) others, within this fyve yeares, to the number of one - thousand and more. I speake nothing of Saint Thomas Hospital and other - howses about this Citye, wherein an infinite multitude are dayly in - cure.... For it hapneth in the house of Saint Bartholomew very seldome - but that among every twentye diseased persons that are taken in, - fiftene of them have the pocks." Like the earlier writers on the - Continent he recognizes that the disease is communicated in more ways - than one; he speaks of "good poor people that be infected by unwary - eating or drinking or keeping company with those lewd beasts, and - which either for shame will not bewray it, or for lack of good - chirurgions know not how to remedy it, or for lack of ability are not - able otherwise to provide for the cure of it." - -In so far as Clowes follows his own experience, he is under no illusion as -to the nature and circumstances of the French pox. But he goes on to -append a pathology of the disease, which is taken from foreign writers and -reflects the bewilderment of the faculty over the constitutional effects -of the malady. As Erasmus said, in the letter quoted, it went all through -the body, "not otherwise than the gout." When it was first observed, it -appeared to be constitutional from the outset. More particularly it -covered the skin with "pustules" or "whelks" as if it had been a primary -eruption like variola, to which it was compared; hence the names "great -pox" and "small pox." It was not until long after that our present -pathology of primary, secondary and tertiary effects was worked out; in -the earliest writings the constitutional effects were referred to an -"inward cause," as Clowes says, to some idiopathic corruption of the -humours having the liver for their place of elaboration, or _minera -morbi_. Thus the learned explanation of the malady, which Clowes adopts -from foreign writers more skilled than himself in such disquisitions, has -no organic unity with his own common-sense observations. In his _Proved -Practice_ he defers still farther to the academical view, as given in the -treatise of John Almenar, a Spanish physician[847]. - -Although Clowes, in 1579, testifies to the very wide prevalence of the -disease, to so great an extent, indeed, that it occupied the hospitals -more than all other diseases put together, yet there is reason to think -that it had by that time lost the terrible severity of its original -epidemic type. The usual statement is that the disease abated both in -extent and in intensity within twenty or thirty years of the Italian -outbreak among the soldiery in 1494-96. A contemporary and ally of Clowes, -John Read, of Gloucester, published in 1588 a volume of translations, from -the Latin manuscript of the English surgeon of the 14th century, John -Ardern, on the cure of fistulas, and from the treatise on wounds, etc. by -the Spanish surgeon Arcaeus (Antwerp, 1574)[848]. In the latter he finds -the following passage, which seems to describe the _morbus Gallicus_ on -its first appearance:-- - - "The French disease did bring with it a kind of universal skabbe, - oftentimes with ring wormes, with the foulness of all the body called - vitiligo and alopecia, running sores in the head called acores, and - werts of both sortes, and many times with flegmatic or melancholic - swellings or ulcers corrosive, filthie and cancrouse, and also running - over the body, together with putrifying of the bone, and many times - also accompanied with all kind of grief, with fevers, consumptions, - and with many other differences of diseases." - -Read's own remarks draw an explicit contrast between the disease on its -first appearance and in his own later experience. Everyone knows now, he -says, how to treat the French pox, "the disease daylie dying and wearing -away by the exquisite cure thereof"--which may be taken to mean, at least, -a notable mitigation of the constitutional effects[849]. The treatment, -however, must have been much less effective then than now. Clowes speaks -of a class who "either for shame will not bewray it, or for lack of good -chirurgions know not how to remedy it, or for lack of ability are not able -otherwise to provide for the cure of it." The expense of a cure would have -been considerable, to judge by the case given above from an account-book -of the year 1503. Unable to employ "good chirurgions," the poorer class -would resort to quacks, of whose practice, in that and other diseases, we -have some glimpses both from Clowes in London and from Read in Gloucester -and Bristol. Of one irregular practitioner Clowes says, "He did compound -for fifteen pound to rid him within three fits of his ague, and to make -him as whole as a fish of all diseases." There was still a lower order of -empirics, whom Clowes disdained to contend with: - - "Yet I do not mean to speak of the old woman at Newington, beyond St - George's Fields, unto whom the people do resort as unto an oracle; - neither will I speak of the woman on the Bankside, who is as cunning - as the horse at the Cross Keys; nor yet of the cunning woman in - Seacole Lane, who hath more skill in her cole-basket than judgment in - urine, or knowledge in physic or surgery"--nor of many others who are - compared to "moths in clothes," to "canker," and to "rust in iron." - -Read gives an account of a travelling mountebank, which is too graphic to -be omitted: - - "In this year, 1587, there came a Fleming into the city of Glocester - named Woolfgange Frolicke, and there hanging forth his pictures, his - flags, his instruments, and his letters of mart with long lybells, - great tossells, broad scales closed in boxes, with such counterfeit - shows and knacks of knavery, cozening the people of their money, - without either learning or knowledge. And yet for money got him a - licence to practise at Bristow. But when he came to Gloceter, and - being called before some being in authority by myself and others, he - was not able to answer to any one point in chirurgerie; which being - perceived, and the man known, the matter was excused by way of - charity, to be good to straungers." - -One of the most systematic and detailed surgical treatises of the time, -John Banister's book on the "general and particular curation of ulcers" -(1575), is significant for the indirect way in which it refers to the lues -venerea. - - Thus at folio 25, "the malignant ulcer called cacoethes" is described - without anything said of a venereal origin, but the specific guaiacum - is given among the remedies. The same is the ease on the 31st and 32nd - leaves, which treat of "filthie and putrefied ulcers," guaiacum being - again prescribed. At folio 51, on ulcers of the mouth, it is said, "If - it proceed a morbo venereo, then first begin with due purgation, and - prescribe the party a thin diet with the decoction of guaiacum, and - use ointments requisite for that disease, strengthening the inner - parts. Use twice a day a sublimated water, as is afore written, to - touch the ulcer with lint rolled therein: - - Rec. Aqua Rosar.} an. two - & Plantag.} ounces, - Sublimati i dragme. - - Boil them in a glass bottel till the sublimate be dissolved." - - On fol. 57, he describes "ulcers of the privie parts," among which are - corroding ulcers, but without reference to the lues. It is in the - section headed, "To prepare the humours" (fol. 61) that the most - explicit reference occurs: "When the ulcers proceed through the French - pockes, a thinne diet must be used, with the decoction of guaiacum or - use universall unctions ex Hydrargyro[850]." - -In 1596 there appeared Peter Lowe's essay on _The Spanish Sickness_[851], -which is purely a product of experience abroad, his own or of others, and -is mainly doctrinal or theoretical. The other properly English works on -the subject are all subsequent to the Restoration, and do not come into -the period of this volume, nor, from an epidemiological point of view, -into this work at all. - -The evidence as to the wide prevalence of the pox in high and low becomes -abundant in the writings and memorials of the reign of James I. The -effects of the disease, as they would have been commonly remarked at this -period, are summed up in a well-known passage in _Timon of Athens_. It -would serve no purpose to collect the numerous references from Puritan -sermons, moral and descriptive essays, plays, and letters of the time. An -anonymous work of the year 1652 actually couples "the plague and the pox," -and shows "how to cure those which are infected with either of them[852]." -One more piece of evidence may be given for London in the year 1662, or -the beginning of the Restoration period,--a date which brings us down a -century and a half from the epidemic invasion with which we are more -immediately concerned; but the information for 1662 will serve to show how -the existence of the disease was still viewed _sub rosa_, and it may help -one to realize what its prevalence and its serious effects on the public -health must have been continuously in the generations before, and most of -all in the generation which experienced the full force of it as an -epidemic[853]. - -The London bills of mortality, setting forth the several causes of death, -were first printed in 1629. The entry of the French pox is in them from -the beginning, and the annual total of deaths set down to it is -considerable, approaching a hundred in the year. But according to Graunt, -who made the bills of mortality the subject of a critical study in -1662[854], they were defective or incorrect in their returns of deaths due -to the pox:-- - - "By the ordinary discourse of the world, it seems a great part of men - have, at one time or other, had some species of this disease ... - whereof many complained so fiercely, etc." He then explains, with - reference to the deaths entered as due to it in the bills of - mortality: "All mentioned to die of the French pox were returned by - the clerks of St Giles' and St Martin's in the Fields only, in which - place I understand that most of the vilest and most miserable houses - of uncleanness were; from whence I concluded that only _hated_ - persons, and such whose very noses were eaten off were reported by the - searchers to have died of this too frequent malady"--the rest having - been included under the head of consumption. - - -Origin of the Epidemic of 1494. - -The French pox, as it was called in England (also the great pox and simply -the pox), or the Spanish pox, as it was called in France, or the sickness -of Naples, or the grandgore, is one of the epidemic diseases concerning -which it seems fitting to say something of the antecedents, in addition to -what has been said of its arrival as an epidemic in this country, and of -its prevalence therein. But this will have to be said very briefly, and -without entering upon the pathology or ultimate nature of the disease. - -The numerous foreign writings upon it during the first years of its spread -over Europe are all singularly at a loss to account for its origin. One of -the earlier guesses was that it arose out of leprosy, as if a graft or -modification of that medieval disease, replacing it among the maladies of -the people. The occasion of that hypothesis seems to have been the lax -diagnosis of leprosy itself, a laxity which goes as far back as Bernard -Gordonio and Gilbert, if not farther back. Many things were called _lepra_ -which were not elephantiasis Graecorum, and among those things the lues -venerea in the Middle Ages was undoubtedly included. At a time when true -leprosy was disappearing or had already disappeared from Europe, a new -form of disease, which came suddenly into universal notice although by no -means then first into existence, seemed to be the successor of leprosy, -evoked out of it, and even caught from the leprous by contagion. That is -the view of Manardus, in a passage quoted in the sequel,--that syphilis -began in certain most particular circumstances at Valencia, in Spain, the -source of all the subsequent contamination of Europe having been a certain -soldier of fortune who was _elephantiosus_ or leprous. In the infancy of a -science it is natural to assign to some such single and definite source a -new phenomenon which was really called forth by a concurrence of -causes[855]. - -Another guess of the same kind was the famous theory, which found a truly -learned defender in Astruc last century and has had supporters more -recently, that the lues venerea came from the New World with the returning -ships of Columbus. There never was any considerable body of facts, -consistent as regards times and places, in support of that theory; and, on -antecedent grounds, the objection to it was that it is as difficult, to -say the least, to conceive of the origin of such a disease among the -savages of Hispaniola as among the natives of Europe. "Here or nowhere is -America" is the proper retort to all such visionary theories put upon the -distant and the unknown. The American theory is now hopelessly dead; the -more that the New World became known, the less did syphilis appear to be -indigenous to it: indeed the disease followed the track of Europeans, and -those parts of the American continent, north and south of the Isthmus, -which were longest in being reached by the civilisation of the Old World, -were also longest in being reached by the lues venerea[856]. - -The name "sickness of Naples," which occurs in the Aberdeen records as -early as 1507, indicates the common opinion of the laity as to the origin -and means of diffusion of the strange malady. In the passage above quoted -from Jones's _Dyall of Agues_, it will be seen that he refers it to "the -besiegers of Naples." The besiegers of Naples were the mercenaries of -Charles VIII. occupying it in the beginning of the year 1495, although -there was no real siege. The new disease was at the time, rightly or -wrongly, traced to them while they occupied Italy, and its diffusion over -Europe was justly traced to their dispersion to their several countries at -the end of the campaign. There is medical testimony that the malady -appeared in 1495 among the Venetian and Milanese troops which were banded -against Charles VIII. at the siege of Novara. Marcellus Cumanus, of -Venice, who was surgeon to the forces, thus speaks of the event, in -certain _Observationes de Lue Venerea_ which he wrote on the margin of -Argelata's work on Surgery[857]: - - "In Italy, in the year 1495, owing to celestial influences, I have - myself seen, and do testify that, while I was in the camp at Novara - with the troops of the Lords of Venice and of the Lords of Milan, many - knights and foot-soldiers suffered from an ebullition of the humours, - producing many pustules in the face and through the whole body; which - pustules commonly began under the prepuce or without the prepuce, like - a grain of millet-seed, or upon the glans, attended by considerable - itching. Sometimes a single pustule began like a small vesicle without - pain, but with itching. Being broken by rubbing, they ulcerated like a - corrosive _formica_, and a few days after, troubles began from pains - in the arms, legs and feet, with great pustules. All the skilled - physicians had difficulty in curing them.... Without medicines, the - pustules upon the body lasted a year or more, like a leprous variola." - He then gives many other details of symptoms and treatment. - -For the year after, 1496, two German writers, who were not surgeons but -occupied with affairs of state, Sebastian Brant (author of the _Ship of -Fools_) and Joseph Gruenbeck, have described the disease, apparently in -connexion with the troops serving in Italy under Maximilian I. against the -invading army of Charles VIII. Thus, there is sufficient evidence that the -malady in its first two or three years of epidemic prevalence, was -associated with a state of war on Italian soil, in the persons of French -troops (and mercenaries of all nations), of Venetian and Milanese troops, -and of the German troops of the Emperor. - -But the German writers are clear that the disease did not originate on -Italian soil, at the siege of Naples or elsewhere. Thus Brant in his poem -of 1496 assigns to it an origin in France, and a dispersion within a year -or two over all Europe[858]: - - "Pestiferum in Lygures transvexit Francia morbum, - Quem _mala de Franzos_ Romula lingua vocat. - Hic Latium atque Italos invasit, ab Alpibus extra - Serpens, Germanos Istricolasque premit; - Grassatur mediis jam Thracibus atque Bohemis - Et morbi genus id Sarmata quisque timet. - Nec satis extremo tutantur in orbe Britanni - Quos refluum cingit succiduumque fretum. - Quin etiam fama est, Aphros penetrasse Getasque - Vigue sua utrumque depopulare polum." - -Gruenbeck, who wrote briefly on the disease in 1496, returned to the -subject at much greater length in 1503, when he was secretary to the -Emperor Maximilian, his later treatise, _De Mentulagra, alias Morbo -Gallico_, being, indeed, among the best that the epidemic called forth. -Hensler doubts whether Gruenbeck was himself in Italy, so as to observe the -ravages of the disease among the troops of the Emperor (including -Venetians and Milanese) at the sieges of Pisa and Leghorn in the summer of -1496, and among the opposing troops of Charles VIII. Be that as it may, -the following is from Gruenbeck's description[859]: - - "O! quid unquam terribilius et abominabilius humanis sensibus - occurrit! Difficile est dictu, creditu fere impossibile, quanta - foeditatis, putredinis et sordium colluvione, quantisque dolorum - anxietatibus nonnullorum militum corpora involuerit. Aliqui etiam a - vertice ad usque genua quodam horrido, squalido, continuo, foedo et - nigro _scabiei_ genere, nulla parte faciei, (solis oculis exemtis), - nec colli, cervicis, pectoris vel pubis immuni relicta, percussi, ita - sordidi abominabilesque effecti sunt, qui ab omnibus commilitonibus - derelicti, ac etiam in plano et nudo campo sub dio emarescentes, nihil - magis quam _mortem_ expetiverunt.... At his omnibus nihil vel parum - proficientibus, et morbo ipso non contento hoc hominum numero, ut eos - solos tantis passionum cruciatibus afficeret, venenum contagiosum in - multos spectantes Italos, Teutones, Helveticos, Vindelicos, Rhaetos, - Noricos, Batavos, Morinos, Anglicos, Hispanos, et alios quos belli - occasio in copias conscripserat, transfudit.... Interea temporis, per - clandestinam Gallorum abitionem, exercitus fuerunt - dissoluti,"--Gruenbeck himself proceeding with some merchants to - Hungary and thence to Poland[860]. - -How came this terrible infection to be among the troops of all nations on -Italian soil in the years 1494, 1495 and 1496? Sebastian Brant clearly -states that the French brought it with them, and that it spread first over -Liguria. Gruenbeck says that it was seen _primo super Insubriam_, or the -Milanese, on which it rested like a dense cloud, until it was scattered by -the winds over the whole of Liguria, and so found its way into the armies -in Italy. Beniveni, of Florence, who wrote in 1498, says that it came to -Italy from Spain, and from Italy was carried to France. Thus we have a -theory of a Spanish origin, of a French origin, and perhaps also of a -native Italian origin--all agreeing that Italy during the state of war -from 1494 to 1496 was the theatre of its first ravages on the great scale, -and the source from which the disease was brought to all the countries of -Europe by the returning soldiery. - -The solution of the difficulty is to be looked for in the inquiries after -still earlier notices of the _lues venerea_. It is beyond the purpose of -this book to enter upon that large subject, farther than has already been -done with the object of proving the generic use of the medieval term -_lepra_. It is now accepted by competent students of medical history that -the same disease, with all varieties or modes of primary, secondary or -tertiary, existed in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, although -secondaries and tertiaries may not have been ascribed to their primary -source. But what specially concerns us here is the question whether the -malady was anywhere beginning to be more noticeable in the years -immediately preceding the great military explosion on Italian soil. On -that point there is some evidence from more than one source, that the -malady was sufficiently prevalent in the south of France to be a subject -of remark previous to the French expedition to Italy, that it had found -its way to the ports of Spain (Barcelona and Valencia), and that the -troops of Charles VIII., if not also that youthful monarch himself, -carried it across the Alps into Liguria, and so gave it that start on -Italian soil which the state of war for the next two years raised to the -power of a virulent and diffusive epidemic[861]. - -The best piece of evidence of its prevalence in Languedoc and its -spreading thence to the adjoining coast of Spain is found in a letter of -the 18th April, 1494 (four months before Charles VIII. entered Italy), -written by Nicolas Scyllatius just after arriving at Barcelona[862]. The -province of Narbonne, he says, a part of France adjoining Spain, now sent -forth another vice. Women felt it most; it infected neighbours by contact; -it has lately invaded Spain, hitherto untouched by it. "I was horrified," -he continues, "on first landing at Barcelona; for I met with many of the -inhabitants who were seized by that contagion. On my inquiring of the -physicians (for with these I held converse during nearly all that -journey), they assured me that the new _lues_ had been derived from -truculent France." In keeping with this entirely credible testimony is the -statement of Torella, a native of Valencia, who wrote one of the earlier -essays on the new disease ("De Pudendagra") in November, 1497. The disease -first broke out, he says, in Auvergne in 1493 (incepit, ut aiunt, haec -maligna aegritudo anno 1493 in Alervnia), and so came in the way of -contagion to Spain and the Islands [to Sardinia, where he was bishop, and -to Corsica], and to Italy, creeping in the end over all Europe, and, if -one may so speak, over the whole globe[863]. - -Torella thus confirms the Barcelona traveller so far as regards -importations from the south of France to the neighbouring ports, the -former writer naming Auvergne as the endemic seat of the malady, whereas -the latter gives Narbonne. Another piece of evidence, that the pox was in -Valencia, as well as in Barcelona, before the expedition of Charles VIII., -is found in a story told by Manardus of Ferrara (1500), a story which is -wholly improbable so far as concerns the origin of syphilis, at a stated -time and place, out of a case of leprosy, but is entirely credible so far -as regards the grossness of its circumstances: - - "Coepisse hunc morbum per id tempus, dicunt, quo Carolus, Francorum - rex, expeditionem Italicam parabat: coepisse, autem, in Valentia, - Hispaniae Taraconensis insigni civitate, a nobili quodam scorto, cujus - noctem elephantiosus quidam, ex equestri ordine miles, quinquaginta - aureis emit; et cum ad mulieris concubitum frequens juventus - accurreret, intra paucos dies supra quadringentos infectos; e quorum - numero nonnulli, Carolum Italiam petentem sequuti, praeter alia quae - adhuc vigent importata mala et hoc addiderunt[864]." - -The evidence that follows is not so explicit, but it has strong -probability. The progress of Charles VIII. from France to Italy in the -autumn of 1494 has been told by Philip de Comines in his _Cronique du Roy -Charles VIII._, first printed at Paris in 1528, nineteen years after the -author's death. De Comines accompanied his master, the French king, as far -as Asti; he was then sent on a mission to Venice, and rejoined the king at -Florence. But De Comines, who was no gossip, omits one interesting fact -near the beginning of the journey to Italy, which has been preserved for -us in a contemporary work (1503) called _La Cronique Martiniane_, or -chronicle of all the popes down to Alexander Borgia lately deceased[865]. -This chronicle relates as follows concerning Charles VIII.'s journey:--"Il -se arresta premierement aucuns jours a Lyon, doubteux s'il passeroit les -mons, car il y estoit detenu pour les delices et plaisances de la cite et -pour les folles amours de aucunes gorrieres lyonnoises. Mais quant l'air -devint pestilent, il s'en tyra a Vienne, cite de Daulphine." His great -army had already passed the Alps and arrived in the country of Asti: it is -said to have consisted, in round numbers, of 3600 men-at-arms, 6000 -bowmen, 8000 pikemen, and 8000 with arquebuses, halberds, two-handed -swords, or other arms, together with a heavy artillery train of 8000 -horses. A large part of this force were Swiss; another part were -Gascons[866]. - -Charles VIII. left Vienne on the 23rd of August, and crossed Mont Genevre -on the 2nd September, whence he proceeded direct by Susa and Turin, -joining his army at Asti on September 9. At Asti, says De Comines, he had -an illness, which caused that minister to delay setting out on his mission -to Venice for a few days. The original printed text of De Comines' -_Chronique_ (Paris, 1528), says that the author remained at Asti a few -days longer "because the king was ill of the smallpox (_de la petite -verolle_) and in peril of death, for that the fever was mixed therewith; -but it lasted only six or seven days, and I set out upon my way." The next -edition has no change but "in great peril of death" (_en grant peril de -mort_), instead of merely "in peril." Now, where did this diagnosis of -_petite verolle_ come from? Nothing is said of smallpox being prevalent at -the time among the troops or along their route. The name _petite verolle_ -itself did not exist in 1494; it came into existence with _grosse -verolle_, having being made necessary by the latter; and the first that we -hear of _grosse verolle_ is when the Italian campaign was over and the pox -was raging in Paris, the Parlement of Paris, on the 6th of March, 1497, -having made an ordinance against a certain contagious malady "nommee la -_grosse verole_," which had been in the kingdom and in the city of Paris -since two years. Probably Comines deliberately wrote "_petite verolle_" in -his manuscript, having composed the latter subsequent to 1498, or at a -time when the terms _verolle_, or _grosse verolle_, and _petite verolle_, -were passing current and were known in their respective senses. The causes -or circumstances of the king's malady at Asti are not enlarged upon by De -Comines, farther than that he makes a somewhat disjointed remark, that all -the Italian wines of that year were sour and that the season was hot, -which would have had as little to do with the one kind of pox as with the -other. Nor is anything said of smallpox spreading among those near the -king[867]. - -The whole sequence of events, from the "folles amours" of Lyons to the -sharp sickness at Asti, has suggested to historians, who have no medical -theory to advocate, that it was not really _petite verole_ that the king -suffered from, but _grosse verole_. Martin says that Charles VIII. -recommenced at Asti his Lyons follies and that he became violently sick, -"of the smallpox, says one, or, perhaps, of a new malady which began to -show itself in Europe," meaning syphilis. To show that such infection was -already possible, he quotes an ordinance of the provost of Paris April 15, -1488, enjoining "the leprous" to leave the capital. This is very like -Edward III.'s order to the London "lepers" a century and a half earlier, -in which the reasons given (the frequenting of stews, the pollution of -their breath, &c.) point somewhat clearly to the nature of their -"leprosy." An order for the banishment of "lepers" from Paris in 1488 must -have been occasioned by some unusual risk of contamination, just as the -London order of 1346 would have been. It is in that sense that the French -historian regards it; the ordinance, he says, "concernait probablement -deja les syphilitiques confondus avec les lepreux[868]." - -De Comines, who is the authority for the diagnosis of smallpox, had -inserted the word _petite_ before _verolle_ for reasons best known to -himself. I shall show in the next chapter, upon smallpox and measles in -England, that the ambiguous teaching of the faculty as to the nature and -affinities of the pox proper within the first years of its epidemic -appearance gave a ready opportunity of calling the _grosse verole_ by the -name of _petite verole_ in circumstances where it was polite, or prudent, -or convenient so to do. The only importance of a correct diagnosis of the -king's malady is that the case of one would have been the case of many. - -The indications all point to a somewhat unusual prevalence of _lues -venerea_ previous to the autumn of 1494, in the luxurious provinces of -southern France as well as in the capital. Beyond doubt, the malady had -already spread by contagion to the great Spanish ports nearest the Gulf of -Lyons. The expedition of Charles VIII. passed through that region on its -route over the Alps. According to Sebastian Brant, it was the French who -brought the disease into Liguria, and, according to Gruenbeck, it issued, -_Gallico tractu, ab occidentali sinu_, gathered like a dense cloud _super -Insubriam_ (the Milanese), and was thence dispersed, as if by the winds, -over the whole province of Liguria. - -But for the circumstances of the military expedition of 1494, and the -state of war in Italy for two years after, it is conceivable that the -unusual prevalence in France of a very ancient malady would have had -little interest for Europe at large, although the cities on the nearest -coast of Spain appear to have already shared the infection. That unusual -prevalence in the south of France has in it nothing of mystery; the period -was the end of the Middle Ages, distinguished by a revival of learning, of -trade and commerce,--a revival of most things except morals. But, assuming -that there was such unusual prevalence above the ancient and medieval -level, it may still seem unaccountable that a great European epidemic, of -a most disastrous and fatal type, should have been engendered therefrom. - -There are, however, many parallel cases, on a minor scale from modern -times, of a peculiar severity of type, of inveteracy, and of -communicability by unusual ways, having been cultivated from commonplace -beginnings, among unsophisticated communities about the Baltic and -Adriatic, the people being without resident doctors and unfamiliar with -such a disease and its risks. These have been collected and analyzed by -Hirsch, whose conclusion is that "the mode of origin, and the character of -these endemics of syphilis, appear to me to furnish the key to an -understanding of the remarkable episode of the disease in the 15th -century,--an episode which entirely resembles them as regards its type, -and differs from them only as regards extent[869]." - -Referring the reader for farther particulars to the work quoted, I shall -leave the antecedents of the epidemic of pox in the end of the 15th -century to be judged of according to the probabilities thus far stated. - - - - -CHAPTER IX. - -SMALLPOX AND MEASLES. - - -With our modern habit of seeking out the matter of fact, of going back to -the reality and of reconstructing the theory, it is not easy for us to -understand how completely the medieval world of medicine was enslaved to -authority and tradition even in matters that were directly under their -eyes. It was thought a great thing that Linacre, of Oxford, in the first -years of the 16th century, and Caius, of Cambridge, some fifty years -later, should have gone back to Galen for their authority, passing over -the Arabians who had been the interpreters of classical medicine all -through the Middle Ages. Their editions of forgotten medical works of the -Graeco-Roman school were a step forward in scholarship, and they opened -the way to the first-hand observations of disease which really began some -hundred years after with the writings of Willis, Sydenham and Morton. But -smallpox and measles were not Galenist themes, they were peculiarly -Arabian; and the very moderate share that England took in the medical -Revival of Learning made no difference to the paragraphs or chapters on -those diseases that were circulating in the medieval compends. While the -Arabian or Arabistic writers of Spain, of Salerno, and of Montpellier were -the depositaries and interpreters of the Galenic teaching, they were also -the first-hand authorities upon some matters of specially Arabian -experience, of which smallpox and measles were the chief. Whatever was -said of those two epidemic maladies abroad, in the systematic works of -Gordonio and Gilbert, and in the later compilation of Gaddesden in -England, was not only of Arabian origin, but it was all that was known of -them. Rhazes, the original Arabic writer on smallpox and measles about the -beginning of the 11th century, supplied both the doctrine and the -experience. His observations and reasonings, altered or added to by his -later countrymen, passed bodily into the medical text-books of all Europe. -The interest in the treatise of Rhazes was so great that it was printed in -1766 by Channing, of Oxford, in Arabic with a Latin translation, and in an -English translation from the original by Greenhill, of Oxford, in 1847. - -In the literature we took over smallpox from the Arabians; but had we no -native experiences of the disease itself, and, if so, when did it first -appear in this country? One can hardly attempt an answer to these -questions even now without stirring up prejudice and embittered memories. -It has been the fate of smallpox, as an epidemological subject, to be -invested with bigotry and intolerance. Whoever has maintained that it is -not as old as creation has been suspected in his motives; anyone who shows -himself inclined to put limits to its historical duration and its former -extent in Britain is clearly seeking to belittle the advantages that have -been derived during the present century from vaccination. - -The wish to establish the antiquity of the smallpox in Europe has been as -strong as the wish to overthrow the antiquity of the great pox. While -undoubted traces of the latter in early times have been covered over with -the generic name of leprosy, the vaguest reference to "pustules" or spots -on the skin have been turned by verbalist ingenuity to mean devastating -epidemics of smallpox. I am here concerned only with Britain, and must -pass over the much-debated reference by Gregory of Tours to epidemics in -the 6th century, the period of the Justinian plague. But in England the -epidemic which stands nearest in our annals to the great plague of the 6th -century, the widespread infection described by Beda as having begun in 664 -and as having continued in monasteries and elsewhere for years after, has -been claimed by Willan as an epidemic of smallpox[870]. Willan, with all -his erudition, was a dermatologist, and acted on the maxim that there is -nothing like leather. His contention in favour of smallpox has been -referred to in the first chapter, dealing with the plague described by -Beda, and need not farther concern us. It is not in England that we find -evidence of smallpox in those remote times but in Arabia. - - -Smallpox in the Arabic Annals. - -For our purpose the evidence on the antiquity of smallpox in China and -India may be accepted, and for the rest left out of account. The Arabian -influence is nearer to us, and is the only one that practically concerns -us. Coming, then, to the history of smallpox in its prevalence nearest to -Europe, we find a definite statement of the disease appearing first among -the Abyssinian army of Abraha at the siege of Mecca in what was known as -the Elephant War of A.D. 569 or 571. The best of the Arabic historians, -Tabari[871], writes: "It has been told to us by Ibn Humaid, after Salima, -after Ibn Ischag, to whom Ja'gub b. Otha b. Mughira b. Achnas related that -one had said to him, that in that year the smallpox appeared for the first -time in Arabia, and also the bitter herbs,--rue, colocynth [and another]." -The tradition is by word of mouth through several, after the Semitic -manner, but it need not on that account be set aside as worthless. So far -as concerns the bitter herbs, it is said to be against probability; but as -regards the new form of epidemic sickness, there is no such objection to -it. - -The Arabic legend, as given by Tabari is as follows: "Thereupon came the -birds from the sea in flocks, every one with three stones, in the claws -two and in the beak one, and threw the stones upon them. Wherever one of -these stones struck, there arose an evil wound, and pustules all over. At -that time the smallpox first appeared, and the bitter trees. The stones -undid them wholly. Thereafter God sent a torrent which carried them away -and swept them into the sea. But Abraha and the remnant of his men fled: -he himself lost one member after another." In a former passage, the -calamity of Abraha is thus given: "But Abraha was smitten with a heavy -stroke; as they brought him along in the retreat, his limbs fell off piece -by piece, and as often as a piece fell off, matter and blood came forth." -To illustrate this account by Tabari, his recent editor, Noeldeke, cites -the following from an anti-Mohammedan poem: "Sixty thousand returned not -to their homes, nor did their sick continue in life after their return." -One of the elephants which dared to enter the sacred region is said to -have been also wounded and afflicted by the smallpox. - -In this narrative of Abraha's disaster, says Noeldeke, there is a mixture -of natural causation and of purely fabulous miracle; a real and sufficient -account of the cause of the Abyssinian leader's discomfiture, namely, an -outbreak of smallpox, had been blended with legendary tales. That the -disease was smallpox is made probable by the continuity of the Arabic -name; under the same name Rhazes, the earliest systematic writer, -describes the symptoms, pathology and treatment of what was unquestionably -the smallpox afterwards familiar in Western Europe. Why it should have -originated on Arabian soil in an invading army from Africa, is a question -that would require much knowledge, now beyond our reach, to answer -conclusively. - - -Theory of the nature of Smallpox. - -The nature of the disease should, however, be borne in mind always in the -front of every speculation as to the origin of its contagious and epidemic -properties. It involves no speculative considerations to pronounce -smallpox a skin-disease, of the nature of lichen turned pustular. It is a -skin-disease first, and a contagious or epidemic malady afterwards; its -place among diseases of the skin is indeed fully acknowledged by -dermatologists. Apart from its contagiousness it conforms to the -characters of other cutaneous eruptions: its outbreak is preceded by -disturbed health, including fever; when the eruption comes out the fever -is so far relieved; and as in some other eruptions which are not -contagious the constitutional disturbance is in proportion to the area of -the skin involved. Even the peculiar scars or pits which it leaves behind -in skins of a certain texture or in the more vascular regions, such as the -face, are not unknown in non-contagious skin-diseases; nor does its other -peculiarity, the offensive odour of many pustules, seem unaccountable in a -skin-disease native to tropical countries. - -Eruptions on the skin are in many cases the outcome of constitutional -ill-health; for example, the eczema of gout. Also where the whole body is -infected, as in syphilis, there are skin-eruptions, which may be pimples -(lichenous) or scales, or rashes, or, as in the first great outburst of -syphilis, "pustules" so general over the body that those who were casting -about for the nosological affinities of the new malady, saw no better -place for it than Avicenna's group of _alhumata_, which included smallpox -and measles. That a skin-eruption of the nature of smallpox should have -come out as a constitutional manifestation, and that a number of persons -should have exhibited it together for the same internal reason, are both -credible suppositions, although necessarily unsupported by historic -evidence. Let us suppose that the Abyssinian army before Mecca endured -some ordinary discomfort of campaigning, that, in the uniformity of their -life, numbers together had fallen into the same constitutional ill-health -just as numbers together have often fallen into scurvy, and that an -eruption of the skin, proper to the tropics, was part of it. What we have -farther to suppose is that the constitutional eruption became catching -from the skin outwards, so to speak,--that it could be detached from its -antecedents in the body, and could exist as an autonomous thing, so that -it would break out upon those who had none of its underlying -constitutional conditions, but had been merely in contact with such as had -developed it constitutionally or from within. Such detachment of a -constitutional eruption from its primary conditions is little more than -constantly happens when a skin-disease like eczema, or acne, persists long -after its provocation, or the disordered health which called it forth, is -removed. The inveteracy or chronicity of some skin-diseases is itself a -form of autonomy, but a form of it which does not transcend the -individual, just as, among infections themselves, cancer does not -transcend the individual or propagate itself by contagion[872]. But there -exists a closer probable analogy for a secondary eruption becoming a -self-existent or independent infective disease. The instance in view is no -more than probable, and may easily be disputed by those who have -sufficient prepossessions the other way; but there is no theory that suits -so well the negro disease of yaws as that it is a somewhat peculiar -secondary of syphilis, which is now able to be communicated as an exanthem -detached from the primary lesions on which it had depended originally for -its existence. - -All the evidence, historical and geographical, points to the several -varieties of the black skin (or yellow skin) as the native tissues of -smallpox. It is not without significance that a disease of the negroes -which was observed by English doctors not long ago in the mining districts -of South Africa led to a sharp controversy whether it was smallpox or not: -according to some, it was a constitutional eruption; according to others -it was a contagious infection. Such phenomena are not likely to be seen in -our latitudes; but the original smallpox itself was not a disease of the -temperate zone[873]. - -I shall not carry farther this line of remark as to the probable -circumstances in which a pustular eruption, among the Abyssinians before -Mecca, or among other Africans or other dark-skinned races in other places -and at other times, had become epidemically contagious in the familiar -way of smallpox. One has to learn by experience that there is at present -no hearing for such inquiries, because a certain dominant fashion in -medicine prefers to relegate all those origins to the remotest parts of -the earth and to the earliest ages (practically _ab aeterno_), and there -to leave them with a complacent sense that they have been so disposed of. -That is not the way in which the study of origins is carried out for all -other matters of human interest. Yet diseases are recent as compared with -the species of living things; some of them are recent even as compared -with civilized societies. Epidemical and constitutional maladies touch at -many points, and depend upon, the circumstances of time and locality, and -upon racial or national characters. Perhaps their origins will one day be -made a branch of historical or archaeological research. - - -European Smallpox in the Middle Ages. - -The present extensive prevalence of smallpox among the Arabs may or may -not date from the Elephant War of A.D. 569. Its prevalence also in -Abyssinia, so widely in modern times that almost everyone bears the marks -of it, may have no continuous history from the return of Abraha's -expedition. But the history of smallpox in the West comes to us through -the Saracens, and there can be no question that the disease is at the -present day peculiarly at home in all African countries, and most of all -in the upper basin of the Nile, where, as Pruner says, "it appears as the -one great sickness[874]." It is a remark of Freind, whose erudition and -judgment should carry weight, that "the Saracens first brought in this -distemper, and wherever their arms prevailed, this spread itself with the -same fury in Africa, in Europe, and through the greatest part of Asia, the -eastern part especially[875]." Our inquiry here does not extend beyond -England, so that the extremely disputable question of the amount and -frequency of smallpox in the European countries conquered or invaded by -the Saracens in the Middle Ages need not be raised[876]. - -So far as concerns England, smallpox was first brought to it, not by the -Saracen arms, but by Saracen pens. The earliest English treatise on -medicine, the _Rosa Anglica_ of Gaddesden, has the same chapter "De -Variolis [et Morbillis]" as all the other medieval compends--in substance -the same as in the earlier work of Gilbert, and in all the other Arabistic -writings earlier or later. The _Rosa Anglica_ was a success in its day, -partly, no doubt, by reason of its style being more boisterous than that -of Gilbert's or Gordonio's treatises, partly, also, on account of its -blunt indecency in certain passages. Guy de Chauliac, of Avignon, one of -the few original observers of the time, had heard of the _Rosa Anglica_, -and was curious to see it; but he found in it "only the fables of -Hispanus, of Gilbert, and of Theodoric," and he rather unkindly fixed upon -it the epithet of "fatuous." What de Chauliac had probably heard of was -Gaddesden's occasional claims to originality; and these we shall now -examine so far as they concern smallpox. - -One of Gaddesden's variations from the stock remarks on smallpox is his -explanation of why the disease was called variola: it is called variola, -says he, because it occurs _in diverse parts of the skin (quia in cute -diversas partes occupant)_. This is an ingenious improvement upon Gilbert, -who says that it is called variola from the variety of colours (_et -dicitur variola a varietate coloris_)--sometimes red, sometimes white, or -yellow, or green, or violet, or black. Another remark attributed (by Haeser -at least) to Gaddesden as original, is that a person may have smallpox -twice; but Gaddesden, in a later paragraph, shows where he got that from: -"And thus says Avicenna (_quarto_ Canonis), that sometimes a man has -smallpox twice--once properly, and a second time improperly." The most -famous of Gaddesden's originalities is his treatment by wrapping the -patient in red cloth; for that also Haeser ascribes to him. But Peter the -Spaniard, the Hispanus of de Chauliac's reference given above, is before -him with the red-cloth treatment also, while he is candid enough to quote -Gilbert: "Any cloth dyed in purple," says Hispanus, "has the property of -attracting the matter to the outside." - -Gilbert's reference is as follows: "Old women in the country give burnt -purple in the drink, for it has an occult property of curing smallpox. Let -a cloth be taken, dyed _de grano_." Bernard Gordonio, also, says: -"Thereafter let the whole body be wrapped in red cloth." There was -probably Arabic authority for that widely diffused prescription, as for -all the rest of the teaching about smallpox. But Gaddesden does improve -upon his predecessors in boldly appealing to his own favourable experience -of red cloth:--"Then let a red cloth be taken, and the variolous patient -be wrapped in it completely, as I did with the son of the most noble king -of England when he suffered those diseases (_istos morbos_); I made -everything about his bed red, and it is a good cure, and I cured him in -the end without marks of smallpox." - -With reference to this cure, it has to be said, in the first place, that -the object of the red cloth was to draw the matter to the surface[877], -and that it had nothing to do with the prevention of pitting. The means -to prevent pitting was usually to open the pustules with a golden needle; -that is the Arabian advice, and all the Arabists copy it. Gaddesden among -the rest copies it, but he does not say that he practised it on the king's -son. If he had said so, we might have believed that the disease was -actually one bearing pustules which could be opened by a needle. What he -says, in the earliest printed text (Pavia, 1492) is that, while the king's -son was "suffering from those diseases," he caused him to be wrapped in -red cloth, and the bed to be hung with the same, and that he cured him -without the marks of smallpox. Gaddesden was not altogether an honest -practitioner; on the contrary he was an early specimen of the quack _in -excelsis_. According to the learned and judicious Dr Freind, "his -practice, I doubt, was not formed upon any extraordinary knowledge of his -faculty;" and again, "He was, as it appears from his own writings, -sagacious enough to see through the foibles of human nature; he could form -a good judgment how far mankind could be imposed upon; and never failed to -make his advantage of their credulity[878]." The opportunity of diagnosing -variola in the king's son, and of curing it by red cloth, so as to leave -no pits, was one that such a person was not likely to let slip. "It is a -good cure," he says; and we may go so far with him as to admit that it -must have been impressive to the royal household to have heard some sharp -sickness of the nursery called by the formidable name of variola, and to -have seen it cured "_sine vestigiis_." - - -Measles in Medieval Writings. - -In the writings of the Arabians and of their imitators, the so-called -Arabists, measles and smallpox are always taken together. The usual -distinction made between them is that _morbilli_, or measles, come from -the bile, whereas _variolae_, or smallpox, come from the blood, that the -former are small, and that they are less apt to attack the eyes. The -reference in Gaddesden is of the usual kind, but it is complicated by the -introduction of a third term, _punctilli_, which Gruner, however, takes to -be merely a synonym for _morbilli_. As Gaddesden's passage is of some -importance for the history of the familiar name of the disease in England, -I shall translate it at length, so far as it can be made into sense:-- - - "Variolae are so called, as if variously choosing the skin itself, - because in the skin they occupy divers parts, by apostematising and - infecting; they are caused by corruption of blood, and therein they - differ from morbilli and punctilli. - - Morbilli are small apostemata in the skin generated of bile; and they - are a diminutive of apostematous diseases because they occupy less - space by reason of the sharpness of choleric matter. They are in fact - variolae of choleric matter, and the smallest of pustules. But - punctilli are infections commonly sanguineous, as if they had arisen - from a fleabite, only they remain continually. And punctilli are of - two kinds, large and small. Of the small I have already spoken [under - the name of morbilli?]. But the large are broad, red and opaque - infections in the legs of poor and wasting persons, (_pauperum et - consumptuorum_), who sit as if continually at the fire without boots; - and they are called in English _mesles_[879]." - -The rest of Gaddesden's chapter on smallpox and measles contains nothing -that is not to be found in Avicenna or in any medieval compend on -medicine. But the passage quoted is of interest as using the old word -"mesles" to mean one of the two forms of _morbilli_ or _punctilli_. We are -here enabled to see a little way into the confusion of mind which attended -the medievalists in their verbalist dealing with disease. The syntax of -Gaddesden's sentence implies that the broad, red and opaque infections on -the legs of poor and wasted persons were called in English _mesles_. In -other writers, both before and after his date, the name of mesles or -mesels or meseals was given, not to a form of disease, but to a class of -sufferers from disease. It is the name applied to the inmates of -leper-houses by Matthew Paris (circa 1250)--_miselli_ and _misellae_, -being diminutives of _miser_[880]. It is the word used for the same class -in the Norman-French entries in the Rolls of Parliament in the reign of -Edward I. fixing the taxation of leper-houses: if the head of the house -was himself a _meseal_, the hospital was to pay nothing, but if the head -were a whole man, the hospital had to pay[881]. The same use of mesles, as -meaning the leprous, in the generic sense, occurs several times in the -14th century poem, 'The Vision of Piers the Ploughman[882].' Thus, Christ -in His ministrations, - - "Sought out the sick and sinful both, - And salved sick and sinful, both blind and crooked; - And comune women converted, and to good turned. - Both meseles and mute, and in the menysoun bloody, - Oft he heled such. He ne held it for no mystery, - Save tho he leched Lazar that had ylain into grave." - -Or again: - - "Ac old men and hore that helpless ben of strength, - And women with child that worche ne mowe, - Blind and bedred and broken their members, - That taketh their mischief mekely, as meseles and other." - -It is this old English word "mesles," meaning the leprous in the generic -sense, that Gaddesden brings into his Latin text in connexion with -_morbilli_ (or _punctilli_). It is useless to look for precision in such a -writer; but if his introduction of "mesles" in the particular context mean -anything at all, it means that the English word represented a variety of -_morbilli_,--the large, broad and opaque variety. That it should have -occurred to him to bring these blotches or spots on the legs of poor -people even remotely into relation with the _morbilli_ of the Arabians, -probably means that Gaddesden had a merely verbal acquaintance with the -latter, or that he knew them only in books. It is certainly improbable -that anyone, even in the Middle Ages, who had ever seen a case of measles -should bracket that transitory and insubstantial mottling of the skin, -with the large, broad and "obscure" spots (or nodules, or what else) on -the legs of poor and wasted persons, which were called, in the vernacular, -mesles. But Gaddesden, though a verbalist and a plagiary, was a great name -in medicine, a name usually joined (as in Chaucer) with more solid -reputations than his own. If he identified "mesles" with a variety of -_morbilli_ (which variety no one but himself seems to have heard of), it -was an easy transition for the name in English usage to become what it now -is, measles meaning _morbilli_, in the correct and only real sense of the -latter[883]. - - -History of the name "Pocks" in English. - -Gaddesden's case of _variola_ which he cured without pitting by means of -red cloth stands alone in English records until the 16th century; probably -he was as little able to diagnose variola as _morbilli_, and it is more -than probable that he would not have scrupled to call some infantile -malady by the book-name _variola_, on the principle of "omne ignotum pro -terribili," when there was anything to be gained by so doing. There is no -independent evidence that smallpox or measles existed in England in the -14th and 15th centuries. There are extant various medieval -prescription-books, in which remedies are given for all the usual -diseases. If the name of _variola_, or any English form of it, occur -therein, we should draw the same inference as from the prescriptions for -maladies of children such as "the kernels," and "the kink" (or -whooping-cough)[884]. In the Anglo-Saxon "leechdoms," which have been -collected in three volumes, the word _poc_ occurs once in the singular in -the phrase "a poc of the eye" (probably a hordeum or sty of the eyelid), -and once in the plural (_poccan_) without reference to any part of the -body and with no indication that a general eruption was meant. Willan, -indeed, has found in a manuscript of uncertain date a Latin incantation -against disease, in which the words _lues_, _pestis_, _pestilentia_, and -_variola_ occur; at the end of it is written in Anglo-Saxon an invocation -of certain saints to "shield me from the _lathan poccas_ and from all -evil[885]." This looks as if _poccas_ had been the Anglo-Saxon translation -of _variola_. But it remains to be seen in what sense the word "pokkes" -was used in the earliest English writings. - -In the 'Vision of Piers the Ploughman' (passus XX) the retribution of -Nature or "Kynde" upon the wickedness of the times is thus mentioned: - - "Kynde came after with many keen sores, - As pokkes and pestilences, and much people shent; - So kynde through corruptions killed full many." - -In the lines immediately preceding there occur some other names, equally -generic: - - "Byles and boches and brennyng agues - Frensyes and foul evils, foragers of kynde." - -"Boche" is botch,--the name given to the plague as late as the Stuart -period, from its chief external sign, the bubo; and "byles" is merely the -Latin _bilis_ = _ulcus_. "Pokkes" may be the Anglo-Saxon word; but it is -known that many of Langland's colloquialisms are of Norman or French -origin, and in that language there is a term _poche_, which is not far -from the English "boche." Whether "poche" be the same as "boche" or not, -"pokkes and pestilences" may be taken to be synonyms for "byles and -boches." The generic or elastic use of such terms received a striking -illustration in 1528, when spotted fever (typhus), perhaps mixed with -plague, became exceedingly common among French and Spanish troops. Among -the French the disease was called _les poches_ and among the Spaniards -_las bubas_[886], although both names had been assigned to syphilis at the -time of its epidemic outburst in the end of the 15th century. In those -times diseases were called by their external marks; so that diseases -essentially most unlike, but having certain spots, or blemishes, or -botches, or pustules of the skin in common, were called by a common name. -The plague itself was known by certain spots on the breast or back called -tokens: hence the figure of John Stow and others that "many died of God's -tokens." - -There was certainly laxity of naming to that extent in the case of modern -languages. As to Willan's inference from the medieval incantation, it is -by no means clear that _variola_ in medieval Latin may not have been used -generically also; although, in the school of Salerno it appears to have -had its meaning fixed, in the Arabic sense of smallpox, from the time of -Constantinus Africanus, who introduced the teaching of Bagdad into that -school about the year 1060. - -The next use of "pokkes" that I have found is in a manuscript chronicle of -England down to the year 1419[887], one of the series known as the -chronicle of the Brute (from its commencing with the mythical landing of -Brutus in England after the siege of Troy); this manuscript, known as the -"Fruit of Times," was afterwards printed at the St Albans press about -1484[888], the history being carried down to Edward IV., and the passage -in question reproduced exactly as it stands in the handwriting. Under the -40th year of Edward III. (1366) there is the following entry: - - "Ther fell also such a pestalence that never none such was seen in no - man's tyme or lyf, for many men as they were gone to bede hole and in - gude poynte sodanly thei diede. Also that tyme fell a seknes that men - call ye pokkes, slogh both men and women thorgh ther enfectyne." - -It is clearly the same passage that occurs condensed in the chronicle of -William Gregory, mayor of London, which was written probably in -1451-52[889]. Under the 40th of Edward III., after referring to a "grete -batille of sparows" just as the earlier chronicle does, he proceeds: "Also -the same yere men and bestys were grettely infectyd with pockys, wherfore -they dyde, bothe men and bestys." The variation of "men and beasts," -instead of men and women, is curious, and suggests that there may have -been a common source for the story. The chronicle contemporary with 1366, -which is of best authority, was that kept at St Albans Abbey; but it gives -nothing under that year. Shortly after 1361, however, and probably about -1362 or 1363 it has a singular entry, which may have been the source of -these references to "pockys." The Latin may be translated thus: "Numbers -died of the disease of lethargy prophesying troubles to many; many women -also died of the flux; and there was a general murrain of cattle[890]." -Here we have men, women, and cattle; also lethargy, flux, and murrain; and -it is conceivable that later compilers of English chronicles may each have -used this contemporary Latin entry of composite events to put their own -gloss upon it, or to amplify the history into what each conceived to be -the probable meaning. But the most singular enlargement was that made by -Holinshed in his chronicle of 1577. Having copied word for word, sparrows -and all, the entry under the year 1366 in the "Fruit of Times" (as printed -at St Albans about 1484), he takes leave to amend the sense in the part -that chiefly concerns us--he changes "pockys" into "smallpocks," and "men -and women" into "men, women, and children[891]." Holinshed was dealing -with an event two hundred years before his own time, and had no more -first-hand knowledge of it than we have; but his authority has been -accepted for the fatal prevalence of smallpox in 1366 by modern writers on -the history of that disease, such as James Moore[892], who have not sought -for the contemporary authority nor exercised a critical judgment upon the -lax ways of verbalist compilers. Thus is history made--but not so easily -unmade. - -One other reference to "pockys" has to be noticed before we leave the -philological part of the subject and come to the unambiguous history of -the realities. Fabyan, in his _Chronicle_ written not long before his -death in 1512, says that Edward IV. during an expedition to the Scots -Marches "was then vysyted with the syknesse of pockys[893]." It is futile -to conjecture what the king's illness may really have been. The word in -Fabyan's time had already acquired a technical sense, which it has ever -since retained; but that well-understood meaning was some twenty years -later than the year 1474 (although the disease itself doubtless existed -all through the Middle Ages); while, in its earlier generic sense, as in -the 'Vision of Piers the Ploughman,' it seems to have meant botches or -other tokens of pestilential disease. In a Latin glossary of English -words, published a hundred years after[894], "a pocke" is still defined as -_phagedaena_, and "the French pocke" as _morbus Gallicus_, while -"smallpox" is not given at all. - - -Smallpox in England in the 16th Century. - -The earliest references to smallpox in England, apart from the probably -incorrect one by Gaddesden early in the 14th century, occur in letters of -the years 1514 and 1518. Another letter of 1514 will serve to bring out -the ambiguity of the names given to diseases at the time. On June 30, -1514, Gerard de Pleine writes from London to Margaret of Savoy that he had -been asked by the bishop of Lincoln why the marriage between the princess -Mary and Louis XII. had been broken off (it took place shortly after), and -by another great peer whether Louis XII. "avoit eu les pocques," which -last sentence has a marginal note in the printed collection of letters: -"c'est la petite verole[895]." But _les pocques_ in a letter written from -London in 1514 did not mean the smallpox. In a letter of March 3, 1514, -Peter Martyr writing in Latin from Valladolid to Ludovico Mendoza, says -that the King of England has had a fever, and that the physicians were -afraid it would turn to the pustules called _variolae_, but he is now well -again and rises from his bed[896]. This illness of Henry VIII. happened at -Richmond previous to 7th February. Although in the letter quoted there was -only a fear that the illness might have turned to the pustules called -smallpox, yet in the instructions of Henry VIII. to Spinelly, English -ambassador in the Low Countries, sent in February, the twelfth item -instructs him to say that the English king has lately been visited by a -malady "nommee la petitte verolle[897]." - -Four years after, on July 14, 1518, Pace writes to Wolsey from -Wallingford, where the court then was, that the king was to leave next day -for Bisham "as it is time; for they do die in these parts in every place, -not only of the small pokkes and mezils, but also of the great -sickness[898]." - -These are the earliest known instances of the use of the words _pocques_, -_variola_, _petite verolle_, "small pokkes and mezils," as applied to -particular cases of sickness, in correspondence from or relating to -England. The remarks to be made upon the early usage are: first, that the -word _pocques_, as used by one writing in French from London in 1514, did -not mean smallpox, but pox; second, that the first authentic mention of -smallpox happens to have been in the French form--"une maladie nommee la -petitte verolle;" third, that, in the political gossip of the time the -opinion of the physicians regarding the illness of the young king is given -as of a fever which they feared might have turned to the pustules called -"_variolae_;" and fourthly, that in the very first mention of the disease -_variola_ by an English name "small pokkes," the name is modelled on the -French, being coupled with the old English name "mezils." It is impossible -to infer from these references anything as to the amount of smallpox in -England at the time, or even to be sure of the correctness of the -diagnosis. The lax usage as between "pox" and "smallpox" is shown in a -book of the year 1530 called 'Prognosticacions out of Ipocras and Avicen,' -in which a brief reference to _variola_ in the Latin original is -translated "to prognosticate of the pockes." - -In Sir Thomas Elyot's _Castel of Health_, published in 1541, children -after their first infancy are said to suffer from a number of maladies, -and in "England commonly purpyls, meazels and smallpockes." That is -perhaps the first use of the terms in a systematic work on medicine, not -indeed by one of the faculty, but by a layman. About the same time we hear -of smallpocks in an infant of noble family: a letter of May 26, 1537, from -Charles duke of Suffolk to Cromwell, written from Hoxun in Suffolk, -excuses his not repairing to Lincolnshire, as the king had ordered, on the -ground that "his son fell sick of the smallpox and his wife of the -ague[899]." "His son" was Henry Brandon, born September 18, 1535, so that -he was then an infant of some twenty months; he is the same that died, -with his younger brother, of the sweating sickness in July 1551. - -The reference to smallpocks and meazels by Elyot in his _Castel of -Health_ is repeated in the almost contemporary _Book of Children_ by -Thomas Phaer. Whether Phaer translated that also "out of the French -tongue" as he did the _Regiment of Life_, with which it is bound up in the -edition of 1553, we have nowhere any information. In a list of forty -infirmities of children, the 32nd in order is "small pockes and measels." -A later passage in the _Book of Children_ shows how much, or how little, -intelligent meaning Phaer attached to these terms: "Of smallpockes and -measels. This disease is common and familiar, called of the Greeks by the -general name of exanthemata, and of Plinie papulae et pituitae eruptiones. -It is of two kinds:--varioli, ye measils; morbilli, called of us ye smal -pocks. They be but of one nature and proceed of one cause. The signs of -both are so manifest to sight that they need no farther declaration;"--but -he does add some signs, such as "itch and fretting of the skin as if it -had been rubbed with nettles, pain in the head and back etc.: sometimes as -it were a dry scab or lepry spreading over all the members, other whiles -in pushes, pimples and whayls running with much corruption and matter, and -with great pains of the face and throat, dryness of the tongue, hoarseness -of voice, and, in some, quiverings of the heart with sownings." He then -gives the four causes, three of them being intrinsic states of the -humours, and the fourth "when the disease commenceth by the way of -contagion, when a sick person infecteth another, and in that case it hath -great affinity with the pestilence." The treatment is directed towards -bringing out the eruption; all occasions of chill are to be carefully -avoided. More special directions are given for cases in which "the wheales -be outrageous and great;" also, "to take away the spots and scarres of the -small pockes and measils," a prescription of some authors is given, to use -the blood of a bull or of a hare. - -The whole of Phaer's section on smallpox and measles bears evidence of a -foreign source, namely the same stock chapter from which Kellwaye drew -most of his section upon the same two diseases appended to his book on the -plague in 1593. Not only does Phaer speak of smallpox and measles -conjointly as leaving spots and scars, but he actually renders _variolae_ -by measles, and _morbilli_ by smallpox. Phaer was more of a literary -compiler than a physician with original knowlege of diseases and their -pathology. But he is not singular among the Tudor writers in taking -measles to be the equivalent of _variolae_. William Clowes, of St -Bartholomew's Hospital, one of the most experienced practitioners of his -time, does the same. His _Proved Practice for all Young Chirurgeons_ has -an appendix of Latin aphorisms "taken out of an old written coppy," to -each of which aphorisms Clowes has added an English translation: in the -aphorism on _variolae_, that term is translated "measles," the name of -"smallpox" nowhere occurring in the book. Clowes's translation is exactly -in accordance with the English-Latin glossary of the time by Levins -(1570). Levins was an Oxford fellow who had graduated in medicine and -afterwards become a schoolmaster, just as Cogan, of _The Haven of Health_, -had done. He wrote the _Pathway of Health_, and also compiled the -_Manipulus Vocabulorum_. His definitions in the latter may be taken, -therefore, to stand for the medical usage of the time. In this glossary, -"ye maysilles" is rendered by _variole_, while the name of "smallpox" is -omitted altogether, "a pocke" having its Latin equivalent in _phagedaena_, -and "ye French pocke" in _morbus Gallicus_. In the Elizabethan dictionary -by Baret, "the maisils" is defined as "a disease with many reddish spottes -or speckles in the face and bodie, much like freckles in colour;" and that -was the disease which the English profession then understood to be the -same as the _variolae_ of medieval writers. - -I leave readers to draw their own conclusions, whether there was much or -little smallpox or measles in England in the Tudor period. They may be -reminded that Pace, dean of St Paul's, in a letter from Berkshire in 1518, -asserts the fatal prevalence of "smallpox and mezils," and that the duke -of Suffolk called the illness of his infant son by the name of smallpox in -1538. They may be farther helped to a conclusion by the following curious -instance which has been recorded by John Stow. - -Among the miscellaneous collections of that antiquary preserved in the -Lambeth Library[900], there is a narrative of the troubled conscience of -Master Richard Allington, esquire, a gentleman who appears to have lent -money at high interest. Believing himself to be dying on November 22, -1561, he summoned to his bedside at eight in the evening the Master of the -Rolls ("Sir John of the Rolls"), two doctors of the law and two other -lawyers. - - He began: "Maisters, seinge that I muste nedes die, which I assure you - I nevar thought wolde have cum to passe by this dessease, consyderinge - it is but the small pockes, I woulde therefore moste hertely desyre - you in the reuerence of God and for Christes passions sake to suffer - me to speake untyll I be dede, that I may dyscharge my conscens" etc. - He then explains that "no man had so especial tokens of God's singular - grace, and so litele regarded them as I have done," and goes on to - mention particular acts of usury and to offer restitution to the - amount of some hundred pounds or more. It had occurred to him to do so - the second night after he fell sick, being in perfect memory lying in - his bed broad awake, but with puppets dancing around him. After - entrusting the lawyers at his bed side with these restitutions, he - asked the Master of the Rolls to read to him certain of the - penitential Psalms which the sick man had selected as appropriate. - "And then he thought he should have died, but then broth being given - unto him, he revived again and fell to prayer and gave himself wholly - to quietness;" and there the narrative ends. - -It appears from a reference in Stow's _Survey of London_ that he did die -in 1561, and that his widow was left well off: for she afterwards built -one of the finest of the new houses that were now beginning to line the -highway of Holborn almost as far out as St Giles's in the Fields. - -This is the first recorded case of smallpox in English. According to the -patient's own view, smallpox was not usually a formidable disease, nor -does it appear that the Master of the Rolls and four other eminent lawyers -(Dr Caldwell, Dr Good, Mr Garth, and Mr Jones) had been apprehensive of -catching it. One finds no other evidence of the existence of smallpox in -London or elsewhere in England until it is mentioned in a letter of 1591 -and in the essay of Kellwaye, 1593, which asserts the occurrence of -"smallpox and measles" in almost the same language as Phaer's earlier -_Book of Children_ and for the most part under the same foreign -inspiration. From Scotland we have a single reference in Dr Gilbert -Skene's essay on the plague, published in 1568, from the terms of which -one may suppose that he is giving his own experience. The season, he -says, will sometimes foretell the plague, as well as other diseases: - - "Siclyk quhen pokis or sic pustulis are frequent, not onlie amangis - barnis, but also amangis those quha be of constant or declynand - aige--greit frequent south and south-vest vyndis." In a similar - passage on the previous page he couples "pokis, mesillis and siclike - diseisis of bodie[901]." - -In a letter of August 26, 1591, written to a member of queen Elizabeth's -court, it is said: "Hir Higness wold you should remove from that place -where the smalle pocks were, to take the fresh and clere ayre, the better -to purge ye from the infection[902]." - -In 1593 we come to the first systematic English essay on the disease, -appended to the treatise on the plague by Simon Kellwaye[903]. The author -is otherwise unknown as a medical writer, but he is commended in a preface -by George Baker, a court surgeon, for his "good and zealous intent and -sufficiencie in his profession." In appending an essay on smallpox to a -treatise on the plague he follows the example of the Salernian treatise of -Alphanus, which also affords him most of his systematic materials in both -diseases, filtered through Ambroise Pare and other writers. Kellwaye -claims, however, to have incorporated native experience: "which work I -have collected and drawn from sundry both auncient and later writers, the -which being shadowed under the calm shroud of auncient consent and -strengthened with the abundant sap of late experience (as well mine own as -others) I here present the same." In the treatise on the plague (fol. 2) -he mentions smallpox as among the forerunners or prognostics of that -disease: - - "When the smalle poxe doth generally abound both in young and old - people." In the separate essay on the smallpox (fol. 38), its interest - is again that of a forerunner or sequel of the plague, according to - the foreign teaching of the time: - - "For that oftentimes those that are infected with the plague are in - the end of the disease sometimes troubled with the smallpockes or - measels, as also by good observation it hath been seen that they are - forerunners or warnings of the plague to come, as Salius and divers - other writers do testify, I have thought good and as a matter - pertinent to my former treatise" etc. - - He proceeds: "I need not greatly to stand upon the description of this - disease because it is a thing well known unto most people." It begins - with a fever; then shortly after there arise small red pustules upon - the skin throughout all the body, which come forth more or less - intermittently; "In some there arise many little pustules with - elevation of the skin, which in one day do increase and grow bigger, - and after have a thick matter growing in them, which the Greeks call - exanthemata or ecthymata; and after the Latins variola, in our English - tongue the smallpockes; and here some writers do make a difference - betwixt variola and exanthemata: for, say they, that is called variola - when many of those pustules do suddenly run into a clear bladder, as - if it had been scalled, but the other doth not so; yet are they both - one in the cure." He recognizes the contagious property of the - disease, calling it "hereditable:" "For we see when one is infected - therewith, that so many as come near him (especially those which are - allied in the same blood) do assuredly for the most part receive the - infection also." His _Practica_ are taken almost entirely from the - Arabian writers, as filtered through Gaddesden, one of them being the - prevention of pitting by opening the pocks with a gold pin or needle. - He had heard, however, "of some which, having not used anything at - all, but suffering them to dry up and fall of themselves without - picking or scratching, have done very well, and not any pits remained - after it." He then refers to complications, such as ulcerations of the - skin, soreness and ulcerations of the mouth (_aphthae_), soreness of - the tonsils, and glueing together of the eyelids, all of which are - stock paragraphs in the foreign writers of the time and are probably - transferred from the latter. Also he goes a considerable way towards - the separation of measles from smallpox, which was not fully effected - in England until the century following: "What the measels or males - are:--many little pimples which are not to be seen but only by feeling - with the hand are to be perceived; they do not maturate as the pocks - doth do, nor assault the eyes" etc. - -About ten years after Kellwaye's essay, there began, in 1604, the -classification of the deaths in London by the Company of Parish Clerks: -but it was not until 1629 that their weekly and annual bills were -regularly printed. In the first printed bills, "Flox, smallpox and -measles" appear as one entry. The meaning of "flox" seems to be explained -by Kellwaye's remark: "And here some writers do make a difference betwixt -variola and exanthemata; for, say they, that is called variola when many -of those pustules do suddenly run into a clear bladder as if it had been -scalled, but the other doth not so." That is the distinction between -confluent smallpox and discrete; and the most probable explanation of -"flox" is that it stands for the confluent kind, or for the pustules that -run together into a clear bladder. - - -Smallpox in the 17th Century. - -The gradual rise of smallpox to prominence in England about the end of the -Elizabethan period and in the first years of the Stuarts cannot fail to -strike anyone who is occupied with the English records of disease as a -whole. Smallpox and measles may have been, and almost certainly were, -observed in England in the earlier part of the 16th century; but they make -no such figure in the records, domestic and other, as they do from the -beginning of the 17th century onwards. Perhaps the first mention of -smallpox, in English literature proper, occurs in a collection of lyrical -poems published in 1602[904]. In some verses "Upon his Ladies sicknesse of -the Small Pocks," the poet, Th. Spilman, apostrophises the "cruel and -impartial sickness" and asks,-- - - Are not these thy steps I trace - In the pure snow of her face? - - Th' heavenly honey thou dost suck - From her rose cheeks, might suffice; - Why then didst thou mar and pluck - Those dear flowers of rarest price? - -In two letters of Dr Donne, dean of St Paul's, written probably a few -years before his death in 1631, reference is made to the smallpox in -London. In the one he says: - - "At my return from Kent to my gate, I found Peg had the pox: so I - withdrew to Prickham and spent a fortnight there. And without coming - home, when I could with some justice hope that it would spread no - farther amongst them (as I humbly thank God it hath not, nor much - disfigured her that had it), I went into Bedfordshire" etc. - -This dread of smallpox infection is quite unlike anything that we meet -with in the earlier 16th-century domestic memorials; in them it is only -the infection of the plague that comes in. Donne's other reference is to -the sickness of my lord Harrington: "a few days since they were doubtful -of him; but he is so well recovered that now they know all his disease to -be the pox and measles mingled[905]." - -Cases of smallpox among the upper classes are occasionally mentioned in -the letters written by Chamberlain to Carleton in the reigns of James I. -and Charles I.[906]. On December 17, 1612, "The Lord Lisle hath lost his -eldest son, Sir William Sidney, by the smallpox, which were well come -out." On December 31, the same year, Carleton, writing from abroad, -mentions that the duke of Mantua had died of the smallpox about three -weeks since, of which he buried his only son not three weeks before. Also -on December 31, Chamberlain writes to him, that the Lady Webbe was sick of -the smallpox, of which, he says in another letter, she died: "She was -grown a very proper woman, but loved the town too well, which in a short -time would have drawn her and her husband dry as well in purse as in -reputation." It is the year 1614 that is given (by Horst) as the worst -season of smallpox all over Europe and the East; England is mentioned by -the foreign writer as among the countries affected, but there is no trace -of an epidemic in our own records. On April 20, 1616, Chamberlain mentions -the case of the duke of Buckingham, the favourite; "he hath been crazy of -late, not without suspicion of the smallpox, which, if it had fallen out, -_actum est de amicitia_. But it proves otherwise." Buckingham's illness, -for which he took much physic, produced an imposthume on his head (an -effect which followed in the more notorious illness of Wolsey), and he is -elsewhere said to be suffering from the _morbus comitialis_. The -suggestion of smallpox appears to be the same euphemism which was resorted -to in the cases of other exalted personages. - -On August 21, 1624, having written of the great mortality from fevers, -Chamberlain adds: "Lady Winwood, hearing that her only daughter was fallen -sick of the smallpox at Ditton and that they came not out currently," had -gone to her. On December 18, 1624, "the Lady Purbeck is sick of the -smallpox, and her husband is so kind that he stirs not from her bed's -feet." In the first week of June, 1625, the famous composer Orlando -Gibbons died at Canterbury, not without suspicion of the plague[907], but -according to another opinion of the smallpox[908]. - -With the year 1629, the causes of death in London began to be published by -Parish Clerks' Hall in a rough classification, smallpox being a regular -item from year to year. For the first eight years the deaths from "flox, -smallpox, and measles" were as follows: - - 1629 72 - 1630 40 - 1631 58 - 1632 531 - 1633 72 - 1634 1354 - 1635 293 - 1636 127 - -The greatest epidemic, it will be seen, was in 1634[909]. For the years -1637-1646, the figures are lost (owing to Graunt's omitting them in his -Table of 1662, for want of room). But it is known from letters that the -autumn of 1641 was a season of severe smallpox as well as plague. Thus on -August 26, "both Houses grow very thin by reason of the smallpox and -plague that is in the town, 133 dying here this week of the plague, and -118 of the smallpox, 610 in the whole of all diseases." On September 9, a -letter from Charing Cross says: "Died this week of the plague 185, and of -the smallpox 101." The plague mortality continues to be mentioned in -subsequent letters, but the references to smallpox cease[910]. On July 16, -1642, one excuses his attendance on some State business because he is sick -of the smallpox[911]. - -About the Restoration the references to smallpox become more -numerous[912]. A letter of January 4, 1658 (1659), speaks of "much -sickness in the town [London], especially fevers, agues and smallpox." On -February 7, 1660, the earl of Anglesey is dead of the smallpox. In -September, 1660, Lord Oxford had a severe attack and recovered; at the -same time the duke of Gloucester, on the 8th September, was diagnosed by -the doctors to have "a disease between the smallpox and the measles; he is -now past danger of death for this bout, as the doctors say." However he -died on 14th September, in the tenth day of the disease, with remarkable -evidences (post mortem) of internal haemorrhage, having bled freely at the -nose a few hours before his death. The eruption had "come out full and -kindly" at the beginning, so that it was not the ordinary haemorrhagic -type. On the 20th December, 1660, the princess Henrietta goes to St -James's for fear of the smallpox. On the 16th January, 1660 (? 1661), "the -princess is recovered of the measles." Letters from a lady at Hambleton to -her husband in London, May 26, 1661, speaks of smallpox raging in the -place, and in the house of her nearest neighbour, her own children having -the whooping-cough. In the bills of mortality of those years the deaths in -London from smallpox and measles were as follows: - - 1647 139 - 1648 401 - 1649 1190 - 1650 184 - 1651 525 - 1652 1279 - 1653 139 - 1654 832 - 1655 1294 - 1656 823 - 1657 835 - 1658 409 - 1659 1523 - 1660 354 - 1661 1246 - 1662 768 - 1663 411 - 1664 1233 - 1665 655 - 1666 38 - -These figures bring us down to the period of Sydenham, who was the first -accurate observer of smallpox in London. With his writings, and with those -of Willis and Morton, we begin a new era in the history of epidemics in -England. We find, for the first time in the history, an adequate -discussion of the epidemiological and clinical facts by the ablest men in -the profession. But, as the new era is at one and the same time marked by -the cessation of plague and by the enormous increase of various fevers, as -well as of smallpox, it falls without the limits of this volume, making, -indeed, the appropriate beginning of the new kind of epidemic history -which is characteristic of England from the Restoration and the Revolution -down to the end of the 18th century. It is clear, from the instances -above given, that smallpox was already at the beginning of the 17th -century becoming a pest among the upper classes. But to anyone who studies -the history over continuous periods it is equally clear that its -prominence was then something new and that the horror and alarm which it -caused became greater as the 17th century approached its close. And so as -not to leave the history of smallpox at this point with a wrong impression -of its general virulence, it may be added that Dr Plot, writing of -Oxfordshire in 1677, says: "Generally here they are so favorable and kind, -that be the nurse but tolerably good, the patient seldom miscarries[913]." - - -Smallpox in Continental Writings of the 16th century. - -It would be beside the purpose of this work to follow the history of -smallpox and measles on the continent of Europe. But it will be necessary -to say a few words on the contemporary foreign writings upon these -diseases, as it is chiefly teaching from a foreign source that we detect -in the English authors of the 16th century. - -It might be inferred from the classical work of Fracastori[914], published -in 1546, that smallpox and measles were frequent and familiar diseases in -the author's experience at Verona. At the same time it is clear that even -he, original observer as he was, is in places merely repeating the old -statements of the Arabian writers. Thus his statement that everyone has -smallpox or measles sooner or later, is the old Arabian tradition or -experience, usually joined to the explanation that the cause of that -universality was the nourishment of the foetus by the retained and impure -menstrual blood, so that all children had to free their constitutions of a -congenital impurity sooner or later. So far as Fracastori's originality -comes in, it is clear that he does not regard smallpox and measles as -serious troubles. In his second chapter he says: - - "First we must treat of those contagious maladies which, although - contagious, are not called pestilential, because, for the most part, - they are salubrious. Of such are variolae and morbilli. By variolae - are understood those which are called also varollae by the common - people, from their likeness, I suppose, to the pustules called vari. - By morbilli are understood those which the common people style fersae, - so-called perhaps from _fervor_. But of these the Greeks do not appear - to have treated under any other name than exanthemata. They happen - principally in children, rarely in men, most rarely in old people. But - they seem to befall all men once in life, or to be apt to befall them - unless a premature death removes the individual. In boys the malady is - more benign than in adults. For the more part, as already said, they - are salubrious, since this ebullition of the blood is something of a - purification of the same. It afflicts more or less according to the - density of the blood and as the vice is apt or not to be separated - from it. If the blood be more pituitous, the pustules are variform, - white, round and full of a kind of mucus; but if it be more bilious - the pustules break forth more of a dry sort. Where the disease has - happened once it is not apt to recur; but there are cases where it has - happened more than once." - -In the brief account by Fracastori, all the points are stated for measles -and smallpox together; and the opinion is twice put forward that an attack -was salubrious as purifying the blood or as freeing it from some vice--an -opinion which is still popularly held. - -It is not until the latter half of the 16th century that we come to real -epidemiological records of smallpox on the Continent,--the works by -Donatus on smallpox and measles at Mantua in 1567, and by Betera upon -epidemics at Brescia in 1570, 1577 and 1588, in which the more malignant -types of smallpox were seen[915]. The treatise most used was that of -Alphanus, published at Naples in 1577[916]; it was on plague and -pestilential fever, with an appendix on smallpox. Either it or Ambroise -Pare's chapters seem to have furnished the greater part of the English -essay by Kellwaye on the plague and smallpox. - -In Ambroise Pare's references to smallpox there occurs one singular line -of remark which will serve to bring us back to etymology and to the great -pox[917]. The _petite verole_, he says, has a resemblance to the _grosse -verole_ as sometimes attacking the bones. He had seen that in smallpox -cases not only in 1568 but on other occasions: and he gives the details of -two cases of smallpox, apparently with periostitis and necrosis, which he -compares to cases of the great pox. To express in one word the meaning of -such cases, he says, the smallpox and _rougeolle_, not having been well -purged, give rise to various troublesome accidents, as the great pox does. -One cannot read Pare's chapters on the _grosse verole_ and the _petite -verole_ without detecting an inclination to compare them or class them -together in nosological characters. The comparison or classification is by -no means explicit; but it seems to be in his thoughts, and he would seem, -accordingly, to have held until a late period of the 16th century a view -of the two diseases which was not unusual at the beginning of that century -(as in the treatise of Pinctor and in the accounts of the dreadful -mortality of Indians in Hispaniola and Mexico[918]), and was expressed in -the popular names given to each disease in France and in England. - - - - -CHAPTER X. - -PLAGUE, FEVER AND INFLUENZA FROM THE ACCESSION OF THE STUART DYNASTY TO -THE RESTORATION. - - -The last period of plague in England, from 1603 to its extinction in 1666, -was as fatal as any that the capital, and the provincial towns, had known -since the 14th century. The mortalities in London in 1603, 1625, and 1665 -are the greatest in the whole history of the City's epidemics, not, -perhaps, relatively to the population, but in absolute numbers. The -capital was growing rapidly, having now become the greatest trading -community in Europe. The dangers which were foreseen in the proclamation -of 1580, of an extension of the City's borders beyond civic control, had -been realized. The old walled city, like Vienna down to a quite recent -date, remained both the residential quarter and the centre of trade and -commerce: the original suburbs, which were in the Liberties or Freedom of -the City, were the slums--the fringe of poverty covered by the poorest -class of tenements, unpaved and without regular streets, but penetrated by -alleys twisting and turning in an endless maze. The City was not, indeed, -without a good deal of building of the same class, especially in the -parish of St Stephen, Coleman Street, the most populous parish within the -walls. But what was an occasional thing in the City where gardens and -other open spaces had been built upon, was the rule in the parishes beyond -the walls. It was in the Liberties and outparishes that the plague of 1603 -began; its origin in 1625 is less certain; but there can be no question -as to the gradual progress of the Great Plague of 1665 from the west end -of the town down Holborn and the Strand to the City, to the great parishes -on the north-east and east, and across the water to Southwark. From one -point of view we may represent the later plagues as incidents in the -transition from the medieval to the modern state of the capital--a -transition which proceeded slowly and is still unfinished so far as -concerns the forms of municipal government. The history of the public -health of London is, for nearly two centuries, the history of irregular -and uncontrolled expansion, of the failure of old municipal institutions -to overtake new duties. Perhaps if Wren's grand conception of a New London -after the fire of 1666 had been taken up and given effect to by Charles -II., the Liberties and suburbs might have been joined more organically to -the centre and have benefited by the municipal traditions of the latter. -The history of the public health in London during the latter part of the -17th century and the whole of the 18th might in that case have been a less -melancholy record. That history falls within our next volume; but as it -began with the expansion of London under Elizabeth and the Stuarts, this -is the place to review the growth of the City from the time when it broke -through its medieval limits. - - -The Growth of London in the Tudor and Stuart Periods[919]. - -The accession of James I. to the English crown in 1603 corresponds in time -with the pretensions of London to be the first city in Europe. "London," -says Dekker, in _The Wonderfull Yeare_, "was never in the highway to -preferment till now. For she saw herself in better state than Jerusalem, -she went more gallant than ever did Antwerp, was more courted by amorous -and lustie suitors than Venice (the minion of Italy); more lofty towers -stood about her temples than ever did about the beautiful forehead of -Rome; Tyre and Sydon to her were like two thatcht houses to Theobals, the -grand Cairo but a hogsty." That is, of course, in Dekker's manner; but it -can be shown by figures that London took a great start in the end of -Elizabeth's reign and grew still faster under James. - -From Richard I. to Henry VII., London was the medieval walled city, as -Drayton says, "built on a rising bank within a vale to stand," with a -population between 40,000 and 50,000. Without the walls lay a few city -parishes or parts of parishes, including the three dedicated to St Botolph -outside Aldgate, Bishopsgate and Aldersgate, respectively, and St Giles's -without Cripplegate, all of these being at the gates or close to the -walls. On the western side, however, lay an extensive but sparsely -populated suburb, which was erected in 1393 into the Ward of Farringdon -Without; it extended westward from the city wall as far as Temple Bar, -Holborn Bars and West Smithfield, and was divided into the four great -parishes of St Sepulchre's without Newgate; St Andrew's, on the other side -of Holborn valley, St Dunstan's in the West (about Chancery Lane and -Fetter Lane), and St Bride's, Fleet Street. - -The earliest known bills of mortality, in 1532 and 1535, from which a -population of some 62,400 might be deduced, show that the St Botolph -parishes, St Giles's without Cripplegate and the four great parishes in -the western Liberties (or, more correctly, in the ward of Farringdon -Without) had one-third of the whole deaths, and presumably about one-third -of the whole population. In the few memoranda left of the plague-bills of -1563, we find evidence that the population had increased to some 93,276, -of which about a sixth or seventh part, or some 12,000 to 15,000 was in -the "out-parishes," or in the parishes not only beyond the walls, but -beyond the Bars of the Freedom. The most valuable series of statistics for -Elizabethan London are those which give the christenings and burials for -five years from 1578 to 1582; from those of the year 1580, which was -almost free from the disturbing element of plague, a population of some -123,034 may be deduced by taking the birth-rate at 29 per 1000 living and -the death-rate at 23 per 1000, or in each case at a favourable rate -corresponding to the large excess of births over deaths. - -There is not enough left of the introduction to these old manuscript -abstracts of weekly births and deaths to show how many parishes they -relate to, or what is the proportion for each division of the capital. -But, as the earlier series of bills of mortality from 1563 to 1566 -included the City, the Liberties and the out-parishes, it is probable that -the series from 1578 to 1582 had done the same. The crowding of the -Liberties with a poor class of tenements, and the extension of the -out-parishes, are otherwise known from the preamble to the proclamation of -1580, which prohibited all building on new sites within three miles of the -City wall. The next figures are for the years 1593, 1594, and 1595, which -show a population increased to about 152,000. - -From the figures of the plague-year, 1593, it appears that the mortality -within the walls, both from plague and from ordinary causes, had now -become the smaller half, or somewhat less than that "without the walls and -in the Liberties,"--a phrase which is used loosely, even in some official -bills, for both Liberties and suburbs. In 1604 we have the exact -proportions of deaths in the City, in the Liberties and in the -out-parishes respectively: - - |96 parishes |16 parishes |8 parishes out| Total - |within walls|in Liberties|of the Freedom| - --------------|------------|------------|--------------|------ - All deaths | 1798 | 2465 | 956 | 5219 - Plague deaths | 280 | 368 | 248 | 896 - Christenings | -- | -- | -- | 5458 - -The sixteen parishes of the Liberties are now decidedly ahead of the -ninety-six old City parishes, while the eight out-parishes have some 18 -per cent. of the whole mortality. The population is best reckoned from the -6504 baptisms of the year after, 1605, by which time the disturbance of -the enormous mortality in 1603 had ceased to be felt; at a birth-rate of -29 per 1000, the population would be some 224,275. The proportions in -1605, from the bills of mortality for the year, are 33.8 per cent. in the -City, 50 per cent. in the Liberties, and 16.2 per cent. in the -out-parishes; so that the City would have contained in that year about -76,000, the Liberties about 114,000, and the out-parishes about 37,000. To -those numbers we should have to add some 20,000 or 30,000 for -Westminster, Stepney, Lambeth, Newington, etc. - -According to Graunt's contemporary estimate for 1662, the population had -grown to 460,000, or to rather more than double that of 1605; and whereas -the proportion in 1605 was two-sixths in the City, three-sixths in the -Liberties and one-sixth in the out-parishes, he makes it in 1662 to have -been one-fifth in the City, three-fifths in the Liberties (including -Southwark) and the out-parishes nearest to the Bars, and one-fifth in the -out-parishes of Stepney, Redriff, Newington, Lambeth, Islington and -Hackney, with the city of Westminster. Thus, whereas in 1535 the City had -two-thirds of the whole estimated population, in 1662 it had one-fifth; -but with its one-fifth in 1662 it was twice as crowded as with its -two-thirds in 1535, the comparatively open appearance given to it by -gardens in various localities, as on Tower Hill, having entirely gone. - -As early as the plague of 1563, the Liberties were observed to be first -infected, and to retain the infection longest; that is alleged of St -Sepulchre's parish by Dr John Jones, from personal knowledge. The history -of the plague of 1593 is imperfectly known; but it is clear from Stow's -summation of the deaths during the year, that more died of plague in the -Liberties and suburbs than in the City. Of the next plague, that of 1603, -we know that it did begin in the Liberties and was prevalent in those -skirts of the City for some time before it entered the gates. "Death," -says _The Wonderfull Yeare_, "had pitcht his tents in the sinfully -polluted suburbs ... the skirts of London were pitifully pared off by -little and little; which they within the gates perceiving," etc. Then the -plague, represented as an invading force, "entered within the walls and -marched through Cheapside," the wealthier inhabitants having escaped -meanwhile. - - -The London Plague of 1603. - -The most useful document for the London plague of 1603 is a printed Bill -of Mortality which is in the Guildhall Library. The bill, which is in the -form of a broadside, is for the week 13-20 October, and purports to be a -true copy, according to the report made to the king by the Company of -Parish Clerks, and printed by John Winder, printer to the honourable City -of London[920]. It is necessary to be thus particular, because the clerk -of the Company of Parish Clerks in the end of 1665 (between the Plague and -the Fire) published an account of all the statistics of former plagues -preserved in his office, and emphatically denied that the Parish Clerks -gave in an accompt for the year 1603; they did not resume their series -after 1595, he says, until 29th December, 1603. But the clerk was -mistaken, as even the most prim of officials will sometimes be. The -printed bill which has come down to us gives the usual weekly return of -deaths from all causes in one column and those from plague in another, for -each of the 96 parishes within their walls, each of the 16 parishes in the -Liberties and each of 8 out-parishes. On the right hand margin it gives -also a summary statement of the deaths in "the first great plague in our -memory" that of 1563, which is the same as in Stow's _Annales_, and of the -deaths in the next great plague, that of 1593, which differs considerably -from Stow's. It then goes on to give the sum of the figures of the year -1603 from 17th December, 1602, and carries the deaths per week from 21st -July down to date, the 20th of October, adding some information for the -parishes which kept separate bills, namely, Westminster, the Savoy, -Stepney, Newington Butts, Islington, Lambeth and Hackney. This extant -weekly bill was probably one of a series; for Graunt, in his book of 1662, -cites various figures of weekly baptisms throughout the year 1603 which -would appear to have been taken from the bills for the respective weeks. -But the returns had not been made regularly from all the parishes within -the Bills from the beginning of the year 1603. The reason why the weekly -figures are not recapitulated farther back than the week ending July 21, -is that the outparishes had not sent in their returns until that week. -From another source, we know the figures for the City and Liberties from -March 10 to July 14, and from the same source we obtain the totals for all -parishes within the Bills from October 19 to the end of the year. By -putting these figures into one table, we may represent the mortality of -1603, not indeed completely, as follows: - -_Weekly Mortalities in London during the plague of 1603._ - - ---------------------------------------------------------- - | City and | - | Liberties. | Out parishes. | Totals. - Week |---------------|---------------|--------------- - ending | All | | All | | All | - |causes.|Plague.|causes.|Plague.|causes.|Plague. - ----------|-------|-------|-------|-------|-------|------- - March 17 | 108 | 3 | | | | - 24 | 60 | 2 | | | | - 31 | 78 | 6 | | | | - April 7 | 66 | 4 | | | | - 14 | 79 | 4 | | | | - 21 | 98 | 8 | | | | - 28 | 109 | 10 | | | | - May 5 | 90 | 11 | | | | - 12 | 112 | 18 | | | | - 19 | 122 | 22 | | | | - 26 | 112 | 30 | | | | - June 2 | 114 | 30 | | | | - 9 | 134 | 43 | | | | - 15 | 144 | 59 | | | | - 23 | 182 | 72 | | | | - 30 | 267 | 158 | | | | - July 7 | 445 | 263 | | | | - 14 | 612 | 424 | | | | - 21 | 867 | 646 | 319 | 271 | 1186 | 917 - 28 | 1312 | 1025 | 398 | 354 | 1710 | 1379 - Aug. 4 | 1700 | 1439 | 537 | 464 | 2237 | 1901 - 11 | 1655 | 1372 | 410 | 361 | 2065 | 1733 - 18 | 2486 | 2199 | 568 | 514 | 3054 | 2713 - 25 | 2343 | 2091 | 510 | 448 | 2853 | 2539 - Sept. 1 | 2798 | 2495 | 587 | 542 | 3385 | 3037 - 8 | 2583 | 2283 | 495 | 441 | 3078 | 2724 - 15 | 2676 | 2411 | 433 | 407 | 3109 | 2818 - 22 | 2080 | 1851 | 376 | 344 | 2456 | 2195 - 29 | 1666 | 1478 | 295 | 254 | 1961 | 1732 - Oct. 6 | 1528 | 1367 | 306 | 274 | 1834 | 1641 - 13 | 1109 | 962 | 203 | 184 | 1312 | 1146 - 20 | 647 | 546 | 119 | 96 | 766 | 642 - 27 | | | | | 625 | 508 - Nov. 3 | | | | | 737 | 594 - 10 | | | | | 545 | 442 - 17 | | | | | 384 | 257 - 24 | | | | | 198 | 105 - Dec. 1 | | | | | 223 | 102 - 8 | | | | | 163 | 55 - 15 | | | | | 200 | 96 - 22 | | | | | 168 | 74 - ---------------------------------------------------------- - -These figures may be accepted as real, so far as they go; and they give a -total (37,192 from all causes, whereof of the plague, 30,519) which is -nearly the same as that usually taken, e.g. by Graunt, for the mortality -of the whole year in all London (37,294 from all causes, whereof of the -plague, 30,561). But it is clear that important additions have to be made. -In the first place, no deaths are included for the weeks previous to March -10. In the second place, no deaths are included from the out-parishes -(within the Bills), previous to July 14. In the third place, no deaths at -all are included from Westminster, Stepney, Newington, Lambeth, etc. These -omissions have to be kept in mind when the plague of 1603 is compared with -those of 1625 and 1665, for which the figures are fully ascertained; and -we possess various data from which to supply them approximately. One great -addition, with nothing conjectural in it, is for the seven parishes -outside the general bill of mortality, Stepney being the largest: they -kept their own bills, and the figures from them, for the principal part of -the year, are given on the margin of the broadside, as quoted below[921]. -Another unconjectural addition is the mortality from all causes in the -City and Liberties from December 17, 1602, to March 10, 1603, which was -1375, having been mostly non-plague deaths. All these deaths, actually -known, bring the total for the year up to 42,945 whereof of the plague -about 33,347. The farther additions, which can only be guessed, are the -mortality from all causes in the eight out-parishes (within the Bills) -previous to July 14, and the mortality in the seven other suburban -localities (Westminster, Stepney, etc.) before and after the dates stated -in the note for each. Only the former of these additions would have been a -considerable figure, the plague being already at 271 deaths a week when -the reckoning begins. Thus the totals, 42,945 burials from all causes, and -from plague alone, 33,347, are well within the reality. - -Some details are extant of the incidence of the disease in particular -parishes at certain dates. Thus, in the great parish of Stepney, which -extended from Shoreditch to Blackwall, 650 plague-deaths, and 24 from -other causes, took place in the single month of September; so that, if the -plague began in Stepney about the 25th of March, it had not come to a head -until autumn. In St Giles's Cripplegate, the burials entered in the parish -register for the whole year are 2879, the highest mortality having been in -the beginning of September, when the burials on three successive days were -36, 26 and 26[922]. In the week 13 to 20 October, for which the printed -bill is extant, the proportions of the City, Liberties and 8 out-parishes -respectively were, for the week, 351, 296, and 119. Of the parishes -without the walls, the most infected were, in their order at that date, St -Sepulchre's, St Saviour's, Southwark, St Andrew's, Holborn, St Giles's, -Cripplegate, St Clement's Danes, St Giles's in the Fields, St Olave's, -Southwark, St Martin's in the Fields, St Mary's, Whitechapel and St -Leonard's, Shoreditch. For St Olave's, Southwark, we have some particulars -of the plague from the minister of the parish. - -In a dialogue conveying various instructions on the plague[923], to his -parishioners of St Olave's, James Bamford states that 2640 had died in -that parish from May 7 to the date of writing (October 13), and that the -burials had fallen from 305 in a week to 51, and from 57 in a day to 4. St -Olave's was a typical parish of the new London. It extended eastwards -along the Surrey bank of the river from London Bridge, and had been -almost all built within the half-century since the purchase of the Borough -of Southwark by the City from the Crown in 1550. In Stow's _Survey_ of -1598 the parish is thus described: "Then from the bridge along by the -Thames eastward is St Olave's Street, having continual building on both -the sides, with lanes and alleys, up to Battle Bridge, to Horsedown and -towards Rotherhithe some good half mile in length from London Bridge"--the -Bermondsey High Street running south from the Horsleydown end of it. St -Olave's Church, he continues, stood on the bank of the river, "a fair and -meet large church, but a far larger parish, especially of aliens or -strangers, and poor people." A mansion of former times, St Leger House, -was now "divided into sundry tenements." Over against the church, the -great house that was once the residence of the prior of Lewes, was now the -Walnut Tree inn, a common hostelry. - -London was now so extensive in area that it becomes of interest to know in -what part of it the plague broke out, and in what course the infection -proceeded. These things are known for the plague of 1665; but for that of -1603 they cannot be ascertained precisely. Dekker is emphatic that it -began in the suburbs. The earliest reference to it in the State papers is -under the date of April 18, when the Lord Mayor wrote to the Lord -Treasurer to inform him of the steps taken to prevent the spread of the -plague in the counties of Middlesex and Surrey. "The parishes in Middlesex -and Surrey" was an expression which afterwards came to mean a group of -twelve out-parishes beyond the Bars of the Freedom, including St Giles's -in the Fields, Lambeth, Newington and Bermondsey, Stepney, Whitechapel, -Shoreditch and Clerkenwell, Islington, Hackney and two others. The phrase -used by the mayor may not have had so definite a meaning in 1603, but he -can hardly have intended it to apply to the City and Liberties of London, -although those were the only divisions of the capital directly under his -own jurisdiction. The parish which is associated with the earliest date, -in the summary of the epidemic in the broadside of 1603, is Stepney, where -the record of deaths from plague and other causes begins from 25th March. -It would perhaps be safe to conclude that the plague of 1603 began at the -extreme east in Stepney, as that of 1665 certainly did at the extreme west -in St Giles's in the Fields. - -An examination of the Table shows that the eight out-parishes had reached -a higher plague mortality relative to their population on July 21, than -the parishes within the bars of the Freedom: but the maximum of deaths -falls in both divisions about the same week. We may take it that the -plague broke out in one of the suburbs; and as Dekker speaks of the flight -having been westwards, the evidence points on the whole to an eastern -suburb, perhaps Whitechapel or Stepney. March is clearly indicated by -various things as a time when plague-deaths began to attract notice; and -that date of commencement is corroborated by the following passage from -the essay of Graunt, based, it would seem, upon a series of weekly -bills:-- - -"We observe as followeth, viz. First, that (when from December 1602 to -March following there was little or no plague) then the christenings at a -medium were between 110 and 130 per week, few weeks being above the one or -below the other; but when the plague increased from thence to July, that -then the christenings decreased to under 90.... (3) Moreover we observe -that from the 21st July to the 12th October, the plague increasing reduced -the christenings to 70 at a medium. Now the cause of this must be flying, -and death of teeming women" &c.--the total christenings of the year 1603 -having been only 4789, as against some 6000 in the year before the plague, -and 5458 in the year after it. - -This prevalence of plague in the suburbs and liberties of the City in the -spring of 1603 coincides with great political events. Queen Elizabeth died -at Richmond on the 24th of March, and was buried at Westminster on the -28th of April; according to Dekker, "never did the English nation behold -so much black worn as there was at her funeral." The approach of king -James from Scotland appears to have caused an outburst of gaiety, his -accession to the crown, according to the same writer, having led to a -marked revival of trade: "Trades that lay dead and rotten started out of -their trance.... There was mirth in everyone's face, the streets were -filled with gallants, tabacconists filled up whole taverns, vintners hung -out spick and span new ivy-bushes (because they wanted good wine), and -their old rain-beaten lattices marched under other colours, having lost -both company and colour before." James made a slow progress from Scotland, -paying visits on the way. He arrived at Theobalds, near Cheshunt, on the -3rd of May, and was at Greenwich before the end of the month. On May 29, a -proclamation was issued commanding gentlemen to depart the court and city -on account of the plague. On June 23, the remainder of Trinity law term -was adjourned. On July 10, a letter (one of the series between J. -Chamberlain and Dudley Carleton) says: "Paul's grows very thin [the church -aisles where people were wont to meet to exchange news], for every man -shrinks away. Our pageants are pretty forward, but most of them are such -small-timbered gentlemen that they cannot last long, and I doubt, if the -plague cease not sooner, they will riot and sink where they stand." The -Coronation was shorn of its full splendour. On July 18, it was announced -that, as the king could not pass through the City--the traditional route -being from the Tower to Westminster--all the customary services by the way -are to be performed between Westminster Bridge and the Abbey. The -ceremony, thus shortened, took place on July 25. On August 8, it was -ordered that all fairs within fifty miles of London should be suspended, -the more important being Bartholomew fair at Smithfield, and Stourbridge -fair near Cambridge. The new Spanish ambassador was unable to approach the -king, who moved from place to place,--Hampton Court, Woodstock and -Southampton. - -These are the traces left by this great epidemic in the state papers of -the time. As in the case of the sweating sickness of 1485, which was in -London while the preparations were going on for Henry VII.'s coronation, -we should hardly have known from public documents that the City was in a -state of panic. But in 1603 we are come to a period when other sources of -information are available. It remains to put together what descriptions -have come down to us of the City of the Plague. - -The most graphic touches are those left by Thomas Dekker, the dramatist, -of whom it has been said that "he knew London as well as Dickens[924]." -To describe first the condition of the "sinfully polluted suburbs," he -takes a walk through the still and melancholy streets in the dead hours of -the night. He hears from every house the loud groans of raving sick men, -the struggling pangs of souls departing, grief striking an alarum, -servants crying out for masters, wives for husbands, parents for children, -children for their mothers. Here, he meets some frantically running to -knock up sextons; there, others fearfully sweating with coffins, to steal -forth dead bodies lest the fatal handwriting of death should seal up their -houses. This would have been an evasion of the order, dating from 1547, -that no bodies were to be buried between six in the evening and six in the -morning--an order which was exactly reversed in the plague of 1665. - -When morning comes, a hundred hungry graves stand gaping, and everyone of -them, as at a breakfast, hath swallowed down ten or eleven lifeless -carcases; before dinner, in the same gulf are twice so many more devoured, -and before the sun takes his rest these numbers are doubled,--threescore -bodies lying slovenly tumbled together in a muck-pit[925]! One gruesome -story he tells of a poor wretch in the Southwark parish of St Mary Overy, -who was thrown for dead upon a heap of bodies in the morning, and in the -afternoon was found gasping and gaping for life. Others were thrust out of -doors by cruel masters, to die in the fields and ditches, or in the common -cages or under stalls. A boy sick of the plague was put on the water in a -wherry to come ashore wherever he could, but landing was denied him by an -army of brown-bill men that kept the shore, so that he had to be taken -whence he came to die in a cellar. The sextons made their fortunes, -especially those of St Giles's, Cripplegate, of St Sepulchre's, outside -Newgate, of St Olave's in Southwark, of St Clement's at Temple Bar, and -of Stepney. Herb-wives and gardeners also prospered; the price of flowers, -herbs, and garlands rose wonderfully, insomuch that rosemary, which had -wont to be sold for twelve pence an armful, went now for six shillings a -handful. - -While plague was thus raging in the poor skirts of the City, "paring them -off by little and little," the well-to-do within the walls took alarm and -fled, "some riding, some on foot, some without boots, some in slippers, by -water, by land, swarm they westwards. Hackneys, watermen and waggons were -not so terribly employed many a year; so that within a short time there -was not a good horse in Smithfield, nor a coach to be set eyes on." But -they might just as well have remained as trust themselves to the -"unmerciful hands of the country hard-hearted hobbinolls." The sight of a -Londoner's flat-cap was dreadful to a lob: a treble ruff threw a whole -village into a sweat. A crow that had been seen on a sunshiny day standing -on the top of Powles would have been better than a beacon on fire, to have -raised all the towns within ten miles of London for the keeping her out. -One Londoner set out for Bristol, thinking not to see his home again this -side Christmas. But forty miles from town the plague came upon him, and he -sought entrance to an inn. When his case was known, the doors of the inn -"had their wooden ribs crushed to pieces by being beaten together; the -casements were shut more close than an usurer's greasy velvet pouch; the -drawing windows were hanged, drawn, and quartered; not a crevice but was -stopt, not a mouse-hole left open." The host and hostess tumbled over each -other in their flight, the maids ran out into the orchard, the tapster -into the cellar. The unhappy Londoner was helped by a fellow-citizen who -appeared on the scene, and was carried to die on a truss of straw in the -corner of a field; but the parson and the clerk refused him burial, and he -was laid in a hole where he had died. According to Stow, Bamford, and -Davies of Hereford, such experiences of fugitive Londoners were repeated -everywhere in the country, and Dekker gives several other tales of the -same sort "to shorten long winter nights." - -Meanwhile, Dekker goes on, the plague had entered the gates of the City -and marched through Cheapside; men, women, and children dropped down -before him, houses were rifled, streets ransacked, rich men's coffers -broken open and shared amongst prodigal heirs and unworthy servants. Every -house looked like St Bartholomew's Hospital and every street like -Bucklersbury: ("the whole street called Bucklersbury," says Stow, "on both -sides throughout is possessed of grocers, and apothecaries towards the -west end thereof"), for poor Mithridaticum and Dragon-water were bought in -every corner, and yet were both drunk every hour at other men's cost. "I -could make your cheeks look pale and your hearts shake with telling how -some have had eighteen sores at one time running upon them, others ten or -twelve, many four and five; and how those that have been four times -wounded by this year's infection have died of the last wound, while -others, hurt as often, are now going about whole." Funerals followed so -close that three thousand mourners went as if trooping together, with rue -and wormwood stuffed into their ears and nostrils, looking like so many -boars' heads stuck with branches of rosemary. A dying man was visited by a -friendly neighbour, who promised to order the coffin; but he died himself -an hour before his infected friend. A churchwarden in Thames Street, on -being asked for space in the churchyard, answered mockingly that he wanted -it for himself, and he did occupy it in three days. - -One more extract from Dekker will bring us back to the strictly medical -history: - - "Never let any man ask me what became of our Phisitions in this - massacre. They hid their synodical heads as well as the proudest, and - I cannot blame them, for their phlebotomies, losinges and electuaries, - with their diacatholicons, diacodions, amulets and antidotes, had not - so much strength to hold life and soul together as a pot of Pinder's - ale and a nutmeg. Their drugs turned to durt, their simples were - simple things. Galen could do no more good than Sir Giles Goosecap. - Hippocrate, Avicen, Paracelsus, Rasis, Fernelius, with all their - succeeding rabble of doctors and water-casters, were at their wits' - end; for not one of them durst peep abroad." - -Only a band of desperadoes, he goes on, some few empirical madcaps--for -they could never be worth velvet caps--clapped their bills upon every -door. But besides the empirical desperadoes, who dared the infection for -the sake of the golden harvest, some few physicians and surgeons remained -at their post, or at least put out essays with prescriptions and rules of -regimen. Three such books on the plague were published in London in 1603, -of which the most notable was one by Dr Thomas Lodge[926], a poet like -Dekker himself, but of the academical school to which Dekker did not -belong. The passage quoted about the impotence of the faculty is perhaps -aimed at these books, which all abound with the sayings and maxims of -Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, and the like, Lodge also quoting the more -obscure name of Fernelius, which Dekker has not failed to seize upon. - -Lodge confirms the statement about the empirical desperadoes clapping -their bills upon every post. One of them, "who underwrit not his bills," -posted them close to Lodge's house in Warwick Lane, so that the physician -was taken by the populace to be himself the advertiser. He was besieged -with applicants for his cordial waters, and wrote his book to make his own -position clear, being "aggrieved because of that loathsome imposition -which was laid upon me to make myself vendible (which is unworthy a -liberal and gentle mind, much more ill-beseeming a physician and -philosopher), who ought not to prostitute so sacred a profession so -abjectly." Farther confirming Dekker about the greed of the quacks as well -as about the strictly business-like attitude of the regular profession, he -speaks of "my poor countrymen left without guide or counsel how to succour -themselves in extremity; for where the infection most rageth, there -poverty reigneth among the commons, which, having no supplies to satisfy -the greedy desires of those that should attend them, are for the most part -left desolate to die without relief." The reader must wonder, he says, -"why, amongst so many excellent and learned physicians of this city, I -alone have undertaken to answer the expectation of the multitude, and to -bear the heavy burthen of contentious critiques and depravers." The -explanation was that the regular faculty had for the most part gone out of -town, along with magistrates, ministers and rich men. Bamford, the -minister of St Olave's, Southwark, who remained at his post, has no excuse -to offer for magistrates or for his clerical brethren, but he is extremely -fair to the doctors: "As for physicians, I only propound this question: -Whether they be bound in conscience to be resident, in regard of their -profession and ability to do good, or they may use their liberty for -themselves and (as they think) for their lives, in regard they are no -public persons and live (not by a common stipend but) by what they can -get." - -Dr Lodge, who dated his book from Warwick Lane on August 19, or when the -epidemic would have been at its height, had already won laurels in the -field of poetry and romance. He was an Oxonian (Trinity College, 1573) and -one of a set with Marlowe and Greene. "At length his mind growing -serious," says Anthony Wood, "he studied physic," travelling abroad for -the purpose and graduating M.D. at Avignon. He had great success in -practice, especially among Catholics, to whom he was suspected of -belonging. He died of the plague, during the next great epidemic of 1625, -at Low Leyton in Essex. His book on the plague would be entitled to a -place in medical literature if only that its style is above the average of -medical compositions. I cannot forbear quoting the following collect for -its structure and euphony: - - "But before I prosecute this my intended purpose, let us invocate and - call upon that divine bounty, from whose fountain head of mercy every - good and gracious benefit is derived, that it will please him to - assist this my labor and charitable intent, and so to order the scope - of my indevour, that it may redound to his eternal glory, our - neighbours' comfort, and the special benefit of our whole country; - which, being now under the fatherly correction of Almighty God, and - punished for our misdeeds by his heavy hand, may through the admirable - effects and fruits of the sacred art of physic, receive prevention of - their danger, and comfort in this desperate time of visitation. To him - therefore, King of kings, invisible and only wise, be all honor, - majesty and dominion, now and for ever. Amen." - -It is only in dealing with the more public aspects of the plague that -Lodge shows any individuality. So far as concerns causes, -prognostications, symptoms, remedies, preventives, and precautions, there -is little in his essay which is not to be found in the older plague-books, -such as the 14th century one of the bishop of Aarhus, his anatomical -directions for blood-letting being word for word the same as the bishop's. -Some of his points are the same as in Skene's Edinburgh essay of 1568, -such as the indication of plague about to begin which is got from rats, -moles and other underground creatures forsaking their holes. To keep off -the infection he advises the wearing of small cakes of arsenic in the -armpits, where the buboes usually came. That Paracelsist practice is known -to have been tried at Zurich in 1564; it was one of the matters of dispute -between the Galenists and the chemical physicians. During the plague of -1603, Dr Peter Turner published a curious tract in defence of it[927]. - -From a Venetian gentleman Lodge obtained also the formula of a -preservative from infection, which contained, among other things, -tormentilla root, white dittany, bole Armeniac and oriental pearl: "The -gentleman that gave me this assured me that he had given it to many in the -time of the great plague in Venice, who, though continually conversant in -the houses of those that were infected, received no infection or prejudice -by them." - -In his chapter on "The Order and Police that ought to be held in a City -during the Plague-time," he advises the removal of the shambles from -within the walls to some remote and convenient place near the river of -Thames, to the end that the blood and garbage of beasts that are killed -may be washed away with the tide. Lodge lived just on the other side of -Newgate Street from the shambles, and could speak feelingly about them, as -many more had done since Edward III.'s time. The nobles of Aries, he says, -had acted so on the advice of Valenolaes, having built their -slaughter-houses to the westward of the city upon the river of Rhone. The -chief interest of the book is in the sections on preventing the spread of -infection. He quotes an instance from Alexander Benedetti of Venice, of a -feather-bed, slept on by one in the plague, having been laid aside for -seven years, "and the first that slept upon the same at the end of the -same term was suddenly surprised with the plague." His directions for the -cleansing of houses, bedding, clothes, &c. are minute and thorough -(Chapter XVII.)[928]. Modern readers will find his views on isolation and -compulsory removal to hospital worth noting. The Pest House, which had -been lately built in the fields towards Finsbury, was then the only -special hospital to which patients in the plague could be removed, and its -accommodation was not great; the burials at it in the nine weeks from July -21 to September 22, 1603, were respectively 18, 18, 12, 21, 12, 6, 5, 10 -and 10. The Bridewell near Fleet Street appears also to have admitted a -small number of plague-cases, the burials from it in the five weeks from -August 18 to September 22, having been respectively 8, 5, 17, 7 and 19. -There was also a pest-house in Tothill fields, for the Westminster end of -the town. Servants appear to have been mostly sent to these refuges. Lodge -saw that the principle of compulsory removal of the sick had no chance -without more hospital accommodation (as Defoe also insisted in reviewing -the plague of 1665), and he proposes a plan for a pest-house with -"twenty-eight to thirty separate chambers on the upper floor, and as many -beneath." He is humanely alive to the hardships of compulsory isolation: - - "For in truth it is a great amazement, and no less horror, to separate - the child from the father and mother, the husband from his wife, the - wife from her husband, and the confederate and friend from his - adherent and friend; and to speak my conscience in this matter, this - course ought not to be kept before that, by the judgment of a learned - physician, the sickness be resolved on. And when it shall be found it - is infectious, yet it is very needful to use humanity towards such as - are seized. And if their parents or friends have the means to succour - them, and that freely, and with a good heart they are willing to do - the same, those that have the charge to carry them to the pest-house - ought to suffer them to use that office of charity towards their sick, - yet with this condition that they keep them apart and suffer them not - to frequent and converse with such as are in health. For, to speak the - truth, one of the chiefest occasions of the death of such sick folks - (besides the danger of their disease) is the fright and fear they - conceive when they see themselves devoid of all succour, and, as it - were, ravished out of the hands of their parents and friends, and - committed to the trust of strangers.... And therefore in this cause - men ought to proceed very discreetly and modestly." - -Another London essay of the same year, by "S. H. Studious in Phisicke" is -a much slighter production. The author writes in a superior strain and -offers advice "unto such Chirurgeons as shall be called or shall adventure -themselves to the care of this so dangerous sickness," one piece of advice -being not to let blood except at the beginning of the seizure, and to take -then five ounces of blood in the morning, and three ounces more at three -in the afternoon, repeating the depletion next day at discretion. He -states also the theory of the plague-bubo: it was a way made by nature to -expel the venomous and corrupt matter which is noisome unto it. He advises -the practice of incising the bubo and of helping it to suppurate, which -was the treatment in the Black Death of 1348-49: if nature be "weak and -not able to expel the venom fast enough, by insensible transpiration the -venom returneth back to the heart and so presently destroyeth -nature[929]." - -It is significant of the state of medical practice and literature in -England at the end of the Elizabethan period that the only other treatise -which the plague of 1603 is known to have called forth was a -mystification[930] under the name of one Thomas Thayre, chirurgian, "for -the benefite of his countrie, but chiefly for the honorable city of -London," elaborately dedicated to the Lord Mayor of the year (by name), -the Sheriffs and the Aldermen, to whom "Thomas Thayre wisheth all -spirituall and temporal blessings." It proves on examination to be a very -close reproduction, with some omissions at the end and a few additions, -of the old Treatise of the Pestilence by Thomas Phayre or Phaer, first -published in 1547, and was probably the venture of some bookseller or -literary hack. The original treatise of Phayre had been reprinted last in -1596, "latelye corrected and enlarged by Thomas Phayre," although that -writer must have been dead many years. A reprint of some of "Dr Phaer's" -remedies and preservatives, without date, is conjecturally assigned to the -year 1601. The original work of Henry VIII.'s time was also a literary -compilation, in some parts copied verbatim from the 14th century book by -the Danish bishop of Arusia, and bears not a trace of first-hand -observation. Yet it had the fortune to be reprinted once more, in 1722, by -a physician W. T., who remarked that, as the writers on plague in his own -time "usually transcribe from others," he wished to set before them a -specimen "of such as have written on a disease of which they were -eye-witnesses." - -Two printed addresses on the plague by London ministers are extant: one by -Henoch Clapham, "to his ordinary hearers," which is merely a sermon, in -the form of an epistle, to improve the occasion[931]; and the other by -James Bamford, rector of St Olave's, Southwark, in the form of a dialogue, -and full of practical and sensible advice[932]. Bamford's tract is -especially directed against "that bloody error which denieth the -pestilence to be contagious; maintained not only by the rude multitude but -by too many of the better sort;" and its chief medical interest lies in -the reasons with which he confutes that deadly heresy:-- - - "Do not the botches, blains and spots (called God's tokens) - accompanied with raving and death, argue a stranger [sic] infection - than that of the leprosy, to be judged by botches and spots? [the - infectiousness of leprosy being proved by revelation, Lev. xiii.]. - Doth not the ordinary experience of laying live pigeons to - plague-sores and taking them presently dead away, and that one after - another, demonstrate mortal infection? In that the plague rageth and - reigneth especially amongst the younger sort, and such as do not - greatly regard clean and sweet keeping, and where many are pestered - together in alleys and houses--is not this an argument of infection? - Thousands can directly tell where, when, and of whom they took the - infection.... Persons of a tender constitution or corrupt humours - sooner take the plague than those of a strong constitution and sound - bodies. The infirmities of many women in travail, and other diseases, - turn into the plague. We see few auncient people die in comparison of - children and the younger sort. - - "Lastly, of those that keep a good diet, have clean and sweet keeping, - live in a good air, use reasonable and seasonable preservatives, and - be not pestered many in one house, or have convenient house-room for - their household--we see few infected in comparison of those that fail - in all these means of preservation and yet will thrust themselves into - danger." - -The plague of London in 1603 called forth also a poem by John Davies, a -schoolmaster of Hereford. It is called "The Triumph of Death; or the -Picture of the Plague, according to the Life, as it was in A.D. -1603[933]." The description is by no means so concrete as the title would -have us believe, and might, indeed, have been taken, most of it, at -second-hand from Dekker:-- - - "Cast out your dead, the carcass-carrier cries, - Which he by heaps in groundless graves inters ... - The London lanes, themselves thereby to save, - Did vomit out their undigested dead, - Who by cart-loads are carried to the grave, - For all those lanes with folk were overfed." - -He mentions that the prisoners in the gaols were comparatively exempt from -plague[934]. One line suggests the great size that the plague-buboes -sometimes reached: - - "Here swells a botch as high as hide can hold." - -Perhaps his particulars of the plague in the provinces, in 1603 and -following years, are from his own knowledge. Both the Universities, he -says, were forsaken. - - "Each village free now stands upon her guard ... - The haycocks in the meads were oft opprest - With plaguy bodies, both alive and dead, - Which being used confounded man and beast." - -One incident he vouches for (in a marginal note) as having occurred at -Leominster: A person with the plague was drowned to prevent infection, by -the order of Sir Herbert Croft, one of the Council of the Marches of -Wales. - - -The Plague of 1603 in the country near London. - -Most of the country parishes nearest to London had plague-burials in 1603, -doubtless from the escape of infected Londoners to them and from the -spreading of the infection. In several of these parish registers[935] the -plague-deaths in 1603 are more than in the time of the Great Plague of -1665: there is a note in the Croydon register that "many died in the -highways near the city." The following table shows the mortalities, great -and small. - - Burials - Burials from from - all causes. plague. - - Barking 381 -- - Battersea 23 -- - Beckenham 24 -- - Bromley 26 -- - Cheam 13 9 - Chigwell 28 -- - Chiselhurst 62 -- - Clapham 20 mostly plague - Croydon -- 158 - Deptford 235 -- - Ealing 136 -- - Edmonton 145 85 - Eltham 52 17 - Enfield 253 129 - Finchley 51 38 - Hackney 321 269 - Hampstead 7 -- - Isleworth 75 -- - Islington 322 -- - Kensington 32 -- - Lambeth 566 -- - Lewisham 117 -- - Romford 122 -- - Stratford 130 89 - Streatham 36 -- - Tottenham 79 44 - Twickenham -- 67 - Wandsworth -- 100 - Wimbledon 21 -- - -A comparison of these figures with those of 1665 will show that the -northern parishes, Islington and Hackney, as well as parishes farther out -in the country, such as Enfield, had more plague-deaths in 1603 than in -the time of the Great Plague. Also Barking, Stratford and Romford on the -one side, and Lewisham, Eltham and Croydon on the other, had heavier -mortalities in the earlier year. It would appear, indeed, that the -infection in the country near London had been attracting notice before the -plague in the capital caused any alarm. On April 18, 1603, the lord mayor -wrote to the Privy Council concerning the steps that had been taken "to -prevent the spread of the plague in the counties of Middlesex and Surrey." -On July 20, 1603, the king issued a warrant to the constables and others -of the hundred of Twyford in Kent, to levy a special rate on certain -parishes to relieve the sufferers by a grievous plague in the villages of -West Malling, East Malling, Offham, and seven others[936]. Such rates were -usually levied when an epidemic was nearly over; so that the outbreak in -Kent must have been at least as early as that in London. - -The towns and villages of Hertfordshire, which were favourite resorts of -Londoners in plague-time, had their share of the visitation in 1603. At -Great Amwell, there were 41 burials in the year, of which 19 were of the -plague between August 19 and November 28, 6 of them in one day. Doubtless -the registers of other parishes in the home counties would show a similar -history if they were searched[937]. - - -Annual Plague in London after 1603. - -Before following the plague of 1603 into the provinces, it will be -convenient to give the history of the infection in London for the next few -years. There was little plague in 1604 and not much in 1605; but in 1606 -the infection again became active, and continued at its endemic level for -some five or six years. The following table, from the weekly bills of -mortality, shows how regularly the infection came to a height in the -autumn year after year, as if it had been a product of the soil[938]: - -_Table, from the Weekly Bills of Mortality (London), showing the increase -of Plague in Autumn, for five successive years._ - - 1606 1607 1608 1609 1610 - - Total deaths from} - plague in the } 2124 2352 2262 4240 1803 - year } - - Weekly deaths in - - { 25 27 16 60 38 - { 33 33 26 57 45 - July { 50 37 24 58 45 - { 46 51 50 91 40 - { 66 43 - - { 67 77 45 100 47 - { 75 69 70 126 50 - August { 85 76 79 101 73 - { 85 71 73 150 60 - { 177 99 - - { 116 105 123 141 96 - { 105 121 136 158 89 - Sept. { 92 114 107 210 86 - { 87 177 143 144 72 - { 147 - - { 141 150 103 154 63 - { 106 113 131 177 79 - Oct. { 117 110 124 131 59 - { 109 82 102 55 49 - { 101 68 - - { 68 66 109 84 58 - { 41 55 72 69 40 - Nov. { 78 46 69 67 22 - { 72 21 70 59 42 - { 51 39 - -In Dekker's _Seven Deadly Sins of London_, published in 1606, he returns -to the subject of the plague. He says that it still slays hundreds in a -week, a statement which will be seen to be an exaggeration by reference to -the Table. But, on another point, Dekker would have been correctly -informed. The playhouses, he says, stand empty, with the doors locked and -the flag taken down. The policy of forbidding plays during plague-time, or -when the infection threatened to be active, was advocated by the Puritan -clergy as early as 1577, and had been in force in the plague of 1563. -"Plaies are banished for a time out of London," says Harrison in 1572, -"lest the resort unto them should ingender a plague, or rather disperse it -being already begonne[939]." In a sermon preached at Paul's Cross on -Sunday, November 3, 1577, in the time of the plague, by T. W., on the text -"Woe to that abominable, filthy and cruel city," the preacher exclaims, -"Behold the sumptuous theatre-houses, a continual monument of London's -prodigal folly! But I understand they are now forbidden because of the -plague[940]." By the year 1581 the lord mayor had become a zealous -supporter of the Puritan demands for the stopping of plays in the City and -in the Liberties[941]. In July (?), 1603, James I. granted a licence to -players for performances in the Curtain and Boar's Head theatres, "as soon -as the plague decreases to 30 deaths per week in London[942]." In the -beginning of winter, 1607, on the subsidence of plague, the theatres were -permitted to be opened, so that the "poor players," might make a living; -but as the plague revived in 1608, and became still more serious in 1609, -it is tolerably certain that the theatres were shut during the whole -summer and autumn of those years. - -Those years, from 1606 to 1610, when the actor's and dramatist's -profession was seriously hindered by the fear of plague, correspond to a -blank period in the personal history of Shakespeare. It has been -conjectured that he retired from London for a time, before his final -retirement to Stratford-on-Avon. At all events his occupation, if not -gone, was greatly interfered with in every one of the years from 1603 to -1610, excepting perhaps the years 1604 and 1605, which would hardly have -come within the limit of 30 plague-deaths in a week. In 1604 his name is -joined in a patent with that of Laurence Fletcher for the Globe theatre. -Plays continued to be acted in the plague-years, before the court or in -the houses of the nobility; but the applause of the pit and gallery would -have been wanting. _Macbeth_, which is supposed, from its subject, to have -been written to celebrate the accession of the king of Scots to the -English crown was not put on the stage until 1610 or 1611. _King Lear_ -was given before the court at Christmas 1606. One of the quartos of -_Troilus and Cressida_, published in 1609, with the author's name, has a -note to say that "this new piece had never been staled with the stage, -never clapper-clawed by the palms of the vulgar;" but another edition of -the same year (1609) omitting the preface, bears on the title that the -piece had been played at the Globe theatre by the king's servants, from -which it is inferred that it had been acted in the interval between the -two editions of 1609. After 1610, and continuously so until 1625, there -was no plague in London to interfere with the business of actors and -play-writers, just as the period from 1594 to 1603 was a clear interval. -The earlier time of freedom was the great period of the drama in London. -The disastrous plague of 1603 and the successive unhealthy summers and -autumns until 1610 seriously interfered with it, and seriously interfered, -also, with Shakespeare's active share in the production of plays on the -stage. Whatever writing he did after that would have been with a less -certain prospect of representation, or, one may say, was not done under -the same direct influence of playhouse atmosphere which inspired his -earlier comedies and historical plays. - - -Plague in the Provinces in 1603 and following years. - -Returning now to 1603, to follow the infection into towns and villages in -the provinces, we find first that the plague had been active in some -provincial parts of England for several months before it broke out -severely in London in 1603. At Chester the great epidemic, referred to in -the sequel, began in September, 1602. At Stamford, an epidemic which -eventually carried off nearly 600 is heard of first on December 2, 1602, -when the corporation resolved to build a "cabbin" for the plague-stricken, -and again in January, 1603, when a fourth part of a fifteenth was levied -for their relief and maintenance[943]. - -At Oxford, which was one of the towns earliest and most severely smitten, -after London, the disease was first seen in July, 1603, and was supposed -to have been spread abroad by the "lewd and dissolute behaviour of some -base and unruly inhabitants." In September the colleges broke up, having -made a collection for the relief of the plague-stricken town's people -before leaving. The Michaelmas term was prorogued until December 5, but -very few came to the congregation, the plague not ceasing until February. -Anthony Wood says: - - "The truth is, the times were very sad, and nothing but lamentation - and bemoanings heard in the streets. Those that had wealth retired - into the country, but those that were needy were, if not taken away by - death, almost starved, and so consequently ready to mutiny against - their superiors for relief." All the gates of colleges and halls were - constantly kept shut day and night, a few persons being left in them - to keep possession. The shops of the town were closed, none but the - attendants on the sick or the collectors for them were to be seen - stirring abroad, the churches were seldom or never open for divine - service. - -The plague having ceased in February most of the scholars came back, and -in April the infection broke out again, but was prevented from spreading. -The court was at Oxford in 1604, and plague broke out after it left, the -infected being sent, as before, to the house in Portmead and to the -cabins. Among the deaths was that of the Principal of Hart Hall, -apparently in August. It broke out once more in March, 1605, but did not -spread, whether owing to the measures that were taken or to natural causes -may remain doubtful[944]. From that date Oxford had a twenty years' -immunity, until 1625. The Cambridge annals are less full, partly, perhaps, -because none of the colleges kept a register on the plan of that of Merton -College; but it appears from a letter assigned to 1608 that the Visitor of -King's College had been unable to come to the college to exercise his -much-needed authority, "in regard of the infection[945]." - -The severity of plague in 1603 among the provincial towns and country -parishes is known accurately for only a few of them. From a considerable -number more there is evidence of outbreaks of one degree or another. Thus -at Canterbury, the accounts of the corporation contain entries of sums -paid for watching shut-up houses, for carrying out the dead, and the like, -during twenty-four weeks in 1603-4[946]. At Exeter, a pest-house had to be -provided, and the fairs were not kept[947]. Similar indications of plague -come from Winchester[948], Colchester[949], Ipswich[950], Norwich[951], -Boston[952], and Newcastle[953]. The register of a parish in Derbyshire -(Brimington) contains plague-deaths in the end of 1602[954]. - -For Chester there are full particulars of a great plague. It began in -September, 1602, in a glover's house in St John's Lane, where 7 died, and -kept increasing until the weekly deaths reached 60. In 1603 there died of -the plague 650, and of other diseases 61. In 1604 the plague-deaths were -986, of which 55 were in one week. From October 14, 1604, to March 20, -1605, 812 died, and about 100 more until the 9th January, 1606, when the -infection ceased for a time. Cabins outside the city were erected for the -plague-stricken. In some houses, especially of sailors, five or six of the -same family died in the course of two or three weeks[955]. - -It appears to have been in Nantwich and Northwych in one or more of the -years 1603-1605, a rate for relief of the poor in them having been ordered -on June 22, 1605. Plague-deaths occur in the registers of Macclesfield and -Congleton in 1603. At Stockport 51 were buried of plague from October 9, -1605, to August 14, 1606, most of them in the latter year[956]. Straggling -epidemics are also reported from Northamptonshire--31 burials from plague -at Merston Trussell in 1604, and 16 at Eydon in 1605[957]. - -One of the severest epidemics of the period occurred at York in 1604. The -markets were closed, the courts adjourned to Ripon and Durham, and the -Minster and Minster-yard closely shut up. The infected were housed in -booths on Hobmoor and Horsefair. The number of those who died is put down -at 3512[958]. Durham also had a visitation in St Giles's parish, but a -minor one[959]. - -At Shrewsbury, however, the plague of 1604 was on the same disastrous -scale as at Chester and York, the deaths in the five parishes from June 2, -1604, to April 6, 1605, having been 667. On October 11, 1604, a -proclamation was issued against buying or receiving apparel, bedding, -etc., as it was suspected that plague spread greatly in the town by such -means[960]. A weekly tax was levied upon the inhabitants of Manchester, -sometime previous to 1606, for the relief of the poor infected, or -suspected of being infected, with the plague[961]. It was in Nottingham in -1604, and in at least one of the parishes in the county (Holme -Pierrepont)[962]. - -There are few parts of England from which evidence of plague does not come -in the years immediately following the great plague in London in 1603. To -those already mentioned we have to add Cranborne, in Dorset, where 71 died -of plague (in a total of 91) from June to December, 1604, six deaths -having occurred in the family first infected and eight in another[963]. -The parish register of Monkleigh in North Devon has the words "cessat -pestis" opposite the entry of a burial on March 30, 1605[964]. In 1606 -Peterborough was visited, the infection lasting "until the September -following[965]." In 1606 Eton also was "visited," as appears from payments -made[966]. - - * * * * * - -In the years 1606-1610, as we have seen, the plague in London occurred as -a regular product of the summer and autumn seasons. The outbreak in 1608 -has left several traces in the state letters[967]. On September 12, Lord -Chancellor Ellesmere writes from Ashridge (Berkhamstead) to the Secretary -of State that he will remain away until he is fully sure of his London -house being clear of the infection. On September 20 the City ditch was -being cleaned out, and Parliament was put off until February. On November -26 a letter from the court at Newmarket states that the king is angry that -my Lord Chamberlain has not sent him the bill of sickness. In 1609 there -were 13 plague-deaths in Enfield parish, and in 1610 some suspicious cases -near Theobalds. - -In the provinces there is no record of plague again until 1608: at -Chester, in that year, 14 died of it "at the Talbot[968]." In 1609 the -infection was at work in a number of provincial centres. On June 1 a -letter from Rochester reports it prevalent in Kent, impeding the work of -the Commissioners for the Aid. On June 15 the Commissioners at Hereford -request farther time on account of the plague. On August 22 the king's -tenants of Long Bennington, near Grantham, are brought to great poverty by -the plague[969]. These accounts relate to the counties of Hereford, -Lincoln and Kent, and with the last may be taken the brief reference to -plague at Sandwich[970]. Other counties affected in 1609, perhaps only at -a few spots, are Derbyshire, Norfolk, Northumberland, and Leicestershire. -In the first, there died at Chesterfield a few persons of the plague from -March 18 until May; at Belper, 51 between May 1 and September 30; and at -Holmesfield, the curate on March 12[971]. At Norwich the outbreak of 1609 -was slight compared with other experiences of that city[972]. Its -existence at Newcastle the same year is known only from the register of St -Nicholas parish[973]. - -The plague in Loughborough was one of the severer kind. The first case of -it appears to have been on the 24th August, 1609, in a woman who had given -birth to a child on the 19th. The last plague entry in the parish register -is on February 19, 1611; so that the epidemic went on for about eighteen -months. During that time the whole mortality was 452, of which by far the -most were plague-burials. Within a mile of Loughborough is a spot of -ground, long after known as the Cabbin Lees, whereon many of the -inhabitants "prudently built themselves huts and encamped to avoid the -infection[974]." - -In Leicester there was a slight amount of plague in 1607, and it -reappeared in 1608 (payments on account of it in the former year, and an -item of "30 hurdells used at the visited houses" in the accounts of 1608). -A more severe outbreak occurred in 1610 and 1611, during and after the -great plague at Loughborough. The streets lying towards the Castle were -exempt; a pest-house was built in Belgrave Gate; the burials for 1610 were -82 in St Martin's parish alone (more than half being from plague), and in -1611 the same parish had 128 burials[975]. - -In 1610 the infection was at work in one or more villages of the county of -Durham; 78 deaths "of the pestilence" occur in the register of Lamesley -parish, and the same year was probably one of the numerous plague seasons -down to 1647 in Whickham parish, where it is said that the people, perhaps -the plague-stricken, lived in huts upon Whickham Fell[976]. At Chester in -1610 "many died of the plague[977]"; and at Evesham there was a visitation -which caused the wealthier inhabitants to leave the town and the -authorities to effect a much-needed improvement in the cleanliness of the -streets (swine found at large to be impounded, stones, timber, dunghills -and carrion to be removed from the streets, and the paving in front of -each house to be repaired and cleansed once a week)[978]. - -Between 1610 and 1625, which was an almost absolutely clear interval for -London, there are few accounts of plague from the provinces. In 1611, -moneys were levied for "the visited" at Sherborne[979], and there was a -local rate for the same class at Canterbury in 1614-15[980]. Accounts of -the same kind for Coventry probably belong to the year 1613[981]. Then, as -we come near the next great plague-period, which began with the new reign -in 1625, we find an entry of 26 plague-deaths at Banbury in 1623, -"recorded in a part of the original register which has not been -transcribed into the parchment copy[982]:" if the date be correct, Banbury -was the first town to break the somewhat prolonged truce with the plague, -which became broken all over the country in 1625. There appears also to -have been distress in Grantham from sickness of some kind in 1623; in -September of that year the corporation of Stamford made a collection "in -this dangerous time of visitation," and sent L10 of it to Grantham, the -rest to go "to London or some other town as occasion offered." But the -years 1623 and 1624 were so much afflicted with fevers that the "dangerous -time of visitation" may not have meant plague. - - -Ireland. - -The accounts for Ireland are so casual that one suspects there may have -been more plague in that country than the records show. Thus, on January -25, 1604, there is a municipal order at Kilkenny, for men to stand at -every gate to keep out all strangers or suspected persons that might come -from any infected place within the kingdom; and on October 24 there is -another order, from which it appears that the plague was then in the town, -that it was needful to have the sick persons removed to remote places, -that no dung should be in the open streets before the doors, and that no -hogs should go or lie in the streets[983]. Towards the end of 1607 and -beginning of 1608 there was a "most dreadful pestilence" in the city of -Cork, which "by degrees ceased of itself[984]." - - -Plague in Scotland, 1603-24. - -The history of the plague in Scotland, which we left in a former chapter -at the year 1603, begins again in that year and goes on at one place or -another continuously until 1609. From June, 1603, until February, 1604, it -continued in the south of Scotland. At Edinburgh, in April, 1604, the -house of Mr John Hall was "clengit," because a servant woman's death was -suspected of the plague: which infection certainly spread in May and -became so severe in July that people fled the city[985]. A letter of July -18 from Codrus Cottage, relating to gold-mining, and making mention of -Closeburn, says that the plague is amongst the men[986]. - -In 1605, towards the end of July, the infection reappeared at Edinburgh, -Leith, and St Andrews[987]. On October 7, the chancellor of Scotland, Lord -Dunfermline, wrote to the earl of Salisbury that the plague was rife in -the small towns about Edinburgh, probably its old favourite seats along -the Firth and on the Fife coast[988]. The chancellor himself, as we know -from another source, had had a sad experience of it in his own house; his -son and niece had died of the plague, and his daughter "had the boils" but -recovered[989]. The next year, 1606, was the worst of this plague-period -in Scotland: "It raged so extremely in all the corners of the kingdoms -that neither burgh nor land in any part was free. The burghs of Ayr and -Stirling were almost desolate, and all the judicatures of the land were -deserted[990]." It is to this epidemic that a curious transaction, -discovered by Chambers, seems to belong. Two houses, on the line of the -great road from the south towards Aberdeen, situated on opposite sides of -the Dee, the one being the house of a proprietor and the other of a -minister, were suspected of having received the infection. The gentlemen -of the county met and resolved to send to Dundee for two professional -"clengers" or disinfectors, giving a bond to the borough of Dundee for 500 -merks for the services of its "clengers[991]." - -In April of the year following, 1607, we hear of the plague in Dundee -itself, despite the experts, as well as in Perth and other places[992]. In -July, 1608, many houses in Dundee were infected, and so many magistrates -dead that new appointments were made by the Privy Council[993]. It broke -out again at Perth on August 29, and continued till May, 1609, "wherein -deit young and auld 500 persons[994]." - -Until 1624 there is no other Scottish reference to plague except an entry, -November 7, 1609, touching the arrival at Leith of a vessel from the -Thames, with some of her crew dead of the plague, and the quarantining of -her at Inchkeith[995]. Edinburgh had a small outbreak the year before the -next great English plague that we come to. On November 23, 1624, the -infection was discovered to be in several houses, and the session of the -law courts was adjourned to January 8[996]; but Scotland appears to have -had no part in the great infection of English soil which immediately -followed. - - -Malignant Fever preceding the Plague of 1625. - -The period of immunity from plague both in London and in the provinces, -which began about 1611, was at length broken in 1625. The health of -London, and of country districts as well, had not been good for two years -before, but plague was not the reigning type of disease. Thus, in London, -the burials rose from 8959 in 1622, to 11,102 in 1623 and to 12,210 in -1624. The letters of the time enable us to see what it was that disturbed -the public health. On August 21, 1624, Chamberlain writes from London to -Dudley Carleton[997]: - - "We had 328 died this week, a greater number than hath been these - fifteen or sixteen years, and yet no mention of plague. God keep it - from among us, for we are in danger. But this spotted fever is - cousin-german to it at least, and makes as quick riddance almost. The - Lady Hatton hath two or three of her children sick of it at her - brother Fanshaw's, in Essex, and hath lost her younger daughter, that - was buried at Westminster on Wednesday night by her father; a pretty - gentlewoman, much lamented." Again, on September 4: "We have here but - a sickly season, which is easily seen by the weekly mounting of our - bill, which is come this last week to 407, and yet we will acknowledge - no infection [i.e., of plague]. Indeed, by the particulars we find - about 250 of them to be children, most of the rest carried away by - this spotted fever, which reigns almost everywhere, in the country as - ill as here.... The mortality is spread far and near, and takes hold - of whole households in many places." On October 9: "The town continues - sickly still, for this week there died 347." On October 23 we hear of - the Lord Keeper being "troubled with the fluent disease of the - time"--the flux, or flix. On December 18 (as well as previously on - August 21) a cure of smallpox is mentioned in a person of quality. - -These, then, were the prevalent types of epidemic sickness, in the houses -of the great as well as among the poor--spotted fever or typhus, dysentery -or flux, and smallpox. Two of these continued into the plague-year, 1625, -as Taylor, the Water-poet, says of that occasion: - - "Thou see'st the fearful plague, the flix and fever, - Which many a soul doth from the body sever." - -An eminent victim of the "pestilent fever" was the marquis of Hamilton, -who died of it while at Moor Park, Rickmansworth, on Ash-Wednesday, -1625[998]. His residence in London was the house called Fisher's Folly -(mentioned by Stow) outside Bishopsgate in a parish which was now -"pestered" with tenements of the poor. - -The fever was not always called the spotted fever. It may have been the -same disease that is often spoken of under the name of ague--"the ague -with a hundred names," as Abraham Holland says (1625). Thus, Mead, of -Christ's College, Cambridge, writes on September 4, 1625: "Agues grow -wonderfully rife both here and everywhere; so that one told me yesterday -that about Royston and Barkway they wanted help to gather their harvest -out of the fields"--perhaps the same sort of "burning fever" which we -shall have to trace a few pages later, both in town and country, in time -of peace as well as in the Civil Wars, the type of sickness which became -the common one in England when the plague had ceased, reaching its highest -point in the 18th century. But here again we meet the old difficulty of -"influenza." - -These historical glimpses of spotted fevers, or pestilent fevers, in the -houses of the great, as well as among the common people, are in -accordance not only with the London bills of mortality for the respective -years, but also with the registers of country parishes and market towns as -abstracted by the laborious Dr Short. Repeating the form of table used in -a former chapter, which dealt with the epidemic years 1557-8 and 1580-82, -we find the years 1623-25 distinguished as follows: - -_Country Parishes._ - - Year. No. of No. of Baptised Buried - registers unhealthy in same in same - examined parishes - - 1622 85 11 177 223 - 1623 84 30 601 836 - 1624 87 19 362 511 - 1625 88 13 246 327 - -_Market Towns._ - - Year. No. of No. of Baptised Buried - registers unhealthy in same in same - examined towns - - 1622 25 4 345 442 - 1623 25 16 439 2254 - 1624 25 9 714 978 - 1625 25 9 563 666 - -The incidence upon the year 1623 is the more noteworthy as there appears -to be no record of plague in England that year in its more usual seats, -except an entry in a parish register at Banbury. Fever, we may take it, -was the prevalent epidemic types both in London and provincial places, -urban and rural. In his other treatise Short calls it "malignant spotted -fever," and refers specially to the parish registers of Keswick, Penrith, -and Wigton for its prevalence in 1623[999]. - -Chamberlain, in the letter of August 21, 1624, says the spotted fever was -cousin-german at least to the plague; and therein he expressed as a layman -an opinion which was afterwards formally expounded by Willis Sydenham and -Morton. Along with the flux and the smallpox it stood for the -unhealthiness of London in 1623 and 1624 and the first months of 1625, -just as the trio were the chief causes of epidemic mortality in the -capital in the latter part of the seventeenth century and throughout the -whole of the eighteenth. But in 1625 London was not yet done with plague. -As the year passed from spring into summer, the spotted fever did not, -indeed, cease (as we may infer from casual references and from the known -facts of the analogous plague-years, 1636 and 1665); but it was soon -overtaken, surpassed, and eclipsed by the greater infection, the old -"common infection" of the sixteenth century, the bubo-plague itself. To -explain the existence of typhus in the Liberties and out-parishes of -London in 1623 and 1624, we find ready to hand the evidence of -overcrowding while the plague was quiet from 1611; the births in 1624 were -about half as many again as immediately before the last great plague of -1603, and the deaths were twice as many. The fringe of poverty had grown -once more, despite the epidemic checks of flux, fever and smallpox: the -harvest was ready for the sickle, and the reaping took place in the summer -and autumn of 1625. The infection of plague was lurking in London, as it -had been for nearly three centuries; but it depended for its activity upon -the times and seasons, and the season of 1625 was a favourable one. - - -The London Plague of 1625. - -The previous summer of 1624 had been unusually hot and dry. The weather in -October was exceptionally fine, and the fruit crop was abundant. In -January the weather was warm and mild. On February 25 there occurred one -of those very high tides that come perhaps once in a generation. Thames -Street was wrecked, Westminster Hall was "full three feet in water all -over. But the greater loss we hear of in the drowning of marshes, and -overthrowing the walls in Kent, Essex, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, and other -places near the sea[1000]." For the first three months of 1625 the deaths -from plague were two or three in a week, some weeks being clear. In the -last week of March they were 11, and in the week after, 10. In the last -week of May they were 69, reported from twenty parishes. The spring is -described by the Water-poet as "wholesome;" but the early summer was -unusually cold. On June 12 Chamberlain writes: "We have had for a month -together the extremest cold weather ever I knew in this season." The whole -month of June was a time of "ceaseless rain in London[1001]." In the -country, the hay-harvest was spoilt, and the corn-harvest was only a half -crop[1002]. Another says (in verse), that the summer sun wore sallow hair -and a languishing complexion; the air was full of black mists and damp, -with no dewdrops at night, but a vaporous smoke[1003]. The following table -of the weekly burials (with christenings) in London will show how the -plague increased after the rains of June. The mortality of May and June -had been a good deal higher for the season than in the moderate endemic -years of plague, such as the last series from 1606 to 1611; but it was not -until July that a plague of the first degree declared itself. - -_A Table of the Christenings and Mortality in London for the year -1625._[1004] - - Of Parishes - Week ending Christened Buried Plague Infected - - Dec. 23 165 183 0 0 - 30 176 211 0 0 - Jan. 6 199 220 1 1 - 13 194 196 1 1 - 20 160 240 0 0 - 27 178 226 0 0 - Feb. 3 178 174 3 1 - 10 161 204 5 2 - 17 181 211 3 1 - 24 190 252 1 1 - Mar. 3 185 207 0 0 - 10 196 210 0 0 - 17 175 262 4 3 - 24 187 226 8 2 - 31 133 243 11 4 - Apr. 7 184 239 10 4 - 14 154 256 24 10 - 21 160 230 25 11 - 28 134 305 26 9 - May 5 158 292 30 10 - 12 140 332 45 13 - 19 182 379 71 17 - 26 145 401 78 16 - June 2 123 395 69 20 - 9 125 434 91 25 - 16 110 510 165 31 - 23 110 640 239 32 - 30 125 942 390 50 - July 7 114 1222 593 57 - 14 115 1741 1004 82 - 21 137 2850 1819 96 - 28 155 3583 2471 103 - Aug. 4 128 4517 3659 114 - 11 125 4855 4115 112 - 18 134 5205 4463 114 - 25 135 4841 4218 114 - Sept. 1 117 3897 3344 117 - 8 112 3157 2550 116 - 15 100 2148 1674 107 - 22 75 1994 1551 111 - 29 78 1236 852 103 - Oct. 6 77 838 538 99 - 13 85 815 511 91 - 20 91 651 331 76 - 27 77 375 134 47 - Nov. 3 82 357 89 41 - 10 85 319 92 35 - 17 88 274 48 22 - 24 88 231 27 16 - Dec. 1 93 190 15 12 - 8 90 181 15 7 - 15 94 168 6 5 - ---- ----- ----- - 6983 54265 35417 - -The deaths from all causes in May and June were so many more than the -reported plague-deaths could account for that those who watched the bills -of mortality (Mead at Cambridge, Salvetti in London) suspected that plague -was being concealed. "It is a strange reckoning," says Mead of the bill -for the week ending June 30: "Are there some other diseases as bad and -spreading as the plague, or is there untrue dealing in the account[1005]?" -Probably there were both; at the end of the year the deaths from all -causes were some 20,000 more than the plague accounted for; and at least -half of that excess was extra to the ordinary mortality. The spotted fever -and the flux doubtless continued side by side with the plague, having -been its forerunners. The parishes most affected were, as in 1603, St -Giles's, Cripplegate, St Olave's, Southwark, St Sepulchre's, without -Newgate, and St Mary's, Whitechapel, corresponding to the mazes of lanes -and twisting passages, "pestered" with the tenements of the poorer class, -of which only a few examples now remain from 18th century London. The -following are the parishes with greatest mortality, in their order (Bell): - - Total Plague - deaths deaths - - St Giles's, Cripplegate 3988 2338 - St Olave's, Southwark 3689 2609 - St Sepulchre's, Newgate 3425 2420 - St Mary's, Whitechapel 3305 2272 - St Saviour's, Southwark 2746 1671 - St Botolph's, Aldgate 2573 1653 - St Botolph's, Bishopsgate 2334 714 - St Andrew's, Holborn 2190 1636 - St Leonard's, Shoreditch 1995 1407 - St George's, Southwark 1608 912 - St Bride's, Fleet St. 1481 1031 - St Martin's in the Fields 1470 973 - St Giles's in the Fields 1333 947 - St Clement's Danes 1284 755 - St James's, Clerkenwell 1191 903 - St Magdalen's, Bermondsey 1127 889 - St Katharine's, Tower 998 744 - St Dunstan's in the West 860 642 - 97 parishes within the walls 14342 9197 - -The original printed bill of the Parish Clerks is extant for the worst -week but one, August 4th to 11th[1006]. Its mortalities for the week in -each of the 122 parishes are almost exactly in the order of the final -summation for the year, so that the details throw no light upon the -question, in what direction the infection spread, or what parishes felt -its incidence most as the season advanced. The total mortalities for the -week within the walls, in the Liberties, and in the nine out-parishes -(within the Bills) are respectively 1144, 2717 and 994. The infection is -said[1007] to have begun in Whitechapel, as we conclude that it did also -in 1603; but the City had its due share at length, the parishes of St -Stephen, Coleman Street (full of tortuous passages), of Allhallows the -Great, and of Christ Church having the largest mortalities. - -In the 97 parishes of the City, the 16 parishes of the Liberties, and 9 -out-parishes, the deaths at the end of the year were 54,265 from all -causes, whereof of the plague 35,417. But that was by no means the whole -mortality. A separate account was kept for the parishes of Stepney, -Newington, Lambeth, Islington, and Hackney, and for the Westminster -parishes, in all of which the deaths from December 30, 1624, to December -22, 1625, were from all causes 8,736, whereof of the plague 5,896[1008]. -The grand total of deaths in 1625 was, accordingly, 63,001, whereof of the -plague 41,313. - -The large parish of Stepney, extending from Shoreditch to Blackwall, was -one of the worst plague-districts in London. It is mentioned as such by -Dekker in 1603; and in the plague of 1665 it headed the list, with 8,598 -deaths, whereof of the plague 6,583. We have some particulars of it for -1625: in the week July 18 to 24, there died in it 184, whereof of the -plague, 144; and from July 25 to 31, 259, of which 241 were -plague-deaths[1009]; and those figures would have been nearly doubled in -the weeks of August. Stepney alone would have had about half the deaths in -the additional bill for the year; the parish register of Lambeth gives 623 -burials, of Islington 213, and of Hackney 170[1010], while Westminster -with St Mary Newington (or Newington Butts, between Lambeth and Southwark) -and Rotherhithe would account for most of the remainder. The parishes -farthest out, and on higher ground, such as Hackney, Islington and Stoke -Newington had fewer burials than in 1603. - -The plague of 1625 was a great national event, although historians, as -usual, do no more than mention it. Coinciding exactly with the accession -of Charles I., it stopped all trade in the City for a season and left -great confusion and impoverishment behind it; in many provincial towns and -in whole counties the plague of that or the following years made the -people unable, supposing that they had been willing, to take up the -forced loan, and to furnish ships or the money for them. The history might -have proceeded just the same without the plague; but historians would -doubtless admit that all causes, moral and physical, should be taken into -the account; and it will not be thought beyond the scope of this history -to enter as fully as possible into these events of sickness. First as to -the sources, other than statistical. Four or more poems were written on -the plague of 1625--an interminable one by George Wither (with other -topics brought in) in eight cantos and about thirty thousand lines[1011], -a piece by John Taylor, the water-poet and Queen's bargeman, not wanting -in graphic touches[1012], a short piece by Abraham Holland[1013], the son -of Philemon Holland, doctor of physic, and another short poem by one -Brewer[1014]. Besides the poems, there were sermons, mostly when the -epidemic was over, and various other moral pieces to improve the occasion. -A broadside called _The Red Crosse_ gives a few details of former plagues. -The letters of Chamberlain to Carleton, those of Mead, at Christ's -College, Cambridge (whose relation Dr Meddus, rector of St Gabriel's, -Fenchurch Street, was in the City during the epidemic), and the diary of -Salvetti, the envoy of the Grand Duke of Tuscany[1015], supply many -particulars; while the _Calendar of State Papers_ brings together other -information both for London and the provinces. I know of no account of the -plague of 1625 from the medical side[1016]. - -James I., prematurely worn out at fifty-seven, died at Theobalds on March -27, from the effects of a tertian ague, for which he preferred to be -treated by the plasters and possets of an obscure ague-curer from Dunmow, -setting aside his physicians, who would have succeeded no better. A great -funeral, for which 14,000 "blacks" were given out, followed on May 7. -Meanwhile the marriage of Charles I. to the princess Henrietta of France -was being arranged. The king met his bride at Dover on June 13, and -entered London with her on the 18th, passing up the river in a state barge -to Denmark House, amidst an immense concourse of people on the houses and -shipping, and in wherries on the water, with salvoes of artillery and -demonstrations of welcome to the Catholic princess. On the 13th the Lord -Keeper had written to Conway, Secretary of State, that cases of plague had -occurred in Westminster, and that he could have wished that his majesty -had determined to come no nearer than Greenwich. The nobility were kept in -town to await the coming of the new queen, and some of them by the summons -to Parliament. The Houses met on June 18, and were advised in the king's -speech to expedite their business on account of the plague. However, those -who were disposed to refuse supplies until grievances were redressed could -make use of the plague as well as the king, and it was proposed by Mallory -and Wentworth to adjourn on that plea until Michaelmas. The Houses sat for -three weeks, until July 11, when they were adjourned to meet at Oxford on -August 1. On a day in June Francis, Lord Russell (afterwards earl of -Bedford), "being to go to Parliament, had his shoemaker to pull on his -boots, who fell down dead of the plague in his presence," so that his -lordship avoided the House. In the first week of July, the court removed -to Hampton Court, and thence to Woodstock and to Beaulieu in the New -Forest. The Coronation was put off until October, for reasons connected -with the queen's religion as well as for the infection, and eventually -until February 2, 1626. - -Before Parliament rose, it obtained the king's sanction to a solemn fast. -"This," says the Tuscan, Salvetti, "is a ceremony which is performed in -all the parishes, and consists in staying in church all day singing -psalms, hearing sermons, the one shortly after the other, and making I -know not how many prayers, imploring God for stoppage of the plague, and -of the ceaseless rain which for a month past has fallen to the detriment -of all kinds of crops." At that date, July 1, he says that plague is now -spread through all the streets and has reached other parts of the kingdom. -A general exodus took place to the country, of all who had the means to -remove. As in 1603, the magistrates, the ministers, the doctors, and the -rich men seem to have left the city to take care of itself. On August 9, -Salvetti, who had himself escaped to Richmond, writes: "The magistrates in -desperation have abandoned every care; everyone does what he pleases, and -the houses of merchants who have left London are broken into and robbed." -On September 1, Dr Meddus, rector of St Gabriel's, Fenchurch Street, -wrote: "The want and misery is the greatest here that ever any man living -knew; no trading at all; the rich all gone; housekeepers and apprentices -of manual trades begging in the streets, and that in such a lamentable -manner as will make the strongest heart to yearn." The city an hour after -noon was the same as at three in the morning in the month of June, no more -people stirring, no more shops open[1017]. This is re-echoed in verse by -Abraham Holland: - - "A noon in Fleet Street now can hardly show - That press which midnight could, not long ago. - Walk through the woeful streets (whoever dare - Still venture on the sad infected air) - So many marked houses you shall meet - As if the city were one Red-Cross Street." - -And by the Water-poet: - - "In some whole street, perhaps, a shop or twain - Stands open for small takings and less gain. - And every closed window, door and stall - Makes every day seem a solemn festival. - All trades are dead, or almost out of breath, - But such as live by sickness and by death." - -The circumstances are so exactly the same as in 1603 that it is needless -to repeat much: the sextons, coffin-makers, bearers, searchers, -apothecaries and quacks are all profitably employed; - - "And last to dog-killers great gain abounds, - For braining brawling curs and foisting hounds." - -The clocks striking the hours are not heard for the constant tolling of -bells. "Strange," says Holland, - - "Strange that the hours should fail to tell the day - When Time to thousands ran so fast away." - -Of the sick, Taylor says there were - - "Some franticke raving, some with anguish crying." - ---delirious ravings and cries of pain (from the buboes) which we know from -the accounts for 1665 to have been no rhetorical exaggeration. There were -the same crowded common graves as in 1603, probably in the same -graveyards: - - "My multitude of graves that gaping wide - Are hourly fed with carcases of men. - Those hardly swallowed, they be fed again." - -Or as Taylor says, - - "Dead coarses carried and recarried still - Whilst fifty corpses scarce one grave doth fill." - -The treatment seems to have been mostly in the hands of quacks. Taylor -says: - - "On many a post I see Quacksalvers' bills - Like fencers' challenges to show their skill." - -The Water-poet, being Queen's bargeman, appears to have had a proper -feeling for all constituted authorities. After denouncing the quacks, as -men who "pick their living out of others' dying," he proceeds to eulogise -the regular practitioners, forgetting to add that they were now -conspicuous by their absence: - - "This sharp invective no way seems to touch - The learned physicians whom I honour much. - The Paracelsists and the Galenists, - The philosophical grave Herbalists,-- - These I admire and reverence, for in those - God doth dame nature's secrets fast inclose, - Which they distribute as occasions serve." - ---the prevalence of plague not being one of the occasions for revealing -the secrets entrusted to them. - -The medical faculty is hardly at all in evidence the whole time. Thayre's -surgical treatise of 1603 was reprinted; while a semi-empiric, one Stephen -Bradwell, the grandson of Banister, a well-known Elizabethan practitioner, -published a poor essay on plague, patched up from the usual stale sources -and plagiarised even from the lay dialogue of the rector of St Olave's in -1603[1018]. Bradwell addressed the reader, on July 15 "from my study in -Mugwell-street, ready to my power to do thee any pleasure." - - "I have two powders. I have also an excellent electuary. I have - likewise lozenges, and rich pomanders to smell of. These are all of my - grandfather's invention, and have been proved to be admirably - effectual both by his and my father's experience. I confess they are - costly; but slight means and cheap medicines (however they promise) - prove as dear as death. The first powder is 12 pence a dram. The - second is 3 pence a grain (the quantity is 10 or 12 grains). The - electuary is 2 shillings and 6 pence an ounce, the quantity is one or - two drams. There is a fellow in Distaff-lane that disperseth his bills - abroad, bragging of a medicine that was my grandfather Bannister's. My - grandfather was very scrupulous of giving any special receipts to - others. But if any man can say he hath any receipt of his, I am sure, - if it were of any value, I have the copy of it. Because many men know - that I have a whole volume of excellent receipts left me both by my - grandfather and my father, and lest they should conceive me as too - strict and covetous in keeping all secret to myself, I have thought - fit for the common good to divulge this excellent antidote - following:"--the ingredients occupying a whole page. - -This enterprising tradesman had been at Oxford, where he failed to take a -degree in medicine, but he was a licentiate of the College of Physicians. -He is the single literary representative of the faculty, so far as -appears, in 1625; and there is nothing in his essay that concerns us, -except the following corroboration of a well-known character of the -epidemic: - - "Poor people, by reason of their great want, living sluttishly, - feeding nastily on offals, or the worst and unwholesomest meats, and - many times, too, lacking food altogether, have both their bodies much - corrupted, and their spirits exceedingly weakened; whereby they - become (of all others) most subject to this sickness. And therefore we - see the plague sweeps up such people in greatest heaps." - -It is impossible to know whether any considerable proportion recovered. It -appears that, as in 1603, the buboes and boils might come out in the same -person more than once, and that the best chance was from their -suppuration: - - "Some with their carbuncles and sores new burst - Are fed with hope they have escaped the worst." - -But the best hope was in flight, as Bradwell was candid enough to say, -although he remained behind with his shilling powders and half-crown -electuaries. _Cito cede, longe recede, tarde redi_--is the proverbial -advice which he quotes. - -However, the people in their flight, unless they were nobles or squires -with country houses, fared but ill in the provinces. The story of their -reception in country towns and villages is so like that of 1603 that one -might suppose in this, as in other things, that the writers of 1625 were -copying from Dekker. One of the versifiers, Brewer, has a section -specially devoted to a "Relation of the many miseries that many of those -that fly the City do fall into in the country." They are driven back by -men with bills and halberds, passing through village after village in -disgrace until they end their journey; they sleep in stables, barns and -outhouses, or even by the roadside in ditches and in the open fields. And -that was the lot of comparatively wealthy men. Taylor says that when he -was with the queen's barge at Hampton Court and up the river almost to -Oxford, he had much grief and remorse to see and hear of the miserable and -cold entertainment of many Londoners: - - "The name of London now both far and near - Strikes all the towns and villages with fear. - And to be thought a Londoner is worse - Than one that breaks a house, or takes a purse ... - Whilst hay-cock lodging with hard slender fare, - Welcome, like dogs into a church, they are. - For why the hob-nailed boors, inhuman blocks, - Uncharitable hounds, hearts hard as rocks, - Did suffer people in the field to sink - Rather than give or sell a draught of drink. - Milkmaids and farmers' wives are grown so nice - They think a Citizen a cockatrice, - And country dames are waxed so coy and brisk - They shun him as they shun a basilisk." - -Taylor gives various instances in prose: - - "A man sick of an ague lying on the ground at Maidenhead in Berkshire, - with his fit violently on him, had stones cast at him by two men of - the towne (whom I could name), and when they could not cause him to - rise, one of them tooke a hitcher, or long boat-hook, and hitched in - the sick man's breeches, drawing him backward with his face grovelling - on the ground, drawing him so under the bridge in a dry place, where - he lay till his fit was gone, and having lost a new hat, went his - way." - -One at Richmond was drawn naked in the night by his own wife and boy, and -cast into the Thames, where the next day the corpse was found. The village -of Hendon distinguished itself by relieving the sick, burying the dead, -and collecting eight pounds, at the least (being but a small village) for -the poor of St Andrew's, Holborn, besides allowing good weekly wages to -two men to attend and bury such as died. The village of Tottenham appears -to have been equally hospitable; but as it was on the road to Theobalds, -and some of his majesty's servants dwelt there, the Privy Council on July -19, wrote to the justices of Middlesex to order the inhabitants of -Tottenham, who had received into their houses "multitudes of inmates," to -remove the new-comers and not to receive any in future[1019]. Although the -king was not at Richmond, yet as there was a royal residence there, the -inhabitants sought to drive away citizens on the ground of the warrant -forbidding them to approach any of his majesty's houses[1020]. At -Woodstock, where the Court was in August, no one was allowed to go from -thence to London, nor any to come thither, and for contraveners a gibbet -was set up at the Court gate[1021]. It was hardly possible to get a letter -smuggled into London[1022]; in the provinces "no one comes into a town -without a ticket, yet there are few free places." At Southampton on August -27, a stranger died in the fields: "He came from London. He had good store -of money about him, which was taken before he was cold[1023]." Dr Donne, -the dean of St Paul's, confirms these experiences in a letter of November -25, from Chelsea[1024]: - - "The citizens fled away as out of a house on fire, and stuffed their - pockets with their best ware, and threw themselves into the highways, - and were not received so much as into barns, and perished so: some of - them with more money about them than would have bought the village - where they died. A justice of the peace told me of one that died so - with L1400 about him." - -Meddus, rector of St Gabriel's, heard of one sad case of a citizen in -Leadenhall-street who removed to the country with his seven children, "but -having buried all there is come again hither," in July[1025]. In October, -the people began to come back, although the infection was by no means -over; Salvetti, who was himself near Huntingdon, says that many of the -returning artisans caught the infection in the city, which is probable -enough, as it happened also in 1665. On October 15, a correspondent of -Mead's wrote that in his passing through London he found the streets full -of people, and the highways full of passengers, horse and foot. On October -24, we hear of great distress among tradesmen, artificers and farmers -round London, and of discontent at the forced loan[1026]; although the -Court itself was in as great extremity during the plague for want of money -as any private house could have been. On November 22, the lord mayor and -aldermen wrote to the Privy Council that the great mortality, although it -had taken many poor people away, yet had made more poverty by decay of -tradesmen, the want and misery being still very great[1027]. Still, the -effect of this great plague on London, cutting off some fifty thousand in -a year, or more than a fifth part of the population, must have been, like -that of all other great plagues in London, to cut off the fringe of -poverty and broken fortunes, and to raise the general average of -well-being of those that remained. Trade would come back; but the -submerged tenth, or sixth, or fourth, or whatever fraction they made, were -drowned for good. - -London soon filled up the gaps made by the plague, doubtless by fresh -blood from the country. In 1627, the christenings were again at 8,408, -having been at a maximum of 8,299 the year before the plague. In 1629 they -actually exceeded the burials by more than a thousand (9,901 to 8,771), -and continued to be slightly in excess until the next plague of 1636. - - -The Plague of 1625 near London. - -In the immediate neighbourhood of the capital the parishes on the Kentish -chalk below London, such as Deptford, Greenwich, Lewisham, Eltham and -Bromley had more plague in 1625 than in 1603. Kensington, for some unknown -reason, has 80 deaths from all causes in the register, as against 32 in -1603 and 62 (of plague 25) in 1665. The group of parishes in Middlesex, -such as Enfield, Edmonton and Finchley, had each a large number of deaths, -but somewhat less than in 1603 and 1665, and the same holds for Hackney -and Stoke Newington, Islington and Hampstead. Places up the Thames all the -way from Battersea to Windsor were infected, including Wandsworth, Putney, -Isleworth, Richmond, Kingston and Hampton Court. Eton was "visited;" even -the sequestered village of Stoke Pogis had houses shut up "by reason of -the contagion" and a collection made for their impoverished inmates. Among -the Hertfordshire towns to which Londoners resorted in plague-times, -Watford is known to have had plague-deaths in 1625. In Essex,--Stratford, -Tottenham, Romford and Barking had each a large number of plague-deaths, -and, in Surrey, Croydon and Streatham. At Carshalton, oddly enough, the -heavy mortality was the year after (1626) "not from plague, but from a -disease somewhat akin to it[1028]." - - -Plague in the Provinces in 1625 and following years. - -It is stated by Salvetti and other gossips of the time that the infection -of plague in 1625 was carried all over the country from London by the -fleeing citizens, and that few places remained free from it, just as it -was said afterwards for the plague of 1665. So far as records show, one -would not be warranted in inferring a great provincial prevalence of -plague either in 1625 or in 1665. There was plague at Plymouth, and in the -south-western counties, under very special circumstances, as we shall see. -There was plague also at Norwich, said to have been brought from Yarmouth, -and at Colchester the year after. Newcastle, also, which hardly ever -escaped the infection when it was afoot, had one of its minor visitations. -But, on the whole, it is impossible to show by local evidences that the -plague of 1625 was diffused universally over England, either in that or in -the following year, or that it grew to a great epidemic in but a few -provincial centres[1029]. Probably all the plague-deaths in the provinces -together, in 1625 and 1626, would not have made a fifth part of the -mortality in London. - -The interest centres in the plague at Plymouth, with which the outbreaks -at Ashburton, Exeter, Dartmouth, Bridport, and perhaps Portsmouth, Rye and -other places, may be connected, if not causally, yet in neighbourhood. The -first that we hear of sickness at Plymouth is under date July 26, 1625; -some of the ships arrived there had been visited with sickness, and the -sick had been landed and lodged under sails[1030]. It is not called "the -sickness," and it is not clear that it was bubo-plague. There may, indeed, -have been real plague on board ships of war: Stow says that it was in the -fleet in 1603, and there is evidence of its existence now and again in the -Venetian galleys of an earlier day. But we are now come to the period of -the beginnings of ship-fever, as we shall see in the next chapter; and, -for the present, we must not assume that the sickness on board ship in -1625 was all plague, or chiefly plague. - -The ships at Plymouth in July were doubtless a part of the squadron of -ninety sail, which sailed thence in autumn, carrying ten thousand men to -make war on Spain, in accordance with the anti-Catholic policy which had -been forced upon James I. in the last years of his reign, and was now -being carried out by Charles I. and Buckingham. This was not the first -fruit of that policy. The immediate result of it was Mansfeld's English -troops for the recovery of the Palatinate to Protestant rule. That -expedition failing to effect a landing was speedily broken with disease, -and before it had been many days on shore in Holland was burying 40 or 50 -men a day. The fleet eight months later had a similar experience. The -ships were victualled with rotten food, and the men were supplied with -worthless clothing. As the facts were never investigated, the king having -interfered to shield the duke of Buckingham from the attack on him by Sir -John Eliot, peculation and jobbery were never proved, although it was -known to everyone that honesty was the last quality to be looked for in -those about the king and the favourite. The fleet reached the Bay of Cadiz -and made a futile demonstration there. It is in the month of November that -we begin to hear of sickness. On the 9th Viscount Wimbledon writes from on -board the 'Anne Royal' to Secretary Conway that there are not men enough -to keep the watches owing to sickness. On December 22, the Commissioners -at Plymouth write to the Council that about thirty sail had arrived there -with 4,000 soldiers "in such miserable condition as for the most part to -be incapable of such comforts as the country would afford them." Captain -Bolles, who died since their coming in, declared the occasion of his -sickness to be scarcity and corruption of the provisions. Great numbers of -the soldiers are continually thrown overboard. Yesterday seven fell down -in the streets. The rest are weak, and want clothes, for the supply of -which some thousands of pounds were needed. The despatch of December 29, -says, "They stink as they go, and the poor rags they have are rotten and -ready to fall off if they be touched"[1031]. - -So far there is no word of plague; on the other hand there is a strong -probability that the sickness was ship-fever, or typhus. It is not until -the spring of 1626 that the plague is mentioned at Plymouth. On March 18, -sickness increases at Plymouth and the plague is wondrous rife. On March -28, the plague is dispersed about the town. On April 5, the sickness -increases very much. On the 11th, 40 died last week and twenty houses are -shut up; some of the sick died and were buried in less than twenty-four -hours. On 8th June, the plague is very bad in Plymouth, and the town is -destitute of its best inhabitants. The town-council records bear witness -to a rate having been levied for the relief of the plague-stricken, and to -attempts as late as 1628 to collect their share of it from those who had -fled the town in 1626. The deaths at Plymouth are stated in a manuscript -book of the municipal annals to have been 2,000[1032]. - -Meanwhile plague appeared in other parts of Devonshire. In Exeter it had -been prevalent sooner than in Plymouth itself; a letter of November 17, -1625, speaks of the afflicted state of the city, and of the weekly -contributions for the plague-stricken. Some particulars of the state of -Exeter at this time are given in a memorial to the Privy Council by the -mayor and bailiffs of the city, dated October 15, 1627. During the great -sickness which fell on their city, and was not cleared in sixteen months, -all trading was stopped and the inhabitants generally left the town. To -appease a mutiny of the more disordered people, who threatened to burn the -city, a rate was assessed generally on the city, but most of the -inhabitants being absent, the corporation took up the amount at interest -on their own credit. The persons whose names are inclosed, being -inhabitants who have returned to the city, now refuse to pay the rate -assessed in their absence; and the Council is petitioned to summon them -before it[1033]. - -On May 17, 1626, the plague is reported to be rife "in Devonshire," and -specifically, on July 28, at Okehampton and Ashburton. The epidemic at -Ashburton was on the same severe scale as at Plymouth. It began in the end -of 1625, but was most fatal in April and May, 1626. The deaths in a -twelvemonth were 365, "probably a fourth of the inhabitants[1034]." (In -1627 there were only 27 deaths, doubtless from the empty state of the -town.) The same summer it is heard of in Dorsetshire. On September 2, the -deputy lieutenants and justices of the county petition the Privy Council -that the 1000 soldiers who were to be removed from Devon and Cornwall, -should not be quartered in Dorset, but in Somerset, as the former was -visited with the plague[1035]. Perhaps Bridport was the centre of plague -referred to. Sometime later in the year, perhaps in November, the bailiffs -and burgesses of that town explain to the Council that, although they had -subscribed to the loan, yet they were unable to pay the amount subscribed -as the town was destitute by reason of a twenty weeks' visitation of -plague[1036]. - -The last of this series of outbreaks in the south-west appears to have -been at Dartmouth in the summer of 1627. On June 29, it was reported that -the plague was so hot there that the inhabitants had left. The mayor wrote -on July 19 to the Privy Council that it was true the inhabitants were -still away, but the plague had ceased; only 15 houses had been infected, -the inhabitants of which had all been removed to the pest-houses remote -from the town[1037]. - -Farther east on the Channel coast, Portsmouth had a visitation of plague -previous to September 28, 1625, perhaps in connexion with the Cadiz fleet; -the mayor and bailiffs, being at the end of their year's office, had -refused to take steps to sever the infected[1038]. At Southampton, only -one house was infected on August 27. The infection is reported also from -Rye in 1625, and from Canterbury, where the famous composer, Orlando -Gibbons, died in the beginning of June, 1625, "not without suspicion of -the sickness," says Chamberlain, but, according to Anthony Wood, of the -smallpox. The king and queen lodged at Canterbury on June 14; but on July -23 the place had to be avoided "for the great infection." - -From Oxford, where the Parliament met on August 1, the vice-chancellor -wrote on July 27, that Sir John Hussey came thither infected from London, -and died, that Dr Chaloner, being in the same house, was since dead, that -the infection was in other parts of Oxford, and that All Souls College was -shut up. There was a slight revival of it in January, 1626, which caused -the exercises and the sermons at St Mary's to be put off[1039]. Anthony -Wood gives much the same account as for 1603, and blames the great -increase of "cottages" erected by townsmen, to which scholars were -enticed. - -Cambridge kept free in 1625; but on October 3, three deaths are reported -at Trumpington--one Peck, his wife, and maid. On the same date three -houses were shut up at Royston, and the infected "translated into the -fields[1040]." - -The outbreak at Norwich was one of the severer degree[1041]. It was said -to have been brought in the end of June, 1625, from Yarmouth, where -nothing is recorded of it. A king's order to the mayor imposed extensive -cleansings, &c., but the plague increased from 26 deaths in a week in -July, to 40 in September, reaching a maximum of 73 from plague in a week, -besides 18 from other causes. On August 27, Mead, the Cambridge don, -writes that he had met the Norwich carrier, who told him that the number -of burials there the last week was 77, whereof of the plague 67, and but -14 the week before. The infection lingered on until December of the year -after (1626), the total deaths from plague having been 1431. The plague at -Norwich was made the excuse, by the mayor and aldermen writing to the -Privy Council on January 30, 1627, for not contributing towards shipping -for the king's service; the city was distressed from inundations and the -plague, "many hundreds of houses" standing empty. There appears to have -been some plague at Lynn in the end of 1625, a Privy Council order of -January, 1626, authorising the fair to be held there, the disease having -ceased. - -In April, 1627, the bailiffs and aldermen of Colchester offer the same -excuse as Norwich; they are unable to set forth any ships as directed on -account of the heavy visitation of their town by the plague, the decay of -their trade in the new draperies and baize, and the loss of their ships at -sea. - -Leicestershire, also, would appear to have had another visitation in 1626. -On July 28, the muster in that county was respited on account of the shire -town and nine or ten other towns being visited with the plague. Of that -there is no trace in the excellent county history by Nichols. Leicester, -like Bristol and other places, is known to have imposed quarantine against -Londoners in the summer of 1625. It is probable that plague was also in -Warwickshire in 1626[1042]. - -Among other outbreaks in 1625 was one at Newcastle, but it does not -compare in extent with some earlier and later plagues there. On September -10, Lord Clifford writes from Appleby Castle to Secretary Conway that -Newcastle is so infected with plague, so ill fortified, and ill -neighboured, that 500 men would disarm it. In his own county of Cumberland -there was plague in Lord William Howard's house. Sir Francis Howard's lady -took the infection from a new gown she had from London, so as she died the -same day she took it; they are all dispersed most miserably, with the -greatest terror in the world. Cheshire also had the infection in -1625[1043]. - -After a clear interval of two or three years, the history of plague begins -again in London, and in the provinces. The London plague of 1630 was a -small affair (1317 deaths), the city being otherwise so healthy that the -christenings exceeded the total burials (9315 to 9237). In 1630, at the -same time as the small London outbreak, Cambridge had what appears to have -been its most considerable plague, but a very small one at the worst. It -began about February 28, caused the colleges to break up and the midsummer -assizes to be transferred to Royston, and from first to last produced 214 -deaths, known or suspected from plague[1044]. - -Along with it there were a good many cases at Wymondham (Windham), and -some straggling cases at Norwich and Colchester, continuing into 1631, -some 20 or 30 dying at Norwich of plague in the latter year[1045]. The -other centre in 1630 was in the north-west. Shrewsbury, an old-world town -which seldom escaped, had a localised epidemic in St Chad's parish. It -began on May 24 in Frankwell, but was confined to that street by cutting -off the residents therein from the rest of the town, and by removing the -infected to pest-houses in Kingsland[1046]. It continued at Shrewsbury -into 1631, and is heard of also at Preston, Wrexham, and Manchester, -collections having been made in neighbouring places for the -infected[1047]. But the one great outbreak of those years fell upon the -town of Louth, in Lincolnshire, of which the sole particulars are that the -plague from April to the end of November, 1631, swept away 754 persons of -whom nearly 500 in July and August[1048]. - -After four years clear in London and in all parts of England (years -occupied with the growing quarrel between the king and the Parliament), -plague broke out again not far from Louth, where we saw it last, namely at -Hull. A century and a half had passed since Hull's last great devastation -by plague year after year from 1472 to 1478. It was then a medieval town, -with a chain drawn across the mouth of its creek of the Humber, surrounded -by great abbeys, and owing its importance to its trade in stock fish from -Iceland and the North Sea. In the Tudor times it had experienced one small -epidemic about the Blackfriars Gate in 1576, causing about a hundred -deaths. The date of the outbreak in 1635 is not given exactly; but, as in -the 15th century, it was the peculiarity of Hull among provincial towns -that it kept the infection for several years,--down to June, 1638. -Business was paralysed, schools shut up, and the town deserted by the -wealthier classes. The deaths from plague from first to last are counted -at 2730, besides those which occurred in flight to other places. Upwards -of 2,500 persons, once in easy circumstances, are said to have been -reduced to seek relief, to which the county of York contributed[1049]. In -1643 Hull stood a siege, but there is no farther mention of plague; nor -did the town suffer in 1665. - -The year 1635, which saw the beginning of the Hull plague, at a time when -the infection was absolutely quiet in the capital, saw also the beginning -of an outbreak at Sandwich, with accompanying cases at Canterbury, and a -beginning at Yarmouth, Lynn and Norwich[1050], in all which places the -infections lingered at a low endemic level for a year or more. The dates -are important only as showing that these provincial infections were -looking up some months before the sharp outburst in London in the late -autumn of 1636 made any sign. In Sandwich, on the 12th of March, 1637, -there were 78 houses "visited," and 188 persons infected; on June 30, 24 -houses shut up, with 103 persons, some of them lodged in tents; from July -6 to October 5, there were buried of the plague about ten every week in St -Clement's parish. Considerable expenses were incurred (more than L40 a -week), to which the county of Kent and the other Cinque Ports -contributed[1051]. - -Besides these lingering endemics in Kent and Norfolk, the great plague -epidemics of 1636 were in Newcastle and London. The Newcastle epidemic -was both earlier and relatively far more severe than that of the capital. -For a town of some 20,000 inhabitants, the following weekly figures[1052] -indicate a plague of the first degree, comparable to the London -death-rates of 1625 and 1665: - -Died of plague at Newcastle, within the liberties, from May 7 to December -31, 1636: - - Week Plague - ending deaths - - May 14 59 - 21 55 - 28 99 - June 4 122 - 11 99 - 18 162 - 25 133 - July 2 172 - 9 184 - 16 212 - 23 270 - 30 366 - Aug. 7 337 - 14 422 - 21 346 - 28 246 - Sept. 4 520 - 11 325 - To end of Dec. 908 - ---- - Total to 31st Dec. 5027 - -Besides in Garthside, from May 30 to October 17, 515, making a total of -5542. - -This tremendous visitation of Tyneside is said to have begun in October, -1635, at North Shields, where the infection rested during the winter cold, -to begin again at Newcastle in spring. During the height of the epidemic -in summer and autumn all trade was suspended, no one being about in the -streets or in the neighbouring highways. The means tried to check the -infection were fumigations with pitch, rosin, and frankincense. Newcastle -had one other visit from the plague, as we shall see, in 1644 and 1645, -during and after the siege by the Scots Presbyterian army; but in 1665 it -is said to have escaped, although Defoe says that the infection was -introduced by colliers returning from the Thames. - - -The London Plague of 1636. - -The London plague of 1636 was one of the second degree, for the capital, -and was otherwise peculiar as being rather later in the autumnal season -than usual. The following table of the weekly mortalities shows how it -increased, reached a height, and declined. - - Christened Buried Buried of - in all plague - - Dec. 24 231 170 0 - 31 195 174 0 - - 1636 - - Jan. 7 217 189 0 - 14 242 174 0 - 21 220 190 0 - 28 214 171 0 - Feb. 4 227 183 0 - 11 234 160 0 - 18 207 203 0 - 25 198 238 0 - Mar. 3 221 198 0 - 10 231 194 0 - 17 244 187 0 - 24 215 177 0 - 31 193 196 0 - Apr. 7 202 199 2 - 14 221 205 4 - 21 202 205 7 - 28 271 210 4 - May 5 197 206 4 - 12 199 254 41 - 19 171 244 22 - 26 160 263 38 - June 2 189 276 51 - 9 153 275 64 - 16 145 325 86 - 23 149 257 65 - 30 141 273 82 - July 7 152 265 64 - 14 142 298 86 - 21 146 350 108 - 28 183 365 136 - Aug. 4 152 394 181 - 11 166 465 244 - 18 167 546 284 - 25 161 690 380 - Sept. 1 163 835 536 - 8 153 921 567 - 15 166 1106 728 - 22 172 1018 645 - 29 168 1211 796 - Oct. 6 170 1195 790 - 13 164 1117 682 - 20 174 855 476 - 27 133 779 404 - Nov. 3 153 1156 755 - 10 164 966 635 - 17 143 827 512 - 24 162 747 408 - Dec. 1 168 550 290 - 8 175 335 143 - 15 134 324 79 - ----- ------ ------ - 9,522 23,359 10,400 - -The parishes chiefly affected were the same as in 1625 and 1603. Stepney -is still wanting from the general bill; but after 1636 it was included -therein, along with Newington, Lambeth, Westminster, Islington and -Hackney. These omitted parishes doubtless contributed largely, Stepney in -particular, so that the total of plague-deaths would have to be increased -by perhaps two thousand. The following parishes had the severest -mortalities: - - Total Plague-deaths - deaths - - St Giles's, Cripplegate 2374 870 - St Mary's, Whitechapel 1766 1060 - St Olave's, Southwark 1537 847 - St Botolph's, Aldgate 1506 735 - St Sepulchre's, Newgate 1327 566 - St Saviour's, Southwark 1269 742 - St Botolph's, Bishopsgate 1239 515 - St George's, Southwark 1044 514 - St Andrew's, Holborn 922 419 - St Giles's in the Fields 863 428 - -Like the greater plagues of 1603 and 1625, that of 1636 appears to have -begun in the suburbs[1053]. Taylor, the Water-poet, in reprinting his poem -on the plague of 1625, with some notes for 1636, says that of 1076 -plague-deaths from April 7 to July 28 (the summation in the annual bill -comes to 864), only 40 had occurred within the walls, so that the general -infection of the City must have followed that of the Liberties and -out-parishes. As early in the epidemic as 31 May, according to a record of -the Middlesex Sessions, "the plague increases most at Stepney," wherefore -the Greengoose Fair at Stratford was prohibited, (the parish of Stepney -extending as far as Shoreditch)[1054]. From Taylor we learn that Gravesend -and Faversham had calamitous visitations, and that the infection was in -many other towns and villages. - -The epidemic of 1636 was like the plague of 1625 in having been preceded -by much typhus fever in London, and accompanied by the same, as many as -2360 deaths being put down to fever in the plague-year in the classified -causes of death now issued regularly (since 1629) in their printed bills -by the Parish Clerks' Hall. The letters and state papers of the time bear -witness to the usual exodus from the City, the movements of the Court, and -personal incidents, which have no farther interest after the samples given -for 1625. One incident relating to the worst week of the plague in London -in 1636 is preserved: eleven persons were committed to Newgate on 5 -October for going with one Samuel Underhill, a trumpeter, who died of the -plague, to his grave with trumpets and swords drawn in the night time in -Shoreditch[1055]. The profession still makes no appearance in the way of -epidemiological writing; but some "necessary directions" were drawn up by -the College of Physicians, in substance the same as certain statutes -issued on the alarm of plague in 1630[1056]. - -Next year, 1637, the plague continued in London, causing 3082 deaths out -of a total of 11,763 in the bills. In 1638 there were only 363 -plague-deaths, but the total mortality was 13,624, or nearly 2000 more -than in the previous year, when plague alone had claimed its 3000. What -were the epidemic types of disease that caused the high mortality in 1638? - - -Fever in London. - -There ought to have been no difficulty in answering the question. The -causes of death in the metropolis had been assigned in the books kept at -Parish Clerks' Hall since 1604, and had been printed since 1629. The -printed series was in the hands of Graunt, from 1629 down to the date of -his writing, January 1662; and he did abstract the deaths under each head -of disease and casualty from 1629 to 1636 inclusive, and again from 1647 -to 1661; but the ten years from 1637 to 1646 inclusive, he omitted as -presenting nothing of importance and as being "inconsistent with the -capacity" of his sheet of paper[1057]. All the original documents prior to -1658 appear to have been lost in the fire of 1666, so that Graunt's -omission cannot now be made good. One could wish that the worthy citizen -had made no difficulty about the size of his paper. The omitted years are -not only those of great political revolution, which may have had an effect -upon the public health, but they are of special interest for the beginning -of that great period of fever and smallpox in London which continued all -through the 18th century. - -The following section of London mortality, down to the end of our present -period, will show, by reference to the total deaths, how important the -omitted years are for the epidemiological history. - - Year Plague Fever Smallpox Total - deaths - - 1629 0 956 72 8771 - 1630 1317 1091 40 10554 - 31 274 1115 58 8562 - 32 8 1108 531 9535 - 33 0 953 72 8393 - 34 1 1279 1354 10400 - 35 0 1622 293 10651 - 36 10400 2360 127 23359 - 37 3082 -- -- 11763 - 38 363 -- -- 13624 - 39 314 -- -- 9862 - 1640 1450 -- -- 12771 - 41 1375 -- -- 13142 - 42 1274 -- -- 13273 - 43 996 -- -- 13212 - 44 1492 -- -- 10933 - 45 1871 -- -- 11479 - 46 2365 -- -- 12780 - 47 3597 1260 139 14059 - 48 611 884 401 9894 - 49 67 751 1190 10566 - 1650 15 970 184 8754 - 51 23 1038 525 10827 - 52 16 1212 1279 12569 - 53 6 282 139 10087 - 54 16 1371 832 13247 - 55 9 689 1294 11357 - 56 6 875 823 13921 - 57 4 999 835 12434 - 58 14 1800 409 14993 - 59 36 2303 1523 14756 - 1660 13 2148 354 12681 - 61 20 3490 1246 16665 - 62 12 2601 768 13664 - 63 9 2107 411 12741 - 64 5 2258 1233 15453 - 65 68596 5257 655 97306 - 1666 1998 741 38 12738 - -The year 1638, and the four successive years 1640-43, have exceptional -mortalities, which plague alone can by no means account for. In one of -those years, 1641, we know that smallpox was rife, along with plague, in -the autumn; in the third week of August there were 118 deaths from -smallpox (133 from plague), and in the second week of September 101 from -smallpox (185 from plague), the plague continuing at even higher figures -all through September and October, while smallpox ceases to be mentioned -in the letters of the time[1058]. According to earlier and later -experience, the epidemic of smallpox would have been followed by a quiet -interval of that disease; so that the high mortality, beyond what plague -could account for, would have been due to some other epidemic type. There -is little doubt that that type was fever, less heard of in letters of the -society people because it was, in its steady prevalence from year to year, -an infection of the crowded quarters of the poor. - -We begin about this period to find fever, or typhus fever, taking that -place in the medical history of England which it continued to hold down to -the generation before our own. What remains of the history of plague until -its extinction in 1665-66, is so closely interwoven with the history of -malignant fever, that it will be more convenient to carry the latter on -side by side with it instead of in a separate chapter. - -The first medical essay upon the malignant fever which got the name of -typhus at the beginning of the 19th century, was that of a physician, Sir -Edward Greaves, published at Oxford in 1643 in connexion with the sickness -in that city while the king and the Royalist army lay there, and with the -sickness in the Parliamentary army of the earl of Essex which lay at -Reading. Greaves describes the unmistakable characters of spotted fever or -typhus, and calls it, in his title "_Morbus Epidemicus Anni 1643_, or the -New Disease." In his text he speaks of "this so frequently termed the New -Disease." The name of "New Disease" was used also for influenza; but there -can be no doubt that typhus did become common in England during the Civil -Wars, between the Royalists and the Parliamentarians, which were the first -and also the only sieges and campaigns on English soil that really touched -the life of the nation. - -The continent of Europe had been familiar with the same type of fever ever -since the beginning of the 16th century, now in Italy, now in Spain, -another time in the Low Countries, or in Hungary, or in Germany in the -Thirty Years' War. Greaves, our first writer on epidemic typhus, had been -preceded a whole century by Fracastori, whose description of the fever at -Verona in 1505 is perhaps the first account of epidemic sickness free from -subservience to ancient or medieval authority, and based upon direct -observations made in modern Europe. At the same time typhus or spotted -fever was not new to England in 1643. There is always the difficulty -whether some epidemics of fever should be called influenza or typhus; but -the fever of the Black Assizes, as well as the standing "sickness of the -house," was certainly typhus, and so probably was the "new disease" in -1612. - -The history of fever in England has been partly traced in the chapter on -gaol-fevers in the Tudor period and on the Protean "hot agues," "new -sickness," "strange fevers" or influenzas of 1540, 1557-8 and 1580. At a -much earlier period, fevers of the same type (with dysenteries, -lienteries, and pestilent sore throats) have been described, with whatever -details there are, in connexion with the periodic famines, especially -since the Conquest. But we are now come to a time in the history when -typhus fevers appeared in the country unconnected with gaols or with -famines. We are come, indeed, to the new era of epidemics, which is -revealed more clearly after the plague was extinguished for good, but was -really concurrent with the last half-century of plague, preparing, as it -were, to succeed the long reign of that infection. The Civil Wars may be -admitted to have given the new types of sickness an impulse, but the wars -did not originate them, nor did they serve in any way to establish them as -the predominant forms of epidemic sickness for nearly two centuries. -Whatever it was in the condition of England that favoured the prevalence -of fevers, fluxes, and smallpox, that factor was beginning to make itself -felt shortly after the Tudor period ended: it continued in operation -through all political changes of Restoration, Revolution, and Georgian -rule; and if the conditions at length changed, largely for the better so -far as the adult population is concerned, and for the better even as -regards infancy, there has followed the "_nova cohors febrium_" of our own -time, appropriate to its own state of society, as was the old troop -before it. This theme is really the subject with which a new volume should -open; but as the plague-period overlaps its successor the fever-period by -half a century, and as one must pay heed to the chronology, it remains to -insert some facts about fevers in this place. - - -Review of Fever in England to 1643. - -Of the prevalence of malignant fevers in England in the earlier years of -the 17th century we have only occasional glimpses. Thus, in London in -November, 1612, there were several deaths of prominent personages. Prince -Henry, eldest son of James I., died of a fever in the course of that -month, the illness being thus referred to by Chamberlain in one of his -letters to Carleton, written on November 12 from London: - - "It is verily thought that the disease was no other than the ordinary - ague that hath reigned and raged almost all over England since the - latter end of summer, which, by observation, is found must have its - ordinary course, and the less physic the better, but only sweating and - an orderly course of keeping and government. The extremity of the - disease seemed to lie in his head [a sure sign of typhus], for remedy - whereof they shaved him and applied warm cocks and pigeons newly - killed, but with no success." - -Sir Theodore Mayerne, the king's physician (who had been driven from Paris -by the intolerance of the Galenists towards those who used antimony and -other Paracelsist remedies), was a good deal blamed because he had purged -the patient instead of bleeding him. - -Writing again on the 19th November, Chamberlain says: "On Friday Sir Harry -Row, our alderman died, and, same morning, Sir George Carey, master of the -wards, of this new disease." Chamberlain's statement that an epidemic -fever, which he calls "the ordinary ague," had raged all over England from -the end of summer, 1612, is supported by Short's abstracts of the parish -registers for that year, while the following year, 1613, stands out as -still more unhealthy. The next unwholesome year in Short's tables is 1616; -and of that sickly time we have one great personal illustration. -Shakespeare died on April 23 at Stratford-on-Avon, after three days' -illness of a fever (but possibly of a chill) having just completed his -52nd year. So far as is known, he was not in failing health. It is a -singular coincidence that he made his will on March 25 preceding, the -first day of the year, old style; but the customary phrase, "in perfect -health and memory (God be praised!)," would have been perhaps varied a -little if illness had been creeping upon him. Now the year 1616 is the -most unhealthy in Short's tables from the beginning of the century; the -parish registers do not bear witness again to so much sickness until 1623, -which, as we have seen, was a year of typhus. The winter of 1615-16 was -altogether exceptional: warm and tempestuous south-westerly and westerly -winds prevailed from November until February; on the 8th February, there -were East Indiamen lying in the Downs, which had been at anchor there for -ten weeks waiting for a change of wind to take them down the Channel. The -warm winds brought "perpetual weeping weather, foul ways and great -floods," and brought also an early spring. In the last week of January the -archbishop found a nest of young blackbirds in his garden at Lambeth, and -had "another sent to him from Croydon about four days after." That was -proverbially the kind of Christmas to make a fat churchyard; but it is -impossible to say whether one type of sickness, such as fever, -predominated, as in the preceding sickly years, 1612-13, and in the next -following 1616, namely 1623-24. The following figures from Short's tables -will prove, at least, that there was excessive mortality. - -In the year 1616, twenty-one parish registers out of eighty-eight -examined, showed excessive mortality, the burials being 601 and the -baptisms 417, the year 1617 showing a somewhat improved state of health. -In the market towns for the same two years, the excessive proportion of -burials to christenings is equally striking: of sixteen town registers -examined, ten showed a bad state of health in 1616 (714 burials to 568 -baptisms), and in 1617, nine towns had 786 burials to 652 baptisms. But -neither in town nor country do the years 1616-17 stand out so unhealthy as -the years 1623-24. Those two biennial periods are the only very -conspicuous ones in Short's list for the first quarter of the 17th -century, the year 1613 coming next in unhealthiness. - -Let us now seek for any causes such as unwholesome conditions of living -upon which these epidemic fevers might have depended. One of the most -notorious forms of typhus in the 18th century was the ship-fever. The -problem how to destroy its infection in the hulls of transports and ships -of war occupied the attention of the men of science, Stephen Hales among -the rest. Parliament, eager for any cure of so disastrous a pest, voted -some thousands of pounds to a projector whose method, when tried, resulted -in nothing but the burning of three ships to the water's edge. This -ship-fever became notorious early in the 17th century, having occurred -before in 1588. If the Elizabethan naval annals in Hakluyt's collection -were less engrossed than they are with adventures and doughty deeds, we -should probably have had more glimpses of an unwholesome state of things -in the 'tween-decks. At all events there is no doubt that fever infested -the shipping of England as well as of France about the year 1625. The -conditions on board ship are, of course, special; there might have been -ship-fever, when there was no gaol-fever, workhouse-fever, or domestic -typhus in general. But what happened on board ship was no bad index of -what was happening on shore. The nation, both on sea and on land, was -expanding far beyond its old medieval limits, with very crude notions of -the elbow-room that it needed. The ideas of cubic space, ventilation, and -the like, with which we are now so familiar, had then no existence. A few -facts about the shipping, gaols and houses will serve to illustrate this -statement. - -The fleet which sailed from Plymouth to make war on Spain in the autumn of -1625 consisted of 90 sail, and carried 10,000 men. Whether there was -overcrowding would depend, of course, on the size of the ships; and it may -be safely said that the largest ship of the fleet was not a fourth part -the size of a transport that would be allowed to carry five hundred men -today. The expedition came back in a few weeks broken by sickness and -mutiny, just as the expedition of Mansfeld for the relief of the -Palatinate had fared. The wretched state of the thirty ships which arrived -at Plymouth in November, 1625, has been mentioned already. At the same -date we read of French ships of war also throwing overboard two or three -dead men every day. There are some more precise figures for French ships -in 1627, to be given in the next chapter, which will enable us to measure -the provocation to ship-fever afforded by the conditions of a transport -service in those years. - -Besides ship-fever, in the great typhus period of the 18th century, there -used to be named gaol-fever, and workhouse-fever. Of the gaol-fever one -hears little in these years. It was severe in the Queen's Bench prison in -Southwark in March, 1579; a petition of that date complains that the -prison held double the usual number, that "the sickness of the house" was -rife, and that near a hundred had died of it there during the previous six -years, many more having been sick[1059]. "The sickness of the house" is a -name suggestive of what was usual. These events of prison life made little -stir unless they involved the health of classes far removed from the -prison-class, as in the three memorable instances of the Black Assizes at -Cambridge, Oxford and Exeter. But it is not certain that even such cases -have been all recorded, or that instances of gaol-fever spreading to those -outside may not have been more frequent than appears. Whitmore in his book -of 1659 on fevers in London and the country, quotes Bacon's remarks upon -the Black Assizes of the Tudor period and adds: "and within this eight or -nine years there happened the like at Southwark, as I am credibly -informed." That would have been in the King's Bench prison some time about -1650, which is not far from the date we have brought the history down -to[1060]. - -The overcrowding of the ships and of the gaols had its counterpart in the -dwelling-houses of London and other towns such as Portsmouth. The -proclamations against the erection of houses on new sites within three -miles of the city gates continued to be issued to the time of Cromwell. -The effect of them was merely to call into existence a class of poor -tenements in odd corners or to overcrowd the existing houses. Thus, on -June 27, 1602: "The council have spied an inconvenient increase of housing -in and about London by building in odd corners, in gardens and over -stables. They have begun to pull down one here and there, lighting in -almost every parish on the unluckiest, which is far from removing the -mischief[1061]." Again, on February 24, 1623, certain inhabitants of -Chancery Lane were indicted at the Middlesex Sessions for subletting, "to -the great danger of infectious disease with plague and other -diseases[1062]." Again, in May, 1637, there were found in one house eleven -married couples and fifteen single persons; in another the householder had -taken in eighteen lodgers[1063]. The monstrous window-tax, which did more -than anything else to breed typhus and perpetuate smallpox, was not -imposed until after the Revolution; but there was enough in the London of -the Stuarts to explain the great increase of those diseases. - -We have already had evidence of the wide prevalence of spotted fever in -1624, even in the houses of the rich. In the harvest of 1625, Mead, of -Cambridge, heard of much sickness which he calls "ague," about Royston and -Barkway, localities by no means malarious; so many were ill that the -people wanted help to gather the harvest out of the fields. The nature of -these "agues" is a question of great difficulty. The intermissions or -remissions of the country fevers are clearly enough asserted by Willis and -others, whatever they were; at the same time the general characters of the -disease, or diseases, are not those of intermittent malarial fever; and -"influenza" does not help us. Chamberlain calls the fever of 1624 "the -spotted fever," and Sir Theodore Mayerne, physician to James I., in a long -opinion upon the king's state of health and the treatment, dated Aug. 20, -1624, introduces a paragraph "Ad Febrem Purpuream," which, he says, was -prevalent that year, "not so much contagious as common through a universal -disposing cause," seizing upon many in the same house, and destroying -numbers, being most full of malignity etc. These various accounts for town -and country point to a form of typhus; and we find that diagnosis -confirmed for the country fevers which were again widely prevalent a few -years later, about 1638. - -Among other statistics in Graunt's essay of 1662 we find the figures from -the register of "a parish in Hampshire" from 1569 to 1658. There were -several years of excessive mortality in that period just as in Short's -tables, but the worst were 1638 and 1639--the years of high mortality (not -plague) in London also. Of that mortality in the Hampshire parish Graunt -has given a brief account, which he seems to have based on first-hand -information. The parish contained about 2700 inhabitants, and enjoyed -average good health during the period of 90 years covered by the figures, -the births exceeding the deaths by twelve on an average in the year. In -the year 1638 the deaths were 156 and the births 66 (about the average); -in 1639 the deaths were 114 and the births 55. The cause of this great -excess of mortality in a country parish was, says Graunt, not plague, "but -a malignant fever raging so fiercely about harvest that there appeared -scarce hands enough to take in the corn; which argues, considering there -were 2700 parishioners, that 7 might be sick for one that died; whereas of -the plague more die than recover. They lay longer sick than is usual in -plague," and there were no plague-tokens. - -This considerable epidemic of fever, which must have affected some -hundreds of people, occurred in a Hampshire parish. In the very same -season (autumn and winter of 1638) we hear of what is obviously the same -sickness being epidemic all over the county of Monmouth. On April 23, -1639, the sheriff of Monmouthshire thus explained his delay in executing -the king's writ for an assessment: "In January last I sent forth my -warrants for the gathering and levying thereof, but there has been such a -general sickness over all this country, called 'the new disease,' that -they could not possibly be expedited.... Besides, the plague was very hot -in divers parts of the county, as Caerleon, Abergavenny, Bedwelty, and -many other places[1064]." Here the sheriff uses the same name as Greaves -put on his title-page five years after, and he distinguishes clearly -between the fever and the plague. The mayor and others of Northampton, in -a memorial to the Recorder, dated May 1, 1638, touching the exclusion of -Northampton tradesmen from fairs in the vicinity owing to suspicions of -the plague in their town, had been informed by the physicians that some -cases were of the plague, and some of "the spotted fever[1065]." The same -distinction had been made at Norwich, in 1636: in October there was a -suspicion of the plague, "but the physicians say it is some other -contagious disease which die with the spots[1066]." At Northampton, the -coexistence of plague and some other sickness is asserted also by the -sheriff (Sept. 18, 1638), who had to excuse himself, like so many other -sheriffs, for his failure to remit the ship-money: he himself and his -servants had had sickness, and the plague was so great and so long in -Northampton that the county still allowed L148 a week for relief of the -sick. The deaths in that epidemic from March to September were 533[1067]. -The sheriff of Montgomery, making a like excuse on October 25, 1638, -speaks of the plague only: "It pleased God to visit a great part of the -county with the plague, and three of the greatest towns, Machynlleth, -Llanidloes and Newton[1068]." The sheriff of Radnorshire, in his excuse to -the Privy Council, on November 14, says he could not collect the -ship-money at Presteign "by reason of the plague, which continued there -for two years together, and did not cease until the latter end of April -last[1069]." We may take it, then, that there was a great deal of plague -in Wales about 1637 and 1638, that there was also "the new disease," or -spotted fever, all over Monmouth and probably other Welsh counties, that -the same two forms coexisted at Norwich and Northampton, just as they -coexisted in London, and that Graunt's parish in Hampshire in 1638 had -probably the fever only. - -Short's statistical tables again bear out the concrete history. In 1638, -nineteen country parishes, out of ninety-four examined, had 699 burials to -542 baptisms, and in 1639, eighteen parishes had 585 burials to 386 -baptisms. In the market towns the unhealthy period (which may have been -due to plague in great part) is a year earlier. In 1637, ten towns out of -twenty-four whose registers were added up, show 1474 burials to 1008 -baptisms, the proportion in 1638 for the same number of unhealthy towns -being 1438 to 1025. - -It would have been one of the country epidemics of those years that -Boghurst brings into his account of the plague of London in 1665: "I was -told by an ancient woman that in Somersetshire the spotted fever was very -epidemical, so that whole families died; but being told that plantan -[plantain] was very good, all of them almost took it, which wrought an -admirable change, for very few died that took it, whereas before they died -very fast." He thinks plantain was as likely to have effected a cure as -"higher priced medicines." We shall find a corresponding prevalence of -fever described by a competent physician, Whitmore, for rural parts of -Cheshire and Shropshire in 1651 and 1658. Thus we have a remarkable -epidemiological phenomenon, somewhat new to England unless, indeed, we -bring all those spotted fevers and the like under the generic name of -influenza. It was in country districts in 1612-13 and from 1623 to 1625, -it was extensively prevalent in 1638 in places as far apart as Hampshire, -Monmouth and Northampton, it appeared in Berkshire and Oxfordshire in 1643 -in connexion with the military movements of the Royalist and Parliamentary -armies, it caused a disastrous loss of life in Tiverton within a few weeks -of Essex's army passing through the town in 1644; it is heard of again in -Shropshire and Cumberland in 1651-52, and in the same parts in 1658, as -well as in Somerset, and in London steadily from year to year. - -It was in its steadiness from year to year in the poor quarters of towns, -as well as in its more frequent recurrences as a country epidemic, that -the spotted fever deserved the name of "new disease" in the reign of -Charles I. But more than one epidemic fever had been called a "new -disease" in England before; and no fewer than five epidemics were so -called from 1643 to 1685, of which only one or two can be classed among -the influenzas. - -If it had been possible to keep in mind the history of sicknesses from -century to century or even from generation to generation, the "new -disease" might have been recognised as not unlike the type that overran -England in 1087, that was described by William of Newburgh in 1196, by -Matthew Paris in 1258, and by Trokelowe in 1315-16. The conditions -producing it or favouring it were not, indeed, the same in all particulars -in the medieval period, in the Tudor period, and in the Stuart period. In -the medieval period, the extreme want and misery which brought epidemic -sickness were due to occasional sharp famines at long intervals, from -failure of the crops. In the Tudor period epidemics were still so -occasional (so far as is known) that something more special will have to -be blamed for them than the swarms of vagrants and criminals all over -England, which made the reign of Henry VIII. notorious, and were still a -source of trouble until late in the reign of Elizabeth; the four chief -periods were in 1540, 1557-8, 1580-82, and 1596-97 so that some special -cause would have to be assumed in those years to account for their -peculiar "epidemic constitution." Almost from the beginning of the Stuart -period, the seasons of fever (to say nothing of flux and smallpox), seem -to come in quicker succession; they are heard of in 1612-13, 1623-25, -1638, 1643-44, 1651, 1658-9, and 1661-65, and heard of in those years over -wide tracts of rural England as well as in London and other towns. It was -from such experiences that the doctrine arose, so unintelligible to us -now, of an "epidemic constitution of the air," which may be traced, -indeed, to much earlier writings than those of the 17th century, but finds -its most frequent applications in the latter. The fevers were in part -contagious and not contagious; contagion could not explain them all, and -yet there was an undoubted infective element in them. The universality or -generality of their incidence was accounted for by assuming, on the one -hand, something common in the state of the air and, on the other hand, -some common predisposition in the bodies of men, which might itself have -had seasonal causes. We have now only one name for such common infection -of the air, namely influenza; and it is significant that the catarrhal -influenzas of 1658 and 1659 were regarded by some at the time as only the -appropriate vernal form of the fever which in the hot weather of 1657 and -1658 had prevailed almost in the same general way as influenza, but with -the symptoms of typhus. One thing which should not be overlooked, is that -plague was still in the country, not always at the same time as the fever, -and perhaps not usually coincident with it. Another thing, which will come -out in its due order at a later part of the history, is that after the -extinction of plague, fever became far more steady in the towns from year -to year, and in certain years was not less prevalent in influenza-like -epidemics all over the country. One might offer some suggestions as to the -meaning of these epidemiological phenomena; but it will perhaps be more -convenient that critics who have a speculative turn or a craving for -generalities should exercise the one or gratify the other at their own -risk. - -Along with the prevalence of plague in 1637-38 in many towns of Wales, we -may associate the outbreak of 1638 in Gloucester on the one side and in -the small Salopian town of Clun on the other. From a letter of the Privy -Council to the justices of Gloucestershire, it appears that a rate in aid -of the plague-stricken in the city had been imposed upon the county in -December, 1637, and that the infection still continued in Gloucester in -September, 1638. Contributions made in Bridgenorth for the relief of the -visited in Clun appear to belong to the same year. At Reading a tax for -the "visited" had been collected once or oftener between 1638 and 1641. In -1641 the town of Leicester was put to some expense (L46. 8_s._ 7_d._) in -watching to keep out the sickness which prevailed in Thurmaston, Birstal, -Whetstone and Oakham. The very severe plague in Stamford the same year -would have been the most intense part of the epidemic in that corner of -England; "Camden," quoting from bishop Sanderson's manuscript, says that -it began at St James's tide, 1641, and ended in March following, whereof -are said to have died between 500 and 600 persons[1070]. - -Another centre of plague in 1641 was Congleton, in Cheshire, if we may -trust the accuracy of the date given in a manuscript written some time -after and seemingly based upon tradition[1071]. The infection was traced -to a box of clothes which had belonged to one dead of the plague in London -and were sent to the dead man's relations at North Rede Hall. The family -who received the box "caught the infection and died." It spread "all over -the country," and came to Congleton, where it made dreadful ravages. The -traditions which the anonymous narrator has put on record are, indeed, -those of a plague of the greater degree--stories of corpses that no one -would bury, of the sick left to their fate, of money dropped into water -before it changed hands. This somewhat doubtful narrative ends with the -statement that "the greatest part of the inhabitants died." - -The period from 1643 to 1650 contains all the outbreaks of plague that -remain, whether in London or the provinces, until we come to the final -explosion of 1665. In London the plague continued at a low endemic level -from the outburst of 1636 until 1648, the deaths in 1647 reaching the -considerable figure of 3597. This series of plague-years has no other -interest than as showing how regularly every season the infection -increased from a few cases in May or June to a maximum in September or -October. One incident, out of many, may find a place. In August, 1647, Sir -Philip Stapleton, one of the Eleven Members, leaders of the Presbyterian -party, who were accused of treason by the Army, went over to Calais with -five more of the accused, and died of the plague almost as soon as he -landed. The people of the house where he died made the rest of the party -pay them L80 before they would let them come forth, for bringing the -sickness into their house[1072]. - -The plagues in provincial towns were in those years much more serious -relatively than those in London. All of them occurred in towns that were -besieged, or had been besieged, or had been occupied by bodies of troops -or by garrisons. At the same time most of them were towns which had -suffered plagues before. But the first effects of the war in the way of -epidemic sickness were not of the type of plague. - - -War-typhus in Oxfordshire and Berkshire. - -It was in the spring and summer of 1643 that England had a first -experience of the war-typhus which had been familiar to the continent of -Europe for a century and a half, having reached perhaps its greatest -prevalence in the Thirty Years' War. It is only in the sense of war-typhus -that Shakespeare's boast, put into the mouth of John of Gaunt, holds good: - - "This fortress, built by nature for herself, - Against infection and the hand of war." - -The medieval civil wars in England do not seem to have bred infection -among the people, unless, perhaps, during the anarchy of Stephen's reign: -there is reason to think that the faction-fights of York and Lancaster had -no such result. But the wars of the Parliament against the Royalists -produced war-sickness in its most characteristic form, and that too, at -the very beginning of the struggle. - -The existence of sickness in 1643 among the troops of the Parliament in -Berkshire and Oxfordshire, under the earl of Essex, is briefly stated by -Rushworth. But, for the first time in the history, we find a medical -account of the type of sickness, of its circumstances, and of the extent -of its prevalence, which is not without interest even for the military -history. It happened that the afterwards celebrated Dr Thomas Willis, -chemist, anatomist, physiologist and physician, was at Christ Church, -Oxford, in 1643, being then aged twenty-one, and intending to enter the -Church. In 1659 he published at the Hague his first medical essays, one on -Fermentation and the other on Fevers[1073]; and in the latter he recalls -many particulars of what he had seen in his earlier years in and around -Oxford. The sickness of 1643 was also the subject of a tract published -that year in Oxford, by his majesty's command, by Sir Edward Greaves, -physician to the king, which appears to have been in sufficient request in -the town to be reprinted within the year[1074]. - -The preceding events may be briefly summarized[1075]. In November, 1642, -the king moved from Oxford with his army towards London and seized -Brentford. The forces of the Parliament, under Essex, concentrated round -the capital, where they were joined by the trainbands of the City, so that -the king recrossed the Thames at Kingston and retired upon Reading and -Oxford. All through the months from January to April 1643, tedious -negociations went on for a treaty, the details largely relating to the -places to be occupied by the Parliamentary troops on the one hand (around -Windsor) and by the Royalist troops on the other (in Oxfordshire and -Bucks). In April the negociations fell through, and Essex came before -Reading on the 15th, with an army of 15,000 foot and 3000 horse. The king -and prince Rupert attempted to raise the siege by a march from Oxford, but -were stopped at Caversham bridge, and on the 26th April, Reading was -surrendered to the Lord General, the garrison marching out the day after. - -The siege had lasted only eleven days; the Royalist commandant was -sentenced to death at Oxford for betraying the town, but was pardoned. -When Essex entered Reading he found the place "infected," and a great -mortality ensued among his men, who were discontented at the want of -plunder and of pay. In June he moved his troops across the chalk downs to -Thame, on the borders of Bucks; but the weather being wet and unseasonable -in the early summer, and afterwards hot, the sickness so increased among -them that "he judged the design upon Oxford impracticable" (Rushworth), -and on July 9, wrote to the Parliament advising a peace. In his letter, -Essex explained that it was impossible to keep the counties from being -plundered, "so that they must suffer much wrong, and the cries of the -people are infinite." Eventually he brought what remained of his army to -the neighbourhood of London, and having received 2000 recruits from the -City, he held a muster on Hounslow Heath, when his whole force amounted to -10,000 men. With his recruited army he marched to the relief of -Gloucester[1076], raised the siege, and on September 20 won the (first) -battle of Newbury. - -The realities of that inactive summer at Reading and Thame may be -conceived from what Willis tells us of the state of things within the -Royalist lines in Oxfordshire. These things, he says, "fell under our own -observation," he being then at Christ Church and not yet entered on the -physic line. - -In the spring of 1643, Reading being held for the king, - - "In both armies there began a disease to arise very epidemical; - however they persisting in that work till the besieged were forced to - a surrender, this disease grew so grievous that in a short time after, - either side left off and from that time for many months fought not - with the enemy, but with the disease; as if there had not been leisure - to turn aside to another kind of death.... - - Essex's camp moving to Thame, pitched in the places adjacent, where he - shortly lost a great part of his men. - - But the king returned to Oxford, where at first the soldiers, being - disposed in the open fields, then afterwards among the towns and - villages, suffered not much less. For his foot (which it chiefly - invaded) being pact together in close houses, when they had filled all - things with filthiness and unwholesome nastiness and stinking odours - (that the very air seemed to be infected) they fell sick by troops, - and as it were by squadrons. At length the fever, now more than a camp - fever, invaded the unarmed and peaceable troops, to wit, the - entertainers of the soldiers, and, generally, all others: yet at first - (the disease being but yet lightly inflicted) though beset with a - heavy and long languishment, however, many escaped. About the summer - solstice this fever began also to increase with worse provision of - symptoms, and to lay hold on the husbandmen and others inhabiting the - country, then afterwards spread through our city and all the country - round for at least ten miles about. In the mean time they who dwelt - far from us in other counties remained free from hurt, being as it - were without the sphere of the contagion. But here this disease became - so epidemical that a great part of the people was killed by it; and - as soon as it had entered a house it ran through the same, that there - was scarce one left well to administer to the sick. Strangers, or such - as were sent to help the sick, were presently taken with the disease; - that at length for fear of the contagion, those who were sick of this - fever were avoided by those who were well, almost as much as if they - had been sick of the plague. - - Nor indeed did there a less mortality or slaughter of men accompany - this disease; because cachectic and phthisical old men, or other ways - unhealthful, were killed by it; also not a few children, young men, - and those of a more mature and robust age. I remember in some villages - that almost all the old men died this year, that there were scarce any - left who were able to defend the manners and privileges of the parish - by the more anciently received traditions[1077]." - -Willis recalls how this epidemic disease changed its type as the season -wore on. At first it was a "putrid synochus," which seemed to be helped by -a sweat or a looseness; a relapse or renewal followed the crisis. Later, -it became a continual fever of six or seven days, with no crisis; when the -fever ceased the sick kept their beds, sometimes raging, more often in a -stupor, great weakness continuing, and sometimes convulsions ensuing. -About midsummer "the disease betrayed its malignancy by the eruption of -whelks and spots." It would often begin with an insidious languishing, the -strength being totally withdrawn. At length buboes appeared in many, as in -the plague. At this time, during the dog-days, the disease began to be -handled, not as a fever, but as a lesser plague--by vomits, purges, and -sudorifics. The autumn coming on, the disease by degrees remitted its -wonted fierceness, so that fewer grew sick of it, and of them many grew -well. At the approach of winter the fever almost wholly vanished, and -health was fully restored to Oxford and the country round about. Among the -victims are mentioned "some belonging to the king's and queen's Court, -with a few scholars[1078]." - -Of the causes, Willis says that, so far as concerned the army, the evident -causes were "errors in the six non-naturals." The spring was very moist -and "flabbery," with almost continual showers, to which a hot summer -succeeded. The tract upon the Oxford fever by Greaves, a short piece of -some 25 pages, which was written for use in the city during the epidemic, -bears out the account by Willis, without developing the doctrine of -increasing malignancy. He is concerned to prove that it was not the plague -"as the relations and hopes of your enemies, and the fears of others, have -suggested." One of his proofs is the insidious mode of invasion, which -Willis ascribes to the sickness in its later type--great weakness without -any manifest cause appearing, such as sweating or looseness, so that even -strong men were prostrated, with a quick, weak and creeping pulse, -sometimes intermittent, with pains in the head, vertigo &c. The most -distinctive thing was the spots; "But what need we any farther signs than -the spots, which appear upon half the number, at least, of those that fall -sick?" Greaves seems to claim that Oxford had some immunity for a time: -"God hath been most merciful to this city in sparing us heretofore, when -our neighbours round about us were visited." - -Among the causes, he mentions putrid exhalations from stinking matters, -dung, carcasses of dead horses and other carrion; "and were there care -taken for the removing of these noisome inconveniences, and keeping the -streets sweet and clean, it would doubtless tend much to the abatement of -the disease." The diet, also, may have had something to do with it; more -particularly the brewers should dry their malt better, boil their beer -longer, and put in a sufficiency of hops. But the great cause was the -presence of the army. - - "We need not look far for a cause where there is an army residing, - which the Athenians called to mind in their calamity, or as Homer - speaks of his Greeks: - - [Greek: ei de homou polemos te dama kai loimos Achaious.] - - --it being seldom or never known that an army, where there is much - filth and nastiness in diet, worse lodging, unshifted apparel, etc., - should continue long without contagious disease." Whole families were - infected, "and seldom in any house where sick soldiers of either side - are quartered, but the inhabitants likewise fall sick of the same - disease." - -There appears to have been the almost inevitable doubt in some minds, -whether the disease were contagious: "But if anyone be yet obstinate, and -will not believe it contagious, let him go near and try." Among the -remedies, he mentions a favourite one of the empiric sort, "Lady Kent's -powder," which Willis also refers to; but Greaves, as became an academical -physician, would not admit that it had any advantage over medicines of -known ingredients. - -This widespread epidemic of typhus, perhaps not without some relapsing -fever, and, according to what Willis says in one of his general chapters, -complicated, in its diffusive form in the villages around, "with squinancy -[sore throat], dysentery, or deadly sweat," is the only one medically -recorded of the Civil Wars. But there was certainly a renewal of it, in -the same circumstances, next year at Tiverton; and it seems probable, from -the heavy mortality which the parish registers witness to in that year -(1644) that some kind of epidemic sickness had spread far and near. Thus, -in Short's abstracts of the burials and christenings in country parishes -and market towns, the years 1643 and 1644, and especially the latter, -stand out as the most unhealthy for a long time before and after, the next -sickly period, as we shall see, being the years 1657-1659. In the year -1643, out of eighty-eight country registers examined, twenty-nine showed a -sickly death-rate, although the disproportion of births to deaths does not -appear great (821 to 847). That was the year of the epidemic fever in -Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Bucks. Next year, which was the year of the -Tiverton epidemic, there are again twenty-nine country registers -indicating unusual sickness (715 baptisms to 938 burials). In nineteen out -of twenty-four market towns, the same two years come out still more -unhealthy (844 births to 1193 deaths in 1643 and 1008 births to 1647 -deaths in 1644). The registers examined by Short were mostly from Northern -and Midland parishes; but they included two or three from Devonshire, and -among his market towns was Tiverton. We shall now see what these bald -figures mean in that concrete instance. - - -War-typhus at Tiverton in 1644. - -Tiverton was then a town of some 8000 inhabitants, mostly occupied in the -weaving industry. On July 5, 1644, Essex arrived with his army on his way -to Cornwall to subdue prince Maurice, and lay there till the 18th. The -diary of one farmer Roberts has an entry that Mr Thomas Lawrence, who came -from Tiverton, reported to him that the earl had 350 and odd carriages, -and of horse belonging thereto for draught 2000[1079]. This would have -been his large artillery train, baggage and ammunition waggons, etc. His -infantry would be some 6000, and his cavalry perhaps 1000. The king's -force meanwhile advanced after Essex, and on July 25 lay in the great -meadow at Crediton. They had advanced by Yeovil and may or may not have -passed through Tiverton. The two armies came to blows in Cornwall, a -prolonged series of encounters in the country around Lostwithiel in wet -August weather ending in the escape of Essex to the coast, the retreat of -his cavalry through the Royalist lines, and the surrender of the infantry -on 1st September. The disarmed foot-soldiers were convoyed back to Poole -and Wareham, and did not trouble Tiverton again. The retreating cavalry -passed that way, but did not enter the town, which was now held by the -Royalists. But the king's army came back by the way of Tiverton, which -they reached on Saturday, the 21st September. They had got no farther than -Chard on the 30th, and may have halted in Tiverton some days. A Royalist -garrison of 200 men was left in it, and held the place until October 1645, -when it was taken by Fairfax after a short siege[1080]. - -Tiverton was thus occupied by both armies in the summer and autumn of -1644, that of Essex having been quartered in and around the town for a -fortnight in July. A serious epidemic followed, especially in the suburb -on the western side of the Exe. The particulars of it are in the parish -register, from which it would appear that the sickness began in August and -lasted until November. The greatest mortality was in October, when 105 -were buried, the whole mortality of the year having been 443. The ordinary -monthly burials would hardly have exceeded a dozen or fifteen; and as the -105 burials in October would have meant some eight or ten times as many -sick, it is not surprising to read that the town was desolate, and that -grass grew in the streets[1081]. Of this epidemic there are no medical -particulars; but it appears from the parish register that it was known as -"the sweating sickness." It would hardly have been so called if sweating -had not been a prominent symptom. Besides the English sweat proper, with -its five epidemics from 1485 to 1551, we have had occasion to notice a -sweating type in several epidemics of fever. That symptom was so marked in -the epidemic of 1558 at Southampton, Portsmouth, and Isle of Wight when -they were full of troops, that Dr John Jones, who had personal experience -of it, compares it to the sweat proper. It was a sufficiently prominent -symptom in the Oxford gaol-fever of 1577 for the _sudor Anglicus_ to be -called to mind. In the English fevers and influenzas of 1580-82, a sweat -or a lask is mentioned by Cogan as a least occasional; but the fevers of -the same years on the Continent had so often the sweating character that -it was sometimes said the English sweat had come back. Lastly for the -war-fevers of 1643 around Reading and Oxford, Willis asserts in more than -one place the occurrence of sweats, critical or giving relief for a time -in the milder form, "deadly sweats" in fevers of an aggravated type. To -anticipate somewhat, it may be mentioned also that a sweating character is -recorded of some cases of the perennial London typhus at its worst period -in the middle of the 18th century. - -Admitting all these facts, we must still hold to the opinion expressed in -the chapter on the Sweating Sickness, that sweating was never again the -_signum pathognomicum_ of a whole epidemic, as it had been of the sudor -Anglicus in its five outbursts. But if there be gradations of type, or -approximations of typhus to sweating sickness (as well as to influenza), -then we may perhaps take the Tiverton epidemic as coming nearer than any -other to the sweating sickness, on the strength of the name given to it in -the parish register. - -Nothing is known of sickness in the army of Essex, which lay at Tiverton -from 5th to 18th July, 1644. It suffered much in the fighting in Cornwall, -and the Parliament on 7 September sent to Portsmouth arms for 6000 foot -and 6000 suits of clothes and shirts for the infantry who had surrendered -and been convoyed back along the coast. The king's troops which occupied -Tiverton on 21 September on their way back, had doubtless suffered also, -from the campaigning in wet fields and miry ways, and are known to have -been discontented for want of pay. Probably the epidemic at Tiverton was -due to aggravation of the usual circumstances of war. It must be classed -as a form of typhus; while its distinctive character of sweating might -find an explanation, on the analogy of the sweat of 1485 in London after -the arrival of Henry VII. from Bosworth Field, if we had sufficient reason -to suppose that the soldiers who successively occupied Tiverton were not -themselves suffering from fever. Contact alone, especially the contact _en -masse_ of men reduced by hardships and disorderly in their habits, will -sometimes serve to breed contagion among a population unlike them in these -respects. The converse of that principle, namely that contagion need not -follow from the introduction of developed sickness _en masse_, finds an -illustration in the case of Tiverton itself within little more than a year -after the epidemic of 1644. In November, 1645, Fairfax lay at Ottery St -Mary with his army, pending the investment of Exeter. On account of much -sickness and heavy mortality among his infantry (not medically described) -he removed them on December 2, to Crediton and ultimately to Tiverton, -which was supposed to be a healthier situation and became his -head-quarters until January 8, 1646[1082]. But no outbreak in the town is -mentioned, and almost certainly none occurred; the health of the place -continued to be good every year of the time that it was under the rule of -the Parliament, as the parish register proves. On the other hand Totness, -which was occupied by the same convalescent force after it left Tiverton, -had a severe epidemic of plague in the end of the year, 1646. - - -Plague in the Provinces during the Civil Wars. - -The type of sickness, after the first two years of the war, does not -appear to have been typhus-fever, but always the old bubo-plague of the -towns. So far as the history is known, the experience of war-sicknesses -upon English soil began in 1643 and ended in 1644, except in the instance -of Fairfax's troops at Ottery St Mary in November, 1645. - -Perhaps the "new model" of the Parliamentary forces, after the pattern of -Cromwell's Ironsides, may have had something to do with the immunity of -England from war-typhus in all the marchings and counter-marchings, -battles, occupations and sieges, from 1645 to the end of the Civil Wars. -Cromwell pointed out to Hampden that the army of Essex was composed of "a -set of poor tapsters and town-apprentices," and gave it as his opinion -that these were not the men to win with. When the original commanders, -Essex, Manchester, Sir W. Waller, and others, had retired in 1645, terms -of the self-denying ordinance, the army of the Parliament acquired a new -character under Fairfax and Cromwell: it contained a large proportion of -"men of religion," especially among the officers; and there is sufficient -evidence that the war was in future carried on so as to produce as few as -possible of those effects of campaigning among the people at large which -had marked the Thirty Years' War in Germany and had attended the -operations of Essex and the Royalists in 1643 and 1644. - -What remains to be said of the epidemics of the Civil Wars relates almost -exclusively to plague, with an occasional reference to the spotted fever -which was widely prevalent in the autumn of 1644. These epidemics of -plague in the English provinces, during the political troubles, more -numerous than usual from 1644 to 1650, are the last on English soil until -we come to the final grand explosion of 1665-66. - -In 1644 there were two principal centres of plague (besides London), -namely Banbury, and the valley of the Tyne. Banbury was near enough to the -Royalist head-quarters to have shared in the fever-epidemic of 1643; in -that year the burials of 58 soldiers are entered in the parish register, -besides a large excess of burials among the civil population (total of 225 -deaths in the year as against an annual mortality in former years ranging -from 30 to 98). The siege by the Parliamentary forces did not begin until -July 19, 1644, and ended in the surrender of the castle in October. The -epidemic of plague may have begun as early as January, a soldier having -"died in the street" on the 16th; but it is not until March 1644, that -plague-deaths appear in the register. In that month there were 10 deaths -from plague, in April 34, and so until November, when there were 2, the -total mortality from plague having been 161. After the plague ceased, the -town remained otherwise unhealthy until 1647[1083]. - -The information as to Newcastle and Tyneside comes from the observant -Scotsman, William Lithgow, who was with the Presbyterian army when -Newcastle was stormed on October 20, 1644[1084]. The town had suffered -heavily from plague, as we have seen, in 1636, and there had been a -slighter outbreak in 1642. Although the state of things during the siege -in 1644 was wretched in the extreme, there does not appear to have been -plague until after the surrender. The infection was already at work, -however, in places near. Thus Tynemouth Castle was surrendered by the -Royalist commander, Sir Thomas Riddell on October 27: "The pestilence -having been five weeks amongst them, with a great mortality, they were -glad to yield, and to scatter themselves abroad; but to the great undoing -and infecting of the country about, as it hath contagiously begun" -(Lithgow). Among the places infected were Gateshead, Sandgate, Sunderland, -and many country villages, the plague being reported in Newcastle itself -in 1645 as well as in Darlington[1085]. - -The year 1645 was one of severe plague in several towns at the same time, -some of them in a state of siege and all of them occupied by troops. The -largest mortality was at Bristol, being proportionate to its size. The -town was taken by prince Rupert on July 22, 1643, and was held by a strong -garrison for two years and some weeks. It was towards the end of the -Royalist occupation that the plague broke out, probably in the spring of -1645[1086]. On the 16th May, Sir John Culpepper wrote to Lord Digby: "The -sickness increases fearfully in this city. There died this week according -to the proportion of 1500 in London[1087]." When it had been stormed by -Fairfax and Cromwell in September 1645, it was found that prince Rupert's -garrison consisted of 2500 foot, and about 1000 horse. The auxiliaries and -the trained bands of the town were reduced in June to about 800, and of -the 2500 families then remaining in the town, 1500 were in a state of -indigence and want[1088]. In Cromwell's despatch of September 14 to Mr -Speaker Lenthall he says: "I hear but of one man that hath died of the -plague in all our army, although we have quartered amongst and in the -midst of infected persons and places[1089]." The deaths from plague in the -whole epidemic approached 3000, according to the MS. calendars[1090]. - -While this was going on within the walls of Bristol, an epidemic of plague -more severe for the size of the town was progressing at Leeds. The town -had been taken by Fairfax on January 23, 1643, and had remained in the -quiet possession of the Parliament, under a military governor. In August, -1644, there were buried 131 persons, "before the plague was perceived," -says the parish register; which means that the excessive mortality was not -from plague, but probably from the spotted fever which reigned that autumn -in other places in the North. The plague proper began with a death in -Vicar-lane on March 11, 1645. The weekly bills of mortality which were -ordered by the military governor showed a total mortality, from March 11 -to December 25, of 1325. It raged most in Vicar-lane and the close yards -adjoining; it was also very prevalent in March-lane, the Calls, Call-lane, -Lower Briggate, and Mill-hill. The largest number of burials in a week -(126) was from July 24 to 31; the mortality kept high all through August -and September (60 to 80 weekly), and declined gradually to 3 in the week -ending Christmas-day. Whitaker estimates that probably the fifth part of -the population died, and he cannot discover any person of name among the -victims. The air was so warm and infectious that dogs, cats, mice and rats -are said to have died (of rats and mice it can well be believed), and that -several birds dropped down dead in their flight over the town[1091]. This -appears to have been the only visitation of plague in Leeds, at least -since the medieval period. - -The plague of Lichfield in 1645-46, like that of Bristol, went on during a -constant state of military turmoil. On April 21, 1643, the Close was taken -by prince Rupert and was held as a Royalist stronghold until July 26, -1646, the king having repaired thither after his defeat at Naseby in June, -1645, and again in September. The plague is said to have been active both -in 1645 and 1646; in twelve streets there occurred 821 deaths, the largest -share (121) falling to Green Hill[1092]. In what way the state of siege -may have contributed to the plague is uncertain. The fosse was drained dry -at one stage, and was choked with rubbish at another. Many of the -inhabitants of the town would appear, from the 4th article of the -capitulation, to have taken refuge with their effects within the fortified -Cathedral Close, which was almost enclosed by water. This was one of -several outbreaks of plague that Lichfield had suffered since early Tudor -times. - -Minor plague outbreaks of 1645 were at Derby and Oxford. Of the latter we -have a glimpse from Willis of Christ Church. - - "Sometime past in this city [Oxford] _viz._, 1645, the plague (tho' - not great) had spread. Doctor Henry Sayer, a very learned physician, - and happy in his practice, many others refusing this province, boldly - visited all the sick, poor as well as rich, daily administered to them - physic, and handled with his own hands their buboes and virulent - ulcers, and so cured very many sick by his sedulous though dangerous - labour. That he might fortifie himself against the contagion, before - he went into the infected houses, he was wont only to drink a large - draught of sack, and then his perambulation about the borders of death - and the very jaws of the grave being finished, to repeat the same - antidote. - - After he had in this city, as if inviolable as to the plague, a long - while taken care of the affairs of the sick without any hurt, he was - sent for to Wallingford Castle, where this disease cruelly raged, as - another AEsculapius, by the governor of the place. But there, being so - bold as to lie in the same bed with a certain captain (his intimate - companion), who was taken with the plague, he quickly received the - contagion of the same disease; nor were the arts then profitable to - the master which had been helpful to so many others, but there with - great sorrow of the inhabitants, nor without great loss to the - medical science, he died of that disease." He treated the sick, in the - pre-bubonic stages, by a vomit of Crocus Metallorum, and then by - diaphoretics[1093]. - -None of the other localized epidemics of plague in those years would -appear to have been of the first magnitude. Thus, the 22 deaths from -plague at Loughborough from 1645 to May 14, 1646, and the renewed -prevalence, after a year's interval, (83 plague-deaths from July 20, 1647 -to March 25, 1648)[1094], are samples of local mortalities from plague -that other parish registers might bear witness to if they had been -examined by antiquaries as closely as Nichols examined those of -Leicestershire. - -Newark was one of the towns which suffered much during the Civil War. -Besieged time after time, it was at length surrendered to the Parliament -on May 6, 1646. A letter written shortly after the surrender says[1095]: - - "Truly it is become a miserable, stinking, infected town. I pray God - they do not infect the counties and towns adjacent.... By reason of - the sickness in divers places, the officers dare not yet venture to - fetch out the arms.... Tradesmen are preparing to furnish their shops - ... but the market cannot be expected to be much whilst the sickness - is in the town." - -The parish register of Newark bears no witness to deaths from plague; but -that of the adjacent parish of Stoke, in which stood the Castle and the -suburb of Newark surrounding it, has numerous entries of plague-deaths, -beginning with one some three weeks after the surrender, on May 28, 1646, -and continuing through July, August, and September. Several of the same -household are buried in one day, one is "buried in the field," another "in -his croft." The vicar sums up the mortality thus: "There dyed in the towne -of Stoke, 1646, eight score and one, whereof of the plage seven score and -nineteen." The whole deaths in Stoke parish the year before had been nine, -and the year after they were six[1096]. If the plague had been at all -proportionate in Newark town itself, the deaths would have far exceeded -159; but, as the parish register does not record plague-deaths at all, it -may be inferred that the infection lay mostly around the Castle. - -Whitmore speaks of having practised in the plague in Staffordshire in -1647-8, and there is some other evidence, without particulars, of an -epidemic in the town of Stafford. - -One more epidemic of plague is reported from the theatre of Civil War in -the south-west, the outbreak at Totness in 1646-7. In the parish register -there is a burial entered on July 30, 1646, "suspected she died of the -plague." A leaf of the register has the following: "From December 6, 1646, -till the 19th October, 1647, there died in Totness of the plague 262 -persons"--a number greater than the register shows in detail. The -stereotyped remark is added, that the town was deserted and that grass -grew in the streets[1097]. For months before the first suspected case of -plague in 1646, Totness had been occupied by one body of troops after -another. In November or December, 1645, Goring's Royalist cavalry, to the -number of nearly 5000, were quartered at Totness and two or three other -places near. On January 11, 1646, Fairfax came with his army to Totness -for the siege of Dartmouth, which was carried by storm on the 20th. The -Lord General then withdrew to resume the investment of Exeter. Before -doing so he issued warrants to four Hundreds to assemble their men at -Totness on the 24th January. The men came in to the number of about 3000, -and a regiment was formed from them[1098]. What connexion with the plague -in the end of the year all this military stir at Totness may have had, it -would not be easy to determine. There had been a great deal of sickness in -the army of Fairfax while it lay at Ottery St Mary in the latter half of -November, 1645. "By reason of the season," says Rushworth, "and want of -accommodation, abundance of his army, especially the foot, were sick, and -many died, seldom less than seven, eight or nine in a day in the town of -Autree, and amongst the rest Colonel Pickering died and some other -officers. The Royal party had notice of this consumption of Fairfax's -army," and took heart to make a new effort. The type of sickness is -unknown; but it was such as to cause the removal of the head-quarters on -December 2 to Tiverton, for better air. The army lay there until January -8, and came to Totness, for the siege of Dartmouth, on the 11th. Thus -Totness had not only been occupied by an army some months before the -plague, but by an army which had lately had a fatal form of sickness in -it. The troops march away, and the historical interest goes with them; -what they may have left behind them concerns only the domestic history. -Fifty-six years had passed since Totness had the plague before; and on -that occasion the epidemic was equally disastrous. - -Two other centres of plague in 1646-7 are casually mentioned, one at -Reading[1099], which affected "a great number of poor people," and the -other at Carlisle[1100]. Of the latter there are no particulars; but the -circumstances of the town for several years were such as to make an -outbreak of plague in 1646 credible. - -Carlisle suffered much from the war for a series of years. In July, 1644, -it was seized for the Royalists, and was besieged by Lesley in October, -the siege lasting many months. It had a garrison of about 700, including -some of the townsfolk armed. About the end of February, 1645, all the corn -in the town was seized to be served out on short allowance; on June 5, -"hempseed, dogs and rats were eaten." The surrender was on June 25, and -the place was held by a Scots garrison until December, 1646. It was again -seized for the Royalists in April, 1648, was recaptured by Cromwell in -October, and held by a strong garrison of 800 foot and a regiment of -horse, besides dragoons to keep the borders. All Cumberland was in such a -state of destitution that the Parliament ordered a collection for its -relief; numbers of the poor are said to have died in the highways, and -30,000 families were in want of bread[1101]. - - -Plague in Scotland during the Civil Wars. - -Connecting with plagues in the north of England, there was a great -prevalence of the infection in Scotland. After the storming of Newcastle -by the Scots Covenanters in October, 1644, the plague appeared in -Edinburgh, Kelso, Borrowstownness, Perth and other places. On April 1, -1645, Kelso was burned down, the fire having originated in a house that -was being "clengit" or disinfected after plague in it. At Edinburgh the -plague-stricken were housed in huts in the King's park below Salisbury -Crags. Collections were made for the relief of people in Leith -impoverished by the plague. The epidemic in and around Perth is said to -have given rise to the story of Bessie Bell and Mary Gray, who fled from -the plague-tainted ground and built themselves a bower by a burn -side[1102]. At Glasgow the infection was severe in the end of 1646, and -did not cease entirely until the autumn of 1648. There are numerous -references to it in the letters of principal Baillie of Glasgow -University, of which the following are the most important[1103]. - -On September 5, 1645, he writes that the pest has laid Leith and Edinburgh -desolate, and rages in many more places: never such a pest seen in -Scotland (in his time, perhaps). About January, 1646, he writes of "the -crushing of our nation by pestilence and Montrose's victories." At the end -of that year, the plague was in Glasgow: on January 26, 1647, during -winter cold, "all that may are fled out of it." On June 2, the plague had -scattered the St Andrews' students, the principal of St Leonard's College -was dead of it, and it was killing many in the north. The same summer, -principal Baillie was shut up in the town of Kilwinning, cut off, with all -the inhabitants, from communication with the outer world owing to a -suspicion of plague in the place. Edinburgh and Leith, which had suffered -earliest, were almost free in the autumn of 1647, but "Aberdeen, Brechin -and other parts of the north are miserably wasted; the schools and -colleges now in all Scotland, but Edinburgh, are scattered." Glasgow had -its worst experience of plague in the summer and autumn of 1648, which -were wet seasons: on August 23, "our condition for the time is sad; the -plague is also in Edinburgh and Aberdeen.... At this time I grieved for -the state of Glasgow.... My brother's son's house was infected; my -brother's house enclosed many in danger; one night near a dozen died of -the sickness.... The long great rains for many weeks did prognosticate -famine; but these three days past there is also a great change of weather; -the Lord continue it." The infection which began at Glasgow in January, -1647, reached Aberdeen in April, having been carried, it was said, by a -woman from Brechin. It was still raging at Aberdeen in September, and -there were straggling cases as late as November of the following year -(1648). The deaths from plague are put down at 1600, besides 140 in the -adjacent fishing villages of Futtie and Torrie on either side of the Dee -mouth. This enormous mortality ensued despite the usual rigorous -measures--the removal of the infected to huts on the Links and -Woolmanhill, a cordon of soldiers to shut them in, a gibbet for the -disobedient, and "clengers" for the infected houses[1104]. This disastrous -epidemic of 1647-1648 is the last that is heard of plague in Scotland. - - -Plague in Chester &c. and in Ireland, 1647-1650. - -The two remaining English plagues of those years were both in cities that -had suffered much from plague before, and were in a constant state of -turmoil during the war, namely Chester and Shrewsbury. Chester was held -for the king, and surrendered to the Parliament on February 3, 1646, after -a siege of twenty weeks, during the latter part of which there was famine -within the walls. It was not until 1647 that plague broke out. From June -22 until April 20, 1648, the numbers that died of plague are stated in the -MS. of Dr Cowper to have been 2099; all business was suspended, and cabins -for the plague-stricken were built outside the town[1105]. - -The Shrewsbury plague of 1650, like that of Chester, is described as -having been dreadful in its effects upon the town. It broke out during the -occupation by the Parliament's troops, on June 12, 1650, in a house in -Frankwell, and continued until January, 1651. Only one parish, St Chad's, -appears to have kept account of the plague-deaths: in that register from -June 12 to January 16, there are entered 277 burials, whereof of the -plague 250, the highest monthly mortality (76) being in August, 1650. Of -these 250 deaths, 123 took place in the pest-houses. A letter of August 21 -says that 153 died in two months, and that there were near 3000 people in -the town dependent upon common charity[1106]. On November 21, there were -still 200 cases in the pest-houses, most of them being in the way to -recover, as usually happened towards the end of an epidemic through the -greater readiness of the buboes to suppurate. - -From the small number of burials due to ordinary causes in the St Chad's -register, it would appear that many citizens had fled. The severity of -incidence upon certain houses appears from the fact that five servants in -Mr Rowley's house died of it; and that 15 out of 21 burials in St Julian's -parish came from four families[1107]. These are incidents like those of -the great plague of London in 1665, which is the next in time in the -English annals after Shrewsbury's visitation in 1650. - -The plague in Ireland in 1649-50 was connected, directly and indirectly, -with the military operations under Ireton and Cromwell. The previous year, -1648, had been one of famine: at the attack on Kildare by the rebels in -the spring, both the English garrison in the town and the attacking Irish -were half-starved, and there was a great mortality on both sides, as well -as a murrain of cattle. On May 4, corn in all the rebel quarters is said -to be at the incredible price of L8 the quarter, both men and cattle dying -in large numbers[1108]. In 1649 the plague broke out in Kilkenny, obliging -the supreme council of Confederate Catholics to remove to Ennis. Ireton, -"thinking he ought not to meddle with what the Lord had so visibly taken -into his hands, has declined taking Kilkenny into his own." But Cromwell -besieged it on March 23, 1650, by which time the garrison of 200 horse and -1,000 foot had been reduced to 300 men through the ravages of the plague, -the inhabitants having also suffered heavily[1109]. - -The Royalist letters from the Hague speak of the plague in the summer of -1650 as disastrous in Ireland, particularly in Dublin[1110]. On August -5/15: "Lady Inchiquin came hither last night; those with her report that -the plague will devour what the sword has not in Ireland." On September -2/12: "All I hear out of Ireland is that the plague has made a horrid -devastation there; 1100 in a week died in Dublin"--an improbable -estimate[1111]. The ranks of the rebels were so thinned by the sword and -pestilence that "not above 200 suffered by the hands of the executioner," -after trial at the high court of justice held in County Cork in -1651[1112]. The epidemic appears to have ceased in the autumn of 1650, -when the Council of State, in a despatch to the Lord Deputy, take notice -of the goodness of God in stopping the plague[1113]. - - -Fever in England, 1651-2. - -Between those plagues of the years 1644-1650 and the final re-appearance -of the infection on English soil from 1665 to 1666, the interval is -occupied with a good deal of fever both in town and country. The -sicknesses of those years are of interest as having been described by two -competent physicians, Willis and Whitmore. - -There were two principal periods of the epidemics, the years 1651-2 and -1657-9. In the former period the sickness appears to have been mostly in -the north-west. Whitmore, who had seen practice in the Civil War, in -Staffordshire and Shropshire, appears to have been in Chester in 1651, and -was settled in London in 1657. It is from him that our information mostly -comes[1114]. - - "It is well known," he says, "that this disease in the year 1651 [the - same fever that he describes more fully for the years 1658 and 1659] - first broke out by the seaside in Cheshire, Lancashire, and North - Wales.... In Cheshire in the year 1651 this disease seized most upon - the country people who were laborious, the seeds being sooner - dispersed in them through the agitation of the humours and spirits in - their harvest labours, than on those who lead a more sedentary life; - and that might be one reason why we were so free in the city of - Chester, when within three or four miles of us round about, whole - towns were infected with it, there being 80 and 100 sick at a time in - small villages, as at Stanney, Dunham-on-the-hill, Norton and all - there abouts by the water side it extremely raged." - -Whitmore refers to something that he had written, "for my private use," on -the subject of this fever as far back as 1642; he remarks also that it -raged every autumn in some place or other of the kingdom, and mentions his -own experience in Staffordshire and Shropshire during the late war. But it -is the epidemic in Cheshire, Lancashire and North Wales, in 1651 that he -specially describes, side by side with those of 1658 and 1659; and it is -of interest to note his suggestion as to the origin of the fever on both -shores of the Mersey. It was well known that the fever in 1651 first broke -out by the seaside in Cheshire, Lancashire and North Wales: - - "And if it were observed in Holland that on a misty day, that - infectious disease the Sudor Anglicus came into Amsterdam in an - afternoon, five hundred or more dying that night of it, as Lemnius - reports, I know not why we may not as well suppose their opposite - neighbour, Dublin, then visited for two years with the plague, should - not have communicated the same to them though in a more remiss - degree." - -Here the suggestion is that the prevalence of plague on the opposite coast -of Ireland had given rise to a minor and "more remiss" contagion along the -coasts of North Wales, Cheshire and Lancashire. But the plague had been -most severe in Chester itself before it broke out in Ireland, and had been -severe in Shrewsbury at the same time as in Ireland. Whatever the theory, -it is significant that the corner of England which was the worst and -perhaps only seat of plague in 1648 and 1650, was the seat of a malignant -fever in 1651, the former having been in the towns, and the latter in the -country villages. - -We get a glimpse of a heavy mortality among the country people the year -after at Bootle, in Cumberland, just across the border from -Lancashire[1115]. On July 8, 1652, Thomas Wharton writes from Kirkdale to -Edward Moore: - - "There was a boy at widow Robinson's died upon Saturday in Whitsun - week, and upon the Wednesday before he was sawying at the steward - Worsley's house with his wrights. The boy and the steward's man slept - together in Worsley's barn; towards night the boy was not well, and - could work no longer. All this John Wiggan of Kirkdale did see. Next, - John Birch died, and four of his children--all are dead but his wife. - At John Robinson's, one child and his wife died last week, and upon - Wednesday last two children more died; and it was thought by the - constable of Bootle that he would be dead before this day at night. - Upon Wednesday at night last, at James Pye's, there died two, his son - and daughter; and a servant of Thomas Doubie's is dead; and it is this - day broken forth in Bridge's, as we hear." - -On what evidence this country epidemic is called "the plague" by the -antiquary who prints the document does not appear. The fatality of the -disease would suggest plague, rather than fever; but the fever itself -would seem to have been more malignant at one place than another, and at -one time than another, and there may have been at Bootle cases unmentioned -which recovered. If it had been true bubo-plague, it is a solitary -instance, so far as records go, in the fifteen years between the -extinction of plague at Shrewsbury in 1650, and its revival in London and -elsewhere in 1665. The epidemic disease that we ordinarily hear of in that -interval is fever; and of the fever our best accounts, after Whitmore's -reference to 1651, are of the epidemics in 1657, 1658 and 1659. - - -Fever and Influenza, 1657-9. - -The account by Willis of three consecutive epidemics in the autumn of -1657, the spring of 1658, and the autumn of 1658, is of peculiar interest -for the reason that it is the first systematic piece of epidemiology -written in England, and that the middle epidemic of the three was one of -influenza[1116]. On reading the narrative of events by Willis, we can -understand how it was that the physicians of that period were so impressed -by the doctrine of an epidemic constitution of the season, and by its -counterpart doctrine of a seasonal predisposition in the human -constitution. That teaching was afterwards expounded in successive essays -by Sydenham; but it was held generally in those times, and Willis found -apt illustrations of it in the three epidemics one after the other in -1657-58. Let us follow his narrative, and add to it some particulars from -Whitmore. - -The spring and summer of 1657 were extremely dry and hot; but especially -after the summer solstice the heats were so intense for many weeks -following that, day and night, there was none that did not complain of the -heat of the air, and were almost in a continual sweat and were not able to -breathe freely. About the calends of July, the fever which was at first -sporadic and particular, began to break forth in some places, perhaps two -or three cases in the same city or village. The fever fits at this period -occurred every other day, but there was no cold fit or rigor preceding, as -in an ordinary ague, the heat being intense from the outset. Vomiting and -bilious stools occurred plentifully to most, with sweat succeeding, not -however an easy, uninterrupted and critical sweat. The remission of the -fever fit was rarely complete in the intermediate day, weakness, languor, -thirst and restlessness always remaining. In some the type improved after -three or four of these quasi-tertian paroxysms; the later fits were -ushered in with a rigor and a cold stage, so that the fever became an -exact tertian intermittent. But in most the type became worse, which may -have been due to errors of regimen and physicking. The fever became, -indeed, a continued one, and might end in nervous symptoms--lethargy, -delirium, cramps or convulsions. - -In August it was spreading far and near, so that in every region or -village round Oxford, many were sick of it; but it was much more frequent -in the country cottages and in the smaller villages than in cities or -towns. It was called "the new disease," as the war-typhus of 1643 had been -called, and other epidemics both earlier and later. - -Willis continues: It crept from house to house, infecting most of the same -family, and especially those in familiar converse with the sick. "Yea old -men, and men of ripe age, it ordinarily took away." It lasted many days in -an individual, nay even months, attended with much evacuation and almost -daily vomits and sweats. "Scarce one in a thousand died of it, which I -never knew in an epidemical synochus." This singular malady, which -differed from ague not only in its want of clear intervals between the -fits of fever, but also in being propagated by contagion, raged throughout -all England in the autumn of 1657. Only in some few limited localities, -and in these only in some cases, was it accompanied by true dysentery. -Willis is not satisfied with the facile explanation of an infection of the -air, "the little bodies of which infections, being admitted within, did -ferment with the blood and humours." There must have been something -equally general in the human body, a predisposition to be so acted upon; -and of that proneness to fever he finds the cause in the intemperance of -the year, namely the great heat of the summer and autumn. - -But the most remarkable illustration of these doctrines was the epidemic -of the following spring, which was a pure and unmistakeable epidemic of -influenza-cold. After the very hot summer and autumn, there was a long -winter of intense frost. From the ides of December to the vernal equinox -the earth was covered with snow, the wind blowing steadily from the north. -The state of health through the winter was fairly good. The north wind -continued until June. "About the middle of April, suddenly a distemper -arose as if sent by some blast of the stars, which laid hold of very many -together; and in some towns in the space of a week above a thousand fell -sick together." They had a troublesome cough, great spitting, and catarrh -"falling down on the palate, throat, and nostrils." The illness approached -with fever, thirst, want of appetite, weariness, grievous pains in the -head, back, loins and limbs, and heat in the praecordia. Some were very -ill in bed, with hoarseness and almost continual coughing; others had -bleeding at the nose, bloody spittle or bloody flux. Not a few old and -infirm died, but the more strong, and almost all the healthy constitutions -recovered. Those that died "wasted leisurely," like persons sick of a -hectic fever. About the third part of mankind was distempered in a month. -Willis's explanation of it is that the constant north wind checked the -natural action of the blood in spring. The spring blood is more lively, -like the juices of vegetables. The catarrhal fever was a disorder of the -spring blood, like new wine close shut up in bottles. - -This outbreak about the middle of April is evidently described for Oxford -and the country around. Willis then describes his third epidemic, that of -the summer and autumn of 1658, which was the same type of fever as in the -summer and autumn of 1657. The vernal fever of 1658 did not last longer -than six weeks. The wind continued still north, until the summer solstice; -a little before the beginning of July there was a most fierce heat for a -few days, and when the dog-days were begun, the air grew most cruelly hot, -so that one could scarce endure it in the open. The new fever arose mostly -about the end of August, and began to spread through whole regions about -us (at Oxford), and chiefly, like that of 1657, in country houses and -villages; but in the meantime few of the inhabitants of the greater towns -and cities fell sick. The symptoms were much the same as in the previous -autumn. The fever was continual in some; in others it was of an -intermitting type at first; but very many were ill "in their brain and -nervous stock," with cruel headache, noises in the ears, dullness of -hearing, stupor, vertigo, waking, and delirium. In some, on the first or -second day, "little broad and red spots like to the measles have leisurely -broken forth in the whole body, which being shortly vanished, the fever -and headache became worse." The patients lay for a few days as if dying, -without speaking or knowing their friends, after which came lethargy and -delirium. The young men mostly recovered, the old men died. In the fits of -old men, the heat was not very sharp, but there were restlessness, tossing -about, idle and random talking, with dryness of the mouth, surfiness of -the tongue, and viscous sordes. Usually the pulse was strong and equal; a -weak, unequal and intermittent pulse, with contractures of the tendons and -convulsive motions in the wrists, was an omen of death. Those who died -passed away in a stupor, without consciousness to dispose of their goods; -the recovery of others was long and doubtful. One notable thing in this -fever was the exanthem, which reminds one more of the rash of sweating -sickness or dengue (breakbone fever), than of the spots of typhus. - -Willis ends his book on fevers with that account of the autumnal epidemic -of 1658, "taken the 13th of September," his work having been published at -the Hague in 1659. Whitmore, whose short essay is dated from London, -November, 1659, begins with the autumnal epidemic of 1658, which is the -last of Willis's three; and, strangely enough, he also has a vernal -epidemic of influenza to describe--an epidemic clearly belonging to the -spring of 1659. Unless there be some error in Whitmore's dates, it is -impossible to avoid the conclusion that the second autumnal fever, that of -1658, was followed by a spring influenza, just as the first, of 1657, had -been. - -Whitmore's account of the autumnal fever of 1658 agrees in the main with -that given by Willis. He defines it as "a putrid continued and malignant -fever containing in it the seeds of contagion." It raged in the last -autumn through all England, "and now begins again," (his preface being -dated November, 1659), seizing on all sorts of people of different nature, -which shows that it is epidemic. The part affected is chiefly the heart, -and therefore some call it _cordis morbus_. - - "In this, as in the plague at the first catching of it, some seem to - be very pleasant, so far are they from perceiving themselves to be - amiss, when indeed death itself hath set his foot within the threshold - of their earthly houses." There were pains in the head, inclination to - vomit, sudden fainting of spirits, and weakness without any manifest - cause, the pulse feeble and sometimes intermittent, so as very lusty - and strong men in Cheshire (in the year 1651 where this disease then - raged) in a very short space so lost their strength that they were not - able to stand or turn themselves in their beds. Some also are taken - with bleeding, purging, and sweating, and many have the spots. But for - the most part it appears in the livery of some other kind of ague. It - begins to show its malignity after the 5th, 7th, or 9th day, with loss - of appetite, thirst, and a dry black tongue. - -Letters of 1658 from London bear out the prevalence of autumnal sickness. -On August 3, one writes that the weather is hot and dry, the town -extremely empty, and the flux beginning. On January 4, 1659, there is much -sickness, especially fevers, agues and the smallpox. - -A good deal of the interest of Whitmore's essay lies in his arguments -against blood letting in this fever; but that is part of a history which -will have to be dealt with as a whole at a later stage. - -Whitmore then proceeds to the vernal epidemic of 1659, just as Willis had -done to that of 1658. His words are (4 Nov. 1659): - - "Having given an account of the nature and cure of this disease which - now rageth throughout England, I shall briefly describe that which - this spring universally infested London; and show how it agreed and - how it differed from that disease which last fall invaded the whole - nation." He then describes the typical influenza, just as Willis had - done under a date a year earlier--pains in the limbs of some, coughs, - and aguish distempers in others; "so that in a week or a fortnight's - time, when it had fermented and caused a putrefaction of humours, it - quickly tended to a height, and struck many thousands in London down, - scarce leaving a family where any store were, without some being ill - of this distemper, suddenly sweeping very many away, being the same, - in the judgment of no mean physician, with that in autumn last, though - in a new skin." Whitmore then gives a reason "why this should hold - them all with coughs, which it did not in the fall." - -Assuming an affinity to the autumnal epidemic of 1658, he proceeds to -state the circumstance of a reappearance in the spring of 1659: "Upon this -hush it lay all the winter, until the Easter week, and then in two or -three warm days broke loose, having had no warm weather all before, but a -rainy and black week, the sun not appearing for five or six days together -just before the holiday; when on a sudden that warm weather breaking -forth, the citizens in their summer pomp, being thinner clothed many of -them than before (like bees on a glorious day) swarmed abroad, and the -pores etc." - -Both Willis and Whitmore incline to the view that the catarrhal fever of -the spring was akin to the strange fever of the autumn, the differentia of -each being appropriate to the season. Willis, however, keeps the two types -more apart than Whitmore. The latter speaks of both fevers as "this -Protean-like distemper," whose various shapes "render it such a hocus -pocus to the amazed and perplexed people, they being held after most -strange and diverse ways with it." It is "so prodigious in its alterations -that it seems to outvie even Proteus himself." Thus the strangest part of -these narratives is not the catarrhal influenza, which has so often -reappeared as to be familiar, but the prevalence of anomalous fevers, in -some respects like intermittents without the clear interval between the -fits, but in respect of contagion, spots, pains and other symptoms, like -typhus--a volatile typhus of the country and of the towns. Although this -epidemiological phenomenon be a strange one, there is no reason to -question the correctness of Willis's observations, corroborated as they -are by those of Whitmore. But there are, indeed, many more experiences of -the like kind in the years to follow, which fall without the limits of the -present volume. One only of these later observers need be mentioned here. -The third of the famous trio with Sydenham and Willis was Morton. He had a -long experience in London of fever and smallpox, which he made the subject -of a book in 1692-4[1117]. His history goes as far back as -1658--"_historia febris [Greek: suneches] ab anno 1658 ad annum 1691_." Of -the year 1658 he says the fever was everywhere through England and refers -to Willis; the only facts of his own being that Oliver Cromwell and his -(Morton's) father were carried off by it in September of that year, that -he had it himself (aged 20) and was three months in recovering, and that -the whole household (in Suffolk) were infected. Cromwell's attack came -upon him at Hampton Court on August 21; but it was not the first sickness -of the kind that he had suffered. He was only fifty-nine, but worn out -with many cares, and at that time distressed by the death of his favourite -daughter, Lady Claypole, under his roof on August 6, from some painful -internal female trouble. The Lord Protector's fever was called a "bastard -tertian," which might have been a name for the fever described by Willis. -He was removed on the 24th August to Whitehall, where the air was thought -to be more wholesome; and died between three and four in the afternoon of -September 3, the anniversary at once of "Dunbar field and Worcester's -laureat wreath." - -This prevalence of fevers, Protean in their varying types, all over -England in 1657-59 corresponds to the fever period of 1623-24. In each -case the fever was a minor plague, and in each case it was followed by a -revival of the plague proper, which had been dormant all over the country -for a dozen or fifteen years. The principal difference is that the -fever-period of 1623-24 was followed by the plague in 1625, whereas the -fever-period of 1657-59 was followed by several years not free from fever -and then by the plague in 1665. It is clear that the fevers of 1657-59 -made a great impression all over England, and were afterwards popularly -spoken of as a warning of the Great Plague itself. In the parish register -of Aldenham, Hertfordshire, there is inserted a poem on the Great Plague -of 1665, which has the following verses[1118]: - - "Seven years since a little plague God sent, - He shook his rod to move us to repent. - Not long before that time a dearth of corn - Was sent to us to see if we would turn." - -In Short's abstracts of parish registers, the years preceding 1665 stand -out as sickly in country districts, according to the following figures: - - No. of No. with Baptisms Burials - registers sickness in same in same - examined - - 1657 98 36 991 1305 - 1658 96 33 704 1159 - 1659 101 29 553 825 - 1660 107 17 342 489 - 1661 182(?) 25 448 685 - 1662 105 20 376 504 - 1663 119 15 325 443 - 1664 118 12 328 364 - 1665 117 14 229 446 - -Periods as unhealthy as 1657-59 do not occur again until 1667-71, and -1679-84. - -Willis says, of the autumnal epidemic of 1658: "But in the meantime few of -the inhabitants of the greater towns and cities fell sick." That is -confirmed for London, in a letter of October 26, 1658: "A world of -sickness in all countries round about London. London is now held the -wholesomest place;" but on January 4, 1659: "There is much sickness in the -town, especially feavers, agues, and smallpox[1119]." In Short's tables, -the registers of market towns bear the same traces of much sickness in -1657 and 1658 as those of country parishes. - -A high mortality from fever and spotted fever continued in London every -year from 1658 to the year of the great plague. The largest number of -deaths from fever was in the year of the plague itself, when the bills of -mortality returned them as 5257 (without much certainty, however, owing to -the confusion of the plague). The next highest figures had been in 1661, -when the fever deaths were 3490. We get a glimpse of that epidemic from -Pepys; on August 16, 1661, he writes: "But it is such a sickly time both -in the city and country everywhere (of a sort of fever) that never was -heard of almost, unless it was in plague-time. Among others, the famous -Tom Fuller is dead of it, and Dr Nicholls [Nicholas], dean of St Paul's, -and my Lord General Monk is very dangerously ill." On August 31 he enters -in his diary: "The season very sickly everywhere of strange and fatal -fevers." The same diarist, on October 20, 1663, has an entry that the -queen is ill of a spotted fever and that "she is as full of spots as a -leopard;" on the 24th the queen was in a good way to recovery. - -It is at this period that Sydenham's famous observations of the seasons -and the public health in London begin. The autumnal intermittents, he -says, which had been prevalent some years before, came back in 1661 with -new strength, about the beginning of July, being mostly tertians of a bad -type: they increased so much in August as to sweep away families almost -entirely, but declined with the winter cold coming on. He then draws the -distinction between them and ordinary tertians. In the same years, -1661-2-3-4, a continued fever is described at great length, and then he -comes to the "pestilential fever" and the plague itself of 1665 and -1666[1120]. Taking from Sydenham the single fact, for the present, that -an unusual amount of pestilential fever led up to the plague of 1665 -(which he did not stay in London to witness), we shall proceed in the next -chapter but one to that crowning epidemic of the present section of our -history. Something more remains to be said of the fevers of 1661 -(specially described by Willis as a fever of the brain and nervous stock, -but called "the new disease" in its turn); but as it is the first of -Sydenham's "epidemic constitutions," and as these are recorded -continuously to 1685, when there was another "new fever," it will be -convenient to end the detailed history of fevers for the present with the -remarkable epidemics of 1657-59. - - - - -CHAPTER XI. - -SICKNESSES OF VOYAGES AND COLONIES. - - -(Sea Scurvy, Flux, Fever, and Yellow Fever.) - -The sicknesses of the first voyages and foreign settlements come into the -history of national maladies, both as concerning Britain on the sea and -beyond sea, and as showing forth the disease-producing conditions of those -early times. In the latter respect there is more to be learned from -voyages and colonial experience than the records of domestic life at home -are likely to inform us of otherwise than vaguely. The Englishman of the -time carried his habits with him to sea and to foreign parts, where the -circumstances were more trying and the consequences more obvious. - -This history divides itself at once into several branches. There are the -disease-incidents of ocean voyages, irregular at first but becoming -somewhat uniform after the East India Company's start in 1601, chief among -them being scurvy. There are next the early discouragements from sickness, -both on the voyage and after landing, in the planting of colonies in -Virginia, New England and the West Indies, among which the troubles of -Jamaica were on a sufficiently great scale to deserve minute study. -Lastly, among the larger sections of this chapter, we have to notice the -beginnings and circumstances of the terrible and long-enduring scourge of -West Indian colonies--yellow fever. While we are mainly, in this record of -the sicknesses of voyages and of new colonies, concerned with British -enterprise, we shall have occasion to glance at the similar experiences of -other nations. - - -The first accounts of Sea Scurvy. - -The malady that figures most in the narratives of the long ocean voyages -which began with the modern period is scurvy. In the very first of the -great voyages, that of Vasco de Gama to the Indies by the Cape of Good -Hope in 1498, scurvy appeared when the ships were on the West African -coast, fifty-five deaths occurring within a short period. Of all the known -subsequent occurrences of the kind, there are accounts more or less full -in the collections of Hakluyt and Purchas, from which the facts in the -sequel have been taken. - -In the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan to the Pacific, scurvy is mentioned -first at a late stage; in the year 1520 the ships had passed the straits -called by his name and had been three months and twelve days sailing -westwards from the last land; their provisions had run short, and, "by -reason of this famine and unclean feeding, some of their gums grew so over -their teeth that they died miserably for hunger." Nineteen men, as well as -a giant from Patagonia and an Indian from Brazil, were dead, and some -twenty-five or thirty others were sick, "so that there was in a manner -none without some disease[1121]." - -There were no voyages of the same length by English ships until many years -after: and then we find the same troubles in them from scurvy and other -sickness. While the Portuguese and Spaniards were navigating in tropical -waters, the English and French were sending most of their expeditions to -the North. The French attempted to found a colony on the shores of the -Gulf of St Lawrence, while the English sought to establish a trade with -Muscovy by way of the White Sea, and to open a nearer route to the far -East by way of the polar regions. The voyages in all these enterprises -were short, the ships for the most part returning after an absence of four -or five months, and without any notable experience of sickness: it was -only when the French wintered in Canada that scurvy broke out. Thus the -English voyages for the Muscovy Company have little or no interest for our -subject; while the three voyages of Frobisher in search of the North-West -passage in 1576, 1577, and 1578, and the three of Davis in 1585, 1586, and -1587 (in which last he got to 73 deg. N.) are as nearly as possible free from -records of sickness. - -Jacques Cartier's second expedition to the St Lawrence in 1535 had a -disastrous experience of scurvy. In his first voyage in 1534, with two -ships of sixty tons each and each carrying sixty-one men, he appears to -have had no sickness, having left St Malo on April 20, traded with the -Indians on the Gulf of St Lawrence, and returned on September 5 of the -same year. The expedition of the following year, with three ships, -wintered on the coast, amidst heavy ice, and about mid-winter began to -suffer from scurvy[1122]. The crews appear to have had no lack of stores, -both meat and drink, and the outbreak of scurvy, described as an unknown -disease, was so surprising that it was traced to infection from the -Indians, who are said to have admitted the deaths of some fifty of their -number from "pestilence." - - "The said unknown sickness began to spread itself amongst us after the - strangest sort that ever was either heard of or seen, insomuch as some - did lose all their strength, and could not stand on their feet; then - did their legs swell, their sinewes shrink as black as any coal. - Others also had their skins spotted with spots of blood of a purple - colour; then did it ascend to their ankles, knees, thighs, shoulders, - arms, and neck; their mouth became stinking, their gums so rotten that - all the flesh did fall off even to the roots of the teeth, which did - also almost all fall out. With such infection did this sickness spread - itself in our three ships that about the middle of February, of a - hundred and ten persons that we were, there were not ten whole; so - that one could not help the other.... There were already 8 dead and - more than 50 sick, and, as we thought, past all recovery." The body of - one dead, aged 22, was opened to see what the disease was; he was - found to have his heart white, but rotten, and more than a quart of - red water about it[1123]; his liver was indifferent fair; but his - lungs black and mortified ... his milt toward the back was somewhat - perished, rough as if it had been rubbed against a stone. - - "From the midst of November to the midst of March there died 25 of our - best and chiefest men, and all the rest sick except three or four; - then it pleased God to cast his pitiful eye upon us, and sent us the - knowledge of remedie of our healths, and recovery.... The Captain, - walking upon the ice, asken of Domagaia [an Indian] how he had done to - heal himself; he answered that he had taken the juice and sap of the - leaves of a certain tree, and therewith had healed himself! for it was - a singular remedy against that disease." The Indian's advice was "to - take the bark and leaves and boil them together and to drink of the - said decoction every other day, and to put the dregs of it upon the - legs that is sick."... - - "It is thought to be the sassafras tree. After this medicine was found - and proved to be true there was such strife about it, who should be - first to take of it, that they were ready to kill one another, so that - a tree as big as any oak in France was spoiled and lopped bare, and - occupied all in five or six days, and it wrought so well that if all - the physicians of Montpelier and Lovaine had been there with all the - drugs of Alexandria, they would not have done so much in one year as - that tree did in six days, for it did so prevail that as many as used - of it, by the grace of God recovered their health." - -In 1542, while Cartier was still trading on his own account to the St -Lawrence from Brittany, a more ambitious project, under a Crown patent, -issued from La Rochelle[1124]. With De la Roche, count of Roberval, as -governor, a number of adventurous nobles and gentry, with men, women and -children to the number of two hundred in all, sailed in three ships, and -established themselves in Lower Canada with all the formalities of -occupation. Two of the three ships were sent home in September, the -colonists proper being left to taste the rigours of a Canadian winter: "In -the end many of our people fell sick of a certain disease in their legges, -reynes and stomacke, so that they seemed to bee deprived of all their -lymmes: and there died about fiftie." - -The first English records of scurvy at sea are in connexion with the early -voyages to Guinea for gold-dust[1125]. Mr John Lok sailed on the second -voyage to Guinea, on October 11, 1554, his ships being the 'Trinitie,' 140 -tons, the 'Bartholomew,' 90 tons, and the 'John Evangelist,' 140 tons. -After trading some months on the African coast the ships sailed for home: -"There died of our men at this last voyage about twenty and four, whereof -many died at their return into the clime of the cold regions, as between -the islands of Azores and England." The disease is not named; but it is -probable from what follows that it was scurvy. - -The next voyage to Guinea was Towrson's first, in October 1555, from -Newport, Isle of Wight, in the 'Hart' and the 'Hind;' the death of only -one man is mentioned; he died "in his sleep" on March 29; by the 7th May, -the provisions were so reduced that the ships put in on the coast of -Ireland to purchase milk and two sheep from the wild kernes, paying in -gold-dust. - -In Towrson's second voyage there is no word of sickness; but in his third -voyage in 1577, it is a prominent topic of the narrative. The vessels -'Minion,' 'Christopher' and 'Tiger' left Plymouth on January 30, 1577. On -the 8th of May, "all our cloth in the 'Minion' being sold, I called the -company together to know whether they would tarry the sale of the cloth -taken in the prize at this place or no: they answered that in respect of -the death of some of their men, and the present sickness of 20 more, they -would not tarry, but repair to the other ships, of whom they had heard -nothing since April 27." Having at length bartered for gold until the -natives would barter no longer, the three ships bore up for home. On July -24 the master of the 'Tiger' came aboard the 'Minion' and reported that -"his men were so weak and the ship so leak that he was not able to keep -her above the water." A muster held of all the three crews the same day -showed that there were not above 30 sound men in them. On September 3, -there being only six men in the 'Tiger' who could work, the gold and -stores were taken out of her, and she was abandoned. On October 6, when -off the coast of Portugal, the 'Christopher' reported herself so weak that -she was not able to keep the sea. The 'Minion' promised to attend her into -Vigo; but a fair wind springing up, she signalled that she was off for -home, whereupon the 'Christopher' followed. On October 16, a great -south-westerly storm arose; the men in the 'Minion' were not able, from -weakness, to handle the sails, which were blown away: however, they made -shift to reach the Isle of Wight on October 20, nothing more being said of -the 'Christopher.' - -The English voyages to Guinea for gold-dust were shortly followed by the -three expeditions of John Hawkins in 1562, 1564 and 1567 to the West coast -of Africa for negro slaves to be sold to the Spaniards in Hispaniola and -Cuba and on the Spanish Main[1126]. Only a brief summary remains of the -first voyage, in which nothing is said of sickness; in the second, the -negroes, at least, appear to have suffered on the somewhat long passage -across the tropical belt, especially from want of water; and the third was -so calamitous in various ways that Hawkins himself wrote of it: "If all -the miseries and troublesome affairs of this sorrowful voyage should be -perfectly and thoroughly written, there should need a painful man with his -pen, and as great a time as he had that wrote the lives and deaths of the -martyrs." Little or nothing is said of one class of martyrs in the -business--the negroes, of whom the ships carried four to five hundred. -English lives were lost in the kidnapping raids, from poisoned arrows, it -was thought, the wounded dying "in strange sort with their mouths shut -some ten days before they died, and after their wounds were whole." It was -on the return from the Gulf of Mexico, more than a year out from England, -that the sickness on board was worst. They cleared the Bahamas channel on -November 16, 1568, after which, "growing near to the cold country, our men -being oppressed with famine, died continually, and they that were left -grew into such weakness that we were scarcely able to manage our ship" -(the 'Jesus' of Lubeck, 700 tons). They put in at Ponte Vedra, near Vigo, -on December 31, but the fresh provisions that they got turned to their -hurt: "our men with excess of fresh meat grew into miserable diseases and -died a great part of them." Twelve fresh hands shipped at Vigo enabled the -vessels to reach the nearest English haven at Mount's Bay in Cornwall. - -Meanwhile we obtain some glimpses of seafaring among the Portuguese, who -had now in the middle of the 16th century a regular trade to the Indies, -established by Vasco de Gama's route round the Cape of Good Hope. Perhaps -the most famous of these records is that of the voyage of St Francis -Xavier from Lisbon to Goa in the spring of 1540. The expedition with which -he took passage carried, it is said, a regiment of a thousand men to -reinforce the garrison of Goa; during the voyage the Jesuit apostle -"rendered to the diseased services too revolting to be described, and -lived among the dying and the profligate, the unwearied minister of -consolation and of peace[1127]." After five months the ships arrived at -Mozambique, by which time Xavier and many more were suffering from fever. -Goa was not reached until thirteen months out from the Tagus. A more -familiar narrative of the same voyage of the Portuguese ships a generation -later is given by an English youth, Thomas Stevens, in a letter written -home to his father, a citizen of London, shortly after arriving at Goa. -Both in its generalities and in its particulars this excellent letter will -serve to measure the prevalence of scurvy, flux, and fever in the earlier -period of the East Indian trade by the Cape[1128]. - - The five ships left Lisbon on April 5, 1579, the solemnity being - marked by the firing of ordnance and the braying of trumpets. In the - ships, "besides shipmen and soldiers, there were a great number of - children, which in the seas bear out better than men; and no marvel, - when that many women also pass very well." After a passage along the - Guinea coast, made tedious by calms and head winds, they rounded the - Cape of Good Hope on July 29. From that point in the voyage the - Portugal ships were wont to follow one or other of two routes - according to the lateness of the season--either the route by the - Mozambique Channel, in which case they were able to get fruits and - fresh provisions, or the route along more southern parallels for a - time, and passing to the east of Madagascar[1129]. In the latter case, - "by reason of the long navigation and want of food and water, they - fall into sundry diseases, their gums wax great and swell, and they - are fain to cut them away, their legs swell, and all the body - becometh sore and so benumbed that they cannot stir hand nor foot, and - so they die for weakness. Others fall into fluxes and agues, and so - die thereby. - - "And this way it was our chance to make; and though we had more than - one hundred and fifty sick, there died not past seven-and-twenty, - which loss they esteemed not much in respect of other times." - - The ships went greatly out of their course, having sighted the island - of Socotra at the entrance to the Gulf of Aden, and did not arrive at - Goa until October 24, 202 days from Lisbon without calling anywhere. - -The first of the long English voyages beyond the Line was Sir Francis -Drake's famous circumnavigation from November 15, 1577, to September 26, -1580[1130]. Drake must have lost many of his men in those three years, but -there is nothing in the narrative to show that they perished of disease. -The expedition was by way of the Straits of Magellan, and was mainly given -up to plundering the Spaniards on the coasts of Chili and Peru. Drake set -out for home loaded with treasure by way of the Philippines and the Cape -of Good Hope. It is not until the narrative brings us to a small island -between Ternate and Celebes that we hear of sickness; they graved the ship -there and remained twenty-six days, during which the "sickly, weak and -decayed" recovered their strength, a large species of crayfish found on -the island being "very good and restoring meat, whereof we had -experience." But even Drake, with all his systematic care and resource, -was destined in after years to have a share of the common sickly -experience at sea, and to find disease a more potent enemy than the -Spaniard. - - -Remarkable Epidemic in Drake's Fleet 1585-6. - -Drake's next great expedition after his circumnavigation was in 1585, with -six Queen's ships and some nineteen others, carrying 2,300 men. A large -number of private adventurers had a money interest in the enterprise, -which had for its object to plunder Spanish towns in the West Indies and -the Spanish Main and to capture the treasure at the isthmus of Panama on -its way to Spain. The fleet experienced one of the most remarkable -epidemics in the whole history of sickness[1131]. - - Having left Plymouth on September 14, 1585, they arrived at the island - of St Jago, in the Cape de Verde group, on November 16. More than a - thousand men were landed, and were marched up the steep and broken - ground to a hill overlooking the capital, which stood in a narrow - valley, with high cliffs on the east and west and the Atlantic open - before it at some distance on the south. The place was surrounded by a - wall, and defended by fifty pieces of brass ordnance; but no - resistance was offered, and the English marched in to find the - inhabitants fled farther inland. On the 17th November, the town was - quartered out for the lodging of the whole army, which remained there - for ten days or a fortnight (there are inconsistent dates), taking - such spoils as the place yielded (wine, oil, meal and "trash" of the - Portuguese trade to the Indies). After a week, when no one had come to - ransom the town, Drake set out with 600 men to the village or town of - St Domingo, twelve miles inland, with the hope of finding the governor - and the bishop; but, finding no one, he marched his men back again the - same evening. On November 26 the whole force was re-embarked, all the - houses in the capital as well as in the country round were set fire - to, the port of Playa, a few miles to the westward, was also burned, - and on the same night the ships weighed anchor from the latter, and - stood away to the south-west. They had filled their water-casks from a - pool, near the seashore, formed by the small stream which runs through - the capital and descends the southern declivity. Nothing is said of - sickness during the occupation of St Jago; there seems to have been - some lax discipline, (owing to the mixed character of the expedition), - which Drake quickly remedied. - -The ships were only eighteen days in crossing the Atlantic to Dominica, a -distance of some forty meridians. In the midst of that quick sailing along -the edge of the tropical belt of ocean, with the steady north-east trade -wind behind them, the season the beginning of December and the climate the -most delightful and most refreshing on the globe, the ships were visited -suddenly with the fury of a deadly pestilential fever, of which the -following is the account by a captain of the land-forces on board: - - "We were not many days at sea but there began among our people such - mortality as in a few days there were dead two or three hundred men. - And until some seven or eight days after our coming from St Jago - there had not died any one man of sickness in all the fleet. The - sickness showed not his infection wherewith so many were stroken until - we were departed thence; and then seized our people with extreme hot - burning and continual agues whereof very few escaped with life, and - yet those for the most part not without great alteration and decay of - their wits and strength for a long time after. In some that died were - plainly showed the small spots which are often found upon those that - be infected with the plague." - -From Dominica the ships sailed to St Christopher, on which island Drake -disembarked his whole force, and cleaned and aired his ships, according to -an excellent practice which he had followed also in his great -circumnavigation. Some days of Christmas having been thus spent ashore, -"to refresh our sick people," the voyage was resumed to Hispaniola. Deaths -continued to occur, from the same disease as at first, both among officers -and men, and so continued for many weeks. However, they were able to land -some 1000 or 1200 men on Hispaniola, and to carry the city of San Domingo -by assault. The fleet then sailed southwards along the coast of the -mainland to Cartagena, which was captured in turn, and in like manner held -to ransom. - -It is at this part of the narrative that we next hear of the infection in -the fleet: - - "We stayed here six weeks [from middle of January to end of February, - 1586], and the sickness with mortality, before spoken of, still - continued among us, though not with the same fury as at the first. And - such as were touched with the said sickness, escaping death, very few - or almost none could recover their strength; yea, many of them were - much decayed in their memory, insomuch that it was grown an ordinary - judgment, when one was heard to speak foolishly, to say he had been - sick of the _calentura_, which is the Spanish name of that burning - ague; for, as I told you before, it is a very burning and pestilent - ague." - -Then follows the Spanish theory of the _calentura_, which may or may not -be rightly applied to the deadly epidemic that broke out suddenly in the -English ships in mid ocean: - - "The original cause thereof is imputed to the evening or first night - air, which they term _la serena_, wherein they say, and hold very firm - opinion, that whoso is then abroad in the open air shall certainly be - infected to the death, not being of the Indian or natural race of - those country people. By holding their watch our men were thus - subjected to the infectious air, which at St Jago was most dangerous - and deadly of all other places. With the inconvenience of continual - mortality, we were forced to give over our intended enterprize, etc." - -The land-captains having been consulted by Drake, on February 27, 1586, -advised that the expedition should go home from Cartagena, instead of -attempting to capture the treasure at Panama. In their memorandum they -wrote: "And being further advised of the slenderness of our strength, -whereunto we be now reduced, as well in respect of the small number of -able bodies, as also not a little in regard of the slack disposition of -the greater part of those which remain, very many of the better minds and -men being either consumed by death, or weakened by sickness and hurts, -etc." The voyage to England was accordingly begun; St Augustine in Florida -was captured by the way, and the struggling colony in Virginia, the first -sent out by Raleigh, was taken up and brought back, and Portsmouth reached -on July 28. "We lost some 750 men in the voyage, above three parts of them -only by sickness." The names are given of eight captains, four -lieutenants, and seven masters, who had died; and there were some other -officers dead unnamed. When the ransoms of San Domingo and Cartagena came -to be divided, the venture must have been found as unprofitable to the -shareholders as it had been disastrous to officers and men. - -The Spanish name _calentura_, by which the fever in the fleet is -described, was probably used generically for various kinds of fever in the -tropics. But of this fever in particular, we have some details not without -diagnostic value. It was doubtless contracted at St Jago in the Cape de -Verde islands; it broke out suddenly in mid ocean after some seven or -eight days sailing before the wind, in a delightful climate, which points -to the regular incubation of an infective virus, received by hundreds of -men when they were last ashore; the mortality was enormous; the symptoms -were those of a burning fever; and in some cases there were small spots or -petechiae like those often seen in the plague. It was clearly a febrile -form of pestilential infection, and, as few recovered, it must be -considered to have had a death-rate such as typhus has rarely had, and -such as yellow fever has commonly had. Nothing is said of the black -vomit, the haemorrhages, and the saffron colour of skin and eyes, which -are distinctive of yellow fever[1132]. On the other hand there is a -remarkable after-effect mentioned in both the passages quoted, the loss of -memory, impairment of wits, and appearance of foolishness, which made "the -calenture" a bye-word in the fleet. I shall not venture to say what the -infection was; but it seems tolerably certain that it was contracted by -the English during their occupation of the capital town of St Jago. More -recent visitors to the Cape de Verde islands have remarked upon their -towns and villages as fever-traps, and have pointed to the source of the -fever; it is not malaria, or the mere climatic influence, but a -pestilential emanation from spots of soil long inhabited by mankind, both -black and white, and so situated in cups of the hills as to retain and -multiply the filth-ferment in them. According to all analogy, the -emanations from such a soil would be felt most by strangers not inured to -them, and most of all by men of another stock and from other -latitudes[1133]. - - -Sicknesses of Voyages, continued: Management of Scurvy. - -The expedition to Virginia which returned in 1586 with Drake's ships -homeward bound from the Spanish Main, was the first sent out by Raleigh -with the intention of settling, an earlier voyage in 1584 having been made -to explore the country. It is in connexion with Raleigh's second colony -(and fourth expedition) in 1587 that we hear of disastrous sickness[1134]. -Having left 118 people to inhabit the country, the two larger ships sailed -for home on August 27 of the same year. On board the "fly-boat," the -provisions fell short, the water turned stinking, officers and men died, -and the vessel was navigated with difficulty to the west coast of Ireland. -When they reached Portsmouth, they found the admiral arrived there three -weeks before them, but with an equally disastrous experience: "Ferdinando -the master, with all his company were not only come home without any -purchase, but also in such weakness by sickness of their chiefest men that -they were scarce able to bring their ship into harbour, but were forced to -let fall anchor without." - -The following year, 1588, was made memorable in the English annals of the -sea by the defeat of the Spanish Armada. There was much sickness in both -fleets. As regards the English ships, a writer who has had special access -to original documents says[1135]: - - "We little think, when we peruse the melancholy tale of disease, - starvation and shame, so needlessly undergone by the heroic champions - of England's liberty against the invading might of Spain, from what - obscure and insignificant causes the difficulties and hardships of the - Island seamen may have chiefly arisen"--namely the peculation of - officials, the mouldering rations, empty magazines, and the like. In - the ships of the Spanish fleet the infection was like that of the - plague itself; the main body of the expedition, fifty sail, reached - Corunna, Santander and St Sebastian with such infection among the ten - thousand men on board, that the inhabitants shut their houses against - them. - -Two of the heroes of that fight, Drake and Hawkins, met their death by -sickness off the Spanish Main in 1595-6. The expedition, consisting of -2500 men in six Queen's ships and twenty-one others, left Plymouth on -August 28, 1595[1136]. Only the deaths of officers are mentioned in the -narrative, but of these there seem to have been a good many, when the -ships were in the Caribbean Sea. Hawkins died off Porto Rico on November -12. On December 7, Mr Yorke, captain of the 'Hope,' died of sickness, on -January 15, captain Plat died of sickness, and then Sir Francis Drake -began to keep his cabin and to complain of a scouring or flux: he died on -January 28, off Porto Bello. On the 27th died captain Jonas of the -'Delight,' captain Egerton, and James Wood, chief surgeon of the fleet, -out of the 'Garland.' On the 28th died Abraham Kendall out of the 'Saker.' -Several of the ships were sunk so that their men might go to the Queen's -ships, which were short of hands. A muster on February 6 showed in the -whole fleet "two thousand sick and whole," or five hundred fewer than had -sailed. There was some loss of life in encounters with the enemy, but much -more from disease. - -Of the filibustering cruises or expeditions to the East by the South -American route, there remain to be mentioned two by Thomas Cavendish, and -one at some length by Richard Hawkins, before we come to the establishment -of regular English trade to the East Indies by the Portuguese route round -the Cape of Good Hope. Cavendish's first voyage[1137] by the Straits of -Magellan was from Plymouth, 25 July, 1586, with three ships (240 tons in -all) carrying 125 men. - - Touching on the west coast of Africa, they went ashore and took lemons - from the trees. Off the coast of Brazil in November and December two - men died "of the disease called scorbuto, which is an infection of the - blood and the liver." Arrived at the Straits of Magellan they found - twenty-three Spaniards living on shell-fish, "which were all that - remained of four hundred which were left there [to found a colony] in - these Straits of Magellan, three years before, all the rest being dead - with famine." They were only too glad to hasten from this place, Port - Famine, "for the noysome stench and vile savour wherewith it was - infected through the contagon of the Spaniards' pined and dead - carkeises." In one of Cavendish's own ships, on February 21, 1588, - when among the East Indian islands, Captain Havers died of "a most - severe and pestilent ague, which held him furiously some seven or - eight days. Moreover presently after his death, myself [Pretty, the - narrator] with divers others in the ship fell marvellously sick, and - so continued in very great pain for the space of three weeks or a - month, by reason of the extreme heat and intemperature of the - climate." - -One might guess that these were cases of ship-fever (or calenture); but in -Cavendish's last voyage we meet with a strange sickness which will perhaps -baffle all nosological conjecture. This voyage, like the first, was -intended for the East Indies by way of the Straits of Magellan[1138]. The -three tall ships and two barks, having sailed from Plymouth on August 26, -1591, never got through the Straits; they were still within their recesses -in April, 1592, many men having "died with cursed famine and miserable -cold," and sick men having been put ashore into the woods in the snow. The -narrative (by John Lane), then follows the fortunes of one of the ships, -the 'Desire.' Landing at Port Desire, in Patagonia, they found -scurvy-grass growing, which they ate with oil: "This herb did so purge the -blood that it took away all kind of swellings, of which many [had] died, -and restored us to perfect health of body, so that we were in as good -case as when we came first out of England." There also they took on board -14,000 penguins, which they had dried on the rocks, mostly without salt; -and sailed northwards on December 22. With only 27 men surviving out of -76, they left the coast of Brazil at Cape Frio (near Rio de Janeiro), and -then began their more singular experience of disease. - - "After we came near unto the sun, our dried penguins began to corrupt, - and there bred in them a most loathsome and ugly worm of an inch long. - This worm did mightily increase, and devour our victuals;" it devoured - everything except iron,--clothes, boots, shirts, even the ship's - timbers! "In this woeful case, after we had passed the equinoctial - toward the North, our men began to fall sick of such a monstrous - disease as I think the like was never heard of: for in their ankles it - began to swell, from thence in two days it would be in their breasts, - so that they could not draw their breath, and then fell into their - cods, and their cods and yardes did swell most grievously and most - dreadfully to behold, so that they could neither stand, lie, nor goe. - Whereupon our men grew mad with grief. Our captain [John Davis] with - extreme anguish of his soul was in such woeful case that he desired - only a speedy end, and though he were scarce able to speak for sorrow, - yet he persuaded them to patience.... For all this, divers grew raging - mad, and some died in most loathsome and furious pain. It were - incredible to write our misery as it was; there was no man in perfect - health but the captain, and one boy.... To be short, all our men died - except sixteen [i.e., eleven died of the survivors after Cape Frio] of - which there were but five able to move." Those five worked the ship - into Berehaven (Bantry Bay) on June 11, 1593, and there ran her - ashore. - -The remarkable epidemic on board the 'Desire,' among men living upon dried -penguin infested with worms, was probably not scurvy, or at least not all -scurvy: the dropsy and dyspnoea suggest one of the two forms of beri-beri, -of a peculiarly severe type. The co-existence of worms in the dried food -may lead one to think of a parasitic malady such as that caused by -Anchylostoma duodenale, which has also an anasarcous or oedematous -character. But the diagnosis of beri-beri appears to be far more likely. -That epidemic, however we interpret it, must rank among the curiosities of -the history. But, in the next that we come to, the sickness on board the -'Daintie,' Richard Hawkins master, on a voyage in 1593 through the Straits -of Magellan, the disease is typical scurvy; and the observations on -sea-scurvy by Hawkins himself are among the best that we have for the -period, and, indeed, until long after the Elizabethan period[1139]. - -The 'Daintie,' a nearly new ship of 300 to 400 tons, weighed anchor from -Blackwall on April 8, 1593. She was deeply laden with merchandise for -trade and accompanied by a victualler, of 100 tons, the 'Hawk.' It was not -until June 12, that they got away from Plymouth. They put in at the Cape -de Verde islands, about whose climate and health Hawkins makes some -observations already quoted. Sailing thence they had come within three or -four degrees of the Line, when scurvy broke out: - - "My company within a few days began to fall sick of a disease which - seamen are wont to call the scurvie; and seemeth to be a kind of - dropsie, and raigneth most in this climate of any that I have heard or - read of in the world, though [it is found] in all seas. It possesseth - all those of which it takes hold with a loathsome sloathfulnesse, - _that even to eate_ they would be content to change _with sleepe and - rest_, which is the most pernicious enemie in this sickness that is - known. It bringeth with it a great desire to drink, and causeth a - general swelling of all parts of the body, especially of the legs, and - gums; and many times the teeth fall out of the jaws without pain. The - signs to know this disease in the beginning are divers,--by the - swelling of the gums, by denting of the flesh of the legs with a man's - finger, the pit remaining without filling up in a good space; others - show it with their laziness; others complain of the crick of the back, - etc., all which are for the most part certain tokens of the infection. - The cause is thought to be the stomack's feebleness by change of air - in intemperate climates, of diet in salt meats, boiled also in salt - water, and corrupted sometimes; the want of exercise, also, either in - persons or elements, as in calms." - -Hawkins then recalls the experience of the Queen's fleet in 1590, at the -Azores, the ships being in calm weather for six months: "in which voyage, -towards the end thereof, many of every ship (saving the 'Nonpereli' which -was under my charge and had only one man sick in all the voyage) fell sick -of this disease and began to die apace." - -Hawkins wrote out the account of his 1593 voyage some time after, and did -not print it until 1622; but it may be supposed that the views about -scurvy therein expressed were the same that he held and acted upon in his -earlier life[1140]. Thus his remarks upon the prevention and cure of -scurvy, about to be given, may be taken to stand for the practical wisdom -or sagacity of the Elizabethan period. The ship should be kept clean, -vinegar should be sprinkled and tar burned. In hot latitudes salt meats -should be shunned, and especially salt fish. Salt water should not be used -to dress the meat, nor to wash shirts in; nor should the men sleep in -their wet clothes. The crews should be set to various exercises, and -encouraged to various pastimes. At this point he seems to feel that he is -a layman giving medical advice, and interpolates: - - "And I wish that some learned men would write of it, for it is the - plague of the sea and the spoil of mariners. Doubtless it would be a - work worthy of a worthy man, and most beneficial for our country, for - in twenty years (since I have used the sea) I dare take upon me to - give account of ten thousand men consumed with this disease." - -The learned man was forthcoming in due course, in the person of John -Woodall, surgeon-general to the East India Company; and we shall see what -he made of it. Meanwhile, in default of professional guidance, we may hear -Hawkins himself: - - "That which I have seen most fruitful for this sickness is sour - oranges and lemons, and a water called Dr Stevens his water, of which - I carried but little, and it took end quickly, but gave health to - those that used it. The oyle of vitry [vitriol] is beneficial--two - drops in a draught of water with a little sugar. But the principal of - all is the air of the land; for the sea is natural for fishes, and the - land for men. And the oftener a man can have his people to land, not - hindering his voyage, the better it is and the profitablest course he - can take to refresh them." - -Hawkins, as well as his contemporaries, as we shall see, knew what -lime-juice could do for scurvy, and knew also the limit of its powers; it -was useful, as he had himself found; but much else was needed to ward off -scurvy. After experience showed clearly enough that some commanders with -the same stores as others could carry their crews through a long voyage -without scurvy; Hawkins himself, in the 'Nonpareil' in 1590, had only one -man sick of it, while it was general in the fleet. In the voyage of 1593, -for all his knowledge and resource, he appears to have found circumstances -too hard for him. His crew showed their bad habits while the ship lay at -Plymouth; as in Lancaster's experience two years before, the evil habits -of sailors told upon their constitutions, so that they became an easy prey -to monotonous living at sea. Scurvy broke out when they were within three -or four degrees of the Line: "The sickness was fervent, every day there -died more or less." The ship's course was accordingly turned westward, -although they were too far south to benefit by the north-east trade wind; -and in the end of October they came to the coast of Brazil at Santos, four -months and a half out from Plymouth. At Santos they obtained 200 or 300 -oranges and lemons, and a few hens; there were so many men sick that there -were not above three or four oranges or lemons to a share: "Coming aboard -of our ships there was great joy amongst my company, and many with the -sight of the oranges and lemons seemed to recover heart." It is the great -and unknown virtue of that fruit, he says, to be a certain remedy for this -infirmity. The rest of the voyage possesses no special interest for us. -The scurvy had "wasted more than half of my people;" so that Hawkins took -the crew and provisions out of the 'Hawk,' and burned her. He left the -Brazilian coast on December 18, passed the Straits of Magellan, and after -some filibustering on the Chilian and Peruvian coasts, was captured by a -Spanish ship, and sent home to Spain to be ransomed. - -Hawkins, it will have been remarked, was no bigoted "lime-juicer;" -although he knew the virtues of anti-scorbutic acids, he had a correct -apprehension of the need of cleanliness, dry clothing, exercise, -amusements and discipline, and if he had understood the need of wind-sails -for the ventilation of 'tween-decks, he would have had as scientific a -grasp of the whole question as Blane had two centuries after. But in the -end of the Tudor period, and in the Stuart period, with abounding -enterprise and national expansion, there was little sense of the personal -need of breathing space, whether in ships or in houses. The number of -souls on board, in proportion to a ship's tonnage, was twice or thrice as -great as the Board of Trade now allows. It was not only in long voyages, -or in the monotony of tropical calms, that scurvy was apt to invade a -crew. The following experience, on our own shores, is credible enough: In -1611 Purchas was shown a letter from Newfoundland, giving an account of a -winter spent there, the writer taking credit to himself for the small -amount of scurvy among the men under him: in a company of 39 persons, only -four were wanting in the spring; but, by way of contrast, he recalls what -happened at home in the year 1600[1141]: - - "One Richard Fletcher, that is master pilot here, and a director of - the fishing, reported unto me that he was one of the company, - consisting of forty persons, that went in a drumbler of Ipswich called - the 'Amitie,' to the north of Ireland about eleven years ago from - London in the late Queen's service under the charge of one Captain - Fleming, and continued there the space of two years. In which time two - and thirty died of the scurvie, and that only eight of them returned - home, whereof the said Richard Fletcher was one ... notwithstanding - that there were to be had fresh victuals and many other helps, which - their country [Newfoundland] as yet hath not, but in good time may - have." - -We have not yet come to any deliverance of the faculty on the subject of -scurvy; Hawkins appears to be giving merely his own experience and -reflections. Beside these we may here place the contemporary observations -and practice of the French laymen, which are expressly at variance on some -points with medical teaching. Some time previous to 1609, Marc Lescarbot -wrote an account of 'the voyage of M. de Monts into New France;' the -expedition sailed from Havre in March, 1604. Their first winter in Canada -is thus related[1142]: - - In the meanwhile the cold and snows came upon them.... Many idle, - sluggish companions drank snow-water, not willing to take the pains to - cross the river. "Briefly, the unknown sicknesses like to those - described unto us by James Quartier in his relation, assailed us. For - remedies there was none to be found. In the meanwhile the poor sick - creatures did languish, pining away by little and little for want of - sweet meats, as milk or spoon meat for to sustain their stomachs, - which could not receive the hard meats, by reason of let, proceeding - from a rotten flesh which grew and overabounded within their mouths; - and when one thought to root it out, it did grow again in one night's - space more abundantly than before.... There died of this sickness - thirty-six; and thirty-six or forty more that were stricken with it - recovered themselves by the help of the Spring, as soon as the - comfortable season appeared. But the deadly season for that sickness - is the end of January, the months of February and March, wherein most - commonly the sick do die, every one at his turn, according to the time - when they have begun to be sick; in such sort that he which began to - be ill in February and March may escape, but he that shall overhaste - himself, and betake him to his bed in December and January, he is in - danger to die in February and March, or the beginning of April.... M. - de Poutrincourt made a negro to be opened that died of that sickness - in our voyage, who was found to have the inward parts very sound - except the stomacke, that had wrinkles as though they were ulcerated." - -Then follow Lescarbot's views of the treatment and prevention of scurvy. -After advising to avoid "cold" meats without juices, gross and corrupted, -salted, "smoaky," musty, raw and of an evil scent, including dried fishes, -he proceeds: - - "I would not, for all that, be so scrupulous as the physicians, which - do put in the number of gross and melancholy meats, beeve's flesh, - bear's, wild boar's and hog's flesh (they might as well add unto them - beaver's flesh, which notwithstanding we have found very good), as - they do amongst fishes the tons [tunnies], dolphins, and all those - that carry lard; among the birds the hernes, ducks and all other - water-birds; for, in being an over-curious observator of these things, - one might fall into the danger of starving. They place yet among the - meats that are to be shunned, bisket[1143], beans and pulse, the often - using of milk, cheese, the gross and harsh wine and that which is too - small, white wine, and the use of vinegar" - ---just like our own great masters in prohibitory dietetics. - -Lescarbot's advice agrees on the whole with that of Sir R. Hawkins: the -men should be well shod and clothed, merriment should be encouraged, and -again: - - "Good wine taken according to the necessity of nature, it is a - soveraigne preservative for all sickness, and particularly for this. - The young buds of herbs in the Spring time be also very soveraigne.... - We have had some sick that have been (as it were) raised up from death - to life, for having eaten twice or thrice of a coolice made of a - cock." - -In the voyage of Sir Thomas Smith to Baffin's Bay in 1616, the treatment -of scurvy by vegetable juices is mentioned: "Next day, going ashore on a -little island we found great abundance of scurvie grass, which we boiled -in beer, and so drank thereof, using it also in sallet, with sorrel and -orpen, which here groweth in abundance; by means whereof, and the blessing -of God, all our men within eight or nine days shall gain perfect health, -and so continue till our arrival in England[1144]." - -On the other hand, those who appear to have had the most correct intuition -of the teaching of the schools were the Red Indians. Lescarbot says that, -in the treatment of scurvy, "they use sweating often." Perhaps they had -some dim notion of the doctrine of peccant humours: at all events they -clung to the alterative practice until long after that date, with a -tenacity second only to that of the European faculty itself. - - -Scurvy in the East India Company's Ships: Professional Treatment. - -Until the end of the Tudor period, scurvy had been only an occasional -incident of English voyages. But as soon as the regular trade to the East -begins, we find it a common experience. - -The English voyages to the East Indies by the Cape route really began in -1591, when Captain James Lancaster sailed first in command of ships -belonging to the Company of Merchant Adventurers; but it was not until -1601 that he sailed again to the East Indies in command of the first ships -of the East India Company, which had been formed the year before. - - The three ships in 1591, the 'Penelope,' 'Marchant Royal,' and 'Edward - Bonaventure,' cleared from Plymouth on April 10[1145]. They crossed - the Line on June 6, by which time two men were dead and divers sick. - In the tropics so much rain fell that "we could not keep our men dry - three hours together, which was an occasion of the infection among - them, and their eating of salt victuals, with the lack of clothes to - shift them." On this first voyage, Lancaster began the practice which - was generally followed when the East India trade in English ships - became established; before attempting to double the Cape of Good Hope, - he refreshed his crews, who were weak and sick in all three ships, by - a sojourn ashore at the Bay of Saldanha, a few leagues to the north of - Table Bay. The voyage had already lasted more than three months from - Plymouth, and about six weeks from the Line[1146]. - - At a muster on August 1, in the Bay of Saldanha, Lancaster found that - he had 198 men sound and whole, of whom he assigned 101 to the - 'Penelope,' and 97 to the 'Edward Bonaventure,' sending home 50 more - or less unfit men in the 'Royal Merchant.' Scurvy, he says, was the - disease: - -"Our soldiers, which have not been used to the sea, have best held out, -but our mariners dropt away, which in my judgment, proceedeth of their -evil diet at home." The voyage was continued to the East Indies, the next -that we hear of the state of health being at Penang in the beginning of -June 1592, or some fourteen months out. The men were then very sick and -many fallen; the sick were landed, and twenty-six died there, but not of -scurvy, we may surmise. They had now left but thirty-three men and one -boy, "of which not past twenty-two were found for labour and help." - - The two ships sailed for home from Point de Galle on December 8, 1592, - and reached St Helena on April 3, 1593; one man was sick of the - scurvy, and another had been suffering from the flux for nine months, - but on the island both shortly recovered their perfect health. Instead - of reaching England, the ships were carried to the West Indies, where, - after an attempt to navigate them northwards, they were wrecked, and - the small remnants of their crews dispersed. - -Lancaster's first voyage for the East India Company in 1601[1147] was -"with foure tall shippes, to wit, the Dragon, the Hector, the Ascension, -and Susan, and a victualler called the Guest." The Company, founded in -1600, began with a capital of L72,000, which was laid out in the purchase -and outfit of the ships, and in loading them with merchandise. The crews -were as follow: - - Dragon, 600 tons, 202 men. - Hector, 300 " 108 " - Ascension, 260 " 82 " - Susan, --- " 88 " - --- - 480 - Guest, 130 tons. - -Further, "in every of the said ships, three merchants to succeed one the -other, if any of them should be taken away by death"--a sufficient -indication of the risks of foreign trade. - - The ships, having loaded in the Thames, sailed from Dartmouth on April - 18, 1601, and got clear of Tor Bay on the 22nd. On July 24, two months - from the Channel, they crossed the southern tropic. But they had been - so long under the Line that "many of our men fell sick." On August 1, - in 30 deg. S., they met the south-west wind, "to the great comfort of all - our people. For, by this time very many of our men were fallen sick of - the scurvy in all our ships, and, unless it were in the general's ship - only, the others were so weak of men that they could hardly handle the - sails." Headwinds again hindered their course, and "now the few whole - men we had began also to fall sick, so that our weakness of men was so - great that in some of the ships the merchants took their turn at the - helm and went into the top to take in the top sails, as the common - mariners did." Lancaster at length made Saldanha Bay, where he had - landed to refresh his crews on his first voyage round the Cape ten - years before. The state of three of the ships "was such that they was - hardly able to let fall an anchor to save themselves withall;" but - "the general went aboard of them and carried good store of men, and - hoysed out their boats for them.... And the reason why the general's - men stood better in health than the men of other ships was this: he - brought to sea with him certain bottles of the juice of lemons, which - he gave to each one as long as it would last, three spoonfuls every - morning fasting, not suffering them to eat anything after it till - noon. This juice worketh much the better if the partie keepe short - diet, and wholly refrain salt meat, which salt meat, and long being at - the sea, is the only cause of the breeding of this disease. By this - means the general cured many of his men and preserved the rest, so - that in this ship (having the double of men that was in the rest of - the ships) he had not so many sick, nor lost so many men as they did, - which was the mercie of God to us all." - -At Saldanha Bay they bartered with the natives for an abundant supply of -fresh meat and other provisions, and in due time doubled the Cape of Good -Hope. On Christmas day, eight months out from England, they put in to -Antongil Bay, on the east side of Madagascar. On landing they found a -writing on the rocks that five Dutch ships had sailed thence two months -before, having "lost between 150 and 200 men while they roade in that -place." The English had a similar experience in store for them: on board -Lancaster's ship, the master's mate, the preacher, the surgeon and some -ten others, died; and, in the vice-admiral's ship, the master with other -two. It was mostly the flux that they died of, brought on by the -drinking-water, or by the excessive wetness of the season, or by "going -open and cold in the stomacke, which our men would often do when they were -hot" (Hawkins gives the latter reason for flux at the Cape de Verde -islands). - -The references to scurvy before reaching the Cape, and to dysentery in -Madagascar, are all that is said of sickness in this first venture of the -East India Company. But in the accounts of the voyages which regularly -followed we hear a great deal of the loss of men at the factories, or in -the country trade, or on the voyage home, as well as on the outward -voyage[1148]. The Directors in London were naturally well aware how -greatly their ventures were imperilled and their profits reduced by the -enormous loss of men. Under their own eyes ships would arrive in the mouth -of the Channel with crews so weakened that they had to be met at Scilly -with help to navigate them through the narrow seas to the Thames. By their -correspondence from abroad, they were frequently hearing of artificers -dying in their factories, of ships arriving out with so many men dead, and -of other ships cast away, partly by stress of weather no doubt, but -sometimes from inability of the crews to man them. Accordingly we find -that they were alive to the best means of preventing "flux, scurvy, and -fever." Lancaster, as we have seen, carried lime-juice on his first voyage -for the Company in 1601. In the Court minutes of August 13, 1607, the -following were ordered to be provided with expedition: "Lemon water, -'alligant' from Alicante, a wine very fit for beverage and good against -the flux, and old corn, etc." At the Court of Directors on December 10, -1614, there was considered an "offer of Dr Burgis to present the Company -with an antidote against poison, scurvy, and other diseases to which -people are subject these long voyages: Sir Thomas Roe and Captain Keeling -to confer with him and report their opinions." Trial was also to be made -of baking fresh bread at sea, with the grinding of corn, "an exercise fit -to preserve men in health." The offer of Dr Burgis was accepted; and on -January 26, 1615, the minutes of the Court mention "instructions in -writing, and boxes of such things as are to be used, for prevention of the -flux, scurvy, and fever, prepared by Dr Burgis, to be delivered to each -ship; the cost, about L23, to be paid." In the minutes of the Court, -November 22, 1619, there is reference to another preventive of scurvy: -"The fleet to be supplied with 15 tons of white wine, to be drunk at the -Line, and the Cape, which is used by the Dutch to preserve men from -scurvy, and will refresh the men and scour their maws, and open and cool -as well as lemon water"--the latter having been in all probability -disliked or refused by the men. In 1624, "the death of mariners" is a -topic at the Court of Directors; again, on October 15, 1626, the Court -considers of the great mortality from scurvy in the 'Charles' and 'Hart,' -homeward bound, and how to prevent it. Some were of opinion that lemon -water was very good, but Mr Styles related that tamarind was the -excellentest thing. However, there had been plenty of tamarinds aboard the -ships; and on Lieutenant Hill being called in, he testified that the crews -had all got tamarind, but they were all debauched people. - -John Woodall, surgeon to St Bartholomew's Hospital, was at this time -surgeon-general to the East India Company, having medical charge of their -dockyard at Blackwall; his name appears in the Court minutes as early as -1614. In 1617 he published his 'Surgion's Mate,' "chiefly for the benefit -of young sea-surgions imployed in the East India companies affairs," and -dedicated it to Sir Thomas Smith, himself a navigator, and then chairman -of the Court of Directors. This practical manual is largely occupied with -the management of fractures, dislocations, amputations, and the like, a -part of his subject wherein Woodall was thoroughly competent; but there -appears also in the title, "the cure of the scurvie, the fluxes of the -belly, of the collica and iliaca passio, tenasmus and exitus ani, the -callenture." The section on scurvy, twenty-six pages long, is the one that -here concerns us. This was what Sir Richard Hawkins had desired: "And I -wish that some learned men would write of it, for it is the plague of the -sea and the spoil of mariners." Woodall begins by disclaiming learning: "A -learned treatise befits not my pen." But, at all events, his was the voice -of the faculty, and he plunges boldly into pathology in the very first -lines: "Scurvy is a disease of the spleen, whereby it is sometimes wholly -stopped" etc. Being a man of much good sense, Woodall quickly leaves that -line of remark, for a time at least. He repeats all the familiar -experience of Hawkins, Lancaster, and the numerous captains of East -Indiamen, with whom he must have conversed many times (it does not appear -that he had himself sailed). He mentions the great benefit to the crews -from landing at the Cape, with the fresh air and food, scurvy being -thereby cured "without much other help." He enforces the need of changes -of clothing, and other things in the regimen on board, just as Hawkins and -others were wont to do in practice. He is as clear on the virtues of -lime-juice as Lancaster, and copies somewhat closely the practice of the -latter in 1601: "each morning two or three spoonfuls, and fast after it -two hours"; his originality appearing in the rider, grateful to seamen: -"and if you add one spoonful of aqua vitae thereto, to a cold stomach it -is the better." He mentions that a "good quantity of juice of lemons is -sent in each ship out of England, by the great care of the merchants, and -intended only for the relief of every poor man in his need." The ship's -surgeon is advised to lay in a store of fresh lemons and oranges where -they were to be had on the voyage, and of tamarinds at Bantam. - -So far, Woodall merely sets down what every shipmaster knew as to the -things that bring on scurvy, the best regimen to keep it off, and the -extraordinarily rapid curative effect of lime-juice and of change to land -air and fresh food. But there was a certain professional doctrine of -scurvy, and a treatment of it _secundum artem_, namely the wisdom of -learned men which Hawkins had called for; and we have now to see what -that was, according to Woodall. His pathology is that of "obstructions," -a curious fancy of the learned[1149]. - -The spleen, said Woodall in his opening lines, is the chief seat of -obstruction; but on resuming the pathology, he proceeds to obstructions -also of the liver and brain: - - "But it is plain that this grief is a lazy foul disease with - obstructions of the liver, or spleen, or both; as also it appeareth - that the head is much diseased, and that there is great obstructions - in the brain, for that the eyes not only look evil coloured, but also - the gums putrefy, and the teeth grow loose, and all the sinewy parts - of the body bear their part in the disease, for the shrinking and - withering of the sinews, with the great pains the party hath, - declareth no less" (p. 180). - -This theoretical pathology Woodall supports by an appeal to morbid -anatomy: - - "Also it is manifest that divers of those which have been opened after - death have had their livers utterly rotted"-others having their livers - much swollen, and the spleen swollen, others full of water, others - their lungs putrefied and stunk while they have lived, (which last may - have been an incorrect inference from the foul state of the mouth). - -Such being the pathology of the disease, he comes next to the indications -of cure; and these he takes from "a famous writer, Johannes Echthius." -They are: - - 1. The opening of obstructions. - - 2. The evacuating of offending humours. - - 3. The altering the property of the humours. - - 4. The comforting and corroborating the parts late diseased. - -The order of treatment, _lege artis_, is accordingly as follows: the -administration of a clyster or clysters; the opening of a vein, if strong -("but beware of taking too much blood away at once"); next day after the -bleeding, "if he can bear it," give him pills of euphorbium or gamboge; -and lastly, "if you see cause," certain days after you have given of any -of your former laxatives, you may give a sweat to the patient in his bed. -Thus the indications from the pathology would be fulfilled--opening of -obstructions, evacuating of ill humours, and altering the property of the -humours. It should be said for Woodall that his practice was better than -his theory. Thus, he cautions the young dogmatists who sailed as surgeons -in East Indiamen, not to carry their principles too far; he has heard that -they are somewhat fond of the lancet, and he cautions them not to take too -much blood at sea, as excessive depletion "makes the disease worse;" he -cautions them also as to the use of gamboge. - -We may now proceed with a few more illustrations of what the Company's -ships were actually experiencing during the period that those questions -were before the Court of Directors[1150]. - - In the sixth voyage for the Company, under the command of Sir H. - Middleton, the captain of the 'Darling' and three of his merchants - died at Tecoa, and most of the men were ill. In the eighth voyage, - when homeward bound between the Cape and St Helena in the month of - June, many of the men fell ill with scurvy, and the ship had to come - in to Waterford instead of the Thames. A similar experience befell - Captain Thomas Best in the 'Dragon' and 'Hosiander,' carrying together - 380 persons. Having left Gravesend on February 1, 1612, he completed - his trading in the Indies, and arrived in the Thames on June 15, 1614, - six months from Bantam. The scurvy in this voyage comes in towards the - end. On March 4, 1614, "I did set sail in the roade of Saldanha; yet - notwithstanding our short passage, having been from Santa Helena but - two monethes and nine days, the one half or more of our company are - laid up [on June 4] of the scurvie and two dead of it. Yet we had - plentie of victuals, as beef, bread, wine, rice, oil, vinegar, sugar; - and all these without allowance. Note that all our men that are sick - have taken their sickness since we fell with Flores and Corvo. For - since that time we have had it very cold, especially in two great - storms.... From the Cape of Good Hope to the islands of Flores and - Corvo I had not one man sick." While in the Malay Archipelago they had - buried twenty-five men at one place. - - On November 3, 1618, the Directors have letters from two of their - captains at the Cape, of July 6 and 7, with news of their arrival - there on June 26, and the loss or sickness of many men, partly through - the stinking beer, the tainted beef, the lack of fresh provisions at - the Cape, and the want of warm clothes. A letter of February 25, 1619, - announces the arrival of the 'Peppercorn' in Bantam roads: A great - many men had died in the ten-months' voyage between England and - Bantam; putrefied beef and pork, "not man's meat," the chief cause of - sickness. When they arrived at Bantam, not six men able to work; the - whole fleet in the like distress. Twenty-five men in all dead or - drowned. A letter from Batavia, January 11, 1622, says the master of - the 'Anne' and 14 men of the fleet were dead: "so many men are - deceased that they have not enough to man all the ships now in the - roads." The 'Diamond' sailed from England on October 8, 1621, and - after a "long and tedious voyage" arrived at Jacatra previous to - November 24, 1622: enclosed are the accounts of those men who have - died, and nine wills. Another letter from Batavia, sometime in 1623, - covers an "abstract of the men deceased in the ships." - - On March 28, 1624, the 'Royal James,' with five others, sailed from - the Downs; she called at Saldanha Bay, and arrived on or before - November 15, at Swally bar, Batavia; the bread had been very bad, the - water too little, the beef not fit for men; have enclosed the names of - those deceased. The 'Jonas,' also arrived out at Batavia on November - 15, appears to have been one of the five others; she called at - Saldanha Bay on July 19; "the wholesomeness of the air and the herb - baths caused the most part of their sick men to recover in ten days - from the scurbeck." In June, 1625, the 'Anne' had been at Mocha for - eight months in great distress, with most part of her men dead and the - ship ready to founder. - - Writing on October 13, 1625, from Batavia to the East India Company in - London, Governor Hawley says that the 'London' had arrived out on - August 23, with loss of 36 men, and 80 sick. She reported the - 'Discovery' to have left the Cape for St Helena, having lost 21 men; - two other ships, the 'Moon' and 'Ruby' had their crews "in remarkable - health." On September 14, the 'Swallow' arrived out, having lost only - 3 men. Of 46 men shipped in the 'Abigail' out of England, all were - dead but 5, in her coasting voyages upon Sumatra. Most of the workmen - and soldiers sent in the 'London' had arrived; "but since, by - disorders, are dead, as are those in the 'Swallow.' The smiths are all - dead; of the armourers, only John Speed and a boy alive. Most other - workmen dead or incapable. This is not remissness of government, but - the newcomers, dreaming of nothing but sack and sugar-plums in India, - are with much difficulty brought to obedience." A Dutch ship, the - 'Leyden' arrived out in 1626, with loss of 22 men, having been twelve - months on the passage. - - In the end of October, 1628, the 'Morris' reached the mouth of the - Channel from Bantam, "which was most happily met with near Scilly by - Captain Bickly, who was sent out to relieve any ship from the Indies, - she being in a very weak state by reason of an infectious disease." - She reached the Downs safely with two other East Indiamen; but having - been driven from her anchors in a great storm, was wrecked on the - coast of Holland previous to November 19. Next year, about October 28, - 1629, the 'Mary' of the East India Company was reported to have put - into Scilly having lost most of her men by sickness. Therefore, Sir H. - Mervyn, of H.M.S. 'Lyon,' in the Downs, having got early word of the - 'Mary's' distress, writes to E. Nicholas, to say that if the Company - desire a convoy for the 'Mary' from their lordships of the Admiralty, - "she being rich," he (Mervyn) hopes that Nicholas will remember him. - -But, although it was not unusual for ships to come home with crews -weakened by scurvy, it was not invariable. The 'William' returned to -England in 1628, as rich a ship as the Company ever had from the East -Indies, with not a sick man in her, nor any dead on the way; her lading -was computed to be worth L170,000[1151]. - -In a despatch of February 6, 1626, Hawley gives an account of a truly -disastrous sickness in the factory and among the Company's ships at -Batavia during the previous year, which illustrates another risk than that -of scurvy or flux, and an experience in the East Indies not altogether -exceptional[1152]. - - "On March 12, I dispeeded the 'Diamond' for Japan to fetch boards, - planks, etc. [to repair the 'Bull' with]; but hardly had fourteen days - passed when the 'Bull's' men fell sick and died daily; then the - 'Reformation's' men died by five, six or more in a day; in a short - time the 'Bull's' men all died but the master and one more, who were - dangerously sick, and in the 'Reformation' the master and all the men - lay at God's mercy. We were forced to relieve them by blacks, and hale - the ships to the open bay [they would seem to have been careened] - where they rode like wrecks without other help than some few to - comfort their sick, for more from the other ships might not be spared. - The contagion was so pestilent that their blood, being licked by dog - or cat, caused them to swell, burst and die. It was more moderate on - shore, and was least on the ships in the open bay, though they also - were daily visited.... The 'Diamond' returned on April 11, with planks - etc.; also slaves and 44 Chinamen, which were with no small charge - procured, and who all fell sick, and 10 or 12 died.... Thinking the - mortality was occasioned, not by pestiferous air or soil, nor by any - noxious tree, but by surfeit and the wet monsoon, I enacted orders for - government building, and cleansing the trees to get more air. Wanted - no provisions of fresh victual; could at pleasure command neighbours - to fish and fetch anything needed, and the island itself furnished - deer. On April 12, took general view of all people, as follows: - - English English Portuguese - in health sick sick - - On shore 40 58 5 - In the 'Charles' 32 10 - " 'Roebuck' 16 2 - " 'Bull' 2 8 - " 'Reformation' 23 14 12 - " 'Abigail' 8 3 - " 'Rose' 7 2 5 - ----- ----- ----- - 128 97 22 - - --leaving, of course, an immense proportion dead. - -These are instances from the records of the East India Company during the -first thirty years of its existence. It would be tedious, even if it were -practicable, to follow the history continuously. But meanwhile to show -that its experiences, good and bad, remained much the same until long -after, let us take two voyages in the year 1682. Governor William Hedges, -passenger on board one of the Company's ships, enters in his diary the -25th of May, 1682, being then off the Cape of Good Hope: "Not lost a man -(except Mr Richards) either by sickness or any other accident, since we -left England, which wants but three days of four months, and is just two -months since we passed the Equinoctial Line," nothing being said of -sickness in the rest of the voyage. But another of the Company's ships the -same year fared worse: "December 9, 1682, ship 'Society' arrived at -Balasore. She left the Downs on May 30, and, not touching at any place by -the way, lost seventeen men of the scurvy[1153]." - - -Sickness in the Colonizing of Virginia and New England. - -Leaving now the long voyages of the English beyond the Line, and their -factories in the East, let us see how they fared as regards health when -they merely crossed the Atlantic in their own latitudes. The earliest -series of voyages to Virginia, at Raleigh's instigation, from 1585 to -1590, have been already referred to. The continuous history of Atlantic -voyages, and of the North American colonies, begins with the expedition -of 1609 under Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers[1154]. - -Seven of the ships fitted out in the Thames, and sailed from Woolwich on -May 15, 1609. Having been joined at Plymouth by two more, the fleet sailed -thence on June 2, and from Falmouth on June 8. The expedition included -"many unruly gallants, packed thither by their friends to escape ill -destinies," with the proportion of women and children usual among -emigrants, as well as horses, and probably other live stock. The -navigation, to reach Western land in 37 deg. N., appears to have been somewhat -erratic: - - "We ran a southerly course from the tropic of Cancer, where, having - the sun within six or seven degrees right over our head in July, we - bore away West; so that by the fervent heat and loomes breezes, many - of our men fell sick of the calenture"--Noah Webster takes that to - mean a spotted pestilential fever--"and out of two ships was thrown - overboard thirty-two persons. The vice-admiral [the 'Diamond'] was - said to have the plague in her; but in the 'Blessing' we had not any - sick, albeit we had twenty women and children." - -A storm came on, in which the ships were scattered, the admiral's ship -being driven to the Bermudas and there wrecked[1155]. In the storm "some -lost their masts, some had their sails blown from their yards; the seas -over-raking our ships, much of our provision was spoiled, our fleet -separated, and our men sick, and many died; and in this miserable state we -arrived at Virginia." The 'Blessing,' on board which was Gabriel Archer, -the principal narrator of events, seems to have fared better than the -rest: "The 'Unity' was sore distressed when she came up with us; for, of -seventy landmen [emigrants], she had not ten found, and all her seamen -were down, but only the master and his boy, with one poor sailor; but we -relieved them, and we four consorting, fell into the King's River [James -River] haply the 11th of August." They found the colony "all in health -(for the most part)." There were fourscore living 20 miles from the Fort, -who fed upon nothing but oysters eight weeks' space. "After our four ships -had been in harbour a few days, came in the vice-admiral, having cut her -mainmast overboard, and had many of her men very sick and weak." This was -the ship that was said to have the plague in her. The admiral and his -ship's company, wrecked on the Bermudas, fared in health best of all; the -whole number of 150 persons reached Jamestown in due course, to find only -60 remaining alive of the 350 who had formed the complement of the other -ships. Part of the mortality had happened on board ship, but probably the -most of it after landing; Jamestown "is in a marish ground, low, flat to -the river, and hath no fresh water springs serving the town, but what we -drew from a well six or seven fathom deep, fed by the brackish river -oozing into it, from whence I verily believe the chief causes have -proceeded of many diseases and sicknesses which have happened to our -people, who are indeed strangely afflicted with fluxes and agues." Lord De -La Warre, one of the early governors, had a succession of illnesses--hot -and violent ague, followed by a relapse still more violent and lasting a -month, "then the flux surprised me and kept me many days," then the cramp, -with strong pains, afterwards the gout, and finally the scurvy--which -last, however, might have been the eczema of gout, although it was said to -have been cured by the oranges and lemons of the Western Islands, and by -the voyage thither[1156]. - -Much in these early ventures was put down to climate, which was really due -to other causes. There are, of course, unhealthy climates; but a great -deal of the talk in the 17th and 18th centuries about the "tainted air" of -"foreign climes" was mere confusion of ideas. A more correct view of -events was that of the Governor and Council of Virginia, in a letter of -January 30, 1624, to the Virginia Company in London: - - "The mortality, which is imputed to the country alone, is chiefly - caused by the pestilent ships, which reach Virginia victualled with - musty bread and stinking beer, heretofore so earnestly complained - of.... Robert Benet in his lifetime boasted that the sale of four - butts of wine would clear a voyage. Rotten wines destroy their bodies - and empty their purses[1157]." - -The letter then goes on to relate how sickness had brought down great -numbers "since their last." According to Purchas, the emigration to -Virginia in three years immediately preceding this, the years 1619, 1620 -and 1621, had amounted to 3570 persons in 42 ships. Overcrowding, we may -be sure, was the rule. We shall find particular evidence of it in speaking -of West Indian colonization in the sequel; and for the present, it may -suffice to quote a document of April 24, 1638, a list of 110 passengers -for New England per 'Confidence' of 200 tons. - -If Virginia was settled by a crew of broken gallants and their humbler -followers, the New England colony was officered by strict Puritans, who -were accompanied by men and women sharing, as nearly as might be, the same -beliefs and principles of conduct. The records of the Massachusetts Bay -settlements might be expected, therefore, to show less of sickness and -failure than the Virginian; and so, indeed, they do, although they are by -no means clear of it. The first voyage of the 'Mayflower' in 1620, -carrying the small sect of Brownists who had tried Holland for a time as a -place of refuge, presents nothing for our purpose. Like the settlers along -the shores of Chesapeake Bay before them, these first New Englanders had -to encounter famine and sickness. Famine appears to have been the cause -also of the disastrous epidemics among the Indians along the whole coast -from Cape Cod to Cape Charles, on two occasions, the one previous to 1614 -and the other in 1619[1158]. The emigration to New England really began in -1630, and of one of the expeditions of that year we have authentic -particulars by the leader of it, John Winthrop[1159]. On board the -'Arbella,' under date April 17, 1630, he enters in his journal: - - "This day our captain told me that our landmen were very nasty and - slovenly, and that the gun-deck, where they lodged, was so beastly and - noisome with their victuals and beastliness as would much endanger the - health of the ship. Hereupon, after prayer, we took order, and - appointed four men to see to it, and to keep that room clean for three - days, and then four others should succeed them, and so forth on." - -Nothing more is said of the health on board the 'Arbella.' The 'Mayflower' -and 'Whale' had their passengers all in health, but most of their cattle -and horses dead. The 'Success' lost -- goats, and many of her passengers -were near starved. The 'Talbot' lost fourteen passengers. The colony had -various experiences of sickness in due course. In 1633, smallpox proved -fatal to whole settlements of Indians: "the English came daily and -ministered to them; and yet few, only two families, took any infection by -it[1160]." In 1646 an epidemic of influenza went among the Indians, -English, French and Dutch, "not a family, nor but few persons, escaping -it;" few died, not above 40 or 50 in Massachusetts, and near as many at -Connecticut[1161]. In the spring of 1654, a general fast was appointed by -the government of Connecticut, one reason among others being "the -mortality which had been among the people of Massachusetts." In 1655 there -was another influenza, in 1658 "great sickness and mortality throughout -New England," in 1659 "cynanche trachealis," croup perhaps, and in 1662 -again general sickness, which, along with drought, called for a day of -thanksgiving on their cessation in October[1162]. It is beside the purpose -to follow the epidemics in America minutely; but before quitting the -subject, the following, from a Philadelphia letter of August 24, 1699, -will suffice to keep in mind the conditions of emigration which prevailed -long after the first voyages: "Arrived the 'Britannia' from Liverpool, -which had been 13 weeks on her passage; she had 200 passengers on -board,--had lost 50 by death, and others were sickly[1163]." - - -West Indian Colonization: Yellow Fever and the Slave Trade. - -The other field of English colonial enterprise that concerns us is the -West Indies. The West Indian colonies of Britain play a great part in the -commercial history, in the naval history, and in the legislative history -in connexion with the negro slave-trade and the institution of negro -slavery. From the very first they play a great part, also, in the history -of epidemic sickness; they and the Spanish, French and other colonies -there were the peculiar home of yellow fever for two centuries, having -shared that unenviable distinction, after a generation or two, with -certain ports of the North American continent. The larger part of the -history of yellow-fever epidemics falls outside the period to which I here -limit myself. But the beginnings fall within it; and as the beginnings -raise the whole question of causation, this part of the subject resolves -itself into a somewhat comprehensive discussion of the circumstances of -yellow fever as illustrated by the first English colonizations in the -Caribbean Sea, and the tradings connected therewith. - -By far the most important disease-producing conditions in the West Indies -arose out of the Guinea slave-trade. But, so that we may set down to that -no more than it deserves, we shall have to review also the earlier -experiences of English and French emigrants, both on the voyage and in -their settlements in Barbados and St Christopher, and, at greatest length, -the disastrous first occupation of Jamaica in 1655 by the army of the -Commonwealth. It will be convenient to begin the history, in which there -is so much to disentangle, with a few facts about the negro labour-traffic -to the New World previous to the time when the demands of the -sugar-plantations caused it to be established on a great scale. - -African negroes were brought first to the West Indies by the Spaniards to -work in the mines of Hispaniola. They are heard of as early as 1501, and -are much in evidence after that date. The Christian conscience appears to -have been at first tender. It was the high purpose of Isabella of Spain to -convert the Indies to the Christian faith; and the cruelties of the negro -importation and of the forced labour in the mines were obviously -inconsistent with the humanitarian teaching of the Gospels. The -remonstrances of missionaries were listened to at the Spanish Court, and -licences to trade in negroes were either granted under strict conditions -or withheld altogether. However, there were rapacious pro-consuls to deal -with as well as monarchs at home, and cargoes of slaves found their way -to Cuba, to Hispaniola (St Domingo), and at length to the Spanish Main. -Each importation as late as 1518 was still regulated by special licence; -but soon after that date a powerful minister sold the privilege to the -Genoese, so that it passed somewhat beyond control of the Spanish -Court[1164]. Connected with these importations in the first quarter of the -16th century, were the disastrous epidemics of two diseases with somewhat -similar names and inextricably confused in the records--the great pox and -the small pox; it is not easy to say which did the most harm among the -native population of the islands and mainland occupied by Spain; but it is -said that by disease of one kind or another Mexicans and Caribs on the -main, in Hispaniola, and in Cuba, came near to being exterminated[1165]. - -The first English share in the negro traffic over sea fell to John Hawkins -and partners, who had not even the excuse of an open market for their -wares in the Spanish colonies, and had sometimes to dispose of their -negroes by stealth. It would appear that it was still in part for the -mines that African negroes were in request. In Richard Hawkins' account of -his voyage to the Pacific in 1593, he mentions that he captured a -Portuguese ship of 100 tons shortly after leaving the coast of Brazil; -she was bound for Angola to load negroes to be carried to and sold in the -River Plate: "It is a trade of great profit and much used. The negroes are -carried to work in the mines of Potosi." - -It is not until a generation after that we hear of the English as -slave-owners. On February 16, 1624, there were 22 negroes on the English -settlements in Virginia, the whites numbering 1253[1166]. In somewhat -greater numbers, negroes are next heard of in English possession in the -Bahamas; but, from the correspondence between the Company of Providence -Island in London and their agents in the colonies, it would appear that -the policy of using forced labour was by no means admitted by all, or free -from difficulties. Thus in 1635 the Company condemned as indiscreet and -injurious Mr Rushworth's behaviour concerning the negroes who ran away, -"arising, as it seems, from a groundless opinion [of Rushworth] that -Christians may not lawfully keep such persons in a state of servitude -during their strangeness from Christianity[1167]." - -Whatever negroes the English colonists possessed at this time they got -either by capture or purchase from Dutch and other foreign traders. Thus, -in the instructions to a shipmaster sailing from London, dated March 19, -1636, captured negroes were to be conveyed to the Somers Islands, those -who can dive for pearls to be employed at Providence. Again, the -instructions to the captain of the 'Mary Hope,' bound for the West Indies, -January 20, 1637, refer to the distribution of negroes "if a prize be -taken." And, on June 7, 1643, the earl of Warwick instructs the captain of -the 'Elias,' 400 tons, that captured negroes are "to be left at my island -of Trinidad[1168]." The negro carrying-trade was in those years mostly in -the hands of the Dutch, who not only stocked their own colony of Surinam -on the mainland but used their small island of Curacoa as a slave-depot -for the supply of colonies belonging to other nations. Thus the governor -of Antigua, which had then no negroes, says in a despatch of about the -year 1670: "At Curacoa they [the Dutch] send a vast quantity of negroes to -the Spaniard, and of late four ships from Jamaica for ready -pieces-of-eight carried thence great store. They intend to settle a mart -for negroes at Tortola to engross the trade of Porto Rico." - -The direct share of England in the negro carrying-trade arose out of the -monopoly of the Guinea Company. The history of English interests in Guinea -and "Binney" need not detain us. When the first patent for sole trade was -granted in 1624, it was felt to be a grievance, as "many had been there -almost for fifty years since." The charter was renewed on November 22, -1631; but in course of time, some who had been ousted from their original -share in the monopoly traded on their own account, the rivalries at home -being aggravated by conflicts with Swedes (in 1653) and Dutch at the -factories on the coast. The trade was ostensibly for gold dust and ivory, -but live freight soon found a place in English bottoms as well as in -Dutch, Swedish, Danish, French, Portuguese, Spanish and others. We may now -return to our proper subject--the state of health in the first English and -French plantations in the West Indies. - -The English and French arrived in the West Indies almost at the same -moment. Their experiences were probably not very different, but it happens -that it is of the French emigrants that we have particulars, which it is -important to introduce here. - -In the year 1625, a Norman adventurer of good family, D'Enambuc, sailed -from Dieppe in a brigantine armed with four pieces and manned with 35 or -40 men, on a roving cruise to the West Indies[1169]. Having been battered -by a Spanish galleon at the Kaymans, D'Enambuc made the island of St -Christopher. He found it occupied by the native Caribs and a few stranded -Frenchmen, who were on good terms with the natives. Shortly after, an -English captain ("Waernard") appears upon the scene, who joined D'Enambuc -in the alleged murdering and poisoning of the natives and the plundering -of the island. Loaded with his Carib spoils and a quantity of tobacco, -D'Enambuc set sail for France, and having sold his tobacco and other -things in Normandy, entered Paris with a fine equipage, thus giving -evidence to all men of the fortunes that awaited them in the Indies. In a -short time he had an audience of Richelieu, and on the 31st October 1626 -the charter was signed of the Compagnie des Isles, granting a monopoly of -trade with "les isles situees a l'entree du Perou"--namely St Christopher -and Barbados. The Company raised 45,000 livres, of which capital Richelieu -held 10,000 livres in his own name. The money was spent in fitting out and -furnishing with stores three ships--the 'Catholique' at Havre, a craft of -250 tons, and the 'Cardinal' and 'Victoire' at St Malo, two much smaller -vessels. Numerous poor peasants and artisans from Brittany and Normandy -were induced to go out as colonists, the 'Catholique' (250 tons) carrying -322 souls, the 'Cardinal' 70, and the 'Victoire' 140. The two last sailed -from St Malo on February 24, 1627 under the command of Du Rossey. The -passage was long, the provisions both bad and insufficient, and the -mortality terrible. When the 'Cardinal' arrived at the Pointe de Sable of -St Christopher on May 8, only 16 of her 70 souls remained alive, and these -were sick. In the other ships, also, "most of the people died on the -passage out." - -The English experience can hardly have been so bad as that. When the -French colonists landed, they found four hundred Englishmen settled near -the chief anchorage, hale and strong and well stocked with provisions, -having lately come out under Lord Carlisle's patent. Cordial to each other -at first, the two nationalities soon fell out. The French had rather the -worst of it, having lost many of their number by sickness, while the -English kept their health. Help came to the former from home, and a -victory over the English is claimed for them. But they had also a Spanish -fleet to reckon with, and eventually the French colony fell into disorder -and escaped to Antigua, while its leader, Du Rossey, went home to France -and was thrown into the Bastille by Richelieu, one of the largest -shareholders. The refugees to Antigua soon returned to St Christopher, -again suffered from famine, and had the mortification of seeing all the -profits of their monopoly swallowed up by unlicensed Dutch traders. In -1635 they obtained a new charter; at the same time a fortunate capture of -a ship-load of negroes from the Spaniards gave them a supply of labour so -that "the island began to change its face." English usurpation was kept -within limits, and the French colony grew daily, by addition of European -settlers and of "Moorish slaves whom the French and Dutch ships go to buy -in Guinea, or capture from the Spaniards along the coasts of Brazil." The -French on St Christopher were now strong enough to send branch colonies to -Guadeloupe and Martinique (1635). It was then the turn of the English to -have disastrous sickness among their immigrants. Sir Thomas Warner, who -had planted the English colonies in Barbados and St Christopher, and was -now governor of the latter, went to England in 1636 to bring over new -settlers. On his arrival out on 10 September, he wrote home that one of -his two ships, the 'Plough,' was given up for lost, and that in his own -ship there had been "great sickness and mortality, not 20 out of 200 -having escaped and 40 having died, some near to him in blood and many of -especial quality and use." - -Meanwhile Barbados had been the chief scene of English enterprise, from a -date (1624-26) almost the same as that of the joint occupation of St -Christopher by French and English. Its earliest annals contain little else -than the accounts of rivalries under Lord Carlisle's patent and other -patents. So far as regards sickness, the annals were probably uneventful. -In 1643 the island had plantations stocked with no fewer than 6400 negro -slaves, and its prosperity advanced so steadily, that by the year 1666, -the slaves in the island numbered some 50,000: "The buildings in 1643 were -mean; but in 1666 [when Bridgetown was burned], plate, jewels and -household stuff were estimated at L500,000[1170]." It is a date -intermediate between those two that directly concerns us--the year 1647. -In that year, Ligon, the historian of the colony, arrived out from England -about the beginning of September[1171]. The ship in which he came to -Barbados was consigned thence to Cutchew, on the African coast, to trade -for negroes. On their arrival they found twenty-two good ships at anchor -in Carlisle Bay (Bridgetown), a brisk trade going on, and plantations -visible all along the shore. A plantation of 500 acres had 96 negroes and -28 Christians; some plantations contained 10,000 acres. The population was -difficult to estimate, so many ships were arriving with passengers daily; -and Ligon's estimate of 50,000, "besides negroes," is doubtless too much. -About one hundred sail visit the island every year; they bring "servants" -and negro slaves, both men and women. The servants are bound for five -years, and are worse treated than the negroes. The negroes are more than -double the number of the Christians; they come from different parts of -Africa--Bonny, Cutchew, Angola and Gambia--and do not understand each -other's language. They are bought out of the ship naked, being chosen as -horses are in a market, the strongest, youthfullest and most beautiful -yielding the highest price (man L30, woman L25 to L27, children at easier -rates). - -We have to note, also, Ligon's account of the colony's chief -harbour--Bridgetown. The whole of Carlisle Bay is environed by high -ground. Bridgetown is so-called "for that a long bridge was made at first -over a little nook of the sea, which was rather a bog than sea." The -stream which discharges there into the bay is like a lake for want of -outfall. The spring tides fill it, but during the neap tides the salt -water is kept stagnant behind the sea-banks, making a small lagoon. The -spring tides seldom rise above four or five feet, but high enough to flow -over the low ground in front of the houses, making the flat a kind of bog, -which vents out a loathsome savour. - -Ligon landed at Bridgetown about the beginning of September, 1647, in time -to witness the ravages of a deadly epidemic: - - "Yet, notwithstanding all this appearance of trade, the inhabitants of - the island, and shipping too, were so grievously visited with the - plague (or as killing a disease) that before a month was expired after - our arrival, the living were hardly able to bury the dead. Whether it - was brought thither by shipping, (for in long voyages diseases grow at - sea and take away many passengers, and these diseases prove - contagious), or by the distemper of the people of the island"--he - leaves uncertain. For one woman that died, there were ten men. The - ships at anchor in Carlisle Bay were, for the most part, infected with - this disease. - -What was the disease? How came it there? What sort of origin did its -characters, symptoms, or type suggest? On these questions we have some -light thrown by other writings besides Ligon's, relating to the same -epidemic. - -John Winthrop, the Governor of Massachusetts, writes in his journal, under -the year 1647[1172]: - - "It pleased the Lord to open to us a trade with Barbados and other - islands in the West Indies, which as it proved gainful, so the - commodities we had in exchange there for our cattle and provisions, as - sugar, cotton, tobacco and indigo, were a good help to discharge our - engagements in England. And this summer there was so great a drouth as - their potatoes and corn, etc. were burnt up; and divers London ships - which rode there were so short of provisions as, if our vessels had - not supplied them, they could not have returned home.... After the - great dearth of victuals in these islands followed presently a great - mortality (whether it were the plague, or pestilent fever, it killed - in three days), that in Barbados there died six thousand, and in - Christophers, of English and French, near as many, and in other - islands proportionable." - -The mention of the French on St Christopher brings us to the third source -of information, the Jesuit father Dutertre, who was an eye-witness[1173]: - - "During this same year, 1648, the plague (la peste), hitherto unknown - in the islands since they were inhabited by the French, was brought - thither by certain ships. It began in St Christopher, and in the - eighteen months that it lasted, it carried off nearly one-third of the - inhabitants." This plague, or peste, was marked by violent pain in the - head, general debility of all the muscles, and continual vomiting. It - was contagious. A ship, the 'Boeuf' of Rochelle, carried it to - Guadeloupe, the sailors and passengers dying on board of her. A priest - went on board to administer the sacraments, and caught the infection; - he recovered, but [had a relapse and] died on August 4. It was - contagious at Guadeloupe also, and lasted twenty months. - -This testimony of Dutertre is important for several things. He had arrived -at Guadeloupe in 1640 in a small vessel of 100 to 120 tons, crowded with -stores and carrying besides, 200 souls of both sexes and all ages. Much -distress and sickness followed their arrival; he mentions nearly 100 sick -in the quarters of M. de la Vernade, with only the ground to sleep on; -more than three-fourths of the help for the struggling colony that arrived -from St Christopher died, perhaps by infectious disease bred by the -others. Now, with that personal experience in his mind, and with personal -experience also of the epidemic of 1647-8, he describes the latter as a -pestilence "hitherto unknown in the islands since they were inhabited by -the French." Like Ligon and Winthrop, he is led to think of plague itself -by the rapidity and fatality of the infection; but he mentions no signs of -plague proper, and at the same time mentions continual vomiting. The -disease was, in short, the Yellow Fever; and the epidemic in the end of -1647 at Bridgetown, and shortly after at St Christopher and Guadeloupe, -was the first of it, so far as is known, in the West Indies. - -But what then were the earlier epidemics spoken of by Dutertre? The branch -colony to Guadeloupe from St Christopher in 1635 had been only two months -in their new home, when, in September, their experiences of famine began. -The famine or scarcity, says Dutertre, continued for five years, and was -followed by "a mortality almost general." It was part of that mortality -which Dutertre himself saw on his arrival at Guadeloupe in 1640. He calls -the fever _coup de barre_--a name which in the sequel was sometimes given -to yellow fever; and he mentions symptoms which agree, in part at least, -with those of yellow fever--violent pains in the head, throbbing of the -temporal arteries, great distress of breathing, lassitude, pains in the -calf of the legs, as if they had been struck by a _coup de barre_. But in -speaking of the sickness which he found prevalent on landing in 1640, he -does not mention the irrepressible vomiting, which he puts in the first -place when he describes the other fever of 1647-8; and, to repeat, he says -that the latter was a pestilence hitherto unknown since the occupation of -the French Antilles, and as fatal as the plague. It is tolerably certain, -therefore, that the sickness on Guadeloupe sometime between 1635 and 1640, -was of the usual kind incidental to the settlement of a new colony. We -have had to notice it in Virginia ("from pestilent ships," the governor -thought), in St Christopher, and in other new settlements. In a petition -of the Governor and Company of the Somers Islands, July 28, 1639, it is -said that about one hundred and thirty of their colonists had transplanted -themselves last year to St Lucia, where they suffered so much from -sickness that not one was in health[1174]. Any one of those epidemics -among new settlers might be diagnosed yellow fever with as much warrant as -another; but the deadly infection of 1647-8 was something special, -different from all that had preceded, and to be accounted the first -appearance of yellow fever whether in the West Indies or anywhere -else[1175]. - -Yellow fever received much elucidation in after years, both as regards its -symptoms and pathology, and as regards its circumstances and causation. To -get a familiar view of what the disease was like, let us take the -following graphic case recorded by Moseley at Jamaica more than a century -after the date with which we are still engaged[1176]: - - "The last patient I saw, in the last stage of the yellow fever, was - Captain Mawhood of the 85th regt. at Port Royal, in Jamaica on the - 24th Sept., 1780. It was on the fourth day of his illness. He had been - in the island seven weeks. - - I arrived at the lodgings of this much esteemed young man about four - hours before his death. When I entered the room, he was vomiting a - black, muddy cruor; and was bleeding at the nose. A bloody ichor was - oozing from the corners of his eyes, and from his mouth and gums. His - face was besmeared with blood; and with the dulness of his eyes, it - presented a most distressing contrast to his natural visage. His - abdomen was swelled, and inflated prodigiously. His body was all over - of a deep yellow, interspersed with livid spots. His hands and feet - were of a livid hue. Every part of him was cold excepting about his - heart. He had a deep, strong hiccup, but neither delirium nor coma; - and was at my first seeing him, as I thought, in his perfect senses. - He looked at the changed appearance of his skin, and expressed, though - he could not speak, by his sad countenance, that he knew life was soon - to yield up her citadel, now abandoning the rest of his body. - Exhausted with vomiting, he at last was suffocated with the blood he - was endeavouring to bring up, and expired." - -One of the best summaries of its symptoms is that given by the Rev. -Griffith Hughes, rector of one of the Barbados parishes[1177]: - - "The attack begins with a feeling of chill lasting an hour or two. - Then violent fever comes on, with excessive pain in the head, back, - and limbs, loss of strength, great dejection of spirits, insatiable - thirst, restlessness, sometimes vomiting, redness of the eyes, and - that redness in a few days turning to yellow. If the patient turn - yellow soon, he has scarce a chance for life, and, the sooner he does, - the worse. After some days the pain in the head abates, as well as the - fever. A sweat breaks out, and the patient appears to be better; but - on a narrow view a yellowness appears in his eyes and skin, and he - becomes visibly worse. About this time he sometimes spits blood, and - that by mouthfuls; as this continues, he grows cold and his pulse - abates till at last it is quite gone, and the patient becomes almost - as cold as a stone, and continues in that state with a composed sedate - mind. In this condition he may perhaps live twelve hours, without any - sensible pulse or heat, and then expire. Such were the symptoms and - progress of this fever in the year 1715." He adds that the haemorrhage - was sometimes from the nose or rectum. "A loose tooth being drawn from - a person who had the fever very severely, there issued out from the - hole a great quantity of black stinking blood, which still kept oozing - till the third day, on which the patient died in great agonies and - convulsions." The symptoms were not uniform in all, nor in every - visitation. It was most commonly rife and fatal in May, June, July and - August, and then mostly among strangers, though a great many of the - inhabitants died of it in 1696 and a great many at different periods - since. (The next Barbados epidemic after 1647 was in 1671.) - -Now, of that remarkable disease, a pestilent fever with haemorrhages, -having a final stage of collapse not unlike the algid termination of -cholera, and a mortality equalled only by that of plague itself, or, in -after times, by that of cholera, it will be difficult to find instances in -any part of the world previous to the Barbados, St Christopher, and -Guadeloupe epidemics of 1647-48. Not only so, but these and other West -Indian harbours were the distinctive seats of it for long after. From -first to last yellow fever has been an infection of certain harbours--of -the shipping anchored, moored, or careened in them, and of the houses -nearest to the shore. In the Barbados epidemic of 1647, Ligon says, the -ships at anchor in Carlisle Bay were for the most part infected; Dutertre -says that the crew and passengers died of it on board the ship which -brought it to Guadeloupe; he says, also, that it had come to St -Christopher with certain ships; and Ligon clearly suspects that it may -have had an origin on board ship: "for in long voyages diseases grow at -sea and take away many passengers, and these diseases prove contagious." -We have had many instances of the sicknesses of voyages, not only scurvy -but also fevers. But these ship-fevers were not yellow fever; we know more -of them in later periods of the history, when they were recognized as -ship-typhus. For yellow fever we must seek something more distinctive, and -that distinctive thing we shall probably find in a kind of voyage which we -have not hitherto considered from the point of view of its sicknesses--the -Middle Passage, or the voyage with negroes from the African coast across -the tropical belt to one part or another of the New World. Let us then -take that particular kind of voyage, as we have already taken the voyages -of the East India Company's ships, the voyages of emigrant ships from -England to the North-American Colonies, and those from France and England -to the West Indies. - -Dutertre, our authority for the first yellow fever in St Christopher, is -also a witness to the sicknesses and mortality of the Middle Passage. Of -the negroes, he says, more die on the passage than land. He has known -captains who have taken on board up to 700 in one ship and landed only -200; they died of misery and hunger, and the stifling monotony of tropical -calms. Some of the slaves are of high degree; there was one negress, in -particular, whom all the rest looked up to as a princess. - -The African slave-trade was not altogether so reputable as to have had the -incidents of the voyages recorded with anything approaching to scientific -fulness. But within the period that now occupies us, there are four -notices of arrivals of slavers in the West Indies from Guinea, in which -the health of the voyage had called for remark[1178]. In a letter from -Barbados, March 20, 1664, it is said that the 'Speedwell' has arrived with -282 negroes, who have greatly lost in value owing to smallpox breaking out -amongst them; the 'Success' brought 193 blacks; the 'Susan' 230, which -were not allowed to be landed until the officers of the ship had proved -that they had not collected them within the Royal African Company's -limits. Another Barbados letter of March 31, 1664, says that "there has -been a great mortality amongst the negroes [? on St Christopher and Nevis] -which the African Company's physician at Barbados, De La Rouse, assures -them is through a malignant distemper contracted, they think, through so -many sick and decaying negroes being thronged together, and perhaps -furthered by the smallpox in Captain Carteret's ships. Most men refused to -receive any of them, and Philip Fusseires, a surgeon, to whom they sold -twenty at a low rate, lost every one." This is a confused letter, but the -reference to "sick and decaying negroes thronged together," appears to -mean, not a sharp sickness soon over, but a general sickly state and loss -of condition, which had come upon them during the voyage[1179]. The third -letter is from Barbados, June 25, 1667: from Guinea are arrived four -ships, two of the African Company's, and two private; in which had -happened a great mortality of negroes and of the ships' companies. Once -more, to bring out the long imprisonment of negroes under decks while the -slaver was filling up on the coast, T. Barrett writing from Port Royal on -October 17, 1672, to James Littleton, "has heard that Capt. James Tallers -bought the negroes for Littleton from another ship in Guinea which had -them three months aboard, and that they were almost all starved and -surfeycatted [surfeit had come to mean dysentery], he having fed them with -little else but musty corn. There must have been something extraordinary -that so many of them died." - -In one of the letters we hear of sickness and mortality not only of slaves -on the passage but also of the ships' companies. Long after, Clarkson -showed from the muster-rolls of Liverpool slave-ships that the -slave-trade, instead of being a "nursery" of British sailors, was their -grave[1180]. There are, however, few medical particulars; doubtless many -of the deaths among the crews occurred on the coast, from fever, dysentery -and the like brought on by debauchery and during trading excursions up the -rivers in the long-boat; but from the third of the letters quoted it -appears that there had been also deaths on the voyage. Of the sicknesses -among the negroes, more is said of smallpox than of any other malady in -the foregoing records. But smallpox was not in ordinary circumstances a -very fatal or very severe disease among negroes, although it was very -common. An early medical writer on the diseases of the Guinea Coast, both -of white men and negroes, Dr Aubrey, "who resided many years on the coast -of Guinea," may pass as a credible witness in the matter, the more so as -his book shows him to have been competent in his profession[1181]. - -"Measles and smallpox," he says, "are no ways dangerous, nor so -troublesome as in cold climates, neither are they so very sick e'er they -come out, nor remains there any great sign of them after they recover. -Abundance of these poor creatures are lost on board ships, to the great -prejudice of the owners and scandal of the surgeon, merely through the -surgeon's ignorance; because he knows not what they are afflicted with, -but supposing it to be a fever, bleeds and purges or vomits them into an -incurable diarrhoea, and in a very few days they become a feast for some -hungry shark. When they are in the woods sick of these diseases, they take -nothing but cold water, and suck oranges, and yet recover, as I myself -have been an eyewitness many a time; and the grandy-men's children are -treated no otherwise in their sickness, and are very well of the smallpox -in less than half a moon," etc. It is conceivable, however, that smallpox -left to itself would not have run so favourable a course in the hold of a -slaver as in the native huts of the negroes. On board ship the subjects of -smallpox died from a complication of diarrhoea; and, according to the same -writer, diarrhoea or dysentery was the grand cause of mortality on the -voyage, the most inveterate form of it, (according to his fixed belief), -occurring in those who had been constitutionally affected by yaws: "This -(the yawey flux) is the mortal disease that cuts off three parts in four -of the negroes that are commonly lost on board ships." But the same writer -reveals enough to let us understand the prevalence of flux as a primary -malady. The food of the slaves on board ship, to say nothing of the -regimen, was distasteful to them. They missed their palm oil and other -accustomed articles of diet. They were fed, morning and evening, on pease, -beans, and the like, mixed with "rotten salt herrings," with an occasional -meal of salt beef or salt pork, and a stinted allowance of water. - - "These are foods that very few of them will eat. Very often they are - abused by sailors, who beat and kick them to that degree that - sometimes they never recover; and then the surgeon is blamed for - letting the slaves die, when they are murthered, partly by strokes and - partly famished; for if they do not eat such salt things as are enough - to destroy them, they must fast till supper; and then they lose their - appetites, and perhaps fall sick, partly through fasting and partly - with grief to see themselves so treated; and if once they take - anything to heart, all the surgeon's art will never keep them alive; - for they never eat anything by fair means or foul, because they choose - rather to die than be ill-treated.... When they are costive and griped - [by the salt food], they stay betwixt decks and will eat nothing; but - cry _yarry, yarry_, and perhaps creep under one of the platforms and - hide themselves, and die there, and the surgeon can't think what is - the meaning on't..., I am very sensible that it is impossible to - maintain the slaves on board, after one quits the Coast, without salt - provisions; but then care might be taken to water the beef and pork - ere it be boiled, and also to bring a cruce of palm-oil round the deck - from mess to mess, and also pepper, and let everyone take as he - pleaseth.... Another principal cause of their destruction is forcing - them into a tub of cold water every day, and pouring the water on - their heads by buckets-full"--doubtless for the sake of cleanliness, - although they were too ill to stand such washings. - -Whatever else the negroes died of on the voyage from Guinea, they did not -die of yellow fever: there is hardly another generality of pathology so -well based as that Africans of pure blood have been found immune from that -infection in all circumstances ashore or afloat--protected not by -acclimatisation but by some strange privilege of their race. And yet we -have to think of yellow fever as somehow related to the over-sea traffic -in negroes. Two instances from the later history will serve to bring the -problem concretely before us. In 1815, a British transport, the 'Regalia,' -was employed in carrying recruits from the West Coast of Africa to the -black regiments in the West Indies. The health of the ship when on the -African coast had been good; but on the voyage across with the -newly-enlisted negroes, much sickness, chiefly dysenteric, occurred among -the latter, whereupon yellow fever broke out with great malignancy, -attacking all on board except the black soldiers, who were from first to -last untouched by it. From such experiences as that, Sir Gilbert Blane -formulated a somewhat vague doctrine that the causes which produced -dysentery in the negro produced yellow fever in the white race. But it is -more probable that the dysenteric matters of the negroes had themselves in -turn bred an infection of yellow fever for the whites. To take another -case: In 1795, after the capture of Martinique from the French, one of the -frigates 'La Pique,' was manned by a British crew and sent to Barbados. On -the voyage they rescued two hundred negroes from a ship which was about -foundering. The negroes were confined in the hold of 'La Pique;' and in a -short time yellow fever broke out among her English crew, killing one -hundred and fifty of them, although it was not prevalent among the blacks -at all. "Such a mixture of men," says Gillespie, "strangers to each other, -has been often found to occasion sickness in ships; and, together with -other causes, fatally operated here before the arrival of the ship at -Barbados.... This is a melancholy instance of the generation of a fatal -epidemic on board ship at a time when the inhabitants of Barbados and the -crews of the other ships in company remained free from any such -disease[1182]." - -But such instances are comparatively rare, while epidemics of yellow fever -on shore, or among the shipping in an anchorage, have been common. It is -possible that the yellow fever experiences of the 'Regalia' and 'La Pique' -had happened often to the white crews of slavers; we shall never know. -What we do know is that the ports of debarkation of the slave-trade -became the endemic seats of yellow fever. The theory is that the matters -productive of yellow fever were brought to the West Indian harbours, -deposited there, left to ferment and accumulate, and so to taint the soil, -the mud and the water as to become an enduring source of poisonous -miasmata. The facts in support of that view are not far to seek. - -Let us come back to the circumstances of Bridgetown, Barbados, when the -yellow fever broke out first in 1647. A good many slavers had landed their -cargoes at Bridgetown in the years preceding (in 1643 the island had at -least 6400 negroes), and each of them had left behind a material quantity -of the filth of the voyage, having probably been careened for the purpose -of cleaning out and overhauling. There are traditions still extant that -the cleaning of a slave-ship after a voyage from Africa was an exceptional -task, to which Kroomen used to be set. Be that as it may, it needs only a -little reflection to see that a crowd of some hundreds of negroes under -gratings in the hold or 'tween decks of a brig or schooner, suffering at -first from sickness of the sea and, as the voyage across the tropic belt -progressed, from the more distressing flux, must have set all rules of -cleanliness at defiance. The ship's bilges and ballast would be foul -beyond measure: and it was just the contents of her bilges, with or -without the ballast itself, that would be pumped out or thrown out when -the ship was moored in the harbour or careened on the mud. At Bridgetown -there were no plunging tides, such as we watch on our own shores, to carry -the filth out to sea. The spring tides, says Ligon, rose only four or five -feet; the flood tide carried the water over the banks into the lagoon, and -the ebb carried it off; but at neap tides a quantity of water remained -stagnant behind the sea-banks, according to the familiar experience in -such circumstances. The flat shore, says Ligon, became "a kind of bog, -which vents out so loathsome a savour as cannot but breed ill blood, and -is (no doubt) the occasion of much sickness to those that live there." A -brackish estuary, with an impeded outfall, will often smell badly, from -rotting sea-wrack or other decomposing matters; but we have yet to learn -that any so commonplace conditions can breed a deadly pestilence such as -arose at Bridgetown for the first time in the autumn of 1647. Carlisle -Bay was doubtless a leeward harbour, with high land all round it and a -sluggish ebb and flow of the tide, subject to calms and a scorching sun; -but besides all that, the careenage at the head of the bay was the regular -receptacle of the ordure of slave-ships year after year. Travellers and -imaginative writers have sometimes pictured the bays and creeks of the -islands and main of the Caribbean Sea as if the mere decay of tropical -vegetation had made them pestilential[1183]. Risk, of course, there is in -such situations, but chiefly when men are exposed by turns to the noonday -heat and the nocturnal chill. The ill repute of West Indian harbours, with -their sweltering mud, mangrove swamps, and lazy tides, is a composite and -confused idea. It is not so much Nature that has made them unwholesome, as -man. Yellow fever, in particular, is not a miasm of remote and primeval -bays or lagoons into which a boat's crew may come once and again; it is -not a fever of any and every part of the coast of a tropical island; it is -a fever of only a few inhabited spots on the wide shores of the globe; and -those seats of it, so far as it has been steady or periodic in its -prevalence, are all of them harbours distinguished at one time or another -as the resort of slave-ships, and distinguished from many other ports of -either Hemisphere in no other way. Everything in the subsequent history of -yellow fever pointed to its being a poison lurking in the mud or even in -the water of slave-ports, and in the soil of their fore-shores, wharves -and houses along the beach. Miasmata rose from the ground in the latter -situations, to taint the air of the town at certain seasons; the poison -also entered the bilges of ships moored or careened in the harbour, and -rose from the holds as a noxious vapour to infect the crews. The miasmata -were deadly for the most part to new comers, especially to those from the -colder latitudes, although acclimatised residents were not exempt in a -time of epidemic; but there is very general agreement that they carried no -risk for negroes of pure blood. - -What was there special in the circumstances of 1647 to give rise to the -first epidemic explosion of yellow fever? There was, in the first place, -the accretion of the peculiar fermenting filth in the mud and soil, which -had been going on for several years. Secondly, there was the brisk trade, -as indicated by the large number of ships in the harbour, a great -concourse of new arrivals having been often remarked in the later history -as one of the conditions of an outbreak. But more particularly there were -the peculiarities of the season: it was one of those seasons in which the -regular rains of June and following months had failed. What we know on -that head comes exclusively from Winthrop's 'Journal,' already quoted. -There was so great a drouth, he says, that their potatoes, corn, &c., were -burnt up; and after the "great dearth of victuals in these islands -followed presently a great mortality." But the mortality was certainly not -from famine, nor from the effects of famine. It was the parching drought -that the epidemic really followed, and not merely the scarcity, which was, -indeed, relieved by the ships from New England, and was so little felt -that Ligon does not mention it. The rainy season missed, or all but -missed, in a tropical country means a great fall of the ground water; it -means the pores of the ground filled with air to an unusual extent; and -that is a state of any soil, if it be already full of fermenting organic -matters, which breeds the most dangerous half-products of decomposition, -or, in other words, the most poisonous miasmata. There needs always some -such special determining thing to explain the epidemic outbursts of yellow -fever; in the later history we shall see that the first great epidemic of -it at Jamaica followed immediately upon the earthquake that destroyed Port -Royal. - -Illustrations of the ordinary principle that seasonal and periodic -infection is dependent on the state of the ground water, are given at -greater length in the chapters upon the later epidemics of plague in -London. What applies in that respect to one soil-poison applies to -another; and it will be shown in the proper place to apply with least -ambiguity of all to Asiatic cholera, as well as to typhoid fever. Yellow -fever is, in clinical characters, allied more to typhus than to typhoid; -but it is a typhus of the soil, whereas the common and much less fatal -typhus of ordinary domestic life in colder latitudes is an infection -above ground--of the air, walls, floors and furnishings of rooms. There is -the same relation between yellow fever and ordinary typhus in that -respect, as between plague and ordinary typhus. When ordinary typhus has -passed into a soil-poison, by aggravation of conditions, as in the -experience of Arab encampments in North Africa, it has become at the same -time bubonic fever, or, approximately plague proper. Yellow fever had its -habitat essentially in the soil, from the peculiar circumstances -(importation of the crude materials of it by ships engaged in the -slave-trade); and plague in ordinary, or in European experience, had also -its habitat in the soil, from circumstances which have been elsewhere -given as its probable conditions. - -It is perhaps because they are soil-poisons that those two diseases rank -so high in their fatality and quickness of execution, in which respects -they resemble Asiatic cholera, and differ from most other infections. -Winthrop says that the first yellow fever killed in three days, and was -therefore comparable to the plague. Ligon says that it was as killing a -disease as the plague (of which both he and Winthrop would have had old -experience at home), and he uses the stock phrase, that the living were -hardly able to bury the dead. Winthrop says that 6000 died in Barbados: -and one of his correspondents in the island, Vines, writes that "in our -parish there were buried twenty in a week, and many weeks together fifteen -or sixteen." Dutertre says that nearly a third of the colonists of St -Christopher died of it, and that it lingered there for eighteen months, -and for twenty months in Guadeloupe, whither it was believed to have been -brought in the ship 'Le Boeuf.' - -Barbados, St Christopher and Guadeloupe (with minor settlements on -Martinique, Nevis, &c.) were the earliest English and French colonies in -the Caribbean Sea. The Spaniards had occupied the Greater Antilles -(Hispaniola or San Domingo, Cuba, Porto Rico and Jamaica) long before. -Nothing particular is known of the health of these colonies except for the -earlier years of the 16th century, when the native populations were -ravaged by the great pox and the smallpox. But when Jamaica was seized -from the Spaniards by the army of the Commonwealth in 1655 we begin to -have authentic information, the state of health being perhaps the most -prominent thing (although little noticed by historians) in the despatches. -That incident in the expansion of England, relating as it does to the -planting of what was for long our greatest island colony, and illustrating -the risks of those early enterprises more fully than any other of the -kind, may fitly come into this chapter and conclude it. - - -The Great Mortality in the occupying of Jamaica. - -The Lord Protector's design in the year 1654, to acquire one or more of -the Spanish Antilles for an English colony, was more methodically -conceived and more strenuously supported by the resources of the State -than any previous attempt at colonization. It was attended with disasters -on a proportionate scale, and at first with ignominy and failure which -must have added seriously to the burden of Cromwell's later years. The -original design, in the admiral's sealed orders, was to seize upon the old -Spanish colony of Hispaniola or San Domingo[1184]. A fleet had been fitted -out at Portsmouth, which sailed on 19th-21st December, 1654, carrying a -land force of three thousand men. After a favourable voyage, the fleet of -thirty sail, half of them victuallers, arrived at Barbados on February 1, -where they lay until March 31, engaging settlers for the proposed new -colony as well as campaigners, including a troop of cavalry, from the not -very choice class of English subjects in that island. Some twenty Dutch -ships were seized and made victuallers or transports. The expedition -received a draft also from Nevis, and calling at St Christopher they took -up 1300 more, making in all an addition of over 5000 colonial men, besides -women and children, to their original force. On April 13 the fleet arrived -off the harbour of St Domingo. It came out afterwards that the sight of so -many English frigates and other ships had driven the townspeople to -instantaneous flight, so that the capital would have fallen to the -English without a blow. But no landing was attempted in the harbour, -owing to difficulties about piloting, ignorance of the depth of water, and -the like. It was decided to disembark the force in a bay at the mouth of a -river some six or ten miles (two leagues) to the eastward, where Drake had -landed in 1586. Most of the ships, however, were carried past the -appointed place, and came to anchor in another bay thirty miles (ten -leagues) eastwards from St Domingo; there a multitude of some 7000 -soldiers and colonials, with their women and children, were landed on the -beach with three days' rations. Several of the ships landed their men at -the original rendezvous two leagues from St Domingo, to the number of -about 2000 in three regiments. The larger and farther-off force began to -advance on St Domingo through dense woods; their presence in the country -was soon known in all the plantations, whence the people fled to the -capital for safety, so that the San Domingans were able to extemporise a -considerable force for defence. The advance of the English was hindered by -the stifling heat; distressed by thirst, they ate immoderately of oranges -and other fruits, and in one way or another brought on dysentery. General -Venables, in a despatch to Cromwell, says that by these causes they "were -troubled with violent fluxes, hundreds of our men having dropped down by -the way, some sick, others dead." Meanwhile the nearer and smaller force -of some 2000 had advanced on St Domingo; they got over one of the two -leagues between them and the capital, but an old fort, manned for the -occasion, barred the way, and the regiments fell back upon the river -whence they had started, and rested there five days, the main body having -meanwhile come up with them. One attempt after another was made to pass -the half-way fort, but the Spaniards held their ground, and actually -inflicted defeat in the open and a disgraceful rout upon the English, some -of whose gallant officers threw their lives away in a vain attempt to lead -their men. All the while this broken and demoralised mob was without -proper supplies from the fleet, the officers of which were either unable -to communicate with the land force or indifferent as to their duty. The -state of health on the 25th of April, some ten or twelve days after -landing, is thus described in a letter: "And the rains nightly pouring, -with fogs and dews along the river, so soaked our bodies with flux, and -none escaping that violence, that our freshment [by retreat to the river] -proved a weakening instead of support." Another letter of two days' later -date (April 27) says: "The rains increasing, our men weakening, all even -to death fluxing, the seamen aboard neglecting,--that forced us to eat all -our troop horses." An attempt was made to restore discipline; an officer -of high rank was cashiered for a coward, his sword having been broken over -his head; a soldier was shot for desertion; some loose women in men's -clothes from Barbados were chastised, and a sharp look-out kept for other -camp-followers of the kind. At length it was decided by Venables and his -council that the attempt on San Domingo must be abandoned; probably it was -seen that the Barbadian and St Christopher following was a fatal -encumbrance at that stage, the more so as the rainy season was in -progress. By the third of May the whole expedition was re-embarked, the -Spaniards making no attempt to harass the operation. The number reshipped -is said to have been seventeen hundred short of that which landed three -weeks before: a good many had fallen fighting, others were slain by the -Spaniards or negroes in the woods, and some appear to have died of the -flux. The attempt on St Domingo having failed it was decided to make a -descent on Jamaica, the least important of the Spanish Antilles. On the -passage thither, Winslow, one of the three lay commissioners or -"politicals" with the expedition, died "very suddenly of a fever." - -On May 10 the ships entered the bay of Caguya. Admiral Penn, being -resolved not to repeat the mistake they had made at St Domingo, kept sail -on the 'Martin' galley until she was beached under the small fort of the -Passage, at the head of the bay, so as to cover the debarkation with his -guns. However, the few Spaniards living at the shore fled, and the whole -force, to the number of some 7000, was landed by midnight. Venables then -returned to his ship for his usual repose, leaving the men under arms all -night. Not until nine next day, by which hour the cool of the morning was -lost, did the march begin to the capital, St Jago de la Vega ("St James of -the Plain"), situated on an elevation by the river Cobre, in the midst of -an alluvial plain with an amphitheatre of hills behind it, some six miles -from the place of landing. About two in the afternoon they came before the -town, and marched in that night: they found it empty, "nothing but bare -walls, bedsteads, chairs and cowhides." The town is said to have had some -1700 houses (too many for its population), two churches, two chapels, and -an abbey; there all the Spaniards dwelt in ease and indolence, "having -their slaves at their several small plantations, who constantly brought -them store of provisions and fruits." In this great island there were but -about 3000 inhabitants, half of them, if not more, being slaves. There -were no manufactures or native commodities, except a very little sugar and -cocoa. The four ships that came thither in a year traded generally for -hides and tallow only. - -The Spanish colony had removed as much of their property as they could in -their first flight, and shortly sent their head men with their governor, -"an old decrepid seignior full of the French disease" carried by two -bearers in a hammock, to treat for their re-entry into the town. Venables -was afterwards much blamed for returning the politeness of the Spaniards; -he received their presents of fresh provisions and fruit, accepted their -promises of a steady supply for his men, and gave them the free run of -their own houses for a week or so, by which time they are said to have -carried off all their personal belongings of value. They objected to leave -the island, saying that Jamaica was their home, and that they had no -friends either in New Spain or in Old Spain. At length they left their old -settlement, with the avowed purpose of embarking for Cuba from a bay on -the same side to the west. There were divided counsels among the English -as to the treatment of the Spaniards, and Colonel Bullard was sent towards -the bay with a large force to intercept them in their flight. They had, -however, given a false direction, and had in reality crossed the mountains -northwards to the other side of the island, clearing the country as they -went of cattle and produce of every kind. Some of them, including eight -families of the upper class, at length found their way to Cuba, but the -larger number remained on the north of the island, where they were -overtaken by famine and pestilence before a few months, and nearly -exterminated. Their negroes took to the mountains, and became the -maroons, famous in the later history of Jamaica. - -In pursuing the Spaniards, the English troops went roaming over the -country, destroying the hogs and cattle in mere wantonness, and leaving -their carcases to putrefy. In a short time the multitude of English at St -Jago de la Vega (Spanish Town) were on short rations, and before long -"dogs and cats the best part of their diet." The stores from the ships had -been left on the beach exposed to the weather, and soon turned mouldy, the -men refusing to carry them, in the absence of waggons, over the six miles -between the shore and the head-quarters. Two or three victuallers besides -had arrived from England within a week or two of the first landing, but, -for all that, the expedition was starving. Many of the men were suffering -from the flux which they had contracted in St Domingo. Venables, in a -private letter of May 25, or a fortnight after landing, gives the number -of the sick at near 3000; in a despatch to Cromwell, of June 4, he says: - - "The want we have been in hitherto of bread (we not being able to be - suddenly supplied therewith out of the fleet, or our stores, through - want of waggons and other conveniences for the transportation - thereof), joined with the drinking of water, hath already cast both - officers and soldiers into such violent fluxes that they look more - like dead men crept out of their graves than persons living; and this - so generally that we have not above two colonels in health, three - majors, some seven field officers in all; besides many have been - already swept away with this disease. We lost Mr Winslow very - suddenly, in our sailing towards this island, of a fever." - -On June 9 there was a general muster of the land forces, "whose number was -found to be much diminished of late, not so much by any pestilential or -violent disease, as for mere want of natural sustenance; which, in common -reason, may seem strange that of all men soldiers should starve in a -cook's shop, as the saying is[1185]." - -In a despatch of June 13, Venables says that "about 2000 are sick. Our men -die daily, eating roots and fresh fish (when any food is got), without -bread or very little." He was himself ill, having had the flux for five -weeks. Admiral Penn (father of the founder of Pennsylvania) had resolved -to go home with two-thirds of the ships, thinking that his services were -no longer needed, and having been advised that he could be of more service -to Cromwell in England. He sailed on June 21, leaving the frigates and the -Dutch prizes, under Goodson; and Venables followed in four days, with the -surviving "political," leaving the settlement in charge of Fortescue, who -wrote home, "I am left to act without book." - -Meanwhile Cromwell had got ready reinforcements, sparing no trouble or -expense at home. The expedition in aid left Plymouth on July 11, 1655, -under the command of Sedgwick, and arrived at Barbados on August 26-31, -after a fine passage; they left again on September 7, having trimmed their -casks and taken in water with other refreshments. This force was in the -best of health until after leaving Barbados. Sedgwick writes: - - "I think never so many ships sailed together with less trouble, grief - or danger than we did; only God did in a little visit us between this - [Jamaica] and Barbados with some sickness, I apprehend caused by some - distemper taken there [? yellow fever]; in which visitation, I think, - in the whole fleet we lost between 20 and 30 seamen and soldiers." - -Finding the Spanish flag flying at San Domingo, they came on to Jamaica on -October 1, and there found a calamitous state of things. - - "For the army, I found them in as sad and deplorable and distracted - condition as can be thought of: commanders, some left them, some dead, - some sick, and some in indifferent health; the soldiery many dead, - their carcases lying unburied in the highways and among bushes, to and - again; many of them that were alive walked like ghosts or dead men, - who, as I went through the town, lay groaning and crying out, Bread, - for God's sake!" - -Sedgwick brought with him in four victuallers a thousand tons of -provisions, which he secured in a store built for the occasion on the -beach. Among his troops was Colonel Humphry's regiment of 831 "lusty, -healthful, gallant men, who encouraged the whole army." But now we begin -to see that the sickness at St Jago de la Vega had become infective or -pestilential. The new-comers, healthy and well found as they were, began -at once to sicken and to die. Of Humphry's regiment, on November 5: - - "There are at this day 50 of them dead, whereof two captains, a - lieutenant, and two ensigns, the colonel himself very weak, the - lieutenant-colonel at death's door. Soldiers die daily, I believe 140 - every week, and so have done ever since I came hither. It is strange - to see lusty men, in appearance well, and in three or four days in the - grave, snatched away in a moment with fevers, agues, fluxes and - dropsies, a confluence of many diseases. We furnished the army now - with 60 butts of Madeira wine, and to every regiment a butt of brandy, - and a hogshead or two of sweet oil. Our soldiers have destroyed all - sorts of fruits, and provisions and cattle. Nothing but ruin attends - them wherever they go." On January 24, 1656, Sedgwick again writes to - Thurloe: "Did you but see the faces of this poor small army with us, - how like skeletons they look, it would move pity; and when I consider - the thousands laid in the dust in such a way as God hath visited, my - heart mourns. Here hath come down to us from many of the Windward - Islands divers people with intentions of sitting down with us, but at - their coming hither, either fall sick and die, or are so affrighted - and dismayed as that, although to their much impoverishing, yet will - not be persuaded to stay with us." - -The men in the fleet were in better health; but among them also "some die -and some are sick, in so much that we need a good recruit fully to man our -ships as men-of-war." On the same date (January 24, 1656) Admiral Goodson, -writing to Thurloe, estimates the surviving officers and men at 2600, -besides women and children; and in another despatch of that date from -Sedgwick and Goodson jointly to Cromwell it is stated: - - "The numbers of the army are much lessened since our last letters - [November 5]; the whole not extending to 3000, many of them sick and - weak, the best and soundest much abated of their strength and vigor, - and God goes on every day to shorten our number. We die daily, not - less than fifty every week, which is much considering our small - numbers." - -As the season advanced the health of the troops on shore improved. A -letter of March 12 says that the condition of the army is much mended; the -soldiers are far more healthful, but much dejected and averse to the -place. The fleet was in good spirits, and impatient for action; however, -there was sickness also on board the ships; they had lost some fourscore -men since the last despatch; and on April 30 the report is: "our seamen -are indifferently well in health; yet some few are sick, and God is daily -shortening them, so that our fleet will want a recruit of men." Several of -the frigates were wormeaten, and careened for repairs. Sickness is -reported in the ships as late as October 10, 1656. - -The sickness among all ranks had been so general and severe that it was -hardly possible to find senior officers to undertake the government. -Fortescue died in October, 1655, and was succeeded temporarily by D'Oyley -and others, the sole government being at length given by Cromwell to -Sedgwick, who died a few days after receiving his unwelcome commission. -Brayne, transferred from Lochaber to Jamaica, also died, and it fell at -length to D'Oyley, an effective person in whom all on the spot had -confidence, to carry the colony through its troubles. Cromwell spared no -effort at home. Immense quantities of provisions were shipped; planters, -with their families, 'servants' and slaves, to the number of some 1700, -were removed to Jamaica from Nevis, under Stokes, the governor of that -island; the New Englanders were also encouraged to resort to the new -colony; and a thousand or so of young men and marriageable young women -were furnished from Ireland, together with pioneers, described as of a -rougher kind, from Scotland. "And so at length," says Carlyle, "a -West-Indian interest did take root; and bears spices and poisons, and -other produce, to this day." - -The sickness and mortality among the first English colonists of Jamaica -gave the island a bad name, and must have added not a little to the -confusion of ideas already existing as to the pestilent character of -tropical climates[1186]. The older sugar-colonies, such as Barbados, which -saw in Jamaica a formidable competitor, would appear to have encouraged -the notion that climates varied much, that of Jamaica being bad. Soon -after the Restoration, Charles II. was urged to give back Jamaica to -Spain, and is said to have seriously entertained that purpose. Among the -state papers is a document, supposed to have been written in November, -1660, which sets forth the natural advantages of Jamaica, together with -two sets of reasons why England should retain it[1187]: - - "The air here is more temperate than in any of the Caribee Islands, - being more northerly and as sufferable hot as in many places.... The - winds here constantly all day blow easterly, so coolly that it renders - any labour sufferable at midday.... We find here is not such antipathy - between the constitution of the English and the climate that sickness - is not inevitable and contingent; for we have experimentally found - that persons observing a good diet and using moderate exercise, enjoy - a somewhat (?) measure of health. The said causes of the mortality of - the Army at their first arrival were want of provisions, unwillingness - to labour or exercise, and inexcusable discontent to be constrained to - stay here. The diseases that strangers are most incident to are - dropsies (occasioned often by evil diet and slothfulness), calentures - (so frequently produced of surfeit), and fevers and agues, which, - although very troublesome, are never mortal.... Cagway [Port Royal] is - the place where all the merchants reside, being the most healthy place - in the island; whither resort all the men that frequent the Indies, - which makes houses so dear that an ordinary house in this town is - worth L40 or L60 per annum. There are about 200 houses there, all - built by the English. About 50 houses have been built by the English - at the fort of the Passage [at the head of the harbour and the nearest - point to Spanish Town]; of the houses in the old capital, St Jago de - la Vega, about 800 are ruinous. As to the number of English in the - island, the relics of the six regiments do muster 2200, and it is - probable that the planters, merchants, sailors and others may be as - many." - -The above statements about the healthiness of Jamaica in 1660 were -repeated by Dr Trapham, in his work on the climate and diseases of the -colony in 1678[1188]. This earliest medical writer is, indeed, more -optimist than those who followed him, as to contagious or infective -sickness; there was no smallpox, or very rarely, saving sometimes brought -from Guinea by negroes; and "no depopulating plague that ere I have heard -of," saving a pestilential fever brought in by the victorious fleet -returned from the signal Panama expedition in 1670. The experiences of -yellow fever at Port Royal and Kingston were mostly, if not entirely, -subsequent to these dates. But, as there had been yellow fever at -Barbados, St Christopher, and Guadeloupe as early as 1647-48, it has been -thought probable that the enormous mortality in Jamaica in 1655-56 was -from the same endemic cause[1189] Undoubtedly the epidemic at Spanish Town -became at length more than the dysentery which had been brought by some of -the troops from San Domingo, or had been induced among others of them by -bad food and water; it became a virulent specific infection, attacking the -healthy and well-found reinforcements from England and the new arrivals -from the Windward Islands, and destroying them quickly, "in three or four -days." Fevers are specially named, as well as fluxes and dropsies; and the -question arises whether the pestilential fever was not yellow fever. - -There is certainly nothing said of the striking and ghastly symptoms of -the _vomito negro_. Moreover the sickness was nearly all at the town of St -Jago de la Vega, six miles from the bay, situated on a rising of the plain -with a declivity to the Cobre river, a place which was only exceptionally -the seat of yellow fever in after-experience. Thus Judge Long, the able -historian of Jamaica, says[1190]: - - "After a series of hot, dry, and calm weather, eight days of continued - rain succeeded in May, 1761. Spanish Town grew more sickly than ever I - knew it, either before or since. From that period to August there were - buried 29 white inhabitants, of whom 15 were soldiers. Their disorder - had all the appearance of being the true yellow fever, and was - supposed to have been communicated from some ship in Kingston - harbour:" - ---Kingston and Port Royal, or the ships moored near to them, being the -common habitat of the disease, as in the corresponding circumstances at -other West Indian islands. - -But if the infective fever at Spanish Town in 1655-56 was almost certainly -not yellow fever, it was probably allied to it in type. Dysentery had -been almost universal; there was no care of the sick, and, so far as one -hears, no medical attendance, no hospitals, no scavenging, no security -taken to keep the water-supply pure--nothing, in short, of what is now -called sanitation. Sedgwick, arriving on October 1, 1655, found even the -dead unburied by the highways and among the bushes. The correlation -between dysentery and pestilential fever is no new hypothesis: flux first -and fever afterwards has been an experience both in sieges and in ordinary -domestic famines on many occasions. The origin of the yellow fever at -Barbados and elsewhere in 1647-8, which has been outlined in this chapter, -is but a special application of the same principle, the dysenteric matters -which represent the crude source of the infection having been brought in -the bilges and ballast of slave-ships, thrown into the mud of almost -tideless harbours, left to ferment amidst the heat and moisture of the -shore, and so made into a soil-poison which, in due season, would give off -emanations, fatal especially to new-comers. Port Royal and Kingston had -full experience of that endemic influence in after-years, for the first -time in 1692, after the earthquake and disturbance of soil which destroyed -the former town and occasioned the building of the latter on the other -side of the bay. By that time there had been slavers enough in the bay to -bring all the ordure that the hypothesis requires. But, down to 1655, the -Spaniards had traded only with hides and tallow in some four ships every -year, and had the headquarters of their cultivation and stock-raising at -the town in the plain some six miles from the shore. Four or five years -after their expulsion we find the whole aspect of the port changed, -according to the description already given. It does not appear that -Cromwell looked forward to negro labour in his colony, although the Nevis -planters brought their blacks with them. Charles II. had not been many -months on the throne when James, earl of Marlborough, petitioned him to -offer inducements to the Royal African Company to make Jamaica the staple -for the sale of blacks, and to contract with that company for one hundred -negroes to be delivered at the island[1191]. Negroes did begin from that -time to arrive in Jamaica, although Port Royal was at first rather a -general centre of commerce and piracy than a slave-port like Bridgetown, -perhaps because the Windward Islands were strong enough to keep their -privileges undivided. As late as 1670 the negro slaves in Jamaica were -reckoned at no more than 2500, not counting the old Spanish maroons[1192]. -On September 20 of that year, Sir Thomas Modyford, governor of Jamaica, -sent to Secretary Arlington certain proposals for the improvement of the -colony, of which the following bears upon our subject[1193]: - - "That they may have licence gratis or at moderate rates to trade for - negroes in Africa. Did those honourable persons, which make that Royal - [African] Company so glorious, but fall into considerations how much - more it is his Majesty's interest to increase the number of his - subjects than bullion of gold or silver (which by law all nations may - import), they would not only freely consent to this proposal for us - but for the whole nation and foreigners also. Mankind is the - principal, gold the accessory: increase the first considerably, and - the other must follow. Barbados had never risen to its late perfection - had it not been lawful for Dutch, Hamburghers, and our whole nation, - and any other, to bring and sell their blacks or any other servants in - the colony's infancy." - -The harbours of Port Royal and Kingston did, in the event, become the -chief resort of slave-ships in the British West Indies, slaves having been -landed there up to ten thousand in a year throughout the 18th century. -They came also to be among the chief seats of yellow fever, and continued -so until a recent date. The subsequent progress of yellow fever there, and -in other West Indian harbours as well as in the ports of some of the North -American colonies, is not the least important of the subjects that fall to -the second period of this history. - - - - -CHAPTER XII. - -THE GREAT PLAGUE OF LONDON, AND THE LAST OF PLAGUE IN ENGLAND. - - -Literature of the Great Plague. - -The writings called forth directly by the London Plague of 1665 were -hardly more numerous or of better quality than those of 1603 and 1625. At -its beginning in June, or in August, there appeared a number of tracts by -enterprising practitioners, containing a few commonplace remarks on causes -and the like, and advertisements of nostrums--by G. Harvey, Kemp, -Garrencieres ("Plague is one of the easiest diseases in the world to cure, -if" etc.), and Gadbury, an astrologer. The directions drawn up by the -College of Physicians in 1636, for the preservation of the sound and -recovery of the sick were re-issued, and an excellent set of "cautionary -rules" by H. Brooke was published by order of the mayor. The writings -which contain accounts of the Great Plague fall under two periods--the -years immediately following 1665, and the years 1720 to 1723 when there -was a sudden revival of interest in the subject in London owing to the -great plague of Marseilles in 1720. To the latter period belongs the most -famous work on the plague of 1665, Defoe's _Journal of the Plague Year_, -which embodied in a picturesque form the substance of various writings -that preceded it, together with traditions known to Defoe. A brief account -of those writings that preceded Defoe's in both periods will serve at the -same time to show the sources of a great part of his information. - -The weekly bills of mortality issued by Parish Clerks' Hall, which showed -the number of deaths week by week in each of the one hundred and forty -parishes of London, with a rough classification of the causes of death, -were reprinted at the end of the year 1665 in a volume with the title -_London's Dreadful Visitation_[1194]. The bills thus collected in -convenient form were made great use of by Defoe, and became, indeed, the -backbone of his work. Next to them in importance, although it is not -certain that Defoe used it, is a treatise on the medical aspects of the -Great Plague, which has never had the fortune to be published. The author -of it was William Boghurst, a young apothecary practising at the White -Hart in St Giles's-in-the-Fields, who advertised in the _Intelligencer_ on -July 31, 1665, at the height of the plague in his parish, that he had -treated forty, fifty or sixty patients in a day, that he was prepared to -undertake the treatment of cases in the City, the suburbs, or the country, -and that he had a water, a lozenge, and an electuary, as well as an -antidote at eightpence an ounce[1195]. - -After the epidemic was over he employed his spare half-hours in writing a -book upon his experiences, "considering that none hath printed anything -either since this plague, or that forty years since--which I something -wonder at." He professes to have taken nothing from hearsay, or from -books, or from the testimonies of others; he writes in English "for -general readers and sale," and he had omitted many things "so as not to -make the book too tedious and too dear to bie." The manuscript was -completed for the press, with a title-page, at the foot of which is what -appears to be a publisher's name (the surname now torn off); but it was -never published, although the author lived until 1685. It is conceivable -that the printed sheets, or the composed type, may have been destroyed in -the fire of September, 1666, and the enterprise abandoned. The manuscript -came into the possession of Sir Hans Sloane, and is now in the British -Museum[1196]. It gives much fuller clinical details of the plague than any -other English work, although in somewhat aphoristic form; and it may be -allowed the character of originality which the author claims for it, -except in some of the more systematic chapters showing the influence of -Diemerbroek. - -Another medical essay following the plague was that of Dr Hodges, of -Watling Street, first written in English in 1666 (May 8) under the title -_A Letter to a Person of Quality_[1197], and expanded in 1671 into a Latin -treatise[1198]. Besides a few pages at the beginning, giving some general -facts of the London outbreak (which Defoe used), it is mostly a systematic -disquisition, although a few cases are interspersed. One other medical -piece of 1666 (June 16) is known, by Dr George Thomson, of Duke's Place -near Aldgate, a Paracelsist or chemical physician; it contains the account -of a dissection of a plague-body, but is mostly occupied with a polemic -against the Galenists, which the author carried on for a number of years -in numerous other writings[1199]. - -Descriptive pieces, in prose or verse, such as the plagues of 1603 and -1625 elicited, are entirely wanting for that of 1665. But there was the -usual crop of religious and moral exercises to improve the occasion. These -appear to have come mostly, if not exclusively, from Dissenters. "Many -useful and pious treatises," says a Dissenter in 1721, "were published -upon the occasion of the last visitation, as by Mr Zach. Crofton, Mr Shaw, -Mr Doolittle, and others." But the only one that attained popularity, -having gone through five editions at once, and been often reprinted, even -as late as 1851, was _God's Terrible Voice in the City_[1200], by the Rev. -Thomas Vincent, of Christ Church, Oxford, who had been ejected from his -living of St Mary Magdalen, Milk Street, and was then a leader of Dissent. -Vincent preached in several parish churches (deserted by their parsons) -all through the plague, and ministered constantly among the sick. His -book, which moralizes also upon the great fire of 1666, will be drawn upon -in the sequel. - -We come next to the revival of interest in the Great Plague of London, -which was occasioned by the Marseilles epidemic in the summer of 1720, an -event that alarmed Western Europe as if the old recurrences of plague were -about to begin afresh after a long interval. In London, in 1721, several -books were published upon the Marseilles plague itself; and the years from -1720 to 1722 saw a whole crop of writings,--new essays and reprints of old -ones,--upon the last London plague of 1665. Among the books reprinted were -Hodges' _Loimologia_, in an English translation by Quincy, his _Letter to -a Person of Quality_, the _Necessary Directions_ of the College of -Physicians, the _Orders drawn up by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the -City_ (these three in 1721 in a _Collection of very Valuable and Scarce -Pieces relating to the last Plague in 1665_), and Vincent's _God's -Terrible Voice in the City_. The new medical books on the Great Plague -were by Scarborough, Hancock and Browne. - -When Defoe in 1722 wrote his _Journal of the Plague Year_, he had these -recent reprints and original books convenient to his hand. He had to go -back to 1665 for the collection of the weekly bills of mortality in the -plague-year (in a volume called _London's Dreadful Visitation_), and he -may have consulted Boghurst's manuscript, which was probably then in the -possession of Sir Hans Sloane. But it is impossible to trace all his -copious narrative of the Great Plague to these sources, even if we make -due allowance for his legitimate construction of incidents out of the -generalities of contemporary writers. It is possible that he may have had -some unknown manuscript, less technical than Boghurst's, to draw from. At -all events, he was a likely person to have had many stories of the plague -in his memory. He was a child of four when the plague was in London, the -son of a butcher named Foe in St Giles's, Cripplegate, which was one of -the most severely visited parishes. The most graphic parts of his -_Journal_ are those which contain such tales as he might have been told in -boyhood concerning the plague in Cripplegate, the scene of them being -carried round to Aldgate, opposite to the Butchers' Row (still there) in -Whitechapel High Street. He must have had some testimony from which to -construct the visit to Blackwall, the view of the shipping moored all up -and down the Thames, and the other particulars of the river-side -population in the plague-time. The rough experiences of the three Stepney -men in the country near London are in the manner of _Robinson Crusoe_, and -needed only a few hints from Dekker's stories, or from the writers of -1625. His account of the burials by the cart-load in plague-pits is also -suggestive of Dekker. The somewhat meagre references by Hodges might have -sufficed him for his frequent theme of the hardships and horrors of -shut-up houses, even if he had not seen two other tracts, of 1665, on the -same. The accounts of the Marseilles plague, one of the worst in history, -would have kept him right in picturing that of London. - -Whatever materials Defoe took from Hodges, Vincent, or the writers on -other plagues, he enlarged them by his power of circumstantial -construction into a narrative which must be accounted on the whole -veracious. He based upon figures, whenever he could get them; he seems -even to have sought among the archives of the City for accounts of monies -distributed to the poor. He prints in full the orders of the Mayor and -Aldermen, and professes to give the text of a formal resolution which they -passed to remain at their posts throughout the crisis. His table of the -number of plague-deaths in each of twenty-six towns or villages near -London does not, indeed, agree with the figures in the parish registers, -as the table on a later page will show; but it can hardly have been drawn -up at a guess. - -The best instance of Defoe's skilful use of authentic documents is his -description of how the infection invaded one part of London after another -from the western suburbs to the eastern, so that its intensity was nearly -over in one place before it had begun in another. That is the most -interesting epidemiological fact in the whole outbreak; and Defoe has done -ample justice to it. Boghurst had stated it with equal clearness and -emphasis in his manuscript of 1666, which Defoe may or may not have -seen[1201]; however the latter deduced it afresh, and illustrated it by -numerous tables from the bills of mortality, which showed the incidence of -plague upon each of the one hundred and forty parishes from week to week. - - -Antecedents, Beginnings and Progress of the Plague of 1665. - -When the London plague of 1665 had given indications that it would grow to -be one of the great outbreaks of that infection, much was made, in the -retrospect, of a single death from plague which had occurred towards the -end of December, 1664, in a house in or near Long Acre. Connected with -that case was one of those trivial chains of evidence which are so often -produced as the easy solution of a difficult problem. A bale of silks had -come to the house from Holland, and that bale of silks could be traced to -the Levant; therefore the seeds of the great plague of London were -imported Levantine seeds. This was pretty well for a city which had a -continuous record of plague-infection in its soil ever since the Black -Death of 1348. But credulity could ignore facts more recent than the -history for three centuries. The death in Long Acre in December was a -solitary one, and was of no more import for what followed than any of the -five other sporadic plague-deaths in 1664[1202]. Only one more death from -plague occurred in the bills (in the middle of February), until the last -week of April, 1665; even then the progress of the infection was slower -for the next two months than it had been in many former seasons of -moderate plague, such as the five years 1606-1610 and the eight years -1640-1647, or than it had been in the great plague-years of 1603, 1625 and -1636. An importation from abroad had been alleged as early as the great -plague of 1563, namely from Havre, which was then held by an English -garrison. But on that occasion the epidemic in London was gaining ground -before the sickness at Havre had declared itself plague, and was of the -bubonic type while the latter was still a malignant fever. The return of -the whole English garrison from Havre, with the seeds of sickness among -them, might well have introduced infection; but that return was not until -the end of July, by which time the mortality in London had been -progressing for two months. There is equally little reason for Stow's -statement that the plague of 1603 was brought to London from Ostend, or -for the corresponding theory of origin for the plague of 1625. A foreign -source was not thought of unless the plague became one of the greater -degree. Year after year in London there were a few cases of plague, and -sometimes for a succession of years the plague-deaths kept steadily at a -level of from one thousand to three thousand. There are, indeed, few years -from 1348 to 1666 in which the infection did not declare its presence in -London. Whether the few threatening cases in the spring were to rise to a -plague of the greater degree depended upon a concurrence of -circumstances--upon the interval since the last great plague, upon the -number of strangers crowding to the capital, and upon the kind of weather -preceding. In 1665 the various determining things did chance to come -together, and a plague of the first degree ensued. The one singular thing -in the history is that such a concurrence never happened again, or that -the conditions had so far changed (certainly not for the better), that -the type of epidemic disease was no longer the bubo-plague. - -According to precedent, a great plague was somewhat overdue in the year -1665. Its two great predecessors (not reckoning the smaller plague of -1636) had happened each at the beginning of a new reign--in 1603 on the -accession of James I., and in 1625 on the accession of Charles I. The -Restoration of 1660 was the time for the next great outburst; but that was -delayed for five years. Those five years were occupied with a good deal of -fever and other infective disease in London, and the fever in the -beginning of 1665 was, according to Sydenham, of a marked pestilential -type. It may be said to have led up to the plague; but the bubonic disease -itself needed something in addition to the determining causes of spotted -fever. It is generally admitted that London was unusually crowded with the -poorer classes whose work is required by the luxury of the rich (Defoe -says that an enumeration for the Lord Mayor had made out 100,000 -ribbon-weavers in the eastern suburbs, although the number is incredible). -There was also a general relaxation of morals, which may have predisposed -many constitutions to receive the seeds of infection. Another element in -the case was the weather. - -The summer before had been remarkable for the immense number of -house-flies, and of other insects and frogs. From November to the end of -March the earth was held in almost continual black frost. Boghurst says -the wind was westerly for seven months. No rain fell all the time except a -slight sprinkling in the end of April. The dry cold continued after the -frost broke, and produced, says Sydenham, an unusual number of cases of -pleurisy, pneumonia and angina. Richard Baxter says of the seasons -preceding the great plague, that they were "the driest winter, spring and -summer that ever man alive knew, or our forefathers ever heard of; so that -the grounds were burnt like the highways, the meadow ground where I lived -[Acton] having but four loads of hay which before bare forty[1203]." The -hay crop was "pitiful," says Boghurst, in consequence of the long cold and -drought. But the summer was made pleasant by refreshing breezes, and -there was abundance of all kinds of grain, vegetables and fruit. - -It was not until the beginning of June that the deaths from plague in all -London, according to the bills of mortality, reached the sum of 43 in the -week. But the mortality had been excessive from the beginning of the year, -and it was suspected, as in the like circumstances in 1625, that the -searchers had been concealing the existence of plague, or calling cases of -it by other names, so as to save the infected houses from being shut up. -The motive for bribery and concealment doubtless existed; it had been kept -in view by the authorities from the first institution of searchers, who -were solemnly sworn before the Dean of the Arches to make a true return of -the cause of death. In all the great plagues, less so in 1563 and 1603 -than in other years, there was reason to suppose that a large proportion -of deaths put down to other causes than plague were really cases of -plague. However there is no doubt that, in the early months of 1665, just -as in the beginning of 1625, there was a great deal of spotted fever in -London, not to mention smallpox and dysentery. The season was a sickly -one, such a sickly season as often occurred in the latter part of the -seventeenth century and throughout the whole of the eighteenth, when there -could be no longer any question of plague. The weekly bills contain -numerous deaths in the several parishes from "fever" and from "spotted -fever" for months before they contain more than an occasional -plague-death. There was no reason why these and other maladies should not -have swelled the bills to three or four hundred in a week; in the year -1739, when London was probably not a third larger than in 1665, Strother -says that fever brought the weekly bill up to near a thousand. It is -remarkable, however, that Boghurst claims to have been treating cases of -plague from the month of November, 1664; Hodges also says that he was -called in the middle of the Christmas holidays to a young man in a fever -who acquired, two days after, a plague-botch in each groin as large as a -nutmeg, and recovered. Boghurst admits that "tokens," by which he means -the marks of plague other than the botch or bubo, "appeared not much till -about the middle of June, and carbuncles not till the latter end of July." -He suspects that the bills of mortality did not tell the whole truth; -and, as an instance of evasion, he says that there had been plague in St -Giles's, St Martin's, St Clement's, and St Paul's, Covent Garden, for -three or four years before (the bills of mortality give only 12, 9, and 5 -deaths respectively for all London in the years 1662, 1663 and 1664), "as -I have been certainly informed by the people themselves that had it in -their houses in those parishes." - -But, in claiming an earlier beginning for the plague than the bills -recognize, and in setting aside the diagnosis of fever as insufficient, -Boghurst takes what is known, in the controversies upon the nature and -affinities of plague, as the "ontological" view: that is to say, he sees -in plague a fixed and uniform entity, and he sees the same in fever. The -other view is the developmental, which recognizes transitions from the one -type of pestilential disease into the other. The great writers of the -time, Willis, Sydenham, and Morton, were none of them "ontologists." They -all taught the scale of malignity, which had simple continued fever at one -end, then a severer fever with spots and "parotids," then a fever with -buboes, and at the farthest end of the scale the true plague, with its -buboes, carbuncles, and tokens. Nor is it denied by competent observers, -such as Boghurst himself, that an epidemic of plague declined as a whole -in malignity towards the end, so that the buboes suppurated, and three out -of four, or three out of five, patients recovered. If that were the case -in the descent of the curve, why should there not have been something -corresponding in the ascent? If certain cases of the prevailing fever in -the beginning of the year developed buboes which suppurated (as in the -case treated by Hodges at Christmas, 1664), should they be called plague -or fever? Willis would have answered in favour of fever, until such time, -at least, as the "epidemic constitution" of the season changed definitely -to plague[1204]; he does in effect answer so in the particular instance -of the Oxford fever of 1643, which in some cases was bubonic, whereas, in -1645, he makes no doubt that the disease prevailing in Oxford and -Wallingford was true plague. - -The more general discussion of this theme will be found in the concluding -section of the chapter on the Black Death, where illustrations are given -of typhus fever turning to bubonic fever and to plague, from recent and -anomalous outbreaks of plague in Arab villages or encampments, in some -Indian villages, and elsewhere. The conclusion there come to was that the -type of plague, or the bubonic type, prevailed when the infection of the -filthy habitations began with change of season to rise from the soil, -whereas the form of sickness was typhus fever so long as the infection was -primarily in the atmosphere of the dwellings. - -We may admit, then, that there was some ambiguity in the naming and -classifying of pestilential cases in the early months of 1665. If we -follow the bills--and there is nothing else to follow--the plague-deaths -in all the parishes of London for the seven weeks from April 18 to June 6 -were respectively no more than 2, 0, 9, 3, 14, 17 and 43, the deaths from -"fever" and "spotted fever" being much more numerous. - -Having thus far determined the date of beginning, we come next to the line -of advance of the plague of 1665. It was from the western and northern -suburbs towards the City, the eastern suburbs, and Southwark. Boghurst, -who practised in St Giles's-in-the-Fields, says: - - "The plague fell first upon the highest ground, for our parish is the - highest ground about London, and the best air, and was first infected. - Highgate, Hampstead and Acton also all shared in it." From the west - end of the town, Boghurst continues, "it gradually insinuated and - crept down Holborn and the Strand, and then into the City, and at last - to the east end of the suburbs, so that it was half a year at the west - end of the city [in his experience] before the east end and Stepney - was infected, which was about the middle of July. Southwark, being the - south suburb, was infected almost as soon as the west end." But the - same writer farther explains that "it fell upon several places of the - city and suburbs like rain--at the first at St Giles', St Martin's, - Chancery-lane, Southwark, Houndsditch, and some places within the - City, as at Proctor's-houses." - -The slow progress from west to east has been made much of by Defoe, who -used the bills of mortality to ascertain the rise of the infection in the -several districts. His conclusion is the same in the main as Boghurst's -contemporary observation; only that he makes the infection of Southwark -later, and with reason so far as the bills show:-- - - "It was now mid-July, and the plague which had chiefly raged at the - other end of the town, and as I said before, in the parishes of St - Giles's, St Andrew's, Holbourn, and towards Westminster, began now to - come eastward towards the part where I lived. It was to be observed, - indeed, that it did not come straight on toward us; for the City, that - is to say within the walls, was indifferent healthy still; nor was it - got then very much over the water into Southwark; for though there - died that week 1268 of all distempers, whereof it might be supposed - above 900 died of the plague [only 725 in the bill], yet there was but - 28 in the whole City within the walls, and but 19 in Southwark, - Lambeth included; whereas in the parishes of St Giles' and St Martin's - in the Fields alone, there died 421.... We perceived, I say, the - distemper to draw our way; viz. by the parishes of Clerkenwell, - Cripplegate, Shoreditch, and Bishopsgate; which last two parishes - joining to Aldgate, Whitechapel and Stepney, the infection came at - length to spread its utmost rage and violence in those parts, even - when it abated at the western parishes where it began. It was very - strange to observe that in this particular week, from the 4th to the - 13th July, when, as I have observed, there died near 400 of the plague - in the two parishes of St Martin's and St Giles' in the Fields only, - there died in the parish of Aldgate but four, in the parish of - Whitechapel three, and in the parish of Stepney but one." In the - following week of July, with a total of 1761 deaths, whereof of the - plague 1089, only 16 occurred on the Southwark side. Soon, however, - Cripplegate had the infection at its hottest, and at the same time - Clerkenwell, St Sepulchre's parish, St Bride's and Aldersgate. "While - it was in all these parishes, the City and the parishes of the - Southwark side of the water, and all Stepney, Whitechapel, Aldgate, - Wapping and Ratcliff were very little touched; so that people went - about their business unconcerned, carried on their trades, kept open - their shops, and conversed freely with one another in all the City, - the east and north-east suburbs, and in Southwark, almost as if the - plague had not been among us." - -In another passage Defoe brings out the moral of its gradual advance. He -had shown - - "how it began at one end of the town, and proceeded gradually and - slowly from one part to another; and like a dark cloud that passes - over our heads, which as it thickens and overcasts the air at one - end, clears up at the other end: so while the plague went on raging - from west to east, as it went forwards east it abated in the west, by - which means those parts of the town which were not seized, or who were - left, and where it had spent its fury were, as it were, spared to help - and assist the other; whereas had the distemper spread itself all over - the City and suburbs at once, raging in all places alike, as it has - done since in some places abroad, the whole body of the people must - have been overwhelmed" etc. - -That is how Defoe constructs a concrete picture from the dry statistics of -the weekly bills. He has defined the stages, and pointed the moral, with a -firmer hand than the reality would most likely have warranted. But no -scientific writer could have apprehended more correctly the general fact -of a gradual invasion from the west end of the town. - -These striking facts of the gradual advance of the Great Plague of London -from west to east will be found to suit that theory of the plague-virus -which has been illustrated in various parts of this volume. The virus of -plague is a soil-poison, or the ground is its habitat; its quiescence or -activity depends upon whether or not the state of the soil favours the -fermentation of the special organic matters therein, which special organic -matters we here take to be the products of cadaveric decomposition. The -conclusion that the poison of plague lay in the soil, and that it rose -into the air in emanations or effluvia, was forced upon all those who -thought much about the matter from the medieval period onwards. Thus, the -apothecary Boghurst, says in his first chapter: "And therefore my opinion -falls in wholly with those who make the earth the seminary and seed-plot -of these venomous vapours and pestiferous effluvia, which vitiate and -corrupt the air, and consequently induce the pestilence." And again: "The -plague is a most subtle, insinuating, venomous, deleterious exhalation, -arising from the maturation of the ferment of the forces (?) of the earth, -extracted into the air by the heat of the sun." It is true that Boghurst, -like the sixteenth-century writers abroad, such as Ambroise Pare, locates -the venom in mysterious cavities and bowels of the earth, and dwells upon -the agency of earthquakes in setting it free. But he comes to more -ordinary causes in his enumeration of favouring things--"dunghills, -excrements, dead bodies lying unburied, putrefying churchyards too full," -and again "breaking up tombs and graves where dead bodies have been long -buried." As telling against the last, however, he adds: "When the -charnel-house at St Paul's was demolished, there was a thousand cart-loads -of dead men's bones carried away to Finsbury, yet no plague followed it." - -The activity of this soil-poison depends upon processes in the soil which -go on so slowly that the link of cause and effect is easily overlooked. In -the last resort, they are dependent on the rise and fall of the -ground-water. It was observed beyond all doubt as the law in Lower Egypt, -that the plague came forth annually after the Nile had begun to fall, and -that it reached its height in the months of March, April and May, when the -soil was driest, or the pores of the ground occupied solely by air after -having been full of water. It was observed, also, that the plague-area and -the inundation-area were co-extensive. Lower Egypt is, of course, somewhat -peculiar (Lower Bengal coming near to it) in these regular alternations of -air alone and water alone in the pores of the ground. But other countries -have the same sharp contrast occasionally, and London had the contrast -very decidedly in the years 1664 and 1665. The months from November 1664 -to June 1665, some of which ought to have brought snow or rain to raise -the wells and springs to their highest periodic water-mark early in the -year, were quite remarkable for drought: Richard Baxter says that no one -remembered the like. The ground-water, instead of rising all through the -winter, must have fallen lower and lower as the spring and summer -advanced. The pores of the ground had been occupied with air to an unusual -depth of the subsoil, and the presence of air in these circumstances had -given occasion to that ferment-activity in the special organic matters of -an old-inhabited soil which produced the virus of plague. The stratum of -subsoil would become dry first in the more elevated parts; and as the -ground-water continued to fall, the air would reach in due course an -unwonted stratum in the lower situations. Defoe says that they came to -water at eighteen feet in digging the Whitechapel plague-pits. The same -seasonal march of a soil-infection from the higher ground to the lower -has been observed in modern times in other cities, and in other diseases -than plague. The drought for seven months from November to June would not, -of itself, have caused a great plague. But it was an essential member of -the co-operating group of things; and it probably determined of itself the -season when the great plague was once more to come and take away the -enormous increase of poor people. - - -Mortality and Incidents of the Great Plague. - -The plague of 1665 was justly called the Great Plague, and is sometimes -spoken of as "the plague of London," as if it were unique. But it was not -much more severe than those of 1603 and 1625 had been for the London of -their generation; and there had been many plagues when London was a small -capital, such as those of 1407, 1479, 1500, 1513 and 1563, which had cut -off as large a proportion (one-fifth to one-sixth) of the population. The -inhabitants in 1665 were not far short of half a million, nearly twice as -many as in 1603, and about a third more than in 1625. The increased -mortality in 1665 was somewhat more than proportionate to the increase of -inhabitants, as the following table shows:-- - - Highest - Year Estimated Total Plague mortality Worst - population deaths deaths in a week week - - 1603 250,000 42,940 33,347 3385 25 Aug.-1 Sept. - 1625 320,000 63,001 41,313 5205 11-18 Aug. - 1665 460,000 97,306 68,596 8297 12-19 Sept. - -Reckoned from the christenings and burials in the bills of Parish Clerks' -Hall, the population in 1605 would have been 224,275, and in 1622, -272,207. But in those years (and until after 1636) certain of the newer -parishes (known as the Seven Parishes), including Stepney and Westminster, -kept separate bills, of which some figures for 1603 and 1625 are given at -p. 477 and p. 511. The population of the Seven Parishes appears to have -been about one-ninth of the whole metropolis in 1603, and about -one-seventh in 1625, while Graunt, a contemporary, makes it one-fifth in -1662. These fractions have been added in the table, so as to make 1603 -and 1625 comparable with 1665. In 1603 and 1625, the highest mortality in -a week does not show the deaths in those parishes (Westminster, Stepney -&c.) which did not send their returns to the general bill until 1636, but -their figures have been included in the totals for those years. It will be -seen that the plague of 1665 fully kept pace with the increase of -population. The old City within the walls had 15,207 deaths in the year -from all causes. It had become crowded since the beginning of Elizabeth's -reign by its gardens and churchyards being built upon, and its mansions -turned into tenement-houses for a poorer class; and yet in 1563 the -mortality from plague and other causes in the City and its Liberties, with -a population hardly exceeding that of the City alone in 1665, was 20,372. -The enormous total of 1665 was largely made up from the populous suburbs -of Cripplegate, Whitechapel, Stepney, St Martin's in the Fields, St -Giles's in the Fields, Southwark and Westminster, which would have -contributed but little to the total down to the middle third of the -sixteenth century. - -The following tables will show the progress of the epidemic from week to -week, the weekly deaths from all causes and from plague, and the incidence -upon the several parts of London. The so-called ordinary deaths are much -in excess of the average, and must have included many that were really -cases of plague. Part of the excess, however, was due to the great -prevalence of fever and spotted fever, which made a heavy mortality in the -early months before the plague began. Bowel complaint also is credited -with a good many deaths. The other more important items in the bills are -consumption and infantile troubles. Boghurst, however, says: "Almost all -other diseases turned into the plague. For five or six months together -there was hardly any other disease seen but the plague and a few -casualties, whatever the Bills say; and Thucydides says the same of the -plague at Athens." As to the total of deaths in the year from all causes -(97,306), Hodges thinks that it does not show the whole mortality. The -largest number of burials in one week is 8297; but he thinks that 12,000 -were buried in that week, and that 4000 were buried in one day and night. -But there seems to be no reason to set aside the tally of the sextons to -that extent; the returns were made weekly from one hundred and forty -parishes, and might easily have been exact to within a few in each. - -_Bill of Mortality of the Plague-year 1665 in London._ - - Week - ending Christened Buried Plague - - Dec. 27 229 291 1 - Jan. 3 239 349 0 - 10 235 394 0 - 17 223 415 0 - 24 237 474 0 - 31 216 409 0 - Feb. 7 221 393 0 - 14 224 462 1 - 21 232 393 0 - 28 233 396 0 - Mar. 7 236 441 0 - 14 236 433 0 - 21 221 363 0 - 28 238 353 0 - Apr. 4 242 344 0 - 11 245 382 0 - 18 287 344 0 - 25 229 398 2 - May 2 237 388 0 - 9 211 347 9 - 16 227 353 3 - 23 231 385 14 - 30 229 400 17 - June 6 234 405 43 - 13 206 558 112 - 20 204 615 168 - 27 199 684 267 - July 4 207 1006 470 - 11 197 1268 725 - 18 194 1761 1089 - 25 193 2785 1843 - Aug. 1 215 3014 2010 - 8 178 4030 2817 - 15 166 5319 3880 - 22 171 5568 4237 - 29 169 7496 6102 - Sept. 5 167 8252 6988 - 12 168 7690 6544 - 19 176 8297 7165 - 26 146 6460 5533 - Oct. 3 142 5720 4929 - 10 141 5068 4327 - 17 147 3219 2665 - 24 104 1806 1421 - 31 104 1388 1031 - Nov. 7 95 1787 1414 - 14 113 1359 1050 - 21 108 905 652 - 28 112 544 333 - Dec. 5 123 428 210 - 12 133 442 243 - 19 147 525 281 - ----- ------ ------ - 9,967 97,306 68,596 - -_Incidence on Parishes of the Plague in 1665._ - -_Ninety-seven Parishes within the Walls._ - - All deaths Plague deaths - 97 City parishes 15,207 9,877 - -(The parishes with heaviest mortalities were St Anne's, Blackfriars; -Christ Church, Newgate; St Stephen's, Coleman St; St Martin's, Vintry; -Allhallows Barking, the Great, and in-the-Wall; St Andrew's, Wardrobe). - -_Sixteen Parishes without the Walls and in the Liberties._ - - St Giles's, Cripplegate 8069 4838 - St Botolph's, Aldgate 4926 4051 - St Olave's, Southwark 4793 2785 - St Sepulchre's 4509 2746 - St Saviour's, Southwark 4235 3446 - St Andrew's, Holborn 3958 3103 - St Botolph's, Bishopsgate 3464 2500 - St Bride's, Fleet Street 2111 1427 - St George's, Southwark 1613 1260 - St Botolph's, Aldersgate 997 755 - St Dunstan's in the West 958 665 - St Bartholomew the Great 493 344 - St Thomas's, Southwark 475 371 - Bridewell Precinct 230 179 - St Bartholomew the Less 193 139 - Trinity, Minories 168 123 - - Pesthouse 159 - -_Twelve Out-parishes in Middlesex and Surrey._ - - Stepney 8598 6583 - Whitechapel 4766 3855 - St Giles's in the Fields 4457 3216 - St Leonard's, Shoreditch 2669 949 - St Magdalen's, Bermondsey 1943 1362 - St James's, Clerkenwell 1863 1377 - St Mary's, Newington 1272 1004 - St Katharine's, Tower 956 601 - Lambeth 798 537 - Islington 696 593 - Rotherhithe 304 210 - Hackney 232 132 - -_Five Parishes in the City and Liberties of Westminster._ - - St Martin's in the Fields 4804 2883 - St Margaret's 4710 3742 - St Clement's Danes 1969 1319 - St Paul's, Covent Garden 408 281 - St Mary's, Savoy 303 198 - - Pesthouse 156 - -The Great Plague brought back all the familiar incidents of 1603 and 1625, -and revealed no new feature. As before, all that could afford to do so -made their escape at the outset. Sydenham, who fled with the rest, says -that two-thirds of the population left; which may be true of the City -proper, but certainly not of the populous Liberties and suburbs on both -sides of the water, as Defoe points out. The poorer classes were left -stranded, and bore the brunt of the calamity, as they had always done. -Flight was, doubtless, the best step to take, the motive being to get -"into clean air," as cardinal Wolsey expressed it in 1515. Those that were -left behind knew that they were in bad air, and knew that it mattered -little whether they came into contact with the sick or not[1205]. Their -employments and wages mostly ceased as the plague extended from suburb to -suburb and to the City, so that with starvation on the one side and plague -on the other, they held their lives cheaply and bore themselves with an -unconcern which was strange to the rich. Their desperate case explains, as -Defoe correctly saw, the ease with which the mayor could always get men to -undertake for pay the disagreeable and risky work of day and night -watchmen to the multitude of shut-up houses, of bearers of the dead, of -buriers, of nurses, and distributors of the public charity. As soon as any -fell in these humble ranks, others were willing to take their place; so -that at no period of the epidemic was there any break-down in the work of -expeditious burial or any failure in good order and decency. To carry the -poor through the great crisis much money was needed; Defoe says that it -was forthcoming from all parts of England and he estimates the -distribution of relief at thousands of pounds weekly, although he failed -to find the exact accounts, which, he thinks, had been destroyed in the -fire of 1666. A thousand pounds a week, he says, was given from the king's -purse. The whole of this great system of relief was under the direction of -the Lord Mayor, Sir John Lawrence, who proved himself worthy of the best -traditions of his office. In the out-parishes there were Justices of the -Peace who discharged the like duties. - -The regular clergy for the most part left the town, but two are honourably -mentioned as having stayed with the plague-stricken people, Dr Anthony -Walker, of St Mary Aldermanbury, and Mr Meriton[1206]. - -Sometime in August Lord Arlington wrote to the bishop of London that the -king was informed of many ministers and lecturers being absent from their -posts during this time of contagion, and that nonconformists had thrust -themselves into their pulpits to preach seditions and doctrines contrary -to the Church. His majesty wishes the bishop to prevent such mischiefs to -Church and State[1207]. The bishop replied, from Fulham, 19 August, that -the sober clergy remain, that he had refused some that offered to supply -vacancies, suspecting them to be of the factious party, though they -promised to conform, that most of his officers had deserted him and gone -into the country, but he could not learn that any nonconformists had -invaded the pulpit[1208]. The bishop, however, was not likely to hear much -within his garden walls at Fulham of what was passing at Aldgate. There -can be no question that Church pulpits were occupied during the plague by -ministers who had been ejected in 1662. Chief among them was Thomas -Vincent, formerly minister of St Magdalen's, Milk Street, who preached in -St Botolph's, Aldgate, Great St Helen's, and Allhallows Staining[1209]. -Vincent says that it was the opportunity of irregular practitioners both -in the Church and in medicine, and he is disposed to say a good word for -the latter from a fellow feeling with them. Besides Vincent, says Richard -Baxter[1210], there were "some strangers that came thither since they were -silenced, as Mr Chester, Mr Janeway, Mr Turner, Mr Grimes, Mr Franklin, -and some others." These all became prominent in London Nonconformity; and -Baxter clearly traces their subsequent power to the opportunity that the -plague gave them: - - "But one great benefit the plague brought to the city, that is, it - occasioned the silenced ministers more openly and laboriously to - preach the Gospel to the exceeding comfort and profit of the people; - in so much that to this day [1670] the freedom of preaching which this - occasioned, cannot, by the daily guards of soldiers, nor by the - imprisonments of multitudes be restrained. The ministers that were - silenced for Nonconformity had ever since 1662 done their work - privately." - -Baxter knew of none among the Nonconformist ministers remaining in London -who fell victims to the plague, except "Mr Grunman, a German, a very -humble, holy, able minister, but being a silenced Nonconformist, was so -poor that he was not able to remove his family." Two others of the sect, -who fled, lost their lives--"Mr Cross, flying from the plague into the -country died with his wife and some children as soon as he came thither, -in the house of that learned worthy man, Mr Shaw, another silenced -minister," and Mr Roberts, "a godly Welsh minister, who also flying from -the plague, fell sick as far off as between Shrewsbury and Oswestry and -died in a little straw, but none durst entertain him." Baxter himself -found refuge in the house of the Hampdens, in Bucks[1211], leaving his -family, as he says, in the midst of plague at Acton. Defoe draws from the -incident of the Nonconformists in Church pulpits a somewhat sentimental -moral; he sees nothing aggressive in it, but merely the levelling of -differences by affliction, and a short-lived prospect of reconciliation. - -The irregular practitioners of physic would appear to have been in great -force, just as in former plagues, when their bills were on every post. -Defoe professes to give specimens of their advertisements, which he might -have adapted from actual advertisements in the news-sheets, the -'Intelligencer' and the 'Newes.' The empirics were of both sexes, and of -foreign extraction as well as native. - -Among the regular physicians who practised for a time, at least, in the -plague were the famous Professor Glisson, Dr Nathan Paget (an intimate -friend of Milton and cousin of Elizabeth Minshull whom the poet, in 1664, -had married for his third wife), Dr Wharton, of St Thomas's Hospital, a -distinguished anatomist, Dr Berwick or Barwick, Dr Brooke, Dr Hodges, and -Dr Conyers. The last was one of two of his order who died of the plague. -Two Paracelsist or chemical physicians, Dr Dey and Dr Starkey, died of it: -and Dr George Thomson says that he survived three several attacks of the -buboes, the first sore lasting for four months. A considerable number of -chirurgeons and apothecaries are said (by Defoe) to have fallen victims. -Pepys says that at the first meeting of Gresham College (the Royal -Society) since the plague, held on January 22, 1666, Dr Goddard "did fill -us with talk in defence of his and his fellow physicians' going out of -town in the plague-time," his plea being that their particular patients -were out of town, and they left at liberty. But that excuse ignores the -fact that the time was a great emergency, and puts the defence upon the -wrong ground. - -Goddard had attended Cromwell in the Irish and Scottish campaigns as -physician to the army. For a short time he had been a member of the -Council of State, and for several years was master of a College at Oxford. -He was Gresham professor of physic, and one of the original council of the -Royal Society. This eminent man of science was the inventor and proprietor -of "Goddard's drop," the secret of which he sold to Charles II. for a -large sum, said to have been L6000. Dr Martin Lister says that the king -showed him the receipt, and that the drops were nothing more than the -volatile spirit of raw silk rectified with oil of cinnamon, and no better -than ordinary spirit of hartshorn. Another writer says that the drops -contained also skull of a person hanged and dried viper. According to -Sydenham, Goddard's drops were preferable to other volatile spirits for -the particular purpose, namely, the recovery of people from faintings of -various kinds. Even if Dr Goddard had remained in town, he would have been -a trafficker in nostrums as much as the empirics; nor is it probable, from -all that we know, that he could have brought epidemiological principles to -bear upon the management of the epidemic among the poor. The best teaching -of the time counselled that which he himself practised, namely, flight. - -Defoe says that the Lord Mayor (Sir John Lawrence), the Sheriffs (Sir -George Waterman and Sir Charles Doe), the Court of Aldermen and certain of -the Common Council, or their deputies, came to a resolution and published -it, viz.: - - "That they would not quit the City themselves, but that they would be - always at hand for the preserving of good order in every place, and - for the doing justice on all occasions; as also for the distributing - the public charity to the poor; and, in a word, for the doing the duty - and discharging the trust reposed in them by the citizens to the - utmost of their power." - -The minutes are extant of numerous meetings of the Mayor and Council, -with the orders made (on May 11, June 17, 19, and 27, July 12, and at -short intervals thereafter)[1212]. Two of the Aldermen died of plague. - -It appears to be admitted by all, that good order was kept, the dead -buried expeditiously, day and night watchmen provided for an immense -number of infected houses (until, as Vincent says, the infected houses -became so many that there was no use shutting them up), bearers of the -dead and grave-diggers engaged to fill the places of those who died, and -applications heard for relief. One of the things that justly excited the -admiration of Defoe was the abundant supply of all the markets, and the -almost unvarying weight of the penny wheaten loaf, which is given every -week at the foot of the bill of mortality. The Parish Clerks brought out -their bill regularly, although Hodges says that the sextons failed at -length to keep an accurate account of the number of corpses. All the dead -were buried at first in coffins and with full ceremony; but when the -infection became hottest in August and September, especially in the -crowded East-end and in Southwark, the bodies are said to have been -brought to the pits in cartloads and thrown in, sometimes without even a -covering[1213]. That is alleged by the writers on the plagues of 1603 and -1625, and the same must have happened to some extent in 1665, but whether -to the extent that Defoe's graphic account implies may be doubted. - -The burials took place over night until, as Vincent says, "now the nights -are too short to bury the dead." This was a reversal of the order, first -issued in 1547 and probably carried out in the plague of 1603, that no -burial was to take place between six in the evening and six in the -morning. Even at the worst time, coffins would seem to have been got for -most. Vincent says, "Now we could hardly go forth but we should meet many -coffins," and he mentions one woman whom he met with a little coffin under -her arm. Evelyn enters in his diary on September 7, the worst week of the -epidemic: "I went all along the City and suburbs from Kent Street to St -James's, a dismal passage and dangerous, to see so many coffins exposed in -the streets now thin of people." Defoe's weird description of the Aldgate -plague-pit at midnight, with seven or eight lanterns set on the heaps of -earth round the edge, and of the constant journeys to and fro of the -dead-carts, has probably made the most of the realities of the case. - -A letter of Pepys to Lady Carteret, written from Woolwich on September 4, -gives us a glimpse of the state of the City: - - "I having stayed in the city till about 7400 died in one week, and of - them above 6000 of the plague, and little noise heard day nor night - but tolling of bells; till I could walk Lumber-Street and not meet - twenty persons from one end to the other, and not fifty upon the - Exchange; till whole families, 10 and 12 together, have been swept - away; till my very physician, Dr Burnet, who undertook to secure me - against any infection, having survived the month of his own being shut - up, died himself of the plague; till the nights, though much - lengthened, are grown too short to conceal the burials of those that - died the day before, people being thereby constrained to borrow - daylight for that service." The butcheries are everywhere visited, his - brewer is shut up, and his baker dead with his whole family. - -On September 20, he writes in his diary: - - "But Lord! what a sad time it is to all: no boats upon the river, and - grass grows all up and down Whitehall Court, and nobody but poor - wretches in the streets." - -Some three weeks later (October 11) Evelyn writes in his diary: "Went -through the whole city, having occasion to alight out of the coach in -several places about business of money, when I was environed with -multitudes of poor pestiferous creatures begging alms. The shops -universally shut up." Vincent says that he would meet "many with sores and -limping in the streets," (from the suppurating buboes in the groins). -Again: - - "It would be endless to speak what we have seen and heard of:--some in - their frenzy rising out of their beds and leaping about their rooms; - others crying and roaring at their windows; some coming forth almost - naked into the streets" - ---the delirium being sometimes of the gentle or foolish kind, and -sometimes violent. These incidents are much enlarged upon by Defoe, who -makes out the cries and groans (mentioned by Dekker and others for the -earlier plagues) to have been from the pain of the hard and tense buboes. -Boghurst says that the treatment by actual cautery and other escharotics -caused more pain than the buboes. - -As a set-off to the more horrible picture given by Defoe of the inmates of -a house all dying together, their bodies being found by the watchmen and -taken away in the dead-cart, we may turn to Vincent's plain account of -what happened in the house where he lodged, probably in the neighbourhood -of Aldgate or Bishopsgate, when he came up from Islington to minister to -the sick. - - "We were eight in the family--three men, three youths, an old woman - and a maid; all which came to me, hearing of my stay in town, some to - accompany me, others to help me [he was a celebrity in the religious - world with a large following]. It was the latter end of September - before any of us were touched.... But at last we were visited.... At - first our maid was smitten; it began with a shivering and trembling in - her flesh, and quickly seized on her spirits.... I came home and the - maid was on her death-bed; and another crying out for help, being left - alone in a sweating fainting-fit. It was on Monday when the maid was - smitten; on Thursday she died full of tokens. On Friday one of the - youths had a swelling in his groin, and on the Lord's day died with - the marks of the distemper upon him. On the same day another youth did - sicken, and on the Wednesday following he died. On the Thursday night - his master fell sick of the disease, and within a day or two was full - of spots, but strangely recovered.... The rest were preserved." - -The two boys appear to have been conscious to the end, and to have died in -the placid mood that often came on in the last hours of plague, as in -other prostrating infections such as yellow fever and cholera. In those -two weeks at the end of September and beginning of October the burials in -all London were 6460 (of plague 5533) and 5720 (of plague 4929). - -The chief preventive measure which the mayor had to give effect to was the -shutting-up of infected houses. Defoe says that he carried out that odious -policy considerately. The policy was a traditional one, and may or may -not have had its origin in medical prescription. It was practised, as we -have seen in a former chapter, early in the reign of Henry VIII., if not -even before that. The doctrine underlying it was the contagiousness of -plague, which was much more a doctrine of the faculty than of the people, -and was most of all a doctrine of the Court. Originally the dogma of -contagiousness, in all its rigour, had been made for the persons of the -Tudor monarchs, and as late as 1665 it was in the atmosphere of the Court -that the contagion of plague was invested with the most powerful -properties. The common people of London gave no heed to it, because they -saw every hour that it was a matter of indifference; the middle classes -held it in a qualified way, knowing that there was less to fear from -plague-bodies than from plague-infected ground; but kings took the -comprehensive view of it, allowing no exceptions or scientific -reservations, and the Court doctors, such as Mead in the 18th century, at -length succeeded in making the high doctrine of plague-contagion to pass -current. Two instances are known from extant petitions, of its rigorous -application upon Court servants in 1665: one in the case of a trumpeter of -the king, and the other in the case of the barber to the household. In the -latter case, apparently when the Court was at Salisbury in the autumn, a -stranger supposed to be visited with the sickness ran into the barber's -tent in his absence; whereon the tent and all his goods and instruments of -livelihood were burnt, he himself confined, and his servants sent away, -according to the orders for the preservation of the Court, "so that he -lost his trade and was utterly ruined[1214]." - -The more discriminating of the profession knew and taught that the seeds -of plague could lurk in a bundle of clothes, or of bedding, or in other -effects, or in bales of goods, and that they became the more virulent -through the fermentation that goes on in these circumstances. The -contagion was understood to be _per fomitem_ and _per distans_; on the -other hand, experience was rather against a contagion from the exhalations -of the sick: the immunity of nurses was as striking as it has been in many -other contagions. The people were instinctively right in their belief -that they mostly caught the plague because the infection was in the air of -the place; so long as they were living on a plague-stricken spot, they -were exposed to the risk; and if there were any difference in safety -between dwelling-houses, and the streets, markets or shops, the preference -seemed to lie with the former. The traditional or official doctrine, -however, was that the plague-stricken were the sources of contagion, that -all who had come near them were suspect, and that the safety of the well -depended upon the rigorous shutting-up of the sick and the suspected -together. The experience of epidemic after epidemic might have shown that -this theoretical reasoning, so attractive to the "thorough" order of mind, -was worthless in practice. A great plague pursued its course until the -infected houses became too many for shutting up; if many plague-years did -not develop epidemics of the first degree, that was in accordance with -some epidemiological law, and not because the preventive measures were one -year effective and another year ineffective. However, a traditional -doctrine will always survive a good deal of adverse experience; and the -shutting-up of houses, which had signally failed in 1563, 1593, 1603, 1625 -and 1636, was resorted to once more in 1665, and perhaps with more rigour -than ever so as to give it a fair chance. Defoe has stated with great -fairness the hardships of it, and he follows Hodges and Boghurst in -pronouncing it a mistake and a failure. Most of the horrible incidents of -the plague came from the shutting-up of houses; those which Defoe -introduces in that connexion do not exceed probability. It is hard to say -whether the condemnation of shutting-up, which found wide currency during -and immediately after the plague of 1665, would have at length made any -difference to the traditional doctrine and practice. The occasion did not -arise again in London except for a few months in 1666, when the old -practice seems to have been enforced. The corresponding doctrine and -practice that arose in its place, was quarantine against foreign -importation; that rested firstly upon the sophistical assertion of the -all-powerful Mead, that plague had been an exotic to England, and secondly -upon the doctrine of plague-contagion in its most comprehensive and least -discriminating form. But the quarantine law dates really from the Queen -Anne period, and the curious history of its rise, progress, and overthrow -belongs to another part of this work. - -The other general preventive measure besides the shutting-up of "visited" -houses was the burning of fires in the streets, which was also a tradition -from Tudor times. The mayor loyally carried out that also; until in the -beginning of autumn a concurrence of things made an end of the practice. -These adverse influences were first, the heavy showers of rain, which put -the fires out; secondly, the differences in medical opinion whether -coal-fires or wood-fires were the better, and whether fires were to be -recommended at all; and thirdly the popular perception that the fires made -no difference to the progress of the epidemic. - -In the way of individual protection and treatment, the College of -Physicians issued a tract full of directions and prescriptions, which -Boghurst says were all old, being taken from De Vigo ([Dagger] 1520). It -is not necessarily against methods of practice that they are old; but one -cannot fail to observe how closely the medieval teaching about plague, -cause and cure together, was followed to the last in England: for two -centuries the writers on plague reproduced the chapters and paragraphs -almost without change that we find in the treatise of the bishop of -Aarhus, which circulated in manuscript in England in the 15th century and -was first printed about 1480. The most popular preventive was something -"to smell to," not sweet but _aigre_. Hence the use of civet-boxes, -pouncet-boxes, and pomanders, which were made to suit all purses. There -were also plague-waters, one of which, "the plague-water of Matthias," -figures among the prescriptions of the College of Physicians both in a -cheap and in an expensive form. The College's prescription "to break the -tumour" is as follows: - - "Take a great onion, hollow it, put into it a fig, rue cut small, and - a dram of Venice treacle; put it close stopt in a wet paper, and roast - it in the embers; apply it hot unto the tumour; lay three or four, one - after another; let one lie three hours." - -The Paracelsist or chemical physician, Thomson, gives a prescription which -brings out the mystical tendencies of that otherwise meritorious sect. It -relates to a method of curing plague by means of a toad. - - "The great difficulty to bring this animal to a true Zenexton lies in - an exquisite preparation of it, the manner whereof that great - investigator of verity, Van Helmont, hath thus delivered, as he - received instructions from Butler, an Irishman who (to Helmont's - knowledge) had cured some thousands of the pest in London. He gave - directions that a large Bufo, taken in the afternoon in the month of - June, should be hung up by the legs, nigh the fire, over a vessel of - yellow wax" etc. - -Tobacco, smoked or chewed, came into great vogue in 1665 as a preservative -from the plague. Hearne, the antiquary, says: - - "I have been told that in the last great plague at London [1665] none - that kept tobacconists shops had the plague. It is certain that - smoaking it was looked upon as a most excellent preservative; in so - much that even children were obliged to smoak. And I remember that I - heard formerly Tom Rogers, who was yeoman beadle, say that when he was - that year, when the plague raged, a schoolboy at Eaton, all the boys - of that school were obliged to smoak in the school every morning, and - that he was never whipped so much in his life as he was one morning - for not smoaking[1215]." - -The best medical details of the Great Plague come from Boghurst, who -claims that the observations were all his own. - - With regard to its incidence he says: "About the beginning most men - got it with fuddling, surfeiting, over heating themselves, and - disorderly living." Again: "Those that married in the heat of the - disease (if they had not had the disease before) almost all fell into - it in a week or a fortnight after it, both in the city and in the - country, of which most died, especially the men." One of Dekker's - stories of the year 1603 is an illustration of the same thing. "It - usually went through a whole kindred, though living in several places; - which was the cause it swept away many whole families.... In some - houses ten out of twelve died, and sixteen out of twenty." Melancholy - for the loss of friends predisposed to it, while cheerfulness and - courage fortified some against it. Old people that had many sores upon - them, especially carbuncles, almost all died. The natural - constitution, disposition, or complexion "did much to make or mar the - disease." People with hollow eyes commonly died. Those who drank - brandy and strong waters grew mad, looked about them wildly, and died - quickly in two days. "All that I saw that were let blood, if they had - been sick two, three, four or five days or more, died the same day." - Teeming women fared miserably; they were not more subject than others: - but scarce one in forty lived (this is enlarged upon by Defoe). Many - people had the spotted fever and the plague both together, and many - the French pox and the plague both together, and yet both sorts - commonly lived (someone says that men caught the French pox of - purpose[1216]). All sorts died, but more of the good than the bad, - more men than women, more of dull complexion than fair. "Of all the - common hackney prostitutes of Luteners-lane, Dog-yard, Cross-lane, - Baldwin-gardens, Hatton-garden and other places, the common criers of - oranges, oysters, fruits etc., all the impudent drunken drabbing - bayles and fellows, and many others of the _rouge route_, there is but - few missing--verifying the testimony of Diemerbroeck that the plague - left the rotten bodies and took the sound[1217]." It fell not very - thick upon old people till about the middle or slake of the disease, - and most in the decrease and declining of the disease. Cats, dogs, - cattle, poultry, etc., were free from infection. - - Some died in twelve or twenty days, but most in five or six. In summer - about one-half that were sick, died; but towards winter, three of four - lived. None died suddenly as stricken by lightning: "I saw none die - under twenty or twenty-four hours." After one rising, or bubo, was - broke and run, commonly another and another would rise in several - parts of the body, so that many had the disease upon them half a year; - some risings would not break under half a year, being so deep in the - flesh. - -This explains Dekker's statement in 1603 that some had buboes repeatedly, -and that one person had eighteen sores. Dr Thomson himself had buboes -thrice. Hodges, also, knew of many cases fatal at the third seizure, the -later attacks being not relapses but new infections; some even fell at the -fifth or sixth time, being before well recovered. In one of the earlier -London plagues, that of 1563, Jones saw a case of a woman near Temple Bar -that ended fatally at the third attack, the buboes having suppurated -twice, but not at the third time. Boghurst goes on: - - Of evil omen was "a white, soft, sudden, puffed up tumour on the neck - behind the ears, in the armpit, or in the flank;" also a "large - extended hard tumour under the chin, swelling downwards upon the - throat and fetching a great compass" (the brawny swelling of the - submaxillary salivary glands and surrounding tissues). Tokens came out - after a violent sweat, which was often induced of purpose by nurses, - who said, 'Cochineal is a fine thing to bring out the tokens.' Nurses - often killed their patients by giving them cold drinks. Many also were - killed by the shutting-up of houses, by wickedness (of nurses ?), by - confident and ignorant mountebanks, by over-hasty cutting and burning - of buboes. Servants and poor people removed to the pest-house or to - other houses in their sickness, took harm therefrom. People using - corrosives, actual cauteries and many intolerable applications put - their patients to more pain than the disease did. - - The botches, or buboes (swollen lymph-glands in the neck, armpits or - groins), were the most distinctive sign of the plague, having given to - it the old name of "the botch." Besides these, there were the "tokens" - (specially limited in meaning to livid spots on the skin), carbuncles - and blains. Carbuncles, says Boghurst, commonly rose upon the most - substantial, gross, firm flesh, as the thighs, legs, backside, - buttock; they never occurred, that he saw, on the head among the hair, - or on the belly. They were not seen until the end of July, were most - rife in September and October, commonly in old people, never in - children. - -Hodges saw one carbuncle on the thigh, the size of two handbreadths, with -a large blister on it, "which being opened by the chirurgeon and -scarification made where the mortification did begin, the patient expired -under the operation." But most commonly carbuncles did not exceed the -breadth of three or four fingers. Boghurst continues: - - "Blains are a kind of diminutive carbuncle, but are not so hard, - black, and fiery; sometimes there is a little core in them. Generally - they are no bigger than a two penny piece, or a groat at the biggest, - with a bladder full of liquor on the top of them, which, if you open - but a little, will come out whitish or of a lemon or straw colour." - "Besides a blain there is a thing you may call a blister, puffing up - the skin, long like one's finger in figure, like a blister raised with - cantharides; and such usually die." The following experience is - remarkable, but it is doubtful whether Boghurst has not taken it from - Diemerbroek: "Towards the latter end of a plague, many people that - stayed, and others that returned, have little angry pustules and - blains rising upon them, especially upon the hands, without being sick - at all. But such never die, nor infect others; and I remember - Diemerbroeck saith, etc." Can this be the meaning of "smallpox" - following the plague, as in the 16th century books by Alphanus, - Kellwaye and others? - -The tokens proper, according to Hodges, were spots on the skin "proceeding -from extravasated blood." The body of the youth dissected by Thomson was -"beset with spots, black and blue," some of which when opened "contained -a coagulated matter." The tokens, as the name implies, were made the most -distinctive sign of the plague; but they were far from being so constant -as the botches or buboes. Boghurst says that "tokens appeared not much -until about the middle of June;" and, according to a letter of September -14, they must have been very variable even at the height of the plague: -"The practitioners in physic stand amazed to meet with so many various -symptoms which they find among their patients; one week the general -distempers are blotches and boils, the next week as clear-skinned as may -be, but death spares neither; one week full of spots and tokens, and -perhaps the succeeding bill none at all[1218]." - -The account of the dissection by Thomson, of a youth dead of the plague, -is perhaps all the morbid anatomy that has come down to us. He found what -appear to have been infarcts in the lungs; the surface was "stigmatised -with several large ill-favoured marks, much tumified and distended," from -which, on section, there issued "sanious, dreggy corruption and a pale -ichor destitute of any blood." The stomach contained a black, tenacious -matter, like ink. The spleen gave out on section an ichorish matter. The -liver was pallid and the kidneys exsanguine. There were "obscure large -marks" on the inner surface of the intestines and stomach. The peritoneal -cavity contained a "virulent ichor or thin liquor, yellowish, or -greenish." There was a decoloured clot in the right ventricle, but "not -one spoonful of that ruddy liquor properly called blood could be obtained -in this pestilential body." In all other cadavers that he ever dissected -he had found that the right ventricle had blackish blood condensed, but -this one had a pale clot "like a lamb-stone cut in twain," which puzzled -him greatly; perhaps it came, he conjectures, from a sumption of mere -crude milk which an indiscreet nurse had given the boy not long before he -died. - -Among the symptoms of a fatal issue, Boghurst mentions the following: -Hiccough, continual vomiting, sudden looseness, or two or three stools in -succession, shortness of breath, stopping of urine, great inward burning -and outward cold, continual great thirst, faltering in the voice, speaking -in the throat and occasionally sighing, with a slight pulling-in one side -of the mouth when they speak, sleeping with the eyes half-open, trembling -of the lips and hands and shaking of the head, staggering in going about -rooms, unwillingness to speak, hoarseness preventing speech, cramp in the -legs, stiffness of one side of the neck, contraction of the jaws, the -vomit running out from the side of the mouth, prolonged bleeding at the -nose, the sores decreasing and turning black on a sudden. - -It is to be remarked that Boghurst says very little of the gentle or the -violent delirium, on which Defoe enlarges picturesquely; nor does he -emphasize the extreme pain of the hard and tense buboes, which is another -of Defoe's themes. Hodges, however, says that "some of the infected run -about staggering like drunken men, and fall and expire in the streets; -while others lie half-dead and comatous.... Some lie vomiting as if they -had drunk poison." - -The progress of the epidemic would seem to have been little influenced by -the weather or by what was done, unless the shutting-up of houses had -helped to intensify the virus. Boghurst says: "If very hot weather -followed a shower of rain, the disease increased much;" and again: "If, in -the heat of the disease the wind blew very sharp and cold, people died -very quickly, many lying sick but one day." We are told, however, by -Hodges that "the whole summer was refreshed with moderate breezes," and -that "the heat was too mild to encourage corruption and fermentation." The -air itself, he says, "remained uninfected." Rain fell from time to time in -the end of summer, copious enough to put out the fires in the streets. -There was at least one very hot day, near the beginning of the epidemic, -the 5th of June, which Pepys says was "the hottest day that I ever felt in -my life." On September 20, however, he says that the increase of the -plague could not have been expected "from the coldness of the late -season." - -The plague lingered in London throughout the year 1666, causing 1998 -deaths in all. In January 1666 it was still at as high a figure as 158 -deaths in a week, and in the week ending September 18 it rose again to the -exceptional height of 104 deaths. In the first three weeks of December, -the deaths were 2, 4, and 3; and from that low level the plague never rose -again in London. A few annual deaths continued to appear in the bills down -to 1679, when they finally disappeared. - - -Plague near London in 1665. - -Meanwhile various parts of England were affected with plague during and -after the great epidemic, and in one or two instances a little before it. -In the immediate neighbourhood of the capital all the towns and villages -usually implicated by the exodus from the City had cases of plague, as the -following table shows. It has been compiled from the parish registers, as -extracted in Lysons' _Environs of London_, Defoe's widely discrepant -figures being given for comparison in the third column. - - All Defoe's - causes Plague list. - Barking 230 200 - Barnes 27 - Barnet and Hadley 43 - Battersea 113 - Beckenham 18 - Brentford 103 432 - Brentwood 70 - Bromley 27 7 - Camberwell 133 - Charlton 7 3 - Chertsey 18 - Chiselhurst 21 - Clapham 28 - Croydon 141 61 - Deptford 548 374 623 - Ealing 286 244 - Edmonton 19 - Eltham 44 32 85 - Enfield 176 32 - Epping 26 - Finchley 38 - Greenwich 416 231 - Hampstead 214 - Heston 48 13 - Hodsdon 30 - Hertford 90 - Hornsey 53 43 85 - Islewort 195 149 - Kensington 62 25 - Kingston 122 - Lewisham 56 - Mortlake 197 170 - Newington, Stoke 17 - Norwood 12 2 - Putney 74 - Romford 90 109 - St Albans 121 - Stratford-Bow 139 - Staines 82 - Tottenham no entries 42 - Twickenham 21 - Uxbridge 117 - Waltham Abbey 23 - Walthamstow 68 - Wandsworth 245 - Ware 160 - Watford 45 - Windsor 103 - Woodford 33 - -The most striking fact that comes out is that most of the parishes around -London had actually fewer deaths from plague in 1665 than in 1603. The -exceptions to this rule in 1665 are the villages on or near the Thames -above London-Battersea, Wandsworth, Putney, Mortlake, Brentford, -Isleworth, and Ealing, which had all a very high mortality, Barnes being -almost exempt. On the lower reaches of the Thames, Barking on the Essex -shore, and Deptford, Greenwich and Lewisham on the other side, had the -infection in them very severely; but these three places in Kent had a -still more severe visitation in 1666, along with other towns in that -county. - -On September 9, Evelyn wrote from his Deptford house, Sayes Court, that -"near thirty houses are visited in this miserable village." The infection -got also among the ships of the navy; on August 29, on board the 'Loyal -Subject' at Deal, Captain Fortescue and six men died suddenly, it was -feared of the plague. - - -Plague in the Provinces in 1665-6. - -The earliest accounts of plague in the provinces come from Yarmouth in -November, 1664. On the 18th it is said to have been brought in a vessel -from Rotterdam; three died in one house, of whom one had the plague. On -November 30, the plague was spreading, if the searchers (drunken women, -however) were to be credited. On February 8, 1665, there was another death -from plague, and as the summer wore on the mortality increased rapidly. On -June 16, thirty had died in the week, the inhabitants had fled, the town -was like a country village, and the poor left behind were lamenting at -once the lack of work and of charity. On August 21, the king wrote from -Salisbury to the bailiffs of Yarmouth concerning the plague. In the weeks -ending August 30 and September 6, there were 117 deaths (96 from plague) -and 110 deaths (100 from plague), and as late as November 6, there had -been 22 plague-deaths in the week. In March, 1666, the epidemic came to an -end[1219]. Smaller outbreaks occurred in the autumn of 1665 and spring of -1666 at Lynn, Norwich, Ipswich and Harwich. The great epidemic at -Colchester began in summer, 1665, but fell mostly in 1666, at a time when -there was little plague elsewhere, so that it practically closes the -history of plague in England, and will come naturally at the end of the -chapter. - -Most of the provincial outbreaks in 1665 were of small extent, and were -probably due to introduction of the virus from London. The valley of the -Tyne, which had often experienced severe plagues, had a slight epidemic, -said to have originated from the colliers returned from the Thames. On -July 18, there were seven houses shut up at Sunderland, one at Wearmouth -and one at Durham[1220]. A paragraph in the 'Newes,' from Durham, October -13, says that the sickness in the north is now much assuaged. Newcastle -remained almost free (although Defoe says different), two houses being -shut up on January 30, 1666, and two at Gateshead. The whole north-west -and west of England, which had suffered most during the last -plague-period, in the Civil Wars, appears to have escaped altogether. - -In the south, there was a good deal of the infection at Southampton in the -summer and autumn of 1665; on July 6, "the poor will not suffer the rich -to quit the town and leave them to starve[1221]." It is heard of, also, at -Poole and Sherborne in Dorset (in November), at Salisbury, where the Court -lay for some weeks, and at Battle[1222] in Sussex; but in none of these -places to any great extent. Various places in Kent had cases in -1665--Rochester, Chatham, Sandwich, Eastry, Westwell, Deal, Dover and -Canterbury[1223]; but it was only the naval stations that had more than a -few cases in 1665; while all of them had it far worse in 1666. Other -centres in 1665 were in Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire. - -At Peterborough, Oundle and Newport Pagnell, there was a visitation of the -severer kind, with flight of the richer inhabitants, and the usual arrest -of work and trade. The parish register of Yardley, Hastings, records that -60 persons died of plague in that town from June 5, 1665, to January 3, -1666. There was also a sharp epidemic in Cambridge and in the country -around, of which we get a glimpse in a letter of October 19, 1665, written -from Clare Hall to one of the fellows of Clare[1224]: - - "Alderman Mynell the brewer and one of his children died of the plague - this last Monday; he hath had four children in all dead of it. - Clayton, the barber in Petty Cury, and one of his children, died last - Saturday of the sickness. It is newly broken out sadly by Christ's - (though they have all fled from the Colledge upon Mr Bunchly, their - manciple, dying of the plague)--where Nicholson the smith, his wife - and two children are dead within three days, his other children being - deadly sick in the house. But it most rageth in St Clement's parish, - where seldom a day passeth without one dead of the sickness.... Poor - Mr Brown, the old man that is one of the University musicians, and Mr - Saunders that sings the deep bass, are shut up in Mr Saunders' house - in Green Street, whose child died last week suspected. Two houses at - Barton are infected by two of Alderman Mynell's children, that are - dead there. Ditton is broke out just by the butcher, from whom we had - our meat, which made us hastily remove to Grantchester. H. Glenton, - the carrier, fled from this town to Shelford, where he died within two - or three days, suspected.... Royston is sadly in two or three places, - the last of which is just in the middle of the town. The infection, - they say, was brought thither by a Cambridge man, whom they caught, - and shut him up; but he hath since made his escape." - - -The Epidemic of Plague at Eyam, 1665-6. - -Another of the English towns visited by plague in 1665 was Derby; whether -the cases were many or few, they caused great alarm, the town being -forsaken, the streets grass-grown, and the market set up on a new stance, -to which the farmers and traders came primed with a plug of tobacco in -their mouths as a preservative. But the epidemic in Derby itself was -totally eclipsed in interest by an extraordinary outbreak of plague in the -small village of Eyam, at the opposite end of the county, in the North -Peak, some twelve miles to the west of Sheffield. The plague of Eyam is, -indeed, the most famous of all English plagues; the story of it has been -told many times in prose and verse, its traditional incidents being well -suited to minor poets and moral writers, and the whole action of the -drama conveniently centered within a circuit of half a mile in a cup of -the heathy hills[1225]. - -Eyam was a village of some three hundred and fifty inhabitants, standing -among meadows around which the hills towered. It had no resident doctor, -but it had two ministers. The one was the rector, the Rev. William -Mompesson, a young man of twenty-seven, with a wife and two children, who -had been settled in Eyam only a year and did not like it; the other was -the former rector, the Rev. Thomas Stanley, who had been ejected for -nonconformity in 1662, and had remained to carry on his ministrations as a -Dissenter among such of his old flock as adhered to him. The wealthier -householders resided at the western and higher end of the village, on the -other side of a brook which crossed under the road; as we shall see, they -escaped the infection almost if not altogether. The annual village wake -had been held in August, 1665, with more than the usual concourse of -people from villages near. On the 2nd or 3rd September a box arrived from -London to the village tailor, who lived in a small house at the western -end of the churchyard; it contained old clothes which someone in London is -supposed to have bought for him cheap, and some tailors' patterns of -cloth. This box is assumed to have been opened by one George Vicars, a -servant, who was certainly the first victim of plague. He found the -contents to be damp and hung them up at the fire to dry. He was quickly -seized with violent sickness, became delirious, developed buboes in his -neck and groin, a plague-token on his breast the third day, and died in a -wretched state on September 6. His body, which is said to have become soon -putrid, was buried in the churchyard on the 7th. Nearly a fortnight passed -before another case occurred, that of a youth supposed to have been the -tailor's son, who was buried on the 22nd September. Before the 30th four -more had died, and in the course of October twenty-two more were buried -of the plague. The deaths in November declined to seven, and in December -they were nine. There was now snow on the ground, with hard frost, and at -the beginning of January, 1666, the plague was confined to two houses. -Four died in January, eight in February, six in March, nine in April, and -only three in May. On June 2, another burial occurred, and then there was -another pause. But in a week or more the epidemic broke out with renewed -power, three having been buried on the 12th of June, three on the 15th, -one on the 16th, three on the 17th, and so on until the total for June -reached nineteen. The wealthier villagers at the west end had taken the -alarm before and had mostly fled in the spring; those who stayed kept -within their houses or at least did not cross the stream. Now that the -infection was revived in the hot weather of June, the rector's wife also -proposed flight, but on her husband's refusal, she resolved to remain with -him, and to send her two children to a relative in Yorkshire. At the same -time the villagers in general were instinctively moved to escape from the -tainted spot; but Mompesson used his authority to prevent them, and a -boundary line was drawn round the village, about half a mile in circuit -and marked by various familiar objects, beyond which no one was to go. -Mompesson's motive appears to have been to prevent the spread of the -infection to the country around, and his parishioners submitted passively. -After the end of June the villagers would have found it difficult to -escape, owing to the terror which the very name of their village caused in -all the country round. Some of them quitted their cottages and took up -their abode in shelters built along the side of a rocky glen within the -cordon. The earl of Devonshire, then at Chatsworth, promised Mompesson -that the village should not be left without supplies; and people from the -villages near brought their market produce to certain stated points on the -boundary, where the Eyam people came to fetch it, the money paid being -dropped into water. Thus shut up in their narrow valley, the villagers -perished helplessly like a stricken flock of sheep. By the end of June -ceremonial burials came to an end, the church and the churchyard were -closed, the dead were carried out wrapped in sheets by one of the -villagers noted for his herculean strength, and laid in shallow graves in -the meadows or on the hill-sides. In July the deaths mounted up to five or -six on some days, and the total for the month to fifty-seven. In August -the dead numbered seventy-eight, among them the rector's wife on the 25th, -after a walk with her husband through the meadows, during which she is -said to have made the ominous remark that the air smelled sweet[1226]. -September added twenty-four to the total, and there were now only about -forty-five left alive in the place. Of these, fifteen died to the 11th -October, when the mortality ceased. Some of the survivors had passed -through an attack of the plague, among them the rector's man, whose buboes -suppurated. Mompesson himself, who had an issue open in his leg all the -time, escaped the infection, as well as his maid-servant. A young woman of -Eyam, married in the village of Corbor, two miles off, came one day to see -her mother, whom she found sick of the plague; on her return home she took -the sickness and died, but no one else in Corbor had it. A man was also at -large in the neighbourhood suspected of plague, to whom the earl of -Devonshire sent a doctor. The doctor and patient met by appointment on the -opposite banks of a stream, and the diagnosis made across the water -acquitted the man of plague; even in these unconventional circumstances -the consultation did not end without a prescription (still extant) for a -bottle of "stuff." Seventy-six households in Eyam were infected, and out -of these two hundred and fifty-nine persons were buried of the plague. -During the time that the infection lasted eight more died from other -causes. When the sickness had ceased Mompesson set about burning the -infected articles in the empty cottages. Three years after, in 1669, he -was presented to the better living of Eakring, in Notts; but on arriving -to enter on his duties he was refused admission by the villagers, and had -to take up his residence in a temporary hut in Rufford Park, until such -time as the prejudices of his new parishioners had been overcome. He -married another wife, and for thirty-nine years held the living of -Eakring, where he died on March 7, 1708. Stanley, his Dissenting colleague -at Eyam, died there a few years after the plague. - -Several things combined to magnify the disaster at Eyam. The story of the -box of clothes from London is entirely credible, and can be matched by -many other instances in the history of plague and of cholera[1227]. -Nothing intensifies the virus of such diseases so much as fermentation -without air in the textures of clothes or linen; a whiff from the opened -box or bundle suffices soon to prostrate the person who breathes it. The -poison at Eyam was a powerful one from the first, and it is credible that -the body of the earliest victim did become quickly putrid. The heavy -mortality, with few recoveries, which followed after a fortnight's -interval, and continued all through the winter, also shows a virus raised -to no ordinary potency. But, for the revival of the infection in June, -1666, we must seek other causes. Eyam was one of those basins which, on a -large scale or on a small, have often been observed to keep infection in -their soil. The virus must have passed into the pores of the ground after -the first sixty or more burials in the churchyard down to the lull of the -epidemic in winter; with the rise of the ground-water in spring, it would -be comparatively inactive; but in June, when the water was again sinking -in the soil and the great heat was raising emanations from the dry ground, -it broke forth with an intensity which poisoned the whole air of the -valley. The burials, after the end of June, without coffins and in shallow -graves in the meadows or on the hill-side, were so much ferment added to a -soil already permeated by it. Flight from such a place was the only -safety, and the rector, with the best motives, counselled the people to -remain. Mompesson's conduct has always been held up as a pattern of -heroism, as if the circumstances had been desperate like those of the -Trojans when the Greeks were in their streets and houses: - - Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem. - -No word of detraction should be spoken of anyone who does manfully what he -conceives to be his duty to his neighbours; but the villagers of Eyam were -sacrificed, all the same, to an idea, and to an idea which we may now say -was not scientifically sound. When the impulse came upon them to flee, -they might have left their tainted soil without much risk to the country -around so long as they did not collect in one spot or carry with them -bedding or the like susceptible articles: those who did flee from the -houses at the upper end of the village are not known to have carried the -infection to other places, and the young woman who brought it to Corbor -gave it to no one else. But the wisdom of flight may be regarded by some -as still disputable; while it will be admitted by all that Mompesson acted -for the best according to his lights. - -The plague in 1666 raged severely in a number of towns, while it lingered -on in London. The information from Winchester is vague; it is said that -the dead were carried out in carts and buried on the downs to the -eastward[1228]; the epidemic was over by the 1st of December, so that the -College resumed[1229]. Pepys enters in his Diary (April 4, 1667): "One at -the table [the duke of Albemarle's] told an odd passage in the late -plague, that at Petersfield (I think he said), one side of the street had -every house almost infected through the town, and the other not one shut -up." There may have been other such centres of plague, and equally -interesting observations made on them; but it appears to be the merest -chance whether anything is recorded of them at all, or whether one has the -luck to come across the record. - -The great centres of plague in 1666 had some connexion with the fleet, and -were mostly in Kent and Essex. Deptford and Greenwich had more plague that -year than the year before, the total deaths at the former having been 715 -(of plague 522) and at the latter 423. Eltham and Lewisham were also -visited in proportion. The other intense centre of infection in Kent was -Deal. On the 26th August, seven died of the plague, and twenty in the -whole week. At that date there were said to be only 16 houses which had -not had plague in them. On December 9, all the houses were clear, although -the crews of ships still avoided the town. Next to Deal, Sandwich, Dover, -Canterbury and Maidstone had considerable outbreaks in the autumn. At -Portsmouth also there was a sharp outbreak in the summer of 1666, -twenty-one having died of plague in a week at the beginning of July. - -In the Eastern Counties, plague revived to a considerable extent in 1666 -at Norwich, Ipswich, Harwich and Woodbridge, the Yarmouth outbreak, which -had been the great one in that quarter the year before, having come to an -end in the spring. But it was at Colchester that the epidemic engrossed -attention in 1666. Colchester had, indeed, two successive seasons of -plague, or rather a continuous prevalence of it from the summer of 1665 to -December, 1666. The plague at Colchester in 1665-66 was the greatest of -all provincial plagues since the Black Death, unless, indeed, we credit -the numbers (11,000 or 12,000) given for a plague at York in 1390. It -reproduced the mortality of the Great Plague of London on a scale more -than proportionate to its size, and it doubtless called forth the same -class of incidents--flight of the wealthier classes, and almost total -extermination of the poor. No documents remain, however, of this plague -except the oaths administered to searchers and bearers of the dead -(printed below) and the weekly totals of deaths from plague and from other -causes[1230]. The weekly bills are, indeed, as eloquent a testimony as -any detailed description could have been; and as they are the most -complete of the kind for a provincial town, I have transcribed them from -the manuscript record in full. The small number of deaths from ordinary -causes points to the emptiness of the better quarters of the town; the -total deaths in seventeen months, 5345, including 4817 plague-deaths and -528 from other causes, must have meant an enormous clearance of the poorer -classes. Colchester was then a place of considerable wealth, with a -thriving Dutch trade and a considerable Dutch colony. Perhaps the -connexion with Holland, where plague had been rife in the years just -before, may explain the origin of the outbreak; but local conditions of -soil, overcrowding, and the like must be looked to for the cause of its -extraordinary persistence and fatality. - -_Weekly mortalities in Colchester, August 14, 1665, to December 14, 1666, -from plague and other diseases._ - -1665 - - Week Plague Other - ending - - Aug. 21 26 2 - 28 62 2 - Sept. 8 122 4 - 15 153 22 - 22 159 25 - 29 100 25 - Oct. 6 161 27 - 13 122 23 - 20 106 15 - 27 60 41 - Nov. 3 104 13 - 10 88 22 - 17 88 18 - 24 62 8 - Dec. 1 38 10 - 8 39 6 - 15 67 4 - 22 53 7 - 29 21 3 - -1666 - - Jan. 5 23 6 - 12 46 8 - 19 36 13 - 26 26 10 - Feb. 2 34 9 - 9 25 3 - 16 23 7 - 23 33 6 - Mar. 2 53 2 - 9 26 11 - 16 37 5 - 23 48 4 - 30 66 1 - Apr. 6 73 2 - 13 90 2 - 20 68 4 - 27 90 4 - May 4 169 8 - 11 167 7 - 18 150 11 - 25 98 12 - June 1 89 10 - 8 110 10 - 15 139 3 - 22 195 6 - 29 176 4 - July 6 167 8 - 13 160 9 - 20 175 3 - 27 109 4 - Aug. 3 109 2 - 10 85 4 - 17 70 1 - 24 51 1 - 31 53 4 - Sept. 7 31 6 - 14 22 2 - 21 16 2 - 28 10 2 - Oct. 5 7 2 - 12 7 0 - 19 7 2 - 26 4 2 - Nov. 2 4 2 - 9 4 2 - 16 2 6 - 23 1 4 - 30 1 8 - Dec. 7 1 7 - 14 0 0 - ---- --- - 4817 528 - -To relieve the poverty caused by this great disaster a tax was levied on -various other parts of the county of Essex, and contributions were made by -private individuals, the London churches collecting L1311. 10_s._ in the -breathing-time between the plague and the fire. Colchester had so far -recovered in the end of 1666 as to be able to contribute in turn about a -hundred pounds for the relief of London after the fire[1231]. - - -The Last of Plague in England. - -The history of plague in England must be made to end with a solitary -epidemic at Nottingham in 1667, but not without some misgivings as to the -correctness of the date. Dr Deering, the historian of the town in 1751, -paid little heed to epidemics, although medicine was his business; but he -mentions one of smallpox in 1736, which had probably come within his own -experience, and proceeds: - - "I question much whether there has been the like since the plague - which visited the town in 1667, and made a cruel desolation in the - higher part of Nottingham, for very few died in the lower; especially - in a street called Narrow Marsh, it was observed that the infection - had no power, and that during the whole time the plague raged, not one - who lived in that street died of it, which induced many of the richer - sort of people to crowd thither and hire lodgings at any price; the - preservation of the people was attributed to the effluvia of the - tanners' ouze (for there were then 47 tanners' yards in that place), - besides which they caused a smoak to be made by burning moist tanners' - knobs[1232]." - -If there had been any reference to the parish registers or to the -corporation minutes, we should have had no reason to doubt that this -epidemic had been correctly assigned to 1667. The last Winchester epidemic -had been given under the year 1668, first by one local historian, and then -by another who copied him; but when a third went to the manuscript -records, he found that the year was 1666, as indeed an incidental -reference to the re-opening of Winchester School on 1st December, 1666, -"the sickness being in all appearance extinguished," might have warranted -one in concluding. It is a singular experience to have brought the history -of plague down through several centuries, not without particulars of times -and numbers, and to be obliged to end it in the latter half of the 17th -century with an unauthenticated date. The Nottingham epidemic may have -been an exception to the generality that all England was finally delivered -from the plague in 1666; it is due, at least, to the local historian, in -the absence of evidence against, to record his date of 1667. The -difficulty of confirming so simple a fact at so late a period may dispose -the readers of this work to be tolerant of any lack of certainty and -precision that they may discover in its history of more remote times. - - - - -INDEX. - - - Aarhus, bishop of, his book on plague, 209, - his identity, 210 _note_ - - Abbotsley, scene in church, 39 - - Aberdeen, leper-spital, 99, - plague at, 361, 362, - long free from plague, 370, - plague at, in 1647, 564, - syphilis arrives at, 417, 419, 361 - - Aelred, his story of queen Matilda and the lepers, 82-3 - - =Agriculture=, state of in Domesday, 22, - neglect of under heavy taxation by Wm, Rufus, 30, - effects of Black Death on, 191-2, - thriving in the 15th cent., 222, - gives place to sheep-farming in Tudor period, 387-392 - - =Agues=, original meaning of 409; - pestilential ague, 214, - "hot ague", 291, 400, 401, 404, 406, - Irish ague, 410; - Jones on, 410, - specialists for, 411, 426, - ambiguous meaning of, 505, 536, 540 - - Allington, Richard, case of smallpox, 459 - - Amwell, Great, plague, 493 - - Andre, Bernard, on sweat of 1508, 244, - on French pox, 420 - - =Anglo-Saxon Leechdoms=, 24, 452 - - Annan, story of a plague at, 11 - - Appleby, plague, 360 - - Arabia, burials in, 165, - plague, 166, - origin of smallpox in 441 - - =Armada, Spanish=, sickness in, 350, 591 - - =Arsenic=, plague-cakes, 487 - - Ashburton, plague, 524 - - Ashwell, inscription at, 139, 217 - - Assir, plague, 166 - - =Assizes, Black=, at Cambridge, 375, - at Oxford, 376, - at Exeter, 383 - - Astruc, on origin of syphilis, 430 - - Aubrey, Dr, on sickness in slave-ships, 627-8 - - Avignon, Black Death at, 133, - _pestis secunda_, 203 - - Axholme, the sweat at, 252 - - Ayr, plague, 503 - - - Baber, Consul, plague in Yun-nan, 168 - - Bacon, Francis, "remedy" of the sweat, 242, - gaol-fever, 382, - sweet odours in plague, 685 _note_ - - Bamford, James, plague of 1603 in St Olave's parish, 478, - on contagion of plague, 490 - - Banbury, plague, 303 _note_, 501, - war-fever and plague, 556-7 - - Banister, John, on syphilis, 427, - his plague-medicines, 516 - - =Bankside stews=, 420 - - Barbados, occupied by English, 619, - yellow fever in, 620, 630-633 - - Barcelona, syphilis at, 434 - - Barking, plague in monastery, 6, - plague, 492, 520, 680 - - =Bartholomew fair=, in plague-time, 300, 481 - - =Bartholomew's, St, Hospital=, filled with cases of pox, 424 - - Basingstoke, hospital at, 95 - - Batavia, epidemic in 1625, 608 - - Baxter, Richard, on the weather before the Great Plague, 653, - on Dissenters in the plague-time, 655 - - Becon, on rural depopulation, 391 - - Beda, on pestilence in, 664-685, 5-7 - - =Beggars=, pretending leprosy, 103, - beadle of, 104, - after Black Death, 183, - statutes for, 392 - - Bellay, Du, letters on the sweat, 250-252 - - Belper, plague, 500 - - Benghazi, plague and typhus in Arab tents, 170 - - =Beri-beri=, supposed in 1593, 593 - - Beverley, the sweat at, 252 - - Birch, Dr T., errors of, on Oxford Black Assizes, 381 _note_, - collects letters of the Stuart period, 504 _note_ - - =Black Death, the=, chroniclers of in England, 114, - arrival and progress, 116-118, - in Ireland, 119, - in Scotland, 119, 233, - symptoms of, 120, - mortality from, 123-139, - direct effects of, 139, 180, - antecedents of, 142-156, 173-4, - favouring conditions for diffusion of, 175. - Its effects on Edward III.'s wars, 178, - on removal of men and treasure, 180, - on price of labour, 181, - on capitalists, 186, - on morals, 186-190, - on area of cultivation, 191, - on system of farming, 192, - on trade and industry, 193, - on town industries, 197, - on village manufactures, 198, - on governing class in towns, 199, - on population, 199. - Infection of, remains in England, 204, 233 - - Bodmin, Black Death at, 116, 125 - - Boghurst, W., spotted fever in Somerset, 543, - his MS. on the Great Plague, 647 _et seq._ - - Boleyn, Anne, in the sweat of 1528, 251, 252, 255 - - Borde, Andrew, 286 - - Borgia, Alexander, pope, 416 _note_ - - Boston, plague at, 349 - - Bosworth, battle of, 265 - - =Botch=, =boche= or =boiche=, early name of plague, 206, 208, 362 - - Bradwardine, archbp, dies of Black Death, 129 - - Bradwell, Stephen, his plague-book, 516 - - Brant, Sebastian, on origin of French pox, 431 - - Brasbridge, on plague in dog's skin, 316 - - Brewer, T., his poem on plague of 1625, 512, 517 - - Bridewell made a hospital, 394, 395 - - Bridgetown, yellow fever at in 1647, 620, 630-33 - - Bridport, Black Death at, 116, - plague at in 1626, 524 - - Brimington, plague, 498 - - Bristol, leper-house, 98, - Black Death, 116, 121, 123, - effects of ditto on trade at, 182 _note_, - plague in 1535, 300, - in 1575, 340, - in 1645, 557 - - Bucklersbury, drug-shops in, 484 - - Bugden, deaths from sweat at, 261 - - Bullein, on plague of 1563, 306, - on London graveyards, 334, - on the French pox, 422 - - Burdwan, number of lepers in, 107 - - =Burial=, interdict of, 11; - neglect of, 12, 13 _note_, - in Chinese famines, 154, - in Islam, 163. - Christian burial in Egypt, 159. - Chinese mode of, 161. - In Arabia, 165, - in Kumaon 167, - neglect of in Yun-nan, 168, - at Merdje, 171; - by the friars, 332, - in St Paul's churchyard, 334, - without coffins, 335, - Latimer on intramural, 336, - relation to plague, 336, - in the great London plagues, 126, 337, 482, 515, 668-9, - hours of in plague-time 303, 482 - - Burton Lazars, 89 - - Bury St Edmunds, burials at in 1257, 44, - hospitals, 92, 96, - plague in 1578, 347 - - Butts, Dr, in the sweat of 1528, 254 - - - Caffa, Black Death at siege of, 144, 147 - - Caius, Dr, on the sweat of 1551, 259, 261, 263, - edits Galen, 439 - - Calais, sweat at 248, 253, 255, - plague in 1509, 288, - "new sickness" in 1558, 403, - plague brought to, 546 - - =Calendar=, the English and the Continental, 256 _note_ - - =Calenture=, 387, 610 - - Cambridge, epidemic of "frenzy" at, 62, - effects of Black Death, 196, - prophecy of pestilence, 229, - sweat of 1517, 248, - of 1528, 252, - of 1551, 262, - plague, 285, 289, 338, 340, 347, 497, 527, 682, - gaol fever, 375, - agues, 505 - - Canterbury, death of monks in 870, 9, - leper-hospitals, 87, 91, - style of living in 14th cent., 50, - Black Death at, 132, - causes of death of monks, 226, - plague in 1544, 303, - in 1564, 309, - in 1593, 357, - in 1603-4, 498, - in 1614-15, 501, - in 1625, 524, - in 1636, 528, - in 1665, 681, - in 1666, 688 - - Cape de Verde islands (St Jago), infection taken from, 586, 589 - - Carlisle, plague, 359, 562 - - Carshalton, mortality in 1626, 520 - - Cartier, Jacques, scurvy in his expedition, 581 - - Castle Combe, records of its manor court, 135, 136, 139, - priests poaching, 189, - village industries, 198, - nuisances removed, 198 _note_, 328 - - Catharine of Arragon, arrives in England in plague-time, 288, - anxious for Henry VIII. on account of plague in 1518, 290 - - =Cats= in plague-time, 316 - - Cavendish, Thomas, sickness in his voyages, 592-3 - - =Cemeteries=, see BURIAL - - Champneys, Sir John, mayor, procures plague-bill in 1535, 298 - - =Chancery=, inquisition on a leper, 105, - business of after Black Death, 188 - - Charles VIII., his invasion of Italy, 430, 433, 435, - his sickness at Asti, 436-7 - - =Charnel-house= of St Paul's, 334, 659 - - Charterhouse, inscription of burials in Black Death, 127, - death of monks in 1528, 252 - - Chatham, leper-hospital, 95, - plague in 1665, 681 - - Chauliac, Guy de, symptoms of _pestis secunda_, 203, - on Gaddesden's _Rosa Anglica_, 446 - - Chester, the sweat, 245, 249, - plague, 304, 339, 498, 500, 501, 564, - smallpox, 465 _note_, - fever in villages near, 567 - - Chesterfield, plague, 349, 500 - - Chesterton depopulated, 199 _note_ - - China, Black Death said to have come from, 143, 145-147, - overland trade to Europe, 148-9, - no record of Black Death in, 149; - great series of floods, famines, &c., 150-152, - followed by a period of plagues, 153; - unburied dead after famines and floods, 154, - Odoric's valley of corpses, 155, - careful mode of burial in, 161. - Plague in modern times, 168-9 - - =Churchyards=, see BURIAL - - Clapham, Henoch, 490 - - =Clarendon, Council of=, 374 - - Clot, Dr, Bey, on plague in Egypt, 160 - - Clowes, William, on the pox in London, 423-5, - on quacks, 426, - his translation of _variola_, 459 - - Clun, plague, 545 - - Clyn, Friar, the Black Death in Ireland, 115, 119, - symptoms of ditto, 121 - - Cogan, Th., on prophesied return of the sweat, 264, - on fever at Oxford Assizes, 378, - on lasks, 412 - - Colchester, wills proved after Black Death, 186, - plague, 348, 498, 525, - plague in 1665-6, 688, - directions to bearers and watchers at, 688 _note_ - - Comines, Philip de, commons of England untouched by Wars of Roses, 38, - 224, 387, - on Charles VIII.'s sickness, 435 - - Congleton, plague, 498, 545 - - Constantinus Africanus applies "variola" to smallpox, 453 - - Cork, leper-hospitals, 100, - alleged sweating sickness, 252, - plague, 371, 502 - - Cornard Parva, Black Death in, 137 - - Coventry, leper-hospital at, 92, - growth of after the Black Death, 194, 195, - plague, 501, 526 _note_ - - Crail, plague, 370 - - Cranborne, plague, 499 - - Cranbrooke, plague, 348 - - Crimea, outbreak of Black Death in, 142, 144 - - Cromwell, O., his death from fever, 574, - colonizes Jamaica, 634, 639 - - Cromwell, T., orders bill of mortality, 297-8 - - =Cross, the blue=, or =red=, 306, 313, 314, 514 - - Croxton, abbey, Black Death in, 131, - ditto in the manor, 138 - - Croydon, plague, 492, 520, 679 - - Croyland abbey, sudden mortality in, 9, - the sweat in, 239, 266 - - Cumanus, Marcellus, the French pox at siege of Novara, 431 - - Cumberland, plague in 1420, 221, - state of in the Civil Wars, 562 - - - Dalry, "grantgore" at, 418 - - =Danes=, camp sickness among, 13 - - Darlington, plague, 359, 557 - - Dartmouth, plague, 351, 524 - - Davison, F., 'Poetical Rapsodie', 463 - - Deal, plague in 1666, 688 - - Defoe, sources of his _Journal of the Plague-Year_, 649, - illustrations of the Great Plague from, 657 _et seq._ - - Dekker, T., on London at accession of James I., 471, 480, - on plague of 1603, 481-4, - theatres closed in plague-time, 494 - - Deptford, plague in 1666, 680, 687 - - Derby, plague at, 309, 349, 357, 559, - plague in 1665, 682 - - Derry, the, plague at in 1566-7, 372 - - =Dogs= in plague-time, 314, 316, 515; - alleged death of in the Leeds plague, 558, - at Batavia from licking pestilent blood, 608 - - =Domesday Survey=, size of towns in, 23, - state of agriculture inferred from, 22 - - Doncaster, plague in 1536, 301 - - Donne, Rev. Dr, his dread of smallpox, 463, - on flight of citizens in 1625, 519 - - Doughty, C., on burials in Arabia, 165 - - Drake, Sir Bernard, at the Exeter Black Assizes, 384, 385 - - Drake, Sir Francis, sickness in his voyage round the world, 585, - great epidemic in his fleet in 1585-6, 585-589, - his death from flux, 591 - - Drogheda, monastery of, Black Death in, 119, 132 - - Dublin, leper-hospitals, 100, - Black Death in, 119, 131, 132, - plague in 1520, 371, - in 1575, 372, - in 1650, 566 - - Dumfries, plague, 235, 369 - - Dunbar, W., "spanyie pockis", 418 - - Dundee, plague, 234, 368, 503 - - Duns, plague, 369 - - Durham, a medieval siege of, 28, - leper-hospital near, 94, 113, - plague, 350, 359, 499, 501, 681, - famine, 358 - - Dysart, plague, 366, 368 - - =Dysentery=, or flux, summary of epidemics, 411-13, - in 1624, 505, - in voyages, 589, 591, 600, 602, 603, - in Virginia, 611, - in slave-ships, 628, - among black troops, 629, - in St Domingo and Jamaica, 635-640 - - - East Indies, Portuguese voyages to, 584, - English voyages to, 599-609 - - =East India Company=, provides against scurvy, 602-3 - - Edenhall, plague, 360 - - Edinburgh, leper-hospital, 99, - _pestilentia volatilis_, 234, - plague, 235, 303, 362, 365-6, 367, 368, 369, 370, 502, 503, 504, 563, - French pox, 417, - mortality of children in 1600, 370 _note_ - - Edward the Confessor and the leper, 81 - - Edward III., his activity after the Black Death, 178-9 - - Edward IV., his illness from "pockys" in 1463, 455 - - Edward VI., on the sweat of 1551, 260 - - Egypt, theory of plague in, 156, 659, - sanitary wisdom of ancient, 158, - embalming in, 159, 160-1, - compared with China, 161-2 - - Elizabeth, Queen, at Windsor in the plague of 1563, 317, - rebukes the uncleanly state of Ipswich, 327, - attempts to stamp out plague in London, 330-331, - her proclamation in 1580 on growth of London, 346, - her trains at Norwich in 1578 carry plague, 348, - her hardness to the sick seamen in the Armada-year, 350, - her precaution against smallpox in 1591, 461 - - Elizabeth of York, in 1502, pays for cure of John Pertriche, 419 - - Elphege, St, stops pestilence in 1011, 13 - - Ely, bishop of, alienates Stourbridge leper-hospital, 93 - - Ely monastery, Black Death in, 132 - - Elyot, Sir Thomas, lay writer on medicine, 402, - mentions smallpox, 457 - - =Emigrants=, mortality of English to Virginia, 610, - to New England &c., 612-13, - to Barbados, 619, - of French to St Christopher, 618, - to Guadeloupe, 621 - - Ensham, manor of, after Black Death, 139, 141 - - Erasmus, still ill from "sweat" in 1511, 245, 399, - ref. to influenza (?) in 1518, 249, - ref. to plague in letters, 288-9, - on English houses, 328, - on the French pox, 420-21 - - =Ergotism=, causes and signs of, 53-55, - two forms, 55, - cases of in England, 57, - possible instances of, 59-63, - reasons of English immunity from, 64, 68 - - Essex, Lord General, typhus in his army, 548-9, - occupies Tiverton, 552-3 - - Ethredge, Dr G., the sweat of 1551 at Oxford, 260, 380, - the gaol-fever at Oxford, 381 - - Eton, plague, 348, 520, - boys compelled to smoke in plague-time, 674 - - Evesham, monastery, fugitives at after wasting of Yorkshire, 27 _note_, - drives out its leprous prior, 101 - - Evesham, town, plague and bad scavenging, 501 - - Exeter, the scavengers of, 327, - plague, 288, - famine and plague, 300, - plague, 498, 523, - Black Assizes, 383-6 - - Eyam, plague at in 1665-6, 682-7 - - Eydon, plague, 498 - - - Fabyan, on the first sweat, 239, - on plague in London, 1478-9, 234, - and 1500, 287, - uses the name "pockys", 420 - - =Famines=, chronology of, to 1322, 15, - in 1370, 215, - about 1383, 219, - in 1391, 220, - in 1438-9, 223, 228, 235, - in 1528, 251, 277, - in 1535, 300, - in 1551, 278, - in 1557, 401, - in 1596-7, 358 - - =Fever=, epidemics of from famine, 15-17 (table), - in 1086-7, 29, - in 1196, 36, - in 1258, 44-45, - in 1315, 48, - in 1438-9, 223, 228, 234-5, - in 1596-7 358, 411; - epidemics of in war, 547, 552; - spotted, 504, 540, 542, 543, 551; - "strange," see INFLUENZA, - Yellow, see YELLOW FEVER, - in gaols, see GAOL-FEVER; - in ships, 350, 538 - - Finchley, dysentery at, 1596-7, 411 - - Findhorn, plague, 370 - - Finsbury, laystalls at, 334 - - Fish, Simon, 'Supplication of Beggars', 421 - - =Fleet Ditch=, unwholesome, 352 - - Forrestier, Dr Thomas, his MS. on the sweat of 1485, 238, - fixes time and place of first outbreak, 238, - his account of the symptoms and treatment, 241, - on extent of first sweat, 243, - on causes of ditto, 266-7 - - =Foul Death=, name used by Scots for plague in 1349, 78, - and in 1379, 218 - - Fracastori, on smallpox, 467, - on typhus, 585 - - Francis, St, of Assisi, and the lepers, 85 - - Freind, Dr J., on a strange chorea, 61, - on diffusion of smallpox, 445, - on Gaddesden, 448 - - =Friars=, their original mission, 41, - their care of lepers, 85, 107, - side with the rich after the Black Death, 188, - bury rather than christen, 332 - - Froude, Mr, on plague at the Derry, 372 _note_, - on "yellow fever" in Drake's fleet, 589 _note_ - - "FRUIT OF TIMES," records "pokkes" for 1366, 453 - - Fryer, Dr John, 307 - - - Gaddesden, John of, fails to describe fever of, 1315 51, - on leprosy, 76, - on smallpox, 446-8, - on morbilli and "mesles", 449-51 - - Gale, Thomas, on "the morbus", 422 - - Galway, "sweating sickness" at, 400 _note_ - - =Gaols=, first built, 374 - - =Gaol Fever=, in Newgate, 374, 395 _note_, - at Cambridge, 375, - at Oxford, 376-382, - at Exeter, 383-386, - referred to in Act, 388, - in the Queen's Bench, Southwark, 395, 539, - Bacon on, 332 - - =Garter, Order of the=, 178 - - Gascoigne T., cases of syphilis, 74, - Henry IV.'s "leprosy", 77 _note_, - "legists" after Black Death, 189 - - Gaubil, abbe, on the Chinese annals, 154 - - Geynes, Dr, 307 - - Gibbon, on the Justinian plague, 2, - on a remark by Procopius, 675 _note_ - - Gibbons, Orlando, 465, 524 - - Gilbertus Anglicus, on leprosy, 70-72, - morphaea, 76, - diet to keep off leprosy, 113, - on smallpox, 446, 447 - - Glasgow, leper-house, 99, - keeps out plague, 366, 369, - plague, 370, 563, - syphilis, 418 - - Gloucester, Black Death, 116, 117, - plague in 1580, 348, - in 1638, 545, - a quack at, 426, - relief of siege, 549 - - Goddard, Dr, his excuse for leaving London in the plague, 667 - - Gordonio, Bernard, on leprosy, 70, - case at Montpellier, 72, - on morphaea, 76, - on smallpox, 447 - - =Grandgore=, in Scotland, 417-18, - derivation of, 418 - - Grantham, plague near, 500, - sickness at, 502 - - Graunt, John, syphilis in London, 428, - London mortality, 532 - - Gravesend, plague, 287, 293, 531 - - Greaves, Sir E., fever at Oxford, 547, 551 - - Greenwich, sweat at, 244, 251, - plague at, 293, - plague in 1666, 687 - - Gregory, W. ref. to "pokkes," 454 - - Gruner, on the sweat, 258, - collections on medieval smallpox, 446 _note_ - - Gruenbeck, Jos. on syphilis, 432 - - Guignes, Des, on origin of Black Death, 143, 152 - - Guinea, voyages to in 16th cent., 581-3, - slave trade from, 583, 625-9 - - Guy, Dr W., on "parish infection", 396 _note_ - - - Hackney, leper-hospital, 97, 98 _note_, - plague in 1535, 301, - in 1603, 492, - in 1625, 511 - - Haddington, _pestilentia volatilis_, 234, - plague during siege, 303 - - Hall, his Chronicle on the sweat of 1517, 250, - on the mercenaries of Henry VII., 274, - on the Cambridge Black Assizes, 375 - - Hampshire, parish in, statistics of, 411, 541 - - Harrison, W. English houses, 330 _note_, - fever of 1557-8, 401 - - Hartlepool, plague, 349 - - Harwich, plague at in 1665-6 - - Havre de Grace (or "Newhaven"), plague during siege, 307 - - Hawkins, Sir John, in the slave trade, 583 - - Hawkins, Sir Richard, on health of Cape de Verde islands, 589 _note_, - scurvy in his voyage of 1593, 594-6 - - Hecker, antecedents of Black Death, 143-4, - on fecundity after Black Death, 200, - sweating sickness, 240, 244 _note_, 258, 263, 265, 271 _note_, 277 - _note_ - - Hendon, sends help in 1625 plague, 518 - - Henry I., taxation under, 31 - - Henry II., charities of, 33-34 - - Henry III., famine under, 43 - - Henry IV., "leprosy" of, 77 - - Henry V., vigorous sanitation under, 325 - - Henry VII., his expedition of 1485, 237, 240, 265, 270, 275, - in the sweat of 1508, 244, - reception of Catharine of Arragon, 288, - sanitation under, 325-6 - - Henry VIII., in the sweat of 1517, 247-8, - in plague of 1517-18, 290, - in sweat of 1528, 250-53, - in plague of 1535, 297, 300, - measures to check plague, 291, 312, 313-14, - repression of vagrancy &c., 390, - his illness in 1514, 456 - - Henry of Huntingdon, poem by, 18 - - Hensler, his history of syphilis, 416 _note_ - - Hensley, plague, 309 - - Hereford, plague, 348 - - Hereford, bishop of, case of morphaea, 76 - - Herefordshire, plague, 500 - - Hertford, sweat at, 254, - law courts at, 331, - plague, 339, 347, 356 - - Hertfordshire, after the Black Death, 191, - plague in, 493 - - Hirsch, Dr August, on endemics of syphilis, 438 - - Hispaniola, great pox and smallpox, 430, 469, - flux among English troops, 635-6 - - Hoddesdon, plague, 347 - - Hodges, Dr, his _Loimologia_, 648, 654, 675 - - Holinshed, erroneous entry of "small pocks", 454 - - Holland, Abraham, poem on plague of 1625, 512 - - Holme Pierrepont, plague, 499 - - Hoeniger, effects of Black Death, 141 _note_ - - Howard, John, Oxford gaol, 377, - gaol-fever, 382 _note_ - - Hugh, St, bp. of Lincoln, his care for burials, 13 _note_, - for lepers, 84 - - Hull, plague at, in 1472-8, 231, - in 1576, 340, - in 1635-38, 527 - - Hunstanton, Black Death, 137 - - Huetten, Ulrich von, cure of syphilis, 416 - - - Ibn Batuta, his report that Black Death came from China, 146 - - Ibn-ul-Khatib, origin of Black Death, 146 - - Ilchester, decayed, 195, 221 - - Ilford, leper-hospital, 95 - - Inchcolm, quarantine island, 363, 369 - - Inchkeith, quarantine for plague, 235, 360, - for syphilis, 417 - - =Influenza=, meaning of, 397, - early epidemics, 398, - in 1510, 399, - in 1540, 400, - in 1557-8, 401-5, - in 1580, 406, - in 1657-9, 568-574, - many other epidemics might be so called, 408-9, 411, 536, 541, 543-4, - 567, 577 - - =Interdict of burial= &c., 11 - - Ipswich, scavengers of, 327, - plague at, in 1603, 498, - in 1665-6, 688 - - Ireland, plague in A.D. 664, 4-5, - condition in 12th cent., 21, - flux among troops, 33, - leper-houses, 100, - Black Death, 115, 118-19, 132, - succeeding plagues, 236, - alleged sweating sickness, 252 _note_, 400 _note_, - influenza, 398 _note_, - plague in Tudor period, 371-3, - in Cromwellian war, 365 - - Isle of Wight, depopulation of, 387, - influenza or sweat in 1558, 403 - - - Jamaica, English occupation of, 636-642 - - James I., authority for "a pockie priest", 415, - his accession followed by a great plague, 480, - his fatal illness, 512 - - Jarrow, plague in monastery of, 7 - - Jersey, plague in, 308 - - Jessopp, Augustus, on mortalities in the Black Death, 132, 134, 137, - on lawlessness after do., 140, - on panic from do., 181 _note_ - - John of Bridlington, 14th cent. pestilences, 204, 207 - - John of Burgoyne, 14th cent. writer on plague, 208 - - Jones, Dr John, on plague in London in 1563, 306, - on effects of the poor-rate, 394, - on influenza of 1558, 403, - his use of "ague", 410 - - =Justinian, plague in reign of=, 2, - theory of it, 156, 159, 161 - - - Kattiwar, plague in, 165, 169 - - Kellwaye, Simon, on the plague of 1593, 355, - on smallpox and measles, 461 - - Kendal, plague in 1598, 359 - - Kensington, plague in 1603, 492, - in 1625, 520 - - Kheybar, burials in, 165 - - Kilkenny, Black Death, 115, 119, 121, 132, - plague in 1649, 565 - - Kirkcaldy, plague in 1574, 366 - - Kirkoswald, plague in 1598, 360 - - Kremer, A. von, Mohammedan plagues, 163 - - Kumaon, plague in, 166 - - Kutch, plague in, 169 - - - =Labourers, Statute of=, 66, 181-2 - - Lamesley, plague in 1610, 501 - - Lancashire, ergotism? in 1702, 59, - wills after Black Death, 138, - fever in 1651, 567 - - Lancaster, Sir James, scurvy in his ships, 599, - treats scurvy by lime juice, 601 - - Langland, see 'Piers the Ploughman' - - =Lask=, old name of flux, 400, 412 - - Latimer, on intramural burial, 336, - on stews closed, 420 - - =Law=, business of increased after Black Death, 188-9 - - =Lazar=, derivation of, 79 _note_ - - Lazarus, St, 79, 94 - - =Lazarus, St, Knights of the Order of=, 89 - - Leake, plague in 1587-8, 349 - - Leeds, fever in 1644, 558, - plague in 1645, 558 - - Leicester, Black Death, 124 - _pestis secunda_, 203, - plague in 1563-4, 309, - in 1593, 357, - in 1607-11, 125, 501, - in 1626, 526 - - Leicestershire, strange epidemic in 1340, 59, - plague, 526 - - Leith, plague, 235 _note_, 361, 363, 366, 369, 503 - - Leominster, plague or fever in 1578, 349, - in 1597, 358 _note_ - - =Leper-houses=, in England, 86-99, - their mixed inmates, 93, - vogue soon past, 91-95, - the later non-monastic, 97, - in Scotland, 99, - in Ireland, 100 - - =Leprosy=, generic meaning of in medieval books, 70-79, - Biblical associations of, 79-81, - religious view of, 81-86, - prejudice against, 100-105, - laws against, 103-6, - estimated amount of, 107, - a disease akin to pellagra, 108, 110, - Gilbert White on causes of, 110, - dietetic cause of in, Hutchinson on cause of, 111 _note_, - constitutional, 112, - diet for in Scotland, 113 - - Lescarbot, on scurvy, 597-8 - - =Leviticus=, use of "leprosy" in, 80 - - Lichfield, plague, 309, 357, 559 - - Lieu-chow, bubonic disease, 169 - - Linacre, 286, 439 - - Lincoln, leper-hospital at, 92, - decay of, 195, - plague at, 357 - - Lindsey, statute of labourers ineffective in, 182 - - Linlithgow, lepers at, 99, - French pox at, 418 - - Lithgow, W., on plague in Tyneside, 557 - - =Lock, the, hospital=, 97, 98 _note_ - - Lodge, Dr T., on rats and moles in plague-time, 173, - on plague in 1603, 485, - on compulsory removal of the sick, 488 - - London: - fever in 962, 26, - in 1258, 44-45, - according to the bills, 504, 532, 576 - Fitzstephen's account of, 34 - French pox in, 424, 428, 432 _note_ - lepers expelled, 103, - stopped at the Gates, 104 - leper-hospitals of 88, 97-8 - nuisances in, 323-6 - overcrowding of, in 1580, 346, - in 1602 et seq., 539-540 - Parish Clerks of, 320-322 - plagues in: - the Black Death, 117, - mortality of ditto, 126-9, - the plague of 1361, 203, - of 1368-9, 215-16, - of 1407, 220, - of 1426, 227, - of 1434, 227-8, - of 1437, 228, - of 1454, 229, - of 1466, 230, - of 1474, 231, - of 1478-9, 231-2, - of 1487, 287, - of 1499-1500, 287, - of 1504, 288, - of 1511-12, 288, - of 1513, 288-9, - of 1514-16, 289-90, - of 1517-18, 290, 292, - of 1521, 292, - of 1529-31, 292-3, - of 1532, 293-6, - of 1535, 297-300, - of 1536, 301-2, - of 1543, 302, - of 1547-8, 303, - of 1563, 304-7, - of 1568-9, 338, - of 1573-4, 339, - of 1577-83, 341-5, 347, - of 1592-93, 351-4, 356, - of 1594, 356, - of 1603, 474-92, - of 1604-1610, 493-4, - of 1625, 507-520, - of 1630, 527 - of 1636 529-32, - of 1637-48, 532, 546 (table 533), - of 1665, 644-679 - plague-orders, 312-322, 355, 481, 488 - population, - end of 12th cent., 34, - in 1258, 44, - in 1349, 128-9, - in 1377, 201, - in 1535, 299, - in 1580, 345, - in 1593, 354, - in 1603 and before and after, 471-4, - in 1665, 660 - Richard of Devizes, on wickedness of, 34 - sanitary ordinances in 1369 and 1371, 216, 324, - in 1388, 324, - in 1415, 325, - in 1488-9, 325, - in 1543, 314, 315, - in 1568, 319, - in 1582, 330 - theatres closed in plague-time, 494-6 - - Loughborough, sweating sickness at, 259, - plague at, 304, 404, 500, 560 - - Louth, plague in 1587, 349 (_Notitiae Ludae_), - in 1631, 527 - - Lowe, Peter, on "Spanish Sickness", 427 - - Lowry, Dr J. H., on Pakhoi plague, 169 - - Lyndsay, Sir D., "grandgore", 418 - - Lynn, a physician of, 51, - leper-houses at, 93, 98, - plague at, in 1635-6, 528, - in 1665, 681 - - - Macclesfield, plague, 498 - - Macgowan, Dr D. J., on rats poisoned by the soil, 169 - - Magellan, scurvy in his ship, 579 - - Mahe, on cadaveric theory of plague, 173 _note_ - - Maidenhead, scene at, 578 - - Maillet, De, on preservation of corpses in Egypt, 161 - - Malpas, plague in 1625, 526 _note_ - - Manardus, origin of syphilis, 434 - - Manchester, plague in 1608, 499, - in 1631, 527 - - Mansfeld, his English troops, 522 - - Margate, sick sailors at after Armada, 350 - - Marshall, John, on "parish infection", 396 _note_ - - Martin, on the illness of Charles VIII., 437 - - Matilda, Queen, and the lepers 82; - her hospital, 88 - - Mayerne, Sir Th., on the fevers of 1624, 540 - - =Measles=, Gaddesden on, 448, - derivation of name, 451, - joined with smallpox, 458-9, 462, 465-6 - - _Measure for Measure_, reference to "the sweat", 413 _note_, - the stews suppressed, 420, - doctrine of "obstruction" in, 605 _note_ - - Meaux, abbey of, Black Death in, 118, 131 - - Meddus, Rev. Dr, in London during plague of 1625, 514 - - =Medicine, profession of=, little in evidence, 51, 258, 402 - - Melcombe, Black Death lands at, 116 - - Merdje, modern plague at, 170 - - Merston Trussell, plague, 498 - - Milton, John, at Chalfont, in 1665, 665 _note_ - - =Moles= in plague-time, 173, 364 - - Molineux on universal fevers and universal colds, 409 - - =Monasteries=, pestilence in, 5-7, 9-10, - Stubbs on, 50, - found hospitals, 95, - Black Death in, 131 - - Monkleigh, plague, 499 - - Monmouthshire, fever and plague in 1638, 541 - - Montgomeryshire, plague in 1638, 542 - - Montpellier, case of _lepra_ at, 72, - practice in the plague at, 210 - - Moorfields, common latrine in, 325 - - More, Sir Thomas, on relapses, 248, - his plague-orders at Oxford, 291, - as "a parish clerk", 321, - describes London as the capital of Utopia, 329, - on pauperism and vagrancy, 389 - - =Morphaea=, a case of, 76 - - Morton, Richard, on the fever of 1658, 574 - - "=Mure=," old name of influenza, 389. - ("Tussis et le Murra." Canterbury MS. in _Hist. MSS. Com._ IX., pt. I. - p. 127). - - =Murrains=, 46 _note_ - - Mussis, De, on origin of Black Death at Caffa, 144 - - - Namasse, modern plague, 166 - - Nanking, death of rats at, 169 - - Nantwich, plague, 498 - - =Naples sickness of= 419, 430 - - "=New Acquaintance=", 260 - - "=New Disease=", 401, 403, 404, 534, 536, 541, 543-4, 570, 577 - - Newark, plague after siege, 560 - - Newcastle, plague in 1420, 222 _note_, - in 1478, 232, - in 1544, 303, - in 1589, 350, - in 1597, 358, - in 1603, 498, - in 1609, 500, - in 1625, 526, - in 1636, 529, - in 1642 and 1645, 557, - in 1666, 681 - - New England, voyages to, 612, - epidemics in, 613 - - Niebuhr, on demoralisation after pestilence, 186 - - Noeldeke, Th., on legend of smallpox, 442 - - Normandy, Henry VII.'s troops raised in, 271, 275, - endemic sweat of, 271, 273 - - Northampton, old hospital at, 90, - plague, 304, - fever and plague in 1638, 542 - - Northwych, plague, 340, 498 - - Norwich, hospitals at, 93, 95, - leper-houses at the gates, 98, - the Black Death in, 129, - decline of after ditto, 193-5, - fever in 1382, 218, - plague in 1465, 230 _note_, - in 1479, 232, - in 1578, 348, - in 1603, 498, - in 1609, 500, - in 1625, 525, - in 1630-31, 527, - in 1636 fever or plague, 542, - plague in 1665-6, 681, 688 - - Nottingham, deaths at in 1518, 291, - plague at in 1593, 357, - in 1604, 499, - in 1667, 691 - - =Nuisances=, at Castle Combe, 198, 328, - in London, 216, 323-6, - at Stratford-on-Avon, 327, - at Ipswich, 327, - alleged by Erasmus, 329, - in London suburbs, 337, - at Evesham, 501, - at Kilkenny, 502 - - - Odoric, friar, his vision of unburied dead in China, 155 - - Okehampton, plague at, in 1626, 524 - - Osiander, on Christian duty in the plague, 310 - - Ottery St Mary, camp sickness at in 1645, 555, 561 - - Oundle, plague in 1665, 681 - - Oxford, leper-hospital, 93, - Black Death at, 125, - law students at after ditto, 189, - sweat of 1485, 243, - sweat (?) of 1508, 245, - sweat of 1517, 247, 248, - sweat of 1551, 260, - plague in the 15th cent., 282-3, - in the 16th cent., 283-4, - houses shut up at in 1518, 291, - plague in 1571, 338, - in 1575, 340, - in 1603-5, 496-7, - in 1625, 525, - in 1645, 559, - gaol-fever in 1577, 376-382, - war-typhus in 1643, 549-51, - fellow expelled for French pox, 421, - unwholesomeness of in 15th cent., 285 _note_, - proposal to remove the university from, 283 - - - Pakhoi, modern plague, 168 - - Pare, Ambroise, holds cadaveric theory of plague, 156, 162, 658, - on likeness of smallpox to great pox, 468 - - Paris, "lepers" banished from in 1488, 104, 437 - - Pariset, Etienne, his theory of plague, 156-161 - - =Parish Clerks=, company of, 320-322 - - "=Parish infection=," a myth, 396 _note_ - - =Pauperism=, 39, 41, 387-395 - - Pauw, De, Cornelius, on plague in Egypt, 157, - on sanitary practice in ditto, 158 - - Paynel, translates book on French pox, 416 - - Peebles, plague at in 1499, 361 - - =Pellagra=, akin to leprosy, 108, 110, - causes of, 109 - - Penrith, plague at in 1598, 359-60 - - Perth, plague at in 1548, 363, - in 1580, 367, - in 1584-5, 368, - in 1608-9, 503-4, - in 1645, 563 - - _Pestilentia volatilis_ in Scotland, 398 - - Peterborough, burials at in 1175, 35, - plague in 1574, 339, - in 1606, 449, - in 1665, 681 - - Petrarch, on effects of Black Death, 177 - - Phaer, Th., or Phayre, or Thayre, writer on plague, 210, 489, - on smallpox and measles, 458 - - =Picardy Sweat=, 271-3 - - 'Piers the Ploughman,' quoted on surfeit and want, 65-67, - on moral effects of Black Death, 187-190, - on continuance of pestilence, 205-207, - on London famine of 1371, 215, - on burials by friars, 332, - use of "meseles", 450, - of "pokkes", 452-3 - - Pinctor, Peter, relates cases of French pox in the Vatican, 416 - - =Plague=, symptoms or characters of, in the Black Death, 120-122, - in medieval manuscripts, 208, 212-214, - in Skene's treatise, 364-5, - in the plague of 1665 (Boghurst), 674; - cadaveric theory of, 156 _et seq._, - relation of to typhus, 170. - General epidemics of: - Black Death, 116-141, - _pestis secunda_ (1361), 203, - _tertia_ (1368-9), 215, - _quarta_ (1375), 217, - _quinta_ (1382), 218, - of 1390-91, 219, - of 1407, 220, - of 1438-9, 225, 228, - of 1465, 230, - of 1471, 230. - Epidemics of in the Northern Marches, in 1379, 218, - in 1399, 220, - in 1421, 221. - See also under London and other places - - Planck, Dr, on causes of plague in Kumaon, 167 - - Plot, Dr, on Oxford Black Assizes, 382, - on mildness of smallpox, 467 - - Plymouth, plague in 1579, 348, - in 1590-91, 351, - sickness in the fleet in 1625, 521-2, - plague in 1626, 523 - - =Poll-tax= of 1377, population reckoned from, 200 - - =Poor-laws=, origin of, 362-3, - Jones on, 394 - - =Population= of towns in Domesday, 23-24, - kept small by death of infants, 25, - after the Black Death, 200-204. - See also "London," "Norwich." - - Portsmouth, plague in Venetian galley 1546, 303, - plague 1625, 524, - 1666, 688 - - =Posting sweat=, 260, - posting fever, 378 - - =Pox, the French=, in Scotland, 417, - in England, 419, - Erasmus on, 421, - meagre writings on, 415, 422, - Clowes on, 423, - Read on, 425, - Banister on, 427, - Graunt on, 428, - origin of epidemic, 429-438 - - Presteign, the sweat of 1551, 259, - plague in 1638, 542 - - Preston, wills proved after Black Death, 138 _note_, - plague at in 1631, 527 - - Procopius, on a plague-immunity, 675 _note_ - - - =Quarantine=, (forty days) for the Court in 1516, 290, 312, - in 1518, 313, - of persons in 1543, 313, - houses in 1563, 317, - in 1568, 318, - proposed for shipping at Gravesend in 1568, 337, - at Inchkeith in 1475, 235, 360, - details of at Inchcolm in 1564, 363, - case of at ditto, 367, - 18th cent. law of, 672 - - - Radnorshire, plague in 1638, 542 - - =Rats=, death of in plague-time, in Kumaon, 167, - in Yun-nan, 168, - in China, 169, - in Gujerat, 170, - ref. to by Lodge (1603), 173 - - Read, John, of Gloucester, on pox grown milder, 425, - describes mountebank, 426 - - Renfrewshire, plague in in 1601, 370 - - Renny, on plague in Garhwal, 167 - - Rhazes, "the pills of", 254, - source of medieval teaching on smallpox, 440 - - _Richard II._, "infection and the hand of war", 547 - - Richard of Devizes, on London in 12th cent., 34, - on dislike of the Franks to soapboilers and scavengers, 329 - - Richmond, Yorks, reduced by Black Death, 191, - plague in 1597-8, 359 - - Ripon, corn at in famine, 40, - leper-hospital at, 93 - - Robert of Brunne, describes effects of famine, 48 - - Rocher, M., on plague in Yun-nan, 168 - - Rochester, late leper foundation at, 97, - plague at in 1665, 681 - - Roger of Wendover, stories of avarice, 39, 40, - on the friars, 41 - - Rogers, Thorold, on prices of corn 13th century, 37, 43, - on rye in England, 64, - on villenage, 184 _note_, - wages after the Black Death, 185, - on new system of farming after ditto, 192, - paralysis of wool-trade after ditto, 193, - on good diet of the English in 15th cent., 222, - introduction of inferior bread, 224 _note_ - - Rome, medieval epidemics at, 3, 10 - - Rouen, siege of, 222 - - Royston, fevers in 1625, 505, - plague in 1625, 525, - in 1665, 682 - - =Rye-corn=, spurred, 53, - little grown in England, 64 - - - St Albans, school of annalists, 37, - burials at in 1247, 42, - famine in 1315, 48, - leper-hospitals at, 90, - admission to ditto, 102, - Black Death in the abbey, 131, - pestilence in 1431, 225, - plague in 1578, 347 - - St Andrews, plague at in 1585, 368, - in 1605, 503, - in 1647, 563 - - St Christopher, the French in, 618, - yellow fever in 1648, 621, 633 - - St Domingo, English attempt on, 634-6 - - St Giles's, Cripplegate, - churchyard, 334, - modes of burial, 335, - populous parish, 472, - the Great Plague in, 649 - - St Giles's-in-the-Fields, leper-hospital of, 83, 88, - Great Plague begins at, 656 - - St Johnstone, see Perth - - St Kilda, boat-cold, 274 - - St Olave's parish, plague of 1603, 478, - description of, 479 - - St Paul's, churchyard, state of in 1582, 333, - the charnel-house of, 334 - - St Sepulchre's parish, plague of 1563 in, 306, - churchyard of, 334 - - Salvetti, on the plague of 1625, 512, 519, - describes a fast, 513 - - Sandwich, plague in 1609, 500, - in 1635-37, 528, - in 1665, 681, 688 - - =Sanitary Act=, the first, 324 - - Sayer, Dr H., treats plague at Oxford in 1645, 559 - - =Scavengers=, at Ipswich, 327, - duties of at Exeter, 327, - in London, 328 - - =Scurvy=, in voyages, 579, 581-5, 594-6, 599-609, - among the French in Canada, 580, 597, - in a coaster, 597, - lime-juice for, 595, 601, 602-3, - pericarditis in, 580 _note_ - - Scyllatius, Nicolas, on French pox at Barcelona in 1494, 434 - - =Searchers=, at Shrewsbury in 1539, 320 _note_, - in London, 319, 321, - oath taken by in St Mary-le-Bow, 322, - at Colchester, 689 _note_ - - Seebohm, F., on mortality of Black Death among clergy, 134, - ditto in manor of Winslow, 136, - on remote effects of Black Death, 196 - - Shakespeare, John, fined, 327 - - Shakespeare, Wm., his business interfered with by plague, 495, - dies in a sickly year, 536. - See also titles of plays. - - =Shambles=, a nuisance in London, 216, 324, 325, 330, 487 - - Sheppey, plague, 348 - - Sherborne, plague in 1611, 501, - in 1665, 681 - - Sherburn, leper-hospital at, 94 - - Short, Dr Thomas, his epidemiological works, 57 _note_, 404 - - Shrewsbury, privilege of lepers at, 99, - new civic class after Black Death, 199, - sweat of 1551, 259, - plague at in 1525, 292, - in 1536-7, 301, 302, - in 1575, 340, - in 1592-3, 357, - in 1604, 499, - in 1630, 527, - in 1650, 564 - - Simpson, Sir James, on leprosy in Scotland, 106 _note_, - on syphilis in Scotland, 418 - - Skeat, Dr, on the derivation of "measles", 451 _note_ - - Skene, Dr Gilbert, on moles in plague-time, 173 _note_, - on cadaveric cause of plague, 336, - his book on plague (1568), 363-5 - - "=Slaedan=," Irish name supposed of influenza, 398 _note_ - - =Slave-ships=, ordure of, 630 - - =Slave-trade=, early history of, 614-17, - mortality of, 625-28 - - =Smallpox=, originally an Arabic subject, 439, - in the Elephant War, 441, - nature and affinities of, 442-4, - in medieval compends, 446 and _note_, - Gaddesden's alleged case, 447-8, - erroneously chronicled in 1366, 455, - in England 16th cent., 456-62, - case of in 1561, 459, - in 17th cent., 463, - Fracastori on, 467, - among American Indians (immunity of English), 613, - in Hispaniola, 615, - type of in Africans, 627, - in slave-ships 625, 627, - confused with great pox, 436-7, 456, 464, 468 - - Somersetshire, Black Death in, 117, - spotted fever in, 543 - - Southampton, plague in Venetian galley in 1519, 292, - plague in 1625, 524, - in 1665, 681 - - Southwell Abbey, plague in 1471, 230, - in 1478, 232 - - Spanish Main, sickness of English ships off, 588, 591 - - Spanish Town, mortality at in 1655, 638-642 - - Sprat, Bishop, on "remedy" of the sweat, 243 - - Stamford, plague in 1574, 339, - in 1580, 348, - in 1602-3, 360, 496, - in 1641, 545 - - Stapleton, Sir Ph., dies of plague at Calais, 546 - - Stepney, plague begins at in 1603, 477, 480, - plague of 1625 in, 511 - - =Stews= suppressed, 420 - - Stirling, grandgore at in 1498, 418, - plague at in 1606, 503 - - Stockport, plague, 498 - - Stoke (Newark), plague after siege, 560 - - Stoke Pogis, plague at in 1625, 520 - - "=Stop-gallant=," "=Stop-knave=," names of the sweat, 260, 262, 263 - - Stourbridge, leper-hospital, 93 - - Stratford, bread-carts, 215 _note_ - - Stratford-on-Avon, plague at, 309, - nuisance at, 327 - - Swainsthorpe, plague in 1479, 232 - - =Sweat, the English=, 1st epidemic, 235-243, - 2nd epidemic, 243-5, - 3rd epidemic, 245-250, - 4th epidemic, 250-255, - 5th epidemic, 259-263, - the epidemic of 1529 on the Continent, 256-259, - supposed sweats in England after 1551, 264, 280, 403, 413 _note_, - at Tiverton, 554, - supposed sweat in Flanders in 1551, 264 _note_, - supposed sweat in Ireland, 252 _note_, 400 _note_, - antecedents of in 1485, 265, 270, 273, - causes of (supposed) in London, 267, - a disease of the well-to-do, 263, 268, - extinction of, 279, - favouring conditions of the outbreaks, 276-9, - mortality from, 250, 251, 260-262, - abroad, 257, - symptoms of, 241, 246, 251, - theory of, 273, - treatment of, 242 - - =Sweat of Picardy=, 271 - - =Sweating= in influenza, 403, 554, - in war-typhus, 554 - - =Syphilis=, probably included under _lepra_, 72-75, 434, 437. - See also POX, THE FRENCH - - - Talifoo, modern plague, 168 - - Tana, 144, 147 - - Taylor, John, "water-poet", 512 - - =Texas fever=, 274 - - Thame, war-fever at, 548-9 - - Thayre, Th., see Phaer - - Thomson, Dr G., dissection of plague-body, 677 - - _Timon of Athens_, the pox described (Act IV. sc. 3), 428 - - Tittenhanger, Henry VIII. at, 254 - - Tiverton, plague at in 1591, 351, - sickness in 1597, 411, - war-typhus ("sweating sickness") at in 1644, 552-5 - - =Tobacco= in plague-time, 674, 682 - - Torella, on origin of French pox, 434 - - Totness, plague at in 1590, 351, - in 1647, 561 - - Tottenham, in plague of 1625, 518, 520 - - Tregony, plague at in 1595, 357 - - Tripe, Andrew, his poem on the pox, 432 _note_ - - Trumpington, plague in 1625, 525 - - Truro, decayed, 221, - plague in 1578, 347 - - Tuke, Brian, on the sweat of 1528, 255 - - Turner, Mrs Anne, 487 _note_ - - Turner, Dr P., arsenic in plague, 487 - - Turner, of Boulogne, preaches against burials in the city, 336 - - Twyford, plague in 1603, 493 - - Tynemouth, plague during siege, 557 - - - Uffculme, sweat at in 1551, 262 - - - Valencia, cases of French pox at, 434-5 - - Vasco da Gama, scurvy in his ships, 579 - - Vatican, the French pox in the, 416 - - Vetlianka, modern plague at, 172 - - Vincent, Rev. Thomas, his experiences of the Great Plague, 648, 664, 670 - - Virgil, Polydore, on the sweat, 237, 240, - on treatment of ditto, 242 - - Virginia, voyages to, 590, 609-612 - - - Wales, pestilence in the marches of in 1234, 12, - Giraldus on, 21, - famine in 1189, 35, - leper-law of, 106, - Black Death in, 118, - plague and fever in 1638, 541 - - Wallingford, after Black Death, 195, - small pox, measles and plague, 291, - plague at, 559 - - "=Wame-ill=," Scots famine-sickness in 1438-9, 235 - - =Wands= carried in plague time, 314-5 - - Wells, Black Death in diocese of, 117, - plague at in 1575, 340 - - West Indies, colonization of, 617 _et seq._ - - Whickham, plague, 501 - - White, Gilbert, on causes of leprosy, 110 - - Whitmore, H., on fever in 1651, 566, - on fever and influenza in 1658-9, 572-4 - - =Whooping-cough=, or the kink, 459 - - Willan, Dr, 4, 440 - - William of Newburgh, story of plague at Annan, 11, - famine-fever of 1196, 35, - Durham leper-hospital, 94 - - Willis, Dr T., on the war typhus of 1643, 547, 549, - on plague at Oxford &c., 559, - on the fevers and (or) influenzas of 1657-8, 568-572 - - =Wills=, in Black Death, in London, 117-18, 186, - in Lancashire, 138 _note_, - in Colchester, 186; - in London in 1361, 203, - in 1368, 216 - - Wilton, sweat at 252 - - Winchester, plague at in 1603, 489, - in 1625, 521 _note_, - in 1666, 687, 691 - - Winslow, manor of, 136 - - Wisbech, plague at in 1586, 349 - - Wither, George, on plague of 1625, 512 - - Woburn, sweat at, 252 - - Wolsey, the sweat in his household, 247, 252, 253, - letter from Anne Boleyn to, 255, - charged with the great pox, 422 - - Woodall, John, describes the plague-bubo, 122, - on scurvy, 603-6 - - Woodstock, sickness near, 291, - plague, 292 - - Wool trade after Black Death, 179, 193 - - Wyclif, on decrease of population, 201 - - - Yarmouth, Black Death in, 130, - decline of, 195, 221; - plague in 1579, 348, - in 1625, 525, - in 1635-6, 528, - in 1664-5, 680 - - =Yellow Fever=, epidemic of at Bridgetown in 1647, 620, - in St Christopher, 621, - case of described, 623, - characters of, 624, - in "Regalia" and "La Pique", 629, - theory of in slave-ports, 630-31, - as a soil-poison, 632-3, - question of, in Drake's fleet, 518-9 - - York, wasting of, 27, - hospital at, 87, - Black Death at, 118, 131, - ditto in diocese of, 134, - size of after ditto, 201, - plague in 1391, 220, - in 1485, 282, - plague or sweat in 1551, 261, - plague in 1604, 489 - - Yun-nan, modern plague, 168 - - Yusufzai, bubonic typhus in, 171 - - -CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AND SONS, AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. - - - - -FOOTNOTES: - -[1] The references to the Justinian plague by contemporary and later -historians have been collected, together with partly irrelevant matter -about portents and earthquakes, by Val. Seibel, _Die grosse Pest zur Zeit -Justinian's I._ Dillingen, 1857. The author, a layman, throws no light -upon its origin. - -[2] Beda, _Hist. Eccles._ Eng. Hist. Society's ed. p. 243: "qui ubi Romam -pervenit, cujus sedi apostolicae tempore illo Vitalianus praeerat, -postquam itineris sui causam praefato papae apostolico patefecit, non -multo post et ipse et omnes pene, qui cum eo advenerant, socii, -pestilentia superveniente, deleti sunt." - -[3] _Flores Histor._ by Roger of Wendover. Eng. Hist. Society's ed. I. -180. - -[4] _Ibid._ I. 228. - -[5] _Miscellaneous Works of the late Robert Willan, M.D., F.R.S., F.A.S._ -Edited by Ashby Smith, M.D. London, 1831. 'An Enquiry into the Antiquity -of the Smallpox etc.' p. 108. - -[6] _Annals of the Four Masters_, ed. O'Donovan, Dublin, 1851, I. 183. -"A.D. 543. There was an extraordinary universal plague through the world, -which swept away the noblest third part of the human race." - -p. 187. "A.D. 548. Of the mortality which was called Cron Chonaill--and -that was the first Buide Chonaill [_flava ictericia_],--these saints -died," several names following. The entries of that plague are under -different years in the various original Annals. - -[7] "Eodem anno dominicae incarnationis sexcentesimo sexagesimo quarto, -facta erat eclipsis solis die tertio mensis Maii, hora circiter decima -diei; quo etiam anno subita pestilentiae lues, depopulatis prius -australibus Brittaniae plagis, Nordanhymbrorum quoque provinciam -corripiens, atque acerba clade diutius longe lateque desaeviens, magnam -hominum multitudinem stravit. Qua plaga praefatus Domini sacerdos Tuda -raptus est de mundo, et in monasterio, quod dicitur Paegnalaech, -honorifice sepultus. Haec autem plaga Hiberniam quoque insulam pari clade -premebat. Erant ibidem eo tempore multi nobilium simul et mediocrium de -gente Anglorum, qui tempore Finani et Colmani episcoporum, relicta insula -patria, vel divinae lectionis, vel continentioris vitae gratia, illo -secesserant.... Erant inter hos duo juvenes magnae indolis, de nobilibus -Anglorum, Aedilhun et Ecgberct," etc. Beda's _Hist. Eccles._ ed. -Stevenson. Engl. Hist. Soc. I. p. 231. - -[8] _Ibid._ p. 240. - -[9] _Annals of the Four Masters_, I. 275. - -[10] Thorpe, in his edition of Florence of Worcester, for the Eng. Hist. -Society, I. 25. - -[11] The first of Beda's incidents of the Barking monastery relates to a -miraculous sign in the heavens showing where the cemetery was to be. It -begins: "Cum tempestas saepe dictae cladis, late cuncta depopulans, etiam -partem monasterii hujus illam qua viri tenebantur, invasisset, et passim -quotidie raperentur ad Dominum." - -[12] "Erat in eodem monasterio [Barking] puer trium circiter, non amplius -annorum, AEsica nomine, qui propter infantilem adhuc aetatem in virginum -Deo dedicatarum solebat cella nutriri, ibique medicari. Hic praefata -pestilentia tactus ubi ad extrema pervenit clamavit tertio unam de -consecratis Christo virginibus, proprio eam nomine quasi praesentem -alloquens 'Eadgyd, Eadgyd, Eadgyd'; et sic terminans temporalem vitam -intravit aeternam. At virgo illa, quam moriens vocabat, ipso quo vocata -est die de hac luce subtracta, et ilium qui se vocavit ad regnum coeleste -secuta est." Beda, p. 265. Then follows the story of a nun dying of the -pestilence in the same monastery. - -[13] Beda, Lib. IV. cap. 14. In addition to the instances in the text, -which I have collected from Beda's _Ecclesiastical History_, I find two -mentioned by Willan in his "Inquiry into the Antiquity of the Smallpox," -(_Miscell. Works_, London, 1821, pp. 109, 110): "About the year 672, St -Cedda, Bishop of the East Saxons, being on a visitation to the monastery -of Lestingham, was infected with a contagious distemper, and died on the -seventh day. Thirty monks, who came to visit the tomb of their bishop, -were likewise infected, and most of them died" (_Vita S. Ceddae_, VII. -Jan. p. 375. Cf. Beda, IV. 3). Again: "In the course of the year 685, the -disease re-appeared at Lindisfarne, (Holy Island), St Cuthbert's abbacy, -and in 686 spread through the adjoining district, where it particularly -affected children" (_Vita S. Cuthberti_, cap. 33). Willan's erudition has -been used in support of a most improbable hypothesis, that the pestilence -of those years, in monasteries and elsewhere, was smallpox. - -[14] _Historia Abbatum Gyrvensium, auctore anonymo_, Secs. 13 and 14. (App. -to vol. II. of Beda's works. Eng. Hist. Society's edition, p. 323.) - -Sec. 13. Qui dum transmarinis moraretur in locis [Benedict] ecce subita -pestilentiae procella Brittaniam corripiens lata nece vastavit, in qua -plurimi de utroque ejus monasterio, et ipse venerabilis ac Deo dilectus -abbas Eosterwini raptus est ad Dominum, quarto ex quo abbas esse coeperat -anno. - -Sec. 14. Porro in monasterio cui Ceolfridus praeerat omnes qui legere, vel -praedicare, vel antiphonas ac responsoria dicere possent ablati sunt -excepto ipso abbate et uno puerulo, qui ab ipso nutritus et eruditus. - -In the Article "Baeda," _Dict. Nat. Biog._, the Rev. W. Hunt points out -that the boy referred to in the above passage would have been Beda -himself. - -[15] The history of the name _pestis flava ictericia_ is given by -O'Donovan in a note to the passage in the _Annals of the Four Masters_, I. -275: "Icteritia vel aurigo, id est abundantia flavae bilis, per corpus -effusae, hominemque pallidum reddentis," is the explanation of P. O'S. -Beare. The earliest mention of "yellow plague" appears to have been in an -ancient life of St Gerald of Mayo, in Colgan's _Acta Sanctorum_, at the -calendar date of 13th March. - -[16] _Polychronicon_, Rolls edition, V. 250. - -[17] _The Story of England_, Rolls series, ed. Furnivall, II. 569. - -[18] Rolls series, ed. Thorpe, I. 136, 137 (Transl. II. 60). Also in -Gervase of Canterbury, Rolls series, ed. Stubbs, II. 348. - -[19] _Chronicon Abbatiae Ramesiensis_, Rolls ed. 1886, p. 397. - -[20] According to an inquisition of 2 Edward III., the abbey of Croyland -contained in 1328, forty-one monks, besides fifteen "corrodiarii" and -thirty-six servitors. _Chronicle of Croyland_ in Gale, I. 482. - -[21] _Epistolae Cantuarienses_, Rolls series, No. 38, ed. Stubbs, Epist. -CCLXXII. p. 254, and Introduction, p. lxvii. - -[22] William of Newburgh, Rolls ed. p. 481. - -[23] Ralph of Coggeshall, Rolls series, No. 66, p. 112. - -[24] Roger of Wendover, III. 72. - -[25] In the Life of St Hugh of Lincoln, who died in 1200, or eight years -before the Papal Interdict, there is a clear reference to difficulties -thrown by the priests in the way of burial, especially for the poor, and -perhaps in a time of epidemic sickness such as the years 1194-6. See _Vita -S. Hugonis Lincolnensis_, Rolls series, No. 37, pp. 228-233. - -[26] Eadmer, _l. c._ - -[27] _Polychronicon_, Rolls ed. VII. 90. - -[28] _Gesta Pontificum_, Rolls ed. p. 171. Another narrator of the story -of St Elphege and the Danes is Henry of Huntingdon (Rolls ed. p. 179); he -says nothing of the pestilence, but describes the sack of Canterbury. -Eadmer also (_Historia Novorum in Anglia_, Rolls ser. 81, p. 4) omits the -pestilence. - -[29] Quoted by Higden, _Polychronicon_, Rolls ed. II. 18. This may have -been one of Henry of Huntingdon's poems which were extant in Leland's -time, but are now lost. - -[30] _Polychronicon_, II. 166. - -[31] Marchand, _Etude sur quelques epidemies et endemies du moyen age_ -(These), Paris, 1873, p. 49, with a reference to Fuchs, "Das heilige Feuer -im Mittelalter" in Hecker's _Annalen_, vol. 28, p. 1, which journal I have -been unable to consult. - -[32] Giraldus Cambrensis, _Topographia Hiberniae_, in Rolls edition of his -works, No. 21, vol. V. - -[33] "Itinerarium Walliae" and "Descriptio Kambriae," _Opera_, vol. VI. - -[34] _Polychronicon_, I. 410. - -[35] William of Newburgh, _sub anno_ 1157, I. 107. - -[36] _Europe during the Middle Ages_, chap. IX. - -[37] I have used for this purpose Merewether and Stephens' _History of -Boroughs_, 3 vols. 1835. - -[38] _Leechdoms, Wort-cunning and Starcraft of Early England._ Edited by -Cockayne for the Rolls Series, 3 vols. 1864-66. - -[39] It is illustrative of the confusion which arises from careless -copying by later compilers of history that Roger of Wendover, in his -_Flores Historiarum_ (Eng. Hist. Society's edition I. 159), takes Beda's -Sussex reference to famine and makes it do duty, under the year 665, for -the great general plague of 664, having apparently overlooked Beda's -entirely distinct account of the latter. - -[40] _Hist. Eccles._ Sec. 290:--"Siquidem tribus annis ante adventum ejus in -provinciam, nulla illis in locis pluvia ceciderat, unde et fames -acerbissima plebem invadens inopia nece prostravit. Denique ferunt quia -saepe quadraginta simul aut quinquaginta homines inedia macerati -procederent ad praecipitium aliquod sive ripam maris, et junctis misere -manibus pariter omnes aut ruina perituri, aut fluctibus absorbendi -deciderent. Verum ipso die, quo baptisma fidei gens suscepit illa, -descendit pluvia serena sed copiosa, refloruit terra, rediit viridantibus -arvis annus laetus et frugifer." - -[41] Green _Short History of the English People_, p. 39: "The very fields -lay waste, and the land was scourged by famine and plague." I have missed -this reference to plague in the original authorities. A passage in -Higden's _Polychronicon_ (V. 258) may relate to that period, although it -is referred to the mythical time of Vortigern. - -[42] Stow, in enumerating the instances of public charity in his _Survey -of London_, ascribes the melting of the church plate to Ethelwald, bishop -of Winchester in the reign of King Edgar, about the year 963. - -[43] The murrain was a flux, _anglice_ "scitha" (Roger of Howden) or -"schitta" (Bromton). - -[44] Simeon of Durham, in Rolls series, II. 188. As to fugitives, see Chr. -Evesham, p. 91. - -[45] _Gesta Pontif. Angl._ p. 208. - -[46] Simeon of Durham, "On the Miracles of St Cuthbert," _Works_, II. -338-40. - -[47] Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Malmesbury adds "a mortality of men." - -[48] William of Malmesbury, _Gest. Reg._ Eng. Hist. Soc. II. 452. - -[49] Malmesbury's construction is repeated by Henry of Huntingdon, Rolls -ed. p. 209. Florence of Worcester merely says: "primo febribus, deinde -fame." - -[50] Henry of Huntingdon, p. 232. - -[51] Annals of Winchester, _sub anno_ 1096. - -[52] "Septimo anno propter tributa quae rex in Normannia positus edixerat, -agricultura defecit; qua fatiscente fames e vestigio; ea quoque -invalescente mortalitas hominum subsecuta, adeo crebra ut deesset -morituris cura, mortuis sepultura." _Gest. Reg._ II. 506. Copied in the -Annals of Margan, Rolls ed. II. 506. - -[53] _Ras Mala_, by A. Kinloch Forbes, 2nd ed. p. 543. - -[54] _Ibid._ - -[55] Thomas Whyte, "Report on the disease which prevailed in Kattywar in -1819-20." _Trans. Med. Phys. Soc. Bombay_, I. (1838), p. 169. See also -Gilder, _ibid._ p. 192; Frederick Forbes _ibid._ II. 1, and Thesis on -Plague, Edin. 1840. - -[56] In 1110 the tax was for the dower of the king's daughter on her -marriage. That also was parallel with a feudal right in Gujerat: "When a -chief has to portion a daughter, or to incur other similar necessary -expense, he has the right of imposing a levy upon the cultivators to meet -it." A. Kinloch Forbes, _Ras Mala_, 2nd ed. p. 546. Refusal to plough, -_temp._ Henry I. is stated by Pearson, I. 442. - -[57] Malmesbury, _Gest. Pont._ p. 442; H. of Huntingdon; Annals of Margan; -Roger of Howden. - -[58] Also in the Annals of Osney: "Mortalitas maxima hominum in Anglia." - -[59] "Attenuata est Anglia, ut ex regno florentissimo infelicissimum -videretur." William of Newburgh, Rolls ed. p. 39. - -[60] Henry of Huntingdon, _sub anno_ 1138. - -[61] _Gesta Stephani_, Rolls series, No. 82, vol. III. p. 99. The author -is conjectured to have been a foreigner in the service of the bishop of -Winchester, brother of the king. - -[62] - - "Affluit ergo fames; consumpta carne gementes - Exhalant animas ossa cutisque vagas. - Quis tantos sepelire queat coetus morientium? - Ecce Stigis facies, consimilisque lues." - -[63] William of Newburgh, _sub anno_ 1149. - -[64] Stow's _Survey of London_, Popular ed. (1890) p. 116. - -[65] "Recentium esus carnium et haustus aquae, tam insolitus quam -incognitus, plures de regis exercitu panis inedia laborantes, fluxu -ventris afflixit in Hybernia." Radulphus de Diceto, _Imagines Historiar._ -I. 350. - -[66] Benedict of Peterborough, I. 104, and, in identical terms, in Roger -of Howden. - -[67] The speaker is represented as a Jew in France. It is significant that -the massacre of the Jews at Lynn in 1190 is stated by William of Newburgh -to have been instigated by the _foreign_ traders. - -[68] Ricardus Divisiensis. Eng. Hist. Society's ed. p. 60. - -[69] Description of London, prefixed to Fitzstephen's Life of Becket. -Reproduced in Stow's _Survey of London_. - -[70] _Petri Blesensis omnia opera_, ed. Giles, Epist. CLI. The number of -churches may seem large for the population; but it should be kept in mind -that these city parish churches were mere chapels or oratories, like the -side-chapels of a great church. Indeed, at Yarmouth, they were actually -built along the sides of the single great parish church; whereas, at -Norwich, there were sixty of them standing each in its own small parish -area, the Cathedral, as well as the other conventual churches, being the -greater places of worship. Lincoln is said to have had 49 of these small -churches, and York 40. An example of them remains in St Peter's at -Cambridge. - -[71] William of Newburgh, p. 431. - -[72] _Ibid._ - -[73] "His quoque nostris diebus, ingruente famis inedia, et maxima -pauperum turba quotidie ad januam jacente, de communi patrum consilio, ad -caritatis explendae sufficientiam, propter bladum in Angliam navis -Bristollum missa est." _Itiner. Walliae_, Rolls ed. VI. 68. The itinerary -of Bishop Baldwin, which the author follows, was in 1188; but the "his -quoque nostris diebus" clearly refers to a later date, which may have been -the year after, or may have been the more severe famine of 1195-7 or of -1203. - -[74] _Histor. Rer. Angl._, Rolls series, No. 82, vol. I. pp. 460, 484. - -[75] Ralph of Coggeshall, _sub anno_. - -[76] "Variis infirmitatibus homines per Angliam vexantur et quamplures -moriuntur," Annals of Margan, Rolls series, No. 36. - -[77] Roger of Wendover, _Fl. Hist._ Rolls ed. - -[78] Matthew Paris, _Chronica Majora_, Rolls series, No. 57, ed. Luard, -vol. V. - -[79] Rishanger in _Chron. Monast. S. Albani_, Rolls series, No. 28. - -[80] John Trokelowe, _ibid._ - -[81] Wendover, II. 162, 171, 190, 205. - -[82] Wendover, III. 95, 98. - -[83] "Qui ex avaritia inopiam semper habent suspectam." - -[84] Alboldslea, or Abbotsley, was the parish of which the famous -Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, was rector (perhaps non-resident) down to -1231, or to within three years of the date of the above anecdote. The -existing church is of great age, and may well have been the actual edifice -in which the scene was enacted. - -[85] Wendover, III. 96. - -[86] _Ibid._ III. 19, 27. - -[87] Wendover, III. 381. - -[88] William of Newburgh, _sub anno_ 1196. - -[89] On the other hand John Stow seems to have acquired, from some -unstated source, an extraordinary prejudice against him. - -[90] Matthew Paris, _Chron. Maj._ ed. Luard, V. 663, 675. - -[91] Annals of Tewkesbury in _Annales Monastici_, Rolls series, No. 36. - -[92] _Chronica Majora_, IV. 647; Stow, _Survey of London_. - -[93] _Chron. Maj._ IV. 654. - -[94] _Chr. Maj._ V. 660. Other details occur here and there to the end of -the chronicle. - -[95] This is the number given by Matthew Paris. It suggests a larger -population in the capital than we might have been disposed to credit. The -same writer says that London was so full of people when the parliament was -sitting the year before (1257) that the city could hardly hold them all in -her ample bosom. The Annals of Tewkesbury put the whole mortality from -famine and fever in London in 1258 at 20,000. But the whole population did -not probably exceed 40,000. - -[96] The year 1274 was the beginning of so exceptional a murrain of sheep -that it deserves mention here, although murrains do not come within the -scope of the work. It is recorded by more than one contemporary. Rishanger -(p. 84) says: "In that year a disastrous plague of sheep seized upon -England, so that the sheep-folds were everywhere emptied through the -spreading of it. It lasted for twenty-eight years following, so that no -farm of the whole kingdom was without the infliction of that misery. Many -attributed the cause of this disease, which the inhabitants had not been -acquainted with before, to a certain rich man of the Frankish nation, who -settled in Northumberland, having brought with him a certain sheep of -Spanish breed, the size of a small two year old ox, which was ailing and -contaminated all the flocks of England by handing on its disease to them." -Under the year following, 1275, he enters it again, using the term -"scabies." Thorold Rogers (_Hist. of Agric. and Prices_, I. 31) has found -"scab" of sheep often mentioned in the bailiffs' accounts from about 1288; -it is assumed to have become permanent from the item of tar occurring -regularly in the accounts; but tar was used ordinarily for marking. It may -have been sheep-pox, which Fitzherbert, in his _Book of Husbandry_ -(edition of 1598), describes under the name of "the Poxe," giving a clear -account of the way to deal with it by isolation. For murrains in general, -the reader may consult Fleming's _Animal Plagues_, 2 vols. 1871--1884, a -work which is mostly compiled (with meagre acknowledgment for -"bibliography" only) from the truly learned work of Heusinger, _Recherches -de Pathologie Comparee_, Cassel, 1844. Fleming has used only the "pieces -justificatives," and has not carried the history beyond the point where -Heusinger left it. - -[97] Continuation of Wm. of Newburgh, Rolls series No. 82, vol. II. p. -560: "Facta est magna fames per universam Angliam et maxime partibus -occidentalibus. In Hibernia vero tres pestes invaluerunt, sc. mortalitas, -fames, et gladius: per guerram mortalem praevalentibus Hybernicis et -Anglicis succumbentibus. Qui vero gladium et famem evadere potuerunt, -peste mortalitatis praeventi sunt, ita ut vivi mortuis sepeliendis vix -sufficere valerent." - -[98] See also the continuation of the chronicle of Florence of Worcester, -Bohn's series, p. 405. - -[99] Rishanger's annals, 1259-1305, and Trokelowe's, 1307-1323, are -printed in the volumes of _Chronica Monast. S. Albani_, No. 28 of the -Rolls series. - -[100] Furnivall's ed. Rolls series, No. 87, vol. II. 569, 573. - -[101] Chronicle of William Gregory, Camden Society, ed. Gairdner, 1876. - -[102] _Annales Londonienses_, Rolls series, No. 76, ed. Stubbs. -Introduction, p. lxxvi. - -[103] _Ibid._ (_Annales Paulini_), p. 238. - -[104] _Ibid._ p. 304. - -[105] _Epistolae Cantuarienses_, Rolls series, No. 38, II. Introduction by -Stubbs, p. xxxii. - -[106] _Epistolae Cantuarienses_, Rolls series, No. 38, II. Introduction by -Stubbs, p. cxix. - -[107] Ralph of Coggeshall, Rolls series, No. 66, p. 156. - -[108] He might have been, and probably was, the prototype of the physician -Nathan Ben Israel, in the 35th Chapter of _Ivanhoe_. - -[109] Adam de Marisco to Grosseteste, _Mon. Francisc._ ed. Brewer, I. 113. - -[110] I have not succeeded in finding this in the author's writings, and -quote it at second hand. - -[111] Quoted, without date, by Marchand, _Etude historique et -nosographique sur quelques epidemies et endemies du moyen age_. Paris, -1873. - -[112] I give this account of the obvious characters of spurred rye from a -recent observation of a growing crop of it. - -[113] One of the greatest epidemics was in Westphalia and the Cologne -district in 1596 and 1597. It fell to be described by two learned writers, -Sennert and Horst, of whose accounts a summary is given by Short, _Air, -weather, seasons, etc._ I. 275-285. - -[114] Translated into the _Philosophical Transactions_, No. 130, vol. XII. -p. 758 (14 Dec. 1676) from the _Journal des Scavans_. - -[115] _Studien ueber den Ergotismus_, Marburg, 1856. - -[116] Simeon of Durham and Roger of Howden have the following, under the -year 1048: "Mortalitas hominum et animalium multas occupavit Angliae -provincias, et ignis aereus, vulgo dictus sylvaticus, in Deorbensi -provincia et quibusdam aliis provinciis, villas et segetes multas -ustulavit." - -[117] "Je crois qu'ils ont voulu indiquer l'ignis sacer ou de St Antoine, -qui dans ces annees et surtout 1044 sevit en France." _Recherches de -Pathologie Comparee_, vol. II. p. cxlviii. - -[118] On the other hand, Short, in his _General Chronological History of -the Air, Weather, Seasons, Meteors etc._ (2 vols. London, 1749) says that -the epidemic of 1110 consisted of "especially an epidemic erysipelas, -whereof many died, the parts being black and shrivelled up;" and that in -1128, "St Anthony's fire was fatal to many in England." He gives no -authority in either case. But the one error is run to earth in a French -entry of 1109, "membris instar carbonum nigrescentibus" (Sig. Gembl. -auctar. p. 274, Migne); the other, most likely, in the _ignis_ around -Chartres, 1128 (Stephen of Caen, Bouquet, xii. 780). - -Perhaps this is the best place to express a general opinion on the work by -Short, which is the only book of the kind in English previous to my own. -It is everywhere uncritical and credulous, and often grossly inaccurate in -dates, sometimes repeating the same epidemic under different years. It -appears to have been compiled, for the earlier part, at least, from -foreign sources, such as a Chronicle of Magdeburg, and to a large extent -from a work by Colle de Belluno (fl. 1631). Many of the facts about -English epidemics are given almost as in the original chronicles, but -without reference to them. English experience of sickness is lost in the -general chronology of epidemics for all Europe, and is dealt with in a -purely verbalist manner. So far as this volume extends (1667) I have found -Short's book of no use, except now and then in calling my attention to -something that I had overlooked. His other work, _New Observations on -City, Town and County Bills of Mortality_ (London, 1750) shows the author -to much greater advantage, and I have used his statistical tables for the -sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. - -[119] The facts were communicated to the Royal Society by Charlton -Wollaston, M.D., F.R.S., then resident in Suffolk, and by the Rev. James -Bones. They were referred by Dr G. Baker to Tissot of Lausanne, who -replied that they corresponded to typical gangrenous ergotism. See _Phil. -Trans._ vol. LII. pt. 2 (1762) p. 523, p. 526, p. 529; and vol. LX. (1768) -p. 106. - -[120] An erroneous statement as to an epidemic of gangrenous ergotism, or -of Kriebelkrankheit, in England in 1676, has somehow come to be current in -German books. It has a place in the latest chronological table of ergotism -epidemics, that of Hirsch in his _Handbuch der historisch-geographischen -Pathologie_, vol. II. 1883 (Engl. Transl. II. p. 206), the reference being -to Birch, _Philos. Transact._ This reference to ergotism in England in -1676 is given also in Th. O. Heusinger's table (1856), where it appears in -the form of "Schnurrer, nach Birch." On turning to Schnurrer's _Chronik -der Seuchen_ (II. 210), the reference is found to be, "Birch, _Phil. -Trans._ vols. XI. and XII."; and coming at length to the _Philosophical -Transactions_, it appears that vols. X., XI. and XII. are bound up -together, that vol. XII. (1676) p. 758, contains an extract from the -_Journal des Scavans_ about ergot of rye in certain parts of France, and -that there is nothing about ergotism in England in either vol. XI. or vol. -XII. So far as concerns Dr Birch, he was secretary to the Royal Society in -the next century. - -[121] Knighton, _De Eventibus Angliae_ in Twysden, col. 2580: "In aestate -scilicet anno Gratiae 1340 accidit quaedam execrabilis et enormis -infirmitas in Anglia quasi communis, et praecipue in comitatu Leicestriae -adeo quod durante passione homines emiserunt vocem latrabilem ac si esset -latratus canum; et fuit quasi intolerabilis poena durante passione: ex -inde fuit magna pestilentia hominum." - -[122] _Phil. Trans._ XXIII. p. 1174 (June 26, 1702). - -[123] _Op. cit._ I. pt. 2, p. 366. - -[124] _Phil. Trans._ XXII. (1700-1701), p. 799, a Letter in Latin from -Joh. Freind dated Christ Church, Oxford, 31 March. - -[125] The earliest religious hysterias of Sweden fall in the years 1668 to -1673, which do not correspond to years of ergotism in that country, -although there was ergotism in France in 1670 and in Westphalia in 1672. -The later Swedish psychopathies have been in 1841-2, 1854, 1858, and -1866-68, some of which years do correspond closely to periods of ergotism -in Sweden. - -[126] "Moriebantur etiam plures morbo litargiae, multis infortunia -prophetantes; mulieres insuper decessere multae per fluxum, et erat -communis pestis bestiarum." Walsingham, _Hist. Angl._, _sub anno_; and in -identical terms in the _Chronicon Angliae_ a Monacho Sancti Albani. - -[127] "Magna et formidabilis pestilentia extemplo subsecuta est -Cantabrigiae, qua homines subito, prout dicebatur, sospites, invasi mentis -phrenesi moriebantur, sine viatico sive sensu." Walsingham, _Hist. Angl._ -II. 186. Under the same year, 1389, the continuator of Higden's -_Polychronicon_ (IX. 216) says that the king being in the south and -"seeing some of his prostrated by sudden death, hastened to Windsor." - -[128] For example in the Sloane MS. 2420 (the treatise by Constantinus -Africanus of Salerno), there are chapters "De Litargia," "De Stupore -Mentis," and "De Phrenesi." - -[129] Th. O. Heusinger, _Studien ueber den Ergotismus_, Marburg, 1856, p. -35: "Es werden freilich in den Beschreibungen einiger frueheren Epidemieen -oefter typhoese Erscheinungen erwaehnt; die Beschreiber behaupten aber auch -dann meist die Contagiositaet der Krankheit, und es liegt die Vermuthung -nahe, dass die Krankheit dann eigentlich ein Typhus war, bei dem die -Erscheinungen des Ergotismus ebenso constant vorkommen, wie sie sonst in -vereinzelteren Faellen dem Typhus sich beigesellen" (cf. 'Dorf Gossfelden,' -in Appendix). - -[130] _History of Agriculture and Prices_, I. 27. - -[131] "Sed in fructibus arborum suspicio multa fuit, eo quod per nebulas -foetentes, exhalationes, aerisque varias corruptiones, ipsi fructus, puta -poma, pyra, et hujusmodi sunt infecta; quorum esu multi mortales hoc anno -[1383] vel pestem letalem vel graves morbos et infirmitates incurrerunt." -Walsingham, _Hist. Angl._ II. 109. The continuator of Higden records under -the same year, in one place a "great pestilence in Kent which destroyed -many, and spared no age or sex" (IX. 27), and on another page (IX. 21) a -great epidemic in Norfolk, which attacked only the youth of either sex -between the ages of seven and twenty-two! - -[132] Walsingham, II. 203; Stow's _Survey of London_, p. 133. - -[133] The spelling, and a few whole words, have been altered from Skeat's -text, so as to make the meaning clear. - -[134] Simpson, _Edin. Med. and Surg. Journ._ 1842, vol. LVII. p. 136. - -[135] Ralph of Coggeshall (Rolls ed. p. 156) describes the death of Hubert -on 13 July, 1205, but does not mention the name of his physician. - -[136] Gilberti Anglici _Compendium Medicinae_, ed. Michael de Capella. -Lugduni, 1512, Lib. VII. cap. "De Lepra," pp. 337-345. - -[137] Bernardi Gordonii _Lilium Medicinae_. Lugd. 1551, p. 88. - -[138] _Compend. Med._ _Ed. cit._ p. 344. - -[139] _Lilium Medicinae._ Lugd. 1551, p. 89. - -[140] _Ibid._ p. 89. - -[141] For fuller reference, see p. 103. - -[142] _Philos. Trans. of Royal Society_, XXXI. 58: "Now in a true leprosy -we never meet with the mention of any disorder in those parts, which, if -there be not, must absolutely secure the person from having that disease -communicated to him by coition with leprous women; but it proves there was -a disease among them which was not the leprosy, although it went by that -name; and that this could be no other than venereal because it was -infectious." - -He then quotes from Trevisa's translation of Bartholomew Glanvile, _De -proprietatibus rerum_, passages which he thinks relate to syphilis, -although they are obviously the distinctive signs of lepra taken almost -verbatim from Gilbertus Anglicus. He implies that the later so-called -leper-houses of London were really founded for syphilis when it became -epidemic. In the will of Ralph Holland, merchant taylor, mention is made -of three leper-houses, the Loke, Hackenay and St Giles beyond Holborn -Bars, as if these were all that existed in the year 1452. But in the reign -of Henry VIII. there were six of them besides St Giles's,--Knightsbridge, -Hammersmith, Highgate, Kingsland, the Lock, and Mile End; and these, says -Beckett, were used for the treatment of the French pox, which became -exceedingly common after 1494-6. - -[143] Martin, _Histoire de France_, VII. 283. - -[144] One of Gascoigne's references was copied by Beckett (_Phil. Trans._ -XXXI. 47), beginning: "Novi enim ego, Magister Thomas Gascoigne, licet -indignus, sacrae theologiae doctor, qui haec scripsi et collegi, diversos -viros, qui mortui fuerunt ex putrefactione membrorum suorum et corporis -sui, quae corruptio et putrefactio causata fuit, ut ipsi dixerunt, per -exercitium copulae carnalis cum mulieribus. Magnus enim dux in Anglia, -scil. J. de Gaunt, mortuus est ex tali putrefactione membrorum genitalium -et corporis sui, causata per frequentationem mulierum. Magnus enim -fornicator fuit, ut in toto regno Angliae divulgabatur," etc. In the _Loci -e Libro Veritatum_, printed by Thorold Rogers (Oxford, 1881), the -following consequences are mentioned: "Plures viri per actum libidinosum -luxuriae habuerunt membra sua corrupta et penitus destructa, non solum -virgam sed genitalia: et alii habuerunt membra sua per luxuriam corrupta -ita quod cogebantur, propter poenam, caput virgae abscindere. Item homo -Oxoniae scholaris, Morland nomine, mortuus fuit Oxoniae ex corruptione -causata per actum luxuriae." p. 136. - -[145] _A most excellent and compendious method of curing woundes in the -head and in other partes of the body; translated into English by John -Read, Chirurgeon; with the exact cure of the Caruncle, treatise of the -Fistulae in the fundament, out of Joh. Ardern, etc._ London, 1588. - -[146] MS. Harl. 2378:--No. 86 is: "Take lynsed or lynyn clothe and brene -it & do ye pouder in a clout, and bynd it to ye sore pintel." Also, "Take -linsed and stamp it and a lytel oyle of olyf and a lytl milk of a cow of a -color, and fry them togeder in a panne, and ley it about ye pyntel in a -clout." No. 87 is "for bolnyng of pyntel." No. 88 is "For ye kank' on a -manys pyntel." On p. 103 is another "For ye bolnyng of a manys yerde.... -Bind it alle abouten ye yerde, and it salle suage." On folio 19: "For ye -nebbe yt semeth leprous ... iii dayes it shall be hole." "For ye kanker" -might have meant cancer or chancre. The prescriptions in Moulton's _This -is the Myrour or Glasse of Helth_ (? 1540) correspond closely with these -in the above Harleian MS. The printed book gives one (cap. 63), "For a man -that is Lepre, and it lake in his legges and go upwarde." There is also a -prescription for "morphewe." - -[147] Nicolas Massa, in Luisini. - -[148] Freeman, _The Reign of William Rufus_. App. vol. II. p. 499. - -[149] _L. c._ V. 679, "Episcopus Herefordensis polipo -percutitur.--Episcopus Herefordensis turpissimo morbo videlicet morphea, -Deo percutiente, merito deformatur, qui totum regnum Angliae proditiose -dampnificavit;" and again V. 622. - -[150] _Compend. Med._ _Ed. cit._ p. 170. - -[151] _Lilium Med._ _Ed. cit._ p. 108. - -[152] Brassac, Art. "Elephantiasis" (p. 465) in _Dict. Encycl. des -Sciences Medicales_. - -[153] _Rosa Anglica._ Papiae, 1492. - -[154] That Baldwin IV.'s disease excited interest in him is clear from the -reference of William of Newburgh, who calls him (p. 242) "princeps -Christianus lepram corporis animi virtute exornans." - -[155] Chronicon de Lanercost (Bannatyne Club, p. 259): "Dominus autem -Robertus de Brus, quia factus fuerat leprosus, illa vice [anno 1327] cum -eis Angliam non intravit." The rubric on folio 228 of the MS. has -"leprosus moritur." - -[156] The original account is by Gascoigne, _Loci etc._ ed. Rogers, Oxon. -p. 228. - -[157] "Item matrimonium inter dominum regem et quandam nobilem mulierem -nequiter impedivit, dum clanculo significavit eidem mulieri et suo generi, -quod rex strabo et fatuus nequamque fuerat, et speciem leprae habere, -fallaxque fuerat et perjurus, imbellis plusquam mulier, in suos tantum -sacvientem, et prorsus inutilem complexibus alicujus ingenuae mulieris -asserendo." Matthew Paris, _Chron. Maj._, Rolls ed., III. 618-19. - -[158] _Chronicon Angliae_ in Twysden, col. 2600. - -[159] _Chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker_, edited by E. Maunde Thompson. -Oxford, 1889, p. 100. - -[160] Professor Robertson Smith has kindly written for me the following -note: "The later Jews were given to shorten proper names; and in the -Talmud we find the shortening _La'zar_ (with a guttural, which the Greeks -could not pronounce, between the _a_ and the _z_), for Eliezer or Eleazar. -[Greek: Lazaros] is simply _La'zar_ with a Greek ending, and occurs, as a -man's name, not only in the New Testament but in Josephus (_B. Jud._ V. -13, 7). This was quite understood by early readers of the Gospels; the -Syriac New Testament, translated from the Greek, restores the lost -guttural, and uses the Syriac form, as employed in _1 Macc._ viii. 17 to -render the Greek [Greek: Eleazaros]. Moreover the Latin and Greek -_onomastica_ explain Lazarus as meaning 'adjutus,' which shows that they -took it from (Hebrew) 'to help'--the second element in the compound -Eliezer. The etymology 'adjutus' (or the like) 'helped by God,' would no -doubt powerfully assist in the choice of the designation lazars (for -lepers). Suicer, in his _Thesaurus_, quotes a sermon of Theophanes, where -it is suggested that every poor man who needs help from those who have -means might be called a Lazarus." - -Hirsch (_Geog. and Hist. Path._ II. 3) says that the Arabic word for the -falling sickness comes from the same root (meaning "thrown to the ground") -as the Hebrew word "saraat," which is the term translated "leprosy" in -Leviticus xiii. and xiv. In Isaiah liii. 4, the Vulgate has "et nos -putavimus eum quasi leprosum," where the English Bible has "yet we did -esteem him stricken." - -[161] Roger of Howden. Edited by Stubbs. Rolls series, No. 51, vol. I. p. -110. Aelred, the chief collector of the miraculous cures by Edward the -Confessor, appears to have omitted this one. - -[162] Ailredi Abbatis Rievallensis _Genealogia Regum Anglorum_. In -Twysden's _Decem Scriptores_, col. 368. "Cum, inquit [David], adolescens -in curia regia [Anglica] servirem, nocte quadam in hospicio meo cum sociis -meis nescio quid agens, ad thalamum reginae ab ipsa vocatus accessi. Et -ecce domus plena leprosis, et regina in medio stans, deposito pallio, -lintheo se precinxit, et posita in pelvi aqua, coepit lavare pedes eorum, -et extergere, extersosque utrisque constringere manibus et devotissime -osculari. Cui ego: 'Quid agis,' inquam, 'O domina mea? Certe si rex sciret -ista, nunquam dignaretur os tuum, leprosorum pedum tabe pollutum, suis -labiis osculari.' Et illa surridens ait: 'Pedes,' inquit, 'Regis aeterni -quis nescit labiis regis morituri esse praeferendos? Ecce, ego idcirco -vocavi te, frater carissime, ut exemplo mei talia discas operari. Sumpta -proinde pelvi, fac quod me facere intueris.' Ad hanc vocem vehementer -expavi, et nullo modo id me pati posse respondi. Necdum enim sciebam -Dominum, nec revelatus fuerat mihi Spiritus ejus. Illa igitur coeptis -insistente, ego--mea culpa--ridens ad socios remeavi." - -[163] _Vita S. Hugonis Lincolnensis._ Rolls series, 39, p. 163-4. - -[164] The bishop left by his will 100 marks to be distributed "per domos -leprosorum" in his diocese and a like sum "per domos hospitales," and -three marks each to the leper-houses at Selwood and outside Bath and -Ilchester. _Hist. MSS. Commiss._ X. pt. 3, p. 186. - -[165] _Monumenta Franciscana._ Rolls series, No. 4. Introd. by Brewer, p. -xxiv. - -[166] William of Malmesbury, _Gesta pontificum_, Rolls ed., p. 72. - -[167] In 1574 it was found providing indoor relief for fifteen brethren -and fifteen sisters, and outdoor relief for as many more. - -[168] Roger of Wendover. Rolls ed. II. 265. - -[169] In the MS. of Matthew Paris's _Chronica Majora_ in the library of -Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, No. 26 in the Parker Collection, p. -220. The late Rev. S. S. Lewis, fellow and librarian of the College, who -most liberally had a fac-simile of the drawing made for me, would date it -a little before 1250. (Rolls edition, by Luard, II. 144.) - -[170] _Rotuli Chartarum_, 1199-1216. Charter of confirmation, 1204 (5 -Joh.) p. 117 b. - -[171] In the _Valor Ecclesiasticus_ of Henry VIII. its revenue is put at -L100. - -[172] The commanderies of the Knights of St Lazarus were numerous in every -province of France. For an enumeration of them see _Les Lepreux et les -Chevaliers de Saint Lazare de Jerusalem et de Notre Dame et de Mont -Carmel_. Par Eugene Vignat, Orleans, 1884, pp. 315-364. - -[173] _Joannis Sarisburiensis Opera omnia_, ed. Giles 1, 141 (letter to -Josselin, bishop of Salisbury). - -[174] "Vix seu raro inveniuntur tot leprosi volentes vitam ducere -observantiis obligatam ad dictum hospitale concurrentes." Walsingham, -_Gesta Abbatum_, Rolls ed. II. 484. - -[175] Matthew Paris, _Chron. Maj._ V. 452. - -[176] Walsingham, _Gesta Abbatum_, II. 401. - -[177] "The sisters of St James's were bound by no vows, and at this period -[1344] were not all, or even any of them, lepers; and in consequence a -place in the hospital was much sought after by needy dependents of the -Court." Report on MSS. of the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury, in _Hist. -MSS. Commission Reports_, IX. p. 87. - -[178] Dugdale's _History of Warwickshire_, p. 197. - -[179] On Nov. 24, 1200, king John signed at Lincoln letters of simple -protection to the _leprosi_ of St Bartholomew's, Oxford (_Rot. Chart. -1199-1216_, p. 99). - -[180] _Rotuli Hundredorum_, II. 359-60. The famous Stourbridge Fair -originally grew out of a right of market-toll granted in aid of the -leper-hospital. - -[181] The decrees of the Third Lateran Council are given by several -historians of the time, among others by William of Newburgh, pp. 206-223. - -[182] Roger of Howden, Rolls edition, II. 265. - -[183] William of Newburgh, Rolls edition, p. 437. - -[184] See the various charters and memorials in Surtees' _History of -Durham_. - -[185] Two of the larger houses for lepers not mentioned in the text were -St Nicholas's at Carlisle and the hospital at Bolton in Northumberland, -each with thirteen beds. - -[186] By collecting every reference to lepers or lazar-houses in Tanner's -_Notitia Monastica_ or in Dugdale's _Monasticon_ Sir J. Y. Simpson has -made out a table of some hundred leper-houses in Britain (_Edin. Med. and -Surg. Journ._ 1841 and 1842). Simpson's table has been added to by Miss -Lambert in the _Nineteenth Century_, Aug.-Sept. 1884, by the Rev. H. P. -Wright (_Leprosy_ etc. 1885), who says at the end of his long list: "There -were hundreds more," and by Mr R. C. Hope (_The Leper in England_, -Scarborough, 1891), whose list runs to 172. - -Perhaps the most remarkable development of that verbalist handling of the -matter has been reserved for a recent medical writer, who has constructed, -from the conventional list of leper-hospitals, a map of the _geographical -distribution of leprosy_ in medieval Britain. (_British Medical Journal_, -March 1, 1890, p. 466.) - -[187] The Lock was doubtless the house of the "Leprosi apud Bermondsey" -who are designated in the Royal Charter of 1 Hen. IV. (1399) as -recipients, along with the _leprosi_ of Westminster (St James's), of "five -or six thousand pounds." (_Rotuli Chartarum_, 1 Hen. IV.) - -[188] Beckett, _Phil. Trans._, vol. 31, p. 60. - -[189] Stow, _Survey of London_, ed. of 1890, p. 437. - -[190] Beckett, _l. c._ The Knightsbridge house was earlier. See next note. - -[191] _Survey of London_, pop. ed. p. 436. Bequests to lepers occur in -various wills of London citizens, in Dr Sharpe's _Calendar of Wills_, vol. -II. Lond. 1890. In a will dated 21 April, 1349, the bequest is to "the -poor lazars without Southwerkebarre and at Hakeney" (p. 3). On 1 July, -1371, another bequeaths money to "the three colleges of lepers near -London, viz. at _le loke_, at St Giles de Holbourne, and at Hakeney" (p. -147). On 7 April, 1396, bequests are made to "the lepers at le loke near -Seynt Georges barre, of St Giles without Holbournebarre, and le meselcotes -de Haconey" (p. 341). The "lazar house at Knyghtbrigge" appears, for the -first time, in a will dated 21 Feb. 1485, along with "the sick people in -the lazercotes next about London" (p. 589). - -[192] _Accounts of the Lord High-Treasurer of Scotland._ Rolls series I. -1473-1498, pp. 337, 356, 361, 378, 386. - -[193] These are all the so-called "medieval leper-hospitals" collected by -Belcher (_Dubl. Quart. Journ. of Med. Sc._ 1868, August, p. 36) chiefly -from Archdall's _Monasticon Hibernicum_. He points out that the very early -references to leprosy in the _Annals of the Four Masters_ included various -kinds of cutaneous maladies. - -[194] _Chronicon Abbatiae Rameseiensis._ Rolls series, 1886, p. 157. The -chronicler has nothing farther to say as to the cause of the leprosy, than -the opinion of "a certain philosopher," that whatever turns us from health -to the vices of disease acts by the weight of too much blood, by -superfluous heat, by humours exuding in excess, or by the spirits flowing -with unwonted laxity through silent passages. - -[195] Eadmer, _Vita S. Anselmi_, Rolls edit., p. 355. - -[196] Walsingham, _Gesta Abbatum_, Rolls edit. II. Appendix C. p. 503. - -[197] Brassac, Art. "Elephantiasis," in _Dict. Encycl. des Sc. Med._ p. -475, says: "Il y avait aussi des vagabonds et des paresseux qui, sans -nulle crainte de la contagion, et desireux de vivre sans rien faire, -simulaient la lepre pour etre admis aux leproseries. On y trouvait encore -des personnes qui s'imposaient une reclusion perpetuelle pour vivre avec -les lepreux et faire leur salut par une vie de soumission aux regles de -l'Eglise." - -[198] The ordinance is translated in full from the City archives by H. T. -Riley, _London in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries_, pp. -230-231. The following is the preamble of it:-- - -"Edward, by the grace of God, etc. Forasmuch as we have been given to -understand that many persons, as well of the city aforesaid as others -coming to the said city, being smitten with the blemish of leprosy, do -publicly dwell among the other citizens and sound persons, and there -continually abide and do not hesitate to communicate with them, as well in -public places as in private; and that some of them, endeavouring to -contaminate others with that abominable blemish (that so, to their own -wretched solace, they may have the more fellows in suffering,) as well in -the way of mutual communications, and by the contagion of their polluted -breath, as by carnal intercourse with women in stews and other secret -places, detestably frequenting the same, do so taint persons who are -sound, both male and female, to the great injury of the people dwelling in -the city aforesaid, and the manifest peril of other persons to the same -city resorting:--We" etc. - -[199] Riley, p. 384. - -[200] _Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence._ Early Eng. Text Soc. - -[201] Riley, p. 365. - -[202] Rymer's _Foedera_, v. pt. 2, p. 166. - -[203] Wharton's _Anglia Sacra_, 11. Praef. p. 32. - -[204] The expression "leprosa Sodomorum" occurs in a Latin poem from a -medieval MS. found in Switzerland. The verses are printed in full by -Hensler, _Geschichte der Lustseuche_, p. 307. - -[205] These and other particulars relating to lepers in Scotland are given -in Simpson's _Antiquarian Notices of Leprosy in Scotland and England_ -(_Edin. Med. and Surg. Journ._ Oct. 1841, Jan. and April 1842), a series -of excellent papers which have been for many years the source of most that -has been written of medieval leprosy in this country. - -[206] Letter to Barrington, 8 January, 1778. - -[207] These numbers seem to stand for the contents of the larders in all -the various manors of De Spenser. - -[208] Mr Jonathan Hutchinson has been adding, year after year, to the -evidence that semi-putrid fish, eaten in that state by preference or of -necessity, is the chief cause of modern leprosy, and he has successfully -met many of the apparent exceptions. Norway has had leprosy in some -provinces for centuries; and it is significant that William of Malmesbury, -referring to those who went on the first Crusade, says: "Scotus -familiaritatem pulicum reliquit, Noricus cruditatem piscium." (_Gesta -Regum_, Eng. Hist. Soc. II. 533.) - -[209] In his section _De preservatione a lepra_ (p. 345) Gilbert advises -to avoid, among other things, all salted fish and meat, and dried bacon. - -[210] Acts of Robert III. in the _Regiam Majestatem_, p. 414 (quoted by -Simpson, _Ed. Med. and Surg. Journ._ vol. 57, p. 416). - -[211] Dr Gilbert Skene, of Aberdeen, and afterwards of Edinburgh, in his -book on the plague (1568), has an incidental remark about "evil and -corrupt meats" which may be taken in a literal sense: "As we see dailie -the pure man subject to sic calamitie nor the potent, quha are constrynit -be povertie to eit evill and corrupte meittis, and diseis is contractit, -heir of us callit pandemiall." (Bannatyne Club edition, p. 6.) - -[212] Higden's _Polychronicon_. Edited for the Rolls series by Babington -and Lumby, vol. VIII. - -[213] _The Annals of Ireland._ By Friar John Clyn, of the Convent of -Friars Minor, Kilkenny, and Thady Dowling, Chancellor of Leighlin. Edited -from the MSS. etc. by R. Butler, Dean of Clonmacnois. Dublin, 1849 (Irish -Archaeological Society). The last entry by Clyn himself appears to be the -words "magna karistia" etc., under 1349. There is added "Videtur quod -author hic obiit;" and then two entries of pestilence made in 1375 in -another hand. - -[214] Henricus de Knighton, _Chronicon Angliae_, in Twysden's _Decem -Script. Angl._ col. 2598 _et seq._ An edition of Knighton's _Chronicle_, -by Lumby, is in progress for the Rolls series. - -[215] _Chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker._ Edited by E. Maunde Thompson, -Oxford, 1889. - -[216] Robertus de Avesbury, _Historia de Mirabilibus Gestis Regis Ed. -III._, Oxon. 1720. Also in the Rolls series. Edited by E. Maunde Thompson. - -[217] _Eulogium Historiarum._ Rolls series, No. 9. Edited by Haydon, III. -213. - -[218] _Itineraria Symonis Simeonis et Willelmi de Worcestre._ Edited by -Nasmith from the MSS. in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. -Cantab. 1778, p. 113: "parum ante nativitatem Domini intravit villam -Bodminiae, ubi mortui fuerunt circa mille quingentos per estimacionem." - -[219] Histor. MSS. Commission, vi. 475. - -[220] Wilkins, _Concilia_ II. 745: "Contagium pestilentiae moderni -temporis undique se dilatans etc." - -[221] Rymer's _Foedera_, V. 655:--"Quia tamen subita plaga Pestilentiae -Mortalis in loco praedicto et aliis partibus circumvicinis adeo indies -invalescit, quod de securo accessu Hominum ad locum illum formidatur -admodum hiis diebus." - -[222] _Ibid._--"Et quia dicta Pestilentia Mortalis in dicto loco -Westmonasteriensi ac in civitate Londoniae, ac alis locis circumvicinis, -gravius solito invalescit (quod dolenter referimus) per quod accessus -Magnatum et aliorum nostrorum Fidelium ad dictum locum nimis periculosus -foret," &c. This second prorogation was _sine die_. - -[223] _Calendar of Wills_ (Husting Court, London), ed. Sharpe, Lond. 1889, -I. 506-624. - -[224] Clyn. But his account for Kilkenny, where he lived, makes the -epidemic either earlier or later there than at Dublin: "Ista pestilencia -apud Kilkenniam in XL{a} invaluit; nam VIto die Marcii viii fratres -predicatores infra diem Natalem obierunt," the Lent referred to being -either that of 1349 or of 1350. The difficulty about assigning the landing -of the infection near Dublin in the beginning of August to the year 1348 -is that the English importation had only then taken place. But of course -Ireland may have got it direct from abroad. - -[225] _Op. cit._ p. 98: "Torserunt illos apostemata e diversis partibus -corporis subito irrumpencia, tam dura et sicca quod ab illis decisis vix -liquor emanavit; a quibus multi per incisionem aut per longam pacienciam -evaserunt. Alii habuerunt pustulos parvos nigros per totam corporis cutem -conspersos, a quibus paucissimi, immo vix aliquis, vitae et sanitati -resilierunt." - -[226] "Nam multi ex anthrace et ex apostematibus, et pustulis quae -creverunt in tibiis et sub asellis, alii ex passione capitis, et quasi in -frenesim versi, alii spuendo sanguinem, moriebantur," p. 36. - -[227] _A Treatise faithfully and plainely declaring the way of preventing, -preserving from and curing that most fearfull I and contagious disease -called the Plague. With the Pestilential Feaver and other the fearful -symptomes and accidents incident thereto._ By John Woodall, surgeon to St -Bartholomew's Hospital, &c. London, 1639. - -[228] Robertus de Avesbury, Rolls ed., p. 177. - -[229] _Eulogium Historiarum._ Rolls ser. No. 9, III. 213. - -[230] Rymer's _Foedera_, V. 668. - -[231] "Pro quorum defectu [referring to the fugitive villeins] mulieres et -parvuli invise missi sunt ad carucas et ad plaustra fuganda." _Eulogium._ -Rolls ed. III. 214. - -[232] Nichols, _History Of Leicestershire_, I. 534. - -[233] Nichols, _l. c._ - -[234] For a series of years the burials in the St Martin's register are as -follow: - - 1610 82 - 1611 128 - 1612 39 - 1613 25 - 1614 34 - 1615 60 - 1616 41 - 1617 31 - 1618 37 - 1619 28 - 1620 25 - 1621 43 - 1622 27 - 1623 37 - 1624 24. - -[235] _History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford._ Ed. Gutch I. -449. He says also: "The school doors were shut, colleges and halls -relinquished, and none scarce left to keep possession or make up a -competent number to bury the dead." The rest of his account of the Black -Death is copied from Le Baker's Chronicle of Osney. - -[236] _Itinerarium_, _l. c._ - -[237] Stow's _Survey_. "Portsoken Ward." - -[238] "Lying without the walls on the north part of the city between the -land of the abbot of Westminster and the prior of St John of Jerusalem." -French Chronicle of London (p. 56), as quoted by Stubbs, in preface (p. -lxxxi) to _Annales Londonienses_, Rolls series, No. 76. - -[239] Robertus de Avesbury, _Historia Edwardi III._ Rolls ed. p. 407. -"Quotidie multos vita privavit, et in tantum excrevit quod a festo -Purificationis usque post Pascha, in novo tunc facto cimiterio juxta -Smithfeld plus quam cc corpora defunctorum, praeter corpora quae in aliis -cimiteriis civitatis ejusdem sepeliebantur, quasi diebus singulis sepulta -fuerunt.... In festo Pentecostes cessavit Londoniis." - -[240] Stow's _Memoranda_. Camden Soc., 1880. - -[241] Camden's _Britannia_, ed. Gough, II. 9. - -[242] Rickman, _Abstract of the Population Returns of 1831_. London, 1832. -Introduction, p. 11. - -[243] Stow's _Survey_, p. 392. - -[244] The population of London is stated on good authority, that of its -archdeacon, in a letter to Pope Innocent III. (_Petri Blessensis Opera -omnia_, ed. Giles, vol. II. p. 85), to have been 40,000 about the years -1190-1200, a period of great expansion or activity. By the usual reckoning -of the poll-tax in 1377 the population would have been 44,770; and in the -year 1349 it was probably not far from those numbers. This matter comes up -again in the next chapter. - -[245] _Memorials of London in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries_, edited -from the Archives of the City, A.D. 1246-1419, by H. T. Riley. Lond. 1868, -p. 219. - -[246] _Ibid._, pp. 239-40. - -[247] Blomefield, _History of Norfolk_, III. 93. - -[248] Peter of Blois, who as archdeacon of London was in a position to -know, gives in his letter to the pope the number of parish churches in the -City at 120. - -[249] Popham, "Subsidy Roll of 51 Edward III.," in _Archaeologia_, VII. -(1785) p. 337. - -[250] _Itineraria, et cet._ ed. Nasmith, Cantab. 1778, p. 344. See also -Weever, _Funeral Monuments_, p. 862, according to whom the record of the -great mortality was on a chronological table hanging up in the church. - -[251] Walsingham, _Gesta Abbatum_. Rolls ed. II. 370. Abbot Michael, he -says, "tactus est communi incommodo inter primos de suis monachis qui illo -letali morbo percussi sunt." - -[252] Th. Stubbs' _Chronicle of York_ in Twysden, col. 1732. - -[253] _Chronicon Monasterii de Melsa_, Rolls ed. III. 36. - -[254] Rymer's _Foedera_. - -[255] Lowth, _Life of William of Wykeham_, p. 93, with a ref. to Regist. -Edyngdon, pt. 1. fol. 49. - -[256] Bentham, _Hist. of Ely_. - -[257] Clyn. - -[258] Jessopp, "The Black Death in East Anglia" in _Nineteenth Century_, -April 1885, p. 602. The sources of these interesting particulars are not -given. - -[259] Peck's _Antiquarian Annals of Stamford_, Bk. XI. p. 47. - -[260] _Hist. MSS. Commission's Reports_, IX. p. 127: "Hi quatuor tantum -moriebantur de pestilencia." The reporter on the MSS. of the Dean and -Chapter conjectures that the monastery may have owed its comparative -immunity to the fact that it was supplied with water brought by closed -pipes from the hills on the north-east of the city. - -[261] Walsingham, _Gesta Abbatum_. - -[262] Knighton. - -[263] _History of Norfolk_, III. 94. - -[264] Owen and Blakeway, _History of Shrewsbury_, I. 166:--"The average -number of institutions to benefices on vacancies by death in the -archdeaconry of Salop, for ten years before 1349, and ten years after, is -one and a half per annum, or fifteen in the whole; in that year alone the -number of institutions on vacancies by death is twenty-nine, besides other -institutions the cause of whose vacancies is not specified and therefore -may also have been the same." - -[265] F. Seebohm, "The Black Death and its Place in English History," -_Fortnightly Review_, Sept. 1 and 15, 1865:--"In the library of the Dean -and Chapter, at York Minster, are voluminous MSS., known by the name of -_Torr's MSS._, which contain the clergy list of every parish in the -diocese of York, and which, in by far the greater number of instances, -state not only the date of each vacancy, but whether it was caused by -death, resignation or otherwise of the incumbent." _L. c._ p. 150. - -[266] Jessopp, "The Black Death in East Anglia," _Nineteenth Century_, -April 1885, pp. 600-602. This author remarks that the evidence from manor -court rolls and from the Institution Books of the clergy "has hardly -received any attention hitherto, its very existence being entirely -overlooked, nay, not even suspected." - -[267] G. Poulett Scrope, M.P., F.R.S., _The Manor and Barony of Castle -Combe_. London, 1852, p. 168. - -[268] The court rolls of the Manor of Snitterton, Norfolk, in the British -Museum. Professor Maitland has lately edited some of the earliest rolls of -manor courts for the Selden Society. - -[269] G. Poulett Scrope, _op. cit._ pp. 151-2. - -[270] F. Seebohm, _The English Village Community_, London, 1882. The Manor -Court Rolls of Winslow, upon which Mr Seebohm bases his work, are in the -library of the University of Cambridge. - -[271] Rev. Augustus Jessopp, D.D. "The Black Death in East Anglia," -_Nineteenth Century_, Dec. 1884. - -[272] Under the heading "The Black Death in Lancashire," Mr A. G. Little -has printed, with remarks, in the _English Historical Review_, July, 1890, -p. 524, the data submitted to a jury of eighteen who had been empannelled -to settle a dispute between the archdeacon of Richmond and Adam de -Kirkham, dean of Amounderness, touching the account rendered by the dean, -as proctor for the archdeacon, of fees received for instituting to vacant -livings, for probates of wills, and for administration of the goods of -intestates. The dean's account to the archdeacon is said to run "from the -Feast of the Nativity of our Lady [8 September] in the year of our Lord -1349 unto the eleventh day of January next following;" but it may not -imply, and almost certainly does not, that the vacancies in benefices, the -probates and the letters of administration, or the corresponding deaths of -individuals, fell between those dates. The archdeacon alleges what fees -Adam de Kirkham had received, but had not accounted for, and the jury find -what Adam did actually receive. Nine benefices of one kind or another are -mentioned as vacant, three of them twice. The numbers said to have died in -the several parishes, with the number of wills and of intestate estates, I -have extracted from the data and tabulated as follows: - - +--------------------------------------------------------------+ - | Parish | Men & Women | With wills | Intestate | - | | dead | (above 100 sh.) | (above 100 sh.) | - |------------|-------------|-----------------|-----------------| - | Preston | 3000 | 300 | 200 | - | Kirkham | 3000 | -- | 100 | - | Pulton | 800 | -- | 40 | - | Lancaster | 3000 | 400 | 80 | - | Garestang | 2000 | 400 | 140 | - | Cokram | 1000 | 300 | 60 | - | Ribchestre | [illegible] | 70 | 40 | - | Lytham | 140 | 80 | 80 | - | St Michel | 80 | 50 | 40 | - | Pulton | 60 | 40 | 20 | - +--------------------------------------------------------------+ - -Of the alleged 300 who died in Preston parish, leaving wills, five married -couples are named, the probate fees being respectively 1/2 marc, 6 sh., 40 -d., 4 sh., and 40 d. The archdeacon's whole claim for the 300 was 20 -marcs, which the jury reduced to 10 pounds. Of the alleged 200 intestates -in the same parish, two married couples, one woman, and "Jakke o [thorn]e hil" -are named. In the parish of Garstang, the executors of 6 deceased are -named, whose probate fees in all amounted to 16 sh. 10 d., the whole claim -of the archdeacon for 400 deceased leaving wills being L10, and the award -of the jury 40 sh. In the parish of Kirkham, on a claim of 20 marcs for -probate fees not accounted for, "the jury say that he received L4;" on a -claim of L10 for quittance, the jury say 20 sh. This was a parish in which -3000 are said to have died, the number of wills being not stated. The -numbers had obviously been put in for a forensic purpose, and are, of -course, not even approximately correct for the actual mortality, or the -actual number of wills proved, or of letters of administration granted. -The awards of the jury amounted in all to L48. 10_s._ See also _Eng. Hist. -Review_, Jan. 1891. - -[273] Thorold Rogers, _History of Agriculture and Prices_, I. 296-7. - -[274] Cussan's _Hertfordshire_, vol. I. Hundred of Odsey, p. 37. - -[275] _Sat. Rev._ 16 Jan. 1886, p. 82. - -[276] Jessopp, _l. c._ April 1885, p. 611-12. - -[277] The priory of Christ Church, Canterbury, lost the following live -stock in the murrain of 1349: oxen, 757, cows and calves, 511, sheep, -4585. (_Hist. MSS. Commission_, V. 444.) - -[278] The author of the _Eulogium_, who wrote not later than 1367, and is -for his own period an authority like Knighton, gives the following prices: -wheat, 12 pence a quarter, barley 9 pence, beans 8 pence; a good horse 16 -shillings (used to be 40 sh.), a large ox 40 pence, a good cow 2 sh. or 18 -pence. Of the scarcity of servants he says: "Pro quorum defectu mulieres -et parvuli invise missi sunt ad carucas et ad plaustra fuganda." - -[279] "The English Manor;" two articles in the _Saturday Review_, 9th and -16th Jan. 1886, p. 82 [by Professor Sir Frederick Pollock], the sources of -information being as yet unpublished. He says: "The prospect of better -terms brought in new tenants." - -[280] Stubbs, _Constitutional History of England_, 1875, II. 434. Hoeniger, -dealing with the German evidence of the Black Death, concludes that the -great mortality was almost without significance for the political course -of affairs; that the great loss of life was unable to check the revival of -trade and industry which had already begun or to retard the splendid -development of the German free towns; that the low state of morals -belonged to the period and was no worse after the epidemic than before; -that no new impulse was given or point of view brought out, unless, -perhaps, the idea of sanitary regulation; and that the scarcity of labour -was merely an incident to be taken advantage of in the struggle against -the existing order which was already going on. (_Der schwarze Tod in -Deutschland._ Berlin, 1882, p. 133.) - -[281] Richter, _Geschichte der Medicin in Russland_, I. 215. - -[282] _Histoire des Huns_, V. 223-4. - -[283] _Ib._ p. 226, note. - -[284] _Der schwarze Tod im vierzehnten Jahrhundert_, Berlin, 1832. Engl. -Transl. by Babington, Lond. 1833. This well-known work presents the more -picturesque aspects of the Black Death in various countries, without -thoroughness for any. England has a large space in the book; but the -author has not gone for his information farther than the chapter on the -Black Death in Barnes's _Life of Edward III._ - -[285] Printed in Haeser's _Archiv fuer die gesammte Medicin_, 1842, II. pp. -26-59; and reprinted in his _Geschichte der Med. u. epid. Krankheiten_, -III. 157, 3d ed., Jena, 1882. - -[286] _Geschichte der Medicin_, Bd. III. "Epidemische Krankheiten." Jena, -1882, p. 139. He gives point to this phrase by an account of the local -plagues of recent times in Gujerat and Kumaon. - -[287] His essay is one of the Escurial MSS., and has been printed, with a -German translation, by M. H. Mueller, in the _Sitzungsberichte der -Muenchener Akad. der Wissensch_. 1863. - -[288] _Voyages d'Ibn Batoutah_ in 4 vols., for the Societe Asiatique, -Paris, 1853, I. 227-9, and IV. 309. - -[289] See Sir Henry Yule's _Cathay and the Way Thither_ (2 vols. Hakluyt -Society) and his edition of _The Book of Marco Polo_, for numerous -particulars of the overland trade to China by the northern parallels, in -the 14th century. - -[290] The stages, distances, expenses, &c. from Tana to Peking are given -in Pegolotti's mercantile handbook (written about 1340), in Yule's _Cathay -and the Way Thither_, vol. II. - -[291] C. A. Gordon, M.D. in _Reports of Med. Officers to the Imperial -Maritime Customs of China_, London, 1884. - -[292] Gaubil, _Histoire de Gentchiscan_, Paris, 1739. - -[293] _The Famine in China_, London, 1878--a translation of a Chinese -appeal for charity, with illustrations. - -[294] Parliamentary Papers, 1878, China, No. 4. - -[295] In Yule's _Cathay and the Way Thither_ (Hakluyt Society), I. 156. - -[296] Etienne Pariset, _Causes de la Peste_. Paris, 1837. - -[297] Volney, _Voyages en Syrie et en Egypte_. Paris, 1792. - -[298] Cornelius de Pauw, _Philosophical Reflections on the Egyptians and -Chinese_, Engl. Transl. Lond. 1795, 2 vols. - -[299] It is noteworthy that Herodotus represents the question of disposal -of the dead as having been raised by the Egyptians: they decided in favour -of embalming and rock entombment, as against cremation or burial, the -reason given for the preference being that fire was "a savage beast," in -the one case, while in the other case, the devouring beast was the worm. -Bk. III. Sec. 16. - -[300] Curiously enough it was among the Christians of Egypt that the -controversy as to the _corruptibles_ and the _incorruptibles_ raged most -furiously. See Gibbon. - -[301] Clot Bey, _Peste en Egypte_. Paris, 1840. - -[302] Benoit de Maillet, _Description de l'Egypte_. Paris, 1735, p. 281. -See also Wilkinson, _Ancient Egyptians_, III. 456, 465. - -[303] Justus Doolittle, _Social Life of the Chinese_, 2 vols. New York, -1867, I. 33, 198, 213. - -[304] T. T. Cooper, _Travels of a Pioneer of Commerce_, Lond. 1871, p. 23, -33. - -[305] This is one of the remarks in Dr Gilbert Skene's treatise on the -Plague, Edinburgh, 1568 (reprinted for the Bannatyne Club, 1840):--Among -the causes are "deid cariounis unbureit, in speciale of mankynd, quhilkis -be similitude of nature is maist nocent to man, as everie brutall is maist -infectand and pestilentiall to thair awin kynd," p. 6. - -[306] A. von Kremer, "Ueber die grossen Seuchen des Orients nach -arabischen Quellen." _Sitzungsber. der Wien. Akad._, Philos.-histor. -Classe, Bd. 96 (1880), p. 69. - -[307] Ch. M. Doughty, _Travels in Arabia Deserta_, 2 vols. Cambridge, -1888. - -[308] Communicated to Herr von Kremer (_l. c._) by Nury Effendi, who -visited Assir, and wrote a report preserved in MS. in the Archives at -Constantinople. - -[309] "Report regarding Mahamurree in Kumaon and Garhwal in 1851-52." By -F. Pearson and Mookerjee. Agra, 1852 (Extracts in _Ind. Annals of Med. -Sc._, I. 358). Also extracts (_Ib._) from Renny's Report, 1851. - -[310] Planck, _Ninth Report of the Sanitary Commissioner, N. W. Prov._ -Allahabad, 1877, pp. 40-95. (Extracts, p. 39, of _Papers relating to the -Plague, Parl. Papers_, 1879.) - -[311] Baber, in _Parliamentary Papers_, 1878, "China." No. 6. Rocher -(_Province Chinoise de Yun-nan_) quoted, without the reference, in _Med. -Reports of Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs_, No. 15, 1878, Shanghai, p. -25. - -[312] J. H. Lowry, _Med. Rep. Chinese Mar. Customs_, No. 24, 1882, p. 27. - -[313] D. J. Macgowan, _Ib._ 1882. Report for Wenchow. - -[314] Thomas Whyte, "Report on the Disease which prevailed in Kattywar, -etc. in 1819-20." _Trans. Med. Phys. Soc. Bombay_, I. 155. Bombay, 1838. - -[315] I have curtailed the evidence from Gujerat; it will be found at -large in the following writers: Gilder, _Bombay Med. Trans._ I. 193; -McAdam, _ib._ 183; F. Forbes, _ib._ II. |I, and Thesis on Plague, Edin. -1840; Glen, _Quart. Journ. Cal. Med. Soc._ I. 433; Ranken, _Report on Pali -Plague_, Calcutta, 1838; and Whyte, as above. - -[316] L. Arnaud, _Peste de Benghazi_, Constantinople, 1875; _Essai sur la -Peste_, Paris, 1888; _Une Mission pour la Peste_, Paris, 1888. - -[317] T. Farquhar, M.D., "Typhus Fever in the Eusofzai," _Ind. Annals of -Med. Sc._ II. 504; R. Lyell, M.D., "Fever of the Yusufzai Valley," _Ib._ -II. p. 16. - -[318] Surgeon-General J. Murray, M.D., at Epidemiological Society, 11 May, -1878. _Med. Times and Gaz._ I. 1878, p. 597. - -[319] Alex. Rittmann, _Chronik der Pest._ Bruenn, 1879. - -[320] Thomas Lodge, _Treatise of the Plague_, Lond. 1603, chap. III. -Skene, in his Edinburgh essay on plague in 1568, gives as a sign of -impending plague the moles and "serpents" leaving their holes: "As when -the moudewart and serpent leavis the eird, beand molestit be the vapore -contenit within the bowells of the samin." He adds what agrees still -farther with modern experience in Yun-nan: "If the domesticall fowls -become pestilential, it is ane signe of maist dangerous pest to follow." -(Bannatyne Club ed. p. 9). - -[321] The writer of the article "Peste" in the _Dict. Encycl. des Sc. -Med._, Dr Mahe, inclines on the whole to the view that the poison of -plague is somehow related to cadaveric products: "Parmi ces accusations -d'insalubrite publique, il en est une qui repose sur un objectif plus -positif en apparance" viz. the "miasme des cadavres." - -[322] Sir Tobie Matthews' _Letters_. Lond. 1660, p. 110. - -[323] _Epist. de rebus familiar._ Lib. viii. epist. 7. The citation of -these contemporary illustrations of the Black Death was begun in the last -century by Sprengel (_Beitraege_, &c., p. 37). - -[324] _Foedera_, III. 184; it was renewed on 30th June for a year longer. - -[325] Avesbury. - -[326] _Foedera_, III. 192. - -[327] _Ib._ 193. - -[328] _Ib._ 200, 201. - -[329] Le Baker's _Chronicle of Osney_. Avesbury. - -[330] _Foedera_, III. 221. - -[331] Avesbury, Rolls ed. 425. - -[332] Blomefield (_Hist. of Norfolk_, III.) says that the writ to Norwich -in 1355 was for 120 men-at-arms to be sent to Portsmouth by Sunday in -mid-Lent. - -[333] Avesbury, pp. 427-8. - -[334] _Ib._ p. 425. - -[335] _Ib._ p. 461. - -[336] Avesbury, p. 431. - -[337] Thorold Rogers, _Hist. of Agric. and Prices_, I. 367, "according to -an account quoted by Misselden in his _Circle of Commerce_." The sack of -wool contained 52 cloves of 7 lbs. each, or 364 lbs. It appears from a -statute of 5 Ric. II. that 240 wool-fells were equivalent, for duty, to -one sack of wool. In Rogers' tables, the wool-fell is usually priced at -about the value of 1-1/2 lbs. of wool, which was at the same time about -the average clip of a sheep. The present average clip would be at least -four times as much. The colonial bale of wool is of the same weight as the -medieval sack, but would represent 40 to 60 fleeces, instead of about 240. -At the smallest of the estimates in the text, the wool of 7,680,000 sheep -would have been exported in a year. Avesbury's estimate would mean an -annual export to foreign countries of the clip of about 24,000,000 sheep. -The average price of a sack of wool just before the Black Death was about -L4 in money of the time; the period immediately following the plague was -one of low prices; but from 1364 to 1380, the price was uniformly high. - -[338] _Foedera_, III. 186. - -[339] _Ib._ III. 191. - -[340] Jessopp (_l. c._) giving a general reference to the _Foedera_, and -probably having the Sandwich letter in view, says there was "mad, -unreasoning, insensate panic among well-to-do classes--the trader and the -moneyed man, the _bourgeoisie_ of the towns," and "a stampede," -(presumably to foreign parts). But the mortality was all over by 1st -December, 1349; and the exodus, whatever motive it may have had, was -almost certainly deliberate. - -[341] _Foedera_, III. 198. - -[342] The last clause of the ordinance implies that not only the labourers -but also the employers of labour were taking the natural advantage of the -situation. There appears to be some particular evidence of this for -Bristol (Rev. W. Hunt, _Bristol_, p. 77): the masters in various crafts -and trades were so reduced in numbers that the survivors could charge what -they pleased. Thus, the attempt to coerce labourers and skilled workmen -was a one-sided affair; although, in practice, it related mostly to -farm-labour, where the one-sidedness did not appear. - -[343] _Foedera_, III. 210. - -[344] _Rot. Parl._ II. 225. - -[345] This was the first parliamentary Statute of Labourers (25 Ed. III. -cap 2). The king's ordinance of 18th June, 1350 (re-issued for Suffolk and -Lindsey on 18th Nov.), is usually reckoned the first Statute of Labourers, -and is invariably assigned to the 23rd year of Edward III., being so -entered in the _Statutes of the Realm_. It is clear, however, from the -text of the ordinance in the _Foedera_ that it belongs to the 24th of -Edward III., its exact date being 18th June, 1350. Longman, in his -_History of the Life and Times of Edward III._, correctly states in one -place (I. 309) that the ordinance of 18th June, 1350, was "the first -step," but on the very next page, after stating that the ordinance failed, -he proceeds, according to the usual chronology of 23 Ed. III. and 25 Ed. -III., to say that "therefore, two years afterwards," the statute of 25 Ed. -III. was made in Parliament. The interval was only some eight months. - -[346] _Rot. Parl._ II. 234. - -[347] Knighton, in Twysden's _Decem Scriptores_, _l. c._ - -[348] Seebohm, _The English Village Community_. Chapter I. - -[349] The Statute of Labourers was re-enacted with increased stringency -six years after (31 Ed. III.), and again in 1360 and 1368. All the labour -statutes were confirmed in the 12th year of Richard II. (cap. 34). -Legislative attempts of the same kind continued to be made as late as the -5th of Elizabeth (1562-3), with particular reference to sturdy beggars. -See copious extracts from the Statutes in Sir George Nicholls's _History -of the English Poor Law_, vol. I. Lond. 1854. "An Act for regulating -Journeymen Tailors" was made in 7 Geo. I. (cap. 13). - -[350] "There is no trace of the villenage described in Glanville and -Bracton, among the tenants of a manor 500 years ago. All customary -services were commutable for money payments; all villein tenants were -secure in the possession of their lands; and the only distinction between -socage and villein occupation lay in the liberation of the former from -certain degrading incidents which affected the latter." Thorold Rogers, -"Effects of the Black Death, &c." _Fort. Rev._ III. (1865) p. 196. - -[351] Seebohm, _The English Village Community_. Lond. 1882. Chapter I. - -[352] Seebohm, p. 31. Such attempts by landowners, to go back to personal -service from their villein tenants, appear to have become more systematic -in the generation following, and to have been a cause of the Peasants' -Rebellion in 1381. See v. Oschenkowski, _England's wirthschaftliche -Entwickelung_, Jena, 1879, confirming the opinion of Thorold Rogers. - -[353] Smith, _Lives of the Berkeleys_, p. 128: "in 24 Edward III." (Cited -by Denton, _England in the 15th Century_.) - -[354] Morant, _Hist. of Essex_. - -[355] Niebuhr, _Lectures on Ancient History_. Engl. transl. London, 1852, -II., p. 53. - -[356] _Eulogium Historiarum._ Rolls ed. III. 230. - -[357] _Loci e Libro Veritatum_, ed. Rogers. Oxon. 1880, p. 202; and, from -Gascoigne's MS., in Anthony Wood, _Hist. and Antiq. Univ. Oxford_, Ed. -Gutch, I. 451: "What I shall farther observe is that before it began there -were but few complaints among the people, and few pleas; as also few -Legists in England, and very few at Oxford." - -[358] _Manor and Barony of Castle Combe_, sub anno 1361. - -[359] Owen and Blakeway, _op. cit._ I. 165. - -[360] Clarkson's _History of Richmond_. Richmond, 1821 (authority not -quoted). - -[361] Hailstone, _History of Bottisham and the Priory of Anglesey_. Camb. -1873. (Transact. Camb. Antiq. Soc. 8vo. series, vol. XIV.) - -[362] Cited by Jessopp, _l. c._ - -[363] See p. 141. - -[364] Clutterbuck, _History of Hertfordshire_. - -[365] Seebohm, for the Manor of Winslow, _op. cit._, p. 34. - -[366] Thorold Rogers, _Fort. Rev._ III. (1865), p. 196. In his _History of -Agriculture and Prices_, IV., the same learned and sagacious student of -English developments thus sums up the agrarian consequences of the Black -Death:--"The indirect effects of this great event were even more -remarkable. The great landowner ceases to carry on agriculture with his -own capital, and farmers' rents of a fixed and almost invariable amount -take the place of the lord's cultivation by bailiffs. Attempts were made -for varying periods of time to continue the old system, especially by -corporations. It is possible that the system of stock and land leasing, -which became very general after the change commenced, may have been -suggested by the hope that the old state of things might be restored.... -In the end all the great landowners conformed to the inevitable change, -and let their land on short leases, and as a rule at low and almost fixed -rents, to capitalist farmers." - -[367] Thorold Rogers, _op. cit._, I. 376. - -[368] _Rot. Parl._, II. 260. a. - -[369] Seebohm, _l. c._ _Fort. Rev._, II. (1865), p. 157. - -[370] Blomefield, III. _sub anno_. - -[371] Blomefield, III. _sub anno_. - -[372] Camden's _Britannia_. Gough's ed. II. 9. - -[373] _Hist. MSS. Commission_, VI. 299. Register of Ely Priory, in Lord -Leconfield's MSS. - -[374] Seebohm, "The Black Death and its Place in English History." _Fort. -Rev._ II. (1865), p. 278. - -[375] These and other labour-statutes are collected in _A History of the -English Poor Law_, by Sir George Nicholls, 2 vols. London, 1854, I. 37-77. - -[376] G. Poulett Scrope, _op. cit._ - -[377] From 1416 to 1424, three different persons were fined at the manor -court for keeping a common brothel in their houses. Forestalling of -butter, cheese and eggs, on the way to market, came before the court in -1418. - -[378] At the manor court in 1417, Thomas Selwin, a butcher, was convicted -of throwing offal and other offensive matters into the common street and -of making his dung-heap there, to the common hurt; also the said Thomas -Selwin "tarde et de novo erexit unam latrinam foetidam in shopa sua ad -commune nocumentum. Ideo ipse in misericordia." The next entry of -nuisances, so far as extracts are given, is as late as 1590--various -offences in the street and churchyard, and the glover washing his skins in -the stream or otherwise befouling the water running by his house. - -[379] Cited in Owen and Blakeway's _History of Shrewsbury_, II. 524: "per -advenas qui in dicta villa post ultimam pestilenciam de novo sunt -inhabitati ... at regimen dictae ville ad se attrahere ... machinantes." -By the "ultima pestilencia" could hardly have been meant the pestis -secunda of 1361, the year of the patent, as the learned antiquaries -suppose. - -[380] _Rotul. Parl._ IV. 60. 7. The petition of Chesterton, near -Cambridge: "And also they seiden that there was made gret waste in the -same Manor of Chesterton of Housing, that is to say of Halles and of -Chambers, and of other houses of office, that were necessary in the same -Manor, and none housinge left standing therein, but gif it were a Shepcote -or a Berne or a Swynsty and a few houses byside to putte in bestes." - -[381] "After the cessation of the Black Plague a greater fecundity in -women was everywhere remarkable--a grand phenomenon which, from its -occurrence after every destructive pestilence, proves to conviction, if -any occurrence can do so, the prevalence of a higher power in the -direction of general organic life. Marriages were almost without exception -prolific," etc. - -[382] _Eulogium Historiarum_, III. 213. - -[383] _Fasciculi Zizan._ Rolls series, No. 5, ed. Shirley, p. 263: -"Dimitto alias rationes palpabiles: quod exhinc regnum nostrum -sensibiliter depauperetur pecunia; quod, praetextu subtractionis hujus -thesauri, qui expenderetur in Anglia, decrescit populus;" etc. - -[384] _Political Songs and Poems, Ed. II.-Ric. II._ Rolls series, No. 14, -ed. T. Wright, I. 2. 53. - -[385] The only monograph that I know is Peinlich's _Pest in Steiermark_, 2 -Bde. Graz, 1877-78. From 1349 to 1716, seventy years are marked in the -annals of Styria as plague-years. Corradi gives the plague-years in Italy -in his _Annali_. - -[386] Guy de Chauliac for Avignon, in Haeser, III. 176. Other foreign -references in the same work. - -[387] _Political Songs and Poems. Ed. II.-Ric. II._ Rolls series, No. 14, -ed. T. Wright, I. 173, 190, &c. - -[388] _Ibid._ I. 229, from a MS. in the library of Cambridge University. - -[389] The spelling has been modernized, a few old words changed, and the -division into verses omitted. - -[390] _Chronicon Angliae_, by a monk of St Albans. Rolls ed. - -[391] Harleian MS. No. 1568, "Chronicle of England to A.D. 1419." (Printed -with additions at the St Albans press about 1484.) - -[392] Skeat, whose great edition of 'The Vision of Piers the Ploughman,' -has been brought out by the Early English Text Society, thinks that the -ironical reference (Passus XIII. 248) to the pope sending a salve for the -pestilence applies particularly to the "Fourth Pestilence" of 1375 and -1376, which was the _pestis tertia_ of some chronicles. - -[393] Flux and fever from famine are alone mentioned in the poems of John -of Bridlington, which cover the period from the Black Death to the reign -of Richard II. - -[394] Egerton MS. No. 2572, Sloane MS. 443 ("xiv. cent."), as well as -several copies of the 15th century. - -[395] Lansdowne MS. 285, fol. 220. - -[396] Mr Warner identifies him with the person who invented "Sir John -Mandeville" and the travels of Sir John. See an article in the _Quarterly -Review_, April, 1891. - -[397] Sloane MS. (British Museum) No. 2276, fol. 191-199. - -[398] 'A passing gode lityll boke necessarye and behouefull azenst the -Pestilence.' British Museum, case 31, e. 13, 4to, twelve leaves. The MS. -begins as follows: "Here begynneth a lytell boke necessary and behouefull -azens the pestylence." - -[399] Dibdin (_Antiq. Typogr._ II. 19) assigns the printing to Machlinia, -and reproduces a page as a sample of his common type. Bliss (_Reliquiae -Hearnianae_, II. 117) says that this sample page does not correspond with -that of the British Museum copy. He adds that there is a fragment of the -printed book in the library of St Peter's College, Cambridge, "pasted -within the wooden covers of the binding of an edition (1499) of _Discipuli -Sermones_." - -[400] In the earliest printed Latin texts of this work (Antwerp, 1485? -Leipzig, 1495? and versified in Albertus Magnus, 'De Virtute Herbarum,' -1500?) he is named Kamitus, bishop of Arusia, a city in the realm of -Denmark. In the copy of the English version in the British Museum, someone -has called him Ramicius, having written on a leaf, "Ramicius Episcopus -Arusiensis civitatis Daciae Regimen contra pestem," with the date 1698. -The name of Kamitus, being judged improbable on the face of it, has been -changed in the catalogue of the British Museum library into Canutus. But -there was no Canutus among the bishops of Aarhus, nor a Kamitus, nor a -Ramicius. The two bishops that appear to suit best are Olaus, or Olaf, who -was bishop from 1371 to 1388, and Ulricus or Udalricus, or Olric Stycka, -who succeeded in 1425 and held the see until 1449. Curiously enough, the -latter, when he went to Rome in 1425 to represent Eric, king of Pomerania -in a suit with the dukes of Sleswig, figures throughout the records of the -suit as "Olaus, episcopus Arosiensis," although Olaus, bishop of Arusia, -belonged to a former generation. It is, of course, the merest guessing; -but I am inclined to think that the author of the essay on plague was -either bishop Olaus, of 1371-1388, or bishop Udalricus, of 1425-1449, a -man of character and ability, who also went by the name of Olaus; and that -in any case the manuscript version of the essay in the English tongue is -more likely to have been of the early part of the fifteenth century than -of the fourteenth. The above facts are collected from various parts of -Langbeck's _Script. Rer. Dan._: the "Series Episcoporum Arhusiorum" is in -vol. VII. p. 212. Nothing is there said of any bishop of Aarhus having -written a book, or having been a physician at Montpellier. - -[401] These words ("the impressions") are contracted in the printed book, -exactly as in the manuscript. I have modernised the spelling for the most -part. - -[402] "When a man feeleth himself infect, as soon as he may, let him be -let blood plenteously till he swoon: then stop the vein. For a little -letting of blood moveth or stirreth venom.... Let him blood on the side of -the body where the swelling appeareth. Therefore if a swelling appear -under the right arm, let blood in the middle of the same arm, in the vein -called _mediana_. If it appear under the left arm, let him blood in midst -of the same, or in the vein of the liver which is about the little finger. -And if it be about the share, let him blood about the heel upon the same -side. If the swelling be in the neck, let him blood in the vein called -_cephalica_, about the thumb in the hand of the same side; or in the vein -the which is called _mediana_ of the same arm, or in the hand of the same -side about the little finger. And, overmore, if the swelling appear about -the ear, let him blood in the vein called _cephalica_ of the same side, or -in the vein which is between the long finger and the thumb, lest many -venomous things go into the brain." If the swelling is in the shoulders, -bleed from the _mediana_: if on the back from _pedica magna_, and so on. - -[403] Walsingham, _Hist. Angl._ I. 309. Adam of Murimuth, Engl. Hist. Soc. - -[404] The Stratford bread-carts are explained in Stow's _Survey of London_ -("Lime Street Ward"). In the famines of 1512 and 1527, they were besieged -on the way by hungry citizens and had to be guarded. The same phrase of -bread being "gesen" or scarce, occurs in a letter of 4 September, 1535, -from Thomas Broke to Cromwell, secretary of State: "never knew good bread -so geason in London at this time of the year; it is so musty, and of so -evil wheat, that it is rather poisonous than nourishing; what was sold for -a halfpenny, when you were here, is now a penny." (_Cal. State Papers_, -Henry VIII. vol. IX. Sec. 274.) - -[405] Thorold Rogers. _A Short English Chronicle_, Camden Soc. 1880:--"45 -Edward III. This yere was called the grete dere yere, and that same yere -was a quarter of whete at iiii nobles." - -[406] Wilkins, _Concilia_, III. 74: "De orando pro cessatione -pestilentiae," dated Slyndon, 10 Cal. Aug. A.D. MCCCLXVIII. - -[407] Sharpe, _Cal. of Wills_, vol. II. - -[408] Otterbourne (ed. Hearne, p. 133) says that the _pestis tertia_ was -in 1368, and that it lasted two years. Nicolas (_Chronol. of History_, p. -389) gives from a Lansdowne MS. (no. 863, fol. 107) of the time of Charles -I., the duration of the _pestis tertia_ as 2 July--29 Sept., 1369, which -should probably read "2 July, 1368--29 Sept. 1369." - -[409] _Memorials of London_, etc. from the Council Records. Edited by H. -T. Riley. Lond. 1867, p. 339 and p. 356. - -[410] Walsingham, _Hist. Angl._ I. 319; Adam of Murimuth. - -[411] The chroniclers are not agreed as to the chronology of the various -14th century plagues from the first (the Black Death) to the fifth. Some -of the enumerations are clearly erroneous. Thus in _A Short English -Chronicle_ from the Lambeth MS. (ed. Gairdner for the Camden Society, -1880), the plague of 1361 is erroneously called "the threde pestilence," -while the fourth is assigned to 1369 and the fifth to 1377 (for 1375). -Otterbourne places the _quarta_ in 1374 (for 1375), and the _quinta_ (as -others do) in 1391; but in the _Life of Richard II._, by a monk of -Evesham, the pestilence of 1382 is more correctly reckoned the fifth from -the Black Death. - -[412] Walsingham, _Hist. Angl._ I. 409. _Chronicon Angliae_, p. 239. - -[413] _Rot. Parl._ IV. 806. - -[414] _Ibid._ III. pp. 139 a, 147 a. - -[415] Blomefield's _History of Norfolk_, III. p. 111. - -[416] Continuator of Higden, IX. 14. - -[417] _Political Songs and Poems._ Rolls series, No. 14, I. p. 252:-- - - "The rysyng of the comuynes in londe, - The pestilens, and the eorthe-quake-- - Theose three thinges I understonde." - -[418] Walsingham, _Hist. Angl._ II. 109. - -[419] Continuator of Higden, IX. 21, 27. - -[420] _Eulogium Historiarum_, III. 369. Otterbourne, ed. Hearne: "From the -nativity of St John Baptist to the feast of St Luke," 1391. - -[421] Continuator of Higden, IX. 216. - -[422] _Ibid._ 237. - -[423] Walsingham, _Hist. Angl._ II. 186. - -[424] Blomefield's _History of Norfolk_, III. 113:--"1390. A great -mortality increased in Norfolk and in many other counties in England, and -it seemed not unlike the season of the great pestilence: it was occasioned -by a great want of victuals, that forced many people to eat unwholesome -food, and so brought distempers upon them. This dearth began under the -sickle, and lasted to the following harvest [1391], but was not so much -for want of corn, as money to purchase it, occasioned by the law made in -relation to wool, by which wool became dog-cheap; for a stone of chosen -and picked wool of the best sort was sold for 3 sh. and some for 22 pence -or 2 sh., so that in these times the woollen manufacture was the great -support of the nation." According to Thorold Rogers, these high prices of -wool obtained from 1364 to 1380. - -[425] Walsingham, II. 203. The Continuator of Higden (IX. 259) says -12,000. These estimates are, of course, the merest guesses, and extreme -exaggerations. The whole population of York would have been under 15,000. - -[426] Higden, _ibid._ - -[427] Walsingham, II. 213; St Albans Annals of Ric. II. and Hen. IV. - -[428] Walsingham, II. 276. The Chronicle of William Gregory (Camden -Society, ed. Gairdner) enters under the year 1407, a great frost, for -twenty-five weeks. It would be of real scientific interest to know the -chronology exactly, whether the plague followed or preceded the long cold -drought; but the year of the plague is disputable, if any heed be paid to -the date of 1406, given by later compilers. - -[429] Walsingham, II. 297. Otterbourne, under 1411, says plague in -Gascony. - -[430] Annals of Bermondsey, in _Annales Monast._ Rolls ed. III. 485. - -[431] _Rot. Parl._ IV. 143 a. It is probably under 1420 that the "great -plague" at Newcastle, given in so many words in Brand's _History_ under -1410, should be placed. - -[432] _Ibid._ 148 b. - -[433] _Histor. Collec. of a Citizen of London, 15th cent._ Camden Soc. ed. -Gairdner, 1876: - - "They dyde faster every day - Thenn men myght them in erthe lay." - -[434] _History of Agriculture and Prices in England_, IV. 105. - -[435] Chronicle of Croyland, in Gale, I. 518; Rogers, IV. 233. - -[436] Denton. London, 1886, p. 92. - -[437] Mackay, _The English Poor_. London, 1890, p. 40. - -[438] W. Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_. 2nd ed. -Camb. 1890, p. 105. He reproduces Denton's statement that "there was -chronic typhoid in the towns." Denton professes to have found this in -Hecker, who had certainly no knowledge of English towns in the 15th -century, and is, in general, more entertaining as a _philosophe_ than -trustworthy for erudition. - -[439] In 1741, during a prevalence of fever all over England, we hear of -bread made of horse-beans, pease, and coarse unsound barley as the chief -food of the poor. (_Gent. Magaz._ letters of 27 Nov. 1741 and 11 Jan. -1742). Thorold Rogers (_Agric. and Prices_, v. Preface) thinks that the -staple food of the English labourer, wheaten bread, had first been -changed, especially in the North, to rye, barley and oat bread, in the -17th century during the Civil Wars. - -[440] _Paston Letters._ Ed. Gairdner, 1872, II. 254: John Wymondham of -Fellbrigg to John Paston, 10th Nov. "And forasmuch as there was a child -dead at Asteleys, and one other like to be dead in the same place, what -time I rode out about my little livelihood, my lady and I both thought -pity on my mistress your wife to see her abide there, and desired her to -come to my poor house, unto such time as you should be otherwise avised." - -[441] _Histor. MSS. Commission_, IX. 127 b. - -[442] _Calendar of State Papers._ Venetian, vol. I. Sec. 236. - -[443] _Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council._ Ed. Nicolas, III. -p. xlv. - -[444] _Rot. Parl._ IV. 420 b. - -[445] _Arnold's Chronicle_, p. xxxii. - -[446] _Proc. and Ord. Privy Council_, IV. p. lxxx. Sir Harris Nicolas, in -this connexion, remarks that Fabyan and all other chroniclers (he had -overlooked Arnold) omit to mention pestilence, while they mention much -less important things; but he is hardly warranted in his inference that -plagues were so common-place as to be left unrecorded. A low level of -plague would not be noticed, but a great epidemic certainly would. - -[447] Johannes Amundesham (of St Albans), _Annales_. Rolls ed. II. 127. - -[448] _Rot. Parl._ V. 31 b. - -[449] This is the only plague in the first half of the fifteenth century -that Anthony Wood records; but he says, under the year 1500, that "no less -than about thirty pests, both great and small, happened in this last -century"--i.e. in the University of Oxford. I shall speak of their general -effects in another chapter. - -[450] _Paston Letters._ Ed. Gairdner, 1872, I. 302-3. - -[451] _Three Fifteenth Century Chronicles._ Ed. Gairdner, for the Camden -Society, 1880, from the Lambeth MSS., p. 163. - -[452] Sir J. Paston to John Paston, 30 April, 1465. Another letter, of -18th August, has: "For the pestilence is so fervent in Norwych, that they -dare no longer abyde there, so God help!" (_Paston Letters_, ed. Gairdner, -II. 226), which probably refers to 1465 also. It is not mentioned by -Blomefield. - -[453] _Chronicle of Croyland_, in Gale, I. 541. - -[454] Communicated to me by the Rev. W. Hunt, from a new volume of the -Camden Society, edited by A. F. Leach, _Visitations and Memorials of -Southwell Minster_, p. 11. - -[455] Tickell, _History of Kingston upon Hull_, 1798. - -[456] _Warkworth's Chronicle._ Camden Society, p. 23 (under the year 13 -Ed. IV.). - -[457] _Chronicle of the Greyfriars._ Camden Society, No. 53, 1852, p. 22. - -[458] Robert Fabyan's _Chronicle of England_, (editions in 1516 and 1533, -and by Ellis, 1808), _sub anno_. - -[459] _Grafton's Chronicle_, p. 742. - -[460] Brand's _History of Newcastle_. - -[461] _Visitations and Memorials_, p. 41. - -[462] Blomefield. - -[463] Paston, 6 Nov. 1479. - -[464] Fordoun, _Scotichronicon_, ed. Hearne, Oxon. 1722, p. 1039. - -[465] _Scotichronicon_, p. 1056: "eadem ... sicut prius jubileo ... in -toto regno Scotiae mirabiliter saeviebat." - -[466] _Exchequer Rolls of Scotland._ Introduction to vol. II. p. xlviii. - -[467] _Scotichronicon_, p. 1141. - -[468] _Exchequer Rolls of Scotland_, III. 650. - -[469] _Ibid._ III. 310. - -[470] _Ibid._ III. 553. - -[471] _Ibid._ III. 579. - -[472] _Scotichronicon_, p. 1287 and p. 1298. - -[473] Cited by R. Chambers (_Domestic Annals of Scotland_, I. 57) from the -Chronicle as printed by Thomas Thomson. - -[474] _Scotichronicon_, p. 1565. Hearne's edition. - -[475] Ferrerius, f. 393, cited in _Excheq. Rolls of Scot._ VIII. p. lx. - -[476] _Excheq. Rolls of Scot._ VIII. 364. Accounts of William, bishop of -Orkney, from 5 Aug. 1475 to 3 Aug. 1476: "et decem martis liberatis, de -tempore pestis, egrotantibus in Incheskeith." Another item (L30. 13_s._ -4_d._) is for forty-six marts destroyed "propter longam moram" in the -lairs at Leith, "anno pestis, videlicet anno ultimo." - -[477] But MS. annals are cited for the date 1361, in _The ancient and -present State of the County and City of Cork_. By Charles Smith, M.D. 2 -vols. Dublin, 1774. 2nd ed. II. p. 23. - -[478] Thady Dowling [Elizabethan] "1370. Pestilentia magna in Hibernia, -adeo quod propter immensitatem mortalitatis vocabatur ab antiquis tertia," -p. 24. - -[479] Dowling, p. 27. - -[480] _Angl. Hist._ Basil. 1555, p. 567. - -[481] In Gale, _Script. Angl._ I. 573. - -[482] British Museum Addit. MS., No. 27,582. - -[483] _Materials illustrative of the Reign of Henry VII._ Rolls series, -No. 60, s. d. - -[484] _Tractatus contra pestilentiam thenasmonem et dissinteriam_ [Rouen, -1490]:--"Causae pestilentiae ut alias scripsimus: in quodam opusculo quod -composuimus de quadam rabiosa febre pestilentiali, quae in duodecim horis -patientes cum calore et sudore continuo interficiebat. Cujus febris -adventus incepit sua vexilla extendere in Anglia in civitate Londoniarum -decima nova die mensis Septembris 1485, in qua die [planetary signs] -posuerunt. Ex qua febre pestilentiali plus quam quindecim millia hominum -ab hoc seculo morte repentina, tanquam ex pugnitione divina, recesserunt, -multique sine mora per vicos deambulantes absque confessione obierunt." - -[485] MSS. Cotton. Vitellius A. XVI. _A Chronicle of England from 1st -Henry III. to 1st Hen. VIII._ - -[486] The Croyland Chronicle (in Gale's _Script. Angl._ I. 570 and 576) -gives the 14th November in one place and the 14th October in another. But -it is clear that the latter is the correct date, the letter from the prior -of Croyland to Henry VII., announcing the death of the abbot and praying -for a _conge d'elire_, being dated the 14th of October. (_Materials -illustrative of the Reign of Henry VII._ vol. I. s.d. 21 Oct. 1485, Rolls -series, No. 60.) - -[487] Anthony Wood, I. 462. - -[488] _The Maire of Bristowe is Kalendar_ (by Robert Ricart, town-clerk of -Bristol, 18 Ed. IV.). Camden Society, 1872, p. 46. - -[489] The Bristol calendar says: "This yere Hary, Erle of Richmond landed -at Milford Haven.... And sone after there was a sodeyn sikenes in all -places of Englond called the sweting syknes, whereof moche people dyed." - -[490] The date of 1506 in Hecker is erroneous, having been taken from the -very loose entry in Hall's chronicle (copied by Grafton), which might -equally well belong to the year 1507. Bernard Andre's date of 1508 is -unmistakeable; his annals go on continuously until the death of Henry VII. -in April following. - -[491] Bernard Andre's _Works_. Rolls series, No. 10, pp. 126-8. - -[492] Hemingway's _History of Chester_, I. 142. - -[493] Anthony Wood's _History and Antiquities of the Univ. of Oxford_. I. -665. - -[494] Calendared for the Rolls series by Brewer for the greater part of -the reign of Henry VIII. (1509-1530), and after him by Gairdner, at -present as far as 1538. The facts given in the next few pages may be taken -as coming from the Calendar of State Papers, under their respective dates, -unless it is otherwise stated in the notes. - -[495] This appears to have been a common direction. In a letter of 12 -August, 1517, dated from the Fleet Prison by Thomas Leeke to his brother -sir John Leeke (_Hist. MSS. Commission Reports_, X. pt. 4, p. 447), the -writer says he has been sore vexed with the sweat and in danger of life: -"If any of you have it, pray you to keep well and close about your breasts -and your heart for twenty-four hours and then with God's grace there is no -danger in it: there has been a marvellous great death for so short a -time." - -[496] In the letter of 12 August from the Fleet Prison, already quoted -(_Hist. MSS. Reports_, _l. c._), it is stated that fifteen are dead in the -Cardinal's house, including Mr Cowper, the steward, Talboys, lord of Kyme, -young Wastness, and one Grenell. In my lord of Durham's house, Dr Port and -Dr Fysche are dead, with divers others. Of the Court, my lord Clinton, Mr -Morgan, steward to the Queen, and one Mat. Jones, of the King's wardrobe, -were buried at Richmond on Friday last, and divers more of the Court are -dead. - -[497] _The Pitiful Life of King Edward the Fifth_: "Considering there is, -as physicians say, and as we also find, double the peril in the relapse -that was in the first sickness," p. 230. Camelot edition. - -[498] Anthony Wood, _Hist. and Antiq._, _sub anno_ 1517. - -[499] Hemingway's _History of Chester_, I. 142. - -[500] The letter bears the date of 8 June, which would make the first of -the sweat the same as in Tuke's letter; but Brewer says the date should be -the 18th June. - -[501] Brewer (_Cal. State Papers_) reads the letter, "On Tuesday one of -the ladies of the chamber, Mlle de Boulan, was infected with the sweat." -But P. Friedmann (_Anne Boleyn_, Lond. 1884, I. 72) says the correct -reading is a fille-de-chambre of Mlle de Boulan; and it is known that Anne -Boleyn did not take the sweat until some days after. - -[502] In the _History of Cork_ by C. Smith, M.D. (2nd ed., 1774) there is -an entry under 1528: "a malignant disorder called the sweating sickness in -Cork," with a reference to "MS. annals." It has been generally supposed -that the sweat did not enter Ireland or Scotland in any of its five -outbreaks. - -[503] The German writers have assumed that the sweat was prevalent abroad -really in the same summer or autumn as in England, explaining the -discrepant dates by the difference in the English calendar. But it was -only the months of January and February, and March to the 24th, that were -counted in the old year in England; the months of June, July, August, etc. -in which the sweat occurred, are the same in the English and foreign -calendar-years. In the English chronology of the sweat, those months -belong quite clearly to the year 1528; and, in the German, Swiss, and -Netherlands chronology of the sweat, just as clearly to the year 1529. The -sweat on the Continent was a year later than in England. - -[504] Gruner's _Scriptores de sudore Anglico superstites_ was reprinted by -Haeser, with additional citations and notes, in 1847. Hecker (_Der -Englische Schweiss_, 1834) refers to the work by Gruner, _Itinerarium -sudoris Anglici ex actis designatum_, Jena, 1805, which I have been unable -to see. The account of the German invasion in the text is accordingly at -second-hand. - -[505] _A boke or counseill against the Sweate_, London, 1552. _De Ephemera -Britannica_, London, 1555. - -[506] "This yere the swetinge sycknes raignyd in England, and began first -in this towne of Shrowsbery the xxii of Marche, and ran through the -realme, and began in London the ixth of July." Quoted from MS. Chronicle, -in Owen and Blakeway's _History of Shrewsbury_, p. 345. - -[507] _Op. cit._ 1552, fol. 10. In the Latin work the date at "Salopia" is -"17 Kal. May." - -[508] Nichols, _Leicestershire_, III. 891. - -[509] Edrichus, _In libros aliquot Pauli AEginetae_, &c. London, 1588 (not -paged). - -[510] "Diary of Edward VI." in Burnet's _Hist. of Reformation_. Stow -(_Annales_) says it began on the 9th July and was most vehement on the -12th. - -[511] _Calendar of State Papers._ Domestic (under the date). - -[512] _Machyn's Diary._ Camden Society, No. 42, edited by J. Gough -Nichols, p. 7. Machyn was an undertaker, and records deaths and funerals. - -[513] Machyn. - -[514] _Ibid._ p. 8. - -[515] Letter from London, in Harl. MS. No. 353, f. 107, cited by Nichols -in notes to Machyn. - -[516] Caius, _Boke or Counseill_, 1552, ff. 10-11. - -[517] The Venetian ambassador (_Cal. S. P._ Venetian, v. 541) says that -the sweat was at an end in London in twenty days. He says, also, that -children under ten years were not subject "questo influsso." The -excitement caused by the London epidemic is shown in an entry of money in -the corporation records of Canterbury: "1551. To one of the King's -servants that brought word how many were dede in the swett." (_Hist. MSS. -Commiss._ IX. 154 b.) - -[518] Edward VI. to Fitzpatrick. - -[519] Drake's _Eboracum_, p. 128. - -[520] Nichols, notes to Machyn, giving a reference to _Gent. Magaz._ 1825, -II. 206. - -[521] Fuller (ed. Nichols, p. 183) says, under 1551: "Many in Cambridge -died of this sweating sickness, patients mending or ending in twenty-four -hours." The death of the two young noblemen was made an occasion for -copies of verses by members of the University. - -[522] Strype, _Memorials_, III. chap. 7 (cited in notes to Machyn). - -[523] Lysons, _Magna Britannia_, VI. 539. - -[524] _Calendar of State Papers._ Venetian, V. 541, under the date of 18 -Aug. 1554. - -[525] Thomas Cogan, 'The Haven of Health: chiefly made for the comfort of -students, and consequently for all those that have a care of their health, -amplified uppon fiue wordes of Hippocrates, written Epid. 6. Labour, -Meate, Drinke, Sleepe, Venus.... Hereunto is added a Preseruation from the -Pestilence: with a short Censure of the late sicknesse at Oxford.' London, -1589. New ed. 1596, p. 272. - -[526] There is a single reference to a sweat on the Continent in 1551, -which may really have been one of those epidemics of typhus (or -influenza), with a sweating character, that were observed in 1557-8 and -1580. Brassavolus, writing _de morbo Gallico_, and illustrating the fact -that epidemics were sometimes generated by drought (though mostly by -humidity), says that the sweat in England, in former years, came with -drought, and that at the time of his writing, the 15th September, 1551, -that disease was vexing Flanders,--the season being extremely dry,--and -had attacked many thousands. This was first noticed by Haeser, _Op. cit._ -III. (1882), p. 332. The reference to Brassavolus is Luisini's _Script. de -lue venerea_. Lugd. Bat. 1728, f. p. 671. - -[527] _Increase and Decrease of Diseases._ London, 1801, p. 70. - -[528] See the references in Gruner, pp. 444, 448. - -[529] "The Autonomous Life of the Specific Infections," in _Brit. Med. -Journ._, 4 August, 1883; "The Origin of Yellow Fever," in _North American -Review_, Sept. 1884; _Illustrations of Unconscious Memory in Disease_, -London, 1885, Chapter XIII. "Vicarious Infection." - -[530] Polydore Virgil, p. 553. Philip de Comines says "three large ships -and a considerable body of land forces." (Chroniques du Roy Louis XI. Eng. -transl. II. 674.) - -[531] Mezeray, II. 762. He adds: "the Bretons boast of having also lent -aid to this prince." His first expedition was purely with Bretons, but the -second was composed mostly if not altogether of Normans. - -[532] This point, which is essential to the theory, was originally stated -in an article on "Epidemics" in the _Quarterly Review_, Jan. 1887, and -there claimed as original. The writer on "Sweating Sickness" in the -_Encycl. Brit._ has adopted it as a common-place; it is obvious enough -when pointed out, but Hecker had not done so. - -[533] The above account is summarised from the chapter in Hirsch, _Geog. -and Histor. Path._ Eng. transl. I. 88. - -[534] Darwin, _Naturalist's Voyage round the World_, pp. 435-6. - -[535] Bernard Andre's _Annales Henrici VII._ Rolls series, No. 10, p. 120. -Under a date in January, 1508, he writes: "Quo quidem die nuncius ab urbe -incredibilia dictu, hoc est de primis verni fructibus temporis floridoque -frumento visis, referebat." Both Fabyan and the anonymous author of MS. -Cotton, Vitellius, A. XVI. (_Chronicle of England from 1 Hen. III. to 1 -Hen. VIII._) give the winter of 1506-7 as "a wonderful [easy] and soft -winter without storms or frost," but fail to remark on the weather of -1507-8. - -[536] Wriothesley's Chronicle. - -[537] Fabyan, Stow. - -[538] Stow's Annals. Hecker, in error, makes out this exceptional season -to have been the one immediately preceding the sweat in the summer of -1528. - -[539] _Cal. State Papers_, under the date. - -[540] Summary in Hirsch, _l. c._ - -[541] Continuator of Fabyan. - -[542] Wriothesley, II. 139. - -[543] Drake's _Eboracum_, (from the town council records). - -[544] _Hist. and Antiq. Univ. Oxford_, I. 651. - -[545] At Cambridge, in October, 1578, two deaths from plague in Queens' -College "moved many to depart." _Cal. Cecil MSS._ II. under date 13 -October. - -[546] Anthony Wood, under the respective years. - -[547] With reference to a pestilence at Oxford in 1448, Wood says: -"occasioned, as 'twas thought, by the overflowing of waters, and the want -of a quick passage for them from the ground. Also by the lying of many -scholars in one room or dormitory in almost every Hall, which occasioned -nasty air and smells, and consequently diseases." _Op. cit._ I. 596. - -[548] _Materials Illustrative of the Reign of Henry VII._ Rolls ser. 60, -II. p. 136. - -[549] _Chronicle of England_, sub anno. - -[550] _Hist. Angl._, p. 609 (Basil, 1546). - -[551] Stow, _Annales_. - -[552] In Rymer's _Foedera_ all these vacancies of bishoprics are entered -under the year 1501, beginning with the see of Canterbury (Morton's) on -9th January, 1501. - -[553] _Plumpton Correspondence_, Camden Soc. No. 4, p. 138: Letter of ? -1499, R. Leventhorpe, of Leventhorpe Hall, Yorkshire, to Sir R. Plumpton: -"And sithe I hard say that a servant of yours was decesed of the sicknes, -which hath bene to your disease, I am right sorry therefore;" he advises -fasting, and trusts "ye sal be no more vexed with that sicknes." In the -next letter (cviii) to Sir R. Plumpton from his son:--"Also, sir, I am -very sorry that the death seaseth not at Plompton." - -[554] _Hardwicke Papers_, London, 1778, I. 2 (from Harl. MSS.). - -[555] Freeman, _Exeter_, in "English Towns" series, p. 99. - -[556] _Annales Henrici VII._ Rolls series, p. 88. - -[557] The information in the next few pages comes from the _Calendar of -State Papers, Henry VIII._, _Domestic_, unless otherwise referred to in the -notes. - -[558] _Chronicle of the Grey Friars_, Camden Society, No. liii. 1852, p. -29. Stow puts the mortality under the year 1513. - -[559] Letter from the Fleet prison, assigned to 1517. _Hist. MSS. Com._ X. -pt. 4. p. 447. - -[560] Phillips, _History of Shrewsbury_, p. 17. - -[561] _Privy Purse of Henry VIII._, p. 79. - -[562] The reference on p. 290 (note 2) to "no parish in London free," -under the date of 25 October, 1517, may imply that bills of mortality had -been kept in that epidemic, which was certainly an occasion when Henry -VIII. interposed in other ways to check the progress of plague. - -[563] Lately purchased for the Egerton Collection. No. 2603, fol. 4. - -[564] There was, however, an English translation of a small foreign essay -on the plague, of unacknowledged authorship, published at London in 1534 -by Thomas Paynel, canon of Merton, a literary hack of the time. - -[565] In the Record Office. State Papers, Henry VIII., No. 4633. It has -been erroneously calendared by Brewer as a bill of mortality of the -sweating sickness in 1528. - -[566] _The Maire of Bristowe, his Kalendar._ Camden Society, 1872, p. 53. - -[567] The plague is said to have been in Exeter in 1535 (Freeman, -_Exeter_, in English Towns Series). - -[568] There is a copy in the Lambeth Library, No. 432. - -[569] Owen and Blakeway, I. 311. - -[570] Continuator of Fabyan. - -[571] Cussan's _History of Hertfordshire_. - -[572] _A London Chronicle of Hen. VII. and Hen. VIII._ Camden Miscellany, -1859. - -[573] _Acts of the Privy Council._ New series, 1542-1547, p. 136. - -[574] Stow's _Annales_. - -[575] _Cal. Cecil MSS._, I. 15. - -[576] Guildhall Records (Extracts by Furnivall in Appendix to Vicary's -_Anatomy_. Early English Text Society). - -[577] Brand's _History of Newcastle_. - -[578] Hasted's _History of Canterbury_, p. 130 (from parish registers). - -[579] Anthony Wood, _op. cit._ II. 74. At Banbury probably about the same -year. Beesley's _History of Banbury_ (from Brasbridge). - -[580] _Register of the Privy Council of Scotland_, I. 5. - -[581] _Acts of the Privy Council._ New series, 1542-1547, 28 April, 1546, -p. 397. - -[582] _Ibid._, Nov. 13, 1546, p. 552. - -[583] Camden's _Britannia_, ed. Gough, I. 262. - -[584] _Ibid._ II. 265. - -[585] _Calendar of State Papers._ Domestic series, Vol. X. - -[586] _Notes and Queries_, 6th series, III. 477. - -[587] Nichols, _Leicestershire_, III. 891 (295 deaths from plague &c. -1555-59.) - -[588] Ormerod's _Cheshire_, I. under 1558, with a reference to "Harl. -MSS." The Harleian MSS. relating to Chester fill many pages of the -catalogue. - -[589] _Calendar of State Papers_, Eliz. I. p. 122. - -[590] _Three Fifteenth Century Chronicles._ Camden Society, ed. Gairdner, -1880, pp. 123, 144. - -[591] Letter from London to the Earl of Shrewsbury, _Hist. MSS. Com._ VI. -455, a. - -[592] Without date, but probably 1564. Watt conjectures 1556, but the book -contains references to the fever-epidemic of 1558, and, as above, to the -plague of 1563. - -[593] Munk, _Roll of the College of Physicians_, I. pp. 32, 63. - -[594] This and other information immediately following are from _Cal. -State Papers_. Foreign series. - -[595] _Calendar of Cecil MSS._, under the dates. - -[596] Glover's _Hist. of Derbyshire_ (21 plague deaths in St Michael's -register, May-Aug. 1563). - -[597] Nichols; Kelly, in _Trans. Hist. Soc._ VI. 395. - -[598] Harwood's _Hist. of Lichfield_, p. 304. - -[599] Hasted's _Hist. of Canterbury_, p. 130 (parish registers). - -[600] _Notes and Queries_, 2nd series, XI. 69. - -[601] 'How and whether a Christen man ought to flye the horrible plage of -the Pestilence. A sermon out of the Psalme "Qui habitat in adjutorio -altissimi," by Andrewe Osiander. Translated out of Hye Almayn into -Englishe, 1537.' Copy in the British Museum. The initials M.C. are taken -to be those of Miles Coverdale. - -[602] Soranzo to the Senate of Venice. _Calendar of State Papers_, -Venetian, V. 541 (18 Aug. 1554). - -[603] _Cal. State Papers_, Henry VIII. Domestic. - -[604] From _Abstract of several orders relating to the Plague_. MS. Addit. -(Brit. Museum), No. 4376. Probably the originals of these abstracts are -among the Guildhall records. I quote from the most accessible source. - -[605] Extracts from the Guildhall Records, by Furnivall, in Appendix to -Vicary's _Anatomy of the Body of Man_. Early English Text Society. - -[606] _Cal. State Papers_, Venetian, VII. 649. - -[607] _Abstract_, &c. in Brit. Mus. MSS., as above. - -[608] The following is the case by which he supports the recommendation to -kill dogs in plague-time: "Not many years since, I knew a glover in Oxford -who with his family, to the number of ten or eleven persons, died of the -plague, which was said to be brought into the house by a dogge skinne that -his wife bought when the disease was in the Citie" (_Poor Man's Jewel_, -Chapter VIII. London, 1578). - -[609] _Transcripts from the MS. Archives_, ed. Bayley, 1856. - -[610] News-letter to the Earl of Shrewsbury, _Hist. MSS. Commis._ VI. 455. - -[611] _Machyn's Diary_, ed. J. Gough Nichols. Camden Soc., No. 42, p. 310. - -[612] _Ibid._ p. 396 (note by Nichols); and Guildhall Records, in -Furnivall, _l. c._ - -[613] _Abstract_, &c. as above. - -[614] Stow's _Memoranda_ (Lambeth MS.), Camden Soc., 1880, p. 123. - -[615] _Abstract_, &c. as above. - -[616] Stow, _ibid._ - -[617] Record Office. _State Papers_, Elizabeth, vol. XLVIII., No. 70. - -[618] Endorsed "An abstract of such orders as have been heretofore for the -preventing and decreasing of the plague in and about London." - -[619] The searchers are mentioned at Shrewsbury as early as 1539 -(Phillips). - -[620] _Survey of London_, _ed. cit._ p. 119. - -[621] Holinshed, III. p. 1260. - -[622] John Bell, _London's Remembrancer_. Lond. 1665. - -[623] _Liber Albus Londinensis._ Rolls series, ed. Riley. The following -instances occur in the report of the commissioners of 1343: P. 446: A -water-gate "obturatur ratione unius gutturi exeuntis de una latrina," etc. -P. 449: the Ebbegate obstructed by certain persons named, "qui fecerunt in -eadem venella latrinas supra dentes, quarum putredo cadit supra capita -hominum transeuntium." Same page: Wendegoslane "obturatur per fimos et -garderobas." Same page: Rethersgate obstructed "per fimos et alia -hujusmodi foetida." Same page: Dowgate. Two householders named "in eisdem -aedificiis diversas latrinas fecerunt, pendentes ultra vicum ejusdem -venellae; quarum putredines cadunt supra homines per eandem venellam -transeuntes." P. 450: at Queenhithe a "communis latrina." P. 451: at -Saltwharf the way to the river obstructed "pulvere et aliis putredinibus -in eadem projiciendis." P. 452: Lekynggeslane has two latrinae and is -impassable owing to want of paving. Same page: Another venel obstructed by -the Earl Marshall; three latrinae in it. In a perambulation of the ground -outside the walls, 26 Ed. III. (1552), the following encroachments are -noted among others: Outside Ludgate, one has erected a shed (_camera_) 16 -ft. x 12-3/4 ft., and made there "unum profundum puteum et quadratum pro -latrina"--a deep well and a latrine-pit together. Also outside Ludgate, -William of Wircestre has a house there and two shelters for beasts, and a -latrine, and part of the said house is 14 ft. x 7-1/2 ft. - -[624] _Statutes of the Realm_, 17 Ric. II. - -[625] Riley, _op. cit._, p. 614. - -[626] Stow's _Survey_. - -[627] Art. "Shakespeare," _Encycl. Britan._ - -[628] Wodderspoon's _Memorials of Ipswich_, p. 285, p. 259. - -[629] "Now first printed." Exeter, 1765, p. 181. - -[630] Poulett Scrope, _op. cit._ p. 333. - -[631] _D. Erasmi Epistolar. lib. XXX._ London, 1642, Lib. xxii. Epist. 12 -(without date). - -[632] Richard of Devizes. Eng. Hist. Soc. p. 60: "Apud Bristolliam nemo -est qui non sit vel fuerit saponarius; et omnis Francus saponarios amat ut -stercorarios." - -[633] William Harrison's _Description of England_ (in Holinshed) gives -proof enough that the filthy floors described by Erasmus had no existence -two generations later, even among the poorer classes. - -[634] The correspondence is in _Remembrancia_, under the head of "Plague." - -[635] From a memorandum of Lord Burghley's, dated Hertford Castle, 21 Nov. -1582, it appears that a survey had shown 577 beds available for strangers -in one parish of Hertford, and 451 in another, "so that there are lying -two a bed above 2000 people." _Cal. State Papers._ Domestic series, -Elizabeth 1581-90, p. 75. - -[636] Stow's _Survey_. - -[637] _Remembrancia_, p. 332. - -[638] _Remembrancia._ - -[639] Baddeley, _Parish of St Giles, Cripplegate_. Lond. 1888. - -[640] _Ibid._, under date August, 1672, p. 193. - -[641] Broadsheets in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries. Cited -by W. Rendle, F.R.C.S., _Old Southwark and its People_. London, 1878, p. -198. Mr Rendle, in one place, seems to imply disapproval of this mode of -coffinless burial; but in another (p. 225, note) he says it was "a sort of -forecast of Mr Seymour Haden's wise proposals." His first thoughts appear -to have been the best. - -[642] Sermon on Third Sunday in Advent, 1552. - -[643] Stow's _Memoranda_. Camden Society, N. S. XXVIII., 1880, p. 125. - -[644] Stow, _Annales_, p. 662. - -[645] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[646] _Cat. Cecil MSS._ - -[647] On July 15, 1570, the Duke of Norfolk craved his release from the -Tower, on account of the great risk to his bodily health and the infection -of the pestilence in that part of the city. (_Calendar of Cecil MSS._) - -[648] _Report Hist. MSS. Commis._ - -[649] Anthony Wood, _op. cit._ - -[650] _Remembrancia_, p. 38. - -[651] Turnor's _History of Hertford_, pp. 236, 268. - -[652] _The Loseley Manuscripts_, ed. Kempe. London, 1836, p. 280. - -[653] Holinshed, III. p. 1240. - -[654] Letter to Cecil, _Cal. Cecil MSS._, II. 106 (under the year 1575). - -[655] Corporation records, in _Notes and Queries_, 6th series, II. 524. - -[656] _Notes and Queries_, 6th series, II. 390. - -[657] Ormerod's _Hist. of Cheshire_, I. Harl. MS. 2177 (a death from -plague, 3 Nov. 1574). - -[658] _Cal. Cecil MSS._, II. 107:--For the week ending 9 September, 1575, -in St Margaret's, 25 deaths (of plague 13), St Martin's 3 of plague, -Savoy, none, St Clement's 3 (2 of plague). - -[659] Cecil to Earl of Lincoln. _Ibid._ 10 September, 1575. - -[660] _The Maire of Bristowe, is Kalendar._ Camden Soc. 1872, p. 59. - -[661] Wells corporation MSS., _Hist. MSS. Com._, I. 107. - -[662] Owen and Blakeway. - -[663] _Calendar of State Papers_, Domestic, 1591-94, p. 269. - -[664] Tickell's _Hist. of Kingston upon Hull_, 1798. - -[665] Records of the Burgh of Kirkcudbright. _Hist. MSS. Commiss._, IV. -539. - -[666] _Remembrancia_, p. 333 (27 Nov. and 6 Dec. 1582). - -[667] By permission of the Marquis of Salisbury. The contents of this -small volume have not been included in the published Calendar of the Cecil -MSS. - -[668] 'A sermon preached at Powles Crosse on Sunday, the third of -November, 1577, in the time of the Plague' by T. W. London, 1578 (February -20). - -[669] Strype's ed. of Stow's _Survey_, Bk. IV. p. 34. Nonsuch was near -Epsom. - -[670] _Remembrancia of the City of London_, p. 331. - -[671] _Calendar of Cecil MSS._, Part II. under the dates. - -[672] Turnor's _Hist. of Hertford_, p. 236. - -[673] _Cal. Cecil MSS._ - -[674] Blomefield, vol. III. ("Norwich," under the date). - -[675] _Ibid._ "Yarmouth." - -[676] Morant's _Hist, of Essex_, I. 50. - -[677] _Hist. MSS. Commission_, IX. 277 b. - -[678] _Notes and Queries_, 6th series, II. 524. - -[679] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[680] Nichols, _Hist. of Leicestershire_. - -[681] _Cal. S. P._ - -[682] _Cal. State Papers._ Eliz. 1581-90 (Lemon), pp. 45, 70. - -[683] Graunt's _Reflections on Bills of Mortality_. 3rd ed., Lond. 1665, -p. 135. - -[684] _Hist. MSS. Com._ - -[685] Saunders, _Hist. of Boston_, p. 228. - -[686] Duke of Rutland's MSS. _Hist. MSS. Com._, May 24, 1586. - -[687] Saunders, _l. c._ - -[688] _Notes and Queries_, 2nd series, XI. 497. - -[689] Blomefield's _Norfolk_. - -[690] _Ibid._ and Gawdy MSS. _Hist. MSS. Com._ - -[691] Glover's _Hist. of Derby_, p. 613. - -[692] _Archaeologia_, VI. 80. - -[693] Townsend's _Hist. of Leominster_, p. 59. - -[694] Sykes, _Local Records of Northumberland and Durham_, p. 80. - -[695] _Cal. S. P._, Domestic, Eliz. ed. Lemon. - -[696] Corporation MSS. of Plymouth. _Hist. MSS. Com._ X. pt. 4, p. 539. - -[697] _Notes and Queries_, 6th series, III. 477. - -[698] Dunsford's _Historical Memoirs of Tiverton_, p. 38. - -[699] _Bill of Mortality for the week ending October 20, 1603._ Broadside -in Guildhall Library, with summary, on margin, of the mortalities in 1563 -and 1592-93. - -[700] _Cal. State Papers_, 1591-94, p. 312. - -[701] _Ibid._ p. 340. - -[702] _Ibid._ 1595-97, p. 45, May 26, 1595: - -"Arguments in proof of the advantages to be derived by the City of London -from stopping up the town ditch:--It is the origin of infection, and the -only noisome place in the city. In the last great plague, more died about -there than in three parishes besides; these fields are the chiefest walks -for recreation of the cityzens, and though the ditch were cast every -second year, yet the water coming from the kennel and slaughter-houses -will be very contagious. It is no material defence for the city, and half -the ditch has been stopped these many years." - -[703] _London's Remembrancer_, by John Bell, Clerk of the Company of -Parish Clerks. London, 1665. He says: "I shall begin with the year 1593, -being the first year in which any account of the christenings and burials -was kept. I cannot find any record of more antiquity than that of this -year in the Company of Parish Clerks Hall." However we can now point to -original weekly bills of mortality of 1532 and 1535, to abstracts of -weekly plague-burials in 1563-66, to the figures from one weekly bill of a -series in 1574, and to abstracts of 1578-83. - -[704] The total of 25,886 was copied, probably from the broadside of 1603, -into an anonymous essay of 1665, called _Reflections on the Bills of -Mortality_, the total of plague alone being given as 11,503, evidently by -a misprint for 15,003. At the same time a table was given, professing to -be of the weekly deaths from all causes, in one column, and from plague in -another, from March 13 to December 18, 1593. The column of plague-deaths -sums up to 11,110, but the total of 11,503 (which originated in a -misprint) is printed at the foot of the column as if that were the -summation. The column of deaths from all causes is made to sum up to -25,886, the actual sum being 25,817. But the weekly mortalities in it for -those weeks that had little plague are an absurdity for 1593. Whatever the -source of this table, it is not genuine for 1593, and was disclaimed by -Bell, the clerk of Parish Clerks' Hall, whose essay was written in 1665 to -correct that and other errors about former plagues in London. - -[705] _Cal. State Papers._ Addenda. Elizabeth. - -[706] Cussan's _Hist. of Hertfordshire_. - -[707] Turner's _Hist. of Hertford_, p. 268. - -[708] Glover's _Hist. of Derby_, p. 613. - -[709] Harwood's _Hist. of Lichfield_, p. 304. - -[710] Nichols, _Leicestershire_ (Town records of Leicester); Kelly, in -_Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc._ VI. (1877), p. 391 (at least 20 houses shut up). - -[711] Owen and Blakeway. - -[712] Parish registers in Townsend's _Leominster_, p. 59. - -[713] Corporation MSS. Canterbury, in 9th Report of _Hist. MSS. -Commission_, pp. 159 a, 160 a, b. "This plague continued from the end of -September to the month of January." - -[714] Parish Register of Penrith: "A sore plage was in London, -Nottinghome, Derbie and Lincolne in the year 1593" (Jefferson's -_Cumberland_, I. 19). - -[715] _Cal. Stale Papers._ Addenda. Elizabeth. - -[716] Syer's _Memorials of Bristol_. The excessive mortality at Leominster -(41 burials in September, 1597) may have been an effect of the famine. -(Townsend's _History_, p. 59.) - -[717] _Cal. State Papers_, Domestic, 1597, Sec. 10, p. 347. - -[718] _Cal. State Papers_, Domestic, 1597, p. 501. - -[719] Sykes, _Local Records_, p. 82. - -[720] Clarkson's _Hist. of Richmond_. - -[721] Camden's _Britannia_, p. 175. - -[722] Jefferson's _Cumberland_, I. 273. But these are the same figures as -for Penrith. - -[723] _Ibid._ I. 391. - -[724] Parish register of Penrith, in Jefferson, _l. c._ - -[725] _Notes and Queries._ 6th series, II. 524. - -[726] _Exchequer Rolls of Scotland_, X. 594. Edin. 1887. - -[727] _Burgh Records of Aberdeen_ (Spalding Club), I. 66. - -[728] _Exchequer Rolls Scot._, XI. p. lxviii. - -[729] _Ibid._ - -[730] _Burgh Records_, pp. 88, 90, 130, 165. - -[731] _Register of the Privy Council, Scotland_, I. 5. - -[732] _Cal. S. P._ Scot. (Thorpe). - -[733] _Burgh Records_, pp. 222, 231, 244, 246. - -[734] _Cal. S. P._ Scot. 18 Nov. 1548. The Rhinegrave recovered, and came -to Edinburgh on the 26th. - -[735] _Reg. P. C. Scot._ I. 279-81. - -[736] _Ibid._ I. 281-2. - -[737] _Ane Breve Description of the Pest_, Edin. 1568. Reprinted, for the -Bannatyne Club, by James Skene of Rubislaw. Edin. 1840. - -[738] _Diurnall of Occurrences_, in Chambers. - -[739] Cited by R. Chambers (_Domestic Annals of Scotland_, I.) from M. -Napier's notes to the Spottiswoode Club edition of Spottiswoode's History. - -[740] _Op. cit._ I. 53. - -[741] _Burgh Records of Canongate._ Maitland Club, Miscellany, II. 313 (in -Chambers). - -[742] Chambers, I. 94. - -[743] _Burgh Records of Glasgow, 1573-1581._ Maitland Club, p. 27. - -[744] _Reg. P. C. Scot._, II. 415. - -[745] _Ibid._ p. 419. - -[746] _Hist. MSS. Com._, IV. 539. - -[747] _Reg. Scots P. C._, III. 229. - -[748] _Ibid._ - -[749] _Ibid._ III. 679. - -[750] _Reg. Scots P. C._ s. d. - -[751] _Chronicle of Perth_, Bannatyne Club, p. 4, and Chambers, I. 154. - -[752] _Reg. Scots P. C._, III. 727. - -[753] Calderwood's _Hist. of Kirk of Scotland_, IV. 366: "It was first -known to be in Simon Mercerbank's house." Birell's _Diary_ (1532-1605) in -Chambers, I. 157. - -[754] _Scots P. C._, III. 746. - -[755] _Ibid._ V. 56. - -[756] Moysie, in Chambers, I. 157. - -[757] _The Diary of Mr James Melville, 1556-1601._ Bannatyne Club. Edin. -1829, p. 153. - -[758] Marioreybank's _Annals_, in Chambers. - -[759] Melville's _Diary_, p. 162. - -[760] Melville, p. 173; Calderwood, cited by Chambers; _Cal. Cecil -Papers_, III. 298, 310. - -[761] _Cal. Cecil Papers_, III. 321. - -[762] _Memorabilia of Glasgow_, in Chambers. - -[763] _Scots Privy Council._ - -[764] Birell, in Chambers. - -[765] _Scots P. C._ - -[766] Calderwood, V. 655. - -[767] Two men sent to buy nolt in Galloway for the needs of the borough of -Dumfries were stopped, with 38 head of cattle, by the provost and others -of Wigton, at the Water of Crie, the cattle being impounded at Wigton for -eight days so that they became lean. A hundred merks compensation was -demanded. _Scots Privy Council_, V. - -[768] _Scots P. C._, VI. 164. - -[769] _Aberdeen Kirk Session Records_, Spalding Club, 1846, Calderwood -(cited by Chambers, I. 319) says that the year 1600 was one of famine, and -that there was also a great death of young children, six or seven being -buried in Edinburgh in a day. - -[770] _Scots Privy Council_, VI. under the respective dates. - -[771] _Burgh Records._ - -[772] Smith's _Cork_, II. 34. - -[773] _Cal. State Papers._ Domestic. - -[774] Smith's _Cork_, on the authority of MS. annals. - -[775] _Annals of Loch Ce._ Rolls ed., II. 289. - -[776] Brabazon to T. Cromwell. _Cal. State Papers._ Irish. - -[777] _Cal. State Papers._ Irish, 1566-7. - -[778] _State Papers_ (Record Office), Irish, 1567, No. 54. Letter from -Lord Treasurer Winchester and Ed. Baeshe, to the Lord Deputy. Mr Froude's -summary of it is that "the clammy vapour had stolen into their lungs and -poisoned them," and again, "the reeking vapour of the charnel house." I -have had difficulty in deciphering the letter, but I can make out "being a -graveyard where all their buriall," etc. - -[779] _Cal. State Papers._ Irish. - -[780] Thady Dowling, p. 41. - -[781] _Cal. State Papers._ Domestic. Sept. 1, 1575. - -[782] Stubbs, in his edition of Roger of Howden (Rolls series, No. 51, II. -249), on the evidence of the Pipe Roll of 1166. - -[783] _Memorials of London in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries_, ed. -Riley. - -[784] Stow's _Survey of London_, pop. ed. (1890), p. 66. - -[785] Hall's _Chronicle_, ed. of 1809, p. 632. - -[786] This account of the Black Assizes at Oxford in 1577 was brought to -light, like so many other things from the register of Merton, first by -Anthony Wood in his _Hist. and Antiq. of the Univ. of Oxford_ (ed. Gutch, -II. 189). It was copied in full, from the original Latin text, in 1758, by -John Ward, LL.D., and sent to the Royal Society, in whose _Phil. Trans._ -(vol. L. p. 699) it is printed, with remarks, by Tho. Birch, D.D., Sec. R. -S. - -[787] Howard, _The State of the Prisons in England and Wales_. 3rd ed., -Warrington, 1784, p. 342. - -[788] _Hist, and Antiq. Univ. Oxford_, ed. Gutch, II. 188-192. - -[789] Georgius Edrichus, 'In Libros aliquot pauli Aeginetae Hypomnemata -quaedam.' Londini apud Tomam East 1588 (without pagination). - -[790] The passage which Anthony Wood thought to relate to the gaol fever -at Oxford in 1577 is the following, under the heading "De morbis publice -grassantibus:" "Publice grassari morbos vidimus Oxonii, et una nocte simul -plus sexaginta agrotasse (_sic_) novimus, et in vicinis postridie pagis, -eo forte aere delato, fere centum. Quod etiam eodem tempore, regnante tum -Edwardo sexto, Cantabrigiae evenit, cum duo simul liberi ducis inclyti -Suffolchiae ibi morerentur. Nec tamen Oxonienses ulli fere interierunt, -quod coeli constitutio apud nos quam ibi salubrior sit. Sed iis ita -succurrendum morbis putamus, ut Brittanico sudore (sic enim vocant) -opitulari solemus." - -[791] Anthony Wood, as we have seen in the text, put together his version -of the fever of 1577 from the Merton College register, from Stow's -_Annals_, and from Ethredge's reference to the sweat of 1551. In 1758, -John Ward, LL.D., copied the passage in the Merton register and sent it to -the Royal Society; whose secretary, the Rev. Dr Thomas Birch, appended to -it in the _Philosophical Transactions_ some annotations--"copying," as -Carlyle said of him with reference to some Cromwell matter, "from Wood's -_Athenae_; and has committed--as who does not?--several errors," his -annotations being "sedulous but ineffectual"--to the extent of fixing on -the original correct narrative an accretion of mistakes (600 for 60, -sweating sickness for gaol fever, &c.). Trusting to the respectable Birch, -Bancroft in his _Essay on the Yellow Fever, with observations concerning -febrile contagion &c._ (Lond., 1811) has based a theory that the Oxford -epidemic was not typhus at all. Murchison (_Continued Fevers of Great -Britain_, 2nd ed. 1873, p. 103) has also been misled, and has found -himself therefore at a disadvantage in answering Bancroft's empty -verbalisms about the invariable reproduction of typhus from some previous -case. F. C. Webb, in a paper "An Historical Account of the Gaol Fever," -_Trans. Epidem. Soc._ for 1857, p. 63, has not used the Oxford case for -any argumentative purpose, but he has, like the others, given the facts -erroneously. He gives no particulars of the Exeter Black Assize. - -[792] Howard, _On Lazarettos in Europe_, &c. Warrington, 1789, p. 231: -"But as I have found, in some prisons abroad, cells and dungeons as -offensive and dirty as any I have observed in this country, where however -the distemper was unknown, I am obliged to look out for some additional -cause of its production. I am of opinion that the sudden change of _diet_ -and lodging so affects the _spirits_ of _new_ convicts that the general -causes of putrid fever exert an immediate effect upon them. Hence it is -common to see them sicken and die in a short time with very little -apparent illness." The last words are important. - -[793] _Sylva Sylvarum, or A Natural History._ In ten centuries. Cent. 10, -Secs. 914-15. Spedding's ed. II. 646. - -[794] Holinshed's _Chronicle_. New edition by Hoker, London, 1587, pp. -1547-8. - -[795] These statements by Hoker, chamberlain of Exeter, are sufficiently -circumstantial; but they do not quite suit the theory of a writer in the -_Dict. Nat. Biog._, under "Drake, Sir Bernard" that the ship was "a great -Portugal ship," called the Lion of Viana, with an English master, taken by -Bernard Drake in Brittany. No doubt such a capture is stated in the _Cal. -State Papers_, 1585, p. 295 (the reference given), Sir W. Raleigh's ship -the "Jobe" being included in the same petition; but nothing is said of -Dartmouth as the port to which the two vessels were brought, or of Exeter -as the place where their captains were imprisoned. It is of importance for -the theory of the Exeter gaol fever to know whether Drake's prisoners were -Portuguese fishermen or not, and Hoker may be supposed to have known. - -[796] The author of the misadventure. He succeeded in getting home to -Crediton, where he died on the 12th April, four weeks after the Assizes -began. - -[797] Sir George Nicholls, in his _History of the English Poor Law_, 1854, -I. 113, threw out the suggestion that the decay was in the old walled -towns, and that it was compensated by the rise of populations on less -hampered sites. This theory has been adopted by some later writers. - -[798] _Calendar of State Papers._ Domestic, Hen. VIII. - -[799] Becon's _Works_, 3 vols. II. fol. 15-16. - -[800] Continuation of Fabyan's _Chronicle_. - -[801] Greyfriars _Chronicle_, Camden Soc. LIII., 1852. Preface by J. G. -Nichols, xxiv. - -[802] Strype's ed. of Stow's _Survey of London_. - -[803] In the Rolls of the Middlesex Sessions (Middlesex Record Society), -there occur numerous entries of inquests on deaths in the gaol of Newgate -from the 25th year of Elizabeth: a few of these are from plague; but by -far the larger number are from "the pining sickness," a malady which -sometimes cut off several prisoners in the same few days and after a brief -illness. In one of these epidemics (Dec. 1586-Feb. 1587), a single case is -called "pestilent fever," the other seven being "pining sickness." Next -year, June 19, there is a case of bloody flux, and, on June 24, a case of -"pining sickness." The other periods when the disease so named was -epidemic in Newgate were Feb.-May, 1595, June and July, 1597, March, 1598, -and March-April, 1602. The pining sickness was probably a generic term, -and may have included chronic disease; there is a solitary case entered as -ailing for as long a period as eight months, the usual duration of the -sickness being one, two, or three days up to three or four weeks. - -This place will serve to notice the strange teaching about "parish -infection" which has received currency among the writers of good repute as -authorities. Guy (_Public Health_, Lectures, 1870, I. 23) says the gaol -distemper was an old offender known as the _sickness of the house_: "I -think I recognize it in the London Bills from 1606 to 1665 as the _Parish -Infection_." The column of figures in the London Bills which has been -taken to show the weekly prevalence of a disease, otherwise unheard of, -"parish infection," really shows the number of "parishes infected." The -earlier bills showed, in the corresponding column, the number of parishes -clear ("parish.clere" or "paroch.clere"). By adding up the number of -parishes infected in each of the 52 weeks of a bad plague-year, a total of -some thousands is got, and that total has been taken to be the annual -mortality from "parish infection"--a pure myth. The original author of -this singular mistake appears to have been Marshall, in his _Mortality of -the Metropolis_, London, 1832, p. 67. Of the "parish infection," he says: -"The disease below is specified by Mr Bell in his _Remembrancer_ [1665]; -it is probably the same as exhibited under the name of spotted fever." -What Bell "specifies" is not another disease, but the number of parishes -in the City and suburbs infected with the plague in each week of the year. - -[804] _Annales Monastici_, Rolls series, No. 19. Chronicle by an unknown -author (St Albans) temp. Hen. VI., 1422-31:--"Quaedam infirmitas reumigata -invasit totum populum, quae _mure_ dicitur: et sic senes cum junioribus -inficiebat quod magnum numerum ad funus letale deducebat." - -In the Report of the Irish Local Government Board, Medical Department, -1890, influenza is identified under the name "slaedan," or prostration, -which was epidemic in Ireland in 1326 or 1328, the same epidemic being -called "murre" in the _Annals of Clonmacnoise_. The use of the word "mure" -in the St Albans Chronicle is just a century later. Murrain (or _morena_ -in Latin chronicles) is probably the modern survival of "mure" or "murre." - -[805] I take this summary from Short (_Chronology_, etc. I. 204), who -omits his authority, probably the foreign writers to whom he is usually -indebted in the earlier period. The first part of Theophilus Thompson's -_Annals of Influenza_ (Sydenham Society) is little else than extracts from -Short, and therefore of foreign origin. - -[806] _Cal. State Papers._ Domestic, _sub dato_. - -[807] Thus in the continuation of Fabyan's Chronicle under the year 1512, -the Marquis of Dorset, sent into Spain with 10,000 men, is said to have -"returned in winter by reason of the flix (dysentery)." And in Hall's -_Chronicle_ (ed. of 1807, p. 523), we have particulars of the very serious -sickness in his army in Biscay; owing to their diet being largely of -garlic and fruits, and their drink being hot wines in hot weather, "there -fell sick 3000 of the flix, and thereof died 1800 men." - -[808] Continuator of Fabyan's _Chronicle_, sub anno. There is an almost -identical entry in _A London Chronicle of Henry VII. and Henry VIII._ -(Camden Miscellany, vol. V. 1859), but under the year 1539, in a hot and -dry summer. The most discrepant date and designation of the epidemic of -those years are those given in Hardiman's _History of Galway_ (p. 40): -"This charitable institution [St Bridget's Hospital] was fortunately -completed in the year 1543, when the sweating sickness broke out, and -raged with great violence, destroying multitudes of the natives, and -particularly the tradesmen of the town." - -[809] The term "hot ague" occurs as early as 1518, in a letter of 18 July -(_Cal. State Papers_). - -[810] Wriothesley, _A Chronicle of England during the reigns of the -Tudors_ (1457-1559). Camden Society, II. 139. - -Anthony Wood also enters for Oxford, under 1557, "A pestilential disease -to the settling of some and the driving away of many; the causes of which -proceeding from the eating of green fruit, the Commissary commanded that -none should be sold in the market or elsewhere in Oxford." - -[811] Fabyan's _Chronicle_, p. 711. - -[812] Stow's _Annales_, ed. Howse, p. 631. Speed also has a paragraph, -unusual with him, on the state of health in the year of Queen Mary's death -(1658), in which the mortality among the clergy is specially mentioned. - -[813] Extracts from Harrison's MS. _Chronologie_ by Furnivall, in Appendix -to _Elizabethan England_. Camelot series, 1890, p. 267. His famine prices, -and the enormous fall of them after harvest, are the same as given by -Stow. - -[814] _State Papers_, Record Office. - -[815] John Jones, M.D. _The Dyall of Ague_, London, 1564? - -[816] _Calendar of State Papers._ Foreign, II. 1558, p. 398. - -[817] _Calendar of State Papers._ Foreign, II. 1558, p. 400. - -[818] _New Observations, Natural, Moral, Civil, Political and Medical, on -City, Town and Country Bills of Mortality._ By Thomas Short, M.D., London, -1750. - -[819] 2 vols. London, 1749. - -[820] _Calendar of Cecil MSS._, II. 525. - -[821] _Phil. Trans._ XVIII. 105 - -[822] Graunt, _Reflections on the Bills of Mortality_, 3rd ed. 1665. - -[823] _Opera_, ed. Greenhill, p. 160. - -[824] _Ibid._ p. 169. - -[825] Giraldus Cambrensis, Rolls series, No. 21, vol. V. _Topogr. -Hiberniae_, p. 67:--"Advenarum, tamen, una his fere est passio et unica -vexatio. Ob humida namque nutrimenta, immoderatum ventris fluxum vix in -primis ullus evadit." Flux among the English troops in Ireland in 1172 is -mentioned by Radulphus de Diceto, _Imag. Histor._ I. 348. - -[826] _Works of James I._, p. 301. - -[827] _Sloane MS._ (Brit. Mus.) No. 389, folios 147-153. It bears no date, -but is marked in the catalogue "xv and xvi cent.," as if belonging either -to the end of the fifteenth century or the beginning of the sixteenth. - -[828] Hensler, who reproduced in 1783 (_Geschichte der Lustseuche_, App. -p. 53) these and other particulars from one of the two remaining copies of -Pinctor's work (in the possession of Professor Cotunni of Naples), -collated with the other copy in the Garelli library at Vienna, finds in -the concluding dedication of the book to Alexander Borgia a sinister -meaning, as if the supreme pontiff had been himself a victim of the -_grande maladie a la mode_; it is easier, he says, to extricate the sense -than the syntax of the passage. - -[829] There was another edition in 1539, and several more following. -Paynel also added a short section, "A Remedy for the Frenche pockes," to -his book entitled, _A Moche Profitable Treatise against the Pestilence_. -Translated into English by Thomas Paynel, chanon of Martin [Merton] Abbey, -London, 1534. - -[830] _Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, -1398-1570._ Edited for the Spalding Club [by Dr John Stuart], vol. I. -1844, p. 425. - -[831] _Phil. Trans._, vol. 42 (1743), p. 420: "Part of a Letter from Mr -Macky, professor of History, to Mr Mac Laurin, professor of Mathematics in -the University of Edinburgh, and by him communicated to the President of -the Royal Society; being an Extract from the Books of the Town Council of -Edinburgh, relating to a Disease there, supposed to be Venereal, in the -year 1497." - -[832] Simpson (_l. c._) quotes the Proclamation from the original -minute-book, almost in the above spelling; it is in Vol. I. of the _Town -Council Records_, fol. 33-34, and is entitled in the rubric "Ane Grangore -Act." - -[833] "On Syphilis in Scotland in the Fifteenth Century," _Trans. Epidem. -Soc._ N. S. 1. (1862), p. 149. Two of the entries are published in the -_Criminal Trials of Scotland_, 1. 117; the others were collected for -Simpson by Mr Joseph Robertson from the High-Treasurer's Accounts in the -Register House, Edinburgh. These accounts have since been published in the -Rolls series (vol. I. 356, 361, 378 (_bis_), 386). - -[834] _Op. cit._ I. 437. - -[835] _Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York._ Edited by Nicolas, -London, 1830, p. 104. - -[836] Stow's _Survey of London_, "Bridge Ward Without." He ascribes these -informations to "Robert Fabian," both in the text and in the margin. The -statement is certainly not made in Fabyan's _Chronicle of England_ under -the year 1506, or other year of the decade, nor is it indexed as occurring -in some earlier connexion. - -[837] Bernard Andre's Works. Rolls series, No. 10. - -[838] _Erasmi Epistolae_, folio. London, 1642, p. 1789 e. - -[839] Anthony Wood, _Hist. Univ. Oxford_, ed. Gutch, I. 514. Freind -(_Hist. of Physic_, Pt. II. p. 345) says that the French pox is mentioned -in the will of Colet, dean of St Paul's, 1518. - -[840] _The Supplication of Beggers_ compyled by Symon Fyshe. Anno -MCCCCCXXIIII. Lond. 1546. - -[841] _Parliamentary History_, I. 494. - -[842] Bullein's _Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence, 1564_. Early English -Text Society, Extra series, 1888, p. 122. - -[843] Bullein's _Bulwarke of Defence against all Sicknes, Sornes, and -Woundes_, etc., 1562, foll. 2, 68. - -[844] _Certain Works of Chirurgerie newly compiled and published by T. -Gale._ London, 1563. - -[845] _Dyall of Agues_, cap. VIII. "Of the Pestilential fever, or plage, -or boche." - -[846] William Clowes, _A short and profitable Treatise touching the cure -of the disease called (Morbus Gallicus) by unctions_, London, 1579. - -[847] 'A Prooved Practice for all young Chirurgeons, concerning burning -with gunpowder, and woundes made with Gunshot, Sword, Halbard, Pike, -Launce or such other. Hereto is adjoyned a Treatise of the French or -Spanish Pocks, written by John Almenar, a Spanish Phisician. Also a -commodious collection of Aphorismes, both English and Latine, taken out of -an old written coppy. Published for the benefit of his country by William -Clowes, Maister in Chirurgery.' New ed., 1591. - -[848] _A most excellent and compendious Method_, etc. London, 1588. - -[849] Read uses, among other terms, one that has played a great part in -the modern pathology of syphilis. Among the points to be noticed are,--"if -recent or old, if the ulcers or whelks be many, whether pustulous matter -or _gummie_ substance appear." - -[850] John Banister, 'A needefull new and necessarie treatise of -Chyrurgerie, briefly comprehending the generall and particular curation of -ulcers ... drawen forth of sundrie worthy writers.... Hereunto is annexed -certaine experimentes of mine owne invention.' London, 1575. - -[851] Peter Lowe, _An easie, certaine and perfect method to cure and -prevent the Spanish sicknes_, Lond. 1596. For an account of the book see -_The Life and Works of Maister Peter Lowe_. By James Finlayson, M.D. -Glasgow, 1889. - -[852] _A Treatise concerning the plague and the pox, discovering as well -the means how to preserve from the danger of these infectious contagions, -or how to cure those which are infected with either of them._ London, -1652. - -[853] Burnet (_History of his own Time_, I. 395-6, Oxford, 1823) retails a -good deal of unsavoury gossip concerning the disease in noble and princely -personages after the Restoration. - -[854] _Natural and Political Observations upon the Bills of Mortality._ By -Captain John Graunt, F.R.S. Preface dated from Birchin Lane, January, -1662. - -[855] The origin of syphilis from leprosy has been maintained in a modern -work by Friedr. Alex. Simon, _Kritische Geschichte des Ursprungs, der -Pathologie und Behandlung der Syphilis, Tochter und widerum Mutter des -Aussatzes_. Hamburg, 1857-8. - -[856] Hirsch, _Geographical and Historical Pathology_ (Translated), II. -67, 68, 81. - -[857] In Hensler, p. 14, and Appendix, p. 11. - -[858] _Ibid._, App. p. 15. - -[859] In Hensler, Appendix, p. 66. - -[860] The rise of the pox in the Italian wars, with its dispersion over -all Europe, comes into "The Smallpox, a Poem" by "Andrew Tripe, M.D.," -London, 1748: - - "Whip! thro' both camps, halloo! it ran, - Nor uninfected left a man ... - Hence soon thro' Italy it flew - Veiled for a while from mortal view, - When suddenly in various modes, - It shone display'd in shankers, nodes, - Swell'd groins, and pricking shins, and headaches - And a long long long string of dread aches ... - From thence with every sail unfurl'd - It traversed almost all the world ... - Until at length this Stygian fury - Worked its foul way to our blest Drury, - Where still Lord Paramount it reigns, - Pregnant with sharp nocturnal pains," etc. - -[861] I do not include among the good evidence the often quoted letter of -Peter Martyr to a professor of Greek at Salamanca, under the date of -"nonis Aprilis, 1488," in which "morbus Gallicus" is used as well as the -Spanish name "las bubas." It seems to me certain that the date should be -1498, or something else than 1488, the correspondence having gone on until -1525. The same kind of misdating occurs among the printed letters of -Erasmus. - -[862] This letter is printed in his _Opuscula_, Papiae, 1496. Attention -was first called to it by Thiene, in his essay confuting the doctrine of -the West-Indian origin of syphilis. - -[863] In Hensler, App. p. 108. - -[864] Manardus, _Epist. Med._ lib. VII. epist. 2. Basil, 1549, p. 137 (as -cited by Hirsch). The first letter of Manardus "de erroribus Sym. Pistoris -de Lypczk circa morbum Gallicum," was printed in 1500 (Hensler, p. 47). - -[865] I quote it from Hensler, _Geschichte der Lustseuche die zu ende des -xv Jahr hunderts in Europa ausbrach_. Altona, 1783, Appendix, p. 109. - -[866] Mezeray, _Histoire de France_, II. 777. - -[867] The diagnosis in De Comines' text appears to have struck the editors -of the chief edition of his work, that of 1747; for they have appended a -footnote to the passage, which is a superfluity unless it be meant to -express surprise: "Charles VIII. malade de la petite verole a l'age de -vingt-deux ans." - -[868] Martin, _Histoire de France_, VII. 257, 283. - -[869] _Handbook of Geographical and Historical Pathology._ Translated by -C. Creighton, 3 vols. London, 1883-86, II. 92-98. - -[870] _Miscellaneous Works of the late Robert Willan, M.D., F.R.S., -containing an Inquiry into the Antiquity of the Smallpox, Measles, and -Scarlet Fever, etc._ Edited by Ashby Smith, M.D., London, 1821. - -[871] Th. Noeldeke, _Geschichte der Araber und Perser, nach Tabari_. -Leyden, 1879, pp. 218, 219. - -[872] The term "autonomy" in the foregoing is used according to the -exposition which I originally gave of it in an address to the British -Medical Association (1883) on "The Autonomous Life of the Specific -Infections" (_Brit. Med. Journ._, Aug. 4, 1883). The semi-independence of -constitutional states has been dealt with in my book, _Illustrations of -Unconscious Memory in Disease_. London, 1885. - -[873] The South-African controversy, which became acute, was carried on in -journals of the colony (the _South African Medical Journal_ about 1883 and -1884 is a likely source of information), but some echoes of it were heard -in letters to the _British Medical Journal_, 1884. A few years ago a -similar diagnostic difficulty arose, not in an African race, but among the -inmates of a Paris hospital. In the smallpox wards of the Hopital St -Antoine, a number of cases occurred, one of them in a nurse, another in an -assistant physician, of a particular skin-disease, which was either -discrete or confluent, lasted about ten days, and was attended by fever up -to 40 deg. C. or 41 deg. C. Yet these cases were discriminated from smallpox; they -were diagnosed, and have been recorded, as an epidemic of ecthyma. (Du -Castel, _Gazette des Hopitaux_, 1881, No. 122, quoted in the -_Jahresbericht_.) - -[874] _Krankheiten des Orients._ Erlangen, 1847, p. 127. - -[875] _History of Physic_, II. 190. - -[876] Gruner, a learned professor of Jena, who made collections of works -or passages relating to syphilis and to the English sweat, published also -in 1790 a collection of medieval chapters or sentences on smallpox, "De -Variolis et Morbillis fragmenta medicorum Arabistarum," including the -whole of Gaddesden's chapter but omitting the earlier and more important -chapter from Gilbert. Gruner correctly says at the end of his extracts: -"while the Arabists write thus, they seem to have followed their Arabic -guides, and to have repeated what they received from the latter." This is -obvious from the text of the chapters themselves: some quote more often -than others from Avicenna, Rhazes and Isaac; but it is clear that they all -base upon the Arabians. The substance is the same in them all; it is a -merely verbal handling of Arabic observation and theory. There are no -concrete experiences or original additions, from which one might infer -that they were familiar at first hand with smallpox and measles. Haeser, -however, seems to take these chapters in the medieval compends as evidence -of the general prevalence of smallpox in Europe in the Middle Ages. As he -finds little writing about smallpox when modern medical literature began, -he is driven into the paradox that epidemics of smallpox had actually -become rarer again in the sixteenth century (III. p. 69). But the -sixteenth-century references to smallpox, although they are indeed scanty, -are at the same time the earliest authentic accounts of it in Western -Europe. - -[877] This intention is most clearly expressed by Valescus de Tharanta: -"Then let him be wrapped in a woollen cloth of Persian, or at least of -red, so that by the sight of the red cloth the blood may be led to the -exterior and so be kept at no excessive heat, according to the tenour of -the sixth canon [of Avicenna]." _Apud_ Gruner, p. 46. - -[878] _History of Physic_, Pt. II. p. 280. - -[879] _Rosa Anglica._ Papiae, 1492. - -[880] _Chronica Majora._ Rolls ed. V. 452. - -[881] _Rolls of Parliament._ - -[882] Early English Text Society's edition by Skeat. Passus xvi. (108), -and Passus vii. - -[883] Trench, in his _Select Glossary_, has adopted the derivation of -measles from _misellus_, without apparently knowing that John of Gaddesden -had actually used "mesles" for a form of _morbilli_. The derivation of -measles from _misellus_ has been summarily rejected by Skeat, who thinks -that "the spelling with the simple vowel _e_, instead of _ae_ or _ea_, -makes all the difference. The confusion between the words is probably -quite modern." Perhaps I ought not to contradict a philologist on his own -ground; but there is no help for it. I know of four instances in which the -simple vowel _e_ is used in spelling the name of the disease that is -associated with smallpox, the English equivalent of _morbilli_. In a -letter of July 14, 1518, from Pace, dean of St Paul's to Wolsey (_Cal. -State Papers_, Henry VIII. II. pt. 1), it is said, "They do die in these -parts [Wallingford] in every place, not only of the small pokkes and -mezils, but also of the great sickness." In the _Description of the Pest_ -by Dr Gilbert Skene, of Edinburgh (Edin. 1568, reprinted for the Bannatyne -Club, 1840, p. 9), he mentions certain states of weather "quhilkis also -signifeis the Pokis, Mesillis and siclik diseisis of bodie to follow." And -if a Scotsman's usage be not admitted, an Oxonian, Cogan, says, "when the -small pockes and mesels are rife," and another Oxonian, Thomas Lodge, in -his _Treatise of the Plague_ (London, 1603, Cap. iii.) says: "When as -Fevers are accompanied with Small Poxe, Mesels, with spots," etc. On the -other hand, Elyot, in the _Castel of Health_ (1541), Phaer in the _Book of -Children_, (1553), Clowes in his _Proved Practice_, and Kellwaye (1593) -write the word with _ea_. There is, indeed, no uniformity, just as one -might have expected in the sixteenth century. Again, Shakespeare -(_Coriolanus_, Act III., scene I) spells the word with _ea_ where it is -clearly the same word that is used in _The Vision of Piers the Ploughman_ -in a generic sense and in the spelling of "meseles:"--"Those meazels which -we disdain should tetter us." Lastly, there are not two words in the -Elizabethan dictionaries, one with _e_ signifying lepers, and another with -_ea_ signifying the disease of _morbilli_. In Levins' _Manipulus -Vocabulorum_, we find "ye Maysilles" = _variolae_, but there is no word -"mesles" = _leprosi_. There was only one word, with the usual varieties of -spelling; and in course of time it came to be restricted in meaning to -_morbilli_, Gaddesden's early use of "mesles" in that sense having -doubtless helped to determine the usage. - -[884] _Harl. MS._, No. 2378. So far as I have observed, there is no -prescription for "mesles," or for smallpox under its Latin name or under -any English name that might correspond thereto. Moulton's _This is The -Myrror or Glasse of Helth_ (? 1540), which reproduces these medieval -prescriptions with their headings, is equally silent about smallpox and -measles. - -[885] Willan's _Miscellaneous Works_. "An Inquiry into the Antiquity of -the Smallpox, Measles, and Scarlet Fever." London, 1821, p. 98. The MS. is -Harleian, No. 585. - -[886] Sandoval, cited by Hecker, _Der Englische Schweiss_. Berlin, 1834, -p. 80. - -[887] MS. Harl., 1568. - -[888] There is a fine copy of the earliest printed version in the British -Museum, with "Sanctus Albanus" for colophon. The same text was reprinted -often in the years following by London printers--in 1498, 1502, 1510, 1515 -(twice), and 1528. - -[889] Camden Society, ed. Gairdner, 1876, p. 87. - -[890] Walsingham, _Hist. Angliae_, I. 299. Also _Chronicon Angliae a -quodam Monacho_, _sub anno_ 1362. - -[891] "Also manie died of the smallpocks, both men, women and children." - -[892] _History of the Smallpox_, 1817. Blomefield, also, in his _History -of Norfolk_, quotes the passage about "pockys" correctly from the "Fruit -of Times," applies it to Norwich, to which city it had no special -relation, and then says that this is the first mention of "small pocks." - -[893] Fabyan's _Chronicle_. Ed. Ellis, p. 653. - -[894] Levins, _Manipulus Vocabulorum_, 1570. Camden Society's edition, -column 158. - -[895] _Lettres du Roy Louis XII._ Brusselle, 1712, IV. 335. - -[896] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[897] "Item, que a son grand desplaisir il ait este naguaires mal dispose -d'une maladie nommee la petitte verolle, dont a present, graces a Dieu, il -est recouvert et passe tout dangier." _Lettres du Roy Louis XII._, IV. -260. Brusselle, 1712. - -[898] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[899] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[900] Edited by Gairdner for the Camden Society, 1880. - -[901] Bannatyne Club's reprint, 1840, pp. 9-10. - -[902] _The Loseley Manuscripts._ Edited by Kempe. London, 1836, p. 315. - -[903] _A Defensative against the Plague ... whereunto is annexed a short -treatise of the small Poxe, how to govern and help those that are infected -therewith._ London, 1593. - -[904] Francis Davison's _Poetical Rapsodie_. The poem of Spilman occurs at -p. 189 of the edition of 1611. In the piratical edition of 1621, after -Davison's death, "small" is left out before "Pocks," and Spilman's name -omitted at the foot of the verses. The printer's error has had the -singular effect of leading Dr Farmer, the writer on Shakespeare, to -conclude that the word "pox" in the Elizabethan period meant smallpox even -in imprecations such as "a pox on it." - -[905] Sir Tobie Matthews' _Letters (1577-1655)_, London, 1660. (1) Donne -to Mrs Cockaine, p. 342; (2) Donne to Sir R. D----, both without date. - -[906] _Court and Times of James I._ - -[907] _Court and Times of Charles I._ (Chamberlain to Carleton), I. 28. - -[908] Anthony Wood. - -[909] For Chester also, in the parish register of Trinity Church (Harl. -MS. 2177) there is a note opposite 1636: "for this two or three years -divers children died of smallpox in Chester." - -[910] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[911] _Ibid._ - -[912] _Hist. MSS. Commission_, V. 146, 151, 156, 168, 174, 201. See also -the Diaries of Pepys and Evelyn. - -[913] _Natural History of Oxfordshire._ Oxford, 1677, p. 23. - -[914] _De contagione et contagiosis morbis_, etc. Venet. 1546. - -[915] Titles in Haeser, III. 383. - -[916] _Opus de peste ... necnon de variolis_, Neap. 1577. - -[917] _Les oeuvres de M. Ambroise Pare._ 5th ed., Paris, 1598, Books XIX. -and XX. The chapters on Plague, Smallpox, etc., were originally published, -according to Haeser, in 1568. - -[918] See Purchas, _Pilgrimes_, III. 996, where syphilis and smallpox are -included together as "infectious or pestilentiall pocks," Ramusio being -given as the authority for the smallpox and Oviedo for the great pox. - -[919] For details of the increase of London population, with the sources -of evidence, I beg to refer to my essay, "The Population of Old London," -_Blackwood's Magazine_, April, 1891. - -[920] Broadside in the Guildhall Library, bound up in a volume labelled -_Political Tracts_, 1680. - -[921] "The time when it began in the City of Westminster and these places -following: - -"Buried in Westminster from 14 July to 20 October, in the whole number -832, whereof of the plague 723. Buried in the Savoy from the 1st of June -to the 20th of October, in the whole number 182, whereof of the plague, -171. Buried in the parish of Stepney from the 25th of March to the 20th of -October, in all 1978, whereof of the plague, 1871. Buried at -Newington-buts from the 14th of June to the 20th of October, in all 626, -whereof of the plague, 562. Buried at Islington 201 in all, 170 of plague; -at Lambeth 373 in all, 362 of plague; at Hackney 192 in all, 169 of -plague. Buried in all within the 7 several places last aforenamed 4378, -whereof of the plague, 3997. The whole number that hath been buried in all -[to 20th October], both within London and the Liberties, and the 7 other -severall places last before mentioned is 39,380, whereof of the number of -the plague, 32,609." - -From the parish registers the burials for the whole year are known: -Stepney, 2257; Lambeth, 566; Islington, 322; Hackney, 321 (of plague 269). - -In Stow's _Annales_, the mortality of 1603 is given as follows:--"There -died in London and the liberties thereof from the xxiii day of December -1602 unto the xxii day of December 1603, of all diseases 38,244, whereof -of the plague 30,578." - -[922] Baddeley, _l. c._ - -[923] _A short Dialogue concerning the Plague Infection._ Published to -preserue Bloud through the blessing of God. London, 1603. - -[924] _The Wonderfull Yeare 1603, wherein is shewed the picture of London -lying sicke of the Plague._ London, 1603. - -[925] In his _Seven Deadly Sins of London_ (1606) he returns to the mode -of burial in the plague: "All ceremonial due to them was taken away, they -were launched ten in one heap, twenty in another, the gallant and the -beggar together, the husband saw his wife and his deadly enemy whom he -hated within a pair of sheets." As an after effect of this mode of -interment, "What rotten stenches and contagious damps would strike up into -thy nostrils!" - -[926] _A Treatise of the Plague._ By Thomas Lodge, Doctor in Phisicke. -London, 1603. It has been reprinted, among Lodge's other works, by the -Hunterian Club of Glasgow, 1880. - -[927] _The opinion of Peter Turner, Doctor in Physicke, concerning Amulets -or Plague-Cakes, whereof perhaps some hold too much and some too little._ -London, 1603, p. 10. Turner held high offices at the College of -Physicians, and died in 1614. There was another physician of the name, -also a dignitary of the College, Dr George Turner, whose widow was the -notorious Mrs Anne Turner, executed for having been an instrument in the -poisoning of Sir T. Overbury. Scott has drawn from her the character of -Mrs Suddlechop, in _The Fortunes of Nigel_, a work invaluable for -realizing the London of King James. The reference in the Earl of -Northumberland's accounts, under date Feb. 6, 1607, to a Dr Turner, who -was paid ten shillings for a "pomander" against the plague, would suit -either Dr Peter or Dr George (_Hist. MSS. Commis._ VI. 2, 29). - -[928] A letter from Hampstead, August 27, 1603, speaks of "the imprudent -exposure of infected beds in the streets." (_Cal. State Papers._) - -[929] _A New Treatise of the Pestilence, etc. the like not before this -time published, and therefore necessarie for all manner of persons in this -time of contagion._ By S. H. Studious in Phisicke. London, 1603. - -[930] This mystification was pointed out in a note to "Thayre" (the 1625 -edition) in the printed Catalogue of the Library of the Royal Medical and -Chirurgical Society. - -[931] _An Epistle discoursing upon the present Pestilence, teaching what -it is and how the people of God should carrie themselves towards God and -their neighbours therein._ Reprinted, with some Additions, by Henoch -Clapham. London, 1603. - -[932] _A Short Dialogue, etc._, _ut supra_. - -[933] In a volume with other pieces. London, 1605. - -[934] But several warders in the Tower died of it. (_Cal. State Papers_, -Sept. 16, 1603.) - -[935] In Lysons, _Environs of London_. - -[936] _Hist. MSS. Com._ X. pt. 4, p. 5. - -[937] E.g. plague at Datchet (_Notes and Queries_, 3rd ser. VI. 217). - -[938] John Bell, _London's Remembrancer_. London, 1665 [1666]. - -[939] Extracts from _Harrison's MS. Chronologie_ by Furnivall in Appendix -(p. 268) to _Elizabethan England_. Camelot Series, 1890. - -[940] _A Sermon preached at Powles Crosse_, etc. London, 1578. - -[941] _Remembrancia_ (numerous extracts from the City records, under -"Plays"). - -[942] _Cal. State Papers_, Addenda, James I. p. 534. - -[943] _Notes and Queries_, 6th series, II. 524. The mortality is stated on -the authority of the parish registers of St George's and St Michael's, the -dead having been "buried at the cabbin of Whitefryers." - -[944] There is _An Account of the Plague at Oxford, 1603_, in the Sloane -MS. No. 4376 (14), extracted from the register of Merton College, which -had also been the source of Anthony Wood's account, as summarised in the -text. - -[945] _Cal. State Papers._ Addenda, 1580-1625. - -[946] _Hist. MSS. Commis._ IX. 160. - -[947] Izacke's 'Memorials of Exeter' (in _N. and Q._, 3rd ser. VI. 217). - -[948] Bailey, _Transcripts from the MS. Archives of Winchester, 1856_, p. -109. - -[949] Cromwell. - -[950] _Hist. MSS. Commis._ IX. - -[951] _Ibid._ X. pt. I, p. 89. - -[952] Thompson's _Boston_. - -[953] _Hist. MSS. Com._ IX. - -[954] _Archaeologia_, VI. 80. - -[955] Rogers' MS. in Hemingway's _Hist. of Chester_. Harl. MS. 2177. - -[956] Earwaker, _East Cheshire_, II. 471; I. 406. - -[957] Bridges and Whalley, II. 53; I. 124. - -[958] Drake's _Eboracum_. Lond. 1736, p. 121. - -[959] Sykes, _Local Records of Northumberland and Durham_. - -[960] Phillips, Owen and Blakeway. - -[961] _Cal. State Papers._ Addenda, 1580-1625. - -[962] Parish Register (in a local history). - -[963] _Notes and Queries_, 6th ser. II. 390. - -[964] _Ib._ - -[965] _Ib._ - -[966] _Ib._ - -[967] _Cal. State Papers_, 1608-9. - -[968] Hemingway. - -[969] _Cal. S. P._ - -[970] _Hist. MSS. Com._ V. 570. - -[971] _Archaeologia_, VI. 80. - -[972] Blomefield. - -[973] Sykes. - -[974] Nichols, III. 892-3. - -[975] Nichols (parish registers); Kelly, _Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc._, 1877, -VI. 395. - -[976] Sykes. - -[977] Hemingway. - -[978] May, _Hist. of Evesham_, 1845; p. 371. - -[979] Add. MS. 29,975. f. 25. - -[980] _Hist. MSS. Com._ IX. 162. - -[981] _Ib._ I. 101. - -[982] Beesley, _Hist. of Banbury_. - -[983] Dean Butler's notes to Clyn's and Dowling's _Annals_. - -[984] Smith's _Cork_, from MS. Annals. - -[985] Chambers, _Domestic Annals_. - -[986] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[987] Chambers. - -[988] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[989] Balfour's _Annals of Scotland_ (in Chambers, I. 399). - -[990] _Ibid._ - -[991] Chambers. - -[992] _Aberdeen Burgh Records._ - -[993] Chambers. - -[994] _Chron. of Perth._ - -[995] Chambers. - -[996] _Ibid._ - -[997] The invaluable letters of Chamberlain, as well as those of Mead (of -Cambridge) and others, were collected by Dr Thomas Birch in the last -century, and printed in 1848 under the titles _The Court and Times of -James I._, and _C. and T. Charles I._, without an index but with some -useful notes. - -[998] Chamberlain to Carleton, _C. and T. James I._, II. 504. - -[999] _Chronological History of the Air, Weather, Seasons, Meteors, etc._ -2 vols. Lond. 1749, I. 306:--"This fever began, and raged terribly in -England in 1623; was little, if at all, short of the plague." - -[1000] Chamberlain to Carleton, in _Court and Times of Charles I._, I. 28. - -[1001] Salvetti's Diary, in _Hist. MSS. Com._ XI. pt. I, p. 26. - -[1002] _Cal. S. P._ 15 Sept. - -[1003] Holland. - -[1004] Bell, _London's Remembrancer_. - -[1005] _C. and T. Charles I._, letter of 2 July, 1625. - -[1006] In a volume of Topographical Papers in the British Museum, 1298, m -(18). - -[1007] W. Heberden, Junr., _Increase and Decrease of Diseases_. Lond. -1801, p. 66. He gives no authority; "1626" is clearly a misprint. - -[1008] _Calendar of State Papers_, 1625-26, p. 184. - -[1009] _The Red Crosse_ (broadside). London, 1625. - -[1010] Parish Histories, and in Lysons' _Environs of London_. - -[1011] _Britain's Remembrancer, containing a Narrative of the Plague -lately past._ London, 1628. - -[1012] _The Fearfull Summer, or London's Calamitie._ Printed at Oxford, -1625 (reprinted with additions, Lond. 1636). - -[1013] Holland's _Posthuma_. Cantab. 1626. - -[1014] _The Weeping Lady, or London like Ninivie in Sackcloth._ By T. B. -London, 1625. - -[1015] _Hist. MSS. Commission_, XI. pt. I, p. 6. - -[1016] Bradwell's book, to be mentioned in the sequel, was written for -practice during the plague. There is a reference to something of Sir -Theodore Mayerne's on the plague of 1625, which I have not succeeded in -finding. His _Opera Medica_ contain ordinary cases treated by him in -London in December, 1625, but there is no mention of plague-cases. -Woodall's essay on plague, published in 1639, thus refers to his -experience in the epidemic of 1625: "In anno 1625 we had many signes -contrarie to the plagues in other times; yea, and many did dye dayly -without any signes or markes on their bodies at all." - -[1017] _C. and T. Charles I._ I. 48. - -[1018] _A Watchman for the Pest, teaching the true Rules of Preservation -from the Pestilent Contagion, at this time fearfully overflowing this -famous Cittie of London. Collected out of the best authors, mixed with -auncient experience, and moulded into a new and most plaine method._ By -Steven Bradwell, of London, Physition. 1625. - -[1019] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[1020] _Ib._ - -[1021] Th. Locke to Carleton, _Cal. S. P._, 14 Aug. - -[1022] Salvetti. - -[1023] Locke to Carleton, 27 Aug. - -[1024] _Cal. S. P._ - -[1025] Mead, letter in _C. and T. Ch. I._ I. 43. - -[1026] _Cal. S. P._ - -[1027] _Ibid._ - -[1028] Mostly from parish registers in Lysons' _Environs of London_. - -[1029] Winchester was probably a fair sample. In the city archives under -the year 1625 there is this entry: "Item, it is also agreed that the -decayed cottage where Lenord Andrews did dwell, he lately dying of the -plague, shall be burned to the grounde for fear of the daunger of -infection that might ensue if it should stande." (Bailey, _Transcripts_, -etc. Winchester, 1856, p. 110.) In a petition relating to Farnham, Jan. -1628, the town is described as being "impoverished through the plague and -many charges," which may mean that plague had been diffused in Surrey and -Hampshire. - -[1030] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[1031] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[1032] MSS. of the Corporation of Plymouth. _Hist. MSS. Commis._ IX. 278. -Accounts are given (p. 280) of the monies collected for the relief of the -poor and sick people of Plymouth "in the time of the infection of the -pestilence from Sept. 29, 1625, to that day A.D. 1627." But that does not -imply that the infection lasted all that time. The civic year began with -September 29, and the accounts are those that fall within two complete -financial years. - -[1033] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[1034] _Notes and Queries_, 6 ser. III. 477. - -[1035] _Cal. S. P._ - -[1036] _Ib._ - -[1037] _Cal. S. P._ - -[1038] _Ib._ - -[1039] _Cal. S. P._ - -[1040] Letter from Mead in _C. and T. Charles I._ I. 51. - -[1041] Blomefield. - -[1042] At Coventry in 1626, L20 was paid to the poor in lieu of a feast at -Lammas, by reason of the infection. (Dugdale, _Warwickshire_.) - -[1043] The following curious extract was sent by J. A. Picton to _Notes -and Queries_, 6th ser. I. 314 from the parish register of Malpas, -Cheshire, 1625: - -"Richard Dawson (brother of the above-named Thomas Dawson of Bradley) -being sick of the plague and perceiving he must die, at that time arose -out of his bed and made his grave, and caused his nephew John Dawson to -cast straw into the grave, which was not far from the house, and went and -laid him down in the said grave and caused clothes to be laid upon, and so -departed out of this world. This he did because he was a strong man and -heavier than his said nephew and another wench were able to bury. He died -about the 24th of August. Thus much was I credibly tould. He died 1625. - -"John Dawson, son of the above-mentioned Thomas, came unto his father when -his father sent for him being sick, and having laid him down in a ditch -died in it the 29th day of August, 1625, in the night. - -"Rose Smyth, servant of the above-named Thomas Dawson, and last of that -household, died of the plague and was buried by Wm. Cooke the 5th day of -September, 1625, near unto the said house." - -[1044] Memoranda of Rev. Thomas Archer, of Houghton Conquest. MSS. Addit. -Brit. Museum. - -[1045] Blomefield. - -[1046] Phillips' _Hist. of Shrewsbury_. _Hist. MSS. Com._ X. pt. 4. p. -498. - -[1047] _Hist. MSS. Com._ II. 258. - -[1048] _Hist. of County of Lincoln_, II. 187. _Notitiae Ludae_, p. 41. - -[1049] Tickell's _Hist. of Kingston-upon-Hull_. Hull, 1798. - -[1050] Gawdy MSS. (_Hist. MSS. Com._ X. pt. 2), various letters from Sept. -14, 1636, to Nov. 26, 1638, relating chiefly to Norwich. - -[1051] Boys, _Hist. of Sandwich_, pp. 707-8. - -[1052] R. Jenison, D.D., _Newcastle's Call to her Neighbor and Sister -Towns_. London, 1637. - -[1053] Heberden says that it began in Whitechapel, but does not say where -he got the information. - -[1054] _Middlesex County Records_, III. 62. - -[1055] _Ibid._ - -[1056] The College of Physicians reported also in May, 1637, on the causes -of plague--overcrowding, nuisances, &c.; among the causes assigned the -following is noteworthy: Those who died of the plague were buried within -the City, and some of the graveyards were so full that partially -decomposed bodies were taken up to make room for fresh interments. (Cited -by S. R. Gardiner, _History, &c._, VIII. 237-9, from the State Papers.) - -[1057] _Natural and Political Reflections on the Bills of Mortality._ -London, 1662. - -[1058] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[1059] Strype's ed. of Stow's _Survey of London_. - -[1060] Rendle (_Old Southwark_, 1878, p. 96) quotes the following from a -letter written in 1618 by Geoffrey Mynshall from the King's Bench prison: -"As to health, it hath more diseases predominant in it than the pest-house -in the plague time ... stinks more than the Lord Mayor's dog-house or -Paris Garden in August ... three men in one bed." - -[1061] _Cal. S. P._ 1601-3, p. 209. - -[1062] _Middlesex County Records_, II. - -[1063] Cited by Gardiner, _History_, VIII. 289. - -[1064] _Calendar of State Papers._ - -[1065] _Cal. S. P._ - -[1066] _Ibid._ - -[1067] _Ibid._ The coexistence of malignant fever with plague at -Northampton in 1638 is decisively shown by particulars of cases published -by Woodall, _Op. cit._ 1639. See also Freeman, _Hist. of Northampton_, p. -75 (but under the year 1637). - -[1068] _Ibid._ - -[1069] _Ibid._ - -[1070] Camden's _Britannia_, ed. Gough, II. 244. - -[1071] _Notes and Queries_, 6th series, IV. 199. - -[1072] _Hist. MSS. Com._ V. 173. - -[1073] _Diatribae duae de Fermentatione et de Febribus._ Hagae, 1659. - -[1074] _Morbus Epidemicus anni 1643; or the New Disease._ Published by -command of his Majesty. Oxford, 1643. - -[1075] From Rushworth. - -[1076] "The City, with much emotion, ranks its trained bands under Essex: -making up an Army for him, despatches him to relieve Gloucester. He -marches on the 26th [August]; steadily along, in spite of rainy weather -and Prince Rupert; westward, westward; on the night of the tenth day, -September 5th, the Gloucester people see his signal-fire flame up, amid -the dark rain, 'on the top of Presbury Hill;'--and understand that they -shall live and not die. The King 'fired his huts,' and marched off without -delay. He never again had any real chance of prevailing in this war.... -The steady march to Gloucester and back again, by Essex, was the chief -feat he did during the war; a considerable feat, and very characteristic -of him, the slow-going inarticulate, indignant, somewhat elephantine man." -Carlyle, _Letters and Speeches of Cromwell_. - -[1077] From the translation by S. Pordage. London, 1681. - -[1078] Anthony Wood, II. pt I. p. 469. - -[1079] Dunsford's _Histor. Mem. of Tiverton_, p. 184. - -[1080] The military events from Rushworth. - -[1081] Dunsford, _Histor. Memoirs of Tiverton_. Harding, _Hist. of -Tiverton_. - -[1082] Rushworth. Moore, _Hist. of Devonshire_, I. 149. - -[1083] Beesley's _Hist. of Banbury_, p. 387. - -[1084] In Somers's _Tracts_. Scott's ed. V. 294. - -[1085] Sykes. - -[1086] Clarendon, referring to a proposed Royal visit to Bristol in April -says: "The plague began to break out there very much for the time of the -year." - -[1087] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[1088] Rushworth. - -[1089] _Letters and Speeches_, I. - -[1090] Seyer's _Memorials of Bristol_, II. 466. - -[1091] Whitaker, _History of Leeds_, p. 75. - -[1092] Harwood, _Hist. of Lichfield_, p. 306. - -[1093] Pordage's translation of Willis's _Remaining Works_, p. 131. - -[1094] Nichols, III. 893. - -[1095] Cornelius Brown, _Annals of Newark_. London, 1879, p. 164. - -[1096] _Ibid._ - -[1097] _Notes and Queries_, 6th ser., III. 477. - -[1098] Rushworth. - -[1099] _Histor. MSS. Com._ XI. 7, p. 190. - -[1100] _Ibid._ IX. 1, p. 201. - -[1101] _Hist. of Carlisle_, 1838. - -[1102] Chambers, _Domestic Annals of Scotland_. - -[1103] Baillie's _Letters_. 3 vols. Edited by D. Laing for the Bannatyne -Club. - -[1104] Kennedy, _Annals of Aberdeen_, I. 270 (expenses of the epidemic -from the Council Register, vol. LIII. p. 130). - -[1105] Hemingway, Ormerod. _The Report of the Hist. MSS. Commission_ (V. -339) notes that Dr Cowper's MS. contains details of 2,099 deaths, but -reproduces none of them. - -[1106] _Hist. MSS. Commiss._ V. 342. - -[1107] Owen and Blakeway. - -[1108] Rushworth, Pt. 4, vol. II., pp. 1100, 1109. - -[1109] _Annals of Ireland_ by Clyn and Dowling, Dean Butler's notes pp. -64, 65 (ref. to Carte's _Life of the Duke of Ormonde_). - -[1110] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[1111] The weekly bills of mortality for Dublin, July 20--Aug. 2, 1662, -showed only 14 baptisms and 20 burials in ten parishes; but these can -hardly have been all the births and deaths in the city. - -[1112] Smith's _Cork_, vol. II. from Cox MSS. - -[1113] _Cal. S. P._ Sept. 21, 1650. - -[1114] H. Whitmore, M.D. _Febris Anomala; or the New Disease that now -rageth throughout England, with a brief description of the Disease which -this Spring most infested London._ London, 1659 (4 November). - -[1115] _Hist. MSS. Commission_, X. pt. 4, p. 106. - -[1116] Willis, _Diatribae duae_. Hagae, 1659. - -[1117] _Pyretologia._ 2 vols. London, 1692-4. Appendix to 1st volume, p. -415. - -[1118] Sent to _Notes and Queries_, 1st ser. XII. 281, by Mr H. Hucks -Gibbs. - -[1119] _Hist. MSS. Commiss._ V. 146 (Sutherland letters). - -[1120] Greenhill's edition (Sydenham Society, 1844), pp. 37, 93, 95-98. - -[1121] Purchas, _His Pilgrimes_. 4 vols., folio. London, 1625, vol. I. -Book II. p. 36. - -[1122] Hakluyt, _The Principal Navigations_, &c. 3 vols. London, 1599, -III. 225-6. - -[1123] Pericarditis scorbutica--a condition which has been observed mostly -in Russia in recent times. The whiteness of the heart would have been due -to the fibrinous layer of lymph on its surface, from the pericarditis. - -[1124] Hakluyt, III. 241. - -[1125] Hakluyt, II. Part II., pp. 22, 36, 48. - -[1126] Hakluyt, III. 501. - -[1127] Sir James Stephen's _Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography_, pop. ed. -p. 125. - -[1128] Hakluyt, II. pt. 2, p. 99. - -[1129] The famous figure in _Paradise Lost_ (IV. 159) is taken from the -route to India passing within Madagascar--a poetic colouring of dreary and -painful realities:-- - - As when to them who sail - Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past - Mozambik, off at sea north-east winds blow - Sabean odours from the spicy shore - Of Araby the blest; with such delay - Well pleas'd they slack their course, and many a league - Cheer'd with the grateful smell old Ocean smiles: - -[1130] _The World Encompassed_ &c., Hakluyt Society, ed. Vaux, p. 149, and -Hakluyt, III. 740. - -[1131] _A summarie and true discourse of Sir Francis Drake's West Indian -voyage begun in the year 1585._ Published by M. Thomas Cates. Shortened in -Hakluyt, III. 542. The earlier part of the narrative is by Captain Bigges, -and, after his death in the West Indies, by his lieutenant, Croftes. - -[1132] Mr Froude (_History_, XII. 150) must be pronounced somewhat happy -in his bold guess of "yellow fever." At the same time the enthymeme by -which he had reached his conclusion is altogether wrong: first, in -assuming that the infection "broke out" after the capture of Cartagena, -ignoring the fact of its disastrous prevalence in mid-ocean two or three -months before, shortly after leaving the Cape de Verde islands; and -secondly in assuming that the yellow fever for which Cartagena and other -harbours of the Spanish Main became notorious in later times had existed -as an infection there in the 16th century. - -[1133] Sir Richard Hawkins, who commanded the galliot 'Duck' in Drake's -expedition of 1585, thus refers to the Cape de Verde islands, on the -occasion of touching there in his own expedition to the Pacific in 1593 -(Purchas, IV. 1368): - -These islands are "one of the most unhealthiest climates in the world. In -two times that I have been in them, either cost us the one half of our -people, with fevers and fluxes of sundry kinds, some shaking, some -burning, some partaking of both; some possesst with frensie, others with -slouth; and in one of them it cost me six months' sickness, with no small -hazard of life." He then gives a reason for the great risk to health: the -north-east breeze about four in the afternoon seldom faileth, "coming cold -and fresh, and finding the pores of the body open and for the most part -naked, penetrateth the very bones, and so causeth sudden distemperature, -and sundry manners of sickness, as the subjects are divers whereupon they -work. Departing out of the calmes of the Islands, and coming into the -fresh breeze, it causeth the like; and I have seen within two days after -that we have partaked of the fresh air, of two thousand men above an -hundred and fifty have been crazed in their health." This seems to refer -to the epidemic in Drake's fleet, as given in the text; but it is clearly -an imperfect account of the facts, and in theory altogether improbable, as -a trade wind within the tropic cannot be credited with such effects, even -if the forms of sickness were conceivably due at all to chill. - -Darwin (_Naturalist's Voyage in the Beagle_, p. 366) says: "The island of -St Jago, at the Cape de Verde, offers another strongly-marked instance of -a country, which anyone would have expected to find most healthy, being -very much the contrary. I have described the bare and open plains as -supporting, during a few weeks after the rainy season, a thin vegetation, -which directly withers away and dries up; at this period the air appears -to become quite poisonous; both natives and foreigners often being -affected with violent fevers. On the other hand, the Galapagos -Archipelago, in the Pacific, with a similar soil, and periodically subject -to the same process of vegetation, is perfectly healthy." But the -Galapagos have been uninhabited, except in recent times by two or three -hundred people banished from Ecuador. On the other hand the Cape de Verde -islands are believed to have been at one time well wooded and not -unfertile; and the Portuguese settlements in them, to say nothing of the -native negro villages, had a fair population. It is not easy to understand -the pernicious character of their fevers without assuming that spots of -soil had become pestilential by human occupancy; but it is at the same -time clear that a degree of befouling of the soil which would be innocuous -in ordinary, would there engender deadly miasmata owing to the remarkable -alternations of drought and wetness under a tropical sun. - -[1134] Hakluyt, III. 286. - -[1135] Mr Hubert Hall, of the Record Office, in _Society in the -Elizabethan Age_. London, 1886, p. 120. - -[1136] Hakluyt, III. 583. - -[1137] Hakluyt, III. 804, 820; and other details in the 1st ed. (1589) pp. -809, 810. - -[1138] Hakluyt, III. 842-52. - -[1139] Purchas, IV. Bk. 7, Chap. 5, (reprinted from Hawkins's own -narrative of the voyage, published a few months after the author's death -in 1622). - -[1140] Mr J. K. Laughton (_Dict. of National Biography._ Art. "Hawkins, -Sir Richard") points out that Hawkins's narrative of the 'Daintie's' -voyage had not always been authenticated by reference to notes or -documents. It seems probable also, from his remarks on the epidemic in -Drake's fleet after leaving the Cape de Verde islands in 1585, that he -trusted his memory too much. But that objection of writing from memory has -no force as against his general observations and reflections on scurvy. - -[1141] Purchas, part IV. p. 1877. - -[1142] _Ibid._ p. 1623. - -[1143] Woodall defends the use of biscuit in his _Surgeon's Mate_, -published in 1617. - -[1144] Purchas, III. 847. - -[1145] _The Voyages of Sir James Lancaster, Knight, to the East Indies._ -Hakluyt Society, ed. Clements Markham, 1878; and in Hakluyt's _Principal -Navigations_, II. pt. 2, p. 102. - -[1146] The slowness of the passage round the Cape of Good Hope in old -times was due less to the build or rig of the ships than to the course -shaped: instead of steering southwest from Madeira across the Atlantic -almost to the coast of Brazil at Cape San Roque, so as to get the -north-east trade wind, and thence on another tack in a wide sweep round to -the Cape with the south-east trade wind, the earlier navigators sailed -past the Cape de Verde islands and along the Guinea coast, keeping within -meridians 20 degrees to the eastward of the modern track, and so falling -into the tropical calms at one part, and at another part of the voyage -into the baffling south-east trades, varying in force according to the -season. - -[1147] Purchas, I. 147. - -[1148] _Calendar of State Papers._ East Indies (under the respective -dates). - -[1149] It seems to have passed into common usage, as "to lie in cold -obstruction and to rot" (_Meas. for Meas._ III. 1), and to have been kept -up therein after the faculty had dropped it--if indeed Byron's line, -"Where cold Obstruction's apathy" be a survival of medical terminology. -There is an instance of the same kind of survival in the use of -"scorbutic;" at one time land-scurvy was detected (under the influence of -theory) in many forms, and we find in the _Pickwick Papers_ a late -reminiscence of that singular dogma in the "young gentleman with the -scorbutic countenance." - -[1150] The three earlier instances from Purchas, I. 248, 466, the later -from the _Cal. State Papers_, East Indies. - -[1151] _Cal. S. P._ Colonial. East Indies. Dec. 24, 1628. - -[1152] _Ibid._ Feb. 6, 1626, p. 146. - -[1153] _William Hedges' Diary._ Hakluyt Society, 1887, I. 24, 54. - -[1154] _A Letter of M. Gabriel Archar_, in Purchas, pt. IV. p. 1733; -Smith's _Virginia_, in Pinkerton, XIII. 99; W. Strachey, in Purchas, pt. -IV. p. 1753. - -[1155] Theobald makes this the storm and shipwreck which Shakespeare -brings into the _Tempest_. - -[1156] Purchas, IV. p. 1762. - -[1157] _Cal. S. P._ America and West Indies. - -[1158] Dermer, in Purchas, IV. p. 1778: Belknap's _American Biography_ -("Life of Gorges"), I. 355. - -[1159] John Winthrop's _Journal_, p. 11. - -[1160] Winthrop, I. pp. 119, 123. - -[1161] _Ibid._ II. 310. - -[1162] Refs. in Noah Webster's _Hist. of Epid. and Pestil. Diseases_. -Hartford, 1799, I. 189, 191, 193. - -[1163] Letter of Norris, in _Hist. of S. Carolina_, I. 142. - -[1164] Saco, _History of African Slavery in the New World_ (Spanish). -Barcelona, 1879. - -[1165] Oviedo, in Purchas, III. 996:--"Extract of Gonzalo Ferdinando de -Oviedo:--'I had acquaintance with divers which went in the first and -second voyages of Columbus; of which was Peter Margarite, commendator in -the second voyage, of most respect with the king and queen, who complained -of those paines. [Syphilis was prevalent in Barcelona and Valencia -previous to 1494. See Chapter VIII.] Soon after, in the year 1496, began -the disease to arrest some courtiers; but in those beginnings it was only -amongst baser persons of small authority; and it was thought that they got -it by having to do with common women. But afterwards it extended to -principal persons, and the physicians could not tell what to think of it, -so that many died.'... But indeed it came from Hispaniola, where it is -ordinary, and the remedy also [guaiacum]. _Our author_ (_l. c._ civ.), and -Ramusio in his preface to his third Tome, say that the souldiers of -Pamfilo de Nuney, having the small pocks, infected the Indians which never -before heard of that disease; in so much that of 1,600,000 soules in that -island there are so few left, as by and by you shall hear.... The -covetousnesse of the mine-workers, neglect of diet, change of gouvernours -growing worse and worse, caused them to poison, kill and hang themselves, -besides those which were consumed by infectious or pestilentiall pocks -(those before mentioned out of Ramusio) and other diseases." - -[1166] _Calendar of State Papers._ Amer. & W. I., I. 57. - -[1167] _Ibid._ - -[1168] _Cal. S. P._ Amer. & W. I., under the respective dates. - -[1169] The account that follows is taken from Father Dutertre's _Histoire -generale des Antilles habitees par les Francois_, 4 vols., Paris, -1667-1671, which superseded his earlier work of 1654. - -[1170] _Cal. S. P._ Amer. & W. I., II. 529. - -[1171] Ligon, _Hist. of Barbadoes_. London, 1657. - -[1172] Winthrop's _Journal_, II. 312. - -[1173] Dutertre, _Hist. gen. des Antilles habitees par les Francois_. 4 -vols. Paris, 1667-1671. - -[1174] _Cal. State Papers_, Amer. and W. I., I. 301. - -[1175] The chronology of yellow-fever epidemics in Hirsch (I. 318) is made -to begin with Guadeloupe, 1635 and 1640, on the authority of Dutertre (as -above), the epidemic of 1647 at Bridgetown being the third in order. - -[1176] Benjamin Moseley, M.D., _Treatise on Tropical Diseases, and on the -Climate of the West Indies_, 3rd ed. (1803), p. 476. - -[1177] Hughes, _The Natural History of Barbados_. London, 1750, p. 37. - -[1178] _Cal. S. P._ Amer. and W. I., under the dates. - -[1179] In Sir John Hawkins' second voyage as a slaver (1565), he was -allowed to trade on the Spanish Main only for his "lean negroes," which -were within the purchasing means of the poorer Spaniards. The voyage had -been tedious, and the supply of water short "for so great a company of -negroes.... Many never thought to have reached to the Indies without great -death of negroes and of themselves; but the Almighty God, who never -suffereth His Elect to perish," etc. Hakluyt, III. 501. - -[1180] Clarkson, _History of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade_. -New ed., Lond. 1839, pp. 307, 352. He showed his prepared document to -Pitt:-- - -"Mr Pitt turned over leaf after leaf, in which the copies of the -muster-rolls were contained, with great patience; and when he had looked -over about a hundred pages accurately, and found the name of every seaman -inserted, his former abode or service, the time of his entry, and what had -become of him, either by death, discharge, or desertion, he expressed his -surprise at the great pains which had been taken in this branch of the -inquiry; and confessed, with some emotion, that his doubts were wholly -removed with respect to the destructive nature of this employ." (p. 273.) - -[1181] T. Aubrey, M.D., _The Sea-Surgeon, or the Guinea Man's Vade Mecum_. -London, 1729, p. 107. - -[1182] Gillespie, _Obs. on the Diseases in H. M.'s Squadron on the Leeward -Island Station in 1794-6_. Lond. 1800. - -[1183] For example, Mr R. L. Stevenson in a striking passage of _Treasure -Island_. - -[1184] Thurloe's _State Papers_, III. IV. and V.; _Harl. Miscell._ III. -513; Long's _History of Jamaica_, 3 vols. London, 1774; _Cal. S. P._, -Amer. and W. I. - -[1185] _Harl. Miscel._ _l. c._ - -[1186] Sir Anthony Shirley touched at Jamaica in 1596, and reported, "we -have not found in the Indies a more pleasant and wholesome place." -Hakluyt, III. 601. Long (_History of Jamaica_, 1774, II. 221) states the -case very fairly with reference to the unfortunate expedition of Venables -in 1655: "The climate of the island has unjustly been accused by many -writers on the subject, the one copying from the other, and represented as -almost pestilential, without an examination into the real sources of this -mortality, which being fairly stated, it will appear that the same men -carrying the like thoughtless conduct and vices into any other uninhabited -quarter of the globe, must infallibly have involved themselves in the like -calamitous situation." - -[1187] _MS. State Papers_, _Colonial_ (Record Office), Vol. XIV. No. 57 -(1660). - -[1188] Thomas Trapham, M.D., _Discourse of the State of Health in -Jamaica_. Lond. 1679. - -[1189] Moseley, _op. cit._ p. 421, without reasons given; followed by -Hirsch. _Geog. and Hist. Pathol._ (English transl.), I. 318. - -[1190] _Hist. of Jamaica_, III. 615. - -[1191] _Cal. S. P._ Amer. and W. I. - -[1192] _Cal. S. P._ Amer. and W. I. 1669-74, Sec. 144. - -[1193] _Ibid._ Sec. 264, III. - -[1194] With a preface by the Printer to the Reader, beginning "The -reprinting of these sad sheets." Printed and are to be sold by E. Cotes, -living in Aldersgate Street, printer to the said Company. - -[1195] The advertisement is cited in Brayley's edition of Defoe's _Journal -of the Plague Year_. - -[1196] Sloane MS. no. 349. [Greek: Loimographia], _or, An experimental -Relation of the Plague, of what happened remarkable in the last Plague in -the City of London_, etc. By William Boghurst, Apothecary in St Giles' in -the Fields. London, 1666. - -[1197] Reprinted in _A Collection of very Valuable and Scarce Pieces -relating to the last Plague in the year 1665_. London, 1721. - -[1198] [Greek: Loimologia]. London, 1671. Translation by Quincy, 1720. - -[1199] [Greek: Loimotomia], _or, the Pest Anatomized_. By George Thomson, -M.D. London, 1666. - -[1200] London, 1667. - -[1201] Among the crop of books brought up by the Plague of Marseilles, in -1720 (the immediate cause of Defoe's book also) was one by Richard -Bradley, F.R.S., a writer upon botany, on _The Plague of Marseilles. Also -Observations taken from an original Manuscript of a graduate physician, -who resided in London during the whole time of the late plague, anno -1665._ London 1721 (and two more editions the same year). The title-page -of this astute gentleman is of the catch-penny order. All that is said of -the original manuscript occupies about the same number of lines in the -text as in the title, and might have been extracted in the course of five -minutes' research; it consists merely of a list of a few things supposed -to be distinctive signs of plague--extraordinary inward heat, difficulty -of breathing, pain and heaviness in the head, inclination to sleep, -frequent vomiting, immoderate thirst, dryness of the tongue and palate, -and then the risings, swellings, or buboes. Boghurst's third chapter is -occupied with twenty-one such signs, and his fourth chapter with a hundred -more signs and circumstances, in numbered paragraphs. It is possible that -his was the manuscript out of which the botanist made capital in his -title-page; but his meagre list of signs might have been got from almost -any work on almost any febrile disorder, and is not sufficient to identify -Boghurst by, although a word or phrase here and there is the same. -However, Defoe would have seen Bradley's title-page, and might have -inquired after the Sloane MS. - -[1202] Of the six plague-deaths in 1664, three were in Whitechapel parish, -and one each in Aldgate, Cripplegate and St Giles's-in-the-Fields. - -[1203] _Reliquiae Baxterianae._ London, 1696, I. 448. This entry in his -journal is dated September 28, 1665, at Hampden, Bucks. - -[1204] _Ed. cit._ Chap. XIV. p. 131:--"Diseases which seem to be nearest -like its (plague's) nature; which chiefly are fevers, called pestilent and -malignant; for 'tis commonly noted that fevers sometimes reign popularly, -which for the vehemency of symptoms, the great slaughter of the sick, and -the great force of contagion, scarce give place to the pestilence; which, -however, because they imitate the type of putrid fevers, and do not so -certainly kill the sick as the plague, or so certainly infect others, they -deserve the name, not of the plague, but by a more minute appellation of a -pestilential fever." - -[1205] In a letter from London, 9 May, 1637 (Gawdy MSS. at Norwich, _Hist. -MSS. Commis._ X. pt. 2. p. 163) it is said: "There is a strange opinion -here amongst the poorer sort of people, who hold it a matter of conscience -to visit their neighbours in any sickness, yea though they know it to be -the infection." - -[1206] Evans, in preface to 1721 edition of Vincent's book. - -[1207] _Cal. State Papers._ - -[1208] _Ibid._ - -[1209] Evans, _l. c._ - -[1210] _Reliquiae Baxterianae._ London, 1696, II. 1. 2. - -[1211] Milton, with his wife and daughters, spent the summer and autumn in -the same quiet neighbourhood, at Chalfont St Giles, in a cottage which -Ellwood had secured for him, still remaining with its low ceilings and -diamond window-panes. He there showed Ellwood the manuscript of _Paradise -Lost_, which was published in 1667. The poem contains no reference to the -plague, unless, indeed, the flight to the country had given point to the -lines in the 9th book: - - "As one who long in populous city pent, - Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air, - Forth issuing on a summer's morn, to breathe - Among the pleasant villages and farms,"-- - -An opportunity arises in the 12th book, where the Plagues of Egypt come -into the prophetic vision of events after the Fall; but the movement is -too rapid to allow of delay, and we have no more than-- - - "Botches and blains must all his flesh emboss, - And all his people." - -Gibbon thought that the comet of 1664 (which was generally remarked upon -as a portent of the plague that followed) might have suggested the lines, -II. 708-11 - - "and like a comet burn'd, - That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge - In the arctic sky, and from his horrid hair - Shakes pestilence and war." - -Gibbon seems to make a slip in taking these as "the famous lines which -startled the licenser;" those are usually taken to have been I. 598-9, the -figure of the sun's eclipse, which - - "with fear of change - Perplexes monarchs." - -[1212] _Brit. Mus. Addit. MS._ 4376 (8). "Abstract of several orders -relating to the Plague," from 35 Hen. VIII. to 1665. - -[1213] In excavating the foundations of the Broad Street terminus of the -North London Railway, the workmen came upon a stratum four feet below the -surface and descending eight or ten feet lower, which was full of -uncoffined skeletons. Some hundreds of them were collected and -re-interred. (_Notes and Queries_, 3rd Ser. IV. 85.) The ground was part -of the old enclosure of Bethlem Hospital (St Mary's Spital outside -Bishopsgate), and was acquired for a cemetery, to the extent of an acre, -by Sir Thomas Roe, in 1569. Probably there were plague-pits dug in it -during more than one of the great epidemics, from 1593 to 1665. - -[1214] _Cal. State Papers_, Domestic, 1665, p. 579. - -[1215] _Reliquiae Hearnianae._ Ed. Bliss, 1869, II. 117 (under the date of -Jan. 21, 1721). - -[1216] _The City Remembrancer._ London, 1769 (professing to be Gideon -Harvey's notes). - -[1217] Procopius (_De Bello Persico_, II. cap. 23, Latin Translation) says -the same of the great Justinian plague in A.D. 543 at Byzantium: "ut vere -quis possit dicere, pestem illam, seu casu aliquo seu providentia, quasi -delectu diligenter habito, sceleratissimos quosque reliquisse. Sed haec -postea clarius patuerunt." On this Gibbon remarks: "Philosophy must -disdain the observation of Procopius, that the lives of such men were -guarded by the peculiar favour of fortune or Providence;" and most men -will agree with Gibbon. But, if we could be sure of the fact of immunity -(and Boghurst's testimony is a little weakened by his deference to -Diemerbroek, who knew the classical traditions of plague), it might be -possible to explain it on merely pathological grounds. - -[1218] John Tillison to Dr Sancroft, September 14, 1665. Harl. MSS. cited -by Heberden, _Increase and Decrease of Diseases_. London, 1801. Woodall, -writing in 1639, and basing on his experience of London plague in 1603, -1625, and 1636, is in like manner emphatic that the symptoms varied much -in individuals and in seasons. - -[1219] _Cal. State Papers._ _Hist. MSS. Com._ IX. 321. - -[1220] _Cal. State Papers._ _Cal. Le Fleming MSS._ p. 37 (also for -Cockermouth). - -[1221] _Ibid._ - -[1222] Mead seems to have known that there were plague-cases at Battle in -1665. - -[1223] _Cal. S. P._ - -[1224] _Hist. MSS. Com._ II. 115. - -[1225] _The History and Antiquities of Eyam, with a full and particular -account of the Great Plague which desolated that village A.D. 1666._ By -William Wood, London, 1842. This small volume, which owes its interest -solely to the plague-incident, has gone through at least five editions. -Among those who have written, in prose or verse, upon the same theme, Wood -mentions Dr Mead, Miss Seward, Allan Cunningham, E. Rhodes, S. T. Hall, -William and Mary Howitt, S. Roberts, and J. Holland. The story is also in -the _Book of Golden Deeds_. - -[1226] Bacon (_Sylva Sylvarum_, Cent. X. Sec. 912. Spedding II. 643) says: -"The plague is many times taken without a manifest sense, as hath been -said. And they report that, where it is found, it hath a scent of the -smell of a mellow apple; and (as some say) of May-flowers; and it is also -received that smells of flowers that are mellow and luscious are ill for -the plague: as white lilies, cowslips and hyacinths." - -[1227] Sir Thomas Elyot, in _The Castle of Health_ (1541), says that -"infected stuff lying in a coffer fast shut for two years, then opened, -has infected those that stood nigh it, who soon after died." (Cited by -Brasbridge, _Poor Man's Jewel_, 1578, Chapter VIII.) - -[1228] Milner's _Hist. of Winchester_. - -[1229] _The City Remembrancer_, Lond. 1769, vol. I.--an account of the -plague, fire, storm of 1703, etc., said to have been "collected from -curious and authentic papers originally compiled by the late learned Dr -[Gideon] Harvey." But the section on the plague is almost purely Defoe and -Vincent, with a few things from Mead. - -[1230] These figures, with the two oaths, had been copied by the antiquary -Morant for his _History of Essex_, and are preserved in No. 87. ff. 55 and -56, of the Stowe MSS. in the British Museum, where Mr J. A. Herbert, of -the Manuscript Department, pointed them out to me. In his printed -_History_ Morant has summarized the plague-deaths in monthly periods. - -The Bearers' Oath, fol. 57:-- - -"Ye shall swear, that ye shall bear to the ground and bury the bodys of -all such persons as, during these infectious times, shall dye of the -pestilence within this Towne or the Liberties thereof, or so many of them -as ye shall have notice of, and may be permitted to bury, carrying them to -burials always in the night time, unless it be otherwise ordered by the -Mayor of this Towne; And ye shall be always in readiness for that purpose -at your abode, where you shall be appointed, keeping apart from your -families together with the searchers, and not to be absent from thence -more than your office of Bearers requires. Ye shall always in your walk, -as much as may be, avoid the society of people, keeping as far distant -from them as may bee, and carrying openly in your hands a white wand, by -which people may know you, and shun and avoid you. And shall do all other -things belonging to the office of Bearers, and therein shall demean -yourselves honestly and faithfully, discharging a good conscience; So etc. - - _August 1665._ - - JAMES BARTON and JOHN COOKE:--sworn, who are to have for their pains - 10 sh. a week a piece; and 2d for every one to be buried, taking the - 2d out of the estate of the deceased. If there be not wherewithal, the - parish to bear it. - -Oath 6. p. 44. - -The Oath for the Searchers of the Plague, 1665. - -"Yee and either of You shall sweare, that ye shall diligently view and -search the corps of all such persons, as during these infectious times, -shall dye within this Towne or the Liberties thereof, or so many of them -as you shall or may have access unto, or have notice of; And shall -according to the best of your skill, determine of what disease every such -dead corps came to its death. And shall immediately give your judgment -thereof to the Constables of the parish where such corps shall be found, -and to the Bearers appointed for the burial of such infected corps. You -shall not make report of the cause of any one's death better or worse than -the nature of the disease shall deserve. Yee shall live together where you -shall be appointed, and not walk abroad more than necessity requires, and -that only in the execution of your office of Searchers. Ye shall decline -and absent yourselves from your families, and always avoid the society of -people. And in your walk shall keep as far distant from men as may be, -always carrying in your hands a white wand, by which the people may know -you, and shun and avoid you. And ye shall well and truly do all other -things belonging to the office of Searchers, according to the best of your -skill, wisdom, knowledge, and power, in all things dealing faithfully, -honestly, unfeignedly and impartially. So help" etc. - -[1231] Morant, _Hist. of Essex_, I. 74. - -[1232] Deering, _Nottingham_, vetus et nova, 1751, pp. 82-83. Copied in -Thoresby's edition of Thoroton's _History of Nottingham_, II. 60. - - - - -Transcriber's Notes: - -Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_. - -Passages in bold are indicated by =bold=. - -Superscripted characters are indicated by {superscript}. - -The original text contains letters with diacritical marks that are not -represented in this text version. - -The original text includes Greek characters that have been replaced with -transliterations in this text version. - -The original text includes a dagger symbol that is represented as [Dagger] -in this text version. - - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A History of Epidemics in Britain -(Volume I of II), by Charles Creighton - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF EPIDEMICS IN BRITAIN *** - -***** This file should be named 42686.txt or 42686.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/4/2/6/8/42686/ - -Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at -http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images -generously made available by The Internet Archive.) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions -will be renamed. - -Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no -one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation -(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without -permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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