Chapter X

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 £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, longé recede, tardé 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:

εἰ δὴ ὁμοῦ πόλεμός τε δαμᾷ καὶ λοιμὸς ’Αχαιούς.

--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 Æsculapius, 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 συνεχὴς 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.