Chapter XII

Chapter XII

THE GREAT PLAGUE OF LONDON, AND THE LAST OF PLAGUE IN ENGLAND.

Literature of the Great Plague.

The writings called forth directly by the London Plague of 1665 were hardly more numerous or of better quality than those of 1603 and 1625. At its beginning in June, or in August, there appeared a number of tracts by enterprising practitioners, containing a few commonplace remarks on causes and the like, and advertisements of nostrums--by G. Harvey, Kemp, Garrencieres (“Plague is one of the easiest diseases in the world to cure, if” etc.), and Gadbury, an astrologer. The directions drawn up by the College of Physicians in 1636, for the preservation of the sound and recovery of the sick were re-issued, and an excellent set of “cautionary rules” by H. Brooke was published by order of the mayor. The writings which contain accounts of the Great Plague fall under two periods--the years immediately following 1665, and the years 1720 to 1723 when there was a sudden revival of interest in the subject in London owing to the great plague of Marseilles in 1720. To the latter period belongs the most famous work on the plague of 1665, Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, which embodied in a picturesque form the substance of various writings that preceded it, together with traditions known to Defoe. A brief account of those writings that preceded Defoe’s in both periods will serve at the same time to show the sources of a great part of his information.

The weekly bills of mortality issued by Parish Clerks’ Hall, which showed the number of deaths week by week in each of the one hundred and forty parishes of London, with a rough classification of the causes of death, were reprinted at the end of the year 1665 in a volume with the title London’s Dreadful Visitation[1194]. The bills thus collected in convenient form were made great use of by Defoe, and became, indeed, the backbone of his work. Next to them in importance, although it is not certain that Defoe used it, is a treatise on the medical aspects of the Great Plague, which has never had the fortune to be published. The author of it was William Boghurst, a young apothecary practising at the White Hart in St Giles’s-in-the-Fields, who advertised in the Intelligencer on July 31, 1665, at the height of the plague in his parish, that he had treated forty, fifty or sixty patients in a day, that he was prepared to undertake the treatment of cases in the City, the suburbs, or the country, and that he had a water, a lozenge, and an electuary, as well as an antidote at eightpence an ounce[1195].

After the epidemic was over he employed his spare half-hours in writing a book upon his experiences, “considering that none hath printed anything either since this plague, or that forty years since--which I something wonder at.” He professes to have taken nothing from hearsay, or from books, or from the testimonies of others; he writes in English “for general readers and sale,” and he had omitted many things “so as not to make the book too tedious and too dear to bie.” The manuscript was completed for the press, with a title-page, at the foot of which is what appears to be a publisher’s name (the surname now torn off); but it was never published, although the author lived until 1685. It is conceivable that the printed sheets, or the composed type, may have been destroyed in the fire of September, 1666, and the enterprise abandoned. The manuscript came into the possession of Sir Hans Sloane, and is now in the British Museum[1196]. It gives much fuller clinical details of the plague than any other English work, although in somewhat aphoristic form; and it may be allowed the character of originality which the author claims for it, except in some of the more systematic chapters showing the influence of Diemerbroek.

Another medical essay following the plague was that of Dr Hodges, of Watling Street, first written in English in 1666 (May 8) under the title A Letter to a Person of Quality[1197], and expanded in 1671 into a Latin treatise[1198]. Besides a few pages at the beginning, giving some general facts of the London outbreak (which Defoe used), it is mostly a systematic disquisition, although a few cases are interspersed. One other medical piece of 1666 (June 16) is known, by Dr George Thomson, of Duke’s Place near Aldgate, a Paracelsist or chemical physician; it contains the account of a dissection of a plague-body, but is mostly occupied with a polemic against the Galenists, which the author carried on for a number of years in numerous other writings[1199].

Descriptive pieces, in prose or verse, such as the plagues of 1603 and 1625 elicited, are entirely wanting for that of 1665. But there was the usual crop of religious and moral exercises to improve the occasion. These appear to have come mostly, if not exclusively, from Dissenters. “Many useful and pious treatises,” says a Dissenter in 1721, “were published upon the occasion of the last visitation, as by Mr Zach. Crofton, Mr Shaw, Mr Doolittle, and others.” But the only one that attained popularity, having gone through five editions at once, and been often reprinted, even as late as 1851, was God’s Terrible Voice in the City[1200], by the Rev. Thomas Vincent, of Christ Church, Oxford, who had been ejected from his living of St Mary Magdalen, Milk Street, and was then a leader of Dissent. Vincent preached in several parish churches (deserted by their parsons) all through the plague, and ministered constantly among the sick. His book, which moralizes also upon the great fire of 1666, will be drawn upon in the sequel.

We come next to the revival of interest in the Great Plague of London, which was occasioned by the Marseilles epidemic in the summer of 1720, an event that alarmed Western Europe as if the old recurrences of plague were about to begin afresh after a long interval. In London, in 1721, several books were published upon the Marseilles plague itself; and the years from 1720 to 1722 saw a whole crop of writings,--new essays and reprints of old ones,--upon the last London plague of 1665. Among the books reprinted were Hodges’ Loimologia, in an English translation by Quincy, his Letter to a Person of Quality, the Necessary Directions of the College of Physicians, the Orders drawn up by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City (these three in 1721 in a Collection of very Valuable and Scarce Pieces relating to the last Plague in 1665), and Vincent’s God’s Terrible Voice in the City. The new medical books on the Great Plague were by Scarborough, Hancock and Browne.

When Defoe in 1722 wrote his Journal of the Plague Year, he had these recent reprints and original books convenient to his hand. He had to go back to 1665 for the collection of the weekly bills of mortality in the plague-year (in a volume called London’s Dreadful Visitation), and he may have consulted Boghurst’s manuscript, which was probably then in the possession of Sir Hans Sloane. But it is impossible to trace all his copious narrative of the Great Plague to these sources, even if we make due allowance for his legitimate construction of incidents out of the generalities of contemporary writers. It is possible that he may have had some unknown manuscript, less technical than Boghurst’s, to draw from. At all events, he was a likely person to have had many stories of the plague in his memory. He was a child of four when the plague was in London, the son of a butcher named Foe in St Giles’s, Cripplegate, which was one of the most severely visited parishes. The most graphic parts of his Journal are those which contain such tales as he might have been told in boyhood concerning the plague in Cripplegate, the scene of them being carried round to Aldgate, opposite to the Butchers’ Row (still there) in Whitechapel High Street. He must have had some testimony from which to construct the visit to Blackwall, the view of the shipping moored all up and down the Thames, and the other particulars of the river-side population in the plague-time. The rough experiences of the three Stepney men in the country near London are in the manner of Robinson Crusoe, and needed only a few hints from Dekker’s stories, or from the writers of 1625. His account of the burials by the cart-load in plague-pits is also suggestive of Dekker. The somewhat meagre references by Hodges might have sufficed him for his frequent theme of the hardships and horrors of shut-up houses, even if he had not seen two other tracts, of 1665, on the same. The accounts of the Marseilles plague, one of the worst in history, would have kept him right in picturing that of London.

Whatever materials Defoe took from Hodges, Vincent, or the writers on other plagues, he enlarged them by his power of circumstantial construction into a narrative which must be accounted on the whole veracious. He based upon figures, whenever he could get them; he seems even to have sought among the archives of the City for accounts of monies distributed to the poor. He prints in full the orders of the Mayor and Aldermen, and professes to give the text of a formal resolution which they passed to remain at their posts throughout the crisis. His table of the number of plague-deaths in each of twenty-six towns or villages near London does not, indeed, agree with the figures in the parish registers, as the table on a later page will show; but it can hardly have been drawn up at a guess.

The best instance of Defoe’s skilful use of authentic documents is his description of how the infection invaded one part of London after another from the western suburbs to the eastern, so that its intensity was nearly over in one place before it had begun in another. That is the most interesting epidemiological fact in the whole outbreak; and Defoe has done ample justice to it. Boghurst had stated it with equal clearness and emphasis in his manuscript of 1666, which Defoe may or may not have seen[1201]; however the latter deduced it afresh, and illustrated it by numerous tables from the bills of mortality, which showed the incidence of plague upon each of the one hundred and forty parishes from week to week.

Antecedents, Beginnings and Progress of the Plague of 1665.

When the London plague of 1665 had given indications that it would grow to be one of the great outbreaks of that infection, much was made, in the retrospect, of a single death from plague which had occurred towards the end of December, 1664, in a house in or near Long Acre. Connected with that case was one of those trivial chains of evidence which are so often produced as the easy solution of a difficult problem. A bale of silks had come to the house from Holland, and that bale of silks could be traced to the Levant; therefore the seeds of the great plague of London were imported Levantine seeds. This was pretty well for a city which had a continuous record of plague-infection in its soil ever since the Black Death of 1348. But credulity could ignore facts more recent than the history for three centuries. The death in Long Acre in December was a solitary one, and was of no more import for what followed than any of the five other sporadic plague-deaths in 1664[1202]. Only one more death from plague occurred in the bills (in the middle of February), until the last week of April, 1665; even then the progress of the infection was slower for the next two months than it had been in many former seasons of moderate plague, such as the five years 1606-1610 and the eight years 1640-1647, or than it had been in the great plague-years of 1603, 1625 and 1636. An importation from abroad had been alleged as early as the great plague of 1563, namely from Havre, which was then held by an English garrison. But on that occasion the epidemic in London was gaining ground before the sickness at Havre had declared itself plague, and was of the bubonic type while the latter was still a malignant fever. The return of the whole English garrison from Havre, with the seeds of sickness among them, might well have introduced infection; but that return was not until the end of July, by which time the mortality in London had been progressing for two months. There is equally little reason for Stow’s statement that the plague of 1603 was brought to London from Ostend, or for the corresponding theory of origin for the plague of 1625. A foreign source was not thought of unless the plague became one of the greater degree. Year after year in London there were a few cases of plague, and sometimes for a succession of years the plague-deaths kept steadily at a level of from one thousand to three thousand. There are, indeed, few years from 1348 to 1666 in which the infection did not declare its presence in London. Whether the few threatening cases in the spring were to rise to a plague of the greater degree depended upon a concurrence of circumstances--upon the interval since the last great plague, upon the number of strangers crowding to the capital, and upon the kind of weather preceding. In 1665 the various determining things did chance to come together, and a plague of the first degree ensued. The one singular thing in the history is that such a concurrence never happened again, or that the conditions had so far changed (certainly not for the better), that the type of epidemic disease was no longer the bubo-plague.

According to precedent, a great plague was somewhat overdue in the year 1665. Its two great predecessors (not reckoning the smaller plague of 1636) had happened each at the beginning of a new reign--in 1603 on the accession of James I., and in 1625 on the accession of Charles I. The Restoration of 1660 was the time for the next great outburst; but that was delayed for five years. Those five years were occupied with a good deal of fever and other infective disease in London, and the fever in the beginning of 1665 was, according to Sydenham, of a marked pestilential type. It may be said to have led up to the plague; but the bubonic disease itself needed something in addition to the determining causes of spotted fever. It is generally admitted that London was unusually crowded with the poorer classes whose work is required by the luxury of the rich (Defoe says that an enumeration for the Lord Mayor had made out 100,000 ribbon-weavers in the eastern suburbs, although the number is incredible). There was also a general relaxation of morals, which may have predisposed many constitutions to receive the seeds of infection. Another element in the case was the weather.

The summer before had been remarkable for the immense number of house-flies, and of other insects and frogs. From November to the end of March the earth was held in almost continual black frost. Boghurst says the wind was westerly for seven months. No rain fell all the time except a slight sprinkling in the end of April. The dry cold continued after the frost broke, and produced, says Sydenham, an unusual number of cases of pleurisy, pneumonia and angina. Richard Baxter says of the seasons preceding the great plague, that they were “the driest winter, spring and summer that ever man alive knew, or our forefathers ever heard of; so that the grounds were burnt like the highways, the meadow ground where I lived [Acton] having but four loads of hay which before bare forty[1203].” The hay crop was “pitiful,” says Boghurst, in consequence of the long cold and drought. But the summer was made pleasant by refreshing breezes, and there was abundance of all kinds of grain, vegetables and fruit.

It was not until the beginning of June that the deaths from plague in all London, according to the bills of mortality, reached the sum of 43 in the week. But the mortality had been excessive from the beginning of the year, and it was suspected, as in the like circumstances in 1625, that the searchers had been concealing the existence of plague, or calling cases of it by other names, so as to save the infected houses from being shut up. The motive for bribery and concealment doubtless existed; it had been kept in view by the authorities from the first institution of searchers, who were solemnly sworn before the Dean of the Arches to make a true return of the cause of death. In all the great plagues, less so in 1563 and 1603 than in other years, there was reason to suppose that a large proportion of deaths put down to other causes than plague were really cases of plague. However there is no doubt that, in the early months of 1665, just as in the beginning of 1625, there was a great deal of spotted fever in London, not to mention smallpox and dysentery. The season was a sickly one, such a sickly season as often occurred in the latter part of the seventeenth century and throughout the whole of the eighteenth, when there could be no longer any question of plague. The weekly bills contain numerous deaths in the several parishes from “fever” and from “spotted fever” for months before they contain more than an occasional plague-death. There was no reason why these and other maladies should not have swelled the bills to three or four hundred in a week; in the year 1739, when London was probably not a third larger than in 1665, Strother says that fever brought the weekly bill up to near a thousand. It is remarkable, however, that Boghurst claims to have been treating cases of plague from the month of November, 1664; Hodges also says that he was called in the middle of the Christmas holidays to a young man in a fever who acquired, two days after, a plague-botch in each groin as large as a nutmeg, and recovered. Boghurst admits that “tokens,” by which he means the marks of plague other than the botch or bubo, “appeared not much till about the middle of June, and carbuncles not till the latter end of July.” He suspects that the bills of mortality did not tell the whole truth; and, as an instance of evasion, he says that there had been plague in St Giles’s, St Martin’s, St Clement’s, and St Paul’s, Covent Garden, for three or four years before (the bills of mortality give only 12, 9, and 5 deaths respectively for all London in the years 1662, 1663 and 1664), “as I have been certainly informed by the people themselves that had it in their houses in those parishes.”

But, in claiming an earlier beginning for the plague than the bills recognize, and in setting aside the diagnosis of fever as insufficient, Boghurst takes what is known, in the controversies upon the nature and affinities of plague, as the “ontological” view: that is to say, he sees in plague a fixed and uniform entity, and he sees the same in fever. The other view is the developmental, which recognizes transitions from the one type of pestilential disease into the other. The great writers of the time, Willis, Sydenham, and Morton, were none of them “ontologists.” They all taught the scale of malignity, which had simple continued fever at one end, then a severer fever with spots and “parotids,” then a fever with buboes, and at the farthest end of the scale the true plague, with its buboes, carbuncles, and tokens. Nor is it denied by competent observers, such as Boghurst himself, that an epidemic of plague declined as a whole in malignity towards the end, so that the buboes suppurated, and three out of four, or three out of five, patients recovered. If that were the case in the descent of the curve, why should there not have been something corresponding in the ascent? If certain cases of the prevailing fever in the beginning of the year developed buboes which suppurated (as in the case treated by Hodges at Christmas, 1664), should they be called plague or fever? Willis would have answered in favour of fever, until such time, at least, as the “epidemic constitution” of the season changed definitely to plague[1204]; he does in effect answer so in the particular instance of the Oxford fever of 1643, which in some cases was bubonic, whereas, in 1645, he makes no doubt that the disease prevailing in Oxford and Wallingford was true plague.

The more general discussion of this theme will be found in the concluding section of the chapter on the Black Death, where illustrations are given of typhus fever turning to bubonic fever and to plague, from recent and anomalous outbreaks of plague in Arab villages or encampments, in some Indian villages, and elsewhere. The conclusion there come to was that the type of plague, or the bubonic type, prevailed when the infection of the filthy habitations began with change of season to rise from the soil, whereas the form of sickness was typhus fever so long as the infection was primarily in the atmosphere of the dwellings.

We may admit, then, that there was some ambiguity in the naming and classifying of pestilential cases in the early months of 1665. If we follow the bills--and there is nothing else to follow--the plague-deaths in all the parishes of London for the seven weeks from April 18 to June 6 were respectively no more than 2, 0, 9, 3, 14, 17 and 43, the deaths from “fever” and “spotted fever” being much more numerous.

Having thus far determined the date of beginning, we come next to the line of advance of the plague of 1665. It was from the western and northern suburbs towards the City, the eastern suburbs, and Southwark. Boghurst, who practised in St Giles’s-in-the-Fields, says:

“The plague fell first upon the highest ground, for our parish is the highest ground about London, and the best air, and was first infected. Highgate, Hampstead and Acton also all shared in it.” From the west end of the town, Boghurst continues, “it gradually insinuated and crept down Holborn and the Strand, and then into the City, and at last to the east end of the suburbs, so that it was half a year at the west end of the city [in his experience] before the east end and Stepney was infected, which was about the middle of July. Southwark, being the south suburb, was infected almost as soon as the west end.” But the same writer farther explains that “it fell upon several places of the city and suburbs like rain--at the first at St Giles’, St Martin’s, Chancery-lane, Southwark, Houndsditch, and some places within the City, as at Proctor’s-houses.”

The slow progress from west to east has been made much of by Defoe, who used the bills of mortality to ascertain the rise of the infection in the several districts. His conclusion is the same in the main as Boghurst’s contemporary observation; only that he makes the infection of Southwark later, and with reason so far as the bills show:--

“It was now mid-July, and the plague which had chiefly raged at the other end of the town, and as I said before, in the parishes of St Giles’s, St Andrew’s, Holbourn, and towards Westminster, began now to come eastward towards the part where I lived. It was to be observed, indeed, that it did not come straight on toward us; for the City, that is to say within the walls, was indifferent healthy still; nor was it got then very much over the water into Southwark; for though there died that week 1268 of all distempers, whereof it might be supposed above 900 died of the plague [only 725 in the bill], yet there was but 28 in the whole City within the walls, and but 19 in Southwark, Lambeth included; whereas in the parishes of St Giles’ and St Martin’s in the Fields alone, there died 421.... We perceived, I say, the distemper to draw our way; viz. by the parishes of Clerkenwell, Cripplegate, Shoreditch, and Bishopsgate; which last two parishes joining to Aldgate, Whitechapel and Stepney, the infection came at length to spread its utmost rage and violence in those parts, even when it abated at the western parishes where it began. It was very strange to observe that in this particular week, from the 4th to the 13th July, when, as I have observed, there died near 400 of the plague in the two parishes of St Martin’s and St Giles’ in the Fields only, there died in the parish of Aldgate but four, in the parish of Whitechapel three, and in the parish of Stepney but one.” In the following week of July, with a total of 1761 deaths, whereof of the plague 1089, only 16 occurred on the Southwark side. Soon, however, Cripplegate had the infection at its hottest, and at the same time Clerkenwell, St Sepulchre’s parish, St Bride’s and Aldersgate. “While it was in all these parishes, the City and the parishes of the Southwark side of the water, and all Stepney, Whitechapel, Aldgate, Wapping and Ratcliff were very little touched; so that people went about their business unconcerned, carried on their trades, kept open their shops, and conversed freely with one another in all the City, the east and north-east suburbs, and in Southwark, almost as if the plague had not been among us.”

In another passage Defoe brings out the moral of its gradual advance. He had shown

“how it began at one end of the town, and proceeded gradually and slowly from one part to another; and like a dark cloud that passes over our heads, which as it thickens and overcasts the air at one end, clears up at the other end: so while the plague went on raging from west to east, as it went forwards east it abated in the west, by which means those parts of the town which were not seized, or who were left, and where it had spent its fury were, as it were, spared to help and assist the other; whereas had the distemper spread itself all over the City and suburbs at once, raging in all places alike, as it has done since in some places abroad, the whole body of the people must have been overwhelmed” etc.

That is how Defoe constructs a concrete picture from the dry statistics of the weekly bills. He has defined the stages, and pointed the moral, with a firmer hand than the reality would most likely have warranted. But no scientific writer could have apprehended more correctly the general fact of a gradual invasion from the west end of the town.

These striking facts of the gradual advance of the Great Plague of London from west to east will be found to suit that theory of the plague-virus which has been illustrated in various parts of this volume. The virus of plague is a soil-poison, or the ground is its habitat; its quiescence or activity depends upon whether or not the state of the soil favours the fermentation of the special organic matters therein, which special organic matters we here take to be the products of cadaveric decomposition. The conclusion that the poison of plague lay in the soil, and that it rose into the air in emanations or effluvia, was forced upon all those who thought much about the matter from the medieval period onwards. Thus, the apothecary Boghurst, says in his first chapter: “And therefore my opinion falls in wholly with those who make the earth the seminary and seed-plot of these venomous vapours and pestiferous effluvia, which vitiate and corrupt the air, and consequently induce the pestilence.” And again: “The plague is a most subtle, insinuating, venomous, deleterious exhalation, arising from the maturation of the ferment of the forces (?) of the earth, extracted into the air by the heat of the sun.” It is true that Boghurst, like the sixteenth-century writers abroad, such as Ambroise Parè, locates the venom in mysterious cavities and bowels of the earth, and dwells upon the agency of earthquakes in setting it free. But he comes to more ordinary causes in his enumeration of favouring things--“dunghills, excrements, dead bodies lying unburied, putrefying churchyards too full,” and again “breaking up tombs and graves where dead bodies have been long buried.” As telling against the last, however, he adds: “When the charnel-house at St Paul’s was demolished, there was a thousand cart-loads of dead men’s bones carried away to Finsbury, yet no plague followed it.”

The activity of this soil-poison depends upon processes in the soil which go on so slowly that the link of cause and effect is easily overlooked. In the last resort, they are dependent on the rise and fall of the ground-water. It was observed beyond all doubt as the law in Lower Egypt, that the plague came forth annually after the Nile had begun to fall, and that it reached its height in the months of March, April and May, when the soil was driest, or the pores of the ground occupied solely by air after having been full of water. It was observed, also, that the plague-area and the inundation-area were co-extensive. Lower Egypt is, of course, somewhat peculiar (Lower Bengal coming near to it) in these regular alternations of air alone and water alone in the pores of the ground. But other countries have the same sharp contrast occasionally, and London had the contrast very decidedly in the years 1664 and 1665. The months from November 1664 to June 1665, some of which ought to have brought snow or rain to raise the wells and springs to their highest periodic water-mark early in the year, were quite remarkable for drought: Richard Baxter says that no one remembered the like. The ground-water, instead of rising all through the winter, must have fallen lower and lower as the spring and summer advanced. The pores of the ground had been occupied with air to an unusual depth of the subsoil, and the presence of air in these circumstances had given occasion to that ferment-activity in the special organic matters of an old-inhabited soil which produced the virus of plague. The stratum of subsoil would become dry first in the more elevated parts; and as the ground-water continued to fall, the air would reach in due course an unwonted stratum in the lower situations. Defoe says that they came to water at eighteen feet in digging the Whitechapel plague-pits. The same seasonal march of a soil-infection from the higher ground to the lower has been observed in modern times in other cities, and in other diseases than plague. The drought for seven months from November to June would not, of itself, have caused a great plague. But it was an essential member of the co-operating group of things; and it probably determined of itself the season when the great plague was once more to come and take away the enormous increase of poor people.

Mortality and Incidents of the Great Plague.

The plague of 1665 was justly called the Great Plague, and is sometimes spoken of as “the plague of London,” as if it were unique. But it was not much more severe than those of 1603 and 1625 had been for the London of their generation; and there had been many plagues when London was a small capital, such as those of 1407, 1479, 1500, 1513 and 1563, which had cut off as large a proportion (one-fifth to one-sixth) of the population. The inhabitants in 1665 were not far short of half a million, nearly twice as many as in 1603, and about a third more than in 1625. The increased mortality in 1665 was somewhat more than proportionate to the increase of inhabitants, as the following table shows:--

Highest Year Estimated Total Plague mortality Worst population deaths deaths in a week week

1603 250,000 42,940 33,347 3385 25 Aug.-1 Sept. 1625 320,000 63,001 41,313 5205 11-18 Aug. 1665 460,000 97,306 68,596 8297 12-19 Sept.

Reckoned from the christenings and burials in the bills of Parish Clerks’ Hall, the population in 1605 would have been 224,275, and in 1622, 272,207. But in those years (and until after 1636) certain of the newer parishes (known as the Seven Parishes), including Stepney and Westminster, kept separate bills, of which some figures for 1603 and 1625 are given at p. 477 and p. 511. The population of the Seven Parishes appears to have been about one-ninth of the whole metropolis in 1603, and about one-seventh in 1625, while Graunt, a contemporary, makes it one-fifth in 1662. These fractions have been added in the table, so as to make 1603 and 1625 comparable with 1665. In 1603 and 1625, the highest mortality in a week does not show the deaths in those parishes (Westminster, Stepney &c.) which did not send their returns to the general bill until 1636, but their figures have been included in the totals for those years. It will be seen that the plague of 1665 fully kept pace with the increase of population. The old City within the walls had 15,207 deaths in the year from all causes. It had become crowded since the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign by its gardens and churchyards being built upon, and its mansions turned into tenement-houses for a poorer class; and yet in 1563 the mortality from plague and other causes in the City and its Liberties, with a population hardly exceeding that of the City alone in 1665, was 20,372. The enormous total of 1665 was largely made up from the populous suburbs of Cripplegate, Whitechapel, Stepney, St Martin’s in the Fields, St Giles’s in the Fields, Southwark and Westminster, which would have contributed but little to the total down to the middle third of the sixteenth century.

The following tables will show the progress of the epidemic from week to week, the weekly deaths from all causes and from plague, and the incidence upon the several parts of London. The so-called ordinary deaths are much in excess of the average, and must have included many that were really cases of plague. Part of the excess, however, was due to the great prevalence of fever and spotted fever, which made a heavy mortality in the early months before the plague began. Bowel complaint also is credited with a good many deaths. The other more important items in the bills are consumption and infantile troubles. Boghurst, however, says: “Almost all other diseases turned into the plague. For five or six months together there was hardly any other disease seen but the plague and a few casualties, whatever the Bills say; and Thucydides says the same of the plague at Athens.” As to the total of deaths in the year from all causes (97,306), Hodges thinks that it does not show the whole mortality. The largest number of burials in one week is 8297; but he thinks that 12,000 were buried in that week, and that 4000 were buried in one day and night. But there seems to be no reason to set aside the tally of the sextons to that extent; the returns were made weekly from one hundred and forty parishes, and might easily have been exact to within a few in each.

Bill of Mortality of the Plague-year 1665 in London.

Week ending Christened Buried Plague

Dec. 27 229 291 1 Jan. 3 239 349 0 10 235 394 0 17 223 415 0 24 237 474 0 31 216 409 0 Feb. 7 221 393 0 14 224 462 1 21 232 393 0 28 233 396 0 Mar. 7 236 441 0 14 236 433 0 21 221 363 0 28 238 353 0 Apr. 4 242 344 0 11 245 382 0 18 287 344 0 25 229 398 2 May 2 237 388 0 9 211 347 9 16 227 353 3 23 231 385 14 30 229 400 17 June 6 234 405 43 13 206 558 112 20 204 615 168 27 199 684 267 July 4 207 1006 470 11 197 1268 725 18 194 1761 1089 25 193 2785 1843 Aug. 1 215 3014 2010 8 178 4030 2817 15 166 5319 3880 22 171 5568 4237 29 169 7496 6102 Sept. 5 167 8252 6988 12 168 7690 6544 19 176 8297 7165 26 146 6460 5533 Oct. 3 142 5720 4929 10 141 5068 4327 17 147 3219 2665 24 104 1806 1421 31 104 1388 1031 Nov. 7 95 1787 1414 14 113 1359 1050 21 108 905 652 28 112 544 333 Dec. 5 123 428 210 12 133 442 243 19 147 525 281 ----- ------ ------ 9,967 97,306 68,596

Incidence on Parishes of the Plague in 1665.

Ninety-seven Parishes within the Walls.

All deaths Plague deaths 97 City parishes 15,207 9,877

(The parishes with heaviest mortalities were St Anne’s, Blackfriars; Christ Church, Newgate; St Stephen’s, Coleman St; St Martin’s, Vintry; Allhallows Barking, the Great, and in-the-Wall; St Andrew’s, Wardrobe).

Sixteen Parishes without the Walls and in the Liberties.

St Giles’s, Cripplegate 8069 4838 St Botolph’s, Aldgate 4926 4051 St Olave’s, Southwark 4793 2785 St Sepulchre’s 4509 2746 St Saviour’s, Southwark 4235 3446 St Andrew’s, Holborn 3958 3103 St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate 3464 2500 St Bride’s, Fleet Street 2111 1427 St George’s, Southwark 1613 1260 St Botolph’s, Aldersgate 997 755 St Dunstan’s in the West 958 665 St Bartholomew the Great 493 344 St Thomas’s, Southwark 475 371 Bridewell Precinct 230 179 St Bartholomew the Less 193 139 Trinity, Minories 168 123

Pesthouse 159

Twelve Out-parishes in Middlesex and Surrey.

Stepney 8598 6583 Whitechapel 4766 3855 St Giles’s in the Fields 4457 3216 St Leonard’s, Shoreditch 2669 949 St Magdalen’s, Bermondsey 1943 1362 St James’s, Clerkenwell 1863 1377 St Mary’s, Newington 1272 1004 St Katharine’s, Tower 956 601 Lambeth 798 537 Islington 696 593 Rotherhithe 304 210 Hackney 232 132

Five Parishes in the City and Liberties of Westminster.

St Martin’s in the Fields 4804 2883 St Margaret’s 4710 3742 St Clement’s Danes 1969 1319 St Paul’s, Covent Garden 408 281 St Mary’s, Savoy 303 198

Pesthouse 156

The Great Plague brought back all the familiar incidents of 1603 and 1625, and revealed no new feature. As before, all that could afford to do so made their escape at the outset. Sydenham, who fled with the rest, says that two-thirds of the population left; which may be true of the City proper, but certainly not of the populous Liberties and suburbs on both sides of the water, as Defoe points out. The poorer classes were left stranded, and bore the brunt of the calamity, as they had always done. Flight was, doubtless, the best step to take, the motive being to get “into clean air,” as cardinal Wolsey expressed it in 1515. Those that were left behind knew that they were in bad air, and knew that it mattered little whether they came into contact with the sick or not[1205]. Their employments and wages mostly ceased as the plague extended from suburb to suburb and to the City, so that with starvation on the one side and plague on the other, they held their lives cheaply and bore themselves with an unconcern which was strange to the rich. Their desperate case explains, as Defoe correctly saw, the ease with which the mayor could always get men to undertake for pay the disagreeable and risky work of day and night watchmen to the multitude of shut-up houses, of bearers of the dead, of buriers, of nurses, and distributors of the public charity. As soon as any fell in these humble ranks, others were willing to take their place; so that at no period of the epidemic was there any break-down in the work of expeditious burial or any failure in good order and decency. To carry the poor through the great crisis much money was needed; Defoe says that it was forthcoming from all parts of England and he estimates the distribution of relief at thousands of pounds weekly, although he failed to find the exact accounts, which, he thinks, had been destroyed in the fire of 1666. A thousand pounds a week, he says, was given from the king’s purse. The whole of this great system of relief was under the direction of the Lord Mayor, Sir John Lawrence, who proved himself worthy of the best traditions of his office. In the out-parishes there were Justices of the Peace who discharged the like duties.

The regular clergy for the most part left the town, but two are honourably mentioned as having stayed with the plague-stricken people, Dr Anthony Walker, of St Mary Aldermanbury, and Mr Meriton[1206].

Sometime in August Lord Arlington wrote to the bishop of London that the king was informed of many ministers and lecturers being absent from their posts during this time of contagion, and that nonconformists had thrust themselves into their pulpits to preach seditions and doctrines contrary to the Church. His majesty wishes the bishop to prevent such mischiefs to Church and State[1207]. The bishop replied, from Fulham, 19 August, that the sober clergy remain, that he had refused some that offered to supply vacancies, suspecting them to be of the factious party, though they promised to conform, that most of his officers had deserted him and gone into the country, but he could not learn that any nonconformists had invaded the pulpit[1208]. The bishop, however, was not likely to hear much within his garden walls at Fulham of what was passing at Aldgate. There can be no question that Church pulpits were occupied during the plague by ministers who had been ejected in 1662. Chief among them was Thomas Vincent, formerly minister of St Magdalen’s, Milk Street, who preached in St Botolph’s, Aldgate, Great St Helen’s, and Allhallows Staining[1209]. Vincent says that it was the opportunity of irregular practitioners both in the Church and in medicine, and he is disposed to say a good word for the latter from a fellow feeling with them. Besides Vincent, says Richard Baxter[1210], there were “some strangers that came thither since they were silenced, as Mr Chester, Mr Janeway, Mr Turner, Mr Grimes, Mr Franklin, and some others.” These all became prominent in London Nonconformity; and Baxter clearly traces their subsequent power to the opportunity that the plague gave them:

“But one great benefit the plague brought to the city, that is, it occasioned the silenced ministers more openly and laboriously to preach the Gospel to the exceeding comfort and profit of the people; in so much that to this day [1670] the freedom of preaching which this occasioned, cannot, by the daily guards of soldiers, nor by the imprisonments of multitudes be restrained. The ministers that were silenced for Nonconformity had ever since 1662 done their work privately.”

Baxter knew of none among the Nonconformist ministers remaining in London who fell victims to the plague, except “Mr Grunman, a German, a very humble, holy, able minister, but being a silenced Nonconformist, was so poor that he was not able to remove his family.” Two others of the sect, who fled, lost their lives--“Mr Cross, flying from the plague into the country died with his wife and some children as soon as he came thither, in the house of that learned worthy man, Mr Shaw, another silenced minister,” and Mr Roberts, “a godly Welsh minister, who also flying from the plague, fell sick as far off as between Shrewsbury and Oswestry and died in a little straw, but none durst entertain him.” Baxter himself found refuge in the house of the Hampdens, in Bucks[1211], leaving his family, as he says, in the midst of plague at Acton. Defoe draws from the incident of the Nonconformists in Church pulpits a somewhat sentimental moral; he sees nothing aggressive in it, but merely the levelling of differences by affliction, and a short-lived prospect of reconciliation.

The irregular practitioners of physic would appear to have been in great force, just as in former plagues, when their bills were on every post. Defoe professes to give specimens of their advertisements, which he might have adapted from actual advertisements in the news-sheets, the ‘Intelligencer’ and the ‘Newes.’ The empirics were of both sexes, and of foreign extraction as well as native.

Among the regular physicians who practised for a time, at least, in the plague were the famous Professor Glisson, Dr Nathan Paget (an intimate friend of Milton and cousin of Elizabeth Minshull whom the poet, in 1664, had married for his third wife), Dr Wharton, of St Thomas’s Hospital, a distinguished anatomist, Dr Berwick or Barwick, Dr Brooke, Dr Hodges, and Dr Conyers. The last was one of two of his order who died of the plague. Two Paracelsist or chemical physicians, Dr Dey and Dr Starkey, died of it: and Dr George Thomson says that he survived three several attacks of the buboes, the first sore lasting for four months. A considerable number of chirurgeons and apothecaries are said (by Defoe) to have fallen victims. Pepys says that at the first meeting of Gresham College (the Royal Society) since the plague, held on January 22, 1666, Dr Goddard “did fill us with talk in defence of his and his fellow physicians’ going out of town in the plague-time,” his plea being that their particular patients were out of town, and they left at liberty. But that excuse ignores the fact that the time was a great emergency, and puts the defence upon the wrong ground.

Goddard had attended Cromwell in the Irish and Scottish campaigns as physician to the army. For a short time he had been a member of the Council of State, and for several years was master of a College at Oxford. He was Gresham professor of physic, and one of the original council of the Royal Society. This eminent man of science was the inventor and proprietor of “Goddard’s drop,” the secret of which he sold to Charles II. for a large sum, said to have been £6000. Dr Martin Lister says that the king showed him the receipt, and that the drops were nothing more than the volatile spirit of raw silk rectified with oil of cinnamon, and no better than ordinary spirit of hartshorn. Another writer says that the drops contained also skull of a person hanged and dried viper. According to Sydenham, Goddard’s drops were preferable to other volatile spirits for the particular purpose, namely, the recovery of people from faintings of various kinds. Even if Dr Goddard had remained in town, he would have been a trafficker in nostrums as much as the empirics; nor is it probable, from all that we know, that he could have brought epidemiological principles to bear upon the management of the epidemic among the poor. The best teaching of the time counselled that which he himself practised, namely, flight.

Defoe says that the Lord Mayor (Sir John Lawrence), the Sheriffs (Sir George Waterman and Sir Charles Doe), the Court of Aldermen and certain of the Common Council, or their deputies, came to a resolution and published it, viz.:

“That they would not quit the City themselves, but that they would be always at hand for the preserving of good order in every place, and for the doing justice on all occasions; as also for the distributing the public charity to the poor; and, in a word, for the doing the duty and discharging the trust reposed in them by the citizens to the utmost of their power.”

The minutes are extant of numerous meetings of the Mayor and Council, with the orders made (on May 11, June 17, 19, and 27, July 12, and at short intervals thereafter)[1212]. Two of the Aldermen died of plague.

It appears to be admitted by all, that good order was kept, the dead buried expeditiously, day and night watchmen provided for an immense number of infected houses (until, as Vincent says, the infected houses became so many that there was no use shutting them up), bearers of the dead and grave-diggers engaged to fill the places of those who died, and applications heard for relief. One of the things that justly excited the admiration of Defoe was the abundant supply of all the markets, and the almost unvarying weight of the penny wheaten loaf, which is given every week at the foot of the bill of mortality. The Parish Clerks brought out their bill regularly, although Hodges says that the sextons failed at length to keep an accurate account of the number of corpses. All the dead were buried at first in coffins and with full ceremony; but when the infection became hottest in August and September, especially in the crowded East-end and in Southwark, the bodies are said to have been brought to the pits in cartloads and thrown in, sometimes without even a covering[1213]. That is alleged by the writers on the plagues of 1603 and 1625, and the same must have happened to some extent in 1665, but whether to the extent that Defoe’s graphic account implies may be doubted.

The burials took place over night until, as Vincent says, “now the nights are too short to bury the dead.” This was a reversal of the order, first issued in 1547 and probably carried out in the plague of 1603, that no burial was to take place between six in the evening and six in the morning. Even at the worst time, coffins would seem to have been got for most. Vincent says, “Now we could hardly go forth but we should meet many coffins,” and he mentions one woman whom he met with a little coffin under her arm. Evelyn enters in his diary on September 7, the worst week of the epidemic: “I went all along the City and suburbs from Kent Street to St James’s, a dismal passage and dangerous, to see so many coffins exposed in the streets now thin of people.” Defoe’s weird description of the Aldgate plague-pit at midnight, with seven or eight lanterns set on the heaps of earth round the edge, and of the constant journeys to and fro of the dead-carts, has probably made the most of the realities of the case.

A letter of Pepys to Lady Carteret, written from Woolwich on September 4, gives us a glimpse of the state of the City:

“I having stayed in the city till about 7400 died in one week, and of them above 6000 of the plague, and little noise heard day nor night but tolling of bells; till I could walk Lumber-Street and not meet twenty persons from one end to the other, and not fifty upon the Exchange; till whole families, 10 and 12 together, have been swept away; till my very physician, Dr Burnet, who undertook to secure me against any infection, having survived the month of his own being shut up, died himself of the plague; till the nights, though much lengthened, are grown too short to conceal the burials of those that died the day before, people being thereby constrained to borrow daylight for that service.” The butcheries are everywhere visited, his brewer is shut up, and his baker dead with his whole family.

On September 20, he writes in his diary:

“But Lord! what a sad time it is to all: no boats upon the river, and grass grows all up and down Whitehall Court, and nobody but poor wretches in the streets.”

Some three weeks later (October 11) Evelyn writes in his diary: “Went through the whole city, having occasion to alight out of the coach in several places about business of money, when I was environed with multitudes of poor pestiferous creatures begging alms. The shops universally shut up.” Vincent says that he would meet “many with sores and limping in the streets,” (from the suppurating buboes in the groins). Again:

“It would be endless to speak what we have seen and heard of:--some in their frenzy rising out of their beds and leaping about their rooms; others crying and roaring at their windows; some coming forth almost naked into the streets”

--the delirium being sometimes of the gentle or foolish kind, and sometimes violent. These incidents are much enlarged upon by Defoe, who makes out the cries and groans (mentioned by Dekker and others for the earlier plagues) to have been from the pain of the hard and tense buboes. Boghurst says that the treatment by actual cautery and other escharotics caused more pain than the buboes.

As a set-off to the more horrible picture given by Defoe of the inmates of a house all dying together, their bodies being found by the watchmen and taken away in the dead-cart, we may turn to Vincent’s plain account of what happened in the house where he lodged, probably in the neighbourhood of Aldgate or Bishopsgate, when he came up from Islington to minister to the sick.

“We were eight in the family--three men, three youths, an old woman and a maid; all which came to me, hearing of my stay in town, some to accompany me, others to help me [he was a celebrity in the religious world with a large following]. It was the latter end of September before any of us were touched.... But at last we were visited.... At first our maid was smitten; it began with a shivering and trembling in her flesh, and quickly seized on her spirits.... I came home and the maid was on her death-bed; and another crying out for help, being left alone in a sweating fainting-fit. It was on Monday when the maid was smitten; on Thursday she died full of tokens. On Friday one of the youths had a swelling in his groin, and on the Lord’s day died with the marks of the distemper upon him. On the same day another youth did sicken, and on the Wednesday following he died. On the Thursday night his master fell sick of the disease, and within a day or two was full of spots, but strangely recovered.... The rest were preserved.”

The two boys appear to have been conscious to the end, and to have died in the placid mood that often came on in the last hours of plague, as in other prostrating infections such as yellow fever and cholera. In those two weeks at the end of September and beginning of October the burials in all London were 6460 (of plague 5533) and 5720 (of plague 4929).

The chief preventive measure which the mayor had to give effect to was the shutting-up of infected houses. Defoe says that he carried out that odious policy considerately. The policy was a traditional one, and may or may not have had its origin in medical prescription. It was practised, as we have seen in a former chapter, early in the reign of Henry VIII., if not even before that. The doctrine underlying it was the contagiousness of plague, which was much more a doctrine of the faculty than of the people, and was most of all a doctrine of the Court. Originally the dogma of contagiousness, in all its rigour, had been made for the persons of the Tudor monarchs, and as late as 1665 it was in the atmosphere of the Court that the contagion of plague was invested with the most powerful properties. The common people of London gave no heed to it, because they saw every hour that it was a matter of indifference; the middle classes held it in a qualified way, knowing that there was less to fear from plague-bodies than from plague-infected ground; but kings took the comprehensive view of it, allowing no exceptions or scientific reservations, and the Court doctors, such as Mead in the 18th century, at length succeeded in making the high doctrine of plague-contagion to pass current. Two instances are known from extant petitions, of its rigorous application upon Court servants in 1665: one in the case of a trumpeter of the king, and the other in the case of the barber to the household. In the latter case, apparently when the Court was at Salisbury in the autumn, a stranger supposed to be visited with the sickness ran into the barber’s tent in his absence; whereon the tent and all his goods and instruments of livelihood were burnt, he himself confined, and his servants sent away, according to the orders for the preservation of the Court, “so that he lost his trade and was utterly ruined[1214].”

The more discriminating of the profession knew and taught that the seeds of plague could lurk in a bundle of clothes, or of bedding, or in other effects, or in bales of goods, and that they became the more virulent through the fermentation that goes on in these circumstances. The contagion was understood to be per fomitem and per distans; on the other hand, experience was rather against a contagion from the exhalations of the sick: the immunity of nurses was as striking as it has been in many other contagions. The people were instinctively right in their belief that they mostly caught the plague because the infection was in the air of the place; so long as they were living on a plague-stricken spot, they were exposed to the risk; and if there were any difference in safety between dwelling-houses, and the streets, markets or shops, the preference seemed to lie with the former. The traditional or official doctrine, however, was that the plague-stricken were the sources of contagion, that all who had come near them were suspect, and that the safety of the well depended upon the rigorous shutting-up of the sick and the suspected together. The experience of epidemic after epidemic might have shown that this theoretical reasoning, so attractive to the “thorough” order of mind, was worthless in practice. A great plague pursued its course until the infected houses became too many for shutting up; if many plague-years did not develop epidemics of the first degree, that was in accordance with some epidemiological law, and not because the preventive measures were one year effective and another year ineffective. However, a traditional doctrine will always survive a good deal of adverse experience; and the shutting-up of houses, which had signally failed in 1563, 1593, 1603, 1625 and 1636, was resorted to once more in 1665, and perhaps with more rigour than ever so as to give it a fair chance. Defoe has stated with great fairness the hardships of it, and he follows Hodges and Boghurst in pronouncing it a mistake and a failure. Most of the horrible incidents of the plague came from the shutting-up of houses; those which Defoe introduces in that connexion do not exceed probability. It is hard to say whether the condemnation of shutting-up, which found wide currency during and immediately after the plague of 1665, would have at length made any difference to the traditional doctrine and practice. The occasion did not arise again in London except for a few months in 1666, when the old practice seems to have been enforced. The corresponding doctrine and practice that arose in its place, was quarantine against foreign importation; that rested firstly upon the sophistical assertion of the all-powerful Mead, that plague had been an exotic to England, and secondly upon the doctrine of plague-contagion in its most comprehensive and least discriminating form. But the quarantine law dates really from the Queen Anne period, and the curious history of its rise, progress, and overthrow belongs to another part of this work.

The other general preventive measure besides the shutting-up of “visited” houses was the burning of fires in the streets, which was also a tradition from Tudor times. The mayor loyally carried out that also; until in the beginning of autumn a concurrence of things made an end of the practice. These adverse influences were first, the heavy showers of rain, which put the fires out; secondly, the differences in medical opinion whether coal-fires or wood-fires were the better, and whether fires were to be recommended at all; and thirdly the popular perception that the fires made no difference to the progress of the epidemic.

In the way of individual protection and treatment, the College of Physicians issued a tract full of directions and prescriptions, which Boghurst says were all old, being taken from De Vigo († 1520). It is not necessarily against methods of practice that they are old; but one cannot fail to observe how closely the medieval teaching about plague, cause and cure together, was followed to the last in England: for two centuries the writers on plague reproduced the chapters and paragraphs almost without change that we find in the treatise of the bishop of Aarhus, which circulated in manuscript in England in the 15th century and was first printed about 1480. The most popular preventive was something “to smell to,” not sweet but aigre. Hence the use of civet-boxes, pouncet-boxes, and pomanders, which were made to suit all purses. There were also plague-waters, one of which, “the plague-water of Matthias,” figures among the prescriptions of the College of Physicians both in a cheap and in an expensive form. The College’s prescription “to break the tumour” is as follows:

“Take a great onion, hollow it, put into it a fig, rue cut small, and a dram of Venice treacle; put it close stopt in a wet paper, and roast it in the embers; apply it hot unto the tumour; lay three or four, one after another; let one lie three hours.”

The Paracelsist or chemical physician, Thomson, gives a prescription which brings out the mystical tendencies of that otherwise meritorious sect. It relates to a method of curing plague by means of a toad.

“The great difficulty to bring this animal to a true Zenexton lies in an exquisite preparation of it, the manner whereof that great investigator of verity, Van Helmont, hath thus delivered, as he received instructions from Butler, an Irishman who (to Helmont’s knowledge) had cured some thousands of the pest in London. He gave directions that a large Bufo, taken in the afternoon in the month of June, should be hung up by the legs, nigh the fire, over a vessel of yellow wax” etc.

Tobacco, smoked or chewed, came into great vogue in 1665 as a preservative from the plague. Hearne, the antiquary, says:

“I have been told that in the last great plague at London [1665] none that kept tobacconists shops had the plague. It is certain that smoaking it was looked upon as a most excellent preservative; in so much that even children were obliged to smoak. And I remember that I heard formerly Tom Rogers, who was yeoman beadle, say that when he was that year, when the plague raged, a schoolboy at Eaton, all the boys of that school were obliged to smoak in the school every morning, and that he was never whipped so much in his life as he was one morning for not smoaking[1215].”

The best medical details of the Great Plague come from Boghurst, who claims that the observations were all his own.

With regard to its incidence he says: “About the beginning most men got it with fuddling, surfeiting, over heating themselves, and disorderly living.” Again: “Those that married in the heat of the disease (if they had not had the disease before) almost all fell into it in a week or a fortnight after it, both in the city and in the country, of which most died, especially the men.” One of Dekker’s stories of the year 1603 is an illustration of the same thing. “It usually went through a whole kindred, though living in several places; which was the cause it swept away many whole families.... In some houses ten out of twelve died, and sixteen out of twenty.” Melancholy for the loss of friends predisposed to it, while cheerfulness and courage fortified some against it. Old people that had many sores upon them, especially carbuncles, almost all died. The natural constitution, disposition, or complexion “did much to make or mar the disease.” People with hollow eyes commonly died. Those who drank brandy and strong waters grew mad, looked about them wildly, and died quickly in two days. “All that I saw that were let blood, if they had been sick two, three, four or five days or more, died the same day.” Teeming women fared miserably; they were not more subject than others: but scarce one in forty lived (this is enlarged upon by Defoe). Many people had the spotted fever and the plague both together, and many the French pox and the plague both together, and yet both sorts commonly lived (someone says that men caught the French pox of purpose[1216]). All sorts died, but more of the good than the bad, more men than women, more of dull complexion than fair. “Of all the common hackney prostitutes of Luteners-lane, Dog-yard, Cross-lane, Baldwin-gardens, Hatton-garden and other places, the common criers of oranges, oysters, fruits etc., all the impudent drunken drabbing bayles and fellows, and many others of the rouge route, there is but few missing--verifying the testimony of Diemerbroeck that the plague left the rotten bodies and took the sound[1217].” It fell not very thick upon old people till about the middle or slake of the disease, and most in the decrease and declining of the disease. Cats, dogs, cattle, poultry, etc., were free from infection.

Some died in twelve or twenty days, but most in five or six. In summer about one-half that were sick, died; but towards winter, three of four lived. None died suddenly as stricken by lightning: “I saw none die under twenty or twenty-four hours.” After one rising, or bubo, was broke and run, commonly another and another would rise in several parts of the body, so that many had the disease upon them half a year; some risings would not break under half a year, being so deep in the flesh.

This explains Dekker’s statement in 1603 that some had buboes repeatedly, and that one person had eighteen sores. Dr Thomson himself had buboes thrice. Hodges, also, knew of many cases fatal at the third seizure, the later attacks being not relapses but new infections; some even fell at the fifth or sixth time, being before well recovered. In one of the earlier London plagues, that of 1563, Jones saw a case of a woman near Temple Bar that ended fatally at the third attack, the buboes having suppurated twice, but not at the third time. Boghurst goes on:

Of evil omen was “a white, soft, sudden, puffed up tumour on the neck behind the ears, in the armpit, or in the flank;” also a “large extended hard tumour under the chin, swelling downwards upon the throat and fetching a great compass” (the brawny swelling of the submaxillary salivary glands and surrounding tissues). Tokens came out after a violent sweat, which was often induced of purpose by nurses, who said, ‘Cochineal is a fine thing to bring out the tokens.’ Nurses often killed their patients by giving them cold drinks. Many also were killed by the shutting-up of houses, by wickedness (of nurses ?), by confident and ignorant mountebanks, by over-hasty cutting and burning of buboes. Servants and poor people removed to the pest-house or to other houses in their sickness, took harm therefrom. People using corrosives, actual cauteries and many intolerable applications put their patients to more pain than the disease did.

The botches, or buboes (swollen lymph-glands in the neck, armpits or groins), were the most distinctive sign of the plague, having given to it the old name of “the botch.” Besides these, there were the “tokens” (specially limited in meaning to livid spots on the skin), carbuncles and blains. Carbuncles, says Boghurst, commonly rose upon the most substantial, gross, firm flesh, as the thighs, legs, backside, buttock; they never occurred, that he saw, on the head among the hair, or on the belly. They were not seen until the end of July, were most rife in September and October, commonly in old people, never in children.

Hodges saw one carbuncle on the thigh, the size of two handbreadths, with a large blister on it, “which being opened by the chirurgeon and scarification made where the mortification did begin, the patient expired under the operation.” But most commonly carbuncles did not exceed the breadth of three or four fingers. Boghurst continues:

“Blains are a kind of diminutive carbuncle, but are not so hard, black, and fiery; sometimes there is a little core in them. Generally they are no bigger than a two penny piece, or a groat at the biggest, with a bladder full of liquor on the top of them, which, if you open but a little, will come out whitish or of a lemon or straw colour.” “Besides a blain there is a thing you may call a blister, puffing up the skin, long like one’s finger in figure, like a blister raised with cantharides; and such usually die.” The following experience is remarkable, but it is doubtful whether Boghurst has not taken it from Diemerbroek: “Towards the latter end of a plague, many people that stayed, and others that returned, have little angry pustules and blains rising upon them, especially upon the hands, without being sick at all. But such never die, nor infect others; and I remember Diemerbroeck saith, etc.” Can this be the meaning of “smallpox” following the plague, as in the 16th century books by Alphanus, Kellwaye and others?

The tokens proper, according to Hodges, were spots on the skin “proceeding from extravasated blood.” The body of the youth dissected by Thomson was “beset with spots, black and blue,” some of which when opened “contained a coagulated matter.” The tokens, as the name implies, were made the most distinctive sign of the plague; but they were far from being so constant as the botches or buboes. Boghurst says that “tokens appeared not much until about the middle of June;” and, according to a letter of September 14, they must have been very variable even at the height of the plague: “The practitioners in physic stand amazed to meet with so many various symptoms which they find among their patients; one week the general distempers are blotches and boils, the next week as clear-skinned as may be, but death spares neither; one week full of spots and tokens, and perhaps the succeeding bill none at all[1218].”

The account of the dissection by Thomson, of a youth dead of the plague, is perhaps all the morbid anatomy that has come down to us. He found what appear to have been infarcts in the lungs; the surface was “stigmatised with several large ill-favoured marks, much tumified and distended,” from which, on section, there issued “sanious, dreggy corruption and a pale ichor destitute of any blood.” The stomach contained a black, tenacious matter, like ink. The spleen gave out on section an ichorish matter. The liver was pallid and the kidneys exsanguine. There were “obscure large marks” on the inner surface of the intestines and stomach. The peritoneal cavity contained a “virulent ichor or thin liquor, yellowish, or greenish.” There was a decoloured clot in the right ventricle, but “not one spoonful of that ruddy liquor properly called blood could be obtained in this pestilential body.” In all other cadavers that he ever dissected he had found that the right ventricle had blackish blood condensed, but this one had a pale clot “like a lamb-stone cut in twain,” which puzzled him greatly; perhaps it came, he conjectures, from a sumption of mere crude milk which an indiscreet nurse had given the boy not long before he died.

Among the symptoms of a fatal issue, Boghurst mentions the following: Hiccough, continual vomiting, sudden looseness, or two or three stools in succession, shortness of breath, stopping of urine, great inward burning and outward cold, continual great thirst, faltering in the voice, speaking in the throat and occasionally sighing, with a slight pulling-in one side of the mouth when they speak, sleeping with the eyes half-open, trembling of the lips and hands and shaking of the head, staggering in going about rooms, unwillingness to speak, hoarseness preventing speech, cramp in the legs, stiffness of one side of the neck, contraction of the jaws, the vomit running out from the side of the mouth, prolonged bleeding at the nose, the sores decreasing and turning black on a sudden.

It is to be remarked that Boghurst says very little of the gentle or the violent delirium, on which Defoe enlarges picturesquely; nor does he emphasize the extreme pain of the hard and tense buboes, which is another of Defoe’s themes. Hodges, however, says that “some of the infected run about staggering like drunken men, and fall and expire in the streets; while others lie half-dead and comatous.... Some lie vomiting as if they had drunk poison.”

The progress of the epidemic would seem to have been little influenced by the weather or by what was done, unless the shutting-up of houses had helped to intensify the virus. Boghurst says: “If very hot weather followed a shower of rain, the disease increased much;” and again: “If, in the heat of the disease the wind blew very sharp and cold, people died very quickly, many lying sick but one day.” We are told, however, by Hodges that “the whole summer was refreshed with moderate breezes,” and that “the heat was too mild to encourage corruption and fermentation.” The air itself, he says, “remained uninfected.” Rain fell from time to time in the end of summer, copious enough to put out the fires in the streets. There was at least one very hot day, near the beginning of the epidemic, the 5th of June, which Pepys says was “the hottest day that I ever felt in my life.” On September 20, however, he says that the increase of the plague could not have been expected “from the coldness of the late season.”

The plague lingered in London throughout the year 1666, causing 1998 deaths in all. In January 1666 it was still at as high a figure as 158 deaths in a week, and in the week ending September 18 it rose again to the exceptional height of 104 deaths. In the first three weeks of December, the deaths were 2, 4, and 3; and from that low level the plague never rose again in London. A few annual deaths continued to appear in the bills down to 1679, when they finally disappeared.

Plague near London in 1665.

Meanwhile various parts of England were affected with plague during and after the great epidemic, and in one or two instances a little before it. In the immediate neighbourhood of the capital all the towns and villages usually implicated by the exodus from the City had cases of plague, as the following table shows. It has been compiled from the parish registers, as extracted in Lysons’ Environs of London, Defoe’s widely discrepant figures being given for comparison in the third column.

All Defoe’s causes Plague list. Barking 230 200 Barnes 27 Barnet and Hadley 43 Battersea 113 Beckenham 18 Brentford 103 432 Brentwood 70 Bromley 27 7 Camberwell 133 Charlton 7 3 Chertsey 18 Chiselhurst 21 Clapham 28 Croydon 141 61 Deptford 548 374 623 Ealing 286 244 Edmonton 19 Eltham 44 32 85 Enfield 176 32 Epping 26 Finchley 38 Greenwich 416 231 Hampstead 214 Heston 48 13 Hodsdon 30 Hertford 90 Hornsey 53 43 85 Islewort 195 149 Kensington 62 25 Kingston 122 Lewisham 56 Mortlake 197 170 Newington, Stoke 17 Norwood 12 2 Putney 74 Romford 90 109 St Albans 121 Stratford-Bow 139 Staines 82 Tottenham no entries 42 Twickenham 21 Uxbridge 117 Waltham Abbey 23 Walthamstow 68 Wandsworth 245 Ware 160 Watford 45 Windsor 103 Woodford 33

The most striking fact that comes out is that most of the parishes around London had actually fewer deaths from plague in 1665 than in 1603. The exceptions to this rule in 1665 are the villages on or near the Thames above London-Battersea, Wandsworth, Putney, Mortlake, Brentford, Isleworth, and Ealing, which had all a very high mortality, Barnes being almost exempt. On the lower reaches of the Thames, Barking on the Essex shore, and Deptford, Greenwich and Lewisham on the other side, had the infection in them very severely; but these three places in Kent had a still more severe visitation in 1666, along with other towns in that county.

On September 9, Evelyn wrote from his Deptford house, Sayes Court, that “near thirty houses are visited in this miserable village.” The infection got also among the ships of the navy; on August 29, on board the ‘Loyal Subject’ at Deal, Captain Fortescue and six men died suddenly, it was feared of the plague.

Plague in the Provinces in 1665-6.

The earliest accounts of plague in the provinces come from Yarmouth in November, 1664. On the 18th it is said to have been brought in a vessel from Rotterdam; three died in one house, of whom one had the plague. On November 30, the plague was spreading, if the searchers (drunken women, however) were to be credited. On February 8, 1665, there was another death from plague, and as the summer wore on the mortality increased rapidly. On June 16, thirty had died in the week, the inhabitants had fled, the town was like a country village, and the poor left behind were lamenting at once the lack of work and of charity. On August 21, the king wrote from Salisbury to the bailiffs of Yarmouth concerning the plague. In the weeks ending August 30 and September 6, there were 117 deaths (96 from plague) and 110 deaths (100 from plague), and as late as November 6, there had been 22 plague-deaths in the week. In March, 1666, the epidemic came to an end[1219]. Smaller outbreaks occurred in the autumn of 1665 and spring of 1666 at Lynn, Norwich, Ipswich and Harwich. The great epidemic at Colchester began in summer, 1665, but fell mostly in 1666, at a time when there was little plague elsewhere, so that it practically closes the history of plague in England, and will come naturally at the end of the chapter.

Most of the provincial outbreaks in 1665 were of small extent, and were probably due to introduction of the virus from London. The valley of the Tyne, which had often experienced severe plagues, had a slight epidemic, said to have originated from the colliers returned from the Thames. On July 18, there were seven houses shut up at Sunderland, one at Wearmouth and one at Durham[1220]. A paragraph in the ‘Newes,’ from Durham, October 13, says that the sickness in the north is now much assuaged. Newcastle remained almost free (although Defoe says different), two houses being shut up on January 30, 1666, and two at Gateshead. The whole north-west and west of England, which had suffered most during the last plague-period, in the Civil Wars, appears to have escaped altogether.

In the south, there was a good deal of the infection at Southampton in the summer and autumn of 1665; on July 6, “the poor will not suffer the rich to quit the town and leave them to starve[1221].” It is heard of, also, at Poole and Sherborne in Dorset (in November), at Salisbury, where the Court lay for some weeks, and at Battle[1222] in Sussex; but in none of these places to any great extent. Various places in Kent had cases in 1665--Rochester, Chatham, Sandwich, Eastry, Westwell, Deal, Dover and Canterbury[1223]; but it was only the naval stations that had more than a few cases in 1665; while all of them had it far worse in 1666. Other centres in 1665 were in Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire.

At Peterborough, Oundle and Newport Pagnell, there was a visitation of the severer kind, with flight of the richer inhabitants, and the usual arrest of work and trade. The parish register of Yardley, Hastings, records that 60 persons died of plague in that town from June 5, 1665, to January 3, 1666. There was also a sharp epidemic in Cambridge and in the country around, of which we get a glimpse in a letter of October 19, 1665, written from Clare Hall to one of the fellows of Clare[1224]:

“Alderman Mynell the brewer and one of his children died of the plague this last Monday; he hath had four children in all dead of it. Clayton, the barber in Petty Cury, and one of his children, died last Saturday of the sickness. It is newly broken out sadly by Christ’s (though they have all fled from the Colledge upon Mr Bunchly, their manciple, dying of the plague)--where Nicholson the smith, his wife and two children are dead within three days, his other children being deadly sick in the house. But it most rageth in St Clement’s parish, where seldom a day passeth without one dead of the sickness.... Poor Mr Brown, the old man that is one of the University musicians, and Mr Saunders that sings the deep bass, are shut up in Mr Saunders’ house in Green Street, whose child died last week suspected. Two houses at Barton are infected by two of Alderman Mynell’s children, that are dead there. Ditton is broke out just by the butcher, from whom we had our meat, which made us hastily remove to Grantchester. H. Glenton, the carrier, fled from this town to Shelford, where he died within two or three days, suspected.... Royston is sadly in two or three places, the last of which is just in the middle of the town. The infection, they say, was brought thither by a Cambridge man, whom they caught, and shut him up; but he hath since made his escape.”

The Epidemic of Plague at Eyam, 1665-6.

Another of the English towns visited by plague in 1665 was Derby; whether the cases were many or few, they caused great alarm, the town being forsaken, the streets grass-grown, and the market set up on a new stance, to which the farmers and traders came primed with a plug of tobacco in their mouths as a preservative. But the epidemic in Derby itself was totally eclipsed in interest by an extraordinary outbreak of plague in the small village of Eyam, at the opposite end of the county, in the North Peak, some twelve miles to the west of Sheffield. The plague of Eyam is, indeed, the most famous of all English plagues; the story of it has been told many times in prose and verse, its traditional incidents being well suited to minor poets and moral writers, and the whole action of the drama conveniently centered within a circuit of half a mile in a cup of the heathy hills[1225].

Eyam was a village of some three hundred and fifty inhabitants, standing among meadows around which the hills towered. It had no resident doctor, but it had two ministers. The one was the rector, the Rev. William Mompesson, a young man of twenty-seven, with a wife and two children, who had been settled in Eyam only a year and did not like it; the other was the former rector, the Rev. Thomas Stanley, who had been ejected for nonconformity in 1662, and had remained to carry on his ministrations as a Dissenter among such of his old flock as adhered to him. The wealthier householders resided at the western and higher end of the village, on the other side of a brook which crossed under the road; as we shall see, they escaped the infection almost if not altogether. The annual village wake had been held in August, 1665, with more than the usual concourse of people from villages near. On the 2nd or 3rd September a box arrived from London to the village tailor, who lived in a small house at the western end of the churchyard; it contained old clothes which someone in London is supposed to have bought for him cheap, and some tailors’ patterns of cloth. This box is assumed to have been opened by one George Vicars, a servant, who was certainly the first victim of plague. He found the contents to be damp and hung them up at the fire to dry. He was quickly seized with violent sickness, became delirious, developed buboes in his neck and groin, a plague-token on his breast the third day, and died in a wretched state on September 6. His body, which is said to have become soon putrid, was buried in the churchyard on the 7th. Nearly a fortnight passed before another case occurred, that of a youth supposed to have been the tailor’s son, who was buried on the 22nd September. Before the 30th four more had died, and in the course of October twenty-two more were buried of the plague. The deaths in November declined to seven, and in December they were nine. There was now snow on the ground, with hard frost, and at the beginning of January, 1666, the plague was confined to two houses. Four died in January, eight in February, six in March, nine in April, and only three in May. On June 2, another burial occurred, and then there was another pause. But in a week or more the epidemic broke out with renewed power, three having been buried on the 12th of June, three on the 15th, one on the 16th, three on the 17th, and so on until the total for June reached nineteen. The wealthier villagers at the west end had taken the alarm before and had mostly fled in the spring; those who stayed kept within their houses or at least did not cross the stream. Now that the infection was revived in the hot weather of June, the rector’s wife also proposed flight, but on her husband’s refusal, she resolved to remain with him, and to send her two children to a relative in Yorkshire. At the same time the villagers in general were instinctively moved to escape from the tainted spot; but Mompesson used his authority to prevent them, and a boundary line was drawn round the village, about half a mile in circuit and marked by various familiar objects, beyond which no one was to go. Mompesson’s motive appears to have been to prevent the spread of the infection to the country around, and his parishioners submitted passively. After the end of June the villagers would have found it difficult to escape, owing to the terror which the very name of their village caused in all the country round. Some of them quitted their cottages and took up their abode in shelters built along the side of a rocky glen within the cordon. The earl of Devonshire, then at Chatsworth, promised Mompesson that the village should not be left without supplies; and people from the villages near brought their market produce to certain stated points on the boundary, where the Eyam people came to fetch it, the money paid being dropped into water. Thus shut up in their narrow valley, the villagers perished helplessly like a stricken flock of sheep. By the end of June ceremonial burials came to an end, the church and the churchyard were closed, the dead were carried out wrapped in sheets by one of the villagers noted for his herculean strength, and laid in shallow graves in the meadows or on the hill-sides. In July the deaths mounted up to five or six on some days, and the total for the month to fifty-seven. In August the dead numbered seventy-eight, among them the rector’s wife on the 25th, after a walk with her husband through the meadows, during which she is said to have made the ominous remark that the air smelled sweet[1226]. September added twenty-four to the total, and there were now only about forty-five left alive in the place. Of these, fifteen died to the 11th October, when the mortality ceased. Some of the survivors had passed through an attack of the plague, among them the rector’s man, whose buboes suppurated. Mompesson himself, who had an issue open in his leg all the time, escaped the infection, as well as his maid-servant. A young woman of Eyam, married in the village of Corbor, two miles off, came one day to see her mother, whom she found sick of the plague; on her return home she took the sickness and died, but no one else in Corbor had it. A man was also at large in the neighbourhood suspected of plague, to whom the earl of Devonshire sent a doctor. The doctor and patient met by appointment on the opposite banks of a stream, and the diagnosis made across the water acquitted the man of plague; even in these unconventional circumstances the consultation did not end without a prescription (still extant) for a bottle of “stuff.” Seventy-six households in Eyam were infected, and out of these two hundred and fifty-nine persons were buried of the plague. During the time that the infection lasted eight more died from other causes. When the sickness had ceased Mompesson set about burning the infected articles in the empty cottages. Three years after, in 1669, he was presented to the better living of Eakring, in Notts; but on arriving to enter on his duties he was refused admission by the villagers, and had to take up his residence in a temporary hut in Rufford Park, until such time as the prejudices of his new parishioners had been overcome. He married another wife, and for thirty-nine years held the living of Eakring, where he died on March 7, 1708. Stanley, his Dissenting colleague at Eyam, died there a few years after the plague.

Several things combined to magnify the disaster at Eyam. The story of the box of clothes from London is entirely credible, and can be matched by many other instances in the history of plague and of cholera[1227]. Nothing intensifies the virus of such diseases so much as fermentation without air in the textures of clothes or linen; a whiff from the opened box or bundle suffices soon to prostrate the person who breathes it. The poison at Eyam was a powerful one from the first, and it is credible that the body of the earliest victim did become quickly putrid. The heavy mortality, with few recoveries, which followed after a fortnight’s interval, and continued all through the winter, also shows a virus raised to no ordinary potency. But, for the revival of the infection in June, 1666, we must seek other causes. Eyam was one of those basins which, on a large scale or on a small, have often been observed to keep infection in their soil. The virus must have passed into the pores of the ground after the first sixty or more burials in the churchyard down to the lull of the epidemic in winter; with the rise of the ground-water in spring, it would be comparatively inactive; but in June, when the water was again sinking in the soil and the great heat was raising emanations from the dry ground, it broke forth with an intensity which poisoned the whole air of the valley. The burials, after the end of June, without coffins and in shallow graves in the meadows or on the hill-side, were so much ferment added to a soil already permeated by it. Flight from such a place was the only safety, and the rector, with the best motives, counselled the people to remain. Mompesson’s conduct has always been held up as a pattern of heroism, as if the circumstances had been desperate like those of the Trojans when the Greeks were in their streets and houses:

Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem.

No word of detraction should be spoken of anyone who does manfully what he conceives to be his duty to his neighbours; but the villagers of Eyam were sacrificed, all the same, to an idea, and to an idea which we may now say was not scientifically sound. When the impulse came upon them to flee, they might have left their tainted soil without much risk to the country around so long as they did not collect in one spot or carry with them bedding or the like susceptible articles: those who did flee from the houses at the upper end of the village are not known to have carried the infection to other places, and the young woman who brought it to Corbor gave it to no one else. But the wisdom of flight may be regarded by some as still disputable; while it will be admitted by all that Mompesson acted for the best according to his lights.

The plague in 1666 raged severely in a number of towns, while it lingered on in London. The information from Winchester is vague; it is said that the dead were carried out in carts and buried on the downs to the eastward[1228]; the epidemic was over by the 1st of December, so that the College resumed[1229]. Pepys enters in his Diary (April 4, 1667): “One at the table [the duke of Albemarle’s] told an odd passage in the late plague, that at Petersfield (I think he said), one side of the street had every house almost infected through the town, and the other not one shut up.” There may have been other such centres of plague, and equally interesting observations made on them; but it appears to be the merest chance whether anything is recorded of them at all, or whether one has the luck to come across the record.

The great centres of plague in 1666 had some connexion with the fleet, and were mostly in Kent and Essex. Deptford and Greenwich had more plague that year than the year before, the total deaths at the former having been 715 (of plague 522) and at the latter 423. Eltham and Lewisham were also visited in proportion. The other intense centre of infection in Kent was Deal. On the 26th August, seven died of the plague, and twenty in the whole week. At that date there were said to be only 16 houses which had not had plague in them. On December 9, all the houses were clear, although the crews of ships still avoided the town. Next to Deal, Sandwich, Dover, Canterbury and Maidstone had considerable outbreaks in the autumn. At Portsmouth also there was a sharp outbreak in the summer of 1666, twenty-one having died of plague in a week at the beginning of July.

In the Eastern Counties, plague revived to a considerable extent in 1666 at Norwich, Ipswich, Harwich and Woodbridge, the Yarmouth outbreak, which had been the great one in that quarter the year before, having come to an end in the spring. But it was at Colchester that the epidemic engrossed attention in 1666. Colchester had, indeed, two successive seasons of plague, or rather a continuous prevalence of it from the summer of 1665 to December, 1666. The plague at Colchester in 1665-66 was the greatest of all provincial plagues since the Black Death, unless, indeed, we credit the numbers (11,000 or 12,000) given for a plague at York in 1390. It reproduced the mortality of the Great Plague of London on a scale more than proportionate to its size, and it doubtless called forth the same class of incidents--flight of the wealthier classes, and almost total extermination of the poor. No documents remain, however, of this plague except the oaths administered to searchers and bearers of the dead (printed below) and the weekly totals of deaths from plague and from other causes[1230]. The weekly bills are, indeed, as eloquent a testimony as any detailed description could have been; and as they are the most complete of the kind for a provincial town, I have transcribed them from the manuscript record in full. The small number of deaths from ordinary causes points to the emptiness of the better quarters of the town; the total deaths in seventeen months, 5345, including 4817 plague-deaths and 528 from other causes, must have meant an enormous clearance of the poorer classes. Colchester was then a place of considerable wealth, with a thriving Dutch trade and a considerable Dutch colony. Perhaps the connexion with Holland, where plague had been rife in the years just before, may explain the origin of the outbreak; but local conditions of soil, overcrowding, and the like must be looked to for the cause of its extraordinary persistence and fatality.

Weekly mortalities in Colchester, August 14, 1665, to December 14, 1666, from plague and other diseases.

1665

Week Plague Other ending

Aug. 21 26 2 28 62 2 Sept. 8 122 4 15 153 22 22 159 25 29 100 25 Oct. 6 161 27 13 122 23 20 106 15 27 60 41 Nov. 3 104 13 10 88 22 17 88 18 24 62 8 Dec. 1 38 10 8 39 6 15 67 4 22 53 7 29 21 3

1666

Jan. 5 23 6 12 46 8 19 36 13 26 26 10 Feb. 2 34 9 9 25 3 16 23 7 23 33 6 Mar. 2 53 2 9 26 11 16 37 5 23 48 4 30 66 1 Apr. 6 73 2 13 90 2 20 68 4 27 90 4 May 4 169 8 11 167 7 18 150 11 25 98 12 June 1 89 10 8 110 10 15 139 3 22 195 6 29 176 4 July 6 167 8 13 160 9 20 175 3 27 109 4 Aug. 3 109 2 10 85 4 17 70 1 24 51 1 31 53 4 Sept. 7 31 6 14 22 2 21 16 2 28 10 2 Oct. 5 7 2 12 7 0 19 7 2 26 4 2 Nov. 2 4 2 9 4 2 16 2 6 23 1 4 30 1 8 Dec. 7 1 7 14 0 0 ---- --- 4817 528

To relieve the poverty caused by this great disaster a tax was levied on various other parts of the county of Essex, and contributions were made by private individuals, the London churches collecting £1311. 10_s._ in the breathing-time between the plague and the fire. Colchester had so far recovered in the end of 1666 as to be able to contribute in turn about a hundred pounds for the relief of London after the fire[1231].

The Last of Plague in England.

The history of plague in England must be made to end with a solitary epidemic at Nottingham in 1667, but not without some misgivings as to the correctness of the date. Dr Deering, the historian of the town in 1751, paid little heed to epidemics, although medicine was his business; but he mentions one of smallpox in 1736, which had probably come within his own experience, and proceeds:

“I question much whether there has been the like since the plague which visited the town in 1667, and made a cruel desolation in the higher part of Nottingham, for very few died in the lower; especially in a street called Narrow Marsh, it was observed that the infection had no power, and that during the whole time the plague raged, not one who lived in that street died of it, which induced many of the richer sort of people to crowd thither and hire lodgings at any price; the preservation of the people was attributed to the effluvia of the tanners’ ouze (for there were then 47 tanners’ yards in that place), besides which they caused a smoak to be made by burning moist tanners’ knobs[1232].”

If there had been any reference to the parish registers or to the corporation minutes, we should have had no reason to doubt that this epidemic had been correctly assigned to 1667. The last Winchester epidemic had been given under the year 1668, first by one local historian, and then by another who copied him; but when a third went to the manuscript records, he found that the year was 1666, as indeed an incidental reference to the re-opening of Winchester School on 1st December, 1666, “the sickness being in all appearance extinguished,” might have warranted one in concluding. It is a singular experience to have brought the history of plague down through several centuries, not without particulars of times and numbers, and to be obliged to end it in the latter half of the 17th century with an unauthenticated date. The Nottingham epidemic may have been an exception to the generality that all England was finally delivered from the plague in 1666; it is due, at least, to the local historian, in the absence of evidence against, to record his date of 1667. The difficulty of confirming so simple a fact at so late a period may dispose the readers of this work to be tolerant of any lack of certainty and precision that they may discover in its history of more remote times.

INDEX.

Aarhus, bishop of, his book on plague, 209, his identity, 210 note

Abbotsley, scene in church, 39

Aberdeen, leper-spital, 99, plague at, 361, 362, long free from plague, 370, plague at, in 1647, 564, syphilis arrives at, 417, 419, 361

Aelred, his story of queen Matilda and the lepers, 82-3

=Agriculture=, state of in Domesday, 22, neglect of under heavy taxation by Wm, Rufus, 30, effects of Black Death on, 191-2, thriving in the 15th cent., 222, gives place to sheep-farming in Tudor period, 387-392

=Agues=, original meaning of 409; pestilential ague, 214, “hot ague”, 291, 400, 401, 404, 406, Irish ague, 410; Jones on, 410, specialists for, 411, 426, ambiguous meaning of, 505, 536, 540

Allington, Richard, case of smallpox, 459

Amwell, Great, plague, 493

André, Bernard, on sweat of 1508, 244, on French pox, 420

=Anglo-Saxon Leechdoms=, 24, 452

Annan, story of a plague at, 11

Appleby, plague, 360

Arabia, burials in, 165, plague, 166, origin of smallpox in 441

=Armada, Spanish=, sickness in, 350, 591

=Arsenic=, plague-cakes, 487

Ashburton, plague, 524

Ashwell, inscription at, 139, 217

Assir, plague, 166

=Assizes, Black=, at Cambridge, 375, at Oxford, 376, at Exeter, 383

Astruc, on origin of syphilis, 430

Aubrey, Dr, on sickness in slave-ships, 627-8

Avignon, Black Death at, 133, pestis secunda, 203

Axholme, the sweat at, 252

Ayr, plague, 503

Baber, Consul, plague in Yun-nan, 168

Bacon, Francis, “remedy” of the sweat, 242, gaol-fever, 382, sweet odours in plague, 685 note

Bamford, James, plague of 1603 in St Olave’s parish, 478, on contagion of plague, 490

Banbury, plague, 303 note, 501, war-fever and plague, 556-7

Banister, John, on syphilis, 427, his plague-medicines, 516

=Bankside stews=, 420

Barbados, occupied by English, 619, yellow fever in, 620, 630-633

Barcelona, syphilis at, 434

Barking, plague in monastery, 6, plague, 492, 520, 680

=Bartholomew fair=, in plague-time, 300, 481

=Bartholomew’s, St, Hospital=, filled with cases of pox, 424

Basingstoke, hospital at, 95

Batavia, epidemic in 1625, 608

Baxter, Richard, on the weather before the Great Plague, 653, on Dissenters in the plague-time, 655

Becon, on rural depopulation, 391

Beda, on pestilence in, 664-685, 5-7

=Beggars=, pretending leprosy, 103, beadle of, 104, after Black Death, 183, statutes for, 392

Bellay, Du, letters on the sweat, 250-252

Belper, plague, 500

Benghazi, plague and typhus in Arab tents, 170

=Beri-beri=, supposed in 1593, 593

Beverley, the sweat at, 252

Birch, Dr T., errors of, on Oxford Black Assizes, 381 note, collects letters of the Stuart period, 504 note

=Black Death, the=, chroniclers of in England, 114, arrival and progress, 116-118, in Ireland, 119, in Scotland, 119, 233, symptoms of, 120, mortality from, 123-139, direct effects of, 139, 180, antecedents of, 142-156, 173-4, favouring conditions for diffusion of, 175. Its effects on Edward III.’s wars, 178, on removal of men and treasure, 180, on price of labour, 181, on capitalists, 186, on morals, 186-190, on area of cultivation, 191, on system of farming, 192, on trade and industry, 193, on town industries, 197, on village manufactures, 198, on governing class in towns, 199, on population, 199. Infection of, remains in England, 204, 233

Bodmin, Black Death at, 116, 125

Boghurst, W., spotted fever in Somerset, 543, his MS. on the Great Plague, 647 et seq.

Boleyn, Anne, in the sweat of 1528, 251, 252, 255

Borde, Andrew, 286

Borgia, Alexander, pope, 416 note

Boston, plague at, 349

Bosworth, battle of, 265

=Botch=, =boche= or =boiche=, early name of plague, 206, 208, 362

Bradwardine, archbp, dies of Black Death, 129

Bradwell, Stephen, his plague-book, 516

Brant, Sebastian, on origin of French pox, 431

Brasbridge, on plague in dog’s skin, 316

Brewer, T., his poem on plague of 1625, 512, 517

Bridewell made a hospital, 394, 395

Bridgetown, yellow fever at in 1647, 620, 630-33

Bridport, Black Death at, 116, plague at in 1626, 524

Brimington, plague, 498

Bristol, leper-house, 98, Black Death, 116, 121, 123, effects of ditto on trade at, 182 note, plague in 1535, 300, in 1575, 340, in 1645, 557

Bucklersbury, drug-shops in, 484

Bugden, deaths from sweat at, 261

Bullein, on plague of 1563, 306, on London graveyards, 334, on the French pox, 422

Burdwan, number of lepers in, 107

=Burial=, interdict of, 11; neglect of, 12, 13 note, in Chinese famines, 154, in Islam, 163. Christian burial in Egypt, 159. Chinese mode of, 161. In Arabia, 165, in Kumaon 167, neglect of in Yun-nan, 168, at Merdje, 171; by the friars, 332, in St Paul’s churchyard, 334, without coffins, 335, Latimer on intramural, 336, relation to plague, 336, in the great London plagues, 126, 337, 482, 515, 668-9, hours of in plague-time 303, 482

Burton Lazars, 89

Bury St Edmunds, burials at in 1257, 44, hospitals, 92, 96, plague in 1578, 347

Butts, Dr, in the sweat of 1528, 254

Caffa, Black Death at siege of, 144, 147

Caius, Dr, on the sweat of 1551, 259, 261, 263, edits Galen, 439

Calais, sweat at 248, 253, 255, plague in 1509, 288, “new sickness” in 1558, 403, plague brought to, 546

=Calendar=, the English and the Continental, 256 note

=Calenture=, 387, 610

Cambridge, epidemic of “frenzy” at, 62, effects of Black Death, 196, prophecy of pestilence, 229, sweat of 1517, 248, of 1528, 252, of 1551, 262, plague, 285, 289, 338, 340, 347, 497, 527, 682, gaol fever, 375, agues, 505

Canterbury, death of monks in 870, 9, leper-hospitals, 87, 91, style of living in 14th cent., 50, Black Death at, 132, causes of death of monks, 226, plague in 1544, 303, in 1564, 309, in 1593, 357, in 1603-4, 498, in 1614-15, 501, in 1625, 524, in 1636, 528, in 1665, 681, in 1666, 688

Cape de Verde islands (St Jago), infection taken from, 586, 589

Carlisle, plague, 359, 562

Carshalton, mortality in 1626, 520

Cartier, Jacques, scurvy in his expedition, 581

Castle Combe, records of its manor court, 135, 136, 139, priests poaching, 189, village industries, 198, nuisances removed, 198 note, 328

Catharine of Arragon, arrives in England in plague-time, 288, anxious for Henry VIII. on account of plague in 1518, 290

=Cats= in plague-time, 316

Cavendish, Thomas, sickness in his voyages, 592-3

=Cemeteries=, see BURIAL

Champneys, Sir John, mayor, procures plague-bill in 1535, 298

=Chancery=, inquisition on a leper, 105, business of after Black Death, 188

Charles VIII., his invasion of Italy, 430, 433, 435, his sickness at Asti, 436-7

=Charnel-house= of St Paul’s, 334, 659

Charterhouse, inscription of burials in Black Death, 127, death of monks in 1528, 252

Chatham, leper-hospital, 95, plague in 1665, 681

Chauliac, Guy de, symptoms of pestis secunda, 203, on Gaddesden’s Rosa Anglica, 446

Chester, the sweat, 245, 249, plague, 304, 339, 498, 500, 501, 564, smallpox, 465 note, fever in villages near, 567

Chesterfield, plague, 349, 500

Chesterton depopulated, 199 note

China, Black Death said to have come from, 143, 145-147, overland trade to Europe, 148-9, no record of Black Death in, 149; great series of floods, famines, &c., 150-152, followed by a period of plagues, 153; unburied dead after famines and floods, 154, Odoric’s valley of corpses, 155, careful mode of burial in, 161. Plague in modern times, 168-9

=Churchyards=, see BURIAL

Clapham, Henoch, 490

=Clarendon, Council of=, 374

Clot, Dr, Bey, on plague in Egypt, 160

Clowes, William, on the pox in London, 423-5, on quacks, 426, his translation of variola, 459

Clun, plague, 545

Clyn, Friar, the Black Death in Ireland, 115, 119, symptoms of ditto, 121

Cogan, Th., on prophesied return of the sweat, 264, on fever at Oxford Assizes, 378, on lasks, 412

Colchester, wills proved after Black Death, 186, plague, 348, 498, 525, plague in 1665-6, 688, directions to bearers and watchers at, 688 note

Comines, Philip de, commons of England untouched by Wars of Roses, 38, 224, 387, on Charles VIII.’s sickness, 435

Congleton, plague, 498, 545

Constantinus Africanus applies “variola” to smallpox, 453

Cork, leper-hospitals, 100, alleged sweating sickness, 252, plague, 371, 502

Cornard Parva, Black Death in, 137

Coventry, leper-hospital at, 92, growth of after the Black Death, 194, 195, plague, 501, 526 note

Crail, plague, 370

Cranborne, plague, 499

Cranbrooke, plague, 348

Crimea, outbreak of Black Death in, 142, 144

Cromwell, O., his death from fever, 574, colonizes Jamaica, 634, 639

Cromwell, T., orders bill of mortality, 297-8

=Cross, the blue=, or =red=, 306, 313, 314, 514

Croxton, abbey, Black Death in, 131, ditto in the manor, 138

Croydon, plague, 492, 520, 679

Croyland abbey, sudden mortality in, 9, the sweat in, 239, 266

Cumanus, Marcellus, the French pox at siege of Novara, 431

Cumberland, plague in 1420, 221, state of in the Civil Wars, 562

Dalry, “grantgore” at, 418

=Danes=, camp sickness among, 13

Darlington, plague, 359, 557

Dartmouth, plague, 351, 524

Davison, F., ‘Poetical Rapsodie’, 463

Deal, plague in 1666, 688

Defoe, sources of his Journal of the Plague-Year, 649, illustrations of the Great Plague from, 657 et seq.

Dekker, T., on London at accession of James I., 471, 480, on plague of 1603, 481-4, theatres closed in plague-time, 494

Deptford, plague in 1666, 680, 687

Derby, plague at, 309, 349, 357, 559, plague in 1665, 682

Derry, the, plague at in 1566-7, 372

=Dogs= in plague-time, 314, 316, 515; alleged death of in the Leeds plague, 558, at Batavia from licking pestilent blood, 608

=Domesday Survey=, size of towns in, 23, state of agriculture inferred from, 22

Doncaster, plague in 1536, 301

Donne, Rev. Dr, his dread of smallpox, 463, on flight of citizens in 1625, 519

Doughty, C., on burials in Arabia, 165

Drake, Sir Bernard, at the Exeter Black Assizes, 384, 385

Drake, Sir Francis, sickness in his voyage round the world, 585, great epidemic in his fleet in 1585-6, 585-589, his death from flux, 591

Drogheda, monastery of, Black Death in, 119, 132

Dublin, leper-hospitals, 100, Black Death in, 119, 131, 132, plague in 1520, 371, in 1575, 372, in 1650, 566

Dumfries, plague, 235, 369

Dunbar, W., “spanyie pockis”, 418

Dundee, plague, 234, 368, 503

Duns, plague, 369

Durham, a medieval siege of, 28, leper-hospital near, 94, 113, plague, 350, 359, 499, 501, 681, famine, 358

Dysart, plague, 366, 368

=Dysentery=, or flux, summary of epidemics, 411-13, in 1624, 505, in voyages, 589, 591, 600, 602, 603, in Virginia, 611, in slave-ships, 628, among black troops, 629, in St Domingo and Jamaica, 635-640

East Indies, Portuguese voyages to, 584, English voyages to, 599-609

=East India Company=, provides against scurvy, 602-3

Edenhall, plague, 360

Edinburgh, leper-hospital, 99, pestilentia volatilis, 234, plague, 235, 303, 362, 365-6, 367, 368, 369, 370, 502, 503, 504, 563, French pox, 417, mortality of children in 1600, 370 note

Edward the Confessor and the leper, 81

Edward III., his activity after the Black Death, 178-9

Edward IV., his illness from “pockys” in 1463, 455

Edward VI., on the sweat of 1551, 260

Egypt, theory of plague in, 156, 659, sanitary wisdom of ancient, 158, embalming in, 159, 160-1, compared with China, 161-2

Elizabeth, Queen, at Windsor in the plague of 1563, 317, rebukes the uncleanly state of Ipswich, 327, attempts to stamp out plague in London, 330-331, her proclamation in 1580 on growth of London, 346, her trains at Norwich in 1578 carry plague, 348, her hardness to the sick seamen in the Armada-year, 350, her precaution against smallpox in 1591, 461

Elizabeth of York, in 1502, pays for cure of John Pertriche, 419

Elphege, St, stops pestilence in 1011, 13

Ely, bishop of, alienates Stourbridge leper-hospital, 93

Ely monastery, Black Death in, 132

Elyot, Sir Thomas, lay writer on medicine, 402, mentions smallpox, 457

=Emigrants=, mortality of English to Virginia, 610, to New England &c., 612-13, to Barbados, 619, of French to St Christopher, 618, to Guadeloupe, 621

Ensham, manor of, after Black Death, 139, 141

Erasmus, still ill from “sweat” in 1511, 245, 399, ref. to influenza (?) in 1518, 249, ref. to plague in letters, 288-9, on English houses, 328, on the French pox, 420-21

=Ergotism=, causes and signs of, 53-55, two forms, 55, cases of in England, 57, possible instances of, 59-63, reasons of English immunity from, 64, 68

Essex, Lord General, typhus in his army, 548-9, occupies Tiverton, 552-3

Ethredge, Dr G., the sweat of 1551 at Oxford, 260, 380, the gaol-fever at Oxford, 381

Eton, plague, 348, 520, boys compelled to smoke in plague-time, 674

Evesham, monastery, fugitives at after wasting of Yorkshire, 27 note, drives out its leprous prior, 101

Evesham, town, plague and bad scavenging, 501

Exeter, the scavengers of, 327, plague, 288, famine and plague, 300, plague, 498, 523, Black Assizes, 383-6

Eyam, plague at in 1665-6, 682-7

Eydon, plague, 498

Fabyan, on the first sweat, 239, on plague in London, 1478-9, 234, and 1500, 287, uses the name “pockys”, 420

=Famines=, chronology of, to 1322, 15, in 1370, 215, about 1383, 219, in 1391, 220, in 1438-9, 223, 228, 235, in 1528, 251, 277, in 1535, 300, in 1551, 278, in 1557, 401, in 1596-7, 358

=Fever=, epidemics of from famine, 15-17 (table), in 1086-7, 29, in 1196, 36, in 1258, 44-45, in 1315, 48, in 1438-9, 223, 228, 234-5, in 1596-7 358, 411; epidemics of in war, 547, 552; spotted, 504, 540, 542, 543, 551; “strange,” see INFLUENZA, Yellow, see YELLOW FEVER, in gaols, see GAOL-FEVER; in ships, 350, 538

Finchley, dysentery at, 1596-7, 411

Findhorn, plague, 370

Finsbury, laystalls at, 334

Fish, Simon, ‘Supplication of Beggars’, 421

=Fleet Ditch=, unwholesome, 352

Forrestier, Dr Thomas, his MS. on the sweat of 1485, 238, fixes time and place of first outbreak, 238, his account of the symptoms and treatment, 241, on extent of first sweat, 243, on causes of ditto, 266-7

=Foul Death=, name used by Scots for plague in 1349, 78, and in 1379, 218

Fracastori, on smallpox, 467, on typhus, 585

Francis, St, of Assisi, and the lepers, 85

Freind, Dr J., on a strange chorea, 61, on diffusion of smallpox, 445, on Gaddesden, 448

=Friars=, their original mission, 41, their care of lepers, 85, 107, side with the rich after the Black Death, 188, bury rather than christen, 332

Froude, Mr, on plague at the Derry, 372 note, on “yellow fever” in Drake’s fleet, 589 note

“FRUIT OF TIMES,” records “pokkes” for 1366, 453

Fryer, Dr John, 307

Gaddesden, John of, fails to describe fever of, 1315 51, on leprosy, 76, on smallpox, 446-8, on morbilli and “mesles”, 449-51

Gale, Thomas, on “the morbus”, 422

Galway, “sweating sickness” at, 400 note

=Gaols=, first built, 374

=Gaol Fever=, in Newgate, 374, 395 note, at Cambridge, 375, at Oxford, 376-382, at Exeter, 383-386, referred to in Act, 388, in the Queen’s Bench, Southwark, 395, 539, Bacon on, 332

=Garter, Order of the=, 178

Gascoigne T., cases of syphilis, 74, Henry IV.’s “leprosy”, 77 note, “legists” after Black Death, 189

Gaubil, abbé, on the Chinese annals, 154

Geynes, Dr, 307

Gibbon, on the Justinian plague, 2, on a remark by Procopius, 675 note

Gibbons, Orlando, 465, 524

Gilbertus Anglicus, on leprosy, 70-72, morphaea, 76, diet to keep off leprosy, 113, on smallpox, 446, 447

Glasgow, leper-house, 99, keeps out plague, 366, 369, plague, 370, 563, syphilis, 418

Gloucester, Black Death, 116, 117, plague in 1580, 348, in 1638, 545, a quack at, 426, relief of siege, 549

Goddard, Dr, his excuse for leaving London in the plague, 667

Gordonio, Bernard, on leprosy, 70, case at Montpellier, 72, on morphaea, 76, on smallpox, 447

=Grandgore=, in Scotland, 417-18, derivation of, 418

Grantham, plague near, 500, sickness at, 502

Graunt, John, syphilis in London, 428, London mortality, 532

Gravesend, plague, 287, 293, 531

Greaves, Sir E., fever at Oxford, 547, 551

Greenwich, sweat at, 244, 251, plague at, 293, plague in 1666, 687

Gregory, W. ref. to “pokkes,” 454

Gruner, on the sweat, 258, collections on medieval smallpox, 446 note

Grünbeck, Jos. on syphilis, 432

Guignes, Des, on origin of Black Death, 143, 152

Guinea, voyages to in 16th cent., 581-3, slave trade from, 583, 625-9

Guy, Dr W., on “parish infection”, 396 note

Hackney, leper-hospital, 97, 98 note, plague in 1535, 301, in 1603, 492, in 1625, 511

Haddington, pestilentia volatilis, 234, plague during siege, 303

Hall, his Chronicle on the sweat of 1517, 250, on the mercenaries of Henry VII., 274, on the Cambridge Black Assizes, 375

Hampshire, parish in, statistics of, 411, 541

Harrison, W. English houses, 330 note, fever of 1557-8, 401

Hartlepool, plague, 349

Harwich, plague at in 1665-6

Havre de Grace (or “Newhaven”), plague during siege, 307

Hawkins, Sir John, in the slave trade, 583

Hawkins, Sir Richard, on health of Cape de Verde islands, 589 note, scurvy in his voyage of 1593, 594-6

Hecker, antecedents of Black Death, 143-4, on fecundity after Black Death, 200, sweating sickness, 240, 244 note, 258, 263, 265, 271 note, 277 note

Hendon, sends help in 1625 plague, 518

Henry I., taxation under, 31

Henry II., charities of, 33-34

Henry III., famine under, 43

Henry IV., “leprosy” of, 77

Henry V., vigorous sanitation under, 325

Henry VII., his expedition of 1485, 237, 240, 265, 270, 275, in the sweat of 1508, 244, reception of Catharine of Arragon, 288, sanitation under, 325-6

Henry VIII., in the sweat of 1517, 247-8, in plague of 1517-18, 290, in sweat of 1528, 250-53, in plague of 1535, 297, 300, measures to check plague, 291, 312, 313-14, repression of vagrancy &c., 390, his illness in 1514, 456

Henry of Huntingdon, poem by, 18

Hensler, his history of syphilis, 416 note

Hensley, plague, 309

Hereford, plague, 348

Hereford, bishop of, case of morphaea, 76

Herefordshire, plague, 500

Hertford, sweat at, 254, law courts at, 331, plague, 339, 347, 356

Hertfordshire, after the Black Death, 191, plague in, 493

Hirsch, Dr August, on endemics of syphilis, 438

Hispaniola, great pox and smallpox, 430, 469, flux among English troops, 635-6

Hoddesdon, plague, 347

Hodges, Dr, his Loimologia, 648, 654, 675

Holinshed, erroneous entry of “small pocks”, 454

Holland, Abraham, poem on plague of 1625, 512

Holme Pierrepont, plague, 499

Höniger, effects of Black Death, 141 note

Howard, John, Oxford gaol, 377, gaol-fever, 382 note

Hugh, St, bp. of Lincoln, his care for burials, 13 note, for lepers, 84

Hull, plague at, in 1472-8, 231, in 1576, 340, in 1635-38, 527

Hunstanton, Black Death, 137

Hütten, Ulrich von, cure of syphilis, 416

Ibn Batuta, his report that Black Death came from China, 146

Ibn-ul-Khatib, origin of Black Death, 146

Ilchester, decayed, 195, 221

Ilford, leper-hospital, 95

Inchcolm, quarantine island, 363, 369

Inchkeith, quarantine for plague, 235, 360, for syphilis, 417

=Influenza=, meaning of, 397, early epidemics, 398, in 1510, 399, in 1540, 400, in 1557-8, 401-5, in 1580, 406, in 1657-9, 568-574, many other epidemics might be so called, 408-9, 411, 536, 541, 543-4, 567, 577

=Interdict of burial= &c., 11

Ipswich, scavengers of, 327, plague at, in 1603, 498, in 1665-6, 688

Ireland, plague in A.D. 664, 4-5, condition in 12th cent., 21, flux among troops, 33, leper-houses, 100, Black Death, 115, 118-19, 132, succeeding plagues, 236, alleged sweating sickness, 252 note, 400 note, influenza, 398 note, plague in Tudor period, 371-3, in Cromwellian war, 365

Isle of Wight, depopulation of, 387, influenza or sweat in 1558, 403

Jamaica, English occupation of, 636-642

James I., authority for “a pockie priest”, 415, his accession followed by a great plague, 480, his fatal illness, 512

Jarrow, plague in monastery of, 7

Jersey, plague in, 308

Jessopp, Augustus, on mortalities in the Black Death, 132, 134, 137, on lawlessness after do., 140, on panic from do., 181 note

John of Bridlington, 14th cent. pestilences, 204, 207

John of Burgoyne, 14th cent. writer on plague, 208

Jones, Dr John, on plague in London in 1563, 306, on effects of the poor-rate, 394, on influenza of 1558, 403, his use of “ague”, 410

=Justinian, plague in reign of=, 2, theory of it, 156, 159, 161

Kattiwar, plague in, 165, 169

Kellwaye, Simon, on the plague of 1593, 355, on smallpox and measles, 461

Kendal, plague in 1598, 359

Kensington, plague in 1603, 492, in 1625, 520

Kheybar, burials in, 165

Kilkenny, Black Death, 115, 119, 121, 132, plague in 1649, 565

Kirkcaldy, plague in 1574, 366

Kirkoswald, plague in 1598, 360

Kremer, A. von, Mohammedan plagues, 163

Kumaon, plague in, 166

Kutch, plague in, 169

=Labourers, Statute of=, 66, 181-2

Lamesley, plague in 1610, 501

Lancashire, ergotism? in 1702, 59, wills after Black Death, 138, fever in 1651, 567

Lancaster, Sir James, scurvy in his ships, 599, treats scurvy by lime juice, 601

Langland, see ‘Piers the Ploughman’

=Lask=, old name of flux, 400, 412

Latimer, on intramural burial, 336, on stews closed, 420

=Law=, business of increased after Black Death, 188-9

=Lazar=, derivation of, 79 note

Lazarus, St, 79, 94

=Lazarus, St, Knights of the Order of=, 89

Leake, plague in 1587-8, 349

Leeds, fever in 1644, 558, plague in 1645, 558

Leicester, Black Death, 124 pestis secunda, 203, plague in 1563-4, 309, in 1593, 357, in 1607-11, 125, 501, in 1626, 526

Leicestershire, strange epidemic in 1340, 59, plague, 526

Leith, plague, 235 note, 361, 363, 366, 369, 503

Leominster, plague or fever in 1578, 349, in 1597, 358 note

=Leper-houses=, in England, 86-99, their mixed inmates, 93, vogue soon past, 91-95, the later non-monastic, 97, in Scotland, 99, in Ireland, 100

=Leprosy=, generic meaning of in medieval books, 70-79, Biblical associations of, 79-81, religious view of, 81-86, prejudice against, 100-105, laws against, 103-6, estimated amount of, 107, a disease akin to pellagra, 108, 110, Gilbert White on causes of, 110, dietetic cause of in, Hutchinson on cause of, 111 note, constitutional, 112, diet for in Scotland, 113

Lescarbot, on scurvy, 597-8

=Leviticus=, use of “leprosy” in, 80

Lichfield, plague, 309, 357, 559

Lieu-chow, bubonic disease, 169

Linacre, 286, 439

Lincoln, leper-hospital at, 92, decay of, 195, plague at, 357

Lindsey, statute of labourers ineffective in, 182

Linlithgow, lepers at, 99, French pox at, 418

Lithgow, W., on plague in Tyneside, 557

=Lock, the, hospital=, 97, 98 note

Lodge, Dr T., on rats and moles in plague-time, 173, on plague in 1603, 485, on compulsory removal of the sick, 488

London: fever in 962, 26, in 1258, 44-45, according to the bills, 504, 532, 576 Fitzstephen’s account of, 34 French pox in, 424, 428, 432 note lepers expelled, 103, stopped at the Gates, 104 leper-hospitals of 88, 97-8 nuisances in, 323-6 overcrowding of, in 1580, 346, in 1602 et seq., 539-540 Parish Clerks of, 320-322 plagues in: the Black Death, 117, mortality of ditto, 126-9, the plague of 1361, 203, of 1368-9, 215-16, of 1407, 220, of 1426, 227, of 1434, 227-8, of 1437, 228, of 1454, 229, of 1466, 230, of 1474, 231, of 1478-9, 231-2, of 1487, 287, of 1499-1500, 287, of 1504, 288, of 1511-12, 288, of 1513, 288-9, of 1514-16, 289-90, of 1517-18, 290, 292, of 1521, 292, of 1529-31, 292-3, of 1532, 293-6, of 1535, 297-300, of 1536, 301-2, of 1543, 302, of 1547-8, 303, of 1563, 304-7, of 1568-9, 338, of 1573-4, 339, of 1577-83, 341-5, 347, of 1592-93, 351-4, 356, of 1594, 356, of 1603, 474-92, of 1604-1610, 493-4, of 1625, 507-520, of 1630, 527 of 1636 529-32, of 1637-48, 532, 546 (table 533), of 1665, 644-679 plague-orders, 312-322, 355, 481, 488 population, end of 12th cent., 34, in 1258, 44, in 1349, 128-9, in 1377, 201, in 1535, 299, in 1580, 345, in 1593, 354, in 1603 and before and after, 471-4, in 1665, 660 Richard of Devizes, on wickedness of, 34 sanitary ordinances in 1369 and 1371, 216, 324, in 1388, 324, in 1415, 325, in 1488-9, 325, in 1543, 314, 315, in 1568, 319, in 1582, 330 theatres closed in plague-time, 494-6

Loughborough, sweating sickness at, 259, plague at, 304, 404, 500, 560

Louth, plague in 1587, 349 (Notitiae Ludae), in 1631, 527

Lowe, Peter, on “Spanish Sickness”, 427

Lowry, Dr J. H., on Pakhoi plague, 169

Lyndsay, Sir D., “grandgore”, 418

Lynn, a physician of, 51, leper-houses at, 93, 98, plague at, in 1635-6, 528, in 1665, 681

Macclesfield, plague, 498

Macgowan, Dr D. J., on rats poisoned by the soil, 169

Magellan, scurvy in his ship, 579

Mahé, on cadaveric theory of plague, 173 note

Maidenhead, scene at, 578

Maillet, De, on preservation of corpses in Egypt, 161

Malpas, plague in 1625, 526 note

Manardus, origin of syphilis, 434

Manchester, plague in 1608, 499, in 1631, 527

Mansfeld, his English troops, 522

Margate, sick sailors at after Armada, 350

Marshall, John, on “parish infection”, 396 note

Martin, on the illness of Charles VIII., 437

Matilda, Queen, and the lepers 82; her hospital, 88

Mayerne, Sir Th., on the fevers of 1624, 540

=Measles=, Gaddesden on, 448, derivation of name, 451, joined with smallpox, 458-9, 462, 465-6

Measure for Measure, reference to “the sweat”, 413 note, the stews suppressed, 420, doctrine of “obstruction” in, 605 note

Meaux, abbey of, Black Death in, 118, 131

Meddus, Rev. Dr, in London during plague of 1625, 514

=Medicine, profession of=, little in evidence, 51, 258, 402

Melcombe, Black Death lands at, 116

Merdjé, modern plague at, 170

Merston Trussell, plague, 498

Milton, John, at Chalfont, in 1665, 665 note

=Moles= in plague-time, 173, 364

Molineux on universal fevers and universal colds, 409

=Monasteries=, pestilence in, 5-7, 9-10, Stubbs on, 50, found hospitals, 95, Black Death in, 131

Monkleigh, plague, 499

Monmouthshire, fever and plague in 1638, 541

Montgomeryshire, plague in 1638, 542

Montpellier, case of lepra at, 72, practice in the plague at, 210

Moorfields, common latrine in, 325

More, Sir Thomas, on relapses, 248, his plague-orders at Oxford, 291, as “a parish clerk”, 321, describes London as the capital of Utopia, 329, on pauperism and vagrancy, 389

=Morphaea=, a case of, 76

Morton, Richard, on the fever of 1658, 574

“=Mure=,” old name of influenza, 389. (“Tussis et le Murra.” Canterbury MS. in Hist. MSS. Com. IX., pt. I. p. 127).

=Murrains=, 46 note

Mussis, De, on origin of Black Death at Caffa, 144

Namasse, modern plague, 166

Nanking, death of rats at, 169

Nantwich, plague, 498

=Naples sickness of= 419, 430

“=New Acquaintance=”, 260

“=New Disease=”, 401, 403, 404, 534, 536, 541, 543-4, 570, 577

Newark, plague after siege, 560

Newcastle, plague in 1420, 222 note, in 1478, 232, in 1544, 303, in 1589, 350, in 1597, 358, in 1603, 498, in 1609, 500, in 1625, 526, in 1636, 529, in 1642 and 1645, 557, in 1666, 681

New England, voyages to, 612, epidemics in, 613

Niebuhr, on demoralisation after pestilence, 186

Nöldeke, Th., on legend of smallpox, 442

Normandy, Henry VII.’s troops raised in, 271, 275, endemic sweat of, 271, 273

Northampton, old hospital at, 90, plague, 304, fever and plague in 1638, 542

Northwych, plague, 340, 498

Norwich, hospitals at, 93, 95, leper-houses at the gates, 98, the Black Death in, 129, decline of after ditto, 193-5, fever in 1382, 218, plague in 1465, 230 note, in 1479, 232, in 1578, 348, in 1603, 498, in 1609, 500, in 1625, 525, in 1630-31, 527, in 1636 fever or plague, 542, plague in 1665-6, 681, 688

Nottingham, deaths at in 1518, 291, plague at in 1593, 357, in 1604, 499, in 1667, 691

=Nuisances=, at Castle Combe, 198, 328, in London, 216, 323-6, at Stratford-on-Avon, 327, at Ipswich, 327, alleged by Erasmus, 329, in London suburbs, 337, at Evesham, 501, at Kilkenny, 502

Odoric, friar, his vision of unburied dead in China, 155

Okehampton, plague at, in 1626, 524

Osiander, on Christian duty in the plague, 310

Ottery St Mary, camp sickness at in 1645, 555, 561

Oundle, plague in 1665, 681

Oxford, leper-hospital, 93, Black Death at, 125, law students at after ditto, 189, sweat of 1485, 243, sweat (?) of 1508, 245, sweat of 1517, 247, 248, sweat of 1551, 260, plague in the 15th cent., 282-3, in the 16th cent., 283-4, houses shut up at in 1518, 291, plague in 1571, 338, in 1575, 340, in 1603-5, 496-7, in 1625, 525, in 1645, 559, gaol-fever in 1577, 376-382, war-typhus in 1643, 549-51, fellow expelled for French pox, 421, unwholesomeness of in 15th cent., 285 note, proposal to remove the university from, 283

Pakhoi, modern plague, 168

Paré, Ambroise, holds cadaveric theory of plague, 156, 162, 658, on likeness of smallpox to great pox, 468

Paris, “lepers” banished from in 1488, 104, 437

Pariset, Etienne, his theory of plague, 156-161

=Parish Clerks=, company of, 320-322

“=Parish infection=,” a myth, 396 note

=Pauperism=, 39, 41, 387-395

Pauw, De, Cornelius, on plague in Egypt, 157, on sanitary practice in ditto, 158

Paynel, translates book on French pox, 416

Peebles, plague at in 1499, 361

=Pellagra=, akin to leprosy, 108, 110, causes of, 109

Penrith, plague at in 1598, 359-60

Perth, plague at in 1548, 363, in 1580, 367, in 1584-5, 368, in 1608-9, 503-4, in 1645, 563

Pestilentia volatilis in Scotland, 398

Peterborough, burials at in 1175, 35, plague in 1574, 339, in 1606, 449, in 1665, 681

Petrarch, on effects of Black Death, 177

Phaer, Th., or Phayre, or Thayre, writer on plague, 210, 489, on smallpox and measles, 458

=Picardy Sweat=, 271-3

‘Piers the Ploughman,’ quoted on surfeit and want, 65-67, on moral effects of Black Death, 187-190, on continuance of pestilence, 205-207, on London famine of 1371, 215, on burials by friars, 332, use of “meseles”, 450, of “pokkes”, 452-3

Pinctor, Peter, relates cases of French pox in the Vatican, 416

=Plague=, symptoms or characters of, in the Black Death, 120-122, in medieval manuscripts, 208, 212-214, in Skene’s treatise, 364-5, in the plague of 1665 (Boghurst), 674; cadaveric theory of, 156 et seq., relation of to typhus, 170. General epidemics of: Black Death, 116-141, pestis secunda (1361), 203, tertia (1368-9), 215, quarta (1375), 217, quinta (1382), 218, of 1390-91, 219, of 1407, 220, of 1438-9, 225, 228, of 1465, 230, of 1471, 230. Epidemics of in the Northern Marches, in 1379, 218, in 1399, 220, in 1421, 221. See also under London and other places

Planck, Dr, on causes of plague in Kumaon, 167

Plot, Dr, on Oxford Black Assizes, 382, on mildness of smallpox, 467

Plymouth, plague in 1579, 348, in 1590-91, 351, sickness in the fleet in 1625, 521-2, plague in 1626, 523

=Poll-tax= of 1377, population reckoned from, 200

=Poor-laws=, origin of, 362-3, Jones on, 394

=Population= of towns in Domesday, 23-24, kept small by death of infants, 25, after the Black Death, 200-204. See also “London,” “Norwich.”

Portsmouth, plague in Venetian galley 1546, 303, plague 1625, 524, 1666, 688

=Posting sweat=, 260, posting fever, 378

=Pox, the French=, in Scotland, 417, in England, 419, Erasmus on, 421, meagre writings on, 415, 422, Clowes on, 423, Read on, 425, Banister on, 427, Graunt on, 428, origin of epidemic, 429-438

Presteign, the sweat of 1551, 259, plague in 1638, 542

Preston, wills proved after Black Death, 138 note, plague at in 1631, 527

Procopius, on a plague-immunity, 675 note

=Quarantine=, (forty days) for the Court in 1516, 290, 312, in 1518, 313, of persons in 1543, 313, houses in 1563, 317, in 1568, 318, proposed for shipping at Gravesend in 1568, 337, at Inchkeith in 1475, 235, 360, details of at Inchcolm in 1564, 363, case of at ditto, 367, 18th cent. law of, 672

Radnorshire, plague in 1638, 542

=Rats=, death of in plague-time, in Kumaon, 167, in Yun-nan, 168, in China, 169, in Gujerat, 170, ref. to by Lodge (1603), 173

Read, John, of Gloucester, on pox grown milder, 425, describes mountebank, 426

Renfrewshire, plague in in 1601, 370

Renny, on plague in Garhwal, 167

Rhazes, “the pills of”, 254, source of medieval teaching on smallpox, 440

Richard II., “infection and the hand of war”, 547

Richard of Devizes, on London in 12th cent., 34, on dislike of the Franks to soapboilers and scavengers, 329

Richmond, Yorks, reduced by Black Death, 191, plague in 1597-8, 359

Ripon, corn at in famine, 40, leper-hospital at, 93

Robert of Brunne, describes effects of famine, 48

Rocher, M., on plague in Yun-nan, 168

Rochester, late leper foundation at, 97, plague at in 1665, 681

Roger of Wendover, stories of avarice, 39, 40, on the friars, 41

Rogers, Thorold, on prices of corn 13th century, 37, 43, on rye in England, 64, on villenage, 184 note, wages after the Black Death, 185, on new system of farming after ditto, 192, paralysis of wool-trade after ditto, 193, on good diet of the English in 15th cent., 222, introduction of inferior bread, 224 note

Rome, medieval epidemics at, 3, 10

Rouen, siege of, 222

Royston, fevers in 1625, 505, plague in 1625, 525, in 1665, 682

=Rye-corn=, spurred, 53, little grown in England, 64

St Albans, school of annalists, 37, burials at in 1247, 42, famine in 1315, 48, leper-hospitals at, 90, admission to ditto, 102, Black Death in the abbey, 131, pestilence in 1431, 225, plague in 1578, 347

St Andrews, plague at in 1585, 368, in 1605, 503, in 1647, 563

St Christopher, the French in, 618, yellow fever in 1648, 621, 633

St Domingo, English attempt on, 634-6

St Giles’s, Cripplegate, churchyard, 334, modes of burial, 335, populous parish, 472, the Great Plague in, 649

St Giles’s-in-the-Fields, leper-hospital of, 83, 88, Great Plague begins at, 656

St Johnstone, see Perth

St Kilda, boat-cold, 274

St Olave’s parish, plague of 1603, 478, description of, 479

St Paul’s, churchyard, state of in 1582, 333, the charnel-house of, 334

St Sepulchre’s parish, plague of 1563 in, 306, churchyard of, 334

Salvetti, on the plague of 1625, 512, 519, describes a fast, 513

Sandwich, plague in 1609, 500, in 1635-37, 528, in 1665, 681, 688

=Sanitary Act=, the first, 324

Sayer, Dr H., treats plague at Oxford in 1645, 559

=Scavengers=, at Ipswich, 327, duties of at Exeter, 327, in London, 328

=Scurvy=, in voyages, 579, 581-5, 594-6, 599-609, among the French in Canada, 580, 597, in a coaster, 597, lime-juice for, 595, 601, 602-3, pericarditis in, 580 note

Scyllatius, Nicolas, on French pox at Barcelona in 1494, 434

=Searchers=, at Shrewsbury in 1539, 320 note, in London, 319, 321, oath taken by in St Mary-le-Bow, 322, at Colchester, 689 note

Seebohm, F., on mortality of Black Death among clergy, 134, ditto in manor of Winslow, 136, on remote effects of Black Death, 196

Shakespeare, John, fined, 327

Shakespeare, Wm., his business interfered with by plague, 495, dies in a sickly year, 536. See also titles of plays.

=Shambles=, a nuisance in London, 216, 324, 325, 330, 487

Sheppey, plague, 348

Sherborne, plague in 1611, 501, in 1665, 681

Sherburn, leper-hospital at, 94

Short, Dr Thomas, his epidemiological works, 57 note, 404

Shrewsbury, privilege of lepers at, 99, new civic class after Black Death, 199, sweat of 1551, 259, plague at in 1525, 292, in 1536-7, 301, 302, in 1575, 340, in 1592-3, 357, in 1604, 499, in 1630, 527, in 1650, 564

Simpson, Sir James, on leprosy in Scotland, 106 note, on syphilis in Scotland, 418

Skeat, Dr, on the derivation of “measles”, 451 note

Skene, Dr Gilbert, on moles in plague-time, 173 note, on cadaveric cause of plague, 336, his book on plague (1568), 363-5

“=Slaedan=,” Irish name supposed of influenza, 398 note

=Slave-ships=, ordure of, 630

=Slave-trade=, early history of, 614-17, mortality of, 625-28

=Smallpox=, originally an Arabic subject, 439, in the Elephant War, 441, nature and affinities of, 442-4, in medieval compends, 446 and note, Gaddesden’s alleged case, 447-8, erroneously chronicled in 1366, 455, in England 16th cent., 456-62, case of in 1561, 459, in 17th cent., 463, Fracastori on, 467, among American Indians (immunity of English), 613, in Hispaniola, 615, type of in Africans, 627, in slave-ships 625, 627, confused with great pox, 436-7, 456, 464, 468

Somersetshire, Black Death in, 117, spotted fever in, 543

Southampton, plague in Venetian galley in 1519, 292, plague in 1625, 524, in 1665, 681

Southwell Abbey, plague in 1471, 230, in 1478, 232

Spanish Main, sickness of English ships off, 588, 591

Spanish Town, mortality at in 1655, 638-642

Sprat, Bishop, on “remedy” of the sweat, 243

Stamford, plague in 1574, 339, in 1580, 348, in 1602-3, 360, 496, in 1641, 545

Stapleton, Sir Ph., dies of plague at Calais, 546

Stepney, plague begins at in 1603, 477, 480, plague of 1625 in, 511

=Stews= suppressed, 420

Stirling, grandgore at in 1498, 418, plague at in 1606, 503

Stockport, plague, 498

Stoke (Newark), plague after siege, 560

Stoke Pogis, plague at in 1625, 520

“=Stop-gallant=,” “=Stop-knave=,” names of the sweat, 260, 262, 263

Stourbridge, leper-hospital, 93

Stratford, bread-carts, 215 note

Stratford-on-Avon, plague at, 309, nuisance at, 327

Swainsthorpe, plague in 1479, 232

=Sweat, the English=, 1st epidemic, 235-243, 2nd epidemic, 243-5, 3rd epidemic, 245-250, 4th epidemic, 250-255, 5th epidemic, 259-263, the epidemic of 1529 on the Continent, 256-259, supposed sweats in England after 1551, 264, 280, 403, 413 note, at Tiverton, 554, supposed sweat in Flanders in 1551, 264 note, supposed sweat in Ireland, 252 note, 400 note, antecedents of in 1485, 265, 270, 273, causes of (supposed) in London, 267, a disease of the well-to-do, 263, 268, extinction of, 279, favouring conditions of the outbreaks, 276-9, mortality from, 250, 251, 260-262, abroad, 257, symptoms of, 241, 246, 251, theory of, 273, treatment of, 242

=Sweat of Picardy=, 271

=Sweating= in influenza, 403, 554, in war-typhus, 554

=Syphilis=, probably included under lepra, 72-75, 434, 437. See also POX, THE FRENCH

Talifoo, modern plague, 168

Tana, 144, 147

Taylor, John, “water-poet”, 512

=Texas fever=, 274

Thame, war-fever at, 548-9

Thayre, Th., see Phaer

Thomson, Dr G., dissection of plague-body, 677

Timon of Athens, the pox described (Act IV. sc. 3), 428

Tittenhanger, Henry VIII. at, 254

Tiverton, plague at in 1591, 351, sickness in 1597, 411, war-typhus (“sweating sickness”) at in 1644, 552-5

=Tobacco= in plague-time, 674, 682

Torella, on origin of French pox, 434

Totness, plague at in 1590, 351, in 1647, 561

Tottenham, in plague of 1625, 518, 520

Tregony, plague at in 1595, 357

Tripe, Andrew, his poem on the pox, 432 note

Trumpington, plague in 1625, 525

Truro, decayed, 221, plague in 1578, 347

Tuke, Brian, on the sweat of 1528, 255

Turner, Mrs Anne, 487 note

Turner, Dr P., arsenic in plague, 487

Turner, of Boulogne, preaches against burials in the city, 336

Twyford, plague in 1603, 493

Tynemouth, plague during siege, 557

Uffculme, sweat at in 1551, 262

Valencia, cases of French pox at, 434-5

Vasco da Gama, scurvy in his ships, 579

Vatican, the French pox in the, 416

Vetlianka, modern plague at, 172

Vincent, Rev. Thomas, his experiences of the Great Plague, 648, 664, 670

Virgil, Polydore, on the sweat, 237, 240, on treatment of ditto, 242

Virginia, voyages to, 590, 609-612

Wales, pestilence in the marches of in 1234, 12, Giraldus on, 21, famine in 1189, 35, leper-law of, 106, Black Death in, 118, plague and fever in 1638, 541

Wallingford, after Black Death, 195, small pox, measles and plague, 291, plague at, 559

“=Wame-ill=,” Scots famine-sickness in 1438-9, 235

=Wands= carried in plague time, 314-5

Wells, Black Death in diocese of, 117, plague at in 1575, 340

West Indies, colonization of, 617 et seq.

Whickham, plague, 501

White, Gilbert, on causes of leprosy, 110

Whitmore, H., on fever in 1651, 566, on fever and influenza in 1658-9, 572-4

=Whooping-cough=, or the kink, 459

Willan, Dr, 4, 440

William of Newburgh, story of plague at Annan, 11, famine-fever of 1196, 35, Durham leper-hospital, 94

Willis, Dr T., on the war typhus of 1643, 547, 549, on plague at Oxford &c., 559, on the fevers and (or) influenzas of 1657-8, 568-572

=Wills=, in Black Death, in London, 117-18, 186, in Lancashire, 138 note, in Colchester, 186; in London in 1361, 203, in 1368, 216

Wilton, sweat at 252

Winchester, plague at in 1603, 489, in 1625, 521 note, in 1666, 687, 691

Winslow, manor of, 136

Wisbech, plague at in 1586, 349

Wither, George, on plague of 1625, 512

Woburn, sweat at, 252

Wolsey, the sweat in his household, 247, 252, 253, letter from Anne Boleyn to, 255, charged with the great pox, 422

Woodall, John, describes the plague-bubo, 122, on scurvy, 603-6

Woodstock, sickness near, 291, plague, 292

Wool trade after Black Death, 179, 193

Wyclif, on decrease of population, 201

Yarmouth, Black Death in, 130, decline of, 195, 221; plague in 1579, 348, in 1625, 525, in 1635-6, 528, in 1664-5, 680

=Yellow Fever=, epidemic of at Bridgetown in 1647, 620, in St Christopher, 621, case of described, 623, characters of, 624, in “Regalia” and “La Pique”, 629, theory of in slave-ports, 630-31, as a soil-poison, 632-3, question of, in Drake’s fleet, 518-9

York, wasting of, 27, hospital at, 87, Black Death at, 118, 131, ditto in diocese of, 134, size of after ditto, 201, plague in 1391, 220, in 1485, 282, plague or sweat in 1551, 261, plague in 1604, 489

Yun-nan, modern plague, 168

Yusufzai, bubonic typhus in, 171

CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AND SONS, AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The references to the Justinian plague by contemporary and later historians have been collected, together with partly irrelevant matter about portents and earthquakes, by Val. Seibel, Die grosse Pest zur Zeit Justinian’s I. Dillingen, 1857. The author, a layman, throws no light upon its origin.

[2] Beda, Hist. Eccles. Eng. Hist. Society’s ed. p. 243: “qui ubi Romam pervenit, cujus sedi apostolicae tempore illo Vitalianus praeerat, postquam itineris sui causam praefato papae apostolico patefecit, non multo post et ipse et omnes pene, qui cum eo advenerant, socii, pestilentia superveniente, deleti sunt.”

[3] Flores Histor. by Roger of Wendover. Eng. Hist. Society’s ed. I. 180.

[4] Ibid. I. 228.

[5] Miscellaneous Works of the late Robert Willan, M.D., F.R.S., F.A.S. Edited by Ashby Smith, M.D. London, 1831. ‘An Enquiry into the Antiquity of the Smallpox etc.’ p. 108.

[6] Annals of the Four Masters, ed. O’Donovan, Dublin, 1851, I. 183. “A.D. 543. There was an extraordinary universal plague through the world, which swept away the noblest third part of the human race.”

p. 187. “A.D. 548. Of the mortality which was called Cron Chonaill--and that was the first Buide Chonaill [flava ictericia],--these saints died,” several names following. The entries of that plague are under different years in the various original Annals.

[7] “Eodem anno dominicae incarnationis sexcentesimo sexagesimo quarto, facta erat eclipsis solis die tertio mensis Maii, hora circiter decima diei; quo etiam anno subita pestilentiae lues, depopulatis prius australibus Brittaniae plagis, Nordanhymbrorum quoque provinciam corripiens, atque acerba clade diutius longe lateque desaeviens, magnam hominum multitudinem stravit. Qua plaga praefatus Domini sacerdos Tuda raptus est de mundo, et in monasterio, quod dicitur Paegnalaech, honorifice sepultus. Haec autem plaga Hiberniam quoque insulam pari clade premebat. Erant ibidem eo tempore multi nobilium simul et mediocrium de gente Anglorum, qui tempore Finani et Colmani episcoporum, relicta insula patria, vel divinae lectionis, vel continentioris vitae gratia, illo secesserant.... Erant inter hos duo juvenes magnae indolis, de nobilibus Anglorum, Aedilhun et Ecgberct,” etc. Beda’s Hist. Eccles. ed. Stevenson. Engl. Hist. Soc. I. p. 231.

[8] Ibid. p. 240.

[9] Annals of the Four Masters, I. 275.

[10] Thorpe, in his edition of Florence of Worcester, for the Eng. Hist. Society, I. 25.

[11] The first of Beda’s incidents of the Barking monastery relates to a miraculous sign in the heavens showing where the cemetery was to be. It begins: “Cum tempestas saepe dictae cladis, late cuncta depopulans, etiam partem monasterii hujus illam qua viri tenebantur, invasisset, et passim quotidie raperentur ad Dominum.”

[12] “Erat in eodem monasterio [Barking] puer trium circiter, non amplius annorum, Æsica nomine, qui propter infantilem adhuc aetatem in virginum Deo dedicatarum solebat cella nutriri, ibique medicari. Hic praefata pestilentia tactus ubi ad extrema pervenit clamavit tertio unam de consecratis Christo virginibus, proprio eam nomine quasi praesentem alloquens ‘Eadgyd, Eadgyd, Eadgyd’; et sic terminans temporalem vitam intravit aeternam. At virgo illa, quam moriens vocabat, ipso quo vocata est die de hac luce subtracta, et ilium qui se vocavit ad regnum coeleste secuta est.” Beda, p. 265. Then follows the story of a nun dying of the pestilence in the same monastery.

[13] Beda, Lib. IV. cap. 14. In addition to the instances in the text, which I have collected from Beda’s Ecclesiastical History, I find two mentioned by Willan in his “Inquiry into the Antiquity of the Smallpox,” (Miscell. Works, London, 1821, pp. 109, 110): “About the year 672, St Cedda, Bishop of the East Saxons, being on a visitation to the monastery of Lestingham, was infected with a contagious distemper, and died on the seventh day. Thirty monks, who came to visit the tomb of their bishop, were likewise infected, and most of them died” (Vita S. Ceddae, VII. Jan. p. 375. Cf. Beda, IV. 3). Again: “In the course of the year 685, the disease re-appeared at Lindisfarne, (Holy Island), St Cuthbert’s abbacy, and in 686 spread through the adjoining district, where it particularly affected children” (Vita S. Cuthberti, cap. 33). Willan’s erudition has been used in support of a most improbable hypothesis, that the pestilence of those years, in monasteries and elsewhere, was smallpox.

[14] Historia Abbatum Gyrvensium, auctore anonymo, §§ 13 and 14. (App. to vol. II. of Beda’s works. Eng. Hist. Society’s edition, p. 323.)

§ 13. Qui dum transmarinis moraretur in locis [Benedict] ecce subita pestilentiae procella Brittaniam corripiens lata nece vastavit, in qua plurimi de utroque ejus monasterio, et ipse venerabilis ac Deo dilectus abbas Eosterwini raptus est ad Dominum, quarto ex quo abbas esse coeperat anno.

§ 14. Porro in monasterio cui Ceolfridus praeerat omnes qui legere, vel praedicare, vel antiphonas ac responsoria dicere possent ablati sunt excepto ipso abbate et uno puerulo, qui ab ipso nutritus et eruditus.

In the Article “Baeda,” Dict. Nat. Biog., the Rev. W. Hunt points out that the boy referred to in the above passage would have been Beda himself.

[15] The history of the name pestis flava ictericia is given by O’Donovan in a note to the passage in the Annals of the Four Masters, I. 275: “Icteritia vel aurigo, id est abundantia flavae bilis, per corpus effusae, hominemque pallidum reddentis,” is the explanation of P. O’S. Beare. The earliest mention of “yellow plague” appears to have been in an ancient life of St Gerald of Mayo, in Colgan’s Acta Sanctorum, at the calendar date of 13th March.

[16] Polychronicon, Rolls edition, V. 250.

[17] The Story of England, Rolls series, ed. Furnivall, II. 569.

[18] Rolls series, ed. Thorpe, I. 136, 137 (Transl. II. 60). Also in Gervase of Canterbury, Rolls series, ed. Stubbs, II. 348.

[19] Chronicon Abbatiae Ramesiensis, Rolls ed. 1886, p. 397.

[20] According to an inquisition of 2 Edward III., the abbey of Croyland contained in 1328, forty-one monks, besides fifteen “corrodiarii” and thirty-six servitors. Chronicle of Croyland in Gale, I. 482.

[21] Epistolae Cantuarienses, Rolls series, No. 38, ed. Stubbs, Epist. CCLXXII. p. 254, and Introduction, p. lxvii.

[22] William of Newburgh, Rolls ed. p. 481.

[23] Ralph of Coggeshall, Rolls series, No. 66, p. 112.

[24] Roger of Wendover, III. 72.

[25] In the Life of St Hugh of Lincoln, who died in 1200, or eight years before the Papal Interdict, there is a clear reference to difficulties thrown by the priests in the way of burial, especially for the poor, and perhaps in a time of epidemic sickness such as the years 1194-6. See Vita S. Hugonis Lincolnensis, Rolls series, No. 37, pp. 228-233.

[26] Eadmer, l. c.

[27] Polychronicon, Rolls ed. VII. 90.

[28] Gesta Pontificum, Rolls ed. p. 171. Another narrator of the story of St Elphege and the Danes is Henry of Huntingdon (Rolls ed. p. 179); he says nothing of the pestilence, but describes the sack of Canterbury. Eadmer also (Historia Novorum in Anglia, Rolls ser. 81, p. 4) omits the pestilence.

[29] Quoted by Higden, Polychronicon, Rolls ed. II. 18. This may have been one of Henry of Huntingdon’s poems which were extant in Leland’s time, but are now lost.

[30] Polychronicon, II. 166.

[31] Marchand, Étude sur quelques épidémies et endémies du moyen âge (Thèse), Paris, 1873, p. 49, with a reference to Fuchs, “Das heilige Feuer im Mittelalter” in Hecker’s Annalen, vol. 28, p. 1, which journal I have been unable to consult.

[32] Giraldus Cambrensis, Topographia Hiberniae, in Rolls edition of his works, No. 21, vol. V.

[33] “Itinerarium Walliae” and “Descriptio Kambriae,” Opera, vol. VI.

[34] Polychronicon, I. 410.

[35] William of Newburgh, sub anno 1157, I. 107.

[36] Europe during the Middle Ages, chap. IX.

[37] I have used for this purpose Merewether and Stephens’ History of Boroughs, 3 vols. 1835.

[38] Leechdoms, Wort-cunning and Starcraft of Early England. Edited by Cockayne for the Rolls Series, 3 vols. 1864-66.

[39] It is illustrative of the confusion which arises from careless copying by later compilers of history that Roger of Wendover, in his Flores Historiarum (Eng. Hist. Society’s edition I. 159), takes Beda’s Sussex reference to famine and makes it do duty, under the year 665, for the great general plague of 664, having apparently overlooked Beda’s entirely distinct account of the latter.

[40] Hist. Eccles. § 290:--“Siquidem tribus annis ante adventum ejus in provinciam, nulla illis in locis pluvia ceciderat, unde et fames acerbissima plebem invadens inopia nece prostravit. Denique ferunt quia saepe quadraginta simul aut quinquaginta homines inedia macerati procederent ad praecipitium aliquod sive ripam maris, et junctis misere manibus pariter omnes aut ruina perituri, aut fluctibus absorbendi deciderent. Verum ipso die, quo baptisma fidei gens suscepit illa, descendit pluvia serena sed copiosa, refloruit terra, rediit viridantibus arvis annus laetus et frugifer.”

[41] Green Short History of the English People, p. 39: “The very fields lay waste, and the land was scourged by famine and plague.” I have missed this reference to plague in the original authorities. A passage in Higden’s Polychronicon (V. 258) may relate to that period, although it is referred to the mythical time of Vortigern.

[42] Stow, in enumerating the instances of public charity in his Survey of London, ascribes the melting of the church plate to Ethelwald, bishop of Winchester in the reign of King Edgar, about the year 963.

[43] The murrain was a flux, anglicé “scitha” (Roger of Howden) or “schitta” (Bromton).

[44] Simeon of Durham, in Rolls series, II. 188. As to fugitives, see Chr. Evesham, p. 91.

[45] Gesta Pontif. Angl. p. 208.

[46] Simeon of Durham, “On the Miracles of St Cuthbert,” Works, II. 338-40.

[47] Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Malmesbury adds “a mortality of men.”

[48] William of Malmesbury, Gest. Reg. Eng. Hist. Soc. II. 452.

[49] Malmesbury’s construction is repeated by Henry of Huntingdon, Rolls ed. p. 209. Florence of Worcester merely says: “primo febribus, deinde fame.”

[50] Henry of Huntingdon, p. 232.

[51] Annals of Winchester, sub anno 1096.

[52] “Septimo anno propter tributa quae rex in Normannia positus edixerat, agricultura defecit; qua fatiscente fames e vestigio; ea quoque invalescente mortalitas hominum subsecuta, adeo crebra ut deesset morituris cura, mortuis sepultura.” Gest. Reg. II. 506. Copied in the Annals of Margan, Rolls ed. II. 506.

[53] Râs Mâlâ, by A. Kinloch Forbes, 2nd ed. p. 543.

[54] Ibid.

[55] Thomas Whyte, “Report on the disease which prevailed in Kattywar in 1819-20.” Trans. Med. Phys. Soc. Bombay, I. (1838), p. 169. See also Gilder, ibid. p. 192; Frederick Forbes ibid. II. 1, and Thesis on Plague, Edin. 1840.

[56] In 1110 the tax was for the dower of the king’s daughter on her marriage. That also was parallel with a feudal right in Gujerat: “When a chief has to portion a daughter, or to incur other similar necessary expense, he has the right of imposing a levy upon the cultivators to meet it.” A. Kinloch Forbes, Râs Mâlâ, 2nd ed. p. 546. Refusal to plough, temp. Henry I. is stated by Pearson, I. 442.

[57] Malmesbury, Gest. Pont. p. 442; H. of Huntingdon; Annals of Margan; Roger of Howden.

[58] Also in the Annals of Osney: “Mortalitas maxima hominum in Anglia.”

[59] “Attenuata est Anglia, ut ex regno florentissimo infelicissimum videretur.” William of Newburgh, Rolls ed. p. 39.

[60] Henry of Huntingdon, sub anno 1138.

[61] Gesta Stephani, Rolls series, No. 82, vol. III. p. 99. The author is conjectured to have been a foreigner in the service of the bishop of Winchester, brother of the king.

[62]

“Affluit ergo fames; consumpta carne gementes Exhalant animas ossa cutisque vagas. Quis tantos sepelire queat coetus morientium? Ecce Stigis facies, consimilisque lues.”

[63] William of Newburgh, sub anno 1149.

[64] Stow’s Survey of London, Popular ed. (1890) p. 116.

[65] “Recentium esus carnium et haustus aquae, tam insolitus quam incognitus, plures de regis exercitu panis inedia laborantes, fluxu ventris afflixit in Hybernia.” Radulphus de Diceto, Imagines Historiar. I. 350.

[66] Benedict of Peterborough, I. 104, and, in identical terms, in Roger of Howden.

[67] The speaker is represented as a Jew in France. It is significant that the massacre of the Jews at Lynn in 1190 is stated by William of Newburgh to have been instigated by the foreign traders.

[68] Ricardus Divisiensis. Eng. Hist. Society’s ed. p. 60.

[69] Description of London, prefixed to Fitzstephen’s Life of Becket. Reproduced in Stow’s Survey of London.

[70] Petri Blesensis omnia opera, ed. Giles, Epist. CLI. The number of churches may seem large for the population; but it should be kept in mind that these city parish churches were mere chapels or oratories, like the side-chapels of a great church. Indeed, at Yarmouth, they were actually built along the sides of the single great parish church; whereas, at Norwich, there were sixty of them standing each in its own small parish area, the Cathedral, as well as the other conventual churches, being the greater places of worship. Lincoln is said to have had 49 of these small churches, and York 40. An example of them remains in St Peter’s at Cambridge.

[71] William of Newburgh, p. 431.

[72] Ibid.

[73] “His quoque nostris diebus, ingruente famis inedia, et maxima pauperum turba quotidie ad januam jacente, de communi patrum consilio, ad caritatis explendae sufficientiam, propter bladum in Angliam navis Bristollum missa est.” Itiner. Walliae, Rolls ed. VI. 68. The itinerary of Bishop Baldwin, which the author follows, was in 1188; but the “his quoque nostris diebus” clearly refers to a later date, which may have been the year after, or may have been the more severe famine of 1195-7 or of 1203.

[74] Histor. Rer. Angl., Rolls series, No. 82, vol. I. pp. 460, 484.

[75] Ralph of Coggeshall, sub anno.

[76] “Variis infirmitatibus homines per Angliam vexantur et quamplures moriuntur,” Annals of Margan, Rolls series, No. 36.

[77] Roger of Wendover, Fl. Hist. Rolls ed.

[78] Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, Rolls series, No. 57, ed. Luard, vol. V.

[79] Rishanger in Chron. Monast. S. Albani, Rolls series, No. 28.

[80] John Trokelowe, ibid.

[81] Wendover, II. 162, 171, 190, 205.

[82] Wendover, III. 95, 98.

[83] “Qui ex avaritia inopiam semper habent suspectam.”

[84] Alboldslea, or Abbotsley, was the parish of which the famous Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, was rector (perhaps non-resident) down to 1231, or to within three years of the date of the above anecdote. The existing church is of great age, and may well have been the actual edifice in which the scene was enacted.

[85] Wendover, III. 96.

[86] Ibid. III. 19, 27.

[87] Wendover, III. 381.

[88] William of Newburgh, sub anno 1196.

[89] On the other hand John Stow seems to have acquired, from some unstated source, an extraordinary prejudice against him.

[90] Matthew Paris, Chron. Maj. ed. Luard, V. 663, 675.

[91] Annals of Tewkesbury in Annales Monastici, Rolls series, No. 36.

[92] Chronica Majora, IV. 647; Stow, Survey of London.

[93] Chron. Maj. IV. 654.

[94] Chr. Maj. V. 660. Other details occur here and there to the end of the chronicle.

[95] This is the number given by Matthew Paris. It suggests a larger population in the capital than we might have been disposed to credit. The same writer says that London was so full of people when the parliament was sitting the year before (1257) that the city could hardly hold them all in her ample bosom. The Annals of Tewkesbury put the whole mortality from famine and fever in London in 1258 at 20,000. But the whole population did not probably exceed 40,000.

[96] The year 1274 was the beginning of so exceptional a murrain of sheep that it deserves mention here, although murrains do not come within the scope of the work. It is recorded by more than one contemporary. Rishanger (p. 84) says: “In that year a disastrous plague of sheep seized upon England, so that the sheep-folds were everywhere emptied through the spreading of it. It lasted for twenty-eight years following, so that no farm of the whole kingdom was without the infliction of that misery. Many attributed the cause of this disease, which the inhabitants had not been acquainted with before, to a certain rich man of the Frankish nation, who settled in Northumberland, having brought with him a certain sheep of Spanish breed, the size of a small two year old ox, which was ailing and contaminated all the flocks of England by handing on its disease to them.” Under the year following, 1275, he enters it again, using the term “scabies.” Thorold Rogers (Hist. of Agric. and Prices, I. 31) has found “scab” of sheep often mentioned in the bailiffs’ accounts from about 1288; it is assumed to have become permanent from the item of tar occurring regularly in the accounts; but tar was used ordinarily for marking. It may have been sheep-pox, which Fitzherbert, in his Book of Husbandry (edition of 1598), describes under the name of “the Poxe,” giving a clear account of the way to deal with it by isolation. For murrains in general, the reader may consult Fleming’s Animal Plagues, 2 vols. 1871--1884, a work which is mostly compiled (with meagre acknowledgment for “bibliography” only) from the truly learned work of Heusinger, Recherches de Pathologie Comparée, Cassel, 1844. Fleming has used only the “pièces justificatives,” and has not carried the history beyond the point where Heusinger left it.

[97] Continuation of Wm. of Newburgh, Rolls series No. 82, vol. II. p. 560: “Facta est magna fames per universam Angliam et maxime partibus occidentalibus. In Hibernia vero tres pestes invaluerunt, sc. mortalitas, fames, et gladius: per guerram mortalem praevalentibus Hybernicis et Anglicis succumbentibus. Qui vero gladium et famem evadere potuerunt, peste mortalitatis praeventi sunt, ita ut vivi mortuis sepeliendis vix sufficere valerent.”

[98] See also the continuation of the chronicle of Florence of Worcester, Bohn’s series, p. 405.

[99] Rishanger’s annals, 1259-1305, and Trokelowe’s, 1307-1323, are printed in the volumes of Chronica Monast. S. Albani, No. 28 of the Rolls series.

[100] Furnivall’s ed. Rolls series, No. 87, vol. II. 569, 573.

[101] Chronicle of William Gregory, Camden Society, ed. Gairdner, 1876.

[102] Annales Londonienses, Rolls series, No. 76, ed. Stubbs. Introduction, p. lxxvi.

[103] Ibid. (Annales Paulini), p. 238.

[104] Ibid. p. 304.

[105] Epistolae Cantuarienses, Rolls series, No. 38, II. Introduction by Stubbs, p. xxxii.

[106] Epistolae Cantuarienses, Rolls series, No. 38, II. Introduction by Stubbs, p. cxix.

[107] Ralph of Coggeshall, Rolls series, No. 66, p. 156.

[108] He might have been, and probably was, the prototype of the physician Nathan Ben Israel, in the 35th Chapter of Ivanhoe.

[109] Adam de Marisco to Grosseteste, Mon. Francisc. ed. Brewer, I. 113.

[110] I have not succeeded in finding this in the author’s writings, and quote it at second hand.

[111] Quoted, without date, by Marchand, Étude historique et nosographique sur quelques épidémies et endémies du moyen âge. Paris, 1873.

[112] I give this account of the obvious characters of spurred rye from a recent observation of a growing crop of it.

[113] One of the greatest epidemics was in Westphalia and the Cologne district in 1596 and 1597. It fell to be described by two learned writers, Sennert and Horst, of whose accounts a summary is given by Short, Air, weather, seasons, etc. I. 275-285.

[114] Translated into the Philosophical Transactions, No. 130, vol. XII. p. 758 (14 Dec. 1676) from the Journal des Sçavans.

[115] Studien über den Ergotismus, Marburg, 1856.

[116] Simeon of Durham and Roger of Howden have the following, under the year 1048: “Mortalitas hominum et animalium multas occupavit Angliae provincias, et ignis aereus, vulgo dictus sylvaticus, in Deorbensi provincia et quibusdam aliis provinciis, villas et segetes multas ustulavit.”

[117] “Je crois qu’ils ont voulu indiquer l’ignis sacer ou de St Antoine, qui dans ces années et surtout 1044 sévit en France.” Recherches de Pathologie Comparée, vol. II. p. cxlviii.

[118] On the other hand, Short, in his General Chronological History of the Air, Weather, Seasons, Meteors etc. (2 vols. London, 1749) says that the epidemic of 1110 consisted of “especially an epidemic erysipelas, whereof many died, the parts being black and shrivelled up;” and that in 1128, “St Anthony’s fire was fatal to many in England.” He gives no authority in either case. But the one error is run to earth in a French entry of 1109, “membris instar carbonum nigrescentibus” (Sig. Gembl. auctar. p. 274, Migne); the other, most likely, in the ignis around Chartres, 1128 (Stephen of Caen, Bouquet, xii. 780).

Perhaps this is the best place to express a general opinion on the work by Short, which is the only book of the kind in English previous to my own. It is everywhere uncritical and credulous, and often grossly inaccurate in dates, sometimes repeating the same epidemic under different years. It appears to have been compiled, for the earlier part, at least, from foreign sources, such as a Chronicle of Magdeburg, and to a large extent from a work by Colle de Belluno (fl. 1631). Many of the facts about English epidemics are given almost as in the original chronicles, but without reference to them. English experience of sickness is lost in the general chronology of epidemics for all Europe, and is dealt with in a purely verbalist manner. So far as this volume extends (1667) I have found Short’s book of no use, except now and then in calling my attention to something that I had overlooked. His other work, New Observations on City, Town and County Bills of Mortality (London, 1750) shows the author to much greater advantage, and I have used his statistical tables for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

[119] The facts were communicated to the Royal Society by Charlton Wollaston, M.D., F.R.S., then resident in Suffolk, and by the Rev. James Bones. They were referred by Dr G. Baker to Tissot of Lausanne, who replied that they corresponded to typical gangrenous ergotism. See Phil. Trans. vol. LII. pt. 2 (1762) p. 523, p. 526, p. 529; and vol. LX. (1768) p. 106.

[120] An erroneous statement as to an epidemic of gangrenous ergotism, or of Kriebelkrankheit, in England in 1676, has somehow come to be current in German books. It has a place in the latest chronological table of ergotism epidemics, that of Hirsch in his Handbuch der historisch-geographischen Pathologie, vol. II. 1883 (Engl. Transl. II. p. 206), the reference being to Birch, Philos. Transact. This reference to ergotism in England in 1676 is given also in Th. O. Heusinger’s table (1856), where it appears in the form of “Schnurrer, nach Birch.” On turning to Schnurrer’s Chronik der Seuchen (II. 210), the reference is found to be, “Birch, Phil. Trans. vols. XI. and XII.”; and coming at length to the Philosophical Transactions, it appears that vols. X., XI. and XII. are bound up together, that vol. XII. (1676) p. 758, contains an extract from the Journal des Sçavans about ergot of rye in certain parts of France, and that there is nothing about ergotism in England in either vol. XI. or vol. XII. So far as concerns Dr Birch, he was secretary to the Royal Society in the next century.

[121] Knighton, De Eventibus Angliae in Twysden, col. 2580: “In aestate scilicet anno Gratiae 1340 accidit quaedam execrabilis et enormis infirmitas in Anglia quasi communis, et praecipue in comitatu Leicestriae adeo quod durante passione homines emiserunt vocem latrabilem ac si esset latratus canum; et fuit quasi intolerabilis poena durante passione: ex inde fuit magna pestilentia hominum.”

[122] Phil. Trans. XXIII. p. 1174 (June 26, 1702).

[123] Op. cit. I. pt. 2, p. 366.

[124] Phil. Trans. XXII. (1700-1701), p. 799, a Letter in Latin from Joh. Freind dated Christ Church, Oxford, 31 March.

[125] The earliest religious hysterias of Sweden fall in the years 1668 to 1673, which do not correspond to years of ergotism in that country, although there was ergotism in France in 1670 and in Westphalia in 1672. The later Swedish psychopathies have been in 1841-2, 1854, 1858, and 1866-68, some of which years do correspond closely to periods of ergotism in Sweden.

[126] “Moriebantur etiam plures morbo litargiae, multis infortunia prophetantes; mulieres insuper decessere multae per fluxum, et erat communis pestis bestiarum.” Walsingham, Hist. Angl., sub anno; and in identical terms in the Chronicon Angliae a Monacho Sancti Albani.

[127] “Magna et formidabilis pestilentia extemplo subsecuta est Cantabrigiae, qua homines subito, prout dicebatur, sospites, invasi mentis phrenesi moriebantur, sine viatico sive sensu.” Walsingham, Hist. Angl. II. 186. Under the same year, 1389, the continuator of Higden’s Polychronicon (IX. 216) says that the king being in the south and “seeing some of his prostrated by sudden death, hastened to Windsor.”

[128] For example in the Sloane MS. 2420 (the treatise by Constantinus Africanus of Salerno), there are chapters “De Litargia,” “De Stupore Mentis,” and “De Phrenesi.”

[129] Th. O. Heusinger, Studien über den Ergotismus, Marburg, 1856, p. 35: “Es werden freilich in den Beschreibungen einiger früheren Epidemieen öfter typhöse Erscheinungen erwähnt; die Beschreiber behaupten aber auch dann meist die Contagiosität der Krankheit, und es liegt die Vermuthung nahe, dass die Krankheit dann eigentlich ein Typhus war, bei dem die Erscheinungen des Ergotismus ebenso constant vorkommen, wie sie sonst in vereinzelteren Fällen dem Typhus sich beigesellen” (cf. ‘Dorf Gossfelden,’ in Appendix).

[130] History of Agriculture and Prices, I. 27.

[131] “Sed in fructibus arborum suspicio multa fuit, eo quod per nebulas foetentes, exhalationes, aerisque varias corruptiones, ipsi fructus, puta poma, pyra, et hujusmodi sunt infecta; quorum esu multi mortales hoc anno [1383] vel pestem letalem vel graves morbos et infirmitates incurrerunt.” Walsingham, Hist. Angl. II. 109. The continuator of Higden records under the same year, in one place a “great pestilence in Kent which destroyed many, and spared no age or sex” (IX. 27), and on another page (IX. 21) a great epidemic in Norfolk, which attacked only the youth of either sex between the ages of seven and twenty-two!

[132] Walsingham, II. 203; Stow’s Survey of London, p. 133.

[133] The spelling, and a few whole words, have been altered from Skeat’s text, so as to make the meaning clear.

[134] Simpson, Edin. Med. and Surg. Journ. 1842, vol. LVII. p. 136.

[135] Ralph of Coggeshall (Rolls ed. p. 156) describes the death of Hubert on 13 July, 1205, but does not mention the name of his physician.

[136] Gilberti Anglici Compendium Medicinae, ed. Michael de Capella. Lugduni, 1512, Lib. VII. cap. “De Lepra,” pp. 337-345.

[137] Bernardi Gordonii Lilium Medicinae. Lugd. 1551, p. 88.

[138] Compend. Med. Ed. cit. p. 344.

[139] Lilium Medicinae. Lugd. 1551, p. 89.

[140] Ibid. p. 89.

[141] For fuller reference, see p. 103.

[142] Philos. Trans. of Royal Society, XXXI. 58: “Now in a true leprosy we never meet with the mention of any disorder in those parts, which, if there be not, must absolutely secure the person from having that disease communicated to him by coition with leprous women; but it proves there was a disease among them which was not the leprosy, although it went by that name; and that this could be no other than venereal because it was infectious.”

He then quotes from Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomew Glanvile, De proprietatibus rerum, passages which he thinks relate to syphilis, although they are obviously the distinctive signs of lepra taken almost verbatim from Gilbertus Anglicus. He implies that the later so-called leper-houses of London were really founded for syphilis when it became epidemic. In the will of Ralph Holland, merchant taylor, mention is made of three leper-houses, the Loke, Hackenay and St Giles beyond Holborn Bars, as if these were all that existed in the year 1452. But in the reign of Henry VIII. there were six of them besides St Giles’s,--Knightsbridge, Hammersmith, Highgate, Kingsland, the Lock, and Mile End; and these, says Beckett, were used for the treatment of the French pox, which became exceedingly common after 1494-6.

[143] Martin, Histoire de France, VII. 283.

[144] One of Gascoigne’s references was copied by Beckett (Phil. Trans. XXXI. 47), beginning: “Novi enim ego, Magister Thomas Gascoigne, licet indignus, sacrae theologiae doctor, qui haec scripsi et collegi, diversos viros, qui mortui fuerunt ex putrefactione membrorum suorum et corporis sui, quae corruptio et putrefactio causata fuit, ut ipsi dixerunt, per exercitium copulae carnalis cum mulieribus. Magnus enim dux in Anglia, scil. J. de Gaunt, mortuus est ex tali putrefactione membrorum genitalium et corporis sui, causata per frequentationem mulierum. Magnus enim fornicator fuit, ut in toto regno Angliae divulgabatur,” etc. In the Loci e Libro Veritatum, printed by Thorold Rogers (Oxford, 1881), the following consequences are mentioned: “Plures viri per actum libidinosum luxuriae habuerunt membra sua corrupta et penitus destructa, non solum virgam sed genitalia: et alii habuerunt membra sua per luxuriam corrupta ita quod cogebantur, propter poenam, caput virgae abscindere. Item homo Oxoniae scholaris, Morland nomine, mortuus fuit Oxoniae ex corruptione causata per actum luxuriae.” p. 136.

[145] A most excellent and compendious method of curing woundes in the head and in other partes of the body; translated into English by John Read, Chirurgeon; with the exact cure of the Caruncle, treatise of the Fistulae in the fundament, out of Joh. Ardern, etc. London, 1588.

[146] MS. Harl. 2378:--No. 86 is: “Take lynsed or lynyn clothe and brēne it & do ye pouder in a clout, and bynd it to ye sore pintel.” Also, “Take linsed and stamp it and a lytel oyle of olyf and a lytl milk of a cow of a color, and fry them togeder in a panne, and ley it about ye pyntel in a clout.” No. 87 is “for bolnyng of pyntel.” No. 88 is “For ye kank’ on a mānys pyntel.” On p. 103 is another “For ye bolnyng of a mānys yerde.... Bind it alle abouten ye yerde, and it salle suage.” On folio 19: “For ye nebbe yt semeth leprous ... iii dayes it shall be hole.” “For ye kanker” might have meant cancer or chancre. The prescriptions in Moulton’s This is the Myrour or Glasse of Helth (? 1540) correspond closely with these in the above Harleian MS. The printed book gives one (cap. 63), “For a man that is Lepre, and it lake in his legges and go upwarde.” There is also a prescription for “morphewe.”

[147] Nicolas Massa, in Luisini.

[148] Freeman, The Reign of William Rufus. App. vol. II. p. 499.

[149] L. c. V. 679, “Episcopus Herefordensis polipo percutitur.--Episcopus Herefordensis turpissimo morbo videlicet morphea, Deo percutiente, merito deformatur, qui totum regnum Angliae proditiose dampnificavit;” and again V. 622.

[150] Compend. Med. Ed. cit. p. 170.

[151] Lilium Med. Ed. cit. p. 108.

[152] Brassac, Art. “Elephantiasis” (p. 465) in Dict. Encycl. des Sciences Médicales.

[153] Rosa Anglica. Papiae, 1492.

[154] That Baldwin IV.’s disease excited interest in him is clear from the reference of William of Newburgh, who calls him (p. 242) “princeps Christianus lepram corporis animi virtute exornans.”

[155] Chronicon de Lanercost (Bannatyne Club, p. 259): “Dominus autem Robertus de Brus, quia factus fuerat leprosus, illa vice [anno 1327] cum eis Angliam non intravit.” The rubric on folio 228 of the MS. has “leprosus moritur.”

[156] The original account is by Gascoigne, Loci etc. ed. Rogers, Oxon. p. 228.

[157] “Item matrimonium inter dominum regem et quandam nobilem mulierem nequiter impedivit, dum clanculo significavit eidem mulieri et suo generi, quod rex strabo et fatuus nequamque fuerat, et speciem leprae habere, fallaxque fuerat et perjurus, imbellis plusquam mulier, in suos tantum sacvientem, et prorsus inutilem complexibus alicujus ingenuae mulieris asserendo.” Matthew Paris, Chron. Maj., Rolls ed., III. 618-19.

[158] Chronicon Angliae in Twysden, col. 2600.

[159] Chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker, edited by E. Maunde Thompson. Oxford, 1889, p. 100.

[160] Professor Robertson Smith has kindly written for me the following note: “The later Jews were given to shorten proper names; and in the Talmud we find the shortening La‘zar (with a guttural, which the Greeks could not pronounce, between the a and the z), for Eliezer or Eleazar. Λάζαρος is simply La‘zar with a Greek ending, and occurs, as a man’s name, not only in the New Testament but in Josephus (B. Jud. V. 13, 7). This was quite understood by early readers of the Gospels; the Syriac New Testament, translated from the Greek, restores the lost guttural, and uses the Syriac form, as employed in 1 Macc. viii. 17 to render the Greek ’Ελάζαρος. Moreover the Latin and Greek onomastica explain Lazarus as meaning ‘adjutus,’ which shows that they took it from (Hebrew) ‘to help’--the second element in the compound Eliezer. The etymology ‘adjutus’ (or the like) ‘helped by God,’ would no doubt powerfully assist in the choice of the designation lazars (for lepers). Suicer, in his Thesaurus, quotes a sermon of Theophanes, where it is suggested that every poor man who needs help from those who have means might be called a Lazarus.”

Hirsch (Geog. and Hist. Path. II. 3) says that the Arabic word for the falling sickness comes from the same root (meaning “thrown to the ground”) as the Hebrew word “sâraat,” which is the term translated “leprosy” in Leviticus xiii. and xiv. In Isaiah liii. 4, the Vulgate has “et nos putavimus eum quasi leprosum,” where the English Bible has “yet we did esteem him stricken.”

[161] Roger of Howden. Edited by Stubbs. Rolls series, No. 51, vol. I. p. 110. Aelred, the chief collector of the miraculous cures by Edward the Confessor, appears to have omitted this one.

[162] Ailredi Abbatis Rievallensis Genealogia Regum Anglorum. In Twysden’s Decem Scriptores, col. 368. “Cum, inquit [David], adolescens in curia regia [Anglica] servirem, nocte quadam in hospicio meo cum sociis meis nescio quid agens, ad thalamum reginae ab ipsa vocatus accessi. Et ecce domus plena leprosis, et regina in medio stans, deposito pallio, lintheo se precinxit, et posita in pelvi aqua, coepit lavare pedes eorum, et extergere, extersosque utrisque constringere manibus et devotissime osculari. Cui ego: ‘Quid agis,’ inquam, ‘O domina mea? Certe si rex sciret ista, nunquam dignaretur os tuum, leprosorum pedum tabe pollutum, suis labiis osculari.’ Et illa surridens ait: ‘Pedes,’ inquit, ‘Regis aeterni quis nescit labiis regis morituri esse praeferendos? Ecce, ego idcirco vocavi te, frater carissime, ut exemplo mei talia discas operari. Sumpta proinde pelvi, fac quod me facere intueris.’ Ad hanc vocem vehementer expavi, et nullo modo id me pati posse respondi. Necdum enim sciebam Dominum, nec revelatus fuerat mihi Spiritus ejus. Illa igitur coeptis insistente, ego--mea culpa--ridens ad socios remeavi.”

[163] Vita S. Hugonis Lincolnensis. Rolls series, 39, p. 163-4.

[164] The bishop left by his will 100 marks to be distributed “per domos leprosorum” in his diocese and a like sum “per domos hospitales,” and three marks each to the leper-houses at Selwood and outside Bath and Ilchester. Hist. MSS. Commiss. X. pt. 3, p. 186.

[165] Monumenta Franciscana. Rolls series, No. 4. Introd. by Brewer, p. xxiv.

[166] William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum, Rolls ed., p. 72.

[167] In 1574 it was found providing indoor relief for fifteen brethren and fifteen sisters, and outdoor relief for as many more.

[168] Roger of Wendover. Rolls ed. II. 265.

[169] In the MS. of Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, No. 26 in the Parker Collection, p. 220. The late Rev. S. S. Lewis, fellow and librarian of the College, who most liberally had a fac-simile of the drawing made for me, would date it a little before 1250. (Rolls edition, by Luard, II. 144.)

[170] Rotuli Chartarum, 1199-1216. Charter of confirmation, 1204 (5 Joh.) p. 117 b.

[171] In the Valor Ecclesiasticus of Henry VIII. its revenue is put at £100.

[172] The commanderies of the Knights of St Lazarus were numerous in every province of France. For an enumeration of them see Les Lepreux et les Chevaliers de Saint Lazare de Jerusalem et de Notre Dame et de Mont Carmel. Par Eugene Vignat, Orleans, 1884, pp. 315-364.

[173] Joannis Sarisburiensis Opera omnia, ed. Giles 1, 141 (letter to Josselin, bishop of Salisbury).

[174] “Vix seu raro inveniuntur tot leprosi volentes vitam ducere observantiis obligatam ad dictum hospitale concurrentes.” Walsingham, Gesta Abbatum, Rolls ed. II. 484.

[175] Matthew Paris, Chron. Maj. V. 452.

[176] Walsingham, Gesta Abbatum, II. 401.

[177] “The sisters of St James’s were bound by no vows, and at this period [1344] were not all, or even any of them, lepers; and in consequence a place in the hospital was much sought after by needy dependents of the Court.” Report on MSS. of the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury, in Hist. MSS. Commission Reports, IX. p. 87.

[178] Dugdale’s History of Warwickshire, p. 197.

[179] On Nov. 24, 1200, king John signed at Lincoln letters of simple protection to the leprosi of St Bartholomew’s, Oxford (Rot. Chart. 1199-1216, p. 99).

[180] Rotuli Hundredorum, II. 359-60. The famous Stourbridge Fair originally grew out of a right of market-toll granted in aid of the leper-hospital.

[181] The decrees of the Third Lateran Council are given by several historians of the time, among others by William of Newburgh, pp. 206-223.

[182] Roger of Howden, Rolls edition, II. 265.

[183] William of Newburgh, Rolls edition, p. 437.

[184] See the various charters and memorials in Surtees’ History of Durham.

[185] Two of the larger houses for lepers not mentioned in the text were St Nicholas’s at Carlisle and the hospital at Bolton in Northumberland, each with thirteen beds.

[186] By collecting every reference to lepers or lazar-houses in Tanner’s Notitia Monastica or in Dugdale’s Monasticon Sir J. Y. Simpson has made out a table of some hundred leper-houses in Britain (Edin. Med. and Surg. Journ. 1841 and 1842). Simpson’s table has been added to by Miss Lambert in the Nineteenth Century, Aug.-Sept. 1884, by the Rev. H. P. Wright (Leprosy etc. 1885), who says at the end of his long list: “There were hundreds more,” and by Mr R. C. Hope (The Leper in England, Scarborough, 1891), whose list runs to 172.

Perhaps the most remarkable development of that verbalist handling of the matter has been reserved for a recent medical writer, who has constructed, from the conventional list of leper-hospitals, a map of the geographical distribution of leprosy in medieval Britain. (British Medical Journal, March 1, 1890, p. 466.)

[187] The Lock was doubtless the house of the “Leprosi apud Bermondsey” who are designated in the Royal Charter of 1 Hen. IV. (1399) as recipients, along with the leprosi of Westminster (St James’s), of “five or six thousand pounds.” (Rotuli Chartarum, 1 Hen. IV.)

[188] Beckett, Phil. Trans., vol. 31, p. 60.

[189] Stow, Survey of London, ed. of 1890, p. 437.

[190] Beckett, l. c. The Knightsbridge house was earlier. See next note.

[191] Survey of London, pop. ed. p. 436. Bequests to lepers occur in various wills of London citizens, in Dr Sharpe’s Calendar of Wills, vol. II. Lond. 1890. In a will dated 21 April, 1349, the bequest is to “the poor lazars without Southwerkebarre and at Hakeney” (p. 3). On 1 July, 1371, another bequeaths money to “the three colleges of lepers near London, viz. at le loke, at St Giles de Holbourne, and at Hakeney” (p. 147). On 7 April, 1396, bequests are made to “the lepers at le loke near Seynt Georges barre, of St Giles without Holbournebarre, and le meselcotes de Haconey” (p. 341). The “lazar house at Knyghtbrigge” appears, for the first time, in a will dated 21 Feb. 1485, along with “the sick people in the lazercotes next about London” (p. 589).

[192] Accounts of the Lord High-Treasurer of Scotland. Rolls series I. 1473-1498, pp. 337, 356, 361, 378, 386.

[193] These are all the so-called “medieval leper-hospitals” collected by Belcher (Dubl. Quart. Journ. of Med. Sc. 1868, August, p. 36) chiefly from Archdall’s Monasticon Hibernicum. He points out that the very early references to leprosy in the Annals of the Four Masters included various kinds of cutaneous maladies.

[194] Chronicon Abbatiae Rameseiensis. Rolls series, 1886, p. 157. The chronicler has nothing farther to say as to the cause of the leprosy, than the opinion of “a certain philosopher,” that whatever turns us from health to the vices of disease acts by the weight of too much blood, by superfluous heat, by humours exuding in excess, or by the spirits flowing with unwonted laxity through silent passages.

[195] Eadmer, Vita S. Anselmi, Rolls edit., p. 355.

[196] Walsingham, Gesta Abbatum, Rolls edit. II. Appendix C. p. 503.

[197] Brassac, Art. “Éléphantiasis,” in Dict. Encycl. des Sc. Méd. p. 475, says: “Il y avait aussi des vagabonds et des paresseux qui, sans nulle crainte de la contagion, et désireux de vivre sans rien faire, simulaient la lèpre pour être admis aux léproseries. On y trouvait encore des personnes qui s’imposaient une réclusion perpétuelle pour vivre avec les lépreux et faire leur salut par une vie de soumission aux règles de l’Église.”

[198] The ordinance is translated in full from the City archives by H. T. Riley, London in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, pp. 230-231. The following is the preamble of it:--

“Edward, by the grace of God, etc. Forasmuch as we have been given to understand that many persons, as well of the city aforesaid as others coming to the said city, being smitten with the blemish of leprosy, do publicly dwell among the other citizens and sound persons, and there continually abide and do not hesitate to communicate with them, as well in public places as in private; and that some of them, endeavouring to contaminate others with that abominable blemish (that so, to their own wretched solace, they may have the more fellows in suffering,) as well in the way of mutual communications, and by the contagion of their polluted breath, as by carnal intercourse with women in stews and other secret places, detestably frequenting the same, do so taint persons who are sound, both male and female, to the great injury of the people dwelling in the city aforesaid, and the manifest peril of other persons to the same city resorting:--We” etc.

[199] Riley, p. 384.

[200] Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence. Early Eng. Text Soc.

[201] Riley, p. 365.

[202] Rymer’s Foedera, v. pt. 2, p. 166.

[203] Wharton’s Anglia Sacra, 11. Praef. p. 32.

[204] The expression “leprosa Sodomorum” occurs in a Latin poem from a medieval MS. found in Switzerland. The verses are printed in full by Hensler, Geschichte der Lustseuche, p. 307.

[205] These and other particulars relating to lepers in Scotland are given in Simpson’s Antiquarian Notices of Leprosy in Scotland and England (Edin. Med. and Surg. Journ. Oct. 1841, Jan. and April 1842), a series of excellent papers which have been for many years the source of most that has been written of medieval leprosy in this country.

[206] Letter to Barrington, 8 January, 1778.

[207] These numbers seem to stand for the contents of the larders in all the various manors of De Spenser.

[208] Mr Jonathan Hutchinson has been adding, year after year, to the evidence that semi-putrid fish, eaten in that state by preference or of necessity, is the chief cause of modern leprosy, and he has successfully met many of the apparent exceptions. Norway has had leprosy in some provinces for centuries; and it is significant that William of Malmesbury, referring to those who went on the first Crusade, says: “Scotus familiaritatem pulicum reliquit, Noricus cruditatem piscium.” (Gesta Regum, Eng. Hist. Soc. II. 533.)

[209] In his section De preservatione a lepra (p. 345) Gilbert advises to avoid, among other things, all salted fish and meat, and dried bacon.

[210] Acts of Robert III. in the Regiam Majestatem, p. 414 (quoted by Simpson, Ed. Med. and Surg. Journ. vol. 57, p. 416).

[211] Dr Gilbert Skene, of Aberdeen, and afterwards of Edinburgh, in his book on the plague (1568), has an incidental remark about “evil and corrupt meats” which may be taken in a literal sense: “As we see dailie the pure man subject to sic calamitie nor the potent, quha are constrynit be povertie to eit evill and corrupte meittis, and diseis is contractit, heir of us callit pandemiall.” (Bannatyne Club edition, p. 6.)

[212] Higden’s Polychronicon. Edited for the Rolls series by Babington and Lumby, vol. VIII.

[213] The Annals of Ireland. By Friar John Clyn, of the Convent of Friars Minor, Kilkenny, and Thady Dowling, Chancellor of Leighlin. Edited from the MSS. etc. by R. Butler, Dean of Clonmacnois. Dublin, 1849 (Irish Archæological Society). The last entry by Clyn himself appears to be the words “magna karistia” etc., under 1349. There is added “Videtur quod author hic obiit;” and then two entries of pestilence made in 1375 in another hand.

[214] Henricus de Knighton, Chronicon Angliae, in Twysden’s Decem Script. Angl. col. 2598 et seq. An edition of Knighton’s Chronicle, by Lumby, is in progress for the Rolls series.

[215] Chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker. Edited by E. Maunde Thompson, Oxford, 1889.

[216] Robertus de Avesbury, Historia de Mirabilibus Gestis Regis Ed. III., Oxon. 1720. Also in the Rolls series. Edited by E. Maunde Thompson.

[217] Eulogium Historiarum. Rolls series, No. 9. Edited by Haydon, III. 213.

[218] Itineraria Symonis Simeonis et Willelmi de Worcestre. Edited by Nasmith from the MSS. in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Cantab. 1778, p. 113: “parum ante nativitatem Domini intravit villam Bodminiae, ubi mortui fuerunt circa mille quingentos per estimacionem.”

[219] Histor. MSS. Commission, vi. 475.

[220] Wilkins, Concilia II. 745: “Contagium pestilentiae moderni temporis undique se dilatans etc.”

[221] Rymer’s Foedera, V. 655:--“Quia tamen subita plaga Pestilentiae Mortalis in loco praedicto et aliis partibus circumvicinis adeo indies invalescit, quod de securo accessu Hominum ad locum illum formidatur admodum hiis diebus.”

[222] Ibid.--“Et quia dicta Pestilentia Mortalis in dicto loco Westmonasteriensi ac in civitate Londoniae, ac alis locis circumvicinis, gravius solito invalescit (quod dolenter referimus) per quod accessus Magnatum et aliorum nostrorum Fidelium ad dictum locum nimis periculosus foret,” &c. This second prorogation was sine die.

[223] Calendar of Wills (Husting Court, London), ed. Sharpe, Lond. 1889, I. 506-624.

[224] Clyn. But his account for Kilkenny, where he lived, makes the epidemic either earlier or later there than at Dublin: “Ista pestilencia apud Kilkenniam in XL{a} invaluit; nam VIto die Marcii viii fratres predicatores infra diem Natalem obierunt,” the Lent referred to being either that of 1349 or of 1350. The difficulty about assigning the landing of the infection near Dublin in the beginning of August to the year 1348 is that the English importation had only then taken place. But of course Ireland may have got it direct from abroad.

[225] Op. cit. p. 98: “Torserunt illos apostemata e diversis partibus corporis subito irrumpencia, tam dura et sicca quod ab illis decisis vix liquor emanavit; a quibus multi per incisionem aut per longam pacienciam evaserunt. Alii habuerunt pustulos parvos nigros per totam corporis cutem conspersos, a quibus paucissimi, immo vix aliquis, vitæ et sanitati resilierunt.”

[226] “Nam multi ex anthrace et ex apostematibus, et pustulis quae creverunt in tibiis et sub asellis, alii ex passione capitis, et quasi in frenesim versi, alii spuendo sanguinem, moriebantur,” p. 36.

[227] A Treatise faithfully and plainely declaring the way of preventing, preserving from and curing that most fearfull I and contagious disease called the Plague. With the Pestilential Feaver and other the fearful symptomes and accidents incident thereto. By John Woodall, surgeon to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, &c. London, 1639.

[228] Robertus de Avesbury, Rolls ed., p. 177.

[229] Eulogium Historiarum. Rolls ser. No. 9, III. 213.

[230] Rymer’s Foedera, V. 668.

[231] “Pro quorum defectu [referring to the fugitive villeins] mulieres et parvuli invise missi sunt ad carucas et ad plaustra fuganda.” Eulogium. Rolls ed. III. 214.

[232] Nichols, History Of Leicestershire, I. 534.

[233] Nichols, l. c.

[234] For a series of years the burials in the St Martin’s register are as follow:

1610 82 1611 128 1612 39 1613 25 1614 34 1615 60 1616 41 1617 31 1618 37 1619 28 1620 25 1621 43 1622 27 1623 37 1624 24.

[235] History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford. Ed. Gutch I. 449. He says also: “The school doors were shut, colleges and halls relinquished, and none scarce left to keep possession or make up a competent number to bury the dead.” The rest of his account of the Black Death is copied from Le Baker’s Chronicle of Osney.

[236] Itinerarium, l. c.

[237] Stow’s Survey. “Portsoken Ward.”

[238] “Lying without the walls on the north part of the city between the land of the abbot of Westminster and the prior of St John of Jerusalem.” French Chronicle of London (p. 56), as quoted by Stubbs, in preface (p. lxxxi) to Annales Londonienses, Rolls series, No. 76.

[239] Robertus de Avesbury, Historia Edwardi III. Rolls ed. p. 407. “Quotidie multos vita privavit, et in tantum excrevit quod a festo Purificationis usque post Pascha, in novo tunc facto cimiterio juxta Smithfeld plus quam cc corpora defunctorum, praeter corpora quae in aliis cimiteriis civitatis ejusdem sepeliebantur, quasi diebus singulis sepulta fuerunt.... In festo Pentecostes cessavit Londoniis.”

[240] Stow’s Memoranda. Camden Soc., 1880.

[241] Camden’s Britannia, ed. Gough, II. 9.

[242] Rickman, Abstract of the Population Returns of 1831. London, 1832. Introduction, p. 11.

[243] Stow’s Survey, p. 392.

[244] The population of London is stated on good authority, that of its archdeacon, in a letter to Pope Innocent III. (Petri Blessensis Opera omnia, ed. Giles, vol. II. p. 85), to have been 40,000 about the years 1190-1200, a period of great expansion or activity. By the usual reckoning of the poll-tax in 1377 the population would have been 44,770; and in the year 1349 it was probably not far from those numbers. This matter comes up again in the next chapter.

[245] Memorials of London in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, edited from the Archives of the City, A.D. 1246-1419, by H. T. Riley. Lond. 1868, p. 219.

[246] Ibid., pp. 239-40.

[247] Blomefield, History of Norfolk, III. 93.

[248] Peter of Blois, who as archdeacon of London was in a position to know, gives in his letter to the pope the number of parish churches in the City at 120.

[249] Popham, “Subsidy Roll of 51 Edward III.,” in Archæologia, VII. (1785) p. 337.

[250] Itineraria, et cet. ed. Nasmith, Cantab. 1778, p. 344. See also Weever, Funeral Monuments, p. 862, according to whom the record of the great mortality was on a chronological table hanging up in the church.

[251] Walsingham, Gesta Abbatum. Rolls ed. II. 370. Abbot Michael, he says, “tactus est communi incommodo inter primos de suis monachis qui illo letali morbo percussi sunt.”

[252] Th. Stubbs’ Chronicle of York in Twysden, col. 1732.

[253] Chronicon Monasterii de Melsa, Rolls ed. III. 36.

[254] Rymer’s Foedera.

[255] Lowth, Life of William of Wykeham, p. 93, with a ref. to Regist. Edyngdon, pt. 1. fol. 49.

[256] Bentham, Hist. of Ely.

[257] Clyn.

[258] Jessopp, “The Black Death in East Anglia” in Nineteenth Century, April 1885, p. 602. The sources of these interesting particulars are not given.

[259] Peck’s Antiquarian Annals of Stamford, Bk. XI. p. 47.

[260] Hist. MSS. Commission’s Reports, IX. p. 127: “Hi quatuor tantum moriebantur de pestilencia.” The reporter on the MSS. of the Dean and Chapter conjectures that the monastery may have owed its comparative immunity to the fact that it was supplied with water brought by closed pipes from the hills on the north-east of the city.

[261] Walsingham, Gesta Abbatum.

[262] Knighton.

[263] History of Norfolk, III. 94.

[264] Owen and Blakeway, History of Shrewsbury, I. 166:--“The average number of institutions to benefices on vacancies by death in the archdeaconry of Salop, for ten years before 1349, and ten years after, is one and a half per annum, or fifteen in the whole; in that year alone the number of institutions on vacancies by death is twenty-nine, besides other institutions the cause of whose vacancies is not specified and therefore may also have been the same.”

[265] F. Seebohm, “The Black Death and its Place in English History,” Fortnightly Review, Sept. 1 and 15, 1865:--“In the library of the Dean and Chapter, at York Minster, are voluminous MSS., known by the name of Torr’s MSS., which contain the clergy list of every parish in the diocese of York, and which, in by far the greater number of instances, state not only the date of each vacancy, but whether it was caused by death, resignation or otherwise of the incumbent.” L. c. p. 150.

[266] Jessopp, “The Black Death in East Anglia,” Nineteenth Century, April 1885, pp. 600-602. This author remarks that the evidence from manor court rolls and from the Institution Books of the clergy “has hardly received any attention hitherto, its very existence being entirely overlooked, nay, not even suspected.”

[267] G. Poulett Scrope, M.P., F.R.S., The Manor and Barony of Castle Combe. London, 1852, p. 168.

[268] The court rolls of the Manor of Snitterton, Norfolk, in the British Museum. Professor Maitland has lately edited some of the earliest rolls of manor courts for the Selden Society.

[269] G. Poulett Scrope, op. cit. pp. 151-2.

[270] F. Seebohm, The English Village Community, London, 1882. The Manor Court Rolls of Winslow, upon which Mr Seebohm bases his work, are in the library of the University of Cambridge.

[271] Rev. Augustus Jessopp, D.D. “The Black Death in East Anglia,” Nineteenth Century, Dec. 1884.

[272] Under the heading “The Black Death in Lancashire,” Mr A. G. Little has printed, with remarks, in the English Historical Review, July, 1890, p. 524, the data submitted to a jury of eighteen who had been empannelled to settle a dispute between the archdeacon of Richmond and Adam de Kirkham, dean of Amounderness, touching the account rendered by the dean, as proctor for the archdeacon, of fees received for instituting to vacant livings, for probates of wills, and for administration of the goods of intestates. The dean’s account to the archdeacon is said to run “from the Feast of the Nativity of our Lady [8 September] in the year of our Lord 1349 unto the eleventh day of January next following;” but it may not imply, and almost certainly does not, that the vacancies in benefices, the probates and the letters of administration, or the corresponding deaths of individuals, fell between those dates. The archdeacon alleges what fees Adam de Kirkham had received, but had not accounted for, and the jury find what Adam did actually receive. Nine benefices of one kind or another are mentioned as vacant, three of them twice. The numbers said to have died in the several parishes, with the number of wills and of intestate estates, I have extracted from the data and tabulated as follows:

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ | Parish | Men & Women | With wills | Intestate | | | dead | (above 100 sh.) | (above 100 sh.) | |------------|-------------|-----------------|-----------------| | Preston | 3000 | 300 | 200 | | Kirkham | 3000 | -- | 100 | | Pulton | 800 | -- | 40 | | Lancaster | 3000 | 400 | 80 | | Garestang | 2000 | 400 | 140 | | Cokram | 1000 | 300 | 60 | | Ribchestre | [illegible] | 70 | 40 | | Lytham | 140 | 80 | 80 | | St Michel | 80 | 50 | 40 | | Pulton | 60 | 40 | 20 | +--------------------------------------------------------------+

Of the alleged 300 who died in Preston parish, leaving wills, five married couples are named, the probate fees being respectively ½ marc, 6 sh., 40 d., 4 sh., and 40 d. The archdeacon’s whole claim for the 300 was 20 marcs, which the jury reduced to 10 pounds. Of the alleged 200 intestates in the same parish, two married couples, one woman, and “Jakke o þe hil” are named. In the parish of Garstang, the executors of 6 deceased are named, whose probate fees in all amounted to 16 sh. 10 d., the whole claim of the archdeacon for 400 deceased leaving wills being £10, and the award of the jury 40 sh. In the parish of Kirkham, on a claim of 20 marcs for probate fees not accounted for, “the jury say that he received £4;” on a claim of £10 for quittance, the jury say 20 sh. This was a parish in which 3000 are said to have died, the number of wills being not stated. The numbers had obviously been put in for a forensic purpose, and are, of course, not even approximately correct for the actual mortality, or the actual number of wills proved, or of letters of administration granted. The awards of the jury amounted in all to £48. 10_s._ See also Eng. Hist. Review, Jan. 1891.

[273] Thorold Rogers, History of Agriculture and Prices, I. 296-7.

[274] Cussan’s Hertfordshire, vol. I. Hundred of Odsey, p. 37.

[275] Sat. Rev. 16 Jan. 1886, p. 82.

[276] Jessopp, l. c. April 1885, p. 611-12.

[277] The priory of Christ Church, Canterbury, lost the following live stock in the murrain of 1349: oxen, 757, cows and calves, 511, sheep, 4585. (Hist. MSS. Commission, V. 444.)

[278] The author of the Eulogium, who wrote not later than 1367, and is for his own period an authority like Knighton, gives the following prices: wheat, 12 pence a quarter, barley 9 pence, beans 8 pence; a good horse 16 shillings (used to be 40 sh.), a large ox 40 pence, a good cow 2 sh. or 18 pence. Of the scarcity of servants he says: “Pro quorum defectu mulieres et parvuli invise missi sunt ad carucas et ad plaustra fuganda.”

[279] “The English Manor;” two articles in the Saturday Review, 9th and 16th Jan. 1886, p. 82 [by Professor Sir Frederick Pollock], the sources of information being as yet unpublished. He says: “The prospect of better terms brought in new tenants.”

[280] Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, 1875, II. 434. Höniger, dealing with the German evidence of the Black Death, concludes that the great mortality was almost without significance for the political course of affairs; that the great loss of life was unable to check the revival of trade and industry which had already begun or to retard the splendid development of the German free towns; that the low state of morals belonged to the period and was no worse after the epidemic than before; that no new impulse was given or point of view brought out, unless, perhaps, the idea of sanitary regulation; and that the scarcity of labour was merely an incident to be taken advantage of in the struggle against the existing order which was already going on. (Der schwarze Tod in Deutschland. Berlin, 1882, p. 133.)

[281] Richter, Geschichte der Medicin in Russland, I. 215.

[282] Histoire des Huns, V. 223-4.

[283] Ib. p. 226, note.

[284] Der schwarze Tod im vierzehnten Jahrhundert, Berlin, 1832. Engl. Transl. by Babington, Lond. 1833. This well-known work presents the more picturesque aspects of the Black Death in various countries, without thoroughness for any. England has a large space in the book; but the author has not gone for his information farther than the chapter on the Black Death in Barnes’s Life of Edward III.

[285] Printed in Häser’s Archiv für die gesammte Medicin, 1842, II. pp. 26-59; and reprinted in his Geschichte der Med. u. epid. Krankheiten, III. 157, 3d ed., Jena, 1882.

[286] Geschichte der Medicin, Bd. III. “Epidemische Krankheiten.” Jena, 1882, p. 139. He gives point to this phrase by an account of the local plagues of recent times in Gujerat and Kumaon.

[287] His essay is one of the Escurial MSS., and has been printed, with a German translation, by M. H. Müller, in the Sitzungsberichte der Münchener Akad. der Wissensch. 1863.

[288] Voyages d’Ibn Batoutah in 4 vols., for the Société Asiatique, Paris, 1853, I. 227-9, and IV. 309.

[289] See Sir Henry Yule’s Cathay and the Way Thither (2 vols. Hakluyt Society) and his edition of The Book of Marco Polo, for numerous particulars of the overland trade to China by the northern parallels, in the 14th century.

[290] The stages, distances, expenses, &c. from Tana to Peking are given in Pegolotti’s mercantile handbook (written about 1340), in Yule’s Cathay and the Way Thither, vol. II.

[291] C. A. Gordon, M.D. in Reports of Med. Officers to the Imperial Maritime Customs of China, London, 1884.

[292] Gaubil, Histoire de Gentchiscan, Paris, 1739.

[293] The Famine in China, London, 1878--a translation of a Chinese appeal for charity, with illustrations.

[294] Parliamentary Papers, 1878, China, No. 4.

[295] In Yule’s Cathay and the Way Thither (Hakluyt Society), I. 156.

[296] Etienne Pariset, Causes de la Peste. Paris, 1837.

[297] Volney, Voyages en Syrie et en Egypte. Paris, 1792.

[298] Cornelius de Pauw, Philosophical Reflections on the Egyptians and Chinese, Engl. Transl. Lond. 1795, 2 vols.

[299] It is noteworthy that Herodotus represents the question of disposal of the dead as having been raised by the Egyptians: they decided in favour of embalming and rock entombment, as against cremation or burial, the reason given for the preference being that fire was “a savage beast,” in the one case, while in the other case, the devouring beast was the worm. Bk. III. § 16.

[300] Curiously enough it was among the Christians of Egypt that the controversy as to the corruptibles and the incorruptibles raged most furiously. See Gibbon.

[301] Clot Bey, Peste en Egypte. Paris, 1840.

[302] Benoit de Maillet, Description de l’Egypte. Paris, 1735, p. 281. See also Wilkinson, Ancient Egyptians, III. 456, 465.

[303] Justus Doolittle, Social Life of the Chinese, 2 vols. New York, 1867, I. 33, 198, 213.

[304] T. T. Cooper, Travels of a Pioneer of Commerce, Lond. 1871, p. 23, 33.

[305] This is one of the remarks in Dr Gilbert Skene’s treatise on the Plague, Edinburgh, 1568 (reprinted for the Bannatyne Club, 1840):--Among the causes are “deid cariounis unbureit, in speciale of mankynd, quhilkis be similitude of nature is maist nocent to man, as everie brutall is maist infectand and pestilentiall to thair awin kynd,” p. 6.

[306] A. von Kremer, “Ueber die grossen Seuchen des Orients nach arabischen Quellen.” Sitzungsber. der Wien. Akad., Philos.-histor. Classe, Bd. 96 (1880), p. 69.

[307] Ch. M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, 2 vols. Cambridge, 1888.

[308] Communicated to Herr von Kremer (l. c.) by Nury Effendi, who visited Assir, and wrote a report preserved in MS. in the Archives at Constantinople.

[309] “Report regarding Mahamurree in Kumaon and Garhwal in 1851-52.” By F. Pearson and Mookerjee. Agra, 1852 (Extracts in Ind. Annals of Med. Sc., I. 358). Also extracts (Ib.) from Renny’s Report, 1851.

[310] Planck, Ninth Report of the Sanitary Commissioner, N. W. Prov. Allahabad, 1877, pp. 40-95. (Extracts, p. 39, of Papers relating to the Plague, Parl. Papers, 1879.)

[311] Baber, in Parliamentary Papers, 1878, “China.” No. 6. Rocher (Province Chinoise de Yun-nan) quoted, without the reference, in Med. Reports of Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs, No. 15, 1878, Shanghai, p. 25.

[312] J. H. Lowry, Med. Rep. Chinese Mar. Customs, No. 24, 1882, p. 27.

[313] D. J. Macgowan, Ib. 1882. Report for Wenchow.

[314] Thomas Whyte, “Report on the Disease which prevailed in Kattywar, etc. in 1819-20.” Trans. Med. Phys. Soc. Bombay, I. 155. Bombay, 1838.

[315] I have curtailed the evidence from Gujerat; it will be found at large in the following writers: Gilder, Bombay Med. Trans. I. 193; McAdam, ib. 183; F. Forbes, ib. II. |I, and Thesis on Plague, Edin. 1840; Glen, Quart. Journ. Cal. Med. Soc. I. 433; Ranken, Report on Pali Plague, Calcutta, 1838; and Whyte, as above.

[316] L. Arnaud, Peste de Benghazi, Constantinople, 1875; Essai sur la Peste, Paris, 1888; Une Mission pour la Peste, Paris, 1888.

[317] T. Farquhar, M.D., “Typhus Fever in the Eusofzai,” Ind. Annals of Med. Sc. II. 504; R. Lyell, M.D., “Fever of the Yusufzai Valley,” Ib. II. p. 16.

[318] Surgeon-General J. Murray, M.D., at Epidemiological Society, 11 May, 1878. Med. Times and Gaz. I. 1878, p. 597.

[319] Alex. Rittmann, Chronik der Pest. Brünn, 1879.

[320] Thomas Lodge, Treatise of the Plague, Lond. 1603, chap. III. Skene, in his Edinburgh essay on plague in 1568, gives as a sign of impending plague the moles and “serpents” leaving their holes: “As when the moudewart and serpent leavis the eird, beand molestit be the vapore contenit within the bowells of the samin.” He adds what agrees still farther with modern experience in Yun-nan: “If the domesticall fowls become pestilential, it is ane signe of maist dangerous pest to follow.” (Bannatyne Club ed. p. 9).

[321] The writer of the article “Peste” in the Dict. Encycl. des Sc. Med., Dr Mahé, inclines on the whole to the view that the poison of plague is somehow related to cadaveric products: “Parmi ces accusations d’insalubrité publique, il en est une qui repose sur un objectif plus positif en apparance” viz. the “miasme des cadavres.”

[322] Sir Tobie Matthews’ Letters. Lond. 1660, p. 110.

[323] Epist. de rebus familiar. Lib. viii. epist. 7. The citation of these contemporary illustrations of the Black Death was begun in the last century by Sprengel (Beiträge, &c., p. 37).

[324] Foedera, III. 184; it was renewed on 30th June for a year longer.

[325] Avesbury.

[326] Foedera, III. 192.

[327] Ib. 193.

[328] Ib. 200, 201.

[329] Le Baker’s Chronicle of Osney. Avesbury.

[330] Foedera, III. 221.

[331] Avesbury, Rolls ed. 425.

[332] Blomefield (Hist. of Norfolk, III.) says that the writ to Norwich in 1355 was for 120 men-at-arms to be sent to Portsmouth by Sunday in mid-Lent.

[333] Avesbury, pp. 427-8.

[334] Ib. p. 425.

[335] Ib. p. 461.

[336] Avesbury, p. 431.

[337] Thorold Rogers, Hist. of Agric. and Prices, I. 367, “according to an account quoted by Misselden in his Circle of Commerce.” The sack of wool contained 52 cloves of 7 lbs. each, or 364 lbs. It appears from a statute of 5 Ric. II. that 240 wool-fells were equivalent, for duty, to one sack of wool. In Rogers’ tables, the wool-fell is usually priced at about the value of 1½ lbs. of wool, which was at the same time about the average clip of a sheep. The present average clip would be at least four times as much. The colonial bale of wool is of the same weight as the medieval sack, but would represent 40 to 60 fleeces, instead of about 240. At the smallest of the estimates in the text, the wool of 7,680,000 sheep would have been exported in a year. Avesbury’s estimate would mean an annual export to foreign countries of the clip of about 24,000,000 sheep. The average price of a sack of wool just before the Black Death was about £4 in money of the time; the period immediately following the plague was one of low prices; but from 1364 to 1380, the price was uniformly high.

[338] Foedera, III. 186.

[339] Ib. III. 191.

[340] Jessopp (l. c.) giving a general reference to the Foedera, and probably having the Sandwich letter in view, says there was “mad, unreasoning, insensate panic among well-to-do classes--the trader and the moneyed man, the bourgeoisie of the towns,” and “a stampede,” (presumably to foreign parts). But the mortality was all over by 1st December, 1349; and the exodus, whatever motive it may have had, was almost certainly deliberate.

[341] Foedera, III. 198.

[342] The last clause of the ordinance implies that not only the labourers but also the employers of labour were taking the natural advantage of the situation. There appears to be some particular evidence of this for Bristol (Rev. W. Hunt, Bristol, p. 77): the masters in various crafts and trades were so reduced in numbers that the survivors could charge what they pleased. Thus, the attempt to coerce labourers and skilled workmen was a one-sided affair; although, in practice, it related mostly to farm-labour, where the one-sidedness did not appear.

[343] Foedera, III. 210.

[344] Rot. Parl. II. 225.

[345] This was the first parliamentary Statute of Labourers (25 Ed. III. cap 2). The king’s ordinance of 18th June, 1350 (re-issued for Suffolk and Lindsey on 18th Nov.), is usually reckoned the first Statute of Labourers, and is invariably assigned to the 23rd year of Edward III., being so entered in the Statutes of the Realm. It is clear, however, from the text of the ordinance in the Foedera that it belongs to the 24th of Edward III., its exact date being 18th June, 1350. Longman, in his History of the Life and Times of Edward III., correctly states in one place (I. 309) that the ordinance of 18th June, 1350, was “the first step,” but on the very next page, after stating that the ordinance failed, he proceeds, according to the usual chronology of 23 Ed. III. and 25 Ed. III., to say that “therefore, two years afterwards,” the statute of 25 Ed. III. was made in Parliament. The interval was only some eight months.

[346] Rot. Parl. II. 234.

[347] Knighton, in Twysden’s Decem Scriptores, l. c.

[348] Seebohm, The English Village Community. Chapter I.

[349] The Statute of Labourers was re-enacted with increased stringency six years after (31 Ed. III.), and again in 1360 and 1368. All the labour statutes were confirmed in the 12th year of Richard II. (cap. 34). Legislative attempts of the same kind continued to be made as late as the 5th of Elizabeth (1562-3), with particular reference to sturdy beggars. See copious extracts from the Statutes in Sir George Nicholls’s History of the English Poor Law, vol. I. Lond. 1854. “An Act for regulating Journeymen Tailors” was made in 7 Geo. I. (cap. 13).

[350] “There is no trace of the villenage described in Glanville and Bracton, among the tenants of a manor 500 years ago. All customary services were commutable for money payments; all villein tenants were secure in the possession of their lands; and the only distinction between socage and villein occupation lay in the liberation of the former from certain degrading incidents which affected the latter.” Thorold Rogers, “Effects of the Black Death, &c.” Fort. Rev. III. (1865) p. 196.

[351] Seebohm, The English Village Community. Lond. 1882. Chapter I.

[352] Seebohm, p. 31. Such attempts by landowners, to go back to personal service from their villein tenants, appear to have become more systematic in the generation following, and to have been a cause of the Peasants’ Rebellion in 1381. See v. Oschenkowski, England’s wirthschaftliche Entwickelung, Jena, 1879, confirming the opinion of Thorold Rogers.

[353] Smith, Lives of the Berkeleys, p. 128: “in 24 Edward III.” (Cited by Denton, England in the 15th Century.)

[354] Morant, Hist. of Essex.

[355] Niebuhr, Lectures on Ancient History. Engl. transl. London, 1852, II., p. 53.

[356] Eulogium Historiarum. Rolls ed. III. 230.

[357] Loci e Libro Veritatum, ed. Rogers. Oxon. 1880, p. 202; and, from Gascoigne’s MS., in Anthony Wood, Hist. and Antiq. Univ. Oxford, Ed. Gutch, I. 451: “What I shall farther observe is that before it began there were but few complaints among the people, and few pleas; as also few Legists in England, and very few at Oxford.”

[358] Manor and Barony of Castle Combe, sub anno 1361.

[359] Owen and Blakeway, op. cit. I. 165.

[360] Clarkson’s History of Richmond. Richmond, 1821 (authority not quoted).

[361] Hailstone, History of Bottisham and the Priory of Anglesey. Camb. 1873. (Transact. Camb. Antiq. Soc. 8vo. series, vol. XIV.)

[362] Cited by Jessopp, l. c.

[363] See p. 141.

[364] Clutterbuck, History of Hertfordshire.

[365] Seebohm, for the Manor of Winslow, op. cit., p. 34.

[366] Thorold Rogers, Fort. Rev. III. (1865), p. 196. In his History of Agriculture and Prices, IV., the same learned and sagacious student of English developments thus sums up the agrarian consequences of the Black Death:--“The indirect effects of this great event were even more remarkable. The great landowner ceases to carry on agriculture with his own capital, and farmers’ rents of a fixed and almost invariable amount take the place of the lord’s cultivation by bailiffs. Attempts were made for varying periods of time to continue the old system, especially by corporations. It is possible that the system of stock and land leasing, which became very general after the change commenced, may have been suggested by the hope that the old state of things might be restored.... In the end all the great landowners conformed to the inevitable change, and let their land on short leases, and as a rule at low and almost fixed rents, to capitalist farmers.”

[367] Thorold Rogers, op. cit., I. 376.

[368] Rot. Parl., II. 260. a.

[369] Seebohm, l. c. Fort. Rev., II. (1865), p. 157.

[370] Blomefield, III. sub anno.

[371] Blomefield, III. sub anno.

[372] Camden’s Britannia. Gough’s ed. II. 9.

[373] Hist. MSS. Commission, VI. 299. Register of Ely Priory, in Lord Leconfield’s MSS.

[374] Seebohm, “The Black Death and its Place in English History.” Fort. Rev. II. (1865), p. 278.

[375] These and other labour-statutes are collected in A History of the English Poor Law, by Sir George Nicholls, 2 vols. London, 1854, I. 37-77.

[376] G. Poulett Scrope, op. cit.

[377] From 1416 to 1424, three different persons were fined at the manor court for keeping a common brothel in their houses. Forestalling of butter, cheese and eggs, on the way to market, came before the court in 1418.

[378] At the manor court in 1417, Thomas Selwin, a butcher, was convicted of throwing offal and other offensive matters into the common street and of making his dung-heap there, to the common hurt; also the said Thomas Selwin “tarde et de novo erexit unam latrinam foetidam in shopa sua ad commune nocumentum. Ideo ipse in misericordia.” The next entry of nuisances, so far as extracts are given, is as late as 1590--various offences in the street and churchyard, and the glover washing his skins in the stream or otherwise befouling the water running by his house.

[379] Cited in Owen and Blakeway’s History of Shrewsbury, II. 524: “per advenas qui in dicta villa post ultimam pestilenciam de novo sunt inhabitati ... at regimen dictae ville ad se attrahere ... machinantes.” By the “ultima pestilencia” could hardly have been meant the pestis secunda of 1361, the year of the patent, as the learned antiquaries suppose.

[380] Rotul. Parl. IV. 60. 7. The petition of Chesterton, near Cambridge: “And also they seiden that there was made gret waste in the same Manor of Chesterton of Housing, that is to say of Halles and of Chambers, and of other houses of office, that were necessary in the same Manor, and none housinge left standing therein, but gif it were a Shepcote or a Berne or a Swynsty and a few houses byside to putte in bestes.”

[381] “After the cessation of the Black Plague a greater fecundity in women was everywhere remarkable--a grand phenomenon which, from its occurrence after every destructive pestilence, proves to conviction, if any occurrence can do so, the prevalence of a higher power in the direction of general organic life. Marriages were almost without exception prolific,” etc.

[382] Eulogium Historiarum, III. 213.

[383] Fasciculi Zizan. Rolls series, No. 5, ed. Shirley, p. 263: “Dimitto alias rationes palpabiles: quod exhinc regnum nostrum sensibiliter depauperetur pecunia; quod, praetextu subtractionis hujus thesauri, qui expenderetur in Anglia, decrescit populus;” etc.

[384] Political Songs and Poems, Ed. II.-Ric. II. Rolls series, No. 14, ed. T. Wright, I. 2. 53.

[385] The only monograph that I know is Peinlich’s Pest in Steiermark, 2 Bde. Graz, 1877-78. From 1349 to 1716, seventy years are marked in the annals of Styria as plague-years. Corradi gives the plague-years in Italy in his Annali.

[386] Guy de Chauliac for Avignon, in Häser, III. 176. Other foreign references in the same work.

[387] Political Songs and Poems. Ed. II.-Ric. II. Rolls series, No. 14, ed. T. Wright, I. 173, 190, &c.

[388] Ibid. I. 229, from a MS. in the library of Cambridge University.

[389] The spelling has been modernized, a few old words changed, and the division into verses omitted.

[390] Chronicon Angliae, by a monk of St Albans. Rolls ed.

[391] Harleian MS. No. 1568, “Chronicle of England to A.D. 1419.” (Printed with additions at the St Albans press about 1484.)

[392] Skeat, whose great edition of ‘The Vision of Piers the Ploughman,’ has been brought out by the Early English Text Society, thinks that the ironical reference (Passus XIII. 248) to the pope sending a salve for the pestilence applies particularly to the “Fourth Pestilence” of 1375 and 1376, which was the pestis tertia of some chronicles.

[393] Flux and fever from famine are alone mentioned in the poems of John of Bridlington, which cover the period from the Black Death to the reign of Richard II.

[394] Egerton MS. No. 2572, Sloane MS. 443 (“xiv. cent.”), as well as several copies of the 15th century.

[395] Lansdowne MS. 285, fol. 220.

[396] Mr Warner identifies him with the person who invented “Sir John Mandeville” and the travels of Sir John. See an article in the Quarterly Review, April, 1891.

[397] Sloane MS. (British Museum) No. 2276, fol. 191-199.

[398] ‘A passing gode lityll boke necessarye and behouefull azenst the Pestilence.’ British Museum, case 31, e. 13, 4to, twelve leaves. The MS. begins as follows: “Here begynneth a lytell boke necessary and behouefull azens the pestylence.”

[399] Dibdin (Antiq. Typogr. II. 19) assigns the printing to Machlinia, and reproduces a page as a sample of his common type. Bliss (Reliquiae Hearnianae, II. 117) says that this sample page does not correspond with that of the British Museum copy. He adds that there is a fragment of the printed book in the library of St Peter’s College, Cambridge, “pasted within the wooden covers of the binding of an edition (1499) of Discipuli Sermones.”

[400] In the earliest printed Latin texts of this work (Antwerp, 1485? Leipzig, 1495? and versified in Albertus Magnus, ‘De Virtute Herbarum,’ 1500?) he is named Kamitus, bishop of Arusia, a city in the realm of Denmark. In the copy of the English version in the British Museum, someone has called him Ramicius, having written on a leaf, “Ramicius Episcopus Arusiensis civitatis Daciae Regimen contra pestem,” with the date 1698. The name of Kamitus, being judged improbable on the face of it, has been changed in the catalogue of the British Museum library into Canutus. But there was no Canutus among the bishops of Aarhus, nor a Kamitus, nor a Ramicius. The two bishops that appear to suit best are Olaus, or Olaf, who was bishop from 1371 to 1388, and Ulricus or Udalricus, or Olric Stycka, who succeeded in 1425 and held the see until 1449. Curiously enough, the latter, when he went to Rome in 1425 to represent Eric, king of Pomerania in a suit with the dukes of Sleswig, figures throughout the records of the suit as “Olaus, episcopus Arosiensis,” although Olaus, bishop of Arusia, belonged to a former generation. It is, of course, the merest guessing; but I am inclined to think that the author of the essay on plague was either bishop Olaus, of 1371-1388, or bishop Udalricus, of 1425-1449, a man of character and ability, who also went by the name of Olaus; and that in any case the manuscript version of the essay in the English tongue is more likely to have been of the early part of the fifteenth century than of the fourteenth. The above facts are collected from various parts of Langbeck’s Script. Rer. Dan.: the “Series Episcoporum Arhusiorum” is in vol. VII. p. 212. Nothing is there said of any bishop of Aarhus having written a book, or having been a physician at Montpellier.

[401] These words (“the impressions”) are contracted in the printed book, exactly as in the manuscript. I have modernised the spelling for the most part.

[402] “When a man feeleth himself infect, as soon as he may, let him be let blood plenteously till he swoon: then stop the vein. For a little letting of blood moveth or stirreth venom.... Let him blood on the side of the body where the swelling appeareth. Therefore if a swelling appear under the right arm, let blood in the middle of the same arm, in the vein called mediana. If it appear under the left arm, let him blood in midst of the same, or in the vein of the liver which is about the little finger. And if it be about the share, let him blood about the heel upon the same side. If the swelling be in the neck, let him blood in the vein called cephalica, about the thumb in the hand of the same side; or in the vein the which is called mediana of the same arm, or in the hand of the same side about the little finger. And, overmore, if the swelling appear about the ear, let him blood in the vein called cephalica of the same side, or in the vein which is between the long finger and the thumb, lest many venomous things go into the brain.” If the swelling is in the shoulders, bleed from the mediana: if on the back from pedica magna, and so on.

[403] Walsingham, Hist. Angl. I. 309. Adam of Murimuth, Engl. Hist. Soc.

[404] The Stratford bread-carts are explained in Stow’s Survey of London (“Lime Street Ward”). In the famines of 1512 and 1527, they were besieged on the way by hungry citizens and had to be guarded. The same phrase of bread being “gesen” or scarce, occurs in a letter of 4 September, 1535, from Thomas Broke to Cromwell, secretary of State: “never knew good bread so geason in London at this time of the year; it is so musty, and of so evil wheat, that it is rather poisonous than nourishing; what was sold for a halfpenny, when you were here, is now a penny.” (Cal. State Papers, Henry VIII. vol. IX. § 274.)

[405] Thorold Rogers. A Short English Chronicle, Camden Soc. 1880:--“45 Edward III. This yere was called the grete dere yere, and that same yere was a quarter of whete at iiii nobles.”

[406] Wilkins, Concilia, III. 74: “De orando pro cessatione pestilentiae,” dated Slyndon, 10 Cal. Aug. A.D. MCCCLXVIII.

[407] Sharpe, Cal. of Wills, vol. II.

[408] Otterbourne (ed. Hearne, p. 133) says that the pestis tertia was in 1368, and that it lasted two years. Nicolas (Chronol. of History, p. 389) gives from a Lansdowne MS. (no. 863, fol. 107) of the time of Charles I., the duration of the pestis tertia as 2 July--29 Sept., 1369, which should probably read “2 July, 1368--29 Sept. 1369.”

[409] Memorials of London, etc. from the Council Records. Edited by H. T. Riley. Lond. 1867, p. 339 and p. 356.

[410] Walsingham, Hist. Angl. I. 319; Adam of Murimuth.

[411] The chroniclers are not agreed as to the chronology of the various 14th century plagues from the first (the Black Death) to the fifth. Some of the enumerations are clearly erroneous. Thus in A Short English Chronicle from the Lambeth MS. (ed. Gairdner for the Camden Society, 1880), the plague of 1361 is erroneously called “the threde pestilence,” while the fourth is assigned to 1369 and the fifth to 1377 (for 1375). Otterbourne places the quarta in 1374 (for 1375), and the quinta (as others do) in 1391; but in the Life of Richard II., by a monk of Evesham, the pestilence of 1382 is more correctly reckoned the fifth from the Black Death.

[412] Walsingham, Hist. Angl. I. 409. Chronicon Angliae, p. 239.

[413] Rot. Parl. IV. 806.

[414] Ibid. III. pp. 139 a, 147 a.

[415] Blomefield’s History of Norfolk, III. p. 111.

[416] Continuator of Higden, IX. 14.

[417] Political Songs and Poems. Rolls series, No. 14, I. p. 252:--

“The rysyng of the comuynes in londe, The pestilens, and the eorthe-quake-- Theose three thinges I understonde.”

[418] Walsingham, Hist. Angl. II. 109.

[419] Continuator of Higden, IX. 21, 27.

[420] Eulogium Historiarum, III. 369. Otterbourne, ed. Hearne: “From the nativity of St John Baptist to the feast of St Luke,” 1391.

[421] Continuator of Higden, IX. 216.

[422] Ibid. 237.

[423] Walsingham, Hist. Angl. II. 186.

[424] Blomefield’s History of Norfolk, III. 113:--“1390. A great mortality increased in Norfolk and in many other counties in England, and it seemed not unlike the season of the great pestilence: it was occasioned by a great want of victuals, that forced many people to eat unwholesome food, and so brought distempers upon them. This dearth began under the sickle, and lasted to the following harvest [1391], but was not so much for want of corn, as money to purchase it, occasioned by the law made in relation to wool, by which wool became dog-cheap; for a stone of chosen and picked wool of the best sort was sold for 3 sh. and some for 22 pence or 2 sh., so that in these times the woollen manufacture was the great support of the nation.” According to Thorold Rogers, these high prices of wool obtained from 1364 to 1380.

[425] Walsingham, II. 203. The Continuator of Higden (IX. 259) says 12,000. These estimates are, of course, the merest guesses, and extreme exaggerations. The whole population of York would have been under 15,000.

[426] Higden, ibid.

[427] Walsingham, II. 213; St Albans Annals of Ric. II. and Hen. IV.

[428] Walsingham, II. 276. The Chronicle of William Gregory (Camden Society, ed. Gairdner) enters under the year 1407, a great frost, for twenty-five weeks. It would be of real scientific interest to know the chronology exactly, whether the plague followed or preceded the long cold drought; but the year of the plague is disputable, if any heed be paid to the date of 1406, given by later compilers.

[429] Walsingham, II. 297. Otterbourne, under 1411, says plague in Gascony.

[430] Annals of Bermondsey, in Annales Monast. Rolls ed. III. 485.

[431] Rot. Parl. IV. 143 a. It is probably under 1420 that the “great plague” at Newcastle, given in so many words in Brand’s History under 1410, should be placed.

[432] Ibid. 148 b.

[433] Histor. Collec. of a Citizen of London, 15th cent. Camden Soc. ed. Gairdner, 1876:

“They dyde faster every day Thenn men myght them in erthe lay.”

[434] History of Agriculture and Prices in England, IV. 105.

[435] Chronicle of Croyland, in Gale, I. 518; Rogers, IV. 233.

[436] Denton. London, 1886, p. 92.

[437] Mackay, The English Poor. London, 1890, p. 40.

[438] W. Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce. 2nd ed. Camb. 1890, p. 105. He reproduces Denton’s statement that “there was chronic typhoid in the towns.” Denton professes to have found this in Hecker, who had certainly no knowledge of English towns in the 15th century, and is, in general, more entertaining as a philosophe than trustworthy for erudition.

[439] In 1741, during a prevalence of fever all over England, we hear of bread made of horse-beans, pease, and coarse unsound barley as the chief food of the poor. (Gent. Magaz. letters of 27 Nov. 1741 and 11 Jan. 1742). Thorold Rogers (Agric. and Prices, v. Preface) thinks that the staple food of the English labourer, wheaten bread, had first been changed, especially in the North, to rye, barley and oat bread, in the 17th century during the Civil Wars.

[440] Paston Letters. Ed. Gairdner, 1872, II. 254: John Wymondham of Fellbrigg to John Paston, 10th Nov. “And forasmuch as there was a child dead at Asteleys, and one other like to be dead in the same place, what time I rode out about my little livelihood, my lady and I both thought pity on my mistress your wife to see her abide there, and desired her to come to my poor house, unto such time as you should be otherwise avised.”

[441] Histor. MSS. Commission, IX. 127 b.

[442] Calendar of State Papers. Venetian, vol. I. § 236.

[443] Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council. Ed. Nicolas, III. p. xlv.

[444] Rot. Parl. IV. 420 b.

[445] Arnold’s Chronicle, p. xxxii.

[446] Proc. and Ord. Privy Council, IV. p. lxxx. Sir Harris Nicolas, in this connexion, remarks that Fabyan and all other chroniclers (he had overlooked Arnold) omit to mention pestilence, while they mention much less important things; but he is hardly warranted in his inference that plagues were so common-place as to be left unrecorded. A low level of plague would not be noticed, but a great epidemic certainly would.

[447] Johannes Amundesham (of St Albans), Annales. Rolls ed. II. 127.

[448] Rot. Parl. V. 31 b.

[449] This is the only plague in the first half of the fifteenth century that Anthony Wood records; but he says, under the year 1500, that “no less than about thirty pests, both great and small, happened in this last century”--i.e. in the University of Oxford. I shall speak of their general effects in another chapter.

[450] Paston Letters. Ed. Gairdner, 1872, I. 302-3.

[451] Three Fifteenth Century Chronicles. Ed. Gairdner, for the Camden Society, 1880, from the Lambeth MSS., p. 163.

[452] Sir J. Paston to John Paston, 30 April, 1465. Another letter, of 18th August, has: “For the pestilence is so fervent in Norwych, that they dare no longer abyde there, so God help!” (Paston Letters, ed. Gairdner, II. 226), which probably refers to 1465 also. It is not mentioned by Blomefield.

[453] Chronicle of Croyland, in Gale, I. 541.

[454] Communicated to me by the Rev. W. Hunt, from a new volume of the Camden Society, edited by A. F. Leach, Visitations and Memorials of Southwell Minster, p. 11.

[455] Tickell, History of Kingston upon Hull, 1798.

[456] Warkworth’s Chronicle. Camden Society, p. 23 (under the year 13 Ed. IV.).

[457] Chronicle of the Greyfriars. Camden Society, No. 53, 1852, p. 22.

[458] Robert Fabyan’s Chronicle of England, (editions in 1516 and 1533, and by Ellis, 1808), sub anno.

[459] Grafton’s Chronicle, p. 742.

[460] Brand’s History of Newcastle.

[461] Visitations and Memorials, p. 41.

[462] Blomefield.

[463] Paston, 6 Nov. 1479.

[464] Fordoun, Scotichronicon, ed. Hearne, Oxon. 1722, p. 1039.

[465] Scotichronicon, p. 1056: “eadem ... sicut prius jubileo ... in toto regno Scotiae mirabiliter saeviebat.”

[466] Exchequer Rolls of Scotland. Introduction to vol. II. p. xlviii.

[467] Scotichronicon, p. 1141.

[468] Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, III. 650.

[469] Ibid. III. 310.

[470] Ibid. III. 553.

[471] Ibid. III. 579.

[472] Scotichronicon, p. 1287 and p. 1298.

[473] Cited by R. Chambers (Domestic Annals of Scotland, I. 57) from the Chronicle as printed by Thomas Thomson.

[474] Scotichronicon, p. 1565. Hearne’s edition.

[475] Ferrerius, f. 393, cited in Excheq. Rolls of Scot. VIII. p. lx.

[476] Excheq. Rolls of Scot. VIII. 364. Accounts of William, bishop of Orkney, from 5 Aug. 1475 to 3 Aug. 1476: “et decem martis liberatis, de tempore pestis, egrotantibus in Incheskeith.” Another item (£30. 13_s._ 4_d._) is for forty-six marts destroyed “propter longam moram” in the lairs at Leith, “anno pestis, videlicet anno ultimo.”

[477] But MS. annals are cited for the date 1361, in The ancient and present State of the County and City of Cork. By Charles Smith, M.D. 2 vols. Dublin, 1774. 2nd ed. II. p. 23.

[478] Thady Dowling [Elizabethan] “1370. Pestilentia magna in Hibernia, adeo quod propter immensitatem mortalitatis vocabatur ab antiquis tertia,” p. 24.

[479] Dowling, p. 27.

[480] Angl. Hist. Basil. 1555, p. 567.

[481] In Gale, Script. Angl. I. 573.

[482] British Museum Addit. MS., No. 27,582.

[483] Materials illustrative of the Reign of Henry VII. Rolls series, No. 60, s. d.

[484] Tractatus contra pestilentiam thenasmonem et dissinteriam [Rouen, 1490]:--“Causae pestilentiae ut alias scripsimus: in quodam opusculo quod composuimus de quadam rabiosa febre pestilentiali, quae in duodecim horis patientes cum calore et sudore continuo interficiebat. Cujus febris adventus incepit sua vexilla extendere in Anglia in civitate Londoniarum decima nova die mensis Septembris 1485, in qua die [planetary signs] posuerunt. Ex qua febre pestilentiali plus quam quindecim millia hominum ab hoc seculo morte repentina, tanquam ex pugnitione divina, recesserunt, multique sine mora per vicos deambulantes absque confessione obierunt.”

[485] MSS. Cotton. Vitellius A. XVI. A Chronicle of England from 1st Henry III. to 1st Hen. VIII.

[486] The Croyland Chronicle (in Gale’s Script. Angl. I. 570 and 576) gives the 14th November in one place and the 14th October in another. But it is clear that the latter is the correct date, the letter from the prior of Croyland to Henry VII., announcing the death of the abbot and praying for a congé d’élire, being dated the 14th of October. (Materials illustrative of the Reign of Henry VII. vol. I. s.d. 21 Oct. 1485, Rolls series, No. 60.)

[487] Anthony Wood, I. 462.

[488] The Maire of Bristowe is Kalendar (by Robert Ricart, town-clerk of Bristol, 18 Ed. IV.). Camden Society, 1872, p. 46.

[489] The Bristol calendar says: “This yere Hary, Erle of Richmond landed at Milford Haven.... And sone after there was a sodeyn sikenes in all places of Englond called the sweting syknes, whereof moche people dyed.”

[490] The date of 1506 in Hecker is erroneous, having been taken from the very loose entry in Hall’s chronicle (copied by Grafton), which might equally well belong to the year 1507. Bernard André’s date of 1508 is unmistakeable; his annals go on continuously until the death of Henry VII. in April following.

[491] Bernard André’s Works. Rolls series, No. 10, pp. 126-8.

[492] Hemingway’s History of Chester, I. 142.

[493] Anthony Wood’s History and Antiquities of the Univ. of Oxford. I. 665.

[494] Calendared for the Rolls series by Brewer for the greater part of the reign of Henry VIII. (1509-1530), and after him by Gairdner, at present as far as 1538. The facts given in the next few pages may be taken as coming from the Calendar of State Papers, under their respective dates, unless it is otherwise stated in the notes.

[495] This appears to have been a common direction. In a letter of 12 August, 1517, dated from the Fleet Prison by Thomas Leeke to his brother sir John Leeke (Hist. MSS. Commission Reports, X. pt. 4, p. 447), the writer says he has been sore vexed with the sweat and in danger of life: “If any of you have it, pray you to keep well and close about your breasts and your heart for twenty-four hours and then with God’s grace there is no danger in it: there has been a marvellous great death for so short a time.”

[496] In the letter of 12 August from the Fleet Prison, already quoted (Hist. MSS. Reports, l. c.), it is stated that fifteen are dead in the Cardinal’s house, including Mr Cowper, the steward, Talboys, lord of Kyme, young Wastness, and one Grenell. In my lord of Durham’s house, Dr Port and Dr Fysche are dead, with divers others. Of the Court, my lord Clinton, Mr Morgan, steward to the Queen, and one Mat. Jones, of the King’s wardrobe, were buried at Richmond on Friday last, and divers more of the Court are dead.

[497] The Pitiful Life of King Edward the Fifth: “Considering there is, as physicians say, and as we also find, double the peril in the relapse that was in the first sickness,” p. 230. Camelot edition.

[498] Anthony Wood, Hist. and Antiq., sub anno 1517.

[499] Hemingway’s History of Chester, I. 142.

[500] The letter bears the date of 8 June, which would make the first of the sweat the same as in Tuke’s letter; but Brewer says the date should be the 18th June.

[501] Brewer (Cal. State Papers) reads the letter, “On Tuesday one of the ladies of the chamber, Mlle de Boulan, was infected with the sweat.” But P. Friedmann (Anne Boleyn, Lond. 1884, I. 72) says the correct reading is a fille-de-chambre of Mlle de Boulan; and it is known that Anne Boleyn did not take the sweat until some days after.

[502] In the History of Cork by C. Smith, M.D. (2nd ed., 1774) there is an entry under 1528: “a malignant disorder called the sweating sickness in Cork,” with a reference to “MS. annals.” It has been generally supposed that the sweat did not enter Ireland or Scotland in any of its five outbreaks.

[503] The German writers have assumed that the sweat was prevalent abroad really in the same summer or autumn as in England, explaining the discrepant dates by the difference in the English calendar. But it was only the months of January and February, and March to the 24th, that were counted in the old year in England; the months of June, July, August, etc. in which the sweat occurred, are the same in the English and foreign calendar-years. In the English chronology of the sweat, those months belong quite clearly to the year 1528; and, in the German, Swiss, and Netherlands chronology of the sweat, just as clearly to the year 1529. The sweat on the Continent was a year later than in England.

[504] Gruner’s Scriptores de sudore Anglico superstites was reprinted by Häser, with additional citations and notes, in 1847. Hecker (Der Englische Schweiss, 1834) refers to the work by Gruner, Itinerarium sudoris Anglici ex actis designatum, Jena, 1805, which I have been unable to see. The account of the German invasion in the text is accordingly at second-hand.

[505] A boke or counseill against the Sweate, London, 1552. De Ephemera Britannica, London, 1555.

[506] “This yere the swetinge sycknes raignyd in England, and began first in this towne of Shrowsbery the xxii of Marche, and ran through the realme, and began in London the ixth of July.” Quoted from MS. Chronicle, in Owen and Blakeway’s History of Shrewsbury, p. 345.

[507] Op. cit. 1552, fol. 10. In the Latin work the date at “Salopia” is “17 Kal. May.”

[508] Nichols, Leicestershire, III. 891.

[509] Edrichus, In libros aliquot Pauli Æginetae, &c. London, 1588 (not paged).

[510] “Diary of Edward VI.” in Burnet’s Hist. of Reformation. Stow (Annales) says it began on the 9th July and was most vehement on the 12th.

[511] Calendar of State Papers. Domestic (under the date).

[512] Machyn’s Diary. Camden Society, No. 42, edited by J. Gough Nichols, p. 7. Machyn was an undertaker, and records deaths and funerals.

[513] Machyn.

[514] Ibid. p. 8.

[515] Letter from London, in Harl. MS. No. 353, f. 107, cited by Nichols in notes to Machyn.

[516] Caius, Boke or Counseill, 1552, ff. 10-11.

[517] The Venetian ambassador (Cal. S. P. Venetian, v. 541) says that the sweat was at an end in London in twenty days. He says, also, that children under ten years were not subject “questo influsso.” The excitement caused by the London epidemic is shown in an entry of money in the corporation records of Canterbury: “1551. To one of the King’s servants that brought word how many were dede in the swett.” (Hist. MSS. Commiss. IX. 154 b.)

[518] Edward VI. to Fitzpatrick.

[519] Drake’s Eboracum, p. 128.

[520] Nichols, notes to Machyn, giving a reference to Gent. Magaz. 1825, II. 206.

[521] Fuller (ed. Nichols, p. 183) says, under 1551: “Many in Cambridge died of this sweating sickness, patients mending or ending in twenty-four hours.” The death of the two young noblemen was made an occasion for copies of verses by members of the University.

[522] Strype, Memorials, III. chap. 7 (cited in notes to Machyn).

[523] Lysons, Magna Britannia, VI. 539.

[524] Calendar of State Papers. Venetian, V. 541, under the date of 18 Aug. 1554.

[525] Thomas Cogan, ‘The Haven of Health: chiefly made for the comfort of students, and consequently for all those that have a care of their health, amplified uppon fiue wordes of Hippocrates, written Epid. 6. Labour, Meate, Drinke, Sleepe, Venus.... Hereunto is added a Preseruation from the Pestilence: with a short Censure of the late sicknesse at Oxford.’ London, 1589. New ed. 1596, p. 272.

[526] There is a single reference to a sweat on the Continent in 1551, which may really have been one of those epidemics of typhus (or influenza), with a sweating character, that were observed in 1557-8 and 1580. Brassavolus, writing de morbo Gallico, and illustrating the fact that epidemics were sometimes generated by drought (though mostly by humidity), says that the sweat in England, in former years, came with drought, and that at the time of his writing, the 15th September, 1551, that disease was vexing Flanders,--the season being extremely dry,--and had attacked many thousands. This was first noticed by Häser, Op. cit. III. (1882), p. 332. The reference to Brassavolus is Luisini’s Script. de lue venerea. Lugd. Bat. 1728, f. p. 671.

[527] Increase and Decrease of Diseases. London, 1801, p. 70.

[528] See the references in Gruner, pp. 444, 448.

[529] “The Autonomous Life of the Specific Infections,” in Brit. Med. Journ., 4 August, 1883; “The Origin of Yellow Fever,” in North American Review, Sept. 1884; Illustrations of Unconscious Memory in Disease, London, 1885, Chapter XIII. “Vicarious Infection.”

[530] Polydore Virgil, p. 553. Philip de Comines says “three large ships and a considerable body of land forces.” (Chroniques du Roy Louis XI. Eng. transl. II. 674.)

[531] Mezeray, II. 762. He adds: “the Bretons boast of having also lent aid to this prince.” His first expedition was purely with Bretons, but the second was composed mostly if not altogether of Normans.

[532] This point, which is essential to the theory, was originally stated in an article on “Epidemics” in the Quarterly Review, Jan. 1887, and there claimed as original. The writer on “Sweating Sickness” in the Encycl. Brit. has adopted it as a common-place; it is obvious enough when pointed out, but Hecker had not done so.

[533] The above account is summarised from the chapter in Hirsch, Geog. and Histor. Path. Eng. transl. I. 88.

[534] Darwin, Naturalist’s Voyage round the World, pp. 435-6.

[535] Bernard André’s Annales Henrici VII. Rolls series, No. 10, p. 120. Under a date in January, 1508, he writes: “Quo quidem die nuncius ab urbe incredibilia dictu, hoc est de primis verni fructibus temporis floridoque frumento visis, referebat.” Both Fabyan and the anonymous author of MS. Cotton, Vitellius, A. XVI. (Chronicle of England from 1 Hen. III. to 1 Hen. VIII.) give the winter of 1506-7 as “a wonderful [easy] and soft winter without storms or frost,” but fail to remark on the weather of 1507-8.

[536] Wriothesley’s Chronicle.

[537] Fabyan, Stow.

[538] Stow’s Annals. Hecker, in error, makes out this exceptional season to have been the one immediately preceding the sweat in the summer of 1528.

[539] Cal. State Papers, under the date.

[540] Summary in Hirsch, l. c.

[541] Continuator of Fabyan.

[542] Wriothesley, II. 139.

[543] Drake’s Eboracum, (from the town council records).

[544] Hist. and Antiq. Univ. Oxford, I. 651.

[545] At Cambridge, in October, 1578, two deaths from plague in Queens’ College “moved many to depart.” Cal. Cecil MSS. II. under date 13 October.

[546] Anthony Wood, under the respective years.

[547] With reference to a pestilence at Oxford in 1448, Wood says: “occasioned, as ’twas thought, by the overflowing of waters, and the want of a quick passage for them from the ground. Also by the lying of many scholars in one room or dormitory in almost every Hall, which occasioned nasty air and smells, and consequently diseases.” Op. cit. I. 596.

[548] Materials Illustrative of the Reign of Henry VII. Rolls ser. 60, II. p. 136.

[549] Chronicle of England, sub anno.

[550] Hist. Angl., p. 609 (Basil, 1546).

[551] Stow, Annales.

[552] In Rymer’s Foedera all these vacancies of bishoprics are entered under the year 1501, beginning with the see of Canterbury (Morton’s) on 9th January, 1501.

[553] Plumpton Correspondence, Camden Soc. No. 4, p. 138: Letter of ? 1499, R. Leventhorpe, of Leventhorpe Hall, Yorkshire, to Sir R. Plumpton: “And sithe I hard say that a servant of yours was decesed of the sicknes, which hath bene to your disease, I am right sorry therefore;” he advises fasting, and trusts “ye sal be no more vexed with that sicknes.” In the next letter (cviii) to Sir R. Plumpton from his son:--“Also, sir, I am very sorry that the death seaseth not at Plompton.”

[554] Hardwicke Papers, London, 1778, I. 2 (from Harl. MSS.).

[555] Freeman, Exeter, in “English Towns” series, p. 99.

[556] Annales Henrici VII. Rolls series, p. 88.

[557] The information in the next few pages comes from the Calendar of State Papers, Henry VIII., Domestic, unless otherwise referred to in the notes.

[558] Chronicle of the Grey Friars, Camden Society, No. liii. 1852, p. 29. Stow puts the mortality under the year 1513.

[559] Letter from the Fleet prison, assigned to 1517. Hist. MSS. Com. X. pt. 4. p. 447.

[560] Phillips, History of Shrewsbury, p. 17.

[561] Privy Purse of Henry VIII., p. 79.

[562] The reference on p. 290 (note 2) to “no parish in London free,” under the date of 25 October, 1517, may imply that bills of mortality had been kept in that epidemic, which was certainly an occasion when Henry VIII. interposed in other ways to check the progress of plague.

[563] Lately purchased for the Egerton Collection. No. 2603, fol. 4.

[564] There was, however, an English translation of a small foreign essay on the plague, of unacknowledged authorship, published at London in 1534 by Thomas Paynel, canon of Merton, a literary hack of the time.

[565] In the Record Office. State Papers, Henry VIII., No. 4633. It has been erroneously calendared by Brewer as a bill of mortality of the sweating sickness in 1528.

[566] The Maire of Bristowe, his Kalendar. Camden Society, 1872, p. 53.

[567] The plague is said to have been in Exeter in 1535 (Freeman, Exeter, in English Towns Series).

[568] There is a copy in the Lambeth Library, No. 432.

[569] Owen and Blakeway, I. 311.

[570] Continuator of Fabyan.

[571] Cussan’s History of Hertfordshire.

[572] A London Chronicle of Hen. VII. and Hen. VIII. Camden Miscellany, 1859.

[573] Acts of the Privy Council. New series, 1542-1547, p. 136.

[574] Stow’s Annales.

[575] Cal. Cecil MSS., I. 15.

[576] Guildhall Records (Extracts by Furnivall in Appendix to Vicary’s Anatomy. Early English Text Society).

[577] Brand’s History of Newcastle.

[578] Hasted’s History of Canterbury, p. 130 (from parish registers).

[579] Anthony Wood, op. cit. II. 74. At Banbury probably about the same year. Beesley’s History of Banbury (from Brasbridge).

[580] Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, I. 5.

[581] Acts of the Privy Council. New series, 1542-1547, 28 April, 1546, p. 397.

[582] Ibid., Nov. 13, 1546, p. 552.

[583] Camden’s Britannia, ed. Gough, I. 262.

[584] Ibid. II. 265.

[585] Calendar of State Papers. Domestic series, Vol. X.

[586] Notes and Queries, 6th series, III. 477.

[587] Nichols, Leicestershire, III. 891 (295 deaths from plague &c. 1555-59.)

[588] Ormerod’s Cheshire, I. under 1558, with a reference to “Harl. MSS.” The Harleian MSS. relating to Chester fill many pages of the catalogue.

[589] Calendar of State Papers, Eliz. I. p. 122.

[590] Three Fifteenth Century Chronicles. Camden Society, ed. Gairdner, 1880, pp. 123, 144.

[591] Letter from London to the Earl of Shrewsbury, Hist. MSS. Com. VI. 455, a.

[592] Without date, but probably 1564. Watt conjectures 1556, but the book contains references to the fever-epidemic of 1558, and, as above, to the plague of 1563.

[593] Munk, Roll of the College of Physicians, I. pp. 32, 63.

[594] This and other information immediately following are from Cal. State Papers. Foreign series.

[595] Calendar of Cecil MSS., under the dates.

[596] Glover’s Hist. of Derbyshire (21 plague deaths in St Michael’s register, May-Aug. 1563).

[597] Nichols; Kelly, in Trans. Hist. Soc. VI. 395.

[598] Harwood’s Hist. of Lichfield, p. 304.

[599] Hasted’s Hist. of Canterbury, p. 130 (parish registers).

[600] Notes and Queries, 2nd series, XI. 69.

[601] ‘How and whether a Christen man ought to flye the horrible plage of the Pestilence. A sermon out of the Psalme “Qui habitat in adjutorio altissimi,” by Andrewe Osiander. Translated out of Hye Almayn into Englishe, 1537.’ Copy in the British Museum. The initials M.C. are taken to be those of Miles Coverdale.

[602] Soranzo to the Senate of Venice. Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, V. 541 (18 Aug. 1554).

[603] Cal. State Papers, Henry VIII. Domestic.

[604] From Abstract of several orders relating to the Plague. MS. Addit. (Brit. Museum), No. 4376. Probably the originals of these abstracts are among the Guildhall records. I quote from the most accessible source.

[605] Extracts from the Guildhall Records, by Furnivall, in Appendix to Vicary’s Anatomy of the Body of Man. Early English Text Society.

[606] Cal. State Papers, Venetian, VII. 649.

[607] Abstract, &c. in Brit. Mus. MSS., as above.

[608] The following is the case by which he supports the recommendation to kill dogs in plague-time: “Not many years since, I knew a glover in Oxford who with his family, to the number of ten or eleven persons, died of the plague, which was said to be brought into the house by a dogge skinne that his wife bought when the disease was in the Citie” (Poor Man’s Jewel, Chapter VIII. London, 1578).

[609] Transcripts from the MS. Archives, ed. Bayley, 1856.

[610] News-letter to the Earl of Shrewsbury, Hist. MSS. Commis. VI. 455.

[611] Machyn’s Diary, ed. J. Gough Nichols. Camden Soc., No. 42, p. 310.

[612] Ibid. p. 396 (note by Nichols); and Guildhall Records, in Furnivall, l. c.

[613] Abstract, &c. as above.

[614] Stow’s Memoranda (Lambeth MS.), Camden Soc., 1880, p. 123.

[615] Abstract, &c. as above.

[616] Stow, ibid.

[617] Record Office. State Papers, Elizabeth, vol. XLVIII., No. 70.

[618] Endorsed “An abstract of such orders as have been heretofore for the preventing and decreasing of the plague in and about London.”

[619] The searchers are mentioned at Shrewsbury as early as 1539 (Phillips).

[620] Survey of London, ed. cit. p. 119.

[621] Holinshed, III. p. 1260.

[622] John Bell, London’s Remembrancer. Lond. 1665.

[623] Liber Albus Londinensis. Rolls series, ed. Riley. The following instances occur in the report of the commissioners of 1343: P. 446: A water-gate “obturatur ratione unius gutturi exeuntis de una latrina,” etc. P. 449: the Ebbegate obstructed by certain persons named, “qui fecerunt in eadem venella latrinas supra dentes, quarum putredo cadit supra capita hominum transeuntium.” Same page: Wendegoslane “obturatur per fimos et garderobas.” Same page: Rethersgate obstructed “per fimos et alia hujusmodi foetida.” Same page: Dowgate. Two householders named “in eisdem aedificiis diversas latrinas fecerunt, pendentes ultra vicum ejusdem venellae; quarum putredines cadunt supra homines per eandem venellam transeuntes.” P. 450: at Queenhithe a “communis latrina.” P. 451: at Saltwharf the way to the river obstructed “pulvere et aliis putredinibus in eadem projiciendis.” P. 452: Lekynggeslane has two latrinae and is impassable owing to want of paving. Same page: Another venel obstructed by the Earl Marshall; three latrinae in it. In a perambulation of the ground outside the walls, 26 Ed. III. (1552), the following encroachments are noted among others: Outside Ludgate, one has erected a shed (camera) 16 ft. × 12¾ ft., and made there “unum profundum puteum et quadratum pro latrina”--a deep well and a latrine-pit together. Also outside Ludgate, William of Wircestre has a house there and two shelters for beasts, and a latrine, and part of the said house is 14 ft. × 7½ ft.

[624] Statutes of the Realm, 17 Ric. II.

[625] Riley, op. cit., p. 614.

[626] Stow’s Survey.

[627] Art. “Shakespeare,” Encycl. Britan.

[628] Wodderspoon’s Memorials of Ipswich, p. 285, p. 259.

[629] “Now first printed.” Exeter, 1765, p. 181.

[630] Poulett Scrope, op. cit. p. 333.

[631] D. Erasmi Epistolar. lib. XXX. London, 1642, Lib. xxii. Epist. 12 (without date).

[632] Richard of Devizes. Eng. Hist. Soc. p. 60: “Apud Bristolliam nemo est qui non sit vel fuerit saponarius; et omnis Francus saponarios amat ut stercorarios.”

[633] William Harrison’s Description of England (in Holinshed) gives proof enough that the filthy floors described by Erasmus had no existence two generations later, even among the poorer classes.

[634] The correspondence is in Remembrancia, under the head of “Plague.”

[635] From a memorandum of Lord Burghley’s, dated Hertford Castle, 21 Nov. 1582, it appears that a survey had shown 577 beds available for strangers in one parish of Hertford, and 451 in another, “so that there are lying two a bed above 2000 people.” Cal. State Papers. Domestic series, Elizabeth 1581-90, p. 75.

[636] Stow’s Survey.

[637] Remembrancia, p. 332.

[638] Remembrancia.

[639] Baddeley, Parish of St Giles, Cripplegate. Lond. 1888.

[640] Ibid., under date August, 1672, p. 193.

[641] Broadsheets in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries. Cited by W. Rendle, F.R.C.S., Old Southwark and its People. London, 1878, p. 198. Mr Rendle, in one place, seems to imply disapproval of this mode of coffinless burial; but in another (p. 225, note) he says it was “a sort of forecast of Mr Seymour Haden’s wise proposals.” His first thoughts appear to have been the best.

[642] Sermon on Third Sunday in Advent, 1552.

[643] Stow’s Memoranda. Camden Society, N. S. XXVIII., 1880, p. 125.

[644] Stow, Annales, p. 662.

[645] Cal. State Papers.

[646] Cat. Cecil MSS.

[647] On July 15, 1570, the Duke of Norfolk craved his release from the Tower, on account of the great risk to his bodily health and the infection of the pestilence in that part of the city. (Calendar of Cecil MSS.)

[648] Report Hist. MSS. Commis.

[649] Anthony Wood, op. cit.

[650] Remembrancia, p. 38.

[651] Turnor’s History of Hertford, pp. 236, 268.

[652] The Loseley Manuscripts, ed. Kempe. London, 1836, p. 280.

[653] Holinshed, III. p. 1240.

[654] Letter to Cecil, Cal. Cecil MSS., II. 106 (under the year 1575).

[655] Corporation records, in Notes and Queries, 6th series, II. 524.

[656] Notes and Queries, 6th series, II. 390.

[657] Ormerod’s Hist. of Cheshire, I. Harl. MS. 2177 (a death from plague, 3 Nov. 1574).

[658] Cal. Cecil MSS., II. 107:--For the week ending 9 September, 1575, in St Margaret’s, 25 deaths (of plague 13), St Martin’s 3 of plague, Savoy, none, St Clement’s 3 (2 of plague).

[659] Cecil to Earl of Lincoln. Ibid. 10 September, 1575.

[660] The Maire of Bristowe, is Kalendar. Camden Soc. 1872, p. 59.

[661] Wells corporation MSS., Hist. MSS. Com., I. 107.

[662] Owen and Blakeway.

[663] Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1591-94, p. 269.

[664] Tickell’s Hist. of Kingston upon Hull, 1798.

[665] Records of the Burgh of Kirkcudbright. Hist. MSS. Commiss., IV. 539.

[666] Remembrancia, p. 333 (27 Nov. and 6 Dec. 1582).

[667] By permission of the Marquis of Salisbury. The contents of this small volume have not been included in the published Calendar of the Cecil MSS.

[668] ‘A sermon preached at Powles Crosse on Sunday, the third of November, 1577, in the time of the Plague’ by T. W. London, 1578 (February 20).

[669] Strype’s ed. of Stow’s Survey, Bk. IV. p. 34. Nonsuch was near Epsom.

[670] Remembrancia of the City of London, p. 331.

[671] Calendar of Cecil MSS., Part II. under the dates.

[672] Turnor’s Hist. of Hertford, p. 236.

[673] Cal. Cecil MSS.

[674] Blomefield, vol. III. (“Norwich,” under the date).

[675] Ibid. “Yarmouth.”

[676] Morant’s Hist, of Essex, I. 50.

[677] Hist. MSS. Commission, IX. 277 b.

[678] Notes and Queries, 6th series, II. 524.

[679] Cal. State Papers.

[680] Nichols, Hist. of Leicestershire.

[681] Cal. S. P.

[682] Cal. State Papers. Eliz. 1581-90 (Lemon), pp. 45, 70.

[683] Graunt’s Reflections on Bills of Mortality. 3rd ed., Lond. 1665, p. 135.

[684] Hist. MSS. Com.

[685] Saunders, Hist. of Boston, p. 228.

[686] Duke of Rutland’s MSS. Hist. MSS. Com., May 24, 1586.

[687] Saunders, l. c.

[688] Notes and Queries, 2nd series, XI. 497.

[689] Blomefield’s Norfolk.

[690] Ibid. and Gawdy MSS. Hist. MSS. Com.

[691] Glover’s Hist. of Derby, p. 613.

[692] Archaeologia, VI. 80.

[693] Townsend’s Hist. of Leominster, p. 59.

[694] Sykes, Local Records of Northumberland and Durham, p. 80.

[695] Cal. S. P., Domestic, Eliz. ed. Lemon.

[696] Corporation MSS. of Plymouth. Hist. MSS. Com. X. pt. 4, p. 539.

[697] Notes and Queries, 6th series, III. 477.

[698] Dunsford’s Historical Memoirs of Tiverton, p. 38.

[699] Bill of Mortality for the week ending October 20, 1603. Broadside in Guildhall Library, with summary, on margin, of the mortalities in 1563 and 1592-93.

[700] Cal. State Papers, 1591-94, p. 312.

[701] Ibid. p. 340.

[702] Ibid. 1595-97, p. 45, May 26, 1595:

“Arguments in proof of the advantages to be derived by the City of London from stopping up the town ditch:--It is the origin of infection, and the only noisome place in the city. In the last great plague, more died about there than in three parishes besides; these fields are the chiefest walks for recreation of the cityzens, and though the ditch were cast every second year, yet the water coming from the kennel and slaughter-houses will be very contagious. It is no material defence for the city, and half the ditch has been stopped these many years.”

[703] London’s Remembrancer, by John Bell, Clerk of the Company of Parish Clerks. London, 1665. He says: “I shall begin with the year 1593, being the first year in which any account of the christenings and burials was kept. I cannot find any record of more antiquity than that of this year in the Company of Parish Clerks Hall.” However we can now point to original weekly bills of mortality of 1532 and 1535, to abstracts of weekly plague-burials in 1563-66, to the figures from one weekly bill of a series in 1574, and to abstracts of 1578-83.

[704] The total of 25,886 was copied, probably from the broadside of 1603, into an anonymous essay of 1665, called Reflections on the Bills of Mortality, the total of plague alone being given as 11,503, evidently by a misprint for 15,003. At the same time a table was given, professing to be of the weekly deaths from all causes, in one column, and from plague in another, from March 13 to December 18, 1593. The column of plague-deaths sums up to 11,110, but the total of 11,503 (which originated in a misprint) is printed at the foot of the column as if that were the summation. The column of deaths from all causes is made to sum up to 25,886, the actual sum being 25,817. But the weekly mortalities in it for those weeks that had little plague are an absurdity for 1593. Whatever the source of this table, it is not genuine for 1593, and was disclaimed by Bell, the clerk of Parish Clerks’ Hall, whose essay was written in 1665 to correct that and other errors about former plagues in London.

[705] Cal. State Papers. Addenda. Elizabeth.

[706] Cussan’s Hist. of Hertfordshire.

[707] Turner’s Hist. of Hertford, p. 268.

[708] Glover’s Hist. of Derby, p. 613.

[709] Harwood’s Hist. of Lichfield, p. 304.

[710] Nichols, Leicestershire (Town records of Leicester); Kelly, in Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc. VI. (1877), p. 391 (at least 20 houses shut up).

[711] Owen and Blakeway.

[712] Parish registers in Townsend’s Leominster, p. 59.

[713] Corporation MSS. Canterbury, in 9th Report of Hist. MSS. Commission, pp. 159 a, 160 a, b. “This plague continued from the end of September to the month of January.”

[714] Parish Register of Penrith: “A sore plage was in London, Nottinghome, Derbie and Lincolne in the year 1593” (Jefferson’s Cumberland, I. 19).

[715] Cal. Stale Papers. Addenda. Elizabeth.

[716] Syer’s Memorials of Bristol. The excessive mortality at Leominster (41 burials in September, 1597) may have been an effect of the famine. (Townsend’s History, p. 59.)

[717] Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1597, § 10, p. 347.

[718] Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1597, p. 501.

[719] Sykes, Local Records, p. 82.

[720] Clarkson’s Hist. of Richmond.

[721] Camden’s Britannia, p. 175.

[722] Jefferson’s Cumberland, I. 273. But these are the same figures as for Penrith.

[723] Ibid. I. 391.

[724] Parish register of Penrith, in Jefferson, l. c.

[725] Notes and Queries. 6th series, II. 524.

[726] Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, X. 594. Edin. 1887.

[727] Burgh Records of Aberdeen (Spalding Club), I. 66.

[728] Exchequer Rolls Scot., XI. p. lxviii.

[729] Ibid.

[730] Burgh Records, pp. 88, 90, 130, 165.

[731] Register of the Privy Council, Scotland, I. 5.

[732] Cal. S. P. Scot. (Thorpe).

[733] Burgh Records, pp. 222, 231, 244, 246.

[734] Cal. S. P. Scot. 18 Nov. 1548. The Rhinegrave recovered, and came to Edinburgh on the 26th.

[735] Reg. P. C. Scot. I. 279-81.

[736] Ibid. I. 281-2.

[737] Ane Breve Description of the Pest, Edin. 1568. Reprinted, for the Bannatyne Club, by James Skene of Rubislaw. Edin. 1840.

[738] Diurnall of Occurrences, in Chambers.

[739] Cited by R. Chambers (Domestic Annals of Scotland, I.) from M. Napier’s notes to the Spottiswoode Club edition of Spottiswoode’s History.

[740] Op. cit. I. 53.

[741] Burgh Records of Canongate. Maitland Club, Miscellany, II. 313 (in Chambers).

[742] Chambers, I. 94.

[743] Burgh Records of Glasgow, 1573-1581. Maitland Club, p. 27.

[744] Reg. P. C. Scot., II. 415.

[745] Ibid. p. 419.

[746] Hist. MSS. Com., IV. 539.

[747] Reg. Scots P. C., III. 229.

[748] Ibid.

[749] Ibid. III. 679.

[750] Reg. Scots P. C. s. d.

[751] Chronicle of Perth, Bannatyne Club, p. 4, and Chambers, I. 154.

[752] Reg. Scots P. C., III. 727.

[753] Calderwood’s Hist. of Kirk of Scotland, IV. 366: “It was first known to be in Simon Mercerbank’s house.” Birell’s Diary (1532-1605) in Chambers, I. 157.

[754] Scots P. C., III. 746.

[755] Ibid. V. 56.

[756] Moysie, in Chambers, I. 157.

[757] The Diary of Mr James Melville, 1556-1601. Bannatyne Club. Edin. 1829, p. 153.

[758] Marioreybank’s Annals, in Chambers.

[759] Melville’s Diary, p. 162.

[760] Melville, p. 173; Calderwood, cited by Chambers; Cal. Cecil Papers, III. 298, 310.

[761] Cal. Cecil Papers, III. 321.

[762] Memorabilia of Glasgow, in Chambers.

[763] Scots Privy Council.

[764] Birell, in Chambers.

[765] Scots P. C.

[766] Calderwood, V. 655.

[767] Two men sent to buy nolt in Galloway for the needs of the borough of Dumfries were stopped, with 38 head of cattle, by the provost and others of Wigton, at the Water of Crie, the cattle being impounded at Wigton for eight days so that they became lean. A hundred merks compensation was demanded. Scots Privy Council, V.

[768] Scots P. C., VI. 164.

[769] Aberdeen Kirk Session Records, Spalding Club, 1846, Calderwood (cited by Chambers, I. 319) says that the year 1600 was one of famine, and that there was also a great death of young children, six or seven being buried in Edinburgh in a day.

[770] Scots Privy Council, VI. under the respective dates.

[771] Burgh Records.

[772] Smith’s Cork, II. 34.

[773] Cal. State Papers. Domestic.

[774] Smith’s Cork, on the authority of MS. annals.

[775] Annals of Loch Cé. Rolls ed., II. 289.

[776] Brabazon to T. Cromwell. Cal. State Papers. Irish.

[777] Cal. State Papers. Irish, 1566-7.

[778] State Papers (Record Office), Irish, 1567, No. 54. Letter from Lord Treasurer Winchester and Ed. Baeshe, to the Lord Deputy. Mr Froude’s summary of it is that “the clammy vapour had stolen into their lungs and poisoned them,” and again, “the reeking vapour of the charnel house.” I have had difficulty in deciphering the letter, but I can make out “being a graveyard where all their buriall,” etc.

[779] Cal. State Papers. Irish.

[780] Thady Dowling, p. 41.

[781] Cal. State Papers. Domestic. Sept. 1, 1575.

[782] Stubbs, in his edition of Roger of Howden (Rolls series, No. 51, II. 249), on the evidence of the Pipe Roll of 1166.

[783] Memorials of London in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, ed. Riley.

[784] Stow’s Survey of London, pop. ed. (1890), p. 66.

[785] Hall’s Chronicle, ed. of 1809, p. 632.

[786] This account of the Black Assizes at Oxford in 1577 was brought to light, like so many other things from the register of Merton, first by Anthony Wood in his Hist. and Antiq. of the Univ. of Oxford (ed. Gutch, II. 189). It was copied in full, from the original Latin text, in 1758, by John Ward, LL.D., and sent to the Royal Society, in whose Phil. Trans. (vol. L. p. 699) it is printed, with remarks, by Tho. Birch, D.D., Sec. R. S.

[787] Howard, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales. 3rd ed., Warrington, 1784, p. 342.

[788] Hist, and Antiq. Univ. Oxford, ed. Gutch, II. 188-192.

[789] Georgius Edrichus, ‘In Libros aliquot pauli Aeginetae Hypomnemata quaedam.’ Londini apud Tomam East 1588 (without pagination).

[790] The passage which Anthony Wood thought to relate to the gaol fever at Oxford in 1577 is the following, under the heading “De morbis publicé grassantibus:” “Publice grassari morbos vidimus Oxonii, et una nocte simul plus sexaginta agrotasse (sic) novimus, et in vicinis postridie pagis, eo forte aëre delato, fere centum. Quod etiam eodem tempore, regnante tum Edwardo sexto, Cantabrigiae evenit, cum duo simul liberi ducis inclyti Suffolchiae ibi morerentur. Nec tamen Oxonienses ulli fere interierunt, quod coeli constitutio apud nos quam ibi salubrior sit. Sed iis ita succurrendum morbis putamus, ut Brittanico sudore (sic enim vocant) opitulari solemus.”

[791] Anthony Wood, as we have seen in the text, put together his version of the fever of 1577 from the Merton College register, from Stow’s Annals, and from Ethredge’s reference to the sweat of 1551. In 1758, John Ward, LL.D., copied the passage in the Merton register and sent it to the Royal Society; whose secretary, the Rev. Dr Thomas Birch, appended to it in the Philosophical Transactions some annotations--“copying,” as Carlyle said of him with reference to some Cromwell matter, “from Wood’s Athenae; and has committed--as who does not?--several errors,” his annotations being “sedulous but ineffectual”--to the extent of fixing on the original correct narrative an accretion of mistakes (600 for 60, sweating sickness for gaol fever, &c.). Trusting to the respectable Birch, Bancroft in his Essay on the Yellow Fever, with observations concerning febrile contagion &c. (Lond., 1811) has based a theory that the Oxford epidemic was not typhus at all. Murchison (Continued Fevers of Great Britain, 2nd ed. 1873, p. 103) has also been misled, and has found himself therefore at a disadvantage in answering Bancroft’s empty verbalisms about the invariable reproduction of typhus from some previous case. F. C. Webb, in a paper “An Historical Account of the Gaol Fever,” Trans. Epidem. Soc. for 1857, p. 63, has not used the Oxford case for any argumentative purpose, but he has, like the others, given the facts erroneously. He gives no particulars of the Exeter Black Assize.

[792] Howard, On Lazarettos in Europe, &c. Warrington, 1789, p. 231: “But as I have found, in some prisons abroad, cells and dungeons as offensive and dirty as any I have observed in this country, where however the distemper was unknown, I am obliged to look out for some additional cause of its production. I am of opinion that the sudden change of diet and lodging so affects the spirits of new convicts that the general causes of putrid fever exert an immediate effect upon them. Hence it is common to see them sicken and die in a short time with very little apparent illness.” The last words are important.

[793] Sylva Sylvarum, or A Natural History. In ten centuries. Cent. 10, §§ 914-15. Spedding’s ed. II. 646.

[794] Holinshed’s Chronicle. New edition by Hoker, London, 1587, pp. 1547-8.

[795] These statements by Hoker, chamberlain of Exeter, are sufficiently circumstantial; but they do not quite suit the theory of a writer in the Dict. Nat. Biog., under “Drake, Sir Bernard” that the ship was “a great Portugal ship,” called the Lion of Viana, with an English master, taken by Bernard Drake in Brittany. No doubt such a capture is stated in the Cal. State Papers, 1585, p. 295 (the reference given), Sir W. Raleigh’s ship the “Jobe” being included in the same petition; but nothing is said of Dartmouth as the port to which the two vessels were brought, or of Exeter as the place where their captains were imprisoned. It is of importance for the theory of the Exeter gaol fever to know whether Drake’s prisoners were Portuguese fishermen or not, and Hoker may be supposed to have known.

[796] The author of the misadventure. He succeeded in getting home to Crediton, where he died on the 12th April, four weeks after the Assizes began.

[797] Sir George Nicholls, in his History of the English Poor Law, 1854, I. 113, threw out the suggestion that the decay was in the old walled towns, and that it was compensated by the rise of populations on less hampered sites. This theory has been adopted by some later writers.

[798] Calendar of State Papers. Domestic, Hen. VIII.

[799] Becon’s Works, 3 vols. II. fol. 15-16.

[800] Continuation of Fabyan’s Chronicle.

[801] Greyfriars Chronicle, Camden Soc. LIII., 1852. Preface by J. G. Nichols, xxiv.

[802] Strype’s ed. of Stow’s Survey of London.

[803] In the Rolls of the Middlesex Sessions (Middlesex Record Society), there occur numerous entries of inquests on deaths in the gaol of Newgate from the 25th year of Elizabeth: a few of these are from plague; but by far the larger number are from “the pining sickness,” a malady which sometimes cut off several prisoners in the same few days and after a brief illness. In one of these epidemics (Dec. 1586-Feb. 1587), a single case is called “pestilent fever,” the other seven being “pining sickness.” Next year, June 19, there is a case of bloody flux, and, on June 24, a case of “pining sickness.” The other periods when the disease so named was epidemic in Newgate were Feb.-May, 1595, June and July, 1597, March, 1598, and March-April, 1602. The pining sickness was probably a generic term, and may have included chronic disease; there is a solitary case entered as ailing for as long a period as eight months, the usual duration of the sickness being one, two, or three days up to three or four weeks.

This place will serve to notice the strange teaching about “parish infection” which has received currency among the writers of good repute as authorities. Guy (Public Health, Lectures, 1870, I. 23) says the gaol distemper was an old offender known as the sickness of the house: “I think I recognize it in the London Bills from 1606 to 1665 as the Parish Infection.” The column of figures in the London Bills which has been taken to show the weekly prevalence of a disease, otherwise unheard of, “parish infection,” really shows the number of “parishes infected.” The earlier bills showed, in the corresponding column, the number of parishes clear (“parish.clere” or “paroch.clere”). By adding up the number of parishes infected in each of the 52 weeks of a bad plague-year, a total of some thousands is got, and that total has been taken to be the annual mortality from “parish infection”--a pure myth. The original author of this singular mistake appears to have been Marshall, in his Mortality of the Metropolis, London, 1832, p. 67. Of the “parish infection,” he says: “The disease below is specified by Mr Bell in his Remembrancer [1665]; it is probably the same as exhibited under the name of spotted fever.” What Bell “specifies” is not another disease, but the number of parishes in the City and suburbs infected with the plague in each week of the year.

[804] Annales Monastici, Rolls series, No. 19. Chronicle by an unknown author (St Albans) temp. Hen. VI., 1422-31:--“Quaedam infirmitas reumigata invasit totum populum, quae mure dicitur: et sic senes cum junioribus inficiebat quod magnum numerum ad funus letale deducebat.”

In the Report of the Irish Local Government Board, Medical Department, 1890, influenza is identified under the name “slaedan,” or prostration, which was epidemic in Ireland in 1326 or 1328, the same epidemic being called “murre” in the Annals of Clonmacnoise. The use of the word “mure” in the St Albans Chronicle is just a century later. Murrain (or morena in Latin chronicles) is probably the modern survival of “mure” or “murre.”

[805] I take this summary from Short (Chronology, etc. I. 204), who omits his authority, probably the foreign writers to whom he is usually indebted in the earlier period. The first part of Theophilus Thompson’s Annals of Influenza (Sydenham Society) is little else than extracts from Short, and therefore of foreign origin.

[806] Cal. State Papers. Domestic, sub dato.

[807] Thus in the continuation of Fabyan’s Chronicle under the year 1512, the Marquis of Dorset, sent into Spain with 10,000 men, is said to have “returned in winter by reason of the flix (dysentery).” And in Hall’s Chronicle (ed. of 1807, p. 523), we have particulars of the very serious sickness in his army in Biscay; owing to their diet being largely of garlic and fruits, and their drink being hot wines in hot weather, “there fell sick 3000 of the flix, and thereof died 1800 men.”

[808] Continuator of Fabyan’s Chronicle, sub anno. There is an almost identical entry in A London Chronicle of Henry VII. and Henry VIII. (Camden Miscellany, vol. V. 1859), but under the year 1539, in a hot and dry summer. The most discrepant date and designation of the epidemic of those years are those given in Hardiman’s History of Galway (p. 40): “This charitable institution [St Bridget’s Hospital] was fortunately completed in the year 1543, when the sweating sickness broke out, and raged with great violence, destroying multitudes of the natives, and particularly the tradesmen of the town.”

[809] The term “hot ague” occurs as early as 1518, in a letter of 18 July (Cal. State Papers).

[810] Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England during the reigns of the Tudors (1457-1559). Camden Society, II. 139.

Anthony Wood also enters for Oxford, under 1557, “A pestilential disease to the settling of some and the driving away of many; the causes of which proceeding from the eating of green fruit, the Commissary commanded that none should be sold in the market or elsewhere in Oxford.”

[811] Fabyan’s Chronicle, p. 711.

[812] Stow’s Annales, ed. Howse, p. 631. Speed also has a paragraph, unusual with him, on the state of health in the year of Queen Mary’s death (1658), in which the mortality among the clergy is specially mentioned.

[813] Extracts from Harrison’s MS. Chronologie by Furnivall, in Appendix to Elizabethan England. Camelot series, 1890, p. 267. His famine prices, and the enormous fall of them after harvest, are the same as given by Stow.

[814] State Papers, Record Office.

[815] John Jones, M.D. The Dyall of Ague, London, 1564?

[816] Calendar of State Papers. Foreign, II. 1558, p. 398.

[817] Calendar of State Papers. Foreign, II. 1558, p. 400.

[818] New Observations, Natural, Moral, Civil, Political and Medical, on City, Town and Country Bills of Mortality. By Thomas Short, M.D., London, 1750.

[819] 2 vols. London, 1749.

[820] Calendar of Cecil MSS., II. 525.

[821] Phil. Trans. XVIII. 105

[822] Graunt, Reflections on the Bills of Mortality, 3rd ed. 1665.

[823] Opera, ed. Greenhill, p. 160.

[824] Ibid. p. 169.

[825] Giraldus Cambrensis, Rolls series, No. 21, vol. V. Topogr. Hiberniae, p. 67:--“Advenarum, tamen, una his fere est passio et unica vexatio. Ob humida namque nutrimenta, immoderatum ventris fluxum vix in primis ullus evadit.” Flux among the English troops in Ireland in 1172 is mentioned by Radulphus de Diceto, Imag. Histor. I. 348.

[826] Works of James I., p. 301.

[827] Sloane MS. (Brit. Mus.) No. 389, folios 147-153. It bears no date, but is marked in the catalogue “xv and xvi cent.,” as if belonging either to the end of the fifteenth century or the beginning of the sixteenth.

[828] Hensler, who reproduced in 1783 (Geschichte der Lustseuche, App. p. 53) these and other particulars from one of the two remaining copies of Pinctor’s work (in the possession of Professor Cotunni of Naples), collated with the other copy in the Garelli library at Vienna, finds in the concluding dedication of the book to Alexander Borgia a sinister meaning, as if the supreme pontiff had been himself a victim of the grande maladie à la mode; it is easier, he says, to extricate the sense than the syntax of the passage.

[829] There was another edition in 1539, and several more following. Paynel also added a short section, “A Remedy for the Frenche pockes,” to his book entitled, A Moche Profitable Treatise against the Pestilence. Translated into English by Thomas Paynel, chanon of Martin [Merton] Abbey, London, 1534.

[830] _Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1398-1570._ Edited for the Spalding Club [by Dr John Stuart], vol. I. 1844, p. 425.

[831] Phil. Trans., vol. 42 (1743), p. 420: “Part of a Letter from Mr Macky, professor of History, to Mr Mac Laurin, professor of Mathematics in the University of Edinburgh, and by him communicated to the President of the Royal Society; being an Extract from the Books of the Town Council of Edinburgh, relating to a Disease there, supposed to be Venereal, in the year 1497.”

[832] Simpson (l. c.) quotes the Proclamation from the original minute-book, almost in the above spelling; it is in Vol. I. of the Town Council Records, fol. 33-34, and is entitled in the rubric “Ane Grangore Act.”

[833] “On Syphilis in Scotland in the Fifteenth Century,” Trans. Epidem. Soc. N. S. 1. (1862), p. 149. Two of the entries are published in the Criminal Trials of Scotland, 1. 117; the others were collected for Simpson by Mr Joseph Robertson from the High-Treasurer’s Accounts in the Register House, Edinburgh. These accounts have since been published in the Rolls series (vol. I. 356, 361, 378 (bis), 386).

[834] Op. cit. I. 437.

[835] Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York. Edited by Nicolas, London, 1830, p. 104.

[836] Stow’s Survey of London, “Bridge Ward Without.” He ascribes these informations to “Robert Fabian,” both in the text and in the margin. The statement is certainly not made in Fabyan’s Chronicle of England under the year 1506, or other year of the decade, nor is it indexed as occurring in some earlier connexion.

[837] Bernard André’s Works. Rolls series, No. 10.

[838] Erasmi Epistolae, folio. London, 1642, p. 1789 e.

[839] Anthony Wood, Hist. Univ. Oxford, ed. Gutch, I. 514. Freind (Hist. of Physic, Pt. II. p. 345) says that the French pox is mentioned in the will of Colet, dean of St Paul’s, 1518.

[840] The Supplication of Beggers compyled by Symon Fyshe. Anno MCCCCCXXIIII. Lond. 1546.

[841] Parliamentary History, I. 494.

[842] Bullein’s Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence, 1564. Early English Text Society, Extra series, 1888, p. 122.

[843] Bullein’s Bulwarke of Defence against all Sicknes, Sornes, and Woundes, etc., 1562, foll. 2, 68.

[844] Certain Works of Chirurgerie newly compiled and published by T. Gale. London, 1563.

[845] Dyall of Agues, cap. VIII. “Of the Pestilential fever, or plage, or boche.”

[846] William Clowes, A short and profitable Treatise touching the cure of the disease called (Morbus Gallicus) by unctions, London, 1579.

[847] ‘A Prooved Practice for all young Chirurgeons, concerning burning with gunpowder, and woundes made with Gunshot, Sword, Halbard, Pike, Launce or such other. Hereto is adjoyned a Treatise of the French or Spanish Pocks, written by John Almenar, a Spanish Phisician. Also a commodious collection of Aphorismes, both English and Latine, taken out of an old written coppy. Published for the benefit of his country by William Clowes, Maister in Chirurgery.’ New ed., 1591.

[848] A most excellent and compendious Method, etc. London, 1588.

[849] Read uses, among other terms, one that has played a great part in the modern pathology of syphilis. Among the points to be noticed are,--“if recent or old, if the ulcers or whelks be many, whether pustulous matter or gummie substance appear.”

[850] John Banister, ‘A needefull new and necessarie treatise of Chyrurgerie, briefly comprehending the generall and particular curation of ulcers ... drawen forth of sundrie worthy writers.... Hereunto is annexed certaine experimentes of mine owne invention.’ London, 1575.

[851] Peter Lowe, An easie, certaine and perfect method to cure and prevent the Spanish sicknes, Lond. 1596. For an account of the book see The Life and Works of Maister Peter Lowe. By James Finlayson, M.D. Glasgow, 1889.

[852] A Treatise concerning the plague and the pox, discovering as well the means how to preserve from the danger of these infectious contagions, or how to cure those which are infected with either of them. London, 1652.

[853] Burnet (History of his own Time, I. 395-6, Oxford, 1823) retails a good deal of unsavoury gossip concerning the disease in noble and princely personages after the Restoration.

[854] Natural and Political Observations upon the Bills of Mortality. By Captain John Graunt, F.R.S. Preface dated from Birchin Lane, January, 1662.

[855] The origin of syphilis from leprosy has been maintained in a modern work by Friedr. Alex. Simon, Kritische Geschichte des Ursprungs, der Pathologie und Behandlung der Syphilis, Tochter und widerum Mutter des Aussatzes. Hamburg, 1857-8.

[856] Hirsch, Geographical and Historical Pathology (Translated), II. 67, 68, 81.

[857] In Hensler, p. 14, and Appendix, p. 11.

[858] Ibid., App. p. 15.

[859] In Hensler, Appendix, p. 66.

[860] The rise of the pox in the Italian wars, with its dispersion over all Europe, comes into “The Smallpox, a Poem” by “Andrew Tripe, M.D.,” London, 1748:

“Whip! thro’ both camps, halloo! it ran, Nor uninfected left a man ... Hence soon thro’ Italy it flew Veiled for a while from mortal view, When suddenly in various modes, It shone display’d in shankers, nodes, Swell’d groins, and pricking shins, and headaches And a long long long string of dread aches ... From thence with every sail unfurl’d It traversed almost all the world ... Until at length this Stygian fury Worked its foul way to our blest Drury, Where still Lord Paramount it reigns, Pregnant with sharp nocturnal pains,” etc.

[861] I do not include among the good evidence the often quoted letter of Peter Martyr to a professor of Greek at Salamanca, under the date of “nonis Aprilis, 1488,” in which “morbus Gallicus” is used as well as the Spanish name “las bubas.” It seems to me certain that the date should be 1498, or something else than 1488, the correspondence having gone on until 1525. The same kind of misdating occurs among the printed letters of Erasmus.

[862] This letter is printed in his Opuscula, Papiae, 1496. Attention was first called to it by Thiene, in his essay confuting the doctrine of the West-Indian origin of syphilis.

[863] In Hensler, App. p. 108.

[864] Manardus, Epist. Med. lib. VII. epist. 2. Basil, 1549, p. 137 (as cited by Hirsch). The first letter of Manardus “de erroribus Sym. Pistoris de Lypczk circa morbum Gallicum,” was printed in 1500 (Hensler, p. 47).

[865] I quote it from Hensler, Geschichte der Lustseuche die zu ende des xv Jahr hunderts in Europa ausbrach. Altona, 1783, Appendix, p. 109.

[866] Mezeray, Histoire de France, II. 777.

[867] The diagnosis in De Comines’ text appears to have struck the editors of the chief edition of his work, that of 1747; for they have appended a footnote to the passage, which is a superfluity unless it be meant to express surprise: “Charles VIII. malade de la petite vérole à l’age de vingt-deux ans.”

[868] Martin, Histoire de France, VII. 257, 283.

[869] Handbook of Geographical and Historical Pathology. Translated by C. Creighton, 3 vols. London, 1883-86, II. 92-98.

[870] Miscellaneous Works of the late Robert Willan, M.D., F.R.S., containing an Inquiry into the Antiquity of the Smallpox, Measles, and Scarlet Fever, etc. Edited by Ashby Smith, M.D., London, 1821.

[871] Th. Nöldeke, Geschichte der Araber und Perser, nach Tabari. Leyden, 1879, pp. 218, 219.

[872] The term “autonomy” in the foregoing is used according to the exposition which I originally gave of it in an address to the British Medical Association (1883) on “The Autonomous Life of the Specific Infections” (Brit. Med. Journ., Aug. 4, 1883). The semi-independence of constitutional states has been dealt with in my book, Illustrations of Unconscious Memory in Disease. London, 1885.

[873] The South-African controversy, which became acute, was carried on in journals of the colony (the South African Medical Journal about 1883 and 1884 is a likely source of information), but some echoes of it were heard in letters to the British Medical Journal, 1884. A few years ago a similar diagnostic difficulty arose, not in an African race, but among the inmates of a Paris hospital. In the smallpox wards of the Hôpital St Antoine, a number of cases occurred, one of them in a nurse, another in an assistant physician, of a particular skin-disease, which was either discrete or confluent, lasted about ten days, and was attended by fever up to 40° C. or 41° C. Yet these cases were discriminated from smallpox; they were diagnosed, and have been recorded, as an epidemic of ecthyma. (Du Castel, Gazette des Hôpitaux, 1881, No. 122, quoted in the Jahresbericht.)

[874] Krankheiten des Orients. Erlangen, 1847, p. 127.

[875] History of Physic, II. 190.

[876] Gruner, a learned professor of Jena, who made collections of works or passages relating to syphilis and to the English sweat, published also in 1790 a collection of medieval chapters or sentences on smallpox, “De Variolis et Morbillis fragmenta medicorum Arabistarum,” including the whole of Gaddesden’s chapter but omitting the earlier and more important chapter from Gilbert. Gruner correctly says at the end of his extracts: “while the Arabists write thus, they seem to have followed their Arabic guides, and to have repeated what they received from the latter.” This is obvious from the text of the chapters themselves: some quote more often than others from Avicenna, Rhazes and Isaac; but it is clear that they all base upon the Arabians. The substance is the same in them all; it is a merely verbal handling of Arabic observation and theory. There are no concrete experiences or original additions, from which one might infer that they were familiar at first hand with smallpox and measles. Häser, however, seems to take these chapters in the medieval compends as evidence of the general prevalence of smallpox in Europe in the Middle Ages. As he finds little writing about smallpox when modern medical literature began, he is driven into the paradox that epidemics of smallpox had actually become rarer again in the sixteenth century (III. p. 69). But the sixteenth-century references to smallpox, although they are indeed scanty, are at the same time the earliest authentic accounts of it in Western Europe.

[877] This intention is most clearly expressed by Valescus de Tharanta: “Then let him be wrapped in a woollen cloth of Persian, or at least of red, so that by the sight of the red cloth the blood may be led to the exterior and so be kept at no excessive heat, according to the tenour of the sixth canon [of Avicenna].” Apud Gruner, p. 46.

[878] History of Physic, Pt. II. p. 280.

[879] Rosa Anglica. Papiae, 1492.

[880] Chronica Majora. Rolls ed. V. 452.

[881] Rolls of Parliament.

[882] Early English Text Society’s edition by Skeat. Passus xvi. (108), and Passus vii.

[883] Trench, in his Select Glossary, has adopted the derivation of measles from misellus, without apparently knowing that John of Gaddesden had actually used “mesles” for a form of morbilli. The derivation of measles from misellus has been summarily rejected by Skeat, who thinks that “the spelling with the simple vowel e, instead of ae or ea, makes all the difference. The confusion between the words is probably quite modern.” Perhaps I ought not to contradict a philologist on his own ground; but there is no help for it. I know of four instances in which the simple vowel e is used in spelling the name of the disease that is associated with smallpox, the English equivalent of morbilli. In a letter of July 14, 1518, from Pace, dean of St Paul’s to Wolsey (Cal. State Papers, Henry VIII. II. pt. 1), it is said, “They do die in these parts [Wallingford] in every place, not only of the small pokkes and mezils, but also of the great sickness.” In the Description of the Pest by Dr Gilbert Skene, of Edinburgh (Edin. 1568, reprinted for the Bannatyne Club, 1840, p. 9), he mentions certain states of weather “quhilkis also signifeis the Pokis, Mesillis and siclik diseisis of bodie to follow.” And if a Scotsman’s usage be not admitted, an Oxonian, Cogan, says, “when the small pockes and mesels are rife,” and another Oxonian, Thomas Lodge, in his Treatise of the Plague (London, 1603, Cap. iii.) says: “When as Fevers are accompanied with Small Poxe, Mesels, with spots,” etc. On the other hand, Elyot, in the Castel of Health (1541), Phaer in the Book of Children, (1553), Clowes in his Proved Practice, and Kellwaye (1593) write the word with ea. There is, indeed, no uniformity, just as one might have expected in the sixteenth century. Again, Shakespeare (Coriolanus, Act III., scene I) spells the word with ea where it is clearly the same word that is used in The Vision of Piers the Ploughman in a generic sense and in the spelling of “meseles:”--“Those meazels which we disdain should tetter us.” Lastly, there are not two words in the Elizabethan dictionaries, one with e signifying lepers, and another with ea signifying the disease of morbilli. In Levins’ Manipulus Vocabulorum, we find “ye Maysilles” = variolae, but there is no word “mesles” = leprosi. There was only one word, with the usual varieties of spelling; and in course of time it came to be restricted in meaning to morbilli, Gaddesden’s early use of “mesles” in that sense having doubtless helped to determine the usage.

[884] Harl. MS., No. 2378. So far as I have observed, there is no prescription for “mesles,” or for smallpox under its Latin name or under any English name that might correspond thereto. Moulton’s This is The Myrror or Glasse of Helth (? 1540), which reproduces these medieval prescriptions with their headings, is equally silent about smallpox and measles.

[885] Willan’s Miscellaneous Works. “An Inquiry into the Antiquity of the Smallpox, Measles, and Scarlet Fever.” London, 1821, p. 98. The MS. is Harleian, No. 585.

[886] Sandoval, cited by Hecker, Der Englische Schweiss. Berlin, 1834, p. 80.

[887] MS. Harl., 1568.

[888] There is a fine copy of the earliest printed version in the British Museum, with “Sanctus Albanus” for colophon. The same text was reprinted often in the years following by London printers--in 1498, 1502, 1510, 1515 (twice), and 1528.

[889] Camden Society, ed. Gairdner, 1876, p. 87.

[890] Walsingham, Hist. Angliae, I. 299. Also Chronicon Angliae a quodam Monacho, sub anno 1362.

[891] “Also manie died of the smallpocks, both men, women and children.”

[892] History of the Smallpox, 1817. Blomefield, also, in his History of Norfolk, quotes the passage about “pockys” correctly from the “Fruit of Times,” applies it to Norwich, to which city it had no special relation, and then says that this is the first mention of “small pocks.”

[893] Fabyan’s Chronicle. Ed. Ellis, p. 653.

[894] Levins, Manipulus Vocabulorum, 1570. Camden Society’s edition, column 158.

[895] Lettres du Roy Louis XII. Brusselle, 1712, IV. 335.

[896] Cal. State Papers.

[897] “Item, que à son grand desplaisir il ait esté naguaires mal disposé d’une maladie nommée la petitte verolle, dont à present, graces à Dieu, il est recouvert et passé tout dangier.” Lettres du Roy Louis XII., IV. 260. Brusselle, 1712.

[898] Cal. State Papers.

[899] Cal. State Papers.

[900] Edited by Gairdner for the Camden Society, 1880.

[901] Bannatyne Club’s reprint, 1840, pp. 9-10.

[902] The Loseley Manuscripts. Edited by Kempe. London, 1836, p. 315.

[903] A Defensative against the Plague ... whereunto is annexed a short treatise of the small Poxe, how to govern and help those that are infected therewith. London, 1593.

[904] Francis Davison’s Poetical Rapsodie. The poem of Spilman occurs at p. 189 of the edition of 1611. In the piratical edition of 1621, after Davison’s death, “small” is left out before “Pocks,” and Spilman’s name omitted at the foot of the verses. The printer’s error has had the singular effect of leading Dr Farmer, the writer on Shakespeare, to conclude that the word “pox” in the Elizabethan period meant smallpox even in imprecations such as “a pox on it.”

[905] Sir Tobie Matthews’ Letters (1577-1655), London, 1660. (1) Donne to Mrs Cockaine, p. 342; (2) Donne to Sir R. D----, both without date.

[906] Court and Times of James I.

[907] Court and Times of Charles I. (Chamberlain to Carleton), I. 28.

[908] Anthony Wood.

[909] For Chester also, in the parish register of Trinity Church (Harl. MS. 2177) there is a note opposite 1636: “for this two or three years divers children died of smallpox in Chester.”

[910] Cal. State Papers.

[911] Ibid.

[912] Hist. MSS. Commission, V. 146, 151, 156, 168, 174, 201. See also the Diaries of Pepys and Evelyn.

[913] Natural History of Oxfordshire. Oxford, 1677, p. 23.

[914] De contagione et contagiosis morbis, etc. Venet. 1546.

[915] Titles in Häser, III. 383.

[916] Opus de peste ... necnon de variolis, Neap. 1577.

[917] Les œuvres de M. Ambroise Paré. 5th ed., Paris, 1598, Books XIX. and XX. The chapters on Plague, Smallpox, etc., were originally published, according to Häser, in 1568.

[918] See Purchas, Pilgrimes, III. 996, where syphilis and smallpox are included together as “infectious or pestilentiall pocks,” Ramusio being given as the authority for the smallpox and Oviedo for the great pox.

[919] For details of the increase of London population, with the sources of evidence, I beg to refer to my essay, “The Population of Old London,” Blackwood’s Magazine, April, 1891.

[920] Broadside in the Guildhall Library, bound up in a volume labelled Political Tracts, 1680.

[921] “The time when it began in the City of Westminster and these places following:

“Buried in Westminster from 14 July to 20 October, in the whole number 832, whereof of the plague 723. Buried in the Savoy from the 1st of June to the 20th of October, in the whole number 182, whereof of the plague, 171. Buried in the parish of Stepney from the 25th of March to the 20th of October, in all 1978, whereof of the plague, 1871. Buried at Newington-buts from the 14th of June to the 20th of October, in all 626, whereof of the plague, 562. Buried at Islington 201 in all, 170 of plague; at Lambeth 373 in all, 362 of plague; at Hackney 192 in all, 169 of plague. Buried in all within the 7 several places last aforenamed 4378, whereof of the plague, 3997. The whole number that hath been buried in all [to 20th October], both within London and the Liberties, and the 7 other severall places last before mentioned is 39,380, whereof of the number of the plague, 32,609.”

From the parish registers the burials for the whole year are known: Stepney, 2257; Lambeth, 566; Islington, 322; Hackney, 321 (of plague 269).

In Stow’s Annales, the mortality of 1603 is given as follows:--“There died in London and the liberties thereof from the xxiii day of December 1602 unto the xxii day of December 1603, of all diseases 38,244, whereof of the plague 30,578.”

[922] Baddeley, l. c.

[923] A short Dialogue concerning the Plague Infection. Published to preserue Bloud through the blessing of God. London, 1603.

[924] The Wonderfull Yeare 1603, wherein is shewed the picture of London lying sicke of the Plague. London, 1603.

[925] In his Seven Deadly Sins of London (1606) he returns to the mode of burial in the plague: “All ceremonial due to them was taken away, they were launched ten in one heap, twenty in another, the gallant and the beggar together, the husband saw his wife and his deadly enemy whom he hated within a pair of sheets.” As an after effect of this mode of interment, “What rotten stenches and contagious damps would strike up into thy nostrils!”

[926] A Treatise of the Plague. By Thomas Lodge, Doctor in Phisicke. London, 1603. It has been reprinted, among Lodge’s other works, by the Hunterian Club of Glasgow, 1880.

[927] The opinion of Peter Turner, Doctor in Physicke, concerning Amulets or Plague-Cakes, whereof perhaps some hold too much and some too little. London, 1603, p. 10. Turner held high offices at the College of Physicians, and died in 1614. There was another physician of the name, also a dignitary of the College, Dr George Turner, whose widow was the notorious Mrs Anne Turner, executed for having been an instrument in the poisoning of Sir T. Overbury. Scott has drawn from her the character of Mrs Suddlechop, in The Fortunes of Nigel, a work invaluable for realizing the London of King James. The reference in the Earl of Northumberland’s accounts, under date Feb. 6, 1607, to a Dr Turner, who was paid ten shillings for a “pomander” against the plague, would suit either Dr Peter or Dr George (Hist. MSS. Commis. VI. 2, 29).

[928] A letter from Hampstead, August 27, 1603, speaks of “the imprudent exposure of infected beds in the streets.” (Cal. State Papers.)

[929] A New Treatise of the Pestilence, etc. the like not before this time published, and therefore necessarie for all manner of persons in this time of contagion. By S. H. Studious in Phisicke. London, 1603.

[930] This mystification was pointed out in a note to “Thayre” (the 1625 edition) in the printed Catalogue of the Library of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society.

[931] An Epistle discoursing upon the present Pestilence, teaching what it is and how the people of God should carrie themselves towards God and their neighbours therein. Reprinted, with some Additions, by Henoch Clapham. London, 1603.

[932] A Short Dialogue, etc., ut supra.

[933] In a volume with other pieces. London, 1605.

[934] But several warders in the Tower died of it. (Cal. State Papers, Sept. 16, 1603.)

[935] In Lysons, Environs of London.

[936] Hist. MSS. Com. X. pt. 4, p. 5.

[937] E.g. plague at Datchet (Notes and Queries, 3rd ser. VI. 217).

[938] John Bell, London’s Remembrancer. London, 1665 [1666].

[939] Extracts from Harrison’s MS. Chronologie by Furnivall in Appendix (p. 268) to Elizabethan England. Camelot Series, 1890.

[940] A Sermon preached at Powles Crosse, etc. London, 1578.

[941] Remembrancia (numerous extracts from the City records, under “Plays”).

[942] Cal. State Papers, Addenda, James I. p. 534.

[943] Notes and Queries, 6th series, II. 524. The mortality is stated on the authority of the parish registers of St George’s and St Michael’s, the dead having been “buried at the cabbin of Whitefryers.”

[944] There is An Account of the Plague at Oxford, 1603, in the Sloane MS. No. 4376 (14), extracted from the register of Merton College, which had also been the source of Anthony Wood’s account, as summarised in the text.

[945] Cal. State Papers. Addenda, 1580-1625.

[946] Hist. MSS. Commis. IX. 160.

[947] Izacke’s ‘Memorials of Exeter’ (in N. and Q., 3rd ser. VI. 217).

[948] Bailey, Transcripts from the MS. Archives of Winchester, 1856, p. 109.

[949] Cromwell.

[950] Hist. MSS. Commis. IX.

[951] Ibid. X. pt. I, p. 89.

[952] Thompson’s Boston.

[953] Hist. MSS. Com. IX.

[954] Archæologia, VI. 80.

[955] Rogers’ MS. in Hemingway’s Hist. of Chester. Harl. MS. 2177.

[956] Earwaker, East Cheshire, II. 471; I. 406.

[957] Bridges and Whalley, II. 53; I. 124.

[958] Drake’s Eboracum. Lond. 1736, p. 121.

[959] Sykes, Local Records of Northumberland and Durham.

[960] Phillips, Owen and Blakeway.

[961] Cal. State Papers. Addenda, 1580-1625.

[962] Parish Register (in a local history).

[963] Notes and Queries, 6th ser. II. 390.

[964] Ib.

[965] Ib.

[966] Ib.

[967] Cal. State Papers, 1608-9.

[968] Hemingway.

[969] Cal. S. P.

[970] Hist. MSS. Com. V. 570.

[971] Archæologia, VI. 80.

[972] Blomefield.

[973] Sykes.

[974] Nichols, III. 892-3.

[975] Nichols (parish registers); Kelly, Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc., 1877, VI. 395.

[976] Sykes.

[977] Hemingway.

[978] May, Hist. of Evesham, 1845; p. 371.

[979] Add. MS. 29,975. f. 25.

[980] Hist. MSS. Com. IX. 162.

[981] Ib. I. 101.

[982] Beesley, Hist. of Banbury.

[983] Dean Butler’s notes to Clyn’s and Dowling’s Annals.

[984] Smith’s Cork, from MS. Annals.

[985] Chambers, Domestic Annals.

[986] Cal. State Papers.

[987] Chambers.

[988] Cal. State Papers.

[989] Balfour’s Annals of Scotland (in Chambers, I. 399).

[990] Ibid.

[991] Chambers.

[992] Aberdeen Burgh Records.

[993] Chambers.

[994] Chron. of Perth.

[995] Chambers.

[996] Ibid.

[997] The invaluable letters of Chamberlain, as well as those of Mead (of Cambridge) and others, were collected by Dr Thomas Birch in the last century, and printed in 1848 under the titles The Court and Times of James I., and C. and T. Charles I., without an index but with some useful notes.

[998] Chamberlain to Carleton, C. and T. James I., II. 504.

[999] Chronological History of the Air, Weather, Seasons, Meteors, etc. 2 vols. Lond. 1749, I. 306:--“This fever began, and raged terribly in England in 1623; was little, if at all, short of the plague.”

[1000] Chamberlain to Carleton, in Court and Times of Charles I., I. 28.

[1001] Salvetti’s Diary, in Hist. MSS. Com. XI. pt. I, p. 26.

[1002] Cal. S. P. 15 Sept.

[1003] Holland.

[1004] Bell, London’s Remembrancer.

[1005] C. and T. Charles I., letter of 2 July, 1625.

[1006] In a volume of Topographical Papers in the British Museum, 1298, m (18).

[1007] W. Heberden, Junr., Increase and Decrease of Diseases. Lond. 1801, p. 66. He gives no authority; “1626” is clearly a misprint.

[1008] Calendar of State Papers, 1625-26, p. 184.

[1009] The Red Crosse (broadside). London, 1625.

[1010] Parish Histories, and in Lysons’ Environs of London.

[1011] Britain’s Remembrancer, containing a Narrative of the Plague lately past. London, 1628.

[1012] The Fearfull Summer, or London’s Calamitie. Printed at Oxford, 1625 (reprinted with additions, Lond. 1636).

[1013] Holland’s Posthuma. Cantab. 1626.

[1014] The Weeping Lady, or London like Ninivie in Sackcloth. By T. B. London, 1625.

[1015] Hist. MSS. Commission, XI. pt. I, p. 6.

[1016] Bradwell’s book, to be mentioned in the sequel, was written for practice during the plague. There is a reference to something of Sir Theodore Mayerne’s on the plague of 1625, which I have not succeeded in finding. His Opera Medica contain ordinary cases treated by him in London in December, 1625, but there is no mention of plague-cases. Woodall’s essay on plague, published in 1639, thus refers to his experience in the epidemic of 1625: “In anno 1625 we had many signes contrarie to the plagues in other times; yea, and many did dye dayly without any signes or markes on their bodies at all.”

[1017] C. and T. Charles I. I. 48.

[1018] A Watchman for the Pest, teaching the true Rules of Preservation from the Pestilent Contagion, at this time fearfully overflowing this famous Cittie of London. Collected out of the best authors, mixed with auncient experience, and moulded into a new and most plaine method. By Steven Bradwell, of London, Physition. 1625.

[1019] Cal. State Papers.

[1020] Ib.

[1021] Th. Locke to Carleton, Cal. S. P., 14 Aug.

[1022] Salvetti.

[1023] Locke to Carleton, 27 Aug.

[1024] Cal. S. P.

[1025] Mead, letter in C. and T. Ch. I. I. 43.

[1026] Cal. S. P.

[1027] Ibid.

[1028] Mostly from parish registers in Lysons’ Environs of London.

[1029] Winchester was probably a fair sample. In the city archives under the year 1625 there is this entry: “Item, it is also agreed that the decayed cottage where Lenord Andrews did dwell, he lately dying of the plague, shall be burned to the grounde for fear of the daunger of infection that might ensue if it should stande.” (Bailey, Transcripts, etc. Winchester, 1856, p. 110.) In a petition relating to Farnham, Jan. 1628, the town is described as being “impoverished through the plague and many charges,” which may mean that plague had been diffused in Surrey and Hampshire.

[1030] Cal. State Papers.

[1031] Cal. State Papers.

[1032] MSS. of the Corporation of Plymouth. Hist. MSS. Commis. IX. 278. Accounts are given (p. 280) of the monies collected for the relief of the poor and sick people of Plymouth “in the time of the infection of the pestilence from Sept. 29, 1625, to that day A.D. 1627.” But that does not imply that the infection lasted all that time. The civic year began with September 29, and the accounts are those that fall within two complete financial years.

[1033] Cal. State Papers.

[1034] Notes and Queries, 6 ser. III. 477.

[1035] Cal. S. P.

[1036] Ib.

[1037] Cal. S. P.

[1038] Ib.

[1039] Cal. S. P.

[1040] Letter from Mead in C. and T. Charles I. I. 51.

[1041] Blomefield.

[1042] At Coventry in 1626, £20 was paid to the poor in lieu of a feast at Lammas, by reason of the infection. (Dugdale, Warwickshire.)

[1043] The following curious extract was sent by J. A. Picton to Notes and Queries, 6th ser. I. 314 from the parish register of Malpas, Cheshire, 1625:

“Richard Dawson (brother of the above-named Thomas Dawson of Bradley) being sick of the plague and perceiving he must die, at that time arose out of his bed and made his grave, and caused his nephew John Dawson to cast straw into the grave, which was not far from the house, and went and laid him down in the said grave and caused clothes to be laid upon, and so departed out of this world. This he did because he was a strong man and heavier than his said nephew and another wench were able to bury. He died about the 24th of August. Thus much was I credibly tould. He died 1625.

“John Dawson, son of the above-mentioned Thomas, came unto his father when his father sent for him being sick, and having laid him down in a ditch died in it the 29th day of August, 1625, in the night.

“Rose Smyth, servant of the above-named Thomas Dawson, and last of that household, died of the plague and was buried by Wm. Cooke the 5th day of September, 1625, near unto the said house.”

[1044] Memoranda of Rev. Thomas Archer, of Houghton Conquest. MSS. Addit. Brit. Museum.

[1045] Blomefield.

[1046] Phillips’ Hist. of Shrewsbury. Hist. MSS. Com. X. pt. 4. p. 498.

[1047] Hist. MSS. Com. II. 258.

[1048] Hist. of County of Lincoln, II. 187. Notitiae Ludae, p. 41.

[1049] Tickell’s Hist. of Kingston-upon-Hull. Hull, 1798.

[1050] Gawdy MSS. (Hist. MSS. Com. X. pt. 2), various letters from Sept. 14, 1636, to Nov. 26, 1638, relating chiefly to Norwich.

[1051] Boys, Hist. of Sandwich, pp. 707-8.

[1052] R. Jenison, D.D., Newcastle’s Call to her Neighbor and Sister Towns. London, 1637.

[1053] Heberden says that it began in Whitechapel, but does not say where he got the information.

[1054] Middlesex County Records, III. 62.

[1055] Ibid.

[1056] The College of Physicians reported also in May, 1637, on the causes of plague--overcrowding, nuisances, &c.; among the causes assigned the following is noteworthy: Those who died of the plague were buried within the City, and some of the graveyards were so full that partially decomposed bodies were taken up to make room for fresh interments. (Cited by S. R. Gardiner, History, &c., VIII. 237-9, from the State Papers.)

[1057] Natural and Political Reflections on the Bills of Mortality. London, 1662.

[1058] Cal. State Papers.

[1059] Strype’s ed. of Stow’s Survey of London.

[1060] Rendle (Old Southwark, 1878, p. 96) quotes the following from a letter written in 1618 by Geoffrey Mynshall from the King’s Bench prison: “As to health, it hath more diseases predominant in it than the pest-house in the plague time ... stinks more than the Lord Mayor’s dog-house or Paris Garden in August ... three men in one bed.”

[1061] Cal. S. P. 1601-3, p. 209.

[1062] Middlesex County Records, II.

[1063] Cited by Gardiner, History, VIII. 289.

[1064] Calendar of State Papers.

[1065] Cal. S. P.

[1066] Ibid.

[1067] Ibid. The coexistence of malignant fever with plague at Northampton in 1638 is decisively shown by particulars of cases published by Woodall, Op. cit. 1639. See also Freeman, Hist. of Northampton, p. 75 (but under the year 1637).

[1068] Ibid.

[1069] Ibid.

[1070] Camden’s Britannia, ed. Gough, II. 244.

[1071] Notes and Queries, 6th series, IV. 199.

[1072] Hist. MSS. Com. V. 173.

[1073] Diatribae duae de Fermentatione et de Febribus. Hagae, 1659.

[1074] Morbus Epidemicus anni 1643; or the New Disease. Published by command of his Majesty. Oxford, 1643.

[1075] From Rushworth.

[1076] “The City, with much emotion, ranks its trained bands under Essex: making up an Army for him, despatches him to relieve Gloucester. He marches on the 26th [August]; steadily along, in spite of rainy weather and Prince Rupert; westward, westward; on the night of the tenth day, September 5th, the Gloucester people see his signal-fire flame up, amid the dark rain, ‘on the top of Presbury Hill;’--and understand that they shall live and not die. The King ‘fired his huts,’ and marched off without delay. He never again had any real chance of prevailing in this war.... The steady march to Gloucester and back again, by Essex, was the chief feat he did during the war; a considerable feat, and very characteristic of him, the slow-going inarticulate, indignant, somewhat elephantine man.” Carlyle, Letters and Speeches of Cromwell.

[1077] From the translation by S. Pordage. London, 1681.

[1078] Anthony Wood, II. pt I. p. 469.

[1079] Dunsford’s Histor. Mem. of Tiverton, p. 184.

[1080] The military events from Rushworth.

[1081] Dunsford, Histor. Memoirs of Tiverton. Harding, Hist. of Tiverton.

[1082] Rushworth. Moore, Hist. of Devonshire, I. 149.

[1083] Beesley’s Hist. of Banbury, p. 387.

[1084] In Somers’s Tracts. Scott’s ed. V. 294.

[1085] Sykes.

[1086] Clarendon, referring to a proposed Royal visit to Bristol in April says: “The plague began to break out there very much for the time of the year.”

[1087] Cal. State Papers.

[1088] Rushworth.

[1089] Letters and Speeches, I.

[1090] Seyer’s Memorials of Bristol, II. 466.

[1091] Whitaker, History of Leeds, p. 75.

[1092] Harwood, Hist. of Lichfield, p. 306.

[1093] Pordage’s translation of Willis’s Remaining Works, p. 131.

[1094] Nichols, III. 893.

[1095] Cornelius Brown, Annals of Newark. London, 1879, p. 164.

[1096] Ibid.

[1097] Notes and Queries, 6th ser., III. 477.

[1098] Rushworth.

[1099] Histor. MSS. Com. XI. 7, p. 190.

[1100] Ibid. IX. 1, p. 201.

[1101] Hist. of Carlisle, 1838.

[1102] Chambers, Domestic Annals of Scotland.

[1103] Baillie’s Letters. 3 vols. Edited by D. Laing for the Bannatyne Club.

[1104] Kennedy, Annals of Aberdeen, I. 270 (expenses of the epidemic from the Council Register, vol. LIII. p. 130).

[1105] Hemingway, Ormerod. The Report of the Hist. MSS. Commission (V. 339) notes that Dr Cowper’s MS. contains details of 2,099 deaths, but reproduces none of them.

[1106] Hist. MSS. Commiss. V. 342.

[1107] Owen and Blakeway.

[1108] Rushworth, Pt. 4, vol. II., pp. 1100, 1109.

[1109] Annals of Ireland by Clyn and Dowling, Dean Butler’s notes pp. 64, 65 (ref. to Carte’s Life of the Duke of Ormonde).

[1110] Cal. State Papers.

[1111] The weekly bills of mortality for Dublin, July 20--Aug. 2, 1662, showed only 14 baptisms and 20 burials in ten parishes; but these can hardly have been all the births and deaths in the city.

[1112] Smith’s Cork, vol. II. from Cox MSS.

[1113] Cal. S. P. Sept. 21, 1650.

[1114] H. Whitmore, M.D. Febris Anomala; or the New Disease that now rageth throughout England, with a brief description of the Disease which this Spring most infested London. London, 1659 (4 November).

[1115] Hist. MSS. Commission, X. pt. 4, p. 106.

[1116] Willis, Diatribae duae. Hagae, 1659.

[1117] Pyretologia. 2 vols. London, 1692-4. Appendix to 1st volume, p. 415.

[1118] Sent to Notes and Queries, 1st ser. XII. 281, by Mr H. Hucks Gibbs.

[1119] Hist. MSS. Commiss. V. 146 (Sutherland letters).

[1120] Greenhill’s edition (Sydenham Society, 1844), pp. 37, 93, 95-98.

[1121] Purchas, His Pilgrimes. 4 vols., folio. London, 1625, vol. I. Book II. p. 36.

[1122] Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, &c. 3 vols. London, 1599, III. 225-6.

[1123] Pericarditis scorbutica--a condition which has been observed mostly in Russia in recent times. The whiteness of the heart would have been due to the fibrinous layer of lymph on its surface, from the pericarditis.

[1124] Hakluyt, III. 241.

[1125] Hakluyt, II. Part II., pp. 22, 36, 48.

[1126] Hakluyt, III. 501.

[1127] Sir James Stephen’s Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography, pop. ed. p. 125.

[1128] Hakluyt, II. pt. 2, p. 99.

[1129] The famous figure in Paradise Lost (IV. 159) is taken from the route to India passing within Madagascar--a poetic colouring of dreary and painful realities:--

As when to them who sail Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past Mozambik, off at sea north-east winds blow Sabean odours from the spicy shore Of Araby the blest; with such delay Well pleas’d they slack their course, and many a league Cheer’d with the grateful smell old Ocean smiles:

[1130] The World Encompassed &c., Hakluyt Society, ed. Vaux, p. 149, and Hakluyt, III. 740.

[1131] A summarie and true discourse of Sir Francis Drake’s West Indian voyage begun in the year 1585. Published by M. Thomas Cates. Shortened in Hakluyt, III. 542. The earlier part of the narrative is by Captain Bigges, and, after his death in the West Indies, by his lieutenant, Croftes.

[1132] Mr Froude (History, XII. 150) must be pronounced somewhat happy in his bold guess of “yellow fever.” At the same time the enthymeme by which he had reached his conclusion is altogether wrong: first, in assuming that the infection “broke out” after the capture of Cartagena, ignoring the fact of its disastrous prevalence in mid-ocean two or three months before, shortly after leaving the Cape de Verde islands; and secondly in assuming that the yellow fever for which Cartagena and other harbours of the Spanish Main became notorious in later times had existed as an infection there in the 16th century.

[1133] Sir Richard Hawkins, who commanded the galliot ‘Duck’ in Drake’s expedition of 1585, thus refers to the Cape de Verde islands, on the occasion of touching there in his own expedition to the Pacific in 1593 (Purchas, IV. 1368):

These islands are “one of the most unhealthiest climates in the world. In two times that I have been in them, either cost us the one half of our people, with fevers and fluxes of sundry kinds, some shaking, some burning, some partaking of both; some possesst with frensie, others with slouth; and in one of them it cost me six months’ sickness, with no small hazard of life.” He then gives a reason for the great risk to health: the north-east breeze about four in the afternoon seldom faileth, “coming cold and fresh, and finding the pores of the body open and for the most part naked, penetrateth the very bones, and so causeth sudden distemperature, and sundry manners of sickness, as the subjects are divers whereupon they work. Departing out of the calmes of the Islands, and coming into the fresh breeze, it causeth the like; and I have seen within two days after that we have partaked of the fresh air, of two thousand men above an hundred and fifty have been crazed in their health.” This seems to refer to the epidemic in Drake’s fleet, as given in the text; but it is clearly an imperfect account of the facts, and in theory altogether improbable, as a trade wind within the tropic cannot be credited with such effects, even if the forms of sickness were conceivably due at all to chill.

Darwin (Naturalist’s Voyage in the Beagle, p. 366) says: “The island of St Jago, at the Cape de Verde, offers another strongly-marked instance of a country, which anyone would have expected to find most healthy, being very much the contrary. I have described the bare and open plains as supporting, during a few weeks after the rainy season, a thin vegetation, which directly withers away and dries up; at this period the air appears to become quite poisonous; both natives and foreigners often being affected with violent fevers. On the other hand, the Galapagos Archipelago, in the Pacific, with a similar soil, and periodically subject to the same process of vegetation, is perfectly healthy.” But the Galapagos have been uninhabited, except in recent times by two or three hundred people banished from Ecuador. On the other hand the Cape de Verde islands are believed to have been at one time well wooded and not unfertile; and the Portuguese settlements in them, to say nothing of the native negro villages, had a fair population. It is not easy to understand the pernicious character of their fevers without assuming that spots of soil had become pestilential by human occupancy; but it is at the same time clear that a degree of befouling of the soil which would be innocuous in ordinary, would there engender deadly miasmata owing to the remarkable alternations of drought and wetness under a tropical sun.

[1134] Hakluyt, III. 286.

[1135] Mr Hubert Hall, of the Record Office, in Society in the Elizabethan Age. London, 1886, p. 120.

[1136] Hakluyt, III. 583.

[1137] Hakluyt, III. 804, 820; and other details in the 1st ed. (1589) pp. 809, 810.

[1138] Hakluyt, III. 842-52.

[1139] Purchas, IV. Bk. 7, Chap. 5, (reprinted from Hawkins’s own narrative of the voyage, published a few months after the author’s death in 1622).

[1140] Mr J. K. Laughton (Dict. of National Biography. Art. “Hawkins, Sir Richard”) points out that Hawkins’s narrative of the ‘Daintie’s’ voyage had not always been authenticated by reference to notes or documents. It seems probable also, from his remarks on the epidemic in Drake’s fleet after leaving the Cape de Verde islands in 1585, that he trusted his memory too much. But that objection of writing from memory has no force as against his general observations and reflections on scurvy.

[1141] Purchas, part IV. p. 1877.

[1142] Ibid. p. 1623.

[1143] Woodall defends the use of biscuit in his Surgeon’s Mate, published in 1617.

[1144] Purchas, III. 847.

[1145] The Voyages of Sir James Lancaster, Knight, to the East Indies. Hakluyt Society, ed. Clements Markham, 1878; and in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, II. pt. 2, p. 102.

[1146] The slowness of the passage round the Cape of Good Hope in old times was due less to the build or rig of the ships than to the course shaped: instead of steering southwest from Madeira across the Atlantic almost to the coast of Brazil at Cape San Roque, so as to get the north-east trade wind, and thence on another tack in a wide sweep round to the Cape with the south-east trade wind, the earlier navigators sailed past the Cape de Verde islands and along the Guinea coast, keeping within meridians 20 degrees to the eastward of the modern track, and so falling into the tropical calms at one part, and at another part of the voyage into the baffling south-east trades, varying in force according to the season.

[1147] Purchas, I. 147.

[1148] Calendar of State Papers. East Indies (under the respective dates).

[1149] It seems to have passed into common usage, as “to lie in cold obstruction and to rot” (Meas. for Meas. III. 1), and to have been kept up therein after the faculty had dropped it--if indeed Byron’s line, “Where cold Obstruction’s apathy” be a survival of medical terminology. There is an instance of the same kind of survival in the use of “scorbutic;” at one time land-scurvy was detected (under the influence of theory) in many forms, and we find in the Pickwick Papers a late reminiscence of that singular dogma in the “young gentleman with the scorbutic countenance.”

[1150] The three earlier instances from Purchas, I. 248, 466, the later from the Cal. State Papers, East Indies.

[1151] Cal. S. P. Colonial. East Indies. Dec. 24, 1628.

[1152] Ibid. Feb. 6, 1626, p. 146.

[1153] William Hedges’ Diary. Hakluyt Society, 1887, I. 24, 54.

[1154] A Letter of M. Gabriel Archar, in Purchas, pt. IV. p. 1733; Smith’s Virginia, in Pinkerton, XIII. 99; W. Strachey, in Purchas, pt. IV. p. 1753.

[1155] Theobald makes this the storm and shipwreck which Shakespeare brings into the Tempest.

[1156] Purchas, IV. p. 1762.

[1157] Cal. S. P. America and West Indies.

[1158] Dermer, in Purchas, IV. p. 1778: Belknap’s American Biography (“Life of Gorges”), I. 355.

[1159] John Winthrop’s Journal, p. 11.

[1160] Winthrop, I. pp. 119, 123.

[1161] Ibid. II. 310.

[1162] Refs. in Noah Webster’s Hist. of Epid. and Pestil. Diseases. Hartford, 1799, I. 189, 191, 193.

[1163] Letter of Norris, in Hist. of S. Carolina, I. 142.

[1164] Saco, History of African Slavery in the New World (Spanish). Barcelona, 1879.

[1165] Oviedo, in Purchas, III. 996:--“Extract of Gonzalo Ferdinando de Oviedo:--‘I had acquaintance with divers which went in the first and second voyages of Columbus; of which was Peter Margarite, commendator in the second voyage, of most respect with the king and queen, who complained of those paines. [Syphilis was prevalent in Barcelona and Valencia previous to 1494. See Chapter VIII.] Soon after, in the year 1496, began the disease to arrest some courtiers; but in those beginnings it was only amongst baser persons of small authority; and it was thought that they got it by having to do with common women. But afterwards it extended to principal persons, and the physicians could not tell what to think of it, so that many died.’... But indeed it came from Hispaniola, where it is ordinary, and the remedy also [guaiacum]. Our author (l. c. civ.), and Ramusio in his preface to his third Tome, say that the souldiers of Pamfilo de Nuney, having the small pocks, infected the Indians which never before heard of that disease; in so much that of 1,600,000 soules in that island there are so few left, as by and by you shall hear.... The covetousnesse of the mine-workers, neglect of diet, change of gouvernours growing worse and worse, caused them to poison, kill and hang themselves, besides those which were consumed by infectious or pestilentiall pocks (those before mentioned out of Ramusio) and other diseases.”

[1166] Calendar of State Papers. Amer. & W. I., I. 57.

[1167] Ibid.

[1168] Cal. S. P. Amer. & W. I., under the respective dates.

[1169] The account that follows is taken from Father Dutertre’s Histoire generale des Antilles habitées par les François, 4 vols., Paris, 1667-1671, which superseded his earlier work of 1654.

[1170] Cal. S. P. Amer. & W. I., II. 529.

[1171] Ligon, Hist. of Barbadoes. London, 1657.

[1172] Winthrop’s Journal, II. 312.

[1173] Dutertre, Hist. gen. des Antilles habitées par les François. 4 vols. Paris, 1667-1671.

[1174] Cal. State Papers, Amer. and W. I., I. 301.

[1175] The chronology of yellow-fever epidemics in Hirsch (I. 318) is made to begin with Guadeloupe, 1635 and 1640, on the authority of Dutertre (as above), the epidemic of 1647 at Bridgetown being the third in order.

[1176] Benjamin Moseley, M.D., Treatise on Tropical Diseases, and on the Climate of the West Indies, 3rd ed. (1803), p. 476.

[1177] Hughes, The Natural History of Barbados. London, 1750, p. 37.

[1178] Cal. S. P. Amer. and W. I., under the dates.

[1179] In Sir John Hawkins’ second voyage as a slaver (1565), he was allowed to trade on the Spanish Main only for his “lean negroes,” which were within the purchasing means of the poorer Spaniards. The voyage had been tedious, and the supply of water short “for so great a company of negroes.... Many never thought to have reached to the Indies without great death of negroes and of themselves; but the Almighty God, who never suffereth His Elect to perish,” etc. Hakluyt, III. 501.

[1180] Clarkson, History of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade. New ed., Lond. 1839, pp. 307, 352. He showed his prepared document to Pitt:--

“Mr Pitt turned over leaf after leaf, in which the copies of the muster-rolls were contained, with great patience; and when he had looked over about a hundred pages accurately, and found the name of every seaman inserted, his former abode or service, the time of his entry, and what had become of him, either by death, discharge, or desertion, he expressed his surprise at the great pains which had been taken in this branch of the inquiry; and confessed, with some emotion, that his doubts were wholly removed with respect to the destructive nature of this employ.” (p. 273.)

[1181] T. Aubrey, M.D., The Sea-Surgeon, or the Guinea Man’s Vade Mecum. London, 1729, p. 107.

[1182] Gillespie, Obs. on the Diseases in H. M.’s Squadron on the Leeward Island Station in 1794-6. Lond. 1800.

[1183] For example, Mr R. L. Stevenson in a striking passage of Treasure Island.

[1184] Thurloe’s State Papers, III. IV. and V.; Harl. Miscell. III. 513; Long’s History of Jamaica, 3 vols. London, 1774; Cal. S. P., Amer. and W. I.

[1185] Harl. Miscel. l. c.

[1186] Sir Anthony Shirley touched at Jamaica in 1596, and reported, “we have not found in the Indies a more pleasant and wholesome place.” Hakluyt, III. 601. Long (History of Jamaica, 1774, II. 221) states the case very fairly with reference to the unfortunate expedition of Venables in 1655: “The climate of the island has unjustly been accused by many writers on the subject, the one copying from the other, and represented as almost pestilential, without an examination into the real sources of this mortality, which being fairly stated, it will appear that the same men carrying the like thoughtless conduct and vices into any other uninhabited quarter of the globe, must infallibly have involved themselves in the like calamitous situation.”

[1187] MS. State Papers, Colonial (Record Office), Vol. XIV. No. 57 (1660).

[1188] Thomas Trapham, M.D., Discourse of the State of Health in Jamaica. Lond. 1679.

[1189] Moseley, op. cit. p. 421, without reasons given; followed by Hirsch. Geog. and Hist. Pathol. (English transl.), I. 318.

[1190] Hist. of Jamaica, III. 615.

[1191] Cal. S. P. Amer. and W. I.

[1192] Cal. S. P. Amer. and W. I. 1669-74, § 144.

[1193] Ibid. § 264, III.

[1194] With a preface by the Printer to the Reader, beginning “The reprinting of these sad sheets.” Printed and are to be sold by E. Cotes, living in Aldersgate Street, printer to the said Company.

[1195] The advertisement is cited in Brayley’s edition of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year.

[1196] Sloane MS. no. 349. Λοιμογραφια, or, An experimental Relation of the Plague, of what happened remarkable in the last Plague in the City of London, etc. By William Boghurst, Apothecary in St Giles’ in the Fields. London, 1666.

[1197] Reprinted in A Collection of very Valuable and Scarce Pieces relating to the last Plague in the year 1665. London, 1721.

[1198] Λοιμολογια. London, 1671. Translation by Quincy, 1720.

[1199] Λοιμοτομια, or, the Pest Anatomized. By George Thomson, M.D. London, 1666.

[1200] London, 1667.

[1201] Among the crop of books brought up by the Plague of Marseilles, in 1720 (the immediate cause of Defoe’s book also) was one by Richard Bradley, F.R.S., a writer upon botany, on The Plague of Marseilles. Also Observations taken from an original Manuscript of a graduate physician, who resided in London during the whole time of the late plague, anno 1665. London 1721 (and two more editions the same year). The title-page of this astute gentleman is of the catch-penny order. All that is said of the original manuscript occupies about the same number of lines in the text as in the title, and might have been extracted in the course of five minutes’ research; it consists merely of a list of a few things supposed to be distinctive signs of plague--extraordinary inward heat, difficulty of breathing, pain and heaviness in the head, inclination to sleep, frequent vomiting, immoderate thirst, dryness of the tongue and palate, and then the risings, swellings, or buboes. Boghurst’s third chapter is occupied with twenty-one such signs, and his fourth chapter with a hundred more signs and circumstances, in numbered paragraphs. It is possible that his was the manuscript out of which the botanist made capital in his title-page; but his meagre list of signs might have been got from almost any work on almost any febrile disorder, and is not sufficient to identify Boghurst by, although a word or phrase here and there is the same. However, Defoe would have seen Bradley’s title-page, and might have inquired after the Sloane MS.

[1202] Of the six plague-deaths in 1664, three were in Whitechapel parish, and one each in Aldgate, Cripplegate and St Giles’s-in-the-Fields.

[1203] Reliquiae Baxterianae. London, 1696, I. 448. This entry in his journal is dated September 28, 1665, at Hampden, Bucks.

[1204] Ed. cit. Chap. XIV. p. 131:--“Diseases which seem to be nearest like its (plague’s) nature; which chiefly are fevers, called pestilent and malignant; for ’tis commonly noted that fevers sometimes reign popularly, which for the vehemency of symptoms, the great slaughter of the sick, and the great force of contagion, scarce give place to the pestilence; which, however, because they imitate the type of putrid fevers, and do not so certainly kill the sick as the plague, or so certainly infect others, they deserve the name, not of the plague, but by a more minute appellation of a pestilential fever.”

[1205] In a letter from London, 9 May, 1637 (Gawdy MSS. at Norwich, Hist. MSS. Commis. X. pt. 2. p. 163) it is said: “There is a strange opinion here amongst the poorer sort of people, who hold it a matter of conscience to visit their neighbours in any sickness, yea though they know it to be the infection.”

[1206] Evans, in preface to 1721 edition of Vincent’s book.

[1207] Cal. State Papers.

[1208] Ibid.

[1209] Evans, l. c.

[1210] Reliquiae Baxterianae. London, 1696, II. 1. 2.

[1211] Milton, with his wife and daughters, spent the summer and autumn in the same quiet neighbourhood, at Chalfont St Giles, in a cottage which Ellwood had secured for him, still remaining with its low ceilings and diamond window-panes. He there showed Ellwood the manuscript of Paradise Lost, which was published in 1667. The poem contains no reference to the plague, unless, indeed, the flight to the country had given point to the lines in the 9th book:

“As one who long in populous city pent, Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air, Forth issuing on a summer’s morn, to breathe Among the pleasant villages and farms,”--

An opportunity arises in the 12th book, where the Plagues of Egypt come into the prophetic vision of events after the Fall; but the movement is too rapid to allow of delay, and we have no more than--

“Botches and blains must all his flesh emboss, And all his people.”

Gibbon thought that the comet of 1664 (which was generally remarked upon as a portent of the plague that followed) might have suggested the lines, II. 708-11

“and like a comet burn’d, That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge In the arctic sky, and from his horrid hair Shakes pestilence and war.”

Gibbon seems to make a slip in taking these as “the famous lines which startled the licenser;” those are usually taken to have been I. 598-9, the figure of the sun’s eclipse, which

“with fear of change Perplexes monarchs.”

[1212] Brit. Mus. Addit. MS. 4376 (8). “Abstract of several orders relating to the Plague,” from 35 Hen. VIII. to 1665.

[1213] In excavating the foundations of the Broad Street terminus of the North London Railway, the workmen came upon a stratum four feet below the surface and descending eight or ten feet lower, which was full of uncoffined skeletons. Some hundreds of them were collected and re-interred. (Notes and Queries, 3rd Ser. IV. 85.) The ground was part of the old enclosure of Bethlem Hospital (St Mary’s Spital outside Bishopsgate), and was acquired for a cemetery, to the extent of an acre, by Sir Thomas Roe, in 1569. Probably there were plague-pits dug in it during more than one of the great epidemics, from 1593 to 1665.

[1214] Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1665, p. 579.

[1215] Reliquiae Hearnianae. Ed. Bliss, 1869, II. 117 (under the date of Jan. 21, 1721).

[1216] The City Remembrancer. London, 1769 (professing to be Gideon Harvey’s notes).

[1217] Procopius (De Bello Persico, II. cap. 23, Latin Translation) says the same of the great Justinian plague in A.D. 543 at Byzantium: “ut vere quis possit dicere, pestem illam, seu casu aliquo seu providentia, quasi delectu diligenter habito, sceleratissimos quosque reliquisse. Sed haec postea clarius patuerunt.” On this Gibbon remarks: “Philosophy must disdain the observation of Procopius, that the lives of such men were guarded by the peculiar favour of fortune or Providence;” and most men will agree with Gibbon. But, if we could be sure of the fact of immunity (and Boghurst’s testimony is a little weakened by his deference to Diemerbroek, who knew the classical traditions of plague), it might be possible to explain it on merely pathological grounds.

[1218] John Tillison to Dr Sancroft, September 14, 1665. Harl. MSS. cited by Heberden, Increase and Decrease of Diseases. London, 1801. Woodall, writing in 1639, and basing on his experience of London plague in 1603, 1625, and 1636, is in like manner emphatic that the symptoms varied much in individuals and in seasons.

[1219] Cal. State Papers. Hist. MSS. Com. IX. 321.

[1220] Cal. State Papers. Cal. Le Fleming MSS. p. 37 (also for Cockermouth).

[1221] Ibid.

[1222] Mead seems to have known that there were plague-cases at Battle in 1665.

[1223] Cal. S. P.

[1224] Hist. MSS. Com. II. 115.

[1225] The History and Antiquities of Eyam, with a full and particular account of the Great Plague which desolated that village A.D. 1666. By William Wood, London, 1842. This small volume, which owes its interest solely to the plague-incident, has gone through at least five editions. Among those who have written, in prose or verse, upon the same theme, Wood mentions Dr Mead, Miss Seward, Allan Cunningham, E. Rhodes, S. T. Hall, William and Mary Howitt, S. Roberts, and J. Holland. The story is also in the Book of Golden Deeds.

[1226] Bacon (Sylva Sylvarum, Cent. X. § 912. Spedding II. 643) says: “The plague is many times taken without a manifest sense, as hath been said. And they report that, where it is found, it hath a scent of the smell of a mellow apple; and (as some say) of May-flowers; and it is also received that smells of flowers that are mellow and luscious are ill for the plague: as white lilies, cowslips and hyacinths.”

[1227] Sir Thomas Elyot, in The Castle of Health (1541), says that “infected stuff lying in a coffer fast shut for two years, then opened, has infected those that stood nigh it, who soon after died.” (Cited by Brasbridge, Poor Man’s Jewel, 1578, Chapter VIII.)

[1228] Milner’s Hist. of Winchester.

[1229] The City Remembrancer, Lond. 1769, vol. I.--an account of the plague, fire, storm of 1703, etc., said to have been “collected from curious and authentic papers originally compiled by the late learned Dr [Gideon] Harvey.” But the section on the plague is almost purely Defoe and Vincent, with a few things from Mead.

[1230] These figures, with the two oaths, had been copied by the antiquary Morant for his History of Essex, and are preserved in No. 87. ff. 55 and 56, of the Stowe MSS. in the British Museum, where Mr J. A. Herbert, of the Manuscript Department, pointed them out to me. In his printed History Morant has summarized the plague-deaths in monthly periods.

The Bearers’ Oath, fol. 57:--

“Ye shall swear, that ye shall bear to the ground and bury the bodys of all such persons as, during these infectious times, shall dye of the pestilence within this Towne or the Liberties thereof, or so many of them as ye shall have notice of, and may be permitted to bury, carrying them to burials always in the night time, unless it be otherwise ordered by the Mayor of this Towne; And ye shall be always in readiness for that purpose at your abode, where you shall be appointed, keeping apart from your families together with the searchers, and not to be absent from thence more than your office of Bearers requires. Ye shall always in your walk, as much as may be, avoid the society of people, keeping as far distant from them as may bee, and carrying openly in your hands a white wand, by which people may know you, and shun and avoid you. And shall do all other things belonging to the office of Bearers, and therein shall demean yourselves honestly and faithfully, discharging a good conscience; So etc.

August 1665.

JAMES BARTON and JOHN COOKE:--sworn, who are to have for their pains 10 sh. a week a piece; and 2d for every one to be buried, taking the 2d out of the estate of the deceased. If there be not wherewithal, the parish to bear it.

Oath 6. p. 44.

The Oath for the Searchers of the Plague, 1665.

“Yee and either of You shall sweare, that ye shall diligently view and search the corps of all such persons, as during these infectious times, shall dye within this Towne or the Liberties thereof, or so many of them as you shall or may have access unto, or have notice of; And shall according to the best of your skill, determine of what disease every such dead corps came to its death. And shall immediately give your judgment thereof to the Constables of the parish where such corps shall be found, and to the Bearers appointed for the burial of such infected corps. You shall not make report of the cause of any one’s death better or worse than the nature of the disease shall deserve. Yee shall live together where you shall be appointed, and not walk abroad more than necessity requires, and that only in the execution of your office of Searchers. Ye shall decline and absent yourselves from your families, and always avoid the society of people. And in your walk shall keep as far distant from men as may be, always carrying in your hands a white wand, by which the people may know you, and shun and avoid you. And ye shall well and truly do all other things belonging to the office of Searchers, according to the best of your skill, wisdom, knowledge, and power, in all things dealing faithfully, honestly, unfeignedly and impartially. So help” etc.

[1231] Morant, Hist. of Essex, I. 74.

[1232] Deering, Nottingham, vetus et nova, 1751, pp. 82-83. Copied in Thoresby’s edition of Thoroton’s History of Nottingham, II. 60.

Transcriber’s Notes:

Passages in bold are indicated by =bold=.

Superscripted characters are indicated by {superscript}.