Axel Wiffirt, servant of the king of Denmark, was licensed to levy 2000
men of war in Scotland, and to convey them away armed as culviriners
on foot, ‘as they best can provide them,’ being to serve the Danish
monarch in his wars.[56]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: JULY 15.]
‘Touran Murray, brother-german to the Laird of Tullibardine, was shot
and slain out of the place of Auchtertyre, in Stratherne, by one Wood
[Mad] Andrew Murray and his confederates, who kept the said place
certain days, and slew some six persons more, yet made escape at that
present.’--_Bir._
* * * * *
[Sidenote: SEP. 8.]
‘Ane called James Dalgliesh, merchant, brought the pest in[to]
Edinburgh.’--_D. O._
[Sidenote: 1568.]
According to custom in Edinburgh, when this dire visitor made his
appearance, the families which proved to be infected were compelled
to remove, with all their goods and furniture, out to the Burgh-moor,
where they lodged in wretched huts hastily erected for their
accommodation. They were allowed to be visited by their friends,
in company with an officer, after eleven in the forenoon; any one
going earlier was liable to be punished with death--as were those
who concealed the pest in their houses. Their clothes were meanwhile
purified by boiling in a large caldron erected in the open air,
and their houses were ‘clengit’ by the proper officers. All these
regulations were under the care of two citizens selected for the
purpose, and called _Bailies of the Muir_; for each of whom, as for
the cleansers and bearers of the dead, a gown of gray was made, with
a white St Andrew’s cross before and behind, to distinguish them from
other people. Another arrangement of the day was, ‘that there be made
twa close biers, with four feet, coloured over with black, and [ane]
white cross with ane bell to be hung upon the side of the said bier,
whilk sall mak warning to the people.’[57]
The public policy was directed rather to the preservation of the
untainted, than to the recovery of the sick. In other words,
selfishness ruled the day. The inhumanity towards the humbler classes
was dreadful. Well might _Maister Gilbert Skeyne, Doctour in Medicine_,
remark in his little tract on the pest, now printed in Edinburgh:
‘Every ane is become sae detestable to other (whilk is to be lamentit),
and specially the puir in the sight of the rich, as gif they were not
equal with them touching their creation, but rather without saul or
spirit, as beasts degenerate fra mankind.’[58] This worthy mediciner
tells us, indeed, that he was partly moved to publish his book by
‘seeand the puir in Christ inlaik [perish] without assistance of
support in body, all men detestand aspection, speech, or communication
with them.’
Dr Skeyne’s treatise, which consists of only forty-six very small
pages, gives us an idea of the views of the learned of those days
regarding the pest. He describes it as ‘ane feverable infection, maist
cruel, and sundry ways strikand down mony in haste.’ It proceeds,
in his opinion, from a corruption of the air, ‘whilk has strength
and wickedness above all natural putrefaction,’ and which he traces
immediately to the wrath of the just God at the sins of mankind.
There are, however, inferior causes, as stagnant waters, corrupting
animal matters and filth, the eating of unwholesome meat and decaying
fruits, and the drinking of corrupt water. Extraordinary humidity in
the atmosphere is also dwelt upon as a powerful cause, especially when
it follows in autumn after a hot summer. ‘Great dearth of victual,
whereby men are constrained to eat evil and corrupt meats,’ he sets
down as a cause much less notable. He does not forget to advert to the
suspicious intermeddling of comets and shooting-stars. ‘Nae pest,’ he
says, ‘continually endures mair than three years;’ and he remarks how
‘we daily see the puir mair subject to sic calamity nor the potent.’
[Sidenote: 1568.]
Dr Skeyne’s regimen for the pest regards both its prevention and its
cure, and involves an immense variety of curious recipes and rules of
treatment, expressed partly in Latin and partly in English. He ends
by calling his readers to observe--‘As there is diversity of time,
country, age, and consuetude to be observit in time of ministration
of ony medicine preservative or curative, even sae there is divers
kinds of pest, whilk may be easily knawn and divided by weel-learnit
physicians, whase counsel in time of sic danger of life is baith
profitable and necessar, in respect that in this pestilential disease
every ane is mair blind nor the moudiewort in sic things as concerns
their awn health.’
There has been preserved a curious letter which Adam Bothwell, bishop
of Orkney, addressed in this time of plague to his brother-in-law,
Sir Archibald Napier of Merchiston, regarding the dangers in which
the latter was placed by the nearness of his house to the bivouac of
the infected on the Burgh-moor.[59] It opens with an allusion to Sir
Archibald’s present position as a friend of Queen Mary in trouble with
the Regent:
[Sidenote: 1568.]
‘RICHT HONOURABLE SIR AND BROTHER--I heard, the day, the rigorous
answer and refuse that ye gat, whereof I was not weel apayit. But
always I pray you, as ye are set amids twa great inconvenients, travel
to eschew them baith. The ane is maist evident--to wit, the remaining
in your awn place where ye are; for by the number of sick folk that
gaes out of the town, the muir is [li]able to be overspread; and it
cannot be but, through the nearness of your place and the indigence of
them that are put out, they sall continually repair about your room,
and through their conversation infect some of your servants, whereby
they sall precipitate yourself and your children in maist extreme
danger. And as I see ye have foreseen the same for the young folk,
whaise bluid is in maist peril to be infectit first, and therefore
purposes to send them away to Menteith, where I wald wiss at God
that ye war yourself, without offence of authority, or of your band,
sae that your house get nae skaith. But yet, sir, there is ane mid
way whilk ye suld not omit, whilk is to withdraw you frae that side
of the town to some house upon the north side of the samen; whereof
ye may have in borrowing, when ye sall have to do--to wit, the Gray
Crook, Innerleith’s self, Wairdie, or sic other places as ye could
choose within ane mile; whereinto I wald suppose ye wald be in less
danger than in Merchanston. And close up your houses, your granges,
your barns, and all, and suffer nae man come therein, while [till] it
please God to put ane stay to this great plague; and in the meantime,
make you to live upon your penny, or on sic thing as comes to you
out of Lennox or Menteith;[60] whilk gif ye do not, I see ye will
ruin yourself; and howbeit I escape in this voyage,[61] I will never
look to see you again, whilk were some mair regret to me than I will
expreme by writing. Always [I] beseeks you, as ye love your awn weal,
the weal of your house, and us your friends that wald you weel, to
tak sure order in this behalf; and, howbeit your evil favourers wald
cast you away, yet ye tak better keep on yourself, and mak not them to
rejoice, and us your friends to mourn baith at ance. Whilk God forbid,
and for his goodness, preserve you and your posterity from sic skaith,
and maintein you in [his] holy keeping for ever. Of Edinburgh, the
21st day of September 1568, by your brother at power,
‘THE BISHOP OF ORKNEY.’
The bishop speaks with unmistakable friendship for his brother-in-law;
but what he says and what he does not say of the miserables of the
Burgh-moor, tends much to confirm Dr Skeyne’s remarks on the absence of
Christian kindness among the upper classes towards the afflicted poor
on this occasion.
This pestilence, lasting till February, is said to have carried off
2500 persons in Edinburgh, which could not be much less than a tenth of
the population. From the double cause of the pest and the absence of
the Regent in England, there were ‘nae diets of Justiciary halden frae
the hinderend of August to the second day of March.’[62] Such of the
inhabitants of the Canongate as were affected had to go out and live
in huts on the Hill (by which is probably meant Salisbury Crags), and
there stay till they were ‘clengit.’ A collection of money was made
among the other inhabitants for their support.[63]
[Sidenote: 1568.]
The distresses of pestilence were preceded and attended by those of
a famine, which suffered a great and sudden abatement in the month
of August 1569, perhaps in consequence of favourable appearances in
the crop then about to be gathered. At least, we are informed by the
_Diurnal of Occurrents_, that on that day, in the forenoon, ‘the boll
of ait meal was sauld for 3_l._ 12_s._, the boll of wheat for 4_l._
10_s._, and the boll of beare for 3_l._; but ere twa afternoon upon
the same day, the boll of ait meal was sauld for 40_s._, 38_s._, and
36_s._, the boll of wheat for 50_s._, and the beare for 33_s._‘--_D.
O._[64]
Little doubt is now entertained that the exanthematous disease called
long ago the Pest, and now the Plague, and which has happily been
unknown in the British Islands for two centuries, was the consequence
of miasma arising from crowded and filthy living, acting on bodies
predisposed by deficient aliment and other causes, and that at a
certain stage it assumed a contagious character. It will be found
throughout the present work that the malady generally, though not
invariably, followed dearth and famine--a generalisation harmonising
with the observations of Professor Alison as to the connection between
destitution and typhus fever, and supporting the views of those who
hold that it is for the interest of the community that all its members
have a sufficiency of the necessaries of life. The pest was not the
only epidemic which afflicted our ancestors in consequence of erroneous
living and misery endured by great multitudes of people. There was
one called the _land-ill_ or _wame-ill_, which seems to have been of
the nature of cholera. In an early chronicle quoted below,[65] is the
following striking notice of this kind of malady in connection with
famine as occurring in 1439:--‘The samen time there was in Scotland
a great dearth, for the boll of wheat was at 40_s._, and the boll of
ait meal 30_s._; and verily the dearth was sae great that there died
a passing [number of] people for hunger. And als the land-ill, the
wame-ill, was so violent, that there died mae that year than ever there
died, owther in pestilence, or yet in ony other sickness in Scotland.
And that samen year the pestilence came in Scotland, and began at
Dumfries, and it was callit the _Pestilence but Mercy_, for there took
it nane that ever recoverit, but they died within twenty-four hours.’
[Sidenote: OCT.
1568.]
At the time when the pest broke out in Edinburgh, there lived in the
city a young man of the middle class, bearing the name of George
Bannatyne, who was somewhat addicted to the vain and unprofitable art
of poesy. He was acquainted with the writings of his predecessors,
Dunbar, Douglas, Henryson, Montgomery, Scott, and others, through the
manuscripts to which alone they had as yet been committed. It was not
then the custom to print literary productions unless for some reason
external to their literary character, and these poems, therefore, were
existing in the same peril of not being preserved to posterity as
the works of Ennius in the days of Augustus. In all probability, the
greater part of them, if not nearly the whole, would have been lost,
but for an accidental circumstance connected with the plague now raging.
[Illustration: George Bannatyne’s Arms and Initials.]
[Sidenote: 1568.]
In that terrible time, when hundreds were dying in the city, and
apprehensions for their own safety engrossed every mind, the young
man George Bannatyne passed into retirement, and for three months
devoted himself to the task of transcribing the fugitive productions
of the Scottish muse into a fair volume. His retreat is supposed to
have been the old manor-house of Newtyle, near the village of Meigle
in Strathmore, and nothing could be more likely, as this was the
country-house of his father, who seems to have been a prosperous
lawyer in Edinburgh. In the short space of time mentioned, George had
copied in a good hand, from the mutilated and obscure manuscripts he
possessed, three hundred and seventy-two poems, covering no less than
eight hundred folio pages; a labour by which he has secured the eternal
gratitude of his countrymen, and established for himself a fame granted
to but few for their own compositions. The volume--celebrated as the
BANNATYNE MANUSCRIPT--still exists, under the greatest veneration, in
the Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh, after yielding from its ample stores
the materials of Ramsay’s, Hailes’s, and other printed selections.[66]
[Sidenote: NOV. 18.]
In this time of dearth and pestilence, the council of the Canongate
providently ordained that ‘the fourpenny loaf be weel baken and
dried, gude and sufficient stuff, and keep the measures and _paik_
of twenty-two ounces;’ ‘that nae browsters nor ony tapsters sell ony
dearer ale nor 6d. the pint;’ and ‘that nae venters of wine buy nae
new wine dearer than that they may sell the same commonly to all our
sovereign’s lieges for 16d. the pint.’
They also ordained (January 10, 1568-9), that ‘nae maner of person
inhabiter within this burgh, venters of wine, hosters, or tapsters of
ale, nor others whatsomever, thole or permit ony maner of persons to
drink, keep company at table in common taverners’ houses, upon Sunday,
the time of preaching, under the pain of forty shillings, to be upta’en
of the man and wife wha aucht the said taverners’ houses sae oft as
they fails, but favour.’[67]
It is evident from this injunction, that the keeping of public-houses
open on Sundays, at times different from those during which there was
public worship, was not then forbidden.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 1568-9.