A HISTORY OF EPIDEMICS IN BRITAIN.
London: C. J. CLAY AND SONS,
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE,
AND
H. K. LEWIS,
136, GOWER STREET, W.C.
Cambridge: DEIGHTON, BELL AND CO.
Leipzig: F. A. BROCKHAUS.
New York: MACMILLAN AND CO.
A HISTORY OF EPIDEMICS IN BRITAIN
from A.D. 664 to the Extinction of Plague
BY CHARLES CREIGHTON, M.A., M.D.,
FORMERLY DEMONSTRATOR OF ANATOMY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE.
CAMBRIDGE:
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
1891
[_All rights reserved._]
Cambridge:
PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AND SONS,
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
PREFACE.
The title and contents-table of this volume will show sufficiently its
scope, and a glance at the references in the several chapters will show
its sources. But it may be convenient to premise a few general remarks
under each of those heads. The date 664 A.D. has been chosen as a
starting-point, for the reason that it is the year of the first pestilence
in Britain recorded on contemporary or almost contemporary authority, that
of Beda’s ‘Ecclesiastical History.’ The other limit of the volume, the
extinction of plague in 1665-66, marks the end of a long era of epidemic
sickness, which differed much in character from the era next following. At
or near the Restoration we come, as it were, to the opening of a new seal
or the outpouring of another vial. The history proceeds thenceforth on
other lines and comes largely from sources of another kind; allowing for a
little overlapping about the middle of the seventeenth century, it might
be continued from 1666 almost without reference to what had gone before.
The history is confined to Great Britain and Ireland, except in Chapter
XI. which is occupied with the first Colonies and the early voyages,
excepting also certain sections of other chapters, where the history has
to trace the antecedents of some great epidemic sickness on a foreign
soil.
The sources of the work have been the ordinary first-hand sources of
English history in general. In the medieval period these include the
monastic histories, chronicles, lives, or the like (partly in the editions
of Gale, Savile, Twysden, and Hearne, and of the English Historical
Society, but chiefly in the great series edited for the Master of the
Rolls), the older printed collections of State documents, and, for the
Black Death, the recently published researches upon the rolls of manor
courts and upon other records. From near the beginning of the Tudor
period, the Calendars of State Papers (Domestic, Foreign, and Colonial),
become an invaluable source of information for the epidemiologist just as
for other historians. Also the Reports of the Historical Manuscripts
Commission, together with its Calendars of private collections of papers,
have yielded a good many facts. Many exact data, relating more
particularly to local outbreaks of plague, have been found in the county,
borough, and parish histories, which are of very unequal value for the
purpose and are often sadly to seek in the matter of an index. The
miscellaneous sources drawn upon have been very numerous, perhaps more
numerous, from the nature of the subject, than in most other branches of
history.
Medical books proper are hardly available for a history of English
epidemics until the Elizabethan period, and they do not begin to be really
important for the purpose until shortly before the date at which the
present history ends. These have been carefully sought for, most of the
known books having been met with and examined closely for illustrative
facts. In the latter part of the seventeenth century the best English
writers on medicine occupied themselves largely with the epidemics of
their own time, and the British school of epidemiology, which took a
distinguished start with Willis, Sydenham and Morton, was worthily
continued by many writers throughout the eighteenth century; so that the
history subsequent to the period here treated of becomes more and more
dependent upon medical sources, and of more special interest to the
profession itself.
Reference has been made not unfrequently to manuscripts; of which the more
important that have been used (for the first time) are a treatise on the
Sweating Sickness of 1485 by a contemporary physician in London, two
original London plague-bills of the reign of Henry VIII., and a valuable
set of tables of the weekly burials and christenings in London for five
years (almost complete) from 1578 to 1583, among the Cecil papers--these
last by kind permission of the Marquis of Salisbury.
Collecting materials for a British epidemiology from these various sources
is not an easy task; had it been so, it would hardly have been left to be
done, or, so far as one knows, even attempted, for the first time at so
late a period. Where the sources of information are so dispersed and
casual it is inevitable that some things should have been overlooked: be
the omissions few or many, they would certainly have been more but for
suggestions and assistance kindly given from time to time by various
friends.
The materials being collected, it remained to consider how best to use
them. The existing national epidemiologies, such as that of Italy by
Professor Corradi or the older ‘Epidemiologia Española’ of Villalba, are
in the form of Annals. But it seemed practicable, without sacrificing a
single item of the chronology, to construct from the greater events of
sickness in the national annals a systematic history that should touch and
connect with the general history at many points and make a volume
supplementary to the same. Such has been the attempt; and in estimating
the measure of its success it may be kept in mind that it is the first of
the kind, British or foreign, in its own department. The author can hardly
hope to have altogether escaped errors in touching upon the general
history of the country over so long a period; but he has endeavoured to go
as little as possible outside his proper province and to avoid making
gratuitous reflections upon historical characters and events. The greater
epidemic diseases have, however, been discussed freely--from the
scientific side or from the point of view of their theory.
It remains to acknowledge the liberality of the Syndics of the Cambridge
University Press in the matter of publication, and the friendly interest
taken in the work by their Chairman, the Master of Peterhouse.
_November, 1891._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
PESTILENCES PREVIOUS TO THE BLACK DEATH, CHIEFLY FROM FAMINES.
The plague of 664-684 described by Beda, and its probable
relation to the plague of Justinian’s reign, 542- 4
Other medieval epidemics not from famine 9
Chronology of Famine Sicknesses, with full accounts of those
of 1194-7, 1257-9, and 1315-16 15
Few traces of epidemics of Ergotism; reason of England’s
immunity from _ignis sacer_ 52
Generalities on medieval famines in England 65
CHAPTER II.
LEPROSY IN MEDIEVAL BRITAIN.
Medieval meanings of _lepra_ 69
Biblical associations of Leprosy 79
Medieval religious sentiment towards lepers 81
Leprosy-prevalence judged by the leper-houses,--their number
in England, special destination, and duration 86
Leper-houses in Scotland and Ireland 99
The prejudice against lepers 100
Laws against lepers 106
Things favouring Leprosy in the manner of life--Modern analogy
of Pellagra 107
CHAPTER III.
THE BLACK DEATH OF 1348-9.
Arrival of the Black Death, and progress through Britain, with
contemporary English and Irish notices of the symptoms 114
Inquiry into the extent of the mortality 123
Antecedents of the Black Death in the East--Overland China
trade--Favouring conditions in China 142
The Theory of Bubo-Plague 156
Illustrations from modern times 163
Summary of causes, and of European favouring conditions 173
CHAPTER IV.
ENGLAND AFTER THE BLACK DEATH, WITH THE EPIDEMICS TO 1485.
Efforts to renew the war with France 177
Direct social and economic consequences in town and country 180
More lasting effects on farming, industries and population 190
Epidemics following the Black Death 202
Medieval English MSS. on Plague 208
The 14th century chronology continued 215
The public health in the 15th century 222
Chronology of Plagues, 15th century 225
Plague &c. in Scotland and Ireland, 1349-1475 233
CHAPTER V.
THE SWEATING SICKNESS, 1485-1551.
The First invasion of the Sweat in 1485 237
The Second outbreak in 1508 243
The Third Sweat in 1517 245
The Fourth Sweat in 1528 250
Extension of the Fourth Sweat to the Continent in 1529 256
The Fifth Sweat in 1551 259
Antecedents of the English Sweat 265
Endemic Sweat of Normandy 271
Theory of the English Sweat 273
Extinction of the Sweat in England 279
CHAPTER VI.
PLAGUE IN THE TUDOR PERIOD.
Chronology of the outbreaks of Plague in London, provincial
towns, and the country generally, from 1485 to 1556 282
The London Plague of 1563 304
Preventive practice in Plague-time under the Tudors 309
Sanitation in Plantagenet and Tudor times 322
The disposal of the dead 332
Chronology of Plague 1564-1592--Vital statistics of London
1578-1583 337
The London Plague of 1592-1593 351
Plague in the Provinces, 1592-1598 356
Plague in Scotland, 1495-1603--Skene on the Plague (1568) 360
Plague in Ireland in the Tudor period 371
CHAPTER VII.
GAOL FEVERS, INFLUENZAS, AND OTHER FEVERS IN THE TUDOR PERIOD.
The Black Assizes of Cambridge, 1522 375
Oxford Black Assizes, 1577 376
Exeter Black Assizes, 1586 383
Increase of Pauperism, Vagrancy, &c. in the Tudor period 387
Influenzas and other “strange fevers” and fluxes, 1540-1597 397
CHAPTER VIII.
THE FRENCH POX.
Meagreness of English records 414
Evidence of its invasion of Scotland and England, in 1497 and
subsequent years 417
English writings on the Pox in the Elizabethan period, with
some notices for the Stuart period 423
The circumstances of the great European outbreak in 1494--
Invasion of Italy by Charles VIII. 429
CHAPTER IX.
SMALLPOX AND MEASLES.
First accounts of Smallpox in Arabic writings--Nature of the
disease 439
European Smallpox in the Middle Ages 445
Measles in medieval writings--Origin of the names “measles”
and “pocks” 448
First English notices of Smallpox in the Tudor period 456
Great increase of Smallpox in the Stuart period 463
Smallpox in Continental writings of the 16th century 467
CHAPTER X.
PLAGUE, FEVER AND INFLUENZA FROM THE ACCESSION OF JAMES I.
TO THE RESTORATION.
Growth of London in the Tudor and Stuart periods 471
The London Plague of 1603 474
Annual Plague in London after 1603 493
Plague in the Provinces, Ireland and Scotland, in 1603 and
following years 496
Malignant Fever preceding the Plague of 1625 504
The London Plague of 1625 507
Plague in the Provinces in 1625 and following years 520
The London Plague of 1636 529
Fever in London and in England generally to 1643 532
War Typhus in Oxfordshire &c. and at Tiverton, 1643-44 547
Plague in the Provinces, Scotland and Ireland during the
Civil Wars 555
Fever in England 1651-52 566
The Influenzas or Fevers of 1657-59 568
CHAPTER XI.
SICKNESSES OF EARLY VOYAGES AND COLONIES.
Scurvy in the early voyages, north and south 579
The remarkable epidemic of Fever in Drake’s expedition of
1585-6 to the Spanish Main 585
Other instances of ship-fevers, flux, scurvy, &c. 590
Scurvy &c. in the East India Company’s ships: the treatment 599
Sickness of Virginian and New England voyages and colonies 609
Early West Indian epidemics, including the first of Yellow
Fever--The Slave Trade 613
The epidemic of 1655-6 at the first planting of Jamaica 634
CHAPTER XII.
THE GREAT PLAGUE OF LONDON, AND THE LAST OF PLAGUE IN ENGLAND.
Literature of the Great Plague 646
Antecedents, beginnings and progress of the London Plague of
1665 651
Mortality and incidents of the Great Plague--Characters of the
disease 660
Plague near London and in the Provinces, 1665-66 679
The Plague at Eyam 1665-66 682
The Plague at Colchester, 1665-66, and the last of Plague in
England 688
ERRATA.
At p. 28 line 4, _for_ “for” _read_ “at.” At p. 126 line 2 _for_ “1351”
_read_ “1350;” same change at p. 130, lines 6 and 9. At p. 185 note 1
_read_ “Ochenkowski.” At p. 264 line 18, and at p. 554 line 11 from
bottom, read “_pathognomonicum_.” At p. 401, note 3 _for_ “1658” _read_
“1558.” At p. 420, line 17, _for_ “Henry IV.,” _read_ “Henry V.” At p.
474, line 4, _for_ “more” _read_ “less.” At p. 649 line 22 _omit_
“Hancock.”
CHAPTER I.
PESTILENCES PREVIOUS TO THE BLACK DEATH, CHIEFLY FROM FAMINES.
The Middle Age of European history has no naturally fixed beginning or
ending. The period of Antiquity may be taken as concluded by the fourth
Christian century, or by the fifth or by the sixth; the Modern period may
be made to commence in the fourteenth, or in the fifteenth or in the
sixteenth. The historian Hallam includes a thousand years in the medieval
period, from the invasion of France by Clovis to the invasion of Italy by
Charles VIII. in 1494. We begin, he says, in darkness and calamity, and we
break off as the morning breathes upon us and the twilight reddens into
the lustre of day. To the epidemiologist the medieval period is rounded
more definitely. At the one end comes the great plague in the reign of
Justinian, and at the other end the Black Death. Those are the two
greatest pestilences in recorded history; each has no parallel except in
the other. They were in the march of events, and should not be fixed upon
as doing more than their share in shaping the course of history. But no
single thing stands out more clearly as the stroke of fate in bringing the
ancient civilization to an end than the vast depopulation and solitude
made by the plague which came with the corn-ships from Egypt to Byzantium
in the year 543; and nothing marks so definitely the emergence of Europe
from the middle period of stagnation as the other depopulation and social
upheaval made by the plague which came in the overland track of Genoese
and Venetian traders from China in the year 1347. While many other
influences were in the air to determine the oncoming and the offgoing of
the middle darkness, those two world-wide pestilences were singular in
their respective effects: of the one, we may say that it turned the key of
the medieval prison-house; and of the other, that it unlocked the door
after eight hundred years.
The Black Death and its after-effects will occupy a large part of this
work, so that what has just been said of it will not stand as a bare
assertion. But the plague in the reign of Justinian hardly touches British
history, and must be left with a brief reference. Gibbon was not
insensible of the part that it played in the great drama of his history.
“There was,” he says, “a visible decrease of the human species, which has
never been repaired in some of the fairest countries of the globe.” After
vainly trying to construe the arithmetic of Procopius, who was a witness
of the calamity at Byzantium, he agrees to strike off one or more ciphers,
and adopts as an estimate “not wholly inadmissible,” a mortality of one
hundred millions. The effects of that depopulation, in part due to war,
are not followed in the history. So far as Gibbon’s method could go, the
plague came for him into the same group of phenomena as comets and
earthquakes; it was part of the stage scenery amidst which the drama of
emperors, pontiffs, generals, eunuchs, Theodoras, and adventurers
proceeded. Even of the comets and earthquakes, he remarks that they were
subject to physical laws; and it was from no want of scientific spirit
that he omitted to show how a plague of such magnitude had a place in the
physical order, and not less in the moral order.
A new science of epidemiology has sprung up since the time of Gibbon, who
had to depend on the writings of Mead, a busy and not very profound Court
physician. More particularly the Egyptian origin of the plague of the
sixth century, and its significance, have been elucidated by the brilliant
theory of Pariset, of which some account will be given at the end of the
chapter on the Black Death. For the present, we are concerned with it only
in so far as it may have a bearing upon the pestilences of Britain. The
plague of the sixth century made the greatest impression, naturally, upon
the oldest civilized countries of Europe; but it extended also to the
outlying provinces of the empire, and to the countries of the barbarians.
It was the same disease as the Black Death of the fourteenth century, the
bubo-plague; and it spread from country to country, and lasted from
generation to generation, as that more familiar infection is known to have
done[1].
Renewals of it are heard of in one part of Europe or another until the end
of the sixth century, when its continuity is lost. But it is clear that
the seeds of pestilence were not wanting in Rome and elsewhere in the
centuries following. Thus, about the year 668, the English
archbishop-elect, Vighard, having gone to Rome to get his election
confirmed by the Pope Vitalianus, was shortly after his arrival cut off by
pestilence, with almost all who had gone with him[2]. Twelve years after,
in 680, there was another severe pestilence in the months of July, August
and September, causing a great mortality at Rome, and such panic at Pavia
that the inhabitants fled to the mountains[3]. In 746 a pestilence is said
to have advanced from Sicily and Calabria, and to have made such
devastation in Rome that there were houses without a single inhabitant
left[4]. The common name for all such epidemics is _pestis_ or
_pestilentia_ or _magna mortalitas_, so that it is open to contend that
some other type than bubo-plague, such as fever or flux, may have been at
least a part of them; but no type of infection has ever been so mortal as
the bubo-plague, and a mortality that is distinguished by a chronicler as
causing panic and devastation was presumably of that type.
Pestilence in England and Ireland in the Seventh Century.
It is more than a century after the first great wave of pestilence had
passed over Europe in the reign of Justinian, before we hear of a great
plague in England and Ireland. Dr Willan, the one English writer on
medicine who has turned his erudition to that period, conjectures that the
infection must have come to this country from the continent at an earlier
date. From the year 597, he says, the progress of conversion to the
Christian religion “led to such frequent intercourse with Italy, France
and Belgium, that the epidemical and contagious disease prevailing on the
continent at the close of the sixth century must necessarily be
communicated from time to time through the Heptarchy[5].” Until we come to
the _Ecclesiastical History_ of Beda, the only authorities are the Irish
annals; and in them, the first undoubted entry of a great plague
corresponds in date with that of Beda’s history, the year 664. It is true,
indeed, that the Irish annals, or the later recensions of them, carry the
name that was given to the plague of 664 (_pestis ictericia_ or _buide
connaill_) back to an alleged mortality in 543, or 548, and make the
latter the “first _buide connaill_”; but the obituary of saints on that
occasion is merely what might have occurred in the ordinary way, and it is
probable, from the form of entry, that it was really the rumour of the
great plague at Byzantium and elsewhere in 543 and subsequent years that
had reached the Irish annalist[6].
The plague of 664 is the only epidemic in early British annals that can be
regarded as a plague of the same nature, and on the same great scale, as
the devastation of the continent of Europe more than a century earlier,
whether it be taken to be a late offshoot of that or not. The English
pestilence of 664 is the same that was fabled long after in prose and
verse as the great plague “of Cadwallader’s time.” It left a mark on the
traditions of England, which may be taken as an index of its reality and
its severity; and with it the history of epidemics in Britain may be said
to begin. It was still sufficiently recent to have been narrated by
eyewitnesses to Beda, whose _Ecclesiastical History_ is the one authentic
source, besides the entry in the Irish annals, of our information
concerning it.
The pestilence broke out suddenly in the year 664, and after
“depopulating” the southern parts of England, seized upon the province of
Northumbria, where it raged for a long time far and wide, destroying an
immense multitude of people[7]. In another passage Beda says that the same
mortality occurred also among the East Saxons, and he appears to connect
therewith their lapse to paganism[8].
The epidemic is said to have entered Ireland at the beginning of August,
but whether in 664 or 665 is not clear. According to one of those vague
estimates which we shall find again in connexion with the Black Death, the
mortality in Ireland was so vast that only a third part of the people were
left alive. The Irish annals do, however, contain a long list of notables
who died in the pestilence[9].
Beda follows his general reference to the plague by a story of the
monastery of Rathmelsigi, identified with Melfont in Meath, which he
heard many years after from the chief actor in it. Egbert, an English
youth of noble birth, had gone to Ireland to lead the monastic life, like
many more of his countrymen of the same rank or of the middle class. The
plague in his monastery had been so severe that all the monks either were
dead of it or had fled before it, save himself and another, who were both
lying sick of the disease. Egbert’s companion died; and he himself, having
vowed to lead a life of austerity if he were spared, survived to give
effect to his vow and died in the year 729 with a great name for sanctity
at the age of ninety.
The plague of 664 is said, perhaps on constructive evidence[10], to have
continued in England and Ireland for twenty years; and there are several
stories told by Beda of incidents in monasteries which show, at least,
that outbreaks of a fatal infection occurred here or there as late as 685.
Several of these relate to the new monastery of Barking in Essex, founded
for monks and nuns by a bishop of London in 676. First we have a story
relating to many deaths on the male side of the house[11], and then two
stories in which a child of three and certain nuns figure as dying of the
pestilence[12]. Another story appears to relate to the plague in a
monastery on the Sussex coast, seemingly Selsea[13]. Still another, in
which Beda himself is supposed to have played a part, is told of the
monastery of Jarrow, the date of it being deducible from the context as
the year 685.
Of the two Northumbrian monasteries founded by Benedict, that of Wearmouth
lost several of its monks by the plague, as well as its abbot Easterwine,
who is otherwise known to have died in March, 685. The other monastery of
Jarrow, of which Ceolfrith was abbot, was even more reduced by the
pestilence. All who could read, or preach, or say the antiphonies and
responses were cut off, excepting the abbot and one little boy whom
Ceolfrith had brought up and taught. For a week the abbot conducted the
shortened services by himself, after which he was joined by the voice of
the boy; and these two carried on the work until others had been
instructed. Beda, who is known to have been a pupil of Ceolfrith’s at
Jarrow, would then have been about twelve years old, and would correspond
to the boy in the story[14].
The nature of these plagues, beginning with the great invasion of 664, can
only be guessed. They have the look of having been due to some poison in
the soil, running hither and thither, as the Black Death did seven
centuries after, and remaining in the country to break out afresh, not
universally as at first, but here and there, as in monasteries. The
hypothesis of a late extension to England and Ireland of the great
European invasion of bubo-plague in 543, would suit the facts so far as we
know them. The one medical detail which has been preserved, on doubtful
authority, that the disease was a _pestis ictericia_, marked by yellowness
of the skin, and colloquially known in the Irish language as _buide
connaill_, is not incompatible with the hypothesis of bubo-plague, and is
otherwise unintelligible[15].
For the next seven centuries, the pestilences of Britain are mainly the
results of famine and are therefore of indigenous origin. So strongly is
the type of famine-pestilence impressed upon the epidemic history of
medieval England that the chroniclers and romancists are unable to
dissociate famine from their ideas of pestilence in general. Thus Higden,
in his reference to the outbreak of the Justinian plague at
Constantinople, associates it with famine alone[16]; and the metrical
romancist, Robert of Brunne, who had the great English famine of 1315-16
fresh in his memory, describes circumstantially the plague of 664 or the
plague of Cadwallader’s time, as a famine-pestilence, his details being
taken in part from the account given by Simeon of Durham of the harrying
of Yorkshire by William the Conqueror, and in part, doubtless, from his
own recent experience of a great English famine[17]. But before we come to
these typical famine-pestilences of Britain, which fill the medieval
interval between the foreign invasion of plague in Beda’s time and the
foreign invasion of 1348, it remains to dispose in this place of those
outbreaks on English soil which do not bear the marks of famine-sickness,
but, on the other hand, the marks of a virulent infection arising at
particular spots probably from a tainted soil. These have to be collected
from casual notices in the most unlikely corners of monastic chronicles;
but it is just the casual nature of the references that makes them
credible, and leads one to suppose that the recorded instances are only
samples of epidemics not altogether rare in the medieval life of England.
Early Epidemics not connected with Famine.
The earliest of these is mentioned in the annals of the priory of Christ
Church, Canterbury. In the year 829, all the monks save five are said to
have died of pestilence, so that the monastery was left almost desolate.
The archbishop Ceolnoth, who was also the abbot of the monastery, filled
up the vacancies with secular clerks, and he is said to have done so with
the consent of the five monks “that did outlive the plague.” The incident
comes into the Canterbury MS. of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle[18] under the
year 870, in connexion with the death of Ceolnoth and the action of his
successor in expelling the seculars and completing the original number of
regulars. So far as the records inform us, that great mortality within the
priory of Christ Church two centuries after it was founded by Augustine,
was an isolated event; the nearest general epidemic to it in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was a great mortality of man and beast about the
year 897 following the Danish invasion which Alfred at length repelled.
That such deadly intramural epidemics in monasteries were not impossible
is conclusively proved by the authentic particulars of a sudden and severe
mortality among the rich monks of Croyland at a much more recent
date--between the years 1304 and 1315. In the appendix to the chronicle of
Ramsey Abbey[19] there is printed a letter from Simon, abbot of Croyland,
without date but falling between the years above given, addressed to his
neighbours the abbots of Ramsey, Peterborough and Thorney, and the prior
of Spalding. The letter is to ask their prayers on the occasion of the
sudden death of thirteen of the monks of Croyland and the sickness of
others; that large number of the brethren had been cut off within fifteen
days--“potius violenter rapti quam fataliter resoluti[20].” The letter is
written from Daddington, whither abbot Simon had doubtless gone to escape
the infection.
These are two instances of deadly epidemics within the walls of English
monasteries. In the plague-years 664-685, and long after in the Black
Death, the mortalities among the monks were of the same degree, only there
was an easy explanation of them, in one if not in both cases, as being
part of an imported infection universally diffused in English soil. What
the nature of the occasional outbreaks in earlier times may have been, we
can only guess: something almost as deadly, we may say, as the plague
itself, and equally sudden. The experience was not peculiar to England. An
incident at Rome almost identical with that of Vighard in 668 is related
in a letter sent home in 1188, by Honorius the prior of Canterbury, who
had gone with others of the abbey on a mission to Rome to obtain judgment
in a dispute between the archbishop and the abbey, that the whole of his
following was stricken with sickness and that five were dead. John de
Bremble, who being also abroad was ordered to go to the help of the prior,
wrote home to the abbey that when he reached Rome only one of the brethren
was alive, and he in great danger, and that the first thing he had to do
on his arrival was to attend the cook’s funeral[21].
There is no clue to the type of these fatal outbreaks of sickness within
monastic communities. One naturally thinks of a soil-poison fermenting
within and around the monastery walls, and striking down the inmates by a
common influence as if at one blow. There are in the medieval history
previous to the Black Death a few instances of local pestilences among the
common people also, which differ from the ordinary famine-sicknesses of
the time. The most significant of these is a story told by William of
Newburgh at the end of his chronicle and probably dating from the
corresponding period, about the year 1196[22]. For several years there had
been, as we shall see, famine and fever in England; but the particular
incident does not relate to the famine, although it may join on to it. It
is the story of a ghost walking, and it comes from the village of Annan on
the Solway, having been related to the monk of Newburgh in Yorkshire by
one who had been an actor in it. A man who had fled from Yorkshire and
taken refuge in the village under the castle of Annan, was killed in a
quarrel about the woman whom he had married, and was buried without the
rites of the church. His unquiet ghost walked, and his corpse tainted the
air of the village; pestilence was in every house, so that the place which
had been populous looked as if deserted, those who escaped the plague
having fled. William of Newburgh’s informant had been in the midst of
these calamities, and had taken a lead in mitigating them; he had gone to
certain wise men living “in sacra dominica quae Palmarum dicitur,” and
having taken counsel with them, he addressed the people: “Let us dig up
that pestilence and let us burn it with fire” (_effodiamus pestem illam et
comburamus igni_). Two young men were, accordingly, induced to set about
the task. They had not far to dig: “repente cadaver non multa humo egesta
nudaverunt, enormi corpulentia distentum, facie rubenti turgentique supra
modum.”
The story, like others of the kind with a mixture of legend in them, is
more symbolical than real. The wise men of Annan may have been in error in
tracing the plague of their village to a single corpse, but they were
probably on the right lines of causation. It is curious to observe in
another chronicler of the same period, Ralph of Coggeshall in Essex, and
in a part of his chronicle which relates to the last years of Richard I.,
and first years of John, a comment upon the action of Pope Innocent III.
(about 1200 A.D.) in interdicting all Christian rites save baptism by the
clergy in France: “O how horrible ... to refuse the Christian rite of
burial to the bodies of the dead, so that they infected the air by their
foetor and struck horror into the souls of the living by their ghastly
looks[23].” The same pope’s interdict of decent burial and of other
clerical rites extended to England in 1208, the famous Interdict of the
reign of John. It was the papal method of checkmating the kingdoms of this
world; that it was subversive of traditional decency and immemorial
sanitary precaution was a small matter beside the assertion of the
authority of Peter.
Rightly or wrongly, taught by experience or misled by fancy, the medieval
world firmly believed that the formal and elaborate disposal of the dead
had a sanitary aspect as well as a pious. The infection of the air, of
which we shall hear much more in connexion with the plague, was a current
notion in England for several centuries before the Black Death. Especially
does the dread of it find expression where corpses were unburied after a
battle, massacre, or calamity of nature. The exertions made in these
circumstances to bury the dead, even when all pious and domestic feeling
was hardened to the barest thought of self-preservation, are explained in
set terms as instigated by the fear of breeding a pestilence. The instinct
is as wide as human nature, and there is clear evidence in our own early
writers that its sanitary meaning was recognised. One such instance may be
quoted from the St Albans annalist of the time of John and first years of
Henry III.[24] In the year 1234, an unusually savage raid was made by the
Welsh as far as Shrewsbury; they laid waste the country by fire and sword;
wayfarers were horrified at the sight of naked and unburied corpses
without number by the road sides, preyed on by ravenous beasts and birds;
the foetor of so much corruption infected the air on all sides, so that
even the dead slew the living. The chronicler’s language, “quod etiam
homines sanos mortui peremerunt,” is marked by the perspicacity or
correctness which distinguishes him. When the bubo-plague came to be
domesticated in English soil more than a century later, the disposal of
the dead became a sanitary question of obvious importance. But even in the
centuries before the Black Death, and most of all in the times when the
traditional practices of decent burial were interdicted by Popes or turned
to mercenary purposes by clergy[25], we shall perhaps not err in looking
for one, at least, of the causes of localised outbreaks of pestilence in
the tainting of the soil and the air by the corruption of corpses
insufficiently buried and coffined.
There still remains, before we come to famine-sickness as the common type
of pestilence in medieval England, to discover from the records any
evidence of pestilence due to war and invasion. The domestic history from
first to last is singularly free from such calamities. The whole history
of Mohammedan conquest and occupation is a history of infection following
in the train of war; and in Western Europe, at least from the invasion of
Italy by Charles VIII., when the medieval period (according to Hallam)
closes, the sieges, battles, and campaigns are constantly associated with
epidemic sickness among the people as well as among the troops. There is
only one period in the history of England, that of the civil wars of the
Parliament and the Royalists, in which the people had a real taste of the
common continental experience. The civil wars of York and Lancaster, as we
shall see, touched the common people little, and appear to have bred no
epidemics.
Apart from civil war, there were invasions, by the Welsh and Scots on the
western and northern marches, and by the Danes. One instance of pestilence
following a Welsh raid in the thirteenth century has been given from Roger
of Wendover. A single instance is recorded in the history of the Danish
invasions. It has been preserved by several independent chroniclers, with
some variation in details; and it appears to have been distinguished by so
much notice for the reason that it illustrates the magnanimity, sanctity,
and miraculous power of St Elphege, archbishop of Canterbury.
In the year 1010 (or 1011 according to some), the Danes had stormed
Canterbury, burnt the fair city, massacred the inhabitants, or carried
them captive to their ships at Sandwich. The archbishop Elphege was put
on board a small vessel and taken (doubtless by the inland channel which
was then open from the Stour to the Thames) to Greenwich, where he was
imprisoned for seven months[26]. A council had assembled in London for the
purpose of raising forty thousand pounds to buy off the invaders.
According to the account used by Higden[27], Elphege refused to sanction
the payment of a ransom of three thousand pounds for his own person: he
was accordingly taken from prison, and on the 13th of the Calends of May,
1010, was stoned to death by the Danes disappointed of his ransom.
Therefore a pestilence fell upon the invaders, a _dolor viscerum_, which
destroyed them by tens and twenties so that a large number perished. The
earlier narrative of William of Malmesbury[28] is diversified by the
introduction of a miracle, and is otherwise more circumstantial. While the
archbishop was held in durance, a deadly sickness broke out among the
Danes, affecting them in troops (_catervatim_), and proving so rapid in
its effects that death ensued before they could feel pain. The stench of
their unburied bodies so infected the air as to bring a plague upon those
of them who had remained well. As the survivors were thrown into a panic,
“sine numero, sine modo,” Elphege appeared upon the scene, and having
administered to them the consecrated bread, restored them to health and
put an end to the plague.
Disregarding what is fabulous, we may take these narratives to establish
the fact that a swift and fatal pestilence did break out among the Danes
in Kent. It had consisted probably of the same forms of camp sickness,
including dysentery (as the name _dolor viscerum_ implies), which have
occurred in later times. It is the only instance of the kind recorded in
the early history.
Medieval Famine-pestilences.
The foregoing are all the instances of pestilence in early English
history, unconnected with famine, that have been collected in a search
through the most likely sources. The history of English epidemics,
previous to the Black Death, is almost wholly a history of famine
sicknesses; and the list of such famines with attendant sickness, without
mentioning the years of mere scarcity, is a considerable one.
TABLE OF FAMINE-PESTILENCES IN ENGLAND.
Year Character Authority
679 Three years’ famine in Sussex Beda, _Hist. Eccles._ § 290
from droughts
793 General famine and severe Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, _sub
mortality anno_. Roger of Howden.
Simeon of Durham
897 Mortality of men and cattle Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Florence
for three years during and of Worcester. Annales
after Danish invasion Cambriae (_anno_ 896)
962 Great mortality: “the great Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
fever in London”
976 Famine Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Roger of
Howden
984 } Famine. Fever of men and Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Roger of
986 } murrain of cattle Howden. Simeon of Durham.
987 } Malmesbury. _Gest. Pontif.
Angl._ p. 171. Flor. of
Worcester. Roger of Wendover,
_Flor. Hist._ Bromton (in
Twysden). Higden
1005 Desolation following expulsion Henry of Huntingdon
of Danes
1036 } Famine Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Henry of
1039 } Huntingdon
1044 Famine Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
1046 Very hard winter; pestilence Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
and murrain
1048 } Great mortality of men and Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (_sub
1049 } cattle anno_ 1049). Roger of Howden.
Simeon of Durham (_sub anno_
1048)
1069 Wasting of Yorkshire Simeon of Durham, ii. 188
1086 } Great fever-pestilence. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
1087 } Sharp famine Malmesbury. Henry of
Huntingdon, and most
annalists
1091 Siege of Durham by the Scots Simeon of Durham, ii. 339
1093 } Floods; hard winter; severe Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Annals
1095 } famines; universal of Winchester. William of
1096 } sickness and mortality Malmesbury. Henry of
1097 } Huntingdon. Annals of Margan.
Matthew Paris, and others
1103 } General pestilence and Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Roger of
1104 } murrain Wendover
1105 }
1110 } Famine Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Roger of
1111 } Wendover
1112 “Destructive pestilence” Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Annals
of Osney. Annales Cambriae
1114 Famine in Ireland; flight Annals of Margan
or death of people
1125 Most dire famine in all Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. William
England; pestilence and of Malmesbury, _Gest. Pont._
murrain p. 442. Henry of Huntingdon.
Annals of Margan. Roger of
Howden.
[1130 Great murrain Annals of Margan. Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle (_sub anno_ 1131)]
1137 } Famine from civil war; Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Annals
1140 } mortality of Winchester. Henry of
Huntingdon (1138)
1143 Famine and mortality. Gesta Stephani, p. 98. William
of Newburgh. Henry of
Huntingdon
1171 Famine in London in Spring Stow, _Survey of London_
1172 Dysentery among the troops Radulphus de Diceto, _Imag.
in Ireland Hist._ i. 348
1173 “Tussis quaedam mala et Chronica de Mailros
inaudita”
1175 Pestilence; famine Benedict of Peterborough. Roger
of Howden
1189 Famine and mortality Annals of Margan. Giraldus
Cambrensis, _Itin. Walliae_
1194} Effects of a five years’ Annals of Burton. William of
1195} scarcity; great mortality Newburgh. Roger of Howden
1196} over all England iii. 290. Rigord. Bromton
1197} (in Twysden col. 1271).
Radulphus de Diceto (_sub
anno_ 1197)
1201 Unprecedented plague of Chronicon de Lanercost (probably
people and murrain of relates to 1203)
animals
1203 Great famine and mortality Annals of Waverley. Annals of
Tewkesbury. Annals of Margan.
Ralph of Coggeshall (_sub
anno_ 1205)
1210 Sickly year throughout Annals of Margan
England
1234 Third year of scarcity; Roger of Wendover. Annals of
sickness Tewkesbury
1247 Pestilence from September Matthew Paris. Higden
to November; dearth and Annales Cambriae (_sub anno_
famine 1248)
1257} Bad harvests; famine and Matthew Paris. Annals of
1258} fever in London and the Tewkesbury. Continuator of M.
1259} country Paris (1259). Rishanger
1268 Probably murrain only. Chronicon de Lanercost
(“Lungessouth”)
1271 Great famine and pestilence Continuator of William of
in England and Ireland Newburgh ii. 560 [doubtful]
[1274 Beginning of a great imported Rishanger (also _sub anno_
murrain among 1275). Contin. Fl. of
sheep Worcester _sub anno_ 1276]
1285 Deaths from heat and Rishanger
drought
1294 Great scarcity; epidemics Rishanger. Continuator of
of flux Florence of Worcester p. 405.
Trivet
1315} General famine in England; Trokelowe. Walsingham, _Hist.
1316} great mortality from fever, Angl._ i. 146. Contin.
flux &c.; murrain Trivet, pp. 18, 27. Rogers,
_Hist. of Agric. and Prices_
1322 Famine and mortality in Higden. Annales Londinenses
Edward II.’s army in
Scotland; scarcity in
London
The period covered by this long list is itself a long one; and the
intervals between successive famine-pestilences are sometimes more than a
generation. A history of epidemics is necessarily a morbid history. In
this chapter of it, we search out the lean years, saying nothing of the
fat years; and by exclusively dwelling upon the dark side we may form an
entirely wrong opinion of the comforts or hardships, prosperity or
adversity, of these remote times. English writers of the earliest period,
when they use generalities, are loud in praise of the advantages of their
own island; until we come to the fourteenth century poem of ‘The Vision of
Piers the Ploughman’ we should hardly suspect, from their usual strain,
that England was other than an earthly paradise, and every village an
Auburn, “where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain.” There is a
poem preserved in Higden’s _Polychronicon_ by one Henricus, who is almost
certainly Henry archdeacon of Huntingdon in the time of Henry I., although
the poem is not included among the archdeacon’s extant verse. The subject
is ‘De Praerogativis Angliae,’ and the period, be it remarked, is one of
the early Norman reigns, when the heel of the conquering race is supposed
to have been upon the neck of the English. Yet this poem contains the
famous boast of ‘Merry England,’ and much else that is the reverse of
unhappy:--
“Anglia terra ferax et fertilis angulus orbis.
Anglia plena jocis, gens libera, digna jocari;
Libera gens, cui libera mens et libera lingua;
Sed lingua melior liberiorque manus.
Anglia terrarum decus et flos finitimarum,
Est contenta sui fertilitate boni.
Externas gentes consumptis rebus egentes,
Quando fames laedit, recreat et reficit.
Commoda terra satis mirandae fertilitatis
Prosperitate viget, cum bona pacis habet[29].”
Or, to take another distich, apparently by Alfred of Beverley,
“Insula praedives, quae toto non eget orbe,
Et cujus totus indiget orbis ope.”
Or, in Higden’s own fourteenth century words, after quoting these earlier
estimates: “Prae ceteris gulae dedita, in victu et vestitu multum
sumptuosa[30].”
On the other hand there is a medieval proverbial saying which places
England in a light strangely at variance with this native boast of
fertility, plenty, and abundance overflowing to the famished peoples
abroad: “Tres plagae tribus regionibus appropriari solent, Anglorum fames,
Gallorum ignis, Normannorum lepra”--three afflictions proper to three
countries, famine to England, St Anthony’s fire to France, leprosy to
Normandy[31]. Whatever the “lepra Normannorum” may refer to, there is no
doubt that St Anthony’s fire, or ergotism from the use of bread containing
the grains of spurred rye, was a frequent scourge of some parts of France;
and, in common repute abroad, famine seems to have been equally
characteristic of England. Perhaps the explanation of England’s evil name
for famines is that there were three great English famines in the medieval
history, before the Black Death, separated by generations, no doubt, but
yet of such magnitude and attended by so disgraceful circumstances that
the rumour of them must have spread to foreign countries and made England
a by-word among the nations. These were the famines of 1194-96, 1257-59,
and 1315-16. Of the first we have a tolerably full account by William of
Newburgh, who saw it in Yorkshire; of the second we have many particulars
and generalities by Matthew Paris of St Albans, who died towards the end
of it; and of the third we have an account by one of his successors as
historiographer at St Albans, John Trokelowe. All other references to
famine in England are meagre beside the narratives of these competent
observers, although there were probably two or three famines in the Norman
period equally worthy of the historian’s pen. For the comprehension of
English famine-pestilences in general, we ought to take the best recorded
first; but it will be on the whole more convenient to observe the
chronological order, and to introduce, as occasion offers, some
generalities on the types of disease which famine induced, the extent of
the mortalities, and the conditions of English agriculture and food-supply
which made possible occasional famines of such magnitude.
From the great plague “of Cadwallader’s time,” which corresponds in
history to the foreign invasion of pestilence in 664, until nearly the end
of the Anglo-Saxon rule, there is little recorded of famines and
consequent epidemic sickness. It does not follow that the period was one
of plenty and prosperity for the people at large. The Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle is at no period detailed or circumstantial on the subject of
famines and pestilences; and although the entries become more numerous in
the last hundred years before the Chronicle came to an end in 1137, their
paucity in the earlier period probably means no more than the imperfection
of the record. Some of the generalities of Malthus might be applied to
help the imagination over a period of history which we might otherwise be
disposed to view as the Golden Age. One of these, originally written for
the South Sea Islands, is applicable to all romantic pictures of “rude
plenty,” such as the picture of the Anglo-Saxon household in _Ivanhoe_. It
has been remarked of Scott as a novelist that he always feeds everyone
well; but the picture, grateful to the imagination though it be, is
probably an illusion. “In a state of society,” says Malthus, “where the
lives of the inferior order of the people seem to be considered by their
superiors as of little or no value, it is evident that we are very liable
to be deceived with regard to the appearances of abundance”; and again:
“We may safely pronounce that among the shepherds of the North of Europe,
war and famine were the principal checks that kept the population down to
the level of their scanty means of subsistence.” The history of English
agriculture is known with some degree of accuracy from the thirteenth
century, and it is a history of prices becoming steadier and crops more
certain. It is not to be supposed that tillage was more advanced before
the Conquest than after it. On the other hand the probabilities are that
England had steadily emerged from a pastoral state. It would be unfair to
judge of the state of rural England at any time by the state of Wales in
the twelfth century, as it is described by Giraldus Cambrensis, or by the
condition of Ireland as described from the same traveller’s observations.
But in the absence of any concrete view of primitive England itself, the
picture of the two neighbouring provinces may be introduced here.
Ireland, says Giraldus, closely following Beda, is a fertile land
neglected; it had no agriculture, industries or arts; its inhabitants were
rude and inhospitable, leading a purely pastoral life, and living more
upon milk than upon meat. At the same time there was little sickness; the
island had little need of physicians; you will hardly ever find people ill
unless they be at the extremity of death; between continuous good health
and final dissolution there was no middle term. The excessive number of
children born blind, or deaf, or deformed, he ascribes to incestuous
unions and other sexual laxities[32].
The picture of Wales is that of a not less primitive society[33]. The
Welsh do not congregate in towns, or in villages, or in fortified places,
but live solitary in the woods; they build no sumptuous houses of stone
and lime, but only ozier booths, sufficient for the year, which they run
up with little labour or cost. They have neither orchards nor gardens, and
little else than pasture land. They partake of a sober meal in the
evening, and if there should be little or nothing to eat at the close of
day, they wait patiently until the next evening. They do not use
table-cloths nor towels; they are more natural than neat (_naturae magis
student quam nitori_). They lie down to sleep in their day clothes, all in
one room, with a coarse covering drawn over them, their feet to the fire,
lying close to keep each other warm, and when they are sore on one side
from lying on the hard floor, they turn over to the other. There are no
beggars among this nation. It is of interest, from the point of view of
the “positive checks” of Malthus, to note that Giraldus more than hints at
the practice of a grosser form of immorality than he had charged the Irish
with. Spinning and weaving were of course not unknown, for the hard and
rough blanket mentioned above was a native product. By the time that
Higden wrote (about 1340), he has to record a considerable advance in the
civilization of Wales. Having used the description of Giraldus, he adds:
“They now acquire property, apply themselves to agriculture, and live in
towns[34].” But in the reign of Henry II., it was found easy to bring the
rebellious Welsh to terms by stopping the supplies of corn from England,
upon which they were largely dependent[35].
Of the condition of Scotland in the twelfth century we have no such sketch
as Giraldus has left for Wales and Ireland. Uncivilized compared with
England, the northern part of the island must certainly have been, if we
may trust the indignant references by Simeon of Durham and Henry of
Huntingdon to the savage practices of the Scots who swarmed over the
border, with or without their king to lead them, or the remark by William
of Malmesbury concerning the Scots who went on the Crusade leaving behind
them the insects of their native country.
Giraldus intended to have written an itinerary or topography of England
also, but his purpose does not appear to have been fulfilled. Higden, his
immediate successor in that kind of writing a century and a half later, is
content, in his section on England, to reproduce the generalities of
earlier authors from Pliny downwards. Of these, we have already quoted the
‘Prerogatives of England’ by Henry of Huntingdon, from which one might
infer that the British Isles, under the Norman yoke, were the Islands of
the Blest. On the other hand, the impression made by the details of the
Domesday survey upon a historian of the soundest judgment, Hallam, is an
impression of poor cultivation and scanty sustenance. “There cannot be a
more striking proof,” he says, “of the low condition of English
agriculture in the eleventh century than is exhibited in Domesday book.
Though almost all England had been partially cultivated, and we find
nearly the same manors, except in the north, which exist at present, yet
the value and extent of cultivated ground are inconceivably small. With
every allowance for the inaccuracies and partialities of those by whom
that famous survey was completed, we are lost in amazement at the constant
recurrence of two or three carucates in demesne, with folkland occupied by
ten or a dozen villeins, valued all together at forty shillings, as the
return of a manor which now would yield a competent income to a
gentleman[36].”
Whether, the population at the Domesday survey were nearer two
millions than one, the people were almost wholly on the land. Of the
size of the chief towns, as the Normans found them, we may form a not
incorrect estimate from the Domesday enumeration of houses held of the
king or of other superiors[37]. London, Winchester and Bristol do not
come at all into the survey. Besides these, the towns of the first
rank are Norwich, York, Lincoln, Thetford, Colchester, Ipswich,
Gloucester, Oxford, Cambridge, and Exeter.
Norwich had 1320 burgesses in the time of Edward the Confessor; in the
borough were 665 English burgesses rendering custom, and 480 bordarii
rendering none on account of their poverty; there were also more than
one hundred French households. Lincoln had 970 inhabited houses in
King Edward’s time, of which 200 were waste at the survey. Thetford
had 943 burgesses before the Conquest, and at the survey 720, with 224
houses vacant. York was so desolated just before the survey that it is
not easy to estimate its ordinary population; but it may be put at
about 1200 houses. Gloucester had 612 burgesses. Oxford seems to have
had about 800 houses; and for Cambridge we find an enumeration of the
houses in nine of the ten wards of the town in King Edward’s time, the
total being about 400. Colchester appears to have had some 700 houses,
Ipswich 538 burgesses, with 328 houses “waste” so far as tax was
concerned. Exeter had 300 king’s houses, and an uncertain number more.
Next in importance come such places as Southampton, Wallingford,
Northampton, Leicester, Warwick, Shrewsbury, Nottingham, Coventry,
Derby, Canterbury, Yarmouth, Rochester, Dover, Sandwich (about 400
houses), and Sudbury. In a third class may be placed towns like
Dorchester, Ilchester, Bridport, Wareham, Shaftesbury, Bath,
Chichester, Lewes, Guildford, Hythe, Romney, Pevensey, Windsor, Bath,
Chester, Worcester, Hereford, Huntingdon, Stamford, Grantham,
Hertford, St Albans, Torchesey, Maldon, each with from 100 to 200
burgesses. Dover and Sandwich each supplied twenty ships, with crews
of twenty-four men, for King Edward’s service during fifteen days of
the year. In Hereford there were six smiths, each rendering one penny
a year for his forge, and making 120 nails of the king’s iron. Many of
these houses were exceedingly small, with a frontage of seven feet;
the poorest class were mere sheds, built in the ditch against the
town wall, as at York and Canterbury.
It would be within the mark to say that less than one-tenth of the
population of England was urban in any distinctive sense of the term.
After London, Norwich, York, and Lincoln, there were probably no towns
with five thousand inhabitants. There were, of course, the simpler forms
of industries, and there was a certain amount of commerce from the Thames,
the East Coast, and the Channel ports. The fertile soil of England
doubtless sustained abundance of fruit trees and produced corn to the
measure of perhaps four or six times the seed. There were flocks of sheep,
yielding more wool than the country used, herds of swine and of cattle.
The exports of wool, hides, iron, lead, and white metal gave occasion to
the importation of commodities and luxuries from Flanders, Normandy, and
Gascony. If there was “rude plenty” in England, it was for a sparse
population, and it was dependent upon the clemency of the skies. A bad
season brought scarcity and murrain, and two bad seasons in succession
brought famine and pestilence.
Of the general state of health we may form some idea from the Anglo-Saxon
leechdoms, or collections of remedies, charms and divinations, supposed to
date from the eleventh century[38]. The maladies to which the English
people were liable in these early times correspond on the whole to the
everyday diseases of our own age. There were then, as now, cancers and
consumptions, scrofula or “kernels,” the gout and the stone, the falling
sickness and St Vitus’ dance, apoplexies and palsies, jaundice, dropsies
and fluxes, quinsies and anginas, sore eyes and putrid mouth, carbuncles,
boils and wildfire, agues, rheums and coughs. Maladies peculiar to women
occupy a chief place, and there is evidence that hysteria, the outcome of
hardships, entered largely into the forms of sickness, as it did in the
time of Sydenham. Among the curiosities of the nosology may be mentioned
wrist-drop, doubtless from working in lead. One great chapter in disease,
the sickness and mortality of infants and children, is almost a complete
blank. It ought doubtless to have been the greatest chapter of all. The
population remained small, for one reason among others, that the children
would be difficult to rear. There is no direct evidence; but we may infer
from analogous circumstances, that the inexpansive population meant an
enormous infant mortality. The sounds which fell on the ear of Æneas as he
crossed the threshold of the nether world may be taken as prophetic, like
so much else in Virgil, of the experience of the Middle Ages:
“Continuo auditae voces, vagitus et ingens
Infantumque animae flentes, in limine primo:
Quos dulcis vitae exsortes, et ab ubere raptos,
Abstulit atra dies, et funere mersit acerbo.”
We come, then, to the chronology of famine-pestilences, and first in the
Anglo-Saxon period. The years from 664 to 685 are occupied, as we have
seen, by a great plague, probably the bubo-plague, which returned in 1348
as the Black Death, affecting, like the latter, the whole of England and
Ireland on its first appearance, and afterwards particular monasteries,
such as Barking and Jarrow. But it is clear that famine-sickness was also
an incident of the same years. The metrical romancist of the fourteenth
century, Robert of Brunne, was probably mistaken in tracing the great
plague of “Cadwaladre’s time” to famine in the first instance; there is no
such suggestion in the authentic history of Beda. But that historian does
make a clear reference to famine in Sussex about the year 679[39].
Describing the conversion of Sussex to Christianity by Wilfrid, he says
that the province had been afflicted with famine owing to three seasons of
drought, that the people were dying of hunger, and that often forty or
fifty together, “inedia macerati,” would proceed to the edge of the Sussex
cliffs, and, joining hands, throw themselves into the sea. But on the very
day when the people accepted the Christian baptism, there fell a
plenteous rain, the earth flourished anew, and a glad and fruitful season
ensued[40].
The anarchy in Northumbria which followed the death of Beda (in 735), with
the decline of piety and learning in the northern monasteries, is said to
have led to famine and plague[41]. It is not until the year 793 that an
entry of famine and mortality occurs in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It is
in keeping with the disappointing nature of all these early records that
Simeon of Durham and Roger of Howden, the two compilers who had access to
lost records, are more particular in enumerating the portents that
preceded the calamity than in describing its actual circumstances. Then a
whole century elapses (but for a vague entry under the year 822) until we
come to the three calamitous years, with 897 as the centre, which followed
Alfred’s famous resistance to the Danes. In that mortality, many of the
chief thanes died, and there was a murrain of cattle, with a scarcity of
food in Ireland. Two generations pass before the chronicle contains
another entry of the kind: in 962 there was a great mortality, and the
“great fever” was in London. At no long intervals there are two more
famines, in 976 and 986. That of 986 (or 987) would appear to have been
severe; the church plate at Winchester was melted for the benefit of the
starving[42], and there was “a fever of men and a murrain of cattle[43].”
After the expulsion of the Danes in 1005, says Henry of Huntingdon, there
was such desolation of famine as no one remembered. Then in 1010 or 1011
comes the incident of St Elphege, already given. From 1036 to 1049 we find
mention of four, or perhaps five, famines, those of the years 1046 and
1049 being marked by a great mortality of men and murrain of cattle.
Except in Yorkshire, the Norman Conquest had no immediate effects upon the
people of England in the way of famine and pestilence. From the last great
mortality of 1049, a period of nearly forty years elapses until we come to
the great pestilence and sharp famine in the last year of the Conqueror’s
reign (1086-7). The harrying of Yorkshire, however, is too important a
local incident to be passed over in this history. Of these ruthless
horrors in the autumn of 1069 we have some particulars from the pen of
Simeon of Durham, who has contemporary authority. There was such hunger,
he says, that men ate the flesh of their own kind, of horses, of dogs, and
of cats. Others sold themselves into perpetual slavery in order that they
might be able to sustain their miserable lives on any terms (like the
Chinese in later times). Others setting out in exile from their country
perished before their journey was ended. It was horrible to look into the
houses and farmyards, or by the wayside, and see the human corpses
dissolved in corruption and crawling with worms. There was no one to bury
them, for all were gone, either in flight or dead by the sword and famine.
The country was one wide solitude, and remained so for nine years. Between
York and Durham no one dwelt, and travellers went in great fear of wild
beasts and of robbers[44]. William of Malmesbury says that the city of
York was so wasted by fire that an old inhabitant would not have
recognized it; and that the country was still waste for sixty miles at the
time of his writing (1125)[45]. In the Domesday survey we find that there
were 540 houses so waste that they paid nothing, 400 houses “not
inhabited,” of which the better sort pay one penny and others less, and
only 50 inhabited houses paying full dues.
The same local chronicler who has left particulars of the devastation of
1069-70, has given also a picture of the siege of Durham by Malcolm
Canmore in 1091, which may serve to realize for us what a medieval siege
was, and what the Scots marches had to endure for intervals during several
centuries:--
Malcolm advancing drives the Northumbrians before him, some into the
woods and hills, others into the city of Durham; for there have they
always a sure refuge. Thither they drive their whole flocks and herds
and carry their furniture, so that there is hardly room within the
town for so great a crowd. Malcolm arrives and invests the city. It
was not easy for one to go outside, and the sheep and cattle could not
be driven to pasture: the churchyard was filled with them, and the
church itself was scarcely kept clear of them. Mixed with the cattle,
a crowd of women and children surrounded the church, so that the
voices of the choristers were drowned by the clamour. The heat of
summer adds to the miseries of famine. Every-where throughout the town
were the sounds of grief, ‘et plurima mortis imago,’ as in the sack of
Troy. The siege is raised by the miraculous intervention of St
Cuthbert[46].
The wasting of Yorkshire by William and the five incursions of the Scots
into Northumberland and Durham in the reign of Malcolm Canmore had the
effect of reducing a large part of the soil of England to a comparatively
unproductive state. The effacement of farms (and churches) in Hampshire,
for the planting of the New Forest, had the same effect in a minor degree.
The rigorous enforcement of the forest laws in the interests of the Norman
nobles must have served also to remove one considerable source of the
means of subsistence from the people. Whether these things, together with
the general oppression of the poor, contributed much or little to what
followed, it is the fact that the long period from the last two years of
William to the welcomed advent of Henry II. to the throne in 1154, is
filled with a record of famines, pestilences, and other national
misfortunes such as no other period of English history shows.
The first general famine and pestilence under Norman rule was in the years
1086 and 1087, the last of the Conqueror’s reign. It is probable from the
entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that the aggravation (for which we
must always look in order to explain a historical famine and pestilence)
was due to two bad harvests in succession. The year 1086 was “heavy,
toilsome and sorrowful,” through failure of the corn and fruit crops owing
to an inclement season, and through murrain of cattle[47]. Some form of
sickness appears to have been prevalent between that harvest and the next.
Almost every other man, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, was stricken with
fever, and that so sharply that many died of it. “Alas! how miserable and
how rueful a time was then! when the wretched men lay driven almost to
death, and afterwards came the sharp famine and destroyed them quite.” It
is probably a careless gloss upon that, by a historian of the next
generation[48], when he says that “a promiscuous fever destroyed more than
half the people,” and that famine, coming after, destroyed those whom the
fever had spared[49]. But there can be no question that this was one of
those great periodic conjunctions of famine and fever (λιμὸν ὁμοῦ καὶ
λοιμόν), of which we shall find fuller details in the chronicles of the
twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is easy to understand
that England, with all her wealth of fruits and corn in a good season, had
no reserve for the poor at least, and sometimes not even for the rich, to
get through two or more bad seasons with. How much the corn crop in those
days depended on the season is clear from the entry in the chronicle two
years after (1089), that reaping was still in progress at Martinmas (11
November) and even later. Fields cultivated to yield an average of only
four or six times the seed were, of course, more at the mercy of the
seasons than the highly cultivated corn-land of our own time.
The next famine with pestilence in England, seven years later, or in the
seventh year of William Rufus, introduces us to a new set of
considerations. It was the time when the exactions of tribute for the
king’s wars in Normandy, or for the satisfaction of his greed and that of
his court, were severely felt both by the church and the people. England,
says one[50], was suffocated and unable to breathe. Both clergy and
laity, says another[51], were in such misery that they were weary of life.
But the most remarkable phraseology is that of William of Malmesbury, the
chief historian of the period, who seldom descends from the region of high
political and ecclesiastical affairs to take notice of such things as
famine and pestilence. In the 7th year of Rufus, he says, “agriculture
failed” on account of the tributes which the king had decreed from his
position in Normandy. The fields running to waste, a famine followed, and
that in turn was succeeded by a mortality so general that the dying were
left untended and the dead unburied[52]. The phrase about the lack of
cultivation is a significant and not incredible statement, which places
the England of Rufus in the same light as certain belated feudal parts of
India within recent memory.
In the villages of Gujerat, when the festival comes round early in
May, the chief of a village collects the cultivators and tells them
that it is time for them to commence work. They say: “No! the
assessment was too heavy last year, you lay too many taxes upon us.”
However, after much higgling, and presents made to the more important
men, a day is fixed for cultivation to begin, and the clearing and
manuring of the fields proceeds as before[53]. But while Gujerat was
still possessed by hundreds of petty feudal chiefs under the Mahratta
rule, previous to the establishment of the British Agency in 1821, the
exactions of tribute by the Baroda government were so extreme, and
enforced by so violent means[54], that cultivation was almost
neglected; the towns and villages swarmed with idlers, who subsisted
upon milk and ghee from their cows, while indolence and inactivity
affected the whole community[55]. A dreadful famine had “raged with
destructive fury” over Gujerat and Kattiwar for more than one year
about 1812-13-14, which was followed, not by a contagious fever, but
by the true bubo-plague.
If the English historian’s language, “agricultura defecit,” with
reference to the tribute exacted by Rufus, have that fitness which we have
reason to expect from him,--Higden varies it to “ita ut agricultura
cessaret et fames succederet,”--then the famine and mortality about the
years 1094-5 were due to no less remarkable a cause than a refusal to
cultivate the land. It is not to be supposed that the incubus of excessive
tribute passed away with the accession of Henry I. The Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle repeats the complaint of heavy taxation in connexion with bad
harvests and murrains in 1103, 1105 and 1110[56]. Severe winters, or
autumn floods, with murrains and scarcity, are recorded also for the years
1111, 1115, 1116, 1117, 1124 and 1125, the famine of 1125 having been
attended with a mortality, and having been sufficiently great and general
to be mentioned by several chroniclers[57]. In the midst of these years of
scarcity and its effects upon the population, there occurs one singular
entry of another kind in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, under the year 1112:
“This was a very good year, and very abundant in wood and in field; but it
was a very sad and sorrowful one, through a most destructive
pestilence[58].” Under the year 1130, the annalist of the Welsh monastery
of Margan, who is specially attentive to domestic events, records a
murrain of cattle all over England, which lasted several years so that
scarcely one township escaped the pest, the pigsties becoming suddenly
empty, and whole meadows swept of their cattle. It is to the same murrain
that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle refers under the year 1131: in towns where
there had been ten or twelve ploughs going there was not one left, and the
man who had 200 or 300 swine had not one left; after that died the
domestic fowls.
These things happened from time to time in the comparatively prosperous
reign of Henry I. But with the death of Henry in 1135, there began a state
of misery and lawlessness lasting almost to the accession of Henry II. in
1154, beside which the former state of England was spoken of as “most
flourishing[59].” Besides the barbarities of the Scots and the Welsh on
the northern and western marches[60], there were the civil wars of the
factions of King Stephen and the Empress Maud, and the cruelties and
predations of the unruly nobles under the walls of a thousand newly-built
strongholds. A graphic account of the condition of England remains to us
from the pen of an eyewitness, the observant author of the _Gesta
Stephani_[61]. Under the year 1143 he writes that there was most dire
famine in all England; the people ate the flesh of dogs and horses or the
raw garbage of herbs and roots. The people in crowds pined and died, or
another part entered on a sorrowful exile with their whole families. One
might see houses of great name standing nearly empty, the residents of
either sex and of every age being dead. As autumn drew near and the fields
whitened for the harvest, there was no one to reap them, for the
cultivators were cut off by the pestilent hunger which had come between.
To these home troubles was added the presence of a multitude of barbarous
adventurers, without bowels of pity and compassion, who had flocked to the
country for military service. The occasion was one of those which cause
the archdeacon of Huntingdon to break out into his elegiac verse:
“Ecce Stygis facies, consimilisque lues[62].”
“And in those days,” says another, “there was no king in Israel[63].” The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which comes to an end in this scene of universal
gloom, describes how one might go a day’s journey and never find a man
sitting in a town, or the land tilled, and how men who once were rich had
to go begging their bread, concluding with the words, “And they said
openly that Christ and His saints slept.”
Among the penances of Henry II. after the murder of Becket, there is
recorded his charity in feeding during a dearth ten thousand persons daily
from the first of April, 1171, until the harvest[64]. But, apart from a
reference to a flux among the troops in Ireland in 1172, from errors of
diet[65], the long reign of Henry II. is marked by only one record of
general pestilence. It is recorded by the best contemporary writer,
Benedict of Peterborough, and it is the first instance in which the number
of burials in a day (perhaps at Peterborough) is given. In the year 1175,
he says, there was in England and the adjacent regions a pestilential
mortality of men, such that on many days seven or eight corpses were
carried out to be buried. And immediately upon that pestilential mortality
there followed a dire famine[66]. It is to be observed that the famine is
explicitly stated to have come after the pestilence, just as in the great
mortality of 1087; and, as in the latter case, it may be that a hard
winter, with scarcity of food, brought a general sickness, and that the
scarcity had been raised to famine point by a second bad harvest. The
entry in the chronicle of Melrose for 1173 may refer to Scotland only: a
bad kind of cough, unheard of before, affected almost everyone far and
wide, whereof, “or from which pest,” many died. This is perhaps the only
special reference to “tussis” as epidemic until the influenzas of the
seventeenth century.