CHAPTER VII.

GAOL FEVERS, INFLUENZAS, AND OTHER FEVERS IN THE TUDOR PERIOD.

The Common Gaols of England date from the Council of Clarendon, in 1164,

by the articles of which the limits of civil and ecclesiastical

jurisdiction were fixed, and the quarrel between archbishop Becket and

Henry II. reduced to terms. In obedience to Article VII. of the Council,

gaols were built, the chief among them having been at Canterbury,

Rochester, Huntingdon, Cambridge, Malmesbury, Sarum, Aylesbury, and

Bedford[782]. Little is heard of the unwholesomeness of prison life until

the medieval period is nearly over--not indeed because the prisons were

better managed than they were later. “In the year 1385,” says Stow,

“William Walworth gave somewhat to relieve the prisoners in Newgate; so

have many others since.” One benefactor brought a supply of water into

Newgate; another, the famous Whittington, left money actually to rebuild

the gaol, which was done in 1422. For several years before that, Newgate

had been notorious. An ordinance of 7 Henry V. (1419) for the

re-establishment of the debtor’s prison at Ludgate, so that debtors need

not have to go to Newgate gaol, was made in compliance with a petition

which said that, in “the hateful gaol of Newgate, by reason of the fetid

and corrupt atmosphere, many persons committed to the said gaol are now

dead[783].” The greatest mortality must have been, according to Stow, in

1414, when the gaolers of Newgate and Ludgate died, and sixty-four

prisoners in Newgate[784].

More than a century after, in 1522, there occurred the first of a series

of gaol-fever tragedies, which were well calculated to produce the effect

ascribed by Aristotle to scenic tragedy, provided only the workings of

cause and effect had been more apparent. The first of these historical

Black Assizes occurred on the occasion of the gaol delivery at the Castle

of Cambridge in Lent, 1522. The facts, which appear to be given nowhere

but in Hall’s _Chronicle_ (of almost contemporary authority), are less

fully related than for some of the later instances of the same strange

visitation; but there is no mistaking the air of reality and the generic

likeness.

Cambridge Black Assizes.

In the 13th year of Henry VIII. at the Assize held in the Castle of

Cambridge in Lent, “the justices and all the gentlemen, bailiffs and

other, resorting thither, took such an infection, whether it were of the

savour of the prisoners, or of the filth of the house, that many

gentlemen, as Sir John Cut, Sir Giles Arlington, Knights, and many other

honest yeomen, thereof died, and almost all which were present were sore

sick, and narrowly escaped with their lives[785].”

It is to be observed that nothing is said of the prisoners being infected:

they were brought from the dungeons to stand their trial in due course,

and the gentlemen and yeomen attending the court officially or as jurors,

or otherwise, were poisoned by their presence. This early chronicle

indicates as the cause, “the savour of the prisoners, or the filth of the

house;” and Bacon, in touching upon that class of incidents nearly a

century later, indicates “the smell of the gaol,” but says nothing of

cases of fever among the prisoners, having no warrant in the evidence for

doing so.

Before we come to consider the condition of England in the Tudor period,

with the policy of Henry VIII. for the repression of beggary and crime,

and the appearance of “new fevers” or “strange fevers” and “laskes” in the

chronicles and other records of the time, it will be desirable to make out

as accurately as possible the clinical type of the Assizes fever, and its

circumstances. For that purpose we must turn to the next recorded outbreak

on the occasion of the Assizes at Oxford in 1577, which happens to have

been somewhat fully described as a memorable event in the register of

Merton College. The entry in the Merton register appears to have been made

within a few weeks of the event[786].

Oxford Black Assizes.

The Assizes met on the 5th and 6th July, 1577, in the Castle and Guild

Hall. Those only fell ill, whether in Oxford itself or after leaving, who

had been present at the Assizes. The two judges (Robert Bell, Chief Baron

of the Exchequer and John Barrham, sergeant-at-law), the sheriff of the

county, two knights, eight squires and justices of the peace, several

gentlemen and not a few of their servants, the whole of the grand jury

with one or two exceptions--these all had not long left Oxford when they

were seized with illness and died (_statim post fere relictam Oxoniam

mortui sunt_). In Oxford itself, on the 15th, 16th and 17th July, some ten

or twelve days after the Assizes, about three hundred fell ill; and in the

next twelve days there died (“_ne quid errem_”) one hundred scholars,

besides townsmen not a few. Five died in Merton College, including one

fellow, the names of four being given who died on the 24th, 27th, 28th and

29th July. Every college, hall, or house had its dead. Women were not

attacked, nor indeed the poor; nor did the infection spread to those who

waited on the sick or came to prescribe for them. Only those who had been

present at the Assizes caught the fever. The symptoms are described as

follows:

The patients laboured under pain both of the head and of the stomach;

they were troubled with phrensy, deprived of understanding, memory,

sight, hearing and their other senses. As their malady increased, they

took no food, could not sleep, and would not suffer attendants or

watchers to be near them; their strength was remarkable, even in the

approach of death; but if they recovered they fell into the extreme of

weakness. No complexion or constitution was spared; but those of a

choleric habit were most obnoxious to the disease. The affected

persons suddenly became delirious and furious, overcoming those who

tried to hold them; some ran about in courts and in the streets after

the manner of insane persons; others leapt headlong into the water.

The spirits of all the people were crushed; the physicians fled, and

the wretched sufferers were deserted. Masters, doctors, and heads of

houses left almost to a man. The Master of Merton remained, _longe

omnium vigilantissimus_, ministering sedulously to the sick. The

pharmacies were soon emptied of their conserves, oils, sweet waters,

pixides and every kind of confection.

This sudden epidemic, which began on the 15th--17th July, did not last

long; within the space of one month the city was restored to its former

health, so that one wonders, says the registrary of Merton, to see already

so many scholars and so many townsmen abroad in the streets and walks.

The infection was suspected by many, says the same eyewitness, to have

arisen either from the fetid and pestilent air of thieves brought forth

from prison, of whom two or three died in chains a few days before

(_quorum duo vel tres sunt ante paucos dies in vinculis mortui_), or from

the devilishly contrived and obviously papistical spirits called forth “e

Lovaniensi barathro,” and let loose upon the court secretly and most

wickedly.

The latter explanation arose out of the heated feelings of the time

against papist plotters, and has no farther interest. But the statement

that two or three of the prisoners had died in chains a few days before

has a great interest, as showing the kind of treatment to which they had

been subjected while awaiting the gaol delivery. A strange confirmation of

the truth of the statement came to light many years after. When John

Howard visited the Oxford gaol in 1779, in the course of his humane

labours on behalf of the prisoners, he was told by the gaoler that, some

years before, wanting to build a little hovel and digging up stones for

the purpose from the ruins of the court, which was formerly in the Castle,

he found under them a complete skeleton with light chains on the legs, the

links very small. “These,” says Howard, “were probably the bones of a

malefactor who died in court of the distemper at the Black Assize[787].”

Next to the Merton register’s account, we may take that of Thomas Cogan, a

graduate in medicine of Oxford, sometime fellow of Oriel, but probably

removed to Manchester previous to 1577. Wherever Cogan got his

information, he acknowledges no source of the following in his _Haven of

Health_, 1589:

“What kind of disease this should be which was first at Cambridge [in

1522] and after at Oxford, it is very hard to define, neither hath any

man (that I know) written of that matter. Yet my judgment is, be it

spoken without offence of the learned physicians, that the disease was

_Febris ardens_, a burning fever. For as much as the signes of a

burning ague did manifestly appear in this disease, which after

Hollerius be these: Extreame heate of the body, vehement thirst,

loathing of meate, tossing to and fro, and unquietnesse, dryness of

the tongue rough and blacke, griping of the belly, cholerick laske,

cruell ake of the head, no sound sleepe, or no sleepe at all, raving

and phrensie, the end whereof, to life or death, is bleeding at the

nose, great vomitting, sweate or laske. And this kind of sicknesse is

one of those rods, and the most common rod, wherewith it pleaseth God

to brake his people for sin.... And this disease indeed, as it is

God’s messenger, and sometimes God’s poaste, because it commeth poaste

haste, and calleth us quickly away, so it is commonly the Pursuivant

of the pestilence and goeth before it.... And certainly after that

sodaine bane at Oxford, the same yeare, and a yeare or two following,

the same kind of ague raged in a manner over all England, and tooke

away very many of the strongest sort, and in their lustiest age, and

for the most part, men and not women nor children, culling them out

here and there, even as you should chuse the best sheepe out of a

flocke. And certaine remedy was none to be found.... And they that

took a moderate sweate at the beginning of their sickness and did rid

their stomachs well by vomit sped much better. Yet thanks be to God

hitherto no great plague hath ensued upon it.”

Besides these medical particulars, he gives certain dates and numbers. It

began, he says, on the 6th of July, from which date to the 12th of August

next ensuing there died of the same sickness five hundred and ten

persons, all men and no women: the chiefest of which were the two judges,

Sir Robert Ball, lord chief baron, and maister Sergeant Baram, maister

Doile the high sheriff, five of the justices, four councillors at law and

an attorney. The rest were jurors and such as repaired thither.

An account not unlike Cogan’s is given by Stow in his _Annales_ (p. 681);

“The 4, 5 and 6 dayes of July were the assizes holden at Oxford, where

was arraigned and condemned one Rowland Jenkes for his seditious

toung, at which time there arose amidst the people such a dampe, that

almost all were smothered, very few escaped that were not taken at

that instant: the Jurors died presently. Shortly after died Sir Robert

Bell, lord chief baron, Sir Robert de Olie, Sir William Babington,

maister Weneman, maister de Olie, high sheriff, maister Davers,

maister Harcurt, maister Kirle, maister Phereplace, maister Greenwood,

maister Foster, maister Nash, sergeaunt Baram, maister Stevens, and

there died in Oxford 300 persons, and sickned there but died in other

places 200 and odde, from the 6th of July to the 12th of August, after

which died not one of that sicknesse, for one of them infected not

another, nor any one woman or child died thereof.”

Stow’s account differs from that of the Merton College register in several

important particulars. The latter is explicit that the sickness appeared

among the scholars and townsmen of Oxford on the 15th, 16th and 17th of

July, or after an interval of ten days or more, and that the deaths

amongst those who had come to Oxford on Assize business did not occur in

Oxford but on their return home. On the other hand, Stow makes out the

Oxford people to have been smothered by the damp which arose in the court

itself: “very few escaped that were not taken ill at that instant;” next

come the deaths of the jurors, and “shortly after” those of the judges and

other high officials, whose names are given by Stow more fully than by

anyone. His total of deaths, the same as Cogan’s, is 300 in Oxford and 200

and odd of persons who had left Oxford, and his dates, “from the 6th of

July to the 12th of August,” are also the same as Cogan’s.

Wood’s account is for the most part taken from the Merton register and in

part from the very different version in Stow’s _Annals_; but he has the

following new matter: “Above 600 sickened in one night, as a physician

that now lived in Oxford attesteth, and the day after, the infectious air

being carried into the next villages, sickened there an hundred

more[788].” That, of course, is very unlike the Merton College account,

which is explicit that no one caught the fever who had not been in the

court. The Oxford physician whose authority is given for the six hundred

cases in Oxford in one night, and the extension next day to villages

around, is Dr George Ethredge, or Ethryg, a physician and learned Greek

scholar living in Oxford at the time and keeping a boarding-house, called

George Hall, for the sons of Catholic gentlemen. In 1588 he published a

small volume of comments upon some books of Paulus Aegineta, which is the

authority given by Wood[789]. On discovering the passage, one finds that

it was not 600 in one night, but “sexaginta” or 60, and that the occasion

on which more than sixty were taken ill at once in a single night at

Oxford, and nearly a hundred next day in the adjacent villages, “whither

the infected air had by chance been borne,” was not that of the gaol-fever

in 1577 but of the sweating sickness in 1551. An extension in the

atmosphere to the villages around is just what would have happened in the

sweating sickness, a disease in that as in other respects closely

analogous to influenza. Ethredge says that, on the particular occasion,

“hardly any of the Oxford people died”--a statement which should of itself

have prevented Wood’s mistake, even if the reference to the same disease

having “at the same time” cut off the two sons of the duke of Suffolk “at

Cambridge” (therefore a less healthy place than Oxford where hardly any

died) had not quite clearly pointed to the sudor Britannicus, which is

actually named in the context (“sic enim vocant”)[790].

Although, in the passage quoted, it is the sweating sickness at Oxford in

1551 that Ethredge refers to, he does also refer to the gaol fever of 1577

in another passage which has hitherto escaped notice.

In the section of his book next following, entitled “De Curatione

morborum populariter grassantium, et de Peste,” he says that he had

used a certain prescription of aloes, ammoniacum and myrrh rubbed

together in wine, for himself as well as for others in a serious

contagion, “quae fuit in martiali sede cum ibi essem,” and also, with

happy effect, upon many “in the most cruel pest at Oxford which

carried off Judge Bell and ever so many more; one gentleman, I could

not persuade to try this medicine, whom therefore I commended to God,

and four days after he was dead. Concerning that pestilential fever,

many colloquies took place between me and two most learned physicians;

and, as to the kind of this contagion, we all agreed (_manibus et

pedibus in hanc sententiam itum est_) in a sentence which I quoted

from Valescus, who sayeth thus: Those sicknesses are dangerous in such

wise that the physicians may be for the most part deceived; for we see

a good hypostasis in the urine, and some other good signs, yet the

sick person dies”--a remark which often recurs in the early writings

on plague.

It has taken longer than usual to determine the matter of fact as to the

fever of the Oxford Black Assizes, because an erroneous version passes

current on respectable authority; but enough has perhaps been said to

enable us to pass from the matter of fact to the matter of theory[791].

The theory of the gaol fever at Oxford, in 1577, was not attempted by any

writer at the time, nor indeed has it been so in later times; but the

significance of the outbreak has been recognized and admitted. An Oxford

scholar, Dr Plot, writing just a century after (1677) mentions the

statement that a “poisonous steam” broke forth from the earth, having

probably in his mind Stow’s imaginative explanation, that a damp arose

amongst the people and smothered them, very few escaping that were not

taken at that instant. Plot then proceeds:--

“But let it not be ascribed to ill fumes and exhalations ascending

from the earth and poysoning the Air, for such would have equally

affected the prisoners as judges, but we find not that they dyed

otherwise than by the halter, which easily perswades me to be of the

mind of my lord Verulam (_Nat. Hist._ cent. X. num. 914) who

attributes it wholly to the smell of the Gaol where the prisoners had

been long, close, and nastily kept.”

We know, indeed, from the register of Merton that “two or three of the

prisoners died in chains a few days before,” which is a sufficient

indication of the state they were kept in, but is no warrant for Anthony

Wood’s free rendering of the words: “of whom two or three, _being overcome

with it_ [i.e. with the “nasty and pestilential smell of the prisoners”]

died a few days before the Assizes began.” Two or three prisoners died in

their chains with symptoms undescribed; and although typhus among the

inmates of gaols has often occurred, it has also been wanting in many

cases where the filth and misery might have bred it in the prisoners

themselves[792].

Bacon’s judgment on the case, referred to above, was based upon a strict

scrutiny of the evidence, and does not transcend the evidence. He

attributes the infection that arose in the court to “the smell of the

gaol;” and so as not to assume a smell which does not appear to have

attracted any particular notice at the time, he is careful to explain in

what sense he means the smell of the gaol:

“The most pernicious infection,” he says, “next the plague, is the

smell of the jail, when prisoners have been long and close and nastily

kept; whereof we have had in our time experience twice or thrice; when

both the judges that sat upon the jail, and numbers of those that

attended the business or were present, sickened upon it and died.

Therefore it were good wisdom, that in such cases the jail were aired

before they be brought forth....

“Leaving out of question such foul smells as be made by art and by the

hand, they consist chiefly of man’s flesh or sweat putrefied; for they

are not those stinks which the nostrils straight abhor and expel, that

are most pernicious; but such airs as have some similitude with man’s

body, and so insinuate themselves and betray the spirits[793].”

Exeter Black Assizes.

The next Black Assizes occurred at Exeter in 1586, nine years after the

Oxford tragedy. The Exeter incident has had the fortune to be chronicled

by a person as competent as was the writer in the Merton College register

in the former case, namely by John Hoker _alias_ Vowell, chamberlain of

the city, and its representative in Parliament, a lawyer of good

education, who must have been conversant with all the circumstances, and

wrote his account within six months. He is known as the chief contributor

to the second edition of Holinshed’s _Chronicle_, in which the history is

brought down to 1586, his name appearing on the title-page. It is in that

work that he inserted his account of the Exeter Black Assizes, written in

October, 1586. The margin bears the words:

“The note of John Hooker _alias_ Vowell;” and the text of the note is

as follows[794] (III. pp. 1547-8):--“At the assizes kept at the citie

of Excester, the fourteenth daie of March, in the eight and twentieth

yeare of hir majesties reigne, before Sir Edmund Anderson, Knight,

lord chief justice of the common pleas, and sargeant Floredaie, one of

the barons of the excheker, justices of the assises in the Countie of

Devon and Exon, there happened a verie sudden and a strange

sickenesse, first amongst the prisoners of the Gaole and Castell of

Exon, and then dispersed (upon their triall) amongst sundrie other

persons; which was not much unlike to the sickenesse that of late

yeares happened at an assise holden at Oxford, before Sir Robert Bell,

Knight, lord chiefe baron of the excheker, and justice then of that

assise....

The origin and cause thereof diverse men are of diverse judgment. Some

did impute it, and were of the mind that it proceeded from the

contagion of the gaole, which by reason of the close aire and filthie

stinke, the prisoners newlie come out of a fresh aire into the same

are in short time for the most part infected therewith; and this is

commonlie called the gaole sickenesse, and manie die thereof. Some did

impute it to certain Portingals, then prisoners in the said gaole. For

not long before, one Barnard Drake, esquire (afterwards dubbed Knight)

had beene at the seas, and meeting with certeine Portingals, come from

New-found-land and laden with fish, he tooke them as a good prize, and

brought them into Dartmouth haven in England, and from thense they

were sent, being in number about eight and thirtie persons, unto the

gaole of the castell of Exon, and there were cast into the deepe pit

and stinking dungeon[795].

These men had beene before a long time at the seas, and had no change

of apparell, nor laine in bed, and now lieing upon the ground without

succor or reliefe, were soone infected; and all for the most part were

sicke, and some of them died, and some one of them was distracted; and

this sickenesse verie soone after dispersed itselfe among all the

residue of the prisoners in the gaole; of which disease manie of them

died, but all brought into great extremities and were hardly escaped.

These men, when they were to be brought before the foresaid justices

for their triall, manie of them were so weak and sicke that they were

not able to goe nor stand; but were caried from the gaole to the place

of judgement, some upon handbarrowes, and some betweene men leading

them, and so brought to the place of justice.

The sight of these men’s miserable and pitifull cases, being thought

(and more like) to be hunger-starved than with sickenesse diseased,

moved manie a man’s heart to behold and look upon them; but none

pitied them more than the lords justices themselves, and especially

the lord chief justice himselfe; who upon this occasion tooke a better

order for keeping all prisoners thenseforth in the gaole, and for the

more often trials; which was now appointed to be quarterlie kept at

every quarter sessions and not to be posted anie more over, as in

times past, untill the assises.

These prisoners thus brought from out of the gaole to the judgment

place, after that they had been staied, and paused awhile in the open

aire, and somewhat refreshed therewith, they were brought into the

house, in the one end of the hall near to the judges seat, and which

is the ordinarie and accountable place where they do stand to their

triales and arraignments. And howsoever the matter fell out, and by

what occasion it happened, an infection followed upon manie and a

great number of such as were there in the court, and especially upon

such as were nearest to them were soonest infected. And albeit the

infection was not then perceived, because every man departed, (as he

thought), in as good health as he came thither; yet the same by little

and little so crept into such as upon whom the infection was seizoned,

that after a few daies, and at their home coming to their owne houses,

they felt the violence of this pestilent sicknesse; wherein more died,

that were infected, than escaped. And besides the prisoners, manie

there were of good account, and of all other degrees, which died

thereof; as by name sargeant Floredaie who then was the judge of those

trials upon the prisoners, Sir John Chichester, Sir Arthur Basset, Sir

Barnard Drake, Knight[796]; Thomas Carew of Haccombe, Robert Carie of

Clovelleigh, John Fortescue of Wood, John Waldron of Bradfeeld and

Thomas Risdone, esquires and justices of the peace.

... Of the plebeian and common people died verie manie, and

especiallie constables, reeves, and tithing men, and such as were

jurors, and namelie one jurie of twelve, of which there died eleven.

This sicknesse was dispersed throughout all the whole shire, and at

the writing hereof in the time of October, 1586, it is not altogether

extinguished. It resteth for the most part about fourteene daies and

upwards by a secret infection, before it breake out into his force and

violence.”

Here we have the same incubation-period as in the Oxford fever, about

fourteen days. But in the Exeter case, we have it clearly stated that an

infection arose in the prison from the poor Portuguese sailors or

fishermen who had been thrown into “deep pit and stinking dungeon” after

their capture on the high seas by Sir Bernard Drake, that the infection

attacked the other prisoners, that many of the prisoners died and all were

brought to extremities, and that those who stood their trial were then in

a most feeble state, although they seemed to the pitying spectators to be

more starved than diseased.

So far as concerned the infection in the Assize Court, among the lawyers,

county gentry, and officials, jurors and others, it was of the same tragic

kind as at Oxford in 1577 and at Cambridge in 1522, and, as we shall see,

on several occasions in the eighteenth century. But the Exeter case has

some features special to itself. Within the gaol were both English felons

and thirty-eight Portugals, who had become subject to capture on their way

home from the banks of Newfoundland with boatloads of stock-fish, and to

treatment as felons, because Spain and England were at war. Within the

gaol there seems to have been also a gradation of misery, a deep pit and

stinking dungeon, “in the lowest deep a lower deep,” to which were

consigned the men of foreign breed, the Portugals. It was among them that

deaths first occurred, in what special form we know not. From them an

infection is clearly stated by Hoker to have spread through the gaol at

large, and to have made many of the prisoners so weak that they had to be

carried into court. This is quite unlike what we read of in the Cambridge

and Oxford cases, in neither of which was illness noted in the prisoners

or asserted of them, although at Oxford two or three had died in chains a

few days before. In the Exeter case there were three circles of the damned

instead of two only: nay there were four. Farthest in were the Portugals,

next to them were the native English felons, then came those present on

business or pleasure at the Assizes, and lastly there were the country

people all over Devonshire for many months after. We must take all those

peculiarities of the Exeter gaol-fever together, and explain them one by

another. It was a somewhat elaborated poison. It had passed from the

foreign prisoners to the English, and in the transmission had, as it were,

consolidated its power; hence, when the prisoners did give it to those who

breathed their atmosphere in court, the infection did not limit itself to

them, as it certainly did at Oxford and, so far as anything is said, at

Cambridge also, and as it usually does in typhus-fever; but it became a

volatile poison, it developed wings and acquired staying power, so that

its effects were felt over the county of Devon for at least six months

longer.

Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England.

The Black Assizes of Cambridge (1522), of Oxford (1577), and of Exeter

(1586) cast, in each case, a momentary and vivid light upon the state of

England in the Tudor period as late as the middle of the reign of

Elizabeth. It has been pointed out in a former chapter that prices and

wages were favourable to the cultivators of the soil in the fifteenth

century, that the English yeomanry sprang up in that period, that village

communities and trading towns prospered although their morals were none of

the best, and that the civil wars of York and Lancaster were so far from

injuring the domestic peace of England that they even secured it. It was

the observation of Philip de Comines, more than once quoted before, that

England had the “peculiar grace” of being untroubled at large by the

calamities of her civil wars, because kings and nobles were left to settle

their quarrels among themselves. “Nothing is perfect in this world,” says

the French statesman, who did not like independence of spirit among the

lower orders. But he recognizes the fact as peculiar to England in the

fifteenth century; and there can be little doubt about it.

The civil wars were hardly over when the troubles of the common people

began. Here, if anywhere, is the turning-point brought into Goldsmith’s

poem of “The Deserted Village:”

A time there was, ere England’s griefs began,

When every rood of ground maintained its man.

Deserted villages became a reality in the last quarter of the fifteenth

century, and throughout the century following. We hear of this

depopulation first in the Isle of Wight, where it affected the national

defence and therefore engaged the attention of the State. Two Acts were

passed in 1488-9, cap. 16 and cap. 19 of 4 Henry VII. The first declares

that “it is for the security of the king and realm that the Isle of Wight

should be well inhabited, for defence against our ancient enemies of

France; the which isle is late decayed of people, by reason that many

towns and villages have been let down, and the fields dyked and made

pastures for beasts and cattle.” The second relates that

“Great inconveniences daily doth increase by desolation and pulling

down and wilful waste of houses and towns, and laying to pasture lands

which customably have been used in tilth, whereby idleness, ground and

beginning of all mischiefs, daily do increase; for where in some towns

two hundred persons were occupied and lived by their lawful labours,

now be there occupied two or three herdsmen, and the residue fall into

idleness.” The remedy enacted is that no one shall take a farm in the

Isle of Wight which shall exceed ten marks, and that owners shall

maintain, upon their estates, houses and buildings necessary for

tillage.

An instance of the same depopulation is given by Dugdale in Warwickshire:

seven hundred acres of arable land turned to pasture, and eighty persons

thrown out of employment causing the destruction of sixteen messuages and

seven cottages. An instance of the same kind has already been quoted from

the neighbourhood of Cambridge as early as 1414; but it is not until the

settlement of the dynastic quarrels and jealousies, partly on the

victories of Edward IV. at Barnet and Tewkesbury in 1471, and completely

after the victory of Henry Tudor at Bosworth in 1485, that agrarian

troubles became general. Then began the famous _enclosures_--enclosures

both of the “wastes” of the manors, and of the open cultivated fields of

the manors in which all the orders of villagers had their share of

tenancy.

A few years after, in 1495, the number of vagabonds and beggars had so

increased, of course in consequence of the enclosures, that a new Act was

required, cap. 2 of the 11th of Henry VII. “Considering the great charges

that should grow for bringing vagabonds to the gaols according to the

statute of 7 Richard II., cap. 5, and the long abiding of them therein,

whereby it is likely many of them would lose their lives:” therefore to

put them in the stocks for three days and three nights upon bread and

water, and after that to set them at large and command them to avoid the

town, and if a vagabond be taken again in the same town or township, then

the stocks for _four_ days, with like diet. The deserving poor, however,

were to be dealt with otherwise, but in an equally futile manner. In

1503-4, by the 19th of Henry VII. cap. 12, the period in the stocks was

reduced to one day and one night (bread and water as before), probably in

order that all vagabonds might have their turn.

The most correct picture of the state of England under Henry VII. and

Henry VIII. is given by Sir Thomas More. The passages in his _Utopia_,

relating to the state of England may be taken as veracious history. A

discussion is supposed to arise at the table of Morton, archbishop of

Canterbury, who was More’s early patron, and who died in 1500. “I durst

boldly speak my mind before the Cardinal,” says the foreign observer of

our manners and custom, Raphael Hythloday; and then follows an account of

the state of England which lacks nothing in plainness of speech.

“But let us consider those things that chance daily before our eyes.

First there is a great number of gentlemen, which cannot be content to

live idle themselves, like drones, of that which other have laboured

for: their tenants I mean, whom they poll and shave to the quick by

raising their rents (for this only point of frugality do they use, men

else through their lavish and prodigal spending able to bring

themselves to very beggary)--these gentlemen, I say, do not only live

in idleness themselves, but also carry about with them at their tails

a great flock or train of idle and loitering serving-men, which never

learned any craft whereby to get their living. These men, as soon as

their master is dead, or be sick themselves, be incontinent thrust out

of doors.... And husbandmen dare not set them a work, knowing well

enough that he is nothing meet to do true and faithful service to a

poor man with a spade and a mattock for small wages and hard fare,

which being daintily and tenderly pampered up in idleness and

pleasure, was wont with a sword and a buckler by his side to strut

through the street with a bragging look, and to think himself too good

to be any man’s mate.

Nay, by Saint Mary, Sir, (quoth the lawyer), not so. For this kind of

men must we make most of. For in them, as men of stouter stomachs,

bolder spirits, and manlier courages than handicraftsmen and ploughmen

be, doth consist the whole power, strength and puissance of our army,

when we must fight in battle.”

So much for the serving-men of the rich, apt to be discarded to swell

the ranks of poverty and crime. But further:--

“There is another cause, which, as I suppose, is proper and peculiar

to you Englishmen alone.--What is that? quoth the Cardinal.--Forsooth,

my lord, quoth I, your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame,

and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers

and so wild that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves.

They consume, destroy and devour whole fields, houses and cities. For

look in what parts of the realm doth grow the finest and therefore

dearest wool, these noblemen and gentlemen, yea and certain abbots,

(holy men, no doubt), not contenting themselves with the yearly

revenues and profits that were wont to grow to their forefathers and

predecessors of their lands, nor being content that they live in rest

and pleasure, nothing profiting yea much annoying the weal public

leave no ground for tillage; they inclose all into pastures; they

throw down houses; they pluck down towns and leave nothing standing,

but only the church to be made a sheep-house. And as though you lost

no small quantity of ground by forests, chases, lawns, and parks,

these holy men turn all dwelling-places and all glebe-land into

desolation and wilderness. Therefore the one covetous and insatiable

cormorant and very plague of his native country may compass about and

inclose many thousand acres of ground together within one pale or

hedge; the husbandmen be thrust out of their own, or else either by

cunning and fraud, or by violent oppression they be put besides it, or

by wrongs and injuries they be so wearied that they be compelled to

sell all. By one means, therefore, or by other, either by hook or

crook, they must needs depart away, poor silly wretched souls, men,

women, husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, woeful mothers

with their young babes, and their whole household small in substance

and much in number as husbandry requireth many hands. Away they

trudge, I say, out of their known and accustomed houses, finding no

place to rest in. All their household stuff, which is very little

worth, though it might well abide the sale, yet being suddenly thrust

out, they be constrained to sell it for a thing of nought. And when

they have wandered abroad till that be spent, what can they then else

do but steal, and then justly, pardy! be hanged, or else go about a

begging. And yet, then also they be cast in prison as vagabonds,

because they go about and work not; whom no man will set a work,

though they never so willingly profer themselves thereto.”

Thus were the gaols filled. The policy of Henry VIII. was to hang for

petty theft--“twenty together upon one gallows.” And yet the lawyer, the

defender of the king’s firm rule, “could not choose but greatly wonder and

marvel, how and by what evil luck it should come to pass that thieves

nevertheless were in every place so rife and rank.”

These descriptions of the state of England were written about 1517, and

the recitals in various Acts of Henry VIII. bear them out. Thus, in 1514

and 1515 (6 Hen. VIII. cap. 5, and 7 Hen. VIII. cap. 1), the towns,

villages and hamlets, and other habitations decayed in the Isle of Wight

are to be re-edified and re-peopled. In 1533-4 (25 Hen. VIII. cap. 13),

there is a more comprehensive Act against the aggrandisements of

pasture-farmers, “by reason whereof a marvellous multitude of the people

of this realm be not able to provide meat, drink and clothes necessary

for themselves, their wives, and children, but be so discouraged with

misery and poverty that they fall daily to theft, robbery, and other

inconvenience, or pitifully die for hunger and cold.” Some greedy and

covetous persons have as many as 24,000 sheep: no one to keep above 2,000

sheep under the penalty of 3_s._ 4_d._ for every sheep kept by him above

that number. Ten years after comes the well-known Act relating to the

decay of towns[797] (35 Hen. VIII. cap. 4).

Besides these recitals in Acts of Parliament, we have other glimpses of

the causes of agrarian distress. Thus, in a letter of June 24, 1528, from

Sir Edward Guildford to Wolsey: Romney Marsh is fallen into decay; there

are many great farms and holdings in the hands of persons who neither

reside on them, nor till, nor breed cattle, but use them for grazing,

trusting to the Welsh store cattle[798].

In Becon’s _Jewel of Joy_, written in the reign of Edward VI. the same

condition of things is described:

“How do the rich men, and specially such as be sheepmongers, oppress

the king’s liege-people by devouring their common pastures with their

sheep, so that the poor people are not able to keep a cow for the

comfort of them and of their poor family, and are like to starve and

perish for hunger, if there be not provision made shortly.... Rich men

were never so much estranged from all pity and compassion toward the

poor people as they be at this present time.... They not only link

house to house, but when they have gotten many houses and tenements

into their hands, yea whole townships, they suffer the houses to fall

into utter ruin and decay, so that by this means whole towns are

become desolate and like unto a wilderness, no man dwelling there

except it be the shepherd and his dog.” The interlocutor in the

dialogue answers: “Truth it is. For I myself know many towns and

villages sore decayed; for whereas in times past there were in some

town an hundred households, there remain not now thirty; in some

fifty, there are not now ten; yea (which is more to be lamented) I

know towns so wholly decayed that there is neither stick nor stone, as

they say.... And the cause of all this wretchedness and beggary in the

common weal is the greed of gentlemen which are sheepmongers and

graziers[799].”

Again, in Bullein’s _Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence_ (1664), the groom

Roger who accompanies the citizen and his wife to the country, in the

direction of Barnet, points out an estate on which the rents had been

raised; the fields had been turned into large pastures, and all the houses

pulled down save the manor house: “for the carles have forfeited their

leases and are gone a-begging like villaines, and many of them are dead

for hunger.”

Vagabonds, beggars, valiant beggars, sturdy beggars, and ruffelers

continue to occupy the pages of the Statute Book for many years. In

1530-31 (a long and elaborate Act), and in 1535-6, they are to be

repressed by the stocks, by whipping, and ear-cropping; “and if any

ruffeler, sturdy vagabond, or valiant beggar, having the upper part of the

right ear cut off as aforesaid, be apprehended wandering in idleness, and

it be duly proved that he hath not applied to such labours as have been

assigned to him, or be not in service with any master, that then he be

committed to gaol until the next quarter sessions, and be there indicted

and tried, and, if found guilty, he shall be adjudged to suffer death as a

felon.” A still more distracted Act was made by the Lord Protector in 1547

(1 Ed. VI. cap. 3): if the vagabond continue idle and refuse to labour, or

run away from work set him to perform, he is to be branded with the letter

V, and be adjudged a slave for two years to any person who shall demand

him, to be fed on bread and water and refuse-meat, and caused to work in

such labour, “how vile soever it be, as he shall be put unto, by beating,

chaining, or otherwise.” If he run away within the two years, he is to be

branded in the cheek with the letter S, and adjudged a slave for life; and

if he run away again he is to suffer death as a felon. Similar provisions

are made for “slave-children;” while the usual exceptions are brought in

for the impotent poor. The above statute remained in force for only two

years, having been from the first a monstrous insult to the intelligence

of the nation, and never applied. It was succeeded by two meek-spirited

Acts, 3 and 4 Ed. VI. cap. 16, and 5 and 6 Ed. VI. cap. 2, in which the

impotent poor are provided for:--collectors in church to “gently ask and

demand alms for the poor.” By the 1st of Mary, cap. 13, the collections

for the poor were made weekly. When Elizabeth came to the throne, greater

pressure was put upon the well-to-do to support the poor: by the Act of 5

Eliz. cap. 3 (1562-3) those who obstinately refused voluntary alms might

be assessed. A more important Act of Elizabeth was that of her 14th year

(1572-3) cap. 5, “For the Punishment of Vagabonds and for Relief of the

Poor and Impotent.” A vagabond, as before, is to be whipped, and burnt on

the ear; for a second offence to suffer death as a felon “unless some

honest person will take him into his service for two whole years;” and for

a third offence to suffer death and loss of lands and goods, as a felon,

without allowance of benefit of clergy or sanctuary. Aged and infirm poor,

by the same Act, are to be cared for by “overseers of the poor” in every

parish, and to have abiding places fixed for them. In 1575-6 (18th Eliz.

cap. 3), the Act of 1572-3 was amended and explained: “collectors and

governors of the poor” are to provide a stock of wool, hemp, iron etc. for

the poor to work upon, and “houses of correction,” or Bridewells, are to

be built-one, two or more in every county for valiant beggars or such

other poor persons as refuse to work under the overseers or embezzle their

work. The last and greatest poor-laws of Elizabeth’s reign were those of

her 39th year (1597-8) caps. 3 and 4 and her 43rd year (1601) cap. 2.

These remained the basis of the English poor-law down to a recent period.

Overseers of the poor are appointed in every parish--the churchwardens _ex

officio_ and four others appointed by the justices in Easter week: the

overseers to meet once a month in the parish church after divine service

on the Sunday: contributions to be levied by the inhabitants of any parish

among themselves, or the parish or hundred to be taxed by the justices,

failing the contributions, or, if the hundred be unable, then the county

to be rated “in aid of” the parishes.

These being the developments of the poor-law and the law against vagabonds

to the end of the Tudor period, we may now return to our particular

illustrations, and more especially to the illustrations from popular

sickness.

Under the year 1537, one of the citizen chroniclers of London has an

entry, “Began a collection for the poor, and a great number cured of many

grievous diseases through the charity thereof.” Under 1540, he records

that “the collection for the poor people ceased[800].” Preaching before

Edward VI. on the fourth Sunday in Lent, 1550, Thomas Lever, Master of St

John’s College, Cambridge, said: “O merciful Lord! what a number of poor,

feeble, halt, blind, lame, sickly--yea with idle vagabonds and dissembling

caitiffs mixed among them, lie and creep, begging in the miry streets of

London and Westminster[801].” In May, 1552, Ridley wrote to Cecil that the

citizens were willing to provide for the poor “both meat, drink, clothing

and firing;” but they lacked lodging, and he wanted the king to give up

Bridewell “to lodge Christ in,” or in other words, the poor “then lying

abroad in the streets of London.”

Coming to the middle of Elizabeth’s reign, in the year 1579 we find, in an

essay dedicated to the queen by Dr John Jones upon general topics of

health and morals, an account of poverty and crime which reads little

better than Sir Thomas More’s for 1517. In his 31st chapter on “The great

cost that the commonwealth is at daily in relieving the poore: Of the

number of them that are yeerly executed,” he speaks of the new poor-rate

as “a greater tax than some subsidies,” and as a “larger collection than

would maintain yeerly a good army;” and, of the felons as “a mightier

company of miserable captives than would defend a large country, as in the

records of the Clerks of the Peace and of the Assize may easily be seen.”

Even from the outset, the poor-rate does not appear to have met the

difficulty:

“And yet housekeepers be but little less discharged, if ye note the

continual resort of the needy, especially in the country and towns

that be incorporate, the poor (as they say) not much the more aided,

as by the moan they make to travellers may be easily gathered, nor

theft and wickedness the less practised. For what misery it is to see

condemned at one assize in a little shire thirty-nine, notwithstanding

the clemency of the Judges, and three hundred and odd in one Diocese

to do penance or fine for their loose living in a year. But these be

the meanest sort only, for the others scape as though it were in them

no offence. And in one gaol of prisoners three hundred and upwards at

one time, whereof a great part perhaps may be through negligence of

justice or cruelty, that otherwise might be punished answerably to the

offences lawfully.”

He then refers to the Bridewells “so charitably and politicly appointed by

the late Act of Parliament, although not yet in every shire erected.” The

Act of Parliament was that of 1572 and the Bridewells were the houses of

correction for vagrants, the first type of workhouses, and so named after

the Bridewell in Fleet Street, which was given by Edward VI. from being a

royal residence to be a refuge of the poor. So far as fever was concerned,

it mattered little whether the Bridewell were a poor-house or a prison,

for in later times gaol fever and workhouse fever were both synonyms for

typhus.

It would not have been surprising to find this enormous extent of

pauperism, vagrancy and crime attended by the distinctive _morbus

pauperum_, typhus-fever. But we are here concerned only with the evidence,

and not with antecedent probabilities. The records are, of course, very

imperfect. The gaol-fevers of Cambridge, Oxford and Exeter attracted much

notice because they touched the governing class. There may have been much

more gaol-fever unrecorded. Hoker, in his account of the Exeter fever,

does indeed say: “and this is commonly called the gaol sickness, and many

die thereof;” and, in a petition to the Crown, March, 1579, the Queen’s

Bench prison in Southwark is said to contain twice its complement, there

is in it a disease called “sickness of the house,” and near a hundred had

died of that sickness in the prison during the previous six years[802]. We

shall not be able to give colour to our epidemiological history by other

such instances from the Tudor period[803]; even for plague itself, the

records of particular outbreaks are meagre and almost certainly only a

part of the whole. The epidemics which shall occupy us for the rest of

this chapter are those that had a general prevalence over the country on

two or three occasions, the same general prevalence of fever that recurs

at shorter intervals in the Stuart period and in the eighteenth century.

Hitherto we have attempted to work out the history of epidemics in Britain

without reference to the epidemics in other countries, except in the case

of the Black Death, which had remarkable antecedents in the remote East,

and in the case of the English Sweat of 1528, which overran a great part

of the Continent in 1529 and 1530. To have attempted a parallel record of

epidemics abroad would have served inevitably to confuse the vision; for

the annals of pestilence in all Europe would have been from year to year

an unrelieved record of sickness and death, an unnatural continuance or

sequence, from which the mind turns away. The several countries of Europe,

and the several cities, had each their turn of plague; but they had each,

also, their free intervals, sometimes very long intervals, as we have seen

in the case of Aberdeen with no plague for nearly two generations in the

sixteenth century. The epidemiography of each country should therefore be

kept apart; and within a given country care should be taken to prevent

the illusion of universal sickness, which is apt to be created in the

bringing of scattered centres of disease (such as plague) together in the

same page.

But there are instances of what are called pandemics, or universal

epidemics, of sickness. The Black Death was one such, covering a period of

perhaps four years in Europe, from 1347 to 1350, the curve of the disease

in each locality lasting about six months. With the beginning of the

modern period we come to more frequent pandemics, not of plague, but of

minor or milder forms of pestilential infection. On the continent of

Europe these were in part related to the state of war, which may be taken

as beginning with the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII. of France in

1494. Typhus-fever, or war-fever with famine-fever, now begins to be a

familiar form of sickness--in 1498, 1505, 1510, 1528, and so on. Other

forms are putrid sore throat, dysentery, and varieties of fever included

under influenza. The various forms were apt to occur together or in

succession, so that epidemiography has a “Protean” character. This

epidemic Proteus is at once a great difficulty and a most instructive

fact. It opens up the very old doctrine of “epidemic constitutions” of the

air, which to many moderns savours of unscientific vagueness; and it

brings us face to face with degrees or kinds of infectiveness which are,

in matter of fact, more wonderful or more incomprehensible than the

deadlier infections, such as the plague or Asiatic cholera. The most

familiar instance of the kind is influenza.

Influenza.

Influenza enters undoubtedly into the Protean infections of the sixteenth

century, and is itself no small part of the Proteus. But what is

influenza? The name is comparatively modern--Italian of the 18th

century--and appears to mean defluxion or catarrh, not in the familiar

sense only, but as derived from the comprehensive pathological doctrine of

humours: thus the Venetian envoy in London called the sweat of 1551 an

“influsso.” It is open to us to include much or little under influenza;

but the name itself, having its root in an obsolete doctrine of humours,

can never be made exact or scientific. Usage has applied it to all

universal colds and coughs; and it has been applied capriciously to some

universal fevers, but not to others. There are two tolerably clear

references to its prevalence in England before the peculiarly unwholesome

state of Europe began with the modern age. Under the year 1173, the

chronicle of Melrose enters “a certain evil and unheard-of cough” (_tussis

quaedam mala et inaudita_), which affected everyone far and near, and cut

off many.

One of the St Albans chroniclers, an unknown writer who kept a record from

1423 to 1431 (reign of Henry VI.), has the following entry under the year

1427: “In the beginning of October, a certain rheumy infirmity (_quaedam

infirmitas reumigata_) which is called ‘_mure_’ invaded the whole people,

and so infected the aged along with the younger that it conducted a great

number to the grave[804].” A good deal is said in this brief passage, and

all that is said points to influenza--the rheumy nature of the malady, the

universality of incidence, presumably the suddenness and brief duration,

the deaths among the aged and the more juvenile. It is known also that a

similarly general malady was prevalent the same year in Paris, where it

bore the name of _ladendo_; the particulars given in the French record of

it leave no doubt that it was influenza.

The singular name of _pestilentia volatilis_ given by Fordoun to two

epidemics in Scotland in his own lifetime, one which began at Edinburgh in

February, 1430 (1431 new style), and the other at Haddington in 1432,

suggests that they may have been influenzas, but there is nothing more

than the name to indicate their nature. Those years are not known to have

been years of influenza in any other country of Europe: the record of the

malady passes direct from 1427 to 1510. There was certainly a great wave

of influenza over Europe in 1510, under the names of _cocqueluche_ and

_coccolucio_. It is said to have come up from the Mediterranean coasts and

to have extended to the shores of the Baltic and North Seas; its

prevalence in Britain is likely enough, and is indeed asserted in one

foreign account, but there is no known native notice of it. Abroad, it had

the usual character of suddenness, simultaneity and universality, and the

symptoms of heaviness, prostration, headache, restlessness, sleeplessness,

and for some time after a violent paroxysmal cough, like whooping-cough.

None died except some children; in some it went off with a looseness, in

others by sweating[805]. The mention of sweating in the influenza epidemic

of 1510 is not without importance. It may serve to explain a remark by

Erasmus, in a letter of 25th August, 1511, from Queens’ College,

Cambridge, that his health was still rather doubtful “from that sweat” (_a

sudore illo_[806]); the sweat can hardly have been the sweating sickness

of 1508, three years before, but the still unsettled health of Erasmus in

1511 may perhaps have been the dregs of the influenza of 1510.

The next great European epidemic of influenza was in 1557, for which I

shall produce medical evidence of England sharing in it, probably during

that year and certainly in the one following. But the intervening years

afford some notices of sickness in England, which was neither so severe as

plague at one end of the pestilential scale nor altogether mild at the

other, being forms of illness which contemporaries pronounced to be “new”

and “strange,” and appear to have been of the nature of pestilent fever

and dysentery.

Neither typhus nor dysentery was really new to England in the sixteenth

century; on the contrary, they were (with putrid sore throat and lientery)

the common types of disease in the great English famines which came at

long intervals, as described in the first chapter. But on the continent of

Europe typhus and dysentery and putrid sore throat (_angina maligna_)

began with the modern age to appear as if capriciously, and independently

of such obvious antecedents as want, although some of the epidemics of

typhus and dysentery were clearly related to the hardships of

warfare[807]. Typhus, indeed, was a disastrous malady on the Continent in

those years, notably in 1528 in Spain, where it was known as “las bubas,”

and in France, where it was called “les poches”--both names relating to

the spots on the skin, and both more strictly applicable to the eruptions

of the lues venerea, which was then also rampant.

Apart from the gaol fever at Cambridge in 1522, the first mention of those

new epidemics in England since the end of the medieval period is under the

year 1540: “This said xxx and two year [of Henry VIII.] divers and many

honest persons died of the hot agues and of a great lask throughout the

realm[808].” The “lask” was dysentery, (Stow, in chronicling the epidemic

in his much later _Annales_ calls it “the bloody flux”), and the “hot

agues,” according to later references under that name, appear to have been

influenza in the sense of a highly volatile typhus[809]. All that we know

of the circumstances of this epidemic is that the summer was one of

excessive drought, that wells and brooks were dried up, and that the

Thames ran so low as to make the tide at London Bridge not merely brackish

but salt.

The spring and summer of 1551 were the seasons of the last outbreak of the

sweat in England, which curiously coincided with another epidemic of

influenza (_cocqueluche_) in France. The years from 1555 to 1558 were a

sickly period for all Europe, the diseases being of the types of

dysentery, typhus, and influenza. The most authentic particulars are given

under the years 1557 and 1558; and those for England, which specially

concern us, are now to be given. Wriothesley, a contemporary, enters under

the year 1557: “This summer reigned in England divers strange and new

sicknesses, taking men and women in their heads; as strange agues and

fevers, whereof many died[810].” Under the year 1558, the continuator of

Fabyan’s chronicle says: “In the beginning of this mayor’s year died many

of the wealthiest men all England through, of a strange fever[811].”

Some light is thrown upon the sickness, general throughout England in

1557-8, also by Stow in his _Annales_. Before the harvest of 1557 corn was

at famine prices, but after the harvest wheat fell to an eighth part of

the price (5_s._ the quarter), the penny wheaten loaf being increased from

11 oz. to 56 oz.! In the harvest of 1558, he goes on, the “quartan agues

continued in like manner, or more vehemently than they had done the last

year passed, where-through died many old people and specially priests, so

that a great number of parishes were unserved and no curates to be gotten,

and much corn was lost in the fields for lack of workmen and

labourers[812].” Harrison, canon of Windsor, says that a third part of the

people of the land did taste the general sickness, which points to

influenza[813].

The year 1557 was certainly remarkable on the continent of Europe as a

year of widely prevalent “pestiferous and contagious sickness,” which was

described by numerous medical writers. That universal epidemic, or

pandemic, is usually counted as one of the great historical waves of

influenza; and in the annals of that wonderful disease it stands the first

which was well recorded by competent foreign observers, including

Ingrassias, Gesner, Rondelet, Riverius, Dodonaeus, and Foreest. The

corresponding sickness in England in 1557 (still more severe in 1558),

which carried off many of the wealthiest men, and made so great an

impression that it is noticed by Stow and Speed, has missed being noticed

by English physicians, with a single exception, and that a casual one. If

the continental physicians had not been copious in writing on several

occasions when our English physicians were silent, such as the epidemic of

syphilis in 1494-6, the English sweat of 1529, and the influenza of

1557-8, it might appear ungracious to remark upon the scanty literary

productiveness of the profession in the Tudor period. Whoever attempts

medical history for England will soon feel our deficiency in materials,

and become disposed to envy the easier task of the foreign historian. The

academical physicians of the time hardly ever wrote. The men who wrote on

medicine were laymen like Sir Thomas Elyot, who justified his interest

therein by the example of men of his own rank like Juba, king of

Mauritania, and Mithridates, king of Pontus; or they were irregular

practitioners desirous to advertise themselves; or booksellers’ hacks like

Paynel; or such as Cogan, a schoolmaster and a physician in one. The

modern reader will be surprised at the common burden of the prefaces of

medical (and perhaps other) books in the Tudor period,--the intolerable

nuisance of “pick-faults,” “depravers,” and cavillers, who sat in their

chairs and criticised; and if the modern reader happen to be in quest of

authentic facts, he can hardly fail to sympathise with Phaer, when he

addresses the academical dog-in-the-manger with the Horatian challenge:

“Si quid novisti rectius istis, candidus imperti; si non, his utere

mecum.”

It is possible, however, to collect a few particulars of the prevalent

sickness of 1558 in England from casual notices of it. Thus, it comes

into a letter to the queen, of September 6, by Lord St John, governor of

the Isle of Wight, from his house at Letley, near Southampton: sickness

affected more than half the people in Southampton, the Isle of Wight and

Portsmouth (those places being filled with troops under St John’s

command), and the captain of the fort at Sandown was dead[814]. Curiously

enough we get an intimate glimpse of this epidemic from a book published

some years after, the _Dyall of Agues_ by Dr John Jones. In his chapter

“Of the Sweating Fevers” (chapter xiv), after illustrating from Galen the

proposition that a sweat may not be critical and wholesome, but τυφώδης or

typhus-like, attending the seizure from its outset and “the same said

sweat little or nothing profiting,” he proceeds to point his remarks by

his own experience:

“I had too good experience of myself in Queen Mary’s reign, living at

Lettlé in my good lord’s house, the right honourable Lord St John,

beside Southampton, the which, notwithstanding the great sweat, it was

long after before I recovered of my health, so that the said sweat did

nothing profit.”

He then proceeds to compare the sweat, almost certainly the epidemic

mentioned in St John’s despatch of 6th September, 1558, with the sweating

sickness of 1551:

“So in our days, even in King Edward VI.’s reign, it brought many to

their long home, as some of the most worthy, the two noble princes of

Suffolk, imps of honour most towardly, with others of all degrees

infinite many; and the more perished no doubt for lack of physical

counsel speedily[815].”

The next that we hear of this epidemic of the autumn of 1558, is in a

despatch from Dover, 11 p.m. 6th October: the writer has “learnt from the

mayor of Dover that there is no plague there, but the people that daily

die are those that come out of the ships, and such poor people as come out

of Calais, of the new sickness[816].” A despatch of 17th October, 1558,

from one of the commissioners for the surrender of Calais, Sir Thomas

Gresham, at Dunkirk, to the Privy Council, says that he “returned hither

to write his letter to the queen, and found Sir William Pickering very

sore sick of this new burning ague. He has had four sore fits, and is

brought very low, and in danger of his life if they continue as they have

done[817].”

Here we have the same term “new sickness” and “new burning ague” as in the

two English chronicles under the year before--the “strange and new

sicknesses” which “took men and women in their heads,” and the “strange

agues and fevers.” The very general prevalence in Southampton, Portsmouth

and the Isle of Wight suggests influenza; the symptom of sweating

described by Jones for his own case during that prevalence is in keeping

with what we hear of the influenzas of the time from foreign writers, and

so is the long and slow convalescence; the fact of one person having had

four sore fits of “this new burning ague” is more like influenza than

typhus.

The severe mortalities in the autumn of 1558 at Loughborough and Chester

are put down to “plague,” and they may, of course, have been circumscribed

outbursts of the old bubo-plague. If, however, they were part of the

general prevalence of hot or burning agues, which we may take to have been

influenza or a very volatile kind of typhus, they would indicate a degree

of fatality in the latter somewhat greater than more recent influenzas

have had. A high death-rate is, indeed, demonstrable for the year 1558,

from parish registers, by comparing the deaths in that year with the

deaths in years near it, and by comparing the deaths with the births in

1558 itself.

The registers of christenings and burials, which had been ordered first in

1538, were kept in a number of parishes from that date; and from 1558,

when the order for keeping them was renewed by queen Elizabeth, they were

generally kept. Dr Thomas Short, a man of great industry, about the middle

of last century obtained access to a large number of parish registers, and

worked an infinite number of arithmetical exercises upon their

figures[818]. His abstract results or conclusions are colourless and

unimpressive, as statistical results are apt to be for the average

concrete mind; nor can they be made to illustrate the epidemic history of

Britain with the help of his companion volumes, ‘A General Chronological

History of the Air, Weather, Seasons, Meteors etc[819].’, for these

extraordinary annals are for the most part loosely compiled from foreign

sources, bringing into one focus the most scattered references to disease

in any part of Europe, and that too without criticism of authorities but

often with surprising credulity and inaccuracy. That so much statistical

or arithmetical zeal and exhaustiveness (in the work of 1750) should go

with so total a deficiency of the critical and historical sense, (in the

work of 1749) is noteworthy, and perhaps not unparalleled in modern times.

Short’s history is mostly foreign, but his statistics, which are English,

may be used to illustrate and confirm what can be learned of sicknesses in

England in the ordinary way of historical research.

Thus, the period from 1557 to 1560 stands out in Short’s table as one of

exceptional unhealthiness both in country parishes and in market towns,

the unhealthiness being estimated by the excess of burials over

christenings.

_Country Parishes._

Registers Unhealthy Baptised Buried

Year examined Parishes in same in same

1557 16 7 62 181

1558 26 11 171 340

1559 34 12 145 252

1560 38 6 100 162

1561 41 1 19 32

_Market Towns._

Registers Unhealthy Baptised Buried

Year examined Towns in same in same

1557 4 2 262 381

1558 4 2 104 159

1559 5 3 102 149

1560 8 3 134 201

1561 8 3 276 399

1562 8 1 58 71

Short’s collection of parish registers appears to have represented many

English counties, although there is no clue to their identity in the

tables from which these figures are taken. The heavy mortalities in the

registers correspond exactly to the epidemic years as otherwise known, and

may be said to bear witness to the extent or generality of the epidemic

infection.

The next that we hear of malignant fevers in England is the outbreak at

Oxford in 1577, following the Assizes. Anthony Wood says of it: “Some

thought that this Oxford mortality was the same that Leonard Fuchsius

styles sudor Anglicus.” Cogan, a contemporary, says:

“And certainly after that sudden bane at Oxford, the same year and a

year or two following, the same kind of agues raged in a manner all

over England, and took away very many of the strongest sort in their

lustiest age, and for the most part men and not women nor children,

culling them out here and there, even as you should choose the best

sheep out of a flock. And certain remedy was none to be found.... And

they that took a moderate sweat at the beginning of their sickness,

and did rid their stomachs well by vomit, sped much better.”

This is partly confirmed by Short’s abstracts of the parish registers.

Thus in 1580, of sixty registers examined, ten showed unhealthiness, the

births being to the deaths as 248 to 284. In 1582, seven country parishes

were markedly unhealthy, the births being to the deaths as 140 to 244. In

market towns the incidence is not so striking: in 1580, four towns out of

sixteen examined showed an unhealthy birth-rate, 237 births to 276 deaths.

It is in 1583 that the disparity becomes greatest in these towns: three

out of the sixteen in the list were notably unhealthy, the deaths being

1062 and the births 467. But it is the obvious defect of Short’s method

that we have no means of knowing whether that mortality may not have been

largely from plague, and not from fever or other form of epidemic

sickness.

The only year between 1558 and 1580 in Short’s tables, which stands out as

decidedly unhealthy both in country parishes and market towns is 1570,

while the years from 1573 to 1575 are less healthy than the average. Those

were years of war, and of war-typhus, on the Continent, as the foreign

writings show, but there are no records of the kind of sickness in

England.

One glimpse of the prevalence of those fevers of 1580-82 is got from a

letter of the earl of Arundell to Lord Burghley, October 19, 1582. The

earl had left his house in London because it was so “beset and

encompassed” by plague; while, as to his country house: “The air of my

house in Sussex is so corrupt even at this time of the year as, when I

came away, I left xxiv sick of hot agues.” He therefore begs the loan of

the bishop of Chichester’s house till such time as the vacancy in the see

should be filled up[820].

The widespread volatile sicknesses of 1557-8 and 1580-2, which are grouped

under the generic name of influenza, were related in time to great

epidemics of the far more deadly bubo-plague. These plague outbursts were

less noticeable in England than abroad. Thus in 1557 there were most

disastrous epidemics of true bubo-plague in several towns of the Low

Countries, and in 1580 there was at Cairo one of the worst epidemics in

the whole history of plague from its beginning. The years preceding 1580

were also plague-years in many parts of Europe (Padua, Mantua, Venice,

Messina, Palermo, Lisbon, Brussels). Those years were also the occasion of

the first great and disastrous epidemics of diphtheria (_garottillo_) in

Spain. Then come the epidemics of typhus; and at the far end of the

pestilential scale the flying waves of influenza. A relation of influenza

to other prevalent infections has been one of the theories of its nature,

especially the relation to epidemics of Asiatic cholera.

In that view influenza looks as if it were a volatile product, a swifter

and more superficial wave on the top of some slower and more deadly

earth-borne virus. As the old writers said, it was a _levis corruptio

aeris_, a diluted virus as it were, mild in proportion to its volatility

and swiftness, but in universality equalling in its own milder way the

universality of the plague of Justinian’s reign or of the Black Death.

Now, the same century and the same state of society which witnessed the

most remarkable of those flying ripples of infection over the whole

surface of Europe witnessed also some waves of infection which did not

travel so far, nor were mere influenzas. The English sweat travelled over

England in that way; it was called the posting sweat, because it posted

from town to town: thus in 1551 it suddenly appeared one day in Oxford,

and next day it was in the villages around, as if carried in the air; in

like manner it posted to Devonshire, to Leicestershire, to Cheshire, and

doubtless all over England, like the influenzas of recent memory. And

while the English sweat was thus flying about in England, influenza was

flying about the same year (1551) in France, a country which never

suffered from any of the five sweating sicknesses of 1485-1551. Again, the

influenza in England in 1558 had the symptom of sweating so marked that it

was compared to the true sweat of 1551 by Dr Jones, who himself suffered

from it. Also the influenza of 1580 all over Europe had so much of a

sweating character that in some places they said the English sweat had

come back. Lastly, the gaol-fever of Oxford in 1577 was thought by some to

present the symptoms described by Leonard Fuchs for _sudor Anglicus_; and

Cogan, an English medical writer then living, specially mentions the

phenomenon of sweating (as well as the intestinal profluvium called a

“lask”), both at Oxford and in the more widely prevalent diseases of that

year and the years following. The gaol-fever of Exeter in 1586 illustrates

still another side of the question; it diffused itself--probably by other

means than contact with the sick--all over the county of Devon, and had

not ceased six months after it began in the month of March at Exeter. The

Devonshire diffusion was like the spreading circles in a still pool. The

spread of influenza was like the flying ripples on a broad surface of

water. The spread of plague, on the occasions when it was universal, was

like the massive rollers of the depths, the onward march of cholera from

the East having, in our own times, illustrated afresh the same momentum.

In using hitherto the name of influenza for the universal fevers in

England in 1557-58 and in 1580-82, I have done so because those years are

usually reckoned in the annals of influenza. But the name is at best a

generic one, and need not commit us to any nosological definition. I shall

have to deal at more length with this question in the tenth chapter, when

speaking of the fevers of 1657-59 described by Willis and Whitmore, two

competent medical observers; in those years the vernal fever was a

catarrhal fever, or influenza proper, while the fever of the hot and dry

season, autumnal or harvest-fever, was a pestilential fever, a spotted

fever, a burning ague, a contagious malignant fever. There were also

differences in their epidemological as well as in their clinical

characters, the influenza wave being soonest past. But so far as regarded

universality of diffusion and generality of incidence, both types were

much alike.

Molineux, writing in 1694, a generation after Willis, “On the late general

coughs and colds,” brought into comparison with them another epidemic

which he had observed in Dublin in the month of July, 1688: “The transient

fever of 1688 ... I look upon to have been the most universal fever, as

this [1693] the most universal cold, that has ever appeared[821].”

When we come to the 18th century, to great epidemics not only in connexion

with famine in Ireland, but also in England, we shall find the same

diffusiveness associated with the clear type of disease which we now call

typhus. Influenza is the only sickness familiar to ourselves which shows

the volatile character, and we are apt to conclude that no other type of

fever ever had that character. But, without going farther back than the

18th century we shall find epidemics of spotted typhus resting like an

atmosphere of infection over whole tracts of Britain and Ireland, town and

country alike; and even if we give the name of influenza to the epidemical

“hot agues” with which we are here immediately concerned, in the years

1540, 1557-8, and 1580-82, we may also regard them as in a manner

corresponding to, if not as embracing, the types of fever that prevailed

from time to time over wide districts of country in the centuries

following.

The term “ague,” often used at the time, is no more decisive for the

nosological character than the term “influenza.” Ague originally meant a

sharp fever (_febris acuta_, ὄξυς), and in Ireland, from the time of

Giraldus Cambrensis down to the 18th century, it meant the acute fever of

the country, which has not been malarial ague, in historical times at

least, but typhus. “Irish ague” was in later times a well-understood term

for contagious pestilential fever or typhus. In the _Dyall of Agues_ by Dr

John Jones (1564 ?), just as in the writings of Sydenham a century later,

intermittents were mixed up with continued fevers which had nothing

malarial in their cause or circumstances. Thus, Jones has a chapter on

“Hot Rotten Agues,” which he identifies with the synochus or continued

fever of the Greeks; in another chapter on “The Continual Rotten Ague,” he

locates the continued fevers within the vessels and the “interpolate”

without their walls, and proceeds:

“It happeneth where all the vessels, but most chiefly in the greatest

which are annexed about the flaps of the lungs and spiritual members,

all equally putrefying, which often happeneth, as Fuchsius witnesseth,

of vehement binding and retaining the filth in the cavity or

hollowness of the vessels, inducing a burning heat. Wherefore, this

kind of fever chanceth not to lean persons, nor to such as be of a

thin constitution and cold temperament, nor an old age (that ever I

saw), but often in them which abound with blood and of sanguine

complexion, replenished with humour, fat and corpulent, solemners of

Bacchus’ feasts,--gorge upon gorge, quaff upon quaff--not altogether

with meat or drink of good nourishment but of omnium gatherum, as well

to the destruction of themselves as uncurable to the physician, as by

my prediction came to pass (besides others) upon a gentleman of

Suffolk, a little from Ipswich, who by the causes aforesaid got his

sickness, and thereof died the ninth day, according to my prediction,

as his wife and friend knoweth.”

Again, in his eighth chapter, “Of the Pestilential Fever, or Plague, or

Boche [Botch],” he remarks upon the varying types of pestilential

diseases, mentioning among other national types the English sweat:

“As we, not out of mind past, with a sweat called stoupe galante, as

that worthy Doctor Caius hath written at large in his book _De

Ephemera Britannica_,” adding the remark that here concerns us:--“and

sethence [since then], with many pestilential agues, and, lastly of

all, with the pestilential boche [botch or plague rightly termed].”

These continued fevers, pestilential agues, or hot rotten agues, Jones

distinguishes from quotidians, tertians and quartans. Of the last he

says: “and when quartans reign everywhere, as they did of no long

years past; of the which then I tasted part, besides my experience had

of others,”--probably the fevers of 1558, elsewhere called by him the

sweating sickness, and by Stow called “quartan agues.” He mentions

also quintains, which he had never seen in England, “but yet in

Ireland, at a place called Carlow, I was informed by Mr Brian Jones,

then there captain, of a kerne or gentleman there that had the

quintain long.”

Not only the term “ague,” but also the terms “intermittent,” “tertian,”

and more especially “quartan,” can hardly be taken in their modern sense

as restricted to malarial or climatic fevers. An intermittent or

paroxysmal character of fevers was made out on various grounds, to suit

the traditional Galenic or Greek teaching; but the paroxysms and

intermissions were not associated specially with rise and fall of the

body-temperature. The curious history of agues, and of the specialist

ague-curers, properly belongs to the time of the Restoration, when

Peruvian bark came into vogue, and will be fully dealt with in the first

chapter of another volume.

The last years in the Tudor period that stand out conspicuously in the

parish registers for a high mortality, not due to plague, are 1597-8. The

year 1597 was a season of influenza in Italy, and perhaps elsewhere in

Europe; so that the epidemic in England that year may have been the same,

but more probably was famine-fever. In the parish register of Cranbrooke

the deaths for the year are 222, against 56 births; and 181 of the deaths

are marked with the mark which is supposed to mean plague proper. The

register of Tiverton has 277 deaths, against 66 births, but it is almost

certain that the cause of the excess was not plague, of which the nearest

epidemic in that town was in 1591. In a country parish of Hampshire, with

a population of some 2700, the deaths in 1597 were 117, against 48 births,

the mortality being about twice as great as in any year from the

commencement of the register in 1569, and after until 1612[822]. In the

north of England the type of disease in 1597-8 was plague proper.

The parish register of Finchley has a remarkable entry under the year 1596

which introduces us to other considerations: “Hoc anno moriebantur de

dysenteria xix,” the whole number of burials for the year having been 28.

Next year, 1597, there are 23 deaths from dysentery, the burials in all

having been 48--an enormous mortality compared with the average of the

parish. The year 1597, if not also 1596, was a year of great scarcity,

apparently all over England; in Northumberland, Durham, and Cumberland,

the scarcity was attended by plague proper; but in other parts of England,

it would seem, by other types of sickness, of which dysentery was one.

One of the 16th century English names used for flux was the obsolete word

lask, which occurs often enough in writings of the period to suggest that

the malady was common; it is sometimes called a choleric lask (cholera

morbus), or a vehement lask, as in Elyot’s _Castel of Health_ and in

Cogan’s _Haven of Health_. Lasks, or lienteries, or dysenteries have not

been dealt with in a chapter by themselves because the records of them are

too few and meagre, so far as we have gone in the history; but it may be

convenient to bring together here the better known instances. In the

period of famine-sicknesses, dysentery and lientery must have been common

types, the latter being specially mentioned by Rishanger of St Albans for

the year 1294. Trokelowe, another St Albans chronicler, writing of the

famine-sickness of 1315-16, uses the singular phrase “morbus enim

dysentericus ex corruptis cibis fere omnes maculavit” and says it was

followed by “acuta febris vel pestis gutturuosa.” Dysentery from corrupt

food is again specially named for the year 1391. The “wame-ill” was the

prevalent type of sickness in the great Scots famine of 1439, a year of

famine in England and France. When we next hear of it in English history

it is among the troops of the marquis of Dorset in Gascony and Biscay in

1512, some 1800 of them having died of “the flix.” Then comes the “great

lask throughout the realm” in 1540, associated with “strange fevers.” The

sickly years 1557-58 and 1580-82 had probably some dysentery, or lientery,

either as primary maladies or as complications of the fevers: Cogan’s

generalities imply as much for 1580-82, and we know that the corresponding

sickly period a century after (1657-59) was so characterised in the

description by Willis. The fatal infection in the fleet after the defeat

of the Spanish Armada, in August, 1588, was probably dysentery and

ship-fever. Many other instances of the kind remain to be given in the

chapter on the sicknesses of voyages and colonial settlements.

Dysentery begins to be heard of more frequently in the Stuart period, as a

malady of London. It is a prominent item, along with summer diarrhoea, in

the London bills of mortality from the year 1658, under the name “griping

of the guts,” and is occasionally mentioned in letters from London about

the same years. The dysentery of London in 1669 was the subject of

Sydenham’s observations, who says that it had been rarely seen in the

preceding ten years[823]. On the other hand he speaks of “the endemic

dysentery of Ireland,” although he is not sure as to its type or

species[824]. Statements as to the Irish “country disease,” are as old as

Giraldus Cambrensis[825]; but as the whole question of dysentery is

intimately bound up with that of typhus-fever, I shall reserve

consideration of its prevalence in Ireland on the great scale, as well as

of the annual mortality from it in the London bills of the 17th century,

until that section of the work in which fevers and the maladies akin to

them come into the first rank as if in lieu of the plague.

* * * * *

NOTE. A sweating character in the “hot agues” or fevers of the Elizabethan

period, in those of 1580-82 as well as in those of 1557-58, is asserted in

several passages in the text. It is noteworthy that in _Measure for

Measure_, one of Shakespeare’s early comedies, the bawd says: “Thus, what

with the war, what with the sweat, what with the gallows, and what with

poverty, I am custom-shrunk” (Act I. Scene 2).