Meanwhile plague appeared in other parts of Devonshire. In Exeter it had

been prevalent sooner than in Plymouth itself; a letter of November 17,

1625, speaks of the afflicted state of the city, and of the weekly

contributions for the plague-stricken. Some particulars of the state of

Exeter at this time are given in a memorial to the Privy Council by the

mayor and bailiffs of the city, dated October 15, 1627. During the great

sickness which fell on their city, and was not cleared in sixteen months,

all trading was stopped and the inhabitants generally left the town. To

appease a mutiny of the more disordered people, who threatened to burn the

city, a rate was assessed generally on the city, but most of the

inhabitants being absent, the corporation took up the amount at interest

on their own credit. The persons whose names are inclosed, being

inhabitants who have returned to the city, now refuse to pay the rate

assessed in their absence; and the Council is petitioned to summon them

before it[1033].

On May 17, 1626, the plague is reported to be rife “in Devonshire,” and

specifically, on July 28, at Okehampton and Ashburton. The epidemic at

Ashburton was on the same severe scale as at Plymouth. It began in the end

of 1625, but was most fatal in April and May, 1626. The deaths in a

twelvemonth were 365, “probably a fourth of the inhabitants[1034].” (In

1627 there were only 27 deaths, doubtless from the empty state of the

town.) The same summer it is heard of in Dorsetshire. On September 2, the

deputy lieutenants and justices of the county petition the Privy Council

that the 1000 soldiers who were to be removed from Devon and Cornwall,

should not be quartered in Dorset, but in Somerset, as the former was

visited with the plague[1035]. Perhaps Bridport was the centre of plague

referred to. Sometime later in the year, perhaps in November, the bailiffs

and burgesses of that town explain to the Council that, although they had

subscribed to the loan, yet they were unable to pay the amount subscribed

as the town was destitute by reason of a twenty weeks’ visitation of

plague[1036].

The last of this series of outbreaks in the south-west appears to have

been at Dartmouth in the summer of 1627. On June 29, it was reported that

the plague was so hot there that the inhabitants had left. The mayor wrote

on July 19 to the Privy Council that it was true the inhabitants were

still away, but the plague had ceased; only 15 houses had been infected,

the inhabitants of which had all been removed to the pest-houses remote

from the town[1037].

Farther east on the Channel coast, Portsmouth had a visitation of plague

previous to September 28, 1625, perhaps in connexion with the Cadiz fleet;

the mayor and bailiffs, being at the end of their year’s office, had

refused to take steps to sever the infected[1038]. At Southampton, only

one house was infected on August 27. The infection is reported also from

Rye in 1625, and from Canterbury, where the famous composer, Orlando

Gibbons, died in the beginning of June, 1625, “not without suspicion of

the sickness,” says Chamberlain, but, according to Anthony Wood, of the

smallpox. The king and queen lodged at Canterbury on June 14; but on July

23 the place had to be avoided “for the great infection.”

From Oxford, where the Parliament met on August 1, the vice-chancellor

wrote on July 27, that Sir John Hussey came thither infected from London,

and died, that Dr Chaloner, being in the same house, was since dead, that

the infection was in other parts of Oxford, and that All Souls College was

shut up. There was a slight revival of it in January, 1626, which caused

the exercises and the sermons at St Mary’s to be put off[1039]. Anthony

Wood gives much the same account as for 1603, and blames the great

increase of “cottages” erected by townsmen, to which scholars were

enticed.

Cambridge kept free in 1625; but on October 3, three deaths are reported

at Trumpington--one Peck, his wife, and maid. On the same date three

houses were shut up at Royston, and the infected “translated into the

fields[1040].”

The outbreak at Norwich was one of the severer degree[1041]. It was said

to have been brought in the end of June, 1625, from Yarmouth, where

nothing is recorded of it. A king’s order to the mayor imposed extensive

cleansings, &c., but the plague increased from 26 deaths in a week in

July, to 40 in September, reaching a maximum of 73 from plague in a week,

besides 18 from other causes. On August 27, Mead, the Cambridge don,

writes that he had met the Norwich carrier, who told him that the number

of burials there the last week was 77, whereof of the plague 67, and but

14 the week before. The infection lingered on until December of the year

after (1626), the total deaths from plague having been 1431. The plague at

Norwich was made the excuse, by the mayor and aldermen writing to the

Privy Council on January 30, 1627, for not contributing towards shipping

for the king’s service; the city was distressed from inundations and the

plague, “many hundreds of houses” standing empty. There appears to have

been some plague at Lynn in the end of 1625, a Privy Council order of

January, 1626, authorising the fair to be held there, the disease having

ceased.

In April, 1627, the bailiffs and aldermen of Colchester offer the same

excuse as Norwich; they are unable to set forth any ships as directed on

account of the heavy visitation of their town by the plague, the decay of

their trade in the new draperies and baize, and the loss of their ships at

sea.

Leicestershire, also, would appear to have had another visitation in 1626.

On July 28, the muster in that county was respited on account of the shire

town and nine or ten other towns being visited with the plague. Of that

there is no trace in the excellent county history by Nichols. Leicester,

like Bristol and other places, is known to have imposed quarantine against

Londoners in the summer of 1625. It is probable that plague was also in

Warwickshire in 1626[1042].

Among other outbreaks in 1625 was one at Newcastle, but it does not

compare in extent with some earlier and later plagues there. On September

10, Lord Clifford writes from Appleby Castle to Secretary Conway that

Newcastle is so infected with plague, so ill fortified, and ill

neighboured, that 500 men would disarm it. In his own county of Cumberland

there was plague in Lord William Howard’s house. Sir Francis Howard’s lady

took the infection from a new gown she had from London, so as she died the

same day she took it; they are all dispersed most miserably, with the

greatest terror in the world. Cheshire also had the infection in

1625[1043].

After a clear interval of two or three years, the history of plague begins

again in London, and in the provinces. The London plague of 1630 was a

small affair (1317 deaths), the city being otherwise so healthy that the

christenings exceeded the total burials (9315 to 9237). In 1630, at the

same time as the small London outbreak, Cambridge had what appears to have

been its most considerable plague, but a very small one at the worst. It

began about February 28, caused the colleges to break up and the midsummer

assizes to be transferred to Royston, and from first to last produced 214

deaths, known or suspected from plague[1044].

Along with it there were a good many cases at Wymondham (Windham), and

some straggling cases at Norwich and Colchester, continuing into 1631,

some 20 or 30 dying at Norwich of plague in the latter year[1045]. The

other centre in 1630 was in the north-west. Shrewsbury, an old-world town

which seldom escaped, had a localised epidemic in St Chad’s parish. It

began on May 24 in Frankwell, but was confined to that street by cutting

off the residents therein from the rest of the town, and by removing the

infected to pest-houses in Kingsland[1046]. It continued at Shrewsbury

into 1631, and is heard of also at Preston, Wrexham, and Manchester,

collections having been made in neighbouring places for the

infected[1047]. But the one great outbreak of those years fell upon the

town of Louth, in Lincolnshire, of which the sole particulars are that the

plague from April to the end of November, 1631, swept away 754 persons of

whom nearly 500 in July and August[1048].

After four years clear in London and in all parts of England (years

occupied with the growing quarrel between the king and the Parliament),

plague broke out again not far from Louth, where we saw it last, namely at

Hull. A century and a half had passed since Hull’s last great devastation

by plague year after year from 1472 to 1478. It was then a medieval town,

with a chain drawn across the mouth of its creek of the Humber, surrounded

by great abbeys, and owing its importance to its trade in stock fish from

Iceland and the North Sea. In the Tudor times it had experienced one small

epidemic about the Blackfriars Gate in 1576, causing about a hundred

deaths. The date of the outbreak in 1635 is not given exactly; but, as in

the 15th century, it was the peculiarity of Hull among provincial towns

that it kept the infection for several years,--down to June, 1638.

Business was paralysed, schools shut up, and the town deserted by the

wealthier classes. The deaths from plague from first to last are counted

at 2730, besides those which occurred in flight to other places. Upwards

of 2,500 persons, once in easy circumstances, are said to have been

reduced to seek relief, to which the county of York contributed[1049]. In

1643 Hull stood a siege, but there is no farther mention of plague; nor

did the town suffer in 1665.

The year 1635, which saw the beginning of the Hull plague, at a time when

the infection was absolutely quiet in the capital, saw also the beginning

of an outbreak at Sandwich, with accompanying cases at Canterbury, and a

beginning at Yarmouth, Lynn and Norwich[1050], in all which places the

infections lingered at a low endemic level for a year or more. The dates

are important only as showing that these provincial infections were

looking up some months before the sharp outburst in London in the late

autumn of 1636 made any sign. In Sandwich, on the 12th of March, 1637,

there were 78 houses “visited,” and 188 persons infected; on June 30, 24

houses shut up, with 103 persons, some of them lodged in tents; from July

6 to October 5, there were buried of the plague about ten every week in St

Clement’s parish. Considerable expenses were incurred (more than £40 a

week), to which the county of Kent and the other Cinque Ports

contributed[1051].

Besides these lingering endemics in Kent and Norfolk, the great plague

epidemics of 1636 were in Newcastle and London. The Newcastle epidemic

was both earlier and relatively far more severe than that of the capital.

For a town of some 20,000 inhabitants, the following weekly figures[1052]

indicate a plague of the first degree, comparable to the London

death-rates of 1625 and 1665:

Died of plague at Newcastle, within the liberties, from May 7 to December

31, 1636:

Week Plague

ending deaths

May 14 59

21 55

28 99

June 4 122

11 99

18 162

25 133

July 2 172

9 184

16 212

23 270

30 366

Aug. 7 337

14 422

21 346

28 246

Sept. 4 520

11 325

To end of Dec. 908

----

Total to 31st Dec. 5027

Besides in Garthside, from May 30 to October 17, 515, making a total of

5542.

This tremendous visitation of Tyneside is said to have begun in October,

1635, at North Shields, where the infection rested during the winter cold,

to begin again at Newcastle in spring. During the height of the epidemic

in summer and autumn all trade was suspended, no one being about in the

streets or in the neighbouring highways. The means tried to check the

infection were fumigations with pitch, rosin, and frankincense. Newcastle

had one other visit from the plague, as we shall see, in 1644 and 1645,

during and after the siege by the Scots Presbyterian army; but in 1665 it

is said to have escaped, although Defoe says that the infection was

introduced by colliers returning from the Thames.

The London Plague of 1636.

The London plague of 1636 was one of the second degree, for the capital,

and was otherwise peculiar as being rather later in the autumnal season

than usual. The following table of the weekly mortalities shows how it

increased, reached a height, and declined.

Christened Buried Buried of

in all plague

Dec. 24 231 170 0

31 195 174 0

1636

Jan. 7 217 189 0

14 242 174 0

21 220 190 0

28 214 171 0

Feb. 4 227 183 0

11 234 160 0

18 207 203 0

25 198 238 0

Mar. 3 221 198 0

10 231 194 0

17 244 187 0

24 215 177 0

31 193 196 0

Apr. 7 202 199 2

14 221 205 4

21 202 205 7

28 271 210 4

May 5 197 206 4

12 199 254 41

19 171 244 22

26 160 263 38

June 2 189 276 51

9 153 275 64

16 145 325 86

23 149 257 65

30 141 273 82

July 7 152 265 64

14 142 298 86

21 146 350 108

28 183 365 136

Aug. 4 152 394 181

11 166 465 244

18 167 546 284

25 161 690 380

Sept. 1 163 835 536

8 153 921 567

15 166 1106 728

22 172 1018 645

29 168 1211 796

Oct. 6 170 1195 790

13 164 1117 682

20 174 855 476

27 133 779 404

Nov. 3 153 1156 755

10 164 966 635

17 143 827 512

24 162 747 408

Dec. 1 168 550 290

8 175 335 143

15 134 324 79

----- ------ ------

9,522 23,359 10,400

The parishes chiefly affected were the same as in 1625 and 1603. Stepney

is still wanting from the general bill; but after 1636 it was included

therein, along with Newington, Lambeth, Westminster, Islington and

Hackney. These omitted parishes doubtless contributed largely, Stepney in

particular, so that the total of plague-deaths would have to be increased

by perhaps two thousand. The following parishes had the severest

mortalities:

Total Plague-deaths

deaths

St Giles’s, Cripplegate 2374 870

St Mary’s, Whitechapel 1766 1060

St Olave’s, Southwark 1537 847

St Botolph’s, Aldgate 1506 735

St Sepulchre’s, Newgate 1327 566

St Saviour’s, Southwark 1269 742

St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate 1239 515

St George’s, Southwark 1044 514

St Andrew’s, Holborn 922 419

St Giles’s in the Fields 863 428

Like the greater plagues of 1603 and 1625, that of 1636 appears to have

begun in the suburbs[1053]. Taylor, the Water-poet, in reprinting his poem

on the plague of 1625, with some notes for 1636, says that of 1076

plague-deaths from April 7 to July 28 (the summation in the annual bill

comes to 864), only 40 had occurred within the walls, so that the general

infection of the City must have followed that of the Liberties and

out-parishes. As early in the epidemic as 31 May, according to a record of

the Middlesex Sessions, “the plague increases most at Stepney,” wherefore

the Greengoose Fair at Stratford was prohibited, (the parish of Stepney

extending as far as Shoreditch)[1054]. From Taylor we learn that Gravesend

and Faversham had calamitous visitations, and that the infection was in

many other towns and villages.

The epidemic of 1636 was like the plague of 1625 in having been preceded

by much typhus fever in London, and accompanied by the same, as many as

2360 deaths being put down to fever in the plague-year in the classified

causes of death now issued regularly (since 1629) in their printed bills

by the Parish Clerks’ Hall. The letters and state papers of the time bear

witness to the usual exodus from the City, the movements of the Court, and

personal incidents, which have no farther interest after the samples given

for 1625. One incident relating to the worst week of the plague in London

in 1636 is preserved: eleven persons were committed to Newgate on 5

October for going with one Samuel Underhill, a trumpeter, who died of the

plague, to his grave with trumpets and swords drawn in the night time in

Shoreditch[1055]. The profession still makes no appearance in the way of

epidemiological writing; but some “necessary directions” were drawn up by

the College of Physicians, in substance the same as certain statutes

issued on the alarm of plague in 1630[1056].

Next year, 1637, the plague continued in London, causing 3082 deaths out

of a total of 11,763 in the bills. In 1638 there were only 363

plague-deaths, but the total mortality was 13,624, or nearly 2000 more

than in the previous year, when plague alone had claimed its 3000. What

were the epidemic types of disease that caused the high mortality in 1638?

Fever in London.

There ought to have been no difficulty in answering the question. The

causes of death in the metropolis had been assigned in the books kept at

Parish Clerks’ Hall since 1604, and had been printed since 1629. The

printed series was in the hands of Graunt, from 1629 down to the date of

his writing, January 1662; and he did abstract the deaths under each head

of disease and casualty from 1629 to 1636 inclusive, and again from 1647

to 1661; but the ten years from 1637 to 1646 inclusive, he omitted as

presenting nothing of importance and as being “inconsistent with the

capacity” of his sheet of paper[1057]. All the original documents prior to

1658 appear to have been lost in the fire of 1666, so that Graunt’s

omission cannot now be made good. One could wish that the worthy citizen

had made no difficulty about the size of his paper. The omitted years are

not only those of great political revolution, which may have had an effect

upon the public health, but they are of special interest for the beginning

of that great period of fever and smallpox in London which continued all

through the 18th century.

The following section of London mortality, down to the end of our present

period, will show, by reference to the total deaths, how important the

omitted years are for the epidemiological history.

Year Plague Fever Smallpox Total

deaths

1629 0 956 72 8771

1630 1317 1091 40 10554

31 274 1115 58 8562

32 8 1108 531 9535

33 0 953 72 8393

34 1 1279 1354 10400

35 0 1622 293 10651

36 10400 2360 127 23359

37 3082 -- -- 11763

38 363 -- -- 13624

39 314 -- -- 9862

1640 1450 -- -- 12771

41 1375 -- -- 13142

42 1274 -- -- 13273

43 996 -- -- 13212

44 1492 -- -- 10933

45 1871 -- -- 11479

46 2365 -- -- 12780

47 3597 1260 139 14059

48 611 884 401 9894

49 67 751 1190 10566

1650 15 970 184 8754

51 23 1038 525 10827

52 16 1212 1279 12569

53 6 282 139 10087

54 16 1371 832 13247

55 9 689 1294 11357

56 6 875 823 13921

57 4 999 835 12434

58 14 1800 409 14993

59 36 2303 1523 14756

1660 13 2148 354 12681

61 20 3490 1246 16665

62 12 2601 768 13664

63 9 2107 411 12741

64 5 2258 1233 15453

65 68596 5257 655 97306

1666 1998 741 38 12738

The year 1638, and the four successive years 1640-43, have exceptional

mortalities, which plague alone can by no means account for. In one of

those years, 1641, we know that smallpox was rife, along with plague, in

the autumn; in the third week of August there were 118 deaths from

smallpox (133 from plague), and in the second week of September 101 from

smallpox (185 from plague), the plague continuing at even higher figures

all through September and October, while smallpox ceases to be mentioned

in the letters of the time[1058]. According to earlier and later

experience, the epidemic of smallpox would have been followed by a quiet

interval of that disease; so that the high mortality, beyond what plague

could account for, would have been due to some other epidemic type. There

is little doubt that that type was fever, less heard of in letters of the

society people because it was, in its steady prevalence from year to year,

an infection of the crowded quarters of the poor.

We begin about this period to find fever, or typhus fever, taking that

place in the medical history of England which it continued to hold down to

the generation before our own. What remains of the history of plague until

its extinction in 1665-66, is so closely interwoven with the history of

malignant fever, that it will be more convenient to carry the latter on

side by side with it instead of in a separate chapter.

The first medical essay upon the malignant fever which got the name of

typhus at the beginning of the 19th century, was that of a physician, Sir

Edward Greaves, published at Oxford in 1643 in connexion with the sickness

in that city while the king and the Royalist army lay there, and with the

sickness in the Parliamentary army of the earl of Essex which lay at

Reading. Greaves describes the unmistakable characters of spotted fever or

typhus, and calls it, in his title “_Morbus Epidemicus Anni 1643_, or the

New Disease.” In his text he speaks of “this so frequently termed the New

Disease.” The name of “New Disease” was used also for influenza; but there

can be no doubt that typhus did become common in England during the Civil

Wars, between the Royalists and the Parliamentarians, which were the first

and also the only sieges and campaigns on English soil that really touched

the life of the nation.

The continent of Europe had been familiar with the same type of fever ever

since the beginning of the 16th century, now in Italy, now in Spain,

another time in the Low Countries, or in Hungary, or in Germany in the

Thirty Years’ War. Greaves, our first writer on epidemic typhus, had been

preceded a whole century by Fracastori, whose description of the fever at

Verona in 1505 is perhaps the first account of epidemic sickness free from

subservience to ancient or medieval authority, and based upon direct

observations made in modern Europe. At the same time typhus or spotted

fever was not new to England in 1643. There is always the difficulty

whether some epidemics of fever should be called influenza or typhus; but

the fever of the Black Assizes, as well as the standing “sickness of the

house,” was certainly typhus, and so probably was the “new disease” in

1612.

The history of fever in England has been partly traced in the chapter on

gaol-fevers in the Tudor period and on the Protean “hot agues,” “new

sickness,” “strange fevers” or influenzas of 1540, 1557-8 and 1580. At a

much earlier period, fevers of the same type (with dysenteries,

lienteries, and pestilent sore throats) have been described, with whatever

details there are, in connexion with the periodic famines, especially

since the Conquest. But we are now come to a time in the history when

typhus fevers appeared in the country unconnected with gaols or with

famines. We are come, indeed, to the new era of epidemics, which is

revealed more clearly after the plague was extinguished for good, but was

really concurrent with the last half-century of plague, preparing, as it

were, to succeed the long reign of that infection. The Civil Wars may be

admitted to have given the new types of sickness an impulse, but the wars

did not originate them, nor did they serve in any way to establish them as

the predominant forms of epidemic sickness for nearly two centuries.

Whatever it was in the condition of England that favoured the prevalence

of fevers, fluxes, and smallpox, that factor was beginning to make itself

felt shortly after the Tudor period ended: it continued in operation

through all political changes of Restoration, Revolution, and Georgian

rule; and if the conditions at length changed, largely for the better so

far as the adult population is concerned, and for the better even as

regards infancy, there has followed the “_nova cohors febrium_” of our own

time, appropriate to its own state of society, as was the old troop

before it. This theme is really the subject with which a new volume should

open; but as the plague-period overlaps its successor the fever-period by

half a century, and as one must pay heed to the chronology, it remains to

insert some facts about fevers in this place.

Review of Fever in England to 1643.

Of the prevalence of malignant fevers in England in the earlier years of

the 17th century we have only occasional glimpses. Thus, in London in

November, 1612, there were several deaths of prominent personages. Prince

Henry, eldest son of James I., died of a fever in the course of that

month, the illness being thus referred to by Chamberlain in one of his

letters to Carleton, written on November 12 from London:

“It is verily thought that the disease was no other than the ordinary

ague that hath reigned and raged almost all over England since the

latter end of summer, which, by observation, is found must have its

ordinary course, and the less physic the better, but only sweating and

an orderly course of keeping and government. The extremity of the

disease seemed to lie in his head [a sure sign of typhus], for remedy

whereof they shaved him and applied warm cocks and pigeons newly

killed, but with no success.”

Sir Theodore Mayerne, the king’s physician (who had been driven from Paris

by the intolerance of the Galenists towards those who used antimony and

other Paracelsist remedies), was a good deal blamed because he had purged

the patient instead of bleeding him.

Writing again on the 19th November, Chamberlain says: “On Friday Sir Harry

Row, our alderman died, and, same morning, Sir George Carey, master of the

wards, of this new disease.” Chamberlain’s statement that an epidemic

fever, which he calls “the ordinary ague,” had raged all over England from

the end of summer, 1612, is supported by Short’s abstracts of the parish

registers for that year, while the following year, 1613, stands out as

still more unhealthy. The next unwholesome year in Short’s tables is 1616;

and of that sickly time we have one great personal illustration.

Shakespeare died on April 23 at Stratford-on-Avon, after three days’

illness of a fever (but possibly of a chill) having just completed his

52nd year. So far as is known, he was not in failing health. It is a

singular coincidence that he made his will on March 25 preceding, the

first day of the year, old style; but the customary phrase, “in perfect

health and memory (God be praised!),” would have been perhaps varied a

little if illness had been creeping upon him. Now the year 1616 is the

most unhealthy in Short’s tables from the beginning of the century; the

parish registers do not bear witness again to so much sickness until 1623,

which, as we have seen, was a year of typhus. The winter of 1615-16 was

altogether exceptional: warm and tempestuous south-westerly and westerly

winds prevailed from November until February; on the 8th February, there

were East Indiamen lying in the Downs, which had been at anchor there for

ten weeks waiting for a change of wind to take them down the Channel. The

warm winds brought “perpetual weeping weather, foul ways and great

floods,” and brought also an early spring. In the last week of January the

archbishop found a nest of young blackbirds in his garden at Lambeth, and

had “another sent to him from Croydon about four days after.” That was

proverbially the kind of Christmas to make a fat churchyard; but it is

impossible to say whether one type of sickness, such as fever,

predominated, as in the preceding sickly years, 1612-13, and in the next

following 1616, namely 1623-24. The following figures from Short’s tables

will prove, at least, that there was excessive mortality.

In the year 1616, twenty-one parish registers out of eighty-eight

examined, showed excessive mortality, the burials being 601 and the

baptisms 417, the year 1617 showing a somewhat improved state of health.

In the market towns for the same two years, the excessive proportion of

burials to christenings is equally striking: of sixteen town registers

examined, ten showed a bad state of health in 1616 (714 burials to 568

baptisms), and in 1617, nine towns had 786 burials to 652 baptisms. But

neither in town nor country do the years 1616-17 stand out so unhealthy as

the years 1623-24. Those two biennial periods are the only very

conspicuous ones in Short’s list for the first quarter of the 17th

century, the year 1613 coming next in unhealthiness.

Let us now seek for any causes such as unwholesome conditions of living

upon which these epidemic fevers might have depended. One of the most

notorious forms of typhus in the 18th century was the ship-fever. The

problem how to destroy its infection in the hulls of transports and ships

of war occupied the attention of the men of science, Stephen Hales among

the rest. Parliament, eager for any cure of so disastrous a pest, voted

some thousands of pounds to a projector whose method, when tried, resulted

in nothing but the burning of three ships to the water’s edge. This

ship-fever became notorious early in the 17th century, having occurred

before in 1588. If the Elizabethan naval annals in Hakluyt’s collection

were less engrossed than they are with adventures and doughty deeds, we

should probably have had more glimpses of an unwholesome state of things

in the ’tween-decks. At all events there is no doubt that fever infested

the shipping of England as well as of France about the year 1625. The

conditions on board ship are, of course, special; there might have been

ship-fever, when there was no gaol-fever, workhouse-fever, or domestic

typhus in general. But what happened on board ship was no bad index of

what was happening on shore. The nation, both on sea and on land, was

expanding far beyond its old medieval limits, with very crude notions of

the elbow-room that it needed. The ideas of cubic space, ventilation, and

the like, with which we are now so familiar, had then no existence. A few

facts about the shipping, gaols and houses will serve to illustrate this

statement.

The fleet which sailed from Plymouth to make war on Spain in the autumn of

1625 consisted of 90 sail, and carried 10,000 men. Whether there was

overcrowding would depend, of course, on the size of the ships; and it may

be safely said that the largest ship of the fleet was not a fourth part

the size of a transport that would be allowed to carry five hundred men

today. The expedition came back in a few weeks broken by sickness and

mutiny, just as the expedition of Mansfeld for the relief of the

Palatinate had fared. The wretched state of the thirty ships which arrived

at Plymouth in November, 1625, has been mentioned already. At the same

date we read of French ships of war also throwing overboard two or three

dead men every day. There are some more precise figures for French ships

in 1627, to be given in the next chapter, which will enable us to measure

the provocation to ship-fever afforded by the conditions of a transport

service in those years.

Besides ship-fever, in the great typhus period of the 18th century, there

used to be named gaol-fever, and workhouse-fever. Of the gaol-fever one

hears little in these years. It was severe in the Queen’s Bench prison in

Southwark in March, 1579; a petition of that date complains that the

prison held double the usual number, that “the sickness of the house” was

rife, and that near a hundred had died of it there during the previous six

years, many more having been sick[1059]. “The sickness of the house” is a

name suggestive of what was usual. These events of prison life made little

stir unless they involved the health of classes far removed from the

prison-class, as in the three memorable instances of the Black Assizes at

Cambridge, Oxford and Exeter. But it is not certain that even such cases

have been all recorded, or that instances of gaol-fever spreading to those

outside may not have been more frequent than appears. Whitmore in his book

of 1659 on fevers in London and the country, quotes Bacon’s remarks upon

the Black Assizes of the Tudor period and adds: “and within this eight or

nine years there happened the like at Southwark, as I am credibly

informed.” That would have been in the King’s Bench prison some time about

1650, which is not far from the date we have brought the history down

to[1060].

The overcrowding of the ships and of the gaols had its counterpart in the

dwelling-houses of London and other towns such as Portsmouth. The

proclamations against the erection of houses on new sites within three

miles of the city gates continued to be issued to the time of Cromwell.

The effect of them was merely to call into existence a class of poor

tenements in odd corners or to overcrowd the existing houses. Thus, on

June 27, 1602: “The council have spied an inconvenient increase of housing

in and about London by building in odd corners, in gardens and over

stables. They have begun to pull down one here and there, lighting in

almost every parish on the unluckiest, which is far from removing the

mischief[1061].” Again, on February 24, 1623, certain inhabitants of

Chancery Lane were indicted at the Middlesex Sessions for subletting, “to

the great danger of infectious disease with plague and other

diseases[1062].” Again, in May, 1637, there were found in one house eleven

married couples and fifteen single persons; in another the householder had

taken in eighteen lodgers[1063]. The monstrous window-tax, which did more

than anything else to breed typhus and perpetuate smallpox, was not

imposed until after the Revolution; but there was enough in the London of

the Stuarts to explain the great increase of those diseases.

We have already had evidence of the wide prevalence of spotted fever in

1624, even in the houses of the rich. In the harvest of 1625, Mead, of

Cambridge, heard of much sickness which he calls “ague,” about Royston and

Barkway, localities by no means malarious; so many were ill that the

people wanted help to gather the harvest out of the fields. The nature of

these “agues” is a question of great difficulty. The intermissions or

remissions of the country fevers are clearly enough asserted by Willis and

others, whatever they were; at the same time the general characters of the

disease, or diseases, are not those of intermittent malarial fever; and

“influenza” does not help us. Chamberlain calls the fever of 1624 “the

spotted fever,” and Sir Theodore Mayerne, physician to James I., in a long

opinion upon the king’s state of health and the treatment, dated Aug. 20,

1624, introduces a paragraph “Ad Febrem Purpuream,” which, he says, was

prevalent that year, “not so much contagious as common through a universal

disposing cause,” seizing upon many in the same house, and destroying

numbers, being most full of malignity etc. These various accounts for town

and country point to a form of typhus; and we find that diagnosis

confirmed for the country fevers which were again widely prevalent a few

years later, about 1638.

Among other statistics in Graunt’s essay of 1662 we find the figures from

the register of “a parish in Hampshire” from 1569 to 1658. There were

several years of excessive mortality in that period just as in Short’s

tables, but the worst were 1638 and 1639--the years of high mortality (not

plague) in London also. Of that mortality in the Hampshire parish Graunt

has given a brief account, which he seems to have based on first-hand

information. The parish contained about 2700 inhabitants, and enjoyed

average good health during the period of 90 years covered by the figures,

the births exceeding the deaths by twelve on an average in the year. In

the year 1638 the deaths were 156 and the births 66 (about the average);

in 1639 the deaths were 114 and the births 55. The cause of this great

excess of mortality in a country parish was, says Graunt, not plague, “but

a malignant fever raging so fiercely about harvest that there appeared

scarce hands enough to take in the corn; which argues, considering there

were 2700 parishioners, that 7 might be sick for one that died; whereas of

the plague more die than recover. They lay longer sick than is usual in

plague,” and there were no plague-tokens.

This considerable epidemic of fever, which must have affected some

hundreds of people, occurred in a Hampshire parish. In the very same

season (autumn and winter of 1638) we hear of what is obviously the same

sickness being epidemic all over the county of Monmouth. On April 23,

1639, the sheriff of Monmouthshire thus explained his delay in executing

the king’s writ for an assessment: “In January last I sent forth my

warrants for the gathering and levying thereof, but there has been such a

general sickness over all this country, called ‘the new disease,’ that

they could not possibly be expedited.... Besides, the plague was very hot

in divers parts of the county, as Caerleon, Abergavenny, Bedwelty, and

many other places[1064].” Here the sheriff uses the same name as Greaves

put on his title-page five years after, and he distinguishes clearly

between the fever and the plague. The mayor and others of Northampton, in

a memorial to the Recorder, dated May 1, 1638, touching the exclusion of

Northampton tradesmen from fairs in the vicinity owing to suspicions of

the plague in their town, had been informed by the physicians that some

cases were of the plague, and some of “the spotted fever[1065].” The same

distinction had been made at Norwich, in 1636: in October there was a

suspicion of the plague, “but the physicians say it is some other

contagious disease which die with the spots[1066].” At Northampton, the

coexistence of plague and some other sickness is asserted also by the

sheriff (Sept. 18, 1638), who had to excuse himself, like so many other

sheriffs, for his failure to remit the ship-money: he himself and his

servants had had sickness, and the plague was so great and so long in

Northampton that the county still allowed £148 a week for relief of the

sick. The deaths in that epidemic from March to September were 533[1067].

The sheriff of Montgomery, making a like excuse on October 25, 1638,

speaks of the plague only: “It pleased God to visit a great part of the

county with the plague, and three of the greatest towns, Machynlleth,

Llanidloes and Newton[1068].” The sheriff of Radnorshire, in his excuse to

the Privy Council, on November 14, says he could not collect the

ship-money at Presteign “by reason of the plague, which continued there

for two years together, and did not cease until the latter end of April

last[1069].” We may take it, then, that there was a great deal of plague

in Wales about 1637 and 1638, that there was also “the new disease,” or

spotted fever, all over Monmouth and probably other Welsh counties, that

the same two forms coexisted at Norwich and Northampton, just as they

coexisted in London, and that Graunt’s parish in Hampshire in 1638 had

probably the fever only.

Short’s statistical tables again bear out the concrete history. In 1638,

nineteen country parishes, out of ninety-four examined, had 699 burials to

542 baptisms, and in 1639, eighteen parishes had 585 burials to 386

baptisms. In the market towns the unhealthy period (which may have been

due to plague in great part) is a year earlier. In 1637, ten towns out of

twenty-four whose registers were added up, show 1474 burials to 1008

baptisms, the proportion in 1638 for the same number of unhealthy towns

being 1438 to 1025.

It would have been one of the country epidemics of those years that

Boghurst brings into his account of the plague of London in 1665: “I was

told by an ancient woman that in Somersetshire the spotted fever was very

epidemical, so that whole families died; but being told that plantan

[plantain] was very good, all of them almost took it, which wrought an

admirable change, for very few died that took it, whereas before they died

very fast.” He thinks plantain was as likely to have effected a cure as

“higher priced medicines.” We shall find a corresponding prevalence of

fever described by a competent physician, Whitmore, for rural parts of

Cheshire and Shropshire in 1651 and 1658. Thus we have a remarkable

epidemiological phenomenon, somewhat new to England unless, indeed, we

bring all those spotted fevers and the like under the generic name of

influenza. It was in country districts in 1612-13 and from 1623 to 1625,

it was extensively prevalent in 1638 in places as far apart as Hampshire,

Monmouth and Northampton, it appeared in Berkshire and Oxfordshire in 1643

in connexion with the military movements of the Royalist and Parliamentary

armies, it caused a disastrous loss of life in Tiverton within a few weeks

of Essex’s army passing through the town in 1644; it is heard of again in

Shropshire and Cumberland in 1651-52, and in the same parts in 1658, as

well as in Somerset, and in London steadily from year to year.

It was in its steadiness from year to year in the poor quarters of towns,

as well as in its more frequent recurrences as a country epidemic, that

the spotted fever deserved the name of “new disease” in the reign of

Charles I. But more than one epidemic fever had been called a “new

disease” in England before; and no fewer than five epidemics were so

called from 1643 to 1685, of which only one or two can be classed among

the influenzas.

If it had been possible to keep in mind the history of sicknesses from

century to century or even from generation to generation, the “new

disease” might have been recognised as not unlike the type that overran

England in 1087, that was described by William of Newburgh in 1196, by

Matthew Paris in 1258, and by Trokelowe in 1315-16. The conditions

producing it or favouring it were not, indeed, the same in all particulars

in the medieval period, in the Tudor period, and in the Stuart period. In

the medieval period, the extreme want and misery which brought epidemic

sickness were due to occasional sharp famines at long intervals, from

failure of the crops. In the Tudor period epidemics were still so

occasional (so far as is known) that something more special will have to

be blamed for them than the swarms of vagrants and criminals all over

England, which made the reign of Henry VIII. notorious, and were still a

source of trouble until late in the reign of Elizabeth; the four chief

periods were in 1540, 1557-8, 1580-82, and 1596-97 so that some special

cause would have to be assumed in those years to account for their

peculiar “epidemic constitution.” Almost from the beginning of the Stuart

period, the seasons of fever (to say nothing of flux and smallpox), seem

to come in quicker succession; they are heard of in 1612-13, 1623-25,

1638, 1643-44, 1651, 1658-9, and 1661-65, and heard of in those years over

wide tracts of rural England as well as in London and other towns. It was

from such experiences that the doctrine arose, so unintelligible to us

now, of an “epidemic constitution of the air,” which may be traced,

indeed, to much earlier writings than those of the 17th century, but finds

its most frequent applications in the latter. The fevers were in part

contagious and not contagious; contagion could not explain them all, and

yet there was an undoubted infective element in them. The universality or

generality of their incidence was accounted for by assuming, on the one

hand, something common in the state of the air and, on the other hand,

some common predisposition in the bodies of men, which might itself have

had seasonal causes. We have now only one name for such common infection

of the air, namely influenza; and it is significant that the catarrhal

influenzas of 1658 and 1659 were regarded by some at the time as only the

appropriate vernal form of the fever which in the hot weather of 1657 and

1658 had prevailed almost in the same general way as influenza, but with

the symptoms of typhus. One thing which should not be overlooked, is that

plague was still in the country, not always at the same time as the fever,

and perhaps not usually coincident with it. Another thing, which will come

out in its due order at a later part of the history, is that after the

extinction of plague, fever became far more steady in the towns from year

to year, and in certain years was not less prevalent in influenza-like

epidemics all over the country. One might offer some suggestions as to the

meaning of these epidemiological phenomena; but it will perhaps be more

convenient that critics who have a speculative turn or a craving for

generalities should exercise the one or gratify the other at their own

risk.

Along with the prevalence of plague in 1637-38 in many towns of Wales, we

may associate the outbreak of 1638 in Gloucester on the one side and in

the small Salopian town of Clun on the other. From a letter of the Privy

Council to the justices of Gloucestershire, it appears that a rate in aid

of the plague-stricken in the city had been imposed upon the county in

December, 1637, and that the infection still continued in Gloucester in

September, 1638. Contributions made in Bridgenorth for the relief of the

visited in Clun appear to belong to the same year. At Reading a tax for

the “visited” had been collected once or oftener between 1638 and 1641. In

1641 the town of Leicester was put to some expense (£46. 8_s._ 7_d._) in

watching to keep out the sickness which prevailed in Thurmaston, Birstal,

Whetstone and Oakham. The very severe plague in Stamford the same year

would have been the most intense part of the epidemic in that corner of

England; “Camden,” quoting from bishop Sanderson’s manuscript, says that

it began at St James’s tide, 1641, and ended in March following, whereof

are said to have died between 500 and 600 persons[1070].

Another centre of plague in 1641 was Congleton, in Cheshire, if we may

trust the accuracy of the date given in a manuscript written some time

after and seemingly based upon tradition[1071]. The infection was traced

to a box of clothes which had belonged to one dead of the plague in London

and were sent to the dead man’s relations at North Rede Hall. The family

who received the box “caught the infection and died.” It spread “all over

the country,” and came to Congleton, where it made dreadful ravages. The

traditions which the anonymous narrator has put on record are, indeed,

those of a plague of the greater degree--stories of corpses that no one

would bury, of the sick left to their fate, of money dropped into water

before it changed hands. This somewhat doubtful narrative ends with the

statement that “the greatest part of the inhabitants died.”

The period from 1643 to 1650 contains all the outbreaks of plague that

remain, whether in London or the provinces, until we come to the final

explosion of 1665. In London the plague continued at a low endemic level

from the outburst of 1636 until 1648, the deaths in 1647 reaching the

considerable figure of 3597. This series of plague-years has no other

interest than as showing how regularly every season the infection

increased from a few cases in May or June to a maximum in September or

October. One incident, out of many, may find a place. In August, 1647, Sir

Philip Stapleton, one of the Eleven Members, leaders of the Presbyterian

party, who were accused of treason by the Army, went over to Calais with

five more of the accused, and died of the plague almost as soon as he

landed. The people of the house where he died made the rest of the party

pay them £80 before they would let them come forth, for bringing the

sickness into their house[1072].

The plagues in provincial towns were in those years much more serious

relatively than those in London. All of them occurred in towns that were

besieged, or had been besieged, or had been occupied by bodies of troops

or by garrisons. At the same time most of them were towns which had

suffered plagues before. But the first effects of the war in the way of

epidemic sickness were not of the type of plague.

War-typhus in Oxfordshire and Berkshire.

It was in the spring and summer of 1643 that England had a first

experience of the war-typhus which had been familiar to the continent of

Europe for a century and a half, having reached perhaps its greatest

prevalence in the Thirty Years’ War. It is only in the sense of war-typhus

that Shakespeare’s boast, put into the mouth of John of Gaunt, holds good:

“This fortress, built by nature for herself,

Against infection and the hand of war.”

The medieval civil wars in England do not seem to have bred infection

among the people, unless, perhaps, during the anarchy of Stephen’s reign:

there is reason to think that the faction-fights of York and Lancaster had

no such result. But the wars of the Parliament against the Royalists

produced war-sickness in its most characteristic form, and that too, at

the very beginning of the struggle.

The existence of sickness in 1643 among the troops of the Parliament in

Berkshire and Oxfordshire, under the earl of Essex, is briefly stated by

Rushworth. But, for the first time in the history, we find a medical

account of the type of sickness, of its circumstances, and of the extent

of its prevalence, which is not without interest even for the military

history. It happened that the afterwards celebrated Dr Thomas Willis,

chemist, anatomist, physiologist and physician, was at Christ Church,

Oxford, in 1643, being then aged twenty-one, and intending to enter the

Church. In 1659 he published at the Hague his first medical essays, one on

Fermentation and the other on Fevers[1073]; and in the latter he recalls

many particulars of what he had seen in his earlier years in and around

Oxford. The sickness of 1643 was also the subject of a tract published

that year in Oxford, by his majesty’s command, by Sir Edward Greaves,

physician to the king, which appears to have been in sufficient request in

the town to be reprinted within the year[1074].

The preceding events may be briefly summarized[1075]. In November, 1642,

the king moved from Oxford with his army towards London and seized

Brentford. The forces of the Parliament, under Essex, concentrated round

the capital, where they were joined by the trainbands of the City, so that

the king recrossed the Thames at Kingston and retired upon Reading and

Oxford. All through the months from January to April 1643, tedious

negociations went on for a treaty, the details largely relating to the

places to be occupied by the Parliamentary troops on the one hand (around

Windsor) and by the Royalist troops on the other (in Oxfordshire and

Bucks). In April the negociations fell through, and Essex came before

Reading on the 15th, with an army of 15,000 foot and 3000 horse. The king

and prince Rupert attempted to raise the siege by a march from Oxford, but

were stopped at Caversham bridge, and on the 26th April, Reading was

surrendered to the Lord General, the garrison marching out the day after.

The siege had lasted only eleven days; the Royalist commandant was

sentenced to death at Oxford for betraying the town, but was pardoned.

When Essex entered Reading he found the place “infected,” and a great

mortality ensued among his men, who were discontented at the want of

plunder and of pay. In June he moved his troops across the chalk downs to

Thame, on the borders of Bucks; but the weather being wet and unseasonable

in the early summer, and afterwards hot, the sickness so increased among

them that “he judged the design upon Oxford impracticable” (Rushworth),

and on July 9, wrote to the Parliament advising a peace. In his letter,

Essex explained that it was impossible to keep the counties from being

plundered, “so that they must suffer much wrong, and the cries of the

people are infinite.” Eventually he brought what remained of his army to

the neighbourhood of London, and having received 2000 recruits from the

City, he held a muster on Hounslow Heath, when his whole force amounted to

10,000 men. With his recruited army he marched to the relief of

Gloucester[1076], raised the siege, and on September 20 won the (first)

battle of Newbury.

The realities of that inactive summer at Reading and Thame may be

conceived from what Willis tells us of the state of things within the

Royalist lines in Oxfordshire. These things, he says, “fell under our own

observation,” he being then at Christ Church and not yet entered on the

physic line.

In the spring of 1643, Reading being held for the king,

“In both armies there began a disease to arise very epidemical;

however they persisting in that work till the besieged were forced to

a surrender, this disease grew so grievous that in a short time after,

either side left off and from that time for many months fought not

with the enemy, but with the disease; as if there had not been leisure

to turn aside to another kind of death....

Essex’s camp moving to Thame, pitched in the places adjacent, where he

shortly lost a great part of his men.

But the king returned to Oxford, where at first the soldiers, being

disposed in the open fields, then afterwards among the towns and

villages, suffered not much less. For his foot (which it chiefly

invaded) being pact together in close houses, when they had filled all

things with filthiness and unwholesome nastiness and stinking odours

(that the very air seemed to be infected) they fell sick by troops,

and as it were by squadrons. At length the fever, now more than a camp

fever, invaded the unarmed and peaceable troops, to wit, the

entertainers of the soldiers, and, generally, all others: yet at first

(the disease being but yet lightly inflicted) though beset with a

heavy and long languishment, however, many escaped. About the summer

solstice this fever began also to increase with worse provision of

symptoms, and to lay hold on the husbandmen and others inhabiting the

country, then afterwards spread through our city and all the country

round for at least ten miles about. In the mean time they who dwelt

far from us in other counties remained free from hurt, being as it

were without the sphere of the contagion. But here this disease became

so epidemical that a great part of the people was killed by it; and

as soon as it had entered a house it ran through the same, that there

was scarce one left well to administer to the sick. Strangers, or such

as were sent to help the sick, were presently taken with the disease;

that at length for fear of the contagion, those who were sick of this

fever were avoided by those who were well, almost as much as if they

had been sick of the plague.

Nor indeed did there a less mortality or slaughter of men accompany

this disease; because cachectic and phthisical old men, or other ways

unhealthful, were killed by it; also not a few children, young men,

and those of a more mature and robust age. I remember in some villages

that almost all the old men died this year, that there were scarce any

left who were able to defend the manners and privileges of the parish

by the more anciently received traditions[1077].”

Willis recalls how this epidemic disease changed its type as the season

wore on. At first it was a “putrid synochus,” which seemed to be helped by

a sweat or a looseness; a relapse or renewal followed the crisis. Later,

it became a continual fever of six or seven days, with no crisis; when the

fever ceased the sick kept their beds, sometimes raging, more often in a

stupor, great weakness continuing, and sometimes convulsions ensuing.

About midsummer “the disease betrayed its malignancy by the eruption of

whelks and spots.” It would often begin with an insidious languishing, the

strength being totally withdrawn. At length buboes appeared in many, as in

the plague. At this time, during the dog-days, the disease began to be

handled, not as a fever, but as a lesser plague--by vomits, purges, and

sudorifics. The autumn coming on, the disease by degrees remitted its

wonted fierceness, so that fewer grew sick of it, and of them many grew

well. At the approach of winter the fever almost wholly vanished, and

health was fully restored to Oxford and the country round about. Among the

victims are mentioned “some belonging to the king’s and queen’s Court,

with a few scholars[1078].”

Of the causes, Willis says that, so far as concerned the army, the evident

causes were “errors in the six non-naturals.” The spring was very moist

and “flabbery,” with almost continual showers, to which a hot summer

succeeded. The tract upon the Oxford fever by Greaves, a short piece of

some 25 pages, which was written for use in the city during the epidemic,

bears out the account by Willis, without developing the doctrine of

increasing malignancy. He is concerned to prove that it was not the plague

“as the relations and hopes of your enemies, and the fears of others, have

suggested.” One of his proofs is the insidious mode of invasion, which

Willis ascribes to the sickness in its later type--great weakness without

any manifest cause appearing, such as sweating or looseness, so that even

strong men were prostrated, with a quick, weak and creeping pulse,

sometimes intermittent, with pains in the head, vertigo &c. The most

distinctive thing was the spots; “But what need we any farther signs than

the spots, which appear upon half the number, at least, of those that fall

sick?” Greaves seems to claim that Oxford had some immunity for a time:

“God hath been most merciful to this city in sparing us heretofore, when

our neighbours round about us were visited.”

Among the causes, he mentions putrid exhalations from stinking matters,

dung, carcasses of dead horses and other carrion; “and were there care

taken for the removing of these noisome inconveniences, and keeping the

streets sweet and clean, it would doubtless tend much to the abatement of

the disease.” The diet, also, may have had something to do with it; more

particularly the brewers should dry their malt better, boil their beer

longer, and put in a sufficiency of hops. But the great cause was the

presence of the army.

“We need not look far for a cause where there is an army residing,

which the Athenians called to mind in their calamity, or as Homer

speaks of his Greeks:

εἰ δὴ ὁμοῦ πόλεμός τε δαμᾷ καὶ λοιμὸς ’Αχαιούς.

--it being seldom or never known that an army, where there is much

filth and nastiness in diet, worse lodging, unshifted apparel, etc.,

should continue long without contagious disease.” Whole families were

infected, “and seldom in any house where sick soldiers of either side

are quartered, but the inhabitants likewise fall sick of the same

disease.”

There appears to have been the almost inevitable doubt in some minds,

whether the disease were contagious: “But if anyone be yet obstinate, and

will not believe it contagious, let him go near and try.” Among the

remedies, he mentions a favourite one of the empiric sort, “Lady Kent’s

powder,” which Willis also refers to; but Greaves, as became an academical

physician, would not admit that it had any advantage over medicines of

known ingredients.

This widespread epidemic of typhus, perhaps not without some relapsing

fever, and, according to what Willis says in one of his general chapters,

complicated, in its diffusive form in the villages around, “with squinancy

[sore throat], dysentery, or deadly sweat,” is the only one medically

recorded of the Civil Wars. But there was certainly a renewal of it, in

the same circumstances, next year at Tiverton; and it seems probable, from

the heavy mortality which the parish registers witness to in that year

(1644) that some kind of epidemic sickness had spread far and near. Thus,

in Short’s abstracts of the burials and christenings in country parishes

and market towns, the years 1643 and 1644, and especially the latter,

stand out as the most unhealthy for a long time before and after, the next

sickly period, as we shall see, being the years 1657-1659. In the year

1643, out of eighty-eight country registers examined, twenty-nine showed a

sickly death-rate, although the disproportion of births to deaths does not

appear great (821 to 847). That was the year of the epidemic fever in

Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Bucks. Next year, which was the year of the

Tiverton epidemic, there are again twenty-nine country registers

indicating unusual sickness (715 baptisms to 938 burials). In nineteen out

of twenty-four market towns, the same two years come out still more

unhealthy (844 births to 1193 deaths in 1643 and 1008 births to 1647

deaths in 1644). The registers examined by Short were mostly from Northern

and Midland parishes; but they included two or three from Devonshire, and

among his market towns was Tiverton. We shall now see what these bald

figures mean in that concrete instance.

War-typhus at Tiverton in 1644.

Tiverton was then a town of some 8000 inhabitants, mostly occupied in the

weaving industry. On July 5, 1644, Essex arrived with his army on his way

to Cornwall to subdue prince Maurice, and lay there till the 18th. The

diary of one farmer Roberts has an entry that Mr Thomas Lawrence, who came

from Tiverton, reported to him that the earl had 350 and odd carriages,

and of horse belonging thereto for draught 2000[1079]. This would have

been his large artillery train, baggage and ammunition waggons, etc. His

infantry would be some 6000, and his cavalry perhaps 1000. The king’s

force meanwhile advanced after Essex, and on July 25 lay in the great

meadow at Crediton. They had advanced by Yeovil and may or may not have

passed through Tiverton. The two armies came to blows in Cornwall, a

prolonged series of encounters in the country around Lostwithiel in wet

August weather ending in the escape of Essex to the coast, the retreat of

his cavalry through the Royalist lines, and the surrender of the infantry

on 1st September. The disarmed foot-soldiers were convoyed back to Poole

and Wareham, and did not trouble Tiverton again. The retreating cavalry

passed that way, but did not enter the town, which was now held by the

Royalists. But the king’s army came back by the way of Tiverton, which

they reached on Saturday, the 21st September. They had got no farther than

Chard on the 30th, and may have halted in Tiverton some days. A Royalist

garrison of 200 men was left in it, and held the place until October 1645,

when it was taken by Fairfax after a short siege[1080].

Tiverton was thus occupied by both armies in the summer and autumn of

1644, that of Essex having been quartered in and around the town for a

fortnight in July. A serious epidemic followed, especially in the suburb

on the western side of the Exe. The particulars of it are in the parish

register, from which it would appear that the sickness began in August and

lasted until November. The greatest mortality was in October, when 105

were buried, the whole mortality of the year having been 443. The ordinary

monthly burials would hardly have exceeded a dozen or fifteen; and as the

105 burials in October would have meant some eight or ten times as many

sick, it is not surprising to read that the town was desolate, and that

grass grew in the streets[1081]. Of this epidemic there are no medical

particulars; but it appears from the parish register that it was known as

“the sweating sickness.” It would hardly have been so called if sweating

had not been a prominent symptom. Besides the English sweat proper, with

its five epidemics from 1485 to 1551, we have had occasion to notice a

sweating type in several epidemics of fever. That symptom was so marked in

the epidemic of 1558 at Southampton, Portsmouth, and Isle of Wight when

they were full of troops, that Dr John Jones, who had personal experience

of it, compares it to the sweat proper. It was a sufficiently prominent

symptom in the Oxford gaol-fever of 1577 for the _sudor Anglicus_ to be

called to mind. In the English fevers and influenzas of 1580-82, a sweat

or a lask is mentioned by Cogan as a least occasional; but the fevers of

the same years on the Continent had so often the sweating character that

it was sometimes said the English sweat had come back. Lastly for the

war-fevers of 1643 around Reading and Oxford, Willis asserts in more than

one place the occurrence of sweats, critical or giving relief for a time

in the milder form, “deadly sweats” in fevers of an aggravated type. To

anticipate somewhat, it may be mentioned also that a sweating character is

recorded of some cases of the perennial London typhus at its worst period

in the middle of the 18th century.

Admitting all these facts, we must still hold to the opinion expressed in

the chapter on the Sweating Sickness, that sweating was never again the

_signum pathognomicum_ of a whole epidemic, as it had been of the sudor

Anglicus in its five outbursts. But if there be gradations of type, or

approximations of typhus to sweating sickness (as well as to influenza),

then we may perhaps take the Tiverton epidemic as coming nearer than any

other to the sweating sickness, on the strength of the name given to it in

the parish register.

Nothing is known of sickness in the army of Essex, which lay at Tiverton

from 5th to 18th July, 1644. It suffered much in the fighting in Cornwall,

and the Parliament on 7 September sent to Portsmouth arms for 6000 foot

and 6000 suits of clothes and shirts for the infantry who had surrendered

and been convoyed back along the coast. The king’s troops which occupied

Tiverton on 21 September on their way back, had doubtless suffered also,

from the campaigning in wet fields and miry ways, and are known to have

been discontented for want of pay. Probably the epidemic at Tiverton was

due to aggravation of the usual circumstances of war. It must be classed

as a form of typhus; while its distinctive character of sweating might

find an explanation, on the analogy of the sweat of 1485 in London after

the arrival of Henry VII. from Bosworth Field, if we had sufficient reason

to suppose that the soldiers who successively occupied Tiverton were not

themselves suffering from fever. Contact alone, especially the contact _en

masse_ of men reduced by hardships and disorderly in their habits, will

sometimes serve to breed contagion among a population unlike them in these

respects. The converse of that principle, namely that contagion need not

follow from the introduction of developed sickness _en masse_, finds an

illustration in the case of Tiverton itself within little more than a year

after the epidemic of 1644. In November, 1645, Fairfax lay at Ottery St

Mary with his army, pending the investment of Exeter. On account of much

sickness and heavy mortality among his infantry (not medically described)

he removed them on December 2, to Crediton and ultimately to Tiverton,

which was supposed to be a healthier situation and became his

head-quarters until January 8, 1646[1082]. But no outbreak in the town is

mentioned, and almost certainly none occurred; the health of the place

continued to be good every year of the time that it was under the rule of

the Parliament, as the parish register proves. On the other hand Totness,

which was occupied by the same convalescent force after it left Tiverton,

had a severe epidemic of plague in the end of the year, 1646.

Plague in the Provinces during the Civil Wars.

The type of sickness, after the first two years of the war, does not

appear to have been typhus-fever, but always the old bubo-plague of the

towns. So far as the history is known, the experience of war-sicknesses

upon English soil began in 1643 and ended in 1644, except in the instance

of Fairfax’s troops at Ottery St Mary in November, 1645.

Perhaps the “new model” of the Parliamentary forces, after the pattern of

Cromwell’s Ironsides, may have had something to do with the immunity of

England from war-typhus in all the marchings and counter-marchings,

battles, occupations and sieges, from 1645 to the end of the Civil Wars.

Cromwell pointed out to Hampden that the army of Essex was composed of “a

set of poor tapsters and town-apprentices,” and gave it as his opinion

that these were not the men to win with. When the original commanders,

Essex, Manchester, Sir W. Waller, and others, had retired in 1645, terms

of the self-denying ordinance, the army of the Parliament acquired a new

character under Fairfax and Cromwell: it contained a large proportion of

“men of religion,” especially among the officers; and there is sufficient

evidence that the war was in future carried on so as to produce as few as

possible of those effects of campaigning among the people at large which

had marked the Thirty Years’ War in Germany and had attended the

operations of Essex and the Royalists in 1643 and 1644.

What remains to be said of the epidemics of the Civil Wars relates almost

exclusively to plague, with an occasional reference to the spotted fever

which was widely prevalent in the autumn of 1644. These epidemics of

plague in the English provinces, during the political troubles, more

numerous than usual from 1644 to 1650, are the last on English soil until

we come to the final grand explosion of 1665-66.

In 1644 there were two principal centres of plague (besides London),

namely Banbury, and the valley of the Tyne. Banbury was near enough to the

Royalist head-quarters to have shared in the fever-epidemic of 1643; in

that year the burials of 58 soldiers are entered in the parish register,

besides a large excess of burials among the civil population (total of 225

deaths in the year as against an annual mortality in former years ranging

from 30 to 98). The siege by the Parliamentary forces did not begin until

July 19, 1644, and ended in the surrender of the castle in October. The

epidemic of plague may have begun as early as January, a soldier having

“died in the street” on the 16th; but it is not until March 1644, that

plague-deaths appear in the register. In that month there were 10 deaths

from plague, in April 34, and so until November, when there were 2, the

total mortality from plague having been 161. After the plague ceased, the

town remained otherwise unhealthy until 1647[1083].

The information as to Newcastle and Tyneside comes from the observant

Scotsman, William Lithgow, who was with the Presbyterian army when

Newcastle was stormed on October 20, 1644[1084]. The town had suffered

heavily from plague, as we have seen, in 1636, and there had been a

slighter outbreak in 1642. Although the state of things during the siege

in 1644 was wretched in the extreme, there does not appear to have been

plague until after the surrender. The infection was already at work,

however, in places near. Thus Tynemouth Castle was surrendered by the

Royalist commander, Sir Thomas Riddell on October 27: “The pestilence

having been five weeks amongst them, with a great mortality, they were

glad to yield, and to scatter themselves abroad; but to the great undoing

and infecting of the country about, as it hath contagiously begun”

(Lithgow). Among the places infected were Gateshead, Sandgate, Sunderland,

and many country villages, the plague being reported in Newcastle itself

in 1645 as well as in Darlington[1085].

The year 1645 was one of severe plague in several towns at the same time,

some of them in a state of siege and all of them occupied by troops. The

largest mortality was at Bristol, being proportionate to its size. The

town was taken by prince Rupert on July 22, 1643, and was held by a strong

garrison for two years and some weeks. It was towards the end of the

Royalist occupation that the plague broke out, probably in the spring of

1645[1086]. On the 16th May, Sir John Culpepper wrote to Lord Digby: “The

sickness increases fearfully in this city. There died this week according

to the proportion of 1500 in London[1087].” When it had been stormed by

Fairfax and Cromwell in September 1645, it was found that prince Rupert’s

garrison consisted of 2500 foot, and about 1000 horse. The auxiliaries and

the trained bands of the town were reduced in June to about 800, and of

the 2500 families then remaining in the town, 1500 were in a state of

indigence and want[1088]. In Cromwell’s despatch of September 14 to Mr

Speaker Lenthall he says: “I hear but of one man that hath died of the

plague in all our army, although we have quartered amongst and in the

midst of infected persons and places[1089].” The deaths from plague in the

whole epidemic approached 3000, according to the MS. calendars[1090].

While this was going on within the walls of Bristol, an epidemic of plague

more severe for the size of the town was progressing at Leeds. The town

had been taken by Fairfax on January 23, 1643, and had remained in the

quiet possession of the Parliament, under a military governor. In August,

1644, there were buried 131 persons, “before the plague was perceived,”

says the parish register; which means that the excessive mortality was not

from plague, but probably from the spotted fever which reigned that autumn

in other places in the North. The plague proper began with a death in

Vicar-lane on March 11, 1645. The weekly bills of mortality which were

ordered by the military governor showed a total mortality, from March 11

to December 25, of 1325. It raged most in Vicar-lane and the close yards

adjoining; it was also very prevalent in March-lane, the Calls, Call-lane,

Lower Briggate, and Mill-hill. The largest number of burials in a week

(126) was from July 24 to 31; the mortality kept high all through August

and September (60 to 80 weekly), and declined gradually to 3 in the week

ending Christmas-day. Whitaker estimates that probably the fifth part of

the population died, and he cannot discover any person of name among the

victims. The air was so warm and infectious that dogs, cats, mice and rats

are said to have died (of rats and mice it can well be believed), and that

several birds dropped down dead in their flight over the town[1091]. This

appears to have been the only visitation of plague in Leeds, at least

since the medieval period.

The plague of Lichfield in 1645-46, like that of Bristol, went on during a

constant state of military turmoil. On April 21, 1643, the Close was taken

by prince Rupert and was held as a Royalist stronghold until July 26,

1646, the king having repaired thither after his defeat at Naseby in June,

1645, and again in September. The plague is said to have been active both

in 1645 and 1646; in twelve streets there occurred 821 deaths, the largest

share (121) falling to Green Hill[1092]. In what way the state of siege

may have contributed to the plague is uncertain. The fosse was drained dry

at one stage, and was choked with rubbish at another. Many of the

inhabitants of the town would appear, from the 4th article of the

capitulation, to have taken refuge with their effects within the fortified

Cathedral Close, which was almost enclosed by water. This was one of

several outbreaks of plague that Lichfield had suffered since early Tudor

times.

Minor plague outbreaks of 1645 were at Derby and Oxford. Of the latter we

have a glimpse from Willis of Christ Church.

“Sometime past in this city [Oxford] _viz._, 1645, the plague (tho’

not great) had spread. Doctor Henry Sayer, a very learned physician,

and happy in his practice, many others refusing this province, boldly

visited all the sick, poor as well as rich, daily administered to them

physic, and handled with his own hands their buboes and virulent

ulcers, and so cured very many sick by his sedulous though dangerous

labour. That he might fortifie himself against the contagion, before

he went into the infected houses, he was wont only to drink a large

draught of sack, and then his perambulation about the borders of death

and the very jaws of the grave being finished, to repeat the same

antidote.

After he had in this city, as if inviolable as to the plague, a long

while taken care of the affairs of the sick without any hurt, he was

sent for to Wallingford Castle, where this disease cruelly raged, as

another Æsculapius, by the governor of the place. But there, being so

bold as to lie in the same bed with a certain captain (his intimate

companion), who was taken with the plague, he quickly received the

contagion of the same disease; nor were the arts then profitable to

the master which had been helpful to so many others, but there with

great sorrow of the inhabitants, nor without great loss to the

medical science, he died of that disease.” He treated the sick, in the

pre-bubonic stages, by a vomit of Crocus Metallorum, and then by

diaphoretics[1093].

None of the other localized epidemics of plague in those years would

appear to have been of the first magnitude. Thus, the 22 deaths from

plague at Loughborough from 1645 to May 14, 1646, and the renewed

prevalence, after a year’s interval, (83 plague-deaths from July 20, 1647

to March 25, 1648)[1094], are samples of local mortalities from plague

that other parish registers might bear witness to if they had been

examined by antiquaries as closely as Nichols examined those of

Leicestershire.

Newark was one of the towns which suffered much during the Civil War.

Besieged time after time, it was at length surrendered to the Parliament

on May 6, 1646. A letter written shortly after the surrender says[1095]:

“Truly it is become a miserable, stinking, infected town. I pray God

they do not infect the counties and towns adjacent.... By reason of

the sickness in divers places, the officers dare not yet venture to

fetch out the arms.... Tradesmen are preparing to furnish their shops

... but the market cannot be expected to be much whilst the sickness

is in the town.”

The parish register of Newark bears no witness to deaths from plague; but

that of the adjacent parish of Stoke, in which stood the Castle and the

suburb of Newark surrounding it, has numerous entries of plague-deaths,

beginning with one some three weeks after the surrender, on May 28, 1646,

and continuing through July, August, and September. Several of the same

household are buried in one day, one is “buried in the field,” another “in

his croft.” The vicar sums up the mortality thus: “There dyed in the towne

of Stoke, 1646, eight score and one, whereof of the plage seven score and

nineteen.” The whole deaths in Stoke parish the year before had been nine,

and the year after they were six[1096]. If the plague had been at all

proportionate in Newark town itself, the deaths would have far exceeded

159; but, as the parish register does not record plague-deaths at all, it

may be inferred that the infection lay mostly around the Castle.

Whitmore speaks of having practised in the plague in Staffordshire in

1647-8, and there is some other evidence, without particulars, of an

epidemic in the town of Stafford.

One more epidemic of plague is reported from the theatre of Civil War in

the south-west, the outbreak at Totness in 1646-7. In the parish register

there is a burial entered on July 30, 1646, “suspected she died of the

plague.” A leaf of the register has the following: “From December 6, 1646,

till the 19th October, 1647, there died in Totness of the plague 262

persons”--a number greater than the register shows in detail. The

stereotyped remark is added, that the town was deserted and that grass

grew in the streets[1097]. For months before the first suspected case of

plague in 1646, Totness had been occupied by one body of troops after

another. In November or December, 1645, Goring’s Royalist cavalry, to the

number of nearly 5000, were quartered at Totness and two or three other

places near. On January 11, 1646, Fairfax came with his army to Totness

for the siege of Dartmouth, which was carried by storm on the 20th. The

Lord General then withdrew to resume the investment of Exeter. Before

doing so he issued warrants to four Hundreds to assemble their men at

Totness on the 24th January. The men came in to the number of about 3000,

and a regiment was formed from them[1098]. What connexion with the plague

in the end of the year all this military stir at Totness may have had, it

would not be easy to determine. There had been a great deal of sickness in

the army of Fairfax while it lay at Ottery St Mary in the latter half of

November, 1645. “By reason of the season,” says Rushworth, “and want of

accommodation, abundance of his army, especially the foot, were sick, and

many died, seldom less than seven, eight or nine in a day in the town of

Autree, and amongst the rest Colonel Pickering died and some other

officers. The Royal party had notice of this consumption of Fairfax’s

army,” and took heart to make a new effort. The type of sickness is

unknown; but it was such as to cause the removal of the head-quarters on

December 2 to Tiverton, for better air. The army lay there until January

8, and came to Totness, for the siege of Dartmouth, on the 11th. Thus

Totness had not only been occupied by an army some months before the

plague, but by an army which had lately had a fatal form of sickness in

it. The troops march away, and the historical interest goes with them;

what they may have left behind them concerns only the domestic history.

Fifty-six years had passed since Totness had the plague before; and on

that occasion the epidemic was equally disastrous.

Two other centres of plague in 1646-7 are casually mentioned, one at

Reading[1099], which affected “a great number of poor people,” and the

other at Carlisle[1100]. Of the latter there are no particulars; but the

circumstances of the town for several years were such as to make an

outbreak of plague in 1646 credible.

Carlisle suffered much from the war for a series of years. In July, 1644,

it was seized for the Royalists, and was besieged by Lesley in October,

the siege lasting many months. It had a garrison of about 700, including

some of the townsfolk armed. About the end of February, 1645, all the corn

in the town was seized to be served out on short allowance; on June 5,

“hempseed, dogs and rats were eaten.” The surrender was on June 25, and

the place was held by a Scots garrison until December, 1646. It was again

seized for the Royalists in April, 1648, was recaptured by Cromwell in

October, and held by a strong garrison of 800 foot and a regiment of

horse, besides dragoons to keep the borders. All Cumberland was in such a

state of destitution that the Parliament ordered a collection for its

relief; numbers of the poor are said to have died in the highways, and

30,000 families were in want of bread[1101].

Plague in Scotland during the Civil Wars.

Connecting with plagues in the north of England, there was a great

prevalence of the infection in Scotland. After the storming of Newcastle

by the Scots Covenanters in October, 1644, the plague appeared in

Edinburgh, Kelso, Borrowstownness, Perth and other places. On April 1,

1645, Kelso was burned down, the fire having originated in a house that

was being “clengit” or disinfected after plague in it. At Edinburgh the

plague-stricken were housed in huts in the King’s park below Salisbury

Crags. Collections were made for the relief of people in Leith

impoverished by the plague. The epidemic in and around Perth is said to

have given rise to the story of Bessie Bell and Mary Gray, who fled from

the plague-tainted ground and built themselves a bower by a burn

side[1102]. At Glasgow the infection was severe in the end of 1646, and

did not cease entirely until the autumn of 1648. There are numerous

references to it in the letters of principal Baillie of Glasgow

University, of which the following are the most important[1103].

On September 5, 1645, he writes that the pest has laid Leith and Edinburgh

desolate, and rages in many more places: never such a pest seen in

Scotland (in his time, perhaps). About January, 1646, he writes of “the

crushing of our nation by pestilence and Montrose’s victories.” At the end

of that year, the plague was in Glasgow: on January 26, 1647, during

winter cold, “all that may are fled out of it.” On June 2, the plague had

scattered the St Andrews’ students, the principal of St Leonard’s College

was dead of it, and it was killing many in the north. The same summer,

principal Baillie was shut up in the town of Kilwinning, cut off, with all

the inhabitants, from communication with the outer world owing to a

suspicion of plague in the place. Edinburgh and Leith, which had suffered

earliest, were almost free in the autumn of 1647, but “Aberdeen, Brechin

and other parts of the north are miserably wasted; the schools and

colleges now in all Scotland, but Edinburgh, are scattered.” Glasgow had

its worst experience of plague in the summer and autumn of 1648, which

were wet seasons: on August 23, “our condition for the time is sad; the

plague is also in Edinburgh and Aberdeen.... At this time I grieved for

the state of Glasgow.... My brother’s son’s house was infected; my

brother’s house enclosed many in danger; one night near a dozen died of

the sickness.... The long great rains for many weeks did prognosticate

famine; but these three days past there is also a great change of weather;

the Lord continue it.” The infection which began at Glasgow in January,

1647, reached Aberdeen in April, having been carried, it was said, by a

woman from Brechin. It was still raging at Aberdeen in September, and

there were straggling cases as late as November of the following year

(1648). The deaths from plague are put down at 1600, besides 140 in the

adjacent fishing villages of Futtie and Torrie on either side of the Dee

mouth. This enormous mortality ensued despite the usual rigorous

measures--the removal of the infected to huts on the Links and

Woolmanhill, a cordon of soldiers to shut them in, a gibbet for the

disobedient, and “clengers” for the infected houses[1104]. This disastrous

epidemic of 1647-1648 is the last that is heard of plague in Scotland.

Plague in Chester &c. and in Ireland, 1647-1650.

The two remaining English plagues of those years were both in cities that

had suffered much from plague before, and were in a constant state of

turmoil during the war, namely Chester and Shrewsbury. Chester was held

for the king, and surrendered to the Parliament on February 3, 1646, after

a siege of twenty weeks, during the latter part of which there was famine

within the walls. It was not until 1647 that plague broke out. From June

22 until April 20, 1648, the numbers that died of plague are stated in the

MS. of Dr Cowper to have been 2099; all business was suspended, and cabins

for the plague-stricken were built outside the town[1105].

The Shrewsbury plague of 1650, like that of Chester, is described as

having been dreadful in its effects upon the town. It broke out during the

occupation by the Parliament’s troops, on June 12, 1650, in a house in

Frankwell, and continued until January, 1651. Only one parish, St Chad’s,

appears to have kept account of the plague-deaths: in that register from

June 12 to January 16, there are entered 277 burials, whereof of the

plague 250, the highest monthly mortality (76) being in August, 1650. Of

these 250 deaths, 123 took place in the pest-houses. A letter of August 21

says that 153 died in two months, and that there were near 3000 people in

the town dependent upon common charity[1106]. On November 21, there were

still 200 cases in the pest-houses, most of them being in the way to

recover, as usually happened towards the end of an epidemic through the

greater readiness of the buboes to suppurate.

From the small number of burials due to ordinary causes in the St Chad’s

register, it would appear that many citizens had fled. The severity of

incidence upon certain houses appears from the fact that five servants in

Mr Rowley’s house died of it; and that 15 out of 21 burials in St Julian’s

parish came from four families[1107]. These are incidents like those of

the great plague of London in 1665, which is the next in time in the

English annals after Shrewsbury’s visitation in 1650.

The plague in Ireland in 1649-50 was connected, directly and indirectly,

with the military operations under Ireton and Cromwell. The previous year,

1648, had been one of famine: at the attack on Kildare by the rebels in

the spring, both the English garrison in the town and the attacking Irish

were half-starved, and there was a great mortality on both sides, as well

as a murrain of cattle. On May 4, corn in all the rebel quarters is said

to be at the incredible price of £8 the quarter, both men and cattle dying

in large numbers[1108]. In 1649 the plague broke out in Kilkenny, obliging

the supreme council of Confederate Catholics to remove to Ennis. Ireton,

“thinking he ought not to meddle with what the Lord had so visibly taken

into his hands, has declined taking Kilkenny into his own.” But Cromwell

besieged it on March 23, 1650, by which time the garrison of 200 horse and

1,000 foot had been reduced to 300 men through the ravages of the plague,

the inhabitants having also suffered heavily[1109].

The Royalist letters from the Hague speak of the plague in the summer of

1650 as disastrous in Ireland, particularly in Dublin[1110]. On August

5/15: “Lady Inchiquin came hither last night; those with her report that

the plague will devour what the sword has not in Ireland.” On September

2/12: “All I hear out of Ireland is that the plague has made a horrid

devastation there; 1100 in a week died in Dublin”--an improbable

estimate[1111]. The ranks of the rebels were so thinned by the sword and

pestilence that “not above 200 suffered by the hands of the executioner,”

after trial at the high court of justice held in County Cork in

1651[1112]. The epidemic appears to have ceased in the autumn of 1650,

when the Council of State, in a despatch to the Lord Deputy, take notice

of the goodness of God in stopping the plague[1113].

Fever in England, 1651-2.

Between those plagues of the years 1644-1650 and the final re-appearance

of the infection on English soil from 1665 to 1666, the interval is

occupied with a good deal of fever both in town and country. The

sicknesses of those years are of interest as having been described by two

competent physicians, Willis and Whitmore.

There were two principal periods of the epidemics, the years 1651-2 and

1657-9. In the former period the sickness appears to have been mostly in

the north-west. Whitmore, who had seen practice in the Civil War, in

Staffordshire and Shropshire, appears to have been in Chester in 1651, and

was settled in London in 1657. It is from him that our information mostly

comes[1114].

“It is well known,” he says, “that this disease in the year 1651 [the

same fever that he describes more fully for the years 1658 and 1659]

first broke out by the seaside in Cheshire, Lancashire, and North

Wales.... In Cheshire in the year 1651 this disease seized most upon

the country people who were laborious, the seeds being sooner

dispersed in them through the agitation of the humours and spirits in

their harvest labours, than on those who lead a more sedentary life;

and that might be one reason why we were so free in the city of

Chester, when within three or four miles of us round about, whole

towns were infected with it, there being 80 and 100 sick at a time in

small villages, as at Stanney, Dunham-on-the-hill, Norton and all

there abouts by the water side it extremely raged.”

Whitmore refers to something that he had written, “for my private use,” on

the subject of this fever as far back as 1642; he remarks also that it

raged every autumn in some place or other of the kingdom, and mentions his

own experience in Staffordshire and Shropshire during the late war. But it

is the epidemic in Cheshire, Lancashire and North Wales, in 1651 that he

specially describes, side by side with those of 1658 and 1659; and it is

of interest to note his suggestion as to the origin of the fever on both

shores of the Mersey. It was well known that the fever in 1651 first broke

out by the seaside in Cheshire, Lancashire and North Wales:

“And if it were observed in Holland that on a misty day, that

infectious disease the Sudor Anglicus came into Amsterdam in an

afternoon, five hundred or more dying that night of it, as Lemnius

reports, I know not why we may not as well suppose their opposite

neighbour, Dublin, then visited for two years with the plague, should

not have communicated the same to them though in a more remiss

degree.”

Here the suggestion is that the prevalence of plague on the opposite coast

of Ireland had given rise to a minor and “more remiss” contagion along the

coasts of North Wales, Cheshire and Lancashire. But the plague had been

most severe in Chester itself before it broke out in Ireland, and had been

severe in Shrewsbury at the same time as in Ireland. Whatever the theory,

it is significant that the corner of England which was the worst and

perhaps only seat of plague in 1648 and 1650, was the seat of a malignant

fever in 1651, the former having been in the towns, and the latter in the

country villages.

We get a glimpse of a heavy mortality among the country people the year

after at Bootle, in Cumberland, just across the border from

Lancashire[1115]. On July 8, 1652, Thomas Wharton writes from Kirkdale to

Edward Moore:

“There was a boy at widow Robinson’s died upon Saturday in Whitsun

week, and upon the Wednesday before he was sawying at the steward

Worsley’s house with his wrights. The boy and the steward’s man slept

together in Worsley’s barn; towards night the boy was not well, and

could work no longer. All this John Wiggan of Kirkdale did see. Next,

John Birch died, and four of his children--all are dead but his wife.

At John Robinson’s, one child and his wife died last week, and upon

Wednesday last two children more died; and it was thought by the

constable of Bootle that he would be dead before this day at night.

Upon Wednesday at night last, at James Pye’s, there died two, his son

and daughter; and a servant of Thomas Doubie’s is dead; and it is this

day broken forth in Bridge’s, as we hear.”

On what evidence this country epidemic is called “the plague” by the

antiquary who prints the document does not appear. The fatality of the

disease would suggest plague, rather than fever; but the fever itself

would seem to have been more malignant at one place than another, and at

one time than another, and there may have been at Bootle cases unmentioned

which recovered. If it had been true bubo-plague, it is a solitary

instance, so far as records go, in the fifteen years between the

extinction of plague at Shrewsbury in 1650, and its revival in London and

elsewhere in 1665. The epidemic disease that we ordinarily hear of in that

interval is fever; and of the fever our best accounts, after Whitmore’s

reference to 1651, are of the epidemics in 1657, 1658 and 1659.

Fever and Influenza, 1657-9.

The account by Willis of three consecutive epidemics in the autumn of

1657, the spring of 1658, and the autumn of 1658, is of peculiar interest

for the reason that it is the first systematic piece of epidemiology

written in England, and that the middle epidemic of the three was one of

influenza[1116]. On reading the narrative of events by Willis, we can

understand how it was that the physicians of that period were so impressed

by the doctrine of an epidemic constitution of the season, and by its

counterpart doctrine of a seasonal predisposition in the human

constitution. That teaching was afterwards expounded in successive essays

by Sydenham; but it was held generally in those times, and Willis found

apt illustrations of it in the three epidemics one after the other in

1657-58. Let us follow his narrative, and add to it some particulars from

Whitmore.

The spring and summer of 1657 were extremely dry and hot; but especially

after the summer solstice the heats were so intense for many weeks

following that, day and night, there was none that did not complain of the

heat of the air, and were almost in a continual sweat and were not able to

breathe freely. About the calends of July, the fever which was at first

sporadic and particular, began to break forth in some places, perhaps two

or three cases in the same city or village. The fever fits at this period

occurred every other day, but there was no cold fit or rigor preceding, as

in an ordinary ague, the heat being intense from the outset. Vomiting and

bilious stools occurred plentifully to most, with sweat succeeding, not

however an easy, uninterrupted and critical sweat. The remission of the

fever fit was rarely complete in the intermediate day, weakness, languor,

thirst and restlessness always remaining. In some the type improved after

three or four of these quasi-tertian paroxysms; the later fits were

ushered in with a rigor and a cold stage, so that the fever became an

exact tertian intermittent. But in most the type became worse, which may

have been due to errors of regimen and physicking. The fever became,

indeed, a continued one, and might end in nervous symptoms--lethargy,

delirium, cramps or convulsions.

In August it was spreading far and near, so that in every region or

village round Oxford, many were sick of it; but it was much more frequent

in the country cottages and in the smaller villages than in cities or

towns. It was called “the new disease,” as the war-typhus of 1643 had been

called, and other epidemics both earlier and later.

Willis continues: It crept from house to house, infecting most of the same

family, and especially those in familiar converse with the sick. “Yea old

men, and men of ripe age, it ordinarily took away.” It lasted many days in

an individual, nay even months, attended with much evacuation and almost

daily vomits and sweats. “Scarce one in a thousand died of it, which I

never knew in an epidemical synochus.” This singular malady, which

differed from ague not only in its want of clear intervals between the

fits of fever, but also in being propagated by contagion, raged throughout

all England in the autumn of 1657. Only in some few limited localities,

and in these only in some cases, was it accompanied by true dysentery.

Willis is not satisfied with the facile explanation of an infection of the

air, “the little bodies of which infections, being admitted within, did

ferment with the blood and humours.” There must have been something

equally general in the human body, a predisposition to be so acted upon;

and of that proneness to fever he finds the cause in the intemperance of

the year, namely the great heat of the summer and autumn.

But the most remarkable illustration of these doctrines was the epidemic

of the following spring, which was a pure and unmistakeable epidemic of

influenza-cold. After the very hot summer and autumn, there was a long

winter of intense frost. From the ides of December to the vernal equinox

the earth was covered with snow, the wind blowing steadily from the north.

The state of health through the winter was fairly good. The north wind

continued until June. “About the middle of April, suddenly a distemper

arose as if sent by some blast of the stars, which laid hold of very many

together; and in some towns in the space of a week above a thousand fell

sick together.” They had a troublesome cough, great spitting, and catarrh

“falling down on the palate, throat, and nostrils.” The illness approached

with fever, thirst, want of appetite, weariness, grievous pains in the

head, back, loins and limbs, and heat in the praecordia. Some were very

ill in bed, with hoarseness and almost continual coughing; others had

bleeding at the nose, bloody spittle or bloody flux. Not a few old and

infirm died, but the more strong, and almost all the healthy constitutions

recovered. Those that died “wasted leisurely,” like persons sick of a

hectic fever. About the third part of mankind was distempered in a month.

Willis’s explanation of it is that the constant north wind checked the

natural action of the blood in spring. The spring blood is more lively,

like the juices of vegetables. The catarrhal fever was a disorder of the

spring blood, like new wine close shut up in bottles.

This outbreak about the middle of April is evidently described for Oxford

and the country around. Willis then describes his third epidemic, that of

the summer and autumn of 1658, which was the same type of fever as in the

summer and autumn of 1657. The vernal fever of 1658 did not last longer

than six weeks. The wind continued still north, until the summer solstice;

a little before the beginning of July there was a most fierce heat for a

few days, and when the dog-days were begun, the air grew most cruelly hot,

so that one could scarce endure it in the open. The new fever arose mostly

about the end of August, and began to spread through whole regions about

us (at Oxford), and chiefly, like that of 1657, in country houses and

villages; but in the meantime few of the inhabitants of the greater towns

and cities fell sick. The symptoms were much the same as in the previous

autumn. The fever was continual in some; in others it was of an

intermitting type at first; but very many were ill “in their brain and

nervous stock,” with cruel headache, noises in the ears, dullness of

hearing, stupor, vertigo, waking, and delirium. In some, on the first or

second day, “little broad and red spots like to the measles have leisurely

broken forth in the whole body, which being shortly vanished, the fever

and headache became worse.” The patients lay for a few days as if dying,

without speaking or knowing their friends, after which came lethargy and

delirium. The young men mostly recovered, the old men died. In the fits of

old men, the heat was not very sharp, but there were restlessness, tossing

about, idle and random talking, with dryness of the mouth, surfiness of

the tongue, and viscous sordes. Usually the pulse was strong and equal; a

weak, unequal and intermittent pulse, with contractures of the tendons and

convulsive motions in the wrists, was an omen of death. Those who died

passed away in a stupor, without consciousness to dispose of their goods;

the recovery of others was long and doubtful. One notable thing in this

fever was the exanthem, which reminds one more of the rash of sweating

sickness or dengue (breakbone fever), than of the spots of typhus.

Willis ends his book on fevers with that account of the autumnal epidemic

of 1658, “taken the 13th of September,” his work having been published at

the Hague in 1659. Whitmore, whose short essay is dated from London,

November, 1659, begins with the autumnal epidemic of 1658, which is the

last of Willis’s three; and, strangely enough, he also has a vernal

epidemic of influenza to describe--an epidemic clearly belonging to the

spring of 1659. Unless there be some error in Whitmore’s dates, it is

impossible to avoid the conclusion that the second autumnal fever, that of

1658, was followed by a spring influenza, just as the first, of 1657, had

been.

Whitmore’s account of the autumnal fever of 1658 agrees in the main with

that given by Willis. He defines it as “a putrid continued and malignant

fever containing in it the seeds of contagion.” It raged in the last

autumn through all England, “and now begins again,” (his preface being

dated November, 1659), seizing on all sorts of people of different nature,

which shows that it is epidemic. The part affected is chiefly the heart,

and therefore some call it _cordis morbus_.

“In this, as in the plague at the first catching of it, some seem to

be very pleasant, so far are they from perceiving themselves to be

amiss, when indeed death itself hath set his foot within the threshold

of their earthly houses.” There were pains in the head, inclination to

vomit, sudden fainting of spirits, and weakness without any manifest

cause, the pulse feeble and sometimes intermittent, so as very lusty

and strong men in Cheshire (in the year 1651 where this disease then

raged) in a very short space so lost their strength that they were not

able to stand or turn themselves in their beds. Some also are taken

with bleeding, purging, and sweating, and many have the spots. But for

the most part it appears in the livery of some other kind of ague. It

begins to show its malignity after the 5th, 7th, or 9th day, with loss

of appetite, thirst, and a dry black tongue.

Letters of 1658 from London bear out the prevalence of autumnal sickness.

On August 3, one writes that the weather is hot and dry, the town

extremely empty, and the flux beginning. On January 4, 1659, there is much

sickness, especially fevers, agues and the smallpox.

A good deal of the interest of Whitmore’s essay lies in his arguments

against blood letting in this fever; but that is part of a history which

will have to be dealt with as a whole at a later stage.

Whitmore then proceeds to the vernal epidemic of 1659, just as Willis had

done to that of 1658. His words are (4 Nov. 1659):

“Having given an account of the nature and cure of this disease which

now rageth throughout England, I shall briefly describe that which

this spring universally infested London; and show how it agreed and

how it differed from that disease which last fall invaded the whole

nation.” He then describes the typical influenza, just as Willis had

done under a date a year earlier--pains in the limbs of some, coughs,

and aguish distempers in others; “so that in a week or a fortnight’s

time, when it had fermented and caused a putrefaction of humours, it

quickly tended to a height, and struck many thousands in London down,

scarce leaving a family where any store were, without some being ill

of this distemper, suddenly sweeping very many away, being the same,

in the judgment of no mean physician, with that in autumn last, though

in a new skin.” Whitmore then gives a reason “why this should hold

them all with coughs, which it did not in the fall.”

Assuming an affinity to the autumnal epidemic of 1658, he proceeds to

state the circumstance of a reappearance in the spring of 1659: “Upon this

hush it lay all the winter, until the Easter week, and then in two or

three warm days broke loose, having had no warm weather all before, but a

rainy and black week, the sun not appearing for five or six days together

just before the holiday; when on a sudden that warm weather breaking

forth, the citizens in their summer pomp, being thinner clothed many of

them than before (like bees on a glorious day) swarmed abroad, and the

pores etc.”

Both Willis and Whitmore incline to the view that the catarrhal fever of

the spring was akin to the strange fever of the autumn, the differentia of

each being appropriate to the season. Willis, however, keeps the two types

more apart than Whitmore. The latter speaks of both fevers as “this

Protean-like distemper,” whose various shapes “render it such a hocus

pocus to the amazed and perplexed people, they being held after most

strange and diverse ways with it.” It is “so prodigious in its alterations

that it seems to outvie even Proteus himself.” Thus the strangest part of

these narratives is not the catarrhal influenza, which has so often

reappeared as to be familiar, but the prevalence of anomalous fevers, in

some respects like intermittents without the clear interval between the

fits, but in respect of contagion, spots, pains and other symptoms, like

typhus--a volatile typhus of the country and of the towns. Although this

epidemiological phenomenon be a strange one, there is no reason to

question the correctness of Willis’s observations, corroborated as they

are by those of Whitmore. But there are, indeed, many more experiences of

the like kind in the years to follow, which fall without the limits of the

present volume. One only of these later observers need be mentioned here.

The third of the famous trio with Sydenham and Willis was Morton. He had a

long experience in London of fever and smallpox, which he made the subject

of a book in 1692-4[1117]. His history goes as far back as

1658--“_historia febris_ συνεχὴς _ab anno 1658 ad annum 1691_.” Of the

year 1658 he says the fever was everywhere through England and refers to

Willis; the only facts of his own being that Oliver Cromwell and his

(Morton’s) father were carried off by it in September of that year, that

he had it himself (aged 20) and was three months in recovering, and that

the whole household (in Suffolk) were infected. Cromwell’s attack came

upon him at Hampton Court on August 21; but it was not the first sickness

of the kind that he had suffered. He was only fifty-nine, but worn out

with many cares, and at that time distressed by the death of his favourite

daughter, Lady Claypole, under his roof on August 6, from some painful

internal female trouble. The Lord Protector’s fever was called a “bastard

tertian,” which might have been a name for the fever described by Willis.

He was removed on the 24th August to Whitehall, where the air was thought

to be more wholesome; and died between three and four in the afternoon of

September 3, the anniversary at once of “Dunbar field and Worcester’s

laureat wreath.”

This prevalence of fevers, Protean in their varying types, all over

England in 1657-59 corresponds to the fever period of 1623-24. In each

case the fever was a minor plague, and in each case it was followed by a

revival of the plague proper, which had been dormant all over the country

for a dozen or fifteen years. The principal difference is that the

fever-period of 1623-24 was followed by the plague in 1625, whereas the

fever-period of 1657-59 was followed by several years not free from fever

and then by the plague in 1665. It is clear that the fevers of 1657-59

made a great impression all over England, and were afterwards popularly

spoken of as a warning of the Great Plague itself. In the parish register

of Aldenham, Hertfordshire, there is inserted a poem on the Great Plague

of 1665, which has the following verses[1118]:

“Seven years since a little plague God sent,

He shook his rod to move us to repent.

Not long before that time a dearth of corn

Was sent to us to see if we would turn.”

In Short’s abstracts of parish registers, the years preceding 1665 stand

out as sickly in country districts, according to the following figures:

No. of No. with Baptisms Burials

registers sickness in same in same

examined

1657 98 36 991 1305

1658 96 33 704 1159

1659 101 29 553 825

1660 107 17 342 489

1661 182(?) 25 448 685

1662 105 20 376 504

1663 119 15 325 443

1664 118 12 328 364

1665 117 14 229 446

Periods as unhealthy as 1657-59 do not occur again until 1667-71, and

1679-84.

Willis says, of the autumnal epidemic of 1658: “But in the meantime few of

the inhabitants of the greater towns and cities fell sick.” That is

confirmed for London, in a letter of October 26, 1658: “A world of

sickness in all countries round about London. London is now held the

wholesomest place;” but on January 4, 1659: “There is much sickness in the

town, especially feavers, agues, and smallpox[1119].” In Short’s tables,

the registers of market towns bear the same traces of much sickness in

1657 and 1658 as those of country parishes.

A high mortality from fever and spotted fever continued in London every

year from 1658 to the year of the great plague. The largest number of

deaths from fever was in the year of the plague itself, when the bills of

mortality returned them as 5257 (without much certainty, however, owing to

the confusion of the plague). The next highest figures had been in 1661,

when the fever deaths were 3490. We get a glimpse of that epidemic from

Pepys; on August 16, 1661, he writes: “But it is such a sickly time both

in the city and country everywhere (of a sort of fever) that never was

heard of almost, unless it was in plague-time. Among others, the famous

Tom Fuller is dead of it, and Dr Nicholls [Nicholas], dean of St Paul’s,

and my Lord General Monk is very dangerously ill.” On August 31 he enters

in his diary: “The season very sickly everywhere of strange and fatal

fevers.” The same diarist, on October 20, 1663, has an entry that the

queen is ill of a spotted fever and that “she is as full of spots as a

leopard;” on the 24th the queen was in a good way to recovery.

It is at this period that Sydenham’s famous observations of the seasons

and the public health in London begin. The autumnal intermittents, he

says, which had been prevalent some years before, came back in 1661 with

new strength, about the beginning of July, being mostly tertians of a bad

type: they increased so much in August as to sweep away families almost

entirely, but declined with the winter cold coming on. He then draws the

distinction between them and ordinary tertians. In the same years,

1661-2-3-4, a continued fever is described at great length, and then he

comes to the “pestilential fever” and the plague itself of 1665 and

1666[1120]. Taking from Sydenham the single fact, for the present, that

an unusual amount of pestilential fever led up to the plague of 1665

(which he did not stay in London to witness), we shall proceed in the next

chapter but one to that crowning epidemic of the present section of our

history. Something more remains to be said of the fevers of 1661

(specially described by Willis as a fever of the brain and nervous stock,

but called “the new disease” in its turn); but as it is the first of

Sydenham’s “epidemic constitutions,” and as these are recorded

continuously to 1685, when there was another “new fever,” it will be

convenient to end the detailed history of fevers for the present with the

remarkable epidemics of 1657-59.