THE GREAT PLAGUE OF LONDON, AND THE LAST OF PLAGUE IN ENGLAND.
Literature of the Great Plague.
The writings called forth directly by the London Plague of 1665 were
hardly more numerous or of better quality than those of 1603 and 1625. At
its beginning in June, or in August, there appeared a number of tracts by
enterprising practitioners, containing a few commonplace remarks on causes
and the like, and advertisements of nostrums--by G. Harvey, Kemp,
Garrencieres (“Plague is one of the easiest diseases in the world to cure,
if” etc.), and Gadbury, an astrologer. The directions drawn up by the
College of Physicians in 1636, for the preservation of the sound and
recovery of the sick were re-issued, and an excellent set of “cautionary
rules” by H. Brooke was published by order of the mayor. The writings
which contain accounts of the Great Plague fall under two periods--the
years immediately following 1665, and the years 1720 to 1723 when there
was a sudden revival of interest in the subject in London owing to the
great plague of Marseilles in 1720. To the latter period belongs the most
famous work on the plague of 1665, Defoe’s _Journal of the Plague Year_,
which embodied in a picturesque form the substance of various writings
that preceded it, together with traditions known to Defoe. A brief account
of those writings that preceded Defoe’s in both periods will serve at the
same time to show the sources of a great part of his information.
The weekly bills of mortality issued by Parish Clerks’ Hall, which showed
the number of deaths week by week in each of the one hundred and forty
parishes of London, with a rough classification of the causes of death,
were reprinted at the end of the year 1665 in a volume with the title
_London’s Dreadful Visitation_[1194]. The bills thus collected in
convenient form were made great use of by Defoe, and became, indeed, the
backbone of his work. Next to them in importance, although it is not
certain that Defoe used it, is a treatise on the medical aspects of the
Great Plague, which has never had the fortune to be published. The author
of it was William Boghurst, a young apothecary practising at the White
Hart in St Giles’s-in-the-Fields, who advertised in the _Intelligencer_ on
July 31, 1665, at the height of the plague in his parish, that he had
treated forty, fifty or sixty patients in a day, that he was prepared to
undertake the treatment of cases in the City, the suburbs, or the country,
and that he had a water, a lozenge, and an electuary, as well as an
antidote at eightpence an ounce[1195].
After the epidemic was over he employed his spare half-hours in writing a
book upon his experiences, “considering that none hath printed anything
either since this plague, or that forty years since--which I something
wonder at.” He professes to have taken nothing from hearsay, or from
books, or from the testimonies of others; he writes in English “for
general readers and sale,” and he had omitted many things “so as not to
make the book too tedious and too dear to bie.” The manuscript was
completed for the press, with a title-page, at the foot of which is what
appears to be a publisher’s name (the surname now torn off); but it was
never published, although the author lived until 1685. It is conceivable
that the printed sheets, or the composed type, may have been destroyed in
the fire of September, 1666, and the enterprise abandoned. The manuscript
came into the possession of Sir Hans Sloane, and is now in the British
Museum[1196]. It gives much fuller clinical details of the plague than any
other English work, although in somewhat aphoristic form; and it may be
allowed the character of originality which the author claims for it,
except in some of the more systematic chapters showing the influence of
Diemerbroek.
Another medical essay following the plague was that of Dr Hodges, of
Watling Street, first written in English in 1666 (May 8) under the title
_A Letter to a Person of Quality_[1197], and expanded in 1671 into a Latin
treatise[1198]. Besides a few pages at the beginning, giving some general
facts of the London outbreak (which Defoe used), it is mostly a systematic
disquisition, although a few cases are interspersed. One other medical
piece of 1666 (June 16) is known, by Dr George Thomson, of Duke’s Place
near Aldgate, a Paracelsist or chemical physician; it contains the account
of a dissection of a plague-body, but is mostly occupied with a polemic
against the Galenists, which the author carried on for a number of years
in numerous other writings[1199].
Descriptive pieces, in prose or verse, such as the plagues of 1603 and
1625 elicited, are entirely wanting for that of 1665. But there was the
usual crop of religious and moral exercises to improve the occasion. These
appear to have come mostly, if not exclusively, from Dissenters. “Many
useful and pious treatises,” says a Dissenter in 1721, “were published
upon the occasion of the last visitation, as by Mr Zach. Crofton, Mr Shaw,
Mr Doolittle, and others.” But the only one that attained popularity,
having gone through five editions at once, and been often reprinted, even
as late as 1851, was _God’s Terrible Voice in the City_[1200], by the Rev.
Thomas Vincent, of Christ Church, Oxford, who had been ejected from his
living of St Mary Magdalen, Milk Street, and was then a leader of Dissent.
Vincent preached in several parish churches (deserted by their parsons)
all through the plague, and ministered constantly among the sick. His
book, which moralizes also upon the great fire of 1666, will be drawn upon
in the sequel.
We come next to the revival of interest in the Great Plague of London,
which was occasioned by the Marseilles epidemic in the summer of 1720, an
event that alarmed Western Europe as if the old recurrences of plague were
about to begin afresh after a long interval. In London, in 1721, several
books were published upon the Marseilles plague itself; and the years from
1720 to 1722 saw a whole crop of writings,--new essays and reprints of old
ones,--upon the last London plague of 1665. Among the books reprinted were
Hodges’ _Loimologia_, in an English translation by Quincy, his _Letter to
a Person of Quality_, the _Necessary Directions_ of the College of
Physicians, the _Orders drawn up by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the
City_ (these three in 1721 in a _Collection of very Valuable and Scarce
Pieces relating to the last Plague in 1665_), and Vincent’s _God’s
Terrible Voice in the City_. The new medical books on the Great Plague
were by Scarborough, Hancock and Browne.
When Defoe in 1722 wrote his _Journal of the Plague Year_, he had these
recent reprints and original books convenient to his hand. He had to go
back to 1665 for the collection of the weekly bills of mortality in the
plague-year (in a volume called _London’s Dreadful Visitation_), and he
may have consulted Boghurst’s manuscript, which was probably then in the
possession of Sir Hans Sloane. But it is impossible to trace all his
copious narrative of the Great Plague to these sources, even if we make
due allowance for his legitimate construction of incidents out of the
generalities of contemporary writers. It is possible that he may have had
some unknown manuscript, less technical than Boghurst’s, to draw from. At
all events, he was a likely person to have had many stories of the plague
in his memory. He was a child of four when the plague was in London, the
son of a butcher named Foe in St Giles’s, Cripplegate, which was one of
the most severely visited parishes. The most graphic parts of his
_Journal_ are those which contain such tales as he might have been told in
boyhood concerning the plague in Cripplegate, the scene of them being
carried round to Aldgate, opposite to the Butchers’ Row (still there) in
Whitechapel High Street. He must have had some testimony from which to
construct the visit to Blackwall, the view of the shipping moored all up
and down the Thames, and the other particulars of the river-side
population in the plague-time. The rough experiences of the three Stepney
men in the country near London are in the manner of _Robinson Crusoe_, and
needed only a few hints from Dekker’s stories, or from the writers of
1625. His account of the burials by the cart-load in plague-pits is also
suggestive of Dekker. The somewhat meagre references by Hodges might have
sufficed him for his frequent theme of the hardships and horrors of
shut-up houses, even if he had not seen two other tracts, of 1665, on the
same. The accounts of the Marseilles plague, one of the worst in history,
would have kept him right in picturing that of London.
Whatever materials Defoe took from Hodges, Vincent, or the writers on
other plagues, he enlarged them by his power of circumstantial
construction into a narrative which must be accounted on the whole
veracious. He based upon figures, whenever he could get them; he seems
even to have sought among the archives of the City for accounts of monies
distributed to the poor. He prints in full the orders of the Mayor and
Aldermen, and professes to give the text of a formal resolution which they
passed to remain at their posts throughout the crisis. His table of the
number of plague-deaths in each of twenty-six towns or villages near
London does not, indeed, agree with the figures in the parish registers,
as the table on a later page will show; but it can hardly have been drawn
up at a guess.
The best instance of Defoe’s skilful use of authentic documents is his
description of how the infection invaded one part of London after another
from the western suburbs to the eastern, so that its intensity was nearly
over in one place before it had begun in another. That is the most
interesting epidemiological fact in the whole outbreak; and Defoe has done
ample justice to it. Boghurst had stated it with equal clearness and
emphasis in his manuscript of 1666, which Defoe may or may not have
seen[1201]; however the latter deduced it afresh, and illustrated it by
numerous tables from the bills of mortality, which showed the incidence of
plague upon each of the one hundred and forty parishes from week to week.
Antecedents, Beginnings and Progress of the Plague of 1665.
When the London plague of 1665 had given indications that it would grow to
be one of the great outbreaks of that infection, much was made, in the
retrospect, of a single death from plague which had occurred towards the
end of December, 1664, in a house in or near Long Acre. Connected with
that case was one of those trivial chains of evidence which are so often
produced as the easy solution of a difficult problem. A bale of silks had
come to the house from Holland, and that bale of silks could be traced to
the Levant; therefore the seeds of the great plague of London were
imported Levantine seeds. This was pretty well for a city which had a
continuous record of plague-infection in its soil ever since the Black
Death of 1348. But credulity could ignore facts more recent than the
history for three centuries. The death in Long Acre in December was a
solitary one, and was of no more import for what followed than any of the
five other sporadic plague-deaths in 1664[1202]. Only one more death from
plague occurred in the bills (in the middle of February), until the last
week of April, 1665; even then the progress of the infection was slower
for the next two months than it had been in many former seasons of
moderate plague, such as the five years 1606-1610 and the eight years
1640-1647, or than it had been in the great plague-years of 1603, 1625 and
1636. An importation from abroad had been alleged as early as the great
plague of 1563, namely from Havre, which was then held by an English
garrison. But on that occasion the epidemic in London was gaining ground
before the sickness at Havre had declared itself plague, and was of the
bubonic type while the latter was still a malignant fever. The return of
the whole English garrison from Havre, with the seeds of sickness among
them, might well have introduced infection; but that return was not until
the end of July, by which time the mortality in London had been
progressing for two months. There is equally little reason for Stow’s
statement that the plague of 1603 was brought to London from Ostend, or
for the corresponding theory of origin for the plague of 1625. A foreign
source was not thought of unless the plague became one of the greater
degree. Year after year in London there were a few cases of plague, and
sometimes for a succession of years the plague-deaths kept steadily at a
level of from one thousand to three thousand. There are, indeed, few years
from 1348 to 1666 in which the infection did not declare its presence in
London. Whether the few threatening cases in the spring were to rise to a
plague of the greater degree depended upon a concurrence of
circumstances--upon the interval since the last great plague, upon the
number of strangers crowding to the capital, and upon the kind of weather
preceding. In 1665 the various determining things did chance to come
together, and a plague of the first degree ensued. The one singular thing
in the history is that such a concurrence never happened again, or that
the conditions had so far changed (certainly not for the better), that
the type of epidemic disease was no longer the bubo-plague.
According to precedent, a great plague was somewhat overdue in the year
1665. Its two great predecessors (not reckoning the smaller plague of
1636) had happened each at the beginning of a new reign--in 1603 on the
accession of James I., and in 1625 on the accession of Charles I. The
Restoration of 1660 was the time for the next great outburst; but that was
delayed for five years. Those five years were occupied with a good deal of
fever and other infective disease in London, and the fever in the
beginning of 1665 was, according to Sydenham, of a marked pestilential
type. It may be said to have led up to the plague; but the bubonic disease
itself needed something in addition to the determining causes of spotted
fever. It is generally admitted that London was unusually crowded with the
poorer classes whose work is required by the luxury of the rich (Defoe
says that an enumeration for the Lord Mayor had made out 100,000
ribbon-weavers in the eastern suburbs, although the number is incredible).
There was also a general relaxation of morals, which may have predisposed
many constitutions to receive the seeds of infection. Another element in
the case was the weather.
The summer before had been remarkable for the immense number of
house-flies, and of other insects and frogs. From November to the end of
March the earth was held in almost continual black frost. Boghurst says
the wind was westerly for seven months. No rain fell all the time except a
slight sprinkling in the end of April. The dry cold continued after the
frost broke, and produced, says Sydenham, an unusual number of cases of
pleurisy, pneumonia and angina. Richard Baxter says of the seasons
preceding the great plague, that they were “the driest winter, spring and
summer that ever man alive knew, or our forefathers ever heard of; so that
the grounds were burnt like the highways, the meadow ground where I lived
[Acton] having but four loads of hay which before bare forty[1203].” The
hay crop was “pitiful,” says Boghurst, in consequence of the long cold and
drought. But the summer was made pleasant by refreshing breezes, and
there was abundance of all kinds of grain, vegetables and fruit.
It was not until the beginning of June that the deaths from plague in all
London, according to the bills of mortality, reached the sum of 43 in the
week. But the mortality had been excessive from the beginning of the year,
and it was suspected, as in the like circumstances in 1625, that the
searchers had been concealing the existence of plague, or calling cases of
it by other names, so as to save the infected houses from being shut up.
The motive for bribery and concealment doubtless existed; it had been kept
in view by the authorities from the first institution of searchers, who
were solemnly sworn before the Dean of the Arches to make a true return of
the cause of death. In all the great plagues, less so in 1563 and 1603
than in other years, there was reason to suppose that a large proportion
of deaths put down to other causes than plague were really cases of
plague. However there is no doubt that, in the early months of 1665, just
as in the beginning of 1625, there was a great deal of spotted fever in
London, not to mention smallpox and dysentery. The season was a sickly
one, such a sickly season as often occurred in the latter part of the
seventeenth century and throughout the whole of the eighteenth, when there
could be no longer any question of plague. The weekly bills contain
numerous deaths in the several parishes from “fever” and from “spotted
fever” for months before they contain more than an occasional
plague-death. There was no reason why these and other maladies should not
have swelled the bills to three or four hundred in a week; in the year
1739, when London was probably not a third larger than in 1665, Strother
says that fever brought the weekly bill up to near a thousand. It is
remarkable, however, that Boghurst claims to have been treating cases of
plague from the month of November, 1664; Hodges also says that he was
called in the middle of the Christmas holidays to a young man in a fever
who acquired, two days after, a plague-botch in each groin as large as a
nutmeg, and recovered. Boghurst admits that “tokens,” by which he means
the marks of plague other than the botch or bubo, “appeared not much till
about the middle of June, and carbuncles not till the latter end of July.”
He suspects that the bills of mortality did not tell the whole truth;
and, as an instance of evasion, he says that there had been plague in St
Giles’s, St Martin’s, St Clement’s, and St Paul’s, Covent Garden, for
three or four years before (the bills of mortality give only 12, 9, and 5
deaths respectively for all London in the years 1662, 1663 and 1664), “as
I have been certainly informed by the people themselves that had it in
their houses in those parishes.”
But, in claiming an earlier beginning for the plague than the bills
recognize, and in setting aside the diagnosis of fever as insufficient,
Boghurst takes what is known, in the controversies upon the nature and
affinities of plague, as the “ontological” view: that is to say, he sees
in plague a fixed and uniform entity, and he sees the same in fever. The
other view is the developmental, which recognizes transitions from the one
type of pestilential disease into the other. The great writers of the
time, Willis, Sydenham, and Morton, were none of them “ontologists.” They
all taught the scale of malignity, which had simple continued fever at one
end, then a severer fever with spots and “parotids,” then a fever with
buboes, and at the farthest end of the scale the true plague, with its
buboes, carbuncles, and tokens. Nor is it denied by competent observers,
such as Boghurst himself, that an epidemic of plague declined as a whole
in malignity towards the end, so that the buboes suppurated, and three out
of four, or three out of five, patients recovered. If that were the case
in the descent of the curve, why should there not have been something
corresponding in the ascent? If certain cases of the prevailing fever in
the beginning of the year developed buboes which suppurated (as in the
case treated by Hodges at Christmas, 1664), should they be called plague
or fever? Willis would have answered in favour of fever, until such time,
at least, as the “epidemic constitution” of the season changed definitely
to plague[1204]; he does in effect answer so in the particular instance
of the Oxford fever of 1643, which in some cases was bubonic, whereas, in
1645, he makes no doubt that the disease prevailing in Oxford and
Wallingford was true plague.
The more general discussion of this theme will be found in the concluding
section of the chapter on the Black Death, where illustrations are given
of typhus fever turning to bubonic fever and to plague, from recent and
anomalous outbreaks of plague in Arab villages or encampments, in some
Indian villages, and elsewhere. The conclusion there come to was that the
type of plague, or the bubonic type, prevailed when the infection of the
filthy habitations began with change of season to rise from the soil,
whereas the form of sickness was typhus fever so long as the infection was
primarily in the atmosphere of the dwellings.
We may admit, then, that there was some ambiguity in the naming and
classifying of pestilential cases in the early months of 1665. If we
follow the bills--and there is nothing else to follow--the plague-deaths
in all the parishes of London for the seven weeks from April 18 to June 6
were respectively no more than 2, 0, 9, 3, 14, 17 and 43, the deaths from
“fever” and “spotted fever” being much more numerous.
Having thus far determined the date of beginning, we come next to the line
of advance of the plague of 1665. It was from the western and northern
suburbs towards the City, the eastern suburbs, and Southwark. Boghurst,
who practised in St Giles’s-in-the-Fields, says:
“The plague fell first upon the highest ground, for our parish is the
highest ground about London, and the best air, and was first infected.
Highgate, Hampstead and Acton also all shared in it.” From the west
end of the town, Boghurst continues, “it gradually insinuated and
crept down Holborn and the Strand, and then into the City, and at last
to the east end of the suburbs, so that it was half a year at the west
end of the city [in his experience] before the east end and Stepney
was infected, which was about the middle of July. Southwark, being the
south suburb, was infected almost as soon as the west end.” But the
same writer farther explains that “it fell upon several places of the
city and suburbs like rain--at the first at St Giles’, St Martin’s,
Chancery-lane, Southwark, Houndsditch, and some places within the
City, as at Proctor’s-houses.”
The slow progress from west to east has been made much of by Defoe, who
used the bills of mortality to ascertain the rise of the infection in the
several districts. His conclusion is the same in the main as Boghurst’s
contemporary observation; only that he makes the infection of Southwark
later, and with reason so far as the bills show:--
“It was now mid-July, and the plague which had chiefly raged at the
other end of the town, and as I said before, in the parishes of St
Giles’s, St Andrew’s, Holbourn, and towards Westminster, began now to
come eastward towards the part where I lived. It was to be observed,
indeed, that it did not come straight on toward us; for the City, that
is to say within the walls, was indifferent healthy still; nor was it
got then very much over the water into Southwark; for though there
died that week 1268 of all distempers, whereof it might be supposed
above 900 died of the plague [only 725 in the bill], yet there was but
28 in the whole City within the walls, and but 19 in Southwark,
Lambeth included; whereas in the parishes of St Giles’ and St Martin’s
in the Fields alone, there died 421.... We perceived, I say, the
distemper to draw our way; viz. by the parishes of Clerkenwell,
Cripplegate, Shoreditch, and Bishopsgate; which last two parishes
joining to Aldgate, Whitechapel and Stepney, the infection came at
length to spread its utmost rage and violence in those parts, even
when it abated at the western parishes where it began. It was very
strange to observe that in this particular week, from the 4th to the
13th July, when, as I have observed, there died near 400 of the plague
in the two parishes of St Martin’s and St Giles’ in the Fields only,
there died in the parish of Aldgate but four, in the parish of
Whitechapel three, and in the parish of Stepney but one.” In the
following week of July, with a total of 1761 deaths, whereof of the
plague 1089, only 16 occurred on the Southwark side. Soon, however,
Cripplegate had the infection at its hottest, and at the same time
Clerkenwell, St Sepulchre’s parish, St Bride’s and Aldersgate. “While
it was in all these parishes, the City and the parishes of the
Southwark side of the water, and all Stepney, Whitechapel, Aldgate,
Wapping and Ratcliff were very little touched; so that people went
about their business unconcerned, carried on their trades, kept open
their shops, and conversed freely with one another in all the City,
the east and north-east suburbs, and in Southwark, almost as if the
plague had not been among us.”
In another passage Defoe brings out the moral of its gradual advance. He
had shown
“how it began at one end of the town, and proceeded gradually and
slowly from one part to another; and like a dark cloud that passes
over our heads, which as it thickens and overcasts the air at one
end, clears up at the other end: so while the plague went on raging
from west to east, as it went forwards east it abated in the west, by
which means those parts of the town which were not seized, or who were
left, and where it had spent its fury were, as it were, spared to help
and assist the other; whereas had the distemper spread itself all over
the City and suburbs at once, raging in all places alike, as it has
done since in some places abroad, the whole body of the people must
have been overwhelmed” etc.
That is how Defoe constructs a concrete picture from the dry statistics of
the weekly bills. He has defined the stages, and pointed the moral, with a
firmer hand than the reality would most likely have warranted. But no
scientific writer could have apprehended more correctly the general fact
of a gradual invasion from the west end of the town.
These striking facts of the gradual advance of the Great Plague of London
from west to east will be found to suit that theory of the plague-virus
which has been illustrated in various parts of this volume. The virus of
plague is a soil-poison, or the ground is its habitat; its quiescence or
activity depends upon whether or not the state of the soil favours the
fermentation of the special organic matters therein, which special organic
matters we here take to be the products of cadaveric decomposition. The
conclusion that the poison of plague lay in the soil, and that it rose
into the air in emanations or effluvia, was forced upon all those who
thought much about the matter from the medieval period onwards. Thus, the
apothecary Boghurst, says in his first chapter: “And therefore my opinion
falls in wholly with those who make the earth the seminary and seed-plot
of these venomous vapours and pestiferous effluvia, which vitiate and
corrupt the air, and consequently induce the pestilence.” And again: “The
plague is a most subtle, insinuating, venomous, deleterious exhalation,
arising from the maturation of the ferment of the forces (?) of the earth,
extracted into the air by the heat of the sun.” It is true that Boghurst,
like the sixteenth-century writers abroad, such as Ambroise Parè, locates
the venom in mysterious cavities and bowels of the earth, and dwells upon
the agency of earthquakes in setting it free. But he comes to more
ordinary causes in his enumeration of favouring things--“dunghills,
excrements, dead bodies lying unburied, putrefying churchyards too full,”
and again “breaking up tombs and graves where dead bodies have been long
buried.” As telling against the last, however, he adds: “When the
charnel-house at St Paul’s was demolished, there was a thousand cart-loads
of dead men’s bones carried away to Finsbury, yet no plague followed it.”
The activity of this soil-poison depends upon processes in the soil which
go on so slowly that the link of cause and effect is easily overlooked. In
the last resort, they are dependent on the rise and fall of the
ground-water. It was observed beyond all doubt as the law in Lower Egypt,
that the plague came forth annually after the Nile had begun to fall, and
that it reached its height in the months of March, April and May, when the
soil was driest, or the pores of the ground occupied solely by air after
having been full of water. It was observed, also, that the plague-area and
the inundation-area were co-extensive. Lower Egypt is, of course, somewhat
peculiar (Lower Bengal coming near to it) in these regular alternations of
air alone and water alone in the pores of the ground. But other countries
have the same sharp contrast occasionally, and London had the contrast
very decidedly in the years 1664 and 1665. The months from November 1664
to June 1665, some of which ought to have brought snow or rain to raise
the wells and springs to their highest periodic water-mark early in the
year, were quite remarkable for drought: Richard Baxter says that no one
remembered the like. The ground-water, instead of rising all through the
winter, must have fallen lower and lower as the spring and summer
advanced. The pores of the ground had been occupied with air to an unusual
depth of the subsoil, and the presence of air in these circumstances had
given occasion to that ferment-activity in the special organic matters of
an old-inhabited soil which produced the virus of plague. The stratum of
subsoil would become dry first in the more elevated parts; and as the
ground-water continued to fall, the air would reach in due course an
unwonted stratum in the lower situations. Defoe says that they came to
water at eighteen feet in digging the Whitechapel plague-pits. The same
seasonal march of a soil-infection from the higher ground to the lower
has been observed in modern times in other cities, and in other diseases
than plague. The drought for seven months from November to June would not,
of itself, have caused a great plague. But it was an essential member of
the co-operating group of things; and it probably determined of itself the
season when the great plague was once more to come and take away the
enormous increase of poor people.
Mortality and Incidents of the Great Plague.
The plague of 1665 was justly called the Great Plague, and is sometimes
spoken of as “the plague of London,” as if it were unique. But it was not
much more severe than those of 1603 and 1625 had been for the London of
their generation; and there had been many plagues when London was a small
capital, such as those of 1407, 1479, 1500, 1513 and 1563, which had cut
off as large a proportion (one-fifth to one-sixth) of the population. The
inhabitants in 1665 were not far short of half a million, nearly twice as
many as in 1603, and about a third more than in 1625. The increased
mortality in 1665 was somewhat more than proportionate to the increase of
inhabitants, as the following table shows:--
Highest
Year Estimated Total Plague mortality Worst
population deaths deaths in a week week
1603 250,000 42,940 33,347 3385 25 Aug.-1 Sept.
1625 320,000 63,001 41,313 5205 11-18 Aug.
1665 460,000 97,306 68,596 8297 12-19 Sept.
Reckoned from the christenings and burials in the bills of Parish Clerks’
Hall, the population in 1605 would have been 224,275, and in 1622,
272,207. But in those years (and until after 1636) certain of the newer
parishes (known as the Seven Parishes), including Stepney and Westminster,
kept separate bills, of which some figures for 1603 and 1625 are given at
p. 477 and p. 511. The population of the Seven Parishes appears to have
been about one-ninth of the whole metropolis in 1603, and about
one-seventh in 1625, while Graunt, a contemporary, makes it one-fifth in
1662. These fractions have been added in the table, so as to make 1603
and 1625 comparable with 1665. In 1603 and 1625, the highest mortality in
a week does not show the deaths in those parishes (Westminster, Stepney
&c.) which did not send their returns to the general bill until 1636, but
their figures have been included in the totals for those years. It will be
seen that the plague of 1665 fully kept pace with the increase of
population. The old City within the walls had 15,207 deaths in the year
from all causes. It had become crowded since the beginning of Elizabeth’s
reign by its gardens and churchyards being built upon, and its mansions
turned into tenement-houses for a poorer class; and yet in 1563 the
mortality from plague and other causes in the City and its Liberties, with
a population hardly exceeding that of the City alone in 1665, was 20,372.
The enormous total of 1665 was largely made up from the populous suburbs
of Cripplegate, Whitechapel, Stepney, St Martin’s in the Fields, St
Giles’s in the Fields, Southwark and Westminster, which would have
contributed but little to the total down to the middle third of the
sixteenth century.
The following tables will show the progress of the epidemic from week to
week, the weekly deaths from all causes and from plague, and the incidence
upon the several parts of London. The so-called ordinary deaths are much
in excess of the average, and must have included many that were really
cases of plague. Part of the excess, however, was due to the great
prevalence of fever and spotted fever, which made a heavy mortality in the
early months before the plague began. Bowel complaint also is credited
with a good many deaths. The other more important items in the bills are
consumption and infantile troubles. Boghurst, however, says: “Almost all
other diseases turned into the plague. For five or six months together
there was hardly any other disease seen but the plague and a few
casualties, whatever the Bills say; and Thucydides says the same of the
plague at Athens.” As to the total of deaths in the year from all causes
(97,306), Hodges thinks that it does not show the whole mortality. The
largest number of burials in one week is 8297; but he thinks that 12,000
were buried in that week, and that 4000 were buried in one day and night.
But there seems to be no reason to set aside the tally of the sextons to
that extent; the returns were made weekly from one hundred and forty
parishes, and might easily have been exact to within a few in each.
_Bill of Mortality of the Plague-year 1665 in London._
Week
ending Christened Buried Plague
Dec. 27 229 291 1
Jan. 3 239 349 0
10 235 394 0
17 223 415 0
24 237 474 0
31 216 409 0
Feb. 7 221 393 0
14 224 462 1
21 232 393 0
28 233 396 0
Mar. 7 236 441 0
14 236 433 0
21 221 363 0
28 238 353 0
Apr. 4 242 344 0
11 245 382 0
18 287 344 0
25 229 398 2
May 2 237 388 0
9 211 347 9
16 227 353 3
23 231 385 14
30 229 400 17
June 6 234 405 43
13 206 558 112
20 204 615 168
27 199 684 267
July 4 207 1006 470
11 197 1268 725
18 194 1761 1089
25 193 2785 1843
Aug. 1 215 3014 2010
8 178 4030 2817
15 166 5319 3880
22 171 5568 4237
29 169 7496 6102
Sept. 5 167 8252 6988
12 168 7690 6544
19 176 8297 7165
26 146 6460 5533
Oct. 3 142 5720 4929
10 141 5068 4327
17 147 3219 2665
24 104 1806 1421
31 104 1388 1031
Nov. 7 95 1787 1414
14 113 1359 1050
21 108 905 652
28 112 544 333
Dec. 5 123 428 210
12 133 442 243
19 147 525 281
----- ------ ------
9,967 97,306 68,596
_Incidence on Parishes of the Plague in 1665._
_Ninety-seven Parishes within the Walls._
All deaths Plague deaths
97 City parishes 15,207 9,877
(The parishes with heaviest mortalities were St Anne’s, Blackfriars;
Christ Church, Newgate; St Stephen’s, Coleman St; St Martin’s, Vintry;
Allhallows Barking, the Great, and in-the-Wall; St Andrew’s, Wardrobe).
_Sixteen Parishes without the Walls and in the Liberties._
St Giles’s, Cripplegate 8069 4838
St Botolph’s, Aldgate 4926 4051
St Olave’s, Southwark 4793 2785
St Sepulchre’s 4509 2746
St Saviour’s, Southwark 4235 3446
St Andrew’s, Holborn 3958 3103
St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate 3464 2500
St Bride’s, Fleet Street 2111 1427
St George’s, Southwark 1613 1260
St Botolph’s, Aldersgate 997 755
St Dunstan’s in the West 958 665
St Bartholomew the Great 493 344
St Thomas’s, Southwark 475 371
Bridewell Precinct 230 179
St Bartholomew the Less 193 139
Trinity, Minories 168 123
Pesthouse 159
_Twelve Out-parishes in Middlesex and Surrey._
Stepney 8598 6583
Whitechapel 4766 3855
St Giles’s in the Fields 4457 3216
St Leonard’s, Shoreditch 2669 949
St Magdalen’s, Bermondsey 1943 1362
St James’s, Clerkenwell 1863 1377
St Mary’s, Newington 1272 1004
St Katharine’s, Tower 956 601
Lambeth 798 537
Islington 696 593
Rotherhithe 304 210
Hackney 232 132
_Five Parishes in the City and Liberties of Westminster._
St Martin’s in the Fields 4804 2883
St Margaret’s 4710 3742
St Clement’s Danes 1969 1319
St Paul’s, Covent Garden 408 281
St Mary’s, Savoy 303 198
Pesthouse 156
The Great Plague brought back all the familiar incidents of 1603 and 1625,
and revealed no new feature. As before, all that could afford to do so
made their escape at the outset. Sydenham, who fled with the rest, says
that two-thirds of the population left; which may be true of the City
proper, but certainly not of the populous Liberties and suburbs on both
sides of the water, as Defoe points out. The poorer classes were left
stranded, and bore the brunt of the calamity, as they had always done.
Flight was, doubtless, the best step to take, the motive being to get
“into clean air,” as cardinal Wolsey expressed it in 1515. Those that were
left behind knew that they were in bad air, and knew that it mattered
little whether they came into contact with the sick or not[1205]. Their
employments and wages mostly ceased as the plague extended from suburb to
suburb and to the City, so that with starvation on the one side and plague
on the other, they held their lives cheaply and bore themselves with an
unconcern which was strange to the rich. Their desperate case explains, as
Defoe correctly saw, the ease with which the mayor could always get men to
undertake for pay the disagreeable and risky work of day and night
watchmen to the multitude of shut-up houses, of bearers of the dead, of
buriers, of nurses, and distributors of the public charity. As soon as any
fell in these humble ranks, others were willing to take their place; so
that at no period of the epidemic was there any break-down in the work of
expeditious burial or any failure in good order and decency. To carry the
poor through the great crisis much money was needed; Defoe says that it
was forthcoming from all parts of England and he estimates the
distribution of relief at thousands of pounds weekly, although he failed
to find the exact accounts, which, he thinks, had been destroyed in the
fire of 1666. A thousand pounds a week, he says, was given from the king’s
purse. The whole of this great system of relief was under the direction of
the Lord Mayor, Sir John Lawrence, who proved himself worthy of the best
traditions of his office. In the out-parishes there were Justices of the
Peace who discharged the like duties.
The regular clergy for the most part left the town, but two are honourably
mentioned as having stayed with the plague-stricken people, Dr Anthony
Walker, of St Mary Aldermanbury, and Mr Meriton[1206].
Sometime in August Lord Arlington wrote to the bishop of London that the
king was informed of many ministers and lecturers being absent from their
posts during this time of contagion, and that nonconformists had thrust
themselves into their pulpits to preach seditions and doctrines contrary
to the Church. His majesty wishes the bishop to prevent such mischiefs to
Church and State[1207]. The bishop replied, from Fulham, 19 August, that
the sober clergy remain, that he had refused some that offered to supply
vacancies, suspecting them to be of the factious party, though they
promised to conform, that most of his officers had deserted him and gone
into the country, but he could not learn that any nonconformists had
invaded the pulpit[1208]. The bishop, however, was not likely to hear much
within his garden walls at Fulham of what was passing at Aldgate. There
can be no question that Church pulpits were occupied during the plague by
ministers who had been ejected in 1662. Chief among them was Thomas
Vincent, formerly minister of St Magdalen’s, Milk Street, who preached in
St Botolph’s, Aldgate, Great St Helen’s, and Allhallows Staining[1209].
Vincent says that it was the opportunity of irregular practitioners both
in the Church and in medicine, and he is disposed to say a good word for
the latter from a fellow feeling with them. Besides Vincent, says Richard
Baxter[1210], there were “some strangers that came thither since they were
silenced, as Mr Chester, Mr Janeway, Mr Turner, Mr Grimes, Mr Franklin,
and some others.” These all became prominent in London Nonconformity; and
Baxter clearly traces their subsequent power to the opportunity that the
plague gave them:
“But one great benefit the plague brought to the city, that is, it
occasioned the silenced ministers more openly and laboriously to
preach the Gospel to the exceeding comfort and profit of the people;
in so much that to this day [1670] the freedom of preaching which this
occasioned, cannot, by the daily guards of soldiers, nor by the
imprisonments of multitudes be restrained. The ministers that were
silenced for Nonconformity had ever since 1662 done their work
privately.”
Baxter knew of none among the Nonconformist ministers remaining in London
who fell victims to the plague, except “Mr Grunman, a German, a very
humble, holy, able minister, but being a silenced Nonconformist, was so
poor that he was not able to remove his family.” Two others of the sect,
who fled, lost their lives--“Mr Cross, flying from the plague into the
country died with his wife and some children as soon as he came thither,
in the house of that learned worthy man, Mr Shaw, another silenced
minister,” and Mr Roberts, “a godly Welsh minister, who also flying from
the plague, fell sick as far off as between Shrewsbury and Oswestry and
died in a little straw, but none durst entertain him.” Baxter himself
found refuge in the house of the Hampdens, in Bucks[1211], leaving his
family, as he says, in the midst of plague at Acton. Defoe draws from the
incident of the Nonconformists in Church pulpits a somewhat sentimental
moral; he sees nothing aggressive in it, but merely the levelling of
differences by affliction, and a short-lived prospect of reconciliation.
The irregular practitioners of physic would appear to have been in great
force, just as in former plagues, when their bills were on every post.
Defoe professes to give specimens of their advertisements, which he might
have adapted from actual advertisements in the news-sheets, the
‘Intelligencer’ and the ‘Newes.’ The empirics were of both sexes, and of
foreign extraction as well as native.
Among the regular physicians who practised for a time, at least, in the
plague were the famous Professor Glisson, Dr Nathan Paget (an intimate
friend of Milton and cousin of Elizabeth Minshull whom the poet, in 1664,
had married for his third wife), Dr Wharton, of St Thomas’s Hospital, a
distinguished anatomist, Dr Berwick or Barwick, Dr Brooke, Dr Hodges, and
Dr Conyers. The last was one of two of his order who died of the plague.
Two Paracelsist or chemical physicians, Dr Dey and Dr Starkey, died of it:
and Dr George Thomson says that he survived three several attacks of the
buboes, the first sore lasting for four months. A considerable number of
chirurgeons and apothecaries are said (by Defoe) to have fallen victims.
Pepys says that at the first meeting of Gresham College (the Royal
Society) since the plague, held on January 22, 1666, Dr Goddard “did fill
us with talk in defence of his and his fellow physicians’ going out of
town in the plague-time,” his plea being that their particular patients
were out of town, and they left at liberty. But that excuse ignores the
fact that the time was a great emergency, and puts the defence upon the
wrong ground.
Goddard had attended Cromwell in the Irish and Scottish campaigns as
physician to the army. For a short time he had been a member of the
Council of State, and for several years was master of a College at Oxford.
He was Gresham professor of physic, and one of the original council of the
Royal Society. This eminent man of science was the inventor and proprietor
of “Goddard’s drop,” the secret of which he sold to Charles II. for a
large sum, said to have been £6000. Dr Martin Lister says that the king
showed him the receipt, and that the drops were nothing more than the
volatile spirit of raw silk rectified with oil of cinnamon, and no better
than ordinary spirit of hartshorn. Another writer says that the drops
contained also skull of a person hanged and dried viper. According to
Sydenham, Goddard’s drops were preferable to other volatile spirits for
the particular purpose, namely, the recovery of people from faintings of
various kinds. Even if Dr Goddard had remained in town, he would have been
a trafficker in nostrums as much as the empirics; nor is it probable, from
all that we know, that he could have brought epidemiological principles to
bear upon the management of the epidemic among the poor. The best teaching
of the time counselled that which he himself practised, namely, flight.
Defoe says that the Lord Mayor (Sir John Lawrence), the Sheriffs (Sir
George Waterman and Sir Charles Doe), the Court of Aldermen and certain of
the Common Council, or their deputies, came to a resolution and published
it, viz.:
“That they would not quit the City themselves, but that they would be
always at hand for the preserving of good order in every place, and
for the doing justice on all occasions; as also for the distributing
the public charity to the poor; and, in a word, for the doing the duty
and discharging the trust reposed in them by the citizens to the
utmost of their power.”
The minutes are extant of numerous meetings of the Mayor and Council,
with the orders made (on May 11, June 17, 19, and 27, July 12, and at
short intervals thereafter)[1212]. Two of the Aldermen died of plague.
It appears to be admitted by all, that good order was kept, the dead
buried expeditiously, day and night watchmen provided for an immense
number of infected houses (until, as Vincent says, the infected houses
became so many that there was no use shutting them up), bearers of the
dead and grave-diggers engaged to fill the places of those who died, and
applications heard for relief. One of the things that justly excited the
admiration of Defoe was the abundant supply of all the markets, and the
almost unvarying weight of the penny wheaten loaf, which is given every
week at the foot of the bill of mortality. The Parish Clerks brought out
their bill regularly, although Hodges says that the sextons failed at
length to keep an accurate account of the number of corpses. All the dead
were buried at first in coffins and with full ceremony; but when the
infection became hottest in August and September, especially in the
crowded East-end and in Southwark, the bodies are said to have been
brought to the pits in cartloads and thrown in, sometimes without even a
covering[1213]. That is alleged by the writers on the plagues of 1603 and
1625, and the same must have happened to some extent in 1665, but whether
to the extent that Defoe’s graphic account implies may be doubted.
The burials took place over night until, as Vincent says, “now the nights
are too short to bury the dead.” This was a reversal of the order, first
issued in 1547 and probably carried out in the plague of 1603, that no
burial was to take place between six in the evening and six in the
morning. Even at the worst time, coffins would seem to have been got for
most. Vincent says, “Now we could hardly go forth but we should meet many
coffins,” and he mentions one woman whom he met with a little coffin under
her arm. Evelyn enters in his diary on September 7, the worst week of the
epidemic: “I went all along the City and suburbs from Kent Street to St
James’s, a dismal passage and dangerous, to see so many coffins exposed in
the streets now thin of people.” Defoe’s weird description of the Aldgate
plague-pit at midnight, with seven or eight lanterns set on the heaps of
earth round the edge, and of the constant journeys to and fro of the
dead-carts, has probably made the most of the realities of the case.
A letter of Pepys to Lady Carteret, written from Woolwich on September 4,
gives us a glimpse of the state of the City:
“I having stayed in the city till about 7400 died in one week, and of
them above 6000 of the plague, and little noise heard day nor night
but tolling of bells; till I could walk Lumber-Street and not meet
twenty persons from one end to the other, and not fifty upon the
Exchange; till whole families, 10 and 12 together, have been swept
away; till my very physician, Dr Burnet, who undertook to secure me
against any infection, having survived the month of his own being shut
up, died himself of the plague; till the nights, though much
lengthened, are grown too short to conceal the burials of those that
died the day before, people being thereby constrained to borrow
daylight for that service.” The butcheries are everywhere visited, his
brewer is shut up, and his baker dead with his whole family.
On September 20, he writes in his diary:
“But Lord! what a sad time it is to all: no boats upon the river, and
grass grows all up and down Whitehall Court, and nobody but poor
wretches in the streets.”
Some three weeks later (October 11) Evelyn writes in his diary: “Went
through the whole city, having occasion to alight out of the coach in
several places about business of money, when I was environed with
multitudes of poor pestiferous creatures begging alms. The shops
universally shut up.” Vincent says that he would meet “many with sores and
limping in the streets,” (from the suppurating buboes in the groins).
Again:
“It would be endless to speak what we have seen and heard of:--some in
their frenzy rising out of their beds and leaping about their rooms;
others crying and roaring at their windows; some coming forth almost
naked into the streets”
--the delirium being sometimes of the gentle or foolish kind, and
sometimes violent. These incidents are much enlarged upon by Defoe, who
makes out the cries and groans (mentioned by Dekker and others for the
earlier plagues) to have been from the pain of the hard and tense buboes.
Boghurst says that the treatment by actual cautery and other escharotics
caused more pain than the buboes.
As a set-off to the more horrible picture given by Defoe of the inmates of
a house all dying together, their bodies being found by the watchmen and
taken away in the dead-cart, we may turn to Vincent’s plain account of
what happened in the house where he lodged, probably in the neighbourhood
of Aldgate or Bishopsgate, when he came up from Islington to minister to
the sick.
“We were eight in the family--three men, three youths, an old woman
and a maid; all which came to me, hearing of my stay in town, some to
accompany me, others to help me [he was a celebrity in the religious
world with a large following]. It was the latter end of September
before any of us were touched.... But at last we were visited.... At
first our maid was smitten; it began with a shivering and trembling in
her flesh, and quickly seized on her spirits.... I came home and the
maid was on her death-bed; and another crying out for help, being left
alone in a sweating fainting-fit. It was on Monday when the maid was
smitten; on Thursday she died full of tokens. On Friday one of the
youths had a swelling in his groin, and on the Lord’s day died with
the marks of the distemper upon him. On the same day another youth did
sicken, and on the Wednesday following he died. On the Thursday night
his master fell sick of the disease, and within a day or two was full
of spots, but strangely recovered.... The rest were preserved.”
The two boys appear to have been conscious to the end, and to have died in
the placid mood that often came on in the last hours of plague, as in
other prostrating infections such as yellow fever and cholera. In those
two weeks at the end of September and beginning of October the burials in
all London were 6460 (of plague 5533) and 5720 (of plague 4929).
The chief preventive measure which the mayor had to give effect to was the
shutting-up of infected houses. Defoe says that he carried out that odious
policy considerately. The policy was a traditional one, and may or may
not have had its origin in medical prescription. It was practised, as we
have seen in a former chapter, early in the reign of Henry VIII., if not
even before that. The doctrine underlying it was the contagiousness of
plague, which was much more a doctrine of the faculty than of the people,
and was most of all a doctrine of the Court. Originally the dogma of
contagiousness, in all its rigour, had been made for the persons of the
Tudor monarchs, and as late as 1665 it was in the atmosphere of the Court
that the contagion of plague was invested with the most powerful
properties. The common people of London gave no heed to it, because they
saw every hour that it was a matter of indifference; the middle classes
held it in a qualified way, knowing that there was less to fear from
plague-bodies than from plague-infected ground; but kings took the
comprehensive view of it, allowing no exceptions or scientific
reservations, and the Court doctors, such as Mead in the 18th century, at
length succeeded in making the high doctrine of plague-contagion to pass
current. Two instances are known from extant petitions, of its rigorous
application upon Court servants in 1665: one in the case of a trumpeter of
the king, and the other in the case of the barber to the household. In the
latter case, apparently when the Court was at Salisbury in the autumn, a
stranger supposed to be visited with the sickness ran into the barber’s
tent in his absence; whereon the tent and all his goods and instruments of
livelihood were burnt, he himself confined, and his servants sent away,
according to the orders for the preservation of the Court, “so that he
lost his trade and was utterly ruined[1214].”
The more discriminating of the profession knew and taught that the seeds
of plague could lurk in a bundle of clothes, or of bedding, or in other
effects, or in bales of goods, and that they became the more virulent
through the fermentation that goes on in these circumstances. The
contagion was understood to be _per fomitem_ and _per distans_; on the
other hand, experience was rather against a contagion from the exhalations
of the sick: the immunity of nurses was as striking as it has been in many
other contagions. The people were instinctively right in their belief
that they mostly caught the plague because the infection was in the air of
the place; so long as they were living on a plague-stricken spot, they
were exposed to the risk; and if there were any difference in safety
between dwelling-houses, and the streets, markets or shops, the preference
seemed to lie with the former. The traditional or official doctrine,
however, was that the plague-stricken were the sources of contagion, that
all who had come near them were suspect, and that the safety of the well
depended upon the rigorous shutting-up of the sick and the suspected
together. The experience of epidemic after epidemic might have shown that
this theoretical reasoning, so attractive to the “thorough” order of mind,
was worthless in practice. A great plague pursued its course until the
infected houses became too many for shutting up; if many plague-years did
not develop epidemics of the first degree, that was in accordance with
some epidemiological law, and not because the preventive measures were one
year effective and another year ineffective. However, a traditional
doctrine will always survive a good deal of adverse experience; and the
shutting-up of houses, which had signally failed in 1563, 1593, 1603, 1625
and 1636, was resorted to once more in 1665, and perhaps with more rigour
than ever so as to give it a fair chance. Defoe has stated with great
fairness the hardships of it, and he follows Hodges and Boghurst in
pronouncing it a mistake and a failure. Most of the horrible incidents of
the plague came from the shutting-up of houses; those which Defoe
introduces in that connexion do not exceed probability. It is hard to say
whether the condemnation of shutting-up, which found wide currency during
and immediately after the plague of 1665, would have at length made any
difference to the traditional doctrine and practice. The occasion did not
arise again in London except for a few months in 1666, when the old
practice seems to have been enforced. The corresponding doctrine and
practice that arose in its place, was quarantine against foreign
importation; that rested firstly upon the sophistical assertion of the
all-powerful Mead, that plague had been an exotic to England, and secondly
upon the doctrine of plague-contagion in its most comprehensive and least
discriminating form. But the quarantine law dates really from the Queen
Anne period, and the curious history of its rise, progress, and overthrow
belongs to another part of this work.
The other general preventive measure besides the shutting-up of “visited”
houses was the burning of fires in the streets, which was also a tradition
from Tudor times. The mayor loyally carried out that also; until in the
beginning of autumn a concurrence of things made an end of the practice.
These adverse influences were first, the heavy showers of rain, which put
the fires out; secondly, the differences in medical opinion whether
coal-fires or wood-fires were the better, and whether fires were to be
recommended at all; and thirdly the popular perception that the fires made
no difference to the progress of the epidemic.
In the way of individual protection and treatment, the College of
Physicians issued a tract full of directions and prescriptions, which
Boghurst says were all old, being taken from De Vigo († 1520). It is not
necessarily against methods of practice that they are old; but one cannot
fail to observe how closely the medieval teaching about plague, cause and
cure together, was followed to the last in England: for two centuries the
writers on plague reproduced the chapters and paragraphs almost without
change that we find in the treatise of the bishop of Aarhus, which
circulated in manuscript in England in the 15th century and was first
printed about 1480. The most popular preventive was something “to smell
to,” not sweet but _aigre_. Hence the use of civet-boxes, pouncet-boxes,
and pomanders, which were made to suit all purses. There were also
plague-waters, one of which, “the plague-water of Matthias,” figures among
the prescriptions of the College of Physicians both in a cheap and in an
expensive form. The College’s prescription “to break the tumour” is as
follows:
“Take a great onion, hollow it, put into it a fig, rue cut small, and
a dram of Venice treacle; put it close stopt in a wet paper, and roast
it in the embers; apply it hot unto the tumour; lay three or four, one
after another; let one lie three hours.”
The Paracelsist or chemical physician, Thomson, gives a prescription which
brings out the mystical tendencies of that otherwise meritorious sect. It
relates to a method of curing plague by means of a toad.
“The great difficulty to bring this animal to a true Zenexton lies in
an exquisite preparation of it, the manner whereof that great
investigator of verity, Van Helmont, hath thus delivered, as he
received instructions from Butler, an Irishman who (to Helmont’s
knowledge) had cured some thousands of the pest in London. He gave
directions that a large Bufo, taken in the afternoon in the month of
June, should be hung up by the legs, nigh the fire, over a vessel of
yellow wax” etc.
Tobacco, smoked or chewed, came into great vogue in 1665 as a preservative
from the plague. Hearne, the antiquary, says:
“I have been told that in the last great plague at London [1665] none
that kept tobacconists shops had the plague. It is certain that
smoaking it was looked upon as a most excellent preservative; in so
much that even children were obliged to smoak. And I remember that I
heard formerly Tom Rogers, who was yeoman beadle, say that when he was
that year, when the plague raged, a schoolboy at Eaton, all the boys
of that school were obliged to smoak in the school every morning, and
that he was never whipped so much in his life as he was one morning
for not smoaking[1215].”
The best medical details of the Great Plague come from Boghurst, who
claims that the observations were all his own.
With regard to its incidence he says: “About the beginning most men
got it with fuddling, surfeiting, over heating themselves, and
disorderly living.” Again: “Those that married in the heat of the
disease (if they had not had the disease before) almost all fell into
it in a week or a fortnight after it, both in the city and in the
country, of which most died, especially the men.” One of Dekker’s
stories of the year 1603 is an illustration of the same thing. “It
usually went through a whole kindred, though living in several places;
which was the cause it swept away many whole families.... In some
houses ten out of twelve died, and sixteen out of twenty.” Melancholy
for the loss of friends predisposed to it, while cheerfulness and
courage fortified some against it. Old people that had many sores upon
them, especially carbuncles, almost all died. The natural
constitution, disposition, or complexion “did much to make or mar the
disease.” People with hollow eyes commonly died. Those who drank
brandy and strong waters grew mad, looked about them wildly, and died
quickly in two days. “All that I saw that were let blood, if they had
been sick two, three, four or five days or more, died the same day.”
Teeming women fared miserably; they were not more subject than others:
but scarce one in forty lived (this is enlarged upon by Defoe). Many
people had the spotted fever and the plague both together, and many
the French pox and the plague both together, and yet both sorts
commonly lived (someone says that men caught the French pox of
purpose[1216]). All sorts died, but more of the good than the bad,
more men than women, more of dull complexion than fair. “Of all the
common hackney prostitutes of Luteners-lane, Dog-yard, Cross-lane,
Baldwin-gardens, Hatton-garden and other places, the common criers of
oranges, oysters, fruits etc., all the impudent drunken drabbing
bayles and fellows, and many others of the _rouge route_, there is but
few missing--verifying the testimony of Diemerbroeck that the plague
left the rotten bodies and took the sound[1217].” It fell not very
thick upon old people till about the middle or slake of the disease,
and most in the decrease and declining of the disease. Cats, dogs,
cattle, poultry, etc., were free from infection.
Some died in twelve or twenty days, but most in five or six. In summer
about one-half that were sick, died; but towards winter, three of four
lived. None died suddenly as stricken by lightning: “I saw none die
under twenty or twenty-four hours.” After one rising, or bubo, was
broke and run, commonly another and another would rise in several
parts of the body, so that many had the disease upon them half a year;
some risings would not break under half a year, being so deep in the
flesh.
This explains Dekker’s statement in 1603 that some had buboes repeatedly,
and that one person had eighteen sores. Dr Thomson himself had buboes
thrice. Hodges, also, knew of many cases fatal at the third seizure, the
later attacks being not relapses but new infections; some even fell at the
fifth or sixth time, being before well recovered. In one of the earlier
London plagues, that of 1563, Jones saw a case of a woman near Temple Bar
that ended fatally at the third attack, the buboes having suppurated
twice, but not at the third time. Boghurst goes on:
Of evil omen was “a white, soft, sudden, puffed up tumour on the neck
behind the ears, in the armpit, or in the flank;” also a “large
extended hard tumour under the chin, swelling downwards upon the
throat and fetching a great compass” (the brawny swelling of the
submaxillary salivary glands and surrounding tissues). Tokens came out
after a violent sweat, which was often induced of purpose by nurses,
who said, ‘Cochineal is a fine thing to bring out the tokens.’ Nurses
often killed their patients by giving them cold drinks. Many also were
killed by the shutting-up of houses, by wickedness (of nurses ?), by
confident and ignorant mountebanks, by over-hasty cutting and burning
of buboes. Servants and poor people removed to the pest-house or to
other houses in their sickness, took harm therefrom. People using
corrosives, actual cauteries and many intolerable applications put
their patients to more pain than the disease did.
The botches, or buboes (swollen lymph-glands in the neck, armpits or
groins), were the most distinctive sign of the plague, having given to
it the old name of “the botch.” Besides these, there were the “tokens”
(specially limited in meaning to livid spots on the skin), carbuncles
and blains. Carbuncles, says Boghurst, commonly rose upon the most
substantial, gross, firm flesh, as the thighs, legs, backside,
buttock; they never occurred, that he saw, on the head among the hair,
or on the belly. They were not seen until the end of July, were most
rife in September and October, commonly in old people, never in
children.
Hodges saw one carbuncle on the thigh, the size of two handbreadths, with
a large blister on it, “which being opened by the chirurgeon and
scarification made where the mortification did begin, the patient expired
under the operation.” But most commonly carbuncles did not exceed the
breadth of three or four fingers. Boghurst continues:
“Blains are a kind of diminutive carbuncle, but are not so hard,
black, and fiery; sometimes there is a little core in them. Generally
they are no bigger than a two penny piece, or a groat at the biggest,
with a bladder full of liquor on the top of them, which, if you open
but a little, will come out whitish or of a lemon or straw colour.”
“Besides a blain there is a thing you may call a blister, puffing up
the skin, long like one’s finger in figure, like a blister raised with
cantharides; and such usually die.” The following experience is
remarkable, but it is doubtful whether Boghurst has not taken it from
Diemerbroek: “Towards the latter end of a plague, many people that
stayed, and others that returned, have little angry pustules and
blains rising upon them, especially upon the hands, without being sick
at all. But such never die, nor infect others; and I remember
Diemerbroeck saith, etc.” Can this be the meaning of “smallpox”
following the plague, as in the 16th century books by Alphanus,
Kellwaye and others?
The tokens proper, according to Hodges, were spots on the skin “proceeding
from extravasated blood.” The body of the youth dissected by Thomson was
“beset with spots, black and blue,” some of which when opened “contained
a coagulated matter.” The tokens, as the name implies, were made the most
distinctive sign of the plague; but they were far from being so constant
as the botches or buboes. Boghurst says that “tokens appeared not much
until about the middle of June;” and, according to a letter of September
14, they must have been very variable even at the height of the plague:
“The practitioners in physic stand amazed to meet with so many various
symptoms which they find among their patients; one week the general
distempers are blotches and boils, the next week as clear-skinned as may
be, but death spares neither; one week full of spots and tokens, and
perhaps the succeeding bill none at all[1218].”
The account of the dissection by Thomson, of a youth dead of the plague,
is perhaps all the morbid anatomy that has come down to us. He found what
appear to have been infarcts in the lungs; the surface was “stigmatised
with several large ill-favoured marks, much tumified and distended,” from
which, on section, there issued “sanious, dreggy corruption and a pale
ichor destitute of any blood.” The stomach contained a black, tenacious
matter, like ink. The spleen gave out on section an ichorish matter. The
liver was pallid and the kidneys exsanguine. There were “obscure large
marks” on the inner surface of the intestines and stomach. The peritoneal
cavity contained a “virulent ichor or thin liquor, yellowish, or
greenish.” There was a decoloured clot in the right ventricle, but “not
one spoonful of that ruddy liquor properly called blood could be obtained
in this pestilential body.” In all other cadavers that he ever dissected
he had found that the right ventricle had blackish blood condensed, but
this one had a pale clot “like a lamb-stone cut in twain,” which puzzled
him greatly; perhaps it came, he conjectures, from a sumption of mere
crude milk which an indiscreet nurse had given the boy not long before he
died.
Among the symptoms of a fatal issue, Boghurst mentions the following:
Hiccough, continual vomiting, sudden looseness, or two or three stools in
succession, shortness of breath, stopping of urine, great inward burning
and outward cold, continual great thirst, faltering in the voice, speaking
in the throat and occasionally sighing, with a slight pulling-in one side
of the mouth when they speak, sleeping with the eyes half-open, trembling
of the lips and hands and shaking of the head, staggering in going about
rooms, unwillingness to speak, hoarseness preventing speech, cramp in the
legs, stiffness of one side of the neck, contraction of the jaws, the
vomit running out from the side of the mouth, prolonged bleeding at the
nose, the sores decreasing and turning black on a sudden.
It is to be remarked that Boghurst says very little of the gentle or the
violent delirium, on which Defoe enlarges picturesquely; nor does he
emphasize the extreme pain of the hard and tense buboes, which is another
of Defoe’s themes. Hodges, however, says that “some of the infected run
about staggering like drunken men, and fall and expire in the streets;
while others lie half-dead and comatous.... Some lie vomiting as if they
had drunk poison.”
The progress of the epidemic would seem to have been little influenced by
the weather or by what was done, unless the shutting-up of houses had
helped to intensify the virus. Boghurst says: “If very hot weather
followed a shower of rain, the disease increased much;” and again: “If, in
the heat of the disease the wind blew very sharp and cold, people died
very quickly, many lying sick but one day.” We are told, however, by
Hodges that “the whole summer was refreshed with moderate breezes,” and
that “the heat was too mild to encourage corruption and fermentation.” The
air itself, he says, “remained uninfected.” Rain fell from time to time in
the end of summer, copious enough to put out the fires in the streets.
There was at least one very hot day, near the beginning of the epidemic,
the 5th of June, which Pepys says was “the hottest day that I ever felt in
my life.” On September 20, however, he says that the increase of the
plague could not have been expected “from the coldness of the late
season.”
The plague lingered in London throughout the year 1666, causing 1998
deaths in all. In January 1666 it was still at as high a figure as 158
deaths in a week, and in the week ending September 18 it rose again to the
exceptional height of 104 deaths. In the first three weeks of December,
the deaths were 2, 4, and 3; and from that low level the plague never rose
again in London. A few annual deaths continued to appear in the bills down
to 1679, when they finally disappeared.
Plague near London in 1665.
Meanwhile various parts of England were affected with plague during and
after the great epidemic, and in one or two instances a little before it.
In the immediate neighbourhood of the capital all the towns and villages
usually implicated by the exodus from the City had cases of plague, as the
following table shows. It has been compiled from the parish registers, as
extracted in Lysons’ _Environs of London_, Defoe’s widely discrepant
figures being given for comparison in the third column.
All Defoe’s
causes Plague list.
Barking 230 200
Barnes 27
Barnet and Hadley 43
Battersea 113
Beckenham 18
Brentford 103 432
Brentwood 70
Bromley 27 7
Camberwell 133
Charlton 7 3
Chertsey 18
Chiselhurst 21
Clapham 28
Croydon 141 61
Deptford 548 374 623
Ealing 286 244
Edmonton 19
Eltham 44 32 85
Enfield 176 32
Epping 26
Finchley 38
Greenwich 416 231
Hampstead 214
Heston 48 13
Hodsdon 30
Hertford 90
Hornsey 53 43 85
Islewort 195 149
Kensington 62 25
Kingston 122
Lewisham 56
Mortlake 197 170
Newington, Stoke 17
Norwood 12 2
Putney 74
Romford 90 109
St Albans 121
Stratford-Bow 139
Staines 82
Tottenham no entries 42
Twickenham 21
Uxbridge 117
Waltham Abbey 23
Walthamstow 68
Wandsworth 245
Ware 160
Watford 45
Windsor 103
Woodford 33
The most striking fact that comes out is that most of the parishes around
London had actually fewer deaths from plague in 1665 than in 1603. The
exceptions to this rule in 1665 are the villages on or near the Thames
above London-Battersea, Wandsworth, Putney, Mortlake, Brentford,
Isleworth, and Ealing, which had all a very high mortality, Barnes being
almost exempt. On the lower reaches of the Thames, Barking on the Essex
shore, and Deptford, Greenwich and Lewisham on the other side, had the
infection in them very severely; but these three places in Kent had a
still more severe visitation in 1666, along with other towns in that
county.
On September 9, Evelyn wrote from his Deptford house, Sayes Court, that
“near thirty houses are visited in this miserable village.” The infection
got also among the ships of the navy; on August 29, on board the ‘Loyal
Subject’ at Deal, Captain Fortescue and six men died suddenly, it was
feared of the plague.
Plague in the Provinces in 1665-6.
The earliest accounts of plague in the provinces come from Yarmouth in
November, 1664. On the 18th it is said to have been brought in a vessel
from Rotterdam; three died in one house, of whom one had the plague. On
November 30, the plague was spreading, if the searchers (drunken women,
however) were to be credited. On February 8, 1665, there was another death
from plague, and as the summer wore on the mortality increased rapidly. On
June 16, thirty had died in the week, the inhabitants had fled, the town
was like a country village, and the poor left behind were lamenting at
once the lack of work and of charity. On August 21, the king wrote from
Salisbury to the bailiffs of Yarmouth concerning the plague. In the weeks
ending August 30 and September 6, there were 117 deaths (96 from plague)
and 110 deaths (100 from plague), and as late as November 6, there had
been 22 plague-deaths in the week. In March, 1666, the epidemic came to an
end[1219]. Smaller outbreaks occurred in the autumn of 1665 and spring of
1666 at Lynn, Norwich, Ipswich and Harwich. The great epidemic at
Colchester began in summer, 1665, but fell mostly in 1666, at a time when
there was little plague elsewhere, so that it practically closes the
history of plague in England, and will come naturally at the end of the
chapter.
Most of the provincial outbreaks in 1665 were of small extent, and were
probably due to introduction of the virus from London. The valley of the
Tyne, which had often experienced severe plagues, had a slight epidemic,
said to have originated from the colliers returned from the Thames. On
July 18, there were seven houses shut up at Sunderland, one at Wearmouth
and one at Durham[1220]. A paragraph in the ‘Newes,’ from Durham, October
13, says that the sickness in the north is now much assuaged. Newcastle
remained almost free (although Defoe says different), two houses being
shut up on January 30, 1666, and two at Gateshead. The whole north-west
and west of England, which had suffered most during the last
plague-period, in the Civil Wars, appears to have escaped altogether.
In the south, there was a good deal of the infection at Southampton in the
summer and autumn of 1665; on July 6, “the poor will not suffer the rich
to quit the town and leave them to starve[1221].” It is heard of, also, at
Poole and Sherborne in Dorset (in November), at Salisbury, where the Court
lay for some weeks, and at Battle[1222] in Sussex; but in none of these
places to any great extent. Various places in Kent had cases in
1665--Rochester, Chatham, Sandwich, Eastry, Westwell, Deal, Dover and
Canterbury[1223]; but it was only the naval stations that had more than a
few cases in 1665; while all of them had it far worse in 1666. Other
centres in 1665 were in Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire.
At Peterborough, Oundle and Newport Pagnell, there was a visitation of the
severer kind, with flight of the richer inhabitants, and the usual arrest
of work and trade. The parish register of Yardley, Hastings, records that
60 persons died of plague in that town from June 5, 1665, to January 3,
1666. There was also a sharp epidemic in Cambridge and in the country
around, of which we get a glimpse in a letter of October 19, 1665, written
from Clare Hall to one of the fellows of Clare[1224]:
“Alderman Mynell the brewer and one of his children died of the plague
this last Monday; he hath had four children in all dead of it.
Clayton, the barber in Petty Cury, and one of his children, died last
Saturday of the sickness. It is newly broken out sadly by Christ’s
(though they have all fled from the Colledge upon Mr Bunchly, their
manciple, dying of the plague)--where Nicholson the smith, his wife
and two children are dead within three days, his other children being
deadly sick in the house. But it most rageth in St Clement’s parish,
where seldom a day passeth without one dead of the sickness.... Poor
Mr Brown, the old man that is one of the University musicians, and Mr
Saunders that sings the deep bass, are shut up in Mr Saunders’ house
in Green Street, whose child died last week suspected. Two houses at
Barton are infected by two of Alderman Mynell’s children, that are
dead there. Ditton is broke out just by the butcher, from whom we had
our meat, which made us hastily remove to Grantchester. H. Glenton,
the carrier, fled from this town to Shelford, where he died within two
or three days, suspected.... Royston is sadly in two or three places,
the last of which is just in the middle of the town. The infection,
they say, was brought thither by a Cambridge man, whom they caught,
and shut him up; but he hath since made his escape.”
The Epidemic of Plague at Eyam, 1665-6.
Another of the English towns visited by plague in 1665 was Derby; whether
the cases were many or few, they caused great alarm, the town being
forsaken, the streets grass-grown, and the market set up on a new stance,
to which the farmers and traders came primed with a plug of tobacco in
their mouths as a preservative. But the epidemic in Derby itself was
totally eclipsed in interest by an extraordinary outbreak of plague in the
small village of Eyam, at the opposite end of the county, in the North
Peak, some twelve miles to the west of Sheffield. The plague of Eyam is,
indeed, the most famous of all English plagues; the story of it has been
told many times in prose and verse, its traditional incidents being well
suited to minor poets and moral writers, and the whole action of the
drama conveniently centered within a circuit of half a mile in a cup of
the heathy hills[1225].
Eyam was a village of some three hundred and fifty inhabitants, standing
among meadows around which the hills towered. It had no resident doctor,
but it had two ministers. The one was the rector, the Rev. William
Mompesson, a young man of twenty-seven, with a wife and two children, who
had been settled in Eyam only a year and did not like it; the other was
the former rector, the Rev. Thomas Stanley, who had been ejected for
nonconformity in 1662, and had remained to carry on his ministrations as a
Dissenter among such of his old flock as adhered to him. The wealthier
householders resided at the western and higher end of the village, on the
other side of a brook which crossed under the road; as we shall see, they
escaped the infection almost if not altogether. The annual village wake
had been held in August, 1665, with more than the usual concourse of
people from villages near. On the 2nd or 3rd September a box arrived from
London to the village tailor, who lived in a small house at the western
end of the churchyard; it contained old clothes which someone in London is
supposed to have bought for him cheap, and some tailors’ patterns of
cloth. This box is assumed to have been opened by one George Vicars, a
servant, who was certainly the first victim of plague. He found the
contents to be damp and hung them up at the fire to dry. He was quickly
seized with violent sickness, became delirious, developed buboes in his
neck and groin, a plague-token on his breast the third day, and died in a
wretched state on September 6. His body, which is said to have become soon
putrid, was buried in the churchyard on the 7th. Nearly a fortnight passed
before another case occurred, that of a youth supposed to have been the
tailor’s son, who was buried on the 22nd September. Before the 30th four
more had died, and in the course of October twenty-two more were buried
of the plague. The deaths in November declined to seven, and in December
they were nine. There was now snow on the ground, with hard frost, and at
the beginning of January, 1666, the plague was confined to two houses.
Four died in January, eight in February, six in March, nine in April, and
only three in May. On June 2, another burial occurred, and then there was
another pause. But in a week or more the epidemic broke out with renewed
power, three having been buried on the 12th of June, three on the 15th,
one on the 16th, three on the 17th, and so on until the total for June
reached nineteen. The wealthier villagers at the west end had taken the
alarm before and had mostly fled in the spring; those who stayed kept
within their houses or at least did not cross the stream. Now that the
infection was revived in the hot weather of June, the rector’s wife also
proposed flight, but on her husband’s refusal, she resolved to remain with
him, and to send her two children to a relative in Yorkshire. At the same
time the villagers in general were instinctively moved to escape from the
tainted spot; but Mompesson used his authority to prevent them, and a
boundary line was drawn round the village, about half a mile in circuit
and marked by various familiar objects, beyond which no one was to go.
Mompesson’s motive appears to have been to prevent the spread of the
infection to the country around, and his parishioners submitted passively.
After the end of June the villagers would have found it difficult to
escape, owing to the terror which the very name of their village caused in
all the country round. Some of them quitted their cottages and took up
their abode in shelters built along the side of a rocky glen within the
cordon. The earl of Devonshire, then at Chatsworth, promised Mompesson
that the village should not be left without supplies; and people from the
villages near brought their market produce to certain stated points on the
boundary, where the Eyam people came to fetch it, the money paid being
dropped into water. Thus shut up in their narrow valley, the villagers
perished helplessly like a stricken flock of sheep. By the end of June
ceremonial burials came to an end, the church and the churchyard were
closed, the dead were carried out wrapped in sheets by one of the
villagers noted for his herculean strength, and laid in shallow graves in
the meadows or on the hill-sides. In July the deaths mounted up to five or
six on some days, and the total for the month to fifty-seven. In August
the dead numbered seventy-eight, among them the rector’s wife on the 25th,
after a walk with her husband through the meadows, during which she is
said to have made the ominous remark that the air smelled sweet[1226].
September added twenty-four to the total, and there were now only about
forty-five left alive in the place. Of these, fifteen died to the 11th
October, when the mortality ceased. Some of the survivors had passed
through an attack of the plague, among them the rector’s man, whose buboes
suppurated. Mompesson himself, who had an issue open in his leg all the
time, escaped the infection, as well as his maid-servant. A young woman of
Eyam, married in the village of Corbor, two miles off, came one day to see
her mother, whom she found sick of the plague; on her return home she took
the sickness and died, but no one else in Corbor had it. A man was also at
large in the neighbourhood suspected of plague, to whom the earl of
Devonshire sent a doctor. The doctor and patient met by appointment on the
opposite banks of a stream, and the diagnosis made across the water
acquitted the man of plague; even in these unconventional circumstances
the consultation did not end without a prescription (still extant) for a
bottle of “stuff.” Seventy-six households in Eyam were infected, and out
of these two hundred and fifty-nine persons were buried of the plague.
During the time that the infection lasted eight more died from other
causes. When the sickness had ceased Mompesson set about burning the
infected articles in the empty cottages. Three years after, in 1669, he
was presented to the better living of Eakring, in Notts; but on arriving
to enter on his duties he was refused admission by the villagers, and had
to take up his residence in a temporary hut in Rufford Park, until such
time as the prejudices of his new parishioners had been overcome. He
married another wife, and for thirty-nine years held the living of
Eakring, where he died on March 7, 1708. Stanley, his Dissenting colleague
at Eyam, died there a few years after the plague.
Several things combined to magnify the disaster at Eyam. The story of the
box of clothes from London is entirely credible, and can be matched by
many other instances in the history of plague and of cholera[1227].
Nothing intensifies the virus of such diseases so much as fermentation
without air in the textures of clothes or linen; a whiff from the opened
box or bundle suffices soon to prostrate the person who breathes it. The
poison at Eyam was a powerful one from the first, and it is credible that
the body of the earliest victim did become quickly putrid. The heavy
mortality, with few recoveries, which followed after a fortnight’s
interval, and continued all through the winter, also shows a virus raised
to no ordinary potency. But, for the revival of the infection in June,
1666, we must seek other causes. Eyam was one of those basins which, on a
large scale or on a small, have often been observed to keep infection in
their soil. The virus must have passed into the pores of the ground after
the first sixty or more burials in the churchyard down to the lull of the
epidemic in winter; with the rise of the ground-water in spring, it would
be comparatively inactive; but in June, when the water was again sinking
in the soil and the great heat was raising emanations from the dry ground,
it broke forth with an intensity which poisoned the whole air of the
valley. The burials, after the end of June, without coffins and in shallow
graves in the meadows or on the hill-side, were so much ferment added to a
soil already permeated by it. Flight from such a place was the only
safety, and the rector, with the best motives, counselled the people to
remain. Mompesson’s conduct has always been held up as a pattern of
heroism, as if the circumstances had been desperate like those of the
Trojans when the Greeks were in their streets and houses:
Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem.
No word of detraction should be spoken of anyone who does manfully what he
conceives to be his duty to his neighbours; but the villagers of Eyam were
sacrificed, all the same, to an idea, and to an idea which we may now say
was not scientifically sound. When the impulse came upon them to flee,
they might have left their tainted soil without much risk to the country
around so long as they did not collect in one spot or carry with them
bedding or the like susceptible articles: those who did flee from the
houses at the upper end of the village are not known to have carried the
infection to other places, and the young woman who brought it to Corbor
gave it to no one else. But the wisdom of flight may be regarded by some
as still disputable; while it will be admitted by all that Mompesson acted
for the best according to his lights.
The plague in 1666 raged severely in a number of towns, while it lingered
on in London. The information from Winchester is vague; it is said that
the dead were carried out in carts and buried on the downs to the
eastward[1228]; the epidemic was over by the 1st of December, so that the
College resumed[1229]. Pepys enters in his Diary (April 4, 1667): “One at
the table [the duke of Albemarle’s] told an odd passage in the late
plague, that at Petersfield (I think he said), one side of the street had
every house almost infected through the town, and the other not one shut
up.” There may have been other such centres of plague, and equally
interesting observations made on them; but it appears to be the merest
chance whether anything is recorded of them at all, or whether one has the
luck to come across the record.
The great centres of plague in 1666 had some connexion with the fleet, and
were mostly in Kent and Essex. Deptford and Greenwich had more plague that
year than the year before, the total deaths at the former having been 715
(of plague 522) and at the latter 423. Eltham and Lewisham were also
visited in proportion. The other intense centre of infection in Kent was
Deal. On the 26th August, seven died of the plague, and twenty in the
whole week. At that date there were said to be only 16 houses which had
not had plague in them. On December 9, all the houses were clear, although
the crews of ships still avoided the town. Next to Deal, Sandwich, Dover,
Canterbury and Maidstone had considerable outbreaks in the autumn. At
Portsmouth also there was a sharp outbreak in the summer of 1666,
twenty-one having died of plague in a week at the beginning of July.
In the Eastern Counties, plague revived to a considerable extent in 1666
at Norwich, Ipswich, Harwich and Woodbridge, the Yarmouth outbreak, which
had been the great one in that quarter the year before, having come to an
end in the spring. But it was at Colchester that the epidemic engrossed
attention in 1666. Colchester had, indeed, two successive seasons of
plague, or rather a continuous prevalence of it from the summer of 1665 to
December, 1666. The plague at Colchester in 1665-66 was the greatest of
all provincial plagues since the Black Death, unless, indeed, we credit
the numbers (11,000 or 12,000) given for a plague at York in 1390. It
reproduced the mortality of the Great Plague of London on a scale more
than proportionate to its size, and it doubtless called forth the same
class of incidents--flight of the wealthier classes, and almost total
extermination of the poor. No documents remain, however, of this plague
except the oaths administered to searchers and bearers of the dead
(printed below) and the weekly totals of deaths from plague and from other
causes[1230]. The weekly bills are, indeed, as eloquent a testimony as
any detailed description could have been; and as they are the most
complete of the kind for a provincial town, I have transcribed them from
the manuscript record in full. The small number of deaths from ordinary
causes points to the emptiness of the better quarters of the town; the
total deaths in seventeen months, 5345, including 4817 plague-deaths and
528 from other causes, must have meant an enormous clearance of the poorer
classes. Colchester was then a place of considerable wealth, with a
thriving Dutch trade and a considerable Dutch colony. Perhaps the
connexion with Holland, where plague had been rife in the years just
before, may explain the origin of the outbreak; but local conditions of
soil, overcrowding, and the like must be looked to for the cause of its
extraordinary persistence and fatality.
_Weekly mortalities in Colchester, August 14, 1665, to December 14, 1666,
from plague and other diseases._
1665
Week Plague Other
ending
Aug. 21 26 2
28 62 2
Sept. 8 122 4
15 153 22
22 159 25
29 100 25
Oct. 6 161 27
13 122 23
20 106 15
27 60 41
Nov. 3 104 13
10 88 22
17 88 18
24 62 8
Dec. 1 38 10
8 39 6
15 67 4
22 53 7
29 21 3
1666
Jan. 5 23 6
12 46 8
19 36 13
26 26 10
Feb. 2 34 9
9 25 3
16 23 7
23 33 6
Mar. 2 53 2
9 26 11
16 37 5
23 48 4
30 66 1
Apr. 6 73 2
13 90 2
20 68 4
27 90 4
May 4 169 8
11 167 7
18 150 11
25 98 12
June 1 89 10
8 110 10
15 139 3
22 195 6
29 176 4
July 6 167 8
13 160 9
20 175 3
27 109 4
Aug. 3 109 2
10 85 4
17 70 1
24 51 1
31 53 4
Sept. 7 31 6
14 22 2
21 16 2
28 10 2
Oct. 5 7 2
12 7 0
19 7 2
26 4 2
Nov. 2 4 2
9 4 2
16 2 6
23 1 4
30 1 8
Dec. 7 1 7
14 0 0
---- ---
4817 528
To relieve the poverty caused by this great disaster a tax was levied on
various other parts of the county of Essex, and contributions were made by
private individuals, the London churches collecting £1311. 10_s._ in the
breathing-time between the plague and the fire. Colchester had so far
recovered in the end of 1666 as to be able to contribute in turn about a
hundred pounds for the relief of London after the fire[1231].
The Last of Plague in England.
The history of plague in England must be made to end with a solitary
epidemic at Nottingham in 1667, but not without some misgivings as to the
correctness of the date. Dr Deering, the historian of the town in 1751,
paid little heed to epidemics, although medicine was his business; but he
mentions one of smallpox in 1736, which had probably come within his own
experience, and proceeds:
“I question much whether there has been the like since the plague
which visited the town in 1667, and made a cruel desolation in the
higher part of Nottingham, for very few died in the lower; especially
in a street called Narrow Marsh, it was observed that the infection
had no power, and that during the whole time the plague raged, not one
who lived in that street died of it, which induced many of the richer
sort of people to crowd thither and hire lodgings at any price; the
preservation of the people was attributed to the effluvia of the
tanners’ ouze (for there were then 47 tanners’ yards in that place),
besides which they caused a smoak to be made by burning moist tanners’
knobs[1232].”
If there had been any reference to the parish registers or to the
corporation minutes, we should have had no reason to doubt that this
epidemic had been correctly assigned to 1667. The last Winchester epidemic
had been given under the year 1668, first by one local historian, and then
by another who copied him; but when a third went to the manuscript
records, he found that the year was 1666, as indeed an incidental
reference to the re-opening of Winchester School on 1st December, 1666,
“the sickness being in all appearance extinguished,” might have warranted
one in concluding. It is a singular experience to have brought the history
of plague down through several centuries, not without particulars of times
and numbers, and to be obliged to end it in the latter half of the 17th
century with an unauthenticated date. The Nottingham epidemic may have
been an exception to the generality that all England was finally delivered
from the plague in 1666; it is due, at least, to the local historian, in
the absence of evidence against, to record his date of 1667. The
difficulty of confirming so simple a fact at so late a period may dispose
the readers of this work to be tolerant of any lack of certainty and
precision that they may discover in its history of more remote times.
INDEX.
Aarhus, bishop of, his book on plague, 209,
his identity, 210 _note_
Abbotsley, scene in church, 39
Aberdeen, leper-spital, 99,
plague at, 361, 362,
long free from plague, 370,
plague at, in 1647, 564,
syphilis arrives at, 417, 419, 361
Aelred, his story of queen Matilda and the lepers, 82-3
=Agriculture=, state of in Domesday, 22,
neglect of under heavy taxation by Wm, Rufus, 30,
effects of Black Death on, 191-2,
thriving in the 15th cent., 222,
gives place to sheep-farming in Tudor period, 387-392
=Agues=, original meaning of 409;
pestilential ague, 214,
“hot ague”, 291, 400, 401, 404, 406,
Irish ague, 410;
Jones on, 410,
specialists for, 411, 426,
ambiguous meaning of, 505, 536, 540
Allington, Richard, case of smallpox, 459
Amwell, Great, plague, 493
André, Bernard, on sweat of 1508, 244,
on French pox, 420
=Anglo-Saxon Leechdoms=, 24, 452
Annan, story of a plague at, 11
Appleby, plague, 360
Arabia, burials in, 165,
plague, 166,
origin of smallpox in 441
=Armada, Spanish=, sickness in, 350, 591
=Arsenic=, plague-cakes, 487
Ashburton, plague, 524
Ashwell, inscription at, 139, 217
Assir, plague, 166
=Assizes, Black=, at Cambridge, 375,
at Oxford, 376,
at Exeter, 383
Astruc, on origin of syphilis, 430
Aubrey, Dr, on sickness in slave-ships, 627-8
Avignon, Black Death at, 133,
_pestis secunda_, 203
Axholme, the sweat at, 252
Ayr, plague, 503
Baber, Consul, plague in Yun-nan, 168
Bacon, Francis, “remedy” of the sweat, 242,
gaol-fever, 382,
sweet odours in plague, 685 _note_
Bamford, James, plague of 1603 in St Olave’s parish, 478,
on contagion of plague, 490
Banbury, plague, 303 _note_, 501,
war-fever and plague, 556-7
Banister, John, on syphilis, 427,
his plague-medicines, 516
=Bankside stews=, 420
Barbados, occupied by English, 619,
yellow fever in, 620, 630-633
Barcelona, syphilis at, 434
Barking, plague in monastery, 6,
plague, 492, 520, 680
=Bartholomew fair=, in plague-time, 300, 481
=Bartholomew’s, St, Hospital=, filled with cases of pox, 424
Basingstoke, hospital at, 95
Batavia, epidemic in 1625, 608
Baxter, Richard, on the weather before the Great Plague, 653,
on Dissenters in the plague-time, 655
Becon, on rural depopulation, 391
Beda, on pestilence in, 664-685, 5-7
=Beggars=, pretending leprosy, 103,
beadle of, 104,
after Black Death, 183,
statutes for, 392
Bellay, Du, letters on the sweat, 250-252
Belper, plague, 500
Benghazi, plague and typhus in Arab tents, 170
=Beri-beri=, supposed in 1593, 593
Beverley, the sweat at, 252
Birch, Dr T., errors of, on Oxford Black Assizes, 381 _note_,
collects letters of the Stuart period, 504 _note_
=Black Death, the=, chroniclers of in England, 114,
arrival and progress, 116-118,
in Ireland, 119,
in Scotland, 119, 233,
symptoms of, 120,
mortality from, 123-139,
direct effects of, 139, 180,
antecedents of, 142-156, 173-4,
favouring conditions for diffusion of, 175.
Its effects on Edward III.’s wars, 178,
on removal of men and treasure, 180,
on price of labour, 181,
on capitalists, 186,
on morals, 186-190,
on area of cultivation, 191,
on system of farming, 192,
on trade and industry, 193,
on town industries, 197,
on village manufactures, 198,
on governing class in towns, 199,
on population, 199.
Infection of, remains in England, 204, 233
Bodmin, Black Death at, 116, 125
Boghurst, W., spotted fever in Somerset, 543,
his MS. on the Great Plague, 647 _et seq._
Boleyn, Anne, in the sweat of 1528, 251, 252, 255
Borde, Andrew, 286
Borgia, Alexander, pope, 416 _note_
Boston, plague at, 349
Bosworth, battle of, 265
=Botch=, =boche= or =boiche=, early name of plague, 206, 208, 362
Bradwardine, archbp, dies of Black Death, 129
Bradwell, Stephen, his plague-book, 516
Brant, Sebastian, on origin of French pox, 431
Brasbridge, on plague in dog’s skin, 316
Brewer, T., his poem on plague of 1625, 512, 517
Bridewell made a hospital, 394, 395
Bridgetown, yellow fever at in 1647, 620, 630-33
Bridport, Black Death at, 116,
plague at in 1626, 524
Brimington, plague, 498
Bristol, leper-house, 98,
Black Death, 116, 121, 123,
effects of ditto on trade at, 182 _note_,
plague in 1535, 300,
in 1575, 340,
in 1645, 557
Bucklersbury, drug-shops in, 484
Bugden, deaths from sweat at, 261
Bullein, on plague of 1563, 306,
on London graveyards, 334,
on the French pox, 422
Burdwan, number of lepers in, 107
=Burial=, interdict of, 11;
neglect of, 12, 13 _note_,
in Chinese famines, 154,
in Islam, 163.
Christian burial in Egypt, 159.
Chinese mode of, 161.
In Arabia, 165,
in Kumaon 167,
neglect of in Yun-nan, 168,
at Merdje, 171;
by the friars, 332,
in St Paul’s churchyard, 334,
without coffins, 335,
Latimer on intramural, 336,
relation to plague, 336,
in the great London plagues, 126, 337, 482, 515, 668-9,
hours of in plague-time 303, 482
Burton Lazars, 89
Bury St Edmunds, burials at in 1257, 44,
hospitals, 92, 96,
plague in 1578, 347
Butts, Dr, in the sweat of 1528, 254
Caffa, Black Death at siege of, 144, 147
Caius, Dr, on the sweat of 1551, 259, 261, 263,
edits Galen, 439
Calais, sweat at 248, 253, 255,
plague in 1509, 288,
“new sickness” in 1558, 403,
plague brought to, 546
=Calendar=, the English and the Continental, 256 _note_
=Calenture=, 387, 610
Cambridge, epidemic of “frenzy” at, 62,
effects of Black Death, 196,
prophecy of pestilence, 229,
sweat of 1517, 248,
of 1528, 252,
of 1551, 262,
plague, 285, 289, 338, 340, 347, 497, 527, 682,
gaol fever, 375,
agues, 505
Canterbury, death of monks in 870, 9,
leper-hospitals, 87, 91,
style of living in 14th cent., 50,
Black Death at, 132,
causes of death of monks, 226,
plague in 1544, 303,
in 1564, 309,
in 1593, 357,
in 1603-4, 498,
in 1614-15, 501,
in 1625, 524,
in 1636, 528,
in 1665, 681,
in 1666, 688
Cape de Verde islands (St Jago), infection taken from, 586, 589
Carlisle, plague, 359, 562
Carshalton, mortality in 1626, 520
Cartier, Jacques, scurvy in his expedition, 581
Castle Combe, records of its manor court, 135, 136, 139,
priests poaching, 189,
village industries, 198,
nuisances removed, 198 _note_, 328
Catharine of Arragon, arrives in England in plague-time, 288,
anxious for Henry VIII. on account of plague in 1518, 290
=Cats= in plague-time, 316
Cavendish, Thomas, sickness in his voyages, 592-3
=Cemeteries=, see BURIAL
Champneys, Sir John, mayor, procures plague-bill in 1535, 298
=Chancery=, inquisition on a leper, 105,
business of after Black Death, 188
Charles VIII., his invasion of Italy, 430, 433, 435,
his sickness at Asti, 436-7
=Charnel-house= of St Paul’s, 334, 659
Charterhouse, inscription of burials in Black Death, 127,
death of monks in 1528, 252
Chatham, leper-hospital, 95,
plague in 1665, 681
Chauliac, Guy de, symptoms of _pestis secunda_, 203,
on Gaddesden’s _Rosa Anglica_, 446
Chester, the sweat, 245, 249,
plague, 304, 339, 498, 500, 501, 564,
smallpox, 465 _note_,
fever in villages near, 567
Chesterfield, plague, 349, 500
Chesterton depopulated, 199 _note_
China, Black Death said to have come from, 143, 145-147,
overland trade to Europe, 148-9,
no record of Black Death in, 149;
great series of floods, famines, &c., 150-152,
followed by a period of plagues, 153;
unburied dead after famines and floods, 154,
Odoric’s valley of corpses, 155,
careful mode of burial in, 161.
Plague in modern times, 168-9
=Churchyards=, see BURIAL
Clapham, Henoch, 490
=Clarendon, Council of=, 374
Clot, Dr, Bey, on plague in Egypt, 160
Clowes, William, on the pox in London, 423-5,
on quacks, 426,
his translation of _variola_, 459
Clun, plague, 545
Clyn, Friar, the Black Death in Ireland, 115, 119,
symptoms of ditto, 121
Cogan, Th., on prophesied return of the sweat, 264,
on fever at Oxford Assizes, 378,
on lasks, 412
Colchester, wills proved after Black Death, 186,
plague, 348, 498, 525,
plague in 1665-6, 688,
directions to bearers and watchers at, 688 _note_
Comines, Philip de, commons of England untouched by Wars of Roses, 38,
224, 387,
on Charles VIII.’s sickness, 435
Congleton, plague, 498, 545
Constantinus Africanus applies “variola” to smallpox, 453
Cork, leper-hospitals, 100,
alleged sweating sickness, 252,
plague, 371, 502
Cornard Parva, Black Death in, 137
Coventry, leper-hospital at, 92,
growth of after the Black Death, 194, 195,
plague, 501, 526 _note_
Crail, plague, 370
Cranborne, plague, 499
Cranbrooke, plague, 348
Crimea, outbreak of Black Death in, 142, 144
Cromwell, O., his death from fever, 574,
colonizes Jamaica, 634, 639
Cromwell, T., orders bill of mortality, 297-8
=Cross, the blue=, or =red=, 306, 313, 314, 514
Croxton, abbey, Black Death in, 131,
ditto in the manor, 138
Croydon, plague, 492, 520, 679
Croyland abbey, sudden mortality in, 9,
the sweat in, 239, 266
Cumanus, Marcellus, the French pox at siege of Novara, 431
Cumberland, plague in 1420, 221,
state of in the Civil Wars, 562
Dalry, “grantgore” at, 418
=Danes=, camp sickness among, 13
Darlington, plague, 359, 557
Dartmouth, plague, 351, 524
Davison, F., ‘Poetical Rapsodie’, 463
Deal, plague in 1666, 688
Defoe, sources of his _Journal of the Plague-Year_, 649,
illustrations of the Great Plague from, 657 _et seq._
Dekker, T., on London at accession of James I., 471, 480,
on plague of 1603, 481-4,
theatres closed in plague-time, 494
Deptford, plague in 1666, 680, 687
Derby, plague at, 309, 349, 357, 559,
plague in 1665, 682
Derry, the, plague at in 1566-7, 372
=Dogs= in plague-time, 314, 316, 515;
alleged death of in the Leeds plague, 558,
at Batavia from licking pestilent blood, 608
=Domesday Survey=, size of towns in, 23,
state of agriculture inferred from, 22
Doncaster, plague in 1536, 301
Donne, Rev. Dr, his dread of smallpox, 463,
on flight of citizens in 1625, 519
Doughty, C., on burials in Arabia, 165
Drake, Sir Bernard, at the Exeter Black Assizes, 384, 385
Drake, Sir Francis, sickness in his voyage round the world, 585,
great epidemic in his fleet in 1585-6, 585-589,
his death from flux, 591
Drogheda, monastery of, Black Death in, 119, 132
Dublin, leper-hospitals, 100,
Black Death in, 119, 131, 132,
plague in 1520, 371,
in 1575, 372,
in 1650, 566
Dumfries, plague, 235, 369
Dunbar, W., “spanyie pockis”, 418
Dundee, plague, 234, 368, 503
Duns, plague, 369
Durham, a medieval siege of, 28,
leper-hospital near, 94, 113,
plague, 350, 359, 499, 501, 681,
famine, 358
Dysart, plague, 366, 368
=Dysentery=, or flux, summary of epidemics, 411-13,
in 1624, 505,
in voyages, 589, 591, 600, 602, 603,
in Virginia, 611,
in slave-ships, 628,
among black troops, 629,
in St Domingo and Jamaica, 635-640
East Indies, Portuguese voyages to, 584,
English voyages to, 599-609
=East India Company=, provides against scurvy, 602-3
Edenhall, plague, 360
Edinburgh, leper-hospital, 99,
_pestilentia volatilis_, 234,
plague, 235, 303, 362, 365-6, 367, 368, 369, 370, 502, 503, 504, 563,
French pox, 417,
mortality of children in 1600, 370 _note_
Edward the Confessor and the leper, 81
Edward III., his activity after the Black Death, 178-9
Edward IV., his illness from “pockys” in 1463, 455
Edward VI., on the sweat of 1551, 260
Egypt, theory of plague in, 156, 659,
sanitary wisdom of ancient, 158,
embalming in, 159, 160-1,
compared with China, 161-2
Elizabeth, Queen, at Windsor in the plague of 1563, 317,
rebukes the uncleanly state of Ipswich, 327,
attempts to stamp out plague in London, 330-331,
her proclamation in 1580 on growth of London, 346,
her trains at Norwich in 1578 carry plague, 348,
her hardness to the sick seamen in the Armada-year, 350,
her precaution against smallpox in 1591, 461
Elizabeth of York, in 1502, pays for cure of John Pertriche, 419
Elphege, St, stops pestilence in 1011, 13
Ely, bishop of, alienates Stourbridge leper-hospital, 93
Ely monastery, Black Death in, 132
Elyot, Sir Thomas, lay writer on medicine, 402,
mentions smallpox, 457
=Emigrants=, mortality of English to Virginia, 610,
to New England &c., 612-13,
to Barbados, 619,
of French to St Christopher, 618,
to Guadeloupe, 621
Ensham, manor of, after Black Death, 139, 141
Erasmus, still ill from “sweat” in 1511, 245, 399,
ref. to influenza (?) in 1518, 249,
ref. to plague in letters, 288-9,
on English houses, 328,
on the French pox, 420-21
=Ergotism=, causes and signs of, 53-55,
two forms, 55,
cases of in England, 57,
possible instances of, 59-63,
reasons of English immunity from, 64, 68
Essex, Lord General, typhus in his army, 548-9,
occupies Tiverton, 552-3
Ethredge, Dr G., the sweat of 1551 at Oxford, 260, 380,
the gaol-fever at Oxford, 381
Eton, plague, 348, 520,
boys compelled to smoke in plague-time, 674
Evesham, monastery, fugitives at after wasting of Yorkshire, 27 _note_,
drives out its leprous prior, 101
Evesham, town, plague and bad scavenging, 501
Exeter, the scavengers of, 327,
plague, 288,
famine and plague, 300,
plague, 498, 523,
Black Assizes, 383-6
Eyam, plague at in 1665-6, 682-7
Eydon, plague, 498
Fabyan, on the first sweat, 239,
on plague in London, 1478-9, 234,
and 1500, 287,
uses the name “pockys”, 420
=Famines=, chronology of, to 1322, 15,
in 1370, 215,
about 1383, 219,
in 1391, 220,
in 1438-9, 223, 228, 235,
in 1528, 251, 277,
in 1535, 300,
in 1551, 278,
in 1557, 401,
in 1596-7, 358
=Fever=, epidemics of from famine, 15-17 (table),
in 1086-7, 29,
in 1196, 36,
in 1258, 44-45,
in 1315, 48,
in 1438-9, 223, 228, 234-5,
in 1596-7 358, 411;
epidemics of in war, 547, 552;
spotted, 504, 540, 542, 543, 551;
“strange,” see INFLUENZA,
Yellow, see YELLOW FEVER,
in gaols, see GAOL-FEVER;
in ships, 350, 538
Finchley, dysentery at, 1596-7, 411
Findhorn, plague, 370
Finsbury, laystalls at, 334
Fish, Simon, ‘Supplication of Beggars’, 421
=Fleet Ditch=, unwholesome, 352
Forrestier, Dr Thomas, his MS. on the sweat of 1485, 238,
fixes time and place of first outbreak, 238,
his account of the symptoms and treatment, 241,
on extent of first sweat, 243,
on causes of ditto, 266-7
=Foul Death=, name used by Scots for plague in 1349, 78,
and in 1379, 218
Fracastori, on smallpox, 467,
on typhus, 585
Francis, St, of Assisi, and the lepers, 85
Freind, Dr J., on a strange chorea, 61,
on diffusion of smallpox, 445,
on Gaddesden, 448
=Friars=, their original mission, 41,
their care of lepers, 85, 107,
side with the rich after the Black Death, 188,
bury rather than christen, 332
Froude, Mr, on plague at the Derry, 372 _note_,
on “yellow fever” in Drake’s fleet, 589 _note_
“FRUIT OF TIMES,” records “pokkes” for 1366, 453
Fryer, Dr John, 307
Gaddesden, John of, fails to describe fever of, 1315 51,
on leprosy, 76,
on smallpox, 446-8,
on morbilli and “mesles”, 449-51
Gale, Thomas, on “the morbus”, 422
Galway, “sweating sickness” at, 400 _note_
=Gaols=, first built, 374
=Gaol Fever=, in Newgate, 374, 395 _note_,
at Cambridge, 375,
at Oxford, 376-382,
at Exeter, 383-386,
referred to in Act, 388,
in the Queen’s Bench, Southwark, 395, 539,
Bacon on, 332
=Garter, Order of the=, 178
Gascoigne T., cases of syphilis, 74,
Henry IV.’s “leprosy”, 77 _note_,
“legists” after Black Death, 189
Gaubil, abbé, on the Chinese annals, 154
Geynes, Dr, 307
Gibbon, on the Justinian plague, 2,
on a remark by Procopius, 675 _note_
Gibbons, Orlando, 465, 524
Gilbertus Anglicus, on leprosy, 70-72,
morphaea, 76,
diet to keep off leprosy, 113,
on smallpox, 446, 447
Glasgow, leper-house, 99,
keeps out plague, 366, 369,
plague, 370, 563,
syphilis, 418
Gloucester, Black Death, 116, 117,
plague in 1580, 348,
in 1638, 545,
a quack at, 426,
relief of siege, 549
Goddard, Dr, his excuse for leaving London in the plague, 667
Gordonio, Bernard, on leprosy, 70,
case at Montpellier, 72,
on morphaea, 76,
on smallpox, 447
=Grandgore=, in Scotland, 417-18,
derivation of, 418
Grantham, plague near, 500,
sickness at, 502
Graunt, John, syphilis in London, 428,
London mortality, 532
Gravesend, plague, 287, 293, 531
Greaves, Sir E., fever at Oxford, 547, 551
Greenwich, sweat at, 244, 251,
plague at, 293,
plague in 1666, 687
Gregory, W. ref. to “pokkes,” 454
Gruner, on the sweat, 258,
collections on medieval smallpox, 446 _note_
Grünbeck, Jos. on syphilis, 432
Guignes, Des, on origin of Black Death, 143, 152
Guinea, voyages to in 16th cent., 581-3,
slave trade from, 583, 625-9
Guy, Dr W., on “parish infection”, 396 _note_
Hackney, leper-hospital, 97, 98 _note_,
plague in 1535, 301,
in 1603, 492,
in 1625, 511
Haddington, _pestilentia volatilis_, 234,
plague during siege, 303
Hall, his Chronicle on the sweat of 1517, 250,
on the mercenaries of Henry VII., 274,
on the Cambridge Black Assizes, 375
Hampshire, parish in, statistics of, 411, 541
Harrison, W. English houses, 330 _note_,
fever of 1557-8, 401
Hartlepool, plague, 349
Harwich, plague at in 1665-6
Havre de Grace (or “Newhaven”), plague during siege, 307
Hawkins, Sir John, in the slave trade, 583
Hawkins, Sir Richard, on health of Cape de Verde islands, 589 _note_,
scurvy in his voyage of 1593, 594-6
Hecker, antecedents of Black Death, 143-4,
on fecundity after Black Death, 200,
sweating sickness, 240, 244 _note_, 258, 263, 265, 271 _note_, 277
_note_
Hendon, sends help in 1625 plague, 518
Henry I., taxation under, 31
Henry II., charities of, 33-34
Henry III., famine under, 43
Henry IV., “leprosy” of, 77
Henry V., vigorous sanitation under, 325
Henry VII., his expedition of 1485, 237, 240, 265, 270, 275,
in the sweat of 1508, 244,
reception of Catharine of Arragon, 288,
sanitation under, 325-6
Henry VIII., in the sweat of 1517, 247-8,
in plague of 1517-18, 290,
in sweat of 1528, 250-53,
in plague of 1535, 297, 300,
measures to check plague, 291, 312, 313-14,
repression of vagrancy &c., 390,
his illness in 1514, 456
Henry of Huntingdon, poem by, 18
Hensler, his history of syphilis, 416 _note_
Hensley, plague, 309
Hereford, plague, 348
Hereford, bishop of, case of morphaea, 76
Herefordshire, plague, 500
Hertford, sweat at, 254,
law courts at, 331,
plague, 339, 347, 356
Hertfordshire, after the Black Death, 191,
plague in, 493
Hirsch, Dr August, on endemics of syphilis, 438
Hispaniola, great pox and smallpox, 430, 469,
flux among English troops, 635-6
Hoddesdon, plague, 347
Hodges, Dr, his _Loimologia_, 648, 654, 675
Holinshed, erroneous entry of “small pocks”, 454
Holland, Abraham, poem on plague of 1625, 512
Holme Pierrepont, plague, 499
Höniger, effects of Black Death, 141 _note_
Howard, John, Oxford gaol, 377,
gaol-fever, 382 _note_
Hugh, St, bp. of Lincoln, his care for burials, 13 _note_,
for lepers, 84
Hull, plague at, in 1472-8, 231,
in 1576, 340,
in 1635-38, 527
Hunstanton, Black Death, 137
Hütten, Ulrich von, cure of syphilis, 416
Ibn Batuta, his report that Black Death came from China, 146
Ibn-ul-Khatib, origin of Black Death, 146
Ilchester, decayed, 195, 221
Ilford, leper-hospital, 95
Inchcolm, quarantine island, 363, 369
Inchkeith, quarantine for plague, 235, 360,
for syphilis, 417
=Influenza=, meaning of, 397,
early epidemics, 398,
in 1510, 399,
in 1540, 400,
in 1557-8, 401-5,
in 1580, 406,
in 1657-9, 568-574,
many other epidemics might be so called, 408-9, 411, 536, 541, 543-4,
567, 577
=Interdict of burial= &c., 11
Ipswich, scavengers of, 327,
plague at, in 1603, 498,
in 1665-6, 688
Ireland, plague in A.D. 664, 4-5,
condition in 12th cent., 21,
flux among troops, 33,
leper-houses, 100,
Black Death, 115, 118-19, 132,
succeeding plagues, 236,
alleged sweating sickness, 252 _note_, 400 _note_,
influenza, 398 _note_,
plague in Tudor period, 371-3,
in Cromwellian war, 365
Isle of Wight, depopulation of, 387,
influenza or sweat in 1558, 403
Jamaica, English occupation of, 636-642
James I., authority for “a pockie priest”, 415,
his accession followed by a great plague, 480,
his fatal illness, 512
Jarrow, plague in monastery of, 7
Jersey, plague in, 308
Jessopp, Augustus, on mortalities in the Black Death, 132, 134, 137,
on lawlessness after do., 140,
on panic from do., 181 _note_
John of Bridlington, 14th cent. pestilences, 204, 207
John of Burgoyne, 14th cent. writer on plague, 208
Jones, Dr John, on plague in London in 1563, 306,
on effects of the poor-rate, 394,
on influenza of 1558, 403,
his use of “ague”, 410
=Justinian, plague in reign of=, 2,
theory of it, 156, 159, 161
Kattiwar, plague in, 165, 169
Kellwaye, Simon, on the plague of 1593, 355,
on smallpox and measles, 461
Kendal, plague in 1598, 359
Kensington, plague in 1603, 492,
in 1625, 520
Kheybar, burials in, 165
Kilkenny, Black Death, 115, 119, 121, 132,
plague in 1649, 565
Kirkcaldy, plague in 1574, 366
Kirkoswald, plague in 1598, 360
Kremer, A. von, Mohammedan plagues, 163
Kumaon, plague in, 166
Kutch, plague in, 169
=Labourers, Statute of=, 66, 181-2
Lamesley, plague in 1610, 501
Lancashire, ergotism? in 1702, 59,
wills after Black Death, 138,
fever in 1651, 567
Lancaster, Sir James, scurvy in his ships, 599,
treats scurvy by lime juice, 601
Langland, see ‘Piers the Ploughman’
=Lask=, old name of flux, 400, 412
Latimer, on intramural burial, 336,
on stews closed, 420
=Law=, business of increased after Black Death, 188-9
=Lazar=, derivation of, 79 _note_
Lazarus, St, 79, 94
=Lazarus, St, Knights of the Order of=, 89
Leake, plague in 1587-8, 349
Leeds, fever in 1644, 558,
plague in 1645, 558
Leicester, Black Death, 124
_pestis secunda_, 203,
plague in 1563-4, 309,
in 1593, 357,
in 1607-11, 125, 501,
in 1626, 526
Leicestershire, strange epidemic in 1340, 59,
plague, 526
Leith, plague, 235 _note_, 361, 363, 366, 369, 503
Leominster, plague or fever in 1578, 349,
in 1597, 358 _note_
=Leper-houses=, in England, 86-99,
their mixed inmates, 93,
vogue soon past, 91-95,
the later non-monastic, 97,
in Scotland, 99,
in Ireland, 100
=Leprosy=, generic meaning of in medieval books, 70-79,
Biblical associations of, 79-81,
religious view of, 81-86,
prejudice against, 100-105,
laws against, 103-6,
estimated amount of, 107,
a disease akin to pellagra, 108, 110,
Gilbert White on causes of, 110,
dietetic cause of in, Hutchinson on cause of, 111 _note_,
constitutional, 112,
diet for in Scotland, 113
Lescarbot, on scurvy, 597-8
=Leviticus=, use of “leprosy” in, 80
Lichfield, plague, 309, 357, 559
Lieu-chow, bubonic disease, 169
Linacre, 286, 439
Lincoln, leper-hospital at, 92,
decay of, 195,
plague at, 357
Lindsey, statute of labourers ineffective in, 182
Linlithgow, lepers at, 99,
French pox at, 418
Lithgow, W., on plague in Tyneside, 557
=Lock, the, hospital=, 97, 98 _note_
Lodge, Dr T., on rats and moles in plague-time, 173,
on plague in 1603, 485,
on compulsory removal of the sick, 488