this connexion, remarks that Fabyan and all other chroniclers (he had
overlooked Arnold) omit to mention pestilence, while they mention much
less important things; but he is hardly warranted in his inference that
plagues were so common-place as to be left unrecorded. A low level of
plague would not be noticed, but a great epidemic certainly would.
[447] Johannes Amundesham (of St Albans), _Annales_. Rolls ed. II. 127.
[448] _Rot. Parl._ V. 31 b.
[449] This is the only plague in the first half of the fifteenth century
that Anthony Wood records; but he says, under the year 1500, that “no less
than about thirty pests, both great and small, happened in this last
century”--i.e. in the University of Oxford. I shall speak of their general
effects in another chapter.
[450] _Paston Letters._ Ed. Gairdner, 1872, I. 302-3.
[451] _Three Fifteenth Century Chronicles._ Ed. Gairdner, for the Camden
Society, 1880, from the Lambeth MSS., p. 163.
[452] Sir J. Paston to John Paston, 30 April, 1465. Another letter, of
18th August, has: “For the pestilence is so fervent in Norwych, that they
dare no longer abyde there, so God help!” (_Paston Letters_, ed. Gairdner,
II. 226), which probably refers to 1465 also. It is not mentioned by
Blomefield.
[453] _Chronicle of Croyland_, in Gale, I. 541.
[454] Communicated to me by the Rev. W. Hunt, from a new volume of the
Camden Society, edited by A. F. Leach, _Visitations and Memorials of
Southwell Minster_, p. 11.
[455] Tickell, _History of Kingston upon Hull_, 1798.
[456] _Warkworth’s Chronicle._ Camden Society, p. 23 (under the year 13
Ed. IV.).
[457] _Chronicle of the Greyfriars._ Camden Society, No. 53, 1852, p. 22.
[458] Robert Fabyan’s _Chronicle of England_, (editions in 1516 and 1533,
and by Ellis, 1808), _sub anno_.
[459] _Grafton’s Chronicle_, p. 742.
[460] Brand’s _History of Newcastle_.
[461] _Visitations and Memorials_, p. 41.
[462] Blomefield.
[463] Paston, 6 Nov. 1479.
[464] Fordoun, _Scotichronicon_, ed. Hearne, Oxon. 1722, p. 1039.
[465] _Scotichronicon_, p. 1056: “eadem ... sicut prius jubileo ... in
toto regno Scotiae mirabiliter saeviebat.”
[466] _Exchequer Rolls of Scotland._ Introduction to vol. II. p. xlviii.
[467] _Scotichronicon_, p. 1141.
[468] _Exchequer Rolls of Scotland_, III. 650.
[469] _Ibid._ III. 310.
[470] _Ibid._ III. 553.
[471] _Ibid._ III. 579.
[472] _Scotichronicon_, p. 1287 and p. 1298.
[473] Cited by R. Chambers (_Domestic Annals of Scotland_, I. 57) from the
Chronicle as printed by Thomas Thomson.
[474] _Scotichronicon_, p. 1565. Hearne’s edition.
[475] Ferrerius, f. 393, cited in _Excheq. Rolls of Scot._ VIII. p. lx.
[476] _Excheq. Rolls of Scot._ VIII. 364. Accounts of William, bishop of
Orkney, from 5 Aug. 1475 to 3 Aug. 1476: “et decem martis liberatis, de
tempore pestis, egrotantibus in Incheskeith.” Another item (£30. 13_s._
4_d._) is for forty-six marts destroyed “propter longam moram” in the
lairs at Leith, “anno pestis, videlicet anno ultimo.”
[477] But MS. annals are cited for the date 1361, in _The ancient and
present State of the County and City of Cork_. By Charles Smith, M.D. 2
vols. Dublin, 1774. 2nd ed. II. p. 23.
[478] Thady Dowling [Elizabethan] “1370. Pestilentia magna in Hibernia,
adeo quod propter immensitatem mortalitatis vocabatur ab antiquis tertia,”
p. 24.
[479] Dowling, p. 27.
[480] _Angl. Hist._ Basil. 1555, p. 567.
[481] In Gale, _Script. Angl._ I. 573.
[482] British Museum Addit. MS., No. 27,582.
[483] _Materials illustrative of the Reign of Henry VII._ Rolls series,
No. 60, s. d.
[484] _Tractatus contra pestilentiam thenasmonem et dissinteriam_ [Rouen,
1490]:--“Causae pestilentiae ut alias scripsimus: in quodam opusculo quod
composuimus de quadam rabiosa febre pestilentiali, quae in duodecim horis
patientes cum calore et sudore continuo interficiebat. Cujus febris
adventus incepit sua vexilla extendere in Anglia in civitate Londoniarum
decima nova die mensis Septembris 1485, in qua die [planetary signs]
posuerunt. Ex qua febre pestilentiali plus quam quindecim millia hominum
ab hoc seculo morte repentina, tanquam ex pugnitione divina, recesserunt,
multique sine mora per vicos deambulantes absque confessione obierunt.”
[485] MSS. Cotton. Vitellius A. XVI. _A Chronicle of England from 1st
Henry III. to 1st Hen. VIII._
[486] The Croyland Chronicle (in Gale’s _Script. Angl._ I. 570 and 576)
gives the 14th November in one place and the 14th October in another. But
it is clear that the latter is the correct date, the letter from the prior
of Croyland to Henry VII., announcing the death of the abbot and praying
for a _congé d’élire_, being dated the 14th of October. (_Materials
illustrative of the Reign of Henry VII._ vol. I. s.d. 21 Oct. 1485, Rolls
series, No. 60.)
[487] Anthony Wood, I. 462.
[488] _The Maire of Bristowe is Kalendar_ (by Robert Ricart, town-clerk of
Bristol, 18 Ed. IV.). Camden Society, 1872, p. 46.
[489] The Bristol calendar says: “This yere Hary, Erle of Richmond landed
at Milford Haven.... And sone after there was a sodeyn sikenes in all
places of Englond called the sweting syknes, whereof moche people dyed.”
[490] The date of 1506 in Hecker is erroneous, having been taken from the
very loose entry in Hall’s chronicle (copied by Grafton), which might
equally well belong to the year 1507. Bernard André’s date of 1508 is
unmistakeable; his annals go on continuously until the death of Henry VII.
in April following.
[491] Bernard André’s _Works_. Rolls series, No. 10, pp. 126-8.
[492] Hemingway’s _History of Chester_, I. 142.
[493] Anthony Wood’s _History and Antiquities of the Univ. of Oxford_. I.
665.
[494] Calendared for the Rolls series by Brewer for the greater part of
the reign of Henry VIII. (1509-1530), and after him by Gairdner, at
present as far as 1538. The facts given in the next few pages may be taken
as coming from the Calendar of State Papers, under their respective dates,
unless it is otherwise stated in the notes.
[495] This appears to have been a common direction. In a letter of 12
August, 1517, dated from the Fleet Prison by Thomas Leeke to his brother
sir John Leeke (_Hist. MSS. Commission Reports_, X. pt. 4, p. 447), the
writer says he has been sore vexed with the sweat and in danger of life:
“If any of you have it, pray you to keep well and close about your breasts
and your heart for twenty-four hours and then with God’s grace there is no
danger in it: there has been a marvellous great death for so short a
time.”
[496] In the letter of 12 August from the Fleet Prison, already quoted
(_Hist. MSS. Reports_, _l. c._), it is stated that fifteen are dead in the
Cardinal’s house, including Mr Cowper, the steward, Talboys, lord of Kyme,
young Wastness, and one Grenell. In my lord of Durham’s house, Dr Port and
Dr Fysche are dead, with divers others. Of the Court, my lord Clinton, Mr
Morgan, steward to the Queen, and one Mat. Jones, of the King’s wardrobe,
were buried at Richmond on Friday last, and divers more of the Court are
dead.
[497] _The Pitiful Life of King Edward the Fifth_: “Considering there is,
as physicians say, and as we also find, double the peril in the relapse
that was in the first sickness,” p. 230. Camelot edition.
[498] Anthony Wood, _Hist. and Antiq._, _sub anno_ 1517.
[499] Hemingway’s _History of Chester_, I. 142.
[500] The letter bears the date of 8 June, which would make the first of
the sweat the same as in Tuke’s letter; but Brewer says the date should be
the 18th June.
[501] Brewer (_Cal. State Papers_) reads the letter, “On Tuesday one of
the ladies of the chamber, Mlle de Boulan, was infected with the sweat.”
But P. Friedmann (_Anne Boleyn_, Lond. 1884, I. 72) says the correct
reading is a fille-de-chambre of Mlle de Boulan; and it is known that Anne
Boleyn did not take the sweat until some days after.
[502] In the _History of Cork_ by C. Smith, M.D. (2nd ed., 1774) there is
an entry under 1528: “a malignant disorder called the sweating sickness in
Cork,” with a reference to “MS. annals.” It has been generally supposed
that the sweat did not enter Ireland or Scotland in any of its five
outbreaks.
[503] The German writers have assumed that the sweat was prevalent abroad
really in the same summer or autumn as in England, explaining the
discrepant dates by the difference in the English calendar. But it was
only the months of January and February, and March to the 24th, that were
counted in the old year in England; the months of June, July, August, etc.
in which the sweat occurred, are the same in the English and foreign
calendar-years. In the English chronology of the sweat, those months
belong quite clearly to the year 1528; and, in the German, Swiss, and
Netherlands chronology of the sweat, just as clearly to the year 1529. The
sweat on the Continent was a year later than in England.
[504] Gruner’s _Scriptores de sudore Anglico superstites_ was reprinted by
Häser, with additional citations and notes, in 1847. Hecker (_Der
Englische Schweiss_, 1834) refers to the work by Gruner, _Itinerarium
sudoris Anglici ex actis designatum_, Jena, 1805, which I have been unable
to see. The account of the German invasion in the text is accordingly at
second-hand.
[505] _A boke or counseill against the Sweate_, London, 1552. _De Ephemera
Britannica_, London, 1555.
[506] “This yere the swetinge sycknes raignyd in England, and began first
in this towne of Shrowsbery the xxii of Marche, and ran through the
realme, and began in London the ixth of July.” Quoted from MS. Chronicle,
in Owen and Blakeway’s _History of Shrewsbury_, p. 345.
[507] _Op. cit._ 1552, fol. 10. In the Latin work the date at “Salopia” is
“17 Kal. May.”
[508] Nichols, _Leicestershire_, III. 891.
[509] Edrichus, _In libros aliquot Pauli Æginetae_, &c. London, 1588 (not
paged).
[510] “Diary of Edward VI.” in Burnet’s _Hist. of Reformation_. Stow
(_Annales_) says it began on the 9th July and was most vehement on the
12th.
[511] _Calendar of State Papers._ Domestic (under the date).
[512] _Machyn’s Diary._ Camden Society, No. 42, edited by J. Gough
Nichols, p. 7. Machyn was an undertaker, and records deaths and funerals.
[513] Machyn.
[514] _Ibid._ p. 8.
[515] Letter from London, in Harl. MS. No. 353, f. 107, cited by Nichols
in notes to Machyn.
[516] Caius, _Boke or Counseill_, 1552, ff. 10-11.
[517] The Venetian ambassador (_Cal. S. P._ Venetian, v. 541) says that
the sweat was at an end in London in twenty days. He says, also, that
children under ten years were not subject “questo influsso.” The
excitement caused by the London epidemic is shown in an entry of money in
the corporation records of Canterbury: “1551. To one of the King’s
servants that brought word how many were dede in the swett.” (_Hist. MSS.
Commiss._ IX. 154 b.)
[518] Edward VI. to Fitzpatrick.
[519] Drake’s _Eboracum_, p. 128.
[520] Nichols, notes to Machyn, giving a reference to _Gent. Magaz._ 1825,
II. 206.
[521] Fuller (ed. Nichols, p. 183) says, under 1551: “Many in Cambridge
died of this sweating sickness, patients mending or ending in twenty-four
hours.” The death of the two young noblemen was made an occasion for
copies of verses by members of the University.
[522] Strype, _Memorials_, III. chap. 7 (cited in notes to Machyn).
[523] Lysons, _Magna Britannia_, VI. 539.
[524] _Calendar of State Papers._ Venetian, V. 541, under the date of 18
Aug. 1554.
[525] Thomas Cogan, ‘The Haven of Health: chiefly made for the comfort of
students, and consequently for all those that have a care of their health,
amplified uppon fiue wordes of Hippocrates, written Epid. 6. Labour,
Meate, Drinke, Sleepe, Venus.... Hereunto is added a Preseruation from the
Pestilence: with a short Censure of the late sicknesse at Oxford.’ London,
1589. New ed. 1596, p. 272.
[526] There is a single reference to a sweat on the Continent in 1551,
which may really have been one of those epidemics of typhus (or
influenza), with a sweating character, that were observed in 1557-8 and
1580. Brassavolus, writing _de morbo Gallico_, and illustrating the fact
that epidemics were sometimes generated by drought (though mostly by
humidity), says that the sweat in England, in former years, came with
drought, and that at the time of his writing, the 15th September, 1551,
that disease was vexing Flanders,--the season being extremely dry,--and
had attacked many thousands. This was first noticed by Häser, _Op. cit._
III. (1882), p. 332. The reference to Brassavolus is Luisini’s _Script. de
lue venerea_. Lugd. Bat. 1728, f. p. 671.
[527] _Increase and Decrease of Diseases._ London, 1801, p. 70.
[528] See the references in Gruner, pp. 444, 448.
[529] “The Autonomous Life of the Specific Infections,” in _Brit. Med.
Journ._, 4 August, 1883; “The Origin of Yellow Fever,” in _North American
Review_, Sept. 1884; _Illustrations of Unconscious Memory in Disease_,
London, 1885, Chapter XIII. “Vicarious Infection.”
[530] Polydore Virgil, p. 553. Philip de Comines says “three large ships
and a considerable body of land forces.” (Chroniques du Roy Louis XI. Eng.
transl. II. 674.)
[531] Mezeray, II. 762. He adds: “the Bretons boast of having also lent
aid to this prince.” His first expedition was purely with Bretons, but the
second was composed mostly if not altogether of Normans.
[532] This point, which is essential to the theory, was originally stated
in an article on “Epidemics” in the _Quarterly Review_, Jan. 1887, and
there claimed as original. The writer on “Sweating Sickness” in the
_Encycl. Brit._ has adopted it as a common-place; it is obvious enough
when pointed out, but Hecker had not done so.
[533] The above account is summarised from the chapter in Hirsch, _Geog.
and Histor. Path._ Eng. transl. I. 88.
[534] Darwin, _Naturalist’s Voyage round the World_, pp. 435-6.
[535] Bernard André’s _Annales Henrici VII._ Rolls series, No. 10, p. 120.
Under a date in January, 1508, he writes: “Quo quidem die nuncius ab urbe
incredibilia dictu, hoc est de primis verni fructibus temporis floridoque
frumento visis, referebat.” Both Fabyan and the anonymous author of MS.
Cotton, Vitellius, A. XVI. (_Chronicle of England from 1 Hen. III. to 1
Hen. VIII._) give the winter of 1506-7 as “a wonderful [easy] and soft
winter without storms or frost,” but fail to remark on the weather of
1507-8.
[536] Wriothesley’s Chronicle.
[537] Fabyan, Stow.
[538] Stow’s Annals. Hecker, in error, makes out this exceptional season
to have been the one immediately preceding the sweat in the summer of
1528.
[539] _Cal. State Papers_, under the date.
[540] Summary in Hirsch, _l. c._
[541] Continuator of Fabyan.
[542] Wriothesley, II. 139.
[543] Drake’s _Eboracum_, (from the town council records).
[544] _Hist. and Antiq. Univ. Oxford_, I. 651.
[545] At Cambridge, in October, 1578, two deaths from plague in Queens’
College “moved many to depart.” _Cal. Cecil MSS._ II. under date 13
October.
[546] Anthony Wood, under the respective years.
[547] With reference to a pestilence at Oxford in 1448, Wood says:
“occasioned, as ’twas thought, by the overflowing of waters, and the want
of a quick passage for them from the ground. Also by the lying of many
scholars in one room or dormitory in almost every Hall, which occasioned
nasty air and smells, and consequently diseases.” _Op. cit._ I. 596.
[548] _Materials Illustrative of the Reign of Henry VII._ Rolls ser. 60,
II. p. 136.
[549] _Chronicle of England_, sub anno.
[550] _Hist. Angl._, p. 609 (Basil, 1546).
[551] Stow, _Annales_.
[552] In Rymer’s _Foedera_ all these vacancies of bishoprics are entered
under the year 1501, beginning with the see of Canterbury (Morton’s) on
9th January, 1501.
[553] _Plumpton Correspondence_, Camden Soc. No. 4, p. 138: Letter of ?
1499, R. Leventhorpe, of Leventhorpe Hall, Yorkshire, to Sir R. Plumpton:
“And sithe I hard say that a servant of yours was decesed of the sicknes,
which hath bene to your disease, I am right sorry therefore;” he advises
fasting, and trusts “ye sal be no more vexed with that sicknes.” In the
next letter (cviii) to Sir R. Plumpton from his son:--“Also, sir, I am
very sorry that the death seaseth not at Plompton.”
[554] _Hardwicke Papers_, London, 1778, I. 2 (from Harl. MSS.).
[555] Freeman, _Exeter_, in “English Towns” series, p. 99.
[556] _Annales Henrici VII._ Rolls series, p. 88.
[557] The information in the next few pages comes from the _Calendar of
State Papers, Henry VIII._, _Domestic_, unless otherwise referred to in
the notes.
[558] _Chronicle of the Grey Friars_, Camden Society, No. liii. 1852, p.
29. Stow puts the mortality under the year 1513.
[559] Letter from the Fleet prison, assigned to 1517. _Hist. MSS. Com._ X.
pt. 4. p. 447.
[560] Phillips, _History of Shrewsbury_, p. 17.
[561] _Privy Purse of Henry VIII._, p. 79.
[562] The reference on p. 290 (note 2) to “no parish in London free,”
under the date of 25 October, 1517, may imply that bills of mortality had
been kept in that epidemic, which was certainly an occasion when Henry
VIII. interposed in other ways to check the progress of plague.
[563] Lately purchased for the Egerton Collection. No. 2603, fol. 4.
[564] There was, however, an English translation of a small foreign essay
on the plague, of unacknowledged authorship, published at London in 1534
by Thomas Paynel, canon of Merton, a literary hack of the time.
[565] In the Record Office. State Papers, Henry VIII., No. 4633. It has
been erroneously calendared by Brewer as a bill of mortality of the
sweating sickness in 1528.
[566] _The Maire of Bristowe, his Kalendar._ Camden Society, 1872, p. 53.
[567] The plague is said to have been in Exeter in 1535 (Freeman,
_Exeter_, in English Towns Series).
[568] There is a copy in the Lambeth Library, No. 432.
[569] Owen and Blakeway, I. 311.
[570] Continuator of Fabyan.
[571] Cussan’s _History of Hertfordshire_.
[572] _A London Chronicle of Hen. VII. and Hen. VIII._ Camden Miscellany,
1859.
[573] _Acts of the Privy Council._ New series, 1542-1547, p. 136.
[574] Stow’s _Annales_.
[575] _Cal. Cecil MSS._, I. 15.
[576] Guildhall Records (Extracts by Furnivall in Appendix to Vicary’s
_Anatomy_. Early English Text Society).
[577] Brand’s _History of Newcastle_.
[578] Hasted’s _History of Canterbury_, p. 130 (from parish registers).
[579] Anthony Wood, _op. cit._ II. 74. At Banbury probably about the same
year. Beesley’s _History of Banbury_ (from Brasbridge).
[580] _Register of the Privy Council of Scotland_, I. 5.
[581] _Acts of the Privy Council._ New series, 1542-1547, 28 April, 1546,
p. 397.
[582] _Ibid._, Nov. 13, 1546, p. 552.
[583] Camden’s _Britannia_, ed. Gough, I. 262.
[584] _Ibid._ II. 265.
[585] _Calendar of State Papers._ Domestic series, Vol. X.
[586] _Notes and Queries_, 6th series, III. 477.
[587] Nichols, _Leicestershire_, III. 891 (295 deaths from plague &c.
1555-59.)
[588] Ormerod’s _Cheshire_, I. under 1558, with a reference to “Harl.
MSS.” The Harleian MSS. relating to Chester fill many pages of the
catalogue.
[589] _Calendar of State Papers_, Eliz. I. p. 122.
[590] _Three Fifteenth Century Chronicles._ Camden Society, ed. Gairdner,
1880, pp. 123, 144.
[591] Letter from London to the Earl of Shrewsbury, _Hist. MSS. Com._ VI.
455, a.
[592] Without date, but probably 1564. Watt conjectures 1556, but the book
contains references to the fever-epidemic of 1558, and, as above, to the
plague of 1563.
[593] Munk, _Roll of the College of Physicians_, I. pp. 32, 63.
[594] This and other information immediately following are from _Cal.
State Papers_. Foreign series.
[595] _Calendar of Cecil MSS._, under the dates.
[596] Glover’s _Hist. of Derbyshire_ (21 plague deaths in St Michael’s
register, May-Aug. 1563).
[597] Nichols; Kelly, in _Trans. Hist. Soc._ VI. 395.
[598] Harwood’s _Hist. of Lichfield_, p. 304.
[599] Hasted’s _Hist. of Canterbury_, p. 130 (parish registers).
[600] _Notes and Queries_, 2nd series, XI. 69.
[601] ‘How and whether a Christen man ought to flye the horrible plage of
the Pestilence. A sermon out of the Psalme “Qui habitat in adjutorio
altissimi,” by Andrewe Osiander. Translated out of Hye Almayn into
Englishe, 1537.’ Copy in the British Museum. The initials M.C. are taken
to be those of Miles Coverdale.
[602] Soranzo to the Senate of Venice. _Calendar of State Papers_,
Venetian, V. 541 (18 Aug. 1554).
[603] _Cal. State Papers_, Henry VIII. Domestic.
[604] From _Abstract of several orders relating to the Plague_. MS. Addit.
(Brit. Museum), No. 4376. Probably the originals of these abstracts are
among the Guildhall records. I quote from the most accessible source.
[605] Extracts from the Guildhall Records, by Furnivall, in Appendix to
Vicary’s _Anatomy of the Body of Man_. Early English Text Society.
[606] _Cal. State Papers_, Venetian, VII. 649.
[607] _Abstract_, &c. in Brit. Mus. MSS., as above.
[608] The following is the case by which he supports the recommendation to
kill dogs in plague-time: “Not many years since, I knew a glover in Oxford
who with his family, to the number of ten or eleven persons, died of the
plague, which was said to be brought into the house by a dogge skinne that
his wife bought when the disease was in the Citie” (_Poor Man’s Jewel_,
Chapter VIII. London, 1578).
[609] _Transcripts from the MS. Archives_, ed. Bayley, 1856.
[610] News-letter to the Earl of Shrewsbury, _Hist. MSS. Commis._ VI. 455.
[611] _Machyn’s Diary_, ed. J. Gough Nichols. Camden Soc., No. 42, p. 310.
[612] _Ibid._ p. 396 (note by Nichols); and Guildhall Records, in
Furnivall, _l. c._
[613] _Abstract_, &c. as above.
[614] Stow’s _Memoranda_ (Lambeth MS.), Camden Soc., 1880, p. 123.
[615] _Abstract_, &c. as above.
[616] Stow, _ibid._
[617] Record Office. _State Papers_, Elizabeth, vol. XLVIII., No. 70.
[618] Endorsed “An abstract of such orders as have been heretofore for the
preventing and decreasing of the plague in and about London.”
[619] The searchers are mentioned at Shrewsbury as early as 1539
(Phillips).
[620] _Survey of London_, _ed. cit._ p. 119.
[621] Holinshed, III. p. 1260.
[622] John Bell, _London’s Remembrancer_. Lond. 1665.
[623] _Liber Albus Londinensis._ Rolls series, ed. Riley. The following
instances occur in the report of the commissioners of 1343: P. 446: A
water-gate “obturatur ratione unius gutturi exeuntis de una latrina,” etc.
P. 449: the Ebbegate obstructed by certain persons named, “qui fecerunt in
eadem venella latrinas supra dentes, quarum putredo cadit supra capita
hominum transeuntium.” Same page: Wendegoslane “obturatur per fimos et
garderobas.” Same page: Rethersgate obstructed “per fimos et alia
hujusmodi foetida.” Same page: Dowgate. Two householders named “in eisdem
aedificiis diversas latrinas fecerunt, pendentes ultra vicum ejusdem
venellae; quarum putredines cadunt supra homines per eandem venellam
transeuntes.” P. 450: at Queenhithe a “communis latrina.” P. 451: at
Saltwharf the way to the river obstructed “pulvere et aliis putredinibus
in eadem projiciendis.” P. 452: Lekynggeslane has two latrinae and is
impassable owing to want of paving. Same page: Another venel obstructed by
the Earl Marshall; three latrinae in it. In a perambulation of the ground
outside the walls, 26 Ed. III. (1552), the following encroachments are
noted among others: Outside Ludgate, one has erected a shed (_camera_) 16
ft. × 12¾ ft., and made there “unum profundum puteum et quadratum pro
latrina”--a deep well and a latrine-pit together. Also outside Ludgate,
William of Wircestre has a house there and two shelters for beasts, and a
latrine, and part of the said house is 14 ft. × 7½ ft.
[624] _Statutes of the Realm_, 17 Ric. II.
[625] Riley, _op. cit._, p. 614.
[626] Stow’s _Survey_.
[627] Art. “Shakespeare,” _Encycl. Britan._
[628] Wodderspoon’s _Memorials of Ipswich_, p. 285, p. 259.
[629] “Now first printed.” Exeter, 1765, p. 181.
[630] Poulett Scrope, _op. cit._ p. 333.
[631] _D. Erasmi Epistolar. lib. XXX._ London, 1642, Lib. xxii. Epist. 12
(without date).
[632] Richard of Devizes. Eng. Hist. Soc. p. 60: “Apud Bristolliam nemo
est qui non sit vel fuerit saponarius; et omnis Francus saponarios amat ut
stercorarios.”
[633] William Harrison’s _Description of England_ (in Holinshed) gives
proof enough that the filthy floors described by Erasmus had no existence
two generations later, even among the poorer classes.
[634] The correspondence is in _Remembrancia_, under the head of “Plague.”
[635] From a memorandum of Lord Burghley’s, dated Hertford Castle, 21 Nov.
1582, it appears that a survey had shown 577 beds available for strangers
in one parish of Hertford, and 451 in another, “so that there are lying
two a bed above 2000 people.” _Cal. State Papers._ Domestic series,
Elizabeth 1581-90, p. 75.
[636] Stow’s _Survey_.
[637] _Remembrancia_, p. 332.
[638] _Remembrancia._
[639] Baddeley, _Parish of St Giles, Cripplegate_. Lond. 1888.
[640] _Ibid._, under date August, 1672, p. 193.
[641] Broadsheets in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries. Cited
by W. Rendle, F.R.C.S., _Old Southwark and its People_. London, 1878, p.
198. Mr Rendle, in one place, seems to imply disapproval of this mode of
coffinless burial; but in another (p. 225, note) he says it was “a sort of
forecast of Mr Seymour Haden’s wise proposals.” His first thoughts appear
to have been the best.
[642] Sermon on Third Sunday in Advent, 1552.
[643] Stow’s _Memoranda_. Camden Society, N. S. XXVIII., 1880, p. 125.
[644] Stow, _Annales_, p. 662.
[645] _Cal. State Papers._
[646] _Cat. Cecil MSS._
[647] On July 15, 1570, the Duke of Norfolk craved his release from the
Tower, on account of the great risk to his bodily health and the infection
of the pestilence in that part of the city. (_Calendar of Cecil MSS._)
[648] _Report Hist. MSS. Commis._
[649] Anthony Wood, _op. cit._
[650] _Remembrancia_, p. 38.
[651] Turnor’s _History of Hertford_, pp. 236, 268.
[652] _The Loseley Manuscripts_, ed. Kempe. London, 1836, p. 280.
[653] Holinshed, III. p. 1240.
[654] Letter to Cecil, _Cal. Cecil MSS._, II. 106 (under the year 1575).
[655] Corporation records, in _Notes and Queries_, 6th series, II. 524.
[656] _Notes and Queries_, 6th series, II. 390.
[657] Ormerod’s _Hist. of Cheshire_, I. Harl. MS. 2177 (a death from
plague, 3 Nov. 1574).
[658] _Cal. Cecil MSS._, II. 107:--For the week ending 9 September, 1575,
in St Margaret’s, 25 deaths (of plague 13), St Martin’s 3 of plague,
Savoy, none, St Clement’s 3 (2 of plague).
[659] Cecil to Earl of Lincoln. _Ibid._ 10 September, 1575.
[660] _The Maire of Bristowe, is Kalendar._ Camden Soc. 1872, p. 59.
[661] Wells corporation MSS., _Hist. MSS. Com._, I. 107.
[662] Owen and Blakeway.
[663] _Calendar of State Papers_, Domestic, 1591-94, p. 269.
[664] Tickell’s _Hist. of Kingston upon Hull_, 1798.
[665] Records of the Burgh of Kirkcudbright. _Hist. MSS. Commiss._, IV.
539.
[666] _Remembrancia_, p. 333 (27 Nov. and 6 Dec. 1582).
[667] By permission of the Marquis of Salisbury. The contents of this
small volume have not been included in the published Calendar of the Cecil
MSS.
[668] ‘A sermon preached at Powles Crosse on Sunday, the third of
November, 1577, in the time of the Plague’ by T. W. London, 1578 (February
20).
[669] Strype’s ed. of Stow’s _Survey_, Bk. IV. p. 34. Nonsuch was near
Epsom.
[670] _Remembrancia of the City of London_, p. 331.
[671] _Calendar of Cecil MSS._, Part II. under the dates.
[672] Turnor’s _Hist. of Hertford_, p. 236.
[673] _Cal. Cecil MSS._
[674] Blomefield, vol. III. (“Norwich,” under the date).
[675] _Ibid._ “Yarmouth.”
[676] Morant’s _Hist, of Essex_, I. 50.
[677] _Hist. MSS. Commission_, IX. 277 b.
[678] _Notes and Queries_, 6th series, II. 524.
[679] _Cal. State Papers._
[680] Nichols, _Hist. of Leicestershire_.
[681] _Cal. S. P._
[682] _Cal. State Papers._ Eliz. 1581-90 (Lemon), pp. 45, 70.
[683] Graunt’s _Reflections on Bills of Mortality_. 3rd ed., Lond. 1665,
p. 135.
[684] _Hist. MSS. Com._
[685] Saunders, _Hist. of Boston_, p. 228.
[686] Duke of Rutland’s MSS. _Hist. MSS. Com._, May 24, 1586.
[687] Saunders, _l. c._
[688] _Notes and Queries_, 2nd series, XI. 497.
[689] Blomefield’s _Norfolk_.
[690] _Ibid._ and Gawdy MSS. _Hist. MSS. Com._
[691] Glover’s _Hist. of Derby_, p. 613.
[692] _Archaeologia_, VI. 80.
[693] Townsend’s _Hist. of Leominster_, p. 59.
[694] Sykes, _Local Records of Northumberland and Durham_, p. 80.
[695] _Cal. S. P._, Domestic, Eliz. ed. Lemon.
[696] Corporation MSS. of Plymouth. _Hist. MSS. Com._ X. pt. 4, p. 539.
[697] _Notes and Queries_, 6th series, III. 477.
[698] Dunsford’s _Historical Memoirs of Tiverton_, p. 38.
[699] _Bill of Mortality for the week ending October 20, 1603._ Broadside
in Guildhall Library, with summary, on margin, of the mortalities in 1563
and 1592-93.
[700] _Cal. State Papers_, 1591-94, p. 312.
[701] _Ibid._ p. 340.
[702] _Ibid._ 1595-97, p. 45, May 26, 1595:
“Arguments in proof of the advantages to be derived by the City of London
from stopping up the town ditch:--It is the origin of infection, and the
only noisome place in the city. In the last great plague, more died about
there than in three parishes besides; these fields are the chiefest walks
for recreation of the cityzens, and though the ditch were cast every
second year, yet the water coming from the kennel and slaughter-houses
will be very contagious. It is no material defence for the city, and half
the ditch has been stopped these many years.”
[703] _London’s Remembrancer_, by John Bell, Clerk of the Company of
Parish Clerks. London, 1665. He says: “I shall begin with the year 1593,
being the first year in which any account of the christenings and burials
was kept. I cannot find any record of more antiquity than that of this
year in the Company of Parish Clerks Hall.” However we can now point to
original weekly bills of mortality of 1532 and 1535, to abstracts of
weekly plague-burials in 1563-66, to the figures from one weekly bill of a
series in 1574, and to abstracts of 1578-83.
[704] The total of 25,886 was copied, probably from the broadside of 1603,
into an anonymous essay of 1665, called _Reflections on the Bills of
Mortality_, the total of plague alone being given as 11,503, evidently by
a misprint for 15,003. At the same time a table was given, professing to
be of the weekly deaths from all causes, in one column, and from plague in
another, from March 13 to December 18, 1593. The column of plague-deaths
sums up to 11,110, but the total of 11,503 (which originated in a
misprint) is printed at the foot of the column as if that were the
summation. The column of deaths from all causes is made to sum up to
25,886, the actual sum being 25,817. But the weekly mortalities in it for
those weeks that had little plague are an absurdity for 1593. Whatever the
source of this table, it is not genuine for 1593, and was disclaimed by
Bell, the clerk of Parish Clerks’ Hall, whose essay was written in 1665 to
correct that and other errors about former plagues in London.
[705] _Cal. State Papers._ Addenda. Elizabeth.
[706] Cussan’s _Hist. of Hertfordshire_.
[707] Turner’s _Hist. of Hertford_, p. 268.
[708] Glover’s _Hist. of Derby_, p. 613.
[709] Harwood’s _Hist. of Lichfield_, p. 304.
[710] Nichols, _Leicestershire_ (Town records of Leicester); Kelly, in
_Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc._ VI. (1877), p. 391 (at least 20 houses shut up).
[711] Owen and Blakeway.
[712] Parish registers in Townsend’s _Leominster_, p. 59.
[713] Corporation MSS. Canterbury, in 9th Report of _Hist. MSS.
Commission_, pp. 159 a, 160 a, b. “This plague continued from the end of
September to the month of January.”
[714] Parish Register of Penrith: “A sore plage was in London,
Nottinghome, Derbie and Lincolne in the year 1593” (Jefferson’s
_Cumberland_, I. 19).
[715] _Cal. Stale Papers._ Addenda. Elizabeth.
[716] Syer’s _Memorials of Bristol_. The excessive mortality at Leominster
(41 burials in September, 1597) may have been an effect of the famine.
(Townsend’s _History_, p. 59.)
[717] _Cal. State Papers_, Domestic, 1597, § 10, p. 347.
[718] _Cal. State Papers_, Domestic, 1597, p. 501.
[719] Sykes, _Local Records_, p. 82.
[720] Clarkson’s _Hist. of Richmond_.
[721] Camden’s _Britannia_, p. 175.
[722] Jefferson’s _Cumberland_, I. 273. But these are the same figures as
for Penrith.
[723] _Ibid._ I. 391.
[724] Parish register of Penrith, in Jefferson, _l. c._
[725] _Notes and Queries._ 6th series, II. 524.
[726] _Exchequer Rolls of Scotland_, X. 594. Edin. 1887.
[727] _Burgh Records of Aberdeen_ (Spalding Club), I. 66.
[728] _Exchequer Rolls Scot._, XI. p. lxviii.
[729] _Ibid._
[730] _Burgh Records_, pp. 88, 90, 130, 165.
[731] _Register of the Privy Council, Scotland_, I. 5.
[732] _Cal. S. P._ Scot. (Thorpe).
[733] _Burgh Records_, pp. 222, 231, 244, 246.
[734] _Cal. S. P._ Scot. 18 Nov. 1548. The Rhinegrave recovered, and came
to Edinburgh on the 26th.
[735] _Reg. P. C. Scot._ I. 279-81.
[736] _Ibid._ I. 281-2.
[737] _Ane Breve Description of the Pest_, Edin. 1568. Reprinted, for the
Bannatyne Club, by James Skene of Rubislaw. Edin. 1840.
[738] _Diurnall of Occurrences_, in Chambers.
[739] Cited by R. Chambers (_Domestic Annals of Scotland_, I.) from M.
Napier’s notes to the Spottiswoode Club edition of Spottiswoode’s History.
[740] _Op. cit._ I. 53.
[741] _Burgh Records of Canongate._ Maitland Club, Miscellany, II. 313 (in
Chambers).
[742] Chambers, I. 94.
[743] _Burgh Records of Glasgow, 1573-1581._ Maitland Club, p. 27.
[744] _Reg. P. C. Scot._, II. 415.
[745] _Ibid._ p. 419.
[746] _Hist. MSS. Com._, IV. 539.
[747] _Reg. Scots P. C._, III. 229.
[748] _Ibid._
[749] _Ibid._ III. 679.
[750] _Reg. Scots P. C._ s. d.
[751] _Chronicle of Perth_, Bannatyne Club, p. 4, and Chambers, I. 154.
[752] _Reg. Scots P. C._, III. 727.
[753] Calderwood’s _Hist. of Kirk of Scotland_, IV. 366: “It was first
known to be in Simon Mercerbank’s house.” Birell’s _Diary_ (1532-1605) in
Chambers, I. 157.
[754] _Scots P. C._, III. 746.
[755] _Ibid._ V. 56.
[756] Moysie, in Chambers, I. 157.
[757] _The Diary of Mr James Melville, 1556-1601._ Bannatyne Club. Edin.
1829, p. 153.
[758] Marioreybank’s _Annals_, in Chambers.
[759] Melville’s _Diary_, p. 162.
[760] Melville, p. 173; Calderwood, cited by Chambers; _Cal. Cecil
Papers_, III. 298, 310.
[761] _Cal. Cecil Papers_, III. 321.
[762] _Memorabilia of Glasgow_, in Chambers.
[763] _Scots Privy Council._
[764] Birell, in Chambers.
[765] _Scots P. C._
[766] Calderwood, V. 655.
[767] Two men sent to buy nolt in Galloway for the needs of the borough of
Dumfries were stopped, with 38 head of cattle, by the provost and others
of Wigton, at the Water of Crie, the cattle being impounded at Wigton for
eight days so that they became lean. A hundred merks compensation was
demanded. _Scots Privy Council_, V.
[768] _Scots P. C._, VI. 164.
[769] _Aberdeen Kirk Session Records_, Spalding Club, 1846, Calderwood
(cited by Chambers, I. 319) says that the year 1600 was one of famine, and
that there was also a great death of young children, six or seven being
buried in Edinburgh in a day.
[770] _Scots Privy Council_, VI. under the respective dates.
[771] _Burgh Records._
[772] Smith’s _Cork_, II. 34.
[773] _Cal. State Papers._ Domestic.
[774] Smith’s _Cork_, on the authority of MS. annals.
[775] _Annals of Loch Cé._ Rolls ed., II. 289.
[776] Brabazon to T. Cromwell. _Cal. State Papers._ Irish.
[777] _Cal. State Papers._ Irish, 1566-7.
[778] _State Papers_ (Record Office), Irish, 1567, No. 54. Letter from
Lord Treasurer Winchester and Ed. Baeshe, to the Lord Deputy. Mr Froude’s
summary of it is that “the clammy vapour had stolen into their lungs and
poisoned them,” and again, “the reeking vapour of the charnel house.” I
have had difficulty in deciphering the letter, but I can make out “being a
graveyard where all their buriall,” etc.
[779] _Cal. State Papers._ Irish.
[780] Thady Dowling, p. 41.
[781] _Cal. State Papers._ Domestic. Sept. 1, 1575.
[782] Stubbs, in his edition of Roger of Howden (Rolls series, No. 51, II.
249), on the evidence of the Pipe Roll of 1166.
[783] _Memorials of London in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries_, ed.
Riley.
[784] Stow’s _Survey of London_, pop. ed. (1890), p. 66.
[785] Hall’s _Chronicle_, ed. of 1809, p. 632.
[786] This account of the Black Assizes at Oxford in 1577 was brought to
light, like so many other things from the register of Merton, first by
Anthony Wood in his _Hist. and Antiq. of the Univ. of Oxford_ (ed. Gutch,
II. 189). It was copied in full, from the original Latin text, in 1758, by
John Ward, LL.D., and sent to the Royal Society, in whose _Phil. Trans._
(vol. L. p. 699) it is printed, with remarks, by Tho. Birch, D.D., Sec. R.
S.
[787] Howard, _The State of the Prisons in England and Wales_. 3rd ed.,
Warrington, 1784, p. 342.
[788] _Hist, and Antiq. Univ. Oxford_, ed. Gutch, II. 188-192.
[789] Georgius Edrichus, ‘In Libros aliquot pauli Aeginetae Hypomnemata
quaedam.’ Londini apud Tomam East 1588 (without pagination).
[790] The passage which Anthony Wood thought to relate to the gaol fever
at Oxford in 1577 is the following, under the heading “De morbis publicé
grassantibus:” “Publice grassari morbos vidimus Oxonii, et una nocte simul
plus sexaginta agrotasse (_sic_) novimus, et in vicinis postridie pagis,
eo forte aëre delato, fere centum. Quod etiam eodem tempore, regnante tum
Edwardo sexto, Cantabrigiae evenit, cum duo simul liberi ducis inclyti
Suffolchiae ibi morerentur. Nec tamen Oxonienses ulli fere interierunt,
quod coeli constitutio apud nos quam ibi salubrior sit. Sed iis ita
succurrendum morbis putamus, ut Brittanico sudore (sic enim vocant)
opitulari solemus.”
[791] Anthony Wood, as we have seen in the text, put together his version
of the fever of 1577 from the Merton College register, from Stow’s
_Annals_, and from Ethredge’s reference to the sweat of 1551. In 1758,
John Ward, LL.D., copied the passage in the Merton register and sent it to
the Royal Society; whose secretary, the Rev. Dr Thomas Birch, appended to
it in the _Philosophical Transactions_ some annotations--“copying,” as
Carlyle said of him with reference to some Cromwell matter, “from Wood’s
_Athenae_; and has committed--as who does not?--several errors,” his
annotations being “sedulous but ineffectual”--to the extent of fixing on
the original correct narrative an accretion of mistakes (600 for 60,
sweating sickness for gaol fever, &c.). Trusting to the respectable Birch,
Bancroft in his _Essay on the Yellow Fever, with observations concerning
febrile contagion &c._ (Lond., 1811) has based a theory that the Oxford
epidemic was not typhus at all. Murchison (_Continued Fevers of Great
Britain_, 2nd ed. 1873, p. 103) has also been misled, and has found
himself therefore at a disadvantage in answering Bancroft’s empty
verbalisms about the invariable reproduction of typhus from some previous
case. F. C. Webb, in a paper “An Historical Account of the Gaol Fever,”
_Trans. Epidem. Soc._ for 1857, p. 63, has not used the Oxford case for
any argumentative purpose, but he has, like the others, given the facts
erroneously. He gives no particulars of the Exeter Black Assize.
[792] Howard, _On Lazarettos in Europe_, &c. Warrington, 1789, p. 231:
“But as I have found, in some prisons abroad, cells and dungeons as
offensive and dirty as any I have observed in this country, where however
the distemper was unknown, I am obliged to look out for some additional
cause of its production. I am of opinion that the sudden change of _diet_
and lodging so affects the _spirits_ of _new_ convicts that the general
causes of putrid fever exert an immediate effect upon them. Hence it is
common to see them sicken and die in a short time with very little
apparent illness.” The last words are important.
[793] _Sylva Sylvarum, or A Natural History._ In ten centuries. Cent. 10,
§§ 914-15. Spedding’s ed. II. 646.
[794] Holinshed’s _Chronicle_. New edition by Hoker, London, 1587, pp.
1547-8.
[795] These statements by Hoker, chamberlain of Exeter, are sufficiently
circumstantial; but they do not quite suit the theory of a writer in the
_Dict. Nat. Biog._, under “Drake, Sir Bernard” that the ship was “a great
Portugal ship,” called the Lion of Viana, with an English master, taken by
Bernard Drake in Brittany. No doubt such a capture is stated in the _Cal.
State Papers_, 1585, p. 295 (the reference given), Sir W. Raleigh’s ship
the “Jobe” being included in the same petition; but nothing is said of
Dartmouth as the port to which the two vessels were brought, or of Exeter
as the place where their captains were imprisoned. It is of importance for
the theory of the Exeter gaol fever to know whether Drake’s prisoners were
Portuguese fishermen or not, and Hoker may be supposed to have known.
[796] The author of the misadventure. He succeeded in getting home to
Crediton, where he died on the 12th April, four weeks after the Assizes
began.
[797] Sir George Nicholls, in his _History of the English Poor Law_, 1854,
I. 113, threw out the suggestion that the decay was in the old walled
towns, and that it was compensated by the rise of populations on less
hampered sites. This theory has been adopted by some later writers.
[798] _Calendar of State Papers._ Domestic, Hen. VIII.
[799] Becon’s _Works_, 3 vols. II. fol. 15-16.
[800] Continuation of Fabyan’s _Chronicle_.
[801] Greyfriars _Chronicle_, Camden Soc. LIII., 1852. Preface by J. G.
Nichols, xxiv.
[802] Strype’s ed. of Stow’s _Survey of London_.
[803] In the Rolls of the Middlesex Sessions (Middlesex Record Society),
there occur numerous entries of inquests on deaths in the gaol of Newgate
from the 25th year of Elizabeth: a few of these are from plague; but by
far the larger number are from “the pining sickness,” a malady which
sometimes cut off several prisoners in the same few days and after a brief
illness. In one of these epidemics (Dec. 1586-Feb. 1587), a single case is
called “pestilent fever,” the other seven being “pining sickness.” Next
year, June 19, there is a case of bloody flux, and, on June 24, a case of
“pining sickness.” The other periods when the disease so named was
epidemic in Newgate were Feb.-May, 1595, June and July, 1597, March, 1598,
and March-April, 1602. The pining sickness was probably a generic term,
and may have included chronic disease; there is a solitary case entered as
ailing for as long a period as eight months, the usual duration of the
sickness being one, two, or three days up to three or four weeks.
This place will serve to notice the strange teaching about “parish
infection” which has received currency among the writers of good repute as
authorities. Guy (_Public Health_, Lectures, 1870, I. 23) says the gaol
distemper was an old offender known as the _sickness of the house_: “I
think I recognize it in the London Bills from 1606 to 1665 as the _Parish
Infection_.” The column of figures in the London Bills which has been
taken to show the weekly prevalence of a disease, otherwise unheard of,
“parish infection,” really shows the number of “parishes infected.” The
earlier bills showed, in the corresponding column, the number of parishes
clear (“parish.clere” or “paroch.clere”). By adding up the number of
parishes infected in each of the 52 weeks of a bad plague-year, a total of
some thousands is got, and that total has been taken to be the annual
mortality from “parish infection”--a pure myth. The original author of
this singular mistake appears to have been Marshall, in his _Mortality of
the Metropolis_, London, 1832, p. 67. Of the “parish infection,” he says:
“The disease below is specified by Mr Bell in his _Remembrancer_ [1665];
it is probably the same as exhibited under the name of spotted fever.”
What Bell “specifies” is not another disease, but the number of parishes
in the City and suburbs infected with the plague in each week of the year.
[804] _Annales Monastici_, Rolls series, No. 19. Chronicle by an unknown
author (St Albans) temp. Hen. VI., 1422-31:--“Quaedam infirmitas reumigata
invasit totum populum, quae _mure_ dicitur: et sic senes cum junioribus
inficiebat quod magnum numerum ad funus letale deducebat.”
In the Report of the Irish Local Government Board, Medical Department,
1890, influenza is identified under the name “slaedan,” or prostration,
which was epidemic in Ireland in 1326 or 1328, the same epidemic being
called “murre” in the _Annals of Clonmacnoise_. The use of the word “mure”
in the St Albans Chronicle is just a century later. Murrain (or _morena_
in Latin chronicles) is probably the modern survival of “mure” or “murre.”
[805] I take this summary from Short (_Chronology_, etc. I. 204), who
omits his authority, probably the foreign writers to whom he is usually
indebted in the earlier period. The first part of Theophilus Thompson’s
_Annals of Influenza_ (Sydenham Society) is little else than extracts from
Short, and therefore of foreign origin.
[806] _Cal. State Papers._ Domestic, _sub dato_.
[807] Thus in the continuation of Fabyan’s Chronicle under the year 1512,
the Marquis of Dorset, sent into Spain with 10,000 men, is said to have
“returned in winter by reason of the flix (dysentery).” And in Hall’s
_Chronicle_ (ed. of 1807, p. 523), we have particulars of the very serious
sickness in his army in Biscay; owing to their diet being largely of
garlic and fruits, and their drink being hot wines in hot weather, “there
fell sick 3000 of the flix, and thereof died 1800 men.”
[808] Continuator of Fabyan’s _Chronicle_, sub anno. There is an almost
identical entry in _A London Chronicle of Henry VII. and Henry VIII._
(Camden Miscellany, vol. V. 1859), but under the year 1539, in a hot and
dry summer. The most discrepant date and designation of the epidemic of
those years are those given in Hardiman’s _History of Galway_ (p. 40):
“This charitable institution [St Bridget’s Hospital] was fortunately
completed in the year 1543, when the sweating sickness broke out, and
raged with great violence, destroying multitudes of the natives, and
particularly the tradesmen of the town.”
[809] The term “hot ague” occurs as early as 1518, in a letter of 18 July
(_Cal. State Papers_).
[810] Wriothesley, _A Chronicle of England during the reigns of the
Tudors_ (1457-1559). Camden Society, II. 139.
Anthony Wood also enters for Oxford, under 1557, “A pestilential disease
to the settling of some and the driving away of many; the causes of which
proceeding from the eating of green fruit, the Commissary commanded that
none should be sold in the market or elsewhere in Oxford.”
[811] Fabyan’s _Chronicle_, p. 711.
[812] Stow’s _Annales_, ed. Howse, p. 631. Speed also has a paragraph,
unusual with him, on the state of health in the year of Queen Mary’s death
(1658), in which the mortality among the clergy is specially mentioned.
[813] Extracts from Harrison’s MS. _Chronologie_ by Furnivall, in Appendix
to _Elizabethan England_. Camelot series, 1890, p. 267. His famine prices,
and the enormous fall of them after harvest, are the same as given by
Stow.
[814] _State Papers_, Record Office.
[815] John Jones, M.D. _The Dyall of Ague_, London, 1564?
[816] _Calendar of State Papers._ Foreign, II. 1558, p. 398.
[817] _Calendar of State Papers._ Foreign, II. 1558, p. 400.
[818] _New Observations, Natural, Moral, Civil, Political and Medical, on
City, Town and Country Bills of Mortality._ By Thomas Short, M.D., London,
1750.
[819] 2 vols. London, 1749.
[820] _Calendar of Cecil MSS._, II. 525.
[821] _Phil. Trans._ XVIII. 105
[822] Graunt, _Reflections on the Bills of Mortality_, 3rd ed. 1665.
[823] _Opera_, ed. Greenhill, p. 160.
[824] _Ibid._ p. 169.
[825] Giraldus Cambrensis, Rolls series, No. 21, vol. V. _Topogr.
Hiberniae_, p. 67:--“Advenarum, tamen, una his fere est passio et unica
vexatio. Ob humida namque nutrimenta, immoderatum ventris fluxum vix in
primis ullus evadit.” Flux among the English troops in Ireland in 1172 is
mentioned by Radulphus de Diceto, _Imag. Histor._ I. 348.
[826] _Works of James I._, p. 301.
[827] _Sloane MS._ (Brit. Mus.) No. 389, folios 147-153. It bears no date,
but is marked in the catalogue “xv and xvi cent.,” as if belonging either
to the end of the fifteenth century or the beginning of the sixteenth.
[828] Hensler, who reproduced in 1783 (_Geschichte der Lustseuche_, App.
p. 53) these and other particulars from one of the two remaining copies of
Pinctor’s work (in the possession of Professor Cotunni of Naples),
collated with the other copy in the Garelli library at Vienna, finds in
the concluding dedication of the book to Alexander Borgia a sinister
meaning, as if the supreme pontiff had been himself a victim of the
_grande maladie à la mode_; it is easier, he says, to extricate the sense
than the syntax of the passage.
[829] There was another edition in 1539, and several more following.
Paynel also added a short section, “A Remedy for the Frenche pockes,” to
his book entitled, _A Moche Profitable Treatise against the Pestilence_.
Translated into English by Thomas Paynel, chanon of Martin [Merton] Abbey,
London, 1534.
[830] _Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen,
1398-1570._ Edited for the Spalding Club [by Dr John Stuart], vol. I.
1844, p. 425.
[831] _Phil. Trans._, vol. 42 (1743), p. 420: “Part of a Letter from Mr
Macky, professor of History, to Mr Mac Laurin, professor of Mathematics in
the University of Edinburgh, and by him communicated to the President of
the Royal Society; being an Extract from the Books of the Town Council of
Edinburgh, relating to a Disease there, supposed to be Venereal, in the
year 1497.”
[832] Simpson (_l. c._) quotes the Proclamation from the original
minute-book, almost in the above spelling; it is in Vol. I. of the _Town
Council Records_, fol. 33-34, and is entitled in the rubric “Ane Grangore
Act.”
[833] “On Syphilis in Scotland in the Fifteenth Century,” _Trans. Epidem.
Soc._ N. S. 1. (1862), p. 149. Two of the entries are published in the
_Criminal Trials of Scotland_, 1. 117; the others were collected for
Simpson by Mr Joseph Robertson from the High-Treasurer’s Accounts in the
Register House, Edinburgh. These accounts have since been published in the
Rolls series (vol. I. 356, 361, 378 (_bis_), 386).
[834] _Op. cit._ I. 437.
[835] _Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York._ Edited by Nicolas,
London, 1830, p. 104.
[836] Stow’s _Survey of London_, “Bridge Ward Without.” He ascribes these
informations to “Robert Fabian,” both in the text and in the margin. The
statement is certainly not made in Fabyan’s _Chronicle of England_ under
the year 1506, or other year of the decade, nor is it indexed as occurring
in some earlier connexion.
[837] Bernard André’s Works. Rolls series, No. 10.
[838] _Erasmi Epistolae_, folio. London, 1642, p. 1789 e.
[839] Anthony Wood, _Hist. Univ. Oxford_, ed. Gutch, I. 514. Freind
(_Hist. of Physic_, Pt. II. p. 345) says that the French pox is mentioned
in the will of Colet, dean of St Paul’s, 1518.
[840] _The Supplication of Beggers_ compyled by Symon Fyshe. Anno
MCCCCCXXIIII. Lond. 1546.
[841] _Parliamentary History_, I. 494.
[842] Bullein’s _Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence, 1564_. Early English
Text Society, Extra series, 1888, p. 122.
[843] Bullein’s _Bulwarke of Defence against all Sicknes, Sornes, and
Woundes_, etc., 1562, foll. 2, 68.
[844] _Certain Works of Chirurgerie newly compiled and published by T.
Gale._ London, 1563.
[845] _Dyall of Agues_, cap. VIII. “Of the Pestilential fever, or plage,
or boche.”
[846] William Clowes, _A short and profitable Treatise touching the cure
of the disease called (Morbus Gallicus) by unctions_, London, 1579.
[847] ‘A Prooved Practice for all young Chirurgeons, concerning burning
with gunpowder, and woundes made with Gunshot, Sword, Halbard, Pike,
Launce or such other. Hereto is adjoyned a Treatise of the French or
Spanish Pocks, written by John Almenar, a Spanish Phisician. Also a
commodious collection of Aphorismes, both English and Latine, taken out of
an old written coppy. Published for the benefit of his country by William
Clowes, Maister in Chirurgery.’ New ed., 1591.
[848] _A most excellent and compendious Method_, etc. London, 1588.
[849] Read uses, among other terms, one that has played a great part in
the modern pathology of syphilis. Among the points to be noticed are,--“if
recent or old, if the ulcers or whelks be many, whether pustulous matter
or _gummie_ substance appear.”
[850] John Banister, ‘A needefull new and necessarie treatise of
Chyrurgerie, briefly comprehending the generall and particular curation of
ulcers ... drawen forth of sundrie worthy writers.... Hereunto is annexed
certaine experimentes of mine owne invention.’ London, 1575.
[851] Peter Lowe, _An easie, certaine and perfect method to cure and
prevent the Spanish sicknes_, Lond. 1596. For an account of the book see
_The Life and Works of Maister Peter Lowe_. By James Finlayson, M.D.
Glasgow, 1889.
[852] _A Treatise concerning the plague and the pox, discovering as well
the means how to preserve from the danger of these infectious contagions,
or how to cure those which are infected with either of them._ London,
1652.
[853] Burnet (_History of his own Time_, I. 395-6, Oxford, 1823) retails a
good deal of unsavoury gossip concerning the disease in noble and princely
personages after the Restoration.
[854] _Natural and Political Observations upon the Bills of Mortality._ By
Captain John Graunt, F.R.S. Preface dated from Birchin Lane, January,
1662.
[855] The origin of syphilis from leprosy has been maintained in a modern
work by Friedr. Alex. Simon, _Kritische Geschichte des Ursprungs, der
Pathologie und Behandlung der Syphilis, Tochter und widerum Mutter des
Aussatzes_. Hamburg, 1857-8.
[856] Hirsch, _Geographical and Historical Pathology_ (Translated), II.
67, 68, 81.
[857] In Hensler, p. 14, and Appendix, p. 11.
[858] _Ibid._, App. p. 15.
[859] In Hensler, Appendix, p. 66.
[860] The rise of the pox in the Italian wars, with its dispersion over
all Europe, comes into “The Smallpox, a Poem” by “Andrew Tripe, M.D.,”
London, 1748:
“Whip! thro’ both camps, halloo! it ran,
Nor uninfected left a man ...
Hence soon thro’ Italy it flew
Veiled for a while from mortal view,
When suddenly in various modes,
It shone display’d in shankers, nodes,
Swell’d groins, and pricking shins, and headaches
And a long long long string of dread aches ...
From thence with every sail unfurl’d
It traversed almost all the world ...
Until at length this Stygian fury
Worked its foul way to our blest Drury,
Where still Lord Paramount it reigns,
Pregnant with sharp nocturnal pains,” etc.
[861] I do not include among the good evidence the often quoted letter of
Peter Martyr to a professor of Greek at Salamanca, under the date of
“nonis Aprilis, 1488,” in which “morbus Gallicus” is used as well as the
Spanish name “las bubas.” It seems to me certain that the date should be
1498, or something else than 1488, the correspondence having gone on until
1525. The same kind of misdating occurs among the printed letters of
Erasmus.
[862] This letter is printed in his _Opuscula_, Papiae, 1496. Attention
was first called to it by Thiene, in his essay confuting the doctrine of
the West-Indian origin of syphilis.
[863] In Hensler, App. p. 108.
[864] Manardus, _Epist. Med._ lib. VII. epist. 2. Basil, 1549, p. 137 (as
cited by Hirsch). The first letter of Manardus “de erroribus Sym. Pistoris
de Lypczk circa morbum Gallicum,” was printed in 1500 (Hensler, p. 47).
[865] I quote it from Hensler, _Geschichte der Lustseuche die zu ende des
xv Jahr hunderts in Europa ausbrach_. Altona, 1783, Appendix, p. 109.
[866] Mezeray, _Histoire de France_, II. 777.
[867] The diagnosis in De Comines’ text appears to have struck the editors
of the chief edition of his work, that of 1747; for they have appended a
footnote to the passage, which is a superfluity unless it be meant to
express surprise: “Charles VIII. malade de la petite vérole à l’age de
vingt-deux ans.”
[868] Martin, _Histoire de France_, VII. 257, 283.
[869] _Handbook of Geographical and Historical Pathology._ Translated by
C. Creighton, 3 vols. London, 1883-86, II. 92-98.
[870] _Miscellaneous Works of the late Robert Willan, M.D., F.R.S.,
containing an Inquiry into the Antiquity of the Smallpox, Measles, and
Scarlet Fever, etc._ Edited by Ashby Smith, M.D., London, 1821.
[871] Th. Nöldeke, _Geschichte der Araber und Perser, nach Tabari_.
Leyden, 1879, pp. 218, 219.
[872] The term “autonomy” in the foregoing is used according to the
exposition which I originally gave of it in an address to the British
Medical Association (1883) on “The Autonomous Life of the Specific
Infections” (_Brit. Med. Journ._, Aug. 4, 1883). The semi-independence of
constitutional states has been dealt with in my book, _Illustrations of
Unconscious Memory in Disease_. London, 1885.
[873] The South-African controversy, which became acute, was carried on in
journals of the colony (the _South African Medical Journal_ about 1883 and
1884 is a likely source of information), but some echoes of it were heard
in letters to the _British Medical Journal_, 1884. A few years ago a
similar diagnostic difficulty arose, not in an African race, but among the
inmates of a Paris hospital. In the smallpox wards of the Hôpital St
Antoine, a number of cases occurred, one of them in a nurse, another in an
assistant physician, of a particular skin-disease, which was either
discrete or confluent, lasted about ten days, and was attended by fever up
to 40° C. or 41° C. Yet these cases were discriminated from smallpox; they
were diagnosed, and have been recorded, as an epidemic of ecthyma. (Du
Castel, _Gazette des Hôpitaux_, 1881, No. 122, quoted in the
_Jahresbericht_.)
[874] _Krankheiten des Orients._ Erlangen, 1847, p. 127.
[875] _History of Physic_, II. 190.
[876] Gruner, a learned professor of Jena, who made collections of works
or passages relating to syphilis and to the English sweat, published also
in 1790 a collection of medieval chapters or sentences on smallpox, “De
Variolis et Morbillis fragmenta medicorum Arabistarum,” including the
whole of Gaddesden’s chapter but omitting the earlier and more important
chapter from Gilbert. Gruner correctly says at the end of his extracts:
“while the Arabists write thus, they seem to have followed their Arabic
guides, and to have repeated what they received from the latter.” This is
obvious from the text of the chapters themselves: some quote more often
than others from Avicenna, Rhazes and Isaac; but it is clear that they all
base upon the Arabians. The substance is the same in them all; it is a
merely verbal handling of Arabic observation and theory. There are no
concrete experiences or original additions, from which one might infer
that they were familiar at first hand with smallpox and measles. Häser,
however, seems to take these chapters in the medieval compends as evidence
of the general prevalence of smallpox in Europe in the Middle Ages. As he
finds little writing about smallpox when modern medical literature began,
he is driven into the paradox that epidemics of smallpox had actually
become rarer again in the sixteenth century (III. p. 69). But the
sixteenth-century references to smallpox, although they are indeed scanty,
are at the same time the earliest authentic accounts of it in Western
Europe.
[877] This intention is most clearly expressed by Valescus de Tharanta:
“Then let him be wrapped in a woollen cloth of Persian, or at least of
red, so that by the sight of the red cloth the blood may be led to the
exterior and so be kept at no excessive heat, according to the tenour of
the sixth canon [of Avicenna].” _Apud_ Gruner, p. 46.
[878] _History of Physic_, Pt. II. p. 280.
[879] _Rosa Anglica._ Papiae, 1492.
[880] _Chronica Majora._ Rolls ed. V. 452.
[881] _Rolls of Parliament._
[882] Early English Text Society’s edition by Skeat. Passus xvi. (108),
and Passus vii.
[883] Trench, in his _Select Glossary_, has adopted the derivation of
measles from _misellus_, without apparently knowing that John of Gaddesden
had actually used “mesles” for a form of _morbilli_. The derivation of
measles from _misellus_ has been summarily rejected by Skeat, who thinks
that “the spelling with the simple vowel _e_, instead of _ae_ or _ea_,
makes all the difference. The confusion between the words is probably
quite modern.” Perhaps I ought not to contradict a philologist on his own
ground; but there is no help for it. I know of four instances in which the
simple vowel _e_ is used in spelling the name of the disease that is
associated with smallpox, the English equivalent of _morbilli_. In a
letter of July 14, 1518, from Pace, dean of St Paul’s to Wolsey (_Cal.
State Papers_, Henry VIII. II. pt. 1), it is said, “They do die in these
parts [Wallingford] in every place, not only of the small pokkes and
mezils, but also of the great sickness.” In the _Description of the Pest_
by Dr Gilbert Skene, of Edinburgh (Edin. 1568, reprinted for the Bannatyne
Club, 1840, p. 9), he mentions certain states of weather “quhilkis also
signifeis the Pokis, Mesillis and siclik diseisis of bodie to follow.” And
if a Scotsman’s usage be not admitted, an Oxonian, Cogan, says, “when the
small pockes and mesels are rife,” and another Oxonian, Thomas Lodge, in
his _Treatise of the Plague_ (London, 1603, Cap. iii.) says: “When as
Fevers are accompanied with Small Poxe, Mesels, with spots,” etc. On the
other hand, Elyot, in the _Castel of Health_ (1541), Phaer in the _Book of
Children_, (1553), Clowes in his _Proved Practice_, and Kellwaye (1593)
write the word with _ea_. There is, indeed, no uniformity, just as one
might have expected in the sixteenth century. Again, Shakespeare
(_Coriolanus_, Act III., scene I) spells the word with _ea_ where it is
clearly the same word that is used in _The Vision of Piers the Ploughman_
in a generic sense and in the spelling of “meseles:”--“Those meazels which
we disdain should tetter us.” Lastly, there are not two words in the
Elizabethan dictionaries, one with _e_ signifying lepers, and another with
_ea_ signifying the disease of _morbilli_. In Levins’ _Manipulus
Vocabulorum_, we find “ye Maysilles” = _variolae_, but there is no word
“mesles” = _leprosi_. There was only one word, with the usual varieties of
spelling; and in course of time it came to be restricted in meaning to
_morbilli_, Gaddesden’s early use of “mesles” in that sense having
doubtless helped to determine the usage.
[884] _Harl. MS._, No. 2378. So far as I have observed, there is no
prescription for “mesles,” or for smallpox under its Latin name or under
any English name that might correspond thereto. Moulton’s _This is The
Myrror or Glasse of Helth_ (? 1540), which reproduces these medieval
prescriptions with their headings, is equally silent about smallpox and
measles.
[885] Willan’s _Miscellaneous Works_. “An Inquiry into the Antiquity of
the Smallpox, Measles, and Scarlet Fever.” London, 1821, p. 98. The MS. is
Harleian, No. 585.
[886] Sandoval, cited by Hecker, _Der Englische Schweiss_. Berlin, 1834,
p. 80.
[887] MS. Harl., 1568.
[888] There is a fine copy of the earliest printed version in the British
Museum, with “Sanctus Albanus” for colophon. The same text was reprinted
often in the years following by London printers--in 1498, 1502, 1510, 1515
(twice), and 1528.
[889] Camden Society, ed. Gairdner, 1876, p. 87.
[890] Walsingham, _Hist. Angliae_, I. 299. Also _Chronicon Angliae a
quodam Monacho_, _sub anno_ 1362.
[891] “Also manie died of the smallpocks, both men, women and children.”
[892] _History of the Smallpox_, 1817. Blomefield, also, in his _History
of Norfolk_, quotes the passage about “pockys” correctly from the “Fruit
of Times,” applies it to Norwich, to which city it had no special
relation, and then says that this is the first mention of “small pocks.”
[893] Fabyan’s _Chronicle_. Ed. Ellis, p. 653.
[894] Levins, _Manipulus Vocabulorum_, 1570. Camden Society’s edition,
column 158.
[895] _Lettres du Roy Louis XII._ Brusselle, 1712, IV. 335.
[896] _Cal. State Papers._
[897] “Item, que à son grand desplaisir il ait esté naguaires mal disposé
d’une maladie nommée la petitte verolle, dont à present, graces à Dieu, il
est recouvert et passé tout dangier.” _Lettres du Roy Louis XII._, IV.
260. Brusselle, 1712.
[898] _Cal. State Papers._
[899] _Cal. State Papers._
[900] Edited by Gairdner for the Camden Society, 1880.
[901] Bannatyne Club’s reprint, 1840, pp. 9-10.
[902] _The Loseley Manuscripts._ Edited by Kempe. London, 1836, p. 315.
[903] _A Defensative against the Plague ... whereunto is annexed a short
treatise of the small Poxe, how to govern and help those that are infected
therewith._ London, 1593.
[904] Francis Davison’s _Poetical Rapsodie_. The poem of Spilman occurs at
p. 189 of the edition of 1611. In the piratical edition of 1621, after
Davison’s death, “small” is left out before “Pocks,” and Spilman’s name
omitted at the foot of the verses. The printer’s error has had the
singular effect of leading Dr Farmer, the writer on Shakespeare, to
conclude that the word “pox” in the Elizabethan period meant smallpox even
in imprecations such as “a pox on it.”
[905] Sir Tobie Matthews’ _Letters (1577-1655)_, London, 1660. (1) Donne
to Mrs Cockaine, p. 342; (2) Donne to Sir R. D----, both without date.
[906] _Court and Times of James I._
[907] _Court and Times of Charles I._ (Chamberlain to Carleton), I. 28.
[908] Anthony Wood.
[909] For Chester also, in the parish register of Trinity Church (Harl.
MS. 2177) there is a note opposite 1636: “for this two or three years
divers children died of smallpox in Chester.”
[910] _Cal. State Papers._
[911] _Ibid._
[912] _Hist. MSS. Commission_, V. 146, 151, 156, 168, 174, 201. See also
the Diaries of Pepys and Evelyn.
[913] _Natural History of Oxfordshire._ Oxford, 1677, p. 23.
[914] _De contagione et contagiosis morbis_, etc. Venet. 1546.
[915] Titles in Häser, III. 383.
[916] _Opus de peste ... necnon de variolis_, Neap. 1577.
[917] _Les œuvres de M. Ambroise Paré._ 5th ed., Paris, 1598, Books XIX.
and XX. The chapters on Plague, Smallpox, etc., were originally published,
according to Häser, in 1568.
[918] See Purchas, _Pilgrimes_, III. 996, where syphilis and smallpox are
included together as “infectious or pestilentiall pocks,” Ramusio being
given as the authority for the smallpox and Oviedo for the great pox.
[919] For details of the increase of London population, with the sources
of evidence, I beg to refer to my essay, “The Population of Old London,”
_Blackwood’s Magazine_, April, 1891.
[920] Broadside in the Guildhall Library, bound up in a volume labelled
_Political Tracts_, 1680.
[921] “The time when it began in the City of Westminster and these places
following:
“Buried in Westminster from 14 July to 20 October, in the whole number
832, whereof of the plague 723. Buried in the Savoy from the 1st of June
to the 20th of October, in the whole number 182, whereof of the plague,
171. Buried in the parish of Stepney from the 25th of March to the 20th of
October, in all 1978, whereof of the plague, 1871. Buried at
Newington-buts from the 14th of June to the 20th of October, in all 626,
whereof of the plague, 562. Buried at Islington 201 in all, 170 of plague;
at Lambeth 373 in all, 362 of plague; at Hackney 192 in all, 169 of
plague. Buried in all within the 7 several places last aforenamed 4378,
whereof of the plague, 3997. The whole number that hath been buried in all
[to 20th October], both within London and the Liberties, and the 7 other
severall places last before mentioned is 39,380, whereof of the number of
the plague, 32,609.”
From the parish registers the burials for the whole year are known:
Stepney, 2257; Lambeth, 566; Islington, 322; Hackney, 321 (of plague 269).
In Stow’s _Annales_, the mortality of 1603 is given as follows:--“There
died in London and the liberties thereof from the xxiii day of December
1602 unto the xxii day of December 1603, of all diseases 38,244, whereof
of the plague 30,578.”
[922] Baddeley, _l. c._
[923] _A short Dialogue concerning the Plague Infection._ Published to
preserue Bloud through the blessing of God. London, 1603.
[924] _The Wonderfull Yeare 1603, wherein is shewed the picture of London
lying sicke of the Plague._ London, 1603.
[925] In his _Seven Deadly Sins of London_ (1606) he returns to the mode
of burial in the plague: “All ceremonial due to them was taken away, they
were launched ten in one heap, twenty in another, the gallant and the
beggar together, the husband saw his wife and his deadly enemy whom he
hated within a pair of sheets.” As an after effect of this mode of
interment, “What rotten stenches and contagious damps would strike up into
thy nostrils!”
[926] _A Treatise of the Plague._ By Thomas Lodge, Doctor in Phisicke.
London, 1603. It has been reprinted, among Lodge’s other works, by the
Hunterian Club of Glasgow, 1880.
[927] _The opinion of Peter Turner, Doctor in Physicke, concerning Amulets
or Plague-Cakes, whereof perhaps some hold too much and some too little._
London, 1603, p. 10. Turner held high offices at the College of
Physicians, and died in 1614. There was another physician of the name,
also a dignitary of the College, Dr George Turner, whose widow was the
notorious Mrs Anne Turner, executed for having been an instrument in the
poisoning of Sir T. Overbury. Scott has drawn from her the character of
Mrs Suddlechop, in _The Fortunes of Nigel_, a work invaluable for
realizing the London of King James. The reference in the Earl of
Northumberland’s accounts, under date Feb. 6, 1607, to a Dr Turner, who
was paid ten shillings for a “pomander” against the plague, would suit
either Dr Peter or Dr George (_Hist. MSS. Commis._ VI. 2, 29).
[928] A letter from Hampstead, August 27, 1603, speaks of “the imprudent
exposure of infected beds in the streets.” (_Cal. State Papers._)
[929] _A New Treatise of the Pestilence, etc. the like not before this
time published, and therefore necessarie for all manner of persons in this
time of contagion._ By S. H. Studious in Phisicke. London, 1603.
[930] This mystification was pointed out in a note to “Thayre” (the 1625
edition) in the printed Catalogue of the Library of the Royal Medical and
Chirurgical Society.
[931] _An Epistle discoursing upon the present Pestilence, teaching what
it is and how the people of God should carrie themselves towards God and
their neighbours therein._ Reprinted, with some Additions, by Henoch
Clapham. London, 1603.
[932] _A Short Dialogue, etc._, _ut supra_.
[933] In a volume with other pieces. London, 1605.
[934] But several warders in the Tower died of it. (_Cal. State Papers_,
Sept. 16, 1603.)
[935] In Lysons, _Environs of London_.
[936] _Hist. MSS. Com._ X. pt. 4, p. 5.
[937] E.g. plague at Datchet (_Notes and Queries_, 3rd ser. VI. 217).
[938] John Bell, _London’s Remembrancer_. London, 1665 [1666].
[939] Extracts from _Harrison’s MS. Chronologie_ by Furnivall in Appendix
(p. 268) to _Elizabethan England_. Camelot Series, 1890.
[940] _A Sermon preached at Powles Crosse_, etc. London, 1578.
[941] _Remembrancia_ (numerous extracts from the City records, under
“Plays”).
[942] _Cal. State Papers_, Addenda, James I. p. 534.
[943] _Notes and Queries_, 6th series, II. 524. The mortality is stated on
the authority of the parish registers of St George’s and St Michael’s, the
dead having been “buried at the cabbin of Whitefryers.”
[944] There is _An Account of the Plague at Oxford, 1603_, in the Sloane
MS. No. 4376 (14), extracted from the register of Merton College, which
had also been the source of Anthony Wood’s account, as summarised in the
text.
[945] _Cal. State Papers._ Addenda, 1580-1625.
[946] _Hist. MSS. Commis._ IX. 160.
[947] Izacke’s ‘Memorials of Exeter’ (in _N. and Q._, 3rd ser. VI. 217).
[948] Bailey, _Transcripts from the MS. Archives of Winchester, 1856_, p.
109.
[949] Cromwell.
[950] _Hist. MSS. Commis._ IX.
[951] _Ibid._ X. pt. I, p. 89.
[952] Thompson’s _Boston_.
[953] _Hist. MSS. Com._ IX.
[954] _Archæologia_, VI. 80.
[955] Rogers’ MS. in Hemingway’s _Hist. of Chester_. Harl. MS. 2177.
[956] Earwaker, _East Cheshire_, II. 471; I. 406.
[957] Bridges and Whalley, II. 53; I. 124.
[958] Drake’s _Eboracum_. Lond. 1736, p. 121.
[959] Sykes, _Local Records of Northumberland and Durham_.
[960] Phillips, Owen and Blakeway.
[961] _Cal. State Papers._ Addenda, 1580-1625.
[962] Parish Register (in a local history).
[963] _Notes and Queries_, 6th ser. II. 390.
[964] _Ib._
[965] _Ib._
[966] _Ib._
[967] _Cal. State Papers_, 1608-9.
[968] Hemingway.
[969] _Cal. S. P._
[970] _Hist. MSS. Com._ V. 570.
[971] _Archæologia_, VI. 80.
[972] Blomefield.
[973] Sykes.
[974] Nichols, III. 892-3.
[975] Nichols (parish registers); Kelly, _Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc._, 1877,
VI. 395.
[976] Sykes.
[977] Hemingway.
[978] May, _Hist. of Evesham_, 1845; p. 371.
[979] Add. MS. 29,975. f. 25.
[980] _Hist. MSS. Com._ IX. 162.
[981] _Ib._ I. 101.
[982] Beesley, _Hist. of Banbury_.
[983] Dean Butler’s notes to Clyn’s and Dowling’s _Annals_.
[984] Smith’s _Cork_, from MS. Annals.
[985] Chambers, _Domestic Annals_.
[986] _Cal. State Papers._
[987] Chambers.
[988] _Cal. State Papers._
[989] Balfour’s _Annals of Scotland_ (in Chambers, I. 399).
[990] _Ibid._
[991] Chambers.
[992] _Aberdeen Burgh Records._
[993] Chambers.
[994] _Chron. of Perth._
[995] Chambers.
[996] _Ibid._
[997] The invaluable letters of Chamberlain, as well as those of Mead (of
Cambridge) and others, were collected by Dr Thomas Birch in the last
century, and printed in 1848 under the titles _The Court and Times of
James I._, and _C. and T. Charles I._, without an index but with some
useful notes.
[998] Chamberlain to Carleton, _C. and T. James I._, II. 504.
[999] _Chronological History of the Air, Weather, Seasons, Meteors, etc._
2 vols. Lond. 1749, I. 306:--“This fever began, and raged terribly in
England in 1623; was little, if at all, short of the plague.”
[1000] Chamberlain to Carleton, in _Court and Times of Charles I._, I. 28.
[1001] Salvetti’s Diary, in _Hist. MSS. Com._ XI. pt. I, p. 26.
[1002] _Cal. S. P._ 15 Sept.
[1003] Holland.
[1004] Bell, _London’s Remembrancer_.
[1005] _C. and T. Charles I._, letter of 2 July, 1625.
[1006] In a volume of Topographical Papers in the British Museum, 1298, m
(18).
[1007] W. Heberden, Junr., _Increase and Decrease of Diseases_. Lond.
1801, p. 66. He gives no authority; “1626” is clearly a misprint.
[1008] _Calendar of State Papers_, 1625-26, p. 184.
[1009] _The Red Crosse_ (broadside). London, 1625.
[1010] Parish Histories, and in Lysons’ _Environs of London_.
[1011] _Britain’s Remembrancer, containing a Narrative of the Plague
lately past._ London, 1628.
[1012] _The Fearfull Summer, or London’s Calamitie._ Printed at Oxford,
1625 (reprinted with additions, Lond. 1636).
[1013] Holland’s _Posthuma_. Cantab. 1626.
[1014] _The Weeping Lady, or London like Ninivie in Sackcloth._ By T. B.
London, 1625.
[1015] _Hist. MSS. Commission_, XI. pt. I, p. 6.
[1016] Bradwell’s book, to be mentioned in the sequel, was written for
practice during the plague. There is a reference to something of Sir
Theodore Mayerne’s on the plague of 1625, which I have not succeeded in
finding. His _Opera Medica_ contain ordinary cases treated by him in
London in December, 1625, but there is no mention of plague-cases.
Woodall’s essay on plague, published in 1639, thus refers to his
experience in the epidemic of 1625: “In anno 1625 we had many signes
contrarie to the plagues in other times; yea, and many did dye dayly
without any signes or markes on their bodies at all.”
[1017] _C. and T. Charles I._ I. 48.
[1018] _A Watchman for the Pest, teaching the true Rules of Preservation
from the Pestilent Contagion, at this time fearfully overflowing this
famous Cittie of London. Collected out of the best authors, mixed with
auncient experience, and moulded into a new and most plaine method._ By
Steven Bradwell, of London, Physition. 1625.
[1019] _Cal. State Papers._
[1020] _Ib._
[1021] Th. Locke to Carleton, _Cal. S. P._, 14 Aug.
[1022] Salvetti.
[1023] Locke to Carleton, 27 Aug.
[1024] _Cal. S. P._
[1025] Mead, letter in _C. and T. Ch. I._ I. 43.
[1026] _Cal. S. P._
[1027] _Ibid._
[1028] Mostly from parish registers in Lysons’ _Environs of London_.
[1029] Winchester was probably a fair sample. In the city archives under
the year 1625 there is this entry: “Item, it is also agreed that the
decayed cottage where Lenord Andrews did dwell, he lately dying of the
plague, shall be burned to the grounde for fear of the daunger of
infection that might ensue if it should stande.” (Bailey, _Transcripts_,
etc. Winchester, 1856, p. 110.) In a petition relating to Farnham, Jan.
1628, the town is described as being “impoverished through the plague and
many charges,” which may mean that plague had been diffused in Surrey and
Hampshire.
[1030] _Cal. State Papers._
[1031] _Cal. State Papers._
[1032] MSS. of the Corporation of Plymouth. _Hist. MSS. Commis._ IX. 278.
Accounts are given (p. 280) of the monies collected for the relief of the
poor and sick people of Plymouth “in the time of the infection of the
pestilence from Sept. 29, 1625, to that day A.D. 1627.” But that does not
imply that the infection lasted all that time. The civic year began with
September 29, and the accounts are those that fall within two complete
financial years.
[1033] _Cal. State Papers._
[1034] _Notes and Queries_, 6 ser. III. 477.
[1035] _Cal. S. P._
[1036] _Ib._
[1037] _Cal. S. P._
[1038] _Ib._
[1039] _Cal. S. P._
[1040] Letter from Mead in _C. and T. Charles I._ I. 51.
[1041] Blomefield.
[1042] At Coventry in 1626, £20 was paid to the poor in lieu of a feast at
Lammas, by reason of the infection. (Dugdale, _Warwickshire_.)
[1043] The following curious extract was sent by J. A. Picton to _Notes
and Queries_, 6th ser. I. 314 from the parish register of Malpas,
Cheshire, 1625:
“Richard Dawson (brother of the above-named Thomas Dawson of Bradley)
being sick of the plague and perceiving he must die, at that time arose
out of his bed and made his grave, and caused his nephew John Dawson to
cast straw into the grave, which was not far from the house, and went and
laid him down in the said grave and caused clothes to be laid upon, and so
departed out of this world. This he did because he was a strong man and
heavier than his said nephew and another wench were able to bury. He died
about the 24th of August. Thus much was I credibly tould. He died 1625.
“John Dawson, son of the above-mentioned Thomas, came unto his father when
his father sent for him being sick, and having laid him down in a ditch
died in it the 29th day of August, 1625, in the night.
“Rose Smyth, servant of the above-named Thomas Dawson, and last of that
household, died of the plague and was buried by Wm. Cooke the 5th day of
September, 1625, near unto the said house.”
[1044] Memoranda of Rev. Thomas Archer, of Houghton Conquest. MSS. Addit.
Brit. Museum.
[1045] Blomefield.
[1046] Phillips’ _Hist. of Shrewsbury_. _Hist. MSS. Com._ X. pt. 4. p.
498.
[1047] _Hist. MSS. Com._ II. 258.
[1048] _Hist. of County of Lincoln_, II. 187. _Notitiae Ludae_, p. 41.
[1049] Tickell’s _Hist. of Kingston-upon-Hull_. Hull, 1798.
[1050] Gawdy MSS. (_Hist. MSS. Com._ X. pt. 2), various letters from Sept.
14, 1636, to Nov. 26, 1638, relating chiefly to Norwich.
[1051] Boys, _Hist. of Sandwich_, pp. 707-8.
[1052] R. Jenison, D.D., _Newcastle’s Call to her Neighbor and Sister
Towns_. London, 1637.
[1053] Heberden says that it began in Whitechapel, but does not say where
he got the information.
[1054] _Middlesex County Records_, III. 62.
[1055] _Ibid._
[1056] The College of Physicians reported also in May, 1637, on the causes
of plague--overcrowding, nuisances, &c.; among the causes assigned the
following is noteworthy: Those who died of the plague were buried within
the City, and some of the graveyards were so full that partially
decomposed bodies were taken up to make room for fresh interments. (Cited
by S. R. Gardiner, _History, &c._, VIII. 237-9, from the State Papers.)
[1057] _Natural and Political Reflections on the Bills of Mortality._
London, 1662.
[1058] _Cal. State Papers._
[1059] Strype’s ed. of Stow’s _Survey of London_.
[1060] Rendle (_Old Southwark_, 1878, p. 96) quotes the following from a
letter written in 1618 by Geoffrey Mynshall from the King’s Bench prison:
“As to health, it hath more diseases predominant in it than the pest-house
in the plague time ... stinks more than the Lord Mayor’s dog-house or
Paris Garden in August ... three men in one bed.”
[1061] _Cal. S. P._ 1601-3, p. 209.
[1062] _Middlesex County Records_, II.
[1063] Cited by Gardiner, _History_, VIII. 289.
[1064] _Calendar of State Papers._
[1065] _Cal. S. P._
[1066] _Ibid._
[1067] _Ibid._ The coexistence of malignant fever with plague at
Northampton in 1638 is decisively shown by particulars of cases published
by Woodall, _Op. cit._ 1639. See also Freeman, _Hist. of Northampton_, p.
75 (but under the year 1637).
[1068] _Ibid._
[1069] _Ibid._
[1070] Camden’s _Britannia_, ed. Gough, II. 244.
[1071] _Notes and Queries_, 6th series, IV. 199.
[1072] _Hist. MSS. Com._ V. 173.
[1073] _Diatribae duae de Fermentatione et de Febribus._ Hagae, 1659.
[1074] _Morbus Epidemicus anni 1643; or the New Disease._ Published by
command of his Majesty. Oxford, 1643.
[1075] From Rushworth.
[1076] “The City, with much emotion, ranks its trained bands under Essex:
making up an Army for him, despatches him to relieve Gloucester. He
marches on the 26th [August]; steadily along, in spite of rainy weather
and Prince Rupert; westward, westward; on the night of the tenth day,
September 5th, the Gloucester people see his signal-fire flame up, amid
the dark rain, ‘on the top of Presbury Hill;’--and understand that they
shall live and not die. The King ‘fired his huts,’ and marched off without
delay. He never again had any real chance of prevailing in this war....
The steady march to Gloucester and back again, by Essex, was the chief
feat he did during the war; a considerable feat, and very characteristic
of him, the slow-going inarticulate, indignant, somewhat elephantine man.”
Carlyle, _Letters and Speeches of Cromwell_.
[1077] From the translation by S. Pordage. London, 1681.
[1078] Anthony Wood, II. pt I. p. 469.
[1079] Dunsford’s _Histor. Mem. of Tiverton_, p. 184.
[1080] The military events from Rushworth.
[1081] Dunsford, _Histor. Memoirs of Tiverton_. Harding, _Hist. of
Tiverton_.
[1082] Rushworth. Moore, _Hist. of Devonshire_, I. 149.
[1083] Beesley’s _Hist. of Banbury_, p. 387.
[1084] In Somers’s _Tracts_. Scott’s ed. V. 294.
[1085] Sykes.
[1086] Clarendon, referring to a proposed Royal visit to Bristol in April
says: “The plague began to break out there very much for the time of the
year.”
[1087] _Cal. State Papers._
[1088] Rushworth.
[1089] _Letters and Speeches_, I.
[1090] Seyer’s _Memorials of Bristol_, II. 466.
[1091] Whitaker, _History of Leeds_, p. 75.
[1092] Harwood, _Hist. of Lichfield_, p. 306.
[1093] Pordage’s translation of Willis’s _Remaining Works_, p. 131.
[1094] Nichols, III. 893.
[1095] Cornelius Brown, _Annals of Newark_. London, 1879, p. 164.
[1096] _Ibid._
[1097] _Notes and Queries_, 6th ser., III. 477.
[1098] Rushworth.
[1099] _Histor. MSS. Com._ XI. 7, p. 190.
[1100] _Ibid._ IX. 1, p. 201.
[1101] _Hist. of Carlisle_, 1838.
[1102] Chambers, _Domestic Annals of Scotland_.
[1103] Baillie’s _Letters_. 3 vols. Edited by D. Laing for the Bannatyne
Club.
[1104] Kennedy, _Annals of Aberdeen_, I. 270 (expenses of the epidemic
from the Council Register, vol. LIII. p. 130).
[1105] Hemingway, Ormerod. _The Report of the Hist. MSS. Commission_ (V.
339) notes that Dr Cowper’s MS. contains details of 2,099 deaths, but
reproduces none of them.
[1106] _Hist. MSS. Commiss._ V. 342.
[1107] Owen and Blakeway.
[1108] Rushworth, Pt. 4, vol. II., pp. 1100, 1109.
[1109] _Annals of Ireland_ by Clyn and Dowling, Dean Butler’s notes pp.
64, 65 (ref. to Carte’s _Life of the Duke of Ormonde_).
[1110] _Cal. State Papers._
[1111] The weekly bills of mortality for Dublin, July 20--Aug. 2, 1662,
showed only 14 baptisms and 20 burials in ten parishes; but these can
hardly have been all the births and deaths in the city.
[1112] Smith’s _Cork_, vol. II. from Cox MSS.
[1113] _Cal. S. P._ Sept. 21, 1650.
[1114] H. Whitmore, M.D. _Febris Anomala; or the New Disease that now
rageth throughout England, with a brief description of the Disease which
this Spring most infested London._ London, 1659 (4 November).
[1115] _Hist. MSS. Commission_, X. pt. 4, p. 106.
[1116] Willis, _Diatribae duae_. Hagae, 1659.
[1117] _Pyretologia._ 2 vols. London, 1692-4. Appendix to 1st volume, p.
415.
[1118] Sent to _Notes and Queries_, 1st ser. XII. 281, by Mr H. Hucks
Gibbs.
[1119] _Hist. MSS. Commiss._ V. 146 (Sutherland letters).
[1120] Greenhill’s edition (Sydenham Society, 1844), pp. 37, 93, 95-98.
[1121] Purchas, _His Pilgrimes_. 4 vols., folio. London, 1625, vol. I.
Book II. p. 36.
[1122] Hakluyt, _The Principal Navigations_, &c. 3 vols. London, 1599,
III. 225-6.
[1123] Pericarditis scorbutica--a condition which has been observed mostly
in Russia in recent times. The whiteness of the heart would have been due
to the fibrinous layer of lymph on its surface, from the pericarditis.
[1124] Hakluyt, III. 241.
[1125] Hakluyt, II. Part II., pp. 22, 36, 48.
[1126] Hakluyt, III. 501.
[1127] Sir James Stephen’s _Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography_, pop. ed.
p. 125.
[1128] Hakluyt, II. pt. 2, p. 99.
[1129] The famous figure in _Paradise Lost_ (IV. 159) is taken from the
route to India passing within Madagascar--a poetic colouring of dreary and
painful realities:--
As when to them who sail
Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past
Mozambik, off at sea north-east winds blow
Sabean odours from the spicy shore
Of Araby the blest; with such delay
Well pleas’d they slack their course, and many a league
Cheer’d with the grateful smell old Ocean smiles:
[1130] _The World Encompassed_ &c., Hakluyt Society, ed. Vaux, p. 149, and
Hakluyt, III. 740.
[1131] _A summarie and true discourse of Sir Francis Drake’s West Indian
voyage begun in the year 1585._ Published by M. Thomas Cates. Shortened in
Hakluyt, III. 542. The earlier part of the narrative is by Captain Bigges,
and, after his death in the West Indies, by his lieutenant, Croftes.
[1132] Mr Froude (_History_, XII. 150) must be pronounced somewhat happy
in his bold guess of “yellow fever.” At the same time the enthymeme by
which he had reached his conclusion is altogether wrong: first, in
assuming that the infection “broke out” after the capture of Cartagena,
ignoring the fact of its disastrous prevalence in mid-ocean two or three
months before, shortly after leaving the Cape de Verde islands; and
secondly in assuming that the yellow fever for which Cartagena and other
harbours of the Spanish Main became notorious in later times had existed
as an infection there in the 16th century.
[1133] Sir Richard Hawkins, who commanded the galliot ‘Duck’ in Drake’s
expedition of 1585, thus refers to the Cape de Verde islands, on the
occasion of touching there in his own expedition to the Pacific in 1593
(Purchas, IV. 1368):
These islands are “one of the most unhealthiest climates in the world. In
two times that I have been in them, either cost us the one half of our
people, with fevers and fluxes of sundry kinds, some shaking, some
burning, some partaking of both; some possesst with frensie, others with
slouth; and in one of them it cost me six months’ sickness, with no small
hazard of life.” He then gives a reason for the great risk to health: the
north-east breeze about four in the afternoon seldom faileth, “coming cold
and fresh, and finding the pores of the body open and for the most part
naked, penetrateth the very bones, and so causeth sudden distemperature,
and sundry manners of sickness, as the subjects are divers whereupon they
work. Departing out of the calmes of the Islands, and coming into the
fresh breeze, it causeth the like; and I have seen within two days after
that we have partaked of the fresh air, of two thousand men above an
hundred and fifty have been crazed in their health.” This seems to refer
to the epidemic in Drake’s fleet, as given in the text; but it is clearly
an imperfect account of the facts, and in theory altogether improbable, as
a trade wind within the tropic cannot be credited with such effects, even
if the forms of sickness were conceivably due at all to chill.
Darwin (_Naturalist’s Voyage in the Beagle_, p. 366) says: “The island of
St Jago, at the Cape de Verde, offers another strongly-marked instance of
a country, which anyone would have expected to find most healthy, being
very much the contrary. I have described the bare and open plains as
supporting, during a few weeks after the rainy season, a thin vegetation,
which directly withers away and dries up; at this period the air appears
to become quite poisonous; both natives and foreigners often being
affected with violent fevers. On the other hand, the Galapagos
Archipelago, in the Pacific, with a similar soil, and periodically subject
to the same process of vegetation, is perfectly healthy.” But the
Galapagos have been uninhabited, except in recent times by two or three
hundred people banished from Ecuador. On the other hand the Cape de Verde
islands are believed to have been at one time well wooded and not
unfertile; and the Portuguese settlements in them, to say nothing of the
native negro villages, had a fair population. It is not easy to understand
the pernicious character of their fevers without assuming that spots of
soil had become pestilential by human occupancy; but it is at the same
time clear that a degree of befouling of the soil which would be innocuous
in ordinary, would there engender deadly miasmata owing to the remarkable
alternations of drought and wetness under a tropical sun.
[1134] Hakluyt, III. 286.
[1135] Mr Hubert Hall, of the Record Office, in _Society in the
Elizabethan Age_. London, 1886, p. 120.
[1136] Hakluyt, III. 583.
[1137] Hakluyt, III. 804, 820; and other details in the 1st ed. (1589) pp.
809, 810.
[1138] Hakluyt, III. 842-52.
[1139] Purchas, IV. Bk. 7, Chap. 5, (reprinted from Hawkins’s own
narrative of the voyage, published a few months after the author’s death
in 1622).
[1140] Mr J. K. Laughton (_Dict. of National Biography._ Art. “Hawkins,
Sir Richard”) points out that Hawkins’s narrative of the ‘Daintie’s’
voyage had not always been authenticated by reference to notes or
documents. It seems probable also, from his remarks on the epidemic in
Drake’s fleet after leaving the Cape de Verde islands in 1585, that he
trusted his memory too much. But that objection of writing from memory has
no force as against his general observations and reflections on scurvy.
[1141] Purchas, part IV. p. 1877.
[1142] _Ibid._ p. 1623.
[1143] Woodall defends the use of biscuit in his _Surgeon’s Mate_,
published in 1617.
[1144] Purchas, III. 847.
[1145] _The Voyages of Sir James Lancaster, Knight, to the East Indies._
Hakluyt Society, ed. Clements Markham, 1878; and in Hakluyt’s _Principal
Navigations_, II. pt. 2, p. 102.
[1146] The slowness of the passage round the Cape of Good Hope in old
times was due less to the build or rig of the ships than to the course
shaped: instead of steering southwest from Madeira across the Atlantic
almost to the coast of Brazil at Cape San Roque, so as to get the
north-east trade wind, and thence on another tack in a wide sweep round to
the Cape with the south-east trade wind, the earlier navigators sailed
past the Cape de Verde islands and along the Guinea coast, keeping within
meridians 20 degrees to the eastward of the modern track, and so falling
into the tropical calms at one part, and at another part of the voyage
into the baffling south-east trades, varying in force according to the
season.
[1147] Purchas, I. 147.
[1148] _Calendar of State Papers._ East Indies (under the respective
dates).
[1149] It seems to have passed into common usage, as “to lie in cold
obstruction and to rot” (_Meas. for Meas._ III. 1), and to have been kept
up therein after the faculty had dropped it--if indeed Byron’s line,
“Where cold Obstruction’s apathy” be a survival of medical terminology.
There is an instance of the same kind of survival in the use of
“scorbutic;” at one time land-scurvy was detected (under the influence of
theory) in many forms, and we find in the _Pickwick Papers_ a late
reminiscence of that singular dogma in the “young gentleman with the
scorbutic countenance.”
[1150] The three earlier instances from Purchas, I. 248, 466, the later
from the _Cal. State Papers_, East Indies.
[1151] _Cal. S. P._ Colonial. East Indies. Dec. 24, 1628.
[1152] _Ibid._ Feb. 6, 1626, p. 146.
[1153] _William Hedges’ Diary._ Hakluyt Society, 1887, I. 24, 54.
[1154] _A Letter of M. Gabriel Archar_, in Purchas, pt. IV. p. 1733;
Smith’s _Virginia_, in Pinkerton, XIII. 99; W. Strachey, in Purchas, pt.
IV. p. 1753.
[1155] Theobald makes this the storm and shipwreck which Shakespeare
brings into the _Tempest_.
[1156] Purchas, IV. p. 1762.
[1157] _Cal. S. P._ America and West Indies.
[1158] Dermer, in Purchas, IV. p. 1778: Belknap’s _American Biography_
(“Life of Gorges”), I. 355.
[1159] John Winthrop’s _Journal_, p. 11.
[1160] Winthrop, I. pp. 119, 123.
[1161] _Ibid._ II. 310.
[1162] Refs. in Noah Webster’s _Hist. of Epid. and Pestil. Diseases_.
Hartford, 1799, I. 189, 191, 193.
[1163] Letter of Norris, in _Hist. of S. Carolina_, I. 142.
[1164] Saco, _History of African Slavery in the New World_ (Spanish).
Barcelona, 1879.
[1165] Oviedo, in Purchas, III. 996:--“Extract of Gonzalo Ferdinando de
Oviedo:--‘I had acquaintance with divers which went in the first and
second voyages of Columbus; of which was Peter Margarite, commendator in
the second voyage, of most respect with the king and queen, who complained
of those paines. [Syphilis was prevalent in Barcelona and Valencia
previous to 1494. See Chapter VIII.] Soon after, in the year 1496, began
the disease to arrest some courtiers; but in those beginnings it was only
amongst baser persons of small authority; and it was thought that they got
it by having to do with common women. But afterwards it extended to
principal persons, and the physicians could not tell what to think of it,
so that many died.’... But indeed it came from Hispaniola, where it is
ordinary, and the remedy also [guaiacum]. _Our author_ (_l. c._ civ.), and
Ramusio in his preface to his third Tome, say that the souldiers of
Pamfilo de Nuney, having the small pocks, infected the Indians which never
before heard of that disease; in so much that of 1,600,000 soules in that
island there are so few left, as by and by you shall hear.... The
covetousnesse of the mine-workers, neglect of diet, change of gouvernours
growing worse and worse, caused them to poison, kill and hang themselves,
besides those which were consumed by infectious or pestilentiall pocks
(those before mentioned out of Ramusio) and other diseases.”
[1166] _Calendar of State Papers._ Amer. & W. I., I. 57.
[1167] _Ibid._
[1168] _Cal. S. P._ Amer. & W. I., under the respective dates.
[1169] The account that follows is taken from Father Dutertre’s _Histoire
generale des Antilles habitées par les François_, 4 vols., Paris,
1667-1671, which superseded his earlier work of 1654.
[1170] _Cal. S. P._ Amer. & W. I., II. 529.
[1171] Ligon, _Hist. of Barbadoes_. London, 1657.
[1172] Winthrop’s _Journal_, II. 312.
[1173] Dutertre, _Hist. gen. des Antilles habitées par les François_. 4
vols. Paris, 1667-1671.
[1174] _Cal. State Papers_, Amer. and W. I., I. 301.
[1175] The chronology of yellow-fever epidemics in Hirsch (I. 318) is made
to begin with Guadeloupe, 1635 and 1640, on the authority of Dutertre (as
above), the epidemic of 1647 at Bridgetown being the third in order.
[1176] Benjamin Moseley, M.D., _Treatise on Tropical Diseases, and on the
Climate of the West Indies_, 3rd ed. (1803), p. 476.
[1177] Hughes, _The Natural History of Barbados_. London, 1750, p. 37.
[1178] _Cal. S. P._ Amer. and W. I., under the dates.
[1179] In Sir John Hawkins’ second voyage as a slaver (1565), he was
allowed to trade on the Spanish Main only for his “lean negroes,” which
were within the purchasing means of the poorer Spaniards. The voyage had
been tedious, and the supply of water short “for so great a company of
negroes.... Many never thought to have reached to the Indies without great
death of negroes and of themselves; but the Almighty God, who never
suffereth His Elect to perish,” etc. Hakluyt, III. 501.
[1180] Clarkson, _History of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade_.
New ed., Lond. 1839, pp. 307, 352. He showed his prepared document to
Pitt:--
“Mr Pitt turned over leaf after leaf, in which the copies of the
muster-rolls were contained, with great patience; and when he had looked
over about a hundred pages accurately, and found the name of every seaman
inserted, his former abode or service, the time of his entry, and what had
become of him, either by death, discharge, or desertion, he expressed his
surprise at the great pains which had been taken in this branch of the
inquiry; and confessed, with some emotion, that his doubts were wholly
removed with respect to the destructive nature of this employ.” (p. 273.)
[1181] T. Aubrey, M.D., _The Sea-Surgeon, or the Guinea Man’s Vade Mecum_.
London, 1729, p. 107.
[1182] Gillespie, _Obs. on the Diseases in H. M.’s Squadron on the Leeward
Island Station in 1794-6_. Lond. 1800.
[1183] For example, Mr R. L. Stevenson in a striking passage of _Treasure
Island_.
[1184] Thurloe’s _State Papers_, III. IV. and V.; _Harl. Miscell._ III.
513; Long’s _History of Jamaica_, 3 vols. London, 1774; _Cal. S. P._,
Amer. and W. I.
[1185] _Harl. Miscel._ _l. c._
[1186] Sir Anthony Shirley touched at Jamaica in 1596, and reported, “we
have not found in the Indies a more pleasant and wholesome place.”
Hakluyt, III. 601. Long (_History of Jamaica_, 1774, II. 221) states the
case very fairly with reference to the unfortunate expedition of Venables
in 1655: “The climate of the island has unjustly been accused by many
writers on the subject, the one copying from the other, and represented as
almost pestilential, without an examination into the real sources of this
mortality, which being fairly stated, it will appear that the same men
carrying the like thoughtless conduct and vices into any other uninhabited
quarter of the globe, must infallibly have involved themselves in the like
calamitous situation.”
[1187] _MS. State Papers_, _Colonial_ (Record Office), Vol. XIV. No. 57
(1660).
[1188] Thomas Trapham, M.D., _Discourse of the State of Health in
Jamaica_. Lond. 1679.
[1189] Moseley, _op. cit._ p. 421, without reasons given; followed by
Hirsch. _Geog. and Hist. Pathol._ (English transl.), I. 318.
[1190] _Hist. of Jamaica_, III. 615.
[1191] _Cal. S. P._ Amer. and W. I.
[1192] _Cal. S. P._ Amer. and W. I. 1669-74, § 144.
[1193] _Ibid._ § 264, III.
[1194] With a preface by the Printer to the Reader, beginning “The
reprinting of these sad sheets.” Printed and are to be sold by E. Cotes,
living in Aldersgate Street, printer to the said Company.
[1195] The advertisement is cited in Brayley’s edition of Defoe’s _Journal
of the Plague Year_.
[1196] Sloane MS. no. 349. Λοιμογραφια, _or, An experimental Relation of
the Plague, of what happened remarkable in the last Plague in the City of
London_, etc. By William Boghurst, Apothecary in St Giles’ in the Fields.
London, 1666.
[1197] Reprinted in _A Collection of very Valuable and Scarce Pieces
relating to the last Plague in the year 1665_. London, 1721.
[1198] Λοιμολογια. London, 1671. Translation by Quincy, 1720.
[1199] Λοιμοτομια, _or, the Pest Anatomized_. By George Thomson, M.D.
London, 1666.
[1200] London, 1667.
[1201] Among the crop of books brought up by the Plague of Marseilles, in
1720 (the immediate cause of Defoe’s book also) was one by Richard
Bradley, F.R.S., a writer upon botany, on _The Plague of Marseilles. Also
Observations taken from an original Manuscript of a graduate physician,
who resided in London during the whole time of the late plague, anno
1665._ London 1721 (and two more editions the same year). The title-page
of this astute gentleman is of the catch-penny order. All that is said of
the original manuscript occupies about the same number of lines in the
text as in the title, and might have been extracted in the course of five
minutes’ research; it consists merely of a list of a few things supposed
to be distinctive signs of plague--extraordinary inward heat, difficulty
of breathing, pain and heaviness in the head, inclination to sleep,
frequent vomiting, immoderate thirst, dryness of the tongue and palate,
and then the risings, swellings, or buboes. Boghurst’s third chapter is
occupied with twenty-one such signs, and his fourth chapter with a hundred
more signs and circumstances, in numbered paragraphs. It is possible that
his was the manuscript out of which the botanist made capital in his
title-page; but his meagre list of signs might have been got from almost
any work on almost any febrile disorder, and is not sufficient to identify
Boghurst by, although a word or phrase here and there is the same.
However, Defoe would have seen Bradley’s title-page, and might have
inquired after the Sloane MS.
[1202] Of the six plague-deaths in 1664, three were in Whitechapel parish,
and one each in Aldgate, Cripplegate and St Giles’s-in-the-Fields.
[1203] _Reliquiae Baxterianae._ London, 1696, I. 448. This entry in his
journal is dated September 28, 1665, at Hampden, Bucks.
[1204] _Ed. cit._ Chap. XIV. p. 131:--“Diseases which seem to be nearest
like its (plague’s) nature; which chiefly are fevers, called pestilent and
malignant; for ’tis commonly noted that fevers sometimes reign popularly,
which for the vehemency of symptoms, the great slaughter of the sick, and
the great force of contagion, scarce give place to the pestilence; which,
however, because they imitate the type of putrid fevers, and do not so
certainly kill the sick as the plague, or so certainly infect others, they
deserve the name, not of the plague, but by a more minute appellation of a
pestilential fever.”
[1205] In a letter from London, 9 May, 1637 (Gawdy MSS. at Norwich, _Hist.
MSS. Commis._ X. pt. 2. p. 163) it is said: “There is a strange opinion
here amongst the poorer sort of people, who hold it a matter of conscience
to visit their neighbours in any sickness, yea though they know it to be
the infection.”
[1206] Evans, in preface to 1721 edition of Vincent’s book.
[1207] _Cal. State Papers._
[1208] _Ibid._
[1209] Evans, _l. c._
[1210] _Reliquiae Baxterianae._ London, 1696, II. 1. 2.
[1211] Milton, with his wife and daughters, spent the summer and autumn in
the same quiet neighbourhood, at Chalfont St Giles, in a cottage which
Ellwood had secured for him, still remaining with its low ceilings and
diamond window-panes. He there showed Ellwood the manuscript of _Paradise
Lost_, which was published in 1667. The poem contains no reference to the
plague, unless, indeed, the flight to the country had given point to the
lines in the 9th book:
“As one who long in populous city pent,
Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
Forth issuing on a summer’s morn, to breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms,”--
An opportunity arises in the 12th book, where the Plagues of Egypt come
into the prophetic vision of events after the Fall; but the movement is
too rapid to allow of delay, and we have no more than--
“Botches and blains must all his flesh emboss,
And all his people.”
Gibbon thought that the comet of 1664 (which was generally remarked upon
as a portent of the plague that followed) might have suggested the lines,
II. 708-11
“and like a comet burn’d,
That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge
In the arctic sky, and from his horrid hair
Shakes pestilence and war.”
Gibbon seems to make a slip in taking these as “the famous lines which
startled the licenser;” those are usually taken to have been I. 598-9, the
figure of the sun’s eclipse, which
“with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs.”
[1212] _Brit. Mus. Addit. MS._ 4376 (8). “Abstract of several orders
relating to the Plague,” from 35 Hen. VIII. to 1665.
[1213] In excavating the foundations of the Broad Street terminus of the
North London Railway, the workmen came upon a stratum four feet below the
surface and descending eight or ten feet lower, which was full of
uncoffined skeletons. Some hundreds of them were collected and
re-interred. (_Notes and Queries_, 3rd Ser. IV. 85.) The ground was part
of the old enclosure of Bethlem Hospital (St Mary’s Spital outside
Bishopsgate), and was acquired for a cemetery, to the extent of an acre,
by Sir Thomas Roe, in 1569. Probably there were plague-pits dug in it
during more than one of the great epidemics, from 1593 to 1665.
[1214] _Cal. State Papers_, Domestic, 1665, p. 579.
[1215] _Reliquiae Hearnianae._ Ed. Bliss, 1869, II. 117 (under the date of
Jan. 21, 1721).
[1216] _The City Remembrancer._ London, 1769 (professing to be Gideon
Harvey’s notes).
[1217] Procopius (_De Bello Persico_, II. cap. 23, Latin Translation) says
the same of the great Justinian plague in A.D. 543 at Byzantium: “ut vere
quis possit dicere, pestem illam, seu casu aliquo seu providentia, quasi
delectu diligenter habito, sceleratissimos quosque reliquisse. Sed haec
postea clarius patuerunt.” On this Gibbon remarks: “Philosophy must
disdain the observation of Procopius, that the lives of such men were
guarded by the peculiar favour of fortune or Providence;” and most men
will agree with Gibbon. But, if we could be sure of the fact of immunity
(and Boghurst’s testimony is a little weakened by his deference to
Diemerbroek, who knew the classical traditions of plague), it might be
possible to explain it on merely pathological grounds.
[1218] John Tillison to Dr Sancroft, September 14, 1665. Harl. MSS. cited
by Heberden, _Increase and Decrease of Diseases_. London, 1801. Woodall,
writing in 1639, and basing on his experience of London plague in 1603,
1625, and 1636, is in like manner emphatic that the symptoms varied much
in individuals and in seasons.
[1219] _Cal. State Papers._ _Hist. MSS. Com._ IX. 321.
[1220] _Cal. State Papers._ _Cal. Le Fleming MSS._ p. 37 (also for
Cockermouth).
[1221] _Ibid._
[1222] Mead seems to have known that there were plague-cases at Battle in
1665.
[1223] _Cal. S. P._
[1224] _Hist. MSS. Com._ II. 115.
[1225] _The History and Antiquities of Eyam, with a full and particular
account of the Great Plague which desolated that village A.D. 1666._ By
William Wood, London, 1842. This small volume, which owes its interest
solely to the plague-incident, has gone through at least five editions.
Among those who have written, in prose or verse, upon the same theme, Wood
mentions Dr Mead, Miss Seward, Allan Cunningham, E. Rhodes, S. T. Hall,
William and Mary Howitt, S. Roberts, and J. Holland. The story is also in
the _Book of Golden Deeds_.
[1226] Bacon (_Sylva Sylvarum_, Cent. X. § 912. Spedding II. 643) says:
“The plague is many times taken without a manifest sense, as hath been
said. And they report that, where it is found, it hath a scent of the
smell of a mellow apple; and (as some say) of May-flowers; and it is also
received that smells of flowers that are mellow and luscious are ill for
the plague: as white lilies, cowslips and hyacinths.”
[1227] Sir Thomas Elyot, in _The Castle of Health_ (1541), says that
“infected stuff lying in a coffer fast shut for two years, then opened,
has infected those that stood nigh it, who soon after died.” (Cited by
Brasbridge, _Poor Man’s Jewel_, 1578, Chapter VIII.)
[1228] Milner’s _Hist. of Winchester_.
[1229] _The City Remembrancer_, Lond. 1769, vol. I.--an account of the
plague, fire, storm of 1703, etc., said to have been “collected from
curious and authentic papers originally compiled by the late learned Dr
[Gideon] Harvey.” But the section on the plague is almost purely Defoe and
Vincent, with a few things from Mead.
[1230] These figures, with the two oaths, had been copied by the antiquary
Morant for his _History of Essex_, and are preserved in No. 87. ff. 55 and
56, of the Stowe MSS. in the British Museum, where Mr J. A. Herbert, of
the Manuscript Department, pointed them out to me. In his printed
_History_ Morant has summarized the plague-deaths in monthly periods.
The Bearers’ Oath, fol. 57:--
“Ye shall swear, that ye shall bear to the ground and bury the bodys of
all such persons as, during these infectious times, shall dye of the
pestilence within this Towne or the Liberties thereof, or so many of them
as ye shall have notice of, and may be permitted to bury, carrying them to
burials always in the night time, unless it be otherwise ordered by the
Mayor of this Towne; And ye shall be always in readiness for that purpose
at your abode, where you shall be appointed, keeping apart from your
families together with the searchers, and not to be absent from thence
more than your office of Bearers requires. Ye shall always in your walk,
as much as may be, avoid the society of people, keeping as far distant
from them as may bee, and carrying openly in your hands a white wand, by
which people may know you, and shun and avoid you. And shall do all other
things belonging to the office of Bearers, and therein shall demean
yourselves honestly and faithfully, discharging a good conscience; So etc.
_August 1665._
JAMES BARTON and JOHN COOKE:--sworn, who are to have for their pains
10 sh. a week a piece; and 2d for every one to be buried, taking the
2d out of the estate of the deceased. If there be not wherewithal, the
parish to bear it.
Oath 6. p. 44.
The Oath for the Searchers of the Plague, 1665.
“Yee and either of You shall sweare, that ye shall diligently view and
search the corps of all such persons, as during these infectious times,
shall dye within this Towne or the Liberties thereof, or so many of them
as you shall or may have access unto, or have notice of; And shall
according to the best of your skill, determine of what disease every such
dead corps came to its death. And shall immediately give your judgment
thereof to the Constables of the parish where such corps shall be found,
and to the Bearers appointed for the burial of such infected corps. You
shall not make report of the cause of any one’s death better or worse than
the nature of the disease shall deserve. Yee shall live together where you
shall be appointed, and not walk abroad more than necessity requires, and
that only in the execution of your office of Searchers. Ye shall decline
and absent yourselves from your families, and always avoid the society of
people. And in your walk shall keep as far distant from men as may be,
always carrying in your hands a white wand, by which the people may know
you, and shun and avoid you. And ye shall well and truly do all other
things belonging to the office of Searchers, according to the best of your
skill, wisdom, knowledge, and power, in all things dealing faithfully,
honestly, unfeignedly and impartially. So help” etc.
[1231] Morant, _Hist. of Essex_, I. 74.
[1232] Deering, _Nottingham_, vetus et nova, 1751, pp. 82-83. Copied in
Thoresby’s edition of Thoroton’s _History of Nottingham_, II. 60.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_.
Passages in bold are indicated by =bold=.
Superscripted characters are indicated by {superscript}.