Chapter IV (2)

From 1349 to 1361 there is no record of pestilence in England. There was scarcity or famine in 1353, owing to an unfavourable harvest, but nothing is said of an unusual amount of sickness. In 1361 came the _pestis secunda_, which would hardly have been so called had it not presented the same type as the great bubo-plague. There is little said of it in the chroniclers; but two of them mention that it was called the _pestis puerorum_, or plague of the juveniles; and a third gives the names of several great personages who died of it, including three bishops and Henry, duke of Lancaster, at his castle of Leicester, in Lent, 1362. This recrudescence, then, of the seeds of plague in English soil, may be taken as having cut off the nobles and the young: that is to say, the members of a class who had, by all accounts, escaped the first plague, and the rising generation who had either escaped the first plague as infants or had been born subsequent to it. The same selection of victims was observed, according to Guy de Chauliac, in the very same year at Avignon; in contrast to the Black Death, the second plague there cut off the upper and well-to-do classes, and an innumerable number of children[386]; among the former, it is said, were five cardinals and a hundred bishops. From Poland, also, it is reported that the return of the plague, which happened in 1360, affected mostly, although not exclusively, the upper classes and children. It is clear from the Continental evidence that the second pestilence was marked by the same buboes, carbuncles, and other signs as the first. In some places, at least, it must have been as destructive as the Black Death itself; thus, in Florence, says Petrarch (with obvious exaggeration) hardly ten in the thousand remained alive in the city after the epidemic of 1359, while Boccaccio estimates the mortality of the year at the equally incredible figure of a hundred thousand. In London many more wills than usual were enrolled in 1361, but not more than a third of the number enrolled in 1349: viz. 4 in February, 2 in March, 8 in April, 8 in May, 12 in June, 39 in July, 28 in October, 15 in November, 11 in December.

The _pestis secunda_ is only one of a series of pestilences in the reigns of Edward III. and Richard II., which the chroniclers number in succession to the _pestis quinta_ in 1391. The entries in the annals are for the most part so meagre and colourless that they give us no help in realizing the share that a continuous infection in the soil, from the Black Death onwards, may have had in bringing about the disastrous state of the country in the latter half of the fourteenth century. Edward III. was ruined in reputation by his French wars, and ended his long reign in dishonour. His grandson Richard II. found the task of government too much for him, and was deposed. The history of this period is not complete without some account of the health of the country; a single line or sentence in a chronicle, to mark the date of a _pestis tertia_ or _quarta_ or _quinta_, hardly does justice to the place of national sickness among the events with which historians fill their pages. The graphic picture of the times is ‘The Vision of Piers the Ploughman,’ some passages of which may help us to realize what the bare enumeration of second, third, fourth and fifth pestilences meant. Some Latin poems of the time may be cited in support; and for more particular evidence of the type of pestilence which remained in England after the Black Death, we shall have to refer to certain extant manuscript treatises, from the latter part of the fourteenth century, which had been written in English to meet the wants of the people.

The Latin poems of the time of Edward III. and Richard II. need only be referred to so as to bring out by contrast the immense superiority of the ‘Vision of Piers the Ploughman.’ The poems of John of Bridlington, which are the most considerable of the Latin series of verses, contain numerous references to the epidemics of the time, both at home and abroad. Curiously, he dwells more upon the effects of famine--flux and fever--than upon the plague proper, which he nowhere distinguishes. Thus, of France about the time of the Black Death:

“Destructis granis, deerit mox copia panis;
Poena fames panis, venter fluxu fit inanis.”

Or again, with specific reference to the _pestis secunda_ of 1361, which we know to have been bubo-plague:

“... fluxus nocet, undique febris
Extirpat fluxus pollutos crimine luxus.”

Another reference, in the form of a prophecy, which from the context is clearly to the pestilence of 1368-69, again dwells exclusively upon famine:

“In mensis justi pandetur copia crusti:
Fundis falsorum premet arcta fames famulorum.”

followed by a note in Latin: “from which it appears that the poor in those days were ill off for want of food[387].” One Latin poem of the end of the fourteenth century is expressly “On the Pestilence,” in the following manner:

“Ecce dolet Anglia luctibus imbuta,
Gens tremit tristitia sordibus polluta,
Necat pestilentia viros atque bruta.
Cur? Quia flagitia regnant resoluta[388].”

Turning to the far more real or observant work of the same date by Langland, we find among his general references to sickness a most significant one in which he compares it to the continual dropping of rain through a leaky roof: “The rain that raineth where we rest should, be sicknesses and sorrows that we suffer oft.” Again, in the allegory of Conscience and Nature, the former makes appeal to Nature to come forth as the scourge of evil-living:

“Nature Conscience heard, and came out of the planets, and sent forth
his fore-goers, fevers and fluxes, coughs and cardiacles, cramps and
toothaches, rheums and radegoundes and roynous scalls, boils and
botches and burning agues, frenzies and foul evils--foragers of Nature
had ypricked and preyed polls of people that largely a legion lose
their life soon. Eld the hoary, he was in the vanguard, and bare the
banner before Death, by right he it claimed. Nature came after, with
many keen sores, as pokkes and pestilences, and much people shent. So
Nature through corruptions killed many. Death came driving after, and
all to dust dashed kings and knights, kaisers and popes, learned and
lewd, he let no man stand that he hit even, that ever stirred after.
Many a lovely lady, and lemans of knights, swooned and swelted for
sorrow of Death’s dints.”

But “Conscience of his courtesy to Nature he besought, to cease and
suffer and see whether they would leave pride privily and be perfect
Christens. And Nature ceased then, to see the people amend. Fortune
gan flatter those few that were alive, and promised them long life;
and Lechery he sent among all manner men, wedded and unwedded, and
gathered a great host all against Conscience[389].”

Next came Avarice, Envy and other of the deadly sins, so that the respite which Nature had given was of no real avail.

A clear reference to pestilence continuing in the country comes in where the pope’s exactions are mentioned. The pope did nothing in return for his English tribute:

“Had I a clerk that could write, I would cast him a bill
That he send me under his seal a salve for the pestilence,
And that his blessing and his bulls botches might destroy.
For, sith he hath the power that Peter himself had,
He hath the pot with the salve, soothly as me thinketh.”

Among the other consequences “sithen the pestilence,” was this: “So is pride waxen, in religion and in all the realm among rich and poor, that prayers have no power the pestilence to let; ... ne for dread of the death withdraw not their pride.”

The _pestis secunda_ of 1361, or _pestis puerorum_, may perhaps be pointed to in the passage where chapmen are blamed for indulging their children, “ne for no pouste of pestilence correct them overmuch.” The ill-assorted marriages had doubtless followed the great mortality itself; but the second pestilence, of 1361, which affected the upper classes especially, and is said by one chronicler to have cut off more men than women[390], may have been more specially pointed to in Langland’s reference. Of that pestilence a chronicle of the next century has preserved a curious reminiscence: among its victims were men, doubtless of the upper class, “whose wives, as women out of gouvernance, took as well strangers to their husbands and other lewd and simple people, the which, forgetting their awe, worship and birth, coupled and married them with them that were of low degree and low reputation[391].”

Although Langland, when he speaks of changes “sith the pestilence time,” means the great mortality of 1349, he means in other places, the second, third, and perhaps also fourth pestilences[392]. The years of the pestilences down to the fifth are not the same in all the chronicles; there are indeed some nine outbreaks that might have been enumerated after the Black Death to the end of the century. Some of these are clearly associated with scarcity, and may have been of the old type of famine-sickness; dysentery is, indeed, mentioned in connexion with the sickness of 1391[393]. Again, an epidemic in London in 1382 is said by a chronicler to have affected children (boys and girls), while the same chronicler is explicit that the sickness in Norfolk the year after was confined to the young of both sexes under a certain age. Lastly, the epidemic of 1391 was so severe in the North as to recall the great mortality itself; but under the same year is the reference to sickness of the type of dysentery due to rotten fruit; and under the year before, 1390, two chroniclers agree that the epidemic was “mostly among children,” or that it cut off “more young than old.” It would be unsafe, therefore, to conclude that all the outbreaks of _pestis_ in England subsequent to the Black Death, were of bubo-plague itself. The list of sicknesses in Langland’s poem gives, indeed, as much space to fevers and fluxes, burning agues and frenzies, as to boils and botches, foul evils, pokkes and pestilences--by which latter group of synonyms the bubo-plague is meant. _Pestis_, it is well known, was a generic name in the medieval period, just as pest and pestilence are generic now. So generic was it that some may doubt whether bubo-plague, of the type of 1349, was included at all among the _pestes_ of the generations following. Positive evidence of the continued existence of bubo-plague in England is, at least, not superfluous, and this will be the best place to bring it in.

Medical Evidence of the Continuance of Plague.

The plague was called “the botch” down to the Elizabethan and Stuart periods; and the “botches” in Langland’s poem, or, as he writes it, “boches,” were the familiar risings, under the arms and elsewhere, which had given the disease its popular name when it began to recur time after time. Apart from this verbal or philological evidence, there is a clear proof of the prevalence of true bubo-plague during the latter part of the fourteenth century, in the manuscript ordinances or rules of prevention and treatment which were in circulation. Most of the extant copies bear the name of one John of Burgoyne, or John of Bordeaux[394]. A fragment in comparatively late handwriting purports to be the ordinance of “a great Clark, Mr John Cordewe, at the prayer of King Richard and other the Lords, for pestilence[395]”; from which it may be concluded that this, the commonly used ordinance, dates from the time of Richard II. The names used in the text are “pestilence” and “pestilential sores,” and the handling of the subject is the conventional one for the plague. The ordinance contains exceedingly little that is of practical interest, and it is difficult to believe that it can have been of real use to anyone. We are introduced to the subject with a few empty common-places; but whenever we come to business, we are plainly told to go and consult those who know--and this, be it observed, in a disease which was remarkably uniform in its type and circumstances:

“Wherefore they that have not dronken of that swete drynke of
Astronomye may putte to these pestilentiall sores no fit remedies;
for, because that they know not the cause and the quality of the
sickness, they may not hele it, as sayeth the prince of physic
Avicenna: ‘How shouldest thou hele a sore and yknowe not the cause?’
He that knoweth not the cause, it is impossible that he hele the
sickness.”

If there were any doubt about the date of John of Burgoyne, or John of Bordeaux[396], it ought to be set at rest by the discovery that he corresponds in the closest way with the physician in the Prologue of the _Canterbury Tales_. Chaucer’s doctor of physic stands for the well-grounded practitioner of the time--“grounded in astronomie,” it is true, but at all events academically grounded, in contrast to the charlatans and pretenders who had not been to Paris or Bologna, probably knew no Latin, to say nothing of “astronomy,” and therefore knew not how to let a patient die (or recover) _secundum artem_. The doctor of physic uses his astrological knowledge so much in the manner of John of Bordeaux, that one suspects Chaucer to have seen the passage quoted above, and to have condensed it into the two following lines:

“The cause yknowne, and of his harm the rote,
Anon he gave to the sick man his bote.”

It was in the pestilence that this practitioner had made the money which he kept so tightly. Richly clad he was;

“And yet he was but easy of dispense;
He kept that he wan in the pestilence.
For gold in physic is a cordial:
Therefore he loved gold in special.”

This is John of Burgoyne all over; it would have been an anachronism in England by more than two hundred years to have represented a physician as caring for any but paying patients, or as regarding an epidemic sickness from any other point of view than as a source of income.

Besides the “ordinance” of John of Burgoyne, which may be assigned to the reign of Richard II., there was another essay on the plague circulating in England in an English translation, of which the copy among the Sloane manuscripts is assigned to the fourteenth century[397]. The importance attached to this manuscript work is shown in the fact that it was chosen among the very first to be printed at an English press, probably in the year 1480[398]. It was reprinted in 1536, and the substance of it was copied into nearly all the English books on plague (from one to another) as late as the seventeenth century, much of its original matter passing under the name of one Phaer, or Phayre or Thayre, who was a compiler about the middle of the sixteenth century. Writers on early English printing have made much of the printed book of 1480; but they do not appear to have known of the manuscript which was used as the printer’s “copy[399].” If one happens to use the latter first, and comes later to the printed book, he will observe the identity not merely in the words and spelling but even in the very form in which the type had been cut. The authorship of a manuscript which is thus invested with a various interest may deserve a few lines of inquiry.

The author of it describes himself in the (translated) introduction as “I the bisshop of Arusiens, Doctour of phisike,” that is to say, bishop of Aarhus, in Denmark. In the text, he claims to have practised physic at Montpellier:

“In the Mount of Pessulane I might not eschewe the company of people,
for I went from house to house, because of my poverty, to cure sick
folk. Therefore bread or a sponge sopped in vinegar I took with me,
holding it to my mouth and nose, because all aigre things stoppen the
ways of humours and suffereth no venomous thing to enter into a man’s
body; and so I escaped the pestilence, my fellows supposing that I
should not live. These foresaid things I have proved by myself[400].”

The fact that this medieval treatise, whatever its exact date, was turned into English and circulated in manuscript, and that it was chosen for printing almost as soon as English printing began, in the reign of Edward IV., is sufficient evidence, if more were needed, that the English had to reckon with bubo-plague as one of their standing diseases throughout the latter part of the medieval period. Before we come to the chronology of English plagues in that period, from the Black Death to the accession of the Tudor dynasty in 1485, it will be convenient to consider here, with the help of the above treatise, how the endemic plague was viewed in those days,--what it was ascribed to in its origin, in its incidence upon houses and persons, and in its propagation, what was advised for its avoidance or prevention, and what was prescribed for its treatment. As the bishop’s essay was the source of most that was taught on these matters in England for the next two or three hundred years, it will be an economy to give a brief account of it here once for all.

The remote causes, or warnings of the approach of pestilence, are given under seven heads, including the kind of weather, swarms of flies, shooting stars, comets, thunder and lightning out of the south, and winds out of the south; this list was reproduced, with little or no change, by the Elizabethan writers of popular health-manuals. The second section of the essay is on the “causes of pestilence.” There are three causes:--

“Sometime it cometh from the root beneath; other while from the root
above, so that we may feel sensibly howwith change of the air
appeareth unto us; and sometime it cometh of both together, as well
from the root above as from the root beneath, as we see a siege or
privy next to a chamber, or of any other particular thing which
corrupteth the air in his substance and quality, which is a thing may
happen every day. And thereof cometh the ague of pestilence (and about
the same many physicians be deceived, not supposing this ague to be a
pestilence). Sometimes it cometh of dead carrion, or corruption of
standing waters in ditches or sloughs and other corrupt places. These
things sometime be universal, sometime particular.” Then follow
sentences on the “root above” which are somewhat transcendental. When
both “roots” work together, when, by “th’ ynp‘ffyons[401]” above, the
air is corrupt and by the putrefaction or rotten carrion of the vile
places beneath,--an infirmity is caused in man. “And such infirmity
sometimes is an ague, sometimes a posthume or a swelling, and that is
in many things. Also the air inspired sometimes is venomous and
corrupt, hurting the heart, that nature many ways is grieved, so that
he perceiveth not his harm....

“These things written before are the causes of pestilence. But about
these things, two questions be mooted. The first is, wherefore one
dieth and another dieth not, in a town where men be dead in one house
and in another house there dieth none. The second question is, whether
pestilence sores be contagious.

“To the first question, I say it may hap to be of two causes: that is
to say, of that thing that doth, and of that thing that suffereth. An
ensample of that thing that doth: The influence of the bodies above
beholdeth that place or that place, more than this place or this
place. And one patient is more disposed to die than another. Therefore
it is to be noted that bodies be more hot disposed, of open pores,
than bodies infect having the pores stopped with many humours. Where
bodies be of resolution or opening, as men which abusen them selfe
with wymmen, or usen often times bathis; or men that be hot with
labour or great anger--they have their bodies more disposed to this
great sickness.

“To the second question I say, that pestilence sores be contagious by
cause of infect humoures bodies, and the reek or smoke of such sores
is venomous and corrupteth the air. And therefore it is to flee from
such persons as be infect. In pestilence time nobody should stand in
great press of people, because some man of them may be infect.
Therefore wise physicians, in visiting sick folk, stand far from the
patient, holding their face toward the door or window. And so should
the servants of sick folk stand. Also it is good to a patient every
day for to change his chamber, and often times to have the windows
open against the North and East, and to spar the windows against the
South. For the south wind hath two causes of putrefaction. The first
is, it maketh a man, being whole or sick, feeble in their bodies. The
second cause is, as it is written in the Third of Aphorisms, the south
wind grieveth the hearing and hurteth the heart, because it openeth
the pores of man and entereth into the heart. Wherefore it is good to
an whole man in time of pestilence, when the wind is in the South, to
keep within the house all the day. And if it shall need a man to go
out, yet let him abide in his house till the sun be up in the East
passing southward.”

These explanations of the incidence of plague are in part repeated in the section of the essay where the author gives directions for avoiding it. After enjoining penance, he proceeds:

“It is a good remedy to void and change the infect place. But some may
not profitably change their places. Therefore as much as to them is
possible, it is to be eschewed every cause of putrefaction and
stinking, and namely every fleshly lust with women is to be eschewed.
Also the southern wind, which wind is naturally infective: therefore
spar the windows, etc. Of the same cause, every foul stink is to be
eschewed--of stable, stinking fields, ways, or streets, and namely of
stinking dead carrion; and most of stinking waters, where in many
places water is kept two days or two nights, or else there be gutters
of water casten under the earth which caused great stink and
corruption. And of this cause some die in that house where such things
happen, and in another house die none, as it is said afore. Likewise
in that place where the worts and coles putrefied, it maketh noifull
savour and stinking. For in like wise as by the sweet odour of bawme
the heart and spirits have recreation, so of evil savours they be made
feeble. Therefore keep your house that an infect air enter not in. For
an infect air most causeth putrefaction in places and houses where
folk sleep. Therefore let your house be clean, and make clear fire of
wood flaming: let your house be made with fumigation of herbs, that is
to say, with leaves of bay-tree, juniper, yberiorgam--it is in the
apothecary shops--wormwood etc.... For a little crust corrupteth all
the body.

“Also in the time of the pestilence it is better to abide within the
house; for it is not wholesome to go into the city or town. Also let
your house be sprinkled, specially in summer, with vinegar and roses,
and with the leaves of vine tree. Also it is good to wash your hands
ofttimes in the day with water and vinegar, and wipe your face with
your hands, and smell to them. Also it is good always to savour aigre
things.”

Then follows his own Montpellier experience, already quoted.

The diagnostics come in casually along with the treatment:

“But some would understand how may a man feel when he is infect. I say
that a man which is infect, that day eateth not much meat for he is
replenished with evil humours; and forthwith after dinner he hath lust
to sleep, and feeleth great heat under cold. Also he hath great pain
in the forehead.... He shall feel a swelling under the arm, or about
the share, or about the ears.... When a man feeleth himself infect, as
soon as he may, let him be let blood plenteously till he swoon: then
stop the vein. For a little letting of blood moveth or stirreth
venom.”

Then follow directions for bleeding, according to the position of the bubo--in the armpit, groin or neck, the direction “if on the back” probably having reference to the carbuncle[402]. The section on treatment, which is the last, ends with a prescription for a medicine “that the sooner a swelling be made ripe.”

These are sufficiently clear indications of the bubonic nature of the disease called pestilence. At the same time the writer includes an ague as also pestilential, due to similar causes and arising on similar occasions. This is a use of the name ague which should not be mistaken for its common application to intermittent fever. Ague was simply (febris) acuta; and pestilential ague was a name for typhus fever in the sixteenth century (as in Jones’ _Dyall of Agues_), as well as in Ireland until a much later period. This early association of acute pestilential fever with true bubo-plague means the same relationship of typhus to plague which was systematically taught by Sydenham, Willis, and Morton in the seventeenth century; typhus in their time was the frequent attendant of plague,--a _pestis mitior_; and it would appear to have been its attendant and congener in the fourteenth century also.

The Fourteenth Century Chronology continued.

Two epidemics contend in the chronicles for being the _pestis tertia_--that of 1368-69, and that of 1375. The former is described as a “great pestilence of men and the larger animals[403],” and it appears to have been associated with unfavourable seasons and with the beginning of that scarcity which Langland’s poem refers to the month of April, 1370:

Atte Londoun, I leve, liketh wel my wafres
And louren whan thei lakken hem.--It is nought longe passed,
There was a careful comune whan no cart cam to towne
With bred fro Strethforth, tho gan beggeres wepe
And werkmen were agast a lite. This wole be thought longe
In the date of our Drighte in a drye Aprille,
A thousand and thre hondreth tweis thretty and ten
My wafres there were gesen whan Chichestre was Maire[404].

The _pestis_ of 1368 and 1369 may have been primarily a famine-sickness; but it does not follow that there was no bubo-plague mixed therewith. On the contrary, seasons of scarcity were often in after experience found to be the seasons of plague, the lowered vitality probably offering the opportunity to the plague-virus. Previous to the harvests of 1376 and 1377, which were abundant, there had been an unbroken period of high prices for many years, of which 1371 was remembered as “the grete dere yere[405].” But the _pestis tertia_ appears to have been most severe in the summer of 1368; for, on 23 July of that year, Simon, archbishop of Canterbury, ordered public prayers for the cessation of the pestilence[406], and it is under the same year that the wills of deceased London citizens are enrolled in unusual numbers, although not in such numbers as in the _pestis secunda_ of 1361[407]. Public prayers for the cessation of pestilence (without reference to famine) and an unusual mortality of the richer citizens, point to the plague proper, which may or may not have been the type of sickness in the country districts in 1369, the second year of the epidemic[408].

There is, furthermore, some indirect evidence that pestilential disease, and probably bubo-plague, occurred in London subsequent to the scarcity of the dry April, 1370, to which Langland’s verses relate. This evidence lies in the comparison of the wording of two ordinances of Edward III., one of 1369 and the other of 1371, both relating to nuisances in the city[409]. In an order of the king in Council (43 Edward III.) for stopping the carrying of slaughter-house offal from the shambles in St Nicholas parish, within Newgate, through the streets, lanes, and other places to the banks of the water of Thames near to Baynard’s Castle, where there was a jetty for throwing the refuse from into the river, the motive assigned is that divers prelates, nobles, and other persons having houses in the line of traffic, had complained grievously of these offences to the sight and smell. But, in an amended order of 28th October, 1371, against the same nuisance and with a definite (but futile) relegation of all slaughtering to Stratford on the one side and Knightsbridge on the other, the motive is differently stated: “Whereas of late, from the putrefied blood of slaughtered beasts running in the streets, and the entrails thereof thrown into the water of Thames, the air in the same city has been greatly corrupted and infected, and whereby the worst of abominations and stenches have been generated, and sicknesses and many other maladies have befallen persons dwelling in the same city and resorting thereto:--We, desiring to take precautions against such perils, and to provide for the decency of the said city, and the safety of the same our people” etc.

Up to this date, the Rolls of Parliament contain frequent references to the wasting and impoverishment of the country by pestilence. A petition of 1362 begs the king “to consider the divers mischiefs that have come to his commons by divers pestilences of wind and water, and mortality of men and beasts”--the destructive wind being the tornado-like storm, on the 16th January, 1362, “on Saturday at even,” which was long remembered, and is commemorated, along with the Black Death itself, in an inscription in the church of Ashwell, Herts. Next year, another petition states that “pestilences and great winds have done divers mischiefs”--manors and tenements held direct from the king having become desolate and ruinous. In 1369 a petition states that “the king’s ferms [rents] in every county of England are greatly abated by the great mortalities.” The parliament of 1376, the “good Parliament” so-called, is able to point the moral of its petitions by frequent references to the pestilences “that have been in the kingdom one after another,” the pestilences “of people and servants,” the murrains of cattle, and “the failure of their corn and other fruits of the earth.” The same language recurs in the second parliament of Richard II. in 1378 (the year after the poll-tax), and from that time until the end of his reign, it becomes stereotyped in the petitions deprecating heavy subsidies or excusing the smallness of the sums voted.

The pestilence of 1375 would appear to have been considered as one of the greater sort. The author of the _Eulogium_ reckons it the _pestis tertia_ (passing over that of 1368-69). The season was one of great heat, there was “grandis pestilentia” both in England and other countries, an infinity of both sexes died, the mortality being so swift that the pope, “at the instance of the cardinal of England” granted plenary remission to all dying contrite and confessing their sins[410]. That looks like an epidemic of true bubo-plague,--probably the _pestis quarta_ correctly so-called[411].

In 1379 there was a great plague in the Northern parts, which were stripped of their best men; the Scots made a raid, with the following prayer on their lips: “God and Sen Mungo, Sen Ninian and Seynt Andrew scheld us this day and ilka day fro Goddis grace, and the foule deth that Ynglessh men dyene upon”--foul death being the name given to plague also in 1349[412]. The northern counties send a petition to the parliament of 1379-80, that the king would “consider the very great hurt and damage which they have suffered, and are still suffering, both by pestilence and by the continual devastations of the Scots enemy[413].”

In the parliament of 1381-82 there is a petition from the convent of Salisbury as to want of money to repair the losses caused by the pestilence, of which the tenants are nearly all dead, and by the murrain of cattle. This is more than thirty years from the Black Death, and can hardly refer, as some earlier petitions may have done, to the enduring effects of that calamity. The sixth parliament of Richard II. (1382), has two of the stereotyped petitions deprecating a heavy subsidy on the ground of “the great poverty and disease” of the commons, through pestilence of people, murrain of cattle, failure of crops, great floods, etc.[414] This was the year after the Peasant Revolt, which had coincided with troubles of various kinds. A Norwich chronicle, perhaps of contemporary authority, enters, under the year 1382, a very pestilential fever in many places of the country, and very extraordinary inundations of the fens[415]. In London the epidemic of 1382 is said to have been “chiefly among boys and girls[416].” A primitive English poem of the time has for its subject the earthquake of 1382, and with that portent it associates not only the Peasant’s Rebellion but also “the pestilens[417].”

The year 1383 was a bad one for the fruit, which was spoiled by “foetid fogs, exhalations and various corruptions of the air”: from eating of the spoiled fruits many died, or incurred serious illness and infirmities[418]. By another account, a great pestilence in Kent and other parts of England destroyed many, sparing no age or sex. In Norfolk the sickness that year is said to have been confined to young persons[419]. This was only one of the occasions which might have been referred to in ‘Piers Ploughman,’ when the poor people thought to “poison Hunger” by bad food.

The next pestilence, that of 1390 and 1391, was so prolonged and so serious as to be compared with the Great Mortality itself. It is called the _pestis quinta_ by two annalists[420], and is described not without some detail by several. It is clear that the seeds of disease were ready to burst forth at various parts of the country; for we read that in 1389, the king was in the south of England, and seeing some of his men prostrated by sudden death, he returned to Windsor[421]. Another outburst came the year after. Intense heat began in June and lasted until September; great mortality ensued, the epidemic continuing in diverse parts of England, but not everywhere, until Michaelmas; it cut off more young than old, as well as several famous soldiers[422]. The St Albans entry confirms this: “A great plague, especially of youths and children, who died everywhere in towns and villages, in incredible and excessive numbers[423].” After the epidemic there was scarcity, of which we have special accounts from Norfolk[424]. But the heaviest mortality fell in the year 1391. There was first of all scarcity, now in its second year, and aggravated by six weeks of continual gloom in July and August. At the time of the nuts, apples and other fruits of the kind, many poor people died of dysentery, and the sickness would have been worse but for the laudable care of the mayor of London who caused corn to be brought from over sea. In Norfolk and many other counties the sickness was compared even to the Great Mortality, and was probably a mixture of famine-pestilence with bubo-plague. At York “eleven thousand” were said to have been buried[425]. Another account says that the North suffered severely, and also the West, and that the sickness lasted all summer[426]. Under the year 1393 one annalist states that many died in Essex in September and October, “on the pestilence setting in[427].” The next evidence comes from the Rolls of Parliament; in the first parliament of Henry IV. (1399) a petition is presented “that the king would graciously consider the great pestilence which is in the northern parts,” and send sufficient men to defend the Scots marches.

The first great outburst of plague in the fifteenth century falls somewhere between 1405 and 1407. “So great pestilence,” says the St Albans annalist, under the year 1407, “had not been seen for many years.” In London “thirty thousand men and women” are reported to have died in a short space; and “in country villages the sickness fell so heavily upon the wretched peasants that many homes that had before been gladdened by a numerous family were left almost empty[428].” But it is under the 7th of Henry IV. (1405) that Hall’s chronicle narrates how the king, to avoid the city on account of the plague, sailed from Queenborough to a port in Essex, and so to Plashey, “there to pass his time till the plague were ceased” (p. 36). Another chronicle says that the plague of 1407 was mostly in the West country. In that year, the 9th of Henry IV., there is a petition from Ilchester in Somerset for a remission of dues “because the town is so impoverished and desolate of people that the burgesses are unable to pay the said ferme,” and for the cancelling of all arrears due since the 43rd year of Edward III. (1369). In the 11th of Henry IV. (1410-11), the burgesses of Truro represent “that the said town is impoverished by pestilence and the death of men, and by invasions and loss by the enemy by sea, and by the surcharge of twelve lives, and by default of inhabitants in the said town”--a petition apparently similar in terms to one that had been submitted in the previous reign. In the 1st of Henry IV. (1399), petitions of the same kind had been presented from Lincoln and Yarmouth; the former was “in great part empty and uninhabited,” while the latter had “its houses vacant and void, owing to pestilence and other things.”

For the year 1413 there is a brief entry that “numbers of Englishmen were struck by plague and ceased to live[429].” A single chronicler mentions a pestilence in Norfolk in 1420[430]; but the Rolls of Parliament bear undoubted witness to a very severe prevalence of plague in the North about the same time: a petition from the Marches in 1421 speaks of “great numbers of persons dead by the great mortalities and pestilences which have raged for three years past and still reign; where a hundred men used to be there are not ten, and these of small account; where people of position kept twenty men at arms they now keep only themselves”; the enemy were making raids and food was scarce[431]. Another petition the same year (9 Henry V.) states that “both by pestilence within the realm and wars without there are not sufficient men of estate to hold the office of sheriff[432].” That was shortly after Agincourt and the conquest of France, when the fortunes of Henry V. were at their highest point. The horrors of the siege of Rouen (1419) were a favourite subject with poets of the time[433], but they were of a kind foreign to English experience in that age, and, indeed, in all periods of our history, save that of the Danish invasions. The Cromwellian Civil Wars, as we shall see, do indeed furnish many instances of plague, and some of typhus fever, in besieged or occupied towns; but, for the middle part of the fifteenth century, including the period of the wars of York and Lancaster, there is no good reason to suppose that fevers or other _morbi miseriae_, were rife among the common people, least of all among the peasantry.

The Public Health in the Fifteenth Century.

Our safest indications are got from the prices of commodities and the rates of wages, and these, according to the most competent authority, Thorold Rogers, were more favourable to the working class in the fifteenth century than at other periods: “As the agriculturist throve in the fifteenth century, so the mechanic and the artisan was also prosperous. This was the age in which the property of the guilds was generally acquired.” On famines in particular, I shall quote one other passage, which entirely confirms the view that I had independently stated in the first chapter when speaking of Ergotism:

“Famine, in the strict sense of the word, has rarely occurred in
England, owing to the practice which the inhabitants of this island
have persistently maintained of living mainly on the dearest kind of
corn.... The people lived abundantly, and, except when extraordinary
scarcity occurred, regularly on the best provision which could be
procured[434].”

One such period of extraordinary scarcity all over England fell in the years 1438-39. The chronicle of Croyland says that there were three wet harvests in succession, that famine had been almost constant for two years, and that the people were reduced to eating dried herbs and roots[435]. That would have been a famine of the old kind, like those of 1258 and 1315, wheat having touched 20_s._ But it should not lead us to suppose that the disastrous period of the end of Edward III.’s reign and of the reign of Richard II. was continued throughout the fifteenth century. It is true that the records of that century are scantier than for earlier periods; the monastic chronicles have all ceased, except those of St Albans and Croyland, and the citizens’ diaries, which took their place, have hardly begun. It is possible that a fuller record would have shown a greater prevalence of distress throughout the country. It is probably owing to the scantiness of the history that the views of the fifteenth century range from the extreme of optimism to the extreme of pessimism. Where little is known, much may be imagined. Thus, a recent writer on _England in the Fifteenth Century_[436], says that “all attempts to specify the years of scarcity would only mislead”; and again: “There is hardly any period of five years during that time [15th century] without these ghastly records.” Another recent writer[437] remarks upon the fifteenth century being called a time of rude plenty, and sets against that “the famines, the plagues, the skin-diseases, the miserable quality of the food, the insecurity of life and property, the hovels in which the people lived, and the tyranny and oppression of a time of unsettled government.” It is needless to controvert the merely subjective impression in an author’s mind. But, in order to clear our ideas, let us take these things one by one. What were firstly the famines? There is no great one but that of 1438-39, which was due to a succession of wet harvests, and was equally severe in Scotland and in France, having in them caused famine-sickness as well as plague. Of the plagues, which were certainly no worse than in the Elizabethan and Stuart times, I shall speak in detail almost at once. Of the skin-diseases, there is nowhere a word said: another writer[438] specifies leprosy as afflicting England “all over the country” in the fifteenth century, whereas it can be shown that the prevalence of that disease, such as it had ever been in England, had almost ceased, and its sentimental vogue passed, in the reign of Edward III. The miserable quality of the food and the wretched hovels have certainly no special relevancy to the period[439]; on the contrary, the picture that we get of the manor of Castle Combe in the fifteenth century is that of a prosperous community, although not a highly moral one. As to insecurity of life and property, and oppression of government, there seems to be some illusion because the time was that of the wars of York and Lancaster. But we have the significant observation of Philip de Comines, a contemporary French statesman who kept his eye on the state of other countries; writing of the effects of civil war, he says:--

“England has this peculiar grace that neither the country, nor the
people, nor the houses are wasted or demolished; but the calamities
and misfortunes of the war fall only upon the soldiers and especially
the nobility, of whom they are more than ordinarily jealous: for
nothing is perfect in this world.”

The truth seems to be that the middle part of the fifteenth century was really the time “ere England’s woes began, when every rood of ground maintained its man,” and that the Golden Age came to an end as soon as the dynastic and aristocratic quarrel was ended, and the nobles left free to turn their attention to their lapsing feudal rights. It is then that we begin to hear of enclosures, of adding house to house and field to field, of huge sheep-farms with no labourers on the soil, and of deserted villages. Goldsmith meant it of his own time; but Auburn flourishing belonged to the fifteenth century, and Auburn deserted was a common English experience in the time of Henry VIII. It is just because the fifteenth century is bounded on either side by periods of known distress among the commons, and is itself without a history, that one thinks of it as happy; and that view of it is borne out by the economic history which has been laboriously constructed for it.

So much being premised of the country’s well-being at large, we may now return to the particular records of epidemics of plague.

Chronology of Plagues in the Fifteenth Century.

With the exception of an undoubted reference to influenza epidemic all over England in 1427 (a year of its prevalence in France also), which I shall postpone to a future chapter, the history down to the arrival of the sweating sickness in 1485, is concerned almost exclusively with notices of plague, and of plague mostly in the towns. It cannot be maintained that rural districts were exempt, or that some great epidemics of plague did not fall on town and country alike. Thus, the St Albans annalist, under the year 1431, has an entry of “pestilence at Codycote and divers places of this domain in this year.” Again, in 1439, the Rolls of Parliament contain a petition to the king “how that a sickness called the Pestilence universally through this your realm more commonly reigneth than hath been usual before this time, the which is an infirmity most infective, and the presence of such so infect must be eschewed, as by noble Fisisseanes and wise Philosofors before this time plainly it hath been determined, and as experience daily showeth”--therefore to omit the ceremony of kissing the king in doing knightly service, “and the homage to be as though they kissed you.” That may have been a plague both of town and country during famine, comparable to the epidemic of 1407, which, as “Walsingham” expressly says, was severely felt in the homes of the peasantry as well as in London. But plague henceforth is seldom universal; it becomes more and more a disease of the towns, and when it does occur in the country, it is for the most part at some few limited spots. A Paston letter of the years between 1461 and 1466 gives us a glimpse of the sort of the incidence of plague in country places, and of the avoidance of such infected spots, which we shall find often mentioned in the documents of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries[440]. There is, of course, no means of estimating the frequency of plague in these almost sporadic circumstances. The disease must have had its seats of election in the country, but we may safely conclude that these, after the Black Death and the recurrences thereof down, say, to 1407, were much fewer than in the towns. One significant piece of evidence comes from the great monastery of Canterbury. Among its records is an obituary, on twenty sheets, of all the monks from 1286 to 1517. Out of a hundred cases taken without selection from the record, there died, of pestilence, 33; of phthisis, 10; of chronic diseases, 29. “Pestilence” appears to mean specifically bubo-plague; for we find besides, among the sample hundred, two deaths from flux, one of these corpses having been buried immediately _propter infexionem_. The inference, under correction from further inquiry, would be that one-third of the deaths in the monastery of Canterbury during the first half of the reign of plague in England were from that disease. And that was in a monastery which, in the Black Death itself, is reported, in the same record, to have lost “only four” out of a membership of about eighty[441].

It remains to enumerate briefly the known instances of plague in London or other towns, from the last date given (1420) down to the beginning of the Tudor period (1485). Its prevalence “in England,” but more probably in London only, in 1426, comes out in a letter from the Senate of Venice cautioning the captain of the Flanders galleys and the vice-captain of the London galleys[442]. We hear also of that plague in London owing to the fact that certain Scotsmen of rank, hostages for the ransom of the king of Scots, died of the plague in London. An envoy who proceeded to Scotland on 12th March, 1427, was instructed to ask that the dead hostages be replaced by others of equal rank; and if the king of Scots objected on the ground that they had died because they had been kept in places where the late pestilence raged, notwithstanding their request to be removed, the envoy was to say that the hostages had been kept in London, where the dukes of Bedford and Gloucester and all other lords of the Council remained during the time; and that the hostages were “neither pinned nor barred up” in any house, but went at large in the city, and might have taken any measures they pleased for their own preservation. It appears, however, that the council removed from the city, and that the courts were adjourned, at a stage of the epidemic subsequent to the deaths of the Scots. The last plea of the envoy was that, supposing the pestilence had prevailed throughout England, the king was not therefore bound to send the hostages out of England; from which hypothetical construction, we may conclude that the epidemic was special to London--one of a long series requiring the king’s Court, the Parliament, and the Law Courts to be adjourned[443].

In 1433, the Parliament which met at Westminster on the 8th July, was prorogued on the 15th August, on account of the _gravis pestilentia_ which began to arise in London and the suburbs[444]. A London chronicler enters, under the 12th of Henry VI. (1433) “a grete pestilence and a grete frost,” a conjunction that would be interesting if the hard winter had preceded[445]. The plague revived in London in the following autumn; for, on the 27th October, 1434, the Privy Council ordered all pleas then pending to be continued from the morrow of All Souls to the octaves of St Hilary on account of the epidemic[446]. After three years, in 1437, the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas paid a visit to St Albans Abbey and remained there some time, “on account of the epidemic plague which was then reigning in the city of London[447].” Two years after, 1439, comes the entry in the Rolls of Parliament, already quoted, with reference to omitting the ceremony of kissing the king, because “a sickness called the Pestilence universally through this your realm more commonly reigneth than hath been usual before this time, the which is an infirmity most infective[448].” Thus we have in the decade from 1430 to 1440 no fewer than four distinct outbreaks of plague, three of them confined to the city of London, and one of them, that of 1439, general throughout the realm. The last was “a sickness called the pestilence,” which should mean the bubo-plague. The year was one of great distress abroad, many thousands having died in Paris. It was a year of famine in Scotland, where the disease was undoubtedly dysentery in part; but the information from Scotland (given in the sequel) points to the true plague supervening on the other. There was famine in England at the time when it was in France and in Scotland, so that the type of sickness may have been, in England also, fever and dysentery first and plague afterwards.