Chapter X (3)

It is stated by Salvetti and other gossips of the time that the infection of plague in 1625 was carried all over the country from London by the fleeing citizens, and that few places remained free from it, just as it was said afterwards for the plague of 1665. So far as records show, one would not be warranted in inferring a great provincial prevalence of plague either in 1625 or in 1665. There was plague at Plymouth, and in the south-western counties, under very special circumstances, as we shall see. There was plague also at Norwich, said to have been brought from Yarmouth, and at Colchester the year after. Newcastle, also, which hardly ever escaped the infection when it was afoot, had one of its minor visitations. But, on the whole, it is impossible to show by local evidences that the plague of 1625 was diffused universally over England, either in that or in the following year, or that it grew to a great epidemic in but a few provincial centres[1029]. Probably all the plague-deaths in the provinces together, in 1625 and 1626, would not have made a fifth part of the mortality in London.

The interest centres in the plague at Plymouth, with which the outbreaks at Ashburton, Exeter, Dartmouth, Bridport, and perhaps Portsmouth, Rye and other places, may be connected, if not causally, yet in neighbourhood. The first that we hear of sickness at Plymouth is under date July 26, 1625; some of the ships arrived there had been visited with sickness, and the sick had been landed and lodged under sails[1030]. It is not called “the sickness,” and it is not clear that it was bubo-plague. There may, indeed, have been real plague on board ships of war: Stow says that it was in the fleet in 1603, and there is evidence of its existence now and again in the Venetian galleys of an earlier day. But we are now come to the period of the beginnings of ship-fever, as we shall see in the next chapter; and, for the present, we must not assume that the sickness on board ship in 1625 was all plague, or chiefly plague.

The ships at Plymouth in July were doubtless a part of the squadron of ninety sail, which sailed thence in autumn, carrying ten thousand men to make war on Spain, in accordance with the anti-Catholic policy which had been forced upon James I. in the last years of his reign, and was now being carried out by Charles I. and Buckingham. This was not the first fruit of that policy. The immediate result of it was Mansfeld’s English troops for the recovery of the Palatinate to Protestant rule. That expedition failing to effect a landing was speedily broken with disease, and before it had been many days on shore in Holland was burying 40 or 50 men a day. The fleet eight months later had a similar experience. The ships were victualled with rotten food, and the men were supplied with worthless clothing. As the facts were never investigated, the king having interfered to shield the duke of Buckingham from the attack on him by Sir John Eliot, peculation and jobbery were never proved, although it was known to everyone that honesty was the last quality to be looked for in those about the king and the favourite. The fleet reached the Bay of Cadiz and made a futile demonstration there. It is in the month of November that we begin to hear of sickness. On the 9th Viscount Wimbledon writes from on board the ‘Anne Royal’ to Secretary Conway that there are not men enough to keep the watches owing to sickness. On December 22, the Commissioners at Plymouth write to the Council that about thirty sail had arrived there with 4,000 soldiers “in such miserable condition as for the most part to be incapable of such comforts as the country would afford them.” Captain Bolles, who died since their coming in, declared the occasion of his sickness to be scarcity and corruption of the provisions. Great numbers of the soldiers are continually thrown overboard. Yesterday seven fell down in the streets. The rest are weak, and want clothes, for the supply of which some thousands of pounds were needed. The despatch of December 29, says, “They stink as they go, and the poor rags they have are rotten and ready to fall off if they be touched”[1031].

So far there is no word of plague; on the other hand there is a strong probability that the sickness was ship-fever, or typhus. It is not until the spring of 1626 that the plague is mentioned at Plymouth. On March 18, sickness increases at Plymouth and the plague is wondrous rife. On March 28, the plague is dispersed about the town. On April 5, the sickness increases very much. On the 11th, 40 died last week and twenty houses are shut up; some of the sick died and were buried in less than twenty-four hours. On 8th June, the plague is very bad in Plymouth, and the town is destitute of its best inhabitants. The town-council records bear witness to a rate having been levied for the relief of the plague-stricken, and to attempts as late as 1628 to collect their share of it from those who had fled the town in 1626. The deaths at Plymouth are stated in a manuscript book of the municipal annals to have been 2,000[1032].

Meanwhile plague appeared in other parts of Devonshire. In Exeter it had been prevalent sooner than in Plymouth itself; a letter of November 17, 1625, speaks of the afflicted state of the city, and of the weekly contributions for the plague-stricken. Some particulars of the state of Exeter at this time are given in a memorial to the Privy Council by the mayor and bailiffs of the city, dated October 15, 1627. During the great sickness which fell on their city, and was not cleared in sixteen months, all trading was stopped and the inhabitants generally left the town. To appease a mutiny of the more disordered people, who threatened to burn the city, a rate was assessed generally on the city, but most of the inhabitants being absent, the corporation took up the amount at interest on their own credit. The persons whose names are inclosed, being inhabitants who have returned to the city, now refuse to pay the rate assessed in their absence; and the Council is petitioned to summon them before it[1033].

On May 17, 1626, the plague is reported to be rife “in Devonshire,” and specifically, on July 28, at Okehampton and Ashburton. The epidemic at Ashburton was on the same severe scale as at Plymouth. It began in the end of 1625, but was most fatal in April and May, 1626. The deaths in a twelvemonth were 365, “probably a fourth of the inhabitants[1034].” (In 1627 there were only 27 deaths, doubtless from the empty state of the town.) The same summer it is heard of in Dorsetshire. On September 2, the deputy lieutenants and justices of the county petition the Privy Council that the 1000 soldiers who were to be removed from Devon and Cornwall, should not be quartered in Dorset, but in Somerset, as the former was visited with the plague[1035]. Perhaps Bridport was the centre of plague referred to. Sometime later in the year, perhaps in November, the bailiffs and burgesses of that town explain to the Council that, although they had subscribed to the loan, yet they were unable to pay the amount subscribed as the town was destitute by reason of a twenty weeks’ visitation of plague[1036].

The last of this series of outbreaks in the south-west appears to have been at Dartmouth in the summer of 1627. On June 29, it was reported that the plague was so hot there that the inhabitants had left. The mayor wrote on July 19 to the Privy Council that it was true the inhabitants were still away, but the plague had ceased; only 15 houses had been infected, the inhabitants of which had all been removed to the pest-houses remote from the town[1037].

Farther east on the Channel coast, Portsmouth had a visitation of plague previous to September 28, 1625, perhaps in connexion with the Cadiz fleet; the mayor and bailiffs, being at the end of their year’s office, had refused to take steps to sever the infected[1038]. At Southampton, only one house was infected on August 27. The infection is reported also from Rye in 1625, and from Canterbury, where the famous composer, Orlando Gibbons, died in the beginning of June, 1625, “not without suspicion of the sickness,” says Chamberlain, but, according to Anthony Wood, of the smallpox. The king and queen lodged at Canterbury on June 14; but on July 23 the place had to be avoided “for the great infection.”

From Oxford, where the Parliament met on August 1, the vice-chancellor wrote on July 27, that Sir John Hussey came thither infected from London, and died, that Dr Chaloner, being in the same house, was since dead, that the infection was in other parts of Oxford, and that All Souls College was shut up. There was a slight revival of it in January, 1626, which caused the exercises and the sermons at St Mary’s to be put off[1039]. Anthony Wood gives much the same account as for 1603, and blames the great increase of “cottages” erected by townsmen, to which scholars were enticed.

Cambridge kept free in 1625; but on October 3, three deaths are reported at Trumpington--one Peck, his wife, and maid. On the same date three houses were shut up at Royston, and the infected “translated into the fields[1040].”

The outbreak at Norwich was one of the severer degree[1041]. It was said to have been brought in the end of June, 1625, from Yarmouth, where nothing is recorded of it. A king’s order to the mayor imposed extensive cleansings, &c., but the plague increased from 26 deaths in a week in July, to 40 in September, reaching a maximum of 73 from plague in a week, besides 18 from other causes. On August 27, Mead, the Cambridge don, writes that he had met the Norwich carrier, who told him that the number of burials there the last week was 77, whereof of the plague 67, and but 14 the week before. The infection lingered on until December of the year after (1626), the total deaths from plague having been 1431. The plague at Norwich was made the excuse, by the mayor and aldermen writing to the Privy Council on January 30, 1627, for not contributing towards shipping for the king’s service; the city was distressed from inundations and the plague, “many hundreds of houses” standing empty. There appears to have been some plague at Lynn in the end of 1625, a Privy Council order of January, 1626, authorising the fair to be held there, the disease having ceased.

In April, 1627, the bailiffs and aldermen of Colchester offer the same excuse as Norwich; they are unable to set forth any ships as directed on account of the heavy visitation of their town by the plague, the decay of their trade in the new draperies and baize, and the loss of their ships at sea.

Leicestershire, also, would appear to have had another visitation in 1626. On July 28, the muster in that county was respited on account of the shire town and nine or ten other towns being visited with the plague. Of that there is no trace in the excellent county history by Nichols. Leicester, like Bristol and other places, is known to have imposed quarantine against Londoners in the summer of 1625. It is probable that plague was also in Warwickshire in 1626[1042].

Among other outbreaks in 1625 was one at Newcastle, but it does not compare in extent with some earlier and later plagues there. On September 10, Lord Clifford writes from Appleby Castle to Secretary Conway that Newcastle is so infected with plague, so ill fortified, and ill neighboured, that 500 men would disarm it. In his own county of Cumberland there was plague in Lord William Howard’s house. Sir Francis Howard’s lady took the infection from a new gown she had from London, so as she died the same day she took it; they are all dispersed most miserably, with the greatest terror in the world. Cheshire also had the infection in 1625[1043].

After a clear interval of two or three years, the history of plague begins again in London, and in the provinces. The London plague of 1630 was a small affair (1317 deaths), the city being otherwise so healthy that the christenings exceeded the total burials (9315 to 9237). In 1630, at the same time as the small London outbreak, Cambridge had what appears to have been its most considerable plague, but a very small one at the worst. It began about February 28, caused the colleges to break up and the midsummer assizes to be transferred to Royston, and from first to last produced 214 deaths, known or suspected from plague[1044].

Along with it there were a good many cases at Wymondham (Windham), and some straggling cases at Norwich and Colchester, continuing into 1631, some 20 or 30 dying at Norwich of plague in the latter year[1045]. The other centre in 1630 was in the north-west. Shrewsbury, an old-world town which seldom escaped, had a localised epidemic in St Chad’s parish. It began on May 24 in Frankwell, but was confined to that street by cutting off the residents therein from the rest of the town, and by removing the infected to pest-houses in Kingsland[1046]. It continued at Shrewsbury into 1631, and is heard of also at Preston, Wrexham, and Manchester, collections having been made in neighbouring places for the infected[1047]. But the one great outbreak of those years fell upon the town of Louth, in Lincolnshire, of which the sole particulars are that the plague from April to the end of November, 1631, swept away 754 persons of whom nearly 500 in July and August[1048].

After four years clear in London and in all parts of England (years occupied with the growing quarrel between the king and the Parliament), plague broke out again not far from Louth, where we saw it last, namely at Hull. A century and a half had passed since Hull’s last great devastation by plague year after year from 1472 to 1478. It was then a medieval town, with a chain drawn across the mouth of its creek of the Humber, surrounded by great abbeys, and owing its importance to its trade in stock fish from Iceland and the North Sea. In the Tudor times it had experienced one small epidemic about the Blackfriars Gate in 1576, causing about a hundred deaths. The date of the outbreak in 1635 is not given exactly; but, as in the 15th century, it was the peculiarity of Hull among provincial towns that it kept the infection for several years,--down to June, 1638. Business was paralysed, schools shut up, and the town deserted by the wealthier classes. The deaths from plague from first to last are counted at 2730, besides those which occurred in flight to other places. Upwards of 2,500 persons, once in easy circumstances, are said to have been reduced to seek relief, to which the county of York contributed[1049]. In 1643 Hull stood a siege, but there is no farther mention of plague; nor did the town suffer in 1665.

The year 1635, which saw the beginning of the Hull plague, at a time when the infection was absolutely quiet in the capital, saw also the beginning of an outbreak at Sandwich, with accompanying cases at Canterbury, and a beginning at Yarmouth, Lynn and Norwich[1050], in all which places the infections lingered at a low endemic level for a year or more. The dates are important only as showing that these provincial infections were looking up some months before the sharp outburst in London in the late autumn of 1636 made any sign. In Sandwich, on the 12th of March, 1637, there were 78 houses “visited,” and 188 persons infected; on June 30, 24 houses shut up, with 103 persons, some of them lodged in tents; from July 6 to October 5, there were buried of the plague about ten every week in St Clement’s parish. Considerable expenses were incurred (more than £40 a week), to which the county of Kent and the other Cinque Ports contributed[1051].

Besides these lingering endemics in Kent and Norfolk, the great plague epidemics of 1636 were in Newcastle and London. The Newcastle epidemic was both earlier and relatively far more severe than that of the capital. For a town of some 20,000 inhabitants, the following weekly figures[1052] indicate a plague of the first degree, comparable to the London death-rates of 1625 and 1665:

Died of plague at Newcastle, within the liberties, from May 7 to December 31, 1636:

Week Plague
ending deaths

May 14 59
21 55
28 99
June 4 122
11 99
18 162
25 133
July 2 172
9 184
16 212
23 270
30 366
Aug. 7 337
14 422
21 346
28 246
Sept. 4 520
11 325
To end of Dec. 908
----
Total to 31st Dec. 5027

Besides in Garthside, from May 30 to October 17, 515, making a total of 5542.

This tremendous visitation of Tyneside is said to have begun in October, 1635, at North Shields, where the infection rested during the winter cold, to begin again at Newcastle in spring. During the height of the epidemic in summer and autumn all trade was suspended, no one being about in the streets or in the neighbouring highways. The means tried to check the infection were fumigations with pitch, rosin, and frankincense. Newcastle had one other visit from the plague, as we shall see, in 1644 and 1645, during and after the siege by the Scots Presbyterian army; but in 1665 it is said to have escaped, although Defoe says that the infection was introduced by colliers returning from the Thames.

The London Plague of 1636.

The London plague of 1636 was one of the second degree, for the capital, and was otherwise peculiar as being rather later in the autumnal season than usual. The following table of the weekly mortalities shows how it increased, reached a height, and declined.

Christened Buried Buried of
in all plague

Dec. 24 231 170 0
31 195 174 0

1636

Jan. 7 217 189 0
14 242 174 0
21 220 190 0
28 214 171 0
Feb. 4 227 183 0
11 234 160 0
18 207 203 0
25 198 238 0
Mar. 3 221 198 0
10 231 194 0
17 244 187 0
24 215 177 0
31 193 196 0
Apr. 7 202 199 2
14 221 205 4
21 202 205 7
28 271 210 4
May 5 197 206 4
12 199 254 41
19 171 244 22
26 160 263 38
June 2 189 276 51
9 153 275 64
16 145 325 86
23 149 257 65
30 141 273 82
July 7 152 265 64
14 142 298 86
21 146 350 108
28 183 365 136
Aug. 4 152 394 181
11 166 465 244
18 167 546 284
25 161 690 380
Sept. 1 163 835 536
8 153 921 567
15 166 1106 728
22 172 1018 645
29 168 1211 796
Oct. 6 170 1195 790
13 164 1117 682
20 174 855 476
27 133 779 404
Nov. 3 153 1156 755
10 164 966 635
17 143 827 512
24 162 747 408
Dec. 1 168 550 290
8 175 335 143
15 134 324 79
----- ------ ------
9,522 23,359 10,400

The parishes chiefly affected were the same as in 1625 and 1603. Stepney is still wanting from the general bill; but after 1636 it was included therein, along with Newington, Lambeth, Westminster, Islington and Hackney. These omitted parishes doubtless contributed largely, Stepney in particular, so that the total of plague-deaths would have to be increased by perhaps two thousand. The following parishes had the severest mortalities:

Total Plague-deaths
deaths

St Giles’s, Cripplegate 2374 870
St Mary’s, Whitechapel 1766 1060
St Olave’s, Southwark 1537 847
St Botolph’s, Aldgate 1506 735
St Sepulchre’s, Newgate 1327 566
St Saviour’s, Southwark 1269 742
St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate 1239 515
St George’s, Southwark 1044 514
St Andrew’s, Holborn 922 419
St Giles’s in the Fields 863 428

Like the greater plagues of 1603 and 1625, that of 1636 appears to have begun in the suburbs[1053]. Taylor, the Water-poet, in reprinting his poem on the plague of 1625, with some notes for 1636, says that of 1076 plague-deaths from April 7 to July 28 (the summation in the annual bill comes to 864), only 40 had occurred within the walls, so that the general infection of the City must have followed that of the Liberties and out-parishes. As early in the epidemic as 31 May, according to a record of the Middlesex Sessions, “the plague increases most at Stepney,” wherefore the Greengoose Fair at Stratford was prohibited, (the parish of Stepney extending as far as Shoreditch)[1054]. From Taylor we learn that Gravesend and Faversham had calamitous visitations, and that the infection was in many other towns and villages.

The epidemic of 1636 was like the plague of 1625 in having been preceded by much typhus fever in London, and accompanied by the same, as many as 2360 deaths being put down to fever in the plague-year in the classified causes of death now issued regularly (since 1629) in their printed bills by the Parish Clerks’ Hall. The letters and state papers of the time bear witness to the usual exodus from the City, the movements of the Court, and personal incidents, which have no farther interest after the samples given for 1625. One incident relating to the worst week of the plague in London in 1636 is preserved: eleven persons were committed to Newgate on 5 October for going with one Samuel Underhill, a trumpeter, who died of the plague, to his grave with trumpets and swords drawn in the night time in Shoreditch[1055]. The profession still makes no appearance in the way of epidemiological writing; but some “necessary directions” were drawn up by the College of Physicians, in substance the same as certain statutes issued on the alarm of plague in 1630[1056].

Next year, 1637, the plague continued in London, causing 3082 deaths out of a total of 11,763 in the bills. In 1638 there were only 363 plague-deaths, but the total mortality was 13,624, or nearly 2000 more than in the previous year, when plague alone had claimed its 3000. What were the epidemic types of disease that caused the high mortality in 1638?

Fever in London.

There ought to have been no difficulty in answering the question. The causes of death in the metropolis had been assigned in the books kept at Parish Clerks’ Hall since 1604, and had been printed since 1629. The printed series was in the hands of Graunt, from 1629 down to the date of his writing, January 1662; and he did abstract the deaths under each head of disease and casualty from 1629 to 1636 inclusive, and again from 1647 to 1661; but the ten years from 1637 to 1646 inclusive, he omitted as presenting nothing of importance and as being “inconsistent with the capacity” of his sheet of paper[1057]. All the original documents prior to 1658 appear to have been lost in the fire of 1666, so that Graunt’s omission cannot now be made good. One could wish that the worthy citizen had made no difficulty about the size of his paper. The omitted years are not only those of great political revolution, which may have had an effect upon the public health, but they are of special interest for the beginning of that great period of fever and smallpox in London which continued all through the 18th century.

The following section of London mortality, down to the end of our present period, will show, by reference to the total deaths, how important the omitted years are for the epidemiological history.

Year Plague Fever Smallpox Total
deaths

1629 0 956 72 8771
1630 1317 1091 40 10554
31 274 1115 58 8562
32 8 1108 531 9535
33 0 953 72 8393
34 1 1279 1354 10400
35 0 1622 293 10651
36 10400 2360 127 23359
37 3082 -- -- 11763
38 363 -- -- 13624
39 314 -- -- 9862
1640 1450 -- -- 12771
41 1375 -- -- 13142
42 1274 -- -- 13273
43 996 -- -- 13212
44 1492 -- -- 10933
45 1871 -- -- 11479
46 2365 -- -- 12780
47 3597 1260 139 14059
48 611 884 401 9894
49 67 751 1190 10566
1650 15 970 184 8754
51 23 1038 525 10827
52 16 1212 1279 12569
53 6 282 139 10087
54 16 1371 832 13247
55 9 689 1294 11357
56 6 875 823 13921
57 4 999 835 12434
58 14 1800 409 14993
59 36 2303 1523 14756
1660 13 2148 354 12681
61 20 3490 1246 16665
62 12 2601 768 13664
63 9 2107 411 12741
64 5 2258 1233 15453
65 68596 5257 655 97306
1666 1998 741 38 12738

The year 1638, and the four successive years 1640-43, have exceptional mortalities, which plague alone can by no means account for. In one of those years, 1641, we know that smallpox was rife, along with plague, in the autumn; in the third week of August there were 118 deaths from smallpox (133 from plague), and in the second week of September 101 from smallpox (185 from plague), the plague continuing at even higher figures all through September and October, while smallpox ceases to be mentioned in the letters of the time[1058]. According to earlier and later experience, the epidemic of smallpox would have been followed by a quiet interval of that disease; so that the high mortality, beyond what plague could account for, would have been due to some other epidemic type. There is little doubt that that type was fever, less heard of in letters of the society people because it was, in its steady prevalence from year to year, an infection of the crowded quarters of the poor.

We begin about this period to find fever, or typhus fever, taking that place in the medical history of England which it continued to hold down to the generation before our own. What remains of the history of plague until its extinction in 1665-66, is so closely interwoven with the history of malignant fever, that it will be more convenient to carry the latter on side by side with it instead of in a separate chapter.

The first medical essay upon the malignant fever which got the name of typhus at the beginning of the 19th century, was that of a physician, Sir Edward Greaves, published at Oxford in 1643 in connexion with the sickness in that city while the king and the Royalist army lay there, and with the sickness in the Parliamentary army of the earl of Essex which lay at Reading. Greaves describes the unmistakable characters of spotted fever or typhus, and calls it, in his title “_Morbus Epidemicus Anni 1643_, or the New Disease.” In his text he speaks of “this so frequently termed the New Disease.” The name of “New Disease” was used also for influenza; but there can be no doubt that typhus did become common in England during the Civil Wars, between the Royalists and the Parliamentarians, which were the first and also the only sieges and campaigns on English soil that really touched the life of the nation.

The continent of Europe had been familiar with the same type of fever ever since the beginning of the 16th century, now in Italy, now in Spain, another time in the Low Countries, or in Hungary, or in Germany in the Thirty Years’ War. Greaves, our first writer on epidemic typhus, had been preceded a whole century by Fracastori, whose description of the fever at Verona in 1505 is perhaps the first account of epidemic sickness free from subservience to ancient or medieval authority, and based upon direct observations made in modern Europe. At the same time typhus or spotted fever was not new to England in 1643. There is always the difficulty whether some epidemics of fever should be called influenza or typhus; but the fever of the Black Assizes, as well as the standing “sickness of the house,” was certainly typhus, and so probably was the “new disease” in 1612.

The history of fever in England has been partly traced in the chapter on gaol-fevers in the Tudor period and on the Protean “hot agues,” “new sickness,” “strange fevers” or influenzas of 1540, 1557-8 and 1580. At a much earlier period, fevers of the same type (with dysenteries, lienteries, and pestilent sore throats) have been described, with whatever details there are, in connexion with the periodic famines, especially since the Conquest. But we are now come to a time in the history when typhus fevers appeared in the country unconnected with gaols or with famines. We are come, indeed, to the new era of epidemics, which is revealed more clearly after the plague was extinguished for good, but was really concurrent with the last half-century of plague, preparing, as it were, to succeed the long reign of that infection. The Civil Wars may be admitted to have given the new types of sickness an impulse, but the wars did not originate them, nor did they serve in any way to establish them as the predominant forms of epidemic sickness for nearly two centuries. Whatever it was in the condition of England that favoured the prevalence of fevers, fluxes, and smallpox, that factor was beginning to make itself felt shortly after the Tudor period ended: it continued in operation through all political changes of Restoration, Revolution, and Georgian rule; and if the conditions at length changed, largely for the better so far as the adult population is concerned, and for the better even as regards infancy, there has followed the “_nova cohors febrium_” of our own time, appropriate to its own state of society, as was the old troop before it. This theme is really the subject with which a new volume should open; but as the plague-period overlaps its successor the fever-period by half a century, and as one must pay heed to the chronology, it remains to insert some facts about fevers in this place.

Review of Fever in England to 1643.

Of the prevalence of malignant fevers in England in the earlier years of the 17th century we have only occasional glimpses. Thus, in London in November, 1612, there were several deaths of prominent personages. Prince Henry, eldest son of James I., died of a fever in the course of that month, the illness being thus referred to by Chamberlain in one of his letters to Carleton, written on November 12 from London:

“It is verily thought that the disease was no other than the ordinary
ague that hath reigned and raged almost all over England since the
latter end of summer, which, by observation, is found must have its
ordinary course, and the less physic the better, but only sweating and
an orderly course of keeping and government. The extremity of the
disease seemed to lie in his head [a sure sign of typhus], for remedy
whereof they shaved him and applied warm cocks and pigeons newly
killed, but with no success.”

Sir Theodore Mayerne, the king’s physician (who had been driven from Paris by the intolerance of the Galenists towards those who used antimony and other Paracelsist remedies), was a good deal blamed because he had purged the patient instead of bleeding him.

Writing again on the 19th November, Chamberlain says: “On Friday Sir Harry Row, our alderman died, and, same morning, Sir George Carey, master of the wards, of this new disease.” Chamberlain’s statement that an epidemic fever, which he calls “the ordinary ague,” had raged all over England from the end of summer, 1612, is supported by Short’s abstracts of the parish registers for that year, while the following year, 1613, stands out as still more unhealthy. The next unwholesome year in Short’s tables is 1616; and of that sickly time we have one great personal illustration. Shakespeare died on April 23 at Stratford-on-Avon, after three days’ illness of a fever (but possibly of a chill) having just completed his 52nd year. So far as is known, he was not in failing health. It is a singular coincidence that he made his will on March 25 preceding, the first day of the year, old style; but the customary phrase, “in perfect health and memory (God be praised!),” would have been perhaps varied a little if illness had been creeping upon him. Now the year 1616 is the most unhealthy in Short’s tables from the beginning of the century; the parish registers do not bear witness again to so much sickness until 1623, which, as we have seen, was a year of typhus. The winter of 1615-16 was altogether exceptional: warm and tempestuous south-westerly and westerly winds prevailed from November until February; on the 8th February, there were East Indiamen lying in the Downs, which had been at anchor there for ten weeks waiting for a change of wind to take them down the Channel. The warm winds brought “perpetual weeping weather, foul ways and great floods,” and brought also an early spring. In the last week of January the archbishop found a nest of young blackbirds in his garden at Lambeth, and had “another sent to him from Croydon about four days after.” That was proverbially the kind of Christmas to make a fat churchyard; but it is impossible to say whether one type of sickness, such as fever, predominated, as in the preceding sickly years, 1612-13, and in the next following 1616, namely 1623-24. The following figures from Short’s tables will prove, at least, that there was excessive mortality.

In the year 1616, twenty-one parish registers out of eighty-eight examined, showed excessive mortality, the burials being 601 and the baptisms 417, the year 1617 showing a somewhat improved state of health. In the market towns for the same two years, the excessive proportion of burials to christenings is equally striking: of sixteen town registers examined, ten showed a bad state of health in 1616 (714 burials to 568 baptisms), and in 1617, nine towns had 786 burials to 652 baptisms. But neither in town nor country do the years 1616-17 stand out so unhealthy as the years 1623-24. Those two biennial periods are the only very conspicuous ones in Short’s list for the first quarter of the 17th century, the year 1613 coming next in unhealthiness.

Let us now seek for any causes such as unwholesome conditions of living upon which these epidemic fevers might have depended. One of the most notorious forms of typhus in the 18th century was the ship-fever. The problem how to destroy its infection in the hulls of transports and ships of war occupied the attention of the men of science, Stephen Hales among the rest. Parliament, eager for any cure of so disastrous a pest, voted some thousands of pounds to a projector whose method, when tried, resulted in nothing but the burning of three ships to the water’s edge. This ship-fever became notorious early in the 17th century, having occurred before in 1588. If the Elizabethan naval annals in Hakluyt’s collection were less engrossed than they are with adventures and doughty deeds, we should probably have had more glimpses of an unwholesome state of things in the ’tween-decks. At all events there is no doubt that fever infested the shipping of England as well as of France about the year 1625. The conditions on board ship are, of course, special; there might have been ship-fever, when there was no gaol-fever, workhouse-fever, or domestic typhus in general. But what happened on board ship was no bad index of what was happening on shore. The nation, both on sea and on land, was expanding far beyond its old medieval limits, with very crude notions of the elbow-room that it needed. The ideas of cubic space, ventilation, and the like, with which we are now so familiar, had then no existence. A few facts about the shipping, gaols and houses will serve to illustrate this statement.

The fleet which sailed from Plymouth to make war on Spain in the autumn of 1625 consisted of 90 sail, and carried 10,000 men. Whether there was overcrowding would depend, of course, on the size of the ships; and it may be safely said that the largest ship of the fleet was not a fourth part the size of a transport that would be allowed to carry five hundred men today. The expedition came back in a few weeks broken by sickness and mutiny, just as the expedition of Mansfeld for the relief of the Palatinate had fared. The wretched state of the thirty ships which arrived at Plymouth in November, 1625, has been mentioned already. At the same date we read of French ships of war also throwing overboard two or three dead men every day. There are some more precise figures for French ships in 1627, to be given in the next chapter, which will enable us to measure the provocation to ship-fever afforded by the conditions of a transport service in those years.

Besides ship-fever, in the great typhus period of the 18th century, there used to be named gaol-fever, and workhouse-fever. Of the gaol-fever one hears little in these years. It was severe in the Queen’s Bench prison in Southwark in March, 1579; a petition of that date complains that the prison held double the usual number, that “the sickness of the house” was rife, and that near a hundred had died of it there during the previous six years, many more having been sick[1059]. “The sickness of the house” is a name suggestive of what was usual. These events of prison life made little stir unless they involved the health of classes far removed from the prison-class, as in the three memorable instances of the Black Assizes at Cambridge, Oxford and Exeter. But it is not certain that even such cases have been all recorded, or that instances of gaol-fever spreading to those outside may not have been more frequent than appears. Whitmore in his book of 1659 on fevers in London and the country, quotes Bacon’s remarks upon the Black Assizes of the Tudor period and adds: “and within this eight or nine years there happened the like at Southwark, as I am credibly informed.” That would have been in the King’s Bench prison some time about 1650, which is not far from the date we have brought the history down to[1060].

The overcrowding of the ships and of the gaols had its counterpart in the dwelling-houses of London and other towns such as Portsmouth. The proclamations against the erection of houses on new sites within three miles of the city gates continued to be issued to the time of Cromwell. The effect of them was merely to call into existence a class of poor tenements in odd corners or to overcrowd the existing houses. Thus, on June 27, 1602: “The council have spied an inconvenient increase of housing in and about London by building in odd corners, in gardens and over stables. They have begun to pull down one here and there, lighting in almost every parish on the unluckiest, which is far from removing the mischief[1061].” Again, on February 24, 1623, certain inhabitants of Chancery Lane were indicted at the Middlesex Sessions for subletting, “to the great danger of infectious disease with plague and other diseases[1062].” Again, in May, 1637, there were found in one house eleven married couples and fifteen single persons; in another the householder had taken in eighteen lodgers[1063]. The monstrous window-tax, which did more than anything else to breed typhus and perpetuate smallpox, was not imposed until after the Revolution; but there was enough in the London of the Stuarts to explain the great increase of those diseases.

We have already had evidence of the wide prevalence of spotted fever in 1624, even in the houses of the rich. In the harvest of 1625, Mead, of Cambridge, heard of much sickness which he calls “ague,” about Royston and Barkway, localities by no means malarious; so many were ill that the people wanted help to gather the harvest out of the fields. The nature of these “agues” is a question of great difficulty. The intermissions or remissions of the country fevers are clearly enough asserted by Willis and others, whatever they were; at the same time the general characters of the disease, or diseases, are not those of intermittent malarial fever; and “influenza” does not help us. Chamberlain calls the fever of 1624 “the spotted fever,” and Sir Theodore Mayerne, physician to James I., in a long opinion upon the king’s state of health and the treatment, dated Aug. 20, 1624, introduces a paragraph “Ad Febrem Purpuream,” which, he says, was prevalent that year, “not so much contagious as common through a universal disposing cause,” seizing upon many in the same house, and destroying numbers, being most full of malignity etc. These various accounts for town and country point to a form of typhus; and we find that diagnosis confirmed for the country fevers which were again widely prevalent a few years later, about 1638.

Among other statistics in Graunt’s essay of 1662 we find the figures from the register of “a parish in Hampshire” from 1569 to 1658. There were several years of excessive mortality in that period just as in Short’s tables, but the worst were 1638 and 1639--the years of high mortality (not plague) in London also. Of that mortality in the Hampshire parish Graunt has given a brief account, which he seems to have based on first-hand information. The parish contained about 2700 inhabitants, and enjoyed average good health during the period of 90 years covered by the figures, the births exceeding the deaths by twelve on an average in the year. In the year 1638 the deaths were 156 and the births 66 (about the average); in 1639 the deaths were 114 and the births 55. The cause of this great excess of mortality in a country parish was, says Graunt, not plague, “but a malignant fever raging so fiercely about harvest that there appeared scarce hands enough to take in the corn; which argues, considering there were 2700 parishioners, that 7 might be sick for one that died; whereas of the plague more die than recover. They lay longer sick than is usual in plague,” and there were no plague-tokens.

This considerable epidemic of fever, which must have affected some hundreds of people, occurred in a Hampshire parish. In the very same season (autumn and winter of 1638) we hear of what is obviously the same sickness being epidemic all over the county of Monmouth. On April 23, 1639, the sheriff of Monmouthshire thus explained his delay in executing the king’s writ for an assessment: “In January last I sent forth my warrants for the gathering and levying thereof, but there has been such a general sickness over all this country, called ‘the new disease,’ that they could not possibly be expedited.... Besides, the plague was very hot in divers parts of the county, as Caerleon, Abergavenny, Bedwelty, and many other places[1064].” Here the sheriff uses the same name as Greaves put on his title-page five years after, and he distinguishes clearly between the fever and the plague. The mayor and others of Northampton, in a memorial to the Recorder, dated May 1, 1638, touching the exclusion of Northampton tradesmen from fairs in the vicinity owing to suspicions of the plague in their town, had been informed by the physicians that some cases were of the plague, and some of “the spotted fever[1065].” The same distinction had been made at Norwich, in 1636: in October there was a suspicion of the plague, “but the physicians say it is some other contagious disease which die with the spots[1066].” At Northampton, the coexistence of plague and some other sickness is asserted also by the sheriff (Sept. 18, 1638), who had to excuse himself, like so many other sheriffs, for his failure to remit the ship-money: he himself and his servants had had sickness, and the plague was so great and so long in Northampton that the county still allowed £148 a week for relief of the sick. The deaths in that epidemic from March to September were 533[1067]. The sheriff of Montgomery, making a like excuse on October 25, 1638, speaks of the plague only: “It pleased God to visit a great part of the county with the plague, and three of the greatest towns, Machynlleth, Llanidloes and Newton[1068].” The sheriff of Radnorshire, in his excuse to the Privy Council, on November 14, says he could not collect the ship-money at Presteign “by reason of the plague, which continued there for two years together, and did not cease until the latter end of April last[1069].” We may take it, then, that there was a great deal of plague in Wales about 1637 and 1638, that there was also “the new disease,” or spotted fever, all over Monmouth and probably other Welsh counties, that the same two forms coexisted at Norwich and Northampton, just as they coexisted in London, and that Graunt’s parish in Hampshire in 1638 had probably the fever only.

Short’s statistical tables again bear out the concrete history. In 1638, nineteen country parishes, out of ninety-four examined, had 699 burials to 542 baptisms, and in 1639, eighteen parishes had 585 burials to 386 baptisms. In the market towns the unhealthy period (which may have been due to plague in great part) is a year earlier. In 1637, ten towns out of twenty-four whose registers were added up, show 1474 burials to 1008 baptisms, the proportion in 1638 for the same number of unhealthy towns being 1438 to 1025.

It would have been one of the country epidemics of those years that Boghurst brings into his account of the plague of London in 1665: “I was told by an ancient woman that in Somersetshire the spotted fever was very epidemical, so that whole families died; but being told that plantan [plantain] was very good, all of them almost took it, which wrought an admirable change, for very few died that took it, whereas before they died very fast.” He thinks plantain was as likely to have effected a cure as “higher priced medicines.” We shall find a corresponding prevalence of fever described by a competent physician, Whitmore, for rural parts of Cheshire and Shropshire in 1651 and 1658. Thus we have a remarkable epidemiological phenomenon, somewhat new to England unless, indeed, we bring all those spotted fevers and the like under the generic name of influenza. It was in country districts in 1612-13 and from 1623 to 1625, it was extensively prevalent in 1638 in places as far apart as Hampshire, Monmouth and Northampton, it appeared in Berkshire and Oxfordshire in 1643 in connexion with the military movements of the Royalist and Parliamentary armies, it caused a disastrous loss of life in Tiverton within a few weeks of Essex’s army passing through the town in 1644; it is heard of again in Shropshire and Cumberland in 1651-52, and in the same parts in 1658, as well as in Somerset, and in London steadily from year to year.

It was in its steadiness from year to year in the poor quarters of towns, as well as in its more frequent recurrences as a country epidemic, that the spotted fever deserved the name of “new disease” in the reign of Charles I. But more than one epidemic fever had been called a “new disease” in England before; and no fewer than five epidemics were so called from 1643 to 1685, of which only one or two can be classed among the influenzas.

If it had been possible to keep in mind the history of sicknesses from century to century or even from generation to generation, the “new disease” might have been recognised as not unlike the type that overran England in 1087, that was described by William of Newburgh in 1196, by Matthew Paris in 1258, and by Trokelowe in 1315-16. The conditions producing it or favouring it were not, indeed, the same in all particulars in the medieval period, in the Tudor period, and in the Stuart period. In the medieval period, the extreme want and misery which brought epidemic sickness were due to occasional sharp famines at long intervals, from failure of the crops. In the Tudor period epidemics were still so occasional (so far as is known) that something more special will have to be blamed for them than the swarms of vagrants and criminals all over England, which made the reign of Henry VIII. notorious, and were still a source of trouble until late in the reign of Elizabeth; the four chief periods were in 1540, 1557-8, 1580-82, and 1596-97 so that some special cause would have to be assumed in those years to account for their peculiar “epidemic constitution.” Almost from the beginning of the Stuart period, the seasons of fever (to say nothing of flux and smallpox), seem to come in quicker succession; they are heard of in 1612-13, 1623-25, 1638, 1643-44, 1651, 1658-9, and 1661-65, and heard of in those years over wide tracts of rural England as well as in London and other towns. It was from such experiences that the doctrine arose, so unintelligible to us now, of an “epidemic constitution of the air,” which may be traced, indeed, to much earlier writings than those of the 17th century, but finds its most frequent applications in the latter. The fevers were in part contagious and not contagious; contagion could not explain them all, and yet there was an undoubted infective element in them. The universality or generality of their incidence was accounted for by assuming, on the one hand, something common in the state of the air and, on the other hand, some common predisposition in the bodies of men, which might itself have had seasonal causes. We have now only one name for such common infection of the air, namely influenza; and it is significant that the catarrhal influenzas of 1658 and 1659 were regarded by some at the time as only the appropriate vernal form of the fever which in the hot weather of 1657 and 1658 had prevailed almost in the same general way as influenza, but with the symptoms of typhus. One thing which should not be overlooked, is that plague was still in the country, not always at the same time as the fever, and perhaps not usually coincident with it. Another thing, which will come out in its due order at a later part of the history, is that after the extinction of plague, fever became far more steady in the towns from year to year, and in certain years was not less prevalent in influenza-like epidemics all over the country. One might offer some suggestions as to the meaning of these epidemiological phenomena; but it will perhaps be more convenient that critics who have a speculative turn or a craving for generalities should exercise the one or gratify the other at their own risk.

Along with the prevalence of plague in 1637-38 in many towns of Wales, we may associate the outbreak of 1638 in Gloucester on the one side and in the small Salopian town of Clun on the other. From a letter of the Privy Council to the justices of Gloucestershire, it appears that a rate in aid of the plague-stricken in the city had been imposed upon the county in December, 1637, and that the infection still continued in Gloucester in September, 1638. Contributions made in Bridgenorth for the relief of the visited in Clun appear to belong to the same year. At Reading a tax for the “visited” had been collected once or oftener between 1638 and 1641. In 1641 the town of Leicester was put to some expense (£46. 8_s._ 7_d._) in watching to keep out the sickness which prevailed in Thurmaston, Birstal, Whetstone and Oakham. The very severe plague in Stamford the same year would have been the most intense part of the epidemic in that corner of England; “Camden,” quoting from bishop Sanderson’s manuscript, says that it began at St James’s tide, 1641, and ended in March following, whereof are said to have died between 500 and 600 persons[1070].