Chapter X (4)

Another centre of plague in 1641 was Congleton, in Cheshire, if we may trust the accuracy of the date given in a manuscript written some time after and seemingly based upon tradition[1071]. The infection was traced to a box of clothes which had belonged to one dead of the plague in London and were sent to the dead man’s relations at North Rede Hall. The family who received the box “caught the infection and died.” It spread “all over the country,” and came to Congleton, where it made dreadful ravages. The traditions which the anonymous narrator has put on record are, indeed, those of a plague of the greater degree--stories of corpses that no one would bury, of the sick left to their fate, of money dropped into water before it changed hands. This somewhat doubtful narrative ends with the statement that “the greatest part of the inhabitants died.”

The period from 1643 to 1650 contains all the outbreaks of plague that remain, whether in London or the provinces, until we come to the final explosion of 1665. In London the plague continued at a low endemic level from the outburst of 1636 until 1648, the deaths in 1647 reaching the considerable figure of 3597. This series of plague-years has no other interest than as showing how regularly every season the infection increased from a few cases in May or June to a maximum in September or October. One incident, out of many, may find a place. In August, 1647, Sir Philip Stapleton, one of the Eleven Members, leaders of the Presbyterian party, who were accused of treason by the Army, went over to Calais with five more of the accused, and died of the plague almost as soon as he landed. The people of the house where he died made the rest of the party pay them £80 before they would let them come forth, for bringing the sickness into their house[1072].

The plagues in provincial towns were in those years much more serious relatively than those in London. All of them occurred in towns that were besieged, or had been besieged, or had been occupied by bodies of troops or by garrisons. At the same time most of them were towns which had suffered plagues before. But the first effects of the war in the way of epidemic sickness were not of the type of plague.

War-typhus in Oxfordshire and Berkshire.

It was in the spring and summer of 1643 that England had a first experience of the war-typhus which had been familiar to the continent of Europe for a century and a half, having reached perhaps its greatest prevalence in the Thirty Years’ War. It is only in the sense of war-typhus that Shakespeare’s boast, put into the mouth of John of Gaunt, holds good:

“This fortress, built by nature for herself,
Against infection and the hand of war.”

The medieval civil wars in England do not seem to have bred infection among the people, unless, perhaps, during the anarchy of Stephen’s reign: there is reason to think that the faction-fights of York and Lancaster had no such result. But the wars of the Parliament against the Royalists produced war-sickness in its most characteristic form, and that too, at the very beginning of the struggle.

The existence of sickness in 1643 among the troops of the Parliament in Berkshire and Oxfordshire, under the earl of Essex, is briefly stated by Rushworth. But, for the first time in the history, we find a medical account of the type of sickness, of its circumstances, and of the extent of its prevalence, which is not without interest even for the military history. It happened that the afterwards celebrated Dr Thomas Willis, chemist, anatomist, physiologist and physician, was at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1643, being then aged twenty-one, and intending to enter the Church. In 1659 he published at the Hague his first medical essays, one on Fermentation and the other on Fevers[1073]; and in the latter he recalls many particulars of what he had seen in his earlier years in and around Oxford. The sickness of 1643 was also the subject of a tract published that year in Oxford, by his majesty’s command, by Sir Edward Greaves, physician to the king, which appears to have been in sufficient request in the town to be reprinted within the year[1074].

The preceding events may be briefly summarized[1075]. In November, 1642, the king moved from Oxford with his army towards London and seized Brentford. The forces of the Parliament, under Essex, concentrated round the capital, where they were joined by the trainbands of the City, so that the king recrossed the Thames at Kingston and retired upon Reading and Oxford. All through the months from January to April 1643, tedious negociations went on for a treaty, the details largely relating to the places to be occupied by the Parliamentary troops on the one hand (around Windsor) and by the Royalist troops on the other (in Oxfordshire and Bucks). In April the negociations fell through, and Essex came before Reading on the 15th, with an army of 15,000 foot and 3000 horse. The king and prince Rupert attempted to raise the siege by a march from Oxford, but were stopped at Caversham bridge, and on the 26th April, Reading was surrendered to the Lord General, the garrison marching out the day after.

The siege had lasted only eleven days; the Royalist commandant was sentenced to death at Oxford for betraying the town, but was pardoned. When Essex entered Reading he found the place “infected,” and a great mortality ensued among his men, who were discontented at the want of plunder and of pay. In June he moved his troops across the chalk downs to Thame, on the borders of Bucks; but the weather being wet and unseasonable in the early summer, and afterwards hot, the sickness so increased among them that “he judged the design upon Oxford impracticable” (Rushworth), and on July 9, wrote to the Parliament advising a peace. In his letter, Essex explained that it was impossible to keep the counties from being plundered, “so that they must suffer much wrong, and the cries of the people are infinite.” Eventually he brought what remained of his army to the neighbourhood of London, and having received 2000 recruits from the City, he held a muster on Hounslow Heath, when his whole force amounted to 10,000 men. With his recruited army he marched to the relief of Gloucester[1076], raised the siege, and on September 20 won the (first) battle of Newbury.

The realities of that inactive summer at Reading and Thame may be conceived from what Willis tells us of the state of things within the Royalist lines in Oxfordshire. These things, he says, “fell under our own observation,” he being then at Christ Church and not yet entered on the physic line.

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

“In both armies there began a disease to arise very epidemical;
however they persisting in that work till the besieged were forced to
a surrender, this disease grew so grievous that in a short time after,
either side left off and from that time for many months fought not
with the enemy, but with the disease; as if there had not been leisure
to turn aside to another kind of death....

Essex’s camp moving to Thame, pitched in the places adjacent, where he
shortly lost a great part of his men.

But the king returned to Oxford, where at first the soldiers, being
disposed in the open fields, then afterwards among the towns and
villages, suffered not much less. For his foot (which it chiefly
invaded) being pact together in close houses, when they had filled all
things with filthiness and unwholesome nastiness and stinking odours
(that the very air seemed to be infected) they fell sick by troops,
and as it were by squadrons. At length the fever, now more than a camp
fever, invaded the unarmed and peaceable troops, to wit, the
entertainers of the soldiers, and, generally, all others: yet at first
(the disease being but yet lightly inflicted) though beset with a
heavy and long languishment, however, many escaped. About the summer
solstice this fever began also to increase with worse provision of
symptoms, and to lay hold on the husbandmen and others inhabiting the
country, then afterwards spread through our city and all the country
round for at least ten miles about. In the mean time they who dwelt
far from us in other counties remained free from hurt, being as it
were without the sphere of the contagion. But here this disease became
so epidemical that a great part of the people was killed by it; and
as soon as it had entered a house it ran through the same, that there
was scarce one left well to administer to the sick. Strangers, or such
as were sent to help the sick, were presently taken with the disease;
that at length for fear of the contagion, those who were sick of this
fever were avoided by those who were well, almost as much as if they
had been sick of the plague.

Nor indeed did there a less mortality or slaughter of men accompany
this disease; because cachectic and phthisical old men, or other ways
unhealthful, were killed by it; also not a few children, young men,
and those of a more mature and robust age. I remember in some villages
that almost all the old men died this year, that there were scarce any
left who were able to defend the manners and privileges of the parish
by the more anciently received traditions[1077].”

Willis recalls how this epidemic disease changed its type as the season wore on. At first it was a “putrid synochus,” which seemed to be helped by a sweat or a looseness; a relapse or renewal followed the crisis. Later, it became a continual fever of six or seven days, with no crisis; when the fever ceased the sick kept their beds, sometimes raging, more often in a stupor, great weakness continuing, and sometimes convulsions ensuing. About midsummer “the disease betrayed its malignancy by the eruption of whelks and spots.” It would often begin with an insidious languishing, the strength being totally withdrawn. At length buboes appeared in many, as in the plague. At this time, during the dog-days, the disease began to be handled, not as a fever, but as a lesser plague--by vomits, purges, and sudorifics. The autumn coming on, the disease by degrees remitted its wonted fierceness, so that fewer grew sick of it, and of them many grew well. At the approach of winter the fever almost wholly vanished, and health was fully restored to Oxford and the country round about. Among the victims are mentioned “some belonging to the king’s and queen’s Court, with a few scholars[1078].”

Of the causes, Willis says that, so far as concerned the army, the evident causes were “errors in the six non-naturals.” The spring was very moist and “flabbery,” with almost continual showers, to which a hot summer succeeded. The tract upon the Oxford fever by Greaves, a short piece of some 25 pages, which was written for use in the city during the epidemic, bears out the account by Willis, without developing the doctrine of increasing malignancy. He is concerned to prove that it was not the plague “as the relations and hopes of your enemies, and the fears of others, have suggested.” One of his proofs is the insidious mode of invasion, which Willis ascribes to the sickness in its later type--great weakness without any manifest cause appearing, such as sweating or looseness, so that even strong men were prostrated, with a quick, weak and creeping pulse, sometimes intermittent, with pains in the head, vertigo &c. The most distinctive thing was the spots; “But what need we any farther signs than the spots, which appear upon half the number, at least, of those that fall sick?” Greaves seems to claim that Oxford had some immunity for a time: “God hath been most merciful to this city in sparing us heretofore, when our neighbours round about us were visited.”

Among the causes, he mentions putrid exhalations from stinking matters, dung, carcasses of dead horses and other carrion; “and were there care taken for the removing of these noisome inconveniences, and keeping the streets sweet and clean, it would doubtless tend much to the abatement of the disease.” The diet, also, may have had something to do with it; more particularly the brewers should dry their malt better, boil their beer longer, and put in a sufficiency of hops. But the great cause was the presence of the army.

“We need not look far for a cause where there is an army residing,
which the Athenians called to mind in their calamity, or as Homer
speaks of his Greeks:

εἰ δὴ ὁμοῦ πόλεμός τε δαμᾷ καὶ λοιμὸς ’Αχαιούς.

--it being seldom or never known that an army, where there is much
filth and nastiness in diet, worse lodging, unshifted apparel, etc.,
should continue long without contagious disease.” Whole families were
infected, “and seldom in any house where sick soldiers of either side
are quartered, but the inhabitants likewise fall sick of the same
disease.”

There appears to have been the almost inevitable doubt in some minds, whether the disease were contagious: “But if anyone be yet obstinate, and will not believe it contagious, let him go near and try.” Among the remedies, he mentions a favourite one of the empiric sort, “Lady Kent’s powder,” which Willis also refers to; but Greaves, as became an academical physician, would not admit that it had any advantage over medicines of known ingredients.

This widespread epidemic of typhus, perhaps not without some relapsing fever, and, according to what Willis says in one of his general chapters, complicated, in its diffusive form in the villages around, “with squinancy [sore throat], dysentery, or deadly sweat,” is the only one medically recorded of the Civil Wars. But there was certainly a renewal of it, in the same circumstances, next year at Tiverton; and it seems probable, from the heavy mortality which the parish registers witness to in that year (1644) that some kind of epidemic sickness had spread far and near. Thus, in Short’s abstracts of the burials and christenings in country parishes and market towns, the years 1643 and 1644, and especially the latter, stand out as the most unhealthy for a long time before and after, the next sickly period, as we shall see, being the years 1657-1659. In the year 1643, out of eighty-eight country registers examined, twenty-nine showed a sickly death-rate, although the disproportion of births to deaths does not appear great (821 to 847). That was the year of the epidemic fever in Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Bucks. Next year, which was the year of the Tiverton epidemic, there are again twenty-nine country registers indicating unusual sickness (715 baptisms to 938 burials). In nineteen out of twenty-four market towns, the same two years come out still more unhealthy (844 births to 1193 deaths in 1643 and 1008 births to 1647 deaths in 1644). The registers examined by Short were mostly from Northern and Midland parishes; but they included two or three from Devonshire, and among his market towns was Tiverton. We shall now see what these bald figures mean in that concrete instance.

War-typhus at Tiverton in 1644.

Tiverton was then a town of some 8000 inhabitants, mostly occupied in the weaving industry. On July 5, 1644, Essex arrived with his army on his way to Cornwall to subdue prince Maurice, and lay there till the 18th. The diary of one farmer Roberts has an entry that Mr Thomas Lawrence, who came from Tiverton, reported to him that the earl had 350 and odd carriages, and of horse belonging thereto for draught 2000[1079]. This would have been his large artillery train, baggage and ammunition waggons, etc. His infantry would be some 6000, and his cavalry perhaps 1000. The king’s force meanwhile advanced after Essex, and on July 25 lay in the great meadow at Crediton. They had advanced by Yeovil and may or may not have passed through Tiverton. The two armies came to blows in Cornwall, a prolonged series of encounters in the country around Lostwithiel in wet August weather ending in the escape of Essex to the coast, the retreat of his cavalry through the Royalist lines, and the surrender of the infantry on 1st September. The disarmed foot-soldiers were convoyed back to Poole and Wareham, and did not trouble Tiverton again. The retreating cavalry passed that way, but did not enter the town, which was now held by the Royalists. But the king’s army came back by the way of Tiverton, which they reached on Saturday, the 21st September. They had got no farther than Chard on the 30th, and may have halted in Tiverton some days. A Royalist garrison of 200 men was left in it, and held the place until October 1645, when it was taken by Fairfax after a short siege[1080].

Tiverton was thus occupied by both armies in the summer and autumn of 1644, that of Essex having been quartered in and around the town for a fortnight in July. A serious epidemic followed, especially in the suburb on the western side of the Exe. The particulars of it are in the parish register, from which it would appear that the sickness began in August and lasted until November. The greatest mortality was in October, when 105 were buried, the whole mortality of the year having been 443. The ordinary monthly burials would hardly have exceeded a dozen or fifteen; and as the 105 burials in October would have meant some eight or ten times as many sick, it is not surprising to read that the town was desolate, and that grass grew in the streets[1081]. Of this epidemic there are no medical particulars; but it appears from the parish register that it was known as “the sweating sickness.” It would hardly have been so called if sweating had not been a prominent symptom. Besides the English sweat proper, with its five epidemics from 1485 to 1551, we have had occasion to notice a sweating type in several epidemics of fever. That symptom was so marked in the epidemic of 1558 at Southampton, Portsmouth, and Isle of Wight when they were full of troops, that Dr John Jones, who had personal experience of it, compares it to the sweat proper. It was a sufficiently prominent symptom in the Oxford gaol-fever of 1577 for the _sudor Anglicus_ to be called to mind. In the English fevers and influenzas of 1580-82, a sweat or a lask is mentioned by Cogan as a least occasional; but the fevers of the same years on the Continent had so often the sweating character that it was sometimes said the English sweat had come back. Lastly for the war-fevers of 1643 around Reading and Oxford, Willis asserts in more than one place the occurrence of sweats, critical or giving relief for a time in the milder form, “deadly sweats” in fevers of an aggravated type. To anticipate somewhat, it may be mentioned also that a sweating character is recorded of some cases of the perennial London typhus at its worst period in the middle of the 18th century.

Admitting all these facts, we must still hold to the opinion expressed in the chapter on the Sweating Sickness, that sweating was never again the _signum pathognomicum_ of a whole epidemic, as it had been of the sudor Anglicus in its five outbursts. But if there be gradations of type, or approximations of typhus to sweating sickness (as well as to influenza), then we may perhaps take the Tiverton epidemic as coming nearer than any other to the sweating sickness, on the strength of the name given to it in the parish register.

Nothing is known of sickness in the army of Essex, which lay at Tiverton from 5th to 18th July, 1644. It suffered much in the fighting in Cornwall, and the Parliament on 7 September sent to Portsmouth arms for 6000 foot and 6000 suits of clothes and shirts for the infantry who had surrendered and been convoyed back along the coast. The king’s troops which occupied Tiverton on 21 September on their way back, had doubtless suffered also, from the campaigning in wet fields and miry ways, and are known to have been discontented for want of pay. Probably the epidemic at Tiverton was due to aggravation of the usual circumstances of war. It must be classed as a form of typhus; while its distinctive character of sweating might find an explanation, on the analogy of the sweat of 1485 in London after the arrival of Henry VII. from Bosworth Field, if we had sufficient reason to suppose that the soldiers who successively occupied Tiverton were not themselves suffering from fever. Contact alone, especially the contact _en masse_ of men reduced by hardships and disorderly in their habits, will sometimes serve to breed contagion among a population unlike them in these respects. The converse of that principle, namely that contagion need not follow from the introduction of developed sickness _en masse_, finds an illustration in the case of Tiverton itself within little more than a year after the epidemic of 1644. In November, 1645, Fairfax lay at Ottery St Mary with his army, pending the investment of Exeter. On account of much sickness and heavy mortality among his infantry (not medically described) he removed them on December 2, to Crediton and ultimately to Tiverton, which was supposed to be a healthier situation and became his head-quarters until January 8, 1646[1082]. But no outbreak in the town is mentioned, and almost certainly none occurred; the health of the place continued to be good every year of the time that it was under the rule of the Parliament, as the parish register proves. On the other hand Totness, which was occupied by the same convalescent force after it left Tiverton, had a severe epidemic of plague in the end of the year, 1646.

Plague in the Provinces during the Civil Wars.

The type of sickness, after the first two years of the war, does not appear to have been typhus-fever, but always the old bubo-plague of the towns. So far as the history is known, the experience of war-sicknesses upon English soil began in 1643 and ended in 1644, except in the instance of Fairfax’s troops at Ottery St Mary in November, 1645.

Perhaps the “new model” of the Parliamentary forces, after the pattern of Cromwell’s Ironsides, may have had something to do with the immunity of England from war-typhus in all the marchings and counter-marchings, battles, occupations and sieges, from 1645 to the end of the Civil Wars. Cromwell pointed out to Hampden that the army of Essex was composed of “a set of poor tapsters and town-apprentices,” and gave it as his opinion that these were not the men to win with. When the original commanders, Essex, Manchester, Sir W. Waller, and others, had retired in 1645, terms of the self-denying ordinance, the army of the Parliament acquired a new character under Fairfax and Cromwell: it contained a large proportion of “men of religion,” especially among the officers; and there is sufficient evidence that the war was in future carried on so as to produce as few as possible of those effects of campaigning among the people at large which had marked the Thirty Years’ War in Germany and had attended the operations of Essex and the Royalists in 1643 and 1644.

What remains to be said of the epidemics of the Civil Wars relates almost exclusively to plague, with an occasional reference to the spotted fever which was widely prevalent in the autumn of 1644. These epidemics of plague in the English provinces, during the political troubles, more numerous than usual from 1644 to 1650, are the last on English soil until we come to the final grand explosion of 1665-66.

In 1644 there were two principal centres of plague (besides London), namely Banbury, and the valley of the Tyne. Banbury was near enough to the Royalist head-quarters to have shared in the fever-epidemic of 1643; in that year the burials of 58 soldiers are entered in the parish register, besides a large excess of burials among the civil population (total of 225 deaths in the year as against an annual mortality in former years ranging from 30 to 98). The siege by the Parliamentary forces did not begin until July 19, 1644, and ended in the surrender of the castle in October. The epidemic of plague may have begun as early as January, a soldier having “died in the street” on the 16th; but it is not until March 1644, that plague-deaths appear in the register. In that month there were 10 deaths from plague, in April 34, and so until November, when there were 2, the total mortality from plague having been 161. After the plague ceased, the town remained otherwise unhealthy until 1647[1083].

The information as to Newcastle and Tyneside comes from the observant Scotsman, William Lithgow, who was with the Presbyterian army when Newcastle was stormed on October 20, 1644[1084]. The town had suffered heavily from plague, as we have seen, in 1636, and there had been a slighter outbreak in 1642. Although the state of things during the siege in 1644 was wretched in the extreme, there does not appear to have been plague until after the surrender. The infection was already at work, however, in places near. Thus Tynemouth Castle was surrendered by the Royalist commander, Sir Thomas Riddell on October 27: “The pestilence having been five weeks amongst them, with a great mortality, they were glad to yield, and to scatter themselves abroad; but to the great undoing and infecting of the country about, as it hath contagiously begun” (Lithgow). Among the places infected were Gateshead, Sandgate, Sunderland, and many country villages, the plague being reported in Newcastle itself in 1645 as well as in Darlington[1085].

The year 1645 was one of severe plague in several towns at the same time, some of them in a state of siege and all of them occupied by troops. The largest mortality was at Bristol, being proportionate to its size. The town was taken by prince Rupert on July 22, 1643, and was held by a strong garrison for two years and some weeks. It was towards the end of the Royalist occupation that the plague broke out, probably in the spring of 1645[1086]. On the 16th May, Sir John Culpepper wrote to Lord Digby: “The sickness increases fearfully in this city. There died this week according to the proportion of 1500 in London[1087].” When it had been stormed by Fairfax and Cromwell in September 1645, it was found that prince Rupert’s garrison consisted of 2500 foot, and about 1000 horse. The auxiliaries and the trained bands of the town were reduced in June to about 800, and of the 2500 families then remaining in the town, 1500 were in a state of indigence and want[1088]. In Cromwell’s despatch of September 14 to Mr Speaker Lenthall he says: “I hear but of one man that hath died of the plague in all our army, although we have quartered amongst and in the midst of infected persons and places[1089].” The deaths from plague in the whole epidemic approached 3000, according to the MS. calendars[1090].

While this was going on within the walls of Bristol, an epidemic of plague more severe for the size of the town was progressing at Leeds. The town had been taken by Fairfax on January 23, 1643, and had remained in the quiet possession of the Parliament, under a military governor. In August, 1644, there were buried 131 persons, “before the plague was perceived,” says the parish register; which means that the excessive mortality was not from plague, but probably from the spotted fever which reigned that autumn in other places in the North. The plague proper began with a death in Vicar-lane on March 11, 1645. The weekly bills of mortality which were ordered by the military governor showed a total mortality, from March 11 to December 25, of 1325. It raged most in Vicar-lane and the close yards adjoining; it was also very prevalent in March-lane, the Calls, Call-lane, Lower Briggate, and Mill-hill. The largest number of burials in a week (126) was from July 24 to 31; the mortality kept high all through August and September (60 to 80 weekly), and declined gradually to 3 in the week ending Christmas-day. Whitaker estimates that probably the fifth part of the population died, and he cannot discover any person of name among the victims. The air was so warm and infectious that dogs, cats, mice and rats are said to have died (of rats and mice it can well be believed), and that several birds dropped down dead in their flight over the town[1091]. This appears to have been the only visitation of plague in Leeds, at least since the medieval period.

The plague of Lichfield in 1645-46, like that of Bristol, went on during a constant state of military turmoil. On April 21, 1643, the Close was taken by prince Rupert and was held as a Royalist stronghold until July 26, 1646, the king having repaired thither after his defeat at Naseby in June, 1645, and again in September. The plague is said to have been active both in 1645 and 1646; in twelve streets there occurred 821 deaths, the largest share (121) falling to Green Hill[1092]. In what way the state of siege may have contributed to the plague is uncertain. The fosse was drained dry at one stage, and was choked with rubbish at another. Many of the inhabitants of the town would appear, from the 4th article of the capitulation, to have taken refuge with their effects within the fortified Cathedral Close, which was almost enclosed by water. This was one of several outbreaks of plague that Lichfield had suffered since early Tudor times.

Minor plague outbreaks of 1645 were at Derby and Oxford. Of the latter we have a glimpse from Willis of Christ Church.

“Sometime past in this city [Oxford] _viz._, 1645, the plague (tho’
not great) had spread. Doctor Henry Sayer, a very learned physician,
and happy in his practice, many others refusing this province, boldly
visited all the sick, poor as well as rich, daily administered to them
physic, and handled with his own hands their buboes and virulent
ulcers, and so cured very many sick by his sedulous though dangerous
labour. That he might fortifie himself against the contagion, before
he went into the infected houses, he was wont only to drink a large
draught of sack, and then his perambulation about the borders of death
and the very jaws of the grave being finished, to repeat the same
antidote.

After he had in this city, as if inviolable as to the plague, a long
while taken care of the affairs of the sick without any hurt, he was
sent for to Wallingford Castle, where this disease cruelly raged, as
another Æsculapius, by the governor of the place. But there, being so
bold as to lie in the same bed with a certain captain (his intimate
companion), who was taken with the plague, he quickly received the
contagion of the same disease; nor were the arts then profitable to
the master which had been helpful to so many others, but there with
great sorrow of the inhabitants, nor without great loss to the
medical science, he died of that disease.” He treated the sick, in the
pre-bubonic stages, by a vomit of Crocus Metallorum, and then by
diaphoretics[1093].

None of the other localized epidemics of plague in those years would appear to have been of the first magnitude. Thus, the 22 deaths from plague at Loughborough from 1645 to May 14, 1646, and the renewed prevalence, after a year’s interval, (83 plague-deaths from July 20, 1647 to March 25, 1648)[1094], are samples of local mortalities from plague that other parish registers might bear witness to if they had been examined by antiquaries as closely as Nichols examined those of Leicestershire.

Newark was one of the towns which suffered much during the Civil War. Besieged time after time, it was at length surrendered to the Parliament on May 6, 1646. A letter written shortly after the surrender says[1095]:

“Truly it is become a miserable, stinking, infected town. I pray God
they do not infect the counties and towns adjacent.... By reason of
the sickness in divers places, the officers dare not yet venture to
fetch out the arms.... Tradesmen are preparing to furnish their shops
... but the market cannot be expected to be much whilst the sickness
is in the town.”

The parish register of Newark bears no witness to deaths from plague; but that of the adjacent parish of Stoke, in which stood the Castle and the suburb of Newark surrounding it, has numerous entries of plague-deaths, beginning with one some three weeks after the surrender, on May 28, 1646, and continuing through July, August, and September. Several of the same household are buried in one day, one is “buried in the field,” another “in his croft.” The vicar sums up the mortality thus: “There dyed in the towne of Stoke, 1646, eight score and one, whereof of the plage seven score and nineteen.” The whole deaths in Stoke parish the year before had been nine, and the year after they were six[1096]. If the plague had been at all proportionate in Newark town itself, the deaths would have far exceeded 159; but, as the parish register does not record plague-deaths at all, it may be inferred that the infection lay mostly around the Castle.

Whitmore speaks of having practised in the plague in Staffordshire in 1647-8, and there is some other evidence, without particulars, of an epidemic in the town of Stafford.

One more epidemic of plague is reported from the theatre of Civil War in the south-west, the outbreak at Totness in 1646-7. In the parish register there is a burial entered on July 30, 1646, “suspected she died of the plague.” A leaf of the register has the following: “From December 6, 1646, till the 19th October, 1647, there died in Totness of the plague 262 persons”--a number greater than the register shows in detail. The stereotyped remark is added, that the town was deserted and that grass grew in the streets[1097]. For months before the first suspected case of plague in 1646, Totness had been occupied by one body of troops after another. In November or December, 1645, Goring’s Royalist cavalry, to the number of nearly 5000, were quartered at Totness and two or three other places near. On January 11, 1646, Fairfax came with his army to Totness for the siege of Dartmouth, which was carried by storm on the 20th. The Lord General then withdrew to resume the investment of Exeter. Before doing so he issued warrants to four Hundreds to assemble their men at Totness on the 24th January. The men came in to the number of about 3000, and a regiment was formed from them[1098]. What connexion with the plague in the end of the year all this military stir at Totness may have had, it would not be easy to determine. There had been a great deal of sickness in the army of Fairfax while it lay at Ottery St Mary in the latter half of November, 1645. “By reason of the season,” says Rushworth, “and want of accommodation, abundance of his army, especially the foot, were sick, and many died, seldom less than seven, eight or nine in a day in the town of Autree, and amongst the rest Colonel Pickering died and some other officers. The Royal party had notice of this consumption of Fairfax’s army,” and took heart to make a new effort. The type of sickness is unknown; but it was such as to cause the removal of the head-quarters on December 2 to Tiverton, for better air. The army lay there until January 8, and came to Totness, for the siege of Dartmouth, on the 11th. Thus Totness had not only been occupied by an army some months before the plague, but by an army which had lately had a fatal form of sickness in it. The troops march away, and the historical interest goes with them; what they may have left behind them concerns only the domestic history. Fifty-six years had passed since Totness had the plague before; and on that occasion the epidemic was equally disastrous.

Two other centres of plague in 1646-7 are casually mentioned, one at Reading[1099], which affected “a great number of poor people,” and the other at Carlisle[1100]. Of the latter there are no particulars; but the circumstances of the town for several years were such as to make an outbreak of plague in 1646 credible.

Carlisle suffered much from the war for a series of years. In July, 1644, it was seized for the Royalists, and was besieged by Lesley in October, the siege lasting many months. It had a garrison of about 700, including some of the townsfolk armed. About the end of February, 1645, all the corn in the town was seized to be served out on short allowance; on June 5, “hempseed, dogs and rats were eaten.” The surrender was on June 25, and the place was held by a Scots garrison until December, 1646. It was again seized for the Royalists in April, 1648, was recaptured by Cromwell in October, and held by a strong garrison of 800 foot and a regiment of horse, besides dragoons to keep the borders. All Cumberland was in such a state of destitution that the Parliament ordered a collection for its relief; numbers of the poor are said to have died in the highways, and 30,000 families were in want of bread[1101].

Plague in Scotland during the Civil Wars.

Connecting with plagues in the north of England, there was a great prevalence of the infection in Scotland. After the storming of Newcastle by the Scots Covenanters in October, 1644, the plague appeared in Edinburgh, Kelso, Borrowstownness, Perth and other places. On April 1, 1645, Kelso was burned down, the fire having originated in a house that was being “clengit” or disinfected after plague in it. At Edinburgh the plague-stricken were housed in huts in the King’s park below Salisbury Crags. Collections were made for the relief of people in Leith impoverished by the plague. The epidemic in and around Perth is said to have given rise to the story of Bessie Bell and Mary Gray, who fled from the plague-tainted ground and built themselves a bower by a burn side[1102]. At Glasgow the infection was severe in the end of 1646, and did not cease entirely until the autumn of 1648. There are numerous references to it in the letters of principal Baillie of Glasgow University, of which the following are the most important[1103].

On September 5, 1645, he writes that the pest has laid Leith and Edinburgh desolate, and rages in many more places: never such a pest seen in Scotland (in his time, perhaps). About January, 1646, he writes of “the crushing of our nation by pestilence and Montrose’s victories.” At the end of that year, the plague was in Glasgow: on January 26, 1647, during winter cold, “all that may are fled out of it.” On June 2, the plague had scattered the St Andrews’ students, the principal of St Leonard’s College was dead of it, and it was killing many in the north. The same summer, principal Baillie was shut up in the town of Kilwinning, cut off, with all the inhabitants, from communication with the outer world owing to a suspicion of plague in the place. Edinburgh and Leith, which had suffered earliest, were almost free in the autumn of 1647, but “Aberdeen, Brechin and other parts of the north are miserably wasted; the schools and colleges now in all Scotland, but Edinburgh, are scattered.” Glasgow had its worst experience of plague in the summer and autumn of 1648, which were wet seasons: on August 23, “our condition for the time is sad; the plague is also in Edinburgh and Aberdeen.... At this time I grieved for the state of Glasgow.... My brother’s son’s house was infected; my brother’s house enclosed many in danger; one night near a dozen died of the sickness.... The long great rains for many weeks did prognosticate famine; but these three days past there is also a great change of weather; the Lord continue it.” The infection which began at Glasgow in January, 1647, reached Aberdeen in April, having been carried, it was said, by a woman from Brechin. It was still raging at Aberdeen in September, and there were straggling cases as late as November of the following year (1648). The deaths from plague are put down at 1600, besides 140 in the adjacent fishing villages of Futtie and Torrie on either side of the Dee mouth. This enormous mortality ensued despite the usual rigorous measures--the removal of the infected to huts on the Links and Woolmanhill, a cordon of soldiers to shut them in, a gibbet for the disobedient, and “clengers” for the infected houses[1104]. This disastrous epidemic of 1647-1648 is the last that is heard of plague in Scotland.

Plague in Chester &c. and in Ireland, 1647-1650.

The two remaining English plagues of those years were both in cities that had suffered much from plague before, and were in a constant state of turmoil during the war, namely Chester and Shrewsbury. Chester was held for the king, and surrendered to the Parliament on February 3, 1646, after a siege of twenty weeks, during the latter part of which there was famine within the walls. It was not until 1647 that plague broke out. From June 22 until April 20, 1648, the numbers that died of plague are stated in the MS. of Dr Cowper to have been 2099; all business was suspended, and cabins for the plague-stricken were built outside the town[1105].

The Shrewsbury plague of 1650, like that of Chester, is described as having been dreadful in its effects upon the town. It broke out during the occupation by the Parliament’s troops, on June 12, 1650, in a house in Frankwell, and continued until January, 1651. Only one parish, St Chad’s, appears to have kept account of the plague-deaths: in that register from June 12 to January 16, there are entered 277 burials, whereof of the plague 250, the highest monthly mortality (76) being in August, 1650. Of these 250 deaths, 123 took place in the pest-houses. A letter of August 21 says that 153 died in two months, and that there were near 3000 people in the town dependent upon common charity[1106]. On November 21, there were still 200 cases in the pest-houses, most of them being in the way to recover, as usually happened towards the end of an epidemic through the greater readiness of the buboes to suppurate.

From the small number of burials due to ordinary causes in the St Chad’s register, it would appear that many citizens had fled. The severity of incidence upon certain houses appears from the fact that five servants in Mr Rowley’s house died of it; and that 15 out of 21 burials in St Julian’s parish came from four families[1107]. These are incidents like those of the great plague of London in 1665, which is the next in time in the English annals after Shrewsbury’s visitation in 1650.

The plague in Ireland in 1649-50 was connected, directly and indirectly, with the military operations under Ireton and Cromwell. The previous year, 1648, had been one of famine: at the attack on Kildare by the rebels in the spring, both the English garrison in the town and the attacking Irish were half-starved, and there was a great mortality on both sides, as well as a murrain of cattle. On May 4, corn in all the rebel quarters is said to be at the incredible price of £8 the quarter, both men and cattle dying in large numbers[1108]. In 1649 the plague broke out in Kilkenny, obliging the supreme council of Confederate Catholics to remove to Ennis. Ireton, “thinking he ought not to meddle with what the Lord had so visibly taken into his hands, has declined taking Kilkenny into his own.” But Cromwell besieged it on March 23, 1650, by which time the garrison of 200 horse and 1,000 foot had been reduced to 300 men through the ravages of the plague, the inhabitants having also suffered heavily[1109].

The Royalist letters from the Hague speak of the plague in the summer of 1650 as disastrous in Ireland, particularly in Dublin[1110]. On August 5/15: “Lady Inchiquin came hither last night; those with her report that the plague will devour what the sword has not in Ireland.” On September 2/12: “All I hear out of Ireland is that the plague has made a horrid devastation there; 1100 in a week died in Dublin”--an improbable estimate[1111]. The ranks of the rebels were so thinned by the sword and pestilence that “not above 200 suffered by the hands of the executioner,” after trial at the high court of justice held in County Cork in 1651[1112]. The epidemic appears to have ceased in the autumn of 1650, when the Council of State, in a despatch to the Lord Deputy, take notice of the goodness of God in stopping the plague[1113].

Fever in England, 1651-2.

Between those plagues of the years 1644-1650 and the final re-appearance of the infection on English soil from 1665 to 1666, the interval is occupied with a good deal of fever both in town and country. The sicknesses of those years are of interest as having been described by two competent physicians, Willis and Whitmore.

There were two principal periods of the epidemics, the years 1651-2 and 1657-9. In the former period the sickness appears to have been mostly in the north-west. Whitmore, who had seen practice in the Civil War, in Staffordshire and Shropshire, appears to have been in Chester in 1651, and was settled in London in 1657. It is from him that our information mostly comes[1114].

“It is well known,” he says, “that this disease in the year 1651 [the
same fever that he describes more fully for the years 1658 and 1659]
first broke out by the seaside in Cheshire, Lancashire, and North
Wales.... In Cheshire in the year 1651 this disease seized most upon
the country people who were laborious, the seeds being sooner
dispersed in them through the agitation of the humours and spirits in
their harvest labours, than on those who lead a more sedentary life;
and that might be one reason why we were so free in the city of
Chester, when within three or four miles of us round about, whole
towns were infected with it, there being 80 and 100 sick at a time in
small villages, as at Stanney, Dunham-on-the-hill, Norton and all
there abouts by the water side it extremely raged.”

Whitmore refers to something that he had written, “for my private use,” on the subject of this fever as far back as 1642; he remarks also that it raged every autumn in some place or other of the kingdom, and mentions his own experience in Staffordshire and Shropshire during the late war. But it is the epidemic in Cheshire, Lancashire and North Wales, in 1651 that he specially describes, side by side with those of 1658 and 1659; and it is of interest to note his suggestion as to the origin of the fever on both shores of the Mersey. It was well known that the fever in 1651 first broke out by the seaside in Cheshire, Lancashire and North Wales:

“And if it were observed in Holland that on a misty day, that
infectious disease the Sudor Anglicus came into Amsterdam in an
afternoon, five hundred or more dying that night of it, as Lemnius
reports, I know not why we may not as well suppose their opposite
neighbour, Dublin, then visited for two years with the plague, should
not have communicated the same to them though in a more remiss
degree.”

Here the suggestion is that the prevalence of plague on the opposite coast of Ireland had given rise to a minor and “more remiss” contagion along the coasts of North Wales, Cheshire and Lancashire. But the plague had been most severe in Chester itself before it broke out in Ireland, and had been severe in Shrewsbury at the same time as in Ireland. Whatever the theory, it is significant that the corner of England which was the worst and perhaps only seat of plague in 1648 and 1650, was the seat of a malignant fever in 1651, the former having been in the towns, and the latter in the country villages.

We get a glimpse of a heavy mortality among the country people the year after at Bootle, in Cumberland, just across the border from Lancashire[1115]. On July 8, 1652, Thomas Wharton writes from Kirkdale to Edward Moore:

“There was a boy at widow Robinson’s died upon Saturday in Whitsun
week, and upon the Wednesday before he was sawying at the steward
Worsley’s house with his wrights. The boy and the steward’s man slept
together in Worsley’s barn; towards night the boy was not well, and
could work no longer. All this John Wiggan of Kirkdale did see. Next,
John Birch died, and four of his children--all are dead but his wife.
At John Robinson’s, one child and his wife died last week, and upon
Wednesday last two children more died; and it was thought by the
constable of Bootle that he would be dead before this day at night.
Upon Wednesday at night last, at James Pye’s, there died two, his son
and daughter; and a servant of Thomas Doubie’s is dead; and it is this
day broken forth in Bridge’s, as we hear.”

On what evidence this country epidemic is called “the plague” by the antiquary who prints the document does not appear. The fatality of the disease would suggest plague, rather than fever; but the fever itself would seem to have been more malignant at one place than another, and at one time than another, and there may have been at Bootle cases unmentioned which recovered. If it had been true bubo-plague, it is a solitary instance, so far as records go, in the fifteen years between the extinction of plague at Shrewsbury in 1650, and its revival in London and elsewhere in 1665. The epidemic disease that we ordinarily hear of in that interval is fever; and of the fever our best accounts, after Whitmore’s reference to 1651, are of the epidemics in 1657, 1658 and 1659.

Fever and Influenza, 1657-9.

The account by Willis of three consecutive epidemics in the autumn of 1657, the spring of 1658, and the autumn of 1658, is of peculiar interest for the reason that it is the first systematic piece of epidemiology written in England, and that the middle epidemic of the three was one of influenza[1116]. On reading the narrative of events by Willis, we can understand how it was that the physicians of that period were so impressed by the doctrine of an epidemic constitution of the season, and by its counterpart doctrine of a seasonal predisposition in the human constitution. That teaching was afterwards expounded in successive essays by Sydenham; but it was held generally in those times, and Willis found apt illustrations of it in the three epidemics one after the other in 1657-58. Let us follow his narrative, and add to it some particulars from Whitmore.

The spring and summer of 1657 were extremely dry and hot; but especially after the summer solstice the heats were so intense for many weeks following that, day and night, there was none that did not complain of the heat of the air, and were almost in a continual sweat and were not able to breathe freely. About the calends of July, the fever which was at first sporadic and particular, began to break forth in some places, perhaps two or three cases in the same city or village. The fever fits at this period occurred every other day, but there was no cold fit or rigor preceding, as in an ordinary ague, the heat being intense from the outset. Vomiting and bilious stools occurred plentifully to most, with sweat succeeding, not however an easy, uninterrupted and critical sweat. The remission of the fever fit was rarely complete in the intermediate day, weakness, languor, thirst and restlessness always remaining. In some the type improved after three or four of these quasi-tertian paroxysms; the later fits were ushered in with a rigor and a cold stage, so that the fever became an exact tertian intermittent. But in most the type became worse, which may have been due to errors of regimen and physicking. The fever became, indeed, a continued one, and might end in nervous symptoms--lethargy, delirium, cramps or convulsions.

In August it was spreading far and near, so that in every region or village round Oxford, many were sick of it; but it was much more frequent in the country cottages and in the smaller villages than in cities or towns. It was called “the new disease,” as the war-typhus of 1643 had been called, and other epidemics both earlier and later.