Chapter XII (2)

“We were eight in the family--three men, three youths, an old woman
and a maid; all which came to me, hearing of my stay in town, some to
accompany me, others to help me [he was a celebrity in the religious
world with a large following]. It was the latter end of September
before any of us were touched.... But at last we were visited.... At
first our maid was smitten; it began with a shivering and trembling in
her flesh, and quickly seized on her spirits.... I came home and the
maid was on her death-bed; and another crying out for help, being left
alone in a sweating fainting-fit. It was on Monday when the maid was
smitten; on Thursday she died full of tokens. On Friday one of the
youths had a swelling in his groin, and on the Lord’s day died with
the marks of the distemper upon him. On the same day another youth did
sicken, and on the Wednesday following he died. On the Thursday night
his master fell sick of the disease, and within a day or two was full
of spots, but strangely recovered.... The rest were preserved.”

The two boys appear to have been conscious to the end, and to have died in the placid mood that often came on in the last hours of plague, as in other prostrating infections such as yellow fever and cholera. In those two weeks at the end of September and beginning of October the burials in all London were 6460 (of plague 5533) and 5720 (of plague 4929).

The chief preventive measure which the mayor had to give effect to was the shutting-up of infected houses. Defoe says that he carried out that odious policy considerately. The policy was a traditional one, and may or may not have had its origin in medical prescription. It was practised, as we have seen in a former chapter, early in the reign of Henry VIII., if not even before that. The doctrine underlying it was the contagiousness of plague, which was much more a doctrine of the faculty than of the people, and was most of all a doctrine of the Court. Originally the dogma of contagiousness, in all its rigour, had been made for the persons of the Tudor monarchs, and as late as 1665 it was in the atmosphere of the Court that the contagion of plague was invested with the most powerful properties. The common people of London gave no heed to it, because they saw every hour that it was a matter of indifference; the middle classes held it in a qualified way, knowing that there was less to fear from plague-bodies than from plague-infected ground; but kings took the comprehensive view of it, allowing no exceptions or scientific reservations, and the Court doctors, such as Mead in the 18th century, at length succeeded in making the high doctrine of plague-contagion to pass current. Two instances are known from extant petitions, of its rigorous application upon Court servants in 1665: one in the case of a trumpeter of the king, and the other in the case of the barber to the household. In the latter case, apparently when the Court was at Salisbury in the autumn, a stranger supposed to be visited with the sickness ran into the barber’s tent in his absence; whereon the tent and all his goods and instruments of livelihood were burnt, he himself confined, and his servants sent away, according to the orders for the preservation of the Court, “so that he lost his trade and was utterly ruined[1214].”

The more discriminating of the profession knew and taught that the seeds of plague could lurk in a bundle of clothes, or of bedding, or in other effects, or in bales of goods, and that they became the more virulent through the fermentation that goes on in these circumstances. The contagion was understood to be _per fomitem_ and _per distans_; on the other hand, experience was rather against a contagion from the exhalations of the sick: the immunity of nurses was as striking as it has been in many other contagions. The people were instinctively right in their belief that they mostly caught the plague because the infection was in the air of the place; so long as they were living on a plague-stricken spot, they were exposed to the risk; and if there were any difference in safety between dwelling-houses, and the streets, markets or shops, the preference seemed to lie with the former. The traditional or official doctrine, however, was that the plague-stricken were the sources of contagion, that all who had come near them were suspect, and that the safety of the well depended upon the rigorous shutting-up of the sick and the suspected together. The experience of epidemic after epidemic might have shown that this theoretical reasoning, so attractive to the “thorough” order of mind, was worthless in practice. A great plague pursued its course until the infected houses became too many for shutting up; if many plague-years did not develop epidemics of the first degree, that was in accordance with some epidemiological law, and not because the preventive measures were one year effective and another year ineffective. However, a traditional doctrine will always survive a good deal of adverse experience; and the shutting-up of houses, which had signally failed in 1563, 1593, 1603, 1625 and 1636, was resorted to once more in 1665, and perhaps with more rigour than ever so as to give it a fair chance. Defoe has stated with great fairness the hardships of it, and he follows Hodges and Boghurst in pronouncing it a mistake and a failure. Most of the horrible incidents of the plague came from the shutting-up of houses; those which Defoe introduces in that connexion do not exceed probability. It is hard to say whether the condemnation of shutting-up, which found wide currency during and immediately after the plague of 1665, would have at length made any difference to the traditional doctrine and practice. The occasion did not arise again in London except for a few months in 1666, when the old practice seems to have been enforced. The corresponding doctrine and practice that arose in its place, was quarantine against foreign importation; that rested firstly upon the sophistical assertion of the all-powerful Mead, that plague had been an exotic to England, and secondly upon the doctrine of plague-contagion in its most comprehensive and least discriminating form. But the quarantine law dates really from the Queen Anne period, and the curious history of its rise, progress, and overthrow belongs to another part of this work.

The other general preventive measure besides the shutting-up of “visited” houses was the burning of fires in the streets, which was also a tradition from Tudor times. The mayor loyally carried out that also; until in the beginning of autumn a concurrence of things made an end of the practice. These adverse influences were first, the heavy showers of rain, which put the fires out; secondly, the differences in medical opinion whether coal-fires or wood-fires were the better, and whether fires were to be recommended at all; and thirdly the popular perception that the fires made no difference to the progress of the epidemic.

In the way of individual protection and treatment, the College of Physicians issued a tract full of directions and prescriptions, which Boghurst says were all old, being taken from De Vigo († 1520). It is not necessarily against methods of practice that they are old; but one cannot fail to observe how closely the medieval teaching about plague, cause and cure together, was followed to the last in England: for two centuries the writers on plague reproduced the chapters and paragraphs almost without change that we find in the treatise of the bishop of Aarhus, which circulated in manuscript in England in the 15th century and was first printed about 1480. The most popular preventive was something “to smell to,” not sweet but _aigre_. Hence the use of civet-boxes, pouncet-boxes, and pomanders, which were made to suit all purses. There were also plague-waters, one of which, “the plague-water of Matthias,” figures among the prescriptions of the College of Physicians both in a cheap and in an expensive form. The College’s prescription “to break the tumour” is as follows:

“Take a great onion, hollow it, put into it a fig, rue cut small, and
a dram of Venice treacle; put it close stopt in a wet paper, and roast
it in the embers; apply it hot unto the tumour; lay three or four, one
after another; let one lie three hours.”

The Paracelsist or chemical physician, Thomson, gives a prescription which brings out the mystical tendencies of that otherwise meritorious sect. It relates to a method of curing plague by means of a toad.

“The great difficulty to bring this animal to a true Zenexton lies in
an exquisite preparation of it, the manner whereof that great
investigator of verity, Van Helmont, hath thus delivered, as he
received instructions from Butler, an Irishman who (to Helmont’s
knowledge) had cured some thousands of the pest in London. He gave
directions that a large Bufo, taken in the afternoon in the month of
June, should be hung up by the legs, nigh the fire, over a vessel of
yellow wax” etc.

Tobacco, smoked or chewed, came into great vogue in 1665 as a preservative from the plague. Hearne, the antiquary, says:

“I have been told that in the last great plague at London [1665] none
that kept tobacconists shops had the plague. It is certain that
smoaking it was looked upon as a most excellent preservative; in so
much that even children were obliged to smoak. And I remember that I
heard formerly Tom Rogers, who was yeoman beadle, say that when he was
that year, when the plague raged, a schoolboy at Eaton, all the boys
of that school were obliged to smoak in the school every morning, and
that he was never whipped so much in his life as he was one morning
for not smoaking[1215].”

The best medical details of the Great Plague come from Boghurst, who claims that the observations were all his own.

With regard to its incidence he says: “About the beginning most men
got it with fuddling, surfeiting, over heating themselves, and
disorderly living.” Again: “Those that married in the heat of the
disease (if they had not had the disease before) almost all fell into
it in a week or a fortnight after it, both in the city and in the
country, of which most died, especially the men.” One of Dekker’s
stories of the year 1603 is an illustration of the same thing. “It
usually went through a whole kindred, though living in several places;
which was the cause it swept away many whole families.... In some
houses ten out of twelve died, and sixteen out of twenty.” Melancholy
for the loss of friends predisposed to it, while cheerfulness and
courage fortified some against it. Old people that had many sores upon
them, especially carbuncles, almost all died. The natural
constitution, disposition, or complexion “did much to make or mar the
disease.” People with hollow eyes commonly died. Those who drank
brandy and strong waters grew mad, looked about them wildly, and died
quickly in two days. “All that I saw that were let blood, if they had
been sick two, three, four or five days or more, died the same day.”
Teeming women fared miserably; they were not more subject than others:
but scarce one in forty lived (this is enlarged upon by Defoe). Many
people had the spotted fever and the plague both together, and many
the French pox and the plague both together, and yet both sorts
commonly lived (someone says that men caught the French pox of
purpose[1216]). All sorts died, but more of the good than the bad,
more men than women, more of dull complexion than fair. “Of all the
common hackney prostitutes of Luteners-lane, Dog-yard, Cross-lane,
Baldwin-gardens, Hatton-garden and other places, the common criers of
oranges, oysters, fruits etc., all the impudent drunken drabbing
bayles and fellows, and many others of the _rouge route_, there is but
few missing--verifying the testimony of Diemerbroeck that the plague
left the rotten bodies and took the sound[1217].” It fell not very
thick upon old people till about the middle or slake of the disease,
and most in the decrease and declining of the disease. Cats, dogs,
cattle, poultry, etc., were free from infection.

Some died in twelve or twenty days, but most in five or six. In summer
about one-half that were sick, died; but towards winter, three of four
lived. None died suddenly as stricken by lightning: “I saw none die
under twenty or twenty-four hours.” After one rising, or bubo, was
broke and run, commonly another and another would rise in several
parts of the body, so that many had the disease upon them half a year;
some risings would not break under half a year, being so deep in the
flesh.

This explains Dekker’s statement in 1603 that some had buboes repeatedly, and that one person had eighteen sores. Dr Thomson himself had buboes thrice. Hodges, also, knew of many cases fatal at the third seizure, the later attacks being not relapses but new infections; some even fell at the fifth or sixth time, being before well recovered. In one of the earlier London plagues, that of 1563, Jones saw a case of a woman near Temple Bar that ended fatally at the third attack, the buboes having suppurated twice, but not at the third time. Boghurst goes on:

Of evil omen was “a white, soft, sudden, puffed up tumour on the neck
behind the ears, in the armpit, or in the flank;” also a “large
extended hard tumour under the chin, swelling downwards upon the
throat and fetching a great compass” (the brawny swelling of the
submaxillary salivary glands and surrounding tissues). Tokens came out
after a violent sweat, which was often induced of purpose by nurses,
who said, ‘Cochineal is a fine thing to bring out the tokens.’ Nurses
often killed their patients by giving them cold drinks. Many also were
killed by the shutting-up of houses, by wickedness (of nurses ?), by
confident and ignorant mountebanks, by over-hasty cutting and burning
of buboes. Servants and poor people removed to the pest-house or to
other houses in their sickness, took harm therefrom. People using
corrosives, actual cauteries and many intolerable applications put
their patients to more pain than the disease did.

The botches, or buboes (swollen lymph-glands in the neck, armpits or
groins), were the most distinctive sign of the plague, having given to
it the old name of “the botch.” Besides these, there were the “tokens”
(specially limited in meaning to livid spots on the skin), carbuncles
and blains. Carbuncles, says Boghurst, commonly rose upon the most
substantial, gross, firm flesh, as the thighs, legs, backside,
buttock; they never occurred, that he saw, on the head among the hair,
or on the belly. They were not seen until the end of July, were most
rife in September and October, commonly in old people, never in
children.

Hodges saw one carbuncle on the thigh, the size of two handbreadths, with a large blister on it, “which being opened by the chirurgeon and scarification made where the mortification did begin, the patient expired under the operation.” But most commonly carbuncles did not exceed the breadth of three or four fingers. Boghurst continues:

“Blains are a kind of diminutive carbuncle, but are not so hard,
black, and fiery; sometimes there is a little core in them. Generally
they are no bigger than a two penny piece, or a groat at the biggest,
with a bladder full of liquor on the top of them, which, if you open
but a little, will come out whitish or of a lemon or straw colour.”
“Besides a blain there is a thing you may call a blister, puffing up
the skin, long like one’s finger in figure, like a blister raised with
cantharides; and such usually die.” The following experience is
remarkable, but it is doubtful whether Boghurst has not taken it from
Diemerbroek: “Towards the latter end of a plague, many people that
stayed, and others that returned, have little angry pustules and
blains rising upon them, especially upon the hands, without being sick
at all. But such never die, nor infect others; and I remember
Diemerbroeck saith, etc.” Can this be the meaning of “smallpox”
following the plague, as in the 16th century books by Alphanus,
Kellwaye and others?

The tokens proper, according to Hodges, were spots on the skin “proceeding from extravasated blood.” The body of the youth dissected by Thomson was “beset with spots, black and blue,” some of which when opened “contained a coagulated matter.” The tokens, as the name implies, were made the most distinctive sign of the plague; but they were far from being so constant as the botches or buboes. Boghurst says that “tokens appeared not much until about the middle of June;” and, according to a letter of September 14, they must have been very variable even at the height of the plague: “The practitioners in physic stand amazed to meet with so many various symptoms which they find among their patients; one week the general distempers are blotches and boils, the next week as clear-skinned as may be, but death spares neither; one week full of spots and tokens, and perhaps the succeeding bill none at all[1218].”

The account of the dissection by Thomson, of a youth dead of the plague, is perhaps all the morbid anatomy that has come down to us. He found what appear to have been infarcts in the lungs; the surface was “stigmatised with several large ill-favoured marks, much tumified and distended,” from which, on section, there issued “sanious, dreggy corruption and a pale ichor destitute of any blood.” The stomach contained a black, tenacious matter, like ink. The spleen gave out on section an ichorish matter. The liver was pallid and the kidneys exsanguine. There were “obscure large marks” on the inner surface of the intestines and stomach. The peritoneal cavity contained a “virulent ichor or thin liquor, yellowish, or greenish.” There was a decoloured clot in the right ventricle, but “not one spoonful of that ruddy liquor properly called blood could be obtained in this pestilential body.” In all other cadavers that he ever dissected he had found that the right ventricle had blackish blood condensed, but this one had a pale clot “like a lamb-stone cut in twain,” which puzzled him greatly; perhaps it came, he conjectures, from a sumption of mere crude milk which an indiscreet nurse had given the boy not long before he died.

Among the symptoms of a fatal issue, Boghurst mentions the following: Hiccough, continual vomiting, sudden looseness, or two or three stools in succession, shortness of breath, stopping of urine, great inward burning and outward cold, continual great thirst, faltering in the voice, speaking in the throat and occasionally sighing, with a slight pulling-in one side of the mouth when they speak, sleeping with the eyes half-open, trembling of the lips and hands and shaking of the head, staggering in going about rooms, unwillingness to speak, hoarseness preventing speech, cramp in the legs, stiffness of one side of the neck, contraction of the jaws, the vomit running out from the side of the mouth, prolonged bleeding at the nose, the sores decreasing and turning black on a sudden.

It is to be remarked that Boghurst says very little of the gentle or the violent delirium, on which Defoe enlarges picturesquely; nor does he emphasize the extreme pain of the hard and tense buboes, which is another of Defoe’s themes. Hodges, however, says that “some of the infected run about staggering like drunken men, and fall and expire in the streets; while others lie half-dead and comatous.... Some lie vomiting as if they had drunk poison.”

The progress of the epidemic would seem to have been little influenced by the weather or by what was done, unless the shutting-up of houses had helped to intensify the virus. Boghurst says: “If very hot weather followed a shower of rain, the disease increased much;” and again: “If, in the heat of the disease the wind blew very sharp and cold, people died very quickly, many lying sick but one day.” We are told, however, by Hodges that “the whole summer was refreshed with moderate breezes,” and that “the heat was too mild to encourage corruption and fermentation.” The air itself, he says, “remained uninfected.” Rain fell from time to time in the end of summer, copious enough to put out the fires in the streets. There was at least one very hot day, near the beginning of the epidemic, the 5th of June, which Pepys says was “the hottest day that I ever felt in my life.” On September 20, however, he says that the increase of the plague could not have been expected “from the coldness of the late season.”

The plague lingered in London throughout the year 1666, causing 1998 deaths in all. In January 1666 it was still at as high a figure as 158 deaths in a week, and in the week ending September 18 it rose again to the exceptional height of 104 deaths. In the first three weeks of December, the deaths were 2, 4, and 3; and from that low level the plague never rose again in London. A few annual deaths continued to appear in the bills down to 1679, when they finally disappeared.

Plague near London in 1665.

Meanwhile various parts of England were affected with plague during and after the great epidemic, and in one or two instances a little before it. In the immediate neighbourhood of the capital all the towns and villages usually implicated by the exodus from the City had cases of plague, as the following table shows. It has been compiled from the parish registers, as extracted in Lysons’ _Environs of London_, Defoe’s widely discrepant figures being given for comparison in the third column.

All Defoe’s
causes Plague list.
Barking 230 200
Barnes 27
Barnet and Hadley 43
Battersea 113
Beckenham 18
Brentford 103 432
Brentwood 70
Bromley 27 7
Camberwell 133
Charlton 7 3
Chertsey 18
Chiselhurst 21
Clapham 28
Croydon 141 61
Deptford 548 374 623
Ealing 286 244
Edmonton 19
Eltham 44 32 85
Enfield 176 32
Epping 26
Finchley 38
Greenwich 416 231
Hampstead 214
Heston 48 13
Hodsdon 30
Hertford 90
Hornsey 53 43 85
Islewort 195 149
Kensington 62 25
Kingston 122
Lewisham 56
Mortlake 197 170
Newington, Stoke 17
Norwood 12 2
Putney 74
Romford 90 109
St Albans 121
Stratford-Bow 139
Staines 82
Tottenham no entries 42
Twickenham 21
Uxbridge 117
Waltham Abbey 23
Walthamstow 68
Wandsworth 245
Ware 160
Watford 45
Windsor 103
Woodford 33

The most striking fact that comes out is that most of the parishes around London had actually fewer deaths from plague in 1665 than in 1603. The exceptions to this rule in 1665 are the villages on or near the Thames above London-Battersea, Wandsworth, Putney, Mortlake, Brentford, Isleworth, and Ealing, which had all a very high mortality, Barnes being almost exempt. On the lower reaches of the Thames, Barking on the Essex shore, and Deptford, Greenwich and Lewisham on the other side, had the infection in them very severely; but these three places in Kent had a still more severe visitation in 1666, along with other towns in that county.

On September 9, Evelyn wrote from his Deptford house, Sayes Court, that “near thirty houses are visited in this miserable village.” The infection got also among the ships of the navy; on August 29, on board the ‘Loyal Subject’ at Deal, Captain Fortescue and six men died suddenly, it was feared of the plague.

Plague in the Provinces in 1665-6.

The earliest accounts of plague in the provinces come from Yarmouth in November, 1664. On the 18th it is said to have been brought in a vessel from Rotterdam; three died in one house, of whom one had the plague. On November 30, the plague was spreading, if the searchers (drunken women, however) were to be credited. On February 8, 1665, there was another death from plague, and as the summer wore on the mortality increased rapidly. On June 16, thirty had died in the week, the inhabitants had fled, the town was like a country village, and the poor left behind were lamenting at once the lack of work and of charity. On August 21, the king wrote from Salisbury to the bailiffs of Yarmouth concerning the plague. In the weeks ending August 30 and September 6, there were 117 deaths (96 from plague) and 110 deaths (100 from plague), and as late as November 6, there had been 22 plague-deaths in the week. In March, 1666, the epidemic came to an end[1219]. Smaller outbreaks occurred in the autumn of 1665 and spring of 1666 at Lynn, Norwich, Ipswich and Harwich. The great epidemic at Colchester began in summer, 1665, but fell mostly in 1666, at a time when there was little plague elsewhere, so that it practically closes the history of plague in England, and will come naturally at the end of the chapter.

Most of the provincial outbreaks in 1665 were of small extent, and were probably due to introduction of the virus from London. The valley of the Tyne, which had often experienced severe plagues, had a slight epidemic, said to have originated from the colliers returned from the Thames. On July 18, there were seven houses shut up at Sunderland, one at Wearmouth and one at Durham[1220]. A paragraph in the ‘Newes,’ from Durham, October 13, says that the sickness in the north is now much assuaged. Newcastle remained almost free (although Defoe says different), two houses being shut up on January 30, 1666, and two at Gateshead. The whole north-west and west of England, which had suffered most during the last plague-period, in the Civil Wars, appears to have escaped altogether.

In the south, there was a good deal of the infection at Southampton in the summer and autumn of 1665; on July 6, “the poor will not suffer the rich to quit the town and leave them to starve[1221].” It is heard of, also, at Poole and Sherborne in Dorset (in November), at Salisbury, where the Court lay for some weeks, and at Battle[1222] in Sussex; but in none of these places to any great extent. Various places in Kent had cases in 1665--Rochester, Chatham, Sandwich, Eastry, Westwell, Deal, Dover and Canterbury[1223]; but it was only the naval stations that had more than a few cases in 1665; while all of them had it far worse in 1666. Other centres in 1665 were in Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire.

At Peterborough, Oundle and Newport Pagnell, there was a visitation of the severer kind, with flight of the richer inhabitants, and the usual arrest of work and trade. The parish register of Yardley, Hastings, records that 60 persons died of plague in that town from June 5, 1665, to January 3, 1666. There was also a sharp epidemic in Cambridge and in the country around, of which we get a glimpse in a letter of October 19, 1665, written from Clare Hall to one of the fellows of Clare[1224]:

“Alderman Mynell the brewer and one of his children died of the plague
this last Monday; he hath had four children in all dead of it.
Clayton, the barber in Petty Cury, and one of his children, died last
Saturday of the sickness. It is newly broken out sadly by Christ’s
(though they have all fled from the Colledge upon Mr Bunchly, their
manciple, dying of the plague)--where Nicholson the smith, his wife
and two children are dead within three days, his other children being
deadly sick in the house. But it most rageth in St Clement’s parish,
where seldom a day passeth without one dead of the sickness.... Poor
Mr Brown, the old man that is one of the University musicians, and Mr
Saunders that sings the deep bass, are shut up in Mr Saunders’ house
in Green Street, whose child died last week suspected. Two houses at
Barton are infected by two of Alderman Mynell’s children, that are
dead there. Ditton is broke out just by the butcher, from whom we had
our meat, which made us hastily remove to Grantchester. H. Glenton,
the carrier, fled from this town to Shelford, where he died within two
or three days, suspected.... Royston is sadly in two or three places,
the last of which is just in the middle of the town. The infection,
they say, was brought thither by a Cambridge man, whom they caught,
and shut him up; but he hath since made his escape.”

The Epidemic of Plague at Eyam, 1665-6.

Another of the English towns visited by plague in 1665 was Derby; whether the cases were many or few, they caused great alarm, the town being forsaken, the streets grass-grown, and the market set up on a new stance, to which the farmers and traders came primed with a plug of tobacco in their mouths as a preservative. But the epidemic in Derby itself was totally eclipsed in interest by an extraordinary outbreak of plague in the small village of Eyam, at the opposite end of the county, in the North Peak, some twelve miles to the west of Sheffield. The plague of Eyam is, indeed, the most famous of all English plagues; the story of it has been told many times in prose and verse, its traditional incidents being well suited to minor poets and moral writers, and the whole action of the drama conveniently centered within a circuit of half a mile in a cup of the heathy hills[1225].

Eyam was a village of some three hundred and fifty inhabitants, standing among meadows around which the hills towered. It had no resident doctor, but it had two ministers. The one was the rector, the Rev. William Mompesson, a young man of twenty-seven, with a wife and two children, who had been settled in Eyam only a year and did not like it; the other was the former rector, the Rev. Thomas Stanley, who had been ejected for nonconformity in 1662, and had remained to carry on his ministrations as a Dissenter among such of his old flock as adhered to him. The wealthier householders resided at the western and higher end of the village, on the other side of a brook which crossed under the road; as we shall see, they escaped the infection almost if not altogether. The annual village wake had been held in August, 1665, with more than the usual concourse of people from villages near. On the 2nd or 3rd September a box arrived from London to the village tailor, who lived in a small house at the western end of the churchyard; it contained old clothes which someone in London is supposed to have bought for him cheap, and some tailors’ patterns of cloth. This box is assumed to have been opened by one George Vicars, a servant, who was certainly the first victim of plague. He found the contents to be damp and hung them up at the fire to dry. He was quickly seized with violent sickness, became delirious, developed buboes in his neck and groin, a plague-token on his breast the third day, and died in a wretched state on September 6. His body, which is said to have become soon putrid, was buried in the churchyard on the 7th. Nearly a fortnight passed before another case occurred, that of a youth supposed to have been the tailor’s son, who was buried on the 22nd September. Before the 30th four more had died, and in the course of October twenty-two more were buried of the plague. The deaths in November declined to seven, and in December they were nine. There was now snow on the ground, with hard frost, and at the beginning of January, 1666, the plague was confined to two houses. Four died in January, eight in February, six in March, nine in April, and only three in May. On June 2, another burial occurred, and then there was another pause. But in a week or more the epidemic broke out with renewed power, three having been buried on the 12th of June, three on the 15th, one on the 16th, three on the 17th, and so on until the total for June reached nineteen. The wealthier villagers at the west end had taken the alarm before and had mostly fled in the spring; those who stayed kept within their houses or at least did not cross the stream. Now that the infection was revived in the hot weather of June, the rector’s wife also proposed flight, but on her husband’s refusal, she resolved to remain with him, and to send her two children to a relative in Yorkshire. At the same time the villagers in general were instinctively moved to escape from the tainted spot; but Mompesson used his authority to prevent them, and a boundary line was drawn round the village, about half a mile in circuit and marked by various familiar objects, beyond which no one was to go. Mompesson’s motive appears to have been to prevent the spread of the infection to the country around, and his parishioners submitted passively. After the end of June the villagers would have found it difficult to escape, owing to the terror which the very name of their village caused in all the country round. Some of them quitted their cottages and took up their abode in shelters built along the side of a rocky glen within the cordon. The earl of Devonshire, then at Chatsworth, promised Mompesson that the village should not be left without supplies; and people from the villages near brought their market produce to certain stated points on the boundary, where the Eyam people came to fetch it, the money paid being dropped into water. Thus shut up in their narrow valley, the villagers perished helplessly like a stricken flock of sheep. By the end of June ceremonial burials came to an end, the church and the churchyard were closed, the dead were carried out wrapped in sheets by one of the villagers noted for his herculean strength, and laid in shallow graves in the meadows or on the hill-sides. In July the deaths mounted up to five or six on some days, and the total for the month to fifty-seven. In August the dead numbered seventy-eight, among them the rector’s wife on the 25th, after a walk with her husband through the meadows, during which she is said to have made the ominous remark that the air smelled sweet[1226]. September added twenty-four to the total, and there were now only about forty-five left alive in the place. Of these, fifteen died to the 11th October, when the mortality ceased. Some of the survivors had passed through an attack of the plague, among them the rector’s man, whose buboes suppurated. Mompesson himself, who had an issue open in his leg all the time, escaped the infection, as well as his maid-servant. A young woman of Eyam, married in the village of Corbor, two miles off, came one day to see her mother, whom she found sick of the plague; on her return home she took the sickness and died, but no one else in Corbor had it. A man was also at large in the neighbourhood suspected of plague, to whom the earl of Devonshire sent a doctor. The doctor and patient met by appointment on the opposite banks of a stream, and the diagnosis made across the water acquitted the man of plague; even in these unconventional circumstances the consultation did not end without a prescription (still extant) for a bottle of “stuff.” Seventy-six households in Eyam were infected, and out of these two hundred and fifty-nine persons were buried of the plague. During the time that the infection lasted eight more died from other causes. When the sickness had ceased Mompesson set about burning the infected articles in the empty cottages. Three years after, in 1669, he was presented to the better living of Eakring, in Notts; but on arriving to enter on his duties he was refused admission by the villagers, and had to take up his residence in a temporary hut in Rufford Park, until such time as the prejudices of his new parishioners had been overcome. He married another wife, and for thirty-nine years held the living of Eakring, where he died on March 7, 1708. Stanley, his Dissenting colleague at Eyam, died there a few years after the plague.

Several things combined to magnify the disaster at Eyam. The story of the box of clothes from London is entirely credible, and can be matched by many other instances in the history of plague and of cholera[1227]. Nothing intensifies the virus of such diseases so much as fermentation without air in the textures of clothes or linen; a whiff from the opened box or bundle suffices soon to prostrate the person who breathes it. The poison at Eyam was a powerful one from the first, and it is credible that the body of the earliest victim did become quickly putrid. The heavy mortality, with few recoveries, which followed after a fortnight’s interval, and continued all through the winter, also shows a virus raised to no ordinary potency. But, for the revival of the infection in June, 1666, we must seek other causes. Eyam was one of those basins which, on a large scale or on a small, have often been observed to keep infection in their soil. The virus must have passed into the pores of the ground after the first sixty or more burials in the churchyard down to the lull of the epidemic in winter; with the rise of the ground-water in spring, it would be comparatively inactive; but in June, when the water was again sinking in the soil and the great heat was raising emanations from the dry ground, it broke forth with an intensity which poisoned the whole air of the valley. The burials, after the end of June, without coffins and in shallow graves in the meadows or on the hill-side, were so much ferment added to a soil already permeated by it. Flight from such a place was the only safety, and the rector, with the best motives, counselled the people to remain. Mompesson’s conduct has always been held up as a pattern of heroism, as if the circumstances had been desperate like those of the Trojans when the Greeks were in their streets and houses:

Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem.

No word of detraction should be spoken of anyone who does manfully what he conceives to be his duty to his neighbours; but the villagers of Eyam were sacrificed, all the same, to an idea, and to an idea which we may now say was not scientifically sound. When the impulse came upon them to flee, they might have left their tainted soil without much risk to the country around so long as they did not collect in one spot or carry with them bedding or the like susceptible articles: those who did flee from the houses at the upper end of the village are not known to have carried the infection to other places, and the young woman who brought it to Corbor gave it to no one else. But the wisdom of flight may be regarded by some as still disputable; while it will be admitted by all that Mompesson acted for the best according to his lights.

The plague in 1666 raged severely in a number of towns, while it lingered on in London. The information from Winchester is vague; it is said that the dead were carried out in carts and buried on the downs to the eastward[1228]; the epidemic was over by the 1st of December, so that the College resumed[1229]. Pepys enters in his Diary (April 4, 1667): “One at the table [the duke of Albemarle’s] told an odd passage in the late plague, that at Petersfield (I think he said), one side of the street had every house almost infected through the town, and the other not one shut up.” There may have been other such centres of plague, and equally interesting observations made on them; but it appears to be the merest chance whether anything is recorded of them at all, or whether one has the luck to come across the record.

The great centres of plague in 1666 had some connexion with the fleet, and were mostly in Kent and Essex. Deptford and Greenwich had more plague that year than the year before, the total deaths at the former having been 715 (of plague 522) and at the latter 423. Eltham and Lewisham were also visited in proportion. The other intense centre of infection in Kent was Deal. On the 26th August, seven died of the plague, and twenty in the whole week. At that date there were said to be only 16 houses which had not had plague in them. On December 9, all the houses were clear, although the crews of ships still avoided the town. Next to Deal, Sandwich, Dover, Canterbury and Maidstone had considerable outbreaks in the autumn. At Portsmouth also there was a sharp outbreak in the summer of 1666, twenty-one having died of plague in a week at the beginning of July.

In the Eastern Counties, plague revived to a considerable extent in 1666 at Norwich, Ipswich, Harwich and Woodbridge, the Yarmouth outbreak, which had been the great one in that quarter the year before, having come to an end in the spring. But it was at Colchester that the epidemic engrossed attention in 1666. Colchester had, indeed, two successive seasons of plague, or rather a continuous prevalence of it from the summer of 1665 to December, 1666. The plague at Colchester in 1665-66 was the greatest of all provincial plagues since the Black Death, unless, indeed, we credit the numbers (11,000 or 12,000) given for a plague at York in 1390. It reproduced the mortality of the Great Plague of London on a scale more than proportionate to its size, and it doubtless called forth the same class of incidents--flight of the wealthier classes, and almost total extermination of the poor. No documents remain, however, of this plague except the oaths administered to searchers and bearers of the dead (printed below) and the weekly totals of deaths from plague and from other causes[1230]. The weekly bills are, indeed, as eloquent a testimony as any detailed description could have been; and as they are the most complete of the kind for a provincial town, I have transcribed them from the manuscript record in full. The small number of deaths from ordinary causes points to the emptiness of the better quarters of the town; the total deaths in seventeen months, 5345, including 4817 plague-deaths and 528 from other causes, must have meant an enormous clearance of the poorer classes. Colchester was then a place of considerable wealth, with a thriving Dutch trade and a considerable Dutch colony. Perhaps the connexion with Holland, where plague had been rife in the years just before, may explain the origin of the outbreak; but local conditions of soil, overcrowding, and the like must be looked to for the cause of its extraordinary persistence and fatality.

_Weekly mortalities in Colchester, August 14, 1665, to December 14, 1666, from plague and other diseases._

1665

Week Plague Other
ending

Aug. 21 26 2
28 62 2
Sept. 8 122 4
15 153 22
22 159 25
29 100 25
Oct. 6 161 27
13 122 23
20 106 15
27 60 41
Nov. 3 104 13
10 88 22
17 88 18
24 62 8
Dec. 1 38 10
8 39 6
15 67 4
22 53 7
29 21 3

1666

Jan. 5 23 6
12 46 8
19 36 13
26 26 10
Feb. 2 34 9
9 25 3
16 23 7
23 33 6
Mar. 2 53 2
9 26 11
16 37 5
23 48 4
30 66 1
Apr. 6 73 2
13 90 2
20 68 4
27 90 4
May 4 169 8
11 167 7
18 150 11
25 98 12
June 1 89 10
8 110 10
15 139 3
22 195 6
29 176 4
July 6 167 8
13 160 9
20 175 3
27 109 4
Aug. 3 109 2
10 85 4
17 70 1
24 51 1
31 53 4
Sept. 7 31 6
14 22 2
21 16 2
28 10 2
Oct. 5 7 2
12 7 0
19 7 2
26 4 2
Nov. 2 4 2
9 4 2
16 2 6
23 1 4
30 1 8
Dec. 7 1 7
14 0 0
---- ---
4817 528

To relieve the poverty caused by this great disaster a tax was levied on various other parts of the county of Essex, and contributions were made by private individuals, the London churches collecting £1311. 10_s._ in the breathing-time between the plague and the fire. Colchester had so far recovered in the end of 1666 as to be able to contribute in turn about a hundred pounds for the relief of London after the fire[1231].

The Last of Plague in England.

The history of plague in England must be made to end with a solitary epidemic at Nottingham in 1667, but not without some misgivings as to the correctness of the date. Dr Deering, the historian of the town in 1751, paid little heed to epidemics, although medicine was his business; but he mentions one of smallpox in 1736, which had probably come within his own experience, and proceeds:

“I question much whether there has been the like since the plague
which visited the town in 1667, and made a cruel desolation in the
higher part of Nottingham, for very few died in the lower; especially
in a street called Narrow Marsh, it was observed that the infection
had no power, and that during the whole time the plague raged, not one
who lived in that street died of it, which induced many of the richer
sort of people to crowd thither and hire lodgings at any price; the
preservation of the people was attributed to the effluvia of the
tanners’ ouze (for there were then 47 tanners’ yards in that place),
besides which they caused a smoak to be made by burning moist tanners’
knobs[1232].”

If there had been any reference to the parish registers or to the corporation minutes, we should have had no reason to doubt that this epidemic had been correctly assigned to 1667. The last Winchester epidemic had been given under the year 1668, first by one local historian, and then by another who copied him; but when a third went to the manuscript records, he found that the year was 1666, as indeed an incidental reference to the re-opening of Winchester School on 1st December, 1666, “the sickness being in all appearance extinguished,” might have warranted one in concluding. It is a singular experience to have brought the history of plague down through several centuries, not without particulars of times and numbers, and to be obliged to end it in the latter half of the 17th century with an unauthenticated date. The Nottingham epidemic may have been an exception to the generality that all England was finally delivered from the plague in 1666; it is due, at least, to the local historian, in the absence of evidence against, to record his date of 1667. The difficulty of confirming so simple a fact at so late a period may dispose the readers of this work to be tolerant of any lack of certainty and precision that they may discover in its history of more remote times.

INDEX.

Aarhus, bishop of, his book on plague, 209,
his identity, 210 _note_

Abbotsley, scene in church, 39

Aberdeen, leper-spital, 99,
plague at, 361, 362,
long free from plague, 370,
plague at, in 1647, 564,
syphilis arrives at, 417, 419, 361

Aelred, his story of queen Matilda and the lepers, 82-3

=Agriculture=, state of in Domesday, 22,
neglect of under heavy taxation by Wm, Rufus, 30,
effects of Black Death on, 191-2,
thriving in the 15th cent., 222,
gives place to sheep-farming in Tudor period, 387-392

=Agues=, original meaning of 409;
pestilential ague, 214,
“hot ague”, 291, 400, 401, 404, 406,
Irish ague, 410;
Jones on, 410,
specialists for, 411, 426,
ambiguous meaning of, 505, 536, 540

Allington, Richard, case of smallpox, 459

Amwell, Great, plague, 493

André, Bernard, on sweat of 1508, 244,
on French pox, 420

=Anglo-Saxon Leechdoms=, 24, 452

Annan, story of a plague at, 11

Appleby, plague, 360

Arabia, burials in, 165,
plague, 166,
origin of smallpox in 441

=Armada, Spanish=, sickness in, 350, 591

=Arsenic=, plague-cakes, 487

Ashburton, plague, 524

Ashwell, inscription at, 139, 217

Assir, plague, 166

=Assizes, Black=, at Cambridge, 375,
at Oxford, 376,
at Exeter, 383

Astruc, on origin of syphilis, 430

Aubrey, Dr, on sickness in slave-ships, 627-8

Avignon, Black Death at, 133,
_pestis secunda_, 203

Axholme, the sweat at, 252

Ayr, plague, 503

Baber, Consul, plague in Yun-nan, 168

Bacon, Francis, “remedy” of the sweat, 242,
gaol-fever, 382,
sweet odours in plague, 685 _note_

Bamford, James, plague of 1603 in St Olave’s parish, 478,
on contagion of plague, 490

Banbury, plague, 303 _note_, 501,
war-fever and plague, 556-7

Banister, John, on syphilis, 427,
his plague-medicines, 516

=Bankside stews=, 420

Barbados, occupied by English, 619,
yellow fever in, 620, 630-633

Barcelona, syphilis at, 434

Barking, plague in monastery, 6,
plague, 492, 520, 680

=Bartholomew fair=, in plague-time, 300, 481

=Bartholomew’s, St, Hospital=, filled with cases of pox, 424

Basingstoke, hospital at, 95

Batavia, epidemic in 1625, 608

Baxter, Richard, on the weather before the Great Plague, 653,
on Dissenters in the plague-time, 655

Becon, on rural depopulation, 391

Beda, on pestilence in, 664-685, 5-7

=Beggars=, pretending leprosy, 103,
beadle of, 104,
after Black Death, 183,
statutes for, 392

Bellay, Du, letters on the sweat, 250-252

Belper, plague, 500

Benghazi, plague and typhus in Arab tents, 170

=Beri-beri=, supposed in 1593, 593

Beverley, the sweat at, 252

Birch, Dr T., errors of, on Oxford Black Assizes, 381 _note_,
collects letters of the Stuart period, 504 _note_

=Black Death, the=, chroniclers of in England, 114,
arrival and progress, 116-118,
in Ireland, 119,
in Scotland, 119, 233,
symptoms of, 120,
mortality from, 123-139,
direct effects of, 139, 180,
antecedents of, 142-156, 173-4,
favouring conditions for diffusion of, 175.
Its effects on Edward III.’s wars, 178,
on removal of men and treasure, 180,
on price of labour, 181,
on capitalists, 186,
on morals, 186-190,
on area of cultivation, 191,
on system of farming, 192,
on trade and industry, 193,
on town industries, 197,
on village manufactures, 198,
on governing class in towns, 199,
on population, 199.
Infection of, remains in England, 204, 233

Bodmin, Black Death at, 116, 125

Boghurst, W., spotted fever in Somerset, 543,
his MS. on the Great Plague, 647 _et seq._

Boleyn, Anne, in the sweat of 1528, 251, 252, 255

Borde, Andrew, 286

Borgia, Alexander, pope, 416 _note_

Boston, plague at, 349

Bosworth, battle of, 265

=Botch=, =boche= or =boiche=, early name of plague, 206, 208, 362

Bradwardine, archbp, dies of Black Death, 129

Bradwell, Stephen, his plague-book, 516

Brant, Sebastian, on origin of French pox, 431

Brasbridge, on plague in dog’s skin, 316

Brewer, T., his poem on plague of 1625, 512, 517

Bridewell made a hospital, 394, 395

Bridgetown, yellow fever at in 1647, 620, 630-33

Bridport, Black Death at, 116,
plague at in 1626, 524

Brimington, plague, 498

Bristol, leper-house, 98,
Black Death, 116, 121, 123,
effects of ditto on trade at, 182 _note_,
plague in 1535, 300,
in 1575, 340,
in 1645, 557

Bucklersbury, drug-shops in, 484

Bugden, deaths from sweat at, 261

Bullein, on plague of 1563, 306,
on London graveyards, 334,
on the French pox, 422

Burdwan, number of lepers in, 107

=Burial=, interdict of, 11;
neglect of, 12, 13 _note_,
in Chinese famines, 154,
in Islam, 163.
Christian burial in Egypt, 159.
Chinese mode of, 161.
In Arabia, 165,
in Kumaon 167,
neglect of in Yun-nan, 168,
at Merdje, 171;
by the friars, 332,
in St Paul’s churchyard, 334,
without coffins, 335,
Latimer on intramural, 336,
relation to plague, 336,
in the great London plagues, 126, 337, 482, 515, 668-9,
hours of in plague-time 303, 482

Burton Lazars, 89

Bury St Edmunds, burials at in 1257, 44,
hospitals, 92, 96,
plague in 1578, 347

Butts, Dr, in the sweat of 1528, 254

Caffa, Black Death at siege of, 144, 147

Caius, Dr, on the sweat of 1551, 259, 261, 263,
edits Galen, 439

Calais, sweat at 248, 253, 255,
plague in 1509, 288,
“new sickness” in 1558, 403,
plague brought to, 546

=Calendar=, the English and the Continental, 256 _note_

=Calenture=, 387, 610

Cambridge, epidemic of “frenzy” at, 62,
effects of Black Death, 196,
prophecy of pestilence, 229,
sweat of 1517, 248,
of 1528, 252,
of 1551, 262,
plague, 285, 289, 338, 340, 347, 497, 527, 682,
gaol fever, 375,
agues, 505

Canterbury, death of monks in 870, 9,
leper-hospitals, 87, 91,
style of living in 14th cent., 50,
Black Death at, 132,
causes of death of monks, 226,
plague in 1544, 303,
in 1564, 309,
in 1593, 357,
in 1603-4, 498,
in 1614-15, 501,
in 1625, 524,
in 1636, 528,
in 1665, 681,
in 1666, 688