Among the causes of the corruption he specially mentions the following, which probably had a real existence in the London of that time, although he is merely reproducing a stock paragraph of foreign origin:

He then mentions a more distant source of corrupt air, apt to be carried on the wind—the corruption of unburied bodies after a battle, which enters into all the plague-writings of the time.

These things were, of course, insufficient to account for the special type of the sweat, or for its sudden outbreak, for the first time in history, in September, 1485. There may have been such favouring conditions in London at the time; something of the kind is indeed implied in Henry VII.’s order against the nuisance of the shambles a few years after; but we require a special factor, without which the unsavoury state of the streets, lanes, yards, and ditches, or the crowded state of the houses, would never have come to an issue in so remarkable an infection as the sweating sickness. Common nuisances were the less relevant to the sweat, for the reason that it touched the well-to-do classes most, the classes who suffered least from the “common infection,” or “the poor’s plague,” and were presumably best housed, or located amidst cleanest surroundings. Even within the narrow limits of Old London there were preferences of locality. If the special incidence of the sweat upon the great households of prelates and nobles, and on the families of wealthy citizens, had rested only on the testimony of Dr Caius, who has a theory and a moral to work out, there might have been some reason for the scepticism of Heberden, who questions whether Caius was not probably in error in saying that the sweat spared the poor and the wretched, because he knows of no parallel instance among infective diseases[527]. But the fact is abundantly illustrated in the details, already given, for each of the five English epidemics; and it is confirmed for the continental invasion of 1529, e.g. by Kock, a parish priest of Lübeck, who says that “the poor people, and those living in cellars or garrets were free from the sickness,” and by Renner, of Bremen, who says that it “went most among the rich people[528].” It was, indeed, owing to its being an affliction chiefly of the upper classes that the sweat has been so much heard of. So far as mere numbers went, all the five London epidemics together could not have caused so great a mortality as the plague caused in a single year of Henry VII., namely the year 1500, or in a single year of Henry VIII., such as the year 1513. But these great mortalities from plague, amounting to perhaps a fifth part of the whole London population in a single season, fell mainly, although not of course exclusively, upon the poorer class. The bubo-plague, domesticated on English soil from 1348 to 1666, was emphatically the “poor’s plague,” and, as such, it illustrated the usual law of infective disease, namely that it specially befell those who were the worst housed, the worst fed, the hardest pressed in the struggle, and the least able to find the means of escaping to the country when the infection in the city gave warning of an outbreak on the approach of warm weather.

But morbus pauperum is not the only principle of infective disease. There are pestilent infections which do not come readily under the law of poor, uncleanly and negligent living, in any ordinary sense of the words; and there are some communicable diseases which directly contradict the principle that infection falls upon those who engender it by their mode of life. Unwholesome conditions of living may be trusted to engender disease, but it does not follow that the infection so engendered will fall upon those who lead the unwholesome lives; sometimes it falls upon the class who are farthest removed from them in social circumstances or domestic habits, or who are widely separated from them in racial characters. This principle I believe to be not only a necessary complement to the more obvious rule, but to be itself one of wide application. It has been an original theme of my own in former writings, to which I take leave to refer in a note[529]; and, I have now to try here whether it may not suit the rather paradoxical and certainly mysterious circumstances of the sweating sickness on its first outbreak in the autumn of 1485.

If the insanitary state of London were insufficient to explain the engendering of the disease, the next thing is to look for a foreign source. Suspicion falls at once upon the foreign mercenaries who landed with Henry Tudor at Milford Haven on the 6th of August. Who were these mercenaries? Did they suffer from any contagious disease? Were they likely to have engendered the sweat? Can the infection be traced, in matter of fact, to them? In seeking an answer, it will be necessary to enter somewhat fully into the history of the expedition.

The earl of Richmond’s successful expedition in 1485 was his second attempt on the English crown. The first had been made in 1483, when the duke of Gloucester was hardly seated on the throne and the duke of Buckingham was in the field against him. Richmond’s army on that occasion had been furnished by the duke of Brittany, and is roughly estimated at 5000 men in 15 ships[530]; the expedition sailed from St Malo in October, encountered a storm in the Channel which scattered the fleet, and drove some of the ships back to the harbours of Brittany and Normandy, so that Richmond, having reached the Dorset coast with only one or two ships, was unable to land in force. He returned to a Norman port, and nothing more is heard of his army of Bretons; during the next two years he appears to have been left with no other following than two or three English nobles, among them the earl of Oxford, who afterwards led a division of his army at Bosworth. After repeated solicitation, he obtained in 1485 a small body-guard (leve praesidium) from the regents of Charles VIII. at Paris, a few pieces of artillery, and money to help pay for the transport of 3000 or 4000 men. With these resources he betook himself to Rouen in the summer of 1485 and began to fit out his expedition. It would appear that he found some difficulty in making up his force to the intended full complement, and that he was urged by the impatience of his followers and the chance of a fair wind to leave the Seine with what force he had on the 31st of July. His force of Frenchmen, under his kinsman de Shandé (afterwards earl of Bath), consisted of only 2000 men, crowded on board a few ships. It is a fair inference that the men had been recruited in and around Rouen; we are told, indeed, by Mezeray that Normandy was at that time infested by bands of francs-archers who had been licensed by Louis XI., and that the ministers of Charles VIII. gave them to Henry Tudor, to the number of 3000, regarding the proposed expedition of the latter as a good opportunity of ridding the province of Normandy of a lawless and disreputable soldiery[531].

These, then, were the mercenaries who landed at Milford Haven on the 6th of August, were at once marched through Wales to Shrewsbury and Lichfield, and took a principal part in the battle of Bosworth on the 22nd of August. They were Normans, who had become so great a pest to their own province that Charles VIII.’s ministers were induced to take up Henry Tudor’s cause partly with the intention of ridding French territory of them. Their quality is plainly indicated in the speech just before the battle by Richard III., which had been composed for Hall’s chronicle; only they were not Bretons, as the speech makes out; they were Normans, recruited for the expedition in Rouen and the surrounding country.

I have given so much emphasis to the nationality of these mercenaries because the theory of the English sweat turns upon it[532]. More than two centuries after Bosworth Field, about the year 1717, when the English sweat had been long forgotten, an almost identical type of disease began to show itself among the villages and towns of that very region of France, the lower basin of the Seine, where the mercenaries of 1485 had been recruited.

A form of Sweat afterwards endemic in Normandy.

The Picardy sweat, which was first noticed as a disease of the soil about the year 1717, and has continued off and on down to recent years, was indigenous to the departments in the basin of the Seine, from the Pas de Calais to Calvados, with Rouen as a centre. Why that strange form of sickness should have sprung up there and continued, now in one town or village now in another, with few blank years for a century and a half, no one can venture to say. It was not the English sweat in all its circumstances; on the contrary it was only rarely epidemic over a large population or a large tract of country at once. It was ordinarily limited to one or two spots at a time, and in the individuals affected it ran a longer course than the English sweat had done. But whenever it did become widely prevalent it also became a short and sharp infection like the English sweat, causing in some years a very considerable number of deaths. Distinctively the Picardy sweat was a somewhat mild sickness of a week or more, seldom fatal, distinctively also of a single town or village, or small group of villages. It was not unknown in some other parts of France, such as the Vosges and Languedoc, in Bavaria and in Northern Italy; but in these other localities it has been much more occasional or even rare. Its distinctive habitat for a century and a half has been the lower basin of the Seine; and there it has been so steady at one point or another from year to year throughout the whole of that period that it may be said to be a disease of the soil, indigenous or domesticated, and depending for its periodic manifestations mostly upon vicissitudes of the seasons, as affecting probably the rise and fall of the ground-water. It has been more a disease of the well-to-do bourgeois class than of the very poor, and it has often shown a preference for the cleaner villages. It has been the subject of a very large number of French writings from the year 1717 down almost to the present date. Strange as this form of disease is, neither its circumstances nor its nosological characters are left in any doubt; it is at once mysterious and perfectly familiar[533].

Theory of the English Sweat.

I have been at some pains to show that Henry Tudor’s mercenaries were enlisted in and around Rouen, or, in other words, they came from that very district of France in which the sweat, in a somewhat modified form, began to make its appearance as an endemic malady two hundred and thirty years after. If the sweat had not become an endemic or standing disease there, as if native to the soil, or if it had become equally a disease of all other parts of Europe, as typhoid fever has, the coincidence would have been less striking, and might have been made to appear altogether irrelevant by the long interval of more than two centuries between the one event and the other. If it were a mere coincidence, we should conclude that the same causes which established in Normandy in the 18th century a steady prevalence of a sweating sickness, not unlike the more familiar prevalence of typhoid, had been at work on English soil more than two centuries earlier, not indeed to establish a form of sweating sickness steadily prevalent from year to year in one place or another, like the plague, but to induce five sharp epidemic outbursts, within a period of sixty-six years, four of which outbursts began in London and extended probably over the whole country, while one began in Shrewsbury, travelled by stages to London, and spread all over England. And, as we are ignorant of the things which determine the type of the endemic sweat of Normandy or Picardy down to the present day, we can neither deny nor affirm that there may have been corresponding factors of disease at work in the England of Henry VII. By such a line of reasoning we are brought to a view of the English sweat which precludes all farther inquiry and makes a permanent blank or maze in our knowledge. Let us try, however, whether the facts of the case do not better fall in with the view that the English sweat had a real relation to the seats of the Norman and Picardy sweat, even at a time when that sweat had not come into existence as a definite form of disease, and although the French provinces appear to have been spared the invasion of the epidemic when it overran the rest of Northern Europe in 1529.

The means of communication in 1485 was not wanting, namely the Norman soldiery of Henry VII. The tradition of their quality is preserved in the speech composed in Hall’s chronicle for Richard III. before the battle of Bosworth, and versified somewhat closely by Shakespeare:

“A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and run-aways,
A scum of Bretagnes, and base lackey peasants:
... Let’s whip these stragglers o’er the seas again;
Lash hence these over-weening rags of France,
These famished beggars, weary of their lives.”

There is nothing incredible in the supposition that these men had brought a disease into London although they had not themselves presented the symptoms of that disease. Such importations are not unknown; the mystery hanging over them does not make them the less real. A well-known instance is the St Kilda boat-cold, “the wonderful story,” as Boswell says, “that upon the approach of a stranger all the inhabitants catch cold,” a story which Mr Macaulay, the author of the History of St Kilda, had been advised to leave out of his book. “Sir,” said Dr Johnson, “to leave things out of a book merely because people tell you they will not be believed, is meanness: Macaulay acted with more magnanimity.” The St Kilda influenza has been amply corroborated since then by parallel instances from the more remote islands of the Pacific, and by striking instances in veterinary pathology. Among the latter may be quoted the instance which has been heard of in Shropshire, of “sheep which have been imported from vessels, although themselves in a healthy condition, if placed in the same fold with others, frequently producing sickness in the flock[534].” But there is an instance on a vast scale from the United States, the instance of Texas cattle-fever, which has recurred so often, and has been so closely watched on account of the disastrous loss which it causes, that there is no room left to doubt the reality of that mysterious form of contagion. I shall have to speak very shortly of the malignant fevers of the assizes, which spread from prisoners who were not known to be ill of fever; these incidents are historical from the year 1522, when an epidemic of the kind arose among the court and grand jury at the gaol delivery in the Castle of Cambridge. Lastly the history of yellow fever, as expounded in part in this volume, is an instance of a long-enduring infection arising from the circumstances of the African slave-trade, the negroes themselves having been racially exempt from the fever although they had been the source of the virus.

In all such cases the sickness which ensued among the healthy from contact with strangers had a more or less definite type; and that type in each case must have been determined mainly by the antecedents of the strangers, their racial characters being reckoned among the antecedents as well as their special hardships and their personal habits. In the case of the singular visitation of England in 1485, the strangers were a swarm of disreputable free-booters from Normandy, natives of a soil which developed the sweat as an indigenous malady in the long course of generations. If they themselves had shown the symptoms of the sweat in 1485, one might have said that the circumstances of their passage in crowded ships, of their exhausting march from Wales to Leicestershire, and thence to London, had brought to the definite issue of a specific disease that which was otherwise no more than a habit of body, a constitutional tendency, a disease in the making. But there is no reason to suppose that they themselves incurred the symptoms of the disease at all; it was contact with them in England, particularly in London, that determined the peculiar type of disease in others. Those others were of a different national stock, and for the most part of another manner of life; in their very differences lay their liability, according to well-known analogies. Of course there must have been something material, something more than abstract contact, to cause the sweat in certain Englishmen; and although we cannot image the form of the virulent matter, we are safe to pronounce, in this hypothesis, that it must have come from the persons of the foreign soldiery.

The Habitat of the Virus.

We may go even farther in the way of specific probability, and bring the virus definitely to a habitat in the soil. The English sweat, like the Picardy sweat itself, had certain characters of a soil poison, like the poison of cholera, yellow fever and typhoid fever; only it was not endemic like the two last, but periodic, as well as somewhat volatile in its manner of travelling, like dengue, influenza, and others of the “posting” fevers of former times. This brings us to the singular history of the epidemics of sweat in England,—to the clear intervals of many years and the sudden bursting forth anew. What became of the specific virus from 1485 to 1508, to 1517 to 1528, to 1551, and after?

A fresh importation in each of the epidemic years after 1485 is improbable; certainly the circumstances of Henry VII.’s expedition never occurred again, and the traffic between England and her two French possessions of Calais and Guines had nothing in it at all analogous. Equally improbable is the continuance of the sweat in isolated or sporadic cases from year to year throughout the intervals between the epidemics; the only facts that give any countenance to such a continuous succession are the occasionally mentioned “hot agues,” as in 1518, and, on a more extensive scale, in 1539. The seeds or germs of the infection which arose first in London in September, 1485, must have lain dormant in the city until some favouring conditions came round to call them into life. It is impossible to figure such dormancy of the virus except on the hypothesis that it was a soil-poison, having its habitat in the pores of the ground. The periodic activity of all such poisons depends, as we can now say with a good deal of certainty, upon the movements of the ground-water, which in turn depend on the wetness or dryness of seasons. The kind of weather preceding each of the epidemics of the English sweat has been remarked on by writers, but somewhat loosely or erroneously. The peculiarity of the year of the second sweat, 1508, (not 1506 as in Hecker, nor 1507 as in other writers) was a “marvellous” forwardness of vegetation in the month of January, unusual heat from the end of May to the 13th of June, much prized rain on that date, on the 16th, and on the 3rd of July[535], the sweat being heard of first in the Lord Treasurer’s household in July. The third year of the sweat, 1517, began with a great frost from the 12th January, so that no boat could go from London to Westminster all the term time[536], while men crossed with horse and cart from Westminster to Lambeth[537]. This great frost would appear to have been without snow, the whole season from September, 1516, to May, 1517, being chronicled as one of unusual drought, “for there fell no rain to be accounted,” so that “in some places men were fain to drive their cattle three or four miles to water.” The kind of weather following the break-up of the drought is not mentioned, but there is implied of course a certain amount of rain. It was about the end of July or first of August, 1517, that the sweat began in London and the suburbs. The fourth, and perhaps the most severe sweat, that of 1528, followed upon two wet seasons, with one spoiled harvest in 1527 and bad prospects for that of 1528. The winter of 1526-27 had been unusually wet from November until the end of January; then dry weather set in until April; after which the rain began again and continued for eight weeks[538]. The harvest before that seems to have been a partial failure, for early in 1527 corn began to run short in London, and for a week or more there was acute general famine, so that the bread carts coming in from Stratford had to be guarded by the sheriffs and their men all the way from Mile End to their proper market. The high price of corn continued into the summer of 1528. The weather of that summer is not specially recorded for England; but we learn from a diplomatic letter dated, Paris, the 4th of July, that much rain had fallen and destroyed the corn and vines, so that there were fears of universal decay and dearth through all France[539]. On the 5th July, Henry VIII. requests Wolsey to have general processions made through the realm “for good weather and for the plague,” the sweat having already been raging for more than a month. The fifth and last sweat, in 1551, also coincided with an unusually high price of corn, or, in other words, followed one or more bad harvests. In 1550 wheat was at 20 shillings the quarter; at Easter in 1551 the price in London was 26sh. 8d.; ten or twelve ship loads of rye and wheat from Holland and Brittany were sold under the mayor’s direction at a stated but very high price. Meanwhile the sweat was advancing from Shrewsbury to London, where it broke out on the 7th July. The statements of Dr Caius about stinking mists carried from town to town are, like most of his statements, so obviously the product of his uncritical rhetoric that it becomes almost impossible to trust his narrative for matters of fact. But we may go so far as to assume that the first half of 1551 was a season of an unusually moist atmosphere. At all events the fifth season of the sweat, and also the fourth (1528), stand out in the annals as years of scarcity following bad harvests, which had probably failed owing to continuous wet weather.

There is not, on the surface, much uniformity in the weather preceding the epidemics of the sweat in 1508, 1517, 1528 and 1551. In the first of these the winter was mild and the early summer excessively hot and dry; in the second the winter and spring were remarkable for drought, with several weeks of intense black frost in the middle period; in the remaining two the antecedent appears to have been an excessive rainfall. But in all the four we shall find that the law of the sub-soil water, as formulated by the recent Munich school with reference to epidemic outbursts, was exemplified. According to that law, the dangerous products of fermentation arise from the soil when the pores of the ground are either getting filled with water after having been long filled with air, or are getting filled with air after having been long filled with water. It is the range of fluctuation in the ground-water, either downwards or upwards, that determines the risk to health; and in two of the years of the sweat, 1508 and 1517, we find that there had been a rise from a very low level of the wells, while in the other two, 1528 and 1551, the wells had begun to fall after standing for a length of time at an unusually high level. If this reading of the somewhat imperfect data can be trusted, it is at one and the same time an explanation of the outbreak of the sweat in the respective seasons, and a confirmation of the hypothesis that the virus of the sweat had its habitat in the ground. That hypothesis is, indeed, supported by so great a convergence of probabilities, both for the English sweat and for the endemic sweat of France[540], that it may be used to explain the seasonal incidence without laying the argument open to the charge of running in a vicious circle.

Whatever had been the kind of weather determining the successive outbreaks of the sweat, it is clear that the favouring circumstances were in general not the same as those of the bubo-plague. The greater outbursts of plague, as we shall see, were in 1500, 1509, 1513, 1531, 1535, 1543, 1547, and other years not sweat-years. It is only in the autumn of 1517 that the plague overlaps somewhat on the sweat, and even then it becomes noticeable mostly in the winter following the decline of the sweat. The two poisons had existed in English soil side by side, but had not come out at the same seasons; also the sweat had been mostly a disease of the greater houses, and the plague mostly of the poorer.

The Extinction of the Sweat in England.

The disappearance of the sweat from England after 1551, or its failure to come out again with the appropriate weather, is one of those phenomena of epidemic disease which might be made to appear less of a mystery by finding several more in the like case. A history of all the extinct types of infective disease would probably bring to light some reason why they had each and all died out. But an epidemic disease leaves no bones behind it in the strata; nor has the astonishing progress of science succeeded as yet in detecting palæozoic bacteria, although that discovery cannot be delayed much longer. Meanwhile we have to make what we can of the ordinary records. In our own time, so to speak, the sweat became extinct in 1551, and the plague in 1666; perhaps someone before long may be able to say that typhus died out (for a time) in Britain in such and such a year, and smallpox (for good) in such and such another. The surprising thing is that an infection which came forth time after time should have one day been missed as if it were dead. If the sweat had five seasons in England, why not fifty? Perhaps its career was short because the circumstances of its origin were transient and, as it were, accidental. But it may have been also subject to the only law of extinct disease-species which our scanty knowledge points to—the law of the succession, or superseding, or supplanting of one epidemic type by another.

Other forms of epidemic fever, in the same pestilential class as the sweat, were coming to the front in England as well as in other parts of Europe. Thus, in 1539, a summer of great heat and drought, “divers and many honest persons died of the hot agues, and of a great laske through the realm.” The hot agues were febrile influenzas, and the great laske was dysentery. Again, in the autumn of 1557, there died “many of the wealthiest men all England through by a strange fever,” according to one writer[541], or, according to another[542], there prevailed “divers strange and new sicknesses, taking men and women in their heads, as strange agues and fevers, whereof many died.” Jones in his Dyall of Agues, describes his own attack near Southampton, in 1558, and calls it the sweating sickness.

That epidemic corresponded to a great prevalence of “influenza” on the continent, which was probably as Protean or composite as the fevers in England. It would not be correct to say that these new fevers or influenzas, with more or less of a sweating type, were the sweat somewhat modified. But they seem to have come in succession to the sweat, if not to have taken its place, or supplanted it. The prevalent types of disease somehow reflect the social condition of the population; they change with the social state of the country or of a group of countries; they depend upon a great number of associated circumstances which it would be hard to enumerate exhaustively. As early as 1522 we have the gaol fever at Cambridge, at a time when Henry VIII.’s attempts to repress crime were come to the strange pass described in More’s Utopia. These things remain for more systematic handling in another chapter; but in concluding the career of the sweat in England we may pass from it with the remark that it did not cease until other forms of pestilential fever were ready to take its place. The same explanation remains to be given of the total disappearance of plague from England after 1666: it was superseded by pestilential contagious fever, a disease which was its congener, and had been establishing itself more and more steadily from year to year as the conditions of living in the towns were passing more and more from the medieval type to the modern. Meanwhile we have to take up the thread of the plague-history where we left it in the reign of Edward IV.

CHAPTER VI.

When the town council of York met on the 16th of August, 1485, to take measures on account of Henry Tudor’s landing in Wales, their first resolution was to despatch the sergeant to the mace to Richard III. at Nottingham, with an offer of men (they promised 400 for his army at Bosworth), and their second resolution was to send at once for all such aldermen and others of the council as were sojourning without the city on account of “the plague that reigneth[543].” These leading citizens of York had gone into the country to avoid the infectious exhalations within the walls in the summer heats; the plague that reigned in York was the old bubo-plague, which would show itself in a house here or there in any ordinary season, and on special occasions would rise to the height of an epidemic, driving away all who could afford to remove from the pestilent air of the town to the comparatively wholesome country, and taking its victims mostly among the poorer class who could not afford a “change of air.” In the three centuries following the Black Death, change of air meant a good deal more than it means now. The infection of the air, or the “intemperies” of the air, at Westminster occasioned (along with other reasons) the prorogation or adjournment to country towns of many parliaments; the infection of the air in and around Fleet Street caused the breaking up of many law terms; and the infection of the air in Oxford colleges was so constant an interruption to the studies of the place in the 15th century that Anthony Wood traces to that cause more than to any other the total decline of learning, the rudeness of manners and the prevalence of “several sorts of vice, which in time appeared so notorious that it was consulted by great personages of annulling the University or else translating it to another place[544].” From the old college registers, chiefly that of his own college of Merton, he has counted some thirty pestilences at Oxford, great and small, during the fifteenth century. The reason why the Oxford annals of plague are so complete is that each outbreak, even if only one or two deaths had occurred[545], meant a dispersion of the scholars and tutors of one or more halls and colleges, their removal in a body to some country house, alteration of the dates of terms, and postponement of the public Acts for degrees in the schools. Experience had taught the necessity of such prompt measures. Thus the first sweat, that of 1485, came so suddenly that it killed many of the scholars before they could disperse, “albeit it lasted but a month or six weeks.” Hardly had the halls and colleges begun to fill again after the dispersion by the sweat of 1485, when “another pestilential disease,” that is to say, the bubo-plague itself, broke forth at the end of August, 1486, in Magdalen parish, and daily increased so much that the scholars were obliged to flee again. In 1491 there was another dispersion; and in 1493 so severe an outbreak of plague from April to Midsummer that many were swept away, both cleric and laic: Magdalen College removed to Brackley in Northamptonshire, Oriel to St Bartholomew’s hospital near Oxford, and Merton to Islip, “instead of Cuxham their usual place of retirement.” The disastrous fifteenth century closes with a specially severe plague in 1499-1500, in which perished “divers of this university accounted worthy in these times;” an accompanying scarcity of grain and consequent failure of scholarships or exhibitions led many students to betake themselves to mechanical occupations. In August, 1503, the plague broke out again in St Alban’s Hall; the principal with all but a few of the students went to Islip, where the pestilence overtook them (three weeks having been spent first in mirth and jollity), so that several died and were buried, some at Islip, others at Ellesfield and one at Noke; in October it broke out in Merton College and drove some of the fellows and bachelors to the lodge in Stow Wood, others to Wotton near Cumner, where they remained until the 17th December. These interruptions had been so frequent that of fifty-five halls, only thirty-three were now inhabited, and they “but slenderly, as may be seen in our registers.” The town of Oxford shared in the decline; streets and lanes formerly populous were now desolate and forsaken. An epidemic in 1508, which may have been the second sweat, caused another dispersion; then the old bubo-plague again in 1510, 1511, 1512 and 1513, filling up the interval until the summer of 1517, when a “sudor tabificus,” the third sweat, “dispersed and swept away most, if not all, of the students.” The bubo-plague followed in the winter and spring, especially in St Mary Hall and Canterbury College. Meanwhile cardinal Wolsey had founded Cardinal College (afterwards Christ Church), bringing to it an infusion of new learning from Cambridge and elsewhere; but in 1525, “while this selected society was busy in preaching, reading, disputing and performing their scholastic Acts, a vehement plague brake forth, which dispersed most of them, so that they returned not all the year following or two years after,” and Cardinal College “thus settled, was soon after left as ’twere desolate.” The same outbreak affected specially the halls or colleges of St Alban, Jesus, St Edmund and Queen’s[546].

Oxford was not altogether singular in this experience of plague from year to year or at intervals of three or four years. What Sir Thomas More says of the cities of Utopia was true of the towns of England or of any medieval country in Christendom: “As for their cities, whoso knoweth one of them, knoweth them all; they be all so like one to another, as far forth as the nature of the place permitteth.” The limitation as to the nature of the place is not without importance for the frequency and severity of plague; the quantity of standing water around Oxford would certainly appear to have made the epidemics there a more regular product of the soil[547]. But we hear of plague also on the soil of Cambridge, particularly in 1511, when Erasmus was there: on the 28th November he writes from Queens’ College to Ammonio in London: “Here is great solitude; most are away for fear of the pestilence,” adding rather unkindly, “although there is also solitude when everyone is in residence.” It is from such chance references in letters of the time that we can infer the existence of plague throughout England. These references become much more numerous as the sixteenth century runs on, not perhaps because plague was more frequent, but because all kinds of documents are better preserved. The remarkable difference between the reigns of Henry VII. and Henry VIII. in regard to the quantity of extant materials for the construction of history is as keenly felt by the student of epidemics as by the student of high politics. The local records of towns, London included, are still almost valueless for our purpose: even the skilled antiquaries employed by the Historical Manuscripts Commission have hitherto extracted nothing concerning pre-Elizabethan epidemics from the archives of civic council-chambers, and only a little from muniment-rooms such as that of Canterbury Abbey.

The few details that we possess, such as those for the plague at Hull from 1472 to 1478, had been extracted from local records by the authors of town and county histories. Before the end of the sixteenth century the evidence of plague epidemic all over England, as well in provincial towns and in the country as in London, becomes abundant. There may have been really a great increase, but it is much more probable that the increase is for the most part only apparent. It is of some consequence to determine the probability as exactly as possible; and I shall therefore examine with more minuteness than would otherwise have been necessary the evidence as to the existence and amount of plague in London and elsewhere year after year from the accession of the Tudor dynasty in 1485, using chiefly the Calendars of State Papers for my purpose. As in the case of the sweat, we happen to hear of plague in London and elsewhere because the Court was kept away by it; the king’s secretaries are informed week after week of the state of health in London, and foreign ambassadors, especially the Venetian envoys, have frequently occasion to mention the hindrance to public business caused by the plague. But for these State papers the historian of epidemics would have little beyond an occasional parish register to build upon. The medical profession in England were not concerned to write or print anything thereon; while there are numerous foreign printed books on the plague (e.g. Forrestier’s at Rouen in 1490) there is not one original English treatise until that of Skene of Edinburgh in 1568. That the physicians were well employed by those who could engage their services, and that they did sustain the credit of their profession by the liberal scale of their fees, we have every reason to believe; thus the Venetian envoy writes on 3rd June, 1535, that he had been ill, and that he had expended seven hundred ducats during his illness, “and for so many physicians,” so that he had only one ducat remaining. But these thriving practitioners did not write books like their brethren abroad. One of their number, Linacre, who was also a prebendary of Westminster, busied himself with editions of certain writings of Galen. Erasmus mentions him in a letter as one of the Oxford scholars in whose society he found pleasure; but there is in the Praise of Folly a reference to a certain grammatical pedant whom Hecker identifies with Linacre. The other physicians and surgeons of the period whose names are known, Butts, Chambre, Borde and the rest of the group in Holbein’s picture of Henry VIII. handing the surgeons their charter, have left nothing in print which illustrates the epidemic diseases of the time, and little of any kind of writing except some formulæ of medicines: Borde, who was patronised by Cromwell, is known only as a humorist or satirist. Thus the inquiry must proceed without any of those aids from the faculty which make the history of epidemics on the Continent comparatively easy.

After the disastrous prevalence of plague in England in the reign of Edward IV., culminating in the great epidemic of 1479 in London and elsewhere, we do not hear of the disease again in London until 1487, two years after the first sweat; in that year, on the 14th April, a king’s writ from Norwich postponed the business of the Common Pleas and King’s Bench until Trinity term, on account of the pestilence in London, Westminster and neighbouring places[548]. The next reference is to the great epidemic of 1499-1500, in London and apparently also in the country. Fabyan, who was then an alderman and likely to know, puts the deaths in London at twenty thousand[549]; Polydore Virgil says thirty thousand[550]; and others say thirty thousand deaths from plague and other diseases together[551]. The smaller total is the more likely to be nearest the mark. There is reason to think that the population of London a generation later was little over 60,000; and it will appear in the sequel that a fourth or a fifth part of the inhabitants was as much as the severest plagues cut off, although it is entirely credible that the Black Death itself had cut off one half.

The enormous mortality in 1499-1500 has left few traces in the records of the City or of the State. Five great prelates died during the plague-year, some of them certainly from it: Morton of Canterbury (a very old man), Langton of Winchester (before he could be transferred to Canterbury), Rotheram of York, Alcock of Ely and Jane of Norwich[552]. Like some of the later plagues in London it lasted through the winter. It was at Oxford in the same years, and casual references in two of the Plumpton letters lead one to infer that it may have been in remote parts of the country also[553].

The infection was still active as late as October, 1501, at Gravesend, and it made some difference to the reception of the young princess Catharine of Arragon, who had come over for her marriage with Prince Arthur, and became famous in history as the wife of his brother Henry VIII. The following are Henry VII.’s instructions, dated October, 1501:—

In 1503 there was plague at Oxford, as we have seen, and at Exeter, where two mayors died of it in quick succession, and two bailiffs[555]. The infection was certainly in London in 1504 or 1505 (perhaps in both, and possibly at its low endemic level in the other years from 1501): for Bernard André mentions casually that he had been absent from the City on account of it[556].

In 1509, the first year of Henry VIII., there was a severe outbreak of plague in the garrison of Calais, as well as “great plague” in divers parts of England[557]. In 1511, Erasmus writes from Cambridge on 17th August, 5th October and 16th October, making reference to the plague in London; and on the 27th October, 8th November, and 28th November, Ammonio answers him that the plague has not entirely disappeared, and again that it is abated, but a famine is feared, and lastly that the plague is entirely gone. On the 26th of July the Venetian ambassador had written that the queen-widow (mother of Edward V.) had died of plague and that the king, Henry VIII., was anxious.

On the 1st November, 1512, Erasmus, on a visit to London, was so afraid of the plague that he did not enter his own lodging, and missed a meeting with Colet. The next year, 1513, was a severe plague-year according to many testimonies. In the diary of the Venetian envoy from August to 3rd September it is stated that deaths from plague are occurring constantly; two of his servants sickened on the 22nd August, but did not recognize the disease; on the 25th they rose from bed, went to a tavern to drink a certain beverage called “ale,” and died the same day: their bed, sheets and other effects were thrown into the sea (? Thames). On the 17th September he writes to Venice that it is perilous to remain in London; the deaths were said to be 200 in a day, there was no business doing, all the Venetian merchants in London had taken houses in the country; the plague is also in the English fleet. In October the deaths are reported by the envoy at 300 to 400 a day; he has gone into the country. On the 6th November and 6th December he writes that plague was still doing much damage. On the 3rd December the rumour of a great prevalence of plague in England had reached Rome. On the 28th November Erasmus writes from Cambridge that he does not intend to come to London before Christmas on account of plague and robbers; and on the 21st December he writes again: “I am shut up in the midst of pestilence and hemmed in with robbers.”

One year is very like another, but it will be desirable to continue the narrative a little longer so as to remove any suspicion of constructing history beyond the facts. In February, 1514, Erasmus writes that he had been disgusted with London, deeming it unsafe to stay there owing to plague. In going in procession to St Paul’s on the 21st May the king preferred to be on horseback, for one reason “to avoid contact with the crowd by reason of the plague;” he had lately recovered from some vaguely reported “fever” at Richmond. On the 1st July Convocation was adjourned on account of the epidemic and the heat.

Next year, 1515, Erasmus writes from London on the 20th April that he is in much trouble; the plague had broken out and it looked as if it would rage everywhere. On the 23rd April Wolsey sends advice to the earl of Shrewsbury in the country (? Wingfield) to “get him into clean air and divide his household,” owing to contagious plague among his servants; on the 28th the earl received from London one pound of manus Christi,—the same remedy that Henry VIII. sent to Wolsey for the sweat—with coral, and half-a-pound of powder preservative. On the same date “they begin to die in London in divers places suddenly of fearful sickness.” One of the incidents of the plague of 1515 which has fixed the attention of chroniclers was the death of twenty-seven of the nuns in a convent at the Minories outside Aldgate[558]. Next year, on 14th May (1516), the sickness was so extreme in Lord Shrewsbury’s house at Wingfield that he has put away all his horse-keepers and turned his horses out to grass. In London, on the 21st May, the Venetian ambassador removed to Putney owing to a case of plague in his house, and he would not be allowed to see Wolsey until the 30th June, when forty days would have passed since the plague in his house.

The next summer, 1517, was the season of the third sweat. It was hardly over when plague began in London in September. On the 21st the Venetian envoy speaks of having had to avoid “the plague and the sweating sickness;” on the 26th he writes that the plague is making some progress and he has left London to avoid it. On the 15th October the king was at Windsor “in fear of the great plague.” One writes on 25 Oct., “As far as I can hear, there is no parish in London free[559].” On the 16th November the envoy begs the seignory of Venice to send someone to replace him as he thinks it high time to escape from “sedition, sweat and plague.” On the 3rd December the king and the cardinal were still absent from London on account of the plague; on the 22nd their absence was causing general discontent, the plague being somewhat abated. It was not until March, 1518, that the court approached London; on the 15th the Venetian envoy rode out to Richmond to see the king, and found him in some trouble, as three of his pages had died “of the plague.” The court withdrew again to Berkshire, and on the 6th April it was decided by the king’s privy council at Abingdon that London was still infected and must be avoided, the queen (Catharine of Arragon) having declared the day before that she had perfect knowledge of the sickness being in London, and that she feared for the king, although she was no prophet. On the 7th April the report of four or five deaths at Nottingham (“as appears by a bill enclosed”) was made the ground of postponing a projected visit of the king to the north. The spring was unusually warm, which made the risk of sickness to be judged greater. It is clear that public business was suffering by the prolonged absence of the court from London, and that the existence of infection was being denied. On the 28th April Master More certified from Oxford to the king at Woodstock that three children were dead of the sickness, but none others; he had accordingly charged the mayor and the commissary in the king’s name “that the inhabitants of those houses that be and shall be infected, shall keep in, put out wispes and bear white rods, according as your grace devised for Londoners;” this was approved by the king’s council, and the question was discussed whether the fair in the Austin Friars of Oxford a fortnight later should not be prohibited, as the resort of people “may make Oxford as dangerous as London, next term” (the law courts sat at Oxford in Trinity term). However, the interests of traders had to be kept in view also. On 28th June, 1518, Pace writes from the court at Woodstock to Wolsey that “all are free from sickness here, but many die of it within four or five miles, as Mr Controller is informed.” On the 11th July he writes again from Woodstock that two persons are dead of the sickness, and more infected, one of them a servant to a yeoman of the king’s guard; to-morrow the king and queen lodge at Ewelme, and stop not by the way, as the place appointed for their lodging is infected. On the 14th July he writes to Wolsey from Wallingford that the king moves to-morrow to Bisham “as it is time: for they do die in these parts in every place, not only of the small pokkes and mezils, but also of the great sickness.” The uncertainty as to what these diseases may have been will appear from the next letter, on the 18th July, from Sir Thomas More: “We have daily advertisements here, other of some sweating or the great sickness from places very near unto us; and as for surfeits and drunkenness we have enough at home.” The king had also heard that one of my lady Princess’s servants was sick of “a hot ague” at Enfield. On the 22nd July, the Venetian ambassador writes from Lambeth asking to be recalled: two of his servants had died of the plague, and he himself had the sweating sickness twice in one week. The pope’s legate, Campeggio, made a state entry into London about the first of August, but the king and Wolsey were not there to receive him, ostensibly for fear of infection. The king was now at Greenwich, and we hear no more of the fear of infection for a time. In the end of March, 1519, deaths from plague occurred on board one of the Venetian galleys at Southampton. On the 4th August, 1520, the king (at Windsor) has heard that the great sickness is still prevalent at Abingdon and other villages towards Woodstock, and has changed his route (“gystes”) accordingly; on 8th August, sickness is reported at Woodstock. The same year some kind of sickness was very disastrous in Ireland.

In the winter of 1521 (2nd November), the sickness continues in London: “it is not much feared, though it is universal in every parish.” According to a vague entry in Hall’s chronicle the year 1522 was in like manner, “not without pestilence nor death,” which may refer to the gaol fever at Cambridge.

Thus from 1511 to 1521 there is not a single year without some reference to the prevalence of plague, the autumn and winter of 1513 having been probably the time of greatest mortality in London. After 1521 or 1522 there comes a break of four or five years in the plague-references, except for a vague mention of plague followed by famine at Shrewsbury in 1525[560]. They begin again in 1526 (from Guildford) and go on until 1532 every year much as in the former period, the year 1528 being mostly occupied with the fourth epidemic of the sweating sickness. On the 4th June, 1529, the legate Campeggio writes from London: “Here we are still wearing our winter clothing, and use fires as if it were January: never did I witness more inconstant weather. The plague begins to rage vigorously, and there is some fear of the sweating sickness.” On the 31st August the Venetian ambassador has a person sick of the plague in his house; on the 9th September he has gone to a village near London on account of the plague. On the 18th September the French ambassador in London (Bishop Du Bellay) has plague in his household, and in spite of repeated changes of lodging his principal servants are dead; he has been unable to refuse leave to the others to go home, and is now quite alone, but the danger from the plague is much diminished.

In 1530 the plague is heard of as early as March 23, previous to which date two of the Venetian ambassador’s servants had died of it; three more of them died afterwards, and the envoy was forbidden the Court for forty days. Parliament was prorogued on April 26 to June 22, on account of the plague in London and the suburbs, and farther, for the same reason, until October 1. The king was at Greenwich, but even there was not beyond the infection; in the Privy Purse book, there is an entry of £18. 8s. paid “to Rede, the marshall of the king’s hall for to dispose of the king’s charge to such poor folk as were expelled the town of the Greenwiche in the tyme of the plague.” Similar payments are entered on January 13, 1531, April 10, April 26 and November 8[561].

On November 23, 1531, the king was obliged to leave Greenwich on account of the plague, removing to Hampton Court (now a royal palace since Wolsey’s fall). In London it had somewhat abated, but, according to a letter of the Venetian ambassador, had been up to 300 or 400 deaths in a week. In mid-winter, the 15th of January, 1532, Parliament was prorogued on account of the insalubrity of the air in London and Westminster. The infection may be assumed to have gone on, according to the analogy of known years, all through the spring and summer, rising to a greater height in the autumn. We next hear of it on the 18th September, 1532, when the Venetian envoy writes from London that the king’s journey to Gravesend and Dover would be by water, “as there is much plague in those parts, and there is no lack of it in London. Yesterday at the king’s court the master of the kitchen died of it, having waited on his majesty the day before.” On the 24th September, “the plague increases daily in London and well nigh throughout the country.”

On the 14th October, “the plague increases daily, and makes everybody uneasy.” On the same date the Privy Council write to the king, who had crossed to Calais accompanied by Mr Secretary Cromwell, for a meeting with the French king, that there is a rumour of the plague increasing, especially at the Inns of Court. On the 18th October Hales, one of the justices, writes to Cromwell that “the plague of sickness is so sore here that I never saw so thin a Michaelmas term.” On the 20th, Audeley the Lord Chancellor writes that many die of the plague, the sergeants in Fleet Street have left in consequence, the Inner Temple has broken commons, the lawyers being in great fear. “The Council have commanded the mayor to certify how many have died of the plague.” That is the first known reference to the London bills of mortality, and was probably the very first occasion of them[562]. By that time the plague had been active in London for more than a month, and had clearly begun to alarm the residents. The result of the Privy Council’s order to the mayor of London was a bill on or before the 21st October, showing that 99 persons had died of the plague in the city, and 27 from other causes, the number of deaths from other causes suggesting that this was the bill for a week. On the 23rd the Secretary of State is informed that the sickness is fervent and many die; those who are not citizens are much afeard. On the 25th Sir John Aleyn has assurances for Cromwell (at Calais) from all parts of the country that the whole realm is quiet, but the plague has been more severe than in London. Cromwell’s French gardener was alive and well on Saturday afternoon, the 12th, and he was dead of the plague and buried on Monday morning the 14th. On the 27th the death “is quite abated” in London and Westminster, according to one; but according to the Lord Chancellor, on the 28th, the plague increases, especially about Fleet Street. On the 31st October one writes, “I have not seen London so destitute of people as it was when I came there.” On 2nd November the death is assuaged and there is good rule kept, for Sir Hugh Vaughan takes pains in his office like an honest gentleman. On the 9th November the plague is abated. There the correspondence ends, the Court having returned from France. But we may here bring in a certain weekly bill of mortality which has come down among the waifs of paper from that period[563]. It is for the week from the 16th to the 23rd of November, the year not being stated; the experts of the national collection of manuscripts were at one time inclined to assign it to “circa 1512;” but the first that we hear of the mayor being called upon to furnish a bill of plague-deaths is the order by the lords of the Council on or about the 20th October 1532, the first bill having shown 99 deaths in the city from plague and 27 deaths (in the week) from other causes. The extant bill for the week 16th to 23rd November is clearly one of a series; there are no good grounds for assigning it to an earlier date than the year 1532, while there are reasons for not placing it later. There are two other plague-bills extant, for August, 1535, written out in a more clerkly fashion, and bearing the marks of greater experience. The bill for the week in November is more primitive in appearance; and we may fairly take it as one of the series first ordered by the Council in 1532: for that was the most considerable year of the plague immediately preceding the outburst of 1535, to which the more finished bills certainly belong. The week in November, for which it gives the deaths from plague and other causes in the city parishes is later than the dates of the 2nd and 9th, when the plague was “suaged” and “abated;” the bill therefore stands for plague on the decline, or near extinction for the season, its total of plague deaths being 33, and of other deaths 32, as against 99 and 27 respectively in the corresponding week of October. As this, the earliest of a great historical series of London bills of mortality, has a peculiar interest, I transcribe it in full, retaining the original spelling.