This enterprising tradesman had been at Oxford, where he failed to take a degree in medicine, but he was a licentiate of the College of Physicians. He is the single literary representative of the faculty, so far as appears, in 1625; and there is nothing in his essay that concerns us, except the following corroboration of a well-known character of the epidemic:

It is impossible to know whether any considerable proportion recovered. It appears that, as in 1603, the buboes and boils might come out in the same person more than once, and that the best chance was from their suppuration:

“Some with their carbuncles and sores new burst
Are fed with hope they have escaped the worst.”

But the best hope was in flight, as Bradwell was candid enough to say, although he remained behind with his shilling powders and half-crown electuaries. Cito cede, longé recede, tardé redi—is the proverbial advice which he quotes.

However, the people in their flight, unless they were nobles or squires with country houses, fared but ill in the provinces. The story of their reception in country towns and villages is so like that of 1603 that one might suppose in this, as in other things, that the writers of 1625 were copying from Dekker. One of the versifiers, Brewer, has a section specially devoted to a “Relation of the many miseries that many of those that fly the City do fall into in the country.” They are driven back by men with bills and halberds, passing through village after village in disgrace until they end their journey; they sleep in stables, barns and outhouses, or even by the roadside in ditches and in the open fields. And that was the lot of comparatively wealthy men. Taylor says that when he was with the queen’s barge at Hampton Court and up the river almost to Oxford, he had much grief and remorse to see and hear of the miserable and cold entertainment of many Londoners:

“The name of London now both far and near
Strikes all the towns and villages with fear.
And to be thought a Londoner is worse
Than one that breaks a house, or takes a purse ...
Whilst hay-cock lodging with hard slender fare,
Welcome, like dogs into a church, they are.
For why the hob-nailed boors, inhuman blocks,
Uncharitable hounds, hearts hard as rocks,
Did suffer people in the field to sink
Rather than give or sell a draught of drink.
Milkmaids and farmers’ wives are grown so nice
They think a Citizen a cockatrice,
And country dames are waxed so coy and brisk
They shun him as they shun a basilisk.”

Taylor gives various instances in prose:

One at Richmond was drawn naked in the night by his own wife and boy, and cast into the Thames, where the next day the corpse was found. The village of Hendon distinguished itself by relieving the sick, burying the dead, and collecting eight pounds, at the least (being but a small village) for the poor of St Andrew’s, Holborn, besides allowing good weekly wages to two men to attend and bury such as died. The village of Tottenham appears to have been equally hospitable; but as it was on the road to Theobalds, and some of his majesty’s servants dwelt there, the Privy Council on July 19, wrote to the justices of Middlesex to order the inhabitants of Tottenham, who had received into their houses “multitudes of inmates,” to remove the new-comers and not to receive any in future[1019]. Although the king was not at Richmond, yet as there was a royal residence there, the inhabitants sought to drive away citizens on the ground of the warrant forbidding them to approach any of his majesty’s houses[1020]. At Woodstock, where the Court was in August, no one was allowed to go from thence to London, nor any to come thither, and for contraveners a gibbet was set up at the Court gate[1021]. It was hardly possible to get a letter smuggled into London[1022]; in the provinces “no one comes into a town without a ticket, yet there are few free places.” At Southampton on August 27, a stranger died in the fields: “He came from London. He had good store of money about him, which was taken before he was cold[1023].” Dr Donne, the dean of St Paul’s, confirms these experiences in a letter of November 25, from Chelsea[1024]:

Meddus, rector of St Gabriel’s, heard of one sad case of a citizen in Leadenhall-street who removed to the country with his seven children, “but having buried all there is come again hither,” in July[1025]. In October, the people began to come back, although the infection was by no means over; Salvetti, who was himself near Huntingdon, says that many of the returning artisans caught the infection in the city, which is probable enough, as it happened also in 1665. On October 15, a correspondent of Mead’s wrote that in his passing through London he found the streets full of people, and the highways full of passengers, horse and foot. On October 24, we hear of great distress among tradesmen, artificers and farmers round London, and of discontent at the forced loan[1026]; although the Court itself was in as great extremity during the plague for want of money as any private house could have been. On November 22, the lord mayor and aldermen wrote to the Privy Council that the great mortality, although it had taken many poor people away, yet had made more poverty by decay of tradesmen, the want and misery being still very great[1027]. Still, the effect of this great plague on London, cutting off some fifty thousand in a year, or more than a fifth part of the population, must have been, like that of all other great plagues in London, to cut off the fringe of poverty and broken fortunes, and to raise the general average of well-being of those that remained. Trade would come back; but the submerged tenth, or sixth, or fourth, or whatever fraction they made, were drowned for good.

London soon filled up the gaps made by the plague, doubtless by fresh blood from the country. In 1627, the christenings were again at 8,408, having been at a maximum of 8,299 the year before the plague. In 1629 they actually exceeded the burials by more than a thousand (9,901 to 8,771), and continued to be slightly in excess until the next plague of 1636.

The Plague of 1625 near London.

In the immediate neighbourhood of the capital the parishes on the Kentish chalk below London, such as Deptford, Greenwich, Lewisham, Eltham and Bromley had more plague in 1625 than in 1603. Kensington, for some unknown reason, has 80 deaths from all causes in the register, as against 32 in 1603 and 62 (of plague 25) in 1665. The group of parishes in Middlesex, such as Enfield, Edmonton and Finchley, had each a large number of deaths, but somewhat less than in 1603 and 1665, and the same holds for Hackney and Stoke Newington, Islington and Hampstead. Places up the Thames all the way from Battersea to Windsor were infected, including Wandsworth, Putney, Isleworth, Richmond, Kingston and Hampton Court. Eton was “visited;” even the sequestered village of Stoke Pogis had houses shut up “by reason of the contagion” and a collection made for their impoverished inmates. Among the Hertfordshire towns to which Londoners resorted in plague-times, Watford is known to have had plague-deaths in 1625. In Essex,—Stratford, Tottenham, Romford and Barking had each a large number of plague-deaths, and, in Surrey, Croydon and Streatham. At Carshalton, oddly enough, the heavy mortality was the year after (1626) “not from plague, but from a disease somewhat akin to it[1028].”

Plague in the Provinces in 1625 and following years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The London Plague of 1636.

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

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

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

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

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

Fever in London.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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