Next came Avarice, Envy and other of the deadly sins, so that the respite which Nature had given was of no real avail.

A clear reference to pestilence continuing in the country comes in where the pope’s exactions are mentioned. The pope did nothing in return for his English tribute:

“Had I a clerk that could write, I would cast him a bill
That he send me under his seal a salve for the pestilence,
And that his blessing and his bulls botches might destroy.
For, sith he hath the power that Peter himself had,
He hath the pot with the salve, soothly as me thinketh.”

Among the other consequences “sithen the pestilence,” was this: “So is pride waxen, in religion and in all the realm among rich and poor, that prayers have no power the pestilence to let; ... ne for dread of the death withdraw not their pride.”

The pestis secunda of 1361, or pestis puerorum, may perhaps be pointed to in the passage where chapmen are blamed for indulging their children, “ne for no pouste of pestilence correct them overmuch.” The ill-assorted marriages had doubtless followed the great mortality itself; but the second pestilence, of 1361, which affected the upper classes especially, and is said by one chronicler to have cut off more men than women[390], may have been more specially pointed to in Langland’s reference. Of that pestilence a chronicle of the next century has preserved a curious reminiscence: among its victims were men, doubtless of the upper class, “whose wives, as women out of gouvernance, took as well strangers to their husbands and other lewd and simple people, the which, forgetting their awe, worship and birth, coupled and married them with them that were of low degree and low reputation[391].”

Although Langland, when he speaks of changes “sith the pestilence time,” means the great mortality of 1349, he means in other places, the second, third, and perhaps also fourth pestilences[392]. The years of the pestilences down to the fifth are not the same in all the chronicles; there are indeed some nine outbreaks that might have been enumerated after the Black Death to the end of the century. Some of these are clearly associated with scarcity, and may have been of the old type of famine-sickness; dysentery is, indeed, mentioned in connexion with the sickness of 1391[393]. Again, an epidemic in London in 1382 is said by a chronicler to have affected children (boys and girls), while the same chronicler is explicit that the sickness in Norfolk the year after was confined to the young of both sexes under a certain age. Lastly, the epidemic of 1391 was so severe in the North as to recall the great mortality itself; but under the same year is the reference to sickness of the type of dysentery due to rotten fruit; and under the year before, 1390, two chroniclers agree that the epidemic was “mostly among children,” or that it cut off “more young than old.” It would be unsafe, therefore, to conclude that all the outbreaks of pestis in England subsequent to the Black Death, were of bubo-plague itself. The list of sicknesses in Langland’s poem gives, indeed, as much space to fevers and fluxes, burning agues and frenzies, as to boils and botches, foul evils, pokkes and pestilences—by which latter group of synonyms the bubo-plague is meant. Pestis, it is well known, was a generic name in the medieval period, just as pest and pestilence are generic now. So generic was it that some may doubt whether bubo-plague, of the type of 1349, was included at all among the pestes of the generations following. Positive evidence of the continued existence of bubo-plague in England is, at least, not superfluous, and this will be the best place to bring it in.

Medical Evidence of the Continuance of Plague.

The plague was called “the botch” down to the Elizabethan and Stuart periods; and the “botches” in Langland’s poem, or, as he writes it, “boches,” were the familiar risings, under the arms and elsewhere, which had given the disease its popular name when it began to recur time after time. Apart from this verbal or philological evidence, there is a clear proof of the prevalence of true bubo-plague during the latter part of the fourteenth century, in the manuscript ordinances or rules of prevention and treatment which were in circulation. Most of the extant copies bear the name of one John of Burgoyne, or John of Bordeaux[394]. A fragment in comparatively late handwriting purports to be the ordinance of “a great Clark, Mr John Cordewe, at the prayer of King Richard and other the Lords, for pestilence[395]”; from which it may be concluded that this, the commonly used ordinance, dates from the time of Richard II. The names used in the text are “pestilence” and “pestilential sores,” and the handling of the subject is the conventional one for the plague. The ordinance contains exceedingly little that is of practical interest, and it is difficult to believe that it can have been of real use to anyone. We are introduced to the subject with a few empty common-places; but whenever we come to business, we are plainly told to go and consult those who know—and this, be it observed, in a disease which was remarkably uniform in its type and circumstances:

If there were any doubt about the date of John of Burgoyne, or John of Bordeaux[396], it ought to be set at rest by the discovery that he corresponds in the closest way with the physician in the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s doctor of physic stands for the well-grounded practitioner of the time—“grounded in astronomie,” it is true, but at all events academically grounded, in contrast to the charlatans and pretenders who had not been to Paris or Bologna, probably knew no Latin, to say nothing of “astronomy,” and therefore knew not how to let a patient die (or recover) secundum artem. The doctor of physic uses his astrological knowledge so much in the manner of John of Bordeaux, that one suspects Chaucer to have seen the passage quoted above, and to have condensed it into the two following lines:

“The cause yknowne, and of his harm the rote,
Anon he gave to the sick man his bote.”

It was in the pestilence that this practitioner had made the money which he kept so tightly. Richly clad he was;

“And yet he was but easy of dispense;
He kept that he wan in the pestilence.
For gold in physic is a cordial:
Therefore he loved gold in special.”

This is John of Burgoyne all over; it would have been an anachronism in England by more than two hundred years to have represented a physician as caring for any but paying patients, or as regarding an epidemic sickness from any other point of view than as a source of income.

Besides the “ordinance” of John of Burgoyne, which may be assigned to the reign of Richard II., there was another essay on the plague circulating in England in an English translation, of which the copy among the Sloane manuscripts is assigned to the fourteenth century[397]. The importance attached to this manuscript work is shown in the fact that it was chosen among the very first to be printed at an English press, probably in the year 1480[398]. It was reprinted in 1536, and the substance of it was copied into nearly all the English books on plague (from one to another) as late as the seventeenth century, much of its original matter passing under the name of one Phaer, or Phayre or Thayre, who was a compiler about the middle of the sixteenth century. Writers on early English printing have made much of the printed book of 1480; but they do not appear to have known of the manuscript which was used as the printer’s “copy[399].” If one happens to use the latter first, and comes later to the printed book, he will observe the identity not merely in the words and spelling but even in the very form in which the type had been cut. The authorship of a manuscript which is thus invested with a various interest may deserve a few lines of inquiry.

The author of it describes himself in the (translated) introduction as “I the bisshop of Arusiens, Doctour of phisike,” that is to say, bishop of Aarhus, in Denmark. In the text, he claims to have practised physic at Montpellier:

The fact that this medieval treatise, whatever its exact date, was turned into English and circulated in manuscript, and that it was chosen for printing almost as soon as English printing began, in the reign of Edward IV., is sufficient evidence, if more were needed, that the English had to reckon with bubo-plague as one of their standing diseases throughout the latter part of the medieval period. Before we come to the chronology of English plagues in that period, from the Black Death to the accession of the Tudor dynasty in 1485, it will be convenient to consider here, with the help of the above treatise, how the endemic plague was viewed in those days,—what it was ascribed to in its origin, in its incidence upon houses and persons, and in its propagation, what was advised for its avoidance or prevention, and what was prescribed for its treatment. As the bishop’s essay was the source of most that was taught on these matters in England for the next two or three hundred years, it will be an economy to give a brief account of it here once for all.

The remote causes, or warnings of the approach of pestilence, are given under seven heads, including the kind of weather, swarms of flies, shooting stars, comets, thunder and lightning out of the south, and winds out of the south; this list was reproduced, with little or no change, by the Elizabethan writers of popular health-manuals. The second section of the essay is on the “causes of pestilence.” There are three causes:—

These explanations of the incidence of plague are in part repeated in the section of the essay where the author gives directions for avoiding it. After enjoining penance, he proceeds:

Then follows his own Montpellier experience, already quoted.

The diagnostics come in casually along with the treatment:

Then follow directions for bleeding, according to the position of the bubo—in the armpit, groin or neck, the direction “if on the back” probably having reference to the carbuncle[402]. The section on treatment, which is the last, ends with a prescription for a medicine “that the sooner a swelling be made ripe.”

These are sufficiently clear indications of the bubonic nature of the disease called pestilence. At the same time the writer includes an ague as also pestilential, due to similar causes and arising on similar occasions. This is a use of the name ague which should not be mistaken for its common application to intermittent fever. Ague was simply (febris) acuta; and pestilential ague was a name for typhus fever in the sixteenth century (as in Jones’ Dyall of Agues), as well as in Ireland until a much later period. This early association of acute pestilential fever with true bubo-plague means the same relationship of typhus to plague which was systematically taught by Sydenham, Willis, and Morton in the seventeenth century; typhus in their time was the frequent attendant of plague,—a pestis mitior; and it would appear to have been its attendant and congener in the fourteenth century also.

The Fourteenth Century Chronology continued.

Two epidemics contend in the chronicles for being the pestis tertia—that of 1368-69, and that of 1375. The former is described as a “great pestilence of men and the larger animals[403],” and it appears to have been associated with unfavourable seasons and with the beginning of that scarcity which Langland’s poem refers to the month of April, 1370:

Atte Londoun, I leve, liketh wel my wafres
And louren whan thei lakken hem.—It is nought longe passed,
There was a careful comune whan no cart cam to towne
With bred fro Strethforth, tho gan beggeres wepe
And werkmen were agast a lite. This wole be thought longe
In the date of our Drighte in a drye Aprille,
A thousand and thre hondreth tweis thretty and ten
My wafres there were gesen whan Chichestre was Maire[404].

The pestis of 1368 and 1369 may have been primarily a famine-sickness; but it does not follow that there was no bubo-plague mixed therewith. On the contrary, seasons of scarcity were often in after experience found to be the seasons of plague, the lowered vitality probably offering the opportunity to the plague-virus. Previous to the harvests of 1376 and 1377, which were abundant, there had been an unbroken period of high prices for many years, of which 1371 was remembered as “the grete dere yere[405].” But the pestis tertia appears to have been most severe in the summer of 1368; for, on 23 July of that year, Simon, archbishop of Canterbury, ordered public prayers for the cessation of the pestilence[406], and it is under the same year that the wills of deceased London citizens are enrolled in unusual numbers, although not in such numbers as in the pestis secunda of 1361[407]. Public prayers for the cessation of pestilence (without reference to famine) and an unusual mortality of the richer citizens, point to the plague proper, which may or may not have been the type of sickness in the country districts in 1369, the second year of the epidemic[408].

There is, furthermore, some indirect evidence that pestilential disease, and probably bubo-plague, occurred in London subsequent to the scarcity of the dry April, 1370, to which Langland’s verses relate. This evidence lies in the comparison of the wording of two ordinances of Edward III., one of 1369 and the other of 1371, both relating to nuisances in the city[409]. In an order of the king in Council (43 Edward III.) for stopping the carrying of slaughter-house offal from the shambles in St Nicholas parish, within Newgate, through the streets, lanes, and other places to the banks of the water of Thames near to Baynard’s Castle, where there was a jetty for throwing the refuse from into the river, the motive assigned is that divers prelates, nobles, and other persons having houses in the line of traffic, had complained grievously of these offences to the sight and smell. But, in an amended order of 28th October, 1371, against the same nuisance and with a definite (but futile) relegation of all slaughtering to Stratford on the one side and Knightsbridge on the other, the motive is differently stated: “Whereas of late, from the putrefied blood of slaughtered beasts running in the streets, and the entrails thereof thrown into the water of Thames, the air in the same city has been greatly corrupted and infected, and whereby the worst of abominations and stenches have been generated, and sicknesses and many other maladies have befallen persons dwelling in the same city and resorting thereto:—We, desiring to take precautions against such perils, and to provide for the decency of the said city, and the safety of the same our people” etc.

Up to this date, the Rolls of Parliament contain frequent references to the wasting and impoverishment of the country by pestilence. A petition of 1362 begs the king “to consider the divers mischiefs that have come to his commons by divers pestilences of wind and water, and mortality of men and beasts”—the destructive wind being the tornado-like storm, on the 16th January, 1362, “on Saturday at even,” which was long remembered, and is commemorated, along with the Black Death itself, in an inscription in the church of Ashwell, Herts. Next year, another petition states that “pestilences and great winds have done divers mischiefs”—manors and tenements held direct from the king having become desolate and ruinous. In 1369 a petition states that “the king’s ferms [rents] in every county of England are greatly abated by the great mortalities.” The parliament of 1376, the “good Parliament” so-called, is able to point the moral of its petitions by frequent references to the pestilences “that have been in the kingdom one after another,” the pestilences “of people and servants,” the murrains of cattle, and “the failure of their corn and other fruits of the earth.” The same language recurs in the second parliament of Richard II. in 1378 (the year after the poll-tax), and from that time until the end of his reign, it becomes stereotyped in the petitions deprecating heavy subsidies or excusing the smallness of the sums voted.

The pestilence of 1375 would appear to have been considered as one of the greater sort. The author of the Eulogium reckons it the pestis tertia (passing over that of 1368-69). The season was one of great heat, there was “grandis pestilentia” both in England and other countries, an infinity of both sexes died, the mortality being so swift that the pope, “at the instance of the cardinal of England” granted plenary remission to all dying contrite and confessing their sins[410]. That looks like an epidemic of true bubo-plague,—probably the pestis quarta correctly so-called[411].

In 1379 there was a great plague in the Northern parts, which were stripped of their best men; the Scots made a raid, with the following prayer on their lips: “God and Sen Mungo, Sen Ninian and Seynt Andrew scheld us this day and ilka day fro Goddis grace, and the foule deth that Ynglessh men dyene upon”—foul death being the name given to plague also in 1349[412]. The northern counties send a petition to the parliament of 1379-80, that the king would “consider the very great hurt and damage which they have suffered, and are still suffering, both by pestilence and by the continual devastations of the Scots enemy[413].”

In the parliament of 1381-82 there is a petition from the convent of Salisbury as to want of money to repair the losses caused by the pestilence, of which the tenants are nearly all dead, and by the murrain of cattle. This is more than thirty years from the Black Death, and can hardly refer, as some earlier petitions may have done, to the enduring effects of that calamity. The sixth parliament of Richard II. (1382), has two of the stereotyped petitions deprecating a heavy subsidy on the ground of “the great poverty and disease” of the commons, through pestilence of people, murrain of cattle, failure of crops, great floods, etc.[414] This was the year after the Peasant Revolt, which had coincided with troubles of various kinds. A Norwich chronicle, perhaps of contemporary authority, enters, under the year 1382, a very pestilential fever in many places of the country, and very extraordinary inundations of the fens[415]. In London the epidemic of 1382 is said to have been “chiefly among boys and girls[416].” A primitive English poem of the time has for its subject the earthquake of 1382, and with that portent it associates not only the Peasant’s Rebellion but also “the pestilens[417].”

The year 1383 was a bad one for the fruit, which was spoiled by “foetid fogs, exhalations and various corruptions of the air”: from eating of the spoiled fruits many died, or incurred serious illness and infirmities[418]. By another account, a great pestilence in Kent and other parts of England destroyed many, sparing no age or sex. In Norfolk the sickness that year is said to have been confined to young persons[419]. This was only one of the occasions which might have been referred to in ‘Piers Ploughman,’ when the poor people thought to “poison Hunger” by bad food.

The next pestilence, that of 1390 and 1391, was so prolonged and so serious as to be compared with the Great Mortality itself. It is called the pestis quinta by two annalists[420], and is described not without some detail by several. It is clear that the seeds of disease were ready to burst forth at various parts of the country; for we read that in 1389, the king was in the south of England, and seeing some of his men prostrated by sudden death, he returned to Windsor[421]. Another outburst came the year after. Intense heat began in June and lasted until September; great mortality ensued, the epidemic continuing in diverse parts of England, but not everywhere, until Michaelmas; it cut off more young than old, as well as several famous soldiers[422]. The St Albans entry confirms this: “A great plague, especially of youths and children, who died everywhere in towns and villages, in incredible and excessive numbers[423].” After the epidemic there was scarcity, of which we have special accounts from Norfolk[424]. But the heaviest mortality fell in the year 1391. There was first of all scarcity, now in its second year, and aggravated by six weeks of continual gloom in July and August. At the time of the nuts, apples and other fruits of the kind, many poor people died of dysentery, and the sickness would have been worse but for the laudable care of the mayor of London who caused corn to be brought from over sea. In Norfolk and many other counties the sickness was compared even to the Great Mortality, and was probably a mixture of famine-pestilence with bubo-plague. At York “eleven thousand” were said to have been buried[425]. Another account says that the North suffered severely, and also the West, and that the sickness lasted all summer[426]. Under the year 1393 one annalist states that many died in Essex in September and October, “on the pestilence setting in[427].” The next evidence comes from the Rolls of Parliament; in the first parliament of Henry IV. (1399) a petition is presented “that the king would graciously consider the great pestilence which is in the northern parts,” and send sufficient men to defend the Scots marches.

The first great outburst of plague in the fifteenth century falls somewhere between 1405 and 1407. “So great pestilence,” says the St Albans annalist, under the year 1407, “had not been seen for many years.” In London “thirty thousand men and women” are reported to have died in a short space; and “in country villages the sickness fell so heavily upon the wretched peasants that many homes that had before been gladdened by a numerous family were left almost empty[428].” But it is under the 7th of Henry IV. (1405) that Hall’s chronicle narrates how the king, to avoid the city on account of the plague, sailed from Queenborough to a port in Essex, and so to Plashey, “there to pass his time till the plague were ceased” (p. 36). Another chronicle says that the plague of 1407 was mostly in the West country. In that year, the 9th of Henry IV., there is a petition from Ilchester in Somerset for a remission of dues “because the town is so impoverished and desolate of people that the burgesses are unable to pay the said ferme,” and for the cancelling of all arrears due since the 43rd year of Edward III. (1369). In the 11th of Henry IV. (1410-11), the burgesses of Truro represent “that the said town is impoverished by pestilence and the death of men, and by invasions and loss by the enemy by sea, and by the surcharge of twelve lives, and by default of inhabitants in the said town”—a petition apparently similar in terms to one that had been submitted in the previous reign. In the 1st of Henry IV. (1399), petitions of the same kind had been presented from Lincoln and Yarmouth; the former was “in great part empty and uninhabited,” while the latter had “its houses vacant and void, owing to pestilence and other things.”

For the year 1413 there is a brief entry that “numbers of Englishmen were struck by plague and ceased to live[429].” A single chronicler mentions a pestilence in Norfolk in 1420[430]; but the Rolls of Parliament bear undoubted witness to a very severe prevalence of plague in the North about the same time: a petition from the Marches in 1421 speaks of “great numbers of persons dead by the great mortalities and pestilences which have raged for three years past and still reign; where a hundred men used to be there are not ten, and these of small account; where people of position kept twenty men at arms they now keep only themselves”; the enemy were making raids and food was scarce[431]. Another petition the same year (9 Henry V.) states that “both by pestilence within the realm and wars without there are not sufficient men of estate to hold the office of sheriff[432].” That was shortly after Agincourt and the conquest of France, when the fortunes of Henry V. were at their highest point. The horrors of the siege of Rouen (1419) were a favourite subject with poets of the time[433], but they were of a kind foreign to English experience in that age, and, indeed, in all periods of our history, save that of the Danish invasions. The Cromwellian Civil Wars, as we shall see, do indeed furnish many instances of plague, and some of typhus fever, in besieged or occupied towns; but, for the middle part of the fifteenth century, including the period of the wars of York and Lancaster, there is no good reason to suppose that fevers or other morbi miseriae, were rife among the common people, least of all among the peasantry.

The Public Health in the Fifteenth Century.

Our safest indications are got from the prices of commodities and the rates of wages, and these, according to the most competent authority, Thorold Rogers, were more favourable to the working class in the fifteenth century than at other periods: “As the agriculturist throve in the fifteenth century, so the mechanic and the artisan was also prosperous. This was the age in which the property of the guilds was generally acquired.” On famines in particular, I shall quote one other passage, which entirely confirms the view that I had independently stated in the first chapter when speaking of Ergotism:

One such period of extraordinary scarcity all over England fell in the years 1438-39. The chronicle of Croyland says that there were three wet harvests in succession, that famine had been almost constant for two years, and that the people were reduced to eating dried herbs and roots[435]. That would have been a famine of the old kind, like those of 1258 and 1315, wheat having touched 20s. But it should not lead us to suppose that the disastrous period of the end of Edward III.’s reign and of the reign of Richard II. was continued throughout the fifteenth century. It is true that the records of that century are scantier than for earlier periods; the monastic chronicles have all ceased, except those of St Albans and Croyland, and the citizens’ diaries, which took their place, have hardly begun. It is possible that a fuller record would have shown a greater prevalence of distress throughout the country. It is probably owing to the scantiness of the history that the views of the fifteenth century range from the extreme of optimism to the extreme of pessimism. Where little is known, much may be imagined. Thus, a recent writer on England in the Fifteenth Century[436], says that “all attempts to specify the years of scarcity would only mislead”; and again: “There is hardly any period of five years during that time [15th century] without these ghastly records.” Another recent writer[437] remarks upon the fifteenth century being called a time of rude plenty, and sets against that “the famines, the plagues, the skin-diseases, the miserable quality of the food, the insecurity of life and property, the hovels in which the people lived, and the tyranny and oppression of a time of unsettled government.” It is needless to controvert the merely subjective impression in an author’s mind. But, in order to clear our ideas, let us take these things one by one. What were firstly the famines? There is no great one but that of 1438-39, which was due to a succession of wet harvests, and was equally severe in Scotland and in France, having in them caused famine-sickness as well as plague. Of the plagues, which were certainly no worse than in the Elizabethan and Stuart times, I shall speak in detail almost at once. Of the skin-diseases, there is nowhere a word said: another writer[438] specifies leprosy as afflicting England “all over the country” in the fifteenth century, whereas it can be shown that the prevalence of that disease, such as it had ever been in England, had almost ceased, and its sentimental vogue passed, in the reign of Edward III. The miserable quality of the food and the wretched hovels have certainly no special relevancy to the period[439]; on the contrary, the picture that we get of the manor of Castle Combe in the fifteenth century is that of a prosperous community, although not a highly moral one. As to insecurity of life and property, and oppression of government, there seems to be some illusion because the time was that of the wars of York and Lancaster. But we have the significant observation of Philip de Comines, a contemporary French statesman who kept his eye on the state of other countries; writing of the effects of civil war, he says:—

The truth seems to be that the middle part of the fifteenth century was really the time “ere England’s woes began, when every rood of ground maintained its man,” and that the Golden Age came to an end as soon as the dynastic and aristocratic quarrel was ended, and the nobles left free to turn their attention to their lapsing feudal rights. It is then that we begin to hear of enclosures, of adding house to house and field to field, of huge sheep-farms with no labourers on the soil, and of deserted villages. Goldsmith meant it of his own time; but Auburn flourishing belonged to the fifteenth century, and Auburn deserted was a common English experience in the time of Henry VIII. It is just because the fifteenth century is bounded on either side by periods of known distress among the commons, and is itself without a history, that one thinks of it as happy; and that view of it is borne out by the economic history which has been laboriously constructed for it.

So much being premised of the country’s well-being at large, we may now return to the particular records of epidemics of plague.

Chronology of Plagues in the Fifteenth Century.

With the exception of an undoubted reference to influenza epidemic all over England in 1427 (a year of its prevalence in France also), which I shall postpone to a future chapter, the history down to the arrival of the sweating sickness in 1485, is concerned almost exclusively with notices of plague, and of plague mostly in the towns. It cannot be maintained that rural districts were exempt, or that some great epidemics of plague did not fall on town and country alike. Thus, the St Albans annalist, under the year 1431, has an entry of “pestilence at Codycote and divers places of this domain in this year.” Again, in 1439, the Rolls of Parliament contain a petition to the king “how that a sickness called the Pestilence universally through this your realm more commonly reigneth than hath been usual before this time, the which is an infirmity most infective, and the presence of such so infect must be eschewed, as by noble Fisisseanes and wise Philosofors before this time plainly it hath been determined, and as experience daily showeth”—therefore to omit the ceremony of kissing the king in doing knightly service, “and the homage to be as though they kissed you.” That may have been a plague both of town and country during famine, comparable to the epidemic of 1407, which, as “Walsingham” expressly says, was severely felt in the homes of the peasantry as well as in London. But plague henceforth is seldom universal; it becomes more and more a disease of the towns, and when it does occur in the country, it is for the most part at some few limited spots. A Paston letter of the years between 1461 and 1466 gives us a glimpse of the sort of the incidence of plague in country places, and of the avoidance of such infected spots, which we shall find often mentioned in the documents of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries[440]. There is, of course, no means of estimating the frequency of plague in these almost sporadic circumstances. The disease must have had its seats of election in the country, but we may safely conclude that these, after the Black Death and the recurrences thereof down, say, to 1407, were much fewer than in the towns. One significant piece of evidence comes from the great monastery of Canterbury. Among its records is an obituary, on twenty sheets, of all the monks from 1286 to 1517. Out of a hundred cases taken without selection from the record, there died, of pestilence, 33; of phthisis, 10; of chronic diseases, 29. “Pestilence” appears to mean specifically bubo-plague; for we find besides, among the sample hundred, two deaths from flux, one of these corpses having been buried immediately propter infexionem. The inference, under correction from further inquiry, would be that one-third of the deaths in the monastery of Canterbury during the first half of the reign of plague in England were from that disease. And that was in a monastery which, in the Black Death itself, is reported, in the same record, to have lost “only four” out of a membership of about eighty[441].

It remains to enumerate briefly the known instances of plague in London or other towns, from the last date given (1420) down to the beginning of the Tudor period (1485). Its prevalence “in England,” but more probably in London only, in 1426, comes out in a letter from the Senate of Venice cautioning the captain of the Flanders galleys and the vice-captain of the London galleys[442]. We hear also of that plague in London owing to the fact that certain Scotsmen of rank, hostages for the ransom of the king of Scots, died of the plague in London. An envoy who proceeded to Scotland on 12th March, 1427, was instructed to ask that the dead hostages be replaced by others of equal rank; and if the king of Scots objected on the ground that they had died because they had been kept in places where the late pestilence raged, notwithstanding their request to be removed, the envoy was to say that the hostages had been kept in London, where the dukes of Bedford and Gloucester and all other lords of the Council remained during the time; and that the hostages were “neither pinned nor barred up” in any house, but went at large in the city, and might have taken any measures they pleased for their own preservation. It appears, however, that the council removed from the city, and that the courts were adjourned, at a stage of the epidemic subsequent to the deaths of the Scots. The last plea of the envoy was that, supposing the pestilence had prevailed throughout England, the king was not therefore bound to send the hostages out of England; from which hypothetical construction, we may conclude that the epidemic was special to London—one of a long series requiring the king’s Court, the Parliament, and the Law Courts to be adjourned[443].

In 1433, the Parliament which met at Westminster on the 8th July, was prorogued on the 15th August, on account of the gravis pestilentia which began to arise in London and the suburbs[444]. A London chronicler enters, under the 12th of Henry VI. (1433) “a grete pestilence and a grete frost,” a conjunction that would be interesting if the hard winter had preceded[445]. The plague revived in London in the following autumn; for, on the 27th October, 1434, the Privy Council ordered all pleas then pending to be continued from the morrow of All Souls to the octaves of St Hilary on account of the epidemic[446]. After three years, in 1437, the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas paid a visit to St Albans Abbey and remained there some time, “on account of the epidemic plague which was then reigning in the city of London[447].” Two years after, 1439, comes the entry in the Rolls of Parliament, already quoted, with reference to omitting the ceremony of kissing the king, because “a sickness called the Pestilence universally through this your realm more commonly reigneth than hath been usual before this time, the which is an infirmity most infective[448].” Thus we have in the decade from 1430 to 1440 no fewer than four distinct outbreaks of plague, three of them confined to the city of London, and one of them, that of 1439, general throughout the realm. The last was “a sickness called the pestilence,” which should mean the bubo-plague. The year was one of great distress abroad, many thousands having died in Paris. It was a year of famine in Scotland, where the disease was undoubtedly dysentery in part; but the information from Scotland (given in the sequel) points to the true plague supervening on the other. There was famine in England at the time when it was in France and in Scotland, so that the type of sickness may have been, in England also, fever and dysentery first and plague afterwards.

In 1444, on the 5th of June, the Rolls contain the entry that grave pestilence began to arise. A severe pestilence is reported at Oxford in 1448[449]. On the 30th May, 1449, Parliament is adjourned to Winchester to avoid “the corrupt and infected airs” of Westminster. On the 6th November of the same year it adjourns to Ludgate, in the city of London, owing to the infection of the air in Westminster. The infected state of Westminster and other places around is again the subject of an entry on the 4th December, with this addition: “it has been sufficiently decreed as to avoiding and extinguishing the said corrupt and infectious air.” About three months later, on 30th March, 1450, Parliament adjourns to Leicester on account of the insalubrity of the air at Westminster. In 1452 it adjourns on 20th November to Reading for the same reason, but is soon after adjourned to the 11th February, owing to plague in Reading itself:—“de magna mortalitate in dicta villa de Redyng jam regnante.” These years must have been a really severe plague-period, for we find in 1454, a reference in the Paston Letters to the alarm caused by the plague in London. Wm. Paston writes to John Paston, 6 September: “Sergeant-at-law Billing came to London this week. He sent for me and asked me how I fared. I told him, here is pestilence, and said I fared the better he was in good hele, for it was noised that he was dead.... Here is great pestilence. I purpose to flee into the country[450].”

From 1454 (and the year following in Scotland) there is a clear interval of ten years without mention of plague in the not very complete records of the time. With the year 1464 there began a series of outbreaks of plague which appear to have lasted in one part of the country or another with few intermissions until 1478. This plague-period is said to have been foretold in a remarkable prophecy. In the year 1462 a boy at Cambridge, while walking in a lane between King’s College and the adjoining buildings of Clare and Trinity Halls, met an old man with a long beard, who addressed him thus: “Go now and tell to anyone that within these two years there will be such pestilence, and famine, and slaughter of men, as no one living has seen.” Having said this he disappeared. Doubts however, were at once thrown on the reality of these words; for the boy, on being questioned by Master Myleton, doctor of theology, and others, said that he neither saw the old man walking on the ground nor heard him speak[451].

The authentic intelligence of plague in England in 1464 is contained in a letter to the Seignory of Venice from Bruges, dated 5th October, 1464, to the effect that some Venetian merchants have arrived from London, which they had quitted on the 26th September. They say the plague is at work there at the rate of two hundred [deaths] per diem, “and thus writes [also] Carlo Ziglio.” In April next year, 1465, we hear of it still in London, through a casual reference in a letter written by one of the Paston family[452]; and as prevailing all over England, through a formal entry in the chronicle of Croyland, the last of the monastic records which continued to be kept. There was an infection of the air, we read, in the whole of England, so that many thousands of people of every age came to their death suddenly, like sheep slaughtered[453].

The very next year, 1466, Parliament is adjourned from Westminster on account of the infection in London, to meet at Reading. Next summer, 1st July, 1467, there is another adjournment to Reading (6 November), because of the heat and because the plague was beginning to reign, by which certain members of the House of Commons had been cut off. After an interval of four years we hear of plague, in a Paston letter, and by a Southwell record. On 2 August, 1471, the residentiary canons of Southwell Minster vote themselves leave of absence for a month “quia regnat morbus pestiferus in villa Southwell, et furit excessivé morbus pestiferus[454].” On 13 September, 1471, Sir John Paston writes from near Winchester: “I cannot hear by pilgrims that pass the country, nor none other man that rideth or goeth any country, that any borough town in England is free from that sickness. God cease it when it please him!” Apart from London the English town which has the most disastrous record for this period is Hull[455]. The plague was so severe there, in three epidemics close together, as almost to ruin the place. It broke out in 1472, and had swept off a great number of the inhabitants before the end of the year, including the mayor. In 1476 it broke out afresh, causing a great mortality. In 1478 it was more violent than ever, the number of its victims being given as 1580, including the mayor and all his family; the people fled the town, the church was shut up, and the streets deserted and grass-grown. The epidemic appears to have been, as usual, an autumnal one, ceasing at the approach of winter. Meanwhile, in 1474, there is mention of a serious prevalence of plague in the Royal household, as well as elsewhere in London. The weather of the previous autumn, 1473, had been remarkable. Labourers are said to have died in the harvest-field from the excessive heat, and “fervues, axes, and the bloody flyx” (fevers, agues, and dysentery) to have been universal in divers parts of England; but there was no dearth. The unusual character of that season, or of the season preceding, was indicated by the bursting forth of underground reservoirs of water[456].

The great plague of this period in London should most probably be placed under the years 1478-9. Merely to show the difficulties of the chronology it may be worth while citing the various accounts. The Greyfriars’ Chronicle says, under the year 17 Edward IV., that the term was “deferred from Ester to Michaelmas because of the grete pestylens[457].” The 17th of Edward IV. was 1477. But Fabyan, who was now a citizen of London (afterwards sheriff and alderman), enters it under the civic year 1478-79, or the year which begins for him with the new lord mayor taking office on 30 October. His words are: “This year was great mortality and death in London and many other parts of this realm, the which began in the latter end of Senii [September] in the preceding year and continued in this year till the beginning of November, in the which passed time died innumerable people in the said city and many places elsewhere[458].” Grafton says, under the year 1478, that the chief mortality fell in four months of great heat, during which the pestilence was so fierce and quick that fifteen years’ war had not consumed a third as many people[459]. To reconcile these dates we should have to take the year of the Greyfriars’ Chronicle as 1478, so that the adjournment of the term from Easter to Michaelmas, might suit the four months in Grafton. At the same time, Fabyan’s statement that the plague “continued in this year till November,” is correct for 1479. Sir John Paston writes home from London, 29 Oct. 1479, of his danger from the sickness; he died there on 15th November; and his brother, who came up from Norfolk to bury him, writes to his mother, who wished him “to haste out of the air that he was in,” that the sickness is “well ceased” in December.

The year 1478, the first of two plague-seasons in London, was also a year of plague at Hull, and at Newcastle and Southwell. The account for Newcastle, in its annals under 1478, is merely that great numbers died of the plague[460]. At Southwell, on 5 July, 1478, the canons residentiary again take leave of absence for the summer, “because it may be probably estimated that the dire pestilential affliction in the town of Southwell will continue, and because the venerable men, with their domestics, have a just fear of incurring the infection of the said pestiferous affliction[461].” Next year, 1479, an “incredible number” died of plague at Norwich[462], and at villages like Swainsthorp, where “they have died and been sick nigh in every house[463].”

Thus in two years, 1478-79, we hear of an epidemic of plague of the first rank in London, an epidemic most severe for the size of the place, at Hull, and epidemics at Southwell, Newcastle and Norwich. This is not unlike the plague-years that we often find in the centuries following. Whether it be that we are merely coming to a time of better records, or that the disease itself was getting worse in English towns, these later years of Edward IV. are comparable to plague-periods under the Tudors and the Stuarts.

The period from the Black Death of 1349 to the reign of Edward IV. witnesses a considerable change in the habits, so to speak, of plague in England. In the earlier part of that period, the epidemics of “pestilence”—although they were not all of plague or wholly of plague—are general throughout England, like the great mortality itself but on a smaller scale. As late as 1407, or perhaps 1439, we still hear of “the disease called the pestilence” being universal and in the homes of the peasantry. The extent of the sickness in 1465, or even the type of it, is not sufficiently known. From that time onwards town and country are contrasted in the matter of plague; it becomes usual to flee to the country so as to escape the pestilential air in town in the summer heats, and the unwholesomeness of the London air becomes on numerous occasions a real reason, or a pretext, for the adjournment of Parliament. All the while, the plague was the lineal descendant of the Black Death,—a virus so potent on its first entry into English soil as to overrun every parish of the land.

Plague and other pestilences in Scotland and Ireland, 1349-1475.

The materials for the history of plague in Scotland, including the Black Death and subsequent outbreaks down to the end of the medieval period, are much fewer than for England. From the English chroniclers (Knighton and Le Baker) we learn that the Black Death in the autumn of 1349 extended from the northern counties to the Scots army in the Forest of Selkirk. According to Fordoun, plague would have been general in Scotland in 1350; but as he includes in his reference “several years before and after” and “divers parts of the world,” his statement that nearly a third part of the human race paid the debt of nature is perhaps a mere echo of the general estimate and without reference specially to Scotland[464]. His next general reference to pestilence is under the year 1362, when the same kind of disease and the same extent of mortality as in 1350 occurred throughout all Scotland[465]. But as he says elsewhere that the visit of David, king of Scots, to Aberdeenshire in 1361, when he took Kildrummy Castle from the earl of Mar, was determined in the first instance by the prevalence of plague in the southern part of his kingdom[466], it may be inferred that the epidemic had begun late in that year in the south, coincident with the pestis secunda of England, and had been interrupted by the coming on of winter, as in the first epidemic of 1349 and 1350. The next mortality recorded by Fordoun he names the fourth (quarta mortalitas) and assigns to 1401[467]. The question arises as to the third; and it appears that there were indeed two plague-years in Scotland between 1362 and 1401—namely, 1380 and 1392, both of them corresponding nearly to great plagues in the north of England. In the former year sir John Lyon, lord of Glamis, was unable to hold his court as auditor of the exchequer in certain places owing to the plague[468]. In 1392, also, the custumars of Haddington, Peebles, and Dumbarton did not attend the “chamberlain ayres” on account of the pestilence[469]. In 1402 (not in 1401, as Fordoun has it), the custumars of Stirling were absent from the audit by reason of the plague[470]; and in the same financial year (10 July, 1402, to 18 July, 1403), only one bailie from Dundee attended the audit at Perth, the others being dead in the pestilence[471].

For a whole generation there is no documentary evidence of plague in Scotland. But Fordoun has two entries of a disease which he calls pestilentia volatilis—it can hardly have been plague and may have been influenza—the one in 1430, having begun at Edinburgh in February, and the other in 1432 at Haddington[472].

Under the year 1439, an old chronicle, Ane Addicioun of Scottis Cornicklis and Deidis records one of those seasons of famine and dysentery or lientery, with some more sudden sickness, which have been described for England in a former chapter. “The samen time there was in Scotland a great dearth, for the boll of wheat was at 40s., and the boll of ait meal 30s.; and verily the dearth was sae great that there died a passing [number of] people for hunger. And als the land-ill, the wame-ill, was so violent, that there died mae that year than ever there died, owther in pestilence, or yet in ony other sickness in Scotland. And that samen year the pestilence came in Scotland, and began at Dumfries, and it was callit the Pestilence but Mercy, for there took it nane that ever recoverit, but they died within twenty-four hours[473].” Here the “land-ill” or “wame-ill” (dysentery or lientery) is contrasted within “the pestilence,” which latter is said to have supervened the same year, beginning at Dumfries and proving peculiarly deadly. This was a year of plague, said to be “universal,” in England (where famine also was severe), and of an enormous mortality in France.

The continuator of Fordoun records under the year 1455 (James II.) a great pestilential mortality of men through the whole kingdom, an epidemic which would be again a year behind the corresponding plague in England[474]. We hear of it next definitely in the year 1475, which falls within the series of plague-years at Hull, and elsewhere in the southern part of the island. On account of an outbreak of pestilence the king of Scots adjourned the meeting of the estates from September 1475 to the Epiphany following[475], when the Parliament actually met. The same year there was a plague-hospital on Inchkeith, in the Firth of Forth, and not for the first time; ten marts from the Orkneys were landed there for the quarantined patients[476].

The references to plague in Scotland begin again about the year 1498; but these, according to the division of our subject, will come into another chapter.

The references to plagues in Ireland after the invasion of 1349 are extremely meagre; but they make it probable that outbursts of bubo-plague recurred at intervals, as well as occasional epidemics of flux and other diseases brought on by scarcity or bad corn. The continuators of Clyn’s Kilkenny annals enumerate various pestes—secunda, tertia, quarta and quinta—just as the English annalists do. The secunda falls in 1362, its season in Scotland also[477]. The tertia is given under 1373; but also under 1370[478]. The quarta is in 1382 (or 1385), and the quinta in 1391. But there is little or no independent evidence that this chronology, originally made for England, is really good for Ireland also. The only other entry, until the Tudor period, is “fames magna in Hibernia” in 1410[479].