Chapter X

PLAGUE, FEVER AND INFLUENZA FROM THE ACCESSION OF THE STUART DYNASTY TO THE RESTORATION.

The last period of plague in England, from 1603 to its extinction in 1666, was as fatal as any that the capital, and the provincial towns, had known since the 14th century. The mortalities in London in 1603, 1625, and 1665 are the greatest in the whole history of the City’s epidemics, not, perhaps, relatively to the population, but in absolute numbers. The capital was growing rapidly, having now become the greatest trading community in Europe. The dangers which were foreseen in the proclamation of 1580, of an extension of the City’s borders beyond civic control, had been realized. The old walled city, like Vienna down to a quite recent date, remained both the residential quarter and the centre of trade and commerce: the original suburbs, which were in the Liberties or Freedom of the City, were the slums—the fringe of poverty covered by the poorest class of tenements, unpaved and without regular streets, but penetrated by alleys twisting and turning in an endless maze. The City was not, indeed, without a good deal of building of the same class, especially in the parish of St Stephen, Coleman Street, the most populous parish within the walls. But what was an occasional thing in the City where gardens and other open spaces had been built upon, was the rule in the parishes beyond the walls. It was in the Liberties and outparishes that the plague of 1603 began; its origin in 1625 is less certain; but there can be no question as to the gradual progress of the Great Plague of 1665 from the west end of the town down Holborn and the Strand to the City, to the great parishes on the north-east and east, and across the water to Southwark. From one point of view we may represent the later plagues as incidents in the transition from the medieval to the modern state of the capital—a transition which proceeded slowly and is still unfinished so far as concerns the forms of municipal government. The history of the public health of London is, for nearly two centuries, the history of irregular and uncontrolled expansion, of the failure of old municipal institutions to overtake new duties. Perhaps if Wren’s grand conception of a New London after the fire of 1666 had been taken up and given effect to by Charles II., the Liberties and suburbs might have been joined more organically to the centre and have benefited by the municipal traditions of the latter. The history of the public health in London during the latter part of the 17th century and the whole of the 18th might in that case have been a less melancholy record. That history falls within our next volume; but as it began with the expansion of London under Elizabeth and the Stuarts, this is the place to review the growth of the City from the time when it broke through its medieval limits.

The Growth of London in the Tudor and Stuart Periods[919].

The accession of James I. to the English crown in 1603 corresponds in time with the pretensions of London to be the first city in Europe. “London,” says Dekker, in The Wonderfull Yeare, “was never in the highway to preferment till now. For she saw herself in better state than Jerusalem, she went more gallant than ever did Antwerp, was more courted by amorous and lustie suitors than Venice (the minion of Italy); more lofty towers stood about her temples than ever did about the beautiful forehead of Rome; Tyre and Sydon to her were like two thatcht houses to Theobals, the grand Cairo but a hogsty.” That is, of course, in Dekker’s manner; but it can be shown by figures that London took a great start in the end of Elizabeth’s reign and grew still faster under James.

From Richard I. to Henry VII., London was the medieval walled city, as Drayton says, “built on a rising bank within a vale to stand,” with a population between 40,000 and 50,000. Without the walls lay a few city parishes or parts of parishes, including the three dedicated to St Botolph outside Aldgate, Bishopsgate and Aldersgate, respectively, and St Giles’s without Cripplegate, all of these being at the gates or close to the walls. On the western side, however, lay an extensive but sparsely populated suburb, which was erected in 1393 into the Ward of Farringdon Without; it extended westward from the city wall as far as Temple Bar, Holborn Bars and West Smithfield, and was divided into the four great parishes of St Sepulchre’s without Newgate; St Andrew’s, on the other side of Holborn valley, St Dunstan’s in the West (about Chancery Lane and Fetter Lane), and St Bride’s, Fleet Street.

The earliest known bills of mortality, in 1532 and 1535, from which a population of some 62,400 might be deduced, show that the St Botolph parishes, St Giles’s without Cripplegate and the four great parishes in the western Liberties (or, more correctly, in the ward of Farringdon Without) had one-third of the whole deaths, and presumably about one-third of the whole population. In the few memoranda left of the plague-bills of 1563, we find evidence that the population had increased to some 93,276, of which about a sixth or seventh part, or some 12,000 to 15,000 was in the “out-parishes,” or in the parishes not only beyond the walls, but beyond the Bars of the Freedom. The most valuable series of statistics for Elizabethan London are those which give the christenings and burials for five years from 1578 to 1582; from those of the year 1580, which was almost free from the disturbing element of plague, a population of some 123,034 may be deduced by taking the birth-rate at 29 per 1000 living and the death-rate at 23 per 1000, or in each case at a favourable rate corresponding to the large excess of births over deaths.

There is not enough left of the introduction to these old manuscript abstracts of weekly births and deaths to show how many parishes they relate to, or what is the proportion for each division of the capital. But, as the earlier series of bills of mortality from 1563 to 1566 included the City, the Liberties and the out-parishes, it is probable that the series from 1578 to 1582 had done the same. The crowding of the Liberties with a poor class of tenements, and the extension of the out-parishes, are otherwise known from the preamble to the proclamation of 1580, which prohibited all building on new sites within three miles of the City wall. The next figures are for the years 1593, 1594, and 1595, which show a population increased to about 152,000.

From the figures of the plague-year, 1593, it appears that the mortality within the walls, both from plague and from ordinary causes, had now become the smaller half, or somewhat less than that “without the walls and in the Liberties,”—a phrase which is used loosely, even in some official bills, for both Liberties and suburbs. In 1604 we have the exact proportions of deaths in the City, in the Liberties and in the out-parishes respectively:

96 parishes within walls 16 parishes in Liberties 8 parishes out of the Freedom Total

All deaths 1798 2465 956 5219

Plague deaths 280 368 248 896

Christenings — — — 5458

The sixteen parishes of the Liberties are now decidedly ahead of the ninety-six old City parishes, while the eight out-parishes have some 18 per cent. of the whole mortality. The population is best reckoned from the 6504 baptisms of the year after, 1605, by which time the disturbance of the enormous mortality in 1603 had ceased to be felt; at a birth-rate of 29 per 1000, the population would be some 224,275. The proportions in 1605, from the bills of mortality for the year, are 33·8 per cent. in the City, 50 per cent. in the Liberties, and 16·2 per cent. in the out-parishes; so that the City would have contained in that year about 76,000, the Liberties about 114,000, and the out-parishes about 37,000. To those numbers we should have to add some 20,000 or 30,000 for Westminster, Stepney, Lambeth, Newington, etc.

According to Graunt’s contemporary estimate for 1662, the population had grown to 460,000, or to rather more than double that of 1605; and whereas the proportion in 1605 was two-sixths in the City, three-sixths in the Liberties and one-sixth in the out-parishes, he makes it in 1662 to have been one-fifth in the City, three-fifths in the Liberties (including Southwark) and the out-parishes nearest to the Bars, and one-fifth in the out-parishes of Stepney, Redriff, Newington, Lambeth, Islington and Hackney, with the city of Westminster. Thus, whereas in 1535 the City had two-thirds of the whole estimated population, in 1662 it had one-fifth; but with its one-fifth in 1662 it was twice as crowded as with its two-thirds in 1535, the comparatively open appearance given to it by gardens in various localities, as on Tower Hill, having entirely gone.

As early as the plague of 1563, the Liberties were observed to be first infected, and to retain the infection longest; that is alleged of St Sepulchre’s parish by Dr John Jones, from personal knowledge. The history of the plague of 1593 is imperfectly known; but it is clear from Stow’s summation of the deaths during the year, that more died of plague in the Liberties and suburbs than in the City. Of the next plague, that of 1603, we know that it did begin in the Liberties and was prevalent in those skirts of the City for some time before it entered the gates. “Death,” says The Wonderfull Yeare, “had pitcht his tents in the sinfully polluted suburbs ... the skirts of London were pitifully pared off by little and little; which they within the gates perceiving,” etc. Then the plague, represented as an invading force, “entered within the walls and marched through Cheapside,” the wealthier inhabitants having escaped meanwhile.

The London Plague of 1603.

The most useful document for the London plague of 1603 is a printed Bill of Mortality which is in the Guildhall Library. The bill, which is in the form of a broadside, is for the week 13-20 October, and purports to be a true copy, according to the report made to the king by the Company of Parish Clerks, and printed by John Winder, printer to the honourable City of London[920]. It is necessary to be thus particular, because the clerk of the Company of Parish Clerks in the end of 1665 (between the Plague and the Fire) published an account of all the statistics of former plagues preserved in his office, and emphatically denied that the Parish Clerks gave in an accompt for the year 1603; they did not resume their series after 1595, he says, until 29th December, 1603. But the clerk was mistaken, as even the most prim of officials will sometimes be. The printed bill which has come down to us gives the usual weekly return of deaths from all causes in one column and those from plague in another, for each of the 96 parishes within their walls, each of the 16 parishes in the Liberties and each of 8 out-parishes. On the right hand margin it gives also a summary statement of the deaths in “the first great plague in our memory” that of 1563, which is the same as in Stow’s Annales, and of the deaths in the next great plague, that of 1593, which differs considerably from Stow’s. It then goes on to give the sum of the figures of the year 1603 from 17th December, 1602, and carries the deaths per week from 21st July down to date, the 20th of October, adding some information for the parishes which kept separate bills, namely, Westminster, the Savoy, Stepney, Newington Butts, Islington, Lambeth and Hackney. This extant weekly bill was probably one of a series; for Graunt, in his book of 1662, cites various figures of weekly baptisms throughout the year 1603 which would appear to have been taken from the bills for the respective weeks. But the returns had not been made regularly from all the parishes within the Bills from the beginning of the year 1603. The reason why the weekly figures are not recapitulated farther back than the week ending July 21, is that the outparishes had not sent in their returns until that week. From another source, we know the figures for the City and Liberties from March 10 to July 14, and from the same source we obtain the totals for all parishes within the Bills from October 19 to the end of the year. By putting these figures into one table, we may represent the mortality of 1603, not indeed completely, as follows:

Weekly Mortalities in London during the plague of 1603.

Week ending City and Liberties. Out parishes. Totals.

All causes. Plague. All causes. Plague. All causes. Plague.

March 17 108 3

24 60 2

31 78 6

April 7 66 4

14 79 4

21 98 8

28 109 10

May 5 90 11

12 112 18

19 122 22

26 112 30

June 2 114 30

9 134 43

15 144 59

23 182 72

30 267 158

July 7 445 263

14 612 424

21 867 646 319 271 1186 917

28 1312 1025 398 354 1710 1379

Aug. 4 1700 1439 537 464 2237 1901

11 1655 1372 410 361 2065 1733

18 2486 2199 568 514 3054 2713

25 2343 2091 510 448 2853 2539

Sept. 1 2798 2495 587 542 3385 3037

8 2583 2283 495 441 3078 2724

15 2676 2411 433 407 3109 2818

22 2080 1851 376 344 2456 2195

29 1666 1478 295 254 1961 1732

Oct. 6 1528 1367 306 274 1834 1641

13 1109 962 203 184 1312 1146

20 647 546 119 96 766 642

27 625 508

Nov. 3 737 594

10 545 442

17 384 257

24 198 105

Dec. 1 223 102

8 163 55

15 200 96

22 168 74

These figures may be accepted as real, so far as they go; and they give a total (37,192 from all causes, whereof of the plague, 30,519) which is nearly the same as that usually taken, e.g. by Graunt, for the mortality of the whole year in all London (37,294 from all causes, whereof of the plague, 30,561). But it is clear that important additions have to be made. In the first place, no deaths are included for the weeks previous to March 10. In the second place, no deaths are included from the out-parishes (within the Bills), previous to July 14. In the third place, no deaths at all are included from Westminster, Stepney, Newington, Lambeth, etc. These omissions have to be kept in mind when the plague of 1603 is compared with those of 1625 and 1665, for which the figures are fully ascertained; and we possess various data from which to supply them approximately. One great addition, with nothing conjectural in it, is for the seven parishes outside the general bill of mortality, Stepney being the largest: they kept their own bills, and the figures from them, for the principal part of the year, are given on the margin of the broadside, as quoted below[921]. Another unconjectural addition is the mortality from all causes in the City and Liberties from December 17, 1602, to March 10, 1603, which was 1375, having been mostly non-plague deaths. All these deaths, actually known, bring the total for the year up to 42,945 whereof of the plague about 33,347. The farther additions, which can only be guessed, are the mortality from all causes in the eight out-parishes (within the Bills) previous to July 14, and the mortality in the seven other suburban localities (Westminster, Stepney, etc.) before and after the dates stated in the note for each. Only the former of these additions would have been a considerable figure, the plague being already at 271 deaths a week when the reckoning begins. Thus the totals, 42,945 burials from all causes, and from plague alone, 33,347, are well within the reality.

Some details are extant of the incidence of the disease in particular parishes at certain dates. Thus, in the great parish of Stepney, which extended from Shoreditch to Blackwall, 650 plague-deaths, and 24 from other causes, took place in the single month of September; so that, if the plague began in Stepney about the 25th of March, it had not come to a head until autumn. In St Giles’s Cripplegate, the burials entered in the parish register for the whole year are 2879, the highest mortality having been in the beginning of September, when the burials on three successive days were 36, 26 and 26[922]. In the week 13 to 20 October, for which the printed bill is extant, the proportions of the City, Liberties and 8 out-parishes respectively were, for the week, 351, 296, and 119. Of the parishes without the walls, the most infected were, in their order at that date, St Sepulchre’s, St Saviour’s, Southwark, St Andrew’s, Holborn, St Giles’s, Cripplegate, St Clement’s Danes, St Giles’s in the Fields, St Olave’s, Southwark, St Martin’s in the Fields, St Mary’s, Whitechapel and St Leonard’s, Shoreditch. For St Olave’s, Southwark, we have some particulars of the plague from the minister of the parish.

In a dialogue conveying various instructions on the plague[923], to his parishioners of St Olave’s, James Bamford states that 2640 had died in that parish from May 7 to the date of writing (October 13), and that the burials had fallen from 305 in a week to 51, and from 57 in a day to 4. St Olave’s was a typical parish of the new London. It extended eastwards along the Surrey bank of the river from London Bridge, and had been almost all built within the half-century since the purchase of the Borough of Southwark by the City from the Crown in 1550. In Stow’s Survey of 1598 the parish is thus described: “Then from the bridge along by the Thames eastward is St Olave’s Street, having continual building on both the sides, with lanes and alleys, up to Battle Bridge, to Horsedown and towards Rotherhithe some good half mile in length from London Bridge”—the Bermondsey High Street running south from the Horsleydown end of it. St Olave’s Church, he continues, stood on the bank of the river, “a fair and meet large church, but a far larger parish, especially of aliens or strangers, and poor people.” A mansion of former times, St Leger House, was now “divided into sundry tenements.” Over against the church, the great house that was once the residence of the prior of Lewes, was now the Walnut Tree inn, a common hostelry.

London was now so extensive in area that it becomes of interest to know in what part of it the plague broke out, and in what course the infection proceeded. These things are known for the plague of 1665; but for that of 1603 they cannot be ascertained precisely. Dekker is emphatic that it began in the suburbs. The earliest reference to it in the State papers is under the date of April 18, when the Lord Mayor wrote to the Lord Treasurer to inform him of the steps taken to prevent the spread of the plague in the counties of Middlesex and Surrey. “The parishes in Middlesex and Surrey” was an expression which afterwards came to mean a group of twelve out-parishes beyond the Bars of the Freedom, including St Giles’s in the Fields, Lambeth, Newington and Bermondsey, Stepney, Whitechapel, Shoreditch and Clerkenwell, Islington, Hackney and two others. The phrase used by the mayor may not have had so definite a meaning in 1603, but he can hardly have intended it to apply to the City and Liberties of London, although those were the only divisions of the capital directly under his own jurisdiction. The parish which is associated with the earliest date, in the summary of the epidemic in the broadside of 1603, is Stepney, where the record of deaths from plague and other causes begins from 25th March. It would perhaps be safe to conclude that the plague of 1603 began at the extreme east in Stepney, as that of 1665 certainly did at the extreme west in St Giles’s in the Fields.

An examination of the Table shows that the eight out-parishes had reached a higher plague mortality relative to their population on July 21, than the parishes within the bars of the Freedom: but the maximum of deaths falls in both divisions about the same week. We may take it that the plague broke out in one of the suburbs; and as Dekker speaks of the flight having been westwards, the evidence points on the whole to an eastern suburb, perhaps Whitechapel or Stepney. March is clearly indicated by various things as a time when plague-deaths began to attract notice; and that date of commencement is corroborated by the following passage from the essay of Graunt, based, it would seem, upon a series of weekly bills:—

“We observe as followeth, viz. First, that (when from December 1602 to March following there was little or no plague) then the christenings at a medium were between 110 and 130 per week, few weeks being above the one or below the other; but when the plague increased from thence to July, that then the christenings decreased to under 90.... (3) Moreover we observe that from the 21st July to the 12th October, the plague increasing reduced the christenings to 70 at a medium. Now the cause of this must be flying, and death of teeming women” &c.—the total christenings of the year 1603 having been only 4789, as against some 6000 in the year before the plague, and 5458 in the year after it.

This prevalence of plague in the suburbs and liberties of the City in the spring of 1603 coincides with great political events. Queen Elizabeth died at Richmond on the 24th of March, and was buried at Westminster on the 28th of April; according to Dekker, “never did the English nation behold so much black worn as there was at her funeral.” The approach of king James from Scotland appears to have caused an outburst of gaiety, his accession to the crown, according to the same writer, having led to a marked revival of trade: “Trades that lay dead and rotten started out of their trance.... There was mirth in everyone’s face, the streets were filled with gallants, tabacconists filled up whole taverns, vintners hung out spick and span new ivy-bushes (because they wanted good wine), and their old rain-beaten lattices marched under other colours, having lost both company and colour before.” James made a slow progress from Scotland, paying visits on the way. He arrived at Theobalds, near Cheshunt, on the 3rd of May, and was at Greenwich before the end of the month. On May 29, a proclamation was issued commanding gentlemen to depart the court and city on account of the plague. On June 23, the remainder of Trinity law term was adjourned. On July 10, a letter (one of the series between J. Chamberlain and Dudley Carleton) says: “Paul’s grows very thin [the church aisles where people were wont to meet to exchange news], for every man shrinks away. Our pageants are pretty forward, but most of them are such small-timbered gentlemen that they cannot last long, and I doubt, if the plague cease not sooner, they will riot and sink where they stand.” The Coronation was shorn of its full splendour. On July 18, it was announced that, as the king could not pass through the City—the traditional route being from the Tower to Westminster—all the customary services by the way are to be performed between Westminster Bridge and the Abbey. The ceremony, thus shortened, took place on July 25. On August 8, it was ordered that all fairs within fifty miles of London should be suspended, the more important being Bartholomew fair at Smithfield, and Stourbridge fair near Cambridge. The new Spanish ambassador was unable to approach the king, who moved from place to place,—Hampton Court, Woodstock and Southampton.

These are the traces left by this great epidemic in the state papers of the time. As in the case of the sweating sickness of 1485, which was in London while the preparations were going on for Henry VII.’s coronation, we should hardly have known from public documents that the City was in a state of panic. But in 1603 we are come to a period when other sources of information are available. It remains to put together what descriptions have come down to us of the City of the Plague.

The most graphic touches are those left by Thomas Dekker, the dramatist, of whom it has been said that “he knew London as well as Dickens[924].” To describe first the condition of the “sinfully polluted suburbs,” he takes a walk through the still and melancholy streets in the dead hours of the night. He hears from every house the loud groans of raving sick men, the struggling pangs of souls departing, grief striking an alarum, servants crying out for masters, wives for husbands, parents for children, children for their mothers. Here, he meets some frantically running to knock up sextons; there, others fearfully sweating with coffins, to steal forth dead bodies lest the fatal handwriting of death should seal up their houses. This would have been an evasion of the order, dating from 1547, that no bodies were to be buried between six in the evening and six in the morning—an order which was exactly reversed in the plague of 1665.

When morning comes, a hundred hungry graves stand gaping, and everyone of them, as at a breakfast, hath swallowed down ten or eleven lifeless carcases; before dinner, in the same gulf are twice so many more devoured, and before the sun takes his rest these numbers are doubled,—threescore bodies lying slovenly tumbled together in a muck-pit[925]! One gruesome story he tells of a poor wretch in the Southwark parish of St Mary Overy, who was thrown for dead upon a heap of bodies in the morning, and in the afternoon was found gasping and gaping for life. Others were thrust out of doors by cruel masters, to die in the fields and ditches, or in the common cages or under stalls. A boy sick of the plague was put on the water in a wherry to come ashore wherever he could, but landing was denied him by an army of brown-bill men that kept the shore, so that he had to be taken whence he came to die in a cellar. The sextons made their fortunes, especially those of St Giles’s, Cripplegate, of St Sepulchre’s, outside Newgate, of St Olave’s in Southwark, of St Clement’s at Temple Bar, and of Stepney. Herb-wives and gardeners also prospered; the price of flowers, herbs, and garlands rose wonderfully, insomuch that rosemary, which had wont to be sold for twelve pence an armful, went now for six shillings a handful.

While plague was thus raging in the poor skirts of the City, “paring them off by little and little,” the well-to-do within the walls took alarm and fled, “some riding, some on foot, some without boots, some in slippers, by water, by land, swarm they westwards. Hackneys, watermen and waggons were not so terribly employed many a year; so that within a short time there was not a good horse in Smithfield, nor a coach to be set eyes on.” But they might just as well have remained as trust themselves to the “unmerciful hands of the country hard-hearted hobbinolls.” The sight of a Londoner’s flat-cap was dreadful to a lob: a treble ruff threw a whole village into a sweat. A crow that had been seen on a sunshiny day standing on the top of Powles would have been better than a beacon on fire, to have raised all the towns within ten miles of London for the keeping her out. One Londoner set out for Bristol, thinking not to see his home again this side Christmas. But forty miles from town the plague came upon him, and he sought entrance to an inn. When his case was known, the doors of the inn “had their wooden ribs crushed to pieces by being beaten together; the casements were shut more close than an usurer’s greasy velvet pouch; the drawing windows were hanged, drawn, and quartered; not a crevice but was stopt, not a mouse-hole left open.” The host and hostess tumbled over each other in their flight, the maids ran out into the orchard, the tapster into the cellar. The unhappy Londoner was helped by a fellow-citizen who appeared on the scene, and was carried to die on a truss of straw in the corner of a field; but the parson and the clerk refused him burial, and he was laid in a hole where he had died. According to Stow, Bamford, and Davies of Hereford, such experiences of fugitive Londoners were repeated everywhere in the country, and Dekker gives several other tales of the same sort “to shorten long winter nights.”

Meanwhile, Dekker goes on, the plague had entered the gates of the City and marched through Cheapside; men, women, and children dropped down before him, houses were rifled, streets ransacked, rich men’s coffers broken open and shared amongst prodigal heirs and unworthy servants. Every house looked like St Bartholomew’s Hospital and every street like Bucklersbury: (“the whole street called Bucklersbury,” says Stow, “on both sides throughout is possessed of grocers, and apothecaries towards the west end thereof”), for poor Mithridaticum and Dragon-water were bought in every corner, and yet were both drunk every hour at other men’s cost. “I could make your cheeks look pale and your hearts shake with telling how some have had eighteen sores at one time running upon them, others ten or twelve, many four and five; and how those that have been four times wounded by this year’s infection have died of the last wound, while others, hurt as often, are now going about whole.” Funerals followed so close that three thousand mourners went as if trooping together, with rue and wormwood stuffed into their ears and nostrils, looking like so many boars’ heads stuck with branches of rosemary. A dying man was visited by a friendly neighbour, who promised to order the coffin; but he died himself an hour before his infected friend. A churchwarden in Thames Street, on being asked for space in the churchyard, answered mockingly that he wanted it for himself, and he did occupy it in three days.

One more extract from Dekker will bring us back to the strictly medical history:

“Never let any man ask me what became of our Phisitions in this massacre. They hid their synodical heads as well as the proudest, and I cannot blame them, for their phlebotomies, losinges and electuaries, with their diacatholicons, diacodions, amulets and antidotes, had not so much strength to hold life and soul together as a pot of Pinder’s ale and a nutmeg. Their drugs turned to durt, their simples were simple things. Galen could do no more good than Sir Giles Goosecap. Hippocrate, Avicen, Paracelsus, Rasis, Fernelius, with all their succeeding rabble of doctors and water-casters, were at their wits’ end; for not one of them durst peep abroad.”

Only a band of desperadoes, he goes on, some few empirical madcaps—for they could never be worth velvet caps—clapped their bills upon every door. But besides the empirical desperadoes, who dared the infection for the sake of the golden harvest, some few physicians and surgeons remained at their post, or at least put out essays with prescriptions and rules of regimen. Three such books on the plague were published in London in 1603, of which the most notable was one by Dr Thomas Lodge[926], a poet like Dekker himself, but of the academical school to which Dekker did not belong. The passage quoted about the impotence of the faculty is perhaps aimed at these books, which all abound with the sayings and maxims of Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, and the like, Lodge also quoting the more obscure name of Fernelius, which Dekker has not failed to seize upon.

Lodge confirms the statement about the empirical desperadoes clapping their bills upon every post. One of them, “who underwrit not his bills,” posted them close to Lodge’s house in Warwick Lane, so that the physician was taken by the populace to be himself the advertiser. He was besieged with applicants for his cordial waters, and wrote his book to make his own position clear, being “aggrieved because of that loathsome imposition which was laid upon me to make myself vendible (which is unworthy a liberal and gentle mind, much more ill-beseeming a physician and philosopher), who ought not to prostitute so sacred a profession so abjectly.” Farther confirming Dekker about the greed of the quacks as well as about the strictly business-like attitude of the regular profession, he speaks of “my poor countrymen left without guide or counsel how to succour themselves in extremity; for where the infection most rageth, there poverty reigneth among the commons, which, having no supplies to satisfy the greedy desires of those that should attend them, are for the most part left desolate to die without relief.” The reader must wonder, he says, “why, amongst so many excellent and learned physicians of this city, I alone have undertaken to answer the expectation of the multitude, and to bear the heavy burthen of contentious critiques and depravers.” The explanation was that the regular faculty had for the most part gone out of town, along with magistrates, ministers and rich men. Bamford, the minister of St Olave’s, Southwark, who remained at his post, has no excuse to offer for magistrates or for his clerical brethren, but he is extremely fair to the doctors: “As for physicians, I only propound this question: Whether they be bound in conscience to be resident, in regard of their profession and ability to do good, or they may use their liberty for themselves and (as they think) for their lives, in regard they are no public persons and live (not by a common stipend but) by what they can get.”

Dr Lodge, who dated his book from Warwick Lane on August 19, or when the epidemic would have been at its height, had already won laurels in the field of poetry and romance. He was an Oxonian (Trinity College, 1573) and one of a set with Marlowe and Greene. “At length his mind growing serious,” says Anthony Wood, “he studied physic,” travelling abroad for the purpose and graduating M.D. at Avignon. He had great success in practice, especially among Catholics, to whom he was suspected of belonging. He died of the plague, during the next great epidemic of 1625, at Low Leyton in Essex. His book on the plague would be entitled to a place in medical literature if only that its style is above the average of medical compositions. I cannot forbear quoting the following collect for its structure and euphony:

“But before I prosecute this my intended purpose, let us invocate and call upon that divine bounty, from whose fountain head of mercy every good and gracious benefit is derived, that it will please him to assist this my labor and charitable intent, and so to order the scope of my indevour, that it may redound to his eternal glory, our neighbours’ comfort, and the special benefit of our whole country; which, being now under the fatherly correction of Almighty God, and punished for our misdeeds by his heavy hand, may through the admirable effects and fruits of the sacred art of physic, receive prevention of their danger, and comfort in this desperate time of visitation. To him therefore, King of kings, invisible and only wise, be all honor, majesty and dominion, now and for ever. Amen.”

It is only in dealing with the more public aspects of the plague that Lodge shows any individuality. So far as concerns causes, prognostications, symptoms, remedies, preventives, and precautions, there is little in his essay which is not to be found in the older plague-books, such as the 14th century one of the bishop of Aarhus, his anatomical directions for blood-letting being word for word the same as the bishop’s. Some of his points are the same as in Skene’s Edinburgh essay of 1568, such as the indication of plague about to begin which is got from rats, moles and other underground creatures forsaking their holes. To keep off the infection he advises the wearing of small cakes of arsenic in the armpits, where the buboes usually came. That Paracelsist practice is known to have been tried at Zurich in 1564; it was one of the matters of dispute between the Galenists and the chemical physicians. During the plague of 1603, Dr Peter Turner published a curious tract in defence of it[927].

From a Venetian gentleman Lodge obtained also the formula of a preservative from infection, which contained, among other things, tormentilla root, white dittany, bole Armeniac and oriental pearl: “The gentleman that gave me this assured me that he had given it to many in the time of the great plague in Venice, who, though continually conversant in the houses of those that were infected, received no infection or prejudice by them.”

In his chapter on “The Order and Police that ought to be held in a City during the Plague-time,” he advises the removal of the shambles from within the walls to some remote and convenient place near the river of Thames, to the end that the blood and garbage of beasts that are killed may be washed away with the tide. Lodge lived just on the other side of Newgate Street from the shambles, and could speak feelingly about them, as many more had done since Edward III.’s time. The nobles of Aries, he says, had acted so on the advice of Valenolaes, having built their slaughter-houses to the westward of the city upon the river of Rhone. The chief interest of the book is in the sections on preventing the spread of infection. He quotes an instance from Alexander Benedetti of Venice, of a feather-bed, slept on by one in the plague, having been laid aside for seven years, “and the first that slept upon the same at the end of the same term was suddenly surprised with the plague.” His directions for the cleansing of houses, bedding, clothes, &c. are minute and thorough (Chapter XVII.)[928]. Modern readers will find his views on isolation and compulsory removal to hospital worth noting. The Pest House, which had been lately built in the fields towards Finsbury, was then the only special hospital to which patients in the plague could be removed, and its accommodation was not great; the burials at it in the nine weeks from July 21 to September 22, 1603, were respectively 18, 18, 12, 21, 12, 6, 5, 10 and 10. The Bridewell near Fleet Street appears also to have admitted a small number of plague-cases, the burials from it in the five weeks from August 18 to September 22, having been respectively 8, 5, 17, 7 and 19. There was also a pest-house in Tothill fields, for the Westminster end of the town. Servants appear to have been mostly sent to these refuges. Lodge saw that the principle of compulsory removal of the sick had no chance without more hospital accommodation (as Defoe also insisted in reviewing the plague of 1665), and he proposes a plan for a pest-house with “twenty-eight to thirty separate chambers on the upper floor, and as many beneath.” He is humanely alive to the hardships of compulsory isolation:

“For in truth it is a great amazement, and no less horror, to separate the child from the father and mother, the husband from his wife, the wife from her husband, and the confederate and friend from his adherent and friend; and to speak my conscience in this matter, this course ought not to be kept before that, by the judgment of a learned physician, the sickness be resolved on. And when it shall be found it is infectious, yet it is very needful to use humanity towards such as are seized. And if their parents or friends have the means to succour them, and that freely, and with a good heart they are willing to do the same, those that have the charge to carry them to the pest-house ought to suffer them to use that office of charity towards their sick, yet with this condition that they keep them apart and suffer them not to frequent and converse with such as are in health. For, to speak the truth, one of the chiefest occasions of the death of such sick folks (besides the danger of their disease) is the fright and fear they conceive when they see themselves devoid of all succour, and, as it were, ravished out of the hands of their parents and friends, and committed to the trust of strangers.... And therefore in this cause men ought to proceed very discreetly and modestly.”

Another London essay of the same year, by “S. H. Studious in Phisicke” is a much slighter production. The author writes in a superior strain and offers advice “unto such Chirurgeons as shall be called or shall adventure themselves to the care of this so dangerous sickness,” one piece of advice being not to let blood except at the beginning of the seizure, and to take then five ounces of blood in the morning, and three ounces more at three in the afternoon, repeating the depletion next day at discretion. He states also the theory of the plague-bubo: it was a way made by nature to expel the venomous and corrupt matter which is noisome unto it. He advises the practice of incising the bubo and of helping it to suppurate, which was the treatment in the Black Death of 1348-49: if nature be “weak and not able to expel the venom fast enough, by insensible transpiration the venom returneth back to the heart and so presently destroyeth nature[929].”

It is significant of the state of medical practice and literature in England at the end of the Elizabethan period that the only other treatise which the plague of 1603 is known to have called forth was a mystification[930] under the name of one Thomas Thayre, chirurgian, “for the benefite of his countrie, but chiefly for the honorable city of London,” elaborately dedicated to the Lord Mayor of the year (by name), the Sheriffs and the Aldermen, to whom “Thomas Thayre wisheth all spirituall and temporal blessings.” It proves on examination to be a very close reproduction, with some omissions at the end and a few additions, of the old Treatise of the Pestilence by Thomas Phayre or Phaer, first published in 1547, and was probably the venture of some bookseller or literary hack. The original treatise of Phayre had been reprinted last in 1596, “latelye corrected and enlarged by Thomas Phayre,” although that writer must have been dead many years. A reprint of some of “Dr Phaer’s” remedies and preservatives, without date, is conjecturally assigned to the year 1601. The original work of Henry VIII.’s time was also a literary compilation, in some parts copied verbatim from the 14th century book by the Danish bishop of Arusia, and bears not a trace of first-hand observation. Yet it had the fortune to be reprinted once more, in 1722, by a physician W. T., who remarked that, as the writers on plague in his own time “usually transcribe from others,” he wished to set before them a specimen “of such as have written on a disease of which they were eye-witnesses.”

Two printed addresses on the plague by London ministers are extant: one by Henoch Clapham, “to his ordinary hearers,” which is merely a sermon, in the form of an epistle, to improve the occasion[931]; and the other by James Bamford, rector of St Olave’s, Southwark, in the form of a dialogue, and full of practical and sensible advice[932]. Bamford’s tract is especially directed against “that bloody error which denieth the pestilence to be contagious; maintained not only by the rude multitude but by too many of the better sort;” and its chief medical interest lies in the reasons with which he confutes that deadly heresy:—

“Do not the botches, blains and spots (called God’s tokens) accompanied with raving and death, argue a stranger [sic] infection than that of the leprosy, to be judged by botches and spots? [the infectiousness of leprosy being proved by revelation, Lev. xiii.]. Doth not the ordinary experience of laying live pigeons to plague-sores and taking them presently dead away, and that one after another, demonstrate mortal infection? In that the plague rageth and reigneth especially amongst the younger sort, and such as do not greatly regard clean and sweet keeping, and where many are pestered together in alleys and houses—is not this an argument of infection? Thousands can directly tell where, when, and of whom they took the infection.... Persons of a tender constitution or corrupt humours sooner take the plague than those of a strong constitution and sound bodies. The infirmities of many women in travail, and other diseases, turn into the plague. We see few auncient people die in comparison of children and the younger sort.

“Lastly, of those that keep a good diet, have clean and sweet keeping, live in a good air, use reasonable and seasonable preservatives, and be not pestered many in one house, or have convenient house-room for their household—we see few infected in comparison of those that fail in all these means of preservation and yet will thrust themselves into danger.”

The plague of London in 1603 called forth also a poem by John Davies, a schoolmaster of Hereford. It is called “The Triumph of Death; or the Picture of the Plague, according to the Life, as it was in A.D. 1603[933].” The description is by no means so concrete as the title would have us believe, and might, indeed, have been taken, most of it, at second-hand from Dekker:—

He mentions that the prisoners in the gaols were comparatively exempt from plague[934]. One line suggests the great size that the plague-buboes sometimes reached:

Perhaps his particulars of the plague in the provinces, in 1603 and following years, are from his own knowledge. Both the Universities, he says, were forsaken.

One incident he vouches for (in a marginal note) as having occurred at Leominster: A person with the plague was drowned to prevent infection, by the order of Sir Herbert Croft, one of the Council of the Marches of Wales.

The Plague of 1603 in the country near London.

Most of the country parishes nearest to London had plague-burials in 1603, doubtless from the escape of infected Londoners to them and from the spreading of the infection. In several of these parish registers[935] the plague-deaths in 1603 are more than in the time of the Great Plague of 1665: there is a note in the Croydon register that “many died in the highways near the city.” The following table shows the mortalities, great and small.

Burials from all causes. Burials from plague.

Barking 381 —

Battersea 23 —

Beckenham 24 —

Bromley 26 —

Cheam 13 9

Chigwell 28 —

Chiselhurst 62 —

Clapham 20 mostly plague

Croydon — 158

Deptford 235 —

Ealing 136 —

Edmonton 145 85

Eltham 52 17

Enfield 253 129

Finchley 51 38

Hackney 321 269

Hampstead 7 —

Isleworth 75 —

Islington 322 —

Kensington 32 —

Lambeth 566 —

Lewisham 117 —

Romford 122 —

Stratford 130 89

Streatham 36 —

Tottenham 79 44

Twickenham — 67

Wandsworth — 100

Wimbledon 21 —

A comparison of these figures with those of 1665 will show that the northern parishes, Islington and Hackney, as well as parishes farther out in the country, such as Enfield, had more plague-deaths in 1603 than in the time of the Great Plague. Also Barking, Stratford and Romford on the one side, and Lewisham, Eltham and Croydon on the other, had heavier mortalities in the earlier year. It would appear, indeed, that the infection in the country near London had been attracting notice before the plague in the capital caused any alarm. On April 18, 1603, the lord mayor wrote to the Privy Council concerning the steps that had been taken “to prevent the spread of the plague in the counties of Middlesex and Surrey.” On July 20, 1603, the king issued a warrant to the constables and others of the hundred of Twyford in Kent, to levy a special rate on certain parishes to relieve the sufferers by a grievous plague in the villages of West Malling, East Malling, Offham, and seven others[936]. Such rates were usually levied when an epidemic was nearly over; so that the outbreak in Kent must have been at least as early as that in London.

The towns and villages of Hertfordshire, which were favourite resorts of Londoners in plague-time, had their share of the visitation in 1603. At Great Amwell, there were 41 burials in the year, of which 19 were of the plague between August 19 and November 28, 6 of them in one day. Doubtless the registers of other parishes in the home counties would show a similar history if they were searched[937].

Annual Plague in London after 1603.

Before following the plague of 1603 into the provinces, it will be convenient to give the history of the infection in London for the next few years. There was little plague in 1604 and not much in 1605; but in 1606 the infection again became active, and continued at its endemic level for some five or six years. The following table, from the weekly bills of mortality, shows how regularly the infection came to a height in the autumn year after year, as if it had been a product of the soil[938]:

Table, from the Weekly Bills of Mortality (London), showing the increase of Plague in Autumn, for five successive years.

1606 1607 1608 1609 1610

Total deaths from plague in the year 2124 2352 2262 4240 1803

Weekly deaths in

July

25 27 16 60 38

33 33 26 57 45

50 37 24 58 45

46 51 50 91 40

66 43

August

67 77 45 100 47

75 69 70 126 50

85 76 79 101 73

85 71 73 150 60

177 99

Sept.

116 105 123 141 96

105 121 136 158 89

92 114 107 210 86

87 177 143 144 72

147

Oct.

141 150 103 154 63

106 113 131 177 79

117 110 124 131 59

109 82 102 55 49

101 68

Nov.

68 66 109 84 58

41 55 72 69 40

78 46 69 67 22

72 21 70 59 42

51 39

In Dekker’s Seven Deadly Sins of London, published in 1606, he returns to the subject of the plague. He says that it still slays hundreds in a week, a statement which will be seen to be an exaggeration by reference to the Table. But, on another point, Dekker would have been correctly informed. The playhouses, he says, stand empty, with the doors locked and the flag taken down. The policy of forbidding plays during plague-time, or when the infection threatened to be active, was advocated by the Puritan clergy as early as 1577, and had been in force in the plague of 1563. “Plaies are banished for a time out of London,” says Harrison in 1572, “lest the resort unto them should ingender a plague, or rather disperse it being already begonne[939].” In a sermon preached at Paul’s Cross on Sunday, November 3, 1577, in the time of the plague, by T. W., on the text “Woe to that abominable, filthy and cruel city,” the preacher exclaims, “Behold the sumptuous theatre-houses, a continual monument of London’s prodigal folly! But I understand they are now forbidden because of the plague[940].” By the year 1581 the lord mayor had become a zealous supporter of the Puritan demands for the stopping of plays in the City and in the Liberties[941]. In July (?), 1603, James I. granted a licence to players for performances in the Curtain and Boar’s Head theatres, “as soon as the plague decreases to 30 deaths per week in London[942].” In the beginning of winter, 1607, on the subsidence of plague, the theatres were permitted to be opened, so that the “poor players,” might make a living; but as the plague revived in 1608, and became still more serious in 1609, it is tolerably certain that the theatres were shut during the whole summer and autumn of those years.

Those years, from 1606 to 1610, when the actor’s and dramatist’s profession was seriously hindered by the fear of plague, correspond to a blank period in the personal history of Shakespeare. It has been conjectured that he retired from London for a time, before his final retirement to Stratford-on-Avon. At all events his occupation, if not gone, was greatly interfered with in every one of the years from 1603 to 1610, excepting perhaps the years 1604 and 1605, which would hardly have come within the limit of 30 plague-deaths in a week. In 1604 his name is joined in a patent with that of Laurence Fletcher for the Globe theatre. Plays continued to be acted in the plague-years, before the court or in the houses of the nobility; but the applause of the pit and gallery would have been wanting. Macbeth, which is supposed, from its subject, to have been written to celebrate the accession of the king of Scots to the English crown was not put on the stage until 1610 or 1611. King Lear was given before the court at Christmas 1606. One of the quartos of Troilus and Cressida, published in 1609, with the author’s name, has a note to say that “this new piece had never been staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed by the palms of the vulgar;” but another edition of the same year (1609) omitting the preface, bears on the title that the piece had been played at the Globe theatre by the king’s servants, from which it is inferred that it had been acted in the interval between the two editions of 1609. After 1610, and continuously so until 1625, there was no plague in London to interfere with the business of actors and play-writers, just as the period from 1594 to 1603 was a clear interval. The earlier time of freedom was the great period of the drama in London. The disastrous plague of 1603 and the successive unhealthy summers and autumns until 1610 seriously interfered with it, and seriously interfered, also, with Shakespeare’s active share in the production of plays on the stage. Whatever writing he did after that would have been with a less certain prospect of representation, or, one may say, was not done under the same direct influence of playhouse atmosphere which inspired his earlier comedies and historical plays.

Plague in the Provinces in 1603 and following years.

Returning now to 1603, to follow the infection into towns and villages in the provinces, we find first that the plague had been active in some provincial parts of England for several months before it broke out severely in London in 1603. At Chester the great epidemic, referred to in the sequel, began in September, 1602. At Stamford, an epidemic which eventually carried off nearly 600 is heard of first on December 2, 1602, when the corporation resolved to build a “cabbin” for the plague-stricken, and again in January, 1603, when a fourth part of a fifteenth was levied for their relief and maintenance[943].

At Oxford, which was one of the towns earliest and most severely smitten, after London, the disease was first seen in July, 1603, and was supposed to have been spread abroad by the “lewd and dissolute behaviour of some base and unruly inhabitants.” In September the colleges broke up, having made a collection for the relief of the plague-stricken town’s people before leaving. The Michaelmas term was prorogued until December 5, but very few came to the congregation, the plague not ceasing until February. Anthony Wood says:

“The truth is, the times were very sad, and nothing but lamentation and bemoanings heard in the streets. Those that had wealth retired into the country, but those that were needy were, if not taken away by death, almost starved, and so consequently ready to mutiny against their superiors for relief.” All the gates of colleges and halls were constantly kept shut day and night, a few persons being left in them to keep possession. The shops of the town were closed, none but the attendants on the sick or the collectors for them were to be seen stirring abroad, the churches were seldom or never open for divine service.

The plague having ceased in February most of the scholars came back, and in April the infection broke out again, but was prevented from spreading. The court was at Oxford in 1604, and plague broke out after it left, the infected being sent, as before, to the house in Portmead and to the cabins. Among the deaths was that of the Principal of Hart Hall, apparently in August. It broke out once more in March, 1605, but did not spread, whether owing to the measures that were taken or to natural causes may remain doubtful[944]. From that date Oxford had a twenty years’ immunity, until 1625. The Cambridge annals are less full, partly, perhaps, because none of the colleges kept a register on the plan of that of Merton College; but it appears from a letter assigned to 1608 that the Visitor of King’s College had been unable to come to the college to exercise his much-needed authority, “in regard of the infection[945].”

The severity of plague in 1603 among the provincial towns and country parishes is known accurately for only a few of them. From a considerable number more there is evidence of outbreaks of one degree or another. Thus at Canterbury, the accounts of the corporation contain entries of sums paid for watching shut-up houses, for carrying out the dead, and the like, during twenty-four weeks in 1603-4[946]. At Exeter, a pest-house had to be provided, and the fairs were not kept[947]. Similar indications of plague come from Winchester[948], Colchester[949], Ipswich[950], Norwich[951], Boston[952], and Newcastle[953]. The register of a parish in Derbyshire (Brimington) contains plague-deaths in the end of 1602[954].

For Chester there are full particulars of a great plague. It began in September, 1602, in a glover’s house in St John’s Lane, where 7 died, and kept increasing until the weekly deaths reached 60. In 1603 there died of the plague 650, and of other diseases 61. In 1604 the plague-deaths were 986, of which 55 were in one week. From October 14, 1604, to March 20, 1605, 812 died, and about 100 more until the 9th January, 1606, when the infection ceased for a time. Cabins outside the city were erected for the plague-stricken. In some houses, especially of sailors, five or six of the same family died in the course of two or three weeks[955].

It appears to have been in Nantwich and Northwych in one or more of the years 1603-1605, a rate for relief of the poor in them having been ordered on June 22, 1605. Plague-deaths occur in the registers of Macclesfield and Congleton in 1603. At Stockport 51 were buried of plague from October 9, 1605, to August 14, 1606, most of them in the latter year[956]. Straggling epidemics are also reported from Northamptonshire—31 burials from plague at Merston Trussell in 1604, and 16 at Eydon in 1605[957].

One of the severest epidemics of the period occurred at York in 1604. The markets were closed, the courts adjourned to Ripon and Durham, and the Minster and Minster-yard closely shut up. The infected were housed in booths on Hobmoor and Horsefair. The number of those who died is put down at 3512[958]. Durham also had a visitation in St Giles’s parish, but a minor one[959].

At Shrewsbury, however, the plague of 1604 was on the same disastrous scale as at Chester and York, the deaths in the five parishes from June 2, 1604, to April 6, 1605, having been 667. On October 11, 1604, a proclamation was issued against buying or receiving apparel, bedding, etc., as it was suspected that plague spread greatly in the town by such means[960]. A weekly tax was levied upon the inhabitants of Manchester, sometime previous to 1606, for the relief of the poor infected, or suspected of being infected, with the plague[961]. It was in Nottingham in 1604, and in at least one of the parishes in the county (Holme Pierrepont)[962].

There are few parts of England from which evidence of plague does not come in the years immediately following the great plague in London in 1603. To those already mentioned we have to add Cranborne, in Dorset, where 71 died of plague (in a total of 91) from June to December, 1604, six deaths having occurred in the family first infected and eight in another[963]. The parish register of Monkleigh in North Devon has the words “cessat pestis” opposite the entry of a burial on March 30, 1605[964]. In 1606 Peterborough was visited, the infection lasting “until the September following[965].” In 1606 Eton also was “visited,” as appears from payments made[966].

In the years 1606-1610, as we have seen, the plague in London occurred as a regular product of the summer and autumn seasons. The outbreak in 1608 has left several traces in the state letters[967]. On September 12, Lord Chancellor Ellesmere writes from Ashridge (Berkhamstead) to the Secretary of State that he will remain away until he is fully sure of his London house being clear of the infection. On September 20 the City ditch was being cleaned out, and Parliament was put off until February. On November 26 a letter from the court at Newmarket states that the king is angry that my Lord Chamberlain has not sent him the bill of sickness. In 1609 there were 13 plague-deaths in Enfield parish, and in 1610 some suspicious cases near Theobalds.

In the provinces there is no record of plague again until 1608: at Chester, in that year, 14 died of it “at the Talbot[968].” In 1609 the infection was at work in a number of provincial centres. On June 1 a letter from Rochester reports it prevalent in Kent, impeding the work of the Commissioners for the Aid. On June 15 the Commissioners at Hereford request farther time on account of the plague. On August 22 the king’s tenants of Long Bennington, near Grantham, are brought to great poverty by the plague[969]. These accounts relate to the counties of Hereford, Lincoln and Kent, and with the last may be taken the brief reference to plague at Sandwich[970]. Other counties affected in 1609, perhaps only at a few spots, are Derbyshire, Norfolk, Northumberland, and Leicestershire. In the first, there died at Chesterfield a few persons of the plague from March 18 until May; at Belper, 51 between May 1 and September 30; and at Holmesfield, the curate on March 12[971]. At Norwich the outbreak of 1609 was slight compared with other experiences of that city[972]. Its existence at Newcastle the same year is known only from the register of St Nicholas parish[973].

The plague in Loughborough was one of the severer kind. The first case of it appears to have been on the 24th August, 1609, in a woman who had given birth to a child on the 19th. The last plague entry in the parish register is on February 19, 1611; so that the epidemic went on for about eighteen months. During that time the whole mortality was 452, of which by far the most were plague-burials. Within a mile of Loughborough is a spot of ground, long after known as the Cabbin Lees, whereon many of the inhabitants “prudently built themselves huts and encamped to avoid the infection[974].”

In Leicester there was a slight amount of plague in 1607, and it reappeared in 1608 (payments on account of it in the former year, and an item of “30 hurdells used at the visited houses” in the accounts of 1608). A more severe outbreak occurred in 1610 and 1611, during and after the great plague at Loughborough. The streets lying towards the Castle were exempt; a pest-house was built in Belgrave Gate; the burials for 1610 were 82 in St Martin’s parish alone (more than half being from plague), and in 1611 the same parish had 128 burials[975].

In 1610 the infection was at work in one or more villages of the county of Durham; 78 deaths “of the pestilence” occur in the register of Lamesley parish, and the same year was probably one of the numerous plague seasons down to 1647 in Whickham parish, where it is said that the people, perhaps the plague-stricken, lived in huts upon Whickham Fell[976]. At Chester in 1610 “many died of the plague[977]”; and at Evesham there was a visitation which caused the wealthier inhabitants to leave the town and the authorities to effect a much-needed improvement in the cleanliness of the streets (swine found at large to be impounded, stones, timber, dunghills and carrion to be removed from the streets, and the paving in front of each house to be repaired and cleansed once a week)[978].

Between 1610 and 1625, which was an almost absolutely clear interval for London, there are few accounts of plague from the provinces. In 1611, moneys were levied for “the visited” at Sherborne[979], and there was a local rate for the same class at Canterbury in 1614-15[980]. Accounts of the same kind for Coventry probably belong to the year 1613[981]. Then, as we come near the next great plague-period, which began with the new reign in 1625, we find an entry of 26 plague-deaths at Banbury in 1623, “recorded in a part of the original register which has not been transcribed into the parchment copy[982]:” if the date be correct, Banbury was the first town to break the somewhat prolonged truce with the plague, which became broken all over the country in 1625. There appears also to have been distress in Grantham from sickness of some kind in 1623; in September of that year the corporation of Stamford made a collection “in this dangerous time of visitation,” and sent £10 of it to Grantham, the rest to go “to London or some other town as occasion offered.” But the years 1623 and 1624 were so much afflicted with fevers that the “dangerous time of visitation” may not have meant plague.

Ireland.

The accounts for Ireland are so casual that one suspects there may have been more plague in that country than the records show. Thus, on January 25, 1604, there is a municipal order at Kilkenny, for men to stand at every gate to keep out all strangers or suspected persons that might come from any infected place within the kingdom; and on October 24 there is another order, from which it appears that the plague was then in the town, that it was needful to have the sick persons removed to remote places, that no dung should be in the open streets before the doors, and that no hogs should go or lie in the streets[983]. Towards the end of 1607 and beginning of 1608 there was a “most dreadful pestilence” in the city of Cork, which “by degrees ceased of itself[984].”

Plague in Scotland, 1603-24.

The history of the plague in Scotland, which we left in a former chapter at the year 1603, begins again in that year and goes on at one place or another continuously until 1609. From June, 1603, until February, 1604, it continued in the south of Scotland. At Edinburgh, in April, 1604, the house of Mr John Hall was “clengit,” because a servant woman’s death was suspected of the plague: which infection certainly spread in May and became so severe in July that people fled the city[985]. A letter of July 18 from Codrus Cottage, relating to gold-mining, and making mention of Closeburn, says that the plague is amongst the men[986].

In 1605, towards the end of July, the infection reappeared at Edinburgh, Leith, and St Andrews[987]. On October 7, the chancellor of Scotland, Lord Dunfermline, wrote to the earl of Salisbury that the plague was rife in the small towns about Edinburgh, probably its old favourite seats along the Firth and on the Fife coast[988]. The chancellor himself, as we know from another source, had had a sad experience of it in his own house; his son and niece had died of the plague, and his daughter “had the boils” but recovered[989]. The next year, 1606, was the worst of this plague-period in Scotland: “It raged so extremely in all the corners of the kingdoms that neither burgh nor land in any part was free. The burghs of Ayr and Stirling were almost desolate, and all the judicatures of the land were deserted[990].” It is to this epidemic that a curious transaction, discovered by Chambers, seems to belong. Two houses, on the line of the great road from the south towards Aberdeen, situated on opposite sides of the Dee, the one being the house of a proprietor and the other of a minister, were suspected of having received the infection. The gentlemen of the county met and resolved to send to Dundee for two professional “clengers” or disinfectors, giving a bond to the borough of Dundee for 500 merks for the services of its “clengers[991].”

In April of the year following, 1607, we hear of the plague in Dundee itself, despite the experts, as well as in Perth and other places[992]. In July, 1608, many houses in Dundee were infected, and so many magistrates dead that new appointments were made by the Privy Council[993]. It broke out again at Perth on August 29, and continued till May, 1609, “wherein deit young and auld 500 persons[994].”

Until 1624 there is no other Scottish reference to plague except an entry, November 7, 1609, touching the arrival at Leith of a vessel from the Thames, with some of her crew dead of the plague, and the quarantining of her at Inchkeith[995]. Edinburgh had a small outbreak the year before the next great English plague that we come to. On November 23, 1624, the infection was discovered to be in several houses, and the session of the law courts was adjourned to January 8[996]; but Scotland appears to have had no part in the great infection of English soil which immediately followed.

Malignant Fever preceding the Plague of 1625.

The period of immunity from plague both in London and in the provinces, which began about 1611, was at length broken in 1625. The health of London, and of country districts as well, had not been good for two years before, but plague was not the reigning type of disease. Thus, in London, the burials rose from 8959 in 1622, to 11,102 in 1623 and to 12,210 in 1624. The letters of the time enable us to see what it was that disturbed the public health. On August 21, 1624, Chamberlain writes from London to Dudley Carleton[997]:

“We had 328 died this week, a greater number than hath been these fifteen or sixteen years, and yet no mention of plague. God keep it from among us, for we are in danger. But this spotted fever is cousin-german to it at least, and makes as quick riddance almost. The Lady Hatton hath two or three of her children sick of it at her brother Fanshaw’s, in Essex, and hath lost her younger daughter, that was buried at Westminster on Wednesday night by her father; a pretty gentlewoman, much lamented.” Again, on September 4: “We have here but a sickly season, which is easily seen by the weekly mounting of our bill, which is come this last week to 407, and yet we will acknowledge no infection [i.e., of plague]. Indeed, by the particulars we find about 250 of them to be children, most of the rest carried away by this spotted fever, which reigns almost everywhere, in the country as ill as here.... The mortality is spread far and near, and takes hold of whole households in many places.” On October 9: “The town continues sickly still, for this week there died 347.” On October 23 we hear of the Lord Keeper being “troubled with the fluent disease of the time”—the flux, or flix. On December 18 (as well as previously on August 21) a cure of smallpox is mentioned in a person of quality.

These, then, were the prevalent types of epidemic sickness, in the houses of the great as well as among the poor—spotted fever or typhus, dysentery or flux, and smallpox. Two of these continued into the plague-year, 1625, as Taylor, the Water-poet, says of that occasion:

An eminent victim of the “pestilent fever” was the marquis of Hamilton, who died of it while at Moor Park, Rickmansworth, on Ash-Wednesday, 1625[998]. His residence in London was the house called Fisher’s Folly (mentioned by Stow) outside Bishopsgate in a parish which was now “pestered” with tenements of the poor.

The fever was not always called the spotted fever. It may have been the same disease that is often spoken of under the name of ague—“the ague with a hundred names,” as Abraham Holland says (1625). Thus, Mead, of Christ’s College, Cambridge, writes on September 4, 1625: “Agues grow wonderfully rife both here and everywhere; so that one told me yesterday that about Royston and Barkway they wanted help to gather their harvest out of the fields”—perhaps the same sort of “burning fever” which we shall have to trace a few pages later, both in town and country, in time of peace as well as in the Civil Wars, the type of sickness which became the common one in England when the plague had ceased, reaching its highest point in the 18th century. But here again we meet the old difficulty of “influenza.”

These historical glimpses of spotted fevers, or pestilent fevers, in the houses of the great, as well as among the common people, are in accordance not only with the London bills of mortality for the respective years, but also with the registers of country parishes and market towns as abstracted by the laborious Dr Short. Repeating the form of table used in a former chapter, which dealt with the epidemic years 1557-8 and 1580-82, we find the years 1623-25 distinguished as follows:

Country Parishes.

Year. No. of registers examined No. of unhealthy parishes Baptised in same Buried in same

1622 85 11 177 223

1623 84 30 601 836

1624 87 19 362 511

1625 88 13 246 327

Market Towns.

Year. No. of registers examined No. of unhealthy towns Baptised in same Buried in same

1622 25 4 345 442

1623 25 16 439 2254

1624 25 9 714 978

1625 25 9 563 666

The incidence upon the year 1623 is the more noteworthy as there appears to be no record of plague in England that year in its more usual seats, except an entry in a parish register at Banbury. Fever, we may take it, was the prevalent epidemic types both in London and provincial places, urban and rural. In his other treatise Short calls it “malignant spotted fever,” and refers specially to the parish registers of Keswick, Penrith, and Wigton for its prevalence in 1623[999].

Chamberlain, in the letter of August 21, 1624, says the spotted fever was cousin-german at least to the plague; and therein he expressed as a layman an opinion which was afterwards formally expounded by Willis Sydenham and Morton. Along with the flux and the smallpox it stood for the unhealthiness of London in 1623 and 1624 and the first months of 1625, just as the trio were the chief causes of epidemic mortality in the capital in the latter part of the seventeenth century and throughout the whole of the eighteenth. But in 1625 London was not yet done with plague. As the year passed from spring into summer, the spotted fever did not, indeed, cease (as we may infer from casual references and from the known facts of the analogous plague-years, 1636 and 1665); but it was soon overtaken, surpassed, and eclipsed by the greater infection, the old “common infection” of the sixteenth century, the bubo-plague itself. To explain the existence of typhus in the Liberties and out-parishes of London in 1623 and 1624, we find ready to hand the evidence of overcrowding while the plague was quiet from 1611; the births in 1624 were about half as many again as immediately before the last great plague of 1603, and the deaths were twice as many. The fringe of poverty had grown once more, despite the epidemic checks of flux, fever and smallpox: the harvest was ready for the sickle, and the reaping took place in the summer and autumn of 1625. The infection of plague was lurking in London, as it had been for nearly three centuries; but it depended for its activity upon the times and seasons, and the season of 1625 was a favourable one.

The London Plague of 1625.

The previous summer of 1624 had been unusually hot and dry. The weather in October was exceptionally fine, and the fruit crop was abundant. In January the weather was warm and mild. On February 25 there occurred one of those very high tides that come perhaps once in a generation. Thames Street was wrecked, Westminster Hall was “full three feet in water all over. But the greater loss we hear of in the drowning of marshes, and overthrowing the walls in Kent, Essex, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, and other places near the sea[1000].” For the first three months of 1625 the deaths from plague were two or three in a week, some weeks being clear. In the last week of March they were 11, and in the week after, 10. In the last week of May they were 69, reported from twenty parishes. The spring is described by the Water-poet as “wholesome;” but the early summer was unusually cold. On June 12 Chamberlain writes: “We have had for a month together the extremest cold weather ever I knew in this season.” The whole month of June was a time of “ceaseless rain in London[1001].” In the country, the hay-harvest was spoilt, and the corn-harvest was only a half crop[1002]. Another says (in verse), that the summer sun wore sallow hair and a languishing complexion; the air was full of black mists and damp, with no dewdrops at night, but a vaporous smoke[1003]. The following table of the weekly burials (with christenings) in London will show how the plague increased after the rains of June. The mortality of May and June had been a good deal higher for the season than in the moderate endemic years of plague, such as the last series from 1606 to 1611; but it was not until July that a plague of the first degree declared itself.

A Table of the Christenings and Mortality in London for the year 1625.[1004]

Week ending Christened Buried Of Plague Parishes Infected

Dec. 23 165 183 0 0

30 176 211 0 0

Jan. 6 199 220 1 1

13 194 196 1 1

20 160 240 0 0

27 178 226 0 0

Feb. 3 178 174 3 1

10 161 204 5 2

17 181 211 3 1

24 190 252 1 1

Mar. 3 185 207 0 0

10 196 210 0 0

17 175 262 4 3

24 187 226 8 2

31 133 243 11 4

Apr. 7 184 239 10 4

14 154 256 24 10

21 160 230 25 11

28 134 305 26 9

May 5 158 292 30 10

12 140 332 45 13

19 182 379 71 17

26 145 401 78 16

June 2 123 395 69 20

9 125 434 91 25

16 110 510 165 31

23 110 640 239 32

30 125 942 390 50

July 7 114 1222 593 57

14 115 1741 1004 82

21 137 2850 1819 96

28 155 3583 2471 103

Aug. 4 128 4517 3659 114

11 125 4855 4115 112

18 134 5205 4463 114

25 135 4841 4218 114

Sept. 1 117 3897 3344 117

8 112 3157 2550 116

15 100 2148 1674 107

22 75 1994 1551 111

29 78 1236 852 103

Oct. 6 77 838 538 99

13 85 815 511 91

20 91 651 331 76

27 77 375 134 47

Nov. 3 82 357 89 41

10 85 319 92 35

17 88 274 48 22

24 88 231 27 16

Dec. 1 93 190 15 12

8 90 181 15 7

15 94 168 6 5

6983 54265 35417

The deaths from all causes in May and June were so many more than the reported plague-deaths could account for that those who watched the bills of mortality (Mead at Cambridge, Salvetti in London) suspected that plague was being concealed. “It is a strange reckoning,” says Mead of the bill for the week ending June 30: “Are there some other diseases as bad and spreading as the plague, or is there untrue dealing in the account[1005]?” Probably there were both; at the end of the year the deaths from all causes were some 20,000 more than the plague accounted for; and at least half of that excess was extra to the ordinary mortality. The spotted fever and the flux doubtless continued side by side with the plague, having been its forerunners. The parishes most affected were, as in 1603, St Giles’s, Cripplegate, St Olave’s, Southwark, St Sepulchre’s, without Newgate, and St Mary’s, Whitechapel, corresponding to the mazes of lanes and twisting passages, “pestered” with the tenements of the poorer class, of which only a few examples now remain from 18th century London. The following are the parishes with greatest mortality, in their order (Bell):

Total deaths Plague deaths

St Giles’s, Cripplegate 3988 2338

St Olave’s, Southwark 3689 2609

St Sepulchre’s, Newgate 3425 2420

St Mary’s, Whitechapel 3305 2272

St Saviour’s, Southwark 2746 1671

St Botolph’s, Aldgate 2573 1653

St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate 2334 714

St Andrew’s, Holborn 2190 1636

St Leonard’s, Shoreditch 1995 1407

St George’s, Southwark 1608 912

St Bride’s, Fleet St. 1481 1031

St Martin’s in the Fields 1470 973

St Giles’s in the Fields 1333 947

St Clement’s Danes 1284 755

St James’s, Clerkenwell 1191 903

St Magdalen’s, Bermondsey 1127 889

St Katharine’s, Tower 998 744

St Dunstan’s in the West 860 642

97 parishes within the walls 14342 9197

The original printed bill of the Parish Clerks is extant for the worst week but one, August 4th to 11th[1006]. Its mortalities for the week in each of the 122 parishes are almost exactly in the order of the final summation for the year, so that the details throw no light upon the question, in what direction the infection spread, or what parishes felt its incidence most as the season advanced. The total mortalities for the week within the walls, in the Liberties, and in the nine out-parishes (within the Bills) are respectively 1144, 2717 and 994. The infection is said[1007] to have begun in Whitechapel, as we conclude that it did also in 1603; but the City had its due share at length, the parishes of St Stephen, Coleman Street (full of tortuous passages), of Allhallows the Great, and of Christ Church having the largest mortalities.

In the 97 parishes of the City, the 16 parishes of the Liberties, and 9 out-parishes, the deaths at the end of the year were 54,265 from all causes, whereof of the plague 35,417. But that was by no means the whole mortality. A separate account was kept for the parishes of Stepney, Newington, Lambeth, Islington, and Hackney, and for the Westminster parishes, in all of which the deaths from December 30, 1624, to December 22, 1625, were from all causes 8,736, whereof of the plague 5,896[1008]. The grand total of deaths in 1625 was, accordingly, 63,001, whereof of the plague 41,313.

The large parish of Stepney, extending from Shoreditch to Blackwall, was one of the worst plague-districts in London. It is mentioned as such by Dekker in 1603; and in the plague of 1665 it headed the list, with 8,598 deaths, whereof of the plague 6,583. We have some particulars of it for 1625: in the week July 18 to 24, there died in it 184, whereof of the plague, 144; and from July 25 to 31, 259, of which 241 were plague-deaths[1009]; and those figures would have been nearly doubled in the weeks of August. Stepney alone would have had about half the deaths in the additional bill for the year; the parish register of Lambeth gives 623 burials, of Islington 213, and of Hackney 170[1010], while Westminster with St Mary Newington (or Newington Butts, between Lambeth and Southwark) and Rotherhithe would account for most of the remainder. The parishes farthest out, and on higher ground, such as Hackney, Islington and Stoke Newington had fewer burials than in 1603.

The plague of 1625 was a great national event, although historians, as usual, do no more than mention it. Coinciding exactly with the accession of Charles I., it stopped all trade in the City for a season and left great confusion and impoverishment behind it; in many provincial towns and in whole counties the plague of that or the following years made the people unable, supposing that they had been willing, to take up the forced loan, and to furnish ships or the money for them. The history might have proceeded just the same without the plague; but historians would doubtless admit that all causes, moral and physical, should be taken into the account; and it will not be thought beyond the scope of this history to enter as fully as possible into these events of sickness. First as to the sources, other than statistical. Four or more poems were written on the plague of 1625—an interminable one by George Wither (with other topics brought in) in eight cantos and about thirty thousand lines[1011], a piece by John Taylor, the water-poet and Queen’s bargeman, not wanting in graphic touches[1012], a short piece by Abraham Holland[1013], the son of Philemon Holland, doctor of physic, and another short poem by one Brewer[1014]. Besides the poems, there were sermons, mostly when the epidemic was over, and various other moral pieces to improve the occasion. A broadside called The Red Crosse gives a few details of former plagues. The letters of Chamberlain to Carleton, those of Mead, at Christ’s College, Cambridge (whose relation Dr Meddus, rector of St Gabriel’s, Fenchurch Street, was in the City during the epidemic), and the diary of Salvetti, the envoy of the Grand Duke of Tuscany[1015], supply many particulars; while the Calendar of State Papers brings together other information both for London and the provinces. I know of no account of the plague of 1625 from the medical side[1016].

James I., prematurely worn out at fifty-seven, died at Theobalds on March 27, from the effects of a tertian ague, for which he preferred to be treated by the plasters and possets of an obscure ague-curer from Dunmow, setting aside his physicians, who would have succeeded no better. A great funeral, for which 14,000 “blacks” were given out, followed on May 7. Meanwhile the marriage of Charles I. to the princess Henrietta of France was being arranged. The king met his bride at Dover on June 13, and entered London with her on the 18th, passing up the river in a state barge to Denmark House, amidst an immense concourse of people on the houses and shipping, and in wherries on the water, with salvoes of artillery and demonstrations of welcome to the Catholic princess. On the 13th the Lord Keeper had written to Conway, Secretary of State, that cases of plague had occurred in Westminster, and that he could have wished that his majesty had determined to come no nearer than Greenwich. The nobility were kept in town to await the coming of the new queen, and some of them by the summons to Parliament. The Houses met on June 18, and were advised in the king’s speech to expedite their business on account of the plague. However, those who were disposed to refuse supplies until grievances were redressed could make use of the plague as well as the king, and it was proposed by Mallory and Wentworth to adjourn on that plea until Michaelmas. The Houses sat for three weeks, until July 11, when they were adjourned to meet at Oxford on August 1. On a day in June Francis, Lord Russell (afterwards earl of Bedford), “being to go to Parliament, had his shoemaker to pull on his boots, who fell down dead of the plague in his presence,” so that his lordship avoided the House. In the first week of July, the court removed to Hampton Court, and thence to Woodstock and to Beaulieu in the New Forest. The Coronation was put off until October, for reasons connected with the queen’s religion as well as for the infection, and eventually until February 2, 1626.

Before Parliament rose, it obtained the king’s sanction to a solemn fast. “This,” says the Tuscan, Salvetti, “is a ceremony which is performed in all the parishes, and consists in staying in church all day singing psalms, hearing sermons, the one shortly after the other, and making I know not how many prayers, imploring God for stoppage of the plague, and of the ceaseless rain which for a month past has fallen to the detriment of all kinds of crops.” At that date, July 1, he says that plague is now spread through all the streets and has reached other parts of the kingdom. A general exodus took place to the country, of all who had the means to remove. As in 1603, the magistrates, the ministers, the doctors, and the rich men seem to have left the city to take care of itself. On August 9, Salvetti, who had himself escaped to Richmond, writes: “The magistrates in desperation have abandoned every care; everyone does what he pleases, and the houses of merchants who have left London are broken into and robbed.” On September 1, Dr Meddus, rector of St Gabriel’s, Fenchurch Street, wrote: “The want and misery is the greatest here that ever any man living knew; no trading at all; the rich all gone; housekeepers and apprentices of manual trades begging in the streets, and that in such a lamentable manner as will make the strongest heart to yearn.” The city an hour after noon was the same as at three in the morning in the month of June, no more people stirring, no more shops open[1017]. This is re-echoed in verse by Abraham Holland:

And by the Water-poet:

The circumstances are so exactly the same as in 1603 that it is needless to repeat much: the sextons, coffin-makers, bearers, searchers, apothecaries and quacks are all profitably employed;

The clocks striking the hours are not heard for the constant tolling of bells. “Strange,” says Holland,

Of the sick, Taylor says there were

—delirious ravings and cries of pain (from the buboes) which we know from the accounts for 1665 to have been no rhetorical exaggeration. There were the same crowded common graves as in 1603, probably in the same graveyards:

Or as Taylor says,

The treatment seems to have been mostly in the hands of quacks. Taylor says:

The Water-poet, being Queen’s bargeman, appears to have had a proper feeling for all constituted authorities. After denouncing the quacks, as men who “pick their living out of others’ dying,” he proceeds to eulogise the regular practitioners, forgetting to add that they were now conspicuous by their absence:

—the prevalence of plague not being one of the occasions for revealing the secrets entrusted to them.

The medical faculty is hardly at all in evidence the whole time. Thayre’s surgical treatise of 1603 was reprinted; while a semi-empiric, one Stephen Bradwell, the grandson of Banister, a well-known Elizabethan practitioner, published a poor essay on plague, patched up from the usual stale sources and plagiarised even from the lay dialogue of the rector of St Olave’s in 1603[1018]. Bradwell addressed the reader, on July 15 “from my study in Mugwell-street, ready to my power to do thee any pleasure.”

“I have two powders. I have also an excellent electuary. I have likewise lozenges, and rich pomanders to smell of. These are all of my grandfather’s invention, and have been proved to be admirably effectual both by his and my father’s experience. I confess they are costly; but slight means and cheap medicines (however they promise) prove as dear as death. The first powder is 12 pence a dram. The second is 3 pence a grain (the quantity is 10 or 12 grains). The electuary is 2 shillings and 6 pence an ounce, the quantity is one or two drams. There is a fellow in Distaff-lane that disperseth his bills abroad, bragging of a medicine that was my grandfather Bannister’s. My grandfather was very scrupulous of giving any special receipts to others. But if any man can say he hath any receipt of his, I am sure, if it were of any value, I have the copy of it. Because many men know that I have a whole volume of excellent receipts left me both by my grandfather and my father, and lest they should conceive me as too strict and covetous in keeping all secret to myself, I have thought fit for the common good to divulge this excellent antidote following:”—the ingredients occupying a whole page.