INDEX. (continued 2)

[273] Thorold Rogers, History of Agriculture and Prices, I. 296-7.

[274] Cussan’s Hertfordshire, vol. I. Hundred of Odsey, p. 37.

[275] Sat. Rev. 16 Jan. 1886, p. 82.

[276] Jessopp, l. c. April 1885, p. 611-12.

[277] The priory of Christ Church, Canterbury, lost the following live stock in the murrain of 1349: oxen, 757, cows and calves, 511, sheep, 4585. (Hist. MSS. Commission, V. 444.)

[278] The author of the Eulogium, who wrote not later than 1367, and is for his own period an authority like Knighton, gives the following prices: wheat, 12 pence a quarter, barley 9 pence, beans 8 pence; a good horse 16 shillings (used to be 40 sh.), a large ox 40 pence, a good cow 2 sh. or 18 pence. Of the scarcity of servants he says: “Pro quorum defectu mulieres et parvuli invise missi sunt ad carucas et ad plaustra fuganda.”

[279] “The English Manor;” two articles in the Saturday Review, 9th and 16th Jan. 1886, p. 82 [by Professor Sir Frederick Pollock], the sources of information being as yet unpublished. He says: “The prospect of better terms brought in new tenants.”

[280] Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, 1875, II. 434. Höniger, dealing with the German evidence of the Black Death, concludes that the great mortality was almost without significance for the political course of affairs; that the great loss of life was unable to check the revival of trade and industry which had already begun or to retard the splendid development of the German free towns; that the low state of morals belonged to the period and was no worse after the epidemic than before; that no new impulse was given or point of view brought out, unless, perhaps, the idea of sanitary regulation; and that the scarcity of labour was merely an incident to be taken advantage of in the struggle against the existing order which was already going on. (Der schwarze Tod in Deutschland. Berlin, 1882, p. 133.)

[281] Richter, Geschichte der Medicin in Russland, I. 215.

[282] Histoire des Huns, V. 223-4.

[283] Ib. p. 226, note.

[284] Der schwarze Tod im vierzehnten Jahrhundert, Berlin, 1832. Engl. Transl. by Babington, Lond. 1833. This well-known work presents the more picturesque aspects of the Black Death in various countries, without thoroughness for any. England has a large space in the book; but the author has not gone for his information farther than the chapter on the Black Death in Barnes’s Life of Edward III.

[285] Printed in Häser’s Archiv für die gesammte Medicin, 1842, II. pp. 26-59; and reprinted in his Geschichte der Med. u. epid. Krankheiten, III. 157, 3d ed., Jena, 1882.

[286] Geschichte der Medicin, Bd. III. “Epidemische Krankheiten.” Jena, 1882, p. 139. He gives point to this phrase by an account of the local plagues of recent times in Gujerat and Kumaon.

[287] His essay is one of the Escurial MSS., and has been printed, with a German translation, by M. H. Müller, in the Sitzungsberichte der Münchener Akad. der Wissensch. 1863.

[288] Voyages d’Ibn Batoutah in 4 vols., for the Société Asiatique, Paris, 1853, I. 227-9, and IV. 309.

[289] See Sir Henry Yule’s Cathay and the Way Thither (2 vols. Hakluyt Society) and his edition of The Book of Marco Polo, for numerous particulars of the overland trade to China by the northern parallels, in the 14th century.

[290] The stages, distances, expenses, &c. from Tana to Peking are given in Pegolotti’s mercantile handbook (written about 1340), in Yule’s Cathay and the Way Thither, vol. II.

[291] C. A. Gordon, M.D. in Reports of Med. Officers to the Imperial Maritime Customs of China, London, 1884.

[292] Gaubil, Histoire de Gentchiscan, Paris, 1739.

[293] The Famine in China, London, 1878—a translation of a Chinese appeal for charity, with illustrations.

[294] Parliamentary Papers, 1878, China, No. 4.

[295] In Yule’s Cathay and the Way Thither (Hakluyt Society), I. 156.

[296] Etienne Pariset, Causes de la Peste. Paris, 1837.

[297] Volney, Voyages en Syrie et en Egypte. Paris, 1792.

[298] Cornelius de Pauw, Philosophical Reflections on the Egyptians and Chinese, Engl. Transl. Lond. 1795, 2 vols.

[299] It is noteworthy that Herodotus represents the question of disposal of the dead as having been raised by the Egyptians: they decided in favour of embalming and rock entombment, as against cremation or burial, the reason given for the preference being that fire was “a savage beast,” in the one case, while in the other case, the devouring beast was the worm. Bk. III. § 16.

[300] Curiously enough it was among the Christians of Egypt that the controversy as to the corruptibles and the incorruptibles raged most furiously. See Gibbon.

[301] Clot Bey, Peste en Egypte. Paris, 1840.

[302] Benoit de Maillet, Description de l’Egypte. Paris, 1735, p. 281. See also Wilkinson, Ancient Egyptians, III. 456, 465.

[303] Justus Doolittle, Social Life of the Chinese, 2 vols. New York, 1867, I. 33, 198, 213.

[304] T. T. Cooper, Travels of a Pioneer of Commerce, Lond. 1871, p. 23, 33.

[305] This is one of the remarks in Dr Gilbert Skene’s treatise on the Plague, Edinburgh, 1568 (reprinted for the Bannatyne Club, 1840):—Among the causes are “deid cariounis unbureit, in speciale of mankynd, quhilkis be similitude of nature is maist nocent to man, as everie brutall is maist infectand and pestilentiall to thair awin kynd,” p. 6.

[306] A. von Kremer, “Ueber die grossen Seuchen des Orients nach arabischen Quellen.” Sitzungsber. der Wien. Akad., Philos.-histor. Classe, Bd. 96 (1880), p. 69.

[307] Ch. M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, 2 vols. Cambridge, 1888.

[308] Communicated to Herr von Kremer (l. c.) by Nury Effendi, who visited Assir, and wrote a report preserved in MS. in the Archives at Constantinople.

[309] “Report regarding Mahamurree in Kumaon and Garhwal in 1851-52.” By F. Pearson and Mookerjee. Agra, 1852 (Extracts in Ind. Annals of Med. Sc., I. 358). Also extracts (Ib.) from Renny’s Report, 1851.

[310] Planck, Ninth Report of the Sanitary Commissioner, N. W. Prov. Allahabad, 1877, pp. 40-95. (Extracts, p. 39, of Papers relating to the Plague, Parl. Papers, 1879.)

[311] Baber, in Parliamentary Papers, 1878, “China.” No. 6. Rocher (Province Chinoise de Yun-nan) quoted, without the reference, in Med. Reports of Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs, No. 15, 1878, Shanghai, p. 25.

[312] J. H. Lowry, Med. Rep. Chinese Mar. Customs, No. 24, 1882, p. 27.

[313] D. J. Macgowan, Ib. 1882. Report for Wenchow.

[314] Thomas Whyte, “Report on the Disease which prevailed in Kattywar, etc. in 1819-20.” Trans. Med. Phys. Soc. Bombay, I. 155. Bombay, 1838.

[315] I have curtailed the evidence from Gujerat; it will be found at large in the following writers: Gilder, Bombay Med. Trans. I. 193; McAdam, ib. 183; F. Forbes, ib. II. |I, and Thesis on Plague, Edin. 1840; Glen, Quart. Journ. Cal. Med. Soc. I. 433; Ranken, Report on Pali Plague, Calcutta, 1838; and Whyte, as above.

[316] L. Arnaud, Peste de Benghazi, Constantinople, 1875; Essai sur la Peste, Paris, 1888; Une Mission pour la Peste, Paris, 1888.

[317] T. Farquhar, M.D., “Typhus Fever in the Eusofzai,” Ind. Annals of Med. Sc. II. 504; R. Lyell, M.D., “Fever of the Yusufzai Valley,” Ib. II. p. 16.

[318] Surgeon-General J. Murray, M.D., at Epidemiological Society, 11 May, 1878. Med. Times and Gaz. I. 1878, p. 597.

[319] Alex. Rittmann, Chronik der Pest. Brünn, 1879.

[320] Thomas Lodge, Treatise of the Plague, Lond. 1603, chap. III. Skene, in his Edinburgh essay on plague in 1568, gives as a sign of impending plague the moles and “serpents” leaving their holes: “As when the moudewart and serpent leavis the eird, beand molestit be the vapore contenit within the bowells of the samin.” He adds what agrees still farther with modern experience in Yun-nan: “If the domesticall fowls become pestilential, it is ane signe of maist dangerous pest to follow.” (Bannatyne Club ed. p. 9).

[321] The writer of the article “Peste” in the Dict. Encycl. des Sc. Med., Dr Mahé, inclines on the whole to the view that the poison of plague is somehow related to cadaveric products: “Parmi ces accusations d’insalubrité publique, il en est une qui repose sur un objectif plus positif en apparance” viz. the “miasme des cadavres.”

[322] Sir Tobie Matthews’ Letters. Lond. 1660, p. 110.

[323] Epist. de rebus familiar. Lib. viii. epist. 7. The citation of these contemporary illustrations of the Black Death was begun in the last century by Sprengel (Beiträge, &c., p. 37).

[324] Foedera, III. 184; it was renewed on 30th June for a year longer.

[325] Avesbury.

[326] Foedera, III. 192.

[327] Ib. 193.

[328] Ib. 200, 201.

[329] Le Baker’s Chronicle of Osney. Avesbury.

[330] Foedera, III. 221.

[331] Avesbury, Rolls ed. 425.

[332] Blomefield (Hist. of Norfolk, III.) says that the writ to Norwich in 1355 was for 120 men-at-arms to be sent to Portsmouth by Sunday in mid-Lent.

[333] Avesbury, pp. 427-8.

[334] Ib. p. 425.

[335] Ib. p. 461.

[336] Avesbury, p. 431.

[337] Thorold Rogers, Hist. of Agric. and Prices, I. 367, “according to an account quoted by Misselden in his Circle of Commerce.” The sack of wool contained 52 cloves of 7 lbs. each, or 364 lbs. It appears from a statute of 5 Ric. II. that 240 wool-fells were equivalent, for duty, to one sack of wool. In Rogers’ tables, the wool-fell is usually priced at about the value of 1½ lbs. of wool, which was at the same time about the average clip of a sheep. The present average clip would be at least four times as much. The colonial bale of wool is of the same weight as the medieval sack, but would represent 40 to 60 fleeces, instead of about 240. At the smallest of the estimates in the text, the wool of 7,680,000 sheep would have been exported in a year. Avesbury’s estimate would mean an annual export to foreign countries of the clip of about 24,000,000 sheep. The average price of a sack of wool just before the Black Death was about £4 in money of the time; the period immediately following the plague was one of low prices; but from 1364 to 1380, the price was uniformly high.

[338] Foedera, III. 186.

[339] Ib. III. 191.

[340] Jessopp (l. c.) giving a general reference to the Foedera, and probably having the Sandwich letter in view, says there was “mad, unreasoning, insensate panic among well-to-do classes—the trader and the moneyed man, the bourgeoisie of the towns,” and “a stampede,” (presumably to foreign parts). But the mortality was all over by 1st December, 1349; and the exodus, whatever motive it may have had, was almost certainly deliberate.

[341] Foedera, III. 198.

[342] The last clause of the ordinance implies that not only the labourers but also the employers of labour were taking the natural advantage of the situation. There appears to be some particular evidence of this for Bristol (Rev. W. Hunt, Bristol, p. 77): the masters in various crafts and trades were so reduced in numbers that the survivors could charge what they pleased. Thus, the attempt to coerce labourers and skilled workmen was a one-sided affair; although, in practice, it related mostly to farm-labour, where the one-sidedness did not appear.

[343] Foedera, III. 210.

[344] Rot. Parl. II. 225.

[345] This was the first parliamentary Statute of Labourers (25 Ed. III. cap 2). The king’s ordinance of 18th June, 1350 (re-issued for Suffolk and Lindsey on 18th Nov.), is usually reckoned the first Statute of Labourers, and is invariably assigned to the 23rd year of Edward III., being so entered in the Statutes of the Realm. It is clear, however, from the text of the ordinance in the Foedera that it belongs to the 24th of Edward III., its exact date being 18th June, 1350. Longman, in his History of the Life and Times of Edward III., correctly states in one place (I. 309) that the ordinance of 18th June, 1350, was “the first step,” but on the very next page, after stating that the ordinance failed, he proceeds, according to the usual chronology of 23 Ed. III. and 25 Ed. III., to say that “therefore, two years afterwards,” the statute of 25 Ed. III. was made in Parliament. The interval was only some eight months.

[346] Rot. Parl. II. 234.

[347] Knighton, in Twysden’s Decem Scriptores, l. c.

[348] Seebohm, The English Village Community. Chapter I.

[349] The Statute of Labourers was re-enacted with increased stringency six years after (31 Ed. III.), and again in 1360 and 1368. All the labour statutes were confirmed in the 12th year of Richard II. (cap. 34). Legislative attempts of the same kind continued to be made as late as the 5th of Elizabeth (1562-3), with particular reference to sturdy beggars. See copious extracts from the Statutes in Sir George Nicholls’s History of the English Poor Law, vol. I. Lond. 1854. “An Act for regulating Journeymen Tailors” was made in 7 Geo. I. (cap. 13).

[350] “There is no trace of the villenage described in Glanville and Bracton, among the tenants of a manor 500 years ago. All customary services were commutable for money payments; all villein tenants were secure in the possession of their lands; and the only distinction between socage and villein occupation lay in the liberation of the former from certain degrading incidents which affected the latter.” Thorold Rogers, “Effects of the Black Death, &c.” Fort. Rev. III. (1865) p. 196.

[351] Seebohm, The English Village Community. Lond. 1882. Chapter I.

[352] Seebohm, p. 31. Such attempts by landowners, to go back to personal service from their villein tenants, appear to have become more systematic in the generation following, and to have been a cause of the Peasants’ Rebellion in 1381. See v. Oschenkowski, England’s wirthschaftliche Entwickelung, Jena, 1879, confirming the opinion of Thorold Rogers.

[353] Smith, Lives of the Berkeleys, p. 128: “in 24 Edward III.” (Cited by Denton, England in the 15th Century.)

[354] Morant, Hist. of Essex.

[355] Niebuhr, Lectures on Ancient History. Engl. transl. London, 1852, II., p. 53.

[356] Eulogium Historiarum. Rolls ed. III. 230.

[357] Loci e Libro Veritatum, ed. Rogers. Oxon. 1880, p. 202; and, from Gascoigne’s MS., in Anthony Wood, Hist. and Antiq. Univ. Oxford, Ed. Gutch, I. 451: “What I shall farther observe is that before it began there were but few complaints among the people, and few pleas; as also few Legists in England, and very few at Oxford.”

[358] Manor and Barony of Castle Combe, sub anno 1361.

[359] Owen and Blakeway, op. cit. I. 165.

[360] Clarkson’s History of Richmond. Richmond, 1821 (authority not quoted).

[361] Hailstone, History of Bottisham and the Priory of Anglesey. Camb. 1873. (Transact. Camb. Antiq. Soc. 8vo. series, vol. XIV.)

[362] Cited by Jessopp, l. c.

[363] See p. 141.

[364] Clutterbuck, History of Hertfordshire.

[365] Seebohm, for the Manor of Winslow, op. cit., p. 34.

[366] Thorold Rogers, Fort. Rev. III. (1865), p. 196. In his History of Agriculture and Prices, IV., the same learned and sagacious student of English developments thus sums up the agrarian consequences of the Black Death:—“The indirect effects of this great event were even more remarkable. The great landowner ceases to carry on agriculture with his own capital, and farmers’ rents of a fixed and almost invariable amount take the place of the lord’s cultivation by bailiffs. Attempts were made for varying periods of time to continue the old system, especially by corporations. It is possible that the system of stock and land leasing, which became very general after the change commenced, may have been suggested by the hope that the old state of things might be restored.... In the end all the great landowners conformed to the inevitable change, and let their land on short leases, and as a rule at low and almost fixed rents, to capitalist farmers.”

[367] Thorold Rogers, op. cit., I. 376.

[368] Rot. Parl., II. 260. a.

[369] Seebohm, l. c. Fort. Rev., II. (1865), p. 157.

[370] Blomefield, III. sub anno.

[371] Blomefield, III. sub anno.

[372] Camden’s Britannia. Gough’s ed. II. 9.

[373] Hist. MSS. Commission, VI. 299. Register of Ely Priory, in Lord Leconfield’s MSS.

[374] Seebohm, “The Black Death and its Place in English History.” Fort. Rev. II. (1865), p. 278.

[375] These and other labour-statutes are collected in A History of the English Poor Law, by Sir George Nicholls, 2 vols. London, 1854, I. 37-77.

[376] G. Poulett Scrope, op. cit.

[377] From 1416 to 1424, three different persons were fined at the manor court for keeping a common brothel in their houses. Forestalling of butter, cheese and eggs, on the way to market, came before the court in 1418.

[378] At the manor court in 1417, Thomas Selwin, a butcher, was convicted of throwing offal and other offensive matters into the common street and of making his dung-heap there, to the common hurt; also the said Thomas Selwin “tarde et de novo erexit unam latrinam foetidam in shopa sua ad commune nocumentum. Ideo ipse in misericordia.” The next entry of nuisances, so far as extracts are given, is as late as 1590—various offences in the street and churchyard, and the glover washing his skins in the stream or otherwise befouling the water running by his house.

[379] Cited in Owen and Blakeway’s History of Shrewsbury, II. 524: “per advenas qui in dicta villa post ultimam pestilenciam de novo sunt inhabitati ... at regimen dictae ville ad se attrahere ... machinantes.” By the “ultima pestilencia” could hardly have been meant the pestis secunda of 1361, the year of the patent, as the learned antiquaries suppose.

[380] Rotul. Parl. IV. 60. 7. The petition of Chesterton, near Cambridge: “And also they seiden that there was made gret waste in the same Manor of Chesterton of Housing, that is to say of Halles and of Chambers, and of other houses of office, that were necessary in the same Manor, and none housinge left standing therein, but gif it were a Shepcote or a Berne or a Swynsty and a few houses byside to putte in bestes.”

[381] “After the cessation of the Black Plague a greater fecundity in women was everywhere remarkable—a grand phenomenon which, from its occurrence after every destructive pestilence, proves to conviction, if any occurrence can do so, the prevalence of a higher power in the direction of general organic life. Marriages were almost without exception prolific,” etc.

[382] Eulogium Historiarum, III. 213.

[383] Fasciculi Zizan. Rolls series, No. 5, ed. Shirley, p. 263: “Dimitto alias rationes palpabiles: quod exhinc regnum nostrum sensibiliter depauperetur pecunia; quod, praetextu subtractionis hujus thesauri, qui expenderetur in Anglia, decrescit populus;” etc.

[384] Political Songs and Poems, Ed. II.-Ric. II. Rolls series, No. 14, ed. T. Wright, I. 2. 53.

[385] The only monograph that I know is Peinlich’s Pest in Steiermark, 2 Bde. Graz, 1877-78. From 1349 to 1716, seventy years are marked in the annals of Styria as plague-years. Corradi gives the plague-years in Italy in his Annali.

[386] Guy de Chauliac for Avignon, in Häser, III. 176. Other foreign references in the same work.

[387] Political Songs and Poems. Ed. II.-Ric. II. Rolls series, No. 14, ed. T. Wright, I. 173, 190, &c.

[388] Ibid. I. 229, from a MS. in the library of Cambridge University.

[389] The spelling has been modernized, a few old words changed, and the division into verses omitted.

[390] Chronicon Angliae, by a monk of St Albans. Rolls ed.

[391] Harleian MS. No. 1568, “Chronicle of England to A.D. 1419.” (Printed with additions at the St Albans press about 1484.)

[392] Skeat, whose great edition of ‘The Vision of Piers the Ploughman,’ has been brought out by the Early English Text Society, thinks that the ironical reference (Passus XIII. 248) to the pope sending a salve for the pestilence applies particularly to the “Fourth Pestilence” of 1375 and 1376, which was the pestis tertia of some chronicles.

[393] Flux and fever from famine are alone mentioned in the poems of John of Bridlington, which cover the period from the Black Death to the reign of Richard II.

[394] Egerton MS. No. 2572, Sloane MS. 443 (“xiv. cent.”), as well as several copies of the 15th century.

[395] Lansdowne MS. 285, fol. 220.

[396] Mr Warner identifies him with the person who invented “Sir John Mandeville” and the travels of Sir John. See an article in the Quarterly Review, April, 1891.

[397] Sloane MS. (British Museum) No. 2276, fol. 191-199.

[398] ‘A passing gode lityll boke necessarye and behouefull azenst the Pestilence.’ British Museum, case 31, e. 13, 4to, twelve leaves. The MS. begins as follows: “Here begynneth a lytell boke necessary and behouefull azens the pestylence.”

[399] Dibdin (Antiq. Typogr. II. 19) assigns the printing to Machlinia, and reproduces a page as a sample of his common type. Bliss (Reliquiae Hearnianae, II. 117) says that this sample page does not correspond with that of the British Museum copy. He adds that there is a fragment of the printed book in the library of St Peter’s College, Cambridge, “pasted within the wooden covers of the binding of an edition (1499) of Discipuli Sermones.”

[400] In the earliest printed Latin texts of this work (Antwerp, 1485? Leipzig, 1495? and versified in Albertus Magnus, ‘De Virtute Herbarum,’ 1500?) he is named Kamitus, bishop of Arusia, a city in the realm of Denmark. In the copy of the English version in the British Museum, someone has called him Ramicius, having written on a leaf, “Ramicius Episcopus Arusiensis civitatis Daciae Regimen contra pestem,” with the date 1698. The name of Kamitus, being judged improbable on the face of it, has been changed in the catalogue of the British Museum library into Canutus. But there was no Canutus among the bishops of Aarhus, nor a Kamitus, nor a Ramicius. The two bishops that appear to suit best are Olaus, or Olaf, who was bishop from 1371 to 1388, and Ulricus or Udalricus, or Olric Stycka, who succeeded in 1425 and held the see until 1449. Curiously enough, the latter, when he went to Rome in 1425 to represent Eric, king of Pomerania in a suit with the dukes of Sleswig, figures throughout the records of the suit as “Olaus, episcopus Arosiensis,” although Olaus, bishop of Arusia, belonged to a former generation. It is, of course, the merest guessing; but I am inclined to think that the author of the essay on plague was either bishop Olaus, of 1371-1388, or bishop Udalricus, of 1425-1449, a man of character and ability, who also went by the name of Olaus; and that in any case the manuscript version of the essay in the English tongue is more likely to have been of the early part of the fifteenth century than of the fourteenth. The above facts are collected from various parts of Langbeck’s Script. Rer. Dan.: the “Series Episcoporum Arhusiorum” is in vol. VII. p. 212. Nothing is there said of any bishop of Aarhus having written a book, or having been a physician at Montpellier.

[401] These words (“the impressions”) are contracted in the printed book, exactly as in the manuscript. I have modernised the spelling for the most part.

[402] “When a man feeleth himself infect, as soon as he may, let him be let blood plenteously till he swoon: then stop the vein. For a little letting of blood moveth or stirreth venom.... Let him blood on the side of the body where the swelling appeareth. Therefore if a swelling appear under the right arm, let blood in the middle of the same arm, in the vein called mediana. If it appear under the left arm, let him blood in midst of the same, or in the vein of the liver which is about the little finger. And if it be about the share, let him blood about the heel upon the same side. If the swelling be in the neck, let him blood in the vein called cephalica, about the thumb in the hand of the same side; or in the vein the which is called mediana of the same arm, or in the hand of the same side about the little finger. And, overmore, if the swelling appear about the ear, let him blood in the vein called cephalica of the same side, or in the vein which is between the long finger and the thumb, lest many venomous things go into the brain.” If the swelling is in the shoulders, bleed from the mediana: if on the back from pedica magna, and so on.

[403] Walsingham, Hist. Angl. I. 309. Adam of Murimuth, Engl. Hist. Soc.

[404] The Stratford bread-carts are explained in Stow’s Survey of London (“Lime Street Ward”). In the famines of 1512 and 1527, they were besieged on the way by hungry citizens and had to be guarded. The same phrase of bread being “gesen” or scarce, occurs in a letter of 4 September, 1535, from Thomas Broke to Cromwell, secretary of State: “never knew good bread so geason in London at this time of the year; it is so musty, and of so evil wheat, that it is rather poisonous than nourishing; what was sold for a halfpenny, when you were here, is now a penny.” (Cal. State Papers, Henry VIII. vol. IX. § 274.)

[405] Thorold Rogers. A Short English Chronicle, Camden Soc. 1880:—“45 Edward III. This yere was called the grete dere yere, and that same yere was a quarter of whete at iiii nobles.”

[406] Wilkins, Concilia, III. 74: “De orando pro cessatione pestilentiae,” dated Slyndon, 10 Cal. Aug. A.D. MCCCLXVIII.

[407] Sharpe, Cal. of Wills, vol. II.

[408] Otterbourne (ed. Hearne, p. 133) says that the pestis tertia was in 1368, and that it lasted two years. Nicolas (Chronol. of History, p. 389) gives from a Lansdowne MS. (no. 863, fol. 107) of the time of Charles I., the duration of the pestis tertia as 2 July—29 Sept., 1369, which should probably read “2 July, 1368—29 Sept. 1369.”

[409] Memorials of London, etc. from the Council Records. Edited by H. T. Riley. Lond. 1867, p. 339 and p. 356.

[410] Walsingham, Hist. Angl. I. 319; Adam of Murimuth.

[411] The chroniclers are not agreed as to the chronology of the various 14th century plagues from the first (the Black Death) to the fifth. Some of the enumerations are clearly erroneous. Thus in A Short English Chronicle from the Lambeth MS. (ed. Gairdner for the Camden Society, 1880), the plague of 1361 is erroneously called “the threde pestilence,” while the fourth is assigned to 1369 and the fifth to 1377 (for 1375). Otterbourne places the quarta in 1374 (for 1375), and the quinta (as others do) in 1391; but in the Life of Richard II., by a monk of Evesham, the pestilence of 1382 is more correctly reckoned the fifth from the Black Death.

[412] Walsingham, Hist. Angl. I. 409. Chronicon Angliae, p. 239.

[413] Rot. Parl. IV. 806.

[414] Ibid. III. pp. 139 a, 147 a.

[415] Blomefield’s History of Norfolk, III. p. 111.

[416] Continuator of Higden, IX. 14.

[417] Political Songs and Poems. Rolls series, No. 14, I. p. 252:—

[418] Walsingham, Hist. Angl. II. 109.

[419] Continuator of Higden, IX. 21, 27.

[420] Eulogium Historiarum, III. 369. Otterbourne, ed. Hearne: “From the nativity of St John Baptist to the feast of St Luke,” 1391.

[421] Continuator of Higden, IX. 216.

[422] Ibid. 237.

[423] Walsingham, Hist. Angl. II. 186.

[424] Blomefield’s History of Norfolk, III. 113:—“1390. A great mortality increased in Norfolk and in many other counties in England, and it seemed not unlike the season of the great pestilence: it was occasioned by a great want of victuals, that forced many people to eat unwholesome food, and so brought distempers upon them. This dearth began under the sickle, and lasted to the following harvest [1391], but was not so much for want of corn, as money to purchase it, occasioned by the law made in relation to wool, by which wool became dog-cheap; for a stone of chosen and picked wool of the best sort was sold for 3 sh. and some for 22 pence or 2 sh., so that in these times the woollen manufacture was the great support of the nation.” According to Thorold Rogers, these high prices of wool obtained from 1364 to 1380.

[425] Walsingham, II. 203. The Continuator of Higden (IX. 259) says 12,000. These estimates are, of course, the merest guesses, and extreme exaggerations. The whole population of York would have been under 15,000.

[426] Higden, ibid.

[427] Walsingham, II. 213; St Albans Annals of Ric. II. and Hen. IV.

[428] Walsingham, II. 276. The Chronicle of William Gregory (Camden Society, ed. Gairdner) enters under the year 1407, a great frost, for twenty-five weeks. It would be of real scientific interest to know the chronology exactly, whether the plague followed or preceded the long cold drought; but the year of the plague is disputable, if any heed be paid to the date of 1406, given by later compilers.

[429] Walsingham, II. 297. Otterbourne, under 1411, says plague in Gascony.

[430] Annals of Bermondsey, in Annales Monast. Rolls ed. III. 485.

[431] Rot. Parl. IV. 143 a. It is probably under 1420 that the “great plague” at Newcastle, given in so many words in Brand’s History under 1410, should be placed.

[432] Ibid. 148 b.

[433] Histor. Collec. of a Citizen of London, 15th cent. Camden Soc. ed. Gairdner, 1876:

[434] History of Agriculture and Prices in England, IV. 105.

[435] Chronicle of Croyland, in Gale, I. 518; Rogers, IV. 233.

[436] Denton. London, 1886, p. 92.

[437] Mackay, The English Poor. London, 1890, p. 40.

[438] W. Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce. 2nd ed. Camb. 1890, p. 105. He reproduces Denton’s statement that “there was chronic typhoid in the towns.” Denton professes to have found this in Hecker, who had certainly no knowledge of English towns in the 15th century, and is, in general, more entertaining as a philosophe than trustworthy for erudition.

[439] In 1741, during a prevalence of fever all over England, we hear of bread made of horse-beans, pease, and coarse unsound barley as the chief food of the poor. (Gent. Magaz. letters of 27 Nov. 1741 and 11 Jan. 1742). Thorold Rogers (Agric. and Prices, v. Preface) thinks that the staple food of the English labourer, wheaten bread, had first been changed, especially in the North, to rye, barley and oat bread, in the 17th century during the Civil Wars.

[440] Paston Letters. Ed. Gairdner, 1872, II. 254: John Wymondham of Fellbrigg to John Paston, 10th Nov. “And forasmuch as there was a child dead at Asteleys, and one other like to be dead in the same place, what time I rode out about my little livelihood, my lady and I both thought pity on my mistress your wife to see her abide there, and desired her to come to my poor house, unto such time as you should be otherwise avised.”

[441] Histor. MSS. Commission, IX. 127 b.

[442] Calendar of State Papers. Venetian, vol. I. § 236.

[443] Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council. Ed. Nicolas, III. p. xlv.

[444] Rot. Parl. IV. 420 b.

[445] Arnold’s Chronicle, p. xxxii.

[446] Proc. and Ord. Privy Council, IV. p. lxxx. Sir Harris Nicolas, in this connexion, remarks that Fabyan and all other chroniclers (he had overlooked Arnold) omit to mention pestilence, while they mention much less important things; but he is hardly warranted in his inference that plagues were so common-place as to be left unrecorded. A low level of plague would not be noticed, but a great epidemic certainly would.

[447] Johannes Amundesham (of St Albans), Annales. Rolls ed. II. 127.

[448] Rot. Parl. V. 31 b.

[449] This is the only plague in the first half of the fifteenth century that Anthony Wood records; but he says, under the year 1500, that “no less than about thirty pests, both great and small, happened in this last century”—i.e. in the University of Oxford. I shall speak of their general effects in another chapter.

[450] Paston Letters. Ed. Gairdner, 1872, I. 302-3.

[451] Three Fifteenth Century Chronicles. Ed. Gairdner, for the Camden Society, 1880, from the Lambeth MSS., p. 163.

[452] Sir J. Paston to John Paston, 30 April, 1465. Another letter, of 18th August, has: “For the pestilence is so fervent in Norwych, that they dare no longer abyde there, so God help!” (Paston Letters, ed. Gairdner, II. 226), which probably refers to 1465 also. It is not mentioned by Blomefield.

[453] Chronicle of Croyland, in Gale, I. 541.

[454] Communicated to me by the Rev. W. Hunt, from a new volume of the Camden Society, edited by A. F. Leach, Visitations and Memorials of Southwell Minster, p. 11.

[455] Tickell, History of Kingston upon Hull, 1798.

[456] Warkworth’s Chronicle. Camden Society, p. 23 (under the year 13 Ed. IV.).

[457] Chronicle of the Greyfriars. Camden Society, No. 53, 1852, p. 22.

[458] Robert Fabyan’s Chronicle of England, (editions in 1516 and 1533, and by Ellis, 1808), sub anno.

[459] Grafton’s Chronicle, p. 742.

[460] Brand’s History of Newcastle.

[461] Visitations and Memorials, p. 41.

[462] Blomefield.

[463] Paston, 6 Nov. 1479.

[464] Fordoun, Scotichronicon, ed. Hearne, Oxon. 1722, p. 1039.

[465] Scotichronicon, p. 1056: “eadem ... sicut prius jubileo ... in toto regno Scotiae mirabiliter saeviebat.”

[466] Exchequer Rolls of Scotland. Introduction to vol. II. p. xlviii.

[467] Scotichronicon, p. 1141.

[468] Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, III. 650.

[469] Ibid. III. 310.

[470] Ibid. III. 553.

[471] Ibid. III. 579.

[472] Scotichronicon, p. 1287 and p. 1298.

[473] Cited by R. Chambers (Domestic Annals of Scotland, I. 57) from the Chronicle as printed by Thomas Thomson.

[474] Scotichronicon, p. 1565. Hearne’s edition.

[475] Ferrerius, f. 393, cited in Excheq. Rolls of Scot. VIII. p. lx.

[476] Excheq. Rolls of Scot. VIII. 364. Accounts of William, bishop of Orkney, from 5 Aug. 1475 to 3 Aug. 1476: “et decem martis liberatis, de tempore pestis, egrotantibus in Incheskeith.” Another item (£30. 13s. 4d.) is for forty-six marts destroyed “propter longam moram” in the lairs at Leith, “anno pestis, videlicet anno ultimo.”

[477] But MS. annals are cited for the date 1361, in The ancient and present State of the County and City of Cork. By Charles Smith, M.D. 2 vols. Dublin, 1774. 2nd ed. II. p. 23.

[478] Thady Dowling [Elizabethan] “1370. Pestilentia magna in Hibernia, adeo quod propter immensitatem mortalitatis vocabatur ab antiquis tertia,” p. 24.

[479] Dowling, p. 27.

[480] Angl. Hist. Basil. 1555, p. 567.

[481] In Gale, Script. Angl. I. 573.

[482] British Museum Addit. MS., No. 27,582.

[483] Materials illustrative of the Reign of Henry VII. Rolls series, No. 60, s. d.

[484] Tractatus contra pestilentiam thenasmonem et dissinteriam [Rouen, 1490]:—“Causae pestilentiae ut alias scripsimus: in quodam opusculo quod composuimus de quadam rabiosa febre pestilentiali, quae in duodecim horis patientes cum calore et sudore continuo interficiebat. Cujus febris adventus incepit sua vexilla extendere in Anglia in civitate Londoniarum decima nova die mensis Septembris 1485, in qua die [planetary signs] posuerunt. Ex qua febre pestilentiali plus quam quindecim millia hominum ab hoc seculo morte repentina, tanquam ex pugnitione divina, recesserunt, multique sine mora per vicos deambulantes absque confessione obierunt.”

[485] MSS. Cotton. Vitellius A. XVI. A Chronicle of England from 1st Henry III. to 1st Hen. VIII.

[486] The Croyland Chronicle (in Gale’s Script. Angl. I. 570 and 576) gives the 14th November in one place and the 14th October in another. But it is clear that the latter is the correct date, the letter from the prior of Croyland to Henry VII., announcing the death of the abbot and praying for a congé d’élire, being dated the 14th of October. (Materials illustrative of the Reign of Henry VII. vol. I. s.d. 21 Oct. 1485, Rolls series, No. 60.)

[487] Anthony Wood, I. 462.

[488] The Maire of Bristowe is Kalendar (by Robert Ricart, town-clerk of Bristol, 18 Ed. IV.). Camden Society, 1872, p. 46.

[489] The Bristol calendar says: “This yere Hary, Erle of Richmond landed at Milford Haven.... And sone after there was a sodeyn sikenes in all places of Englond called the sweting syknes, whereof moche people dyed.”

[490] The date of 1506 in Hecker is erroneous, having been taken from the very loose entry in Hall’s chronicle (copied by Grafton), which might equally well belong to the year 1507. Bernard André’s date of 1508 is unmistakeable; his annals go on continuously until the death of Henry VII. in April following.

[491] Bernard André’s Works. Rolls series, No. 10, pp. 126-8.

[492] Hemingway’s History of Chester, I. 142.

[493] Anthony Wood’s History and Antiquities of the Univ. of Oxford. I. 665.

[494] Calendared for the Rolls series by Brewer for the greater part of the reign of Henry VIII. (1509-1530), and after him by Gairdner, at present as far as 1538. The facts given in the next few pages may be taken as coming from the Calendar of State Papers, under their respective dates, unless it is otherwise stated in the notes.

[495] This appears to have been a common direction. In a letter of 12 August, 1517, dated from the Fleet Prison by Thomas Leeke to his brother sir John Leeke (Hist. MSS. Commission Reports, X. pt. 4, p. 447), the writer says he has been sore vexed with the sweat and in danger of life: “If any of you have it, pray you to keep well and close about your breasts and your heart for twenty-four hours and then with God’s grace there is no danger in it: there has been a marvellous great death for so short a time.”

[496] In the letter of 12 August from the Fleet Prison, already quoted (Hist. MSS. Reports, l. c.), it is stated that fifteen are dead in the Cardinal’s house, including Mr Cowper, the steward, Talboys, lord of Kyme, young Wastness, and one Grenell. In my lord of Durham’s house, Dr Port and Dr Fysche are dead, with divers others. Of the Court, my lord Clinton, Mr Morgan, steward to the Queen, and one Mat. Jones, of the King’s wardrobe, were buried at Richmond on Friday last, and divers more of the Court are dead.

[497] The Pitiful Life of King Edward the Fifth: “Considering there is, as physicians say, and as we also find, double the peril in the relapse that was in the first sickness,” p. 230. Camelot edition.

[498] Anthony Wood, Hist. and Antiq., sub anno 1517.

[499] Hemingway’s History of Chester, I. 142.

[500] The letter bears the date of 8 June, which would make the first of the sweat the same as in Tuke’s letter; but Brewer says the date should be the 18th June.

[501] Brewer (Cal. State Papers) reads the letter, “On Tuesday one of the ladies of the chamber, Mlle de Boulan, was infected with the sweat.” But P. Friedmann (Anne Boleyn, Lond. 1884, I. 72) says the correct reading is a fille-de-chambre of Mlle de Boulan; and it is known that Anne Boleyn did not take the sweat until some days after.

[502] In the History of Cork by C. Smith, M.D. (2nd ed., 1774) there is an entry under 1528: “a malignant disorder called the sweating sickness in Cork,” with a reference to “MS. annals.” It has been generally supposed that the sweat did not enter Ireland or Scotland in any of its five outbreaks.

[503] The German writers have assumed that the sweat was prevalent abroad really in the same summer or autumn as in England, explaining the discrepant dates by the difference in the English calendar. But it was only the months of January and February, and March to the 24th, that were counted in the old year in England; the months of June, July, August, etc. in which the sweat occurred, are the same in the English and foreign calendar-years. In the English chronology of the sweat, those months belong quite clearly to the year 1528; and, in the German, Swiss, and Netherlands chronology of the sweat, just as clearly to the year 1529. The sweat on the Continent was a year later than in England.

[504] Gruner’s Scriptores de sudore Anglico superstites was reprinted by Häser, with additional citations and notes, in 1847. Hecker (Der Englische Schweiss, 1834) refers to the work by Gruner, Itinerarium sudoris Anglici ex actis designatum, Jena, 1805, which I have been unable to see. The account of the German invasion in the text is accordingly at second-hand.

[505] A boke or counseill against the Sweate, London, 1552. De Ephemera Britannica, London, 1555.

[506] “This yere the swetinge sycknes raignyd in England, and began first in this towne of Shrowsbery the xxii of Marche, and ran through the realme, and began in London the ixth of July.” Quoted from MS. Chronicle, in Owen and Blakeway’s History of Shrewsbury, p. 345.

[507] Op. cit. 1552, fol. 10. In the Latin work the date at “Salopia” is “17 Kal. May.”

[508] Nichols, Leicestershire, III. 891.

[509] Edrichus, In libros aliquot Pauli Æginetae, &c. London, 1588 (not paged).

[510] “Diary of Edward VI.” in Burnet’s Hist. of Reformation. Stow (Annales) says it began on the 9th July and was most vehement on the 12th.

[511] Calendar of State Papers. Domestic (under the date).

[512] Machyn’s Diary. Camden Society, No. 42, edited by J. Gough Nichols, p. 7. Machyn was an undertaker, and records deaths and funerals.

[513] Machyn.

[514] Ibid. p. 8.

[515] Letter from London, in Harl. MS. No. 353, f. 107, cited by Nichols in notes to Machyn.

[516] Caius, Boke or Counseill, 1552, ff. 10-11.

[517] The Venetian ambassador (Cal. S. P. Venetian, v. 541) says that the sweat was at an end in London in twenty days. He says, also, that children under ten years were not subject “questo influsso.” The excitement caused by the London epidemic is shown in an entry of money in the corporation records of Canterbury: “1551. To one of the King’s servants that brought word how many were dede in the swett.” (Hist. MSS. Commiss. IX. 154 b.)

[518] Edward VI. to Fitzpatrick.

[519] Drake’s Eboracum, p. 128.

[520] Nichols, notes to Machyn, giving a reference to Gent. Magaz. 1825, II. 206.

[521] Fuller (ed. Nichols, p. 183) says, under 1551: “Many in Cambridge died of this sweating sickness, patients mending or ending in twenty-four hours.” The death of the two young noblemen was made an occasion for copies of verses by members of the University.

[522] Strype, Memorials, III. chap. 7 (cited in notes to Machyn).

[523] Lysons, Magna Britannia, VI. 539.

[524] Calendar of State Papers. Venetian, V. 541, under the date of 18 Aug. 1554.

[525] Thomas Cogan, ‘The Haven of Health: chiefly made for the comfort of students, and consequently for all those that have a care of their health, amplified uppon fiue wordes of Hippocrates, written Epid. 6. Labour, Meate, Drinke, Sleepe, Venus.... Hereunto is added a Preseruation from the Pestilence: with a short Censure of the late sicknesse at Oxford.’ London, 1589. New ed. 1596, p. 272.

[526] There is a single reference to a sweat on the Continent in 1551, which may really have been one of those epidemics of typhus (or influenza), with a sweating character, that were observed in 1557-8 and 1580. Brassavolus, writing de morbo Gallico, and illustrating the fact that epidemics were sometimes generated by drought (though mostly by humidity), says that the sweat in England, in former years, came with drought, and that at the time of his writing, the 15th September, 1551, that disease was vexing Flanders,—the season being extremely dry,—and had attacked many thousands. This was first noticed by Häser, Op. cit. III. (1882), p. 332. The reference to Brassavolus is Luisini’s Script. de lue venerea. Lugd. Bat. 1728, f. p. 671.

[527] Increase and Decrease of Diseases. London, 1801, p. 70.

[528] See the references in Gruner, pp. 444, 448.

[529] “The Autonomous Life of the Specific Infections,” in Brit. Med. Journ., 4 August, 1883; “The Origin of Yellow Fever,” in North American Review, Sept. 1884; Illustrations of Unconscious Memory in Disease, London, 1885, Chapter XIII. “Vicarious Infection.”

[530] Polydore Virgil, p. 553. Philip de Comines says “three large ships and a considerable body of land forces.” (Chroniques du Roy Louis XI. Eng. transl. II. 674.)

[531] Mezeray, II. 762. He adds: “the Bretons boast of having also lent aid to this prince.” His first expedition was purely with Bretons, but the second was composed mostly if not altogether of Normans.

[532] This point, which is essential to the theory, was originally stated in an article on “Epidemics” in the Quarterly Review, Jan. 1887, and there claimed as original. The writer on “Sweating Sickness” in the Encycl. Brit. has adopted it as a common-place; it is obvious enough when pointed out, but Hecker had not done so.

[533] The above account is summarised from the chapter in Hirsch, Geog. and Histor. Path. Eng. transl. I. 88.

[534] Darwin, Naturalist’s Voyage round the World, pp. 435-6.

[535] Bernard André’s Annales Henrici VII. Rolls series, No. 10, p. 120. Under a date in January, 1508, he writes: “Quo quidem die nuncius ab urbe incredibilia dictu, hoc est de primis verni fructibus temporis floridoque frumento visis, referebat.” Both Fabyan and the anonymous author of MS. Cotton, Vitellius, A. XVI. (Chronicle of England from 1 Hen. III. to 1 Hen. VIII.) give the winter of 1506-7 as “a wonderful [easy] and soft winter without storms or frost,” but fail to remark on the weather of 1507-8.

[536] Wriothesley’s Chronicle.

[537] Fabyan, Stow.

[538] Stow’s Annals. Hecker, in error, makes out this exceptional season to have been the one immediately preceding the sweat in the summer of 1528.

[539] Cal. State Papers, under the date.

[540] Summary in Hirsch, l. c.

[541] Continuator of Fabyan.

[542] Wriothesley, II. 139.

[543] Drake’s Eboracum, (from the town council records).

[544] Hist. and Antiq. Univ. Oxford, I. 651.

[545] At Cambridge, in October, 1578, two deaths from plague in Queens’ College “moved many to depart.” Cal. Cecil MSS. II. under date 13 October.

[546] Anthony Wood, under the respective years.

[547] With reference to a pestilence at Oxford in 1448, Wood says: “occasioned, as ’twas thought, by the overflowing of waters, and the want of a quick passage for them from the ground. Also by the lying of many scholars in one room or dormitory in almost every Hall, which occasioned nasty air and smells, and consequently diseases.” Op. cit. I. 596.

[548] Materials Illustrative of the Reign of Henry VII. Rolls ser. 60, II. p. 136.

[549] Chronicle of England, sub anno.

[550] Hist. Angl., p. 609 (Basil, 1546).

[551] Stow, Annales.

[552] In Rymer’s Foedera all these vacancies of bishoprics are entered under the year 1501, beginning with the see of Canterbury (Morton’s) on 9th January, 1501.

[553] Plumpton Correspondence, Camden Soc. No. 4, p. 138: Letter of ? 1499, R. Leventhorpe, of Leventhorpe Hall, Yorkshire, to Sir R. Plumpton: “And sithe I hard say that a servant of yours was decesed of the sicknes, which hath bene to your disease, I am right sorry therefore;” he advises fasting, and trusts “ye sal be no more vexed with that sicknes.” In the next letter (cviii) to Sir R. Plumpton from his son:—“Also, sir, I am very sorry that the death seaseth not at Plompton.”

[554] Hardwicke Papers, London, 1778, I. 2 (from Harl. MSS.).

[555] Freeman, Exeter, in “English Towns” series, p. 99.

[556] Annales Henrici VII. Rolls series, p. 88.

[557] The information in the next few pages comes from the Calendar of State Papers, Henry VIII., Domestic, unless otherwise referred to in the notes.

[558] Chronicle of the Grey Friars, Camden Society, No. liii. 1852, p. 29. Stow puts the mortality under the year 1513.

[559] Letter from the Fleet prison, assigned to 1517. Hist. MSS. Com. X. pt. 4. p. 447.

[560] Phillips, History of Shrewsbury, p. 17.

[561] Privy Purse of Henry VIII., p. 79.

[562] The reference on p. 290 (note 2) to “no parish in London free,” under the date of 25 October, 1517, may imply that bills of mortality had been kept in that epidemic, which was certainly an occasion when Henry VIII. interposed in other ways to check the progress of plague.

[563] Lately purchased for the Egerton Collection. No. 2603, fol. 4.

[564] There was, however, an English translation of a small foreign essay on the plague, of unacknowledged authorship, published at London in 1534 by Thomas Paynel, canon of Merton, a literary hack of the time.

[565] In the Record Office. State Papers, Henry VIII., No. 4633. It has been erroneously calendared by Brewer as a bill of mortality of the sweating sickness in 1528.

[566] The Maire of Bristowe, his Kalendar. Camden Society, 1872, p. 53.

[567] The plague is said to have been in Exeter in 1535 (Freeman, Exeter, in English Towns Series).

[568] There is a copy in the Lambeth Library, No. 432.

[569] Owen and Blakeway, I. 311.

[570] Continuator of Fabyan.

[571] Cussan’s History of Hertfordshire.

[572] A London Chronicle of Hen. VII. and Hen. VIII. Camden Miscellany, 1859.

[573] Acts of the Privy Council. New series, 1542-1547, p. 136.

[574] Stow’s Annales.

[575] Cal. Cecil MSS., I. 15.

[576] Guildhall Records (Extracts by Furnivall in Appendix to Vicary’s Anatomy. Early English Text Society).

[577] Brand’s History of Newcastle.

[578] Hasted’s History of Canterbury, p. 130 (from parish registers).

[579] Anthony Wood, op. cit. II. 74. At Banbury probably about the same year. Beesley’s History of Banbury (from Brasbridge).

[580] Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, I. 5.

[581] Acts of the Privy Council. New series, 1542-1547, 28 April, 1546, p. 397.

[582] Ibid., Nov. 13, 1546, p. 552.

[583] Camden’s Britannia, ed. Gough, I. 262.

[584] Ibid. II. 265.

[585] Calendar of State Papers. Domestic series, Vol. X.

[586] Notes and Queries, 6th series, III. 477.

[587] Nichols, Leicestershire, III. 891 (295 deaths from plague &c. 1555-59.)

[588] Ormerod’s Cheshire, I. under 1558, with a reference to “Harl. MSS.” The Harleian MSS. relating to Chester fill many pages of the catalogue.

[589] Calendar of State Papers, Eliz. I. p. 122.

[590] Three Fifteenth Century Chronicles. Camden Society, ed. Gairdner, 1880, pp. 123, 144.

[591] Letter from London to the Earl of Shrewsbury, Hist. MSS. Com. VI. 455, a.

[592] Without date, but probably 1564. Watt conjectures 1556, but the book contains references to the fever-epidemic of 1558, and, as above, to the plague of 1563.

[593] Munk, Roll of the College of Physicians, I. pp. 32, 63.

[594] This and other information immediately following are from Cal. State Papers. Foreign series.

[595] Calendar of Cecil MSS., under the dates.

[596] Glover’s Hist. of Derbyshire (21 plague deaths in St Michael’s register, May-Aug. 1563).

[597] Nichols; Kelly, in Trans. Hist. Soc. VI. 395.

[598] Harwood’s Hist. of Lichfield, p. 304.

[599] Hasted’s Hist. of Canterbury, p. 130 (parish registers).

[600] Notes and Queries, 2nd series, XI. 69.

[601] ‘How and whether a Christen man ought to flye the horrible plage of the Pestilence. A sermon out of the Psalme “Qui habitat in adjutorio altissimi,” by Andrewe Osiander. Translated out of Hye Almayn into Englishe, 1537.’ Copy in the British Museum. The initials M.C. are taken to be those of Miles Coverdale.

[602] Soranzo to the Senate of Venice. Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, V. 541 (18 Aug. 1554).

[603] Cal. State Papers, Henry VIII. Domestic.

[604] From Abstract of several orders relating to the Plague. MS. Addit. (Brit. Museum), No. 4376. Probably the originals of these abstracts are among the Guildhall records. I quote from the most accessible source.

[605] Extracts from the Guildhall Records, by Furnivall, in Appendix to Vicary’s Anatomy of the Body of Man. Early English Text Society.

[606] Cal. State Papers, Venetian, VII. 649.

[607] Abstract, &c. in Brit. Mus. MSS., as above.

[608] The following is the case by which he supports the recommendation to kill dogs in plague-time: “Not many years since, I knew a glover in Oxford who with his family, to the number of ten or eleven persons, died of the plague, which was said to be brought into the house by a dogge skinne that his wife bought when the disease was in the Citie” (Poor Man’s Jewel, Chapter VIII. London, 1578).

[609] Transcripts from the MS. Archives, ed. Bayley, 1856.

[610] News-letter to the Earl of Shrewsbury, Hist. MSS. Commis. VI. 455.

[611] Machyn’s Diary, ed. J. Gough Nichols. Camden Soc., No. 42, p. 310.

[612] Ibid. p. 396 (note by Nichols); and Guildhall Records, in Furnivall, l. c.

[613] Abstract, &c. as above.

[614] Stow’s Memoranda (Lambeth MS.), Camden Soc., 1880, p. 123.

[615] Abstract, &c. as above.

[616] Stow, ibid.

[617] Record Office. State Papers, Elizabeth, vol. XLVIII., No. 70.

[618] Endorsed “An abstract of such orders as have been heretofore for the preventing and decreasing of the plague in and about London.”

[619] The searchers are mentioned at Shrewsbury as early as 1539 (Phillips).

[620] Survey of London, ed. cit. p. 119.

[621] Holinshed, III. p. 1260.

[622] John Bell, London’s Remembrancer. Lond. 1665.

[623] Liber Albus Londinensis. Rolls series, ed. Riley. The following instances occur in the report of the commissioners of 1343: P. 446: A water-gate “obturatur ratione unius gutturi exeuntis de una latrina,” etc. P. 449: the Ebbegate obstructed by certain persons named, “qui fecerunt in eadem venella latrinas supra dentes, quarum putredo cadit supra capita hominum transeuntium.” Same page: Wendegoslane “obturatur per fimos et garderobas.” Same page: Rethersgate obstructed “per fimos et alia hujusmodi foetida.” Same page: Dowgate. Two householders named “in eisdem aedificiis diversas latrinas fecerunt, pendentes ultra vicum ejusdem venellae; quarum putredines cadunt supra homines per eandem venellam transeuntes.” P. 450: at Queenhithe a “communis latrina.” P. 451: at Saltwharf the way to the river obstructed “pulvere et aliis putredinibus in eadem projiciendis.” P. 452: Lekynggeslane has two latrinae and is impassable owing to want of paving. Same page: Another venel obstructed by the Earl Marshall; three latrinae in it. In a perambulation of the ground outside the walls, 26 Ed. III. (1552), the following encroachments are noted among others: Outside Ludgate, one has erected a shed (camera) 16 ft. × 12¾ ft., and made there “unum profundum puteum et quadratum pro latrina”—a deep well and a latrine-pit together. Also outside Ludgate, William of Wircestre has a house there and two shelters for beasts, and a latrine, and part of the said house is 14 ft. × 7½ ft.

[624] Statutes of the Realm, 17 Ric. II.

[625] Riley, op. cit., p. 614.

[626] Stow’s Survey.

[627] Art. “Shakespeare,” Encycl. Britan.

[628] Wodderspoon’s Memorials of Ipswich, p. 285, p. 259.

[629] “Now first printed.” Exeter, 1765, p. 181.

[630] Poulett Scrope, op. cit. p. 333.

[631] D. Erasmi Epistolar. lib. XXX. London, 1642, Lib. xxii. Epist. 12 (without date).

[632] Richard of Devizes. Eng. Hist. Soc. p. 60: “Apud Bristolliam nemo est qui non sit vel fuerit saponarius; et omnis Francus saponarios amat ut stercorarios.”

[633] William Harrison’s Description of England (in Holinshed) gives proof enough that the filthy floors described by Erasmus had no existence two generations later, even among the poorer classes.

[634] The correspondence is in Remembrancia, under the head of “Plague.”

[635] From a memorandum of Lord Burghley’s, dated Hertford Castle, 21 Nov. 1582, it appears that a survey had shown 577 beds available for strangers in one parish of Hertford, and 451 in another, “so that there are lying two a bed above 2000 people.” Cal. State Papers. Domestic series, Elizabeth 1581-90, p. 75.

[636] Stow’s Survey.

[637] Remembrancia, p. 332.

[638] Remembrancia.

[639] Baddeley, Parish of St Giles, Cripplegate. Lond. 1888.

[640] Ibid., under date August, 1672, p. 193.

[641] Broadsheets in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries. Cited by W. Rendle, F.R.C.S., Old Southwark and its People. London, 1878, p. 198. Mr Rendle, in one place, seems to imply disapproval of this mode of coffinless burial; but in another (p. 225, note) he says it was “a sort of forecast of Mr Seymour Haden’s wise proposals.” His first thoughts appear to have been the best.

[642] Sermon on Third Sunday in Advent, 1552.

[643] Stow’s Memoranda. Camden Society, N. S. XXVIII., 1880, p. 125.

[644] Stow, Annales, p. 662.

[645] Cal. State Papers.

[646] Cat. Cecil MSS.

[647] On July 15, 1570, the Duke of Norfolk craved his release from the Tower, on account of the great risk to his bodily health and the infection of the pestilence in that part of the city. (Calendar of Cecil MSS.)

[648] Report Hist. MSS. Commis.

[649] Anthony Wood, op. cit.

[650] Remembrancia, p. 38.

[651] Turnor’s History of Hertford, pp. 236, 268.

[652] The Loseley Manuscripts, ed. Kempe. London, 1836, p. 280.

[653] Holinshed, III. p. 1240.

[654] Letter to Cecil, Cal. Cecil MSS., II. 106 (under the year 1575).

[655] Corporation records, in Notes and Queries, 6th series, II. 524.

[656] Notes and Queries, 6th series, II. 390.

[657] Ormerod’s Hist. of Cheshire, I. Harl. MS. 2177 (a death from plague, 3 Nov. 1574).

[658] Cal. Cecil MSS., II. 107:—For the week ending 9 September, 1575, in St Margaret’s, 25 deaths (of plague 13), St Martin’s 3 of plague, Savoy, none, St Clement’s 3 (2 of plague).

[659] Cecil to Earl of Lincoln. Ibid. 10 September, 1575.

[660] The Maire of Bristowe, is Kalendar. Camden Soc. 1872, p. 59.

[661] Wells corporation MSS., Hist. MSS. Com., I. 107.

[662] Owen and Blakeway.

[663] Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1591-94, p. 269.

[664] Tickell’s Hist. of Kingston upon Hull, 1798.

[665] Records of the Burgh of Kirkcudbright. Hist. MSS. Commiss., IV. 539.

[666] Remembrancia, p. 333 (27 Nov. and 6 Dec. 1582).

[667] By permission of the Marquis of Salisbury. The contents of this small volume have not been included in the published Calendar of the Cecil MSS.

[668] ‘A sermon preached at Powles Crosse on Sunday, the third of November, 1577, in the time of the Plague’ by T. W. London, 1578 (February 20).

[669] Strype’s ed. of Stow’s Survey, Bk. IV. p. 34. Nonsuch was near Epsom.

[670] Remembrancia of the City of London, p. 331.

[671] Calendar of Cecil MSS., Part II. under the dates.

[672] Turnor’s Hist. of Hertford, p. 236.

[673] Cal. Cecil MSS.

[674] Blomefield, vol. III. (“Norwich,” under the date).

[675] Ibid. “Yarmouth.”

[676] Morant’s Hist, of Essex, I. 50.

[677] Hist. MSS. Commission, IX. 277 b.

[678] Notes and Queries, 6th series, II. 524.

[679] Cal. State Papers.

[680] Nichols, Hist. of Leicestershire.

[681] Cal. S. P.

[682] Cal. State Papers. Eliz. 1581-90 (Lemon), pp. 45, 70.

[683] Graunt’s Reflections on Bills of Mortality. 3rd ed., Lond. 1665, p. 135.

[684] Hist. MSS. Com.

[685] Saunders, Hist. of Boston, p. 228.

[686] Duke of Rutland’s MSS. Hist. MSS. Com., May 24, 1586.

[687] Saunders, l. c.

[688] Notes and Queries, 2nd series, XI. 497.

[689] Blomefield’s Norfolk.

[690] Ibid. and Gawdy MSS. Hist. MSS. Com.

[691] Glover’s Hist. of Derby, p. 613.

[692] Archaeologia, VI. 80.

[693] Townsend’s Hist. of Leominster, p. 59.

[694] Sykes, Local Records of Northumberland and Durham, p. 80.

[695] Cal. S. P., Domestic, Eliz. ed. Lemon.

[696] Corporation MSS. of Plymouth. Hist. MSS. Com. X. pt. 4, p. 539.

[697] Notes and Queries, 6th series, III. 477.

[698] Dunsford’s Historical Memoirs of Tiverton, p. 38.

[699] Bill of Mortality for the week ending October 20, 1603. Broadside in Guildhall Library, with summary, on margin, of the mortalities in 1563 and 1592-93.

[700] Cal. State Papers, 1591-94, p. 312.

[701] Ibid. p. 340.

[702] Ibid. 1595-97, p. 45, May 26, 1595:

“Arguments in proof of the advantages to be derived by the City of London from stopping up the town ditch:—It is the origin of infection, and the only noisome place in the city. In the last great plague, more died about there than in three parishes besides; these fields are the chiefest walks for recreation of the cityzens, and though the ditch were cast every second year, yet the water coming from the kennel and slaughter-houses will be very contagious. It is no material defence for the city, and half the ditch has been stopped these many years.”

[703] London’s Remembrancer, by John Bell, Clerk of the Company of Parish Clerks. London, 1665. He says: “I shall begin with the year 1593, being the first year in which any account of the christenings and burials was kept. I cannot find any record of more antiquity than that of this year in the Company of Parish Clerks Hall.” However we can now point to original weekly bills of mortality of 1532 and 1535, to abstracts of weekly plague-burials in 1563-66, to the figures from one weekly bill of a series in 1574, and to abstracts of 1578-83.

[704] The total of 25,886 was copied, probably from the broadside of 1603, into an anonymous essay of 1665, called Reflections on the Bills of Mortality, the total of plague alone being given as 11,503, evidently by a misprint for 15,003. At the same time a table was given, professing to be of the weekly deaths from all causes, in one column, and from plague in another, from March 13 to December 18, 1593. The column of plague-deaths sums up to 11,110, but the total of 11,503 (which originated in a misprint) is printed at the foot of the column as if that were the summation. The column of deaths from all causes is made to sum up to 25,886, the actual sum being 25,817. But the weekly mortalities in it for those weeks that had little plague are an absurdity for 1593. Whatever the source of this table, it is not genuine for 1593, and was disclaimed by Bell, the clerk of Parish Clerks’ Hall, whose essay was written in 1665 to correct that and other errors about former plagues in London.

[705] Cal. State Papers. Addenda. Elizabeth.

[706] Cussan’s Hist. of Hertfordshire.

[707] Turner’s Hist. of Hertford, p. 268.

[708] Glover’s Hist. of Derby, p. 613.

[709] Harwood’s Hist. of Lichfield, p. 304.

[710] Nichols, Leicestershire (Town records of Leicester); Kelly, in Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc. VI. (1877), p. 391 (at least 20 houses shut up).

[711] Owen and Blakeway.

[712] Parish registers in Townsend’s Leominster, p. 59.

[713] Corporation MSS. Canterbury, in 9th Report of Hist. MSS. Commission, pp. 159 a, 160 a, b. “This plague continued from the end of September to the month of January.”

[714] Parish Register of Penrith: “A sore plage was in London, Nottinghome, Derbie and Lincolne in the year 1593” (Jefferson’s Cumberland, I. 19).

[715] Cal. Stale Papers. Addenda. Elizabeth.

[716] Syer’s Memorials of Bristol. The excessive mortality at Leominster (41 burials in September, 1597) may have been an effect of the famine. (Townsend’s History, p. 59.)

[717] Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1597, § 10, p. 347.

[718] Cal. State Papers, Domestic, 1597, p. 501.

[719] Sykes, Local Records, p. 82.

[720] Clarkson’s Hist. of Richmond.

[721] Camden’s Britannia, p. 175.

[722] Jefferson’s Cumberland, I. 273. But these are the same figures as for Penrith.

[723] Ibid. I. 391.

[724] Parish register of Penrith, in Jefferson, l. c.

[725] Notes and Queries. 6th series, II. 524.

[726] Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, X. 594. Edin. 1887.

[727] Burgh Records of Aberdeen (Spalding Club), I. 66.

[728] Exchequer Rolls Scot., XI. p. lxviii.

[729] Ibid.

[730] Burgh Records, pp. 88, 90, 130, 165.

[731] Register of the Privy Council, Scotland, I. 5.

[732] Cal. S. P. Scot. (Thorpe).

[733] Burgh Records, pp. 222, 231, 244, 246.

[734] Cal. S. P. Scot. 18 Nov. 1548. The Rhinegrave recovered, and came to Edinburgh on the 26th.

[735] Reg. P. C. Scot. I. 279-81.

[736] Ibid. I. 281-2.

[737] Ane Breve Description of the Pest, Edin. 1568. Reprinted, for the Bannatyne Club, by James Skene of Rubislaw. Edin. 1840.

[738] Diurnall of Occurrences, in Chambers.

[739] Cited by R. Chambers (Domestic Annals of Scotland, I.) from M. Napier’s notes to the Spottiswoode Club edition of Spottiswoode’s History.

[740] Op. cit. I. 53.

[741] Burgh Records of Canongate. Maitland Club, Miscellany, II. 313 (in Chambers).

[742] Chambers, I. 94.

[743] Burgh Records of Glasgow, 1573-1581. Maitland Club, p. 27.

[744] Reg. P. C. Scot., II. 415.

[745] Ibid. p. 419.

[746] Hist. MSS. Com., IV. 539.

[747] Reg. Scots P. C., III. 229.

[748] Ibid.

[749] Ibid. III. 679.

[750] Reg. Scots P. C. s. d.

[751] Chronicle of Perth, Bannatyne Club, p. 4, and Chambers, I. 154.

[752] Reg. Scots P. C., III. 727.

[753] Calderwood’s Hist. of Kirk of Scotland, IV. 366: “It was first known to be in Simon Mercerbank’s house.” Birell’s Diary (1532-1605) in Chambers, I. 157.

[754] Scots P. C., III. 746.

[755] Ibid. V. 56.

[756] Moysie, in Chambers, I. 157.

[757] The Diary of Mr James Melville, 1556-1601. Bannatyne Club. Edin. 1829, p. 153.

[758] Marioreybank’s Annals, in Chambers.

[759] Melville’s Diary, p. 162.

[760] Melville, p. 173; Calderwood, cited by Chambers; Cal. Cecil Papers, III. 298, 310.

[761] Cal. Cecil Papers, III. 321.

[762] Memorabilia of Glasgow, in Chambers.

[763] Scots Privy Council.

[764] Birell, in Chambers.

[765] Scots P. C.

[766] Calderwood, V. 655.

[767] Two men sent to buy nolt in Galloway for the needs of the borough of Dumfries were stopped, with 38 head of cattle, by the provost and others of Wigton, at the Water of Crie, the cattle being impounded at Wigton for eight days so that they became lean. A hundred merks compensation was demanded. Scots Privy Council, V.

[768] Scots P. C., VI. 164.

[769] Aberdeen Kirk Session Records, Spalding Club, 1846, Calderwood (cited by Chambers, I. 319) says that the year 1600 was one of famine, and that there was also a great death of young children, six or seven being buried in Edinburgh in a day.

[770] Scots Privy Council, VI. under the respective dates.

[771] Burgh Records.

[772] Smith’s Cork, II. 34.

[773] Cal. State Papers. Domestic.

[774] Smith’s Cork, on the authority of MS. annals.

[775] Annals of Loch Cé. Rolls ed., II. 289.

[776] Brabazon to T. Cromwell. Cal. State Papers. Irish.

[777] Cal. State Papers. Irish, 1566-7.

[778] State Papers (Record Office), Irish, 1567, No. 54. Letter from Lord Treasurer Winchester and Ed. Baeshe, to the Lord Deputy. Mr Froude’s summary of it is that “the clammy vapour had stolen into their lungs and poisoned them,” and again, “the reeking vapour of the charnel house.” I have had difficulty in deciphering the letter, but I can make out “being a graveyard where all their buriall,” etc.

[779] Cal. State Papers. Irish.

[780] Thady Dowling, p. 41.

[781] Cal. State Papers. Domestic. Sept. 1, 1575.

[782] Stubbs, in his edition of Roger of Howden (Rolls series, No. 51, II. 249), on the evidence of the Pipe Roll of 1166.

[783] Memorials of London in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, ed. Riley.

[784] Stow’s Survey of London, pop. ed. (1890), p. 66.

[785] Hall’s Chronicle, ed. of 1809, p. 632.

[786] This account of the Black Assizes at Oxford in 1577 was brought to light, like so many other things from the register of Merton, first by Anthony Wood in his Hist. and Antiq. of the Univ. of Oxford (ed. Gutch, II. 189). It was copied in full, from the original Latin text, in 1758, by John Ward, LL.D., and sent to the Royal Society, in whose Phil. Trans. (vol. L. p. 699) it is printed, with remarks, by Tho. Birch, D.D., Sec. R. S.

[787] Howard, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales. 3rd ed., Warrington, 1784, p. 342.

[788] Hist, and Antiq. Univ. Oxford, ed. Gutch, II. 188-192.

[789] Georgius Edrichus, ‘In Libros aliquot pauli Aeginetae Hypomnemata quaedam.’ Londini apud Tomam East 1588 (without pagination).

[790] The passage which Anthony Wood thought to relate to the gaol fever at Oxford in 1577 is the following, under the heading “De morbis publicé grassantibus:” “Publice grassari morbos vidimus Oxonii, et una nocte simul plus sexaginta agrotasse (sic) novimus, et in vicinis postridie pagis, eo forte aëre delato, fere centum. Quod etiam eodem tempore, regnante tum Edwardo sexto, Cantabrigiae evenit, cum duo simul liberi ducis inclyti Suffolchiae ibi morerentur. Nec tamen Oxonienses ulli fere interierunt, quod coeli constitutio apud nos quam ibi salubrior sit. Sed iis ita succurrendum morbis putamus, ut Brittanico sudore (sic enim vocant) opitulari solemus.”

[791] Anthony Wood, as we have seen in the text, put together his version of the fever of 1577 from the Merton College register, from Stow’s Annals, and from Ethredge’s reference to the sweat of 1551. In 1758, John Ward, LL.D., copied the passage in the Merton register and sent it to the Royal Society; whose secretary, the Rev. Dr Thomas Birch, appended to it in the Philosophical Transactions some annotations—“copying,” as Carlyle said of him with reference to some Cromwell matter, “from Wood’s Athenae; and has committed—as who does not?—several errors,” his annotations being “sedulous but ineffectual”—to the extent of fixing on the original correct narrative an accretion of mistakes (600 for 60, sweating sickness for gaol fever, &c.). Trusting to the respectable Birch, Bancroft in his Essay on the Yellow Fever, with observations concerning febrile contagion &c. (Lond., 1811) has based a theory that the Oxford epidemic was not typhus at all. Murchison (Continued Fevers of Great Britain, 2nd ed. 1873, p. 103) has also been misled, and has found himself therefore at a disadvantage in answering Bancroft’s empty verbalisms about the invariable reproduction of typhus from some previous case. F. C. Webb, in a paper “An Historical Account of the Gaol Fever,” Trans. Epidem. Soc. for 1857, p. 63, has not used the Oxford case for any argumentative purpose, but he has, like the others, given the facts erroneously. He gives no particulars of the Exeter Black Assize.

[792] Howard, On Lazarettos in Europe, &c. Warrington, 1789, p. 231: “But as I have found, in some prisons abroad, cells and dungeons as offensive and dirty as any I have observed in this country, where however the distemper was unknown, I am obliged to look out for some additional cause of its production. I am of opinion that the sudden change of diet and lodging so affects the spirits of new convicts that the general causes of putrid fever exert an immediate effect upon them. Hence it is common to see them sicken and die in a short time with very little apparent illness.” The last words are important.

[793] Sylva Sylvarum, or A Natural History. In ten centuries. Cent. 10, §§ 914-15. Spedding’s ed. II. 646.

[794] Holinshed’s Chronicle. New edition by Hoker, London, 1587, pp. 1547-8.

[795] These statements by Hoker, chamberlain of Exeter, are sufficiently circumstantial; but they do not quite suit the theory of a writer in the Dict. Nat. Biog., under “Drake, Sir Bernard” that the ship was “a great Portugal ship,” called the Lion of Viana, with an English master, taken by Bernard Drake in Brittany. No doubt such a capture is stated in the Cal. State Papers, 1585, p. 295 (the reference given), Sir W. Raleigh’s ship the “Jobe” being included in the same petition; but nothing is said of Dartmouth as the port to which the two vessels were brought, or of Exeter as the place where their captains were imprisoned. It is of importance for the theory of the Exeter gaol fever to know whether Drake’s prisoners were Portuguese fishermen or not, and Hoker may be supposed to have known.

[796] The author of the misadventure. He succeeded in getting home to Crediton, where he died on the 12th April, four weeks after the Assizes began.

[797] Sir George Nicholls, in his History of the English Poor Law, 1854, I. 113, threw out the suggestion that the decay was in the old walled towns, and that it was compensated by the rise of populations on less hampered sites. This theory has been adopted by some later writers.

[798] Calendar of State Papers. Domestic, Hen. VIII.

[799] Becon’s Works, 3 vols. II. fol. 15-16.

[800] Continuation of Fabyan’s Chronicle.

[801] Greyfriars Chronicle, Camden Soc. LIII., 1852. Preface by J. G. Nichols, xxiv.

[802] Strype’s ed. of Stow’s Survey of London.

[803] In the Rolls of the Middlesex Sessions (Middlesex Record Society), there occur numerous entries of inquests on deaths in the gaol of Newgate from the 25th year of Elizabeth: a few of these are from plague; but by far the larger number are from “the pining sickness,” a malady which sometimes cut off several prisoners in the same few days and after a brief illness. In one of these epidemics (Dec. 1586-Feb. 1587), a single case is called “pestilent fever,” the other seven being “pining sickness.” Next year, June 19, there is a case of bloody flux, and, on June 24, a case of “pining sickness.” The other periods when the disease so named was epidemic in Newgate were Feb.-May, 1595, June and July, 1597, March, 1598, and March-April, 1602. The pining sickness was probably a generic term, and may have included chronic disease; there is a solitary case entered as ailing for as long a period as eight months, the usual duration of the sickness being one, two, or three days up to three or four weeks.

This place will serve to notice the strange teaching about “parish infection” which has received currency among the writers of good repute as authorities. Guy (Public Health, Lectures, 1870, I. 23) says the gaol distemper was an old offender known as the sickness of the house: “I think I recognize it in the London Bills from 1606 to 1665 as the Parish Infection.” The column of figures in the London Bills which has been taken to show the weekly prevalence of a disease, otherwise unheard of, “parish infection,” really shows the number of “parishes infected.” The earlier bills showed, in the corresponding column, the number of parishes clear (“parish.clere” or “paroch.clere”). By adding up the number of parishes infected in each of the 52 weeks of a bad plague-year, a total of some thousands is got, and that total has been taken to be the annual mortality from “parish infection”—a pure myth. The original author of this singular mistake appears to have been Marshall, in his Mortality of the Metropolis, London, 1832, p. 67. Of the “parish infection,” he says: “The disease below is specified by Mr Bell in his Remembrancer [1665]; it is probably the same as exhibited under the name of spotted fever.” What Bell “specifies” is not another disease, but the number of parishes in the City and suburbs infected with the plague in each week of the year.

[804] Annales Monastici, Rolls series, No. 19. Chronicle by an unknown author (St Albans) temp. Hen. VI., 1422-31:—“Quaedam infirmitas reumigata invasit totum populum, quae mure dicitur: et sic senes cum junioribus inficiebat quod magnum numerum ad funus letale deducebat.”

In the Report of the Irish Local Government Board, Medical Department, 1890, influenza is identified under the name “slaedan,” or prostration, which was epidemic in Ireland in 1326 or 1328, the same epidemic being called “murre” in the Annals of Clonmacnoise. The use of the word “mure” in the St Albans Chronicle is just a century later. Murrain (or morena in Latin chronicles) is probably the modern survival of “mure” or “murre.”

[805] I take this summary from Short (Chronology, etc. I. 204), who omits his authority, probably the foreign writers to whom he is usually indebted in the earlier period. The first part of Theophilus Thompson’s Annals of Influenza (Sydenham Society) is little else than extracts from Short, and therefore of foreign origin.

[806] Cal. State Papers. Domestic, sub dato.

[807] Thus in the continuation of Fabyan’s Chronicle under the year 1512, the Marquis of Dorset, sent into Spain with 10,000 men, is said to have “returned in winter by reason of the flix (dysentery).” And in Hall’s Chronicle (ed. of 1807, p. 523), we have particulars of the very serious sickness in his army in Biscay; owing to their diet being largely of garlic and fruits, and their drink being hot wines in hot weather, “there fell sick 3000 of the flix, and thereof died 1800 men.”

[808] Continuator of Fabyan’s Chronicle, sub anno. There is an almost identical entry in A London Chronicle of Henry VII. and Henry VIII. (Camden Miscellany, vol. V. 1859), but under the year 1539, in a hot and dry summer. The most discrepant date and designation of the epidemic of those years are those given in Hardiman’s History of Galway (p. 40): “This charitable institution [St Bridget’s Hospital] was fortunately completed in the year 1543, when the sweating sickness broke out, and raged with great violence, destroying multitudes of the natives, and particularly the tradesmen of the town.”

[809] The term “hot ague” occurs as early as 1518, in a letter of 18 July (Cal. State Papers).

[810] Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England during the reigns of the Tudors (1457-1559). Camden Society, II. 139.

Anthony Wood also enters for Oxford, under 1557, “A pestilential disease to the settling of some and the driving away of many; the causes of which proceeding from the eating of green fruit, the Commissary commanded that none should be sold in the market or elsewhere in Oxford.”

[811] Fabyan’s Chronicle, p. 711.

[812] Stow’s Annales, ed. Howse, p. 631. Speed also has a paragraph, unusual with him, on the state of health in the year of Queen Mary’s death (1658), in which the mortality among the clergy is specially mentioned.

[813] Extracts from Harrison’s MS. Chronologie by Furnivall, in Appendix to Elizabethan England. Camelot series, 1890, p. 267. His famine prices, and the enormous fall of them after harvest, are the same as given by Stow.

[814] State Papers, Record Office.

[815] John Jones, M.D. The Dyall of Ague, London, 1564?

[816] Calendar of State Papers. Foreign, II. 1558, p. 398.

[817] Calendar of State Papers. Foreign, II. 1558, p. 400.

[818] New Observations, Natural, Moral, Civil, Political and Medical, on City, Town and Country Bills of Mortality. By Thomas Short, M.D., London, 1750.

[819] 2 vols. London, 1749.

[820] Calendar of Cecil MSS., II. 525.

[821] Phil. Trans. XVIII. 105

[822] Graunt, Reflections on the Bills of Mortality, 3rd ed. 1665.

[823] Opera, ed. Greenhill, p. 160.

[824] Ibid. p. 169.

[825] Giraldus Cambrensis, Rolls series, No. 21, vol. V. Topogr. Hiberniae, p. 67:—“Advenarum, tamen, una his fere est passio et unica vexatio. Ob humida namque nutrimenta, immoderatum ventris fluxum vix in primis ullus evadit.” Flux among the English troops in Ireland in 1172 is mentioned by Radulphus de Diceto, Imag. Histor. I. 348.

[826] Works of James I., p. 301.

[827] Sloane MS. (Brit. Mus.) No. 389, folios 147-153. It bears no date, but is marked in the catalogue “xv and xvi cent.,” as if belonging either to the end of the fifteenth century or the beginning of the sixteenth.

[828] Hensler, who reproduced in 1783 (Geschichte der Lustseuche, App. p. 53) these and other particulars from one of the two remaining copies of Pinctor’s work (in the possession of Professor Cotunni of Naples), collated with the other copy in the Garelli library at Vienna, finds in the concluding dedication of the book to Alexander Borgia a sinister meaning, as if the supreme pontiff had been himself a victim of the grande maladie à la mode; it is easier, he says, to extricate the sense than the syntax of the passage.

[829] There was another edition in 1539, and several more following. Paynel also added a short section, “A Remedy for the Frenche pockes,” to his book entitled, A Moche Profitable Treatise against the Pestilence. Translated into English by Thomas Paynel, chanon of Martin [Merton] Abbey, London, 1534.

[830] Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1398-1570. Edited for the Spalding Club [by Dr John Stuart], vol. I. 1844, p. 425.

[831] Phil. Trans., vol. 42 (1743), p. 420: “Part of a Letter from Mr Macky, professor of History, to Mr Mac Laurin, professor of Mathematics in the University of Edinburgh, and by him communicated to the President of the Royal Society; being an Extract from the Books of the Town Council of Edinburgh, relating to a Disease there, supposed to be Venereal, in the year 1497.”

[832] Simpson (l. c.) quotes the Proclamation from the original minute-book, almost in the above spelling; it is in Vol. I. of the Town Council Records, fol. 33-34, and is entitled in the rubric “Ane Grangore Act.”

[833] “On Syphilis in Scotland in the Fifteenth Century,” Trans. Epidem. Soc. N. S. 1. (1862), p. 149. Two of the entries are published in the Criminal Trials of Scotland, 1. 117; the others were collected for Simpson by Mr Joseph Robertson from the High-Treasurer’s Accounts in the Register House, Edinburgh. These accounts have since been published in the Rolls series (vol. I. 356, 361, 378 (bis), 386).

[834] Op. cit. I. 437.

[835] Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York. Edited by Nicolas, London, 1830, p. 104.

[836] Stow’s Survey of London, “Bridge Ward Without.” He ascribes these informations to “Robert Fabian,” both in the text and in the margin. The statement is certainly not made in Fabyan’s Chronicle of England under the year 1506, or other year of the decade, nor is it indexed as occurring in some earlier connexion.

[837] Bernard André’s Works. Rolls series, No. 10.

[838] Erasmi Epistolae, folio. London, 1642, p. 1789 e.

[839] Anthony Wood, Hist. Univ. Oxford, ed. Gutch, I. 514. Freind (Hist. of Physic, Pt. II. p. 345) says that the French pox is mentioned in the will of Colet, dean of St Paul’s, 1518.

[840] The Supplication of Beggers compyled by Symon Fyshe. Anno MCCCCCXXIIII. Lond. 1546.

[841] Parliamentary History, I. 494.

[842] Bullein’s Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence, 1564. Early English Text Society, Extra series, 1888, p. 122.

[843] Bullein’s Bulwarke of Defence against all Sicknes, Sornes, and Woundes, etc., 1562, foll. 2, 68.

[844] Certain Works of Chirurgerie newly compiled and published by T. Gale. London, 1563.

[845] Dyall of Agues, cap. VIII. “Of the Pestilential fever, or plage, or boche.”

[846] William Clowes, A short and profitable Treatise touching the cure of the disease called (Morbus Gallicus) by unctions, London, 1579.

[847] ‘A Prooved Practice for all young Chirurgeons, concerning burning with gunpowder, and woundes made with Gunshot, Sword, Halbard, Pike, Launce or such other. Hereto is adjoyned a Treatise of the French or Spanish Pocks, written by John Almenar, a Spanish Phisician. Also a commodious collection of Aphorismes, both English and Latine, taken out of an old written coppy. Published for the benefit of his country by William Clowes, Maister in Chirurgery.’ New ed., 1591.

[848] A most excellent and compendious Method, etc. London, 1588.

[849] Read uses, among other terms, one that has played a great part in the modern pathology of syphilis. Among the points to be noticed are,—“if recent or old, if the ulcers or whelks be many, whether pustulous matter or gummie substance appear.”

[850] John Banister, ‘A needefull new and necessarie treatise of Chyrurgerie, briefly comprehending the generall and particular curation of ulcers ... drawen forth of sundrie worthy writers.... Hereunto is annexed certaine experimentes of mine owne invention.’ London, 1575.

[851] Peter Lowe, An easie, certaine and perfect method to cure and prevent the Spanish sicknes, Lond. 1596. For an account of the book see The Life and Works of Maister Peter Lowe. By James Finlayson, M.D. Glasgow, 1889.

[852] A Treatise concerning the plague and the pox, discovering as well the means how to preserve from the danger of these infectious contagions, or how to cure those which are infected with either of them. London, 1652.

[853] Burnet (History of his own Time, I. 395-6, Oxford, 1823) retails a good deal of unsavoury gossip concerning the disease in noble and princely personages after the Restoration.

[854] Natural and Political Observations upon the Bills of Mortality. By Captain John Graunt, F.R.S. Preface dated from Birchin Lane, January, 1662.

[855] The origin of syphilis from leprosy has been maintained in a modern work by Friedr. Alex. Simon, Kritische Geschichte des Ursprungs, der Pathologie und Behandlung der Syphilis, Tochter und widerum Mutter des Aussatzes. Hamburg, 1857-8.

[856] Hirsch, Geographical and Historical Pathology (Translated), II. 67, 68, 81.

[857] In Hensler, p. 14, and Appendix, p. 11.

[858] Ibid., App. p. 15.

[859] In Hensler, Appendix, p. 66.

[860] The rise of the pox in the Italian wars, with its dispersion over all Europe, comes into “The Smallpox, a Poem” by “Andrew Tripe, M.D.,” London, 1748:

[861] I do not include among the good evidence the often quoted letter of Peter Martyr to a professor of Greek at Salamanca, under the date of “nonis Aprilis, 1488,” in which “morbus Gallicus” is used as well as the Spanish name “las bubas.” It seems to me certain that the date should be 1498, or something else than 1488, the correspondence having gone on until 1525. The same kind of misdating occurs among the printed letters of Erasmus.

[862] This letter is printed in his Opuscula, Papiae, 1496. Attention was first called to it by Thiene, in his essay confuting the doctrine of the West-Indian origin of syphilis.

[863] In Hensler, App. p. 108.

[864] Manardus, Epist. Med. lib. VII. epist. 2. Basil, 1549, p. 137 (as cited by Hirsch). The first letter of Manardus “de erroribus Sym. Pistoris de Lypczk circa morbum Gallicum,” was printed in 1500 (Hensler, p. 47).

[865] I quote it from Hensler, Geschichte der Lustseuche die zu ende des xv Jahr hunderts in Europa ausbrach. Altona, 1783, Appendix, p. 109.

[866] Mezeray, Histoire de France, II. 777.

[867] The diagnosis in De Comines’ text appears to have struck the editors of the chief edition of his work, that of 1747; for they have appended a footnote to the passage, which is a superfluity unless it be meant to express surprise: “Charles VIII. malade de la petite vérole à l’age de vingt-deux ans.”

[868] Martin, Histoire de France, VII. 257, 283.

[869] Handbook of Geographical and Historical Pathology. Translated by C. Creighton, 3 vols. London, 1883-86, II. 92-98.

[870] Miscellaneous Works of the late Robert Willan, M.D., F.R.S., containing an Inquiry into the Antiquity of the Smallpox, Measles, and Scarlet Fever, etc. Edited by Ashby Smith, M.D., London, 1821.

[871] Th. Nöldeke, Geschichte der Araber und Perser, nach Tabari. Leyden, 1879, pp. 218, 219.

[872] The term “autonomy” in the foregoing is used according to the exposition which I originally gave of it in an address to the British Medical Association (1883) on “The Autonomous Life of the Specific Infections” (Brit. Med. Journ., Aug. 4, 1883). The semi-independence of constitutional states has been dealt with in my book, Illustrations of Unconscious Memory in Disease. London, 1885.

[873] The South-African controversy, which became acute, was carried on in journals of the colony (the South African Medical Journal about 1883 and 1884 is a likely source of information), but some echoes of it were heard in letters to the British Medical Journal, 1884. A few years ago a similar diagnostic difficulty arose, not in an African race, but among the inmates of a Paris hospital. In the smallpox wards of the Hôpital St Antoine, a number of cases occurred, one of them in a nurse, another in an assistant physician, of a particular skin-disease, which was either discrete or confluent, lasted about ten days, and was attended by fever up to 40° C. or 41° C. Yet these cases were discriminated from smallpox; they were diagnosed, and have been recorded, as an epidemic of ecthyma. (Du Castel, Gazette des Hôpitaux, 1881, No. 122, quoted in the Jahresbericht.)

[874] Krankheiten des Orients. Erlangen, 1847, p. 127.

[875] History of Physic, II. 190.

[876] Gruner, a learned professor of Jena, who made collections of works or passages relating to syphilis and to the English sweat, published also in 1790 a collection of medieval chapters or sentences on smallpox, “De Variolis et Morbillis fragmenta medicorum Arabistarum,” including the whole of Gaddesden’s chapter but omitting the earlier and more important chapter from Gilbert. Gruner correctly says at the end of his extracts: “while the Arabists write thus, they seem to have followed their Arabic guides, and to have repeated what they received from the latter.” This is obvious from the text of the chapters themselves: some quote more often than others from Avicenna, Rhazes and Isaac; but it is clear that they all base upon the Arabians. The substance is the same in them all; it is a merely verbal handling of Arabic observation and theory. There are no concrete experiences or original additions, from which one might infer that they were familiar at first hand with smallpox and measles. Häser, however, seems to take these chapters in the medieval compends as evidence of the general prevalence of smallpox in Europe in the Middle Ages. As he finds little writing about smallpox when modern medical literature began, he is driven into the paradox that epidemics of smallpox had actually become rarer again in the sixteenth century (III. p. 69). But the sixteenth-century references to smallpox, although they are indeed scanty, are at the same time the earliest authentic accounts of it in Western Europe.

[877] This intention is most clearly expressed by Valescus de Tharanta: “Then let him be wrapped in a woollen cloth of Persian, or at least of red, so that by the sight of the red cloth the blood may be led to the exterior and so be kept at no excessive heat, according to the tenour of the sixth canon [of Avicenna].” Apud Gruner, p. 46.

[878] History of Physic, Pt. II. p. 280.

[879] Rosa Anglica. Papiae, 1492.

[880] Chronica Majora. Rolls ed. V. 452.

[881] Rolls of Parliament.

[882] Early English Text Society’s edition by Skeat. Passus xvi. (108), and Passus vii.

[883] Trench, in his Select Glossary, has adopted the derivation of measles from misellus, without apparently knowing that John of Gaddesden had actually used “mesles” for a form of morbilli. The derivation of measles from misellus has been summarily rejected by Skeat, who thinks that “the spelling with the simple vowel e, instead of ae or ea, makes all the difference. The confusion between the words is probably quite modern.” Perhaps I ought not to contradict a philologist on his own ground; but there is no help for it. I know of four instances in which the simple vowel e is used in spelling the name of the disease that is associated with smallpox, the English equivalent of morbilli. In a letter of July 14, 1518, from Pace, dean of St Paul’s to Wolsey (Cal. State Papers, Henry VIII. II. pt. 1), it is said, “They do die in these parts [Wallingford] in every place, not only of the small pokkes and mezils, but also of the great sickness.” In the Description of the Pest by Dr Gilbert Skene, of Edinburgh (Edin. 1568, reprinted for the Bannatyne Club, 1840, p. 9), he mentions certain states of weather “quhilkis also signifeis the Pokis, Mesillis and siclik diseisis of bodie to follow.” And if a Scotsman’s usage be not admitted, an Oxonian, Cogan, says, “when the small pockes and mesels are rife,” and another Oxonian, Thomas Lodge, in his Treatise of the Plague (London, 1603, Cap. iii.) says: “When as Fevers are accompanied with Small Poxe, Mesels, with spots,” etc. On the other hand, Elyot, in the Castel of Health (1541), Phaer in the Book of Children, (1553), Clowes in his Proved Practice, and Kellwaye (1593) write the word with ea. There is, indeed, no uniformity, just as one might have expected in the sixteenth century. Again, Shakespeare (Coriolanus, Act III., scene I) spells the word with ea where it is clearly the same word that is used in The Vision of Piers the Ploughman in a generic sense and in the spelling of “meseles:”—“Those meazels which we disdain should tetter us.” Lastly, there are not two words in the Elizabethan dictionaries, one with e signifying lepers, and another with ea signifying the disease of morbilli. In Levins’ Manipulus Vocabulorum, we find “ye Maysilles” = variolae, but there is no word “mesles” = leprosi. There was only one word, with the usual varieties of spelling; and in course of time it came to be restricted in meaning to morbilli, Gaddesden’s early use of “mesles” in that sense having doubtless helped to determine the usage.

[884] Harl. MS., No. 2378. So far as I have observed, there is no prescription for “mesles,” or for smallpox under its Latin name or under any English name that might correspond thereto. Moulton’s This is The Myrror or Glasse of Helth (? 1540), which reproduces these medieval prescriptions with their headings, is equally silent about smallpox and measles.

[885] Willan’s Miscellaneous Works. “An Inquiry into the Antiquity of the Smallpox, Measles, and Scarlet Fever.” London, 1821, p. 98. The MS. is Harleian, No. 585.

[886] Sandoval, cited by Hecker, Der Englische Schweiss. Berlin, 1834, p. 80.

[887] MS. Harl., 1568.

[888] There is a fine copy of the earliest printed version in the British Museum, with “Sanctus Albanus” for colophon. The same text was reprinted often in the years following by London printers—in 1498, 1502, 1510, 1515 (twice), and 1528.

[889] Camden Society, ed. Gairdner, 1876, p. 87.

[890] Walsingham, Hist. Angliae, I. 299. Also Chronicon Angliae a quodam Monacho, sub anno 1362.

[891] “Also manie died of the smallpocks, both men, women and children.”

[892] History of the Smallpox, 1817. Blomefield, also, in his History of Norfolk, quotes the passage about “pockys” correctly from the “Fruit of Times,” applies it to Norwich, to which city it had no special relation, and then says that this is the first mention of “small pocks.”

[893] Fabyan’s Chronicle. Ed. Ellis, p. 653.

[894] Levins, Manipulus Vocabulorum, 1570. Camden Society’s edition, column 158.

[895] Lettres du Roy Louis XII. Brusselle, 1712, IV. 335.

[896] Cal. State Papers.

[897] “Item, que à son grand desplaisir il ait esté naguaires mal disposé d’une maladie nommée la petitte verolle, dont à present, graces à Dieu, il est recouvert et passé tout dangier.” Lettres du Roy Louis XII., IV. 260. Brusselle, 1712.

[898] Cal. State Papers.

[899] Cal. State Papers.

[900] Edited by Gairdner for the Camden Society, 1880.

[901] Bannatyne Club’s reprint, 1840, pp. 9-10.

[902] The Loseley Manuscripts. Edited by Kempe. London, 1836, p. 315.

[903] A Defensative against the Plague ... whereunto is annexed a short treatise of the small Poxe, how to govern and help those that are infected therewith. London, 1593.

[904] Francis Davison’s Poetical Rapsodie. The poem of Spilman occurs at p. 189 of the edition of 1611. In the piratical edition of 1621, after Davison’s death, “small” is left out before “Pocks,” and Spilman’s name omitted at the foot of the verses. The printer’s error has had the singular effect of leading Dr Farmer, the writer on Shakespeare, to conclude that the word “pox” in the Elizabethan period meant smallpox even in imprecations such as “a pox on it.”