Note 25 — CHAP. XIII.

The cholera first visited England about the beginning of August 1348. From the seaport towns on the coasts of Dorsetshire, Devonshire, and Somersetshire, it ran to Bristol, and the men of Gloucester established a quarantine between the two places. But this “familiar fury” mocked then as now at the quarantine, and walking in darkness appeared in Gloucestershire to the horror of its inhabitants. From thence it passed by way of Oxford to London, finally spreading all over England, “scattering everywhere such ruin and desolation that of all sorts hardly the tenth person was left alive.”

In the church and churchyard of Yarmouth, 7052 were buried in one year. Within six months, in the city of Norwich more than 57,000 died. In London, death was so outrageously cruel that every day saw twenty, sometimes forty, and sometimes sixty or more dead bodies flung into one pit. The churchyards became crowded. Fields and additional places of burial were set apart, and these soon failed to suffice; the number of the dead increasing so rapidly that “they were fain to make deep ditches and pits very broad, wherein they laid a range of carcasses and a range of earth upon them, and then another range of dead bodies,” and in this manner the people, except those of the better sort, were placed in their long home. The cattle died in hedges and ditches by thousands for want of men to attend them. All suits and pleadings in the King’s Bench and other places ceased. The sessions of parliament were stopped. England and France forgot for a time that they were “natural enemies.” County, city, and town witnessed solemn prayers and public processions for days together, and God was implored in highway and in byway to “sheath his angry sword and preserve the residue from the devouring pestilence.” When this pestilence which yet yearly threatens our coast had passed away, it was found that its prey had been chiefly old men, women, and children of the “common sort of people,” and that but few of the nobility of the land had been seized by it. Property was for a long period depreciated: that which was previously sold for forty shillings, only fetched a mark; and the Scots in scorn invented a new oath, swearing in contempt “by the foul deaths of the English.”