A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 1 (of 2) by Charles Creighton

THE BLACK DEATH. The most likely of the fourteenth-century English annalists to have given us a good account of the Black Death was the historian Ranulphus Higden, author of the _Polychronicon_, who became a monk of St Werburgh’s abbey at Chester about the beginning of the century, and lived to see the disastrous year of 1349[212]. That part of his history which relates to his own period he brings down year by year to 1348, with less fulness of detail in the later years, as if old age were making him brief. Under the year 1348 he begins the subject of the great mortality, speaks of the incessant rains of the second half of the year from Midsummer to Christmas, refers to the ravages of the plague at Avignon, the then ecclesiastical capital of Christendom, just mentions England and Ireland, and then lets the pen fall from his hand. Higden is believed to have resumed his annals after 1352; but he was then a very old man, and the last entries are unimportant. But the period from 1348 to 1352 is an absolute blank. He comes to the edge of the great subject of that time, as if he had intended to deal with it comprehensively, beginning with a notice of the previous weather, which is by no means irrelevant, and after two or three lines more he breaks off. Most of the monastic chronicles are interrupted at the same point; if there is an entry at all under the year 1349 it is for the most part merely the words magna mortalitas. The prevailing sense of desolation and despair comes out in the record made by a friar of Kilkenny, who kept a chronicle of passing events, and escaped the fate of his brethren in the convent only long enough to record a few particulars of the great mortality[213]: “And I, friar John Clyn, of the Order of Friars Minor, and of the convent of Kilkenny, wrote in this book those notable things which happened in my time, which I saw with my eyes, or which I learned from persons worthy of credit. And lest things worthy of remembrance should perish with time, and fall away from the memory of those who are to come after us, I, seeing these many evils, and the whole world lying, as it were, in the wicked one, among the dead waiting for death till it come--as I have truly heard and examined, so have I reduced these things to writing; and lest the writing should perish with the writer, and the work fail together with the workman, I leave parchment for continuing the work, if haply any man survive, and any of the race of Adam escape this pestilence and continue the work which I have commenced.” There is nothing in the English chronicles so directly personal as that, but there are some facts recorded of the mortality in four of them which have contemporary value, or almost contemporary. The best of these accounts, as a piece of history, is that of Henry Knighton, canon of Leicester[214], who acknowledges his indebtedness to Higden’s _Polychronicon_ for the events down to 1326, but after that date either writes from his own observation or takes his facts from some unknown contemporary source. The next in importance is Geoffrey le Baker[215], a clerk of the abbey of Osney, near Oxford, whose account of the arrival of the Black Death in England has obtained wide currency as copied literally in the 1605 edition of Stow’s _Annals_. The third is Robert de Avesbury[216], whose _History of Edward III._ serves as a chronicle for the city of London more particularly. The fourth is the Malmesbury monk who wrote, about 1367, the chronicle known as the _Eulogium_[217]. From the systematic paragraphs of those writers, and from various other incidental notices, an outline of the progress of the pestilence in England, Scotland and Ireland, may be traced. It entered English soil at a port of Dorsetshire--said in the _Eulogium_ to have been Melcombe (Weymouth)--in the beginning of August, 1348. It is said to have spread rapidly through Dorset, Devon and Somerset, almost stripping those counties of their inhabitants, and to have reached Bristol by the 15th of August. The people of Gloucester in vain tried to keep out the infection by cutting off all intercourse with Bristol; from Gloucester it came to Oxford, and from Oxford to London, reaching the capital at Michaelmas, according to one account, or at All Saints (1st November) according to another. Although the 15th of August is definitely given as the date of its arrival at Bristol from the Dorset coast, it must not be assumed that the infection covered the ground so quickly as that in the rest of its progresses. We have a measure of the rate of its advance south-westward through Devonshire to Cornwall, in a contemporary entry in the register of the Church of Friars Minor at Bodmin[218]: confirming the independent statements that the pestilence entered England at the beginning of August, the register goes on to record that it reached the town of Bodmin shortly before Christmas, and that there died in that town about fifteen hundred persons, as estimated. The corporation records of Bridport, a town near to the place in Dorset where the infection landed, show that four bailiffs held office, instead of two, in the 23rd of Edward III., _in tempore pestilentiae_; the 23rd of Edward III. would begin 25 Jan. 1349, but the municipal year would probably have extended from September 1348, so that Bridport may have had the infection before the end of that year[219]. It seems probable that the smaller towns, and the villages, all over the South-west, had been infected in the end of 1348, but somewhat later than Bristol and Gloucester. The mandate of Ralph, bishop of Bath and Wells, “On confessions in the time of the pestilence,” is dated Wynchelcomb, 4. id. Jan. M.CCC.XLVIII. (10 January, 1349) and it speaks of the contagion spreading everywhere, and of many parish churches and other cures in his diocese being left without curate and priest to visit the sick and administer the sacraments[220]. The autumn of 1348 may be taken, then, as correct for the South-west; and there is no doubt that the infection had been severe enough in London before the end of that year to move the authorities to action. “Owing to the increasing severity of the sudden plague day by day at Westminster and places adjoining,” Parliament was prorogued on the 1st of January, 1349[221]. There was a further prorogation on the 10th of March, for the reason given that “the pestilence was continuing at Westminster, in the city of London, and in other places, more severely than before” (_gravius solito_)[222]. This agrees with Avesbury’s statement that the epidemic in London reached a height (_in tantum excrevit_) after Candlemas, 1349, and that it was over about Pentecost. One of the best proofs of the season and duration of the Black Death in London is got from the number of wills enrolled in the Husting Court of the city in the successive months. Those who died of the plague leaving wills were, of course, but a small fraction of the whole mortality; but the wills during some eight months of 1349 are ten or fifteen times more numerous than in any other year before or after, excepting perhaps the year of the _pestis secunda_, 1361. Starting from 3 in November, 1348 (none in December), the probates rise to 18 in January, 1349, 42 in February, 41 in March, none in April (owing to paralysis of business, doubtless), but 121 in May, 31 in June, 51 in July, none in August and September, 18 in October, 27 in November, and then an ordinary average[223]. Thus it would have had a duration of some seven or eight months in the capital, with a curve of increase, maximum intensity, and decrease, just as the great London epidemics of the same disease in the 16th and 17th centuries are known from the weekly bills to have had. It does not appear to have been felt at all in Norwich and other places in the Eastern Counties until the end of March, 1349, its enormous ravages in that part of England falling mostly in the summer. There is a definite statement that it began at York about the feast of the Ascension, by which time it had almost ceased in London, and that it lasted in the capital of the northern province until the end of July. The infection almost emptied the abbey of Meaux, in Holdernesse, of its monks, and the abbey lands of their tenants; and the date given in the abbey chronicle is the month of August, 1349. The spring and summer of that year appear to have been the seasons of the great mortality all over England, excepting perhaps in the southern counties where the outbreak began; even at Oxford, which is one of the towns mentioned as on the route of the pestilence from Dorsetshire to London, the mortality is entered under the year 1349, which was also the year of its enormous prevalence among the farmers and peasants on the manor of Winslow, in the county of Bucks. Its invasion of the mountainous country of Wales (by no means exempt from plague in the 17th century) may have been a season later--_anno sequenti_, says Le Baker, which may mean either 1349 or 1350. In the Irish annals, the first mention of the pestilence is under the year 1348; but it was probably only the rumour of the mortality at Avignon and elsewhere abroad that caused the alarm in Ireland among ecclesiastics and in gatherings of the people. It was first seen on the shores of Dublin Bay, at Howth and Dalkey, and a little farther north on the coast at Drogheda; it raged in Dublin “from the beginning of August until the Nativity[224],” which may mean the year 1348, although the year 1349 is the date given for the great mortality in Ireland in later chronicles. The experience of Scotland illustrates still farther the slow progression of the plague, and its dependence to some extent upon the season of the year. Two English chroniclers (Le Baker and Knighton) mention that it got among the Scots assembled in the forest of Selkirk for an invasion at the time when the mortality was greatest in the northern counties, the autumn of 1349. But the winter cold must have held it in check as regards the rest of Scotland; for it is clear from Fordoun that its great season in that country generally was the year 1350. Thus the Black Death may be said to have extended over three seasons in the British Islands--a partial season in the south of England in 1348, a great season all over England, in Ireland and in the south of Scotland in 1349, and a late extension to Scotland generally in 1350. The experience of all Europe was similar, the Mediterranean provinces receiving the infection as early as 1347, and the northern countries, on the Baltic and North Seas, as late as 1350. Symptoms and Type of the Black Death. This sweeping pestilence was part of a great wave of infection which passed over Europe from the remote East, and of which we shall trace the antecedents in the latter part of this chapter. The type and symptoms of the disease are sufficiently well-known from foreign descriptions--by Guy de Chauliac and Raymond de Chalin, both of Avignon, by Boccaccio, and by the Villani of Florence. It was the bubo-plague, a disease which is known to have existed in Egypt in the time of the Ptolemies, and made its first great incursion from that country into Europe in the reign of Justinian in the year 543 (see Chapter I.). Its second great invasion, but from a new direction, was the Black Death of 1347-9; and from that time it remained domesticated in the soil of Europe for more than three hundred years as “the plague.” The first medical descriptions of it by native British writers are comparatively late. Manuscript treatises or “ordinances” on the plague circulated in England from the reign of Richard II., most of them being copies of a short work of no great value by one John of Burgoyne or John of Bordeaux. There is also extant an English translation in manuscript, assigned to the 14th century (but belonging to the end of it, if not to the 15th), of a really good work on the plague by the bishop of Aarhus, in Denmark, of which I shall have more to say in the next chapter. But none of these give English experience; and the earliest of our 16th century plague-books, by Phaer, is a compilation mostly, if not entirely, from the Danish bishop’s treatise, the latter having been printed in its English form in or near 1480. It is not until we come to the work of Dr Gilbert Skene of Edinburgh, printed in 1568, that we find a treatise on plague showing traces of first-hand observation and reflection. Then follow the essay of Simon Kellwaye on the London plague of 1593, and that of the well-known Elizabethan poet and physician Thomas Lodge, on the plague of 1603. Thus the reign of the plague in Britain was approaching an end before the native medical profession began to write upon it. Its eventful history from its arrival in 1348 down to a comparatively late period has to be constructed from other materials than the records or systematic writings of the faculty. The type of the Black Death in England is sufficiently indicated by Le Baker, who was probably living at Osney, near Oxford, when the infection began, and indubitably by friar Clyn of Kilkenny. Le Baker mentions the _apostemata_ or swellings in diverse parts, their sudden eruption, and their extreme hardness and dryness, so that hardly any fluid escaped when they were lanced according to the usual method of treating them[225]. He speaks also of a peculiarly fatal form, from which few or none recovered; it was characterised by “small black pustules” on the skin, probably the livid spots or “tokens” which came to be considered the peculiar mark of the plague, and were certainly the index of a malignant type of it, just as the corresponding haemorrhages are in pestilential fever (or typhus) and in yellow fever. The disease, he adds, was swift in doing its work: one day people were in high health and the next day dead and buried. Knighton also says, with special reference to Bristol, that the attack was fatal sometimes within twelve hours, and usually within three days at the most. The treatment, which would have been, according to all subsequent experience, the privilege only of those who could pay for it, would appear to have consisted in lancing the risings or botches in the armpits, neck, or groins; these were the lymph-glands enlarged to the size of a walnut or of a hen’s egg, and of a livid colour,--the most striking and certain of all the plague-signs. Clyn’s account of the disease, as he saw it at Kilkenny in 1349, is important for including one remarkable symptom on which great importance has been laid as distinctive of the Black Death among the epidemics of bubo-plague, namely haemorrhage from the lungs: “For many died from carbuncles, and boils, and botches which grew on the legs and under the arms; others from passion of the head, as if thrown into a frenzy; others by vomiting blood[226].” It was so contagious, he says, that those who touched the dead, or even the sick, were incontinently infected that they died, and both penitent and confessor were borne together to the same grave. Such was the fear and horror of it that men scarce dared exercise the offices of pity, namely, to visit the sick and bury the dead. Clyn’s list of symptoms includes all the most prominent features of the plague as we shall find them described for the great epidemics of the Stuart period--the botches in the armpits or groins, the carbuncles, the boils (or blains), and the frenzy or delirium, as well as the special symptom of the great mortality--vomiting of blood. Of the botch, which was the most striking sign of the plague, the following description, by Woodall (1639), may be introduced here, to supplement the more meagre accounts of the bubo-plague on its first appearance. Woodall had himself suffered from the bubo or botch on two occasions, in its comparatively safe suppurating form; his description relates to the hard, tense, and dry botch, especially mentioned by Le Baker for 1349, and always the index of great malignity: “But the pestilential bubo or boyle commeth ever furiously on, and as in a rage of a Feaver, and as being in haste; sometimes it lighteth on or near the inguen thwart, but more often lower upon the thigh, pointing downward with one end, the upper end towards the belly being commonly the biggest or the fullest part of the bubo, the whole thigh being also inflamed[227].” Of this disease, says Le Baker, few of the first rank died, but of the common people an incalculable number, and of the clergy and the cleric class a multitude known to God only. It was mostly the young and strong who were cut off, the aged and weakly being commonly spared. No one dared come near the sick, and the bodies of the dead were shunned. Both Le Baker and Knighton speak of whole villages and hamlets left desolate, and of numbers of houses, both great and small, left empty and falling to ruin. It was not merely one in a house that died, says friar Clyn of Kilkenny, but commonly husband, wife, children and domestics all went the same way of death; the friar himself wrote as one _inter mortuos mortem expectans_. Without naming the locality, Avesbury says that in a single day, twenty, forty, sixty or more corpses were buried in the same trench[228]. The stereotyped phrase in the monastic chronicles is that not more than a tenth part of the people were left alive. However, the author of the _Eulogium_, a monk of Malmesbury who brought his history down to 1366, gives a numerical estimate at the other extreme. He says that the plague entered England at Melcumbe, destroyed innumerable people in Dorset, Devon and Somerset, and, having left few alive in Bristol, proceeded northwards, leaving no city, nor town, nor hamlet, nor scarcely a house, in which it did not cut off the greater part of the people, or the whole of them; but he adds, somewhat inconsequently, “so that a fifth part of the men, women and children in all England were consigned to the grave[229].” These are the vague contemporary estimates of the mortality--ranging from nine-tenths to one-fifth of the whole population. It is possible, however, to come much nearer to precision by the systematic use of documents; and in that exercise we shall now proceed, in an order from the more general to the more particular. Estimates of the Mortality. There are two State documents the language of which favours the more moderate kind of estimate. In a letter of the king[230], dated 1 December, 1349, or after the epidemic was over, to the mayor and bailiffs of Sandwich, ordering them to watch all who took ship for foreign parts so as to arrest the exit of men and money, the preamble or motive is: “Quia non modica pars populi regni nostri Angliae praesenti Pestilentia est defuncta.” (Forasmuch as no mean part of the people of our kingdom of England is dead of the present pestilence.) The Statute of Labourers, 18 November, 1350, begins: “Quia magna pars populi, et maximé operariorum et servientium jam in ultima pestilentia est defuncta.” (Forasmuch as a great part of the people, principally of artisans and labourers, is dead in the late pestilence.) The statute would have emphasized the loss of artizans and labourers as these were its special subjects, but the _maximé operariorum et servientium_ may be fairly taken in a literal sense to mean that the adult and able-bodied of the working class suffered most. One of the contemporary chronicles says that the women and children were sent to take the places of the men in field labour[231]. It is also significant that the “second plague” of 1361 is named by two independent chroniclers the _pestis puerorum_, or plague of the juveniles, as if it were now their turn. The _pestis secunda_ was also notable, both in England and on the Continent, for the numbers of the nobility which it carried off, and in that respect it was contrasted with the Black Death. Next we come to certain numerical statements as to the mortality of 1349, which have an air of precision. They relate to Leicester, Oxford, Bodmin, Norwich, Yarmouth and London. In Leicester, according to Knighton, who was a canon there at the time or shortly after, the burials from the Black Death were more than 700 in St Margaret’s churchyard, more than 400 in Holy Cross parish (afterwards St Martin’s), more than 380 in St Leonard’s parish, which was a small one, and in the same proportion in the other parishes, which were three or four in number, and none of them so large as the two first named. Knighton’s round numbers for three parishes are not improbable, considering that Leicester was a comparatively populous town at the time of the poll-tax of 1377: the numbers who paid the tax were 2101, which would give, by the usual way of reckoning, a population of