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

plague of 1563, namely from Havre, which was then held by an English garrison. But on that occasion the epidemic in London was gaining ground before the sickness at Havre had declared itself plague, and was of the bubonic type while the latter was still a malignant fever. The return of the whole English garrison from Havre, with the seeds of sickness among them, might well have introduced infection; but that return was not until the end of July, by which time the mortality in London had been progressing for two months. There is equally little reason for Stow’s statement that the plague of 1603 was brought to London from Ostend, or for the corresponding theory of origin for the plague of 1625. A foreign source was not thought of unless the plague became one of the greater degree. Year after year in London there were a few cases of plague, and sometimes for a succession of years the plague-deaths kept steadily at a level of from one thousand to three thousand. There are, indeed, few years from 1348 to 1666 in which the infection did not declare its presence in London. Whether the few threatening cases in the spring were to rise to a plague of the greater degree depended upon a concurrence of circumstances--upon the interval since the last great plague, upon the number of strangers crowding to the capital, and upon the kind of weather preceding. In 1665 the various determining things did chance to come together, and a plague of the first degree ensued. The one singular thing in the history is that such a concurrence never happened again, or that the conditions had so far changed (certainly not for the better), that the type of epidemic disease was no longer the bubo-plague. According to precedent, a great plague was somewhat overdue in the year