Cambridge Black Assizes.
In the 13th year of Henry VIII. at the Assize held in the Castle of Cambridge in Lent, “the justices and all the gentlemen, bailiffs and other, resorting thither, took such an infection, whether it were of the savour of the prisoners, or of the filth of the house, that many gentlemen, as Sir John Cut, Sir Giles Arlington, Knights, and many other honest yeomen, thereof died, and almost all which were present were sore sick, and narrowly escaped with their lives[785].”
It is to be observed that nothing is said of the prisoners being infected: they were brought from the dungeons to stand their trial in due course, and the gentlemen and yeomen attending the court officially or as jurors, or otherwise, were poisoned by their presence. This early chronicle indicates as the cause, “the savour of the prisoners, or the filth of the house;” and Bacon, in touching upon that class of incidents nearly a century later, indicates “the smell of the gaol,” but says nothing of cases of fever among the prisoners, having no warrant in the evidence for doing so.
Before we come to consider the condition of England in the Tudor period, with the policy of Henry VIII. for the repression of beggary and crime, and the appearance of “new fevers” or “strange fevers” and “laskes” in the chronicles and other records of the time, it will be desirable to make out as accurately as possible the clinical type of the Assizes fever, and its circumstances. For that purpose we must turn to the next recorded outbreak on the occasion of the Assizes at Oxford in 1577, which happens to have been somewhat fully described as a memorable event in the register of Merton College. The entry in the Merton register appears to have been made within a few weeks of the event[786].