A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 1 (of 2) / From A.D. 664 to the Extinction of Plague

by Charles Creighton

Fever in England, 1651-2.

Between those plagues of the years 1644-1650 and the final re-appearance of the infection on English soil from 1665 to 1666, the interval is occupied with a good deal of fever both in town and country. The sicknesses of those years are of interest as having been described by two competent physicians, Willis and Whitmore.

There were two principal periods of the epidemics, the years 1651-2 and 1657-9. In the former period the sickness appears to have been mostly in the north-west. Whitmore, who had seen practice in the Civil War, in Staffordshire and Shropshire, appears to have been in Chester in 1651, and was settled in London in 1657. It is from him that our information mostly comes[1114].

“It is well known,” he says, “that this disease in the year 1651 [the same fever that he describes more fully for the years 1658 and 1659] first broke out by the seaside in Cheshire, Lancashire, and North Wales.... In Cheshire in the year 1651 this disease seized most upon the country people who were laborious, the seeds being sooner dispersed in them through the agitation of the humours and spirits in their harvest labours, than on those who lead a more sedentary life; and that might be one reason why we were so free in the city of Chester, when within three or four miles of us round about, whole towns were infected with it, there being 80 and 100 sick at a time in small villages, as at Stanney, Dunham-on-the-hill, Norton and all there abouts by the water side it extremely raged.”

Whitmore refers to something that he had written, “for my private use,” on the subject of this fever as far back as 1642; he remarks also that it raged every autumn in some place or other of the kingdom, and mentions his own experience in Staffordshire and Shropshire during the late war. But it is the epidemic in Cheshire, Lancashire and North Wales, in 1651 that he specially describes, side by side with those of 1658 and 1659; and it is of interest to note his suggestion as to the origin of the fever on both shores of the Mersey. It was well known that the fever in 1651 first broke out by the seaside in Cheshire, Lancashire and North Wales:

“And if it were observed in Holland that on a misty day, that infectious disease the Sudor Anglicus came into Amsterdam in an afternoon, five hundred or more dying that night of it, as Lemnius reports, I know not why we may not as well suppose their opposite neighbour, Dublin, then visited for two years with the plague, should not have communicated the same to them though in a more remiss degree.”

Here the suggestion is that the prevalence of plague on the opposite coast of Ireland had given rise to a minor and “more remiss” contagion along the coasts of North Wales, Cheshire and Lancashire. But the plague had been most severe in Chester itself before it broke out in Ireland, and had been severe in Shrewsbury at the same time as in Ireland. Whatever the theory, it is significant that the corner of England which was the worst and perhaps only seat of plague in 1648 and 1650, was the seat of a malignant fever in 1651, the former having been in the towns, and the latter in the country villages.

We get a glimpse of a heavy mortality among the country people the year after at Bootle, in Cumberland, just across the border from Lancashire[1115]. On July 8, 1652, Thomas Wharton writes from Kirkdale to Edward Moore:

“There was a boy at widow Robinson’s died upon Saturday in Whitsun week, and upon the Wednesday before he was sawying at the steward Worsley’s house with his wrights. The boy and the steward’s man slept together in Worsley’s barn; towards night the boy was not well, and could work no longer. All this John Wiggan of Kirkdale did see. Next, John Birch died, and four of his children—all are dead but his wife. At John Robinson’s, one child and his wife died last week, and upon Wednesday last two children more died; and it was thought by the constable of Bootle that he would be dead before this day at night. Upon Wednesday at night last, at James Pye’s, there died two, his son and daughter; and a servant of Thomas Doubie’s is dead; and it is this day broken forth in Bridge’s, as we hear.”

On what evidence this country epidemic is called “the plague” by the antiquary who prints the document does not appear. The fatality of the disease would suggest plague, rather than fever; but the fever itself would seem to have been more malignant at one place than another, and at one time than another, and there may have been at Bootle cases unmentioned which recovered. If it had been true bubo-plague, it is a solitary instance, so far as records go, in the fifteen years between the extinction of plague at Shrewsbury in 1650, and its revival in London and elsewhere in 1665. The epidemic disease that we ordinarily hear of in that interval is fever; and of the fever our best accounts, after Whitmore’s reference to 1651, are of the epidemics in 1657, 1658 and 1659.