Oxford Black Assizes.
The Assizes met on the 5th and 6th July, 1577, in the Castle and Guild Hall. Those only fell ill, whether in Oxford itself or after leaving, who had been present at the Assizes. The two judges (Robert Bell, Chief Baron of the Exchequer and John Barrham, sergeant-at-law), the sheriff of the county, two knights, eight squires and justices of the peace, several gentlemen and not a few of their servants, the whole of the grand jury with one or two exceptions—these all had not long left Oxford when they were seized with illness and died (statim post fere relictam Oxoniam mortui sunt). In Oxford itself, on the 15th, 16th and 17th July, some ten or twelve days after the Assizes, about three hundred fell ill; and in the next twelve days there died (“ne quid errem”) one hundred scholars, besides townsmen not a few. Five died in Merton College, including one fellow, the names of four being given who died on the 24th, 27th, 28th and 29th July. Every college, hall, or house had its dead. Women were not attacked, nor indeed the poor; nor did the infection spread to those who waited on the sick or came to prescribe for them. Only those who had been present at the Assizes caught the fever. The symptoms are described as follows:
The patients laboured under pain both of the head and of the stomach; they were troubled with phrensy, deprived of understanding, memory, sight, hearing and their other senses. As their malady increased, they took no food, could not sleep, and would not suffer attendants or watchers to be near them; their strength was remarkable, even in the approach of death; but if they recovered they fell into the extreme of weakness. No complexion or constitution was spared; but those of a choleric habit were most obnoxious to the disease. The affected persons suddenly became delirious and furious, overcoming those who tried to hold them; some ran about in courts and in the streets after the manner of insane persons; others leapt headlong into the water. The spirits of all the people were crushed; the physicians fled, and the wretched sufferers were deserted. Masters, doctors, and heads of houses left almost to a man. The Master of Merton remained, longe omnium vigilantissimus, ministering sedulously to the sick. The pharmacies were soon emptied of their conserves, oils, sweet waters, pixides and every kind of confection.
This sudden epidemic, which began on the 15th—17th July, did not last long; within the space of one month the city was restored to its former health, so that one wonders, says the registrary of Merton, to see already so many scholars and so many townsmen abroad in the streets and walks.
The infection was suspected by many, says the same eyewitness, to have arisen either from the fetid and pestilent air of thieves brought forth from prison, of whom two or three died in chains a few days before (quorum duo vel tres sunt ante paucos dies in vinculis mortui), or from the devilishly contrived and obviously papistical spirits called forth “e Lovaniensi barathro,” and let loose upon the court secretly and most wickedly.
The latter explanation arose out of the heated feelings of the time against papist plotters, and has no farther interest. But the statement that two or three of the prisoners had died in chains a few days before has a great interest, as showing the kind of treatment to which they had been subjected while awaiting the gaol delivery. A strange confirmation of the truth of the statement came to light many years after. When John Howard visited the Oxford gaol in 1779, in the course of his humane labours on behalf of the prisoners, he was told by the gaoler that, some years before, wanting to build a little hovel and digging up stones for the purpose from the ruins of the court, which was formerly in the Castle, he found under them a complete skeleton with light chains on the legs, the links very small. “These,” says Howard, “were probably the bones of a malefactor who died in court of the distemper at the Black Assize[787].”
Next to the Merton register’s account, we may take that of Thomas Cogan, a graduate in medicine of Oxford, sometime fellow of Oriel, but probably removed to Manchester previous to 1577. Wherever Cogan got his information, he acknowledges no source of the following in his Haven of Health, 1589:
“What kind of disease this should be which was first at Cambridge [in 1522] and after at Oxford, it is very hard to define, neither hath any man (that I know) written of that matter. Yet my judgment is, be it spoken without offence of the learned physicians, that the disease was Febris ardens, a burning fever. For as much as the signes of a burning ague did manifestly appear in this disease, which after Hollerius be these: Extreame heate of the body, vehement thirst, loathing of meate, tossing to and fro, and unquietnesse, dryness of the tongue rough and blacke, griping of the belly, cholerick laske, cruell ake of the head, no sound sleepe, or no sleepe at all, raving and phrensie, the end whereof, to life or death, is bleeding at the nose, great vomitting, sweate or laske. And this kind of sicknesse is one of those rods, and the most common rod, wherewith it pleaseth God to brake his people for sin.... And this disease indeed, as it is God’s messenger, and sometimes God’s poaste, because it commeth poaste haste, and calleth us quickly away, so it is commonly the Pursuivant of the pestilence and goeth before it.... And certainly after that sodaine bane at Oxford, the same yeare, and a yeare or two following, the same kind of ague raged in a manner over all England, and tooke away very many of the strongest sort, and in their lustiest age, and for the most part, men and not women nor children, culling them out here and there, even as you should chuse the best sheepe out of a flocke. And certaine remedy was none to be found.... And they that took a moderate sweate at the beginning of their sickness and did rid their stomachs well by vomit sped much better. Yet thanks be to God hitherto no great plague hath ensued upon it.”
Besides these medical particulars, he gives certain dates and numbers. It began, he says, on the 6th of July, from which date to the 12th of August next ensuing there died of the same sickness five hundred and ten persons, all men and no women: the chiefest of which were the two judges, Sir Robert Ball, lord chief baron, and maister Sergeant Baram, maister Doile the high sheriff, five of the justices, four councillors at law and an attorney. The rest were jurors and such as repaired thither.
An account not unlike Cogan’s is given by Stow in his Annales (p. 681);
“The 4, 5 and 6 dayes of July were the assizes holden at Oxford, where was arraigned and condemned one Rowland Jenkes for his seditious toung, at which time there arose amidst the people such a dampe, that almost all were smothered, very few escaped that were not taken at that instant: the Jurors died presently. Shortly after died Sir Robert Bell, lord chief baron, Sir Robert de Olie, Sir William Babington, maister Weneman, maister de Olie, high sheriff, maister Davers, maister Harcurt, maister Kirle, maister Phereplace, maister Greenwood, maister Foster, maister Nash, sergeaunt Baram, maister Stevens, and there died in Oxford 300 persons, and sickned there but died in other places 200 and odde, from the 6th of July to the 12th of August, after which died not one of that sicknesse, for one of them infected not another, nor any one woman or child died thereof.”
Stow’s account differs from that of the Merton College register in several important particulars. The latter is explicit that the sickness appeared among the scholars and townsmen of Oxford on the 15th, 16th and 17th of July, or after an interval of ten days or more, and that the deaths amongst those who had come to Oxford on Assize business did not occur in Oxford but on their return home. On the other hand, Stow makes out the Oxford people to have been smothered by the damp which arose in the court itself: “very few escaped that were not taken ill at that instant;” next come the deaths of the jurors, and “shortly after” those of the judges and other high officials, whose names are given by Stow more fully than by anyone. His total of deaths, the same as Cogan’s, is 300 in Oxford and 200 and odd of persons who had left Oxford, and his dates, “from the 6th of July to the 12th of August,” are also the same as Cogan’s.
Wood’s account is for the most part taken from the Merton register and in part from the very different version in Stow’s Annals; but he has the following new matter: “Above 600 sickened in one night, as a physician that now lived in Oxford attesteth, and the day after, the infectious air being carried into the next villages, sickened there an hundred more[788].” That, of course, is very unlike the Merton College account, which is explicit that no one caught the fever who had not been in the court. The Oxford physician whose authority is given for the six hundred cases in Oxford in one night, and the extension next day to villages around, is Dr George Ethredge, or Ethryg, a physician and learned Greek scholar living in Oxford at the time and keeping a boarding-house, called George Hall, for the sons of Catholic gentlemen. In 1588 he published a small volume of comments upon some books of Paulus Aegineta, which is the authority given by Wood[789]. On discovering the passage, one finds that it was not 600 in one night, but “sexaginta” or 60, and that the occasion on which more than sixty were taken ill at once in a single night at Oxford, and nearly a hundred next day in the adjacent villages, “whither the infected air had by chance been borne,” was not that of the gaol-fever in 1577 but of the sweating sickness in 1551. An extension in the atmosphere to the villages around is just what would have happened in the sweating sickness, a disease in that as in other respects closely analogous to influenza. Ethredge says that, on the particular occasion, “hardly any of the Oxford people died”—a statement which should of itself have prevented Wood’s mistake, even if the reference to the same disease having “at the same time” cut off the two sons of the duke of Suffolk “at Cambridge” (therefore a less healthy place than Oxford where hardly any died) had not quite clearly pointed to the sudor Britannicus, which is actually named in the context (“sic enim vocant”)[790].
Although, in the passage quoted, it is the sweating sickness at Oxford in 1551 that Ethredge refers to, he does also refer to the gaol fever of 1577 in another passage which has hitherto escaped notice.
In the section of his book next following, entitled “De Curatione morborum populariter grassantium, et de Peste,” he says that he had used a certain prescription of aloes, ammoniacum and myrrh rubbed together in wine, for himself as well as for others in a serious contagion, “quae fuit in martiali sede cum ibi essem,” and also, with happy effect, upon many “in the most cruel pest at Oxford which carried off Judge Bell and ever so many more; one gentleman, I could not persuade to try this medicine, whom therefore I commended to God, and four days after he was dead. Concerning that pestilential fever, many colloquies took place between me and two most learned physicians; and, as to the kind of this contagion, we all agreed (manibus et pedibus in hanc sententiam itum est) in a sentence which I quoted from Valescus, who sayeth thus: Those sicknesses are dangerous in such wise that the physicians may be for the most part deceived; for we see a good hypostasis in the urine, and some other good signs, yet the sick person dies”—a remark which often recurs in the early writings on plague.
It has taken longer than usual to determine the matter of fact as to the fever of the Oxford Black Assizes, because an erroneous version passes current on respectable authority; but enough has perhaps been said to enable us to pass from the matter of fact to the matter of theory[791].
The theory of the gaol fever at Oxford, in 1577, was not attempted by any writer at the time, nor indeed has it been so in later times; but the significance of the outbreak has been recognized and admitted. An Oxford scholar, Dr Plot, writing just a century after (1677) mentions the statement that a “poisonous steam” broke forth from the earth, having probably in his mind Stow’s imaginative explanation, that a damp arose amongst the people and smothered them, very few escaping that were not taken at that instant. Plot then proceeds:—
“But let it not be ascribed to ill fumes and exhalations ascending from the earth and poysoning the Air, for such would have equally affected the prisoners as judges, but we find not that they dyed otherwise than by the halter, which easily perswades me to be of the mind of my lord Verulam (Nat. Hist. cent. X. num. 914) who attributes it wholly to the smell of the Gaol where the prisoners had been long, close, and nastily kept.”
We know, indeed, from the register of Merton that “two or three of the prisoners died in chains a few days before,” which is a sufficient indication of the state they were kept in, but is no warrant for Anthony Wood’s free rendering of the words: “of whom two or three, being overcome with it [i.e. with the “nasty and pestilential smell of the prisoners”] died a few days before the Assizes began.” Two or three prisoners died in their chains with symptoms undescribed; and although typhus among the inmates of gaols has often occurred, it has also been wanting in many cases where the filth and misery might have bred it in the prisoners themselves[792].
Bacon’s judgment on the case, referred to above, was based upon a strict scrutiny of the evidence, and does not transcend the evidence. He attributes the infection that arose in the court to “the smell of the gaol;” and so as not to assume a smell which does not appear to have attracted any particular notice at the time, he is careful to explain in what sense he means the smell of the gaol:
“The most pernicious infection,” he says, “next the plague, is the smell of the jail, when prisoners have been long and close and nastily kept; whereof we have had in our time experience twice or thrice; when both the judges that sat upon the jail, and numbers of those that attended the business or were present, sickened upon it and died. Therefore it were good wisdom, that in such cases the jail were aired before they be brought forth....
“Leaving out of question such foul smells as be made by art and by the hand, they consist chiefly of man’s flesh or sweat putrefied; for they are not those stinks which the nostrils straight abhor and expel, that are most pernicious; but such airs as have some similitude with man’s body, and so insinuate themselves and betray the spirits[793].”