Plague in Ireland in the Tudor period.
The accounts of plague in Ireland in the Tudor period are not many, but some of them are of interest. The province of Munster is said to have had a pestilence raging in it in 1504, evidently not a famine-fever, for the dearth, and mortality therefrom, came in 1505[772]. There is no doubt as to the reality of the next plague in Ireland, in 1520.
The earl of Surrey writes from Dublin to Wolsey, on the 3rd August, 1520: “There is a marvellous death in all this country, which is so sore that all the people be fled out of their houses into the fields and woods, where they in likewise die wonderfully; so that their bodies be dead like swine unburied.” On the 23rd July he had already written that there was sickness in the English pale; and on the 6th September he wrote again that the death continued in the English pale[773]. It is perhaps the same epidemic, or an extension of it, that is referred to as the plague raging in Munster in 1522[774]. On the same authority, “a most violent plague” is said to have been in the city of Cork in 1535, and “a great plague” in the same in 1547. The earlier of those dates corresponds probably to a season of ill-health in Ireland generally: “1536. This year was a sickly, unhealthy year, in which numerous diseases, viz. a general plague, and smallpox [i.e. a disease with an Irish name supposed to be smallpox], and a flux plague, and the bed-distemper prevailed exceedingly[775].” In a State letter from Ireland September 10, 1535, the prevalence of “plague” is mentioned[776].
In the winter of 1566-7, a remarkable outbreak of plague occurred among the English troops quartered around the old monastery of the Derry, at the head of Loch Foyle, where Londonderry was afterwards built. The men were landed there in October, and by November “the flux was reigning among them wonderfully.” On December 18 and January 13, many of the soldiers are dead, the rest are discontented, and provisions are short. On February 16, the sickness continues, “in this miserable place,” and on March 26, the death at the Derry is said to be by cold and infection: the survivors to be removed to Strangford Haven[777]. Only 300 men were fit for service out of 1100, and several officers of rank were dead. The men’s quarters had been built over the graveyard of the ancient abbey, and the infection of plague was ascribed at the time to the emanations from the soil[778]. The scarcity was general in Ireland that winter, and was attended by great mortality. Sir Philip Sydney, the lord deputy, writes to the queen on April 20, 1567: “Yea the view of the bones and skulls of your dead subjects who, partly by murder, partly by famine, have died in the fields is such that hardly any Christian with dry eye could behold[779].”
In 1575 there was a severe and wide-spread outbreak of plague, the localities specially named being Wexford, Dublin, Naas, Athy, Carlow, and Leighlin. The city of Dublin was as if deserted of people, so that grass grew in the streets and at the doors of churches; no term was held after Trinity, and prayers were appointed by the archbishop throughout the whole province[780]. The extremity of the plague in Ireland was such that the English troops sent by way of Chester and Holyhead had difficulty in finding a safe place to land[781]. Whether that outbreak had been connected with the military operations (as afterwards in Cromwell’s time), the information does not enable us to judge; but Chester and other places near, in direct communication with Ireland, had been visited with plague the year before (1574).
CHAPTER VII.
GAOL FEVERS, INFLUENZAS, AND OTHER FEVERS IN THE TUDOR PERIOD.
The Common Gaols of England date from the Council of Clarendon, in 1164, by the articles of which the limits of civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction were fixed, and the quarrel between archbishop Becket and Henry II. reduced to terms. In obedience to Article VII. of the Council, gaols were built, the chief among them having been at Canterbury, Rochester, Huntingdon, Cambridge, Malmesbury, Sarum, Aylesbury, and Bedford[782]. Little is heard of the unwholesomeness of prison life until the medieval period is nearly over—not indeed because the prisons were better managed than they were later. “In the year 1385,” says Stow, “William Walworth gave somewhat to relieve the prisoners in Newgate; so have many others since.” One benefactor brought a supply of water into Newgate; another, the famous Whittington, left money actually to rebuild the gaol, which was done in 1422. For several years before that, Newgate had been notorious. An ordinance of 7 Henry V. (1419) for the re-establishment of the debtor’s prison at Ludgate, so that debtors need not have to go to Newgate gaol, was made in compliance with a petition which said that, in “the hateful gaol of Newgate, by reason of the fetid and corrupt atmosphere, many persons committed to the said gaol are now dead[783].” The greatest mortality must have been, according to Stow, in 1414, when the gaolers of Newgate and Ludgate died, and sixty-four prisoners in Newgate[784].
More than a century after, in 1522, there occurred the first of a series of gaol-fever tragedies, which were well calculated to produce the effect ascribed by Aristotle to scenic tragedy, provided only the workings of cause and effect had been more apparent. The first of these historical Black Assizes occurred on the occasion of the gaol delivery at the Castle of Cambridge in Lent, 1522. The facts, which appear to be given nowhere but in Hall’s Chronicle (of almost contemporary authority), are less fully related than for some of the later instances of the same strange visitation; but there is no mistaking the air of reality and the generic likeness.