Plague in Scotland, 1603-24.
The history of the plague in Scotland, which we left in a former chapter at the year 1603, begins again in that year and goes on at one place or another continuously until 1609. From June, 1603, until February, 1604, it continued in the south of Scotland. At Edinburgh, in April, 1604, the house of Mr John Hall was “clengit,” because a servant woman’s death was suspected of the plague: which infection certainly spread in May and became so severe in July that people fled the city[985]. A letter of July 18 from Codrus Cottage, relating to gold-mining, and making mention of Closeburn, says that the plague is amongst the men[986].
In 1605, towards the end of July, the infection reappeared at Edinburgh, Leith, and St Andrews[987]. On October 7, the chancellor of Scotland, Lord Dunfermline, wrote to the earl of Salisbury that the plague was rife in the small towns about Edinburgh, probably its old favourite seats along the Firth and on the Fife coast[988]. The chancellor himself, as we know from another source, had had a sad experience of it in his own house; his son and niece had died of the plague, and his daughter “had the boils” but recovered[989]. The next year, 1606, was the worst of this plague-period in Scotland: “It raged so extremely in all the corners of the kingdoms that neither burgh nor land in any part was free. The burghs of Ayr and Stirling were almost desolate, and all the judicatures of the land were deserted[990].” It is to this epidemic that a curious transaction, discovered by Chambers, seems to belong. Two houses, on the line of the great road from the south towards Aberdeen, situated on opposite sides of the Dee, the one being the house of a proprietor and the other of a minister, were suspected of having received the infection. The gentlemen of the county met and resolved to send to Dundee for two professional “clengers” or disinfectors, giving a bond to the borough of Dundee for 500 merks for the services of its “clengers[991].”
In April of the year following, 1607, we hear of the plague in Dundee itself, despite the experts, as well as in Perth and other places[992]. In July, 1608, many houses in Dundee were infected, and so many magistrates dead that new appointments were made by the Privy Council[993]. It broke out again at Perth on August 29, and continued till May, 1609, “wherein deit young and auld 500 persons[994].”
Until 1624 there is no other Scottish reference to plague except an entry, November 7, 1609, touching the arrival at Leith of a vessel from the Thames, with some of her crew dead of the plague, and the quarantining of her at Inchkeith[995]. Edinburgh had a small outbreak the year before the next great English plague that we come to. On November 23, 1624, the infection was discovered to be in several houses, and the session of the law courts was adjourned to January 8[996]; but Scotland appears to have had no part in the great infection of English soil which immediately followed.