Relation of Typhus to Bubo-plague.
The smallest and the most easily surveyed of all the recent foci of bubo-plague, is that among the Bedouin of the Cyrenaic plateau in North Africa (port of Benghazi), a desert region corresponding to one of the most famous corn-lands of antiquity.
There was no difference of opinion that the small outbreak of plague in 1874 began simultaneously in the tents of Orphas and the tents of Ferig-el-Hanan, containing together about a hundred souls[316]. These Arabs keep cows, sheep and goats; some of them also cultivate small patches of corn. They are subject to periodic famines, and there had been much want among them in 1869, 1870, 1871, 1872 and 1873, attended by epidemics of typhus, cholera and smallpox. In the winter they found employment among the traders of Merdjé, and at the end of March, 1873, had quitted that village to place their animals in the neighbouring hill-pastures. The ground had been saturated, after long drought, by the rains of the winter. Their tents are pitched in hollows which may be filled by water in a few minutes. The encampments, like those of the Bedouin in Arabia, are excessively filthy and are often the scene of typhus fever. In April, 1874, the plague began, the first case being in a child; the buboes were in the groin, armpit or neck. The other symptoms were bilious vomiting, black vomit, haematemesis, petechiae, anthraceous boils, pains in the head, collapse, and delirium. A few cases were mild, but the majority grave and fatal; in several cases there was a relapse with new buboes. The disease was brought from the tents to the village of Merdjé, in which 270 were attacked in a population of 310, with 100 deaths. The total known attacks from 5 April to 24 July were 533 in a population of 734, with 208 deaths and 325 recoveries, 201 resisting the infection. The sanitary state of the village was as bad as that of the tents: the houses, entered by a low door, had windows not to the sun, but to the courtyard, which is a stable choked with filth; the floors of the houses are covered with filth. The graveyard is in the centre of the village, beside a pool of standing water: the graves are shallow, and the corpses are sometimes unearthed by jackals. Both in the village and in the encampments a fall of rain was followed by a new series of attacks. The advice of the sanitary commisioner was to make graves at least six feet deep, and to cover them with lime.
These events in 1874 were an exact repetition of those of 1858. In both years heavy rains followed long drought, giving promise of an abundant harvest after a period of famine. The dry years, in both instances, were attended with sickness, typhus and other; the first wet season turned the sickness to plague, that is to say, it added the complication of buboes and haemorrhagic symptoms to the characters of typhus. The meaning of that seems to be that the saturation of the ground generated a soil-poison where there had previously been the milder aerial poison of typhus. This view of plague, as a typhus of the soil, or a disease made so much more malignant than typhus just because of underground fermentation of the putrescible animal matters, is borne out by the facts already given for China and for India. The latter country furnishes other illustrations of typhus fever becoming complicated with buboes, and so becoming something like plague. Perhaps the best instance is the fever observed in the Yusufzai valley, near Peshawur, in 1852[317].
It arose mostly in the filthy Mohammedan houses, shared by cattle and human beings; but it invaded some of the cleaner Hindoo houses also. The disease began in low, marshy situations, which were covered with water after rain and heavy night dews. It was of the type of typhus, or relapsing fever, with yellowness of the skin, bleeding from the gums, and from the bowels, and often from the nose. One of the observers says: “The only other concomitant affection worthy of note is swelling of the lymphatic glands over various parts of the body; this, however, is only met with in a very few instances.” The other authority says: “Inflammation and suppuration of the glands in the groin, axilla, and neck occurred in some that survived the first or second relapse.” To this outbreak, which is removed only in degree from the Benghazi plague, the Pakhoi plague, and the Pali plague (Gujerat), may be added some others, about which the information is more general. Thus, the fevers which have become notorious in Burdwan since the health of that province changed so disastrously owing to the damming of the ground-water, are said to have been attended now and then with buboes. The typhus fever at Saugor in 1859 was occasionally complicated with suppuration of the lymphatic glands: “In the Doab, as in the subsequent gaol attack, the glands in the groin were very rarely affected; those in the neck were more frequently affected, but this was not a prominent feature in the disease[318].” Again, General Loris Melikoff told the correspondent of the Golos that twenty men died in a day in the Russo-Turkish war in the winter of 1878, with glandular swellings; everywhere there was Schmutz, Schmutz! And lastly, in the epidemic of 1878 at Vetlianka, on the Volga, which is reckoned among the historic occurrences of bubo-plague in Europe, the first ten cases in November, 1878, had suppurating glands in the axilla, did not take to bed, and recovered; there had been ordinary typhus in the filthy fisher cottages in 1877, and there was typhus concurrent with the disease which at length became, and was at length recognized as, true bubo-plague in the winter of 1878-79[319].
One thing which distinguishes these recent outbreaks of plague from the great plague of Justinian’s reign, in part from the series of Mohammedan plagues, and from the Black Death, is that they have for the most part shown no independent vitality and no diffusive power. As in typhus fever itself (except on great occasions), they have been almost confined to those who lived in the filthy houses, and to those who came within the influence of the pestilential emanations. The great plagues of the 6th and 14th centuries had, on the other hand, a diffusive power which carried them over the whole known world. The buboes of Egypt and of China became familiar as far as Norway and Greenland.
But, apart from diffusiveness, the conditions of recent local plagues are not unlike those of the great historical epidemics. The very same observation of the rats leaving their holes, which is so abundantly confirmed from the recent plague-spots of Southern China, of Yun-nan, of Kumaon, and of Gujerat, was familiar in the plague-books of London and of Edinburgh in the Elizabethan period. Of the great outbreak in 1603, Thomas Lodge writes: “And when as rats, moules, and other creatures (accustomed to live underground) forsake their holes and habitations, it is a token of corruption in the same, by reason that such sorts of creatures forsake their wonted places of aboade[320].” That is only one of many proofs that the virus of plague has its habitat in the soil, although it may be carried long distances clinging to other things. In its most diffusive potency it is a soil-poison generated, we may now say with some confidence, out of the products of cadaveric decay[321]; in its less diffusive but hardly less malignant potency, it is a soil-poison generated out of the filth of cattle housed with human beings, or out of domestic filth generally, and in nearly all the known instances of such generation, associated with, but perhaps not absolutely dependent upon, carelessness in the disposal of the dead after famine or fever; in the least malignant form, when plague is only a small part of an epidemic of typhus and with the buboes inclined to suppurate, it appears to be still a soil-poison, and to differ from typhus itself, just because the pestilential product of decomposing filth has been engendered in the pores of the ground, rather than in the atmosphere of living-rooms.
The Black Death, which here concerns us immediately, is one of the two great instances of a plague-virus with vast diffusive power, enormous momentum, and centuries of endurance. So great effects may be said to postulate adequate causes; and one must assume that the virus had been bred from cadaveric decomposition in circumstances of peculiar aggravation and on some vast or national scale. The sequence of events carries us to China; and the annals of China do furnish evidence that the assumed cause was there on a vast scale through a long period of national disaster, while the national customs of China for the disposal of the dead, like those of ancient Egypt, point to the existence of a real risk from allowing the soil to be permeated at large by the crude or hasty products of cadaveric decomposition.
It is our duty to construct the best hypothesis we can, sparing no labour. No one really dispenses with theory, whatever his protestations to the contrary; those who are the loudest professors of suspended judgment are the most likely to fall victims to some empty verbalism which hangs loose at both ends, some ill-considered piece of argument which ignores the historical antecedents and stops short of the concrete conclusions. It has been so in the case of infective diseases, and of bubo-plague in particular. The virus of the plague, we are told, is specific; it has existed from an unknown antiquity, and has come down in an unbroken succession; we can no more discover how it arose, than we can tell how the first man arose, or the first mollusc, or the first moss or lichen; its species is, indeed, of the nature of the lowest vegetable organisms.
The objection to that hypothesis of plague is that it involves a total disregard of facts. It is a mere formula, which saves all trouble, dispenses with all historical inquiry, and appears to be adapted equally to popular apprehension and to academic ease. The bubo-plagues of history have not, in fact, been all of the same descent; notably the Black Death was a wave of pestilence which Mohammedan countries, accustomed as they had been to native bubo-plagues for centuries before, recognized as an invasion from a foreign source, as an interruption of the sequence of their own plagues. Again, the attempt to link in one series the various scattered and circumscribed spots of plague now or lately existing must fail disastrously the moment it is seriously attempted. The hypothesis of one single source of the plague, of a species of disease arising we know not how, beginning we know not when or where, but at all events reproduced by ordinary generation in an unbroken series of cases, ab aevo, ab ovo, is the merest verbalism, wanting in reality or concreteness, and dictated by the curious illusion that a species of disease, because it reproduces itself after its kind, must resemble in other respects a species of living things.
The diffusive power of the virus of the Black Death, which has been equalled only by that of the plague in Justinian’s reign, may seem to have depended upon the favouring conditions that it met with. But although favouring conditions count for much, they are not all. The Black Death raged as furiously as anywhere among the nomade Tartars who were its first victims; the virus, as soon as it was let loose, put forth a degree of virulence which must have been native to it, or brought with it from its place of engendering. None the less the incidence of the Black Death in Europe had depended in part upon the preparedness of the soil. It came to Europe in the age of feudalism and of walled towns, with a cramped and unwholesome manner of life, and inhabited spots of ground choked with the waste matters of generations. But even amidst these generally fostering conditions, there would have been more special things that determined its election. It is a principle exemplified in all importations of disease from remote sources, in smallpox among the aerial contagions and in Asiatic cholera among the soil-poisons, that the conditions which favour diffusion abroad are approximately the same amidst which the infection had been originally engendered. A soil-poison of foreign origin makes straight for the most likely spots in the line of its travels; it may not, and often does not confine itself to these, but it gives them a preference. Thus, if we conclude on the evidence that the bubo-plague is a soil-poison having a special affinity to the products of cadaveric decomposition, we shall understand why the Black Death, when it came to England, found so congenial a soil in the monasteries, and in the homes of the clergy. Within the monastery walls, under the floor of the chapel or cloisters, were buried not only generations of monks, but often the bodies of princes, of notables of the surrounding country, and of great ecclesiastics. In every parish the house of the priest would have stood close to the church and the churchyard. One has to figure the virus of the Black Death not so much as carried by individuals from place to place in their persons, or in their clothes and effects, but rather as a leaven which had passed into the ground, spreading hither and thither therein as if by polarizing the adjacent particles of the soil, and that not instantaneously like a physical force, but so gradually as to occupy a whole twelvemonth between Dorset and Yorkshire. Sooner or later it reached to every corner of the land, manifesting its presence wherever there were people resident. Such universality in the soil of England, we have reason to think, it had. But it appears to have put forth its greatest power in the walled town, in the monastery, and in the neighbourhood of the village churchyard.
CHAPTER IV.
ENGLAND AFTER THE BLACK DEATH, WITH THE EPIDEMICS TO THE TUDOR PERIOD.
The great mortality came to an end everywhere in England by Michaelmas, 1349. The pestilence had lasted some fourteen months, from its first appearance on the Dorset coast at the beginning of August, 1348, until its subsidence in the northern counties in the autumn of 1349. It came to an end, as all devastating epidemics do, through having spent its force, exhausted its pabulum, run through all the susceptible subjects. A letter-writer of Charles I.’s reign has put into colloquial language the corresponding reason for a pause in the ravages of the plague towards the end of its stay in London: “And I think the only reason why the plague is somewhat slackened is because the place is dead already, and no bodie left in it worth the killing[322].” The exhausted state of the country, and of all Europe, is not easy for us to realize. Petrarch, a witness of the Black Death in Italy, foresaw the incredulity of after ages, or their inability to image the state of things—the empty houses, the abandoned towns, the squalid country, the fields crowded with the dead, the vast and dreadful solitude over the whole world. If you inquire of historians, he continues, they are silent; if you consult the physicians, they are at their wits’ end; if you question the philosophers, they shrug their shoulders, wrinkle their brows, and lay the finger on the lip. Is it possible that posterity can believe these things? For we who have seen them can hardly believe them[323].
The blow fell upon every country of Europe within a period of two or three years; and it must have paralysed all trade and industry, war and politics, for the time being. Edward III.’s wars in France, which had resulted in the victory of Crecy in 1346 and the conquest of Calais in 1347, had been suspended by a truce, which was renewed from time to time. Thus, in the very midst of the pestilence, on the 2nd of May, 1349, the envoys of the English and French kings, “in their tents between Calais and Guines,” agreed upon a form of treaty continuing the truce until Pentecost, 1350[324]. In the last days of 1349, Edward III. in person, with a small force, was able to repel an attack upon his new possession of Calais[325]. It was in the year after the Black Death (1350) according to both Stow and Selden, that Edward III. held a great feast at Windsor, to which his heralds invited knights from abroad, to celebrate the institution of the Order of the Garter, the statutes of the Order having been drawn up the year before. What is styled “the necessary defence of the realm,” was a chief subject of concern throughout the year 1350. On the 12th February an order was made to the sheriffs of counties for a supply of so many arrows from each[326]. On the 20th March the mayors and bailiffs of 110 towns are ordered to provide their respective quotas of men-at-arms—London 100, Norwich 60, Bristol 20, and so on—and to send them to Sandwich “for the necessary defence of our realm[327].” On the 1st of May a commission was issued to engage mariners for certain ships, and on the 20th May, an order for ships, pinnaces and barges.
On the 22nd July and 10th August there are proclamations relating to the piratical fleet of Spanish ships, intercepting the English traders to Gascony, and threatening an invasion of England[328]; the Spaniards were routed, their ships taken, and the Channel cleared, in a famous engagement off Winchelsea, on 29th August, 1350, which the king directed in person[329]. On 15th June, three days before the first of the ordinances against the Labourers, the king issued two orders to counties, to raise men “for our passage against the parts over sea”—one to the Welsh lords, and the other to the sheriffs of English counties, the demands being in all for 4170 bowmen from England, and for 1350 men from Wales[330]. Whatever these edicts may have resulted in, it was not until four years after that the king really resumed his wars with France. On the 8th September, 1355, the Black Prince sailed from Plymouth with a fleet of some three hundred ships carrying an army of knights, men-at-arms, English bowmen and Welshmen, to the Garonne, for his famous raid across the south of France[331]. Later in the autumn the king collected at Portsmouth[332] and Sandwich, and at Calais, a force of three thousand men-at-arms, two thousand mounted bowmen, and an immense number of bowmen on foot, with which he took the field on the 2nd November[333]. The same summer, a fleet of forty great ships was fitted out at Rotherhithe, for a force of foot under Henry, duke of Lancaster, to aid the king of Navarre; it sailed on the 10th of July, but was unable to clear the Channel, and for various reasons did not proceed[334]; next year, however, the duke of Lancaster crossed from Southampton to Normandy with a force in forty-eight ships[335].
Thus was the war with France resumed six years after the great mortality. The means for equipping these expeditions had been provided by loans raised on the security of the enormous subsidy which the Parliament of 1353-54 was induced to vote, in the form of an export duty of fifty shillings on every sack of wool shipped to foreign countries during the next six years. According to Avesbury’s calculation, Edward had a revenue, from that source, of a thousand marks a day; it was the common opinion, he says, that more than 100,000 sacks of wool were exported in a year[336]. But another and perhaps better authority gives the annual export of wool in the middle of the fourteenth century at nearly 32,000 sacks[337].