The Epidemics following the Black Death.
Not the least of the effects of the Black Death upon England was the domestication of the foreign pestilence on the soil. For more than three centuries bubo-plague was never long absent from one part of Britain or another. The whole country was never again swamped by a vast wave of plague as in the fourteen months of 1348-49. Nor does it appear that the succeeding plagues of the fourteenth century, the pestis secunda, tertia, quarta and quinta were all of the same type as the first, or otherwise comparable to it. Disastrous as many subsequent English epidemics of bubo-plague were, they appear to have been localised in the North, perhaps, or in Norfolk, or confined to the young; and, above all, the bubo-plague became, in its later period, peculiarly a disease of the poor in the towns, although it did not cease altogether in the villages and country houses until it ceased absolutely in 1666. For three hundred years plague was the grand “zymotic” disease of England—the same type of plague that came from the East in 1347-49, continuously reproduced in a succession of epidemics at one place or another, which, by diligent search, can be made to fill the annals with few gaps, and, if the records were better, could probably be made to fill most years. Britain was not peculiar among the countries of Europe in that respect, although the chronology of plagues abroad has not been worked out minutely, except for an occasional province in which some zealous archaeologist had happened to take up the subject[385].
From 1349 to 1361 there is no record of pestilence in England. There was scarcity or famine in 1353, owing to an unfavourable harvest, but nothing is said of an unusual amount of sickness. In 1361 came the pestis secunda, which would hardly have been so called had it not presented the same type as the great bubo-plague. There is little said of it in the chroniclers; but two of them mention that it was called the pestis puerorum, or plague of the juveniles; and a third gives the names of several great personages who died of it, including three bishops and Henry, duke of Lancaster, at his castle of Leicester, in Lent, 1362. This recrudescence, then, of the seeds of plague in English soil, may be taken as having cut off the nobles and the young: that is to say, the members of a class who had, by all accounts, escaped the first plague, and the rising generation who had either escaped the first plague as infants or had been born subsequent to it. The same selection of victims was observed, according to Guy de Chauliac, in the very same year at Avignon; in contrast to the Black Death, the second plague there cut off the upper and well-to-do classes, and an innumerable number of children[386]; among the former, it is said, were five cardinals and a hundred bishops. From Poland, also, it is reported that the return of the plague, which happened in 1360, affected mostly, although not exclusively, the upper classes and children. It is clear from the Continental evidence that the second pestilence was marked by the same buboes, carbuncles, and other signs as the first. In some places, at least, it must have been as destructive as the Black Death itself; thus, in Florence, says Petrarch (with obvious exaggeration) hardly ten in the thousand remained alive in the city after the epidemic of 1359, while Boccaccio estimates the mortality of the year at the equally incredible figure of a hundred thousand. In London many more wills than usual were enrolled in 1361, but not more than a third of the number enrolled in 1349: viz. 4 in February, 2 in March, 8 in April, 8 in May, 12 in June, 39 in July, 28 in October, 15 in November, 11 in December.
The pestis secunda is only one of a series of pestilences in the reigns of Edward III. and Richard II., which the chroniclers number in succession to the pestis quinta in 1391. The entries in the annals are for the most part so meagre and colourless that they give us no help in realizing the share that a continuous infection in the soil, from the Black Death onwards, may have had in bringing about the disastrous state of the country in the latter half of the fourteenth century. Edward III. was ruined in reputation by his French wars, and ended his long reign in dishonour. His grandson Richard II. found the task of government too much for him, and was deposed. The history of this period is not complete without some account of the health of the country; a single line or sentence in a chronicle, to mark the date of a pestis tertia or quarta or quinta, hardly does justice to the place of national sickness among the events with which historians fill their pages. The graphic picture of the times is ‘The Vision of Piers the Ploughman,’ some passages of which may help us to realize what the bare enumeration of second, third, fourth and fifth pestilences meant. Some Latin poems of the time may be cited in support; and for more particular evidence of the type of pestilence which remained in England after the Black Death, we shall have to refer to certain extant manuscript treatises, from the latter part of the fourteenth century, which had been written in English to meet the wants of the people.
The Latin poems of the time of Edward III. and Richard II. need only be referred to so as to bring out by contrast the immense superiority of the ‘Vision of Piers the Ploughman.’ The poems of John of Bridlington, which are the most considerable of the Latin series of verses, contain numerous references to the epidemics of the time, both at home and abroad. Curiously, he dwells more upon the effects of famine—flux and fever—than upon the plague proper, which he nowhere distinguishes. Thus, of France about the time of the Black Death:
“Destructis granis, deerit mox copia panis;
Poena fames panis, venter fluxu fit inanis.”
Or again, with specific reference to the pestis secunda of 1361, which we know to have been bubo-plague:
“... fluxus nocet, undique febris
Extirpat fluxus pollutos crimine luxus.”
Another reference, in the form of a prophecy, which from the context is clearly to the pestilence of 1368-69, again dwells exclusively upon famine:
“In mensis justi pandetur copia crusti:
Fundis falsorum premet arcta fames famulorum.”
followed by a note in Latin: “from which it appears that the poor in those days were ill off for want of food[387].” One Latin poem of the end of the fourteenth century is expressly “On the Pestilence,” in the following manner:
“Ecce dolet Anglia luctibus imbuta,
Gens tremit tristitia sordibus polluta,
Necat pestilentia viros atque bruta.
Cur? Quia flagitia regnant resoluta[388].”
Turning to the far more real or observant work of the same date by Langland, we find among his general references to sickness a most significant one in which he compares it to the continual dropping of rain through a leaky roof: “The rain that raineth where we rest should, be sicknesses and sorrows that we suffer oft.” Again, in the allegory of Conscience and Nature, the former makes appeal to Nature to come forth as the scourge of evil-living:
“Nature Conscience heard, and came out of the planets, and sent forth his fore-goers, fevers and fluxes, coughs and cardiacles, cramps and toothaches, rheums and radegoundes and roynous scalls, boils and botches and burning agues, frenzies and foul evils—foragers of Nature had ypricked and preyed polls of people that largely a legion lose their life soon. Eld the hoary, he was in the vanguard, and bare the banner before Death, by right he it claimed. Nature came after, with many keen sores, as pokkes and pestilences, and much people shent. So Nature through corruptions killed many. Death came driving after, and all to dust dashed kings and knights, kaisers and popes, learned and lewd, he let no man stand that he hit even, that ever stirred after. Many a lovely lady, and lemans of knights, swooned and swelted for sorrow of Death’s dints.”
But “Conscience of his courtesy to Nature he besought, to cease and suffer and see whether they would leave pride privily and be perfect Christens. And Nature ceased then, to see the people amend. Fortune gan flatter those few that were alive, and promised them long life; and Lechery he sent among all manner men, wedded and unwedded, and gathered a great host all against Conscience[389].”
Next came Avarice, Envy and other of the deadly sins, so that the respite which Nature had given was of no real avail.
A clear reference to pestilence continuing in the country comes in where the pope’s exactions are mentioned. The pope did nothing in return for his English tribute:
“Had I a clerk that could write, I would cast him a bill
That he send me under his seal a salve for the pestilence,
And that his blessing and his bulls botches might destroy.
For, sith he hath the power that Peter himself had,
He hath the pot with the salve, soothly as me thinketh.”
Among the other consequences “sithen the pestilence,” was this: “So is pride waxen, in religion and in all the realm among rich and poor, that prayers have no power the pestilence to let; ... ne for dread of the death withdraw not their pride.”
The pestis secunda of 1361, or pestis puerorum, may perhaps be pointed to in the passage where chapmen are blamed for indulging their children, “ne for no pouste of pestilence correct them overmuch.” The ill-assorted marriages had doubtless followed the great mortality itself; but the second pestilence, of 1361, which affected the upper classes especially, and is said by one chronicler to have cut off more men than women[390], may have been more specially pointed to in Langland’s reference. Of that pestilence a chronicle of the next century has preserved a curious reminiscence: among its victims were men, doubtless of the upper class, “whose wives, as women out of gouvernance, took as well strangers to their husbands and other lewd and simple people, the which, forgetting their awe, worship and birth, coupled and married them with them that were of low degree and low reputation[391].”
Although Langland, when he speaks of changes “sith the pestilence time,” means the great mortality of 1349, he means in other places, the second, third, and perhaps also fourth pestilences[392]. The years of the pestilences down to the fifth are not the same in all the chronicles; there are indeed some nine outbreaks that might have been enumerated after the Black Death to the end of the century. Some of these are clearly associated with scarcity, and may have been of the old type of famine-sickness; dysentery is, indeed, mentioned in connexion with the sickness of 1391[393]. Again, an epidemic in London in 1382 is said by a chronicler to have affected children (boys and girls), while the same chronicler is explicit that the sickness in Norfolk the year after was confined to the young of both sexes under a certain age. Lastly, the epidemic of 1391 was so severe in the North as to recall the great mortality itself; but under the same year is the reference to sickness of the type of dysentery due to rotten fruit; and under the year before, 1390, two chroniclers agree that the epidemic was “mostly among children,” or that it cut off “more young than old.” It would be unsafe, therefore, to conclude that all the outbreaks of pestis in England subsequent to the Black Death, were of bubo-plague itself. The list of sicknesses in Langland’s poem gives, indeed, as much space to fevers and fluxes, burning agues and frenzies, as to boils and botches, foul evils, pokkes and pestilences—by which latter group of synonyms the bubo-plague is meant. Pestis, it is well known, was a generic name in the medieval period, just as pest and pestilence are generic now. So generic was it that some may doubt whether bubo-plague, of the type of 1349, was included at all among the pestes of the generations following. Positive evidence of the continued existence of bubo-plague in England is, at least, not superfluous, and this will be the best place to bring it in.