The Extinction of the Sweat in England.
The disappearance of the sweat from England after 1551, or its failure to come out again with the appropriate weather, is one of those phenomena of epidemic disease which might be made to appear less of a mystery by finding several more in the like case. A history of all the extinct types of infective disease would probably bring to light some reason why they had each and all died out. But an epidemic disease leaves no bones behind it in the strata; nor has the astonishing progress of science succeeded as yet in detecting palæozoic bacteria, although that discovery cannot be delayed much longer. Meanwhile we have to make what we can of the ordinary records. In our own time, so to speak, the sweat became extinct in 1551, and the plague in 1666; perhaps someone before long may be able to say that typhus died out (for a time) in Britain in such and such a year, and smallpox (for good) in such and such another. The surprising thing is that an infection which came forth time after time should have one day been missed as if it were dead. If the sweat had five seasons in England, why not fifty? Perhaps its career was short because the circumstances of its origin were transient and, as it were, accidental. But it may have been also subject to the only law of extinct disease-species which our scanty knowledge points to—the law of the succession, or superseding, or supplanting of one epidemic type by another.
Other forms of epidemic fever, in the same pestilential class as the sweat, were coming to the front in England as well as in other parts of Europe. Thus, in 1539, a summer of great heat and drought, “divers and many honest persons died of the hot agues, and of a great laske through the realm.” The hot agues were febrile influenzas, and the great laske was dysentery. Again, in the autumn of 1557, there died “many of the wealthiest men all England through by a strange fever,” according to one writer[541], or, according to another[542], there prevailed “divers strange and new sicknesses, taking men and women in their heads, as strange agues and fevers, whereof many died.” Jones in his Dyall of Agues, describes his own attack near Southampton, in 1558, and calls it the sweating sickness.
That epidemic corresponded to a great prevalence of “influenza” on the continent, which was probably as Protean or composite as the fevers in England. It would not be correct to say that these new fevers or influenzas, with more or less of a sweating type, were the sweat somewhat modified. But they seem to have come in succession to the sweat, if not to have taken its place, or supplanted it. The prevalent types of disease somehow reflect the social condition of the population; they change with the social state of the country or of a group of countries; they depend upon a great number of associated circumstances which it would be hard to enumerate exhaustively. As early as 1522 we have the gaol fever at Cambridge, at a time when Henry VIII.’s attempts to repress crime were come to the strange pass described in More’s Utopia. These things remain for more systematic handling in another chapter; but in concluding the career of the sweat in England we may pass from it with the remark that it did not cease until other forms of pestilential fever were ready to take its place. The same explanation remains to be given of the total disappearance of plague from England after 1666: it was superseded by pestilential contagious fever, a disease which was its congener, and had been establishing itself more and more steadily from year to year as the conditions of living in the towns were passing more and more from the medieval type to the modern. Meanwhile we have to take up the thread of the plague-history where we left it in the reign of Edward IV.
CHAPTER VI.
PLAGUE IN THE TUDOR PERIOD.
When the town council of York met on the 16th of August, 1485, to take measures on account of Henry Tudor’s landing in Wales, their first resolution was to despatch the sergeant to the mace to Richard III. at Nottingham, with an offer of men (they promised 400 for his army at Bosworth), and their second resolution was to send at once for all such aldermen and others of the council as were sojourning without the city on account of “the plague that reigneth[543].” These leading citizens of York had gone into the country to avoid the infectious exhalations within the walls in the summer heats; the plague that reigned in York was the old bubo-plague, which would show itself in a house here or there in any ordinary season, and on special occasions would rise to the height of an epidemic, driving away all who could afford to remove from the pestilent air of the town to the comparatively wholesome country, and taking its victims mostly among the poorer class who could not afford a “change of air.” In the three centuries following the Black Death, change of air meant a good deal more than it means now. The infection of the air, or the “intemperies” of the air, at Westminster occasioned (along with other reasons) the prorogation or adjournment to country towns of many parliaments; the infection of the air in and around Fleet Street caused the breaking up of many law terms; and the infection of the air in Oxford colleges was so constant an interruption to the studies of the place in the 15th century that Anthony Wood traces to that cause more than to any other the total decline of learning, the rudeness of manners and the prevalence of “several sorts of vice, which in time appeared so notorious that it was consulted by great personages of annulling the University or else translating it to another place[544].” From the old college registers, chiefly that of his own college of Merton, he has counted some thirty pestilences at Oxford, great and small, during the fifteenth century. The reason why the Oxford annals of plague are so complete is that each outbreak, even if only one or two deaths had occurred[545], meant a dispersion of the scholars and tutors of one or more halls and colleges, their removal in a body to some country house, alteration of the dates of terms, and postponement of the public Acts for degrees in the schools. Experience had taught the necessity of such prompt measures. Thus the first sweat, that of 1485, came so suddenly that it killed many of the scholars before they could disperse, “albeit it lasted but a month or six weeks.” Hardly had the halls and colleges begun to fill again after the dispersion by the sweat of 1485, when “another pestilential disease,” that is to say, the bubo-plague itself, broke forth at the end of August, 1486, in Magdalen parish, and daily increased so much that the scholars were obliged to flee again. In 1491 there was another dispersion; and in 1493 so severe an outbreak of plague from April to Midsummer that many were swept away, both cleric and laic: Magdalen College removed to Brackley in Northamptonshire, Oriel to St Bartholomew’s hospital near Oxford, and Merton to Islip, “instead of Cuxham their usual place of retirement.” The disastrous fifteenth century closes with a specially severe plague in 1499-1500, in which perished “divers of this university accounted worthy in these times;” an accompanying scarcity of grain and consequent failure of scholarships or exhibitions led many students to betake themselves to mechanical occupations. In August, 1503, the plague broke out again in St Alban’s Hall; the principal with all but a few of the students went to Islip, where the pestilence overtook them (three weeks having been spent first in mirth and jollity), so that several died and were buried, some at Islip, others at Ellesfield and one at Noke; in October it broke out in Merton College and drove some of the fellows and bachelors to the lodge in Stow Wood, others to Wotton near Cumner, where they remained until the 17th December. These interruptions had been so frequent that of fifty-five halls, only thirty-three were now inhabited, and they “but slenderly, as may be seen in our registers.” The town of Oxford shared in the decline; streets and lanes formerly populous were now desolate and forsaken. An epidemic in 1508, which may have been the second sweat, caused another dispersion; then the old bubo-plague again in 1510, 1511, 1512 and 1513, filling up the interval until the summer of 1517, when a “sudor tabificus,” the third sweat, “dispersed and swept away most, if not all, of the students.” The bubo-plague followed in the winter and spring, especially in St Mary Hall and Canterbury College. Meanwhile cardinal Wolsey had founded Cardinal College (afterwards Christ Church), bringing to it an infusion of new learning from Cambridge and elsewhere; but in 1525, “while this selected society was busy in preaching, reading, disputing and performing their scholastic Acts, a vehement plague brake forth, which dispersed most of them, so that they returned not all the year following or two years after,” and Cardinal College “thus settled, was soon after left as ’twere desolate.” The same outbreak affected specially the halls or colleges of St Alban, Jesus, St Edmund and Queen’s[546].
Oxford was not altogether singular in this experience of plague from year to year or at intervals of three or four years. What Sir Thomas More says of the cities of Utopia was true of the towns of England or of any medieval country in Christendom: “As for their cities, whoso knoweth one of them, knoweth them all; they be all so like one to another, as far forth as the nature of the place permitteth.” The limitation as to the nature of the place is not without importance for the frequency and severity of plague; the quantity of standing water around Oxford would certainly appear to have made the epidemics there a more regular product of the soil[547]. But we hear of plague also on the soil of Cambridge, particularly in 1511, when Erasmus was there: on the 28th November he writes from Queens’ College to Ammonio in London: “Here is great solitude; most are away for fear of the pestilence,” adding rather unkindly, “although there is also solitude when everyone is in residence.” It is from such chance references in letters of the time that we can infer the existence of plague throughout England. These references become much more numerous as the sixteenth century runs on, not perhaps because plague was more frequent, but because all kinds of documents are better preserved. The remarkable difference between the reigns of Henry VII. and Henry VIII. in regard to the quantity of extant materials for the construction of history is as keenly felt by the student of epidemics as by the student of high politics. The local records of towns, London included, are still almost valueless for our purpose: even the skilled antiquaries employed by the Historical Manuscripts Commission have hitherto extracted nothing concerning pre-Elizabethan epidemics from the archives of civic council-chambers, and only a little from muniment-rooms such as that of Canterbury Abbey.
The few details that we possess, such as those for the plague at Hull from 1472 to 1478, had been extracted from local records by the authors of town and county histories. Before the end of the sixteenth century the evidence of plague epidemic all over England, as well in provincial towns and in the country as in London, becomes abundant. There may have been really a great increase, but it is much more probable that the increase is for the most part only apparent. It is of some consequence to determine the probability as exactly as possible; and I shall therefore examine with more minuteness than would otherwise have been necessary the evidence as to the existence and amount of plague in London and elsewhere year after year from the accession of the Tudor dynasty in 1485, using chiefly the Calendars of State Papers for my purpose. As in the case of the sweat, we happen to hear of plague in London and elsewhere because the Court was kept away by it; the king’s secretaries are informed week after week of the state of health in London, and foreign ambassadors, especially the Venetian envoys, have frequently occasion to mention the hindrance to public business caused by the plague. But for these State papers the historian of epidemics would have little beyond an occasional parish register to build upon. The medical profession in England were not concerned to write or print anything thereon; while there are numerous foreign printed books on the plague (e.g. Forrestier’s at Rouen in 1490) there is not one original English treatise until that of Skene of Edinburgh in 1568. That the physicians were well employed by those who could engage their services, and that they did sustain the credit of their profession by the liberal scale of their fees, we have every reason to believe; thus the Venetian envoy writes on 3rd June, 1535, that he had been ill, and that he had expended seven hundred ducats during his illness, “and for so many physicians,” so that he had only one ducat remaining. But these thriving practitioners did not write books like their brethren abroad. One of their number, Linacre, who was also a prebendary of Westminster, busied himself with editions of certain writings of Galen. Erasmus mentions him in a letter as one of the Oxford scholars in whose society he found pleasure; but there is in the Praise of Folly a reference to a certain grammatical pedant whom Hecker identifies with Linacre. The other physicians and surgeons of the period whose names are known, Butts, Chambre, Borde and the rest of the group in Holbein’s picture of Henry VIII. handing the surgeons their charter, have left nothing in print which illustrates the epidemic diseases of the time, and little of any kind of writing except some formulæ of medicines: Borde, who was patronised by Cromwell, is known only as a humorist or satirist. Thus the inquiry must proceed without any of those aids from the faculty which make the history of epidemics on the Continent comparatively easy.
After the disastrous prevalence of plague in England in the reign of Edward IV., culminating in the great epidemic of 1479 in London and elsewhere, we do not hear of the disease again in London until 1487, two years after the first sweat; in that year, on the 14th April, a king’s writ from Norwich postponed the business of the Common Pleas and King’s Bench until Trinity term, on account of the pestilence in London, Westminster and neighbouring places[548]. The next reference is to the great epidemic of 1499-1500, in London and apparently also in the country. Fabyan, who was then an alderman and likely to know, puts the deaths in London at twenty thousand[549]; Polydore Virgil says thirty thousand[550]; and others say thirty thousand deaths from plague and other diseases together[551]. The smaller total is the more likely to be nearest the mark. There is reason to think that the population of London a generation later was little over 60,000; and it will appear in the sequel that a fourth or a fifth part of the inhabitants was as much as the severest plagues cut off, although it is entirely credible that the Black Death itself had cut off one half.
The enormous mortality in 1499-1500 has left few traces in the records of the City or of the State. Five great prelates died during the plague-year, some of them certainly from it: Morton of Canterbury (a very old man), Langton of Winchester (before he could be transferred to Canterbury), Rotheram of York, Alcock of Ely and Jane of Norwich[552]. Like some of the later plagues in London it lasted through the winter. It was at Oxford in the same years, and casual references in two of the Plumpton letters lead one to infer that it may have been in remote parts of the country also[553].
The infection was still active as late as October, 1501, at Gravesend, and it made some difference to the reception of the young princess Catharine of Arragon, who had come over for her marriage with Prince Arthur, and became famous in history as the wife of his brother Henry VIII. The following are Henry VII.’s instructions, dated October, 1501:—
“My lord Steward shall shew or cause to be shewed to the said Princess, that the King’s Grace, tenderly considering her great and long pain and travel upon the sea, would full gladly that she landed and lodged for the night at Gravesend; but forasmuch as the plague was there of late, and that is not yet clean purged thereof, the King would not that she should be put in any such adventure or danger, and therefore his Grace hath commanded the bark to be prepared and arrayed for her lodging[554].”
In 1503 there was plague at Oxford, as we have seen, and at Exeter, where two mayors died of it in quick succession, and two bailiffs[555]. The infection was certainly in London in 1504 or 1505 (perhaps in both, and possibly at its low endemic level in the other years from 1501): for Bernard André mentions casually that he had been absent from the City on account of it[556].
In 1509, the first year of Henry VIII., there was a severe outbreak of plague in the garrison of Calais, as well as “great plague” in divers parts of England[557]. In 1511, Erasmus writes from Cambridge on 17th August, 5th October and 16th October, making reference to the plague in London; and on the 27th October, 8th November, and 28th November, Ammonio answers him that the plague has not entirely disappeared, and again that it is abated, but a famine is feared, and lastly that the plague is entirely gone. On the 26th of July the Venetian ambassador had written that the queen-widow (mother of Edward V.) had died of plague and that the king, Henry VIII., was anxious.
On the 1st November, 1512, Erasmus, on a visit to London, was so afraid of the plague that he did not enter his own lodging, and missed a meeting with Colet. The next year, 1513, was a severe plague-year according to many testimonies. In the diary of the Venetian envoy from August to 3rd September it is stated that deaths from plague are occurring constantly; two of his servants sickened on the 22nd August, but did not recognize the disease; on the 25th they rose from bed, went to a tavern to drink a certain beverage called “ale,” and died the same day: their bed, sheets and other effects were thrown into the sea (? Thames). On the 17th September he writes to Venice that it is perilous to remain in London; the deaths were said to be 200 in a day, there was no business doing, all the Venetian merchants in London had taken houses in the country; the plague is also in the English fleet. In October the deaths are reported by the envoy at 300 to 400 a day; he has gone into the country. On the 6th November and 6th December he writes that plague was still doing much damage. On the 3rd December the rumour of a great prevalence of plague in England had reached Rome. On the 28th November Erasmus writes from Cambridge that he does not intend to come to London before Christmas on account of plague and robbers; and on the 21st December he writes again: “I am shut up in the midst of pestilence and hemmed in with robbers.”
One year is very like another, but it will be desirable to continue the narrative a little longer so as to remove any suspicion of constructing history beyond the facts. In February, 1514, Erasmus writes that he had been disgusted with London, deeming it unsafe to stay there owing to plague. In going in procession to St Paul’s on the 21st May the king preferred to be on horseback, for one reason “to avoid contact with the crowd by reason of the plague;” he had lately recovered from some vaguely reported “fever” at Richmond. On the 1st July Convocation was adjourned on account of the epidemic and the heat.
Next year, 1515, Erasmus writes from London on the 20th April that he is in much trouble; the plague had broken out and it looked as if it would rage everywhere. On the 23rd April Wolsey sends advice to the earl of Shrewsbury in the country (? Wingfield) to “get him into clean air and divide his household,” owing to contagious plague among his servants; on the 28th the earl received from London one pound of manus Christi,—the same remedy that Henry VIII. sent to Wolsey for the sweat—with coral, and half-a-pound of powder preservative. On the same date “they begin to die in London in divers places suddenly of fearful sickness.” One of the incidents of the plague of 1515 which has fixed the attention of chroniclers was the death of twenty-seven of the nuns in a convent at the Minories outside Aldgate[558]. Next year, on 14th May (1516), the sickness was so extreme in Lord Shrewsbury’s house at Wingfield that he has put away all his horse-keepers and turned his horses out to grass. In London, on the 21st May, the Venetian ambassador removed to Putney owing to a case of plague in his house, and he would not be allowed to see Wolsey until the 30th June, when forty days would have passed since the plague in his house.
The next summer, 1517, was the season of the third sweat. It was hardly over when plague began in London in September. On the 21st the Venetian envoy speaks of having had to avoid “the plague and the sweating sickness;” on the 26th he writes that the plague is making some progress and he has left London to avoid it. On the 15th October the king was at Windsor “in fear of the great plague.” One writes on 25 Oct., “As far as I can hear, there is no parish in London free[559].” On the 16th November the envoy begs the seignory of Venice to send someone to replace him as he thinks it high time to escape from “sedition, sweat and plague.” On the 3rd December the king and the cardinal were still absent from London on account of the plague; on the 22nd their absence was causing general discontent, the plague being somewhat abated. It was not until March, 1518, that the court approached London; on the 15th the Venetian envoy rode out to Richmond to see the king, and found him in some trouble, as three of his pages had died “of the plague.” The court withdrew again to Berkshire, and on the 6th April it was decided by the king’s privy council at Abingdon that London was still infected and must be avoided, the queen (Catharine of Arragon) having declared the day before that she had perfect knowledge of the sickness being in London, and that she feared for the king, although she was no prophet. On the 7th April the report of four or five deaths at Nottingham (“as appears by a bill enclosed”) was made the ground of postponing a projected visit of the king to the north. The spring was unusually warm, which made the risk of sickness to be judged greater. It is clear that public business was suffering by the prolonged absence of the court from London, and that the existence of infection was being denied. On the 28th April Master More certified from Oxford to the king at Woodstock that three children were dead of the sickness, but none others; he had accordingly charged the mayor and the commissary in the king’s name “that the inhabitants of those houses that be and shall be infected, shall keep in, put out wispes and bear white rods, according as your grace devised for Londoners;” this was approved by the king’s council, and the question was discussed whether the fair in the Austin Friars of Oxford a fortnight later should not be prohibited, as the resort of people “may make Oxford as dangerous as London, next term” (the law courts sat at Oxford in Trinity term). However, the interests of traders had to be kept in view also. On 28th June, 1518, Pace writes from the court at Woodstock to Wolsey that “all are free from sickness here, but many die of it within four or five miles, as Mr Controller is informed.” On the 11th July he writes again from Woodstock that two persons are dead of the sickness, and more infected, one of them a servant to a yeoman of the king’s guard; to-morrow the king and queen lodge at Ewelme, and stop not by the way, as the place appointed for their lodging is infected. On the 14th July he writes to Wolsey from Wallingford that the king moves to-morrow to Bisham “as it is time: for they do die in these parts in every place, not only of the small pokkes and mezils, but also of the great sickness.” The uncertainty as to what these diseases may have been will appear from the next letter, on the 18th July, from Sir Thomas More: “We have daily advertisements here, other of some sweating or the great sickness from places very near unto us; and as for surfeits and drunkenness we have enough at home.” The king had also heard that one of my lady Princess’s servants was sick of “a hot ague” at Enfield. On the 22nd July, the Venetian ambassador writes from Lambeth asking to be recalled: two of his servants had died of the plague, and he himself had the sweating sickness twice in one week. The pope’s legate, Campeggio, made a state entry into London about the first of August, but the king and Wolsey were not there to receive him, ostensibly for fear of infection. The king was now at Greenwich, and we hear no more of the fear of infection for a time. In the end of March, 1519, deaths from plague occurred on board one of the Venetian galleys at Southampton. On the 4th August, 1520, the king (at Windsor) has heard that the great sickness is still prevalent at Abingdon and other villages towards Woodstock, and has changed his route (“gystes”) accordingly; on 8th August, sickness is reported at Woodstock. The same year some kind of sickness was very disastrous in Ireland.
In the winter of 1521 (2nd November), the sickness continues in London: “it is not much feared, though it is universal in every parish.” According to a vague entry in Hall’s chronicle the year 1522 was in like manner, “not without pestilence nor death,” which may refer to the gaol fever at Cambridge.
Thus from 1511 to 1521 there is not a single year without some reference to the prevalence of plague, the autumn and winter of 1513 having been probably the time of greatest mortality in London. After 1521 or 1522 there comes a break of four or five years in the plague-references, except for a vague mention of plague followed by famine at Shrewsbury in 1525[560]. They begin again in 1526 (from Guildford) and go on until 1532 every year much as in the former period, the year 1528 being mostly occupied with the fourth epidemic of the sweating sickness. On the 4th June, 1529, the legate Campeggio writes from London: “Here we are still wearing our winter clothing, and use fires as if it were January: never did I witness more inconstant weather. The plague begins to rage vigorously, and there is some fear of the sweating sickness.” On the 31st August the Venetian ambassador has a person sick of the plague in his house; on the 9th September he has gone to a village near London on account of the plague. On the 18th September the French ambassador in London (Bishop Du Bellay) has plague in his household, and in spite of repeated changes of lodging his principal servants are dead; he has been unable to refuse leave to the others to go home, and is now quite alone, but the danger from the plague is much diminished.
In 1530 the plague is heard of as early as March 23, previous to which date two of the Venetian ambassador’s servants had died of it; three more of them died afterwards, and the envoy was forbidden the Court for forty days. Parliament was prorogued on April 26 to June 22, on account of the plague in London and the suburbs, and farther, for the same reason, until October 1. The king was at Greenwich, but even there was not beyond the infection; in the Privy Purse book, there is an entry of £18. 8s. paid “to Rede, the marshall of the king’s hall for to dispose of the king’s charge to such poor folk as were expelled the town of the Greenwiche in the tyme of the plague.” Similar payments are entered on January 13, 1531, April 10, April 26 and November 8[561].
On November 23, 1531, the king was obliged to leave Greenwich on account of the plague, removing to Hampton Court (now a royal palace since Wolsey’s fall). In London it had somewhat abated, but, according to a letter of the Venetian ambassador, had been up to 300 or 400 deaths in a week. In mid-winter, the 15th of January, 1532, Parliament was prorogued on account of the insalubrity of the air in London and Westminster. The infection may be assumed to have gone on, according to the analogy of known years, all through the spring and summer, rising to a greater height in the autumn. We next hear of it on the 18th September, 1532, when the Venetian envoy writes from London that the king’s journey to Gravesend and Dover would be by water, “as there is much plague in those parts, and there is no lack of it in London. Yesterday at the king’s court the master of the kitchen died of it, having waited on his majesty the day before.” On the 24th September, “the plague increases daily in London and well nigh throughout the country.”
On the 14th October, “the plague increases daily, and makes everybody uneasy.” On the same date the Privy Council write to the king, who had crossed to Calais accompanied by Mr Secretary Cromwell, for a meeting with the French king, that there is a rumour of the plague increasing, especially at the Inns of Court. On the 18th October Hales, one of the justices, writes to Cromwell that “the plague of sickness is so sore here that I never saw so thin a Michaelmas term.” On the 20th, Audeley the Lord Chancellor writes that many die of the plague, the sergeants in Fleet Street have left in consequence, the Inner Temple has broken commons, the lawyers being in great fear. “The Council have commanded the mayor to certify how many have died of the plague.” That is the first known reference to the London bills of mortality, and was probably the very first occasion of them[562]. By that time the plague had been active in London for more than a month, and had clearly begun to alarm the residents. The result of the Privy Council’s order to the mayor of London was a bill on or before the 21st October, showing that 99 persons had died of the plague in the city, and 27 from other causes, the number of deaths from other causes suggesting that this was the bill for a week. On the 23rd the Secretary of State is informed that the sickness is fervent and many die; those who are not citizens are much afeard. On the 25th Sir John Aleyn has assurances for Cromwell (at Calais) from all parts of the country that the whole realm is quiet, but the plague has been more severe than in London. Cromwell’s French gardener was alive and well on Saturday afternoon, the 12th, and he was dead of the plague and buried on Monday morning the 14th. On the 27th the death “is quite abated” in London and Westminster, according to one; but according to the Lord Chancellor, on the 28th, the plague increases, especially about Fleet Street. On the 31st October one writes, “I have not seen London so destitute of people as it was when I came there.” On 2nd November the death is assuaged and there is good rule kept, for Sir Hugh Vaughan takes pains in his office like an honest gentleman. On the 9th November the plague is abated. There the correspondence ends, the Court having returned from France. But we may here bring in a certain weekly bill of mortality which has come down among the waifs of paper from that period[563]. It is for the week from the 16th to the 23rd of November, the year not being stated; the experts of the national collection of manuscripts were at one time inclined to assign it to “circa 1512;” but the first that we hear of the mayor being called upon to furnish a bill of plague-deaths is the order by the lords of the Council on or about the 20th October 1532, the first bill having shown 99 deaths in the city from plague and 27 deaths (in the week) from other causes. The extant bill for the week 16th to 23rd November is clearly one of a series; there are no good grounds for assigning it to an earlier date than the year 1532, while there are reasons for not placing it later. There are two other plague-bills extant, for August, 1535, written out in a more clerkly fashion, and bearing the marks of greater experience. The bill for the week in November is more primitive in appearance; and we may fairly take it as one of the series first ordered by the Council in 1532: for that was the most considerable year of the plague immediately preceding the outburst of 1535, to which the more finished bills certainly belong. The week in November, for which it gives the deaths from plague and other causes in the city parishes is later than the dates of the 2nd and 9th, when the plague was “suaged” and “abated;” the bill therefore stands for plague on the decline, or near extinction for the season, its total of plague deaths being 33, and of other deaths 32, as against 99 and 27 respectively in the corresponding week of October. As this, the earliest of a great historical series of London bills of mortality, has a peculiar interest, I transcribe it in full, retaining the original spelling.
Syns the XVIth day of November unto the XXIII day of the same moneth ys dead within the cite and freedom yong and old these many folowyng of the plage and other dyseases.
Inprimys benetts gracechurch i of the plage
S Buttolls in front of Bysshops gate i corse
S Nycholas flesshammls i of the plage
S Peturs in Cornhill i of the plage
Mary Woolnerth i corse
All Halowes Barkyng ii corses
Kateryn Colman i of the plage
Mary Aldermanbury i corse
Michaels in Cornhill iii one of the plage
All halows the Moor ii i of the plage
S Gyliz iiii corses iii of the plage
S Dunstons in the West iiii of the plage
Stevens in Colman Strete i corse
All halowys Lumbert Strete i corse
Martins Owut Whiche i corse
Margett Moyses i of the plage
Kateryn Creechurch ii of the plage
Martyns in the Vintre ii corses
Buttolls in front Algate iiii corses
S Olavs in Hart Strete ii corses
S Andros in Holborn ii of the plage
S Peters at Powls Wharff ii of the plage
S Fayths i corse of the plage
S Alphes i corse of the plage
S Mathows in Fryday Strete i of the plage
Aldermary ii corses
S Pulcres iii corses i of the plage
S Thomas Appostells ii of the plage
S Leonerds Foster Lane i of the plage
Michaels in the Ryall ii corses
S Albornes i corse of the plage
Swytthyns ii corses of the plage
Mary Somersette i corse
S Bryde v corses i of the plage
S Benetts Powls Wharff i of the plage
All halows in the Wall i of the plage
Mary Hyll i corse.
Sum of the plage xxxiiii persons
Sum of other seknes xxxii persons
The holl sum xx⁄iii & vi.
And there is this weke clere xxx⁄iii and iii paryshes as by this bille doth appere.
The execn
of corses
buryed of
the plage
within the
cite of
London
syns &c.
There does not appear to have been any occasion for a continuance of plague-bills beyond the date of the one just given until nearly three years after: we hear, indeed, of a severe epidemic of plague at Oxford in 1533, but nothing of it in London until 1535[564]. It so happens that a pair of London bills of mortality is extant from the month of August in that year. Thus, by a singular coincidence, the only original bills of mortality that have come down (so far as is known) from the sixteenth century, are one from the end of the series in the first year of their execution (1532), and another the very first of the series in the second year of their execution (1535), or in the series ordered on account of the epidemic of plague next following. Of that epidemic also it may be permitted to give somewhat full details, for it is only rarely that we have the chance of realizing the facts in so concrete a way.
In the summer and autumn of 1535 Henry VIII., with the queen (Anne Boleyn), was mostly at his manor of Thornbury in Gloucestershire, Cromwell the principal Secretary of State being either with the king or in his immediate neighbourhood. The absence of the Court occasions numerous letters to be sent from and to London, in which we hear of the plague among other things. Cromwell had four houses in or near London at this time,—at the Rolls in Chancery Lane, at Austin Friars in the City, at the fashionable suburb of Stepney, and at Highbury: besides these he had a fine villa building at Hackney. From his steward or other servants at one or more of these he was in receipt of letters constantly during his absence. A letter from the Rolls on the 30th July informs him that twelve heron-shaws had been sent to him from Kent, and had been received at the Rolls “as the city of London is sorely infected with the plague.” Next day another writes that the City is infected but Fleet Street is clean. On the 5th August “the common sickness waxeth very busy in London.” On the 7th Lord Chancellor Audeley writes from “my house at Christchurch” (Creechurch, near Aldgate) that he had been expecting Cromwell in London, but hears that he will not return for nine or ten days; will therefore go to his house at Colchester meanwhile, as they are dying of the plague in divers parishes in London. Cromwell was naturally desirous to know accurately the state of health in the city, so as to regulate his own movements and perhaps the king’s also; he accordingly makes inquiries of his various correspondents. Another letter from London on the 7th August informs him that there is no death at Court, but only in certain places in the city: “I fear these great humidities will engender pestilence at the end of the year, rather after Bartholomew tide than before. If you be near London you must avoid conference of people.” On receipt of this Cromwell would appear to have written to the mayor of London, for on the 13th August his clerk at the Rolls replies to him that he had delivered the letter to the lord mayor. On the 16th another of the household at the Rolls writes that the plague rages in every parish in London, but not so bad as in many places abroad: “I will send the number of the dead. The mayor keeps his chamber. Some say he is sick of an ague; others that he was cut about the brows for the megrims, which vexeth him sore. Few men come at him, but women.” The bill of mortality which Cromwell had asked for previous to 13th August is extant[565]. It is in two parts: one showing 31 deaths from plague and 31 deaths from other causes in thirty-seven out of one hundred parishes from the 5th to the 12th August, with a list of parishes clear; and the other, headed “14th August” and probably meant to include the former, showing a much heavier mortality and a much shorter list of parishes clear, the whole being endorsed by the mayor, Sir John Champneys, as follows: “So appeareth there be dead within the city of London of the plague and otherwise from the 6th day of this month of August to the 14th day, which be eight days complete, the full number of 152 persons [105 of them from plague]. And this day se’night your mastership [Mr Secretary Cromwell] shall be certified of the number that shall chance to depart in the meantime. Yours as I am bound, John Champeneys.” This double bill for certain days in August, 1535, is rather more elaborate than, but otherwise not unlike, the above bill, for a week in November, most likely of the year 1532. It will be noticed that the deaths in all the city parishes from other causes than plague are 47 in the bill for eight (or nine) days; 31 in the bill, partly the same, for seven days, and 32 in the earlier bill for seven days, while they are known to have been 27 in another bill of October, 1532, probably also for seven days. These figures, the best to be had, are important for calculating the population of London at the time; they represent quite an ordinary weekly mortality, the deaths from plague being found to be always extra deaths, where we can compare the mortality year after year, as in the London bills of later times.
The weekly bills of mortality called for in the plague of 1535 were sent regularly to the Secretary of State until the end of September—on the 22nd and 30th August, and on the 4th, (and 5th), 11th and 27th September. The one sent on Monday the 30th August showed 157 deaths during the preceding week, of which 140 were put down to plague, leaving only 17 deaths in the week from ordinary causes,—a small number owing perhaps to so many residents having gone to the country. No figures remain from the other bills, but we know from letters that the plague increased considerably in September (e.g. 11th Sept. “By the Lord Mayor’s certificate which I send you will see that the plague increases”) both in London and in the country, justifying the prediction that it would be worse after Bartholomew-tide; it is not until the 28th October that we hear of the deaths being “well stopped” in London. Some few particulars of this epidemic, and of its revival in 1536, remain to be added before we come to speak of the London bills of mortality in general, of the extent of the City and liberties at this period, of its sanitary condition, and of the public health from year to year.
On the 18th August, 1535, one writes to Cromwell from the Temple that the plague “has visited my house near Stepney where my wife lives.” On the 20th August a resident in Lincoln’s Inn was seized with plague and conveyed thence by night to a poor man’s house right against the chamber of one of Cromwell’s household at the Rolls, where he died. “Such as lodge in your gate seldom go out, and will have less occasion if, before great time pass, you will appoint from Endevill, or elsewhere within your rule, some venison for the household, that men may be the better contented with their fare.” On the same date Cromwell is informed by his steward at Austin Friars that “the Frenchman next your house that was in St Peter’s parish [Cornhill] has buried two, but no more.” The plague looked threatening enough to raise the question whether Bartholomew fair should be held at Smithfield this year. Meanwhile the king and court were at Thornbury in Gloucestershire, having arrived there on the 18th August. The town of Bristol was avoided “because the plague of pestilence then reigned within the said town;” but a deputation of three persons was sent to the king to present him with ten fat oxen and forty sheep, and to present the queen, Anne Boleyn, with a gold cup full of gold pieces, an offering known as “queen gold[566].” On the 25th of August the French ambassador proceeded to Gloucestershire to inform Henry VIII. “of the interview of the two queens,” but he stopped six miles short of the court, owing to a “French merchant” who followed him having died of plague on the road. On the 4th September the plague in London is aggravated by a scarcity of bread; “what was sold for ½d. when you were here is now 1d.,” and it is so musty that it is rather poisonous than nourishing. On the 6th the season has been unfavourable and there is great probability of famine. On the 13th the Lord Chancellor will stay at his house at Old Ford beside Stratford, on account of the plague in London increasing; he will have to go to Westminster on the 3rd November, with the Speaker and others, to prorogue Parliament, and advises the prorogation to be until the 4th of February, and of the law courts until the eve of All Souls, by which time, by coldness of the weather, the plague should cease. Wheat and rye were at a mark and 16/- the quarter. A letter from Exeter on the 17th September shows the danger of famine to have been great there also[567]. On the 23rd September one of the masons working at Cromwell’s house in Austen Friars is sick of the plague: three corses were buried at Hackney [of men employed at the new house?] last St Matthew’s day. In October the king is on his way back from Gloucestershire, but changes his route owing to a death at Shalford and four deaths at Farnham. On the 24th October the bishop of Winchester, on his way to Paris, lost his servant at Calais by the great sickness “wherewith he was infected at his late being in London longer than I would he should:” travelling is cumbrous in the “strange watery weather” in France. In November the pope has heard that England is troubled with famine and pestilence. The curate of Much Malvern writes in November (but perhaps of 1536): “I have buried four persons of pestilence since Saturday, and I have one more to bury to-day. Yesterday I was in a house where the plague is very sore.”
The sickness appears to have shown itself again in London as early as April, 1536. On the 2nd of May two gentlemen of the Inner Temple had died of the sickness; on the 15th the abbot of York writes to be excused from attending Parliament “because of the plague which has visited my house near Powles [St Paul’s].” In the same summer the election of knights to serve in Parliament for Shropshire could not be held at Shrewsbury because the plague was in the town. In September one of the king’s visitors of the abbeys, previous to their suppression, found hardly any place clear of the plague in Somerset, and was much impeded in his work. On the 27th September one of the numerous coronations of new queens in Henry VIII.’s reign (this time Jane Seymour in succession to Anne Boleyn, beheaded in May) was like to be postponed “seeing how the plague reigned in Westminster, even in the Abbey.” On the 9th October plague was at Dieppe, thought to have been brought over from Rye. In Yorkshire also, the duke of Norfolk, sent to put down the rebellion in November, 1536, came into close contact with plague; many were dying of it at Doncaster: “Where I and my son lay, at a friar’s, ten or twelve houses were infected within a butt’s length. On Friday night the mayor’s wife and two daughters and a servant all died in one house.” Nine soldiers also were dead. At Oxford the plague was active, and the scholars had gone into the country. In London on the 27th November it was dangerous to tarry at Lincoln’s Inn “for they die daily in the City.” In September, 1536, the small essay on plague by the 14th century bishop of Aarhus, which had circulated in manuscript in the medieval period and was first printed in 1480, was reprinted at London, the regimen, as the title declares, having been “of late practised and proved in mani places within the City of London, and by the same many folke have been recovered and cured[568].” In 1537 there appear to have been a few cases of plague at Shrewsbury, on account of which the town council paid certain moneys[569].
Beyond the year 1538 the domestic records of State are not as yet calendared in such fulness as to bring to light any references to plague in them. It may be, therefore, that the clear interval from 1537 to 1542 is in appearance only. From such sources as are available we can continue the history of plague down to the great London plague of 1563; but it is a history meagre and disappointing after the numerous concrete glimpses and details of the earlier period.
The summer of 1540 was a sickly one throughout England[570]; it introduces us to a different and perhaps new type of disease, “hot agues,” with “laskes” or dysenteries, of which a good deal remains to be said in another chapter.
It was in 1539 that Parish Registers of the births, marriages and deaths began to be kept—very irregularly for the most part but in some few parishes continuously from that year. By their means we can henceforth trace the existence of epidemic disease in the country, which might not have been suspected or thought probable. Thus, at Watford from July to September, 1540, there were 47 burials, of which 40 were from “plague.” Next year, in the month of October, the burials were 14, a number greatly in excess of the average[571]. In 1543 there was “a great death” in London, which lasted so far into the winter that the Michaelmas law term had to be kept at St Albans[572]. Another civic chronicle adds that there had been a great death the summer before; and from an ordinance of the Privy Council it appears that the plague was in London as early as May 21, 1543[573]. The next definite proof of plague in the capital is under 1547 and 1548. On the 15th November in the former year blue crosses were ordered to be affixed to the door-posts of houses visited by the plague. In 1548, says Stow, there was “great pestilence” in London, and a commission was issued to curates that there should be no burials between the hours of six in the evening and six in the morning, and that the bell should be tolled for three-quarters of an hour[574]. A letter of July 19 says that they had been visited by plague in the Temple, and that it still continued[575]. On August 28, the Common Council adjourned for a fortnight by reason of the violence of the plague[576].
These are the London informations for 1547 and 1548, but it would be unsafe to conclude that the other years from 1543 were free from plague. In 1544 it was raging at Newcastle[577], at Canterbury[578] and at Oxford[579], at which last it continued most of the next year, and was considered to be “the dregs of that which happened anno 1542.” It had been prevalent in Edinburgh previous to June 24, 1545[580]. In April, 1546, there was a severe mortality on board a Venetian ship at Portsmouth, which may have been the plague, as in a similar case at Southampton[581]. In the autumn or early winter of the same year the plague was raging so fervently in Devonshire that the Commissioners for the Musters were obliged to put off their work till it ceased[582]. Within the town of Haddington, which was held by an English garrison against a large besieging force of French and others, plague broke out in 1547[583]. In 1549 the disease is reported from Lincoln[584]. A letter of November 23, 1550, states that the Princess Mary was driven from Wanstead by one dying of the plague there[585].
The reigns of Edward VI. and Mary, full of trouble as they were in other ways, furnish hardly a single record of plague. The sweating sickness of 1551 we hear of sufficiently; and the pestilent fevers, or influenzas, in 1557-58 are not altogether without record; but of plague down to the 5th year of Elizabeth (1563) there is very little said, and that little not free from ambiguity. Sometime in that interval, or still earlier, must have fallen the pestilence at Northampton, severe enough to require the new cemetery which cardinal Pole, in a deed of March 9, 1557, ordered to be henceforth kept enclosed[586]. Only two of the many centres of sickness in England in 1558 are said to have had the infection of the type, not of fever, but of plague,—Loughborough and Chester. In the Leicestershire town the burials were numerous enough for true plague, and the cause of mortality is so named[587]. In Chester also the sickness is called the plague, and it is added that many fled the town, although the deaths were few[588]. A State paper of February 25, 1559, speaks of the county of Cheshire as “weakened by the prevalence of plague[589].”