The Fourteenth Century Chronology continued.
Two epidemics contend in the chronicles for being the pestis tertia—that of 1368-69, and that of 1375. The former is described as a “great pestilence of men and the larger animals[403],” and it appears to have been associated with unfavourable seasons and with the beginning of that scarcity which Langland’s poem refers to the month of April, 1370:
Atte Londoun, I leve, liketh wel my wafres
And louren whan thei lakken hem.—It is nought longe passed,
There was a careful comune whan no cart cam to towne
With bred fro Strethforth, tho gan beggeres wepe
And werkmen were agast a lite. This wole be thought longe
In the date of our Drighte in a drye Aprille,
A thousand and thre hondreth tweis thretty and ten
My wafres there were gesen whan Chichestre was Maire[404].
The pestis of 1368 and 1369 may have been primarily a famine-sickness; but it does not follow that there was no bubo-plague mixed therewith. On the contrary, seasons of scarcity were often in after experience found to be the seasons of plague, the lowered vitality probably offering the opportunity to the plague-virus. Previous to the harvests of 1376 and 1377, which were abundant, there had been an unbroken period of high prices for many years, of which 1371 was remembered as “the grete dere yere[405].” But the pestis tertia appears to have been most severe in the summer of 1368; for, on 23 July of that year, Simon, archbishop of Canterbury, ordered public prayers for the cessation of the pestilence[406], and it is under the same year that the wills of deceased London citizens are enrolled in unusual numbers, although not in such numbers as in the pestis secunda of 1361[407]. Public prayers for the cessation of pestilence (without reference to famine) and an unusual mortality of the richer citizens, point to the plague proper, which may or may not have been the type of sickness in the country districts in 1369, the second year of the epidemic[408].
There is, furthermore, some indirect evidence that pestilential disease, and probably bubo-plague, occurred in London subsequent to the scarcity of the dry April, 1370, to which Langland’s verses relate. This evidence lies in the comparison of the wording of two ordinances of Edward III., one of 1369 and the other of 1371, both relating to nuisances in the city[409]. In an order of the king in Council (43 Edward III.) for stopping the carrying of slaughter-house offal from the shambles in St Nicholas parish, within Newgate, through the streets, lanes, and other places to the banks of the water of Thames near to Baynard’s Castle, where there was a jetty for throwing the refuse from into the river, the motive assigned is that divers prelates, nobles, and other persons having houses in the line of traffic, had complained grievously of these offences to the sight and smell. But, in an amended order of 28th October, 1371, against the same nuisance and with a definite (but futile) relegation of all slaughtering to Stratford on the one side and Knightsbridge on the other, the motive is differently stated: “Whereas of late, from the putrefied blood of slaughtered beasts running in the streets, and the entrails thereof thrown into the water of Thames, the air in the same city has been greatly corrupted and infected, and whereby the worst of abominations and stenches have been generated, and sicknesses and many other maladies have befallen persons dwelling in the same city and resorting thereto:—We, desiring to take precautions against such perils, and to provide for the decency of the said city, and the safety of the same our people” etc.
Up to this date, the Rolls of Parliament contain frequent references to the wasting and impoverishment of the country by pestilence. A petition of 1362 begs the king “to consider the divers mischiefs that have come to his commons by divers pestilences of wind and water, and mortality of men and beasts”—the destructive wind being the tornado-like storm, on the 16th January, 1362, “on Saturday at even,” which was long remembered, and is commemorated, along with the Black Death itself, in an inscription in the church of Ashwell, Herts. Next year, another petition states that “pestilences and great winds have done divers mischiefs”—manors and tenements held direct from the king having become desolate and ruinous. In 1369 a petition states that “the king’s ferms [rents] in every county of England are greatly abated by the great mortalities.” The parliament of 1376, the “good Parliament” so-called, is able to point the moral of its petitions by frequent references to the pestilences “that have been in the kingdom one after another,” the pestilences “of people and servants,” the murrains of cattle, and “the failure of their corn and other fruits of the earth.” The same language recurs in the second parliament of Richard II. in 1378 (the year after the poll-tax), and from that time until the end of his reign, it becomes stereotyped in the petitions deprecating heavy subsidies or excusing the smallness of the sums voted.
The pestilence of 1375 would appear to have been considered as one of the greater sort. The author of the Eulogium reckons it the pestis tertia (passing over that of 1368-69). The season was one of great heat, there was “grandis pestilentia” both in England and other countries, an infinity of both sexes died, the mortality being so swift that the pope, “at the instance of the cardinal of England” granted plenary remission to all dying contrite and confessing their sins[410]. That looks like an epidemic of true bubo-plague,—probably the pestis quarta correctly so-called[411].
In 1379 there was a great plague in the Northern parts, which were stripped of their best men; the Scots made a raid, with the following prayer on their lips: “God and Sen Mungo, Sen Ninian and Seynt Andrew scheld us this day and ilka day fro Goddis grace, and the foule deth that Ynglessh men dyene upon”—foul death being the name given to plague also in 1349[412]. The northern counties send a petition to the parliament of 1379-80, that the king would “consider the very great hurt and damage which they have suffered, and are still suffering, both by pestilence and by the continual devastations of the Scots enemy[413].”
In the parliament of 1381-82 there is a petition from the convent of Salisbury as to want of money to repair the losses caused by the pestilence, of which the tenants are nearly all dead, and by the murrain of cattle. This is more than thirty years from the Black Death, and can hardly refer, as some earlier petitions may have done, to the enduring effects of that calamity. The sixth parliament of Richard II. (1382), has two of the stereotyped petitions deprecating a heavy subsidy on the ground of “the great poverty and disease” of the commons, through pestilence of people, murrain of cattle, failure of crops, great floods, etc.[414] This was the year after the Peasant Revolt, which had coincided with troubles of various kinds. A Norwich chronicle, perhaps of contemporary authority, enters, under the year 1382, a very pestilential fever in many places of the country, and very extraordinary inundations of the fens[415]. In London the epidemic of 1382 is said to have been “chiefly among boys and girls[416].” A primitive English poem of the time has for its subject the earthquake of 1382, and with that portent it associates not only the Peasant’s Rebellion but also “the pestilens[417].”
The year 1383 was a bad one for the fruit, which was spoiled by “foetid fogs, exhalations and various corruptions of the air”: from eating of the spoiled fruits many died, or incurred serious illness and infirmities[418]. By another account, a great pestilence in Kent and other parts of England destroyed many, sparing no age or sex. In Norfolk the sickness that year is said to have been confined to young persons[419]. This was only one of the occasions which might have been referred to in ‘Piers Ploughman,’ when the poor people thought to “poison Hunger” by bad food.
The next pestilence, that of 1390 and 1391, was so prolonged and so serious as to be compared with the Great Mortality itself. It is called the pestis quinta by two annalists[420], and is described not without some detail by several. It is clear that the seeds of disease were ready to burst forth at various parts of the country; for we read that in 1389, the king was in the south of England, and seeing some of his men prostrated by sudden death, he returned to Windsor[421]. Another outburst came the year after. Intense heat began in June and lasted until September; great mortality ensued, the epidemic continuing in diverse parts of England, but not everywhere, until Michaelmas; it cut off more young than old, as well as several famous soldiers[422]. The St Albans entry confirms this: “A great plague, especially of youths and children, who died everywhere in towns and villages, in incredible and excessive numbers[423].” After the epidemic there was scarcity, of which we have special accounts from Norfolk[424]. But the heaviest mortality fell in the year 1391. There was first of all scarcity, now in its second year, and aggravated by six weeks of continual gloom in July and August. At the time of the nuts, apples and other fruits of the kind, many poor people died of dysentery, and the sickness would have been worse but for the laudable care of the mayor of London who caused corn to be brought from over sea. In Norfolk and many other counties the sickness was compared even to the Great Mortality, and was probably a mixture of famine-pestilence with bubo-plague. At York “eleven thousand” were said to have been buried[425]. Another account says that the North suffered severely, and also the West, and that the sickness lasted all summer[426]. Under the year 1393 one annalist states that many died in Essex in September and October, “on the pestilence setting in[427].” The next evidence comes from the Rolls of Parliament; in the first parliament of Henry IV. (1399) a petition is presented “that the king would graciously consider the great pestilence which is in the northern parts,” and send sufficient men to defend the Scots marches.
The first great outburst of plague in the fifteenth century falls somewhere between 1405 and 1407. “So great pestilence,” says the St Albans annalist, under the year 1407, “had not been seen for many years.” In London “thirty thousand men and women” are reported to have died in a short space; and “in country villages the sickness fell so heavily upon the wretched peasants that many homes that had before been gladdened by a numerous family were left almost empty[428].” But it is under the 7th of Henry IV. (1405) that Hall’s chronicle narrates how the king, to avoid the city on account of the plague, sailed from Queenborough to a port in Essex, and so to Plashey, “there to pass his time till the plague were ceased” (p. 36). Another chronicle says that the plague of 1407 was mostly in the West country. In that year, the 9th of Henry IV., there is a petition from Ilchester in Somerset for a remission of dues “because the town is so impoverished and desolate of people that the burgesses are unable to pay the said ferme,” and for the cancelling of all arrears due since the 43rd year of Edward III. (1369). In the 11th of Henry IV. (1410-11), the burgesses of Truro represent “that the said town is impoverished by pestilence and the death of men, and by invasions and loss by the enemy by sea, and by the surcharge of twelve lives, and by default of inhabitants in the said town”—a petition apparently similar in terms to one that had been submitted in the previous reign. In the 1st of Henry IV. (1399), petitions of the same kind had been presented from Lincoln and Yarmouth; the former was “in great part empty and uninhabited,” while the latter had “its houses vacant and void, owing to pestilence and other things.”
For the year 1413 there is a brief entry that “numbers of Englishmen were struck by plague and ceased to live[429].” A single chronicler mentions a pestilence in Norfolk in 1420[430]; but the Rolls of Parliament bear undoubted witness to a very severe prevalence of plague in the North about the same time: a petition from the Marches in 1421 speaks of “great numbers of persons dead by the great mortalities and pestilences which have raged for three years past and still reign; where a hundred men used to be there are not ten, and these of small account; where people of position kept twenty men at arms they now keep only themselves”; the enemy were making raids and food was scarce[431]. Another petition the same year (9 Henry V.) states that “both by pestilence within the realm and wars without there are not sufficient men of estate to hold the office of sheriff[432].” That was shortly after Agincourt and the conquest of France, when the fortunes of Henry V. were at their highest point. The horrors of the siege of Rouen (1419) were a favourite subject with poets of the time[433], but they were of a kind foreign to English experience in that age, and, indeed, in all periods of our history, save that of the Danish invasions. The Cromwellian Civil Wars, as we shall see, do indeed furnish many instances of plague, and some of typhus fever, in besieged or occupied towns; but, for the middle part of the fifteenth century, including the period of the wars of York and Lancaster, there is no good reason to suppose that fevers or other morbi miseriae, were rife among the common people, least of all among the peasantry.