The Last of Plague in England.
The history of plague in England must be made to end with a solitary epidemic at Nottingham in 1667, but not without some misgivings as to the correctness of the date. Dr Deering, the historian of the town in 1751, paid little heed to epidemics, although medicine was his business; but he mentions one of smallpox in 1736, which had probably come within his own experience, and proceeds:
“I question much whether there has been the like since the plague which visited the town in 1667, and made a cruel desolation in the higher part of Nottingham, for very few died in the lower; especially in a street called Narrow Marsh, it was observed that the infection had no power, and that during the whole time the plague raged, not one who lived in that street died of it, which induced many of the richer sort of people to crowd thither and hire lodgings at any price; the preservation of the people was attributed to the effluvia of the tanners’ ouze (for there were then 47 tanners’ yards in that place), besides which they caused a smoak to be made by burning moist tanners’ knobs[1232].”
If there had been any reference to the parish registers or to the corporation minutes, we should have had no reason to doubt that this epidemic had been correctly assigned to 1667. The last Winchester epidemic had been given under the year 1668, first by one local historian, and then by another who copied him; but when a third went to the manuscript records, he found that the year was 1666, as indeed an incidental reference to the re-opening of Winchester School on 1st December, 1666, “the sickness being in all appearance extinguished,” might have warranted one in concluding. It is a singular experience to have brought the history of plague down through several centuries, not without particulars of times and numbers, and to be obliged to end it in the latter half of the 17th century with an unauthenticated date. The Nottingham epidemic may have been an exception to the generality that all England was finally delivered from the plague in 1666; it is due, at least, to the local historian, in the absence of evidence against, to record his date of 1667. The difficulty of confirming so simple a fact at so late a period may dispose the readers of this work to be tolerant of any lack of certainty and precision that they may discover in its history of more remote times.