A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 1 (of 2) / From A.D. 664 to the Extinction of Plague

by Charles Creighton

Theory of the English Sweat.

I have been at some pains to show that Henry Tudor’s mercenaries were enlisted in and around Rouen, or, in other words, they came from that very district of France in which the sweat, in a somewhat modified form, began to make its appearance as an endemic malady two hundred and thirty years after. If the sweat had not become an endemic or standing disease there, as if native to the soil, or if it had become equally a disease of all other parts of Europe, as typhoid fever has, the coincidence would have been less striking, and might have been made to appear altogether irrelevant by the long interval of more than two centuries between the one event and the other. If it were a mere coincidence, we should conclude that the same causes which established in Normandy in the 18th century a steady prevalence of a sweating sickness, not unlike the more familiar prevalence of typhoid, had been at work on English soil more than two centuries earlier, not indeed to establish a form of sweating sickness steadily prevalent from year to year in one place or another, like the plague, but to induce five sharp epidemic outbursts, within a period of sixty-six years, four of which outbursts began in London and extended probably over the whole country, while one began in Shrewsbury, travelled by stages to London, and spread all over England. And, as we are ignorant of the things which determine the type of the endemic sweat of Normandy or Picardy down to the present day, we can neither deny nor affirm that there may have been corresponding factors of disease at work in the England of Henry VII. By such a line of reasoning we are brought to a view of the English sweat which precludes all farther inquiry and makes a permanent blank or maze in our knowledge. Let us try, however, whether the facts of the case do not better fall in with the view that the English sweat had a real relation to the seats of the Norman and Picardy sweat, even at a time when that sweat had not come into existence as a definite form of disease, and although the French provinces appear to have been spared the invasion of the epidemic when it overran the rest of Northern Europe in 1529.

The means of communication in 1485 was not wanting, namely the Norman soldiery of Henry VII. The tradition of their quality is preserved in the speech composed in Hall’s chronicle for Richard III. before the battle of Bosworth, and versified somewhat closely by Shakespeare:

“A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and run-aways,
A scum of Bretagnes, and base lackey peasants:
... Let’s whip these stragglers o’er the seas again;
Lash hence these over-weening rags of France,
These famished beggars, weary of their lives.”

There is nothing incredible in the supposition that these men had brought a disease into London although they had not themselves presented the symptoms of that disease. Such importations are not unknown; the mystery hanging over them does not make them the less real. A well-known instance is the St Kilda boat-cold, “the wonderful story,” as Boswell says, “that upon the approach of a stranger all the inhabitants catch cold,” a story which Mr Macaulay, the author of the History of St Kilda, had been advised to leave out of his book. “Sir,” said Dr Johnson, “to leave things out of a book merely because people tell you they will not be believed, is meanness: Macaulay acted with more magnanimity.” The St Kilda influenza has been amply corroborated since then by parallel instances from the more remote islands of the Pacific, and by striking instances in veterinary pathology. Among the latter may be quoted the instance which has been heard of in Shropshire, of “sheep which have been imported from vessels, although themselves in a healthy condition, if placed in the same fold with others, frequently producing sickness in the flock[534].” But there is an instance on a vast scale from the United States, the instance of Texas cattle-fever, which has recurred so often, and has been so closely watched on account of the disastrous loss which it causes, that there is no room left to doubt the reality of that mysterious form of contagion. I shall have to speak very shortly of the malignant fevers of the assizes, which spread from prisoners who were not known to be ill of fever; these incidents are historical from the year 1522, when an epidemic of the kind arose among the court and grand jury at the gaol delivery in the Castle of Cambridge. Lastly the history of yellow fever, as expounded in part in this volume, is an instance of a long-enduring infection arising from the circumstances of the African slave-trade, the negroes themselves having been racially exempt from the fever although they had been the source of the virus.

In all such cases the sickness which ensued among the healthy from contact with strangers had a more or less definite type; and that type in each case must have been determined mainly by the antecedents of the strangers, their racial characters being reckoned among the antecedents as well as their special hardships and their personal habits. In the case of the singular visitation of England in 1485, the strangers were a swarm of disreputable free-booters from Normandy, natives of a soil which developed the sweat as an indigenous malady in the long course of generations. If they themselves had shown the symptoms of the sweat in 1485, one might have said that the circumstances of their passage in crowded ships, of their exhausting march from Wales to Leicestershire, and thence to London, had brought to the definite issue of a specific disease that which was otherwise no more than a habit of body, a constitutional tendency, a disease in the making. But there is no reason to suppose that they themselves incurred the symptoms of the disease at all; it was contact with them in England, particularly in London, that determined the peculiar type of disease in others. Those others were of a different national stock, and for the most part of another manner of life; in their very differences lay their liability, according to well-known analogies. Of course there must have been something material, something more than abstract contact, to cause the sweat in certain Englishmen; and although we cannot image the form of the virulent matter, we are safe to pronounce, in this hypothesis, that it must have come from the persons of the foreign soldiery.