The extinction of Plague in Britain.
Plague had been the grand infective disease of Britain from the year of the Black Death, 1348-9, for more than three centuries, down to 1666. The last of plague in Scotland was in 1647-8, in the west and north-west of England about 1650 (in Wales probably in 1636-8), in Ireland in 1650, and in all other parts of the kingdom including London in 1666, the absolute last of its provincial prevalence having been at Peterborough in the first months of 1667[53], while two or three occasional deaths continued to occur annually in London down to 1679. False reports of plague, contradicted by public advertisement, were circulated for Bath in 1675[54], and for Newcastle in 1710[55]; while in London as late as 1799, during a bad time of typhus fever, the occurrence of plague was alleged[56].
It is not easy to say why the plague should have died out. It had been continuous in England from 1348, at first in general epidemics, all over the country in certain years, thereafter mostly in the towns, either in great explosions at long intervals or at a moderate level for years together. The final outburst in 1665, which was one of the most severe in its whole history, had followed an unusually long period of freedom from plague in London, and was followed, as it were, by a still longer period of freedom until at last it could be said that the plague was extinct. In some large towns it had been extinct, as the event showed, at a much earlier date; thus at York the last known epidemic was in 1604, and it can hardly be doubted that many other towns in England, Scotland and Ireland would have closed their records of plague earlier than they did had not the sieges and military occupations of the Civil Wars given especial occasion for the seeds of the infection to spring into life. Plague seemed to be dying out all over England and Scotland (in Ireland it is little heard of except in connexion with the Elizabethan and Cromwellian conquests) for some time before its final grand explosion in London in 1665.
In seeking for the causes of its decline and extinction we must keep prominently in view the fact that the virus was brought into the country from abroad as the Black Death of 1348-9. But for that importation it is conceivable that there would have been no signal history of plague in Britain. Its original prevalence was on a great scale, and there were several other widespread epidemics throughout the rest of the 14th century. In the first volume of this history I have collected evidence that plague was endemic or steady for long periods of the 15th and 16th centuries in London, with greater outbursts at intervals, and that in the 17th century it came chiefly in great explosions. Something must have served to keep the virus in the country, and more especially in the towns, until at length it was exhausted. An exotic infection, or one that had not arisen from indigenous conditions, and would probably never have so arisen, does not remain indefinitely in the country to which it is imported. Thus Asiatic cholera, imported into Europe on six, or perhaps five, occasions in the 19th century, has never become domesticated; and yellow fever had a career in the southern provinces of Spain during some twenty years only. Plague did become domesticated for about three centuries in England, and for longer in some other countries of Europe; but it died out at length, and it would almost certainly have died out sooner had it not found in all European countries some conditions not altogether unsuited to it. What were the favouring conditions?
If, as I believe, the virus of plague had its habitat in the soil, from which it rose in emanations, and if it depended therein, both remotely for its origin in some distant country, as well as immediately for its continuance in all countries, upon the decomposition of human bodies, then it is easy to understand that the immense mortalities caused by each epidemic would preserve the seeds of the disease, or the crude matters of the disease, in the soil. Buried plague-bodies would be the most obvious sources of future plagues. But if the theory given of the Black Death be correct, bodies dead of famine or famine-fever would also favour in an especial way the continuance of the plague-virus in certain spots of ground, although they would probably never have originated it in this country. Moreover, the products of ordinary cadaveric decomposition would be so much pabulum or nutriment for the continuance of the virus. But all those things being constant, the continuance of plague would largely depend upon the manner in which the dead, after plague, or after famine and fever, or in general, were disposed of. The soil of all England in 1348-9 was filled with multitudes of the dead laid in trenches, and there were several general revivals of plague in the fifty or sixty years following. In London there were plague-pits opened in the suburbs in many great epidemics during three centuries. Even when there was no epidemic the dead were laid in the ground in such a manner that their resolution was speedy, and the diffusion of the products unchecked. But it is undoubted that greater care in the disposal of the dead did at length come into vogue. Thus, in the Black Book of the Corporation of Tewkesbury there is an entry under the year 1603, that all those dead of plague, “to avoid the perill, were buried in coffins of bourde,” the disease having carried off no fewer than 560 the year before (1602) and being then in its second season.[57]. The reason given is “to avoid the peril,” and it is beyond question that burial in a coffin did in fact delay decomposition (unless in peculiar circumstances which need not be particularized), and kept the cadaveric products from passing quickly and freely into the pores of the ground. Again, if the burial were in such coffins as the Chinese commonly use, the decomposition would proceed almost as slowly as if the body had been embalmed, and with as little risk of befouling the soil. For a long time in England such burials were the privilege only of the rich; but as wealth increased by commerce they became the privilege of all classes; and in the last great plague of London, as I said in my former volume, “even at the worst time coffins would seem to have been got for most.” Defoe’s account of the burials in heaps in plague-pits is so exactly like that of Dekker for the plague of 1603, and of other contemporaries for the plague of 1625, that one may reasonably suspect him to have used these earlier accounts as his authority for the practice in 1665, which he had no direct knowledge of. However, I do not contend that there were no such burials in 1665; just as one learns from Dekker that the coffin-makers in 1603 were busily employed and grew rich, although he also describes how a husband “saw his wife and his deadly enemy whom he hated” launched into the pit “within a pair of sheets.” In ordinary times, as we learn from the tables of burial-dues, there were poorer interments without coffins as late as 1628, according to a document printed by Spelman, the name of the parish being withheld, and even as late as 1672 in the parish of St Giles’s, Cripplegate. Spelman’s object in writing in 1641 was to protest against the mercenary practices of the clergy in the matter of burial, recalling the numerous canons of the medieval Church directed against all such forms of simony; and incidentally he mentions that it was testified before the Commissioners that a certain parson “had made forty pound of one grave in ten yeeres, by ten pounds at a time”[58]—a “tenancy of the soil” short enough to satisfy even the so-called Church of England Burial Reform Association. The use of coffins in the burial of the very poorest is now so universal that we hardly realize how gradually it was introduced. I am unable to say when burial in a sheet or cerecloth ceased; but it became less and less the rule for the poorer classes throughout the 17th century. In 1666 was passed the Act for burial in woollen, which was re-enacted more strictly in 1678[59]. The motive of it was to encourage the native woollen manufactures, or to prevent the money of the country from being expended on foreign-made linen; and its clauses ordained that woollen should be substituted for linen in the lining of the coffin and in the shrouding of the corpse, but that no penalty should be exacted for burying in linen any that shall die of the plague. Whether it prohibited in effect the use of linen cerecloths to enshroud corpses where no coffin was used does not appear clearly from the terms of the Act; but, as the intention was to discourage the use of linen, and to bring in the use of woollen, for all purposes of burial, it is probable that it served to put an end to coffinless burials altogether, wherever it was enforced, inasmuch as the prescribed material was wholly unsuited for the purpose of a cerecloth.
The history of the London plague-pit between Soho and the present Regent Street shows that, after the last great plague of 1665-66, more caution was used against infection from the buried plague-bodies. Macaulay says it was popularly believed that the earth was deeply tainted with infection, and could not be disturbed without imminent risk to human life; and he asserts that no foundations were laid in the pest-field till two generations had passed and till the spot had long been surrounded with buildings, the space being left blank in maps of London as late as the end of George I.’s reign[60].
After 1666 the old churchyards were not less crowded than before, but more crowded, perhaps because coffined corpses occupied more space and decayed more slowly. On 17 October, 1672, Evelyn paid a visit to Norwich: “I observed that most of the churchyards (tho’ some of them large enough) were filled up with earth, or rather the congestion of dead bodys one upon another, for want of earth, even to the very top of the walls, and some above the walls, so as the churches seemed to be built in pitts.” The same day he had visited Sir Thomas Browne, the author of the famous essay on urn burial or cremation, (suggested to him by the digging up of forty or fifty funeral urns in a field at Old Walsingham). The essay is full of curious learning and equally curious moralizing. But Sir Thomas, though a physician, has not a word to say on so proximate a topic as the state of the Norwich churchyards, which came under his eyes and perhaps under his nose every day of his life[61].
The practice of burying in coffins, which came at length within the means of all classes, may seem too paltry a cause to assign, even in part, for so remarkable an effect as the absolute disappearance of plague after a duration of more than three centuries. My view of the matter is that the virus would have died out of itself had it not been continually augmented, or fed by its appropriate pabulum, and that the gradual change in the mode of interment helped to check such augmentation or feeding.
But the more elaborate interment of the dead was itself an index of the greater spending power of the community, and it may be said that it was the better condition of the people, and not this one particular thing in it, which put an end to the periodical recurrences of plague. In all but its earliest outbursts in the fourteenth, and perhaps the fifteenth century, plague had been peculiarly an infection of the poor, being known as “the poor’s plague.” Perhaps the chief reason why the richer classes usually escaped it was that they fled from the plague-tainted place, leaving the poorer classes unable to stir from their homes, exposed to the infectious air, and all the more exposed that their habitual employments and wages would cease, their sustenance become precarious, their condition lowered, and their manners reckless. Again, it was not unusual for the plague to break out in a season of famine or scarcity, during which the ordinary risks of the labouring class would be aggravated. Famines ceased (except in Ireland, where there had been comparatively little plague), and scarcities became less common. The sieges and occupations of the Civil Wars in the middle of the 17th century, which undoubtedly were the occasion of the last outbursts of plague in many of the towns, were a brief experience, followed by unbroken tranquillity. Whatever things were tending to the removal of plague in all its old seats had free course thereafter.
On the other hand, one may make too much of the increase of well-being among the labouring class which coincided with the cessation of plague. As a check upon population plague worked in a very remarkable way. In London, as well as in towns like Newcastle and Chester, plague towards the end of its reign arose perhaps once in a generation and made a clean sweep of a fifth or a fourth part of the inhabitants, including hardly any of the well-to-do. It destroyed, of course, many bread-winners and many that were not absolutely sunk in poverty; but its broad effect was to cut off the margin of poverty as if by a periodical process of pruning. The Lord Mayor of London wrote to the Privy Council at the end of the great plague of 1625: “The great mortality, although it had taken many poor people away, yet had made more poverty by decay of tradesmen”—a decay of trade which they might reasonably expect to recover from before long. No such ruthless shears was ever applied at intervals to the growing fringe of poverty in after times. The poor were a more permanent residue, pressing more upon each other; but they did not press more upon the rich, except through the poor rate; on the contrary, the separation of classes became more marked.
Perhaps I ought to give an illustration of this, so as not to leave so radical a change in the vague and disputable form of a generality. I shall take the instance of Chester; its circuit of walls, remaining from the Roman conquest, is something fixed for the imagination to rest upon amidst changes within and without them.
Passing over its medieval and its not infrequent Tudor experiences of epidemic sickness, let us come to the beginning of the 17th century. In two or three successive seasons from 1602 to 1605 it lost 1,313 persons by plague, as well as about 250 from other causes. The population was then mostly within the walls, and probably did not exceed 5000. There was a shipping quarter on the west side, with egress by the Water-gate to the landing-places on the Dee; a millers’ quarter, with corn-market and hostelries, on the south, connecting by the South gate and bridge with a hamlet across the river along the road to Wales; a Liberty or Freedom of the city outside the walls on the east, along the road to Warrington and Manchester, with a Bar, a short distance out, as in London, to mark the limit of the mayor’s jurisdiction; and on the north side, within the walls, the cattle-market and shambles, with the market for country produce, and a few straggling houses without the gate on the road leading to Liverpool. Chester was a characteristic county town, with its cathedral clergy, its garrison, its resident nobility and gentry, its professional classes, its tradesmen, market people and populace, with the addition of a shipping trade to Ireland and afterwards to foreign and colonial ports. Plague continuing from 1602 to 1605 cut off a fourth or a fifth of its population, and these the poorest. The gaps in the population would gradually have filled up, and the fringe of poverty grown again[62].
The plague came again in 1647, and cut off 2053 in the short space of twenty-three weeks from 22 June to 30 November. The bills of it are extant[63], and show on what parishes the plague fell most. All the parishes were originally within the walls but one, St John’s, the ancient collegiate church of Mercia, built upon a rocky knoll in the south-east angle made by the walls with the river. The other nine parish churches and their graveyards were within the walls; but the parishes of three of them extended beyond the gates, just as the three parishes dedicated to St Botolph at the gates of London did. These three were St Oswald’s, which included the Liberty on the east side, Trinity, which included the shipping quarter on the west as well as the houses along the Liverpool road on the north, and St Mary’s, which included the millers’ suburb across the Dee on the south. Hollar’s map, made a few years after the plague of 1647, shows very few houses beyond the walls, except in the ancient Liberty on the east. But it will appear from the following table that the parishes which had extended beyond the walls must either have been very crowded close up to the walls (as the Gate parishes were always apt to be), or there must have actually been a greater population outside the gates than the contemporary map shows:
Burials from Plague in the several Parishes of Chester in 23 weeks, June 22-Nov. 30, 1647.
| 5 parishes wholly within the walls. | ||||||
| Total. | First week. | Worst (7th) week. | ||||
| St Peter | 75 | 0 | 14 | |||
| St Bridget | 85 | 7 | 9 | |||
| St Martin | 173 | 9 | 23 | |||
| St Michael | 133 | 26 | 9 | |||
| St Olave | 59 | 3 | 5 | |||
| 3 parishes extending beyond the walls. | ||||||
| St Oswald | 396 | 11 | 37 | |||
| St Mary | 314 | 5 | 20 | |||
| Trinity | 232 | 1 | 32 | |||
| 1 parish wholly without the walls. | ||||||
| St John | 358 | 2 | 26 | |||
| Pesthouse | 228 | 0 | 34 | |||
| 2053 | 64 | 209 | ||||
This was the last plague of Chester, but for a small outbreak in 1654. The next vital statistics that we get for the city are more than a century after, in 1774[64]. The population of 14,713 was then divided into two almost distinct parts, separated by the wall. The old city was being rebuilt, all but some ancient blocks of buildings held in the dead hand of the cathedral chapter; it was becoming a model 18th century place of residence for a wealthy and refined class, who were remarkably healthy and not very prolific, the parishes wholly within the walls having 3502 inhabitants. The poorer class had gone to live mostly outside the walls in new and mean suburbs, the three parishes at the Gates and extending now far beyond the walls, together with the original extramural parish of St John’s, having a population of 11,211. There was no town in Britain where the separation of the rich from the poor was more complete; there was hardly another town of the size where the health of the rich was better; and although the health of the populace was not so bad as in the manufacturing towns of Lancashire and Cumberland, close at hand, yet it is hardly possible to find so great a contrast as that between the clean and wholesome residential quarter within the walls and the mean fever-stricken suburbs as described by Haygarth in 1774:
“The inhabitants of the suburbs,” he says, “are generally of the lowest rank; they want most of the conveniences and comforts of life; their houses are small, close, crowded and dirty; their diet affords very bad nourishment, and their cloaths are seldom changed or washed.... These miserable wretches, even when they go abroad, carry a poisonous atmosphere round their bodies that is distinguished by a noisome and offensive smell, which is peculiarly disgustful even to the healthy and vigorous, exciting sickness and a sense of general debility. It cannot therefore be wondered that diseases should be produced where such poison is inspired with every breath.”
The case of Chester shows by broader contrasts than anywhere else the change from the public health of plague-times to that of more modern times. But it can hardly be said to show the populace better off than before; it shows them changed into a proletariat, and separated from the richer classes by walls several feet thick. Such, at least, was the result after four generations of immunity from plague, a result which indicates, as I have said, that we may easily make too much of the improved well-being of the poorer classes as a cause of the cessation of plague.
An easy explanation of plague ceasing in London has long been current, and just because it is an easy explanation it will probably hold the field for many years to come. It is that the fire of 1666 burnt out the seeds of plague. Defoe, writing in 1723, ascribed this opinion to certain “quacking philosophers,” but he would hardly have said so if he could have foreseen the respectable authority for it in after times. The plague had ceased in most of its provincial centres after the Civil Wars, and in some of them, such as York, from as early a date as 1604. It ceased in all the principal cities of Western Europe within a few years of its cessation in London. In London itself it ceased after 1666, not only in the City which was the part burned down in September of that year, but in St Giles’s, where the Great Plague began, in Cripplegate, Whitechapel and Stepney, where it was always worst, in Southwark, Bermondsey and Newington, in Lambeth and Westminster. Nor can it be said that the City was the source from which the infection used to spread to the Liberties and out-parishes. All the later plagues of London, perhaps even that of 1563, began in the Liberties or out-parishes and at length invaded the City. The part of London that was rebuilt after 1666 contained many finer dwelling-houses than before, built of stone, with substantial carpentry, and elegantly finished in fine and rare woods. The fronts of the new houses did not overhang so as to obstruct the ventilation of the streets and lanes; but the streets, lanes, alleys and courts were somewhat closely reproduced on the old foundations. A side walk in some streets was secured for foot-passengers by means of massive posts, which, with the projecting signs of houses and shops, were at length removed in 1766. The improvements in the City after the fire were mostly in the houses of the richer citizens. The City was the place of residence of the rich, with perhaps as many poorer purlieus in close proximity as the residential districts of London now have. But four-fifths of London at the time of the fire were beyond the walls of the City. It is in these extramural regions that the interest mostly lies for epidemical diseases. They remain, says Defoe in 1723, “still in the same condition they were in before.” Unfortunately we know little of their condition, whether in the 17th century or in the 18th. But there must have been something in it most unfavourable to health; for we find from the Bills of Mortality that the cessation of plague made hardly any difference to the annual average of deaths, the increase of population being allowed for. This fact makes the disappearance of plague all the more remarkable.