Sweating sickness—a kind of rheumatic fever—struck Oxford hard in 1517. In the following years other loathsome diseases, attributed to the noisome smells which arose from the marshy grounds around the city and the obstructed state of the Thames, manifested themselves and caused the students to fly. Frequent instances are recorded of fellows obtaining permission to leave Oxford on account of the pestilence. In 1513 most of the members of Oriel removed to a farm at Dean; in 1522 the inmates of New College fled on the outbreak of some illness, and the fellows of University College dispersed on the same account in 1525. From Magdalen, in unhealthy seasons, there were frequent migrations of a large portion of the society to Witney or to Brackley, where the hospital had been indicated by the founder as a place to which such migrations might be made. But it was in 1528 that the sweating sickness broke out in its severest form. Many persons died within a few hours of being attacked by the disease; public business was postponed, and the lecture rooms were closed. The Festival of S. John was stopped. It was decreed that all clerks who thought themselves in danger might be absent until October. It might almost have been the influenza (1894).
The plague broke out in 1571, so that the University term had to be deferred. It broke out again in the following years, and culminated, in 1577, in the “Black Assizes.” Rowland Jencks, a bookbinder, had been seized and sent to London for railing against the Commonwealth and the established religion. His house was searched for “bulls, libels, and suchlike things against the Queen and religion.” He was returned to Oxford to be committed to prison. At the Assizes, held in the Court House at the Castle-yard, he was condemned to lose his ears. No sooner was the prisoner removed from the crowded court than, as Wood tells us,
“there arose such an infectious damp or breath among the people, that many there present, to the apprehensions of most men, were then smothered and others so deeply infected that they lived not many hours after. Above 600 sickened in one night; and the day after, the infectious air being carried into the next villages, sickened there an hundred more. The number of persons that died in five weeks’ space were 300 in Oxford, and 200 and odd in other places; so that the whole number that died in that time were 510 persons, of whom many bled till they expired.”
The description of the disease given by Wood reminds one of Thucydides’ account of the plague at Athens. The outbreak was attributed by some to the Roman Catholics, who were said to have used magic to revenge themselves for the cropping of Jencks’ ears, but the explanation suggested by a remark of Bacon is more probable. “The most pernicious infection next to the plague,” he says, “is the smell of the Jail, when prisoners have been long and close nastily kept.”
In 1582 the plague again threatened. This time measures were taken to improve the sanitary conditions of the place. Regulations were introduced, which do not greatly differ from the precautions of modern legislation. It was, for instance, ordained that—
“No person shall cast or lay any donge, dust, ordure, rubbish, carreyne or any other thing noyant into any the waters ryvers or streams or any the streets, wayes or lanes. But every person shall swepe together & take up the said things noyant out of the channel of the street so far as their ground reacheth and cause the same to be carried away twice every week. All privies & hogsties set or made over upon or adjoining to any the waters or streames leading to any brew-house shall be removed & taken away. No person shall keep any hogs or swine within the said City but only within their own several backsides; no butcher shall keep any slaughter house or kill any oxen kyne shepe or calves within the walls. All pavements shall be made and amended in places defective and all chimneys occupied with fire shall from henceforth be swept four times every year.”
These ordinances, it will be seen, provided against the customary crying evils of a mediæval town. Similar provisions against similar evils are to be found in the archives of most cities in England or France in the sixteenth century. But ordinances are one thing and effective street-police is another. A hundred years later S. James’s Square was still the receptacle for all offal and cinders, for all the dead cats and dead dogs of Westminster, whilst Voltaire’s scathing description of the streets of Paris was no exaggeration. It was a state of affairs on which the Plague of London was the grimmest of all possible commentaries.
Another outbreak of plague in 1593 produced an order against plays, which were said to bring too many people, and the plague with them, from London. Regulations were also passed against overcrowding in the houses. At the beginning of the reign of James I., however, the infection spread once more from London to Oxford. Term was prorogued; the colleges broke up; and the citizens were so hard hit that they petitioned the University for aid. A weekly contribution from the colleges alleviated the distress that arose from this doleful sickness. The town was almost deserted; the shops were closed; and only the keepers of the sick or the collectors of relief appeared in the streets—“no not so much as dog or cat.” The churches were seldom opened, and grass grew in the common market-place. Next year and the next plague broke out again, by which time some arrangements had been made for a system of isolation. Yet the mediæval attitude of mind towards medicine and sanitation would seem to have lasted on through the Age of Reason. For in 1774, when small-pox had many times scourged the town, all attempts at inoculation were formally forbidden by the Vice-Chancellor and Mayor.
Foxe had aided the rise and rejoiced in the success of Wolsey. But that success was not universally popular. In spite of his benefactions to learning, and the University, it was an Oxford Laureate, one of our earliest satirists, who, when the Cardinal was at the height of his power, more monarch than the King himself, attacked him with the most outspoken virulence.
A crown of laurel would seem to have been the outward sign and symbol of a degree in Rhetoric, and rhetoricians were occasionally styled Poets Laureate. John Skelton, who was perhaps Court Poet to Henry VIII., was certainly tutor to Prince Henry and Laureate of both Universities. He was very proud of this distinction, and, not being troubled by any excess of modesty, he wrote a poem of 1600 lines in praise of himself: