Market Towns.
| Year | Registers examined | Unhealthy Towns | Baptised in same | Buried in same | ||||
| 1557 | 4 | 2 | 262 | 381 | ||||
| 1558 | 4 | 2 | 104 | 159 | ||||
| 1559 | 5 | 3 | 102 | 149 | ||||
| 1560 | 8 | 3 | 134 | 201 | ||||
| 1561 | 8 | 3 | 276 | 399 | ||||
| 1562 | 8 | 1 | 58 | 71 |
Short’s collection of parish registers appears to have represented many English counties, although there is no clue to their identity in the tables from which these figures are taken. The heavy mortalities in the registers correspond exactly to the epidemic years as otherwise known, and may be said to bear witness to the extent or generality of the epidemic infection.
The next that we hear of malignant fevers in England is the outbreak at Oxford in 1577, following the Assizes. Anthony Wood says of it: “Some thought that this Oxford mortality was the same that Leonard Fuchsius styles sudor Anglicus.” Cogan, a contemporary, says:
“And certainly after that sudden bane at Oxford, the same year and a year or two following, the same kind of agues raged in a manner all over England, and took away very many of the strongest sort in their lustiest age, and for the most part men and not women nor children, culling them out here and there, even as you should choose the best sheep out of a flock. And certain remedy was none to be found.... And they that took a moderate sweat at the beginning of their sickness, and did rid their stomachs well by vomit, sped much better.”
This is partly confirmed by Short’s abstracts of the parish registers. Thus in 1580, of sixty registers examined, ten showed unhealthiness, the births being to the deaths as 248 to 284. In 1582, seven country parishes were markedly unhealthy, the births being to the deaths as 140 to 244. In market towns the incidence is not so striking: in 1580, four towns out of sixteen examined showed an unhealthy birth-rate, 237 births to 276 deaths. It is in 1583 that the disparity becomes greatest in these towns: three out of the sixteen in the list were notably unhealthy, the deaths being 1062 and the births 467. But it is the obvious defect of Short’s method that we have no means of knowing whether that mortality may not have been largely from plague, and not from fever or other form of epidemic sickness.
The only year between 1558 and 1580 in Short’s tables, which stands out as decidedly unhealthy both in country parishes and market towns is 1570, while the years from 1573 to 1575 are less healthy than the average. Those were years of war, and of war-typhus, on the Continent, as the foreign writings show, but there are no records of the kind of sickness in England.
One glimpse of the prevalence of those fevers of 1580-82 is got from a letter of the earl of Arundell to Lord Burghley, October 19, 1582. The earl had left his house in London because it was so “beset and encompassed” by plague; while, as to his country house: “The air of my house in Sussex is so corrupt even at this time of the year as, when I came away, I left xxiv sick of hot agues.” He therefore begs the loan of the bishop of Chichester’s house till such time as the vacancy in the see should be filled up[820].
The widespread volatile sicknesses of 1557-8 and 1580-2, which are grouped under the generic name of influenza, were related in time to great epidemics of the far more deadly bubo-plague. These plague outbursts were less noticeable in England than abroad. Thus in 1557 there were most disastrous epidemics of true bubo-plague in several towns of the Low Countries, and in 1580 there was at Cairo one of the worst epidemics in the whole history of plague from its beginning. The years preceding 1580 were also plague-years in many parts of Europe (Padua, Mantua, Venice, Messina, Palermo, Lisbon, Brussels). Those years were also the occasion of the first great and disastrous epidemics of diphtheria (garottillo) in Spain. Then come the epidemics of typhus; and at the far end of the pestilential scale the flying waves of influenza. A relation of influenza to other prevalent infections has been one of the theories of its nature, especially the relation to epidemics of Asiatic cholera.
In that view influenza looks as if it were a volatile product, a swifter and more superficial wave on the top of some slower and more deadly earth-borne virus. As the old writers said, it was a levis corruptio aeris, a diluted virus as it were, mild in proportion to its volatility and swiftness, but in universality equalling in its own milder way the universality of the plague of Justinian’s reign or of the Black Death.