In the ‘Vision of Piers the Ploughman’ (passus XX) the retribution of Nature or “Kynde” upon the wickedness of the times is thus mentioned:
“Kynde came after with many keen sores,
As pokkes and pestilences, and much people shent;
So kynde through corruptions killed full many.”
In the lines immediately preceding there occur some other names, equally generic:
“Byles and boches and brennyng agues
Frensyes and foul evils, foragers of kynde.”
“Boche” is botch,—the name given to the plague as late as the Stuart period, from its chief external sign, the bubo; and “byles” is merely the Latin bilis = ulcus. “Pokkes” may be the Anglo-Saxon word; but it is known that many of Langland’s colloquialisms are of Norman or French origin, and in that language there is a term poche, which is not far from the English “boche.” Whether “poche” be the same as “boche” or not, “pokkes and pestilences” may be taken to be synonyms for “byles and boches.” The generic or elastic use of such terms received a striking illustration in 1528, when spotted fever (typhus), perhaps mixed with plague, became exceedingly common among French and Spanish troops. Among the French the disease was called les poches and among the Spaniards las bubas[886], although both names had been assigned to syphilis at the time of its epidemic outburst in the end of the 15th century. In those times diseases were called by their external marks; so that diseases essentially most unlike, but having certain spots, or blemishes, or botches, or pustules of the skin in common, were called by a common name. The plague itself was known by certain spots on the breast or back called tokens: hence the figure of John Stow and others that “many died of God’s tokens.”
There was certainly laxity of naming to that extent in the case of modern languages. As to Willan’s inference from the medieval incantation, it is by no means clear that variola in medieval Latin may not have been used generically also; although, in the school of Salerno it appears to have had its meaning fixed, in the Arabic sense of smallpox, from the time of Constantinus Africanus, who introduced the teaching of Bagdad into that school about the year 1060.
The next use of “pokkes” that I have found is in a manuscript chronicle of England down to the year 1419[887], one of the series known as the chronicle of the Brute (from its commencing with the mythical landing of Brutus in England after the siege of Troy); this manuscript, known as the “Fruit of Times,” was afterwards printed at the St Albans press about 1484[888], the history being carried down to Edward IV., and the passage in question reproduced exactly as it stands in the handwriting. Under the 40th year of Edward III. (1366) there is the following entry:
“Ther fell also such a pestalence that never none such was seen in no man’s tyme or lyf, for many men as they were gone to bede hole and in gude poynte sodanly thei diede. Also that tyme fell a seknes that men call ye pokkes, slogh both men and women thorgh ther enfectyne.”
It is clearly the same passage that occurs condensed in the chronicle of William Gregory, mayor of London, which was written probably in 1451-52[889]. Under the 40th of Edward III., after referring to a “grete batille of sparows” just as the earlier chronicle does, he proceeds: “Also the same yere men and bestys were grettely infectyd with pockys, wherfore they dyde, bothe men and bestys.” The variation of “men and beasts,” instead of men and women, is curious, and suggests that there may have been a common source for the story. The chronicle contemporary with 1366, which is of best authority, was that kept at St Albans Abbey; but it gives nothing under that year. Shortly after 1361, however, and probably about 1362 or 1363 it has a singular entry, which may have been the source of these references to “pockys.” The Latin may be translated thus: “Numbers died of the disease of lethargy prophesying troubles to many; many women also died of the flux; and there was a general murrain of cattle[890].” Here we have men, women, and cattle; also lethargy, flux, and murrain; and it is conceivable that later compilers of English chronicles may each have used this contemporary Latin entry of composite events to put their own gloss upon it, or to amplify the history into what each conceived to be the probable meaning. But the most singular enlargement was that made by Holinshed in his chronicle of 1577. Having copied word for word, sparrows and all, the entry under the year 1366 in the “Fruit of Times” (as printed at St Albans about 1484), he takes leave to amend the sense in the part that chiefly concerns us—he changes “pockys” into “smallpocks,” and “men and women” into “men, women, and children[891].” Holinshed was dealing with an event two hundred years before his own time, and had no more first-hand knowledge of it than we have; but his authority has been accepted for the fatal prevalence of smallpox in 1366 by modern writers on the history of that disease, such as James Moore[892], who have not sought for the contemporary authority nor exercised a critical judgment upon the lax ways of verbalist compilers. Thus is history made—but not so easily unmade.
One other reference to “pockys” has to be noticed before we leave the philological part of the subject and come to the unambiguous history of the realities. Fabyan, in his Chronicle written not long before his death in 1512, says that Edward IV. during an expedition to the Scots Marches “was then vysyted with the syknesse of pockys[893].” It is futile to conjecture what the king’s illness may really have been. The word in Fabyan’s time had already acquired a technical sense, which it has ever since retained; but that well-understood meaning was some twenty years later than the year 1474 (although the disease itself doubtless existed all through the Middle Ages); while, in its earlier generic sense, as in the ‘Vision of Piers the Ploughman,’ it seems to have meant botches or other tokens of pestilential disease. In a Latin glossary of English words, published a hundred years after[894], “a pocke” is still defined as phagedaena, and “the French pocke” as morbus Gallicus, while “smallpox” is not given at all.