Along with the prevalence of plague in 1637-38 in many towns of Wales, we may associate the outbreak of 1638 in Gloucester on the one side and in the small Salopian town of Clun on the other. From a letter of the Privy Council to the justices of Gloucestershire, it appears that a rate in aid of the plague-stricken in the city had been imposed upon the county in December, 1637, and that the infection still continued in Gloucester in September, 1638. Contributions made in Bridgenorth for the relief of the visited in Clun appear to belong to the same year. At Reading a tax for the “visited” had been collected once or oftener between 1638 and 1641. In 1641 the town of Leicester was put to some expense (£46. 8s. 7d.) in watching to keep out the sickness which prevailed in Thurmaston, Birstal, Whetstone and Oakham. The very severe plague in Stamford the same year would have been the most intense part of the epidemic in that corner of England; “Camden,” quoting from bishop Sanderson’s manuscript, says that it began at St James’s tide, 1641, and ended in March following, whereof are said to have died between 500 and 600 persons[1070].
Another centre of plague in 1641 was Congleton, in Cheshire, if we may trust the accuracy of the date given in a manuscript written some time after and seemingly based upon tradition[1071]. The infection was traced to a box of clothes which had belonged to one dead of the plague in London and were sent to the dead man’s relations at North Rede Hall. The family who received the box “caught the infection and died.” It spread “all over the country,” and came to Congleton, where it made dreadful ravages. The traditions which the anonymous narrator has put on record are, indeed, those of a plague of the greater degree—stories of corpses that no one would bury, of the sick left to their fate, of money dropped into water before it changed hands. This somewhat doubtful narrative ends with the statement that “the greatest part of the inhabitants died.”
The period from 1643 to 1650 contains all the outbreaks of plague that remain, whether in London or the provinces, until we come to the final explosion of 1665. In London the plague continued at a low endemic level from the outburst of 1636 until 1648, the deaths in 1647 reaching the considerable figure of 3597. This series of plague-years has no other interest than as showing how regularly every season the infection increased from a few cases in May or June to a maximum in September or October. One incident, out of many, may find a place. In August, 1647, Sir Philip Stapleton, one of the Eleven Members, leaders of the Presbyterian party, who were accused of treason by the Army, went over to Calais with five more of the accused, and died of the plague almost as soon as he landed. The people of the house where he died made the rest of the party pay them £80 before they would let them come forth, for bringing the sickness into their house[1072].
The plagues in provincial towns were in those years much more serious relatively than those in London. All of them occurred in towns that were besieged, or had been besieged, or had been occupied by bodies of troops or by garrisons. At the same time most of them were towns which had suffered plagues before. But the first effects of the war in the way of epidemic sickness were not of the type of plague.
War-typhus in Oxfordshire and Berkshire.
It was in the spring and summer of 1643 that England had a first experience of the war-typhus which had been familiar to the continent of Europe for a century and a half, having reached perhaps its greatest prevalence in the Thirty Years’ War. It is only in the sense of war-typhus that Shakespeare’s boast, put into the mouth of John of Gaunt, holds good:
“This fortress, built by nature for herself,
Against infection and the hand of war.”
The medieval civil wars in England do not seem to have bred infection among the people, unless, perhaps, during the anarchy of Stephen’s reign: there is reason to think that the faction-fights of York and Lancaster had no such result. But the wars of the Parliament against the Royalists produced war-sickness in its most characteristic form, and that too, at the very beginning of the struggle.
The existence of sickness in 1643 among the troops of the Parliament in Berkshire and Oxfordshire, under the earl of Essex, is briefly stated by Rushworth. But, for the first time in the history, we find a medical account of the type of sickness, of its circumstances, and of the extent of its prevalence, which is not without interest even for the military history. It happened that the afterwards celebrated Dr Thomas Willis, chemist, anatomist, physiologist and physician, was at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1643, being then aged twenty-one, and intending to enter the Church. In 1659 he published at the Hague his first medical essays, one on Fermentation and the other on Fevers[1073]; and in the latter he recalls many particulars of what he had seen in his earlier years in and around Oxford. The sickness of 1643 was also the subject of a tract published that year in Oxford, by his majesty’s command, by Sir Edward Greaves, physician to the king, which appears to have been in sufficient request in the town to be reprinted within the year[1074].