Minor plague outbreaks of 1645 were at Derby and Oxford. Of the latter we have a glimpse from Willis of Christ Church.
“Sometime past in this city [Oxford] viz., 1645, the plague (tho’ not great) had spread. Doctor Henry Sayer, a very learned physician, and happy in his practice, many others refusing this province, boldly visited all the sick, poor as well as rich, daily administered to them physic, and handled with his own hands their buboes and virulent ulcers, and so cured very many sick by his sedulous though dangerous labour. That he might fortifie himself against the contagion, before he went into the infected houses, he was wont only to drink a large draught of sack, and then his perambulation about the borders of death and the very jaws of the grave being finished, to repeat the same antidote.
After he had in this city, as if inviolable as to the plague, a long while taken care of the affairs of the sick without any hurt, he was sent for to Wallingford Castle, where this disease cruelly raged, as another Æsculapius, by the governor of the place. But there, being so bold as to lie in the same bed with a certain captain (his intimate companion), who was taken with the plague, he quickly received the contagion of the same disease; nor were the arts then profitable to the master which had been helpful to so many others, but there with great sorrow of the inhabitants, nor without great loss to the medical science, he died of that disease.” He treated the sick, in the pre-bubonic stages, by a vomit of Crocus Metallorum, and then by diaphoretics[1093].
None of the other localized epidemics of plague in those years would appear to have been of the first magnitude. Thus, the 22 deaths from plague at Loughborough from 1645 to May 14, 1646, and the renewed prevalence, after a year’s interval, (83 plague-deaths from July 20, 1647 to March 25, 1648)[1094], are samples of local mortalities from plague that other parish registers might bear witness to if they had been examined by antiquaries as closely as Nichols examined those of Leicestershire.
Newark was one of the towns which suffered much during the Civil War. Besieged time after time, it was at length surrendered to the Parliament on May 6, 1646. A letter written shortly after the surrender says[1095]:
“Truly it is become a miserable, stinking, infected town. I pray God they do not infect the counties and towns adjacent.... By reason of the sickness in divers places, the officers dare not yet venture to fetch out the arms.... Tradesmen are preparing to furnish their shops ... but the market cannot be expected to be much whilst the sickness is in the town.”
The parish register of Newark bears no witness to deaths from plague; but that of the adjacent parish of Stoke, in which stood the Castle and the suburb of Newark surrounding it, has numerous entries of plague-deaths, beginning with one some three weeks after the surrender, on May 28, 1646, and continuing through July, August, and September. Several of the same household are buried in one day, one is “buried in the field,” another “in his croft.” The vicar sums up the mortality thus: “There dyed in the towne of Stoke, 1646, eight score and one, whereof of the plage seven score and nineteen.” The whole deaths in Stoke parish the year before had been nine, and the year after they were six[1096]. If the plague had been at all proportionate in Newark town itself, the deaths would have far exceeded 159; but, as the parish register does not record plague-deaths at all, it may be inferred that the infection lay mostly around the Castle.
Whitmore speaks of having practised in the plague in Staffordshire in 1647-8, and there is some other evidence, without particulars, of an epidemic in the town of Stafford.
One more epidemic of plague is reported from the theatre of Civil War in the south-west, the outbreak at Totness in 1646-7. In the parish register there is a burial entered on July 30, 1646, “suspected she died of the plague.” A leaf of the register has the following: “From December 6, 1646, till the 19th October, 1647, there died in Totness of the plague 262 persons”—a number greater than the register shows in detail. The stereotyped remark is added, that the town was deserted and that grass grew in the streets[1097]. For months before the first suspected case of plague in 1646, Totness had been occupied by one body of troops after another. In November or December, 1645, Goring’s Royalist cavalry, to the number of nearly 5000, were quartered at Totness and two or three other places near. On January 11, 1646, Fairfax came with his army to Totness for the siege of Dartmouth, which was carried by storm on the 20th. The Lord General then withdrew to resume the investment of Exeter. Before doing so he issued warrants to four Hundreds to assemble their men at Totness on the 24th January. The men came in to the number of about 3000, and a regiment was formed from them[1098]. What connexion with the plague in the end of the year all this military stir at Totness may have had, it would not be easy to determine. There had been a great deal of sickness in the army of Fairfax while it lay at Ottery St Mary in the latter half of November, 1645. “By reason of the season,” says Rushworth, “and want of accommodation, abundance of his army, especially the foot, were sick, and many died, seldom less than seven, eight or nine in a day in the town of Autree, and amongst the rest Colonel Pickering died and some other officers. The Royal party had notice of this consumption of Fairfax’s army,” and took heart to make a new effort. The type of sickness is unknown; but it was such as to cause the removal of the head-quarters on December 2 to Tiverton, for better air. The army lay there until January 8, and came to Totness, for the siege of Dartmouth, on the 11th. Thus Totness had not only been occupied by an army some months before the plague, but by an army which had lately had a fatal form of sickness in it. The troops march away, and the historical interest goes with them; what they may have left behind them concerns only the domestic history. Fifty-six years had passed since Totness had the plague before; and on that occasion the epidemic was equally disastrous.
Two other centres of plague in 1646-7 are casually mentioned, one at Reading[1099], which affected “a great number of poor people,” and the other at Carlisle[1100]. Of the latter there are no particulars; but the circumstances of the town for several years were such as to make an outbreak of plague in 1646 credible.