[399] Dibdin (Antiq. Typogr. II. 19) assigns the printing to Machlinia, and reproduces a page as a sample of his common type. Bliss (Reliquiae Hearnianae, II. 117) says that this sample page does not correspond with that of the British Museum copy. He adds that there is a fragment of the printed book in the library of St Peter’s College, Cambridge, “pasted within the wooden covers of the binding of an edition (1499) of Discipuli Sermones.”
[400] In the earliest printed Latin texts of this work (Antwerp, 1485? Leipzig, 1495? and versified in Albertus Magnus, ‘De Virtute Herbarum,’ 1500?) he is named Kamitus, bishop of Arusia, a city in the realm of Denmark. In the copy of the English version in the British Museum, someone has called him Ramicius, having written on a leaf, “Ramicius Episcopus Arusiensis civitatis Daciae Regimen contra pestem,” with the date 1698. The name of Kamitus, being judged improbable on the face of it, has been changed in the catalogue of the British Museum library into Canutus. But there was no Canutus among the bishops of Aarhus, nor a Kamitus, nor a Ramicius. The two bishops that appear to suit best are Olaus, or Olaf, who was bishop from 1371 to 1388, and Ulricus or Udalricus, or Olric Stycka, who succeeded in 1425 and held the see until 1449. Curiously enough, the latter, when he went to Rome in 1425 to represent Eric, king of Pomerania in a suit with the dukes of Sleswig, figures throughout the records of the suit as “Olaus, episcopus Arosiensis,” although Olaus, bishop of Arusia, belonged to a former generation. It is, of course, the merest guessing; but I am inclined to think that the author of the essay on plague was either bishop Olaus, of 1371-1388, or bishop Udalricus, of 1425-1449, a man of character and ability, who also went by the name of Olaus; and that in any case the manuscript version of the essay in the English tongue is more likely to have been of the early part of the fifteenth century than of the fourteenth. The above facts are collected from various parts of Langbeck’s Script. Rer. Dan.: the “Series Episcoporum Arhusiorum” is in vol. VII. p. 212. Nothing is there said of any bishop of Aarhus having written a book, or having been a physician at Montpellier.
[401] These words (“the impressions”) are contracted in the printed book, exactly as in the manuscript. I have modernised the spelling for the most part.
[402] “When a man feeleth himself infect, as soon as he may, let him be let blood plenteously till he swoon: then stop the vein. For a little letting of blood moveth or stirreth venom.... Let him blood on the side of the body where the swelling appeareth. Therefore if a swelling appear under the right arm, let blood in the middle of the same arm, in the vein called mediana. If it appear under the left arm, let him blood in midst of the same, or in the vein of the liver which is about the little finger. And if it be about the share, let him blood about the heel upon the same side. If the swelling be in the neck, let him blood in the vein called cephalica, about the thumb in the hand of the same side; or in the vein the which is called mediana of the same arm, or in the hand of the same side about the little finger. And, overmore, if the swelling appear about the ear, let him blood in the vein called cephalica of the same side, or in the vein which is between the long finger and the thumb, lest many venomous things go into the brain.” If the swelling is in the shoulders, bleed from the mediana: if on the back from pedica magna, and so on.
[403] Walsingham, Hist. Angl. I. 309. Adam of Murimuth, Engl. Hist. Soc.
[404] The Stratford bread-carts are explained in Stow’s Survey of London (“Lime Street Ward”). In the famines of 1512 and 1527, they were besieged on the way by hungry citizens and had to be guarded. The same phrase of bread being “gesen” or scarce, occurs in a letter of 4 September, 1535, from Thomas Broke to Cromwell, secretary of State: “never knew good bread so geason in London at this time of the year; it is so musty, and of so evil wheat, that it is rather poisonous than nourishing; what was sold for a halfpenny, when you were here, is now a penny.” (Cal. State Papers, Henry VIII. vol. IX. § 274.)
[405] Thorold Rogers. A Short English Chronicle, Camden Soc. 1880:—“45 Edward III. This yere was called the grete dere yere, and that same yere was a quarter of whete at iiii nobles.”
[406] Wilkins, Concilia, III. 74: “De orando pro cessatione pestilentiae,” dated Slyndon, 10 Cal. Aug. A.D. MCCCLXVIII.
[407] Sharpe, Cal. of Wills, vol. II.
[408] Otterbourne (ed. Hearne, p. 133) says that the pestis tertia was in 1368, and that it lasted two years. Nicolas (Chronol. of History, p. 389) gives from a Lansdowne MS. (no. 863, fol. 107) of the time of Charles I., the duration of the pestis tertia as 2 July—29 Sept., 1369, which should probably read “2 July, 1368—29 Sept. 1369.”