[786] This account of the Black Assizes at Oxford in 1577 was brought to light, like so many other things from the register of Merton, first by Anthony Wood in his Hist. and Antiq. of the Univ. of Oxford (ed. Gutch, II. 189). It was copied in full, from the original Latin text, in 1758, by John Ward, LL.D., and sent to the Royal Society, in whose Phil. Trans. (vol. L. p. 699) it is printed, with remarks, by Tho. Birch, D.D., Sec. R. S.
[787] Howard, The State of the Prisons in England and Wales. 3rd ed., Warrington, 1784, p. 342.
[788] Hist, and Antiq. Univ. Oxford, ed. Gutch, II. 188-192.
[789] Georgius Edrichus, ‘In Libros aliquot pauli Aeginetae Hypomnemata quaedam.’ Londini apud Tomam East 1588 (without pagination).
[790] The passage which Anthony Wood thought to relate to the gaol fever at Oxford in 1577 is the following, under the heading “De morbis publicé grassantibus:” “Publice grassari morbos vidimus Oxonii, et una nocte simul plus sexaginta agrotasse (sic) novimus, et in vicinis postridie pagis, eo forte aëre delato, fere centum. Quod etiam eodem tempore, regnante tum Edwardo sexto, Cantabrigiae evenit, cum duo simul liberi ducis inclyti Suffolchiae ibi morerentur. Nec tamen Oxonienses ulli fere interierunt, quod coeli constitutio apud nos quam ibi salubrior sit. Sed iis ita succurrendum morbis putamus, ut Brittanico sudore (sic enim vocant) opitulari solemus.”
[791] Anthony Wood, as we have seen in the text, put together his version of the fever of 1577 from the Merton College register, from Stow’s Annals, and from Ethredge’s reference to the sweat of 1551. In 1758, John Ward, LL.D., copied the passage in the Merton register and sent it to the Royal Society; whose secretary, the Rev. Dr Thomas Birch, appended to it in the Philosophical Transactions some annotations—“copying,” as Carlyle said of him with reference to some Cromwell matter, “from Wood’s Athenae; and has committed—as who does not?—several errors,” his annotations being “sedulous but ineffectual”—to the extent of fixing on the original correct narrative an accretion of mistakes (600 for 60, sweating sickness for gaol fever, &c.). Trusting to the respectable Birch, Bancroft in his Essay on the Yellow Fever, with observations concerning febrile contagion &c. (Lond., 1811) has based a theory that the Oxford epidemic was not typhus at all. Murchison (Continued Fevers of Great Britain, 2nd ed. 1873, p. 103) has also been misled, and has found himself therefore at a disadvantage in answering Bancroft’s empty verbalisms about the invariable reproduction of typhus from some previous case. F. C. Webb, in a paper “An Historical Account of the Gaol Fever,” Trans. Epidem. Soc. for 1857, p. 63, has not used the Oxford case for any argumentative purpose, but he has, like the others, given the facts erroneously. He gives no particulars of the Exeter Black Assize.
[792] Howard, On Lazarettos in Europe, &c. Warrington, 1789, p. 231: “But as I have found, in some prisons abroad, cells and dungeons as offensive and dirty as any I have observed in this country, where however the distemper was unknown, I am obliged to look out for some additional cause of its production. I am of opinion that the sudden change of diet and lodging so affects the spirits of new convicts that the general causes of putrid fever exert an immediate effect upon them. Hence it is common to see them sicken and die in a short time with very little apparent illness.” The last words are important.
[793] Sylva Sylvarum, or A Natural History. In ten centuries. Cent. 10, §§ 914-15. Spedding’s ed. II. 646.
[794] Holinshed’s Chronicle. New edition by Hoker, London, 1587, pp. 1547-8.
[795] These statements by Hoker, chamberlain of Exeter, are sufficiently circumstantial; but they do not quite suit the theory of a writer in the Dict. Nat. Biog., under “Drake, Sir Bernard” that the ship was “a great Portugal ship,” called the Lion of Viana, with an English master, taken by Bernard Drake in Brittany. No doubt such a capture is stated in the Cal. State Papers, 1585, p. 295 (the reference given), Sir W. Raleigh’s ship the “Jobe” being included in the same petition; but nothing is said of Dartmouth as the port to which the two vessels were brought, or of Exeter as the place where their captains were imprisoned. It is of importance for the theory of the Exeter gaol fever to know whether Drake’s prisoners were Portuguese fishermen or not, and Hoker may be supposed to have known.