In the Report of the Irish Local Government Board, Medical Department, 1890, influenza is identified under the name “slaedan,” or prostration, which was epidemic in Ireland in 1326 or 1328, the same epidemic being called “murre” in the Annals of Clonmacnoise. The use of the word “mure” in the St Albans Chronicle is just a century later. Murrain (or morena in Latin chronicles) is probably the modern survival of “mure” or “murre.”
[805] I take this summary from Short (Chronology, etc. I. 204), who omits his authority, probably the foreign writers to whom he is usually indebted in the earlier period. The first part of Theophilus Thompson’s Annals of Influenza (Sydenham Society) is little else than extracts from Short, and therefore of foreign origin.
[806] Cal. State Papers. Domestic, sub dato.
[807] Thus in the continuation of Fabyan’s Chronicle under the year 1512, the Marquis of Dorset, sent into Spain with 10,000 men, is said to have “returned in winter by reason of the flix (dysentery).” And in Hall’s Chronicle (ed. of 1807, p. 523), we have particulars of the very serious sickness in his army in Biscay; owing to their diet being largely of garlic and fruits, and their drink being hot wines in hot weather, “there fell sick 3000 of the flix, and thereof died 1800 men.”
[808] Continuator of Fabyan’s Chronicle, sub anno. There is an almost identical entry in A London Chronicle of Henry VII. and Henry VIII. (Camden Miscellany, vol. V. 1859), but under the year 1539, in a hot and dry summer. The most discrepant date and designation of the epidemic of those years are those given in Hardiman’s History of Galway (p. 40): “This charitable institution [St Bridget’s Hospital] was fortunately completed in the year 1543, when the sweating sickness broke out, and raged with great violence, destroying multitudes of the natives, and particularly the tradesmen of the town.”
[809] The term “hot ague” occurs as early as 1518, in a letter of 18 July (Cal. State Papers).
[810] Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England during the reigns of the Tudors (1457-1559). Camden Society, II. 139.
Anthony Wood also enters for Oxford, under 1557, “A pestilential disease to the settling of some and the driving away of many; the causes of which proceeding from the eating of green fruit, the Commissary commanded that none should be sold in the market or elsewhere in Oxford.”
[811] Fabyan’s Chronicle, p. 711.
[812] Stow’s Annales, ed. Howse, p. 631. Speed also has a paragraph, unusual with him, on the state of health in the year of Queen Mary’s death (1658), in which the mortality among the clergy is specially mentioned.