The pestis secunda of 1361, or pestis puerorum, may perhaps be pointed to in the passage where chapmen are blamed for indulging their children, “ne for no pouste of pestilence correct them overmuch.” The ill-assorted marriages had doubtless followed the great mortality itself; but the second pestilence, of 1361, which affected the upper classes especially, and is said by one chronicler to have cut off more men than women[390], may have been more specially pointed to in Langland’s reference. Of that pestilence a chronicle of the next century has preserved a curious reminiscence: among its victims were men, doubtless of the upper class, “whose wives, as women out of gouvernance, took as well strangers to their husbands and other lewd and simple people, the which, forgetting their awe, worship and birth, coupled and married them with them that were of low degree and low reputation[391].”
Although Langland, when he speaks of changes “sith the pestilence time,” means the great mortality of 1349, he means in other places, the second, third, and perhaps also fourth pestilences[392]. The years of the pestilences down to the fifth are not the same in all the chronicles; there are indeed some nine outbreaks that might have been enumerated after the Black Death to the end of the century. Some of these are clearly associated with scarcity, and may have been of the old type of famine-sickness; dysentery is, indeed, mentioned in connexion with the sickness of 1391[393]. Again, an epidemic in London in 1382 is said by a chronicler to have affected children (boys and girls), while the same chronicler is explicit that the sickness in Norfolk the year after was confined to the young of both sexes under a certain age. Lastly, the epidemic of 1391 was so severe in the North as to recall the great mortality itself; but under the same year is the reference to sickness of the type of dysentery due to rotten fruit; and under the year before, 1390, two chroniclers agree that the epidemic was “mostly among children,” or that it cut off “more young than old.” It would be unsafe, therefore, to conclude that all the outbreaks of pestis in England subsequent to the Black Death, were of bubo-plague itself. The list of sicknesses in Langland’s poem gives, indeed, as much space to fevers and fluxes, burning agues and frenzies, as to boils and botches, foul evils, pokkes and pestilences—by which latter group of synonyms the bubo-plague is meant. Pestis, it is well known, was a generic name in the medieval period, just as pest and pestilence are generic now. So generic was it that some may doubt whether bubo-plague, of the type of 1349, was included at all among the pestes of the generations following. Positive evidence of the continued existence of bubo-plague in England is, at least, not superfluous, and this will be the best place to bring it in.
Medical Evidence of the Continuance of Plague.
The plague was called “the botch” down to the Elizabethan and Stuart periods; and the “botches” in Langland’s poem, or, as he writes it, “boches,” were the familiar risings, under the arms and elsewhere, which had given the disease its popular name when it began to recur time after time. Apart from this verbal or philological evidence, there is a clear proof of the prevalence of true bubo-plague during the latter part of the fourteenth century, in the manuscript ordinances or rules of prevention and treatment which were in circulation. Most of the extant copies bear the name of one John of Burgoyne, or John of Bordeaux[394]. A fragment in comparatively late handwriting purports to be the ordinance of “a great Clark, Mr John Cordewe, at the prayer of King Richard and other the Lords, for pestilence[395]”; from which it may be concluded that this, the commonly used ordinance, dates from the time of Richard II. The names used in the text are “pestilence” and “pestilential sores,” and the handling of the subject is the conventional one for the plague. The ordinance contains exceedingly little that is of practical interest, and it is difficult to believe that it can have been of real use to anyone. We are introduced to the subject with a few empty common-places; but whenever we come to business, we are plainly told to go and consult those who know—and this, be it observed, in a disease which was remarkably uniform in its type and circumstances:
“Wherefore they that have not dronken of that swete drynke of Astronomye may putte to these pestilentiall sores no fit remedies; for, because that they know not the cause and the quality of the sickness, they may not hele it, as sayeth the prince of physic Avicenna: ‘How shouldest thou hele a sore and yknowe not the cause?’ He that knoweth not the cause, it is impossible that he hele the sickness.”
If there were any doubt about the date of John of Burgoyne, or John of Bordeaux[396], it ought to be set at rest by the discovery that he corresponds in the closest way with the physician in the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s doctor of physic stands for the well-grounded practitioner of the time—“grounded in astronomie,” it is true, but at all events academically grounded, in contrast to the charlatans and pretenders who had not been to Paris or Bologna, probably knew no Latin, to say nothing of “astronomy,” and therefore knew not how to let a patient die (or recover) secundum artem. The doctor of physic uses his astrological knowledge so much in the manner of John of Bordeaux, that one suspects Chaucer to have seen the passage quoted above, and to have condensed it into the two following lines:
“The cause yknowne, and of his harm the rote,
Anon he gave to the sick man his bote.”
It was in the pestilence that this practitioner had made the money which he kept so tightly. Richly clad he was;
“And yet he was but easy of dispense;
He kept that he wan in the pestilence.
For gold in physic is a cordial:
Therefore he loved gold in special.”