The earliest of these is mentioned in the annals of the priory of Christ Church, Canterbury. In the year 829, all the monks save five are said to have died of pestilence, so that the monastery was left almost desolate. The archbishop Ceolnoth, who was also the abbot of the monastery, filled up the vacancies with secular clerks, and he is said to have done so with the consent of the five monks “that did outlive the plague.” The incident comes into the Canterbury MS. of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle[18] under the year 870, in connexion with the death of Ceolnoth and the action of his successor in expelling the seculars and completing the original number of regulars. So far as the records inform us, that great mortality within the priory of Christ Church two centuries after it was founded by Augustine, was an isolated event; the nearest general epidemic to it in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was a great mortality of man and beast about the year 897 following the Danish invasion which Alfred at length repelled.
That such deadly intramural epidemics in monasteries were not impossible is conclusively proved by the authentic particulars of a sudden and severe mortality among the rich monks of Croyland at a much more recent date—between the years 1304 and 1315. In the appendix to the chronicle of Ramsey Abbey[19] there is printed a letter from Simon, abbot of Croyland, without date but falling between the years above given, addressed to his neighbours the abbots of Ramsey, Peterborough and Thorney, and the prior of Spalding. The letter is to ask their prayers on the occasion of the sudden death of thirteen of the monks of Croyland and the sickness of others; that large number of the brethren had been cut off within fifteen days—“potius violenter rapti quam fataliter resoluti[20].” The letter is written from Daddington, whither abbot Simon had doubtless gone to escape the infection.
These are two instances of deadly epidemics within the walls of English monasteries. In the plague-years 664-685, and long after in the Black Death, the mortalities among the monks were of the same degree, only there was an easy explanation of them, in one if not in both cases, as being part of an imported infection universally diffused in English soil. What the nature of the occasional outbreaks in earlier times may have been, we can only guess: something almost as deadly, we may say, as the plague itself, and equally sudden. The experience was not peculiar to England. An incident at Rome almost identical with that of Vighard in 668 is related in a letter sent home in 1188, by Honorius the prior of Canterbury, who had gone with others of the abbey on a mission to Rome to obtain judgment in a dispute between the archbishop and the abbey, that the whole of his following was stricken with sickness and that five were dead. John de Bremble, who being also abroad was ordered to go to the help of the prior, wrote home to the abbey that when he reached Rome only one of the brethren was alive, and he in great danger, and that the first thing he had to do on his arrival was to attend the cook’s funeral[21].
There is no clue to the type of these fatal outbreaks of sickness within monastic communities. One naturally thinks of a soil-poison fermenting within and around the monastery walls, and striking down the inmates by a common influence as if at one blow. There are in the medieval history previous to the Black Death a few instances of local pestilences among the common people also, which differ from the ordinary famine-sicknesses of the time. The most significant of these is a story told by William of Newburgh at the end of his chronicle and probably dating from the corresponding period, about the year 1196[22]. For several years there had been, as we shall see, famine and fever in England; but the particular incident does not relate to the famine, although it may join on to it. It is the story of a ghost walking, and it comes from the village of Annan on the Solway, having been related to the monk of Newburgh in Yorkshire by one who had been an actor in it. A man who had fled from Yorkshire and taken refuge in the village under the castle of Annan, was killed in a quarrel about the woman whom he had married, and was buried without the rites of the church. His unquiet ghost walked, and his corpse tainted the air of the village; pestilence was in every house, so that the place which had been populous looked as if deserted, those who escaped the plague having fled. William of Newburgh’s informant had been in the midst of these calamities, and had taken a lead in mitigating them; he had gone to certain wise men living “in sacra dominica quae Palmarum dicitur,” and having taken counsel with them, he addressed the people: “Let us dig up that pestilence and let us burn it with fire” (effodiamus pestem illam et comburamus igni). Two young men were, accordingly, induced to set about the task. They had not far to dig: “repente cadaver non multa humo egesta nudaverunt, enormi corpulentia distentum, facie rubenti turgentique supra modum.”
The story, like others of the kind with a mixture of legend in them, is more symbolical than real. The wise men of Annan may have been in error in tracing the plague of their village to a single corpse, but they were probably on the right lines of causation. It is curious to observe in another chronicler of the same period, Ralph of Coggeshall in Essex, and in a part of his chronicle which relates to the last years of Richard I., and first years of John, a comment upon the action of Pope Innocent III. (about 1200 A.D.) in interdicting all Christian rites save baptism by the clergy in France: “O how horrible ... to refuse the Christian rite of burial to the bodies of the dead, so that they infected the air by their foetor and struck horror into the souls of the living by their ghastly looks[23].” The same pope’s interdict of decent burial and of other clerical rites extended to England in 1208, the famous Interdict of the reign of John. It was the papal method of checkmating the kingdoms of this world; that it was subversive of traditional decency and immemorial sanitary precaution was a small matter beside the assertion of the authority of Peter.
Rightly or wrongly, taught by experience or misled by fancy, the medieval world firmly believed that the formal and elaborate disposal of the dead had a sanitary aspect as well as a pious. The infection of the air, of which we shall hear much more in connexion with the plague, was a current notion in England for several centuries before the Black Death. Especially does the dread of it find expression where corpses were unburied after a battle, massacre, or calamity of nature. The exertions made in these circumstances to bury the dead, even when all pious and domestic feeling was hardened to the barest thought of self-preservation, are explained in set terms as instigated by the fear of breeding a pestilence. The instinct is as wide as human nature, and there is clear evidence in our own early writers that its sanitary meaning was recognised. One such instance may be quoted from the St Albans annalist of the time of John and first years of Henry III.[24] In the year 1234, an unusually savage raid was made by the Welsh as far as Shrewsbury; they laid waste the country by fire and sword; wayfarers were horrified at the sight of naked and unburied corpses without number by the road sides, preyed on by ravenous beasts and birds; the foetor of so much corruption infected the air on all sides, so that even the dead slew the living. The chronicler’s language, “quod etiam homines sanos mortui peremerunt,” is marked by the perspicacity or correctness which distinguishes him. When the bubo-plague came to be domesticated in English soil more than a century later, the disposal of the dead became a sanitary question of obvious importance. But even in the centuries before the Black Death, and most of all in the times when the traditional practices of decent burial were interdicted by Popes or turned to mercenary purposes by clergy[25], we shall perhaps not err in looking for one, at least, of the causes of localised outbreaks of pestilence in the tainting of the soil and the air by the corruption of corpses insufficiently buried and coffined.
There still remains, before we come to famine-sickness as the common type of pestilence in medieval England, to discover from the records any evidence of pestilence due to war and invasion. The domestic history from first to last is singularly free from such calamities. The whole history of Mohammedan conquest and occupation is a history of infection following in the train of war; and in Western Europe, at least from the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII., when the medieval period (according to Hallam) closes, the sieges, battles, and campaigns are constantly associated with epidemic sickness among the people as well as among the troops. There is only one period in the history of England, that of the civil wars of the Parliament and the Royalists, in which the people had a real taste of the common continental experience. The civil wars of York and Lancaster, as we shall see, touched the common people little, and appear to have bred no epidemics.
Apart from civil war, there were invasions, by the Welsh and Scots on the western and northern marches, and by the Danes. One instance of pestilence following a Welsh raid in the thirteenth century has been given from Roger of Wendover. A single instance is recorded in the history of the Danish invasions. It has been preserved by several independent chroniclers, with some variation in details; and it appears to have been distinguished by so much notice for the reason that it illustrates the magnanimity, sanctity, and miraculous power of St Elphege, archbishop of Canterbury.
In the year 1010 (or 1011 according to some), the Danes had stormed Canterbury, burnt the fair city, massacred the inhabitants, or carried them captive to their ships at Sandwich. The archbishop Elphege was put on board a small vessel and taken (doubtless by the inland channel which was then open from the Stour to the Thames) to Greenwich, where he was imprisoned for seven months[26]. A council had assembled in London for the purpose of raising forty thousand pounds to buy off the invaders. According to the account used by Higden[27], Elphege refused to sanction the payment of a ransom of three thousand pounds for his own person: he was accordingly taken from prison, and on the 13th of the Calends of May, 1010, was stoned to death by the Danes disappointed of his ransom. Therefore a pestilence fell upon the invaders, a dolor viscerum, which destroyed them by tens and twenties so that a large number perished. The earlier narrative of William of Malmesbury[28] is diversified by the introduction of a miracle, and is otherwise more circumstantial. While the archbishop was held in durance, a deadly sickness broke out among the Danes, affecting them in troops (catervatim), and proving so rapid in its effects that death ensued before they could feel pain. The stench of their unburied bodies so infected the air as to bring a plague upon those of them who had remained well. As the survivors were thrown into a panic, “sine numero, sine modo,” Elphege appeared upon the scene, and having administered to them the consecrated bread, restored them to health and put an end to the plague.
Disregarding what is fabulous, we may take these narratives to establish the fact that a swift and fatal pestilence did break out among the Danes in Kent. It had consisted probably of the same forms of camp sickness, including dysentery (as the name dolor viscerum implies), which have occurred in later times. It is the only instance of the kind recorded in the early history.