A casual mention is made of plague at Yarmouth in 1584[684]. The town of Boston appears to have had plague continuously for four years from 1585 to 1588. In 1585 houses were shut up[685]; in 1586 a case at Southwell was supposed to have been imported from Boston[686]; in the parish register the burials from plague and other causes in 1587 reach the high figure of 372, and in 1588 they are 200, the average for eight years before being 122, and for twelve years after, only 84. In 1588 one Williams, of Holm, in Huntingdonshire, was sent for to cleanse infected houses in St John’s Row, which had been used as pest-houses[687]. Within ten miles round Boston the plague prevailed; at Leake there were 104 burials from November, 1587, to November, 1588, the annual average being 24; at Frampton there were 130 burials in 1586-87, the average being 30; at Kirton there were 57 burials in 1589, and 102 in 1590[688].
Another centre on the east coast was Wisbech. In 1585 it appeared in the hamlet of Guyhirne. In 1586 it entered Wisbech itself, caused the usual shutting up of houses, and so increased in 1587 that there were 42 burials in September and 62 in October[689], being three or four times more than average. It is mentioned also at Ipswich in 1585, and at Norwich in 1588[690]. At Derby, in 1586, there was plague in St Peter’s parish[691]. At Chesterfield in November, 1586, there were plague-deaths, and again in May 1587[692]. At Leominster, in 1587, there was an excessive mortality (209 burials)[693].
The other great centre on the east coast in those years was in Durham and Northumberland[694]. In 1587 the infection began to show at Hartlepool, and in the parishes of Stranton and Hart; at the latter village 89 were buried of the plague, one of them an unknown young woman who died in the street. In 1589 the plague entered Newcastle and raged severely; of 340 deaths in the whole year in St John’s parish, 103 occurred in September; the total mortality of the epidemic to the 1st January, 1590, was 1727. Durham also had a visitation in 1589, plague-huts having been erected on Elvet Moor. Those were years of scarcity, the year 1586 having been one of famine-prices.
The great event of the time was the defeat of the Spanish Armada off the French coast from Calais to Gravelines in the last days of July, 1588. A southerly gale sprang up, which drove the magnificent Spanish fleet past the Thames as far as the Orkneys. It was perhaps well for England that the winds parted the two fleets. The English ships, which had come to anchor in Margate Roads to guard the mouth of the Thames, were in two or three weeks utterly crippled by sickness. The disease must have been a very rapid and deadly infection. Lord Admiral Howard writes to the queen: “those that come in fresh are soonest infected; they sicken one day and die the next.” In a previous letter to Burghley he writes: “It is a most pitiful sight to see the men die in the streets of Margate. The Elizabeth Jonas has lost half her crew. Of all the men brought out by Sir Richard Townsend, he has but one left alive.” The ships were so weak that they could not venture to come through the Downs from Margate to Dover[695]. It is doubtful whether any part of this sickness and mortality was due to plague, which was not active anywhere in the south of England in that year. Want of food and want of clothes, and in the last resort the hardness and parsimony of Elizabeth, appear to have been the causes. Lord Howard begs for £1000 worth of new clothing, as the men were in great want, and Lord H. Seymour writes that “the men fell sick with cold.” Dysentery and typhus were doubtless the infections which had been bred, and became communicable to the fresh drafts of men. But in the Spanish ships, beating about on the high seas and unable to land their men or even to help each other, the sickness grew into true plague, so that the broken remnants of the Armada which reached Corunna were like so many floating pest-houses.
In 1590 and 1591, at a clear interval from the Armada year, there was much plague in Devonshire. The evidence of its having been in Plymouth comes solely from the corporation accounts; at various times in 1590 and 1591 there were paid, “ten shillings to one that all his stuff was burned for avoiding the sickness,” a sum of £5. 19s. for houses shut, and a like sum to persons kept in, and sixteen shillings to four men “to watch the townes end for to stay the people of the infected places[696].” The chief epidemics, however, appear to have been at Totness in 1590 and at Tiverton in 1591. The parish register of Totness enters the “first of the plague, Margary, the daughter of Mr Wyche of Dartmouth, June 22, 1590,” from which it may be inferred that plague was first at Dartmouth, nine miles down the river, and had ascended to Totness. The following monthly mortalities will show how severe the infection became at Totness in the summer and autumn immediately following[697]:
July 42 (36 of plague, 6 not),
August 81 (80 of plague, 1 not),
September 39 (all of plague),
October 37 (all of plague),
November 25 (24 of plague, 1 not),
December 19 (all of plague),
January, 1591, 10 of plague,
February 1 of plague.
This heavy mortality from plague (246 deaths) was hardly over, when the infection began in March, 1591, at Tiverton. It is said to have been introduced by one William Waulker “a waulking man or traveller.” From 1st March, 1591, to 1st March, 1592, the deaths from plague and other causes were 551, or about one in nine of the population[698].
The London Plague of 1592-1593.
The epidemic of plague, which reached its height in the year 1593, began to be felt in London in the autumn of 1592[699], and is said to have caused 2000 deaths before the end of the year. On the 7th September, soldiers from the north on their way to Southampton to embark for foreign parts had to pass round London “to avoid the infection which is much spread abroad” in the city. On the 16th September, the spoil of a great Spanish carrack at Dartmouth could be brought no farther than Greenwich, on account of the contagion in London; no one to go from London to Dartmouth to buy the goods. It was an ominous sign that the infection lasted through the winter; even in mid winter people were leaving London: “the plague is so sore that none of worth stay about these places[700].” On the 6th April, 1593, one William Cecil who had been kept in the Fleet prison by the queen’s command, writes that “the place where he lies is a congregation of the unwholesome smells of the town, and the season contagious, so many have died of the plague[701].” From a memorial of 1595, it appears that the neighbourhood of Fleet Ditch had been the most infected part of the whole city and liberties in 1593; “in the last great plague more died about there than in three parishes besides[702].” The epidemic does not appear to have reached its height until summer; on 12th June, a letter states that “the plague is very hot in London and other places of the realm, so that a great mortality is expected this summer.” On 3 July the Court “is in out places, and a great part of the household cut off [? dispensed with].” The infection is mentioned in letters down to November, after which date its public interest, at least, appears to have ceased.
Of that London epidemic a weekly record was kept by the Company of Parish Clerks, and published by them, beginning with the weekly bill of 21st December, 1592. The clerk of the Company of Parish Clerks, writing in 1665, had the annual bill for 1593 before him, with the plague-deaths and other deaths in each of 109 parishes in alphabetical order, and the christenings as well[703]. For the next two years, 1594 and 1595, he appears to have had before him not only the annual bills but also a complete set of the weekly bills of burials and christenings according to parishes. The same documents were used by Graunt in 1662, and had doubtless been used by John Stow at the time when they were published. The originals are all lost, and only a few totals extracted from them remain on record. To begin with Stow’s. The mortality of 17,844 from all causes in 1593 is given as for the City and Liberties only. But there was already a considerable population in the parishes immediately beyond the Bars of the Liberties, which were known as the nine out-parishes, namely those of St Clement Danes, St Giles in the Fields, St James, Clerkenwell, St Katharine at the Tower, St Leonard, Shoreditch, St Martin in the Fields, St Mary, Whitechapel, St Magdalen, Bermondsey, and the Savoy. Besides these there were important parishes still farther out—the Westminster parishes, Lambeth, Newington, Stepney, Hackney and Islington. Of these, Whitechapel, Stepney, Shoreditch, Clerkenwell and some of the western parishes contributed largely to the plague-bills of the epidemics next following, in 1603 and 1625, and it is known from the parish registers of some of them that they contributed to the mortality of 1593. It is probably to these parishes that we should ascribe the difference between the above total of 17,844 (for City and Liberties) and the much larger total of deaths “in and about London,” given on the margin of a broadside of 1603: “And in the last visitation from the 20th of December, 1592 to the 23rd of the same month in the year 1593, died in all 25,886—of the plague in and about London 15,003.” The addition for the parishes beyond the Bars would thus be 8,042 deaths from all causes, and from plague alone 4,541—numbers which will seem not inadmissible if they be compared with the figures for the corresponding parishes ten years after, in 1603, Stepney alone having had 2,257 deaths in that plague-year[704].