The Common Gaols of England date from the Council of Clarendon, in 1164, by the articles of which the limits of civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction were fixed, and the quarrel between archbishop Becket and Henry II. reduced to terms. In obedience to Article VII. of the Council, gaols were built, the chief among them having been at Canterbury, Rochester, Huntingdon, Cambridge, Malmesbury, Sarum, Aylesbury, and Bedford[782]. Little is heard of the unwholesomeness of prison life until the medieval period is nearly over—not indeed because the prisons were better managed than they were later. “In the year 1385,” says Stow, “William Walworth gave somewhat to relieve the prisoners in Newgate; so have many others since.” One benefactor brought a supply of water into Newgate; another, the famous Whittington, left money actually to rebuild the gaol, which was done in 1422. For several years before that, Newgate had been notorious. An ordinance of 7 Henry V. (1419) for the re-establishment of the debtor’s prison at Ludgate, so that debtors need not have to go to Newgate gaol, was made in compliance with a petition which said that, in “the hateful gaol of Newgate, by reason of the fetid and corrupt atmosphere, many persons committed to the said gaol are now dead[783].” The greatest mortality must have been, according to Stow, in 1414, when the gaolers of Newgate and Ludgate died, and sixty-four prisoners in Newgate[784].
More than a century after, in 1522, there occurred the first of a series of gaol-fever tragedies, which were well calculated to produce the effect ascribed by Aristotle to scenic tragedy, provided only the workings of cause and effect had been more apparent. The first of these historical Black Assizes occurred on the occasion of the gaol delivery at the Castle of Cambridge in Lent, 1522. The facts, which appear to be given nowhere but in Hall’s Chronicle (of almost contemporary authority), are less fully related than for some of the later instances of the same strange visitation; but there is no mistaking the air of reality and the generic likeness.
Cambridge Black Assizes.
In the 13th year of Henry VIII. at the Assize held in the Castle of Cambridge in Lent, “the justices and all the gentlemen, bailiffs and other, resorting thither, took such an infection, whether it were of the savour of the prisoners, or of the filth of the house, that many gentlemen, as Sir John Cut, Sir Giles Arlington, Knights, and many other honest yeomen, thereof died, and almost all which were present were sore sick, and narrowly escaped with their lives[785].”
It is to be observed that nothing is said of the prisoners being infected: they were brought from the dungeons to stand their trial in due course, and the gentlemen and yeomen attending the court officially or as jurors, or otherwise, were poisoned by their presence. This early chronicle indicates as the cause, “the savour of the prisoners, or the filth of the house;” and Bacon, in touching upon that class of incidents nearly a century later, indicates “the smell of the gaol,” but says nothing of cases of fever among the prisoners, having no warrant in the evidence for doing so.
Before we come to consider the condition of England in the Tudor period, with the policy of Henry VIII. for the repression of beggary and crime, and the appearance of “new fevers” or “strange fevers” and “laskes” in the chronicles and other records of the time, it will be desirable to make out as accurately as possible the clinical type of the Assizes fever, and its circumstances. For that purpose we must turn to the next recorded outbreak on the occasion of the Assizes at Oxford in 1577, which happens to have been somewhat fully described as a memorable event in the register of Merton College. The entry in the Merton register appears to have been made within a few weeks of the event[786].
Oxford Black Assizes.
The Assizes met on the 5th and 6th July, 1577, in the Castle and Guild Hall. Those only fell ill, whether in Oxford itself or after leaving, who had been present at the Assizes. The two judges (Robert Bell, Chief Baron of the Exchequer and John Barrham, sergeant-at-law), the sheriff of the county, two knights, eight squires and justices of the peace, several gentlemen and not a few of their servants, the whole of the grand jury with one or two exceptions—these all had not long left Oxford when they were seized with illness and died (statim post fere relictam Oxoniam mortui sunt). In Oxford itself, on the 15th, 16th and 17th July, some ten or twelve days after the Assizes, about three hundred fell ill; and in the next twelve days there died (“ne quid errem”) one hundred scholars, besides townsmen not a few. Five died in Merton College, including one fellow, the names of four being given who died on the 24th, 27th, 28th and 29th July. Every college, hall, or house had its dead. Women were not attacked, nor indeed the poor; nor did the infection spread to those who waited on the sick or came to prescribe for them. Only those who had been present at the Assizes caught the fever. The symptoms are described as follows:
The patients laboured under pain both of the head and of the stomach; they were troubled with phrensy, deprived of understanding, memory, sight, hearing and their other senses. As their malady increased, they took no food, could not sleep, and would not suffer attendants or watchers to be near them; their strength was remarkable, even in the approach of death; but if they recovered they fell into the extreme of weakness. No complexion or constitution was spared; but those of a choleric habit were most obnoxious to the disease. The affected persons suddenly became delirious and furious, overcoming those who tried to hold them; some ran about in courts and in the streets after the manner of insane persons; others leapt headlong into the water. The spirits of all the people were crushed; the physicians fled, and the wretched sufferers were deserted. Masters, doctors, and heads of houses left almost to a man. The Master of Merton remained, longe omnium vigilantissimus, ministering sedulously to the sick. The pharmacies were soon emptied of their conserves, oils, sweet waters, pixides and every kind of confection.
This sudden epidemic, which began on the 15th—17th July, did not last long; within the space of one month the city was restored to its former health, so that one wonders, says the registrary of Merton, to see already so many scholars and so many townsmen abroad in the streets and walks.