In the section of his book next following, entitled “De Curatione morborum populariter grassantium, et de Peste,” he says that he had used a certain prescription of aloes, ammoniacum and myrrh rubbed together in wine, for himself as well as for others in a serious contagion, “quae fuit in martiali sede cum ibi essem,” and also, with happy effect, upon many “in the most cruel pest at Oxford which carried off Judge Bell and ever so many more; one gentleman, I could not persuade to try this medicine, whom therefore I commended to God, and four days after he was dead. Concerning that pestilential fever, many colloquies took place between me and two most learned physicians; and, as to the kind of this contagion, we all agreed (manibus et pedibus in hanc sententiam itum est) in a sentence which I quoted from Valescus, who sayeth thus: Those sicknesses are dangerous in such wise that the physicians may be for the most part deceived; for we see a good hypostasis in the urine, and some other good signs, yet the sick person dies”—a remark which often recurs in the early writings on plague.
It has taken longer than usual to determine the matter of fact as to the fever of the Oxford Black Assizes, because an erroneous version passes current on respectable authority; but enough has perhaps been said to enable us to pass from the matter of fact to the matter of theory[791].
The theory of the gaol fever at Oxford, in 1577, was not attempted by any writer at the time, nor indeed has it been so in later times; but the significance of the outbreak has been recognized and admitted. An Oxford scholar, Dr Plot, writing just a century after (1677) mentions the statement that a “poisonous steam” broke forth from the earth, having probably in his mind Stow’s imaginative explanation, that a damp arose amongst the people and smothered them, very few escaping that were not taken at that instant. Plot then proceeds:—
“But let it not be ascribed to ill fumes and exhalations ascending from the earth and poysoning the Air, for such would have equally affected the prisoners as judges, but we find not that they dyed otherwise than by the halter, which easily perswades me to be of the mind of my lord Verulam (Nat. Hist. cent. X. num. 914) who attributes it wholly to the smell of the Gaol where the prisoners had been long, close, and nastily kept.”
We know, indeed, from the register of Merton that “two or three of the prisoners died in chains a few days before,” which is a sufficient indication of the state they were kept in, but is no warrant for Anthony Wood’s free rendering of the words: “of whom two or three, being overcome with it [i.e. with the “nasty and pestilential smell of the prisoners”] died a few days before the Assizes began.” Two or three prisoners died in their chains with symptoms undescribed; and although typhus among the inmates of gaols has often occurred, it has also been wanting in many cases where the filth and misery might have bred it in the prisoners themselves[792].
Bacon’s judgment on the case, referred to above, was based upon a strict scrutiny of the evidence, and does not transcend the evidence. He attributes the infection that arose in the court to “the smell of the gaol;” and so as not to assume a smell which does not appear to have attracted any particular notice at the time, he is careful to explain in what sense he means the smell of the gaol:
“The most pernicious infection,” he says, “next the plague, is the smell of the jail, when prisoners have been long and close and nastily kept; whereof we have had in our time experience twice or thrice; when both the judges that sat upon the jail, and numbers of those that attended the business or were present, sickened upon it and died. Therefore it were good wisdom, that in such cases the jail were aired before they be brought forth....
“Leaving out of question such foul smells as be made by art and by the hand, they consist chiefly of man’s flesh or sweat putrefied; for they are not those stinks which the nostrils straight abhor and expel, that are most pernicious; but such airs as have some similitude with man’s body, and so insinuate themselves and betray the spirits[793].”
Exeter Black Assizes.
The next Black Assizes occurred at Exeter in 1586, nine years after the Oxford tragedy. The Exeter incident has had the fortune to be chronicled by a person as competent as was the writer in the Merton College register in the former case, namely by John Hoker alias Vowell, chamberlain of the city, and its representative in Parliament, a lawyer of good education, who must have been conversant with all the circumstances, and wrote his account within six months. He is known as the chief contributor to the second edition of Holinshed’s Chronicle, in which the history is brought down to 1586, his name appearing on the title-page. It is in that work that he inserted his account of the Exeter Black Assizes, written in October, 1586. The margin bears the words: