These being the developments of the poor-law and the law against vagabonds to the end of the Tudor period, we may now return to our particular illustrations, and more especially to the illustrations from popular sickness.
Under the year 1537, one of the citizen chroniclers of London has an entry, “Began a collection for the poor, and a great number cured of many grievous diseases through the charity thereof.” Under 1540, he records that “the collection for the poor people ceased[800].” Preaching before Edward VI. on the fourth Sunday in Lent, 1550, Thomas Lever, Master of St John’s College, Cambridge, said: “O merciful Lord! what a number of poor, feeble, halt, blind, lame, sickly—yea with idle vagabonds and dissembling caitiffs mixed among them, lie and creep, begging in the miry streets of London and Westminster[801].” In May, 1552, Ridley wrote to Cecil that the citizens were willing to provide for the poor “both meat, drink, clothing and firing;” but they lacked lodging, and he wanted the king to give up Bridewell “to lodge Christ in,” or in other words, the poor “then lying abroad in the streets of London.”
Coming to the middle of Elizabeth’s reign, in the year 1579 we find, in an essay dedicated to the queen by Dr John Jones upon general topics of health and morals, an account of poverty and crime which reads little better than Sir Thomas More’s for 1517. In his 31st chapter on “The great cost that the commonwealth is at daily in relieving the poore: Of the number of them that are yeerly executed,” he speaks of the new poor-rate as “a greater tax than some subsidies,” and as a “larger collection than would maintain yeerly a good army;” and, of the felons as “a mightier company of miserable captives than would defend a large country, as in the records of the Clerks of the Peace and of the Assize may easily be seen.”
Even from the outset, the poor-rate does not appear to have met the difficulty:
“And yet housekeepers be but little less discharged, if ye note the continual resort of the needy, especially in the country and towns that be incorporate, the poor (as they say) not much the more aided, as by the moan they make to travellers may be easily gathered, nor theft and wickedness the less practised. For what misery it is to see condemned at one assize in a little shire thirty-nine, notwithstanding the clemency of the Judges, and three hundred and odd in one Diocese to do penance or fine for their loose living in a year. But these be the meanest sort only, for the others scape as though it were in them no offence. And in one gaol of prisoners three hundred and upwards at one time, whereof a great part perhaps may be through negligence of justice or cruelty, that otherwise might be punished answerably to the offences lawfully.”
He then refers to the Bridewells “so charitably and politicly appointed by the late Act of Parliament, although not yet in every shire erected.” The Act of Parliament was that of 1572 and the Bridewells were the houses of correction for vagrants, the first type of workhouses, and so named after the Bridewell in Fleet Street, which was given by Edward VI. from being a royal residence to be a refuge of the poor. So far as fever was concerned, it mattered little whether the Bridewell were a poor-house or a prison, for in later times gaol fever and workhouse fever were both synonyms for typhus.
It would not have been surprising to find this enormous extent of pauperism, vagrancy and crime attended by the distinctive morbus pauperum, typhus-fever. But we are here concerned only with the evidence, and not with antecedent probabilities. The records are, of course, very imperfect. The gaol-fevers of Cambridge, Oxford and Exeter attracted much notice because they touched the governing class. There may have been much more gaol-fever unrecorded. Hoker, in his account of the Exeter fever, does indeed say: “and this is commonly called the gaol sickness, and many die thereof;” and, in a petition to the Crown, March, 1579, the Queen’s Bench prison in Southwark is said to contain twice its complement, there is in it a disease called “sickness of the house,” and near a hundred had died of that sickness in the prison during the previous six years[802]. We shall not be able to give colour to our epidemiological history by other such instances from the Tudor period[803]; even for plague itself, the records of particular outbreaks are meagre and almost certainly only a part of the whole. The epidemics which shall occupy us for the rest of this chapter are those that had a general prevalence over the country on two or three occasions, the same general prevalence of fever that recurs at shorter intervals in the Stuart period and in the eighteenth century.
Hitherto we have attempted to work out the history of epidemics in Britain without reference to the epidemics in other countries, except in the case of the Black Death, which had remarkable antecedents in the remote East, and in the case of the English Sweat of 1528, which overran a great part of the Continent in 1529 and 1530. To have attempted a parallel record of epidemics abroad would have served inevitably to confuse the vision; for the annals of pestilence in all Europe would have been from year to year an unrelieved record of sickness and death, an unnatural continuance or sequence, from which the mind turns away. The several countries of Europe, and the several cities, had each their turn of plague; but they had each, also, their free intervals, sometimes very long intervals, as we have seen in the case of Aberdeen with no plague for nearly two generations in the sixteenth century. The epidemiography of each country should therefore be kept apart; and within a given country care should be taken to prevent the illusion of universal sickness, which is apt to be created in the bringing of scattered centres of disease (such as plague) together in the same page.
But there are instances of what are called pandemics, or universal epidemics, of sickness. The Black Death was one such, covering a period of perhaps four years in Europe, from 1347 to 1350, the curve of the disease in each locality lasting about six months. With the beginning of the modern period we come to more frequent pandemics, not of plague, but of minor or milder forms of pestilential infection. On the continent of Europe these were in part related to the state of war, which may be taken as beginning with the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII. of France in 1494. Typhus-fever, or war-fever with famine-fever, now begins to be a familiar form of sickness—in 1498, 1505, 1510, 1528, and so on. Other forms are putrid sore throat, dysentery, and varieties of fever included under influenza. The various forms were apt to occur together or in succession, so that epidemiography has a “Protean” character. This epidemic Proteus is at once a great difficulty and a most instructive fact. It opens up the very old doctrine of “epidemic constitutions” of the air, which to many moderns savours of unscientific vagueness; and it brings us face to face with degrees or kinds of infectiveness which are, in matter of fact, more wonderful or more incomprehensible than the deadlier infections, such as the plague or Asiatic cholera. The most familiar instance of the kind is influenza.