“I had too good experience of myself in Queen Mary’s reign, living at Lettlé in my good lord’s house, the right honourable Lord St John, beside Southampton, the which, notwithstanding the great sweat, it was long after before I recovered of my health, so that the said sweat did nothing profit.”
He then proceeds to compare the sweat, almost certainly the epidemic mentioned in St John’s despatch of 6th September, 1558, with the sweating sickness of 1551:
“So in our days, even in King Edward VI.’s reign, it brought many to their long home, as some of the most worthy, the two noble princes of Suffolk, imps of honour most towardly, with others of all degrees infinite many; and the more perished no doubt for lack of physical counsel speedily[815].”
The next that we hear of this epidemic of the autumn of 1558, is in a despatch from Dover, 11 p.m. 6th October: the writer has “learnt from the mayor of Dover that there is no plague there, but the people that daily die are those that come out of the ships, and such poor people as come out of Calais, of the new sickness[816].” A despatch of 17th October, 1558, from one of the commissioners for the surrender of Calais, Sir Thomas Gresham, at Dunkirk, to the Privy Council, says that he “returned hither to write his letter to the queen, and found Sir William Pickering very sore sick of this new burning ague. He has had four sore fits, and is brought very low, and in danger of his life if they continue as they have done[817].”
Here we have the same term “new sickness” and “new burning ague” as in the two English chronicles under the year before—the “strange and new sicknesses” which “took men and women in their heads,” and the “strange agues and fevers.” The very general prevalence in Southampton, Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight suggests influenza; the symptom of sweating described by Jones for his own case during that prevalence is in keeping with what we hear of the influenzas of the time from foreign writers, and so is the long and slow convalescence; the fact of one person having had four sore fits of “this new burning ague” is more like influenza than typhus.
The severe mortalities in the autumn of 1558 at Loughborough and Chester are put down to “plague,” and they may, of course, have been circumscribed outbursts of the old bubo-plague. If, however, they were part of the general prevalence of hot or burning agues, which we may take to have been influenza or a very volatile kind of typhus, they would indicate a degree of fatality in the latter somewhat greater than more recent influenzas have had. A high death-rate is, indeed, demonstrable for the year 1558, from parish registers, by comparing the deaths in that year with the deaths in years near it, and by comparing the deaths with the births in 1558 itself.
The registers of christenings and burials, which had been ordered first in 1538, were kept in a number of parishes from that date; and from 1558, when the order for keeping them was renewed by queen Elizabeth, they were generally kept. Dr Thomas Short, a man of great industry, about the middle of last century obtained access to a large number of parish registers, and worked an infinite number of arithmetical exercises upon their figures[818]. His abstract results or conclusions are colourless and unimpressive, as statistical results are apt to be for the average concrete mind; nor can they be made to illustrate the epidemic history of Britain with the help of his companion volumes, ‘A General Chronological History of the Air, Weather, Seasons, Meteors etc[819].’, for these extraordinary annals are for the most part loosely compiled from foreign sources, bringing into one focus the most scattered references to disease in any part of Europe, and that too without criticism of authorities but often with surprising credulity and inaccuracy. That so much statistical or arithmetical zeal and exhaustiveness (in the work of 1750) should go with so total a deficiency of the critical and historical sense, (in the work of 1749) is noteworthy, and perhaps not unparalleled in modern times. Short’s history is mostly foreign, but his statistics, which are English, may be used to illustrate and confirm what can be learned of sicknesses in England in the ordinary way of historical research.
Thus, the period from 1557 to 1560 stands out in Short’s table as one of exceptional unhealthiness both in country parishes and in market towns, the unhealthiness being estimated by the excess of burials over christenings.
Country Parishes.
| Year | Registers examined | Unhealthy Parishes | Baptised in same | Buried in same | ||||
| 1557 | 16 | 7 | 62 | 181 | ||||
| 1558 | 26 | 11 | 171 | 340 | ||||
| 1559 | 34 | 12 | 145 | 252 | ||||
| 1560 | 38 | 6 | 100 | 162 | ||||
| 1561 | 41 | 1 | 19 | 32 |