[281] This is the period and the district to which Robert Burns refers, under date of 21 June, 1783, in a letter to his cousin, James Burness, of Montrose: “I shall only trouble you with a few particulars relative to the wretched state of this country. Our markets are exceedingly high, oatmeal 17d. and 18d. per boll, and not to be got even at that price. We have, indeed, been pretty well supplied with quantities of white peas from England and elsewhere; but that resource is likely to fail us, and what will become of us then, particularly the very poorest sort, heaven only knows.” The lately flourishing silk and carpet weaving had declined during the American War, and the seasons had been adverse to farmers. The lines in Burns’ poem, “Death and Dr Hornbook”:
‘This while ye hae been mony a gate
At mony a house.’
‘Ay, Ay,’ quoth he, and shook his head.—
are explained by a note, “An epidemical fever was then raging in the country.”
[282] Account by Rev. Geo. Skene Keith, Statist. Act. II. 544.
[283] Also Banff, ibid. XX. 347.
“Not twenty years ago, but you I think
Can scarcely bear it now in mind, there came
Two blighting seasons, when the fields were left
With half a harvest. It pleased heaven to add
A worse affliction in the plague of war, &c.”
Trotter, Medicina Nautica, I. 182, 1797, gives these real cases:—“During the short time that I attended the dispensary at Newcastle, just at the beginning of the [French] war, I was sent for to a poor man in a miserable and low part of the town called Sandgate. He was ill with what is called a spotted fever.” Six children were standing round his bed, the oldest not more than nine. They had been ill first, then his wife, who was recovered and had gone out to pawn the last article they had to buy meal for the children. The man worked on the quay at 1s. 2d. per diem. Again, “When I practised as a surgeon and apothecary at the end of the late [American] war in a small town in Northumberland, with an extensive country business, some similar scenes came under my view. Two servants of two opulent farmers applied to me for relief. The first had seven children, who took the fever one by one till the whole became sick. His wages were 1s. per diem. His master, a rich man, thought himself charitable by allowing them to pull turnips from his field for food. The other servant was a shepherd; but his herding, as the saying is, was a poor one. The first and second of six children were able to work a little, till they got a fever in a severe winter, and down they fell, one after another, the father and mother at last.” They wanted to sell the cow; but some charitable ladies raised a small subscription, by which means the comforts of wine and diet came within their reach; their master, for his part, sent them the carcase of a sheep, which had been found dead in a furrow, with a request that the skin should be returned.
[285] Jenner to Shrapnell, Baron’s Life of Jenner, I. 106-7.
[286] John Barker, Epidemicks, pp. 201-6.