The Story of London

by Henry B. Wheatley

Doubtless there were many cases of true leprosy in the Middle Ages, but there was a great confusion of diseases under this generic term, and we are told that, ‘in some instances of leper hospitals with authentic charters, the provision for the leprous was in the proportion of one to three or four of the non-leprous inmates.’[162]

It was a very terrible fate for a man or woman to be accused of being a leper, for the sufferers were driven from the haunts of men, and being in many cases uncared for, they grew worse and worse. The disease was largely caused by bad food, and this cause was quite neglected in many places.

A monstrous Ordinance of the Scottish Parliament at Scone in 1386 is recorded in the Ancient Laws and Customs of the Burghs of Scotland: ‘Gif ony man brings to the market corrupt swine or salmond to be sauld, they sall be taken by the bailie, and incontinent, without ony question, sall be sent to the lepper folke; and gif there be na lepper folke, they sall be destroyed all uterlie.’ The Rev. W. Denton, in quoting this instance of horrible cruelty, writes: ‘Sir Walter Scott must have had instances of such economy in his mind when he put into the mouth of John Girder the directions—“Let the house be redd up, the broken meat set by, and if there be ony thing totally uneatable, let it be gien to the puir folk.”—Bride of Lammermuir.’[163]

Men sometimes took advantage of a charge of leprosy to injure an enemy. In 1468, Johanna Nightyngale, of Brentwood, in Essex, was accused of leprosy. She refused to remove herself to a solitary place, and appealed to Edward IV., who issued a Chancery warrant for her examination by his physicians and certain lawyers to be associated with them. The court of inquiry reported that they found the woman to be in no way leprous, nor to have any sign of lepra. The case is recorded in Rymer’s Foedera.[164]

There was another evil caused by the privilege of begging which was accorded to lepers, for men sometimes pretended to be lepers in order to avail themselves of this privilege.

It is worthy of mention, in passing, that the two districts of London which have given their names to the extremes of high and low life—viz., St. James’s and St. Giles’s—both have their origin in the leper hospitals of the Middle Ages.

The Plague.—The greatest scourge among the epidemics which have devastated the world is the Eastern bubonic plague, which entered Europe for the first time in the fourteenth century. All epidemics, when they find a new field, appear to be specially virulent, and this was the case with the first appearance of the plague, which so terrified the inhabitants of Europe that they applied to it this ominous name; but the epidemic of 1349 has of late years received the new name of the Black Death, which distinguishes it in the popular mind from the later visitations. The name, which came from Germany, will not be found in the old descriptions of the plague in England. A writer in the Quarterly Review says: ‘The term “Der Schwarze Tod” may have been used in Germany in the fourteenth century, but it does not seem to have been current in England before Hecker’s work [on Epidemics] was translated into English in 1833.’[165]

The Black Death entered Dorsetshire in August 1348, moving on to Bristol, Gloucester and Oxford. From Oxford the infection marched to London, which city it reached at Michaelmas or November. It soon swept over the whole country. Dr. Creighton writes: ‘The Black Death may be said to have extended over three seasons in the British islands—a partial season in the south of England in 1348; a great season all over England, in Ireland, and in the south of Scotland, in 1349; and a late extension in Scotland generally in 1350. The experience of all Europe was similar, the Mediterranean provinces receiving the infection as early as 1347, and the northern countries, on the Baltic and North Seas, as late as 1350.’[166]

This plague had the most momentous effect upon the history of England, on account of the fearful mortality that it caused. It paralysed industry, and permanently altered the position of the labourer. Ineffectual attempts were made to neutralise these effects by the Statute of Labourers and by enactments ‘that every workman and labourer shall do his work just as he used before the pestilence’; ‘that the servants of substantial people shall take no more than they used to take’; and ‘that labourers and workmen who will not work shall be arrested and imprisoned.’[167]

The effects of the pestilence on the Church and on morals is seen in the writings of Wiclif and Langland. Wiclif, who was an Oxford student, in 1348 predicted in his book, The Last Age of the Church, the end of the world in 1400 at latest. The effects upon architecture has been dwelt upon by the antiquaries; upon the growth of the country, by political economists; and upon the general health of the country, by doctors; so that it is not necessary here to enter into further explanations.