1568.
The distresses of pestilence were preceded and attended by those of a famine, which suffered a great and sudden abatement in the month of August 1569, perhaps in consequence of favourable appearances in the crop then about to be gathered. At least, we are informed by the Diurnal of Occurrents, that on that day, in the forenoon, ‘the boll of ait meal was sauld for 3l. 12s., the boll of wheat for 4l. 10s., and the boll of beare for 3l.; but ere twa afternoon upon the same day, the boll of ait meal was sauld for 40s., 38s., and 36s., the boll of wheat for 50s., and the beare for 33s.‘—D. O.[64]
Little doubt is now entertained that the exanthematous disease called long ago the Pest, and now the Plague, and which has happily been unknown in the British Islands for two centuries, was the consequence of miasma arising from crowded and filthy living, acting on bodies predisposed by deficient aliment and other causes, and that at a certain stage it assumed a contagious character. It will be found throughout the present work that the malady generally, though not invariably, followed dearth and famine—a generalisation harmonising with the observations of Professor Alison as to the connection between destitution and typhus fever, and supporting the views of those who hold that it is for the interest of the community that all its members have a sufficiency of the necessaries of life. The pest was not the only epidemic which afflicted our ancestors in consequence of erroneous living and misery endured by great multitudes of people. There was one called the land-ill or wame-ill, which seems to have been of the nature of cholera. In an early chronicle quoted below,[65] is the following striking notice of this kind of malady in connection with famine as occurring in 1439:—‘The samen time there was in Scotland a great dearth, for the boll of wheat was at 40s., and the boll of ait meal 30s.; and verily the dearth was sae great that there died a passing [number of] people for hunger. And als the land-ill, the wame-ill, was so violent, that there died mae that year than ever there died, owther in pestilence, or yet in ony other sickness in Scotland. And that samen year the pestilence came in Scotland, and began at Dumfries, and it was callit the Pestilence but Mercy, for there took it nane that ever recoverit, but they died within twenty-four hours.’
Oct. 1568.
At the time when the pest broke out in Edinburgh, there lived in the city a young man of the middle class, bearing the name of George Bannatyne, who was somewhat addicted to the vain and unprofitable art of poesy. He was acquainted with the writings of his predecessors, Dunbar, Douglas, Henryson, Montgomery, Scott, and others, through the manuscripts to which alone they had as yet been committed. It was not then the custom to print literary productions unless for some reason external to their literary character, and these poems, therefore, were existing in the same peril of not being preserved to posterity as the works of Ennius in the days of Augustus. In all probability, the greater part of them, if not nearly the whole, would have been lost, but for an accidental circumstance connected with the plague now raging.
George Bannatyne’s Arms and Initials.
1568.
In that terrible time, when hundreds were dying in the city, and apprehensions for their own safety engrossed every mind, the young man George Bannatyne passed into retirement, and for three months devoted himself to the task of transcribing the fugitive productions of the Scottish muse into a fair volume. His retreat is supposed to have been the old manor-house of Newtyle, near the village of Meigle in Strathmore, and nothing could be more likely, as this was the country-house of his father, who seems to have been a prosperous lawyer in Edinburgh. In the short space of time mentioned, George had copied in a good hand, from the mutilated and obscure manuscripts he possessed, three hundred and seventy-two poems, covering no less than eight hundred folio pages; a labour by which he has secured the eternal gratitude of his countrymen, and established for himself a fame granted to but few for their own compositions. The volume—celebrated as the Bannatyne Manuscript—still exists, under the greatest veneration, in the Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh, after yielding from its ample stores the materials of Ramsay’s, Hailes’s, and other printed selections.[66]
Nov. 18.