We have no reliable evidence of the actual mortality produced by these terrible diseases; for no physician has left such an account of the epidemics of which he was an eye-witness as enables us to determine it, and there was no Registrar-General to fill up the momentous columns included in his death-roll. We can therefore only take the statements of the time as we find them.
According to the accounts of contemporary writers, the Black Death swept away, within the space of four years, a fourth part of the population of Europe. Some towns in England are stated to have lost two-thirds of their inhabitants, and it is computed that one-half of the entire population of the country perished.
Of the Sweating Sickness, Bacon says it “destroyed infinite persons;” Stowe “a wonderful number;” and other writers reckon the deaths in the places attacked by thousands.
Similar representations are given of the ravages of the Plague, of the Petechial Fever, and even occasionally of Intermittent Fever; and the substantial correctness of these statements is confirmed by entries in parish registers still extant, which tell the story of the local outbreaks of those days with graphic and touching simplicity.
During some of the worst of these visitations, contemporary writers concur in stating that the living were insufficient to bury the dead; business was suspended; the courts of law were closed; the churches were deserted for want of a sufficient number of clergy to perform the service; and ships were seen driving about on the ocean and drifting on shore, whose crews had perished to the last man.
We can form no adequate conception of the terror inspired by these events. We have seen alarm in our own day, but then it bordered on maniacal despair. It seemed as if the last judgment had come upon the world, and men abandoned alike their possessions and their friends. The rich gave up their treasures and laid them at the foot of the altars; neighbour abandoned neighbour; parents their offspring, and brothers their sisters. “If” says one of the chroniclers, “in a circle of friends any one only by a single word happened to bring the plague to mind, first one and then another of the company was seized with a tormenting anguish; certain that they were attacked with a mortal sickness, they slunk away home, and there soon yielded up the ghost.”
These fearful forms of pestilence were accompanied by moral epidemics more appalling than the physical. Of these the two following may serve as examples:—
Vast assemblages of men and women formed circles hand in hand, dancing, leaping, shouting, insensible to external impressions; some seeing visions and spirits whose names they shrieked out; others in epileptic convulsions with foaming at the mouth; all continuing to make the most violent muscular exertions for hours together, until they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion. Lookers-on were seized with an uncontrollable impulse to join in these wild revels. Peasants left their ploughs, mechanics their workshops, servants their masters, boys and girls their parents, women their domestic duties, and men their business, thus to spend days and nights; these infatuated crowds passing furiously through streets, along highways, over fields, and from town to town. This madness pervaded the least barbarous countries of Europe for upwards of two centuries, under the name of the “Dancing Mania.” It was universally attributed to demoniacal possession, and its cure was attempted by exorcism. It was one expression and outlet of the violent passions of that time, imposture and profligacy playing principal parts in this strange drama.
More pernicious than this madness was the mania of cruelty, an especial manifestation of which was the ferocious persecution of the Jews, who were put to death by hundreds and thousands, under the accusation that they had poisoned the wells. At Basle a number of this nation, whose European history proves them to have been everywhere amongst the most inoffensive of the people, were enclosed in a wooden building and burnt with it. At Strasburg two thousand were burnt alive. Whoever showed them compassion and endeavoured to protect them were put upon the rack and burnt with them. In numerous instances these unhappy people, driven to despair, assembled in their own habitations, to which they set fire and consumed themselves with their families. The noble and the mean bound themselves by an oath to extirpate them from the face of the earth by fire and sword.
In England this relentless cruelty took particularly the shape of burning innocent people under the name of witches; an infatuation which pervaded all classes from the highest to the lowest, affording a melancholy exemplification of the close alliance between credulity and cruelty.[[13]]