1741. The Institution Book of the diocese of Norwich, he says (with a

reference to No. IV. of the _Lib. Instit._), shows 863 institutions to benefices in 1349, “the clergy dying so fast that they were obliged to admit numbers of youths, that had only devoted themselves for clerks by being shaven, to be rectors of parishes[263].” A more precise use of Institution Books, but more to show how zealous the clergy had been in exposing themselves to infection than to ascertain the death-rate, was made (1825) for the archdeaconry of Salop. It was found that twenty-nine new presentations, after death-vacancies, had been made in the single year of 1349, the average number of death vacancies at the time having been three in two years[264]. The first systematic attempt to deduce the mortality of 1349 from the number of benefices vacant through death was made in 1865 by Mr Seebohm, by original researches for the diocese of York and by using Blomefield’s collections for the diocese of Norwich[265]. In the archdeaconry of the West Riding there were 96 death vacancies in 1349, leaving only 45 parishes in which the incumbent had survived. In the East Riding 60 incumbents died out of 95 parishes. In the archdeaconry of Nottingham there were deaths of priests in 65 parishes, and 61 survivals. In the diocese of Norwich there were 527 vacancies by death or transfer, while in 272 benefices there was no change. Thus the statement made to the pope by the bishop of Norwich, that two-thirds of the clergy had died in the great mortality is almost exact for his own diocese as well as for the diocese of York. These figures of mortality among the Norfolk clergy were confirmed, with fuller details, by a later writer[266]: the 527 new institutions in the diocese of Norwich fall between the months of March and October--23 before the end of April; 74 in May; 39 from 30th May to 10th June; 100 from 10th June to 4th July; 209 in July; and 82 more to October. According to another enumeration of the same author for East Anglia, upwards of 800 parishes lost their parsons from March 1349 to March 1350, 83 parishes having been twice vacant, and 10 three times. There is no mistaking the significance of these facts as regards the clergy: some two-thirds of a class composed of adult males in moderate circumstances, and living mostly in country villages, were cut off by the plague in Norfolk and Suffolk, in Yorkshire and Shropshire, and probably all over England. That alone would suffice to show that the virus of the Black Death permeated the soil everywhere, country and town alike. It is this universality of incidence that chiefly distinguishes the Black Death from the later outbreaks of plague, which were more often in towns than in villages or scattered houses, and were seldom in many places in the same year. But there remains to be mentioned, lastly, evidence inferential from another source, which shows that the incidence in the country districts was upon the people at large. That evidence is derived from the rolls of the manor courts. It was remarked in one of the earliest works (1852) upon the history of an English manor and of its courts, that “the real life or history of a nation is to be gathered from the humble and seemingly trivial records of these petty local courts[267],” and so the researches of the generation following have abundantly proved. Much of this curious learning lies outside the present subject and is unfamiliar to the writer, but some of it intimately concerns us, and a few general remarks appear to be called for. The manor was the unit of local government as the Normans found it. The lord of the manor and the cultivators of the soil had respectively their rights and duties, with a court to exact them. There are no written records of manor courts extant from a period before the reign of Edward I., when justice began to be administered according to regular forms. But in the year 1279 we find written rolls of a manor court[268]. From the reign of Edward III. these rolls begin to be fairly numerous; for example, there is extant a complete series of them for the manor of Chedzey in Somerset from 1329-30 to 1413-14. The court met twice, thrice, or four times in the year, and the business transacted at each sitting was engrossed by the clerk upon a long roll of parchment. The business related to fines and heriots payable to the lord by the various orders of tenants on various occasions, including changes in tenancy, successions by heirship, death-duties, the marriages of daughters, the births of illegitimate children, the commission of nuisances, poaching, and all matters of petty local government. The first court of the year has usually the longest roll, the parchment being written on one side, perhaps to the length of twenty or twenty-four inches; the margin bears the amount of fines opposite each entry; there are occasionally jury lists where causes had to be tried. Of the community whose business was thus managed a notion may be formed from the instance of the Castle Combe manor[269]: in 1340 it had two open fields, each of about 500 acres, on its hill-slopes, cultivated by 10 freemen tenants, 15 villeins, 11 other bondsmen cultivating a half-acre each; 8 tenants of cottages with crofts, 12 tenants of cottages without crofts, as well as 3 tenants of cottages in Malmesbury. It will be readily understood that an unusual event such as the great mortality of 1348-49 would leave its mark upon the rolls of the manor courts; the death-vacancies, with their fines and heriots, and all entries relating to changes in tenancy, would be unusually numerous. Accordingly we find in the rolls for that year that there was much to record; at the first glance the parchments are seen to be written within and without, like the roll in the prophet’s vision; and that is perhaps all that the inspection will show unless the student be expert in one of the most difficult of all kinds of ancient handwriting,--most difficult because most full of contractions and conventional forms. But by a few those palaeographic difficulties have been surmounted (doubtless at some cost of expert labour), and the results as regards the great mortality of 1349 have been disclosed. The manor of Winslow, in Buckinghamshire, belonging to the great abbey of St Albans, was a large and typical one[270]. Besides the principal village it had six hamlets. At the manor courts held in 1348-9 no fewer than 153 holdings are entered as changing hands from the deaths of previous holders, the tenancies being either re-granted to the single heir of the deceased or to reversioners, or, in default of such, retained by the lord. Of the 153 deceased tenants, 28 were holders of virgates and 14 of half-virgates; or, in other words, there died 42 small farmers, cultivating from forty to fifteen acres each, in half-acre strips scattered all over the common fields of the manor. These 42 held twice as much land as all the remaining 111 together; the latter more numerous class were the crofters, who cultivated one or more half-acre strips: they would include the various small traders, artisans and labourers of the village and its hamlets; while the former class represented “the highest grades of tenants in villenage.” Of both classes together 153 had died in the great mortality. What proportion that number bore to the whole body of tenants on the manor may be inferred from the following: out of 43 jurymen belonging almost exclusively to the class of larger holders, who had served upon the petty jury in 1346, 1347 and 1348, as many as 27 had died in 1349; so that we may reckon three out of every five adult males to have died in the Winslow district, although it would be erroneous to conclude that the same proportion of adult women had died, or of aged persons, or of infants and young children. Another more varied body of evidence has been obtained from researches in the rolls of manor courts in East Anglia[271]. In the parish of Hunstanton, in the extreme north of Norfolk, with an area of about 2000 to 2500 acres, 63 men and 15 women had been carried off in two months: in 31 of these instances there were only women and children to succeed, and in 9 of the cases there were no heirs at all; the whole number of tenants of the manor dead in eight months was 172, of whom 74 left no heirs male, and 19 others had no blood relations left to claim the inheritance. The following is the record of the manor court of Cornard Parva, a small parish in Suffolk: on 31st March, 1349, 6 women and 3 men reported dead; on 1st May, 13 men and 2 women, of whom 7 had no heirs; at the next meeting on 3 November, 36 more deaths of tenants, of whom 13 left no heirs. At Hadeston, a hamlet of Bunwell, twelve miles from Norwich, which could not possibly have had 400 inhabitants, 54 men and 14 women were carried off in six months, 24 of them without anyone to inherit. At the manor court of Croxton, near Thetford, on 24th July, 17 deaths are reported since last court, 8 of these without heirs. At the Raynham court, on the same day, 18 tenements had fallen into the lord’s hands, 8 of them absolutely escheated, and the rest retained until the heir should appear. At other courts, the suits set down for hearing could not be proceeded with owing to the deaths of witnesses (e.g. 11 deaths among 16 witnesses) or of principals. The manor court rolls of Lessingham have an entry, 15th January, 1350, that only thirty shillings of tallage was demanded, “because the greater part of those tenants who were wont to render tallage had died in the previous year by reason of the deadly pestilence[272].” Further research upon the records of the manor courts will doubtless show that the experience of Buckinghamshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Lancashire was not singular. From the Castle Combe rolls nothing has been extracted as to the mortality in 1348-9, except one entry (Nov. 13, 1357) that a certain tenement was ruinous, having remained in the lord’s hands since the time of the pestilence for want of a purchaser; but it would be unsafe to conclude that this sequestered manor of Wiltshire had not shared the common fate. The accounts of certain manors in Hertfordshire were headed, for thirty years after the Black Death, with a list of those who had vacated tenancies by death in that pestilence[273]. A decayed inscription cut in the stone of the parish church of Ashwell, in the same county, records the great mortality of 1349 and the great tempest in January, 1362[274]. The tenants of the abbey of Meaux, in the Holdernesse division of Yorkshire, were nearly all dead, as well as the monks within the monastery walls. On the manor of Ensham, near Oxford, “there remained hardly two tenants[275].” The immediate effects of the great mortality were not so striking as might have been supposed. Although it fell upon town and country in one terrific blow, yet some places had recovered from it before others felt it; it was over in Bristol (so far as we know) before it came to a height in London, and nearly over in London before it began in York. The dead were expeditiously buried in trenches; vacancies among the clergy were promptly filled; the manor courts met and transacted business, and had their records engrossed for the most part in the usual clerkly style. So great a dislocation of society naturally gave rise to some irregularities: stripping the dead is reported from one district in Norfolk, fights and quarrels came into court more often than ever in 1349 and 1350, and we read of two women who each had three husbands in as many months[276]. Knighton says that sheep and cattle were left to wander about untended, and that they often perished in ditches by the wayside. A murrain occurred the same year; at one place five thousand sheep died in the pasture and were left to putrefy[277]. The price of a horse fell from forty shillings to half a marc; a fat ox could be bought for four shillings, a cow for twelve pence, a heifer for sixpence, a fat sheep for four pence, a stone of wool for nine pence[278]. On the other hand, when the harvest of 1349 had to be gathered, the price of labour rose enormously. According to Knighton, a reaper got eightpence a day, with his food, and a mower twelvepence. The extant accounts tabulated by Thorold Rogers confirm the contemporary statement: the rates for threshing the harvest of 1349 were those of panic and compulsion, being unparalleled, whether before or after, in the Eastern, Midland and Southern counties; the immediate effect of the scarcity of hands was to nearly double the wages of labour for the time being. Many villeins or bondsmen took the opportunity of escaping to the towns or to distant manors, where they could make their own terms. Of the last kind of incident, probably a very common one, we have an instance recorded[279]: At an inquest, some years after the Black Death, upon sundry manors near Oxford belonging to Christ Church, it was ascertained that, “in the time of the mortality or pestilence, which was in the year 1349, there remained hardly two tenants in the said manor [Ensham], and these had wished to leave, had not brother Nicholas de Upton, then abbot of the said manor, compounded anew with them, as well as with other tenants who came in.” So far as regards the immediate effects of the great mortality. Its after-effects, felt within a year or two, upon the economics and morals of the country, upon the power of the old governing class, upon the dispersion of industries and the new life of towns, upon the system of farming, upon the development of the legal profession in London, and upon various other things, are a much more intricate and disputable subject, some part of which will be dealt with in the next chapter in connexion with the subsequent history of plague or its domestication upon the soil of England. Many things in England were noted as having happened “sithen the Pestilence,” to quote the stock phrase of the ‘Vision of Piers the Ploughman,’ and not the least of them was the frequent recurrence of plague, or a prevalence of sickness so steady that the poet compares it to the rain coming in through a leaky roof. Some historians have doubted whether after all the Black Death made so very much difference to the course of affairs[280]. It is perhaps inevitable that scholars, accustomed to deal only with obvious human causation, should look with some distrust upon the large claims made, in the way of moral and social consequences, for a phenomenon which has been apt to be classed with comets and earthquakes. The sudden thinning of the population may indeed become a subject for economists without any regard to the causation, and irrespectively of the means by which the numbers were reduced; and that has been the only historic interest of the great mortality hitherto. But the operation of pestilence is peculiar; the thinning of the population is not effected as if in the due course of nature; the analogy is closer with a decimating or exterminating war. The invasion of the Black Death was part of the great human drama, just as if a swarming people or a barbarous conqueror had been visibly present in it. If things were moving in the fourteenth century towards a particular issue, as historians find in their retrospect that they were, then the coming of a great plague was part of that movement, organically bound up with the other forces of it, and no more arbitrary than they. Thus it becomes of interest to trace the antecedents of the Black Death before we attempt to follow out its consequences; and it is not the less of interest to do so, that the train of events leads us as far eastwards as the soil of China, and to the incidents that attended the collapse of the greatest government of the Middle Ages, the empire of the Great Khan. The Antecedents of the Black Death. When the Black Death in its progress westwards came to Constantinople in 1347, the emperor-historian, John Cantacuzenes, was present in his capital to witness the arrival of the pestilence; in his history he wrote that it came among them from the country of the hyperborean Scythians, that is to say, the Tartars of the Crimea. The other contemporary Byzantine historian, Nicephorus Gregoras, says that the pestilence began among the Scythians in the Crimea and at the mouths of the Don. The Russian annals, which are an independent source, and likely enough to have a correct tradition, also say that the plague was God’s punishment on the people of the Don territory and of several other localities with obsolete names, including the famous city of Sarai on the Volga[281]. The Chersonese, and the country from the Don to the Volga, or from the Euxine to the Caspian, are the regions thus clearly indicated as the scene of the first outburst of the Black Death; but there was no clue to its unaccountable appearance there, or to the connexion between its outburst on the confines of Europe and the distant home in the East which the rumour of the day vaguely assigned to it. The more definite association of the Black Death with China dates from 1757, when the abbé Des Guignes, in his _Histoire des Huns_[282], took up the old tradition of the Arab historian, Aboel Mahasin, that the plague began in Tartary, that the smell of corpses spread on every side, that the infection passed from Cathay or Tartary to the Tartars of the Kaptchac (Crimea), and from them to Constantinople and Europe on the one hand, and to Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt and North Africa on the other. He pointed out also that the overland caravan trade was a ready means of transport for the infection. That which specially attracted his attention as the historian of the Mongol power was the other statement of the Arab historian in the same context, that China had been visited by floods so disastrous that men, beasts, and even birds perished, and that the country was almost depopulated. Upon that hint Des Guignes collected from the Chinese annals of the first half of the fourteenth century a considerable list[283] of calamities, which had actually happened--floods causing the loss of millions of lives, earthquakes, and the like, appending the catalogue without comment as a note to the text where he has occasion to mention the Black Death. Des Guignes’ note was reproduced verbatim by Hecker in his essay on the Black Death in 1832, and the unwonted series of phenomena in China was made the basis of certain mystical speculations as to the effect of earthquakes in causing a “progressive infection of the zones,” a perturbation of “the earth’s organism,” a “baneful commotion of the atmosphere,” or the like. In that nebulous and unsatisfactory state the old tradition of the Black Death originating in China has remained to the present hour; the intuition of the Peking Jesuit had merely been appropriated and set forth in his own way by the German “Naturphilosoph[284].” Meanwhile, in 1842 a clue to Des Guignes’ conjecture of a connexion between the importation of the Black Death and the China land-route was found (but not followed up) in the discovery by Henschel of a Latin manuscript in the Rhediger Library at Breslau[285]. This was a narrative compiled by one Gabriel de Mussis, a jurist of Piacenza, who had been practising as a notary or advocate among the Genoese and Venetians trading around the shores of the Euxine and Caspian, and had been an eyewitness of the outbreak of the plague in that region. De Mussis has no theory of the origin of the plague; he merely narrates the events as they unfolded themselves before his own eyes; so much was he in the midst of them that he was a passenger on board the very ship which brought the first seeds of the Black Death direct from the Crimea to Genoa as early as the spring of 1347. The substance of this story is that the Italian merchants, who were then settled in considerable numbers at the various termini or entrepôts of the overland trade from China and Central Asia by the more northern route, were harassed by the Tartar hordes; that they had stood a siege in Tana, on the Don, but had been driven out of it, and had sought refuge for themselves and their merchandise within the walls of Caffa, a small fortified post on the Crimean Straits (of Kertch), built by Genoese not long before; that Caffa was besieged in due course by the Tartar barbarians; that the investment lasted nearly three years; that the merchants and others, crowded into the narrow space within the walls, were put to great straits and could hardly breathe, being only partially relieved by the arrival of a ship with supplies; that the plague broke out among the besieging Tartar host and daily destroyed thousands; that the Tartars threw the pestilent dead bodies inside the walls by their engines of siege, so that the infection took hold of those within the fort; that the Tartars dispersed in panic and spread the infection all over the shores of the Euxine, Caspian and Levant; that such of the Italian traders as were able, De Mussis himself with them, escaped from Caffa in a ship; and that the infection appeared in Genoa in its most deadly form a day or two after the arrival of the ship, although none of those on board were suffering from the plague. These are all the circumstances related by De Mussis of the beginning of the outbreak as known to himself at first hand: the rest of his narrative is occupied with various incidents of the plague in Europe, with pious reflections, and accounts of portents. His single reference to China is as follows: “In the Orient, about Cathay, where is the head of the world and the beginning of the earth, horrible and fearful signs appeared; for serpents and frogs, descending in dense rains, entered the dwellings and consumed countless numbers, wounding them by their venom and corroding them with their teeth. In the meridian parts, about the Indies, regions were overturned by earthquakes, and cities wasted in ruin, tongues of flame being shot forth. Fiery vapours burnt up many, and in places there were copious rains of blood and murderous showers of stones.” De Mussis has certainly no scientific intention; nor can it be said that any scientific use has been made of his manuscript since its discovery. For Häser, its editor, merely reproduces in his history the passage from Hecker on the three overland routes between Europe and the East, without remarking on the fact that De Mussis definitely places the outbreak of the plague at the European terminus of one of them: its remote origin is involved in “impenetrable obscurity;” all we can say is that it came from the East, “the cradle of the human race[286].” But the entirely credible narrative by De Mussis of the outbreak of plague at the siege of Caffa is just the clue that was wanting to unravel the meaning of the widespread rumour of the time, that the plague came from China. Let us first examine somewhat closely the source of that rumour. It finds its most definite expression in an Arabic account of the Black Death at Granada, by the famous Moorish statesman of that city, Ibn-ul-Khatib[287]. Besides giving the local circumstances for Granada, he makes various remarks on the nature of the plague, and on its mode of spreading, which are not exceeded in shrewdness and insight by the more scientific doctrines of later times. Its origin in China he repeats on the authority of several trustworthy and far-travelled men, more particularly of his celebrated countryman Ibn-Batuta, or “the Traveller,” whose story was that the plague arose in China from the corruption of many corpses after a war, a famine, and a conflagration. The mention of Ibn-Batuta, as the authority more particularly, has a special interest. That traveller was actually in China from 1342 to 1346. In his book of travels[288] he tells us how on his way back (he took the East-Indian sea-route to the Persian Gulf) he came at length to Damascus, Aleppo and Cairo in the summer of 1348, and was a witness of the Black Death at each of those places, and of the mixed religious processions at Damascus of Jews with their Hebrew Scriptures and Christians with their Gospels. But he says not one word anywhere as to the origin of the plague in China, whence he was journeying homewards. He continued his journey to Tangier, his birthplace, and crossed thence to Spain about the beginning of 1350. At Granada he spent some days among his countrymen, of whom he mentions in his journal four by name; but the most famous of them, Ibn-ul-Khatib, he does not mention. However, here was Ibn-Batuta at Granada, a year or two after the Black Death, discoursing on all manner of topics with the most eminent Moors of the place; and here is one of them, Ibn-ul-Khatib, in an account of the Black Death at Granada, quoting the report of Ibn-Batuta that the pestilence arose in China from the corruption of unburied corpses. None of the other statements of an Eastern origin can compare with this in precision or in credibility; they all indeed confuse the backward extension of the plague from the Euxine eastwards to Khiva, Bokhara and the like, with its original progress towards Europe from a source still farther east. The authority of Ibn-Batuta himself is not, of course, that of historian or observer; although he was in China during part, at least, of the national calamities which the Chinese Annals record, he says nothing of them, and probably witnessed nothing of them. But the traveller was a likely person to have heard correctly the gossip of the East and to have judged of its credibility; so that there is a satisfaction in tracing it through him. The siege of Caffa, and the general circumstances of it, we may take as historical on the authority of the Italian notary who was there; but it may be doubted whether the plague began, as he says, among the nomade hordes outside the fort. In sieges it has been not unusual for both sides to suffer from infective disease; and although it is not always easy to say where the disease may have begun, the presumption is that it arose among those who were most crowded, most pressed by want, and most desponding in spirit. It is, of course, not altogether inconceivable that the Tartar besiegers of Caffa had bred a pestilential disease in their camp; the nomades of the Cyrenaic plateau have bred bubo-plague itself more than once in recent years in their wretched summer tents, and plague has appeared from time to time in isolated or remote Bedouin villages on the basaltic plateaus of Arabia. There is nothing in the nomade manner of life adverse to pestilential products, least of all in the life of nomades encamped for a season. But such outbreaks of bubo-plague or of typhus fever have been local, sporadic, or non-diffusive. On the other hand the plague which arose at the siege of Caffa was the Black Death, one of the two greatest pestilences in the history of the world. Let us then see whether there is any greater likelihood of finding inside the walls of Caffa the lurking germs of so great a pestilence. Within the walls of the Genoese trading fort were the Italian merchants driven in from all around that region, with their merchandise--as De Mussis says, _fugientes pro suarum tutione personarum et rerum_. Previous to their three years’ siege in Caffa they, or some of them, had stood a siege in Tana, and had retreated to the next post on the homeward route. Tana was at the eastward bend of the Don, whence the road across the steppe is shortest to the westward bend of the Volga; a little above the bend of the Volga was the great city of Sarai--whence the caravans started on their overland journey along northern parallels, across mountain ranges and the desert of Gobi, to enter China at its north-western angle, just within the end of the Great Wall[289]. The merchandise of Sarai and Tana was the return merchandise of China--the bales of silks and fine cloths, spices and drugs, which had become the articles of a great commerce between China and Europe since Marco Polo first showed the way, and which continued to reach Europe by the caravan routes until about 1360: then the route was closed owing to the final overthrow of the authority of the Great Khan, which had once secured a peaceful transit from the Yellow Sea to the Black Sea--so completely closed that men forgot, two hundred years after, that it had ever existed. Did these bales of Chinese stuffs, carried into Caffa for protection, contain the seeds of the Black Death? There is, at least, nothing improbable in the seeds of plague lurking in bales of goods; that mode of transmission was afterwards recognized as highly characteristic of the plague during its Levantine days. Nor is there anything improbable in the seeds of an infection being carried thousands of miles across the deserts of Central Asia; cholera came in that way from India in 1827-8 by the caravan-route to Cabul, Balkh, Bokhara, Khiva and the Kirghiz Steppe to Orenburg, and again in 1847 to Astrakhan; and the slow land-borne viruses of those two great epidemics exceeded in virulence the later importations of cholera by the sea route from the East. Still farther, there is nothing improbable in the germs of plague lying latent for a long time, or in the disease existing as a potency although not manifested in a succession of cases. The next stage of its progress, from Caffa to Genoa, illustrates that very point; for we know that there were no cases of plague on board ship, although the very atmosphere or smell of the new arrival seemed sufficient to taint the whole air of Genoa, and to carry death to every part of the city within a couple of days. And lastly the long imprisonment of a virus in bales of goods, the crowding of merchants and merchandise into the narrow space of a walled seaport, amidst the almost inevitable squalor and fœtor of a three years’ siege, were the very circumstances needed to raise the potency of the assumed virus to an unusual height, to give it a degree of virulence that would make it effective, and a power of diffusion that would spread and continue the liberated infection after the manner of the greatest of pestilences. Thus, if we have to choose between the origin of the plague-virus among the Tartar hordes besieging the China merchants within the walls of Caffa, and the pre-existence of that virus, for a long time latent, among the goods or effects of the besieged, the latter hypothesis must be accorded the advantage in probability. Accepting it, we follow the virus back to Tana on the Don, from Tana to Sarai on the Volga, from Sarai by a well-trodden route which need not be particularized[290], for many weeks’ journey until we come to the soil of China. According to a dominant school of epidemiologists it is always enough to have traced a virus to a remote source, to the “roof of the world” or to the back of the east wind, and there to leave it, in the full assurance that there must have been circumstances to account for its engendering there, perhaps in an equally remote past, if only we knew them. If, however, we follow the trail back definitely to China, it is our duty to connect it there with an actual history or tradition, immemorial if need be, of Chinese plague. But there is no such history or tradition to be found. We know something of the China of Kublai Khan, fifty years before, from the book of Marco Polo; and the only possible reference to plague there is an ambiguous statement about “carbuncles” in a remote province, which was probably Yun-nan. Not only so, but if we scrutinize the Chinese Annals closely, we shall find that the thirty years preceding the Black Death were indeed marked by many great calamities and loss of life on a vast scale, by floods, droughts, earthquakes, famines and famine-fevers, but not by pestilence unconnected with these; on the other hand, the thirty or forty years after the Black Death had overrun Europe, beginning with the year 1352, are marked in the Chinese Annals (as summarized in the _Imperial Encyclopædia_ of Peking, 1726) by a succession of “great plagues” in various provinces of the Empire, which are not associated with calamitous seasons, but stand alone as disease-calamities pure and simple[291]. If the Black Death connects at all with events in China, these events were natural calamities and their attendant loss of life, and not outbreaks of plague itself; for the latter, assuming them to have been bubo-plague, were subsequent in China to the devastation of Europe by the plague. We are left, then, to make what we can of the antecedent calamities of China; and we may now revert to the curious rumour of the time that the relevant thing in China was the corruption of many corpses left unburied after inundation, war and conflagration. So far as war and conflagration are concerned they are quite subordinate; there was no war except an occasional ineffective revolt in some remote western province, and the conflagrations were minor affairs, noticed, indeed, in the Annals, but lost among the greater calamities. The floods, droughts and famines were events of almost annual recurrence for many years before, so that no period in the Annals of China presents such a continuous picture of national calamity, full as Chinese history has at all times been of disasters of the same kind. It was the decadence of the great Mongol empire, founded by Genghiz and carried by Kublai to that marvellous height of splendour and prosperity which we read of in the book of Marco Polo. The warlike virtues of the earlier Mongol rulers had degenerated in their successors into sensual vices during the times of peace; and the history of the country, priest-ridden, tax-burdened, and ruled by women and eunuchs, neglected in its thousand water-ways and in all the safeguards against floods and famine which wiser rulers had set up, became from year to year an illustration of the ancient Chinese maxim, that misgovernment in the palace is visited by the anger of the sky. The following epitome of the calamities in China is taken from De Mailla’s _Histoire générale de la Chine_. Paris, 1777, 9 vols. 4to., a translation of the abridged official annals. The year 1308 marks the beginning of the series of bad seasons. Droughts in some places, floods in others, locusts and failure of the crops, brought famine and pestilence. The people in Kiang-Hoaï were reduced to live on wild roots and the bark of trees. In Ho-nan and Chan-tong the fathers ate the flesh of the children. The imperial granaries were still able to supply grain, but not nearly enough for the people’s wants. The provinces of Kiang-si and Che-kiang were depopulated by the plague or malignant fever which followed the famine. The ministers sent in their resignations, which were not accepted. In 1313 the same events recur, including the resignations of ministers. An epidemic carried off many in the capital, and the whole empire was desolated by drought. At a council of ministers to devise remedies and avert further calamities it was proposed by some to copy the institutions of ancient empires celebrated for their virtue, and by others to abolish the Bhuddist priesthood of Foh as the cause of all misfortunes. The throne is now occupied by Gin-tsong, an emperor of a serious and ascetic disposition. In 1314 he revived the old Chinese system of competitive examinations and the distinctive dress among the grades of mandarins, which the earlier Mongol rulers had been able to dispense with. Next year there is a public distribution of grain, and a check to the exactions of tax-gatherers in the distressed districts. In 1317, it appears that the provincial mandarins, in defiance of express orders, had neglected the laws of Kublai with reference to the distribution of grain, although it was dangerous to defer such public aid longer; they had failed also to relax their rigour in collecting the taxes. One day the emperor found at Peking a soldier in rags from a distant garrison, and discovered that a system of embezzlement in the army clothing department had been going on for five years. Gin-tsong is reported to have said to his ministers, “My august predecessors have left wise laws, which I have always had at heart to follow closely; but I see with pain that they are neglected, and that my people are unhappy.” In 1318 we read of a great flood in one province, of multitudes drowned, and of a public distribution of grain. In 1320, forty of the Censors of the Empire remonstrated against the cruel exactions of “public leeches,” and against a practice of calumniating honest men so as to get them out of the way. The emperor Gin-tsong died in that year, aged thirty-three, and with his death the last serious attempt to check the flood of corruption came to an end. In 1321 there is drought in Ho-nan, followed by famine. In 1324 we read of droughts, locusts, inundations and earthquakes. The emperor demanded advice of the nobles, ministers and wise men, and received the following answer: “While the palace of the prince is full of eunuchs, astrologers, physicians, women, and other idle people, whose maintenance costs the State an enormous sum, the people are plunged in extreme misery. The empire is a family, and the emperor its father: let him listen to the cries of the miserable.” In 1325 famine follows the disasters of the year before; and we learn that the people were supplied from the full granaries of the rich, who were paid, not out of the State treasury, but by places in the mandarinate! In 1326 the tyranny and licentiousness of the Bhuddist lamas reaches a climax, and an edict is issued against them. The year 1327 is marked by a series of calamities and portents--drought, locusts, ruined crops, earthquakes, inundations. In 1330, again floods and the harvest destroyed, a cruel famine in Hou-Kouang, millions of acres of land ruined, and 400,000 families reduced to beggary. In 1331 the harvest is worse than in the year before--in Che-kiang there were more than 800,000 families who did not gather a single grain of corn or rice,--and all the while enormous taxes were ground out of universal poverty. In 1333 begins the long and calamitous reign of Shun-ti, who came to the throne a weak youth of thirteen. Next year the misfortunes of China touch their highest point. Inundations ruined the crops in Chan-tong; a drought in Che-kiang brought famine and pestilence; in the southern provinces generally, famine and floods caused the deaths of 2,270,000 families, or of 13,000,000 individuals. In 1336 inundations in Chan-tong ruined the harvest; in Kiang-nan and Che-kiang the first harvest was a failure from drought, multitudes perished of hunger, and a plague broke out. The emperor, insensible to the misfortunes of his people, abandons himself to his pleasures. Next year sees the first of those provincial revolts, led by obscure Chinese peasants, which eventually overthrew the dynasty in 1368. Floods occurred in more than one river basin, by which multitudes of men and beasts were drowned; in the valley of the Kiang (a tributary of the Hoang-ho) four millions perished. For several years we read of numerous and repeated shocks of earthquakes, in 1341 of a great famine, in 1342 of a famine so severe that human flesh was eaten, in 1343 of seven towns submerged, in 1344 of a great tract of country inundated by the sea in consequence of an earthquake, in 1345 of earthquakes in Pe-chili, in 1346 of earthquakes for seven days in Chan-tong, and of a great famine in Chan-si. In 1347 earthquakes in various provinces, and drought in Ho-tong, followed by many deaths. The record of disasters in De Mailla’s abridged annals, and in Des Guignes, who had clearly access to fuller narrations, comes to an end for a time at the year 1347. It will be observed that in these records there is comparatively little said of epidemic sickness. The references to pestilence would in no case suggest more than the typhus fever which has been the usual attendant upon Chinese famines, and has never shown the independent vitality and diffusive properties of plague. But the minor place occupied by actual pestilence in China, in the years before the Black Death in Europe, is brought out even more clearly on comparing that period with the section of the Chinese annals for the generation following. In the chronology of Chinese epidemics drawn up by Gordon (London, 1884) from the Peking _Encyclopædia_ of 1726, there are, from 1308-1347, just the same entries of pestilence as are given above from De Mailla’s and Des Guignes’ French adaptation of the Annals. (Gordon makes the obvious mistake of attributing to pestilence the enormous loss of life which the Annals clearly assigned to floods and famines, with their attendant sickness.) But with the year 1352 we enter upon a great pestilential period, as clearly marked in the history of China by the annual recurrence of vast epidemics as the decades before it were marked by the unusual frequency of floods, famines and earthquakes. Every year from 1352 to 1363, except 1355, has an entry of “great pestilence” or “great plague” (yi-li), in one province or another, although the old tale of floods and famines has come to an end in the Annals. The last of the nearly continuous series of great pestilences is in 1369, when there was a great pest in Fukien, and “the dead lay in heaps on the ground.” There is then a break until 1380, and after that a longer break until 1403. It would thus appear as if the great pestilential period of China in the fourteenth century had not coincided with the succession of disastrous seasons, but had followed the latter at a distinct interval. Conversely the years of plague from 1352 to 1369 do not appear to have been years of inundations and bad harvests; they stand out in the chronology, by comparison, as years of plague-sickness pure and simple; and although nothing is said to indicate the type of bubo-plague, yet the disease can hardly be assumed to have been the old famine fevers or other sickness directly due to floods and scarcity, so long as not a word is said of floods and famines in that context or in the Annals generally. The suggestion is that the soil of China may not have felt the full effects of the plague virus, originally engendered thereon, until some few years after the same had been carried to Europe, having produced there within a short space of time the stupendous phenomenon of the Black Death. If there be something of a paradox in that view, it is the facts themselves that refuse to fall into what might be thought the natural sequence. The historian Gaubil thinks that the national Annals make the most of these recurring calamities, having been written by the official scribes of the next dynasty, who sought to discredit the Mongol rule as much as possible[292]; but it is not suggested that the compilers had invented the series of disasters,--now in one province or river basin, now in another, at one time with thirteen millions of lives lost, at another with four hundred thousand families reduced to beggary, this time a drought, and next time a flood, and in another series of years a succession of destructive earthquakes. We are here concerned with discovering any possible relation that these disasters, coming one upon another almost without time for recovery, can have had to the engendering of the plague-virus. According to the rumours of the time, it was the corruption of unburied corpses in China which caused the Black Death; and certainly the unburied corpses were there, a _vera causa_, if that were all. Recent experiences in China make it easy for us to construct in imagination the state of the shores of rivers after those fatal inundations of the fourteenth century, or of the roadsides after the recurring famines. Thus, of the famine of 1878 it is said[293]: “Coffins are not to be got for the corpses, nor can graves be prepared for them. Their blood is a dispersed mass on the ground, their bones lie all about.... Pestilence [it is otherwise known to have been typhus fever] comes with the famine, and who can think of medicine for the plague or coffins for the multitude of the dead?” Or, again, according to a memorial in the official Peking Gazette of 16 January, 1878, “the roads are lined with corpses in such numbers as to distance all efforts for their interment[294].” There is much of sameness in the history of China from century to century; what happened in 1878, and again on a lesser scale two or three years ago, must have happened on an unparalleled scale year after year during the ill-starred period which ended about 1342; there must have been no ordinary break-down in the decencies and sanitary safeguards of interment in such years as 1334, when thirteen millions (two million, two hundred and seventy thousand families) were swept away by the floods of the Yang-tsi, or destroyed by hunger and disease. But we are not left altogether to the exercise of the imagination. A strangely vivid picture remains to us of a scene in China in those years, which a returning missionary saw as in a vision. The friar Odoric, of Pordenone, had spent six years in Northern China previous to 1327 or 1328, when he returned to Italy by one of the overland routes. The story of his travels[295] was afterwards taken down from his lips, and it is made to end with one gruesome scene, which is brought in without naming the time or the place. It is a vision of a valley of death, invested with the same air of generality as in Bunyan’s allegory of the common lot. “Another great and terrible thing I saw. For, as I went through a certain valley which lieth by the River of Delights (_flumen deliciarum_) I saw therein many dead corpses lying. And I heard also therein sundry kinds of music, but chiefly nakers, which were marvellously played upon. And so great was the noise thereof that very great fear came upon me. Now, this valley is seven or eight miles long; and if any unbeliever enter therein, he quitteth it never again, but perisheth incontinently. Yet I hesitated not to go in that I might see once for all what the matter was. And when I had gone in I saw there, as I have said, such numbers of corpses as no one without seeing it could deem credible. And at one side of the valley, in the very rock, I beheld as it were the face of a man very great and terrible, so very terrible indeed that for my exceeding great fear my spirit seemed to die in me. Wherefore I made the sign of the Cross, and began continually to repeat _Verbum caro factum_, but I dared not at all come nigh that face, but kept at seven or eight paces from it. And so I came at length to the other end of the valley, and there I ascended a hill of sand and looked around me.” Narrated as it is of no specified place and of no one year of his journey, it may stand, and perhaps it was meant to stand, for a common experience of China in the period of Mongol decadence. Whether he left the country by the gorges of the Yang-tsi and the Yun-nan route, or along the upper basin of the Hoang-ho by the more usual northern route to the desert of Gobi, his vision of a Valley of Corpses is equally significant. The Theory of the Plague-Virus. The question that remains is the connexion, in pathological theory, between the bubo-plague and the corruption of the unburied dead or of the imperfectly buried dead. Some such connexion was the rumour of the time, before any scientific theory can well have existed. Also the factor in question was undoubtedly there among the antecedents, if it were not even the most conspicuous of the antecedents. But we might still be following a wandering light if we were to trust the theory of the Black Death to those empirical suggestions, striking and plausible though they be. It is not for the Black Death only, but for the great plagues of the Mohammedan conquests, which preceded the Black Death by many centuries and also followed that great intercurrent wave until long after in their own strict succession, for the circumscribed spots of plague in various parts of Asia and Africa in our own day, and above all for the great plague of Justinian’s reign,--it is for them all that a theory of bubo-plague is needed. A survey of the circumstances of all these plagues will either weaken or strengthen, destroy or establish, the theory that the virus of the Black Death had arisen on the soil of China from the cadaveric poison present in some peculiar potency, and had been carried to Europe in the course of that overland trade at whose terminus we first hear of its virulence being manifested. The theory of the origin of the plague-virus from the corruption of the dead was a common one in the sixteenth century. It was held by Ambroise Paré among others, and it was elaborately worked out for the Egypt of his day by Prosper Alpinus, physician to the Venetian Consulate at Cairo towards the end of the same century. But the most brilliant exposition of it, one of the finest exercises of diction and of reasoning that has ever issued from the profession of medicine, was that given for the origin in Egypt of the great plague of Justinian’s reign by Etienne Pariset, secretary to the Académie de Médecine and commissioner from France to study the plague in Syria and Egypt in 1829[296]. In the plague-stricken Egypt of that time, overburdened with population and still awaiting the beneficent rule of Mehemet Ali, Dr Pariset had his attention forcibly directed to the same contrast between the modern and ancient manner of disposing of the dead, and to the insuitability of the former to the Delta, which had been remarked by Prosper Alpinus in 1591, and by De Maillet, French consul at Cairo, in 1735, and had been specially dwelt upon by _philosophes_ of the eighteenth century, such as Montesquieu, Volney and De Pauw. On the one hand he saw under his eyes various revolting things in the Delta,--brick tombs invaded by water, an occasional corpse floating at large, canals choked with the putrefying bodies of bullocks dead of a murrain, the courtyards of Coptic and Jewish houses, and the floors of mosques, churches and monasteries filled with generations of the dead in their flooded vaults and catacombs. On the other hand he saw, on the slopes of the Libyan range and on the edge of the desert beyond the reach of the inundation, the occasional openings of a vast and uncounted series of rock-grottoes in which the Egyptians of the pre-Christian era had carefully put away every dead body, whether of bird, or of beast, or of human kind. He was persuaded of the truth of Volney’s remark, “In a crowded population, under a hot sun, and in a soil filled deep with water during several months of every year, the _rapid_ putrefaction of bodies becomes a leaven of plague and of other disease[297].” The remark of De Pauw, although it is not adduced, was equally to the point: “Neither men nor beasts are any longer embalmed in Egypt; but the ancient Egyptians seem to have done well in following that mode, and in keeping the mummies in the deepest recesses of excavated rocks.... Were we to note here all that those two nations [Arabs and Turks] have left undone, and everything that they ought not to have done, it would be easy to understand how a country formerly not altogether unhealthy, is now become a hotbed of the plague[298].” These eighteenth-century reflections, casual and discursive after the manner of the time, were amplified by Pariset to scientific fulness and order, and set in permanent classical form. Like De Pauw and Volney, he extolled the ancient sanitary wisdom of Egypt, and excused the priestly mask of superstition for the implicit obedience that it secured. De Pauw had pointed out that the towns most remarkable for the worship of crocodiles,--Coptos, Arsinöe (Crocodilopolis), and Athribis,--were all situated on canals at some distance from the Nile; the crocodiles could never have got to them unless the canals were kept clear; according to Aelian and Eusebius the crocodile was the symbol of water fit to drink; so that the superstitious worship of the animal was in effect the motive for keeping the canals of the Nile in repair. The priests of Egypt, says Pariset, with their apparatus of fictions and emblems, sought to veil from the profane eyes of the vulgar and of strangers the secrets of a sublime philosophy[299]. They made things sacred so as to make them binding, so as to constrain by the force of religion, as Moses did, their disciple. They had to reckon with the annual overflow of the Nile, with a hot sun, and a crowded population. Suppose that all the dead animal matter, human or other, were to be incorporated with the soil under these rapid changes of saturation and drying, of diffusion and emanation, what a mass of poison, what danger to the living! What foresight they showed in avoiding it, what labour and effort, but what results! Can anyone pretend that a system so vast, so beautiful, so coherent in all its parts, had been engendered and conserved merely by an ignorant fanaticism, or that a people who had so much of wisdom in their actions had none in their thoughts? Looking around him at the Egypt of the Christian and Mohammedan eras, he asks, What has become of that hygiene, attentive, scrupulous and enlightened, of that marvellous police of sepulture, of that prodigious care to preserve the soil from all admixture of putrescible matters? The ancient learning of Egypt, the wisdom taught by hard experience in remote ages and perfected in prosperous times, had gradually been overthrown, first by the Persian and Greek conquests which weakened the national spirit, then by the Roman conquest which broke it, then by the prevalence of the Christian doctrines, and lastly by the Mohammedan domination, more hostile than all the others to sanitary precaution. Pariset’s remaining argument was that ancient Egypt, by its systematic care in providing for a slow mouldering of human and animal bodies beyond the reach of the inundation, had been saved from the plague; in the historic period there had been epidemics, but these had been of typhus or other sickness of prisons, slavery, and famines. According to Herodotus, Egypt and Libya were the two healthiest countries under the sun. But when St Paul’s vehement argument as to the natural and the spiritual body began to make way, when men began to ask the question, “How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come?” the ancient practice of Egypt was judged to be out of harmony with Christian doctrine. Embalming was denounced as sinful by St Anthony, the founder of Egyptian monachism, in the third century; and by the time that the church of North Africa had reached its point of highest influence under St Augustine, bishop of Hippo, the ancient religious rites of Egypt had everywhere given place to Christian burial[300]. Bubo-plague had already been prevalent in at least one disastrous epidemic in Lower Egypt at the time of the great massacres of Christians in the episcopate of Cyprian; and in the year 542 it broke out at Pelusium, one of the uncleannest spots in the Delta, spread thence on the one hand along the North African coast, and on the other hand by the corn ships to Byzantium, and grew into the disastrous world-wide pestilence which has ever since been associated with the reign of Justinian. After the Mohammedan conquest things went from bad to worse; and from the tenth century until the year 1846, plague had been domesticated on the soil of Egypt. The theory of Pariset was communicated by him to the Académie de Médecine on 12 July, 1831, and finally published in a carefully designed and highly finished essay in 1837. It was received with much disfavour; according to his colleague Daremberg, the learned librarian of the Academy, nothing but its brilliant style could have saved it from being forgotten in a week. It was vigorously opposed by Clot Bey, on behalf of Egyptian officialdom, because it fixed upon Egypt the stigma of holding in the soil an inherent and abiding cause of the plague[301]. Besides the general objection that it was the theorizing of a _philosophe_, exception was taken to particular parts of the argument. Thus Labat demonstrated by arithmetic that the mummied carcases of all the generations of men and animals in Egypt for three thousand years would have required a space as large as the whole of Egypt, which should thus have become one vast ossuary. And as to the fact, he added, embalming was the privilege of the rich, and of some sacred species of animals. Clot Bey asserted that the whole class of slaves were not thought worthy of embalming. He found also, in the language used by Herodotus, evidence that the people of Egypt felt themselves to be under “the continual menace” of some great epidemic scourge and took precautions accordingly--the very ground on which Pariset based his theory. The objection which weighed most with Daremberg was the fact that, just about the time when Pariset had asserted the immunity of Egypt from plague in her prosperous days, evidence had been found, in the newly-discovered collections of Oribasius, that a bubonic disease was recorded for Egypt and Libya by a Greek physician two centuries before the Christian era, and by another Greek medical writer about the beginning of our era. It does not appear to have occurred to the opponents of Pariset’s theory that the two chief objections, first that embalming was far from general, and second that cases of plague did occur in ancient Egypt, answered each other. But, as matter of fact, it can be shown that there were cheaper forms of embalming practised for the great mass of the people. Again, it was found by De Maillet that bodies not embalmed at all, but laid in coarse cloths upon beds of charcoal under six or eight feet of sand at an elevation on the edge of the great plain of mummies at Memphis, and beyond the reach of the water, were as perfectly preserved from putrid decay as if they had been embalmed, the dry air and the nitrous soil contributing to their slow and inoffensive decomposition[302]. These facts tended to support the notion that it was not ceremony which really determined the national practice, but utility, into which neither art nor religion necessarily entered. The existence also of bubonic disease in the period of the Ptolemies proved that the risk assumed in Pariset’s theory was a real risk, the precautions having been not always sufficient to meet it. The plague which overran the known world in Justinian’s reign (542) was, according to this theory, the effect on a grand scale of an equally grand cause, namely, the final overthrow of a most ancient religion and national life, which had not been built up for nothing and had a true principle concealed beneath its superstitions. The parallelism between China and ancient Egypt has been a favourite subject. In China whatever of religion there is runs upon the Egyptian lines--reverence for the dead or worship of ancestors. The Chinese do not indeed embalm their dead, but they practise an equivalent art of preservation which may be read in almost identical terms in the book of Marco Polo and in modern works on the social life of China[303]. To prevent the products of cadaveric decay from passing into the soil may be said to be the object of their practices. The pains taken to secure dry burial-places are especially obvious in those parts of the country, such as the “reed lands” of the Yang-tsi, which are subject to inundations, annual or occasional[304]. Much of the national art of Feng-shui is concerned, under the mask of divination, with these common-sense aims. Both Egypt and China are liable to have their river-basins flooded at one time and parched to dust at another. These extreme fluctuations of the ground water are now known to scientific research to be the cause of peculiar and unwholesome products of putrefaction in the soil: given a soil charged with animal matters, the risk to those living upon it is in proportion to the range of fluctuation of the ground water. If it happen as an annual thing that the pores of the ground are now full of water, now full of air, or if these extreme alternations be a common liability, then a soil with the products of animal decomposition dispersed through it will be always unwholesome, and unwholesome on a national scale. It is often held that even vegetables rotting on the ground are pestiferous; Ambroise Paré believed that the rotting carcase of a stranded whale caused an outbreak of bubo-plague at Genoa; but human decomposition is something special--at least for the living of the same species[305]. Most special of all is it when its gross and crude matters pass rapidly into the ground, getting carried hither and thither by the movements of the ground water, and giving off those half-products of oxidation which the extreme alternations from air to water, or from water to air, in the pores of the ground are known to favour. There may be nothing offensive to the sense, but the emanations from such a soil will in all probability be poisonous or pestilent. In particular circumstances of locality the permeation or leavening of the soil with the products of organic decomposition produces Asiatic cholera; in still more special circumstances the result is yellow fever; in circumstances familiar enough to ourselves the result is typhoid fever, and probably also summer diarrhœa or British cholera. These are all soil poisons. Bubo-plague also is a soil poison; and it is claimed as specially related to the products of _cadaveric_ decomposition, diffused at large in such a soil as soil-poisons are ordinarily engendered in. It is possible to subject that theory of the plague to the test of facts still further. Thus bubo-plague dogged the steps of Mohammedan conquest from the first century after the Hegira, now in Syria when Damascus was the capital, now in Irak when Bagdad was the centre of Mohammedan rule, now in Egypt when the seat of empire shifted to Grand Cairo; and, over a great part of the period, simultaneously in all the regions of Islam. That long series of plague-epidemics has been recorded in Arabic annals, and has lately been published in an abstract accessible to all, with a summary of conclusions[306]. What are the conclusions of the learned commentator on the Arabic annals, as to the general causes of the thousand years of Mohammedan plague?--“War, with the wasting of whole nations, in disregard of all established rights, with plundering of towns and concentration of great masses of men ill provided for and unregulated, who developed the seeds of communicable and malignant diseases. Add to these things the negligent or wholly neglected burial of those who had fallen in battle, the straits and privations of the wounded, and the effects of a hot climate, especially in flooded and swampy tracts of country.... The kind of burial, in very shallow and often badly covered graves, which used to be practised in most Eastern towns, and in part is still practised, may also have had disastrous consequences not unfrequently.” The Theory tested by Modern Instances. With that general statement for the long succession of plague-epidemics in Islam during nine centuries from the Hegira, beginning with a Syrian epidemic in A.D. 628 and ending with a close succession of twelve epidemics in Egypt from 1410 to 1492, we may pass to the more detailed accounts of the conditions under which bubo-plague has been found in various localities, often circumscribed spots far apart and out of the way, during recent years. These spots are so varied, have so little apparently in common, and are so capriciously chosen in the midst of their several regions of the globe, that they do not readily fall into any order or classification. What are we to make of a few spots of plague among nomade Arabs of the Cyrenaic plateau; of plague in some stricken villages high up in the highlands of Kurdistan, or in low-lying towns such as Resht, near the shore of the Caspian, or amidst the black ooze of amphibious habitations in the lower valley of Tigris and Euphrates; of true bubonic disease in some few Bedouin villages or small towns on the summits of the basaltic plateaus that rise like gigantic warts from the Arabian desert; of bubo-plague in Yun-nan, at or near the capital Talifoo, where the Mohammedan and Chinese influences have been struggling for mastery, as well as among the cabins in the rocky valleys of the Salwen; of some forty or fifty Himalayan hamlets picked out as plague-spots among the six thousand villages of Kumaon; and of the now extinct but comparatively recent centres of the same disease in the walled towns and walled villages of Kutch, Kattiwar, and Marwar? And lastly what are we to make of those cases of typhus fever with buboes which have been observed in villages of the Yusufzai valley, near Peshawur, in 1852; in the Chinese town of Pakhoi, on the gulf of Tonking, in 1886; occasionally among the fever-cases in Burdwan since the health of that province underwent so disastrous a change about the year 1870; and, on credible report, among the troops in the Russo-Turkish war of 1879? It is surely unnecessary, at least, to refute the sterile dogmatism that these are all the effects of one pre-existing virus, carried, we know not how, from point to point of the globe in an unbroken succession. It is a far cry even on a small-scale map from Kumaon to Kutch, from Yun-nan to the Gulf of Tonking, from Resht to the Armenian highlands, from the centre of Arabia to Tripoli, and from Mesopotamia to North Yemen. And what is the use of assuming that there has always been bubo-plague in the “cradle of the human race,” and concluding that the Black Death was one of its excursions westwards, so long as the plagues of Islam were going on from decade to decade, all through the Middle Ages, at no great distance from Byzantium and from Western Europe? Are not Damascus, Bagdad and Grand Cairo of more account as plague-foci than a few villages in the Himalaya or in Kattiwar, even granting that the plague may have been in the latter at an earlier date than we know? It is not communication that connects the several seats of plague, scattered widely in time and place; but it is community of conditions, or of the causes and associated circumstances which breed the plague in each separately. Let us take them in some sort of order. Among the most remarkable habitats of modern bubo-plague are the villages on the basalt plateaus of the Arabian desert. We have information of these plague-spots from Doughty[307], who did not indeed visit Assir, the most notorious of them, but several others more to the north and east. He describes the ruined villages of Mogug, Gofar, Hâyil and others, where the people had died of plague some years before. A year of dearth preceded the plague in some, if not in all of them. The author is struck by the carelessness of burial, or the difficulties of it in the baked soil, although he does not directly connect that with the epidemics. Thus, in passing the graveyard of Hâyil, one of the plague-towns, he remarks: “Aheyd was a man of much might and glory in his day; he lies a yard under the squalid gravel in his shirt.” Of Kheybar, with vague traditions of plague, he says: “We passed through a burial-ground of black volcanic mould and salt-warp; the squalid grave heaps are marked with headstones of wild basalt. That funeral earth is chapped and ghastly, bulging over her enwombed corses, like a garden soil in spring-time which is pushed by the new spring plants. All is horror at Kheybar!” He is led to the following general remarks: “The care of sepulture was beyond measure in the religions of antiquity, which were without humility. Under the new religion [of Arabia] the deceased is wound in a shirt-cloth of calico, and his corse is laid in the shallow pit of droughty earth.” Again, of Bedouin burials in general: “The deceased is buried the same day or on the morrow. They scrape out painfully with a stick and their hands in the hard-burned soil a shallow grave. I have seen their graves in the desert ruined by foul hyenas, and their winding-sheets lay half above ground.” Of the best known of these Arabian plague-spots the plateau of Assir, to the south-east of Mecca, we have the following information relating to the years 1874-79[308]; the chief plague-locality is Namasse, the principal town of Beny Sheir, with five other villages. The site is on a mountain ridge too high for camels, the climate is cold and moist, the soil fruitful, springs abundant, and no standing water. The houses are built of stone, and stand close together. The ground-floor of each house is used as the stable; and as the winter in these mountains is very severe, so that water freezes, the inhabitants live with their cattle in a horrible state of filth. According to information from the district superintendent, there had been plague in a few villages every two or three years for the previous thirty-five or forty years. It has seldom extended further than five or six leagues. The region is a mountain canton, with no trade; it is cut off from the rest of the world. The disease is mostly attended with buboes in the groins, armpits, and neck, but not always; sometimes petechial spots were spoken of; in the sheikh Faïk’s own household the disease began with rigors, and developed buboes, petechiæ, headache and burning thirst. Dr Nury counted up in six villages, with a population of eight hundred, cases of plague to the number of 184 (68 men, 45 women, 50 boys and 21 girls), with 155 deaths and 29 recoveries. Let us now place beside this the accounts of the plague in the mountains village of Kumaon[309]. Of the plague-villages of Danpore and Munsharee, near the snow, we read: “Their houses are generally built of stone, one storey high. On the ground-floor herd the cattle; in this compartment the dung is allowed to accumulate till such time as there is no room left for the cattle to stand erect; it is then removed and carefully packed close around all sides, so that the house literally stands in the centre of a hot-bed.... In many instances we have seen it accumulated above the level of the floor of the upper story in which the family lives.” In that compartment, four feet high, with no window and a door of some three feet by eighteen inches, ten or fifteen people live, lying huddled together with the door shut. Their food is as poor as their lodging. When plague breaks out, the family ties are rudely loosened: those who can, flee to the jungle, leaving the stricken to their fate. The following is by Renny: “Fourteen died at a place in the forest half a mile or more from Duddoli, respecting which I had the best description yet given to me of the career of the sickness. Here were only two houses, or long low huts, occupied by two separate families, the heads being two brothers, sixteen souls in all. These two huts had to contain also thirty head of cattle, large and small, at the worst season of the year. In these two huts the Mahamurree [bubo-plague] commenced about ten or eleven months ago, corresponding to the time it appeared in Duddoli. At this place the sixteen residents kept together till fourteen died, and one adult only, a man of about thirty years of age, with his female child of six years old, survived. There was no particular disorder among the cattle, but the outbreak of the plague was preceded and accompanied by a great mortality among the rats in their houses.” Let us now take the accounts, twenty-five years later, of the plague in the same district in 1876-77[310]. Confirming the earlier statements as to the extraordinary filth of the houses--the cattle under the same roof and the baskets of damp and unripe grain--he directs attention specially to the disposal of the dead. The custom of the country is to burn the body beside the most convenient mountain stream terminating in the Ganges. But from that good practice the people have deviated in regard to bodies dead of any pestilence (smallpox, cholera, plague), which are buried. Of all countries the Himalaya is least suited to the burial of the dead. For, by reason of the rocky subsoil, it is seldom possible to dig a grave more than two feet deep; and, as a rule, the pestilent dead are laid in shallow trenches in the surface soil of the field nearest to the place of death, or of the terrace facing the house, or even of the floor of the house itself. This bad practice is begotten of fear to handle the body, and has been long established. Such mismanagement of the dead is sufficient to account for the continuous existence of the active principle of plague-disease, sometimes dormant for want of opportunity, but ever ready to affect persons suitably prepared by any cause producing a low or bad state of health. In the houses of families about to suffer from an outbreak of plague, rats are sometimes found dead on the floor. Planck had seen them himself; all that he had seen appeared to have died suddenly, as by suffocation, their bodies being in good condition, a piece of rag sometimes clenched in the teeth. He mentions nine villages, all of them endemic seats of plague, in which the premonitory death of rats in the infected houses was testified. The affected villages were not one in a hundred of all the villages of Kumaon, and were widely scattered throughout the northern half of the province. Even in each of those few villages, the plague is confined to one house, or one terrace, or one portion of the village. Let us turn next to the small spots of bubo-plague in the remote province of Yun-nan. Our information comes from members of the British and French Consular services[311]. The plague occurs in towns and villages and is the cause of much mortality. After ravaging villages scattered about the plains, it frequently ascends the mountains, and takes off many of the aborigines inhabiting the high lands. What, in M. Rocher’s opinion, aggravates the evil is the practice of not burying the bodies of those who die of this disease. Instead of being buried, the body is placed on a bier and exposed to the sun. As a consequence of this practice the traveller passing the outskirts of a village where the plague is raging is nearly choked with the nauseous smell emanating from the exposed and rotting corpses. Burial is the usual mode of disposal, although many of the villages are on rocky mountain sides, as in Kumaon. The rats are first affected; as soon as they sicken, they leave their holes in troops, and after staggering about and falling over each other, drop down dead. Mr Baber had the same information from a French missionary in the upper valley of the Salwen, a long, low valley about two miles broad, walled in by immense precipices, so hot in summer that the inhabitants go up the hill sides to live. The approach of bubo-plague (the buboes may be as large as a hen’s or goose’s egg) may often be known from the extraordinary behaviour of the rats, who leave their holes and crevices and issue on to the floors without a trace of their accustomed timidity, springing continually upwards from their hind legs as if they were trying to jump out of something. The rats fall dead, and then comes the turn of the poultry, pigs, goats, etc. The good father had a theory of his own that the plague is really a pestilential emanation slowly rising in an equable stratum from the ground, the smallest creatures being first engulfed. The larger plague-centre at or near the capital, Talifoo, appears to be related to Mohammedan warfare, and possibly to the neglect to bury the dead, which is an admitted fact, although not connected by the narrator with the prevalence of plague. The other Chinese plague-spot is hundreds of miles away, on the shores of the Gulf of Tonking. The best known centre of plague is the port of Pakhoi, the native quarter of which is described as peculiarly filthy. The houses are little cleaner than the streets, the floors being saturated with excrement, and the drains being either close to the surface or open altogether. An outbreak of plague there in 1882 is minutely described by Dr Lowry[312]. It occurred in the hot weather of June (85° Fahr. day, 76° Fahr. night); for fear of thieves the houses are carefully shut up even on the hottest night. The epidemic caused about 400 to 500 deaths in a population of 25,000. The disease does not spread. In nearly every house where the disease broke out, the rats had been coming out of their holes and dying on the floors: Dr Lowry dissected several of them, and found the lungs congested. In the human subject, except for the buboes, the disease resembled typhus: “anyone going to the bedside of a patient would certainly at first think it was that disease he had to deal with.” The same disease occurred at Lien-chow, a city twelve miles off. Another English physician in the service of the China Maritime Customs heard of a malady with the symptoms of plague in certain districts of Southern Kiangsi in the autumn of 1886; but no particulars were to be had. Typhus was prevalent, and very fatal, every year in the towns, villages and hamlets of Northern Kiangsi. One curious piece of evidence as to the death of rats, not associated with plague in men, comes from a more northern province of China. In the autumn of 1881, on the opposite side of the Yang-tsi from Nanking and in the western suburbs of the ancient capital, the rats emerged from holes in dwellings, jumped up, turned round, and fell dead. Baskets and boxes filled with their bodies were cast into the canal. “Here,” says Dr Macgowan, “was evidently a subsoil poison which affected the animals precisely in the same way as the malaria of the Yun-nan pest. Happily the subterranean miasm at Nanking did not affect animals that live above ground[313].” The evidence from Kutch, Kattiwar, and Marwar relates to the years 1815-20, and 1838. In circumstances peculiar in some respects, namely, of walled towns and stockaded villages, but the same as those already given in the matter of filth from cattle crowded into the human dwellings, we find bubo-plague breaking out so long as the unwholesome state of things lasted under Mahratta rule and until British rule had been fairly at work. The causes of the bubo-plague, says Whyte, were the same as of typhus--walled and crowded towns, cattle housed with human beings, slow wasting diseases among the cattle, which were not killed for food but kept for milk and ghee. He questions whether, in shutting out their enemies, they had not shut in one far more powerful[314]. Here also we have various independent witnesses[315] testifying to the premonitory death of the rats; they lay dead in all places and directions--in the streets, houses, and hiding-places of the walls. This happened in every town that was affected in Marwar, so that the inhabitants of any house instantly quitted it on seeing a dead rat. Relation of Typhus to Bubo-plague. The smallest and the most easily surveyed of all the recent foci of bubo-plague, is that among the Bedouin of the Cyrenaic plateau in North Africa (port of Benghazi), a desert region corresponding to one of the most famous corn-lands of antiquity. There was no difference of opinion that the small outbreak of plague in 1874 began simultaneously in the tents of Orphas and the tents of Ferig-el-Hanan, containing together about a hundred souls[316]. These Arabs keep cows, sheep and goats; some of them also cultivate small patches of corn. They are subject to periodic famines, and there had been much want among them in 1869, 1870, 1871, 1872 and 1873, attended by epidemics of typhus, cholera and smallpox. In the winter they found employment among the traders of Merdjé, and at the end of March, 1873, had quitted that village to place their animals in the neighbouring hill-pastures. The ground had been saturated, after long drought, by the rains of the winter. Their tents are pitched in hollows which may be filled by water in a few minutes. The encampments, like those of the Bedouin in Arabia, are excessively filthy and are often the scene of typhus fever. In April, 1874, the plague began, the first case being in a child; the buboes were in the groin, armpit or neck. The other symptoms were bilious vomiting, black vomit, haematemesis, petechiae, anthraceous boils, pains in the head, collapse, and delirium. A few cases were mild, but the majority grave and fatal; in several cases there was a relapse with new buboes. The disease was brought from the tents to the village of Merdjé, in which 270 were attacked in a population of 310, with 100 deaths. The total known attacks from 5 April to 24 July were 533 in a population of 734, with 208 deaths and 325 recoveries, 201 resisting the infection. The sanitary state of the village was as bad as that of the tents: the houses, entered by a low door, had windows not to the sun, but to the courtyard, which is a stable choked with filth; the floors of the houses are covered with filth. The graveyard is in the centre of the village, beside a pool of standing water: the graves are shallow, and the corpses are sometimes unearthed by jackals. Both in the village and in the encampments a fall of rain was followed by a new series of attacks. The advice of the sanitary commisioner was to make graves at least six feet deep, and to cover them with lime. These events in 1874 were an exact repetition of those of 1858. In both years heavy rains followed long drought, giving promise of an abundant harvest after a period of famine. The dry years, in both instances, were attended with sickness, typhus and other; the first wet season turned the sickness to plague, that is to say, it added the complication of buboes and haemorrhagic symptoms to the characters of typhus. The meaning of that seems to be that the saturation of the ground generated a soil-poison where there had previously been the milder aerial poison of typhus. This view of plague, as a typhus of the soil, or a disease made so much more malignant than typhus just because of underground fermentation of the putrescible animal matters, is borne out by the facts already given for China and for India. The latter country furnishes other illustrations of typhus fever becoming complicated with buboes, and so becoming something like plague. Perhaps the best instance is the fever observed in the Yusufzai valley, near Peshawur, in 1852[317]. It arose mostly in the filthy Mohammedan houses, shared by cattle and human beings; but it invaded some of the cleaner Hindoo houses also. The disease began in low, marshy situations, which were covered with water after rain and heavy night dews. It was of the type of typhus, or relapsing fever, with yellowness of the skin, bleeding from the gums, and from the bowels, and often from the nose. One of the observers says: “The only other concomitant affection worthy of note is swelling of the lymphatic glands over various parts of the body; this, however, is only met with in a very few instances.” The other authority says: “Inflammation and suppuration of the glands in the groin, axilla, and neck occurred in some that survived the first or second relapse.” To this outbreak, which is removed only in degree from the Benghazi plague, the Pakhoi plague, and the Pali plague (Gujerat), may be added some others, about which the information is more general. Thus, the fevers which have become notorious in Burdwan since the health of that province changed so disastrously owing to the damming of the ground-water, are said to have been attended now and then with buboes. The typhus fever at Saugor in 1859 was occasionally complicated with suppuration of the lymphatic glands: “In the Doab, as in the subsequent gaol attack, the glands in the groin were very rarely affected; those in the neck were more frequently affected, but this was not a prominent feature in the disease[318].” Again, General Loris Melikoff told the correspondent of the _Golos_ that twenty men died in a day in the Russo-Turkish war in the winter of 1878, with glandular swellings; everywhere there was Schmutz, Schmutz! And lastly, in the epidemic of 1878 at Vetlianka, on the Volga, which is reckoned among the historic occurrences of bubo-plague in Europe, the first ten cases in November, 1878, had suppurating glands in the axilla, did not take to bed, and recovered; there had been ordinary typhus in the filthy fisher cottages in 1877, and there was typhus concurrent with the disease which at length became, and was at length recognized as, true bubo-plague in the winter of 1878-79[319]. One thing which distinguishes these recent outbreaks of plague from the great plague of Justinian’s reign, in part from the series of Mohammedan plagues, and from the Black Death, is that they have for the most part shown no independent vitality and no diffusive power. As in typhus fever itself (except on great occasions), they have been almost confined to those who lived in the filthy houses, and to those who came within the influence of the pestilential emanations. The great plagues of the 6th and 14th centuries had, on the other hand, a diffusive power which carried them over the whole known world. The buboes of Egypt and of China became familiar as far as Norway and Greenland. But, apart from diffusiveness, the conditions of recent local plagues are not unlike those of the great historical epidemics. The very same observation of the rats leaving their holes, which is so abundantly confirmed from the recent plague-spots of Southern China, of Yun-nan, of Kumaon, and of Gujerat, was familiar in the plague-books of London and of Edinburgh in the Elizabethan period. Of the great outbreak in 1603, Thomas Lodge writes: “And when as rats, moules, and other creatures (accustomed to live underground) forsake their holes and habitations, it is a token of corruption in the same, by reason that such sorts of creatures forsake their wonted places of aboade[320].” That is only one of many proofs that the virus of plague has its habitat in the soil, although it may be carried long distances clinging to other things. In its most diffusive potency it is a soil-poison generated, we may now say with some confidence, out of the products of cadaveric decay[321]; in its less diffusive but hardly less malignant potency, it is a soil-poison generated out of the filth of cattle housed with human beings, or out of domestic filth generally, and in nearly all the known instances of such generation, associated with, but perhaps not absolutely dependent upon, carelessness in the disposal of the dead after famine or fever; in the least malignant form, when plague is only a small part of an epidemic of typhus and with the buboes inclined to suppurate, it appears to be still a soil-poison, and to differ from typhus itself, just because the pestilential product of decomposing filth has been engendered in the pores of the ground, rather than in the atmosphere of living-rooms. * * * * * The Black Death, which here concerns us immediately, is one of the two great instances of a plague-virus with vast diffusive power, enormous momentum, and centuries of endurance. So great effects may be said to postulate adequate causes; and one must assume that the virus had been bred from cadaveric decomposition in circumstances of peculiar aggravation and on some vast or national scale. The sequence of events carries us to China; and the annals of China do furnish evidence that the assumed cause was there on a vast scale through a long period of national disaster, while the national customs of China for the disposal of the dead, like those of ancient Egypt, point to the existence of a real risk from allowing the soil to be permeated at large by the crude or hasty products of cadaveric decomposition. It is our duty to construct the best hypothesis we can, sparing no labour. No one really dispenses with theory, whatever his protestations to the contrary; those who are the loudest professors of suspended judgment are the most likely to fall victims to some empty verbalism which hangs loose at both ends, some ill-considered piece of argument which ignores the historical antecedents and stops short of the concrete conclusions. It has been so in the case of infective diseases, and of bubo-plague in particular. The virus of the plague, we are told, is specific; it has existed from an unknown antiquity, and has come down in an unbroken succession; we can no more discover how it arose, than we can tell how the first man arose, or the first mollusc, or the first moss or lichen; its species is, indeed, of the nature of the lowest vegetable organisms. The objection to that hypothesis of plague is that it involves a total disregard of facts. It is a mere formula, which saves all trouble, dispenses with all historical inquiry, and appears to be adapted equally to popular apprehension and to academic ease. The bubo-plagues of history have not, in fact, been all of the same descent; notably the Black Death was a wave of pestilence which Mohammedan countries, accustomed as they had been to native bubo-plagues for centuries before, recognized as an invasion from a foreign source, as an interruption of the sequence of their own plagues. Again, the attempt to link in one series the various scattered and circumscribed spots of plague now or lately existing must fail disastrously the moment it is seriously attempted. The hypothesis of one single source of the plague, of a species of disease arising we know not how, beginning we know not when or where, but at all events reproduced by ordinary generation in an unbroken series of cases, _ab aevo, ab ovo_, is the merest verbalism, wanting in reality or concreteness, and dictated by the curious illusion that a species of disease, because it reproduces itself after its kind, must resemble in other respects a species of living things. The diffusive power of the virus of the Black Death, which has been equalled only by that of the plague in Justinian’s reign, may seem to have depended upon the favouring conditions that it met with. But although favouring conditions count for much, they are not all. The Black Death raged as furiously as anywhere among the nomade Tartars who were its first victims; the virus, as soon as it was let loose, put forth a degree of virulence which must have been native to it, or brought with it from its place of engendering. None the less the incidence of the Black Death in Europe had depended in part upon the preparedness of the soil. It came to Europe in the age of feudalism and of walled towns, with a cramped and unwholesome manner of life, and inhabited spots of ground choked with the waste matters of generations. But even amidst these generally fostering conditions, there would have been more special things that determined its election. It is a principle exemplified in all importations of disease from remote sources, in smallpox among the aerial contagions and in Asiatic cholera among the soil-poisons, that the conditions which favour diffusion abroad are approximately the same amidst which the infection had been originally engendered. A soil-poison of foreign origin makes straight for the most likely spots in the line of its travels; it may not, and often does not confine itself to these, but it gives them a preference. Thus, if we conclude on the evidence that the bubo-plague is a soil-poison having a special affinity to the products of cadaveric decomposition, we shall understand why the Black Death, when it came to England, found so congenial a soil in the monasteries, and in the homes of the clergy. Within the monastery walls, under the floor of the chapel or cloisters, were buried not only generations of monks, but often the bodies of princes, of notables of the surrounding country, and of great ecclesiastics. In every parish the house of the priest would have stood close to the church and the churchyard. One has to figure the virus of the Black Death not so much as carried by individuals from place to place in their persons, or in their clothes and effects, but rather as a leaven which had passed into the ground, spreading hither and thither therein as if by polarizing the adjacent particles of the soil, and that not instantaneously like a physical force, but so gradually as to occupy a whole twelvemonth between Dorset and Yorkshire. Sooner or later it reached to every corner of the land, manifesting its presence wherever there were people resident. Such universality in the soil of England, we have reason to think, it had. But it appears to have put forth its greatest power in the walled town, in the monastery, and in the neighbourhood of the village churchyard.