1349. The pestilence had lasted some fourteen months, from its first

appearance on the Dorset coast at the beginning of August, 1348, until its subsidence in the northern counties in the autumn of 1349. It came to an end, as all devastating epidemics do, through having spent its force, exhausted its pabulum, run through all the susceptible subjects. A letter-writer of Charles I.’s reign has put into colloquial language the corresponding reason for a pause in the ravages of the plague towards the end of its stay in London: “And I think the only reason why the plague is somewhat slackened is because the place is dead already, and no bodie left in it worth the killing[322].” The exhausted state of the country, and of all Europe, is not easy for us to realize. Petrarch, a witness of the Black Death in Italy, foresaw the incredulity of after ages, or their inability to image the state of things--the empty houses, the abandoned towns, the squalid country, the fields crowded with the dead, the vast and dreadful solitude over the whole world. If you inquire of historians, he continues, they are silent; if you consult the physicians, they are at their wits’ end; if you question the philosophers, they shrug their shoulders, wrinkle their brows, and lay the finger on the lip. Is it possible that posterity can believe these things? For we who have seen them can hardly believe them[323]. The blow fell upon every country of Europe within a period of two or three years; and it must have paralysed all trade and industry, war and politics, for the time being. Edward III.’s wars in France, which had resulted in the victory of Crecy in 1346 and the conquest of Calais in 1347, had been suspended by a truce, which was renewed from time to time. Thus, in the very midst of the pestilence, on the 2nd of May, 1349, the envoys of the English and French kings, “in their tents between Calais and Guines,” agreed upon a form of treaty continuing the truce until Pentecost, 1350[324]. In the last days of 1349, Edward III. in person, with a small force, was able to repel an attack upon his new possession of Calais[325]. It was in the year after the Black Death (1350) according to both Stow and Selden, that Edward III. held a great feast at Windsor, to which his heralds invited knights from abroad, to celebrate the institution of the Order of the Garter, the statutes of the Order having been drawn up the year before. What is styled “the necessary defence of the realm,” was a chief subject of concern throughout the year 1350. On the 12th February an order was made to the sheriffs of counties for a supply of so many arrows from each[326]. On the 20th March the mayors and bailiffs of 110 towns are ordered to provide their respective quotas of men-at-arms--London 100, Norwich 60, Bristol 20, and so on--and to send them to Sandwich “for the necessary defence of our realm[327].” On the 1st of May a commission was issued to engage mariners for certain ships, and on the 20th May, an order for ships, pinnaces and barges. On the 22nd July and 10th August there are proclamations relating to the piratical fleet of Spanish ships, intercepting the English traders to Gascony, and threatening an invasion of England[328]; the Spaniards were routed, their ships taken, and the Channel cleared, in a famous engagement off Winchelsea, on 29th August, 1350, which the king directed in person[329]. On 15th June, three days before the first of the ordinances against the Labourers, the king issued two orders to counties, to raise men “for our passage against the parts over sea”--one to the Welsh lords, and the other to the sheriffs of English counties, the demands being in all for 4170 bowmen from England, and for 1350 men from Wales[330]. Whatever these edicts may have resulted in, it was not until four years after that the king really resumed his wars with France. On the 8th September, 1355, the Black Prince sailed from Plymouth with a fleet of some three hundred ships carrying an army of knights, men-at-arms, English bowmen and Welshmen, to the Garonne, for his famous raid across the south of France[331]. Later in the autumn the king collected at Portsmouth[332] and Sandwich, and at Calais, a force of three thousand men-at-arms, two thousand mounted bowmen, and an immense number of bowmen on foot, with which he took the field on the 2nd November[333]. The same summer, a fleet of forty great ships was fitted out at Rotherhithe, for a force of foot under Henry, duke of Lancaster, to aid the king of Navarre; it sailed on the 10th of July, but was unable to clear the Channel, and for various reasons did not proceed[334]; next year, however, the duke of Lancaster crossed from Southampton to Normandy with a force in forty-eight ships[335]. Thus was the war with France resumed six years after the great mortality. The means for equipping these expeditions had been provided by loans raised on the security of the enormous subsidy which the Parliament of 1353-54 was induced to vote, in the form of an export duty of fifty shillings on every sack of wool shipped to foreign countries during the next six years. According to Avesbury’s calculation, Edward had a revenue, from that source, of a thousand marks a day; it was the common opinion, he says, that more than 100,000 sacks of wool were exported in a year[336]. But another and perhaps better authority gives the annual export of wool in the middle of the fourteenth century at nearly 32,000 sacks[337]. Direct effects of the Black Death. Meanwhile internal affairs were demanding the king’s attention, although they occupy less space in the extant State papers than the warlike preparations. On the 23rd August, while the mortality was raging in the north, a proclamation was issued to the sheriff of Northumberland against the migration of people to Scotland, with arms, victuals, goods and merchandise, the pestilence not being mentioned[338]. The first State paper which relates to the recent great mortality is the king’s proclamation of 1st December, 1349, to the mayor and bailiffs of Sandwich, and of forty-eight other English ports, including London[339]. The proclamation begins: “Forasmuch as no mean part of the people of our realm of England is dead in the present pestilence, and the treasure of the said realm is mostly exhausted, and (as we have learned) numbers of this our kingdom are daily passing, or proposing to pass, to parts over sea with money which they were able to have kept within the realm, Now we, taking heed that if passage after this manner be tolerated, the kingdom will in a short time be stripped both of men and of treasure, and so therefrom grave danger may easily arise to us and to the said realm, unless a fitting remedy be speedily appointed--do command the mayor and bailiffs of Sandwich (and of forty-eight other ports) to stop the passage beyond sea of them that have no mandate, especially if they be Englishmen, excepting merchants, notaries, or the king’s envoys.” The edict was probably directed more against the drain of treasure than against the emigration of people; but this not uninteresting question really belongs to other historians, who do not appear to have dealt with it[340]. On the 18th of June, 1350, the first summer after the mortality, there was issued the first proclamation, to the sheriffs of counties, on the demands of the labourers and artificers for higher wages, entitled “De magna parte populi in ultima pestilentia defuncta, et de servientium salariis proinde moderandis[341].” The preamble or motive is one that cannot but seem strange to modern ideas, although it must have been correct and conventional according to feudal notions: “Forasmuch as some, having regard to the necessities of lords and to the scarcity of servants, are unwilling to serve unless they receive excessive wages, while others prefer to beg in idleness, rather than to seek their living by labour--be it therefore enacted that any man or woman, bond or free, under the age of sixty, and not living by a trade or handicraft, nor possessing private means, nor having land to cultivate, shall be obliged, when required, to serve any master who is willing to hire him or her at such wages as were usually paid in the locality in the year 1346, or on the average of five or six years preceding; provided that the lords of villeins or tenants shall have the preference of their labour, so that they retain no more than shall be necessary for them.” It was strictly forbidden either to offer or to demand wages above the old rate. Another clause forbids the giving of alms to beggars. Handicraftsmen of various kinds are also ordered to be paid at the old rate. Lastly, victuallers and other traders are directed to sell their wares at reasonable prices[342]. The same ordinance, with some added paragraphs, was reissued on the 18th November, 1350, to the county of Suffolk and to the district of Lindsey (Lincolnshire), the latter being one of the chief sheep-grazing parts of England; in those two localities, it is stated in so many words, the labourers had set at nought the ordinance of 18th June[343]. When Parliament met--for the first time since the mortality--on the 9th of February, 1351, it was acknowledged that the commissions to sheriffs issued by the king and his council had been ineffective, and that wages had been at twice or thrice the old rate[344]. The Parliament, having legislated for a number of technical matters in connexion with the enormous number of wills and successions, proceeded next to the labour question, and passed the famous Statute of Labourers, by which the generalities of the ordinance of 18th June, 1350, are replaced by an elaborate schedule of wages for harvest-time and other times[345]. One clause of the Act is specially directed against the migration of labourers to other counties. It was the ancient manorial system that was threatened most of all by the depopulation. The surviving labourers sought work where they could command the best wages, and at the same time could escape from the few degrading bonds of servitude which still clung to the _nativi_ or serfs of a manor. But the Manor Court was still the unit of government, and the Act would have been inoperative except on that basis. That fundamental intention of the statute of the 9th February, 1351, comes out, not only in the explicit clause against migrations, but also by contrast, in the special permission given to the labourers of the counties of Stafford, Derby and Lancaster, to the people of Craven, and to the dwellers in the Marches of Wales and Scotland, to go about in search of work in harvest “as they were wont to do before this time[346].” The immediate effect of the depopulation had been to mobilise, as it were, the labouring class. Many of them must have taken the road at once; for, in the first ordinance of 18th June, 1350, before the harvest of that year had begun, it is stated that certain of the labourers preferred to live by begging instead of by labour, and it is therefore forbidden to give alms to beggars. According to Knighton, the effect of the ordinance itself was to swell the ranks of the wandering poor; when some were arrested, imprisoned, or fined in terms of the commission to the sheriffs, others fled to the woods and wastes (_ad silvas et boscos_)[347]. These escapes continued for years after; the rolls of the Manor Court of Winslow have entries of many such cases long after the pestilence[348]. Many of these fugitive villeins formed the class of “wasters,” often referred to in the _Vision of Piers the Ploughman_: “waster would not work, but wander about,” or he would work only in harvest, squander his earnings, and for the rest of the year feel the pinch of hunger “until both his eyen watered.” But it is clear that others went to distant manors, and settled down again to steady employment, freed from their bonds as _nativi_; and it cannot be doubted that some went to the towns[349]. In order to realize the causes and circumstances of the labour difficulty after the enormous thinning of the population, it may be well to recall the composition of the village communities. In each manor the arable land was in two portions--on the one hand the immense open fields (two or perhaps three) in which the villagers had each so many half-acre strips, and on the other hand the lord’s demesne, or home-farm. Part of the latter would often be let to free tenants, or even to villeins, who would count for the occasion as free tenants. For the cultivation of his demesne the lord was dependent on his tenants in villenage, who owed him, in form, so many days’ work in the year, but in reality were often able to commute their personal services for a money payment and are said to have done so very generally[350]. Thus the lord of the manor was no longer able to call upon his serfs to plough or to sow or to reap; he had to hire them for his occasions. The free tenants would also be dependent to some extent upon hired labour; and as some even of the villeins cultivated up to forty acres or more, in the open fields of the manor, these would also have to hire unless their families were old enough to help. All that labour for hire would naturally be supplied by the poorer villagers, the cottars and bordars, who would seldom cultivate more than a few half-acres, and in some cases perhaps none[351]. The lower order of tenants in villenage formed accordingly the class of labourers; and it was their demands which gave occasion for the ordinances of 1350 and the statute of 1351. In each manor the lord would have been affected more than all the rest by the scarcity of labour, in respect of the extensive demesne or home-farm managed by his bailiff. It is conjectured that he tried, in some cases, to go back to his rights of customary service from his villeins, which had gradually become commutable for rents paid in money, and that the attempts to do so led to insubordination[352]. He had to pay wages, notwithstanding all his rights of lordship. The wages paid in the harvest of 1349 were, says Rogers, those of panic. In the form of petition which brought the labour-question before Parliament in February 1351, it is stated that the wages demanded were at double or treble the old rate; of the year preceding (1350) it is recorded that the wages paid to labourers for gathering the harvest on the manor of Ham, belonging to the lord Berkeley, amounted to 1144 days’ work, on the old scale of commutation[353]. The labourers, although the lowest order on the manors, were accordingly masters of the situation. Personal service to the lord, measurable merely by days, and having no reference to fluctuations in the rate of wages, had become obsolete; nor do the ordinance of 1350 and the statute of 1351 give any hint of trying to revive it. If the men refused to be hired at the old rate, they were to be arrested and imprisoned. There were, of course, many things besides the statute, tending to keep the majority of peasants on the manors where they had been born; so that the formal abolition of villenage remained to be carried by rebellion in 1381, while many traces of it in practice remained for long after. Those who stayed on their old manors, or removed to another county or hundred to become tenants under new lords, were able to get permanently better wages; the price of labour remained about forty per cent. higher than it had been before the mortality; so that the statute was on the whole ineffective. But another large proportion of the labouring class appears to have been driven to a wandering life. It is not easy to explain on economical principles why the class of “wasters,” of whom we hear so much, should have been called into existence. Hands were scarce, and wages were high; the conditions look on the surface to be entirely adverse to the creation of a class of sturdy beggars and idle tramps. But the economic conditions were really complex; and when all has been said on the head of economics, there will remain something to be explained on the side of ethics. Not only the labourers but also the employers of labour were cut off in the mortality. A great part of the capital of the country passed suddenly into new hands. Before the Parliament of 1351 legislated upon wages, it was occupied with a number of technical difficulties about wills. Of the proving of wills and the granting of letters of administration on a great scale we have had an instance from an archdeaconry in Lancashire. In Colchester, a town with some four hundred burgesses, one hundred and eleven wills were proved[354]. In the Husting Court of London, three hundred and sixty wills were enrolled and proved from 13th January, 1349, to 13th January, 1350. An immense number of persons came into money who could not all have had the inclination, even if they had the skill and aptitude, for employing it as capital. If there were wasters among the labourers, there were wasters also among the moneyed class. The mortality produced, indeed, that demoralisation of the whole national life which has been usually observed to follow in the like circumstances. “Almost all great epochs of moral degradation are connected with great epidemics,” says Niebuhr, generalizing the evidence which Thucydides gives specially for the plague of Athens[355]. The fourteenth century was by no means a period of high morality before the Black Death; but it was undoubtedly worse after it. Langland’s poem of the vision of Piers the Ploughman is one long diatribe against the vices of the age, and some of the worst of them he expressly dates “sith the pestilence time.” It will be convenient to take these ethical illustrations, before we proceed with the effects of the mortality upon material prosperity and population, and with the domestication of plague on the soil. So far from the labouring class being the chief sinners, it is in the humbler ranks that the root of goodness remains. Langland’s hero, the Ploughman, is obviously chosen to represent “that ingenuous simplicity and native candour and integrity,” which, as Burke says, “formerly characterized the English nation,” and, one may add, have been at all times its saving grace. It was in that class that the reforming movement, led by Wyclif twenty years after, had its strength. Lollardy and the Peasants’ Rebellion were closely allied. The grievance of the latter was that the gulf between the gentleman and the workman had become wider than in nature it should be. An ultimate and very indirect effect of the great mortality was to strengthen the middle class by recruits from beneath; it created the circumstances which produced the English yeoman of the fifteenth century. But we are here engaged with the immediate effect; and that was to broaden the contrast between the rich and the poor. Luxury had already touched so high a point as to call for a statute against extravagant living, the curious sumptuary law of 1336 which prohibited many courses at table. Nothing could be more significant of its later developments in London than the sarcastic description, which fills an unusual space in one of the chroniclers, of the fantastic excesses of dress and ornament among the male sex about the year 1362[356]. Some of the names of the men’s ornaments occur also in Langland’s verses: “Sir John and Sir Goffray hath a gerdel of silver, A basellarde or a ballok-knyf with botones overgilt.” These effeminate fashions actually led to a Statute of Dress in 1363, in which also the lower class are forbidden to ape their betters. It is perhaps to these hangers-on of wealth that Langland refers in his bitter lines: “Right so! ye rich, ye robeth that be rich | and helpeth them that helpeth you, and giveth where no need is. | As who so filled a tun of a fresh river | and went forth with that water to woke with Thames. | Right so! ye rich, ye robe and feed | them that have as ye have, them ye make at ease.” But, as for the poor, Avarice considers them fair game: “I have as moche pite of pore men as pedlere hath of cattes, | that wolde kill them if he cacche hem myghte, for covetise of their skynnes.” In London the preaching clergy are accused of pandering to the avarice of the rich: “And were mercy in mean men no more than in rich | mendicants meatless might go to bed. | God is much in the gorge of these great masters, | but among mean men his mercy and his works. | Friars and faitours have found such questions, | to plese with proud men sithen the pestilence tyme, | and prechers at Saint Poules, for pure envye of clerkis, | that folke is nought firmed in the feith ne fill of their goodes. | ... Ne be plentyous to the pore as pure charitye wolde, | but in gayness and in glotonye forglotten her goode hem selve, | and breken noughte to the beggar as the Boke techeth.” The friars had lost altogether the enthusiasm of their early days: “And how that friars followed folk that was rich, | and folk that was poor at little price they set; | and no corpse in their kirk-yard nor in their kirk was buried, | but quick he bequeath them aughte or should help quit their debts.” As for the monks, the same might have been said of them before; but now more land had been thrown into their possession by the mortality: “Ac now is Religion a ryder, a rowmer bi streetes, A leader of love-days, and a lond-buyer, A pricker on a palfrey fro manere to manere, An heap of houndes at his ers, as he a lord were. And but if his knave kneel, that shall his cup bringe, He lowreth on hym, and axeth hym who taught hym curtesye.” According to Langland’s poem, the country clergy left their livings and came up to London:-- “Parsons and parish priests plained them to the bishop | that their parishes were poor sith the pestilence time; | to have licence and leave at London to dwell | and syngen there for simony, for silver is sweet. | Bishops and bachelors, both masters and doctours, | that have cures under Christ and crowning in token and sign, | that they should shrive their parishours, preach and pray for them and the poor feed, | live in London in Lent and all”-- some of them serving the king in the offices of Exchequer and Chancery, and some acting as the stewards of lords. It is undoubted that the business of the courts in London received a great impetus after the mortality, as one can readily understand from the number of inheritances, successions, and feudal claims that had to be settled. Several of the Inns of Chancery date from about that time. Gascoigne, who was “cancellarius” at Oxford about 1430, and had access to the rolls of former “cancellarii,” was struck by the increase of legists after the commotion of 1349: “Before the great pestilence there were few disputes among the people, and few pleas; and, accordingly, there were few legists in the realm of England, and few legists in Oxford, at a time when there were thirty thousand scholars in Oxford, as I have seen in the rolls,” etc.[357] The country clergy, such of them as remained in their cures were a notoriously illiterate class; according to Knighton, they could read the Latin services without understanding what they read. Langland makes a parson confess his poor qualifications to be the spiritual guide of his flock; on the other hand he was not without skill in the sports of the field: “But I can fynde in a felde or in a furlonge an hare.” At one of the manor courts in Wiltshire in 1361, a gang of the district clergy were convicted of night poaching[358]. Such being the state of matters among the upper and middle classes, it is not surprising to find a lax morality among the lower orders. The ploughman is as severe a satirist of his own class as he is of the rich. In London we have a picture of the interior of a tavern crowded with loafers of all sorts “early in the morning.” In the country also the contrast is drawn between the industrious and the idle class: “And whoso helpeth me to erie [plough] or sowen here ere I wende | shall have leve, bi oure Lorde to lese here in harvest, | and make him merry there-mydde, maugre whoso begruccheth it: | save Jakke the jogeloure and Jonet of the stewes, | and Danget the dys-playere, and Denot the bawd, | and Frere the faytoure and folk of his order, | and Robyn the rybaudoure for his rusty wordes.” To live out of wedlock was nothing unusual: “Many of you ne wedde nought the wimmen that ye with delen, | but as wilde bestis with wehe worthen up and worchen, | and bryngeth forth barnes that bastardes men calleth.” Ill-assorted marriages also appear to have been common: “It is an oncomely couple, bi Cryst, as me-thinketh, | to gyven a yonge wenche to an olde feble, | or wedden any widwe for welth of hir goodis, | that never shall bairne bere but if it be in armes. | Many a paire sithen the pestilence have plight hem togiders: | the fruit that thei brynge forth aren foule wordes: | in jalousye joyeles and jangling in bedde | have thei no children but cheste and choppyng hem betweene.” Chapmen did not chastise their children. Old traditions of weather-lore, and of reckoning the yield of harvest, were forgotten. As a set-off to the uniformly bad picture of the times given by Langland, we may turn to the gay and good-humoured scenes of the ‘Canterbury Tales.’ But Chaucer was emphatically the poet of the cultured class, and it is proper to his muse to keep within the limits of a well-bred cynicism. Again, Langland’s strictures on the avarice and other vices of the rich may seem to be a mere echo of a very old cry, which finds equally strong expression in Roger of Wendover, about the year 1235, and in Robert of Brunne’s ‘Handlyng Synne’ in the year 1303. But the Vision of the Ploughman is too consistent, and too concrete, to be considered as a mere homily on the wickedness of the times, such as might have been written of almost any age or of any country in which the Seven Mortal Sins were still called by their plain names. The words “sithen the pestilence” recur so often, that this contemporary author must be held as sharing the belief that the Black Death made a marked difference to the morals of the nation throughout all classes. More lasting effects on Farming, Industries, and Population. Turning from things moral to things material, we shall find that the Great Mortality left its mark on the cultivated area of the country, on rents of land, on the kind of tenure and the system of farming, on industry, trade and municipal government, on the population, and, on what chiefly concerns us, the subsequent health of the country. Corn-growing would appear to have met with at least a temporary check. Three water-mills near Shrewsbury fell in annual value by one half, owing to the scarcity of corn to grind[359]. Richmond, one of the chief corn-markets in Yorkshire, is said, on rather uncertain evidence, to have been permanently reduced for the same reason; besides losing an enormous number by the plague itself (vaguely stated at 2000), the town lost its corn-trade through the land around falling out of cultivation, so that some of the burgesses, being unable to pay rent, had to wander abroad as mendicants[360]. The general statements of Knighton, Le Baker and others for England (not to mention numerous rhetorical passages of foreign writers), to the effect that whole villages were left desolate, are borne out by the petitions recurring in the Rolls of Parliament for many years after. There are also some references to the continuing desolateness of particular places, which are probably fair samples of a larger number. Thus a rich clergyman in Hertfordshire had given, just before the Black Death, all his lands and tenements in Braghinge, Herts, to the prior and convent of Anglesey, Cambridgeshire, in consideration that they should find at their proper expense a chantry of two priests for ever in the church of Anglesey, to say masses for the souls of the benefactor and his family. But on the 10th of May, 1351, he remitted the charge and support of one of the two said priests, on the ground that, “on account of the vast mortality, lands lie uncultivated in many and innumerable places, not a few tenements daily and suddenly decay and are pulled down, rents and services cannot be levied, but a much smaller profit is obliged to be taken than usual[361].” An instance of a long-abiding effect is that of the manor of Hockham belonging to the earl of Arundel, which was not tenanted for thirty years[362]. The history of rents is peculiar. The immediate effect, as we learn from Knighton, as well as from the rolls of particular manor courts, was a remission of them by the lords, lest their tenants in villenage should quit the lands. There was, indeed, a competition among landlords for tenants to occupy their manors, so that the cultivators could make their own terms. Of that we have had an instance from the manor of Ensham, belonging to Christ Church, Oxford[363]. But, after a few years, rents appear to have come back to near their old level. The following figures have been compiled from the Tower records of assizes made for the purpose of taxation[364]: 1268 9_d._ 1348-9 -- 1417 6_d._ 1446 8_d._ 1271 12_d._ 1359 9¼_d._ 1422 4_d._ 1336 11½_d._ 1368 10½_d._ 1429 4_d._ 1338 11½_d._ 1381 9¾_d._ 1432 6_d._ The great fall, it will be seen, was in the next century. Perhaps the most striking effect upon agriculture of the upheaval produced by the great mortality was, as Thorold Rogers has shown, in changing the system of farming and in creating the type of the English yeoman. The system of farming the lord’s demesne or home-farm by a bailiff, never very profitable, became, says that historian, quite unproductive, owing especially to the permanent rise in wages. The small men who took the lord’s land to farm--they had been doing so to some extent before[365]--had not sufficient of their own for stock and seed; but they got advances from the lord, which were repaid in due course. It was a kind of _métairie_ farming. It prevailed for about fifty years, by which time the ordinary system of farming on lease was becoming general. Finally, and especially in the Civil Wars of the fifteenth century, much of the land which had belonged in fee to the feudal lords, passed away by purchase to the tenant farmers[366]. Thus arose the famous breed of English yeomen--the “good yeomen whose limbs were made in England.” The effect of the mortality upon trade and industry was, momentarily, to paralyse them. Of the great wool-trade, Rogers, the historian of English prices, says: “Nothing, I think, in the whole history of these prices is more significant of the terror and prostration induced by the plague than the sudden fall in the price of wool at this time. It is a long time before a recovery takes place[367].” But from 1364 to 1380, the price of wool was uniformly above the average; and, if there be any accuracy in Avesbury’s figures already given for the years following 1355, the export of bales of wool to the Continent (100,000 sacks in a year, he says, each sack being a bale of the present colonial size, or weighing about three hundredweights) meant a very considerable amount of labour, tonnage and exchange. Among other articles of export, we hear specially of iron, in a petition to Parliament of 28 Ed. III. (1354); the price of iron had risen to four times what it was before the plague, and it was desired to stop the export of it and to fix the price[368]. The effect of the mortality upon the industries of the country was shown most in Norwich. That city was the centre of the Flemish cloth-weaving, which had been flourishing in Norfolk for some twenty years, under the direct encouragement of Edward III., and of a protective statute against foreign-made cloth. Before the pestilence, Norwich was the second city in the kingdom. In the king’s warrant for men-at-arms, which was indeed issued in 1350, but may be taken as drawn up on the old lines and irrespective of the pestilence, the quota of Norwich is rated at 60, London’s being 100, Bristol’s and Lynn’s 20 each, that of Coventry, Gloucester, Hereford, Shrewsbury, Winchester, Sarum, Oxford, Canterbury and Bury St Edmund’s 10 each, and of other towns from 8 to 1 each, York not being mentioned. But in the Subsidy Roll of 1377, which shows how many persons, above the age of fourteen, paid the poll-tax of a groat in each county and in each principal town, Norwich comes sixth in the list instead of second, being far surpassed in numbers by York and Bristol, and surpassed considerably by Coventry and Plymouth. So far from being in a proportion to London of 60 to 100, it is now in a proportion of 3952 to 23,314, its whole population, as estimated, being 7410 against 44,770 in the capital which at one time it bade fair to rival. It had lost heavily in the Black Death, and so had the populous district around it, where the Flemish industries and trade were planted in numerous villages. By 1368, ten of the sixty very small parishes of Norwich had disappeared, and fourteen more disappeared by degrees, the ruins of twenty of them being still visible[369]. There is no mistaking the significance of these figures and facts for the second city of the kingdom. At least one generation passed before Norwich recovered something of its old prosperity. In the fifteenth century it was still the chief seat of the woollen manufactures; the county of Norfolk kept its old pre-eminence, although rival centres of industry had grown up. There were, however, causes at work which at length reduced the capital of East Anglia to a comparatively poor state. One of the intermediate glimpses that we get of it--they are not many, even in Blomefield’s history--is the statute of 1455, to put down the enormous number of “pettifogging attorneys” in the city and county[370]. Its real decline was in the early Tudor reigns. When Henry VII. visited Norwich in 1497, the mayor in presenting the Queen’s usual gold cup with a hundred pieces in it, took occasion to tell the monarch “howbeit that they are more poor, and not of such wealth as they have been afore these days[371].” When the town suffered much from fires about the year 1505, the city of London raised large sums in aid of its rebuilding. To the same period belongs a municipal order that no one should dig holes in the market-place to get sand, without the mayor’s licence. In 1525, there was a general decay of work, the clothiers and farmers being unable to employ the artisans and labourers, who began to rise in revolt against the heavy taxes. An Act of 33 Hen. VIII. recites that the making and weaving of worsteds is wholly decayed and taken away from the city of Norwich and county of Norfolk--by the deceit and crafty practices of the great multitude of regrators and buyers of the said yarn. These evidences of decline in prosperity are in part long after the Black Death; but they seem to have been continuous from that event. So far as concerns the other large towns of England, they did not all fare alike. The capital was more luxurious, and probably not less populous, after the mortality than before it. The chancery and exchequer business alone would have served to draw numbers to it; and we may be sure, from all subsequent experience, that the gaps left by the plague were filled up by influx from the provinces and from abroad in the course of two or three years. Nor does it appear from the poll-tax that York had suffered to anything like the same extent as Norwich; while Bristol and Coventry became towns of much greater consequence than before the plague. On the other hand, Lincoln is described, in a petition for relief in 1399 (1 Hen. IV.) as being “in the greater part empty and uninhabited.” In the same year, Yarmouth has its houses “vacant and void,” although, in 1369, it is said to have “gained so much upon Norwich” that it was made a seat of the wool-staple. Other towns which figure in petitions to Parliament as “impoverished and desolate of people,” are Ilchester (1407) and Truro (1410). Camden instances the ancient borough of Wallingford, on the Thames, as having been permanently reduced by the Black Death, although the inhabitants, he says, traced the decay of the town to the diversion of traffic over the new bridges at Abingdon and Dorchester[372]. Some parts of Cambridge would appear to have borne the traces of the pestilence for a number of years after. A charter of the bishop of Ely, dated 12 September, 1365, mentions that the parishioners of All Saints (on the north-east side) are for the most part dead by pestilence, and those that are alive are gone to the parishes of other churches; that the parishioners of St Giles’s (the adjoining parish, near the Castle) have died; and that the nave of All Saints is ruinous and the bones of dead bodies are exposed to beasts; therefore the bishop unites All Saints and St Giles’s[373]. At that time the churches of those parishes would have been small, perhaps not much larger than the little church of St Peter still standing on the high ground opposite to the great modern church of St Giles. These instances of the chequered history of English towns subsequent to the great mortality are not altogether favourable to the generality which has been put forward by an able historian[374], that the great social revolution produced by that event was to detach the people from the soil, to drive them into the towns, to increase the urban population disproportionately to the rural, to plant the germs of commerce and industry, and to determine that expansion of England which became manifest in the end of the Elizabethan period and under the Stuarts, the British nation being “doomed by its economic conditions to take the course which it has taken.” Many things happened between the Black Death and the expansion of England. The fifteenth century intervened, which was in its middle period, at least, distinguished as much by the rise of the yeoman class as by the growth of trade guilds in the town. But that which mars the generality most of all was the decline of industries and the decay of towns (London and Bristol always excepted) in the reigns of Henry VII. and Henry VIII.; the country had to recover from that before the Elizabethan expansion,--before the nation began “to increase rapidly in population until at length it should overflow the limits of its island home.” At the same time, one effect of the great mortality was to mobilise the class of agricultural labourers, and to drive a certain number of them into the towns. Proof of that migration comes from the statutes and the Rolls of Parliament. An Act of 34 Edward III. (1360) imposes a fine of ten pounds to the king on the mayor and bailiffs of any town refusing “to deliver up a labourer, servant, or artificer” who had absented himself from his master’s service, with a farther fine of five pounds to the lord. In 1376 the “Good Parliament” makes complaint that servants and labourers quitted service on the slightest cause, and then led an idle life in towns, or wandered in parties about the country, “many becoming beggars, others staff-strikers, but the greater number taking to robbing.” More direct evidence of industries diverting hands from farm labour is found in the various statutes about apprentices. In the Act of 12 Ric. II. (1388) it is provided that “he or she which use to labour at the plough and cart or other labour or service of husbandry till they be of the age of twelve years, shall abide at that labour without being put to any mystery or handicraft; and if any covenant or bond of apprentice be from henceforth made to the contrary, the same shall be holden for none.” A more definite provision of the same kind was made in 7 Hen. IV. (1405-6): “Notwithstanding the good statutes aforemade, infants whose fathers and mothers have no land, nor rent, nor other living, but only their service or mystery, be put to serve and bound apprentices to divers crafts within cities and boroughs, sometimes at the age of twelve years, sometimes within the said age, and that for the pride of clothing and other evil customs which servants do use in the same” etc.--the result being that farm labourers were scarce; therefore no one, not having land or rent of twenty-shillings a year, to bind his son or daughter of whatsoever age to serve as apprentice within any city or borough. In the 8th of Henry VI. (1429) this statute was repealed so far as respected London, on account of the hindrance which the said statute might occasion to the inhabitants of that city[375]. It may be doubted if, after the Black Death, the towns underwent any marked industrial development, except in such cases as Coventry and Bristol. On the other hand, the cloth-weaving of East Anglia was dispersed over the country, more particularly to the western and south-western counties, so that the west of England gained an industrial character which it retained until the comparatively modern rise of the cloth-industries of Yorkshire and Lancashire. But it was in great part a development of village industries upon the old manorial basis, as well as a migration of labour to the towns. We have an authentic instance, and probably a typical instance, in the manor and barony of Castle Combe, of which the social history has been pieced together from the rolls of its manor court by one of the earliest students of that class of documents. Before the middle of the fifteenth century this village situated among the Wiltshire hills, difficult of access and almost secluded from the highways, had grown into a thriving community of weavers, fullers, dyers, glovers, and the like, with their attendant tradings and marketings, all upon its old manorial basis, and with its old agriculture going hand in hand with its new industries. There were free or copyhold tenants occupying their farms, while several clothiers and occupiers of fulling-mills held farms also, “driving a double and evidently a very thriving trade, accumulating considerable wealth and giving employment to a large number of artizans who had been attracted to the place for this purpose. Yet, strange to say, some of the wealthiest and most prosperous of these tradesmen were still subject to the odious bonds of serfship, adscript the soil[376].” It is clear, however, that the jury of the manor court took care that the lord should not have the best of it. The morals of this industrial village were, as might have been expected, somewhat lax[377]. At the same time the removal of nuisances was insisted upon by this self-governing community as effectively, perhaps, as if it had been under the Local Government Acts[378]. Another kind of effect than the industrial, upon the state of the towns, is exemplified in the case of Shrewsbury. The dislocation of the old social order had somehow touched the privileges and monopolies of municipal corporations and guilds, and given power to a hitherto unenfranchised class. The general question, besides being a somewhat new one, is foreign to this subject; but the reference to Shrewsbury is given, as the “late pestilence” is expressly connected with the municipal changes. A patent of the 35th of Edward III. (1361), relating to the town of Shrewsbury, recites the grievous debates and dissensions which had arisen therein, “through the strangers who had newly come to reside in the said town after the late pestilence, and were plotting to draw to themselves the government of the said town[379].” It has been conjectured that population in the country at large speedily righted itself, according to the principle that population always tends to come close to the limit of subsistence. But there is reason to think that the means of subsistence were themselves reduced. We read of corn-land running to waste, although most of the references to desolation are perhaps to be taken as true for only one or two harvests following the plague. Again, it is undoubted that sheep-farming and the pasturing of cattle at length took the place of much of the old agriculture. It is not easy to make out when the change begins; but there are instances of rural depopulation as early as 1414[380], and the same had become a burning grievance in the time of cardinal Morton and the early years of sir Thomas More. It has been assumed, also, that the “positive checks” to population had been taken off, when they ought in theory so to have been: that is to say, after the inhabitants had been enormously thinned. The statement of Hecker, that there was increased fecundity after the pestilence, appears to be an instance of that author’s _a priori_ habit of mind[381]. What we read in an English chronicle of the time is just the opposite, namely, that “the women who survived remained for the most part barren during several years[382].” The authority is not conclusive, but the statement is in keeping with what we may gather from Langland’s poem as to ill-assorted and sterile marriages, and as to illicit unions, which, as Malthus teaches, are comparatively unfruitful. The alleged sterility is also in keeping with, although not strictly parallel to, the experience of crowded Indian provinces, such as Orissa, where a thinning of the population by famine and disease has been statistically proved to be followed by a marked decrease of fecundity. More direct evidence of a permanent loss of people occurs a generation after the Black Death, at a time when the circumstances of health were such as would explain it. The poll-tax of 1377 was a means of estimating the population. The tax was levied on every person, male or female, above the age of fourteen. In estimating the population from the poll-tax returns, it is usual to add one-fifth for taxable subjects who had evaded it, and to reckon the taxable subjects above fourteen years as two-thirds of the whole population. On that basis of reckoning, the population of the whole of England, except Cheshire and Durham, in the year 1377 would have been 2,580,828 (or 1,376,442 who actually paid their groat each). The population of the principal towns is calculated, in the second column of the Table, from the numbers in the first column who actually paid the poll-tax, according to the Subsidy Roll of 51 Edward III. Laity assessed for the Poll-tax of 1377 in each of the following Towns, being persons of either sex above the age of fourteen years. -------------------------------------- | Taxed |Estimated | |Population ------------------|--------|---------- London | 23,314 | 44,770 York | 7248 | 13,590 Bristol | 6345 | 11,904 Plymouth | 4837 | 9069 Coventry | 4817 | 9032 Norwich | 3952 | 7410 Lincoln | 3412 | 6399 Sarum | 3226 | 6048 Lynn | 3127 | 5863 Colchester | 2955 | 5540 Beverley | 2663 | 4993 Newcastle-on-Tyne | 2647 | 4963 Canterbury | 2574 | 4826 Bury St Edmunds | 2442 | 4580 Oxford | 2357 | 4420 Gloucester | 2239 | 4198 Leicester | 2101 | 3939 Shrewsbury | 2082 | 3904 Yarmouth | 1941 | 3640 Hereford | 1903 | 3568 Cambridge | 1722 | 3230 Ely | 1722 | 3230 Exeter | 1560 | 2925 Hull | 1557 | 2920 Worcester | 1557 | 2920 Ipswich | 1507 | 2825 Nottingham | 1447 | 2713 Northampton | 1447 | 2713 Winchester | 1440 | 2700 Stamford | 1218 | 2284 Newark | 1178 | 2209 Wells | 1172 | 2198 Ludlow | 1172 | 2198 Southampton | 1152 | 2160 Derby | 1046 | 1961 Lichfield | 1024 | 1920 Chichester | 869 | 1630 Boston | 814 | 1526 Carlisle | 678 | 1271 Bath | 570 | 1070 Rochester | 570 | 1070 Dartmouth | 506| 949 -------------------------------------- That this indirect census was taken on a declining population may be inferred from the language of contemporaries. In the year of the poll-tax (1377), Richard II. addressed certain questions to Wyclif concerning the papal exactions of tribute; the reformer’s reply gives as the second objection to the tribute “that the people decreases by reason of (_praetextu_) the withdrawal of this treasure, which should be spent in England[383].” In the political poems of the time there are numerous references to the pestilences and famines. One of these doggerel productions, “On the Council of London,” 1382, contains a clear reference to a decrease of the people: “In nos pestilentia saeva jam crescit, Quod virorum fortium jam populus decrescit[384].” These general expressions in writings of the time will appear the more credible after we have carried the history of plague and other forms of epidemic sickness down through a whole generation from 1349. The Epidemics following the Black Death. Not the least of the effects of the Black Death upon England was the domestication of the foreign pestilence on the soil. For more than three centuries bubo-plague was never long absent from one part of Britain or another. The whole country was never again swamped by a vast wave of plague as in the fourteen months of 1348-49. Nor does it appear that the succeeding plagues of the fourteenth century, the _pestis secunda_, _tertia_, _quarta_ and _quinta_ were all of the same type as the first, or otherwise comparable to it. Disastrous as many subsequent English epidemics of bubo-plague were, they appear to have been localised in the North, perhaps, or in Norfolk, or confined to the young; and, above all, the bubo-plague became, in its later period, peculiarly a disease of the poor in the towns, although it did not cease altogether in the villages and country houses until it ceased absolutely in 1666. For three hundred years plague was the grand “zymotic” disease of England--the same type of plague that came from the East in 1347-49, continuously reproduced in a succession of epidemics at one place or another, which, by diligent search, can be made to fill the annals with few gaps, and, if the records were better, could probably be made to fill most years. Britain was not peculiar among the countries of Europe in that respect, although the chronology of plagues abroad has not been worked out minutely, except for an occasional province in which some zealous archaeologist had happened to take up the subject[385]. From 1349 to 1361 there is no record of pestilence in England. There was scarcity or famine in 1353, owing to an unfavourable harvest, but nothing is said of an unusual amount of sickness. In 1361 came the _pestis secunda_, which would hardly have been so called had it not presented the same type as the great bubo-plague. There is little said of it in the chroniclers; but two of them mention that it was called the _pestis puerorum_, or plague of the juveniles; and a third gives the names of several great personages who died of it, including three bishops and Henry, duke of Lancaster, at his castle of Leicester, in Lent, 1362. This recrudescence, then, of the seeds of plague in English soil, may be taken as having cut off the nobles and the young: that is to say, the members of a class who had, by all accounts, escaped the first plague, and the rising generation who had either escaped the first plague as infants or had been born subsequent to it. The same selection of victims was observed, according to Guy de Chauliac, in the very same year at Avignon; in contrast to the Black Death, the second plague there cut off the upper and well-to-do classes, and an innumerable number of children[386]; among the former, it is said, were five cardinals and a hundred bishops. From Poland, also, it is reported that the return of the plague, which happened in 1360, affected mostly, although not exclusively, the upper classes and children. It is clear from the Continental evidence that the second pestilence was marked by the same buboes, carbuncles, and other signs as the first. In some places, at least, it must have been as destructive as the Black Death itself; thus, in Florence, says Petrarch (with obvious exaggeration) hardly ten in the thousand remained alive in the city after the epidemic of 1359, while Boccaccio estimates the mortality of the year at the equally incredible figure of a hundred thousand. In London many more wills than usual were enrolled in 1361, but not more than a third of the number enrolled in 1349: viz. 4 in February, 2 in March, 8 in April, 8 in May, 12 in June, 39 in July, 28 in October, 15 in November, 11 in December. The _pestis secunda_ is only one of a series of pestilences in the reigns of Edward III. and Richard II., which the chroniclers number in succession to the _pestis quinta_ in 1391. The entries in the annals are for the most part so meagre and colourless that they give us no help in realizing the share that a continuous infection in the soil, from the Black Death onwards, may have had in bringing about the disastrous state of the country in the latter half of the fourteenth century. Edward III. was ruined in reputation by his French wars, and ended his long reign in dishonour. His grandson Richard II. found the task of government too much for him, and was deposed. The history of this period is not complete without some account of the health of the country; a single line or sentence in a chronicle, to mark the date of a _pestis tertia_ or _quarta_ or _quinta_, hardly does justice to the place of national sickness among the events with which historians fill their pages. The graphic picture of the times is ‘The Vision of Piers the Ploughman,’ some passages of which may help us to realize what the bare enumeration of second, third, fourth and fifth pestilences meant. Some Latin poems of the time may be cited in support; and for more particular evidence of the type of pestilence which remained in England after the Black Death, we shall have to refer to certain extant manuscript treatises, from the latter part of the fourteenth century, which had been written in English to meet the wants of the people. The Latin poems of the time of Edward III. and Richard II. need only be referred to so as to bring out by contrast the immense superiority of the ‘Vision of Piers the Ploughman.’ The poems of John of Bridlington, which are the most considerable of the Latin series of verses, contain numerous references to the epidemics of the time, both at home and abroad. Curiously, he dwells more upon the effects of famine--flux and fever--than upon the plague proper, which he nowhere distinguishes. Thus, of France about the time of the Black Death: “Destructis granis, deerit mox copia panis; Poena fames panis, venter fluxu fit inanis.” Or again, with specific reference to the _pestis secunda_ of 1361, which we know to have been bubo-plague: “... fluxus nocet, undique febris Extirpat fluxus pollutos crimine luxus.” Another reference, in the form of a prophecy, which from the context is clearly to the pestilence of 1368-69, again dwells exclusively upon famine: “In mensis justi pandetur copia crusti: Fundis falsorum premet arcta fames famulorum.” followed by a note in Latin: “from which it appears that the poor in those days were ill off for want of food[387].” One Latin poem of the end of the fourteenth century is expressly “On the Pestilence,” in the following manner: “Ecce dolet Anglia luctibus imbuta, Gens tremit tristitia sordibus polluta, Necat pestilentia viros atque bruta. Cur? Quia flagitia regnant resoluta[388].” Turning to the far more real or observant work of the same date by Langland, we find among his general references to sickness a most significant one in which he compares it to the continual dropping of rain through a leaky roof: “The rain that raineth where we rest should, be sicknesses and sorrows that we suffer oft.” Again, in the allegory of Conscience and Nature, the former makes appeal to Nature to come forth as the scourge of evil-living: “Nature Conscience heard, and came out of the planets, and sent forth his fore-goers, fevers and fluxes, coughs and cardiacles, cramps and toothaches, rheums and radegoundes and roynous scalls, boils and botches and burning agues, frenzies and foul evils--foragers of Nature had ypricked and preyed polls of people that largely a legion lose their life soon. Eld the hoary, he was in the vanguard, and bare the banner before Death, by right he it claimed. Nature came after, with many keen sores, as pokkes and pestilences, and much people shent. So Nature through corruptions killed many. Death came driving after, and all to dust dashed kings and knights, kaisers and popes, learned and lewd, he let no man stand that he hit even, that ever stirred after. Many a lovely lady, and lemans of knights, swooned and swelted for sorrow of Death’s dints.” But “Conscience of his courtesy to Nature he besought, to cease and suffer and see whether they would leave pride privily and be perfect Christens. And Nature ceased then, to see the people amend. Fortune gan flatter those few that were alive, and promised them long life; and Lechery he sent among all manner men, wedded and unwedded, and gathered a great host all against Conscience[389].” Next came Avarice, Envy and other of the deadly sins, so that the respite which Nature had given was of no real avail. A clear reference to pestilence continuing in the country comes in where the pope’s exactions are mentioned. The pope did nothing in return for his English tribute: “Had I a clerk that could write, I would cast him a bill That he send me under his seal a salve for the pestilence, And that his blessing and his bulls botches might destroy. For, sith he hath the power that Peter himself had, He hath the pot with the salve, soothly as me thinketh.” Among the other consequences “sithen the pestilence,” was this: “So is pride waxen, in religion and in all the realm among rich and poor, that prayers have no power the pestilence to let; ... ne for dread of the death withdraw not their pride.” The _pestis secunda_ of 1361, or _pestis puerorum_, may perhaps be pointed to in the passage where chapmen are blamed for indulging their children, “ne for no pouste of pestilence correct them overmuch.” The ill-assorted marriages had doubtless followed the great mortality itself; but the second pestilence, of 1361, which affected the upper classes especially, and is said by one chronicler to have cut off more men than women[390], may have been more specially pointed to in Langland’s reference. Of that pestilence a chronicle of the next century has preserved a curious reminiscence: among its victims were men, doubtless of the upper class, “whose wives, as women out of gouvernance, took as well strangers to their husbands and other lewd and simple people, the which, forgetting their awe, worship and birth, coupled and married them with them that were of low degree and low reputation[391].” Although Langland, when he speaks of changes “sith the pestilence time,” means the great mortality of 1349, he means in other places, the second, third, and perhaps also fourth pestilences[392]. The years of the pestilences down to the fifth are not the same in all the chronicles; there are indeed some nine outbreaks that might have been enumerated after the Black Death to the end of the century. Some of these are clearly associated with scarcity, and may have been of the old type of famine-sickness; dysentery is, indeed, mentioned in connexion with the sickness of 1391[393]. Again, an epidemic in London in 1382 is said by a chronicler to have affected children (boys and girls), while the same chronicler is explicit that the sickness in Norfolk the year after was confined to the young of both sexes under a certain age. Lastly, the epidemic of 1391 was so severe in the North as to recall the great mortality itself; but under the same year is the reference to sickness of the type of dysentery due to rotten fruit; and under the year before, 1390, two chroniclers agree that the epidemic was “mostly among children,” or that it cut off “more young than old.” It would be unsafe, therefore, to conclude that all the outbreaks of _pestis_ in England subsequent to the Black Death, were of bubo-plague itself. The list of sicknesses in Langland’s poem gives, indeed, as much space to fevers and fluxes, burning agues and frenzies, as to boils and botches, foul evils, pokkes and pestilences--by which latter group of synonyms the bubo-plague is meant. _Pestis_, it is well known, was a generic name in the medieval period, just as pest and pestilence are generic now. So generic was it that some may doubt whether bubo-plague, of the type of 1349, was included at all among the _pestes_ of the generations following. Positive evidence of the continued existence of bubo-plague in England is, at least, not superfluous, and this will be the best place to bring it in. Medical Evidence of the Continuance of Plague. The plague was called “the botch” down to the Elizabethan and Stuart periods; and the “botches” in Langland’s poem, or, as he writes it, “boches,” were the familiar risings, under the arms and elsewhere, which had given the disease its popular name when it began to recur time after time. Apart from this verbal or philological evidence, there is a clear proof of the prevalence of true bubo-plague during the latter part of the fourteenth century, in the manuscript ordinances or rules of prevention and treatment which were in circulation. Most of the extant copies bear the name of one John of Burgoyne, or John of Bordeaux[394]. A fragment in comparatively late handwriting purports to be the ordinance of “a great Clark, Mr John Cordewe, at the prayer of King Richard and other the Lords, for pestilence[395]”; from which it may be concluded that this, the commonly used ordinance, dates from the time of Richard II. The names used in the text are “pestilence” and “pestilential sores,” and the handling of the subject is the conventional one for the plague. The ordinance contains exceedingly little that is of practical interest, and it is difficult to believe that it can have been of real use to anyone. We are introduced to the subject with a few empty common-places; but whenever we come to business, we are plainly told to go and consult those who know--and this, be it observed, in a disease which was remarkably uniform in its type and circumstances: “Wherefore they that have not dronken of that swete drynke of Astronomye may putte to these pestilentiall sores no fit remedies; for, because that they know not the cause and the quality of the sickness, they may not hele it, as sayeth the prince of physic Avicenna: ‘How shouldest thou hele a sore and yknowe not the cause?’ He that knoweth not the cause, it is impossible that he hele the sickness.” If there were any doubt about the date of John of Burgoyne, or John of Bordeaux[396], it ought to be set at rest by the discovery that he corresponds in the closest way with the physician in the Prologue of the _Canterbury Tales_. Chaucer’s doctor of physic stands for the well-grounded practitioner of the time--“grounded in astronomie,” it is true, but at all events academically grounded, in contrast to the charlatans and pretenders who had not been to Paris or Bologna, probably knew no Latin, to say nothing of “astronomy,” and therefore knew not how to let a patient die (or recover) _secundum artem_. The doctor of physic uses his astrological knowledge so much in the manner of John of Bordeaux, that one suspects Chaucer to have seen the passage quoted above, and to have condensed it into the two following lines: “The cause yknowne, and of his harm the rote, Anon he gave to the sick man his bote.” It was in the pestilence that this practitioner had made the money which he kept so tightly. Richly clad he was; “And yet he was but easy of dispense; He kept that he wan in the pestilence. For gold in physic is a cordial: Therefore he loved gold in special.” This is John of Burgoyne all over; it would have been an anachronism in England by more than two hundred years to have represented a physician as caring for any but paying patients, or as regarding an epidemic sickness from any other point of view than as a source of income. Besides the “ordinance” of John of Burgoyne, which may be assigned to the reign of Richard II., there was another essay on the plague circulating in England in an English translation, of which the copy among the Sloane manuscripts is assigned to the fourteenth century[397]. The importance attached to this manuscript work is shown in the fact that it was chosen among the very first to be printed at an English press, probably in the year 1480[398]. It was reprinted in 1536, and the substance of it was copied into nearly all the English books on plague (from one to another) as late as the seventeenth century, much of its original matter passing under the name of one Phaer, or Phayre or Thayre, who was a compiler about the middle of the sixteenth century. Writers on early English printing have made much of the printed book of 1480; but they do not appear to have known of the manuscript which was used as the printer’s “copy[399].” If one happens to use the latter first, and comes later to the printed book, he will observe the identity not merely in the words and spelling but even in the very form in which the type had been cut. The authorship of a manuscript which is thus invested with a various interest may deserve a few lines of inquiry. The author of it describes himself in the (translated) introduction as “I the bisshop of Arusiens, Doctour of phisike,” that is to say, bishop of Aarhus, in Denmark. In the text, he claims to have practised physic at Montpellier: “In the Mount of Pessulane I might not eschewe the company of people, for I went from house to house, because of my poverty, to cure sick folk. Therefore bread or a sponge sopped in vinegar I took with me, holding it to my mouth and nose, because all aigre things stoppen the ways of humours and suffereth no venomous thing to enter into a man’s body; and so I escaped the pestilence, my fellows supposing that I should not live. These foresaid things I have proved by myself[400].” The fact that this medieval treatise, whatever its exact date, was turned into English and circulated in manuscript, and that it was chosen for printing almost as soon as English printing began, in the reign of Edward IV., is sufficient evidence, if more were needed, that the English had to reckon with bubo-plague as one of their standing diseases throughout the latter part of the medieval period. Before we come to the chronology of English plagues in that period, from the Black Death to the accession of the Tudor dynasty in 1485, it will be convenient to consider here, with the help of the above treatise, how the endemic plague was viewed in those days,--what it was ascribed to in its origin, in its incidence upon houses and persons, and in its propagation, what was advised for its avoidance or prevention, and what was prescribed for its treatment. As the bishop’s essay was the source of most that was taught on these matters in England for the next two or three hundred years, it will be an economy to give a brief account of it here once for all. The remote causes, or warnings of the approach of pestilence, are given under seven heads, including the kind of weather, swarms of flies, shooting stars, comets, thunder and lightning out of the south, and winds out of the south; this list was reproduced, with little or no change, by the Elizabethan writers of popular health-manuals. The second section of the essay is on the “causes of pestilence.” There are three causes:-- “Sometime it cometh from the root beneath; other while from the root above, so that we may feel sensibly howwith change of the air appeareth unto us; and sometime it cometh of both together, as well from the root above as from the root beneath, as we see a siege or privy next to a chamber, or of any other particular thing which corrupteth the air in his substance and quality, which is a thing may happen every day. And thereof cometh the ague of pestilence (and about the same many physicians be deceived, not supposing this ague to be a pestilence). Sometimes it cometh of dead carrion, or corruption of standing waters in ditches or sloughs and other corrupt places. These things sometime be universal, sometime particular.” Then follow sentences on the “root above” which are somewhat transcendental. When both “roots” work together, when, by “th’ ynp‘ffyons[401]” above, the air is corrupt and by the putrefaction or rotten carrion of the vile places beneath,--an infirmity is caused in man. “And such infirmity sometimes is an ague, sometimes a posthume or a swelling, and that is in many things. Also the air inspired sometimes is venomous and corrupt, hurting the heart, that nature many ways is grieved, so that he perceiveth not his harm.... “These things written before are the causes of pestilence. But about these things, two questions be mooted. The first is, wherefore one dieth and another dieth not, in a town where men be dead in one house and in another house there dieth none. The second question is, whether pestilence sores be contagious. “To the first question, I say it may hap to be of two causes: that is to say, of that thing that doth, and of that thing that suffereth. An ensample of that thing that doth: The influence of the bodies above beholdeth that place or that place, more than this place or this place. And one patient is more disposed to die than another. Therefore it is to be noted that bodies be more hot disposed, of open pores, than bodies infect having the pores stopped with many humours. Where bodies be of resolution or opening, as men which abusen them selfe with wymmen, or usen often times bathis; or men that be hot with labour or great anger--they have their bodies more disposed to this great sickness. “To the second question I say, that pestilence sores be contagious by cause of infect humoures bodies, and the reek or smoke of such sores is venomous and corrupteth the air. And therefore it is to flee from such persons as be infect. In pestilence time nobody should stand in great press of people, because some man of them may be infect. Therefore wise physicians, in visiting sick folk, stand far from the patient, holding their face toward the door or window. And so should the servants of sick folk stand. Also it is good to a patient every day for to change his chamber, and often times to have the windows open against the North and East, and to spar the windows against the South. For the south wind hath two causes of putrefaction. The first is, it maketh a man, being whole or sick, feeble in their bodies. The second cause is, as it is written in the Third of Aphorisms, the south wind grieveth the hearing and hurteth the heart, because it openeth the pores of man and entereth into the heart. Wherefore it is good to an whole man in time of pestilence, when the wind is in the South, to keep within the house all the day. And if it shall need a man to go out, yet let him abide in his house till the sun be up in the East passing southward.” These explanations of the incidence of plague are in part repeated in the section of the essay where the author gives directions for avoiding it. After enjoining penance, he proceeds: “It is a good remedy to void and change the infect place. But some may not profitably change their places. Therefore as much as to them is possible, it is to be eschewed every cause of putrefaction and stinking, and namely every fleshly lust with women is to be eschewed. Also the southern wind, which wind is naturally infective: therefore spar the windows, etc. Of the same cause, every foul stink is to be eschewed--of stable, stinking fields, ways, or streets, and namely of stinking dead carrion; and most of stinking waters, where in many places water is kept two days or two nights, or else there be gutters of water casten under the earth which caused great stink and corruption. And of this cause some die in that house where such things happen, and in another house die none, as it is said afore. Likewise in that place where the worts and coles putrefied, it maketh noifull savour and stinking. For in like wise as by the sweet odour of bawme the heart and spirits have recreation, so of evil savours they be made feeble. Therefore keep your house that an infect air enter not in. For an infect air most causeth putrefaction in places and houses where folk sleep. Therefore let your house be clean, and make clear fire of wood flaming: let your house be made with fumigation of herbs, that is to say, with leaves of bay-tree, juniper, yberiorgam--it is in the apothecary shops--wormwood etc.... For a little crust corrupteth all the body. “Also in the time of the pestilence it is better to abide within the house; for it is not wholesome to go into the city or town. Also let your house be sprinkled, specially in summer, with vinegar and roses, and with the leaves of vine tree. Also it is good to wash your hands ofttimes in the day with water and vinegar, and wipe your face with your hands, and smell to them. Also it is good always to savour aigre things.” Then follows his own Montpellier experience, already quoted. The diagnostics come in casually along with the treatment: “But some would understand how may a man feel when he is infect. I say that a man which is infect, that day eateth not much meat for he is replenished with evil humours; and forthwith after dinner he hath lust to sleep, and feeleth great heat under cold. Also he hath great pain in the forehead.... He shall feel a swelling under the arm, or about the share, or about the ears.... When a man feeleth himself infect, as soon as he may, let him be let blood plenteously till he swoon: then stop the vein. For a little letting of blood moveth or stirreth venom.” Then follow directions for bleeding, according to the position of the bubo--in the armpit, groin or neck, the direction “if on the back” probably having reference to the carbuncle[402]. The section on treatment, which is the last, ends with a prescription for a medicine “that the sooner a swelling be made ripe.” These are sufficiently clear indications of the bubonic nature of the disease called pestilence. At the same time the writer includes an ague as also pestilential, due to similar causes and arising on similar occasions. This is a use of the name ague which should not be mistaken for its common application to intermittent fever. Ague was simply (febris) acuta; and pestilential ague was a name for typhus fever in the sixteenth century (as in Jones’ _Dyall of Agues_), as well as in Ireland until a much later period. This early association of acute pestilential fever with true bubo-plague means the same relationship of typhus to plague which was systematically taught by Sydenham, Willis, and Morton in the seventeenth century; typhus in their time was the frequent attendant of plague,--a _pestis mitior_; and it would appear to have been its attendant and congener in the fourteenth century also. The Fourteenth Century Chronology continued. Two epidemics contend in the chronicles for being the _pestis tertia_--that of 1368-69, and that of 1375. The former is described as a “great pestilence of men and the larger animals[403],” and it appears to have been associated with unfavourable seasons and with the beginning of that scarcity which Langland’s poem refers to the month of April, 1370: Atte Londoun, I leve, liketh wel my wafres And louren whan thei lakken hem.--It is nought longe passed, There was a careful comune whan no cart cam to towne With bred fro Strethforth, tho gan beggeres wepe And werkmen were agast a lite. This wole be thought longe In the date of our Drighte in a drye Aprille, A thousand and thre hondreth tweis thretty and ten My wafres there were gesen whan Chichestre was Maire[404]. The _pestis_ of 1368 and 1369 may have been primarily a famine-sickness; but it does not follow that there was no bubo-plague mixed therewith. On the contrary, seasons of scarcity were often in after experience found to be the seasons of plague, the lowered vitality probably offering the opportunity to the plague-virus. Previous to the harvests of 1376 and 1377, which were abundant, there had been an unbroken period of high prices for many years, of which 1371 was remembered as “the grete dere yere[405].” But the _pestis tertia_ appears to have been most severe in the summer of 1368; for, on 23 July of that year, Simon, archbishop of Canterbury, ordered public prayers for the cessation of the pestilence[406], and it is under the same year that the wills of deceased London citizens are enrolled in unusual numbers, although not in such numbers as in the _pestis secunda_ of 1361[407]. Public prayers for the cessation of pestilence (without reference to famine) and an unusual mortality of the richer citizens, point to the plague proper, which may or may not have been the type of sickness in the country districts in 1369, the second year of the epidemic[408]. There is, furthermore, some indirect evidence that pestilential disease, and probably bubo-plague, occurred in London subsequent to the scarcity of the dry April, 1370, to which Langland’s verses relate. This evidence lies in the comparison of the wording of two ordinances of Edward III., one of 1369 and the other of 1371, both relating to nuisances in the city[409]. In an order of the king in Council (43 Edward III.) for stopping the carrying of slaughter-house offal from the shambles in St Nicholas parish, within Newgate, through the streets, lanes, and other places to the banks of the water of Thames near to Baynard’s Castle, where there was a jetty for throwing the refuse from into the river, the motive assigned is that divers prelates, nobles, and other persons having houses in the line of traffic, had complained grievously of these offences to the sight and smell. But, in an amended order of 28th October, 1371, against the same nuisance and with a definite (but futile) relegation of all slaughtering to Stratford on the one side and Knightsbridge on the other, the motive is differently stated: “Whereas of late, from the putrefied blood of slaughtered beasts running in the streets, and the entrails thereof thrown into the water of Thames, the air in the same city has been greatly corrupted and infected, and whereby the worst of abominations and stenches have been generated, and sicknesses and many other maladies have befallen persons dwelling in the same city and resorting thereto:--We, desiring to take precautions against such perils, and to provide for the decency of the said city, and the safety of the same our people” etc. Up to this date, the Rolls of Parliament contain frequent references to the wasting and impoverishment of the country by pestilence. A petition of 1362 begs the king “to consider the divers mischiefs that have come to his commons by divers pestilences of wind and water, and mortality of men and beasts”--the destructive wind being the tornado-like storm, on the 16th January, 1362, “on Saturday at even,” which was long remembered, and is commemorated, along with the Black Death itself, in an inscription in the church of Ashwell, Herts. Next year, another petition states that “pestilences and great winds have done divers mischiefs”--manors and tenements held direct from the king having become desolate and ruinous. In 1369 a petition states that “the king’s ferms [rents] in every county of England are greatly abated by the great mortalities.” The parliament of 1376, the “good Parliament” so-called, is able to point the moral of its petitions by frequent references to the pestilences “that have been in the kingdom one after another,” the pestilences “of people and servants,” the murrains of cattle, and “the failure of their corn and other fruits of the earth.” The same language recurs in the second parliament of Richard II. in 1378 (the year after the poll-tax), and from that time until the end of his reign, it becomes stereotyped in the petitions deprecating heavy subsidies or excusing the smallness of the sums voted. The pestilence of 1375 would appear to have been considered as one of the greater sort. The author of the _Eulogium_ reckons it the _pestis tertia_ (passing over that of 1368-69). The season was one of great heat, there was “grandis pestilentia” both in England and other countries, an infinity of both sexes died, the mortality being so swift that the pope, “at the instance of the cardinal of England” granted plenary remission to all dying contrite and confessing their sins[410]. That looks like an epidemic of true bubo-plague,--probably the _pestis quarta_ correctly so-called[411]. In 1379 there was a great plague in the Northern parts, which were stripped of their best men; the Scots made a raid, with the following prayer on their lips: “God and Sen Mungo, Sen Ninian and Seynt Andrew scheld us this day and ilka day fro Goddis grace, and the foule deth that Ynglessh men dyene upon”--foul death being the name given to plague also in 1349[412]. The northern counties send a petition to the parliament of 1379-80, that the king would “consider the very great hurt and damage which they have suffered, and are still suffering, both by pestilence and by the continual devastations of the Scots enemy[413].” In the parliament of 1381-82 there is a petition from the convent of Salisbury as to want of money to repair the losses caused by the pestilence, of which the tenants are nearly all dead, and by the murrain of cattle. This is more than thirty years from the Black Death, and can hardly refer, as some earlier petitions may have done, to the enduring effects of that calamity. The sixth parliament of Richard II. (1382), has two of the stereotyped petitions deprecating a heavy subsidy on the ground of “the great poverty and disease” of the commons, through pestilence of people, murrain of cattle, failure of crops, great floods, etc.[414] This was the year after the Peasant Revolt, which had coincided with troubles of various kinds. A Norwich chronicle, perhaps of contemporary authority, enters, under the year 1382, a very pestilential fever in many places of the country, and very extraordinary inundations of the fens[415]. In London the epidemic of 1382 is said to have been “chiefly among boys and girls[416].” A primitive English poem of the time has for its subject the earthquake of 1382, and with that portent it associates not only the Peasant’s Rebellion but also “the pestilens[417].” The year 1383 was a bad one for the fruit, which was spoiled by “foetid fogs, exhalations and various corruptions of the air”: from eating of the spoiled fruits many died, or incurred serious illness and infirmities[418]. By another account, a great pestilence in Kent and other parts of England destroyed many, sparing no age or sex. In Norfolk the sickness that year is said to have been confined to young persons[419]. This was only one of the occasions which might have been referred to in ‘Piers Ploughman,’ when the poor people thought to “poison Hunger” by bad food. The next pestilence, that of 1390 and 1391, was so prolonged and so serious as to be compared with the Great Mortality itself. It is called the _pestis quinta_ by two annalists[420], and is described not without some detail by several. It is clear that the seeds of disease were ready to burst forth at various parts of the country; for we read that in 1389, the king was in the south of England, and seeing some of his men prostrated by sudden death, he returned to Windsor[421]. Another outburst came the year after. Intense heat began in June and lasted until September; great mortality ensued, the epidemic continuing in diverse parts of England, but not everywhere, until Michaelmas; it cut off more young than old, as well as several famous soldiers[422]. The St Albans entry confirms this: “A great plague, especially of youths and children, who died everywhere in towns and villages, in incredible and excessive numbers[423].” After the epidemic there was scarcity, of which we have special accounts from Norfolk[424]. But the heaviest mortality fell in the year 1391. There was first of all scarcity, now in its second year, and aggravated by six weeks of continual gloom in July and August. At the time of the nuts, apples and other fruits of the kind, many poor people died of dysentery, and the sickness would have been worse but for the laudable care of the mayor of London who caused corn to be brought from over sea. In Norfolk and many other counties the sickness was compared even to the Great Mortality, and was probably a mixture of famine-pestilence with bubo-plague. At York “eleven thousand” were said to have been buried[425]. Another account says that the North suffered severely, and also the West, and that the sickness lasted all summer[426]. Under the year 1393 one annalist states that many died in Essex in September and October, “on the pestilence setting in[427].” The next evidence comes from the Rolls of Parliament; in the first parliament of Henry IV. (1399) a petition is presented “that the king would graciously consider the great pestilence which is in the northern parts,” and send sufficient men to defend the Scots marches. The first great outburst of plague in the fifteenth century falls somewhere between 1405 and 1407. “So great pestilence,” says the St Albans annalist, under the year 1407, “had not been seen for many years.” In London “thirty thousand men and women” are reported to have died in a short space; and “in country villages the sickness fell so heavily upon the wretched peasants that many homes that had before been gladdened by a numerous family were left almost empty[428].” But it is under the 7th of Henry IV. (1405) that Hall’s chronicle narrates how the king, to avoid the city on account of the plague, sailed from Queenborough to a port in Essex, and so to Plashey, “there to pass his time till the plague were ceased” (p. 36). Another chronicle says that the plague of 1407 was mostly in the West country. In that year, the 9th of Henry IV., there is a petition from Ilchester in Somerset for a remission of dues “because the town is so impoverished and desolate of people that the burgesses are unable to pay the said ferme,” and for the cancelling of all arrears due since the 43rd year of Edward III. (1369). In the 11th of Henry IV. (1410-11), the burgesses of Truro represent “that the said town is impoverished by pestilence and the death of men, and by invasions and loss by the enemy by sea, and by the surcharge of twelve lives, and by default of inhabitants in the said town”--a petition apparently similar in terms to one that had been submitted in the previous reign. In the 1st of Henry IV. (1399), petitions of the same kind had been presented from Lincoln and Yarmouth; the former was “in great part empty and uninhabited,” while the latter had “its houses vacant and void, owing to pestilence and other things.” For the year 1413 there is a brief entry that “numbers of Englishmen were struck by plague and ceased to live[429].” A single chronicler mentions a pestilence in Norfolk in 1420[430]; but the Rolls of Parliament bear undoubted witness to a very severe prevalence of plague in the North about the same time: a petition from the Marches in 1421 speaks of “great numbers of persons dead by the great mortalities and pestilences which have raged for three years past and still reign; where a hundred men used to be there are not ten, and these of small account; where people of position kept twenty men at arms they now keep only themselves”; the enemy were making raids and food was scarce[431]. Another petition the same year (9 Henry V.) states that “both by pestilence within the realm and wars without there are not sufficient men of estate to hold the office of sheriff[432].” That was shortly after Agincourt and the conquest of France, when the fortunes of Henry V. were at their highest point. The horrors of the siege of Rouen (1419) were a favourite subject with poets of the time[433], but they were of a kind foreign to English experience in that age, and, indeed, in all periods of our history, save that of the Danish invasions. The Cromwellian Civil Wars, as we shall see, do indeed furnish many instances of plague, and some of typhus fever, in besieged or occupied towns; but, for the middle part of the fifteenth century, including the period of the wars of York and Lancaster, there is no good reason to suppose that fevers or other _morbi miseriae_, were rife among the common people, least of all among the peasantry. The Public Health in the Fifteenth Century. Our safest indications are got from the prices of commodities and the rates of wages, and these, according to the most competent authority, Thorold Rogers, were more favourable to the working class in the fifteenth century than at other periods: “As the agriculturist throve in the fifteenth century, so the mechanic and the artisan was also prosperous. This was the age in which the property of the guilds was generally acquired.” On famines in particular, I shall quote one other passage, which entirely confirms the view that I had independently stated in the first chapter when speaking of Ergotism: “Famine, in the strict sense of the word, has rarely occurred in England, owing to the practice which the inhabitants of this island have persistently maintained of living mainly on the dearest kind of corn.... The people lived abundantly, and, except when extraordinary scarcity occurred, regularly on the best provision which could be procured[434].” One such period of extraordinary scarcity all over England fell in the years 1438-39. The chronicle of Croyland says that there were three wet harvests in succession, that famine had been almost constant for two years, and that the people were reduced to eating dried herbs and roots[435]. That would have been a famine of the old kind, like those of 1258 and 1315, wheat having touched 20_s._ But it should not lead us to suppose that the disastrous period of the end of Edward III.’s reign and of the reign of Richard II. was continued throughout the fifteenth century. It is true that the records of that century are scantier than for earlier periods; the monastic chronicles have all ceased, except those of St Albans and Croyland, and the citizens’ diaries, which took their place, have hardly begun. It is possible that a fuller record would have shown a greater prevalence of distress throughout the country. It is probably owing to the scantiness of the history that the views of the fifteenth century range from the extreme of optimism to the extreme of pessimism. Where little is known, much may be imagined. Thus, a recent writer on _England in the Fifteenth Century_[436], says that “all attempts to specify the years of scarcity would only mislead”; and again: “There is hardly any period of five years during that time [15th century] without these ghastly records.” Another recent writer[437] remarks upon the fifteenth century being called a time of rude plenty, and sets against that “the famines, the plagues, the skin-diseases, the miserable quality of the food, the insecurity of life and property, the hovels in which the people lived, and the tyranny and oppression of a time of unsettled government.” It is needless to controvert the merely subjective impression in an author’s mind. But, in order to clear our ideas, let us take these things one by one. What were firstly the famines? There is no great one but that of 1438-39, which was due to a succession of wet harvests, and was equally severe in Scotland and in France, having in them caused famine-sickness as well as plague. Of the plagues, which were certainly no worse than in the Elizabethan and Stuart times, I shall speak in detail almost at once. Of the skin-diseases, there is nowhere a word said: another writer[438] specifies leprosy as afflicting England “all over the country” in the fifteenth century, whereas it can be shown that the prevalence of that disease, such as it had ever been in England, had almost ceased, and its sentimental vogue passed, in the reign of Edward III. The miserable quality of the food and the wretched hovels have certainly no special relevancy to the period[439]; on the contrary, the picture that we get of the manor of Castle Combe in the fifteenth century is that of a prosperous community, although not a highly moral one. As to insecurity of life and property, and oppression of government, there seems to be some illusion because the time was that of the wars of York and Lancaster. But we have the significant observation of Philip de Comines, a contemporary French statesman who kept his eye on the state of other countries; writing of the effects of civil war, he says:-- “England has this peculiar grace that neither the country, nor the people, nor the houses are wasted or demolished; but the calamities and misfortunes of the war fall only upon the soldiers and especially the nobility, of whom they are more than ordinarily jealous: for nothing is perfect in this world.” The truth seems to be that the middle part of the fifteenth century was really the time “ere England’s woes began, when every rood of ground maintained its man,” and that the Golden Age came to an end as soon as the dynastic and aristocratic quarrel was ended, and the nobles left free to turn their attention to their lapsing feudal rights. It is then that we begin to hear of enclosures, of adding house to house and field to field, of huge sheep-farms with no labourers on the soil, and of deserted villages. Goldsmith meant it of his own time; but Auburn flourishing belonged to the fifteenth century, and Auburn deserted was a common English experience in the time of Henry VIII. It is just because the fifteenth century is bounded on either side by periods of known distress among the commons, and is itself without a history, that one thinks of it as happy; and that view of it is borne out by the economic history which has been laboriously constructed for it. So much being premised of the country’s well-being at large, we may now return to the particular records of epidemics of plague. Chronology of Plagues in the Fifteenth Century. With the exception of an undoubted reference to influenza epidemic all over England in 1427 (a year of its prevalence in France also), which I shall postpone to a future chapter, the history down to the arrival of the sweating sickness in 1485, is concerned almost exclusively with notices of plague, and of plague mostly in the towns. It cannot be maintained that rural districts were exempt, or that some great epidemics of plague did not fall on town and country alike. Thus, the St Albans annalist, under the year 1431, has an entry of “pestilence at Codycote and divers places of this domain in this year.” Again, in 1439, the Rolls of Parliament contain a petition to the king “how that a sickness called the Pestilence universally through this your realm more commonly reigneth than hath been usual before this time, the which is an infirmity most infective, and the presence of such so infect must be eschewed, as by noble Fisisseanes and wise Philosofors before this time plainly it hath been determined, and as experience daily showeth”--therefore to omit the ceremony of kissing the king in doing knightly service, “and the homage to be as though they kissed you.” That may have been a plague both of town and country during famine, comparable to the epidemic of 1407, which, as “Walsingham” expressly says, was severely felt in the homes of the peasantry as well as in London. But plague henceforth is seldom universal; it becomes more and more a disease of the towns, and when it does occur in the country, it is for the most part at some few limited spots. A Paston letter of the years between 1461 and 1466 gives us a glimpse of the sort of the incidence of plague in country places, and of the avoidance of such infected spots, which we shall find often mentioned in the documents of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries[440]. There is, of course, no means of estimating the frequency of plague in these almost sporadic circumstances. The disease must have had its seats of election in the country, but we may safely conclude that these, after the Black Death and the recurrences thereof down, say, to 1407, were much fewer than in the towns. One significant piece of evidence comes from the great monastery of Canterbury. Among its records is an obituary, on twenty sheets, of all the monks from 1286 to 1517. Out of a hundred cases taken without selection from the record, there died, of pestilence, 33; of phthisis, 10; of chronic diseases, 29. “Pestilence” appears to mean specifically bubo-plague; for we find besides, among the sample hundred, two deaths from flux, one of these corpses having been buried immediately _propter infexionem_. The inference, under correction from further inquiry, would be that one-third of the deaths in the monastery of Canterbury during the first half of the reign of plague in England were from that disease. And that was in a monastery which, in the Black Death itself, is reported, in the same record, to have lost “only four” out of a membership of about eighty[441]. It remains to enumerate briefly the known instances of plague in London or other towns, from the last date given (1420) down to the beginning of the Tudor period (1485). Its prevalence “in England,” but more probably in London only, in 1426, comes out in a letter from the Senate of Venice cautioning the captain of the Flanders galleys and the vice-captain of the London galleys[442]. We hear also of that plague in London owing to the fact that certain Scotsmen of rank, hostages for the ransom of the king of Scots, died of the plague in London. An envoy who proceeded to Scotland on 12th March, 1427, was instructed to ask that the dead hostages be replaced by others of equal rank; and if the king of Scots objected on the ground that they had died because they had been kept in places where the late pestilence raged, notwithstanding their request to be removed, the envoy was to say that the hostages had been kept in London, where the dukes of Bedford and Gloucester and all other lords of the Council remained during the time; and that the hostages were “neither pinned nor barred up” in any house, but went at large in the city, and might have taken any measures they pleased for their own preservation. It appears, however, that the council removed from the city, and that the courts were adjourned, at a stage of the epidemic subsequent to the deaths of the Scots. The last plea of the envoy was that, supposing the pestilence had prevailed throughout England, the king was not therefore bound to send the hostages out of England; from which hypothetical construction, we may conclude that the epidemic was special to London--one of a long series requiring the king’s Court, the Parliament, and the Law Courts to be adjourned[443]. In 1433, the Parliament which met at Westminster on the 8th July, was prorogued on the 15th August, on account of the _gravis pestilentia_ which began to arise in London and the suburbs[444]. A London chronicler enters, under the 12th of Henry VI. (1433) “a grete pestilence and a grete frost,” a conjunction that would be interesting if the hard winter had preceded[445]. The plague revived in London in the following autumn; for, on the 27th October, 1434, the Privy Council ordered all pleas then pending to be continued from the morrow of All Souls to the octaves of St Hilary on account of the epidemic[446]. After three years, in 1437, the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas paid a visit to St Albans Abbey and remained there some time, “on account of the epidemic plague which was then reigning in the city of London[447].” Two years after, 1439, comes the entry in the Rolls of Parliament, already quoted, with reference to omitting the ceremony of kissing the king, because “a sickness called the Pestilence universally through this your realm more commonly reigneth than hath been usual before this time, the which is an infirmity most infective[448].” Thus we have in the decade from 1430 to 1440 no fewer than four distinct outbreaks of plague, three of them confined to the city of London, and one of them, that of 1439, general throughout the realm. The last was “a sickness called the pestilence,” which should mean the bubo-plague. The year was one of great distress abroad, many thousands having died in Paris. It was a year of famine in Scotland, where the disease was undoubtedly dysentery in part; but the information from Scotland (given in the sequel) points to the true plague supervening on the other. There was famine in England at the time when it was in France and in Scotland, so that the type of sickness may have been, in England also, fever and dysentery first and plague afterwards. In 1444, on the 5th of June, the Rolls contain the entry that grave pestilence began to arise. A severe pestilence is reported at Oxford in 1448[449]. On the 30th May, 1449, Parliament is adjourned to Winchester to avoid “the corrupt and infected airs” of Westminster. On the 6th November of the same year it adjourns to Ludgate, in the city of London, owing to the infection of the air in Westminster. The infected state of Westminster and other places around is again the subject of an entry on the 4th December, with this addition: “it has been sufficiently decreed as to avoiding and extinguishing the said corrupt and infectious air.” About three months later, on 30th March, 1450, Parliament adjourns to Leicester on account of the insalubrity of the air at Westminster. In 1452 it adjourns on 20th November to Reading for the same reason, but is soon after adjourned to the 11th February, owing to plague in Reading itself:--“de magna mortalitate in dicta villa de Redyng jam regnante.” These years must have been a really severe plague-period, for we find in 1454, a reference in the Paston Letters to the alarm caused by the plague in London. Wm. Paston writes to John Paston, 6 September: “Sergeant-at-law Billing came to London this week. He sent for me and asked me how I fared. I told him, here is pestilence, and said I fared the better he was in good hele, for it was noised that he was dead.... Here is great pestilence. I purpose to flee into the country[450].” From 1454 (and the year following in Scotland) there is a clear interval of ten years without mention of plague in the not very complete records of the time. With the year 1464 there began a series of outbreaks of plague which appear to have lasted in one part of the country or another with few intermissions until 1478. This plague-period is said to have been foretold in a remarkable prophecy. In the year 1462 a boy at Cambridge, while walking in a lane between King’s College and the adjoining buildings of Clare and Trinity Halls, met an old man with a long beard, who addressed him thus: “Go now and tell to anyone that within these two years there will be such pestilence, and famine, and slaughter of men, as no one living has seen.” Having said this he disappeared. Doubts however, were at once thrown on the reality of these words; for the boy, on being questioned by Master Myleton, doctor of theology, and others, said that he neither saw the old man walking on the ground nor heard him speak[451]. The authentic intelligence of plague in England in 1464 is contained in a letter to the Seignory of Venice from Bruges, dated 5th October, 1464, to the effect that some Venetian merchants have arrived from London, which they had quitted on the 26th September. They say the plague is at work there at the rate of two hundred [deaths] per diem, “and thus writes [also] Carlo Ziglio.” In April next year, 1465, we hear of it still in London, through a casual reference in a letter written by one of the Paston family[452]; and as prevailing all over England, through a formal entry in the chronicle of Croyland, the last of the monastic records which continued to be kept. There was an infection of the air, we read, in the whole of England, so that many thousands of people of every age came to their death suddenly, like sheep slaughtered[453]. The very next year, 1466, Parliament is adjourned from Westminster on account of the infection in London, to meet at Reading. Next summer, 1st July, 1467, there is another adjournment to Reading (6 November), because of the heat and because the plague was beginning to reign, by which certain members of the House of Commons had been cut off. After an interval of four years we hear of plague, in a Paston letter, and by a Southwell record. On 2 August, 1471, the residentiary canons of Southwell Minster vote themselves leave of absence for a month “quia regnat morbus pestiferus in villa Southwell, et furit excessivé morbus pestiferus[454].” On 13 September, 1471, Sir John Paston writes from near Winchester: “I cannot hear by pilgrims that pass the country, nor none other man that rideth or goeth any country, that any borough town in England is free from that sickness. God cease it when it please him!” Apart from London the English town which has the most disastrous record for this period is Hull[455]. The plague was so severe there, in three epidemics close together, as almost to ruin the place. It broke out in 1472, and had swept off a great number of the inhabitants before the end of the year, including the mayor. In 1476 it broke out afresh, causing a great mortality. In 1478 it was more violent than ever, the number of its victims being given as 1580, including the mayor and all his family; the people fled the town, the church was shut up, and the streets deserted and grass-grown. The epidemic appears to have been, as usual, an autumnal one, ceasing at the approach of winter. Meanwhile, in 1474, there is mention of a serious prevalence of plague in the Royal household, as well as elsewhere in London. The weather of the previous autumn, 1473, had been remarkable. Labourers are said to have died in the harvest-field from the excessive heat, and “fervues, axes, and the bloody flyx” (fevers, agues, and dysentery) to have been universal in divers parts of England; but there was no dearth. The unusual character of that season, or of the season preceding, was indicated by the bursting forth of underground reservoirs of water[456]. The great plague of this period in London should most probably be placed under the years 1478-9. Merely to show the difficulties of the chronology it may be worth while citing the various accounts. The Greyfriars’ Chronicle says, under the year 17 Edward IV., that the term was “deferred from Ester to Michaelmas because of the grete pestylens[457].” The 17th of Edward IV. was 1477. But Fabyan, who was now a citizen of London (afterwards sheriff and alderman), enters it under the civic year 1478-79, or the year which begins for him with the new lord mayor taking office on 30 October. His words are: “This year was great mortality and death in London and many other parts of this realm, the which began in the latter end of Senii [September] in the preceding year and continued in this year till the beginning of November, in the which passed time died innumerable people in the said city and many places elsewhere[458].” Grafton says, under the year 1478, that the chief mortality fell in four months of great heat, during which the pestilence was so fierce and quick that fifteen years’ war had not consumed a third as many people[459]. To reconcile these dates we should have to take the year of the Greyfriars’ Chronicle as 1478, so that the adjournment of the term from Easter to Michaelmas, might suit the four months in Grafton. At the same time, Fabyan’s statement that the plague “continued in this year till November,” is correct for 1479. Sir John Paston writes home from London, 29 Oct. 1479, of his danger from the sickness; he died there on 15th November; and his brother, who came up from Norfolk to bury him, writes to his mother, who wished him “to haste out of the air that he was in,” that the sickness is “well ceased” in December. The year 1478, the first of two plague-seasons in London, was also a year of plague at Hull, and at Newcastle and Southwell. The account for Newcastle, in its annals under 1478, is merely that great numbers died of the plague[460]. At Southwell, on 5 July, 1478, the canons residentiary again take leave of absence for the summer, “because it may be probably estimated that the dire pestilential affliction in the town of Southwell will continue, and because the venerable men, with their domestics, have a just fear of incurring the infection of the said pestiferous affliction[461].” Next year, 1479, an “incredible number” died of plague at Norwich[462], and at villages like Swainsthorp, where “they have died and been sick nigh in every house[463].” Thus in two years, 1478-79, we hear of an epidemic of plague of the first rank in London, an epidemic most severe for the size of the place, at Hull, and epidemics at Southwell, Newcastle and Norwich. This is not unlike the plague-years that we often find in the centuries following. Whether it be that we are merely coming to a time of better records, or that the disease itself was getting worse in English towns, these later years of Edward IV. are comparable to plague-periods under the Tudors and the Stuarts. The period from the Black Death of 1349 to the reign of Edward IV. witnesses a considerable change in the habits, so to speak, of plague in England. In the earlier part of that period, the epidemics of “pestilence”--although they were not all of plague or wholly of plague--are general throughout England, like the great mortality itself but on a smaller scale. As late as 1407, or perhaps 1439, we still hear of “the disease called the pestilence” being universal and in the homes of the peasantry. The extent of the sickness in 1465, or even the type of it, is not sufficiently known. From that time onwards town and country are contrasted in the matter of plague; it becomes usual to flee to the country so as to escape the pestilential air in town in the summer heats, and the unwholesomeness of the London air becomes on numerous occasions a real reason, or a pretext, for the adjournment of Parliament. All the while, the plague was the lineal descendant of the Black Death,--a virus so potent on its first entry into English soil as to overrun every parish of the land. Plague and other pestilences in Scotland and Ireland, 1349-1475. The materials for the history of plague in Scotland, including the Black Death and subsequent outbreaks down to the end of the medieval period, are much fewer than for England. From the English chroniclers (Knighton and Le Baker) we learn that the Black Death in the autumn of 1349 extended from the northern counties to the Scots army in the Forest of Selkirk. According to Fordoun, plague would have been general in Scotland in 1350; but as he includes in his reference “several years before and after” and “divers parts of the world,” his statement that nearly a third part of the human race paid the debt of nature is perhaps a mere echo of the general estimate and without reference specially to Scotland[464]. His next general reference to pestilence is under the year 1362, when the same kind of disease and the same extent of mortality as in 1350 occurred throughout all Scotland[465]. But as he says elsewhere that the visit of David, king of Scots, to Aberdeenshire in 1361, when he took Kildrummy Castle from the earl of Mar, was determined in the first instance by the prevalence of plague in the southern part of his kingdom[466], it may be inferred that the epidemic had begun late in that year in the south, coincident with the _pestis secunda_ of England, and had been interrupted by the coming on of winter, as in the first epidemic of 1349 and 1350. The next mortality recorded by Fordoun he names the fourth (_quarta mortalitas_) and assigns to 1401[467]. The question arises as to the third; and it appears that there were indeed two plague-years in Scotland between 1362 and 1401--namely, 1380 and 1392, both of them corresponding nearly to great plagues in the north of England. In the former year sir John Lyon, lord of Glamis, was unable to hold his court as auditor of the exchequer in certain places owing to the plague[468]. In 1392, also, the custumars of Haddington, Peebles, and Dumbarton did not attend the “chamberlain ayres” on account of the pestilence[469]. In 1402 (not in 1401, as Fordoun has it), the custumars of Stirling were absent from the audit by reason of the plague[470]; and in the same financial year (10 July, 1402, to 18 July, 1403), only one bailie from Dundee attended the audit at Perth, the others being dead in the pestilence[471]. For a whole generation there is no documentary evidence of plague in Scotland. But Fordoun has two entries of a disease which he calls _pestilentia volatilis_--it can hardly have been plague and may have been influenza--the one in 1430, having begun at Edinburgh in February, and the other in 1432 at Haddington[472]. Under the year 1439, an old chronicle, _Ane Addicioun of Scottis Cornicklis and Deidis_ records one of those seasons of famine and dysentery or lientery, with some more sudden sickness, which have been described for England in a former chapter. “The samen time there was in Scotland a great dearth, for the boll of wheat was at 40_s._, and the boll of ait meal 30_s._; and verily the dearth was sae great that there died a passing [number of] people for hunger. And als the land-ill, the wame-ill, was so violent, that there died mae that year than ever there died, owther in pestilence, or yet in ony other sickness in Scotland. And that samen year the pestilence came in Scotland, and began at Dumfries, and it was callit the _Pestilence but Mercy_, for there took it nane that ever recoverit, but they died within twenty-four hours[473].” Here the “land-ill” or “wame-ill” (dysentery or lientery) is contrasted within “the pestilence,” which latter is said to have supervened the same year, beginning at Dumfries and proving peculiarly deadly. This was a year of plague, said to be “universal,” in England (where famine also was severe), and of an enormous mortality in France. The continuator of Fordoun records under the year 1455 (James II.) a great pestilential mortality of men through the whole kingdom, an epidemic which would be again a year behind the corresponding plague in England[474]. We hear of it next definitely in the year 1475, which falls within the series of plague-years at Hull, and elsewhere in the southern part of the island. On account of an outbreak of pestilence the king of Scots adjourned the meeting of the estates from September 1475 to the Epiphany following[475], when the Parliament actually met. The same year there was a plague-hospital on Inchkeith, in the Firth of Forth, and not for the first time; ten marts from the Orkneys were landed there for the quarantined patients[476]. The references to plague in Scotland begin again about the year 1498; but these, according to the division of our subject, will come into another chapter. The references to plagues in Ireland after the invasion of 1349 are extremely meagre; but they make it probable that outbursts of bubo-plague recurred at intervals, as well as occasional epidemics of flux and other diseases brought on by scarcity or bad corn. The continuators of Clyn’s Kilkenny annals enumerate various _pestes_--_secunda_, _tertia_, _quarta_ and _quinta_--just as the English annalists do. The _secunda_ falls in 1362, its season in Scotland also[477]. The _tertia_ is given under 1373; but also under 1370[478]. The _quarta_ is in 1382 (or 1385), and the _quinta_ in 1391. But there is little or no independent evidence that this chronology, originally made for England, is really good for Ireland also. The only other entry, until the Tudor period, is “fames magna in Hibernia” in 1410[479].