CHAPTER VII.

GAOL FEVERS, INFLUENZAS, AND OTHER FEVERS IN THE TUDOR PERIOD. The Common Gaols of England date from the Council of Clarendon, in 1164, by the articles of which the limits of civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction were fixed, and the quarrel between archbishop Becket and Henry II. reduced to terms. In obedience to Article VII. of the Council, gaols were built, the chief among them having been at Canterbury, Rochester, Huntingdon, Cambridge, Malmesbury, Sarum, Aylesbury, and Bedford[782]. Little is heard of the unwholesomeness of prison life until the medieval period is nearly over--not indeed because the prisons were better managed than they were later. “In the year 1385,” says Stow, “William Walworth gave somewhat to relieve the prisoners in Newgate; so have many others since.” One benefactor brought a supply of water into Newgate; another, the famous Whittington, left money actually to rebuild the gaol, which was done in 1422. For several years before that, Newgate had been notorious. An ordinance of 7 Henry V. (1419) for the re-establishment of the debtor’s prison at Ludgate, so that debtors need not have to go to Newgate gaol, was made in compliance with a petition which said that, in “the hateful gaol of Newgate, by reason of the fetid and corrupt atmosphere, many persons committed to the said gaol are now dead[783].” The greatest mortality must have been, according to Stow, in 1414, when the gaolers of Newgate and Ludgate died, and sixty-four prisoners in Newgate[784]. More than a century after, in 1522, there occurred the first of a series of gaol-fever tragedies, which were well calculated to produce the effect ascribed by Aristotle to scenic tragedy, provided only the workings of cause and effect had been more apparent. The first of these historical Black Assizes occurred on the occasion of the gaol delivery at the Castle of Cambridge in Lent, 1522. The facts, which appear to be given nowhere but in Hall’s _Chronicle_ (of almost contemporary authority), are less fully related than for some of the later instances of the same strange visitation; but there is no mistaking the air of reality and the generic likeness. Cambridge Black Assizes. In the 13th year of Henry VIII. at the Assize held in the Castle of Cambridge in Lent, “the justices and all the gentlemen, bailiffs and other, resorting thither, took such an infection, whether it were of the savour of the prisoners, or of the filth of the house, that many gentlemen, as Sir John Cut, Sir Giles Arlington, Knights, and many other honest yeomen, thereof died, and almost all which were present were sore sick, and narrowly escaped with their lives[785].” It is to be observed that nothing is said of the prisoners being infected: they were brought from the dungeons to stand their trial in due course, and the gentlemen and yeomen attending the court officially or as jurors, or otherwise, were poisoned by their presence. This early chronicle indicates as the cause, “the savour of the prisoners, or the filth of the house;” and Bacon, in touching upon that class of incidents nearly a century later, indicates “the smell of the gaol,” but says nothing of cases of fever among the prisoners, having no warrant in the evidence for doing so. Before we come to consider the condition of England in the Tudor period, with the policy of Henry VIII. for the repression of beggary and crime, and the appearance of “new fevers” or “strange fevers” and “laskes” in the chronicles and other records of the time, it will be desirable to make out as accurately as possible the clinical type of the Assizes fever, and its circumstances. For that purpose we must turn to the next recorded outbreak on the occasion of the Assizes at Oxford in 1577, which happens to have been somewhat fully described as a memorable event in the register of Merton College. The entry in the Merton register appears to have been made within a few weeks of the event[786]. Oxford Black Assizes. The Assizes met on the 5th and 6th July, 1577, in the Castle and Guild Hall. Those only fell ill, whether in Oxford itself or after leaving, who had been present at the Assizes. The two judges (Robert Bell, Chief Baron of the Exchequer and John Barrham, sergeant-at-law), the sheriff of the county, two knights, eight squires and justices of the peace, several gentlemen and not a few of their servants, the whole of the grand jury with one or two exceptions--these all had not long left Oxford when they were seized with illness and died (_statim post fere relictam Oxoniam mortui sunt_). In Oxford itself, on the 15th, 16th and 17th July, some ten or twelve days after the Assizes, about three hundred fell ill; and in the next twelve days there died (“_ne quid errem_”) one hundred scholars, besides townsmen not a few. Five died in Merton College, including one fellow, the names of four being given who died on the 24th, 27th, 28th and 29th July. Every college, hall, or house had its dead. Women were not attacked, nor indeed the poor; nor did the infection spread to those who waited on the sick or came to prescribe for them. Only those who had been present at the Assizes caught the fever. The symptoms are described as follows: The patients laboured under pain both of the head and of the stomach; they were troubled with phrensy, deprived of understanding, memory, sight, hearing and their other senses. As their malady increased, they took no food, could not sleep, and would not suffer attendants or watchers to be near them; their strength was remarkable, even in the approach of death; but if they recovered they fell into the extreme of weakness. No complexion or constitution was spared; but those of a choleric habit were most obnoxious to the disease. The affected persons suddenly became delirious and furious, overcoming those who tried to hold them; some ran about in courts and in the streets after the manner of insane persons; others leapt headlong into the water. The spirits of all the people were crushed; the physicians fled, and the wretched sufferers were deserted. Masters, doctors, and heads of houses left almost to a man. The Master of Merton remained, _longe omnium vigilantissimus_, ministering sedulously to the sick. The pharmacies were soon emptied of their conserves, oils, sweet waters, pixides and every kind of confection. This sudden epidemic, which began on the 15th--17th July, did not last long; within the space of one month the city was restored to its former health, so that one wonders, says the registrary of Merton, to see already so many scholars and so many townsmen abroad in the streets and walks. The infection was suspected by many, says the same eyewitness, to have arisen either from the fetid and pestilent air of thieves brought forth from prison, of whom two or three died in chains a few days before (_quorum duo vel tres sunt ante paucos dies in vinculis mortui_), or from the devilishly contrived and obviously papistical spirits called forth “e Lovaniensi barathro,” and let loose upon the court secretly and most wickedly. The latter explanation arose out of the heated feelings of the time against papist plotters, and has no farther interest. But the statement that two or three of the prisoners had died in chains a few days before has a great interest, as showing the kind of treatment to which they had been subjected while awaiting the gaol delivery. A strange confirmation of the truth of the statement came to light many years after. When John Howard visited the Oxford gaol in 1779, in the course of his humane labours on behalf of the prisoners, he was told by the gaoler that, some years before, wanting to build a little hovel and digging up stones for the purpose from the ruins of the court, which was formerly in the Castle, he found under them a complete skeleton with light chains on the legs, the links very small. “These,” says Howard, “were probably the bones of a malefactor who died in court of the distemper at the Black Assize[787].” Next to the Merton register’s account, we may take that of Thomas Cogan, a graduate in medicine of Oxford, sometime fellow of Oriel, but probably removed to Manchester previous to 1577. Wherever Cogan got his information, he acknowledges no source of the following in his _Haven of Health_, 1589: “What kind of disease this should be which was first at Cambridge [in 1522] and after at Oxford, it is very hard to define, neither hath any man (that I know) written of that matter. Yet my judgment is, be it spoken without offence of the learned physicians, that the disease was _Febris ardens_, a burning fever. For as much as the signes of a burning ague did manifestly appear in this disease, which after Hollerius be these: Extreame heate of the body, vehement thirst, loathing of meate, tossing to and fro, and unquietnesse, dryness of the tongue rough and blacke, griping of the belly, cholerick laske, cruell ake of the head, no sound sleepe, or no sleepe at all, raving and phrensie, the end whereof, to life or death, is bleeding at the nose, great vomitting, sweate or laske. And this kind of sicknesse is one of those rods, and the most common rod, wherewith it pleaseth God to brake his people for sin.... And this disease indeed, as it is God’s messenger, and sometimes God’s poaste, because it commeth poaste haste, and calleth us quickly away, so it is commonly the Pursuivant of the pestilence and goeth before it.... And certainly after that sodaine bane at Oxford, the same yeare, and a yeare or two following, the same kind of ague raged in a manner over all England, and tooke away very many of the strongest sort, and in their lustiest age, and for the most part, men and not women nor children, culling them out here and there, even as you should chuse the best sheepe out of a flocke. And certaine remedy was none to be found.... And they that took a moderate sweate at the beginning of their sickness and did rid their stomachs well by vomit sped much better. Yet thanks be to God hitherto no great plague hath ensued upon it.” Besides these medical particulars, he gives certain dates and numbers. It began, he says, on the 6th of July, from which date to the 12th of August next ensuing there died of the same sickness five hundred and ten persons, all men and no women: the chiefest of which were the two judges, Sir Robert Ball, lord chief baron, and maister Sergeant Baram, maister Doile the high sheriff, five of the justices, four councillors at law and an attorney. The rest were jurors and such as repaired thither. An account not unlike Cogan’s is given by Stow in his _Annales_ (p. 681); “The 4, 5 and 6 dayes of July were the assizes holden at Oxford, where was arraigned and condemned one Rowland Jenkes for his seditious toung, at which time there arose amidst the people such a dampe, that almost all were smothered, very few escaped that were not taken at that instant: the Jurors died presently. Shortly after died Sir Robert Bell, lord chief baron, Sir Robert de Olie, Sir William Babington, maister Weneman, maister de Olie, high sheriff, maister Davers, maister Harcurt, maister Kirle, maister Phereplace, maister Greenwood, maister Foster, maister Nash, sergeaunt Baram, maister Stevens, and there died in Oxford 300 persons, and sickned there but died in other places 200 and odde, from the 6th of July to the 12th of August, after which died not one of that sicknesse, for one of them infected not another, nor any one woman or child died thereof.” Stow’s account differs from that of the Merton College register in several important particulars. The latter is explicit that the sickness appeared among the scholars and townsmen of Oxford on the 15th, 16th and 17th of July, or after an interval of ten days or more, and that the deaths amongst those who had come to Oxford on Assize business did not occur in Oxford but on their return home. On the other hand, Stow makes out the Oxford people to have been smothered by the damp which arose in the court itself: “very few escaped that were not taken ill at that instant;” next come the deaths of the jurors, and “shortly after” those of the judges and other high officials, whose names are given by Stow more fully than by anyone. His total of deaths, the same as Cogan’s, is 300 in Oxford and 200 and odd of persons who had left Oxford, and his dates, “from the 6th of July to the 12th of August,” are also the same as Cogan’s. Wood’s account is for the most part taken from the Merton register and in part from the very different version in Stow’s _Annals_; but he has the following new matter: “Above 600 sickened in one night, as a physician that now lived in Oxford attesteth, and the day after, the infectious air being carried into the next villages, sickened there an hundred more[788].” That, of course, is very unlike the Merton College account, which is explicit that no one caught the fever who had not been in the court. The Oxford physician whose authority is given for the six hundred cases in Oxford in one night, and the extension next day to villages around, is Dr George Ethredge, or Ethryg, a physician and learned Greek scholar living in Oxford at the time and keeping a boarding-house, called George Hall, for the sons of Catholic gentlemen. In 1588 he published a small volume of comments upon some books of Paulus Aegineta, which is the authority given by Wood[789]. On discovering the passage, one finds that it was not 600 in one night, but “sexaginta” or 60, and that the occasion on which more than sixty were taken ill at once in a single night at Oxford, and nearly a hundred next day in the adjacent villages, “whither the infected air had by chance been borne,” was not that of the gaol-fever in 1577 but of the sweating sickness in 1551. An extension in the atmosphere to the villages around is just what would have happened in the sweating sickness, a disease in that as in other respects closely analogous to influenza. Ethredge says that, on the particular occasion, “hardly any of the Oxford people died”--a statement which should of itself have prevented Wood’s mistake, even if the reference to the same disease having “at the same time” cut off the two sons of the duke of Suffolk “at Cambridge” (therefore a less healthy place than Oxford where hardly any died) had not quite clearly pointed to the sudor Britannicus, which is actually named in the context (“sic enim vocant”)[790]. Although, in the passage quoted, it is the sweating sickness at Oxford in 1551 that Ethredge refers to, he does also refer to the gaol fever of 1577 in another passage which has hitherto escaped notice. In the section of his book next following, entitled “De Curatione morborum populariter grassantium, et de Peste,” he says that he had used a certain prescription of aloes, ammoniacum and myrrh rubbed together in wine, for himself as well as for others in a serious contagion, “quae fuit in martiali sede cum ibi essem,” and also, with happy effect, upon many “in the most cruel pest at Oxford which carried off Judge Bell and ever so many more; one gentleman, I could not persuade to try this medicine, whom therefore I commended to God, and four days after he was dead. Concerning that pestilential fever, many colloquies took place between me and two most learned physicians; and, as to the kind of this contagion, we all agreed (_manibus et pedibus in hanc sententiam itum est_) in a sentence which I quoted from Valescus, who sayeth thus: Those sicknesses are dangerous in such wise that the physicians may be for the most part deceived; for we see a good hypostasis in the urine, and some other good signs, yet the sick person dies”--a remark which often recurs in the early writings on plague. It has taken longer than usual to determine the matter of fact as to the fever of the Oxford Black Assizes, because an erroneous version passes current on respectable authority; but enough has perhaps been said to enable us to pass from the matter of fact to the matter of theory[791]. The theory of the gaol fever at Oxford, in 1577, was not attempted by any writer at the time, nor indeed has it been so in later times; but the significance of the outbreak has been recognized and admitted. An Oxford scholar, Dr Plot, writing just a century after (1677) mentions the statement that a “poisonous steam” broke forth from the earth, having probably in his mind Stow’s imaginative explanation, that a damp arose amongst the people and smothered them, very few escaping that were not taken at that instant. Plot then proceeds:-- “But let it not be ascribed to ill fumes and exhalations ascending from the earth and poysoning the Air, for such would have equally affected the prisoners as judges, but we find not that they dyed otherwise than by the halter, which easily perswades me to be of the mind of my lord Verulam (_Nat. Hist._ cent. X. num. 914) who attributes it wholly to the smell of the Gaol where the prisoners had been long, close, and nastily kept.” We know, indeed, from the register of Merton that “two or three of the prisoners died in chains a few days before,” which is a sufficient indication of the state they were kept in, but is no warrant for Anthony Wood’s free rendering of the words: “of whom two or three, _being overcome with it_ [i.e. with the “nasty and pestilential smell of the prisoners”] died a few days before the Assizes began.” Two or three prisoners died in their chains with symptoms undescribed; and although typhus among the inmates of gaols has often occurred, it has also been wanting in many cases where the filth and misery might have bred it in the prisoners themselves[792]. Bacon’s judgment on the case, referred to above, was based upon a strict scrutiny of the evidence, and does not transcend the evidence. He attributes the infection that arose in the court to “the smell of the gaol;” and so as not to assume a smell which does not appear to have attracted any particular notice at the time, he is careful to explain in what sense he means the smell of the gaol: “The most pernicious infection,” he says, “next the plague, is the smell of the jail, when prisoners have been long and close and nastily kept; whereof we have had in our time experience twice or thrice; when both the judges that sat upon the jail, and numbers of those that attended the business or were present, sickened upon it and died. Therefore it were good wisdom, that in such cases the jail were aired before they be brought forth.... “Leaving out of question such foul smells as be made by art and by the hand, they consist chiefly of man’s flesh or sweat putrefied; for they are not those stinks which the nostrils straight abhor and expel, that are most pernicious; but such airs as have some similitude with man’s body, and so insinuate themselves and betray the spirits[793].” Exeter Black Assizes. The next Black Assizes occurred at Exeter in 1586, nine years after the Oxford tragedy. The Exeter incident has had the fortune to be chronicled by a person as competent as was the writer in the Merton College register in the former case, namely by John Hoker _alias_ Vowell, chamberlain of the city, and its representative in Parliament, a lawyer of good education, who must have been conversant with all the circumstances, and wrote his account within six months. He is known as the chief contributor to the second edition of Holinshed’s _Chronicle_, in which the history is brought down to 1586, his name appearing on the title-page. It is in that work that he inserted his account of the Exeter Black Assizes, written in October, 1586. The margin bears the words: “The note of John Hooker _alias_ Vowell;” and the text of the note is as follows[794] (III. pp. 1547-8):--“At the assizes kept at the citie of Excester, the fourteenth daie of March, in the eight and twentieth yeare of hir majesties reigne, before Sir Edmund Anderson, Knight, lord chief justice of the common pleas, and sargeant Floredaie, one of the barons of the excheker, justices of the assises in the Countie of Devon and Exon, there happened a verie sudden and a strange sickenesse, first amongst the prisoners of the Gaole and Castell of Exon, and then dispersed (upon their triall) amongst sundrie other persons; which was not much unlike to the sickenesse that of late yeares happened at an assise holden at Oxford, before Sir Robert Bell, Knight, lord chiefe baron of the excheker, and justice then of that assise.... The origin and cause thereof diverse men are of diverse judgment. Some did impute it, and were of the mind that it proceeded from the contagion of the gaole, which by reason of the close aire and filthie stinke, the prisoners newlie come out of a fresh aire into the same are in short time for the most part infected therewith; and this is commonlie called the gaole sickenesse, and manie die thereof. Some did impute it to certain Portingals, then prisoners in the said gaole. For not long before, one Barnard Drake, esquire (afterwards dubbed Knight) had beene at the seas, and meeting with certeine Portingals, come from New-found-land and laden with fish, he tooke them as a good prize, and brought them into Dartmouth haven in England, and from thense they were sent, being in number about eight and thirtie persons, unto the gaole of the castell of Exon, and there were cast into the deepe pit and stinking dungeon[795]. These men had beene before a long time at the seas, and had no change of apparell, nor laine in bed, and now lieing upon the ground without succor or reliefe, were soone infected; and all for the most part were sicke, and some of them died, and some one of them was distracted; and this sickenesse verie soone after dispersed itselfe among all the residue of the prisoners in the gaole; of which disease manie of them died, but all brought into great extremities and were hardly escaped. These men, when they were to be brought before the foresaid justices for their triall, manie of them were so weak and sicke that they were not able to goe nor stand; but were caried from the gaole to the place of judgement, some upon handbarrowes, and some betweene men leading them, and so brought to the place of justice. The sight of these men’s miserable and pitifull cases, being thought (and more like) to be hunger-starved than with sickenesse diseased, moved manie a man’s heart to behold and look upon them; but none pitied them more than the lords justices themselves, and especially the lord chief justice himselfe; who upon this occasion tooke a better order for keeping all prisoners thenseforth in the gaole, and for the more often trials; which was now appointed to be quarterlie kept at every quarter sessions and not to be posted anie more over, as in times past, untill the assises. These prisoners thus brought from out of the gaole to the judgment place, after that they had been staied, and paused awhile in the open aire, and somewhat refreshed therewith, they were brought into the house, in the one end of the hall near to the judges seat, and which is the ordinarie and accountable place where they do stand to their triales and arraignments. And howsoever the matter fell out, and by what occasion it happened, an infection followed upon manie and a great number of such as were there in the court, and especially upon such as were nearest to them were soonest infected. And albeit the infection was not then perceived, because every man departed, (as he thought), in as good health as he came thither; yet the same by little and little so crept into such as upon whom the infection was seizoned, that after a few daies, and at their home coming to their owne houses, they felt the violence of this pestilent sicknesse; wherein more died, that were infected, than escaped. And besides the prisoners, manie there were of good account, and of all other degrees, which died thereof; as by name sargeant Floredaie who then was the judge of those trials upon the prisoners, Sir John Chichester, Sir Arthur Basset, Sir Barnard Drake, Knight[796]; Thomas Carew of Haccombe, Robert Carie of Clovelleigh, John Fortescue of Wood, John Waldron of Bradfeeld and Thomas Risdone, esquires and justices of the peace. ... Of the plebeian and common people died verie manie, and especiallie constables, reeves, and tithing men, and such as were jurors, and namelie one jurie of twelve, of which there died eleven. This sicknesse was dispersed throughout all the whole shire, and at the writing hereof in the time of October, 1586, it is not altogether extinguished. It resteth for the most part about fourteene daies and upwards by a secret infection, before it breake out into his force and violence.” Here we have the same incubation-period as in the Oxford fever, about fourteen days. But in the Exeter case, we have it clearly stated that an infection arose in the prison from the poor Portuguese sailors or fishermen who had been thrown into “deep pit and stinking dungeon” after their capture on the high seas by Sir Bernard Drake, that the infection attacked the other prisoners, that many of the prisoners died and all were brought to extremities, and that those who stood their trial were then in a most feeble state, although they seemed to the pitying spectators to be more starved than diseased. So far as concerned the infection in the Assize Court, among the lawyers, county gentry, and officials, jurors and others, it was of the same tragic kind as at Oxford in 1577 and at Cambridge in 1522, and, as we shall see, on several occasions in the eighteenth century. But the Exeter case has some features special to itself. Within the gaol were both English felons and thirty-eight Portugals, who had become subject to capture on their way home from the banks of Newfoundland with boatloads of stock-fish, and to treatment as felons, because Spain and England were at war. Within the gaol there seems to have been also a gradation of misery, a deep pit and stinking dungeon, “in the lowest deep a lower deep,” to which were consigned the men of foreign breed, the Portugals. It was among them that deaths first occurred, in what special form we know not. From them an infection is clearly stated by Hoker to have spread through the gaol at large, and to have made many of the prisoners so weak that they had to be carried into court. This is quite unlike what we read of in the Cambridge and Oxford cases, in neither of which was illness noted in the prisoners or asserted of them, although at Oxford two or three had died in chains a few days before. In the Exeter case there were three circles of the damned instead of two only: nay there were four. Farthest in were the Portugals, next to them were the native English felons, then came those present on business or pleasure at the Assizes, and lastly there were the country people all over Devonshire for many months after. We must take all those peculiarities of the Exeter gaol-fever together, and explain them one by another. It was a somewhat elaborated poison. It had passed from the foreign prisoners to the English, and in the transmission had, as it were, consolidated its power; hence, when the prisoners did give it to those who breathed their atmosphere in court, the infection did not limit itself to them, as it certainly did at Oxford and, so far as anything is said, at Cambridge also, and as it usually does in typhus-fever; but it became a volatile poison, it developed wings and acquired staying power, so that its effects were felt over the county of Devon for at least six months longer. Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England. The Black Assizes of Cambridge (1522), of Oxford (1577), and of Exeter (1586) cast, in each case, a momentary and vivid light upon the state of England in the Tudor period as late as the middle of the reign of Elizabeth. It has been pointed out in a former chapter that prices and wages were favourable to the cultivators of the soil in the fifteenth century, that the English yeomanry sprang up in that period, that village communities and trading towns prospered although their morals were none of the best, and that the civil wars of York and Lancaster were so far from injuring the domestic peace of England that they even secured it. It was the observation of Philip de Comines, more than once quoted before, that England had the “peculiar grace” of being untroubled at large by the calamities of her civil wars, because kings and nobles were left to settle their quarrels among themselves. “Nothing is perfect in this world,” says the French statesman, who did not like independence of spirit among the lower orders. But he recognizes the fact as peculiar to England in the fifteenth century; and there can be little doubt about it. The civil wars were hardly over when the troubles of the common people began. Here, if anywhere, is the turning-point brought into Goldsmith’s poem of “The Deserted Village:” A time there was, ere England’s griefs began, When every rood of ground maintained its man. Deserted villages became a reality in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, and throughout the century following. We hear of this depopulation first in the Isle of Wight, where it affected the national defence and therefore engaged the attention of the State. Two Acts were passed in 1488-9, cap. 16 and cap. 19 of 4 Henry VII. The first declares that “it is for the security of the king and realm that the Isle of Wight should be well inhabited, for defence against our ancient enemies of France; the which isle is late decayed of people, by reason that many towns and villages have been let down, and the fields dyked and made pastures for beasts and cattle.” The second relates that “Great inconveniences daily doth increase by desolation and pulling down and wilful waste of houses and towns, and laying to pasture lands which customably have been used in tilth, whereby idleness, ground and beginning of all mischiefs, daily do increase; for where in some towns two hundred persons were occupied and lived by their lawful labours, now be there occupied two or three herdsmen, and the residue fall into idleness.” The remedy enacted is that no one shall take a farm in the Isle of Wight which shall exceed ten marks, and that owners shall maintain, upon their estates, houses and buildings necessary for tillage. An instance of the same depopulation is given by Dugdale in Warwickshire: seven hundred acres of arable land turned to pasture, and eighty persons thrown out of employment causing the destruction of sixteen messuages and seven cottages. An instance of the same kind has already been quoted from the neighbourhood of Cambridge as early as 1414; but it is not until the settlement of the dynastic quarrels and jealousies, partly on the victories of Edward IV. at Barnet and Tewkesbury in 1471, and completely after the victory of Henry Tudor at Bosworth in 1485, that agrarian troubles became general. Then began the famous _enclosures_--enclosures both of the “wastes” of the manors, and of the open cultivated fields of the manors in which all the orders of villagers had their share of tenancy. A few years after, in 1495, the number of vagabonds and beggars had so increased, of course in consequence of the enclosures, that a new Act was required, cap. 2 of the 11th of Henry VII. “Considering the great charges that should grow for bringing vagabonds to the gaols according to the statute of 7 Richard II., cap. 5, and the long abiding of them therein, whereby it is likely many of them would lose their lives:” therefore to put them in the stocks for three days and three nights upon bread and water, and after that to set them at large and command them to avoid the town, and if a vagabond be taken again in the same town or township, then the stocks for _four_ days, with like diet. The deserving poor, however, were to be dealt with otherwise, but in an equally futile manner. In 1503-4, by the 19th of Henry VII. cap. 12, the period in the stocks was reduced to one day and one night (bread and water as before), probably in order that all vagabonds might have their turn. The most correct picture of the state of England under Henry VII. and Henry VIII. is given by Sir Thomas More. The passages in his _Utopia_, relating to the state of England may be taken as veracious history. A discussion is supposed to arise at the table of Morton, archbishop of Canterbury, who was More’s early patron, and who died in 1500. “I durst boldly speak my mind before the Cardinal,” says the foreign observer of our manners and custom, Raphael Hythloday; and then follows an account of the state of England which lacks nothing in plainness of speech. “But let us consider those things that chance daily before our eyes. First there is a great number of gentlemen, which cannot be content to live idle themselves, like drones, of that which other have laboured for: their tenants I mean, whom they poll and shave to the quick by raising their rents (for this only point of frugality do they use, men else through their lavish and prodigal spending able to bring themselves to very beggary)--these gentlemen, I say, do not only live in idleness themselves, but also carry about with them at their tails a great flock or train of idle and loitering serving-men, which never learned any craft whereby to get their living. These men, as soon as their master is dead, or be sick themselves, be incontinent thrust out of doors.... And husbandmen dare not set them a work, knowing well enough that he is nothing meet to do true and faithful service to a poor man with a spade and a mattock for small wages and hard fare, which being daintily and tenderly pampered up in idleness and pleasure, was wont with a sword and a buckler by his side to strut through the street with a bragging look, and to think himself too good to be any man’s mate. Nay, by Saint Mary, Sir, (quoth the lawyer), not so. For this kind of men must we make most of. For in them, as men of stouter stomachs, bolder spirits, and manlier courages than handicraftsmen and ploughmen be, doth consist the whole power, strength and puissance of our army, when we must fight in battle.” So much for the serving-men of the rich, apt to be discarded to swell the ranks of poverty and crime. But further:-- “There is another cause, which, as I suppose, is proper and peculiar to you Englishmen alone.--What is that? quoth the Cardinal.--Forsooth, my lord, quoth I, your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy and devour whole fields, houses and cities. For look in what parts of the realm doth grow the finest and therefore dearest wool, these noblemen and gentlemen, yea and certain abbots, (holy men, no doubt), not contenting themselves with the yearly revenues and profits that were wont to grow to their forefathers and predecessors of their lands, nor being content that they live in rest and pleasure, nothing profiting yea much annoying the weal public leave no ground for tillage; they inclose all into pastures; they throw down houses; they pluck down towns and leave nothing standing, but only the church to be made a sheep-house. And as though you lost no small quantity of ground by forests, chases, lawns, and parks, these holy men turn all dwelling-places and all glebe-land into desolation and wilderness. Therefore the one covetous and insatiable cormorant and very plague of his native country may compass about and inclose many thousand acres of ground together within one pale or hedge; the husbandmen be thrust out of their own, or else either by cunning and fraud, or by violent oppression they be put besides it, or by wrongs and injuries they be so wearied that they be compelled to sell all. By one means, therefore, or by other, either by hook or crook, they must needs depart away, poor silly wretched souls, men, women, husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, woeful mothers with their young babes, and their whole household small in substance and much in number as husbandry requireth many hands. Away they trudge, I say, out of their known and accustomed houses, finding no place to rest in. All their household stuff, which is very little worth, though it might well abide the sale, yet being suddenly thrust out, they be constrained to sell it for a thing of nought. And when they have wandered abroad till that be spent, what can they then else do but steal, and then justly, pardy! be hanged, or else go about a begging. And yet, then also they be cast in prison as vagabonds, because they go about and work not; whom no man will set a work, though they never so willingly profer themselves thereto.” Thus were the gaols filled. The policy of Henry VIII. was to hang for petty theft--“twenty together upon one gallows.” And yet the lawyer, the defender of the king’s firm rule, “could not choose but greatly wonder and marvel, how and by what evil luck it should come to pass that thieves nevertheless were in every place so rife and rank.” These descriptions of the state of England were written about 1517, and the recitals in various Acts of Henry VIII. bear them out. Thus, in 1514 and 1515 (6 Hen. VIII. cap. 5, and 7 Hen. VIII. cap. 1), the towns, villages and hamlets, and other habitations decayed in the Isle of Wight are to be re-edified and re-peopled. In 1533-4 (25 Hen. VIII. cap. 13), there is a more comprehensive Act against the aggrandisements of pasture-farmers, “by reason whereof a marvellous multitude of the people of this realm be not able to provide meat, drink and clothes necessary for themselves, their wives, and children, but be so discouraged with misery and poverty that they fall daily to theft, robbery, and other inconvenience, or pitifully die for hunger and cold.” Some greedy and covetous persons have as many as 24,000 sheep: no one to keep above 2,000 sheep under the penalty of 3_s._ 4_d._ for every sheep kept by him above that number. Ten years after comes the well-known Act relating to the decay of towns[797] (35 Hen. VIII. cap. 4). Besides these recitals in Acts of Parliament, we have other glimpses of the causes of agrarian distress. Thus, in a letter of June 24, 1528, from Sir Edward Guildford to Wolsey: Romney Marsh is fallen into decay; there are many great farms and holdings in the hands of persons who neither reside on them, nor till, nor breed cattle, but use them for grazing, trusting to the Welsh store cattle[798]. In Becon’s _Jewel of Joy_, written in the reign of Edward VI. the same condition of things is described: “How do the rich men, and specially such as be sheepmongers, oppress the king’s liege-people by devouring their common pastures with their sheep, so that the poor people are not able to keep a cow for the comfort of them and of their poor family, and are like to starve and perish for hunger, if there be not provision made shortly.... Rich men were never so much estranged from all pity and compassion toward the poor people as they be at this present time.... They not only link house to house, but when they have gotten many houses and tenements into their hands, yea whole townships, they suffer the houses to fall into utter ruin and decay, so that by this means whole towns are become desolate and like unto a wilderness, no man dwelling there except it be the shepherd and his dog.” The interlocutor in the dialogue answers: “Truth it is. For I myself know many towns and villages sore decayed; for whereas in times past there were in some town an hundred households, there remain not now thirty; in some fifty, there are not now ten; yea (which is more to be lamented) I know towns so wholly decayed that there is neither stick nor stone, as they say.... And the cause of all this wretchedness and beggary in the common weal is the greed of gentlemen which are sheepmongers and graziers[799].” Again, in Bullein’s _Dialogue of the Fever Pestilence_ (1664), the groom Roger who accompanies the citizen and his wife to the country, in the direction of Barnet, points out an estate on which the rents had been raised; the fields had been turned into large pastures, and all the houses pulled down save the manor house: “for the carles have forfeited their leases and are gone a-begging like villaines, and many of them are dead for hunger.” Vagabonds, beggars, valiant beggars, sturdy beggars, and ruffelers continue to occupy the pages of the Statute Book for many years. In 1530-31 (a long and elaborate Act), and in 1535-6, they are to be repressed by the stocks, by whipping, and ear-cropping; “and if any ruffeler, sturdy vagabond, or valiant beggar, having the upper part of the right ear cut off as aforesaid, be apprehended wandering in idleness, and it be duly proved that he hath not applied to such labours as have been assigned to him, or be not in service with any master, that then he be committed to gaol until the next quarter sessions, and be there indicted and tried, and, if found guilty, he shall be adjudged to suffer death as a felon.” A still more distracted Act was made by the Lord Protector in 1547 (1 Ed. VI. cap. 3): if the vagabond continue idle and refuse to labour, or run away from work set him to perform, he is to be branded with the letter V, and be adjudged a slave for two years to any person who shall demand him, to be fed on bread and water and refuse-meat, and caused to work in such labour, “how vile soever it be, as he shall be put unto, by beating, chaining, or otherwise.” If he run away within the two years, he is to be branded in the cheek with the letter S, and adjudged a slave for life; and if he run away again he is to suffer death as a felon. Similar provisions are made for “slave-children;” while the usual exceptions are brought in for the impotent poor. The above statute remained in force for only two years, having been from the first a monstrous insult to the intelligence of the nation, and never applied. It was succeeded by two meek-spirited Acts, 3 and 4 Ed. VI. cap. 16, and 5 and 6 Ed. VI. cap. 2, in which the impotent poor are provided for:--collectors in church to “gently ask and demand alms for the poor.” By the 1st of Mary, cap. 13, the collections for the poor were made weekly. When Elizabeth came to the throne, greater pressure was put upon the well-to-do to support the poor: by the Act of 5 Eliz. cap. 3 (1562-3) those who obstinately refused voluntary alms might be assessed. A more important Act of Elizabeth was that of her 14th year (1572-3) cap. 5, “For the Punishment of Vagabonds and for Relief of the Poor and Impotent.” A vagabond, as before, is to be whipped, and burnt on the ear; for a second offence to suffer death as a felon “unless some honest person will take him into his service for two whole years;” and for a third offence to suffer death and loss of lands and goods, as a felon, without allowance of benefit of clergy or sanctuary. Aged and infirm poor, by the same Act, are to be cared for by “overseers of the poor” in every parish, and to have abiding places fixed for them. In 1575-6 (18th Eliz. cap. 3), the Act of 1572-3 was amended and explained: “collectors and governors of the poor” are to provide a stock of wool, hemp, iron etc. for the poor to work upon, and “houses of correction,” or Bridewells, are to be built-one, two or more in every county for valiant beggars or such other poor persons as refuse to work under the overseers or embezzle their work. The last and greatest poor-laws of Elizabeth’s reign were those of her 39th year (1597-8) caps. 3 and 4 and her 43rd year (1601) cap. 2. These remained the basis of the English poor-law down to a recent period. Overseers of the poor are appointed in every parish--the churchwardens _ex officio_ and four others appointed by the justices in Easter week: the overseers to meet once a month in the parish church after divine service on the Sunday: contributions to be levied by the inhabitants of any parish among themselves, or the parish or hundred to be taxed by the justices, failing the contributions, or, if the hundred be unable, then the county to be rated “in aid of” the parishes. These being the developments of the poor-law and the law against vagabonds to the end of the Tudor period, we may now return to our particular illustrations, and more especially to the illustrations from popular sickness. Under the year 1537, one of the citizen chroniclers of London has an entry, “Began a collection for the poor, and a great number cured of many grievous diseases through the charity thereof.” Under 1540, he records that “the collection for the poor people ceased[800].” Preaching before Edward VI. on the fourth Sunday in Lent, 1550, Thomas Lever, Master of St John’s College, Cambridge, said: “O merciful Lord! what a number of poor, feeble, halt, blind, lame, sickly--yea with idle vagabonds and dissembling caitiffs mixed among them, lie and creep, begging in the miry streets of London and Westminster[801].” In May, 1552, Ridley wrote to Cecil that the citizens were willing to provide for the poor “both meat, drink, clothing and firing;” but they lacked lodging, and he wanted the king to give up Bridewell “to lodge Christ in,” or in other words, the poor “then lying abroad in the streets of London.” Coming to the middle of Elizabeth’s reign, in the year 1579 we find, in an essay dedicated to the queen by Dr John Jones upon general topics of health and morals, an account of poverty and crime which reads little better than Sir Thomas More’s for 1517. In his 31st chapter on “The great cost that the commonwealth is at daily in relieving the poore: Of the number of them that are yeerly executed,” he speaks of the new poor-rate as “a greater tax than some subsidies,” and as a “larger collection than would maintain yeerly a good army;” and, of the felons as “a mightier company of miserable captives than would defend a large country, as in the records of the Clerks of the Peace and of the Assize may easily be seen.” Even from the outset, the poor-rate does not appear to have met the difficulty: “And yet housekeepers be but little less discharged, if ye note the continual resort of the needy, especially in the country and towns that be incorporate, the poor (as they say) not much the more aided, as by the moan they make to travellers may be easily gathered, nor theft and wickedness the less practised. For what misery it is to see condemned at one assize in a little shire thirty-nine, notwithstanding the clemency of the Judges, and three hundred and odd in one Diocese to do penance or fine for their loose living in a year. But these be the meanest sort only, for the others scape as though it were in them no offence. And in one gaol of prisoners three hundred and upwards at one time, whereof a great part perhaps may be through negligence of justice or cruelty, that otherwise might be punished answerably to the offences lawfully.” He then refers to the Bridewells “so charitably and politicly appointed by the late Act of Parliament, although not yet in every shire erected.” The Act of Parliament was that of 1572 and the Bridewells were the houses of correction for vagrants, the first type of workhouses, and so named after the Bridewell in Fleet Street, which was given by Edward VI. from being a royal residence to be a refuge of the poor. So far as fever was concerned, it mattered little whether the Bridewell were a poor-house or a prison, for in later times gaol fever and workhouse fever were both synonyms for typhus. It would not have been surprising to find this enormous extent of pauperism, vagrancy and crime attended by the distinctive _morbus pauperum_, typhus-fever. But we are here concerned only with the evidence, and not with antecedent probabilities. The records are, of course, very imperfect. The gaol-fevers of Cambridge, Oxford and Exeter attracted much notice because they touched the governing class. There may have been much more gaol-fever unrecorded. Hoker, in his account of the Exeter fever, does indeed say: “and this is commonly called the gaol sickness, and many die thereof;” and, in a petition to the Crown, March, 1579, the Queen’s Bench prison in Southwark is said to contain twice its complement, there is in it a disease called “sickness of the house,” and near a hundred had died of that sickness in the prison during the previous six years[802]. We shall not be able to give colour to our epidemiological history by other such instances from the Tudor period[803]; even for plague itself, the records of particular outbreaks are meagre and almost certainly only a part of the whole. The epidemics which shall occupy us for the rest of this chapter are those that had a general prevalence over the country on two or three occasions, the same general prevalence of fever that recurs at shorter intervals in the Stuart period and in the eighteenth century. Hitherto we have attempted to work out the history of epidemics in Britain without reference to the epidemics in other countries, except in the case of the Black Death, which had remarkable antecedents in the remote East, and in the case of the English Sweat of 1528, which overran a great part of the Continent in 1529 and 1530. To have attempted a parallel record of epidemics abroad would have served inevitably to confuse the vision; for the annals of pestilence in all Europe would have been from year to year an unrelieved record of sickness and death, an unnatural continuance or sequence, from which the mind turns away. The several countries of Europe, and the several cities, had each their turn of plague; but they had each, also, their free intervals, sometimes very long intervals, as we have seen in the case of Aberdeen with no plague for nearly two generations in the sixteenth century. The epidemiography of each country should therefore be kept apart; and within a given country care should be taken to prevent the illusion of universal sickness, which is apt to be created in the bringing of scattered centres of disease (such as plague) together in the same page. But there are instances of what are called pandemics, or universal epidemics, of sickness. The Black Death was one such, covering a period of perhaps four years in Europe, from 1347 to 1350, the curve of the disease in each locality lasting about six months. With the beginning of the modern period we come to more frequent pandemics, not of plague, but of minor or milder forms of pestilential infection. On the continent of Europe these were in part related to the state of war, which may be taken as beginning with the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII. of France in