A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 1 (of 2) by Charles Creighton
1636. An importation from abroad had been alleged as early as the great
309 words | Chapter 83
plague of 1563, namely from Havre, which was then held by an English
garrison. But on that occasion the epidemic in London was gaining ground
before the sickness at Havre had declared itself plague, and was of the
bubonic type while the latter was still a malignant fever. The return of
the whole English garrison from Havre, with the seeds of sickness among
them, might well have introduced infection; but that return was not until
the end of July, by which time the mortality in London had been
progressing for two months. There is equally little reason for Stow’s
statement that the plague of 1603 was brought to London from Ostend, or
for the corresponding theory of origin for the plague of 1625. A foreign
source was not thought of unless the plague became one of the greater
degree. Year after year in London there were a few cases of plague, and
sometimes for a succession of years the plague-deaths kept steadily at a
level of from one thousand to three thousand. There are, indeed, few years
from 1348 to 1666 in which the infection did not declare its presence in
London. Whether the few threatening cases in the spring were to rise to a
plague of the greater degree depended upon a concurrence of
circumstances--upon the interval since the last great plague, upon the
number of strangers crowding to the capital, and upon the kind of weather
preceding. In 1665 the various determining things did chance to come
together, and a plague of the first degree ensued. The one singular thing
in the history is that such a concurrence never happened again, or that
the conditions had so far changed (certainly not for the better), that
the type of epidemic disease was no longer the bubo-plague.
According to precedent, a great plague was somewhat overdue in the year
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