A HISTORY OF EPIDEMICS IN BRITAIN.

London: C. J. CLAY and SONS,
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE,
AND
H. K. LEWIS,
136, GOWER STREET, W.C.

Cambridge: DEIGHTON, BELL AND CO.
Leipzig: F. A. BROCKHAUS.
New York: MACMILLAN AND CO.

A HISTORY

OF

EPIDEMICS IN BRITAIN

from A.D. 664 to the Extinction of Plague

BY
CHARLES CREIGHTON, M.A., M.D.,
FORMERLY DEMONSTRATOR OF ANATOMY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE.

CAMBRIDGE:
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
1891

[All rights reserved.]

Cambridge:
PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AND SONS,
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

PREFACE.

The title and contents-table of this volume will show sufficiently its scope, and a glance at the references in the several chapters will show its sources. But it may be convenient to premise a few general remarks under each of those heads. The date 664 A.D. has been chosen as a starting-point, for the reason that it is the year of the first pestilence in Britain recorded on contemporary or almost contemporary authority, that of Beda’s ‘Ecclesiastical History.’ The other limit of the volume, the extinction of plague in 1665-66, marks the end of a long era of epidemic sickness, which differed much in character from the era next following. At or near the Restoration we come, as it were, to the opening of a new seal or the outpouring of another vial. The history proceeds thenceforth on other lines and comes largely from sources of another kind; allowing for a little overlapping about the middle of the seventeenth century, it might be continued from 1666 almost without reference to what had gone before. The history is confined to Great Britain and Ireland, except in Chapter XI. which is occupied with the first Colonies and the early voyages, excepting also certain sections of other chapters, where the history has to trace the antecedents of some great epidemic sickness on a foreign soil.

The sources of the work have been the ordinary first-hand sources of English history in general. In the medieval period these include the monastic histories, chronicles, lives, or the like (partly in the editions of Gale, Savile, Twysden, and Hearne, and of the English Historical Society, but chiefly in the great series edited for the Master of the Rolls), the older printed collections of State documents, and, for the Black Death, the recently published researches upon the rolls of manor courts and upon other records. From near the beginning of the Tudor period, the Calendars of State Papers (Domestic, Foreign, and Colonial), become an invaluable source of information for the epidemiologist just as for other historians. Also the Reports of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, together with its Calendars of private collections of papers, have yielded a good many facts. Many exact data, relating more particularly to local outbreaks of plague, have been found in the county, borough, and parish histories, which are of very unequal value for the purpose and are often sadly to seek in the matter of an index. The miscellaneous sources drawn upon have been very numerous, perhaps more numerous, from the nature of the subject, than in most other branches of history.

Medical books proper are hardly available for a history of English epidemics until the Elizabethan period, and they do not begin to be really important for the purpose until shortly before the date at which the present history ends. These have been carefully sought for, most of the known books having been met with and examined closely for illustrative facts. In the latter part of the seventeenth century the best English writers on medicine occupied themselves largely with the epidemics of their own time, and the British school of epidemiology, which took a distinguished start with Willis, Sydenham and Morton, was worthily continued by many writers throughout the eighteenth century; so that the history subsequent to the period here treated of becomes more and more dependent upon medical sources, and of more special interest to the profession itself.

Reference has been made not unfrequently to manuscripts; of which the more important that have been used (for the first time) are a treatise on the Sweating Sickness of 1485 by a contemporary physician in London, two original London plague-bills of the reign of Henry VIII., and a valuable set of tables of the weekly burials and christenings in London for five years (almost complete) from 1578 to 1583, among the Cecil papers—these last by kind permission of the Marquis of Salisbury.

Collecting materials for a British epidemiology from these various sources is not an easy task; had it been so, it would hardly have been left to be done, or, so far as one knows, even attempted, for the first time at so late a period. Where the sources of information are so dispersed and casual it is inevitable that some things should have been overlooked: be the omissions few or many, they would certainly have been more but for suggestions and assistance kindly given from time to time by various friends.

The materials being collected, it remained to consider how best to use them. The existing national epidemiologies, such as that of Italy by Professor Corradi or the older ‘Epidemiologia Española’ of Villalba, are in the form of Annals. But it seemed practicable, without sacrificing a single item of the chronology, to construct from the greater events of sickness in the national annals a systematic history that should touch and connect with the general history at many points and make a volume supplementary to the same. Such has been the attempt; and in estimating the measure of its success it may be kept in mind that it is the first of the kind, British or foreign, in its own department. The author can hardly hope to have altogether escaped errors in touching upon the general history of the country over so long a period; but he has endeavoured to go as little as possible outside his proper province and to avoid making gratuitous reflections upon historical characters and events. The greater epidemic diseases have, however, been discussed freely—from the scientific side or from the point of view of their theory.

It remains to acknowledge the liberality of the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press in the matter of publication, and the friendly interest taken in the work by their Chairman, the Master of Peterhouse.

November, 1891.

CONTENTS.

ERRATA.

At p. 28 line 4, for “for” read “at.” At p. 126 line 2 for “1351” read “1350;” same change at p. 130, lines 6 and 9. At p. 185 note 1 read “Ochenkowski.” At p. 264 line 18, and at p. 554 line 11 from bottom, read “pathognomonicum.” At p. 401, note 3 for “1658” read “1558.” At p. 420, line 17, for “Henry IV.,” read “Henry V.” At p. 474, line 4, for “more” read “less.” At p. 649 line 22 omit “Hancock.”

CHAPTER I.

PESTILENCES PREVIOUS TO THE BLACK DEATH, CHIEFLY FROM FAMINES.

The Middle Age of European history has no naturally fixed beginning or ending. The period of Antiquity may be taken as concluded by the fourth Christian century, or by the fifth or by the sixth; the Modern period may be made to commence in the fourteenth, or in the fifteenth or in the sixteenth. The historian Hallam includes a thousand years in the medieval period, from the invasion of France by Clovis to the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII. in 1494. We begin, he says, in darkness and calamity, and we break off as the morning breathes upon us and the twilight reddens into the lustre of day. To the epidemiologist the medieval period is rounded more definitely. At the one end comes the great plague in the reign of Justinian, and at the other end the Black Death. Those are the two greatest pestilences in recorded history; each has no parallel except in the other. They were in the march of events, and should not be fixed upon as doing more than their share in shaping the course of history. But no single thing stands out more clearly as the stroke of fate in bringing the ancient civilization to an end than the vast depopulation and solitude made by the plague which came with the corn-ships from Egypt to Byzantium in the year 543; and nothing marks so definitely the emergence of Europe from the middle period of stagnation as the other depopulation and social upheaval made by the plague which came in the overland track of Genoese and Venetian traders from China in the year 1347. While many other influences were in the air to determine the oncoming and the offgoing of the middle darkness, those two world-wide pestilences were singular in their respective effects: of the one, we may say that it turned the key of the medieval prison-house; and of the other, that it unlocked the door after eight hundred years.

The Black Death and its after-effects will occupy a large part of this work, so that what has just been said of it will not stand as a bare assertion. But the plague in the reign of Justinian hardly touches British history, and must be left with a brief reference. Gibbon was not insensible of the part that it played in the great drama of his history. “There was,” he says, “a visible decrease of the human species, which has never been repaired in some of the fairest countries of the globe.” After vainly trying to construe the arithmetic of Procopius, who was a witness of the calamity at Byzantium, he agrees to strike off one or more ciphers, and adopts as an estimate “not wholly inadmissible,” a mortality of one hundred millions. The effects of that depopulation, in part due to war, are not followed in the history. So far as Gibbon’s method could go, the plague came for him into the same group of phenomena as comets and earthquakes; it was part of the stage scenery amidst which the drama of emperors, pontiffs, generals, eunuchs, Theodoras, and adventurers proceeded. Even of the comets and earthquakes, he remarks that they were subject to physical laws; and it was from no want of scientific spirit that he omitted to show how a plague of such magnitude had a place in the physical order, and not less in the moral order.

A new science of epidemiology has sprung up since the time of Gibbon, who had to depend on the writings of Mead, a busy and not very profound Court physician. More particularly the Egyptian origin of the plague of the sixth century, and its significance, have been elucidated by the brilliant theory of Pariset, of which some account will be given at the end of the chapter on the Black Death. For the present, we are concerned with it only in so far as it may have a bearing upon the pestilences of Britain. The plague of the sixth century made the greatest impression, naturally, upon the oldest civilized countries of Europe; but it extended also to the outlying provinces of the empire, and to the countries of the barbarians. It was the same disease as the Black Death of the fourteenth century, the bubo-plague; and it spread from country to country, and lasted from generation to generation, as that more familiar infection is known to have done[1].

Renewals of it are heard of in one part of Europe or another until the end of the sixth century, when its continuity is lost. But it is clear that the seeds of pestilence were not wanting in Rome and elsewhere in the centuries following. Thus, about the year 668, the English archbishop-elect, Vighard, having gone to Rome to get his election confirmed by the Pope Vitalianus, was shortly after his arrival cut off by pestilence, with almost all who had gone with him[2]. Twelve years after, in 680, there was another severe pestilence in the months of July, August and September, causing a great mortality at Rome, and such panic at Pavia that the inhabitants fled to the mountains[3]. In 746 a pestilence is said to have advanced from Sicily and Calabria, and to have made such devastation in Rome that there were houses without a single inhabitant left[4]. The common name for all such epidemics is pestis or pestilentia or magna mortalitas, so that it is open to contend that some other type than bubo-plague, such as fever or flux, may have been at least a part of them; but no type of infection has ever been so mortal as the bubo-plague, and a mortality that is distinguished by a chronicler as causing panic and devastation was presumably of that type.

Pestilence in England and Ireland in the Seventh Century.

It is more than a century after the first great wave of pestilence had passed over Europe in the reign of Justinian, before we hear of a great plague in England and Ireland. Dr Willan, the one English writer on medicine who has turned his erudition to that period, conjectures that the infection must have come to this country from the continent at an earlier date. From the year 597, he says, the progress of conversion to the Christian religion “led to such frequent intercourse with Italy, France and Belgium, that the epidemical and contagious disease prevailing on the continent at the close of the sixth century must necessarily be communicated from time to time through the Heptarchy[5].” Until we come to the Ecclesiastical History of Beda, the only authorities are the Irish annals; and in them, the first undoubted entry of a great plague corresponds in date with that of Beda’s history, the year 664. It is true, indeed, that the Irish annals, or the later recensions of them, carry the name that was given to the plague of 664 (pestis ictericia or buide connaill) back to an alleged mortality in 543, or 548, and make the latter the “first buide connaill”; but the obituary of saints on that occasion is merely what might have occurred in the ordinary way, and it is probable, from the form of entry, that it was really the rumour of the great plague at Byzantium and elsewhere in 543 and subsequent years that had reached the Irish annalist[6].

The plague of 664 is the only epidemic in early British annals that can be regarded as a plague of the same nature, and on the same great scale, as the devastation of the continent of Europe more than a century earlier, whether it be taken to be a late offshoot of that or not. The English pestilence of 664 is the same that was fabled long after in prose and verse as the great plague “of Cadwallader’s time.” It left a mark on the traditions of England, which may be taken as an index of its reality and its severity; and with it the history of epidemics in Britain may be said to begin. It was still sufficiently recent to have been narrated by eyewitnesses to Beda, whose Ecclesiastical History is the one authentic source, besides the entry in the Irish annals, of our information concerning it.

The pestilence broke out suddenly in the year 664, and after “depopulating” the southern parts of England, seized upon the province of Northumbria, where it raged for a long time far and wide, destroying an immense multitude of people[7]. In another passage Beda says that the same mortality occurred also among the East Saxons, and he appears to connect therewith their lapse to paganism[8].

The epidemic is said to have entered Ireland at the beginning of August, but whether in 664 or 665 is not clear. According to one of those vague estimates which we shall find again in connexion with the Black Death, the mortality in Ireland was so vast that only a third part of the people were left alive. The Irish annals do, however, contain a long list of notables who died in the pestilence[9].

Beda follows his general reference to the plague by a story of the monastery of Rathmelsigi, identified with Melfont in Meath, which he heard many years after from the chief actor in it. Egbert, an English youth of noble birth, had gone to Ireland to lead the monastic life, like many more of his countrymen of the same rank or of the middle class. The plague in his monastery had been so severe that all the monks either were dead of it or had fled before it, save himself and another, who were both lying sick of the disease. Egbert’s companion died; and he himself, having vowed to lead a life of austerity if he were spared, survived to give effect to his vow and died in the year 729 with a great name for sanctity at the age of ninety.

The plague of 664 is said, perhaps on constructive evidence[10], to have continued in England and Ireland for twenty years; and there are several stories told by Beda of incidents in monasteries which show, at least, that outbreaks of a fatal infection occurred here or there as late as 685. Several of these relate to the new monastery of Barking in Essex, founded for monks and nuns by a bishop of London in 676. First we have a story relating to many deaths on the male side of the house[11], and then two stories in which a child of three and certain nuns figure as dying of the pestilence[12]. Another story appears to relate to the plague in a monastery on the Sussex coast, seemingly Selsea[13]. Still another, in which Beda himself is supposed to have played a part, is told of the monastery of Jarrow, the date of it being deducible from the context as the year 685.

Of the two Northumbrian monasteries founded by Benedict, that of Wearmouth lost several of its monks by the plague, as well as its abbot Easterwine, who is otherwise known to have died in March, 685. The other monastery of Jarrow, of which Ceolfrith was abbot, was even more reduced by the pestilence. All who could read, or preach, or say the antiphonies and responses were cut off, excepting the abbot and one little boy whom Ceolfrith had brought up and taught. For a week the abbot conducted the shortened services by himself, after which he was joined by the voice of the boy; and these two carried on the work until others had been instructed. Beda, who is known to have been a pupil of Ceolfrith’s at Jarrow, would then have been about twelve years old, and would correspond to the boy in the story[14].

The nature of these plagues, beginning with the great invasion of 664, can only be guessed. They have the look of having been due to some poison in the soil, running hither and thither, as the Black Death did seven centuries after, and remaining in the country to break out afresh, not universally as at first, but here and there, as in monasteries. The hypothesis of a late extension to England and Ireland of the great European invasion of bubo-plague in 543, would suit the facts so far as we know them. The one medical detail which has been preserved, on doubtful authority, that the disease was a pestis ictericia, marked by yellowness of the skin, and colloquially known in the Irish language as buide connaill, is not incompatible with the hypothesis of bubo-plague, and is otherwise unintelligible[15].

For the next seven centuries, the pestilences of Britain are mainly the results of famine and are therefore of indigenous origin. So strongly is the type of famine-pestilence impressed upon the epidemic history of medieval England that the chroniclers and romancists are unable to dissociate famine from their ideas of pestilence in general. Thus Higden, in his reference to the outbreak of the Justinian plague at Constantinople, associates it with famine alone[16]; and the metrical romancist, Robert of Brunne, who had the great English famine of 1315-16 fresh in his memory, describes circumstantially the plague of 664 or the plague of Cadwallader’s time, as a famine-pestilence, his details being taken in part from the account given by Simeon of Durham of the harrying of Yorkshire by William the Conqueror, and in part, doubtless, from his own recent experience of a great English famine[17]. But before we come to these typical famine-pestilences of Britain, which fill the medieval interval between the foreign invasion of plague in Beda’s time and the foreign invasion of 1348, it remains to dispose in this place of those outbreaks on English soil which do not bear the marks of famine-sickness, but, on the other hand, the marks of a virulent infection arising at particular spots probably from a tainted soil. These have to be collected from casual notices in the most unlikely corners of monastic chronicles; but it is just the casual nature of the references that makes them credible, and leads one to suppose that the recorded instances are only samples of epidemics not altogether rare in the medieval life of England.

Early Epidemics not connected with Famine.

The earliest of these is mentioned in the annals of the priory of Christ Church, Canterbury. In the year 829, all the monks save five are said to have died of pestilence, so that the monastery was left almost desolate. The archbishop Ceolnoth, who was also the abbot of the monastery, filled up the vacancies with secular clerks, and he is said to have done so with the consent of the five monks “that did outlive the plague.” The incident comes into the Canterbury MS. of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle[18] under the year 870, in connexion with the death of Ceolnoth and the action of his successor in expelling the seculars and completing the original number of regulars. So far as the records inform us, that great mortality within the priory of Christ Church two centuries after it was founded by Augustine, was an isolated event; the nearest general epidemic to it in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was a great mortality of man and beast about the year 897 following the Danish invasion which Alfred at length repelled.

That such deadly intramural epidemics in monasteries were not impossible is conclusively proved by the authentic particulars of a sudden and severe mortality among the rich monks of Croyland at a much more recent date—between the years 1304 and 1315. In the appendix to the chronicle of Ramsey Abbey[19] there is printed a letter from Simon, abbot of Croyland, without date but falling between the years above given, addressed to his neighbours the abbots of Ramsey, Peterborough and Thorney, and the prior of Spalding. The letter is to ask their prayers on the occasion of the sudden death of thirteen of the monks of Croyland and the sickness of others; that large number of the brethren had been cut off within fifteen days—“potius violenter rapti quam fataliter resoluti[20].” The letter is written from Daddington, whither abbot Simon had doubtless gone to escape the infection.

These are two instances of deadly epidemics within the walls of English monasteries. In the plague-years 664-685, and long after in the Black Death, the mortalities among the monks were of the same degree, only there was an easy explanation of them, in one if not in both cases, as being part of an imported infection universally diffused in English soil. What the nature of the occasional outbreaks in earlier times may have been, we can only guess: something almost as deadly, we may say, as the plague itself, and equally sudden. The experience was not peculiar to England. An incident at Rome almost identical with that of Vighard in 668 is related in a letter sent home in 1188, by Honorius the prior of Canterbury, who had gone with others of the abbey on a mission to Rome to obtain judgment in a dispute between the archbishop and the abbey, that the whole of his following was stricken with sickness and that five were dead. John de Bremble, who being also abroad was ordered to go to the help of the prior, wrote home to the abbey that when he reached Rome only one of the brethren was alive, and he in great danger, and that the first thing he had to do on his arrival was to attend the cook’s funeral[21].

There is no clue to the type of these fatal outbreaks of sickness within monastic communities. One naturally thinks of a soil-poison fermenting within and around the monastery walls, and striking down the inmates by a common influence as if at one blow. There are in the medieval history previous to the Black Death a few instances of local pestilences among the common people also, which differ from the ordinary famine-sicknesses of the time. The most significant of these is a story told by William of Newburgh at the end of his chronicle and probably dating from the corresponding period, about the year 1196[22]. For several years there had been, as we shall see, famine and fever in England; but the particular incident does not relate to the famine, although it may join on to it. It is the story of a ghost walking, and it comes from the village of Annan on the Solway, having been related to the monk of Newburgh in Yorkshire by one who had been an actor in it. A man who had fled from Yorkshire and taken refuge in the village under the castle of Annan, was killed in a quarrel about the woman whom he had married, and was buried without the rites of the church. His unquiet ghost walked, and his corpse tainted the air of the village; pestilence was in every house, so that the place which had been populous looked as if deserted, those who escaped the plague having fled. William of Newburgh’s informant had been in the midst of these calamities, and had taken a lead in mitigating them; he had gone to certain wise men living “in sacra dominica quae Palmarum dicitur,” and having taken counsel with them, he addressed the people: “Let us dig up that pestilence and let us burn it with fire” (effodiamus pestem illam et comburamus igni). Two young men were, accordingly, induced to set about the task. They had not far to dig: “repente cadaver non multa humo egesta nudaverunt, enormi corpulentia distentum, facie rubenti turgentique supra modum.”

The story, like others of the kind with a mixture of legend in them, is more symbolical than real. The wise men of Annan may have been in error in tracing the plague of their village to a single corpse, but they were probably on the right lines of causation. It is curious to observe in another chronicler of the same period, Ralph of Coggeshall in Essex, and in a part of his chronicle which relates to the last years of Richard I., and first years of John, a comment upon the action of Pope Innocent III. (about 1200 A.D.) in interdicting all Christian rites save baptism by the clergy in France: “O how horrible ... to refuse the Christian rite of burial to the bodies of the dead, so that they infected the air by their foetor and struck horror into the souls of the living by their ghastly looks[23].” The same pope’s interdict of decent burial and of other clerical rites extended to England in 1208, the famous Interdict of the reign of John. It was the papal method of checkmating the kingdoms of this world; that it was subversive of traditional decency and immemorial sanitary precaution was a small matter beside the assertion of the authority of Peter.

Rightly or wrongly, taught by experience or misled by fancy, the medieval world firmly believed that the formal and elaborate disposal of the dead had a sanitary aspect as well as a pious. The infection of the air, of which we shall hear much more in connexion with the plague, was a current notion in England for several centuries before the Black Death. Especially does the dread of it find expression where corpses were unburied after a battle, massacre, or calamity of nature. The exertions made in these circumstances to bury the dead, even when all pious and domestic feeling was hardened to the barest thought of self-preservation, are explained in set terms as instigated by the fear of breeding a pestilence. The instinct is as wide as human nature, and there is clear evidence in our own early writers that its sanitary meaning was recognised. One such instance may be quoted from the St Albans annalist of the time of John and first years of Henry III.[24] In the year 1234, an unusually savage raid was made by the Welsh as far as Shrewsbury; they laid waste the country by fire and sword; wayfarers were horrified at the sight of naked and unburied corpses without number by the road sides, preyed on by ravenous beasts and birds; the foetor of so much corruption infected the air on all sides, so that even the dead slew the living. The chronicler’s language, “quod etiam homines sanos mortui peremerunt,” is marked by the perspicacity or correctness which distinguishes him. When the bubo-plague came to be domesticated in English soil more than a century later, the disposal of the dead became a sanitary question of obvious importance. But even in the centuries before the Black Death, and most of all in the times when the traditional practices of decent burial were interdicted by Popes or turned to mercenary purposes by clergy[25], we shall perhaps not err in looking for one, at least, of the causes of localised outbreaks of pestilence in the tainting of the soil and the air by the corruption of corpses insufficiently buried and coffined.

There still remains, before we come to famine-sickness as the common type of pestilence in medieval England, to discover from the records any evidence of pestilence due to war and invasion. The domestic history from first to last is singularly free from such calamities. The whole history of Mohammedan conquest and occupation is a history of infection following in the train of war; and in Western Europe, at least from the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII., when the medieval period (according to Hallam) closes, the sieges, battles, and campaigns are constantly associated with epidemic sickness among the people as well as among the troops. There is only one period in the history of England, that of the civil wars of the Parliament and the Royalists, in which the people had a real taste of the common continental experience. The civil wars of York and Lancaster, as we shall see, touched the common people little, and appear to have bred no epidemics.

Apart from civil war, there were invasions, by the Welsh and Scots on the western and northern marches, and by the Danes. One instance of pestilence following a Welsh raid in the thirteenth century has been given from Roger of Wendover. A single instance is recorded in the history of the Danish invasions. It has been preserved by several independent chroniclers, with some variation in details; and it appears to have been distinguished by so much notice for the reason that it illustrates the magnanimity, sanctity, and miraculous power of St Elphege, archbishop of Canterbury.

In the year 1010 (or 1011 according to some), the Danes had stormed Canterbury, burnt the fair city, massacred the inhabitants, or carried them captive to their ships at Sandwich. The archbishop Elphege was put on board a small vessel and taken (doubtless by the inland channel which was then open from the Stour to the Thames) to Greenwich, where he was imprisoned for seven months[26]. A council had assembled in London for the purpose of raising forty thousand pounds to buy off the invaders. According to the account used by Higden[27], Elphege refused to sanction the payment of a ransom of three thousand pounds for his own person: he was accordingly taken from prison, and on the 13th of the Calends of May, 1010, was stoned to death by the Danes disappointed of his ransom. Therefore a pestilence fell upon the invaders, a dolor viscerum, which destroyed them by tens and twenties so that a large number perished. The earlier narrative of William of Malmesbury[28] is diversified by the introduction of a miracle, and is otherwise more circumstantial. While the archbishop was held in durance, a deadly sickness broke out among the Danes, affecting them in troops (catervatim), and proving so rapid in its effects that death ensued before they could feel pain. The stench of their unburied bodies so infected the air as to bring a plague upon those of them who had remained well. As the survivors were thrown into a panic, “sine numero, sine modo,” Elphege appeared upon the scene, and having administered to them the consecrated bread, restored them to health and put an end to the plague.

Disregarding what is fabulous, we may take these narratives to establish the fact that a swift and fatal pestilence did break out among the Danes in Kent. It had consisted probably of the same forms of camp sickness, including dysentery (as the name dolor viscerum implies), which have occurred in later times. It is the only instance of the kind recorded in the early history.

Medieval Famine-pestilences.

The foregoing are all the instances of pestilence in early English history, unconnected with famine, that have been collected in a search through the most likely sources. The history of English epidemics, previous to the Black Death, is almost wholly a history of famine sicknesses; and the list of such famines with attendant sickness, without mentioning the years of mere scarcity, is a considerable one.

TABLE OF FAMINE-PESTILENCES IN ENGLAND.

The period covered by this long list is itself a long one; and the intervals between successive famine-pestilences are sometimes more than a generation. A history of epidemics is necessarily a morbid history. In this chapter of it, we search out the lean years, saying nothing of the fat years; and by exclusively dwelling upon the dark side we may form an entirely wrong opinion of the comforts or hardships, prosperity or adversity, of these remote times. English writers of the earliest period, when they use generalities, are loud in praise of the advantages of their own island; until we come to the fourteenth century poem of ‘The Vision of Piers the Ploughman’ we should hardly suspect, from their usual strain, that England was other than an earthly paradise, and every village an Auburn, “where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain.” There is a poem preserved in Higden’s Polychronicon by one Henricus, who is almost certainly Henry archdeacon of Huntingdon in the time of Henry I., although the poem is not included among the archdeacon’s extant verse. The subject is ‘De Praerogativis Angliae,’ and the period, be it remarked, is one of the early Norman reigns, when the heel of the conquering race is supposed to have been upon the neck of the English. Yet this poem contains the famous boast of ‘Merry England,’ and much else that is the reverse of unhappy:—

“Anglia terra ferax et fertilis angulus orbis.
Anglia plena jocis, gens libera, digna jocari;
Libera gens, cui libera mens et libera lingua;
Sed lingua melior liberiorque manus.
Anglia terrarum decus et flos finitimarum,
Est contenta sui fertilitate boni.
Externas gentes consumptis rebus egentes,
Quando fames laedit, recreat et reficit.
Commoda terra satis mirandae fertilitatis
Prosperitate viget, cum bona pacis habet[29].”

Or, to take another distich, apparently by Alfred of Beverley,

“Insula praedives, quae toto non eget orbe,
Et cujus totus indiget orbis ope.”

Or, in Higden’s own fourteenth century words, after quoting these earlier estimates: “Prae ceteris gulae dedita, in victu et vestitu multum sumptuosa[30].”

On the other hand there is a medieval proverbial saying which places England in a light strangely at variance with this native boast of fertility, plenty, and abundance overflowing to the famished peoples abroad: “Tres plagae tribus regionibus appropriari solent, Anglorum fames, Gallorum ignis, Normannorum lepra”—three afflictions proper to three countries, famine to England, St Anthony’s fire to France, leprosy to Normandy[31]. Whatever the “lepra Normannorum” may refer to, there is no doubt that St Anthony’s fire, or ergotism from the use of bread containing the grains of spurred rye, was a frequent scourge of some parts of France; and, in common repute abroad, famine seems to have been equally characteristic of England. Perhaps the explanation of England’s evil name for famines is that there were three great English famines in the medieval history, before the Black Death, separated by generations, no doubt, but yet of such magnitude and attended by so disgraceful circumstances that the rumour of them must have spread to foreign countries and made England a by-word among the nations. These were the famines of 1194-96, 1257-59, and 1315-16. Of the first we have a tolerably full account by William of Newburgh, who saw it in Yorkshire; of the second we have many particulars and generalities by Matthew Paris of St Albans, who died towards the end of it; and of the third we have an account by one of his successors as historiographer at St Albans, John Trokelowe. All other references to famine in England are meagre beside the narratives of these competent observers, although there were probably two or three famines in the Norman period equally worthy of the historian’s pen. For the comprehension of English famine-pestilences in general, we ought to take the best recorded first; but it will be on the whole more convenient to observe the chronological order, and to introduce, as occasion offers, some generalities on the types of disease which famine induced, the extent of the mortalities, and the conditions of English agriculture and food-supply which made possible occasional famines of such magnitude.

From the great plague “of Cadwallader’s time,” which corresponds in history to the foreign invasion of pestilence in 664, until nearly the end of the Anglo-Saxon rule, there is little recorded of famines and consequent epidemic sickness. It does not follow that the period was one of plenty and prosperity for the people at large. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is at no period detailed or circumstantial on the subject of famines and pestilences; and although the entries become more numerous in the last hundred years before the Chronicle came to an end in 1137, their paucity in the earlier period probably means no more than the imperfection of the record. Some of the generalities of Malthus might be applied to help the imagination over a period of history which we might otherwise be disposed to view as the Golden Age. One of these, originally written for the South Sea Islands, is applicable to all romantic pictures of “rude plenty,” such as the picture of the Anglo-Saxon household in Ivanhoe. It has been remarked of Scott as a novelist that he always feeds everyone well; but the picture, grateful to the imagination though it be, is probably an illusion. “In a state of society,” says Malthus, “where the lives of the inferior order of the people seem to be considered by their superiors as of little or no value, it is evident that we are very liable to be deceived with regard to the appearances of abundance”; and again: “We may safely pronounce that among the shepherds of the North of Europe, war and famine were the principal checks that kept the population down to the level of their scanty means of subsistence.” The history of English agriculture is known with some degree of accuracy from the thirteenth century, and it is a history of prices becoming steadier and crops more certain. It is not to be supposed that tillage was more advanced before the Conquest than after it. On the other hand the probabilities are that England had steadily emerged from a pastoral state. It would be unfair to judge of the state of rural England at any time by the state of Wales in the twelfth century, as it is described by Giraldus Cambrensis, or by the condition of Ireland as described from the same traveller’s observations. But in the absence of any concrete view of primitive England itself, the picture of the two neighbouring provinces may be introduced here.

Ireland, says Giraldus, closely following Beda, is a fertile land neglected; it had no agriculture, industries or arts; its inhabitants were rude and inhospitable, leading a purely pastoral life, and living more upon milk than upon meat. At the same time there was little sickness; the island had little need of physicians; you will hardly ever find people ill unless they be at the extremity of death; between continuous good health and final dissolution there was no middle term. The excessive number of children born blind, or deaf, or deformed, he ascribes to incestuous unions and other sexual laxities[32].

The picture of Wales is that of a not less primitive society[33]. The Welsh do not congregate in towns, or in villages, or in fortified places, but live solitary in the woods; they build no sumptuous houses of stone and lime, but only ozier booths, sufficient for the year, which they run up with little labour or cost. They have neither orchards nor gardens, and little else than pasture land. They partake of a sober meal in the evening, and if there should be little or nothing to eat at the close of day, they wait patiently until the next evening. They do not use table-cloths nor towels; they are more natural than neat (naturae magis student quam nitori). They lie down to sleep in their day clothes, all in one room, with a coarse covering drawn over them, their feet to the fire, lying close to keep each other warm, and when they are sore on one side from lying on the hard floor, they turn over to the other. There are no beggars among this nation. It is of interest, from the point of view of the “positive checks” of Malthus, to note that Giraldus more than hints at the practice of a grosser form of immorality than he had charged the Irish with. Spinning and weaving were of course not unknown, for the hard and rough blanket mentioned above was a native product. By the time that Higden wrote (about 1340), he has to record a considerable advance in the civilization of Wales. Having used the description of Giraldus, he adds: “They now acquire property, apply themselves to agriculture, and live in towns[34].” But in the reign of Henry II., it was found easy to bring the rebellious Welsh to terms by stopping the supplies of corn from England, upon which they were largely dependent[35].

Of the condition of Scotland in the twelfth century we have no such sketch as Giraldus has left for Wales and Ireland. Uncivilized compared with England, the northern part of the island must certainly have been, if we may trust the indignant references by Simeon of Durham and Henry of Huntingdon to the savage practices of the Scots who swarmed over the border, with or without their king to lead them, or the remark by William of Malmesbury concerning the Scots who went on the Crusade leaving behind them the insects of their native country.

Giraldus intended to have written an itinerary or topography of England also, but his purpose does not appear to have been fulfilled. Higden, his immediate successor in that kind of writing a century and a half later, is content, in his section on England, to reproduce the generalities of earlier authors from Pliny downwards. Of these, we have already quoted the ‘Prerogatives of England’ by Henry of Huntingdon, from which one might infer that the British Isles, under the Norman yoke, were the Islands of the Blest. On the other hand, the impression made by the details of the Domesday survey upon a historian of the soundest judgment, Hallam, is an impression of poor cultivation and scanty sustenance. “There cannot be a more striking proof,” he says, “of the low condition of English agriculture in the eleventh century than is exhibited in Domesday book. Though almost all England had been partially cultivated, and we find nearly the same manors, except in the north, which exist at present, yet the value and extent of cultivated ground are inconceivably small. With every allowance for the inaccuracies and partialities of those by whom that famous survey was completed, we are lost in amazement at the constant recurrence of two or three carucates in demesne, with folkland occupied by ten or a dozen villeins, valued all together at forty shillings, as the return of a manor which now would yield a competent income to a gentleman[36].”

Whether, the population at the Domesday survey were nearer two millions than one, the people were almost wholly on the land. Of the size of the chief towns, as the Normans found them, we may form a not incorrect estimate from the Domesday enumeration of houses held of the king or of other superiors[37]. London, Winchester and Bristol do not come at all into the survey. Besides these, the towns of the first rank are Norwich, York, Lincoln, Thetford, Colchester, Ipswich, Gloucester, Oxford, Cambridge, and Exeter.

Norwich had 1320 burgesses in the time of Edward the Confessor; in the borough were 665 English burgesses rendering custom, and 480 bordarii rendering none on account of their poverty; there were also more than one hundred French households. Lincoln had 970 inhabited houses in King Edward’s time, of which 200 were waste at the survey. Thetford had 943 burgesses before the Conquest, and at the survey 720, with 224 houses vacant. York was so desolated just before the survey that it is not easy to estimate its ordinary population; but it may be put at about 1200 houses. Gloucester had 612 burgesses. Oxford seems to have had about 800 houses; and for Cambridge we find an enumeration of the houses in nine of the ten wards of the town in King Edward’s time, the total being about 400. Colchester appears to have had some 700 houses, Ipswich 538 burgesses, with 328 houses “waste” so far as tax was concerned. Exeter had 300 king’s houses, and an uncertain number more. Next in importance come such places as Southampton, Wallingford, Northampton, Leicester, Warwick, Shrewsbury, Nottingham, Coventry, Derby, Canterbury, Yarmouth, Rochester, Dover, Sandwich (about 400 houses), and Sudbury. In a third class may be placed towns like Dorchester, Ilchester, Bridport, Wareham, Shaftesbury, Bath, Chichester, Lewes, Guildford, Hythe, Romney, Pevensey, Windsor, Bath, Chester, Worcester, Hereford, Huntingdon, Stamford, Grantham, Hertford, St Albans, Torchesey, Maldon, each with from 100 to 200 burgesses. Dover and Sandwich each supplied twenty ships, with crews of twenty-four men, for King Edward’s service during fifteen days of the year. In Hereford there were six smiths, each rendering one penny a year for his forge, and making 120 nails of the king’s iron. Many of these houses were exceedingly small, with a frontage of seven feet; the poorest class were mere sheds, built in the ditch against the town wall, as at York and Canterbury.

It would be within the mark to say that less than one-tenth of the population of England was urban in any distinctive sense of the term. After London, Norwich, York, and Lincoln, there were probably no towns with five thousand inhabitants. There were, of course, the simpler forms of industries, and there was a certain amount of commerce from the Thames, the East Coast, and the Channel ports. The fertile soil of England doubtless sustained abundance of fruit trees and produced corn to the measure of perhaps four or six times the seed. There were flocks of sheep, yielding more wool than the country used, herds of swine and of cattle. The exports of wool, hides, iron, lead, and white metal gave occasion to the importation of commodities and luxuries from Flanders, Normandy, and Gascony. If there was “rude plenty” in England, it was for a sparse population, and it was dependent upon the clemency of the skies. A bad season brought scarcity and murrain, and two bad seasons in succession brought famine and pestilence.

Of the general state of health we may form some idea from the Anglo-Saxon leechdoms, or collections of remedies, charms and divinations, supposed to date from the eleventh century[38]. The maladies to which the English people were liable in these early times correspond on the whole to the everyday diseases of our own age. There were then, as now, cancers and consumptions, scrofula or “kernels,” the gout and the stone, the falling sickness and St Vitus’ dance, apoplexies and palsies, jaundice, dropsies and fluxes, quinsies and anginas, sore eyes and putrid mouth, carbuncles, boils and wildfire, agues, rheums and coughs. Maladies peculiar to women occupy a chief place, and there is evidence that hysteria, the outcome of hardships, entered largely into the forms of sickness, as it did in the time of Sydenham. Among the curiosities of the nosology may be mentioned wrist-drop, doubtless from working in lead. One great chapter in disease, the sickness and mortality of infants and children, is almost a complete blank. It ought doubtless to have been the greatest chapter of all. The population remained small, for one reason among others, that the children would be difficult to rear. There is no direct evidence; but we may infer from analogous circumstances, that the inexpansive population meant an enormous infant mortality. The sounds which fell on the ear of Æneas as he crossed the threshold of the nether world may be taken as prophetic, like so much else in Virgil, of the experience of the Middle Ages:

“Continuo auditae voces, vagitus et ingens
Infantumque animae flentes, in limine primo:
Quos dulcis vitae exsortes, et ab ubere raptos,
Abstulit atra dies, et funere mersit acerbo.”

We come, then, to the chronology of famine-pestilences, and first in the Anglo-Saxon period. The years from 664 to 685 are occupied, as we have seen, by a great plague, probably the bubo-plague, which returned in 1348 as the Black Death, affecting, like the latter, the whole of England and Ireland on its first appearance, and afterwards particular monasteries, such as Barking and Jarrow. But it is clear that famine-sickness was also an incident of the same years. The metrical romancist of the fourteenth century, Robert of Brunne, was probably mistaken in tracing the great plague of “Cadwaladre’s time” to famine in the first instance; there is no such suggestion in the authentic history of Beda. But that historian does make a clear reference to famine in Sussex about the year 679[39]. Describing the conversion of Sussex to Christianity by Wilfrid, he says that the province had been afflicted with famine owing to three seasons of drought, that the people were dying of hunger, and that often forty or fifty together, “inedia macerati,” would proceed to the edge of the Sussex cliffs, and, joining hands, throw themselves into the sea. But on the very day when the people accepted the Christian baptism, there fell a plenteous rain, the earth flourished anew, and a glad and fruitful season ensued[40].

The anarchy in Northumbria which followed the death of Beda (in 735), with the decline of piety and learning in the northern monasteries, is said to have led to famine and plague[41]. It is not until the year 793 that an entry of famine and mortality occurs in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It is in keeping with the disappointing nature of all these early records that Simeon of Durham and Roger of Howden, the two compilers who had access to lost records, are more particular in enumerating the portents that preceded the calamity than in describing its actual circumstances. Then a whole century elapses (but for a vague entry under the year 822) until we come to the three calamitous years, with 897 as the centre, which followed Alfred’s famous resistance to the Danes. In that mortality, many of the chief thanes died, and there was a murrain of cattle, with a scarcity of food in Ireland. Two generations pass before the chronicle contains another entry of the kind: in 962 there was a great mortality, and the “great fever” was in London. At no long intervals there are two more famines, in 976 and 986. That of 986 (or 987) would appear to have been severe; the church plate at Winchester was melted for the benefit of the starving[42], and there was “a fever of men and a murrain of cattle[43].” After the expulsion of the Danes in 1005, says Henry of Huntingdon, there was such desolation of famine as no one remembered. Then in 1010 or 1011 comes the incident of St Elphege, already given. From 1036 to 1049 we find mention of four, or perhaps five, famines, those of the years 1046 and 1049 being marked by a great mortality of men and murrain of cattle.

Except in Yorkshire, the Norman Conquest had no immediate effects upon the people of England in the way of famine and pestilence. From the last great mortality of 1049, a period of nearly forty years elapses until we come to the great pestilence and sharp famine in the last year of the Conqueror’s reign (1086-7). The harrying of Yorkshire, however, is too important a local incident to be passed over in this history. Of these ruthless horrors in the autumn of 1069 we have some particulars from the pen of Simeon of Durham, who has contemporary authority. There was such hunger, he says, that men ate the flesh of their own kind, of horses, of dogs, and of cats. Others sold themselves into perpetual slavery in order that they might be able to sustain their miserable lives on any terms (like the Chinese in later times). Others setting out in exile from their country perished before their journey was ended. It was horrible to look into the houses and farmyards, or by the wayside, and see the human corpses dissolved in corruption and crawling with worms. There was no one to bury them, for all were gone, either in flight or dead by the sword and famine. The country was one wide solitude, and remained so for nine years. Between York and Durham no one dwelt, and travellers went in great fear of wild beasts and of robbers[44]. William of Malmesbury says that the city of York was so wasted by fire that an old inhabitant would not have recognized it; and that the country was still waste for sixty miles at the time of his writing (1125)[45]. In the Domesday survey we find that there were 540 houses so waste that they paid nothing, 400 houses “not inhabited,” of which the better sort pay one penny and others less, and only 50 inhabited houses paying full dues.

The same local chronicler who has left particulars of the devastation of 1069-70, has given also a picture of the siege of Durham by Malcolm Canmore in 1091, which may serve to realize for us what a medieval siege was, and what the Scots marches had to endure for intervals during several centuries:—

Malcolm advancing drives the Northumbrians before him, some into the woods and hills, others into the city of Durham; for there have they always a sure refuge. Thither they drive their whole flocks and herds and carry their furniture, so that there is hardly room within the town for so great a crowd. Malcolm arrives and invests the city. It was not easy for one to go outside, and the sheep and cattle could not be driven to pasture: the churchyard was filled with them, and the church itself was scarcely kept clear of them. Mixed with the cattle, a crowd of women and children surrounded the church, so that the voices of the choristers were drowned by the clamour. The heat of summer adds to the miseries of famine. Every-where throughout the town were the sounds of grief, ‘et plurima mortis imago,’ as in the sack of Troy. The siege is raised by the miraculous intervention of St Cuthbert[46].

The wasting of Yorkshire by William and the five incursions of the Scots into Northumberland and Durham in the reign of Malcolm Canmore had the effect of reducing a large part of the soil of England to a comparatively unproductive state. The effacement of farms (and churches) in Hampshire, for the planting of the New Forest, had the same effect in a minor degree. The rigorous enforcement of the forest laws in the interests of the Norman nobles must have served also to remove one considerable source of the means of subsistence from the people. Whether these things, together with the general oppression of the poor, contributed much or little to what followed, it is the fact that the long period from the last two years of William to the welcomed advent of Henry II. to the throne in 1154, is filled with a record of famines, pestilences, and other national misfortunes such as no other period of English history shows.

The first general famine and pestilence under Norman rule was in the years 1086 and 1087, the last of the Conqueror’s reign. It is probable from the entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that the aggravation (for which we must always look in order to explain a historical famine and pestilence) was due to two bad harvests in succession. The year 1086 was “heavy, toilsome and sorrowful,” through failure of the corn and fruit crops owing to an inclement season, and through murrain of cattle[47]. Some form of sickness appears to have been prevalent between that harvest and the next. Almost every other man, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, was stricken with fever, and that so sharply that many died of it. “Alas! how miserable and how rueful a time was then! when the wretched men lay driven almost to death, and afterwards came the sharp famine and destroyed them quite.” It is probably a careless gloss upon that, by a historian of the next generation[48], when he says that “a promiscuous fever destroyed more than half the people,” and that famine, coming after, destroyed those whom the fever had spared[49]. But there can be no question that this was one of those great periodic conjunctions of famine and fever (λιμὸν ὁμοῦ καὶ λοιμόν), of which we shall find fuller details in the chronicles of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is easy to understand that England, with all her wealth of fruits and corn in a good season, had no reserve for the poor at least, and sometimes not even for the rich, to get through two or more bad seasons with. How much the corn crop in those days depended on the season is clear from the entry in the chronicle two years after (1089), that reaping was still in progress at Martinmas (11 November) and even later. Fields cultivated to yield an average of only four or six times the seed were, of course, more at the mercy of the seasons than the highly cultivated corn-land of our own time.

The next famine with pestilence in England, seven years later, or in the seventh year of William Rufus, introduces us to a new set of considerations. It was the time when the exactions of tribute for the king’s wars in Normandy, or for the satisfaction of his greed and that of his court, were severely felt both by the church and the people. England, says one[50], was suffocated and unable to breathe. Both clergy and laity, says another[51], were in such misery that they were weary of life. But the most remarkable phraseology is that of William of Malmesbury, the chief historian of the period, who seldom descends from the region of high political and ecclesiastical affairs to take notice of such things as famine and pestilence. In the 7th year of Rufus, he says, “agriculture failed” on account of the tributes which the king had decreed from his position in Normandy. The fields running to waste, a famine followed, and that in turn was succeeded by a mortality so general that the dying were left untended and the dead unburied[52]. The phrase about the lack of cultivation is a significant and not incredible statement, which places the England of Rufus in the same light as certain belated feudal parts of India within recent memory.

In the villages of Gujerat, when the festival comes round early in May, the chief of a village collects the cultivators and tells them that it is time for them to commence work. They say: “No! the assessment was too heavy last year, you lay too many taxes upon us.” However, after much higgling, and presents made to the more important men, a day is fixed for cultivation to begin, and the clearing and manuring of the fields proceeds as before[53]. But while Gujerat was still possessed by hundreds of petty feudal chiefs under the Mahratta rule, previous to the establishment of the British Agency in 1821, the exactions of tribute by the Baroda government were so extreme, and enforced by so violent means[54], that cultivation was almost neglected; the towns and villages swarmed with idlers, who subsisted upon milk and ghee from their cows, while indolence and inactivity affected the whole community[55]. A dreadful famine had “raged with destructive fury” over Gujerat and Kattiwar for more than one year about 1812-13-14, which was followed, not by a contagious fever, but by the true bubo-plague.

If the English historian’s language, “agricultura defecit,” with reference to the tribute exacted by Rufus, have that fitness which we have reason to expect from him,—Higden varies it to “ita ut agricultura cessaret et fames succederet,”—then the famine and mortality about the years 1094-5 were due to no less remarkable a cause than a refusal to cultivate the land. It is not to be supposed that the incubus of excessive tribute passed away with the accession of Henry I. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle repeats the complaint of heavy taxation in connexion with bad harvests and murrains in 1103, 1105 and 1110[56]. Severe winters, or autumn floods, with murrains and scarcity, are recorded also for the years 1111, 1115, 1116, 1117, 1124 and 1125, the famine of 1125 having been attended with a mortality, and having been sufficiently great and general to be mentioned by several chroniclers[57]. In the midst of these years of scarcity and its effects upon the population, there occurs one singular entry of another kind in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, under the year 1112: “This was a very good year, and very abundant in wood and in field; but it was a very sad and sorrowful one, through a most destructive pestilence[58].” Under the year 1130, the annalist of the Welsh monastery of Margan, who is specially attentive to domestic events, records a murrain of cattle all over England, which lasted several years so that scarcely one township escaped the pest, the pigsties becoming suddenly empty, and whole meadows swept of their cattle. It is to the same murrain that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle refers under the year 1131: in towns where there had been ten or twelve ploughs going there was not one left, and the man who had 200 or 300 swine had not one left; after that died the domestic fowls.

These things happened from time to time in the comparatively prosperous reign of Henry I. But with the death of Henry in 1135, there began a state of misery and lawlessness lasting almost to the accession of Henry II. in 1154, beside which the former state of England was spoken of as “most flourishing[59].” Besides the barbarities of the Scots and the Welsh on the northern and western marches[60], there were the civil wars of the factions of King Stephen and the Empress Maud, and the cruelties and predations of the unruly nobles under the walls of a thousand newly-built strongholds. A graphic account of the condition of England remains to us from the pen of an eyewitness, the observant author of the Gesta Stephani[61]. Under the year 1143 he writes that there was most dire famine in all England; the people ate the flesh of dogs and horses or the raw garbage of herbs and roots. The people in crowds pined and died, or another part entered on a sorrowful exile with their whole families. One might see houses of great name standing nearly empty, the residents of either sex and of every age being dead. As autumn drew near and the fields whitened for the harvest, there was no one to reap them, for the cultivators were cut off by the pestilent hunger which had come between. To these home troubles was added the presence of a multitude of barbarous adventurers, without bowels of pity and compassion, who had flocked to the country for military service. The occasion was one of those which cause the archdeacon of Huntingdon to break out into his elegiac verse:

“Ecce Stygis facies, consimilisque lues[62].”

“And in those days,” says another, “there was no king in Israel[63].” The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which comes to an end in this scene of universal gloom, describes how one might go a day’s journey and never find a man sitting in a town, or the land tilled, and how men who once were rich had to go begging their bread, concluding with the words, “And they said openly that Christ and His saints slept.”

Among the penances of Henry II. after the murder of Becket, there is recorded his charity in feeding during a dearth ten thousand persons daily from the first of April, 1171, until the harvest[64]. But, apart from a reference to a flux among the troops in Ireland in 1172, from errors of diet[65], the long reign of Henry II. is marked by only one record of general pestilence. It is recorded by the best contemporary writer, Benedict of Peterborough, and it is the first instance in which the number of burials in a day (perhaps at Peterborough) is given. In the year 1175, he says, there was in England and the adjacent regions a pestilential mortality of men, such that on many days seven or eight corpses were carried out to be buried. And immediately upon that pestilential mortality there followed a dire famine[66]. It is to be observed that the famine is explicitly stated to have come after the pestilence, just as in the great mortality of 1087; and, as in the latter case, it may be that a hard winter, with scarcity of food, brought a general sickness, and that the scarcity had been raised to famine point by a second bad harvest. The entry in the chronicle of Melrose for 1173 may refer to Scotland only: a bad kind of cough, unheard of before, affected almost everyone far and wide, whereof, “or from which pest,” many died. This is perhaps the only special reference to “tussis” as epidemic until the influenzas of the seventeenth century.

The comparative freedom of the long reign of Henry II. from famines and national distress probably arose as much from good government as from the clemency of the seasons. The country was growing rich by foreign trade. In 1190 the two leading Jews of York, Joyce and Benedict, were occupying residences in the heart of the town like royal palaces in size and in the sumptuousness of their furniture. The same historian, William of Newburgh, who records the king’s protection of these envied capitalists, mentions also his protection of “the poor, the widows and the orphans,” and his liberal charities. That the king’s protection of his poorer subjects was not unneeded, would be obvious if we could trust the extraordinary account of the keen traders of London which is put by Richard of Devizes into the mouth of a hostile witness[67]. The peoples of all nations, it appears, flocked to London, each nationality contributing to the morals of the capital its proper vices and manners. There was no righteous person in London, no, not one; there were more thieves in London than in all France[68]. In the entirely different account, of the same date, by an enthusiastic Londoner, the monk Fitz-Stephen, the only “plagues” of London are said to be “the immoderate drinking of fools and the frequency of fires.” The city and suburbs had one hundred and twenty-six small parish churches, besides thirteen greater conventual churches; and it was a model to all the world for religious observances. “Nearly all the bishops, abbots, and magnates of England are, as it were, citizens and freemen of London; having there their own splendid houses, to which they resort, where they spend largely when summoned to great councils by the king or by their metropolitan, or drawn thither by their own private affairs[69].” The archdeacon of London, of the same date, Peter of Blois, in a letter to the pope, Innocent III., concerning the extent of his duties and the smallness of his stipend, gives the parish churches in the city at one hundred and twenty, and the population at forty thousand[70]. The Germans who came in the train of Richard I. on his return to England in 1194, after his release from the hands of the emperor, were amazed at the display of wealth and finery which the Londoners made to welcome back the king; if the emperor had known the riches of England, they said, he would have demanded a heavier ransom[71]. The ransom, all the same, required a second, or even a third levy before it was raised, owing, it was said, to peculation; and the ecclesiastics, who held a large part of the soil, appear to have had so little in hand to pay their share that they had to pledge the gold and silver vessels of the altar[72].

The year of Richard’s accession, 1189, is given by the annalist of the Welsh monastery of Margan, as a year of severe famine and of a mortality of men. Probably it was a local famine, and it may well have been the same in which Giraldus Cambrensis says that he himself saw crowds of poor people coming day after day to the gates of the monastery of Margan, so that the brethren took counsel and sent a ship to Bristol for corn[73]. The great and general famine with pestilence in Richard’s time was in the years 1193, 1194, 1195, 1196 and 1197, and it appears to have been felt in France, in the basin of the Danube, and over all Europe, as well as in England. Of the pestilence which came with it in England we have an exceptionally full account from the pen of William of Newburgh. The monastery in which William wrote his history was situated among woods by the side of a stream under the Hambledon hills in Yorkshire, on the road between York and the mouth of the Tees; so that when he says of this famine and pestilence, “we speak what we do know, and testify what we have seen,” he may be taken as recording the experience of a sufficiently typical region of rural England.

His narrative of the pestilence[74] is given under the year 1196, which was the fourth year of the scarcity or famine: After the crowds of poor had been dying on all sides of want, a most savage plague ensued, as if from air corrupted by dead bodies of the poor. This pestilence showed but little respect even for those who had abundance of food; and as to those who were in want, it put an end to their long agony of hunger. The disease crept about everywhere, always of one type, namely that of an acute fever. Day after day it seized so many, and finished so many more, so that there were scarcely to be found any to give heed to the sick or to bury the dead. The usual rites of burial were omitted, except in the case of some nobler or richer person; at whatever hour anyone died the body was forthwith committed to the earth, and in many places great trenches were made if the number of corpses was too great to afford time for burying them one by one. And as so many were dying every day, even those who were in health fell into low spirits, and went about with pale faces, themselves the living picture of death. In the monasteries alone was this pestilence comparatively unfelt. After it had raged on all sides for five or six months, it subsided when the winter cold came.

Those lean years were doubtless followed by seven fat years; for it is not until 1203, the fourth year of John, that we again meet with the records of famine and pestilence. From various monasteries, from Waverley in Sussex, Tewkesbury in Gloucester and Margan in Glamorgan, we have the same testimony—“fames magna et mortalitas,” “fames valida, et saeva mortalitas multitudinem pauperum extinguit,” “maxima fames.” The monks of Waverley had to leave their own house and disperse themselves through various monasteries. Two years after, 1205, there came so hard a season that the winter-sown seed was almost killed by frost. The Thames was crossed on the ice, and there was no ploughing for many weeks. An Essex annalist says there was a famine, and quotes the famine prices: a quarter of wheat was sold for a pound in many parts of England, although in Henry II.’s time it was often as low as twelve pence; a quarter of beans ten shillings; a quarter of oats forty pence, which used to be four pence[75]. The annalist at Margan enters also the year 1210 as a sickly one throughout England[76].

We are now come to the period when we can read the succession of these events in the domestic life of the people from the more trustworthy records of the St Albans school of historians. Of the scarcity and sickness among the poor in 1234 we have some suggestive particulars by Roger of Wendover[77], and for the series of famines and epidemics from 1257 to 1259 we have a comparatively full account by his famous successor in the office of historiographer to the abbey, Matthew Paris[78]. The next St Albans scriptorius, Rishanger[79], notes the kind of harvest every year from 1259 to 1305, and for only one of those years after the scarcity of 1259 was past, namely the year 1294, does he speak of the people dying of hunger. His successor, John Trokelowe[80], carries on the annals to 1323, and gives us some particulars, not without diagnostic value, of the great famine-sickness of 1315-16, and of the succession of dear years of which the epidemic was an incident. It is on these contemporary accounts by the St Albans school, together with the record for the year 1196 by William of Newburgh, that our knowledge of the famine-pestilences of England must be based.

With the harvest of 1259 begins the tabulation of agricultural prices from farm-bailiffs’ accounts, by Professor Thorold Rogers, a work of vast labour in which the economic history of the English people is written in indubitable characters, and by means of which we are enabled to check the more general and often rhetorical statements of the contemporary historians.

Although the history of the last year or two of John and of the earlier years of Henry III. is full of turbulence and rapine, yet we hear of no general distress among the cultivators of the soil. The contemporary authority, Roger of Wendover, has no entry of the kind until 1234, excepting a single note under the year 1222, that wheat rose to twelve shillings the quarter. We hear of king John and his following as plundering the rich churchmen and laymen all the way from St Albans to Nottingham, of William Longspée, earl of Salisbury, carrying on the same practices in the counties of Essex, Middlesex, Hertford, Cambridge and Huntingdon, of the spoliation of the Isle of Ely, and of the occupation of towns and villages in Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk by Louis, Dauphin of France, the king-elect, or broken reed, on whom the Barons of Magna Charta thought for a time to lean[81]. But the whole of that period, and of the years following until 1234, is absolutely free from any record of wide-spread distress among the lower class. We are reminded of the observation by Philip de Comines, with the civil wars of York and Lancaster in his mind, a saying which is doubtless true of all the struggles in England for the settlement of the respective claims of king and aristocracy: “England has this peculiar grace,” says the French statesman, “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.” That cannot apply of course to the barbarous incursions of the Scots and the Welsh; for the northern marches were often reduced to desolation during a period of three hundred years after the Conquest and were never more desolate than in the reign of Richard II.; while the marches of Wales were subject to not less ruthless spoliations until the concessions to the Welsh by Edward I. Nor is the immunity of the peasantry from the troubles of civil war to be taken as absolute; for we find under the year 1264, when Simon de Montfort was in the field against the king, an explicit statement that the small peasantry were plundered even to the poor furniture of their cottages. But on the whole we may take it that the paralysing effect of civil war seldom reached to the English lower classes in the medieval period, that the tenour of their lives was seldom disturbed except by famine or plague, and that kings and nobles were left to fight it out among themselves.

We become aware, however, from the time of the Great Charter, and during the steady growth of the country’s prosperity, of a widening chasm between the rich and the poor within the ranks of the commons themselves, and that too, not only in the centres of trade (as we shall see), but also in country districts. The claims of feudal service did not prevent some among the villagers from adding house to house, and field to field, thereby marking in every parish the interval between the thriving and comfortable and a residuum of pauperes composed of the less capable or the less fortunate. A curious story, told by Roger of Wendover of the village of Abbotsley near St Neots, will serve as an illustration of a fact which we might be otherwise well assured of from first principles[82].

The year 1234 was the third of a succession of lean years. So sharp was the famine before the harvest of that year, that crowds of the poor went to the fields in the month of July, and plucked the unripe ears of corn, rubbing them in their hands and eating the raw grain. The St Albans monk is full of indignation against the prevailing spirit of avarice which reduced some of the people to that sad necessity: Alms had everywhere gone out of fashion; the rich, abounding in all manner of temporal goods, were so smitten with blind greed that they suffered Christian men, made in the image of God, to die for want of food. Some, indeed, were so impious as to say that their wealth was due to their own industry, and not to the gift of God. Of that mind seem to have been the more prosperous cultivators of the village of Abbotsley “who looked on the needy with an eye of suspicion[83].”

The following story is told of them. Seeing the poor making free with their corn in the ear, they assembled in the parish church on a Sunday in August, and assailed the parson with their clamours, demanding that he would forthwith pronounce the ban of the Church upon those who helped themselves to the ears of corn. The parson, notwithstanding a well-known precedent in the Gospels, was about to yield to their insistence, when a man of religion and piety rose in the congregation and adjured the priest, in the name of God and all His saints, to refrain from the sentence, adding that those who were in need were welcome to help themselves to his own corn. The others, however, insisted, and the parson was just beginning to ban the pilferers, when a thunderstorm suddenly burst, with hail and torrents of rain. When the storm had passed, the peasants went out to find their crops destroyed,—all but that one simple and just man who found his corn untouched.

We have only to recall the minute subdivisions of the common field, or fields, of the parish into half-acre strips separated by balks of turf, and the fact that no two half-acres of the same cultivator lay together, to realize how nice must have been the discrimination[84].

But the moral of the story is obvious. It is an appeal to the teaching and the sanction of the Gospels, against the rooted belief of the natural man that he owes what he has to his own industry and thrift, and that it is no business of his to part with his goods for the sustenance of a helpless and improvident class.

The spirit of avarice, according to Wendover, permeated all classes at this period, from high ecclesiastics downwards. Walter, archbishop of York, had his granaries full of corn during the scarcity, some of it five years old. When the peasants on his manors asked to be supplied from these stores in the summer of 1234, the archbishop instructed his bailiffs to give out the old corn on condition of getting new for it when the harvest was over. It need not be told at length how the archbishop’s barns at Ripon were found on examination to be infested with vermin, how the corn had turned mouldy and rotten, and how the whole of it had to be destroyed by fire[85]. Of the same import are the raids upon the barns of the alien or Italian clergy in 1228, in the diocese of Winchester and elsewhere, and the ostentatious distribution by the raiders of doles to the poor[86].

The somewhat parallel course of public morality in the centres of trade, or, as Wendover would call it, the prevalence of avarice, demands a brief notice for our purpose.

In every state of society, there will of course be rich and poor. But a class of pauperes seems to emerge more distinctly in the life of England from about the beginning of the thirteenth century. The period corresponds to the appearance on the scene of St Francis and his friars. Doubtless St Francis was inspired by a true sense of what the time needed, even if it be open to contend that his ministrations of charity brought out, consolidated, and kept alive a helpless class who would have been less heard of if they had been left to the tender mercies of economic principles. The mission of the friars was not merely to the poor; it was also to the rich, whether of the church or of the world, “to soften the hardness of their hearts by the oil of preaching[87].” It was one of these interpositions, ever needed and never wanting, to reduce the inequalities of the human lot, not by preaching down-right theoretical communism, but, more by force of rhetoric than of logic, to extort from the strong some concessions to the weak, to mitigate the severity of the struggle for existence, and to bring the respectable vices of greed and sharp practice to the bar of conscience.

As early as 1196 there is the significant incident, in the city of London, of the rising of the poorer class and the middling class, headed by Fitzosbert Longbeard, himself one of the privileged citizens, against an assessment in which the class represented by the mayor and aldermen were alleged to have been very tender of their own interests[88]. Longbeard was hailed as “the friend of the poor,” and, having lost his life in their cause (whether in the street before Bow Church, or on a gallows at Tyburn, or at the Smithfield elms, the narratives are not agreed), he is celebrated by the sympathetic Matthew Paris as “the martyr of the poor[89].” That historian continues, after the manner of his predecessor Wendover, to speak of Londoners as on the one hand the “mediocres, populares et plebei,” and on the other hand the “divites.” In 1258 the latter class overreached themselves: they were caught in actual vulgar peculation of money raised by assessment for repairing the city walls; some of them were thrown into prison and only escaped death through the royal clemency at the instance of the notorious pluralist John Mansel, and on making restitution of their plunder; but one of them, the mayor, never recovered the blow to his respectability, and died soon after of grief[90]. Whether it meant a wide-spread spirit of petty fraud, or some unadjusted change in value, the young king in 1228, during a journey from York to London, took occasion along his route to destroy the “false measures” of corn, ale and wine, to substitute more ample measures, and to increase the weight of the loaf.

The scarcity or famine of 1234, to which the Abbotsley incident belongs, was accompanied, says the St Albans annalist, by a mortality which raged cruelly everywhere. On the other hand the annalist of Tewkesbury may be credited when he says that, although the year was one of scarcity, corn being at eight shillings, yet “by the grace of God the poor were better sustained than in other years[91].”

There was an epidemic in 1247, but it is not clear whether it was due to famine. Although Higden, quoting from some unknown record, says that there was dearth in England in that year, wheat being at twelve shillings the quarter, yet he does not mention sickness at all; and Matthew Paris, who was then living, is explicit that the harvest of 1247 was an abundant one, and that the mortality did not begin until September of that year. There does appear, however, to have been a sharp famine in Wales; and it is recorded that the bishop of Norwich, “about the year 1245,” in a time of great dearth, sold all his plate and distributed it to the poor[92]. All that we know of this epidemic is the statement of Matthew Paris, that it began in September and lasted for three months; and that as many as nine or ten bodies were buried in one day in the single churchyard of St Peter’s at Saint Albans[93].

Matthew Paris notes the quality of the harvest and the prices of grain every year, and his successor Rishanger continues the practice. The prices noted appear, from comparison with those tabulated by Thorold Rogers from actual accounts, to have been the lowest market rates of the year. The harvest of 1248 was plentiful, and wheat sold at two shillings and sixpence a quarter. In 1249 and 1250 it was at two shillings, oats being at one shilling. But those years of exceptional abundance were followed at no long interval by a series of years of scarcity or famine, which brought pestilential sickness of the severest kind.

The scarcity or famine in the years 1256-59 was all the more acutely felt owing to the dearth of money in the country. The burden of the history of Matthew Paris before he comes to the famine is that England had been emptied of treasure by the exactions of king and pope. Henry III. was under some not quite intelligible obligation of money to his brother, the earl of Cornwall. The English earl was a candidate for the Imperial crown, and had got so far towards the dignity of emperor as to have been made king of the Germans. It was English money that went to pay his German troops, and to further his cause with the electoral princes; but the circulating coin of England does not appear to have sufficed for these and domestic purposes also. The harvest of 1256 had been spoiled by wet, and the weather of the spring of 1257 was wretched in the extreme. All England was in a state of marsh and mud, and the roads were impassable. Many sowed their fields over again; but the autumn proved as wet as the rest of the year. “Whatever had been sown in winter, whatever had germinated in spring, whatever the summer had brought forward—all was drowned in the floods of autumn.” The want of coins in circulation caused unheard-of poverty. At the end of the year the fields lay untilled, and a multitude of people were dead of famine. At Christmas wheat rose to ten shillings a quarter. But the year 1257 appears to have had “lethal fevers” before the loss of the harvest of that year could be felt. Not to mention other places, says the St Albans historian, there was at St Edmundsbury in the dog-days so great a mortality that more than two thousand bodies were buried in its spacious cemetery[94].

The full effects of the famine were not felt until the spring of 1258. So great was the pinch in London from the failure of the crops and the want of money that fifteen thousand[95] are said to have died of famine, and of a grievous and wide-spread pestilence that broke out about the feast of the Trinity (19 May).

The earl of Cornwall (and king of Germany) who had relieved the country of a great part of its circulating coin, took the opportunity to buy up corn in Germany and Holland for the supply of the London market. Fifty great ships, says Matthew Paris, arrived in the Thames laden with wheat, barley, and other grain. Not three English counties had produced as much as was imported. The corn was for such as could buy it; but the king interposed with an edict that, whereas greed was to be discouraged, no one was to buy the foreign corn in order to store it up and trade in it. Those who had no money, we are expressly told, died of hunger, even after the arrival of the ships; and even men of good position went about with faces pinched by hunger, and passed sleepless nights sighing for bread. No one had seen such famine and misery, although many would have remembered corn at higher prices. The price quoted about this stage of the narrative, although not with special reference to the foreign wheat, is nine shillings the quarter. Elsewhere the price is said to have mounted up to fifteen shillings, which may have been the rate before the foreign supply came in. But such was the scarceness of money, we are told, that if the price of the quarter of wheat had been less, there would hardly have been found anyone to buy it. Even those who were wont to succour the miserable were now reduced to perish along with them. It is difficult to believe that the historian has not given way to the temptations of rhetoric, and it is pleasing to be able to give the following complement to his picture. After some 15,000 had died in London, mostly of the poorer sort, one might hear a crier making proclamation to the starving multitude to go to a distribution of bread by this or that nobleman, at such and such a place, mentioning the name of the benefactor and the place of dole.

In other passages, which may be taken as picturing the state of matters in the country, the historian says that the bodies of the starved were found swollen and livid, lying five or six together in pig-sties, or on dungheaps, or in the mud of farmyards. The dying were refused shelter and succour for fear of contagion, and scarcely anyone would go near the dead to bury them. Where many corpses were found together, they were buried in capacious trenches in the churchyards.

We come now to the harvest of 1258. After a bleak and late spring the crops had come forward well under excessive heat in summer, and the harvest was an unusually abundant, although a late one. Rains set in before the corn could be cut, and at the feast of All Saints (1 November) the heavy crops had rotted until the fields were like so many dungheaps. Only in some places was any attempt made to carry the harvest home, and then it was so spoiled as to be hardly worth the trouble. Even the mouldy grain sold as high as sixteen shillings a quarter. The famishing people resorted to various shifts, selling their cattle and reducing their households. How the country got through the winter, we are not told. Matthew Paris himself died early in 1259, and the annalist who added a few pages to the Chronica Majora after his death, merely mentions that the corn, the oil and the wine turned corrupt, and that as the sun entered Cancer a pestilence and mortality of men began unexpectedly, in which many died. Among others Fulk, the bishop of London, died of pestilence in the spring of 1259; and, to say nothing of many other places, at Paris —— thousand (the number is left blank) were buried.

The vagueness of the last statement reminds us that we are now deprived of the comparatively safe guidance of Matthew Paris. His successor in the office of annalist at St Albans, Rishanger, is much less trustworthy. He sums up the year 1259 in a paragraph which repeats exactly the facts of the notorious year 1258, and probably applies to that alone; for the year 1260 his summary is that it was more severe, more cruel and more terrible to all living things than the year before, the pestilence and famine being intolerable. There is, however, no confirmation of that in the authentic prices of the year collected by Thorold Rogers. Parcels of wheat of the harvest of 1259 were sold at about five and six shillings, and of the harvest of 1260 at from three shillings and sixpence to six shillings. For a number of years, corresponding to the Barons’ war and the war in Wales, the price is moderate or low, the figures of extant bailiffs’ accounts agreeing on the whole with Rishanger’s summary statements about the respective harvests[96]. The years from 1271 to 1273 were dear years, and for the first of the series we find a doubtful record by the Yorkshire continuator of William of Newburgh that there was “a great famine and pestilence in England and Ireland[97].” The harvest of 1288 was so abundant that the price of wheat in the bailiffs’ accounts is mostly about two shillings, ranging from sixteen pence to four and eightpence. Rishanger’s prices for the year are sufficiently near the mark: in some places wheat sold at twenty pence the quarter, in others at sixteen pence, and in others at twelve pence. From that extremely low point, a rise begins which culminates in 1294. The chronicler’s statement for 1289, that in London the bushel of wheat rose from threepence to two shillings, is not borne out by the bailiffs’ accounts, which show a range of from two shillings and eightpence to six shillings the quarter. But these accounts confirm the statement that the years following were dear years, and that 1294 was a year of famine prices, wheat having touched fourteen shillings at Cambridge, in July. Rishanger’s two notes are that the poor perished of hunger, and that the poor died of hunger on all sides, afflicted with a looseness (lienteria)[98]. The two years following are also given as hard for the poor, but not as years of famine or sickness; the country was at the same time heavily taxed for the expenses of the war which Edward I. was waging against the Scots. Ordinary prosperity attends the cultivators of the soil until the end of Rishanger’s chronicle in 1305; and from the beginning of Trokelowe’s in 1307, the year of Edward II.’s accession, there is nothing for our purpose until we come to the great famine of 1315[99].

It is clear, however, that prices were high in every year from 1309 until that famine, with the single exception of the harvest of 1311. At the meeting of Parliament in London before Easter in 1315, the dearth was a subject of deliberation, and a King’s writ was issued attempting to fix the prices at which fat oxen, cows, sheep, pigs, geese, fowls, capons, chickens, pigeons and eggs should be sold on demand, subject to confiscation if the sale were refused. The statute was ineffective (it was repealed the year after), and provisions became dearer than ever. The quarter of wheat, beans and peas sold for twenty shillings, of oats for ten shillings, and of salt for thirty-five. When the king stopped at St Albans at the feast of St Lawrence, says Trokelowe, it was hardly possible to buy bread for the use of his household. The scarcity was most felt from the month of May until the harvest. With the new crop, ruined as it was by rains and floods, the scarcity lessened somewhat, but not before many had felt the pinch of hunger, and others were seen (as the St Albans annalist says he saw them) lying squalid and dead in the villages and by the road-sides. At Midsummer, 1316, wheat rose to thirty shillings, and after that as high as forty shillings (the highest price found by Thorold Rogers is twenty-six shillings and eightpence at Leatherhead in July). The various forms of famine-sickness are mentioned:—dysentery from corrupt food, affecting nearly everyone, an acute fever which killed many, or a putrid sore throat (pestis gutturuosa). To show the extremities to which England was reduced, Trokelowe specially inserts the following: Ordinary flesh was not to be had, but horse-flesh was eaten, fat dogs were stolen to eat, and it was rumoured abroad that in many places both men and women secretly ate the flesh of their own children, or of the children of others. But the detail which Trokelowe justly thinks posterity will be most horrified to read, is that prisoners in gaols set upon the thieves newly brought in and devoured them alive.

It is probably the same famine and pestilence that we find worked into the metrical romance of Robert of Brunne (1338), under the guise of the plague ‘in Cadwaladre’s time,’ that is, the pestilence recorded by Beda for the year 664. The Lincolnshire romancist must have seen the famine and pestilence of 1315-16, for he was then in the prime of life, and probably he transferred his own experiences of famine and pestilence to the remote episode of the seventh century, to which he devotes thirty-eight lines of his romance. In Cadwaladre’s time the corn fails and there is great hunger. A man may go for three days before he can buy any food in burgh, or in city, or in upland; he may indeed catch wild creatures, or fishes, or gather leaves and roots. Worse still, a plague comes, from rotten air and wicked winds, so that hale men fall down suddenly and die; gentle and bondmen all go, hardly any are left to till the land, the living cannot bury the dead, those who try fall dead in the grave. Men leave house and land, and few are left in the country. Eleven years does Britain lie waste with but few folk to till the land[100].

After the famine of 1315-16, the third and last of the great and, one may say, disgraceful famines which gave rise to the by-word “Anglorum fames,” prices continued at their ordinary level for several years. But from 1320 to 1323 they again came to a height. To that period probably belongs a mortality which is entered, in a chronicle of the next century[101], under the year 1325. On the contemporary authority of Higden we know that, in 1322, the king went to Scotland about the feast of St Peter ad Vincula, “and though he met not with resistance, lost many of his own by famine and disease.” After that period of scarcity comes a long succession of cheap years, covering the interval to the next great event in the annals of pestilence that concerns us, the arrival of the Black Death in the autumn of 1348. With that great event the history of English epidemics enters upon a new chapter. There were, of course, years of dearth and scarcity in the centuries following, but there were no great famine-pestilences like those of 1196, 1258 and 1315.

The period of the great famines ought not to be left without another reference to the widening gulf between the rich and the poor, and the keenness of traders which led them sometimes to incur the restraints of government and the punishments of justice.

On 26 March, 1269, was issued one of those ordinances against forestalling, of which many more followed for several centuries: no citizen to go outside the city of London, either by road or river, to meet victuals coming to market. In the 7th year of Edward I., clipping or debasing the coinage was carried on so systematically that nearly three hundred persons, mostly of the Hebrew race, were drawn and hanged for it. In the 11th year of Edward I. (1283) a statute had been directed against cheating by bakers and millers. Meanwhile the nobility retaliated by plundering the traders and merchants at Boston fair, and the king settled the account with these marauding nobles by hanging them. A statute of 1316, the second year of the famine, to fix the price of ale, has an interest on account of its motive—“ne frumentum ulterius per potum consumeretur.” The proportion of the corn of the country turned into malt, or the amount diverted from bread to beer, may be guessed from the fact that in London, for which the beer ordinance was first made, there were in 1309, brewhouses to the number of 1334, and taverns to the number of 354[102]. In the very year of great famine, 1316, an ordinance was issued (in French, dated from King’s Langley) against extravagant housekeeping[103]. In the year of great scarcity and mortality, 1322, there was such a crowd for a funeral dole at Blackfriars (for the soul of Henry Fingret) that fifty-five persons, children and adults, were crushed to death in the scramble[104]. At the same time the prior of Christ Church, Canterbury, was sitting down to dinners of seventeen dishes, the cellarer had thirty-eight servants under him, the chamberlain and sacrist had large numbers of people employed as tailors, furriers, launderers and the like, and the servants and equipages of the one hundred and forty brethren were numerous and splendid[105]. The monasteries, on which the relief of the poor mostly depended, have been thus characterized:

“From the end of the twelfth century until the Reformation,” says Bishop Stubbs, “from the days of Hubert Walter to those of Wolsey, the monasteries remained magnificent hostelries: their churches were splendid chapels for noble patrons; their inhabitants were bachelor country gentlemen, more polished and charitable, but little more learned or more pure in life than their lay neighbours; their estates were well managed, and enjoyed great advantages and exemptions; they were, in fact, an element of peace in a nation that delighted in war. But, with a few noble exceptions, there was nothing in the system that did spiritual service[106].”

There is little to be said, at this period, of the profession most directly concerned with sickness, epidemic or other, namely the medical. We become aware of its existence on rare occasions: as in the account of the death of William the Conqueror at Rouen on 9 September, 1087, of the illness and death of Hubert, archbishop of Canterbury, on 13 July, 1205, at one of his manors on a journey to Rochester[107], or in the reference by William of Newburgh, to the noted Jewish physician of King’s Lynn, whose honourable repute among the citizens for skill and modesty did not save him from the murderous fanaticism against his race in 1190[108], or in occasional letters of the time[109]. There were doubtless benevolent men among the practitioners of medicine, then as now; but the profession has never been one in which individuals could rise conspicuously above the level of their age, and the moral standard of those centuries was a poor one. It is not surprising, then, that John of Salisbury, indulging a taste for epigram, should have characterized the profession of medicine in the twelfth century as follows: “They have only two maxims which they never violate, ‘Never mind the poor; never refuse money from the rich’[110].”

The one English physician whose writings have come down to us from the period that we are still engaged with, is John of Gaddesden. There is every reason to think that he was practising at the time of the famine and pestilence of 1315-16; but it is not from his bulky treatise on medicine that we learn the nosological types of the epidemic maladies of those years. Some account of his Rosa Anglica will be found in the chapter on Smallpox; it must suffice to say here that he was a verbalist compiler from other books, themselves not altogether original, and that, according to Dr Freind, he displays no great knowledge of his profession.

It is nothing strange, therefore, that Gaddesden throws no light upon the famine-pestilences of England, such as those of 1315-16, which he lived through. Dysentery and lientery, he treats of almost in the very words of Gilbertus Anglicus; but those maladies might have been among the dwellers in another planet, so far as native experience comes in. He reproduces whole chapters from his predecessors, on synochus and synocha, without a hint that England ever witnessed such scenes of hunger-typhus as the St Albans chroniclers have recorded for us from their own observation. The reference by Trokelowe to the prevalence of pestis gutturuosa in 1316, is one that a medical writer of the time might well have amplified; but Gaddesden missed the opportunity of perhaps anticipating Fothergill’s description of putrid sore-throat by more than four hundred years.

Epidemics of St Anthony’s Fire, or Ergotism.

One form of epidemic malady, intimately connected with bad harvests and a poor state of agriculture, namely Ergotism, from the mixture of poisoned grains in the rye or other corn, is conspicuously missed from English records of the medieval period, although it plays a great part in the history of French epidemics of the Middle Ages, under such names as ignis sacer, ignis S. Antonii, or ignis infernalis. According to the proverbial saying already quoted, France was as notorious for ignis as England for famine, and Normandy for lepra: “Tres plagae tribus regionibus appropriari solent, Anglorum fames, Gallorum ignis, Normannorum lepra[111].” The malady was of a nature to attract notice and excite pity; it is entered by chroniclers, and is a frequent topic in French legends of the Saints. Its occurrence in epidemic form can be traced in France, with a degree of probability, as far back as 857 (perhaps to 590); six great outbreaks are recorded in the tenth century, seven in the eleventh, ten in the twelfth, and three in the thirteenth, the medieval series ending with one in the year 1373. The estimates of mortality in the several epidemics of ergotism over a larger or smaller area of France, range as high as 40,000, and 14,000, which numbers may be taken to be the roughest of guesses; but in later times upwards of 500 deaths from ergotism have been accurately counted in a single outbreak within a limited district. The epidemics have been observed in particular seasons, sometimes twenty years or more elapsing without the disease being seen; they have occurred also in particular provinces—in the basin of the Loire, in Lorraine, and, since the close of the medieval period, especially in the Sologne. The disease has usually been traced to a spoiled rye crop; but there is undoubted evidence from the more recent period that a poison with corresponding effects can be produced in some other cereals, even in wheat itself.

In a field of rye, especially after a wet sowing or a wet season of growth, a certain proportion of the heads bear long brown or purple corns, one or more upon a head, projecting in the shape of a cock’s spur, whence the French name of ergot. The spur appears to be, and probably is, an overgrown grain of rye; it is grooved like a rye-corn, occupies the place of the corn between the two chaff-coverings, and contains an abundant whitish meal. Microscopic research has detected in or upon the spurred rye the filaments of a minute parasitic mould; so that it is to the invasion by a parasite that we may trace the enormous overgrowth of one or more grains on an ear, and it is probably to the ferment-action of the fungus that we should ascribe the poisonous properties of the meal. The proportion of all the stalks in a field so affected will vary considerably, as well as the proportion of grains on each affected head of corn[112]. Rye affected with ergot is apt to be a poor crop at any rate; one or more spurred corns on a head tend to keep the rest of the grains small or unfilled; and if there be many stalks in the field so affected, the spurred grain will bulk considerably in the whole yield. When the diseased grains are ground to meal along with the healthy grains, the meal and the bread will contain an appreciable quantity of the poison of ergot; and if rye-bread were the staple food, there would be a great risk, after an unusually bad harvest, of an outbreak of the remarkable constitutional effects of ergotism. Rye-bread with much ergot in it may be rather blacker than usual; but it is said to have no peculiar taste.

It is almost exclusively among the peasantry that symptoms of ergotism have been seen, and among children particularly. The attack usually began with intense pains in the legs or feet, causing the victims to writhe and scream. A fire seemed to burn between the flesh and the bones, and, at a later stage, even in the bowels, the surface of the body being all the while cold as ice. Sometimes the skin of affected limbs became livid or black; now and then large blebs or blisters arose upon it, as in bad kinds of erysipelas. Gangrene or sloughing of the extremities followed; a foot or a hand fell off, or the flesh of a whole limb was destroyed down to the bones, by a process which began in the deeper textures. The spontaneous separation of a gangrenous hand or foot was on the whole a good sign for the recovery of the patient. Such was the ignis sacer, or ignis S. Antonii which figures prominently, I am told, in the French legends of the Saints, and of which epidemics are recorded in the French medieval chronicles. Corresponding effects of ergotism may or may not have occurred during the medieval period in other countries of Europe where rye was grown.

The remarkable thing is, that when we do begin in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to obtain evidence of agrarian epidemics in Germany, Sweden and Russia, which have eventually come to be identified, in the light of more recent knowledge, with ergotism, the type of the disease is different, not perhaps fundamentally or in the ultimate pathological analysis, but at all events different as being a functional disorder of the nervous system, instead of a disorder, on nervous lines, affecting the nutrition of parts and their structural integrity. This newer form, distinctive of Germany and north-eastern Europe, was known by the name of Kriebelkrankheit, from the creeping or itching sensations in the limbs at the beginning of it; these heightened sensibilities often amounted to acute pain, as in the beginning of the gangrenous form also; but the affection of the sensory nerves, instead of leading to a breakdown in the nutrition of the parts and to gangrene, was followed by disorder of the motor nerves,—by spasms of the hands and arms, feet and legs, very often passing into contractures of the joints which no force could unbend, and in some cases passing into periodic convulsive fits of the whole body like epilepsy, whence the name of convulsive ergotism[113].

Side by side with these German, Swedish and Russian outbreaks of convulsive ergotism, or Kriebelkrankheit (called by Linnaeus in Sweden by the Latin name raphania), there had been a renewal or continuance of the medieval epidemics in France, notably in the Sologne; but the French ergotism has retained its old type of ignis or gangrene. It was not until the eighteenth century that the learned world became clear as to the connexion between either of those forms of disease among the peasantry and a damaged rye-crop, although the country people themselves, and the observant medical practitioners of the affected districts, had put this and that together long before. Thus, as late as 1672-75, there were communications made to the Paris Academy of Medicine[114] by observers in the Sologne and especially around Montargis, in which ergot of rye is clearly described, as well as the associated symptoms of gangrenous disease in the peasantry; but the connexion between the two was still regarded as open to doubt, and as a question that could only be settled by experiment; while there is not a hint given that these modern outbreaks were of the same nature as the notorious medieval ignis sacer. According to Häser, it was not until the French essay of Read (Strasbourg, 1771) that the identity of the old ignis with the modern gangrenous ergotism was pointed out.

The result of the modern study of outbreaks of ergotism, including the minute record of individual cases, has been to show that there is no hard and fast line between the gangrenous and convulsive forms, that the French epidemics, although on the whole marked by the phenomena of gangrene, have not been wanting in functional nervous symptoms, and that the German or northern outbreaks have often been of a mixed type. Thus, in the French accounts of 1676, “malign fevers accompanied with drowsiness and raving,” are mentioned along with “the gangrene in the arms but mostly in the legs, which ordinarily are corrupted first.”

Again, the observations of Th. O. Heusinger[115] on an outbreak near Marburg in 1855-56, led him decidedly to conclude for the essential sameness of ignis and Kriebelkrankheit, and for the existence of a middle type, although undoubtedly the sensory and motor disorders, including hyperaesthesia, pain and anaesthesia on the one hand, and contractures of the joints, choreic movements and convulsions on the other, were more distinctive of the epidemics of ergotism on German or northern European soil.

Thus far the foreign experience of ergotism, both medieval and modern, and of its several types. We shall now be in a position to examine the English records for indications of the same effects of damaged grain.

In the English medieval chronicles an occasional reference may be found to ignis or wild fire. The reference to wild fire in Derbyshire in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year 1049, probably means some meteorological phenomenon, elsewhere called ignis sylvaticus: “Eac þ wilde fyr on Deorbyscire micel yfel dyde[116].” Whatever the ignis sylvaticus or ignis aereus was, which destroyed houses as well as crops, there appears to be no warrant for the conclusion of C. F. Heusinger that it was the same as the ignis sacer of the French peasantry[117]. An undoubted reference to ignis infernalis as a human malady occurs in the Topography of Ireland by Giraldus Cambrensis: a certain archer who had ravished a woman at St Fechin’s mill at Fore was overtaken by swift vengeance, “igne infernali in membro percussus, usque in ipsum corpus statim exarsit, et nocte eadem exspiravit.” Taking the incident as legendary, and the diagnosis as valueless, we may still conclude that the name, at least, of ignis infernalis was familiar to English writers. But in all the accounts of English famines and wide-spread sicknesses in the medieval period which have been extracted from the nearest contemporary authorities, I have found no mention of any disease that might correspond to ergotism[118].

The first undoubted instance of ergotism in England belongs to the eighteenth century. On or about the 10th of January, 1762, a peasant’s family (father, mother, and six children) of Wattisham in Suffolk, were attacked almost simultaneously with the symptoms of gangrenous ergotism, several of them eventually losing portions of their limbs. The disease began with intense pain in the legs, and contractures of the hands and feet. It was proved that they had not been using rye flour; but their bread for a short time before had been made exclusively from damaged wheat, grown in the neighbourhood and kept apart from the farmer’s good corn so as not to spoil his sample. It had been sent to the mill just before Christmas, and had been used by some others besides the family who developed the symptoms of ergotism[119].

In that authentic instance of ergotism (although not from rye), there was one symptom, the contractures of the hands and feet, which is distinctive of the convulsive form; so that the English type may be said to have been a mixture of the French form and of the form special to the north-eastern countries of Europe. With that instance as a type, let us now inquire whether any epidemics in England at earlier periods may not be brought under the head of ergotism. It is to be kept in mind that none of the medieval outbreaks were called by their present name, or traced to their true source, until centuries after; so that our task is, not to search the records for the name of ergotism, but to scrutinize any anomalous outbreak of disease, or any outbreak distinguished in the chronicles by some unusual mark, with a view to discovering whether it suits the hypothesis of ergotism. I shall have to speak of three such outbreaks in the fourteenth century, and of one in Lancashire and Cheshire in 1702[120].

The first of these is given by Knighton for a period and a locality that may have been within his own cognizance. In the summer of 1340 there happened in England generally, but especially in the county of Leicester, a certain deplorable and enormous infirmity. It was marked by paroxysms or fits, attended by intolerable suffering; while the fit lasted, the victims emitted a noise like the barking of dogs. A “great pestilence,” or perhaps a great mortality, is said to have ensued[121]. In that record the salient points are, firstly the wide or epidemic incidence of the malady, at all events in Leicestershire, which was Knighton’s own county; secondly the paroxysmal nature of the attacks, and the strange noises emitted therewith; thirdly the intolerable suffering (poena) that attended each fit (passio). Except for the clear indication of pain, one might think of the strange hysterical outbreaks, extending, by a kind of psychical contagion, to whole communities, which were observed about the same period in some parts of the continent of Europe. But of these medieval psychopathies, as they are called, there is hardly any trace in England. The Flagellants came over from Zealand to London in 1349, and gave exhibitions at St Paul’s, but that pseudo-religious mania does not appear to have taken hold among the English. The epidemic recorded by Knighton had probably a more material cause. To illustrate the somewhat meagre reference by Knighton to the strange epidemic of 1340, I shall proceed at once to the remarkable outbreak in Lancashire and Cheshire in 1702, which was clearly not a psychopathy or hysterical outbreak, and yet had a seemingly hysterical element in it. An account of it was sent to the Royal Society by Dr Charles Leigh “of Lancashire[122].”

“We have this year [1702] had an epidemical fever, attended with very surprising symptoms. In the beginning, the patient was frequently attacked with the colica ventriculi; convulsions in various parts, sometimes violent vomitings, and a dysentery; the jaundice, and in many of them, a suppression of urine; and what urine was made was highly saturated with choler. About the state of the distemper, large purple spots appeared, and on each side of ’em two large blisters, which continued three or four days: these blisters were so placed about the spots that they might in some measure be term’d satellites or tenders: of these there were in many four different eruptions. But the most remarkable instance I saw in the fever was in a poor boy of Lymm in Cheshire, one John Pownel, about 13 years of age, who was affected with the following symptoms:—

“Upon the crisis or turn of the fever, he was seized with an aphonia, and was speechless six weeks [? days], with the following convulsions: the distemper infested the nerves of both arms and legs which produced the Chorea Sancti Viti, or St Vitus’s dance; and the legs sometimes were both so contracted that no person could reduce them to their natural position. Besides these, he had most terrible symptoms, which began in the following manner: [description of convulsions follows] ... and then he barked in all the usual notes of a dog, sometimes snarling, barking, and at the last howling like an hound. After this the nerves of the mandibles were convulsed, and then the jaws clashed together with that violence that several of his teeth were beaten out, and then at several times there came a great foam from his mouth.... These symptoms were so amazing that several persons about him believed he was possessed. I told them there was no ground for such suppositions, but that the distemper was natural, and a species of an epilepsy, and by the effects I convinced them of the truth of it; for in a week’s time I recovered the boy his speech, his senses returned, his convulsions vanished, and the boy is now very cheerful. There have been other persons in this country much after the same manner.”

This epidemic of 1702 in Lancashire and Cheshire was recorded as something unusual. It had certain intestinal symptoms such as colic, which may well have followed the use of poisoned food and are indeed described among the symptoms of ergotism; there were also convulsions, large purple spots with blisters coming and going on the skin near them, and, in the single case that is given with details, there were contractures of the legs “so that no person could reduce them to their natural position,” and a continuance for several days of painful epileptiform fits attended with noises like the barking of a dog, or the hissing of a goose, “all which different sounds (I take it) proceed from the different contractions of the lungs variously forcing out the air.” The remarkable case of the boy, certified by several witnesses, is expressly given as one belonging to the general epidemic of the locality, others having been affected “much after the same manner.” Whatever suggestion there may be of ergotism in these particulars, nothing is said of gangrene of the limbs, although the livid spots and blisters are part of the symptoms of gangrenous ergotism, just as the convulsions and contractures are of convulsive ergotism. In the Suffolk cases of 1762 there were both contractures of the limbs and gangrene.

Knighton’s mention of the barking noises emitted by the sufferers of 1340 has suggested to Nichols, the author of the History of Leicestershire[123], a comparison of them with the cases investigated by Dr Freind in the year 1700, at the village of Blackthorn in Oxfordshire. Having heard a great rumour in the summer of that year that certain girls at that Oxfordshire village were taken with frequent barkings like dogs, Dr Freind made a journey to the place to investigate the cases[124].

He found that this pestis or plague had invaded two families in the village, on terms of close intimacy with each other. Two or three girls in each family are specially referred to: they were seized at intervals of a few hours with spasms of the neck and mouth, attended by vociferous cries; the spasmodic movements increased to a climax, when the victims sank exhausted. The fits had kept occurring for several weeks, and had appeared in the second family at a considerable interval after the first. The symptoms, said Freind, were those that had been described by Seidelius—distortion of the mouth, indecorous working of the tongue, and noises emitted like barking. He found nothing in the girls’ symptoms that could not be referred to a form of St Vitus’ dance or to hysteria, in which maladies, laughter, howling and beating of the breast are occasionally seen as well as the spasmodic working of the neck and limbs.

The question remains whether the cases of 1700 in the Oxfordshire village, assuming Dr Freind’s reading of them to be correct, were as illustrative of the outbreak of 1340 as the cases of 1702 in Lancashire and Cheshire, which were probably too numerous and too much complicated with symptoms of material toxic disorder to be explained as hysterical. There is, indeed, a larger question raised, whether the so-called psychopathies of the medieval and more recent periods may not have had a beginning, at least, in some toxic property of the staple food. The imagination readily fixes upon such symptoms as foaming at the mouth and barking noises, exalts these phenomena over deeper symptoms that a physician might have detected, and finds a simple explanation of the whole complex seizure as demoniac possession or, in modern phrase, as a psychopathy. Without questioning the subjective or imitative nature of many outbreaks which have been set down to hysteria, it may be well to use some discrimination before we exclude altogether an element of material poisoning such as ergot in the staple food, more especially in the case of the wide-spread hysterical epidemics of Sweden, a country subject to ergotism also[125].

These eighteenth-century instances have been brought in to illustrate Knighton’s account of the epidemic of 1340. The next strange outbreak of the fourteenth century is recorded by the St Albans historian (“Walsingham”) under a year between 1361 and 1365, probably the year 1362. Like so many more of the medieval records of epidemic sickness, it is a meagre and confused statement: “Numbers died of the disease of lethargy, prophesying troubles to many; many women also died by the flux; and there was a general murrain of cattle[126].” Along with that enigmatical entry, we may take the last of the kind that here concerns us. At Cambridge, in 1389, there occurred an epidemic of “phrensy;” it is described as “a great and formidable pestilence, which arose suddenly, and in which men were attacked all at once by the disease of phrensy of the mind, dying without the viaticum, and in a state of unconsciousness[127].” The names of phrensy and lethargy occur in the manuscript medical treatises of the time in the chapters upon diseases of the brain and nerves[128]; strictly they are names of symptoms, and not of forms or types of disease, and they may be used loosely of various morbid states which have little in common. A lethargy would in some cases be a name for coma in fever, or for a paralytic stroke; a phrensy might be actual mania, or it might be the delirium of plague or typhus fever. The “lethargy” of 1362 is alleged of a number of people as if in an epidemic, whatever the singular phrase “prophetantes infortunia multis” may mean; and the “phrensy of the mind” of which many died suddenly at Cambridge in 1389, does not look as if it had been a symptom of plague or pestilential fever. The judicious reader will make what he can of these disappointingly meagre details. But for his guidance it may be added that the French accounts of ergotism in 1676 give one of the poisonous effects as being “to cause sometimes malign fevers accompanied with drowsiness and raving,” which terms might stand for lethargy and phrensy; also that it has not always been easy, in an epidemic among the peasantry after a bad harvest, to distinguish the cases of ergotism from the cases of typhus, the contractures of the limbs, which seem so special to ergotism, having been described also for undoubted cases of typhus[129].

Whether these anomalous epidemics in medieval England were instances of convulsive ergotism or not, the English records are on the whole wanting in the evidence of such wide-spread and frequent disasters from a poisoned harvest as distinguish the French annals of the same period. One reason of our immunity may have been that the grain was better grown; another reason certainly is that rye was a comparatively rare crop in England, wheaten bread being preferred, although bread made from beans and barley was not uncommon. Thorold Rogers says: “Rye was scantily cultivated. An occasional crop on many estates, it is habitually sown in few. It is regularly sown in Cambridgeshire and some other of the eastern counties. As the period before us passes on [1259-1400], it becomes still more rare, and as will be seen below, some of the later years of this enquiry contain no entries of its purchase and sale[130].” But it is clear from the entries in chronicles, more particularly about the very period of the fourteenth century to which the three epidemics suggestive of ergotism belong, that the English peasantry suffered from the poisonous effects of damaged food, even if they suffered little from spurred rye. Thus, under the year 1383, in the history known as Walsingham’s, there is an unmistakeable reference to many fatalities, as well as serious maladies, caused by the eating of damaged fruit[131]. Again, under 1391, it is stated that this was “a hard and difficult year for the poor owing to a dearth of fruits, which had now lasted two years; whence it happened that at the time of the nuts and apples, many of the poor died of dysentery brought on by eating them; and the pestilence would have been worse had it not been for the laudable diligence of the Mayor of London, who caused corn to be brought to London from over sea[132].”

Generalities on Medieval Famines in England.

Summing up the English famine-pestilences of the medieval period, we find that they included the usual forms of such sickness—spotted fever of the nature of typhus, dysentery, lientery or looseness (such as has often subsequently accompanied typhus or famine-fever in Ireland), and putrid sore-throat. That some of these effects were due to spoiled grain and fruits, as well as to absolute want, we may reasonably conclude; for example the harvest of 1258 rotted on the ground, and yet the mouldy corn was sold at famine prices. With all those records of famines and their attendant sicknesses in England, it is significant that there is little indication of ergotism. The immunity of England from ergotism, with such a record of famines as the annals show, can only have been because little rye was grown and little black bread eaten. The standard of living would appear to have been higher among the English peasantry than among the French. A bad harvest, still more two bad harvests in succession, made them feel the pinch of famine more acutely, perhaps, than if they had accommodated themselves to the more sober level of rye bread. Hence the somewhat paradoxical but doubtless true saying of the Middle Ages—“Anglorum fames, Francorum ignis.” The saying really means, not that England was a poor country, which would be an absurd repute for foreigners to have fixed upon her; but that the English were subject to alternating periods of abundance and scarcity, of surfeit and starvation. The earliest English work which deals fully and concretely with the social condition of the country is the fourteenth-century poem of “The Vision of Piers the Ploughman.” A few passages from that poem will be of use as throwing light upon the famines of England, before we finally leave the period of which they are characteristic.

Langland’s poem describes the social state of England in peculiar circumstances, namely, after the upheaval and dislocation of the Great Mortality of 1349; and in that respect it has an interest for our subject which comes into a later chapter. But in so far as it illustrates the alternating periods of abundance and scarcity, the vision of medieval England concerns us here before we quit the subject of famine-pestilences. The average industrious ploughman, represented by Piers himself, fares but soberly until Lammas comes round[133]:—

“I have no penny, quod Piers, pullets for to buy,
Ne neither geese nor pigs, but two green cheeses,
A few cruddes and cream, and an haver-cake,
And two loaves of beans and bran ybake for my fauntis.
And yet I say, by my soul, I have no salt bacon,
Nor no cookeney, by Christ, collops for to maken.
And I have percil and porettes and many kole-plantes,
And eke a cow and a calf, and a cart-mare
To draw afield my dung the while the drought lasteth.
And by this lyflode me mot live till lammas time;
And by that I hope to have harvest in my croft;
And then may I digte thy dinner as me dear liketh.”

Some are worse off than the ploughman in the slack time before the harvest:

“All the poor people tho pesecoddes fetched,
Beans and baken apples they brought in their lappes,
Chibolles and chervelles and ripe cherries many,
And proferred Piers this present to plead with Hunger.
All Hunger ate in haste, and axed after more.
Then poor folk for fear fed Hunger eagerlie,
With green poret and pesen, to poison Hunger they thought.
By that it nighed near harvest, new corn came to chipping.
Then was folk fain, and fed Hunger with the best,
With good ale, as glutton taught, and gerte Hunger go sleep.
And though would waster not work but wandren about,
Ne no beggar eat bread that beans in were,
But of cocket or clerematyn or else of clean wheat:
Ne no halfpenny ale in none wise drink,
But of the best and of the brownest that in burgh is to sell.
Labourers that have no land to live on, but their hands,
Deigned nought to dine a-day night-old wortes.
May no penny ale them pay ne no piece of bacon,
But if it be fresh flesh other fish fried other bake.”

The waster being now in his season of plenty falls to abusing the Statute of Labourers:

“And then cursed he the king and all his council after,
Such laws to loke, labourers to grieve.
But whiles Hunger was their master there would none of them chide,
Nor strive against his statute, so sternly he looked.
And I warn you, workmen, wynneth while ye mowe,
For Hunger hitherward hasteth him fast.
He shall awake with water wasters to chasten.
Ere five year be fulfilled such famine shall arise
Through floods and through foul weathers fruits shall fail.
And so said Saturn, and sent you to warn ...
Then shall death withdraw and dearth be justice,
And Daw the dyker die for hunger,
But if God of his goodness grant us a truce.”

He proposes to feed the lazy wasters on beans:

“And gif the groomes grudge, bid them go swynk,
And he shall sup the sweeter when he hath deserved.”

The ploughman asks Hunger the reason why both himself and his servants are unable to work:

“I wot well, quod Hunger, what sickness you aileth.
Ye have maunged over much, and that maketh you groan ...
Let not sir Surfeit sitten at thy board ...
And gif thy diet be thus, I dare lay mine ears
That Physic shall his furred hoods for his food sell,
And his cloak of calabre with all the knaps of gold,
And be fain, by my faith, his physic to let,
And learn to labour with land, for lyflode is sweet:
For murtherers are many leeches, Lord them amend!
They do men kill through their drinks, or destiny it would.
By Saint Poul, quod Piers, these aren profitable words.”

In another place, Hawkin the minstrel confesses to gluttony:

“And more meat ate and drank than nature might digest,
And caught sickness some time for my surfeits oft.”

A liking for the best of food, and plenty of it, when it was to be had, has clearly been an English trait from the earliest times. Conversely thrift does not appear to have been a virtue or a grace of the labouring class in England. Thus a bad harvest brought wide-spread scarcity, and two bad harvests brought famine and famine-pestilences. The contrasts were sharp because the standard of living was high. And although three, at least, of the English famines were disgraceful to so rich a country, and were probably the occasion of the foreign reproach of “Anglorum fames;” yet the significant fact remains that the disease of the European peasantry, which is the truest index of an inferior diet, namely ergotism, has little or no place in our annals of sickness.

CHAPTER II.

LEPROSY IN MEDIEVAL BRITAIN.

The history of leprosy in Britain can hardly be the history of leprosy alone, but of that disease along with others which were either mistaken for it or conveniently and euphemistically included under it. That there was leprosy in the country is undoubted; but it is just as certain that there was lues venerea; that the latter as a primary lesion led an anonymous existence or was called lepra or morphaea if it were called anything; that the remote effects of the lues were not known as such, being taken for detached or original outcomes of the disordered humours and therefore in the same general class as leprous manifestations; and that the popular and clerical notions of leprosy were too superstitious and inexact, even if the diagnostic intention had been more resolute than it was, to permit of any clear separation of the leprous from the syphilitic, to say nothing of their separation from the poor victims of lupus and cancer of the face, of scrofulous running sores, or of neglected skin-eruptions more repulsive to the eye than serious in their nature. I shall give some proof of each of those assertions—as an essential preliminary to any correct handling of the historical records of British leprosy.

Leprosy in Medieval Medical Treatises.

The picture given of true leprosy in the medieval treatises on medicine is unmistakeable. There are two systematic writers about the year 1300 who have left a better account of it than the Arabian authors from whom they mostly copied. While the writers in question have transferred whole chapters unaltered from Avicenna, Rhazes and Theodoric, they have improved upon their models in the stock chapter ‘De Lepra.’ It so happens that those two writers, Bernard Gordonio and Gilbertus Anglicus, bear names which have been taken to indicate British nationality, and the picture of leprosy by the latter has actually been adduced as a contemporary account of the disease observed in England[134]. Gordonio was a professor at Montpellier, and his experience and scholarship are purely foreign. The circumstances of Gilbert the Englishman are not so well known; but it is tolerably certain that he was not, as often assumed, the Gilbert Langley, Gilbert de l’Aigle, or Gilbertus de Aquila, who was physician to Hubert, archbishop of Canterbury († 13 July, 1205)[135], having been a pupil at Salerno in the time of Aegidius of Corbeil (about 1180). The treatise of Gilbertus Anglicus bears internal evidence of a later century and school; it is distinguished by method and comprehensiveness, and is almost exactly on the lines of the Lilium Medicinae by Gordonio, whose date at Montpellier is known with some exactness to have been from 1285 to about 1307. Future research may perhaps discover where Gilbert taught or was taught; meanwhile we may safely assume that his scholarship and system were of a foreign colour. The medical writer of that time in England was John of Gaddesden, mentioned in the end of the foregoing chapter; he is the merest plagiary, and the one or two original remarks in his chapter ‘De Lepra’ would almost justify the epithet of “fatuous” which Guy de Chauliac applied to him.

Although we cannot appeal to Gilbertus Anglicus for native English experience any more than we can to his alter ego, Gordonio, yet we may assume that the picture of leprosy which they give might have been sketched in England as well as in Italy or in Provence. The conditions were practically uniform throughout Christendom; the true leprosy of any one part of medieval Europe is the true leprosy of the whole.

Gilbert’s picture[136], as we have said, is unmistakeable, and the same might be said of Bernard’s[137]—the eyebrows falling bare and getting knotted with uneven tuberosities, the nose and other features becoming thick, coarse and lumpy, the face losing its mobility or play of expression, the raucous voice, the loss of sensibility in the hands, and the ultimate break-up or naufragium of the leprous growths into foul running sores. The enumeration of nervous symptoms, which are now recognised to be fundamental in the pathology of leprosy, shows that Gilbert went below the surface. Among the “signa leprae generalia” he mentions such forms of hyperaesthesia as formicatio (the creeping of ants), and the feeling of “needles and pins;” and, in the way of anaesthesia, he speaks of the loss of sensibility from the little finger to the elbow, as well as in the exposed parts where the blanched spots or thickenings come—the forehead, cheeks, eyebrows, to which he adds the tongue. Gilbert’s whole chapter ‘De Lepra’ is an obvious improvement upon the corresponding one in Avicenna, who says that lepra is a cancer of the whole body, cancer being the lepra of a single member, and is probably confusing lupus with leprosy when he describes the cartilages of the nose as corroded in the latter, and the nostrils destroyed by the same kind of naufragium as the fingers and toes. All students of the history or clinical characters of leprosy, from Guy de Chauliac, who wrote about 1350, down to Hensler and Sprengel, have recognised in Gilbert’s and Bernard’s account of it the marks of first-hand observation; so that we may take it, without farther debate, that leprosy, as correctly diagnosed, was a disease of Europe and of Britain in the Middle Ages.

Having got so far, we come next to a region of almost inextricable confusion, a region of secrecy and mystification, as well as of real contemporary ignorance. We may best approach it by one or two passages from Gilbert and Gordonio themselves. The systematic handling of lepra in their writings is one thing, and their more concrete remarks on its conditions of origin, its occasions, or circumstances are another. What are we to make of this kind of leprosy?—“In hoc genere, causa est accessus ad mulierem ad quam accessit prius leprosus; et corrumpit velocius vir sanus quam mulier a leproso.... Et penetrant [venena] in nervos calidos et arterias et venas viriles, et inficiunt spiritus et bubones, et hoc velocius si mulier,” etc. Or to quote Gilbert again: “Ex accessu ad mulieres, diximus superius, lepram in plerisque generari post coitûs leprosos[138].” Or in Gordonio: “Et provenit [lepra] etiam ex nimia confibulatione cum leprosis, et ex coitu cum leprosa, et qui jacuit cum muliere cum qua jacuit leprosus[139].” That these circumstances of contracting lepra were not mere verbal theorizings inspired by the pathology of the day and capable of being now set aside, is obvious from a historia or case which Gordonio introduces into his text. “I shall tell what happened,” he says; and then proceeds to the following relation:[140]

“Quaedam comtissa venit leprosa ad Montem Pessulanum [Montpellier], et erat in fine in cura mea; et quidam Baccalarius in medicina ministrabat ei, et jacuit cum ea, et impregnavit eam, et perfectissime leprosus factus est.” Happy is he therefore, he adds, who learns caution from the risks of others.

Here we have sufficient evidence, from the beginning of the fourteenth century, of a disease being called lepra which does not conform to the conditions of leprosy as we now understand them. The same confusion between leprosy and the lues venerea prevailed through the whole medieval period. Thus, in the single known instance of a severe edict against lepers in England, the order of Edward III. to the mayor and sheriffs of London in 1346[141], the reasons for driving lepers out of the City are given,—among others, because they communicate their disease “by carnal intercourse with women in stews and other secret places,” and by their polluted breath. It was pointed out long ago by Beckett in his paper on the antiquity of the lues venerea[142], that the polluted breath was characteristic of the latter, but not of leprosy. Of course the pollution of their breath might have meant no more than the theoretical reasoning of the books (as in Gilbert, where the breath of lepers, as well as the mere sight of them, is said to give the disease, p. 337), but the breath was probably obnoxious in a more real way, just as we know, from Gordonio’s case at Montpellier, that the other alleged source of “leprous” contagion was no mere theoretical deduction. As the medieval period came to an end the leper-houses (in France) were found to contain a miscellaneous gathering of cases generically called leprous; and about the same time, the year 1488, an edict of the same purport as Edward III.’s London one of 1346, was issued by the provost of Paris against les lépreux of that city. The year 1488 is so near the epidemic outburst of the morbus Gallicus during the French campaigns on Italian soil in 1494-95, that the historian has not hesitated to set down that sudden reappearance of leprous contagion, in a proclamation of the State, to a real prevalence already in Paris of the contagious malady which was to be heard of to the farthest corners of Europe a few years after[143].

There is no difficulty in producing evidence from medieval English records of the prevalence of lues venerea, which was not concealed under the euphemistic or mistaken diagnosis of leprosy. Instances of a very bad kind, authenticated with the names of the individuals, are given in Gascoigne’s Liber Veritatum, under the date of 1433[144].

In the medieval text-books of Avicenna, Gilbert and others, there are invariably paragraphs on pustulae et apostemata virgae. In the only original English medical work of those times, by John Ardern, who was practising at Newark from 1349 to 1370, and came afterwards to London, appearances are described which can mean nothing else than condylomata[145]. From a manuscript prescription-book of the medieval period, in the British Museum, I have collected some receipts (or their headings) which relate, as an index of later date prefixed to the MS. says, to “the pox of old[146].”

Some have refused to see in such cases any real correspondence with the modern forms of syphilis because only local effects are described and no constitutional consequences traced. But no one in those times thought of a primary focus of infection with its remoter effects at large, in the case of any disease whatsoever. Even in the great epidemic of syphilis at the end of the fifteenth century, the sequence of primary and secondary (tertiaries were unheard of until long after), was not at first understood; the eruption of the skin, which was compared to a bad kind of variola, the imposthumes of the head and of the bones elsewhere, together with all other constitutional or general symptoms, were traced, in good faith, to a disordered liver, an organ which was chosen on theoretical grounds as the minera morbi or laboratory of the disease[147]. The circumstances of the great epidemic were, of course, special, but they were not altogether new. No medieval miracle could have been more of a suspension of the order of nature than that luxuria, immunditia, and foeditas, with their attendant corruptio membrorum, should have been free from those consequences, in the individual and in the community, which are more familiar in our own not less clean-living days merely because the sequence of events is better understood. That such vices abounded in the medieval world we have sufficient evidence. They were notorious among the Norman conquerors of England, especially notorious in the reign of William Rufus[148]; hence, perhaps, the significance of the phrase lepra Normannorum. That particular vice which amounts to a felony was the subject of the sixth charge (unproved) in the indictment of the order of the Templars before the Pope Clement V. in 1307. Effects on the public health traceable to such causes, for the most part sub rosa, have been often felt in the history of nations, from the Biblical episode of Baal-peor down to modern times. The evidence is written at large in the works of Astruc, Hensler and Rosenbaum. We are here concerned with a much smaller matter, namely, any evidence from England which may throw light upon the classes of cases that were called leprous if they were called by a name at all.

Under the year 1258, Matthew Paris introduces a singular paragraph, which is headed, “The Bishop of Hereford smitten with polypus.” The bishop, a Provençal, had made himself obnoxious by his treacherous conduct as the agent of Henry III. at the Holy See in the matter of the English subsidies to the pope. Accordingly it was by the justice of God that he was deformed by a most disgraceful disease, to wit, morphea, or again, “morphea polipo, vel quadam specie leprae[149].” According to the medical teaching of the time, as we find it in Gilbertus Anglicus, morphaea was an infection producing a change in the natural colour of the skin; it was confined to the skin, whereas lepra was in the flesh also; the former was curable, the latter incurable; morphaea might be white, red, or black[150]. The account of morphaea by Gordonio is somewhat fuller. All things, he says, that are causes of lepra are causes of morphaea; so that what is in the flesh lepra is morphaea in the skin. It was a patchy discoloration of the skin, reddish, yellowish, whitish, dusky, or black, producing terribilis aspectus; curable if recent, incurable if of long standing; curable also if of moderate extent, but difficult to cure if of great extent[151]. In this description by Gordonio a modern French writer on leprosy[152] discovers the classical characters of the syphilis of our own day: “not one sign is wanting.”

No doubt the medical writers drew a distinction between morphaea and lepra, as we have seen in quoting Gilbert and Gordonio. Gaddesden, also, who mostly copies them, interpolates here an original remark. No one should be adjudged leprous, he says, and separated from his fellows, merely because the “figure and form” (the stock phrase) of the face are corrupted: the disease might be “scabies foeda,” or if in the feet, it might be “cancer.” Nodosities or tubercles should not be taken to mean leprosy, unless they are confirmed (inveterate) in the face[153]. But how uncertain are these diagnostic indications, as between lepra and morphaea, lepra and “scabies foeda,” lepra and “cancer in pedibus!” If there were any object in calling the disease by one name rather than another, it is clear that the same disease might be called by a euphemism in one case and by a term meant to be opprobrious in another. Although leprosy was not in general a disease that anyone might wish to be credited with, yet there were circumstances when the diagnosis of leprosy had its advantages. It was of use to a beggar or tramp to be called a leper: he would excite more pity, he might get admission to a hospital, and he might solicit alms, under royal privilege, although begging in ordinary was punishable. It is conceivable also that the diagnosis of leprosy was a convenient one for men in conspicuous positions in Church and State. It is most improbable that the “lepra Normannorum” was all leprosy; it is absurd to suppose that leprosy became common in Europe because returning Crusaders introduced it from the East, as if leprosy could be “introduced” in any such way; and it is not easy to arrive at certitude, that all the cases of leprosy in princes and other high-placed personages (Baldwin IV. of Jerusalem who died at the age of twenty-five,[154] Robert the Bruce of Scotland,[155] and Henry IV. of England[156]) were cases that would now be diagnosed leprous.

Instances may be quoted to show that the name of leper was flung about somewhat at random. Thus, in an edict issued by Henry II., during the absence of Becket abroad for the settlement of his quarrel with the king, it was decreed that anyone who brought into the country documents relating to the threatened papal interdict should have his feet cut off if he were a regular cleric, his eyes put out if a secular clerk, should be hanged if a layman, and be burned if a leprosus—that is to say, a beggar or common tramp. Again, in the charges brought for Henry III. against the powerful minister Hubert de Burg in 1239, one item is that he had prevented the marriage of our lord the king with a certain noble lady by representing to the latter and to her guardian that the king was “a squinter, and a fool, and a good-for-nothing, and that he had a kind of leprosy, and was a deceiver, and a perjurer, and more of a craven than any woman[157]” etc.

There is also a curious instance of the term leprous being applied to the Scots, evidently in the sense in which William of Malmesbury, and many more after him, twitted that nation with their cutaneous infirmities. When the Black Death of 1348-9 had reached the northern counties of England, the Scots took advantage of their prostrate state to gather in the forest of Selkirk for an invasion, exulting in the “foul death of England.” Knighton says that the plague reached them there, that five thousand of them died, and that their rout was completed by the English falling upon them[158]. But the other contemporary chronicler of the Black Death, Geoffrey le Baker[159], tells the story with a curious difference. The Scots, he says, swearing by the foul death of the English, passed from the extreme of exultation to that of grief; the sword of God’s wrath was lifted from the English and fell in its fury upon the Scots, “et [Scotos] per lepram, nec minus quam Anglicos per apostemata et pustulos, mactavit.” The apostemata and pustuli were indeed the buboes, boils and carbuncles of the plague, correctly named; but what was the lepra of the Scots? It was probably a vague term of abuse; but, if the clerk of Osney attached any meaning to it, it is clear that he saw nothing improbable in a disease called lepra springing up suddenly and spreading among a body of men.

We conclude, then, that lepra was a term used in a generic sense because of a real uncertainty of diagnosis, or because there was some advantage to be got from being called leprosus, or because it was flung about at random. But there is still another reason for the inexact use of the terms lepra and leprosus in the medieval period, namely, the dominant influence of religious tradition. The heritage or accretion of religious sentiment not only perverted the correct use of the name, but led to regulations and proscriptions which were out of place even for the real disease.

The Biblical Associations of Leprosy.

Among the synonyms for leprosi we find the terms “pauperes Christi, videlicet Lazares,” the name of “Christ’s poor” being given to lepers by Aelred in the twelfth century and by Matthew Paris in the thirteenth. The association of ideas with Lazarus is a good sample of the want of discrimination in all that pertains to medieval leprosy. The Lazarus of St Luke’s Gospel, who was laid at the rich man’s gate full of sores, is a representative person, existing only in parable. On the other hand, the Lazarus of St John’s Gospel, Lazarus of Bethany, the brother of Martha and Mary, the man of many friends, is both a historical personage and a saint in the calendar. But there is nothing to show that he was a leper. He had a remarkable experience of restoration to the light of day, and it was probably on account of an episode in his life that made so much talk that he received posthumously the name of Lazarus, or “helped of God[160].” The name of the man in the parable is also generic, just as generic as that of his contrast Dives is; but specifically there was nothing in common between the one Lazarus and the other. Yet St Lazarus specially named as the brother of Martha and Mary (as in the charter of the leper-house at Sherburn) became the patron of lepers. The ascription to Lazarus of Bethany of the malady of Lazarus in the parable has done much for the prestige of the latter’s disease; in the medieval world it brought all persons full of sores within a nimbus of sanctity, as being in a special sense “pauperes Christi,” the successors at once of him whom Jesus loved and of “Lazarus ulcerosus.” Doubtless the lepers deserved all the charity that they got; but we shall not easily understand the interest exceptionally taken in them, amidst abounding suffering and wretchedness in other forms, unless we keep in mind that they somehow came to be regarded as Christ’s poor.

Next to the image of Lazarus, or rather the composite image of the two Lazaruses, the picture of leprosy that filled the imagination was that of the thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of Leviticus. That picture is even more composite than the other, and for leprosy in the strict sense it is absolutely misleading. The word translated “leprosy” is a generic term for various communicable maladies, most of which were curable within a definite period, sometimes no longer than a week. It rested with the skill of the priesthood to discriminate between the forms of communicable disease, and to prescribe the appropriate ceremonial treatment for each; the people had one common name for them all, and beyond that they were in the hands of their priests, who knew quite well what they were about. The Christian Church dealt with all those archaic institutions of an Eastern people in a child-like spirit of verbal or literal interpretation, doubtless finding the greater part of them a meaningless jargon. But some verses would touch the imagination and call up a real and vivid picture, such verses, for example, as the following:

“And the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent, and his head bare, and he shall put a covering upon his upper lip, and shall cry, Unclean, unclean. All the days wherein the plague shall be in him he shall be defiled; he is unclean; he shall dwell alone; without the camp shall his habitation be.”

Even in that comparatively plain direction, the obvious suggestion that the unclean person would not always be unclean, and that there was a term to his stay outside the camp, would go for little in reading the scripture. The medieval religious world took those parts of the Jewish teaching that appealed to their apprehension, and applied them to the circumstances of their own time with as much of zeal as the common sense of the community would permit. We have clear evidence of the effect of the Levitical teaching about “leprosy” upon English practice in the ordinances of the St Albans leper hospital of St Julian, which will be given in the sequel.

The Medieval Religious Sentiment towards Lepers.

Several incidents told of lepers by the chroniclers bring out that exaggerated religious view of the disease. Roger of Howden has preserved the following mythical story of Edward the Confessor. Proceeding one day from his palace to the Abbey Church in pomp and state, he passed with his train of nobles and ecclesiastics through a street in which sat a leper full of sores. The courtiers were about to drive the wretched man out from the royal presence, when the king ordered them to let him sit where he was. The leper, waxing bold after this concession, addressed the king, “I adjure thee by the living God to take me on thy shoulders and bring me into the church;” whereupon the king bowed his head and took the leper upon his shoulders. And as the king went, he prayed that God would give health to the leper; and his prayer was heard, and the leper was made whole from that very hour, praising and glorifying God[161].

It is not the miraculous ending of this incident that need surprise us most; for the Royal touch by which the Confessor wrought his numerous cures of the blind and the halt and the scrofulous, continued to be exercised, with unabated virtue, down to the eighteenth century, and came at length to be supervised by Court surgeons who were fellows of the Royal Society. It is the humility of a crowned head in the presence of a leper that marks an old-world kind of religious sentiment. The nearest approach to it in our time is the feet-washing of the poor by the empress at Vienna on Corpus Christi day.

A similar story, with a truer touch of nature in it, is told of Matilda, queen of Henry I.; and it happens to be related on so good authority that we may believe every word of it. Matilda was a Saxon princess, daughter of Margaret the Atheling, the queen of Malcolm Canmore. The other actor in the story was her brother David, afterwards king of Scots and, like his mother, honoured as a saint of the Church. The narrator is Aelred, abbot of Rievaulx, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, celebrated for his Latin style and his care for Saxon history. The abbot was a friend of St David, whose virtues he celebrates at length; the incident of queen Matilda and the lepers was one that he often heard from David’s own lips (quod ex ore saepe Davidis regis audivi). The princess Matilda, taking more after her mother than her father, had been brought up in an English convent under her aunt, the abbess of it. When it came to a marriage between her and Henry I., an alliance which was meant to reconcile the Saxons to Norman rule, the question arose in the mind of Anselm whether the princess Matilda had not actually taken the veil, and whether he could legally marry her to the king. Questioned as to the fact, the princess made answer that she had indeed worn the veil in public, but only as a protection from the licentious insolence of the Norman nobles. She had no liking for the great match arranged for her, and consented unwillingly although the king was enamoured of her. Such was her humility that Aelred designates her “the Esther of our times.” The marriage was on the 15th of November, 1100; and in the next year, according to the usual date given, the young queen sought relief and effusion for her religious instincts by founding the leper hospital of St Giles in the Fields, “with a chapel and a sufficient edifice.” Matthew Paris, a century and a half after, saw it standing as queen Matilda had built it, and made a sketch of it in colours on the margin of his page, still remaining to us in a library at Cambridge, with the description, “Memoriale Matild. Regine.”

The story which her brother David told to the abbot of Rievaulx is as follows:

When he was serving as a youth at the English Court, one evening he was with his companions in his lodging, when the queen called him into her chamber. He found the place full of lepers, and the queen standing in the midst, with her robe laid aside and a towel girt round her. Having filled a basin with water, she proceeded to wash the feet of the lepers and to wipe them with the towel, and then taking them in both her hands, she kissed them with devotion. To whom her brother: “What dost thou, my lady? Certes if the king were to know this, never would he deign to kiss with his lips that mouth of thine polluted with the soil of leprous feet.” But she answered with a smile: “Who does not know that the feet of an Eternal King are to be preferred to the lips of a mortal king? See, then, dearest brother, wherefore I have called thee, that thou mayest learn by my example to do so also. Take the basin, and do what thou hast seen me do.” “At this,” said David, narrating to the abbot, “I was sore afraid, and answered that I could on no account endure it. For as yet I did not know the Lord, nor had His Spirit been revealed to me. And as she proceeded with her task, I laughed—mea culpa—and returned to my comrades[162].”

The example of his sister, however, was not lost upon him; for when he acquired the earldom and manor of Huntingdon, and so became an opulent English noble, he founded a leper-hospital there. Aelred sees him in Abraham’s bosom with Lazarus.

The meaning of all this devotion to lepers is shown in the name which Aelred applies to them—pauperes Christi. In washing their feet the pious Matilda was in effect washing the feet of an Eternal King; and that, in her estimation, was better than kissing the lips of a mortal king.

Again, in the Life of St Hugh of Lincoln we see the good bishop moved to treat the leprous poor with a sort of attention which they can hardly have needed or expected, merely because they were, as his biographer says, the successors of Lazarus ulcerosus, and the special protegés of Jesus. Not a few, says the biographer, were kept in seclusion owing to that disease, both men and women. Bishop Hugh would take up his abode among them and speak to them words of good cheer, promising them the flowers of Paradise and an immortal crown. Having sent the women lepers out of the way, he would go round among the men to kiss them, and when he came to one who was more atrociously marked by the disease than another, he would hold him in a longer and more gracious embrace. It was too much for the bishop’s biographer: “Spare, good Jesus, the unhappy soul of him who relates these things”—horrified, as he says he was, at seeing the “swollen and livid faces, deformed and sanious, with the eyelids everted, the eyeballs dug out, and the lips wasted away, faces which it were impossible to touch close or even to behold afar off[163]”. But these horrible disfigurements of the face are by no means the distinctive marks of leprosy. The dragging down of the eyelids is an effect of leprosy but as likely to happen in lupus or rodent ulcer. The loss of the eyeball may be a leprous sign, or perhaps from tumour. The wasting of the lips is a characteristic feature of lupus, after it has scarred, or if there be an actual loss of substance, of epithelial cancer; in leprosy, on the other hand, the lips, as well as other prominent folds of the face, undergo thickening, and will probably remain thickened to the end. The sufferers who excited the compassion of St Hugh must have merited it; only they were not all lepers, nor probably the majority of them[164].

Two leper-stories are told to the honour of St Francis of Assisi. Seeing one day a friar of his order named James the Simple, consorting on the way to church with a leper from the hospital under his care, St Francis rebuked the friar for allowing the leper to be at large. While he thus admonished the friar, he thought that he observed the leper to blush, and was stricken with a sudden remorse that he should have said anything to hurt the wretched man’s feelings. Having confessed and taken counsel, he resolved, by way of penance, to sit beside the leper at table and to eat with him out of the same dish, a penance all the greater, says the biographer, that the leper was covered all over with offensive sores and that the blood and sanies trickled down his fingers as he dipped them in the dish. The other story is a more pleasing one. There was a certain leper among those cared for by the friars, who would appear from the description of him to have been one of the class of truculent impostors, made all the worse by the morbid consideration with which his disease, or supposed disease, was regarded. One of his complaints was that no one would wash him; whereupon St Francis, having ordered a friar to bring a basin of perfumed water, proceeded to wash the leper with his own hands[165].

These four tales, all of them told of saints except that of Matilda—she somehow missed being canonised along with her mother St Margaret and her brother St David—will serve to show what a halo of morbid exaggeration surrounded the idea of leprosy in the medieval religious mind. We live in a time of saner and better-proportioned sentiment; but the critical spirit, which has set so much else in a sober light, has spared the medieval tradition of leprosy. Not only so, but our more graphic writers have put that disease into the medieval foreground as if it had been the commonest affliction of the time. We are taught to see the figures of lepers in their grey or russet gowns flitting everywhere through the scene; the air of those remote times is as if filled with the dull creaking of St Lazarus’s rattle. Our business here is to apply to the question of leprosy in medieval Britain the same kind of scrutiny which has been applied to the question of famines and famine-fevers, and remains to be applied next in order to the great question of plague—the kind of scrutiny which no historian would be excused from if his business were with politics, or campaigns, or economics, or manners and customs. The best available evidence for our purpose is the history of the leper-houses, to which we shall now proceed.

The English Leper-houses.

The English charitable foundations, or hospitals of all kinds previous to the dissolution of the monasteries, including almshouses, infirmaries, Maisons Dieu and lazar-houses, amount to five hundred and nine in the index of Bishop Tanner’s Notitia Monastica. In the 1830 edition of the Monasticon Anglicanum, the latest recension of those immense volumes of antiquarian research, there are one hundred and four such foundations given, for which the original charters, or confirming charters, or reports of inquisitions, are known; and, besides these, there are about three hundred and sixty given in the section on “Additional Hospitals,” the existence and circumstances of which rest upon such evidence as casual mention in old documents, or entries in monastery annals, or surviving names and traditions of the locality. Our task is to discover, if we can, what share of this charitable provision in medieval England, embracing at least four hundred and sixty houses, was intended for the class of leprosi; what indications there are of the sort of patients reckoned leprosi; how many sick inmates the leper-houses had, absolutely as well as in proportion to their clerical staff; and how far those refuges were in request among the people, either from a natural desire to find a refuge or from the social pressure upon them to keep themselves out of the way.

It is clear that the endowed hospitals of medieval England were in no exclusive sense leper-hospitals, but a general provision, under religious discipline, for the infirm and sick poor, for infirm and ailing monks and clergy, and here or there for decayed gentlefolk. The earliest of them that is known, St Peter’s and St Leonard’s hospital at York, founded in 936 by king Athelstane, and enlarged more especially on its religious side by king Stephen, was a great establishment for the relief of the poor, with no reference to leprosy; it provided for no fewer than two hundred and six bedesmen, and was served by a master, thirteen brethren, four seculars, eight sisters, thirty choristers and six servitors. When Lanfranc, the first Norman archbishop of Canterbury, set about organising the charitable relief of his see in 1084, he endowed two hospitals, one for the sick and infirm poor in general, and the other for leprosi[166]. The former, St John Baptist’s hospital, was at the north gate, a commodious house of stone, for poor, infirm, lame or blind men and women. The latter was the hospital of Herbaldown, an erection of timber, in the woods of Blean about a mile from the west gate, for persons regia valetudine fluentibus (?), who are styled leprosi in a confirming charter of Henry II.[167] The charge of both these houses was given to the new priory of St Gregory, over against St John Baptist’s hospital, endowed with tithes for secular clergy. The leper-house at Herbaldown was divided between men and women; but in a later reign (Henry II.) a hospital entirely for women (twenty-five leprous sisters) was founded at Tannington, outside Canterbury, with a master, prioress and three priests. There was still a third hospital at Canterbury, St Lawrence’s, founded about 1137, for the relief of leprous monks or for the poor parents and relations of the monks of St Augustine’s.

London had two endowed leper-hospitals under ecclesiastical government, as well as certain spitals or refuges of comparatively late date. The hospital and chapel of St Giles in the Fields was founded, as we have seen, by Matilda, queen of Henry I., in 1101, and was commonly known for long after as Matilda’s hospital. It was built for forty leprosi, who may or may not all have lived in it; and it was supported in part by the voluntary contributions of the citizens collected by a proctor. Its staff was at first exceptionally small for the number of patients,—a chaplain, a clerk and a messenger; but as its endowments increased several other clerics and some matrons were added. By a king’s charter of 1208 (10th John), it was to receive sixty shillings annually. It is next heard of, in the Rolls of Parliament, in connexion with a petition of 1314-15 (8 Ed. II.), by the terms of which, and of the reply to it, we can see that there were then some lepers in the hospital but also patients of another kind. It is mentioned by Wendover, under the year 1222, as the scene of a trial of strength between the citizens and the comprovinciales extra urbem positos[168]: at that date it stood well in the country, probably near to where the church of St Giles now stands at the end of old High Holborn. The drawing of the hospital on the margin of Matthew Paris’s manuscript shows it as a house of stone, with a tower at the east end and a smaller one over the west porch, and with a chapel and a hall, but probably no dormitories for forty lepers[169].

The other endowed leper-house of the metropolis was the hospital of St James, in the fields beyond Westminster. It was of ancient date, and provided for fourteen female patients, who came somehow to be called the leprosae puellae[170], although youth is by no means specially associated with leprosy. This house grew rich, and supported eight brethren for the religious services of the sixteen patients[171].

It is usual to enumerate five, and sometimes six, other leper-hospitals, in the outskirts of London—at Kingsland or Hackney, in Kent Street, Southwark (the Lock), at Highgate, at Mile End, at Knightsbridge and at Hammersmith. But the earliest of these were founded in the reign of Edward III. (about 1346) at a time when the old ecclesiastical leper-houses were nearly empty of lepers. It would be misleading to include them among the medieval leper-houses proper, and I shall refer to them in a later part of this chapter.

The example of archbishop Lanfranc at Canterbury and of queen Matilda in London was soon followed by other founders and benefactors. The movement in favour of lepers—there was probably too real an occasion for it to call it a craze—gained much from the appearance on the scene of the Knights of the Order of St Lazarus of Jerusalem. Those knights were the most sentimental of the orders of chivalry, and probably not more reputable than the Templars or the main body of the Hospitallers from which they branched off. If we may judge of them by modern instances, they wanted to do some great thing, and to do it in the most theatrical way, with everybody looking on. What real services they may have rendered to the sick poor, leprous or other, there is little to show. The head-quarters of the order were at Jerusalem, the Grand Master and the Knights there being all leprosi—doubtless in a liberal sense of the term. We should be doing them no injustice if we take them to have been Crusaders so badly hit by their vices or their misfortunes as to be marked off into a separate order by a natural line. However, many others enlisted under the banner of St Lazarus who were not leprosi; these established themselves in various countries of Europe, acquired many manors and built fine houses[172]. In England their chief house was at Burton in Leicestershire; it was not by any means a great leper-hospital, but a Commandery or Preceptory for eight whole knights, with some provision for an uncertain number of poor brethren—the real Lazaruses who, like their prototype, would receive the crumbs from the high table. The house of Burton Lazars gradually swallowed up the lands of leper-hospitals elsewhere, as these passed into desuetude, and at the valuation of Henry VIII. it headed the list with an annual rental of £250. Their establishment in England dates from the early part of the twelfth century, and although the house at Burton appears to have been their only considerable possession, they are said, on vague evidence, to have enlisted many knights from England, and, curiously enough, still more from Scotland. A letter is extant by the celebrated schoolman, John of Salisbury, afterwards bishop of Chartres, written in the reign of Henry II. to a bishop of Salisbury, from which it would appear that the “Fratres Hospitales” were regarded with jealousy and dislike by the clerical profession; “rapiunt ut distribuant,” says the writer, as if there were something at once forced and forcible in their charities[173].

Coincidently with the appearance in England of the Knights of St Lazarus, we find the monasteries, and sometimes private benefactors among the nobility, beginning to make provision for lepers, either along with other deserving poor or in houses apart. After the hospitals at Canterbury and London (as well as an eleventh-century foundation at Northampton, which may or may not have been originally destined for leprosi), come the two leper-houses founded by the great abbey of St Albans. As these were probably as good instances as can be found, their history is worth following.

In the time of abbot Gregory (1119 to 1146), the hospital and church of St Julian was built on the London road, for six poor brethren (Lazares or pauperes Christi) governed by a master and four chaplains. The mastership of St Julian’s is twice mentioned in the abbey chronicles as a valuable piece of preferment. In 1254 the lands of the hospital were so heavily taxed, for the king and the pope, that the miselli, according to Matthew Paris, had barely the necessaries of life. But a century after, in 1350, the revenues were too large for its needs, and new statutes were made; the accommodation of its six beds was by no means in request, the number of inmates being never more than three, sometimes only two, and occasionally only one[174]. The fate of the other leper-house of St Albans abbey, that of St Mary de Pratis for women, is not less instructive. The date of its foundation is not known, but in 1254 it had a church and a hospital occupied by misellae[175]. A century later we hear of the house being shared between illiterate sisters and nuns. The former are not called lepers, but simply poor sisters; whatever they were, the nuns and they did not get on comfortably together, and the abbot restored harmony by turning the hospital into a nunnery pure and simple[176]. Similar was the history of one of the richest foundations of the kind, that of Mayden Bradley in Wiltshire. It was originally endowed shortly before or shortly after the accession of Henry II. (1135) by a noble family for an unstated number of poor women, generally assumed to have been leprosae, and for an unstated number of regular and secular clerics to perform the religious offices and manage the property. It had not existed long, however, when the bishop of Salisbury, in 1190, got the charter altered so as to assign the revenues to eight canons and—poor sisters, and so it continued until the valuation of Henry VIII., when it was found to be of considerable wealth. In like manner the hospital of St James, at Tannington near Canterbury, founded in the reign of Henry II. for twenty-five “leprous sisters,” was found, in the reign of Edward III. (1344), to contain no lepers, its “corrodies” being much sought after by needy gentlewomen[177].

Another foundation of Henry II.’s reign was the leper-hospital of St Mary Magdalen at Sponne, outside the walls of Coventry. It was founded by an Earl of Chester, who, having a certain leprous knight in his household, gave in pure alms for the health of his soul and the souls of his ancestors his chapel at Sponne with the site thereof, and half a carucate of land for the maintenance of such lepers as should happen to be in the town of Coventry. There was one priest to celebrate, and with him were wont to be also certain brethren or sisters together with the lepers, praying to God for the good estate of all their benefactors. “But clear it is,” says Dugdale, “that the monks shortly after appropriated it to their own use.” However, they were in time dispossessed by the Crown, to which the hospital belonged until the 14th of Edward IV[178].

One of the most typical as well as earliest foundations was the hospital of the Holy Innocents at Lincoln, endowed by Henry I. We owe our knowledge of its charter to an inquisition of Edward III. It was intended for ten leprosi, who were to be of the outcasts (de ejectibus) of the city of Lincoln, the presentation to be in the king’s gift or in that of the mayor or other good men of the city, and the administration of it by a master or warden, two chaplains and one clerk. In the space of two centuries from its foundation the character of its inmates had gradually changed. Edward III.’s commissioners found nine poor brethren or sisters in it; only one of them was leprosus, and he had obtained admission by a golden key; also the seven poor women had got in per viam pecuniam. In Henry VI.’s time provision was made for the possibility of lepers still requiring its shelter—quod absit, as the new charter said.

In the same reign (end of Henry I.) the hospital of St Peter was founded at Bury St Edmunds by abbot Anselm, for priests and others when they grew old and infirm, leprous or diseased. The other hospital at Bury, St Saviour’s, had no explicit reference to leprosy at all. It was founded by the famous abbot Samson about 1184, for a warden, twelve chaplain-priests, six clerks, twelve poor gentlemen, and twelve poor women. About a hundred years later the poor sisters had to go, in order to make room for old and infirm priests.

Sometime before his death in 1139, Thurstan, archbishop of York, founded a hospital at Ripon for the relief of “all the lepers in Richmondshire;” the provision was for eighteen patients, a chaplain and sisters. At an uncertain date afterwards the house was found to contain a master, two or three chaplains and some brethren, who are not styled leprosi; and from the inquisition of Edward III. we learn that its original destination had been for the relief as much of the poor as the leprous (tam pauperum quam leprosorum), and that there was no leprous person in it at the date of the inquisition.

The mixed character of hospitals commonly reckoned leper-hospitals is shown by several other instances. St Mary Magdalene’s at Lynn (1145) provided for a prior and twelve brethren or sisters, nine of whom were to be whole and three leprous. St Leonard’s at Lancaster (time of king John) was endowed for a master, a chaplain, and nine poor persons, three of them to be leprous. St Bartholomew’s at Oxford provided for a master, a clerk, two whole brethren and six infirm or leprous brethren; but the infirm or leprous brethren had all been changed into whole brethren by the time of Edward III[179]. So again the Normans’ spital at Norwich was found to be sheltering “seven whole sisters and seven half-sisters.”

The leper-hospital at Stourbridge, near Cambridge, was founded for lepers by king John, the one king in English history who cared greatly about his leprous subjects. It was committed to the charge of the burgesses of Cambridge, but it was shortly after seized by Hugo de Norwold, bishop of Ely, and within little more than fifty years from its foundation (7 Ed. I.) it was found that the bishop of Ely of that day was using it for some purposes of his own, but “was keeping no lepers in it, as he ought, and as the custom had been[180].”

The ostentatious patronage of lepers by king John, of which something more might be said, was preceded by a more important interposition on their behalf by the third Council of the Lateran in 1179 (Alexander III.). The position of leprosi in the community had clearly become anomalous, and one of the decrees of the Council was directed to setting it right. Lepers, who were “unable to live with sound persons, or to attend church with them, or to get buried in the same churchyard, or to have the ministrations of the proper priest,” were enjoined to have their own presbytery, church, and churchyard, and their lands were to be exempt from tithe[181]. Within two or three years of that decree, in or near 1181, we find a bishop of Durham, Hugh de Puiset, endowing the greatest of all the English leper-hospitals, at Sherburn, a mile or more outside the city of Durham. The bishop was a noted instance of the worldly ecclesiastic of his time. He was accused by the king of misappropriating money left by the archbishop of York, and his defence was that he had spent it on the blind, the deaf, the dumb, the leprous, and such like deserving objects[182]. William of Newburgh has left us his opinion of the bishop’s charity: it was a noble hospital lavishly provided for, “but with largess not quite honestly come by” (sed tamen ex parte minus honesta largitione[183]). The hospital of bishop Hugh, dedicated to the Saviour, the Blessed Virgin, St Lazarus, and his sisters Mary and Martha, still exists as Christ’s Hospital, a quadrangular building enclosing about an acre in a sunny valley to the south of the city, with a fine chapel, a great hall (of which the ancient raftered roof existed into the present century), a master’s lodge, and a low range of buildings on the west side of the square for the poor brethren, with their own modest hall in the middle of it. The original foundation was certainly on a princely scale, as things then went: it was for five “convents” of lepers, including in all sixty-five persons of both sexes, with a steward or guardian to be their own proper representative or protector, three priests, four attendant clerks, and a prior and prioress. We hear nothing more of the hospital for a century and a half, during which time it had doubtless been filled by a succession of poor brethren, or sick poor brethren, but whether leprous brethren, or even mainly leprous, may well be doubted after the recorded experiences of Ripon, Lincoln and Stourbridge. Its charter was confirmed by bishop Kellaw about 1311-1316; and in an ordinance of 1349 we still read, but not without a feeling of something forced and unreal, of the hospital ministering to the hunger, the thirst, the nakedness of the leprous, and to the other wants and miseries by which they are incessantly afflicted. But within ninety years of that time (1434) the real state of the case becomes apparent; the poor brethren had been neglected, and the estates so mismanaged or alienated to other uses, that new statutes were made reducing the number of inmates to thirteen poor brethren and two lepers, the latter being thrown in, “if they can be found in these parts,” in order to preserve the memory of the original foundation[184].

To these samples, which are also the chief instances of English leper-hospitals, may be added two or three more to bring out another side of the matter. In the cases already given, it has been seen that the provision for the clerical staff was either a very liberal one at first or became so in course of time. The hospitals, whether leprous or other, were for the most part dependencies of the abbeys, affording occupation and residence to so many more monks, just as if they had been “cells” of the abbey. The enormous disproportion of the clerical staff to the inmates of hospitals (not, however, leprous) is seen in the instances of St Giles’s at Norwich, St Saviour’s at Bury and St Cross at Winchester. The provision was about six for the poor and half-a-dozen for the monks. But even the purely nosocomial part of these charities was in not a few instances for the immediate relief of the monasteries themselves. St Bartholomew’s at Chatham, one of the earliest foundations usually counted among the leper-hospitals, was for sick or infirm monks. The hospital at Basingstoke, endowed by Merton College, Oxford, was for incurably sick fellows and scholars of Merton itself. The leper-hospital at Ilford in Essex was founded about 1180 by the rich abbey of Barking, for the leprous tenants and servants of the abbey, the provision being for a secular master, a leprous master, thirteen leprous brethren, two chaplains and a clerk. St Lawrence’s at Canterbury (1137) was for leprous monks or for the poor parents and relations of monks. St Peter’s at Bury St Edmunds, founded by abbot Anselm in the reign of Henry I., was for priests and others when they grew old, infirm, leprous, or diseased.

The instances which have been detailed in the last few pages, perhaps not without risk of tediousness, have not been chosen to give a colour to the view of medieval leprosy; they are a fair sample of the whole, and they include nearly all those leper-hospitals of which the charters or other authentic records are known[185]. It is possible by using every verbal reference to leprosy that may be found in connexion with all the five hundred or more medieval English hospitals in Bishop Tanner’s Notitia Monastica or in Dugdale’s Monasticon, to make out a list of over a hundred leper-hospitals of one kind or another. But there are probably not thirty of them for which the special destination of the charity is known from charters or inquisitions; and even these, as we have seen, were not all purely for lepers or even mainly for lepers. As to the rest of the list of one hundred, the connexion with leprosy is of the vaguest kind. Thus, four out of the five hospitals in Cornwall are called lazar-houses or leper-hospitals, but they were so called merely on the authority of antiquaries subsequent to the sixteenth century. The same criticism applies almost equally to the eight so-called leper-hospitals, out of a total of fourteen medieval hospitals of all kinds, in Devonshire. It is clear that “lazar-house” became an even more widely generic term than the terms lepra and leprosus themselves[186].

Thus our doubts as to the amount of true leprosy that once existed in England, and was provided for in the access of chivalrous sentiment that came upon Christendom in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, tend to multiply in a compound ratio. We doubt whether many of the so-called leper-houses or lazar-houses in the list of one hundred, more or less, that may be compiled from the Monasticon, were not ordinary refuges for the sick and infirm poor, like the three or four hundred other religious charities of the country. We know that, in some instances of leper-hospitals with authentic charters, the provision for the leprous was in the proportion of one to three or four of non-leprous inmates. We know that as early as the end of the thirteenth century the leprosi were disappearing or getting displaced even from hospitals where the intentions of the founder were explicit. And lastly we doubt the homogeneity of the disease called lepra and of the class called leprosi.

As to the foundations of a later age they were no longer under ecclesiastical management, and they seem to have been mostly rude shelters on the outskirts of the larger towns. In 1316 a burgess of Rochester, who had sat in Parliament, left a house in Eastgate to be called St Katharine’s Spital, “for poor men of the city, leprous or otherwise diseased, impotent and poor”—or, in other words, a common almshouse. The remarkable ordinance of Edward III. in 1346, for the expulsion of lepers from London, seems to have been the occasion of the founding of two so-called lazar-houses, one in Kent Street, Southwark, called “the Loke[187],” and the other at Hackney or Kingsland. These are the only two mentioned in the subsequent orders to the porters of the City Gates in 1375; and as late as the reign of Henry VI. they are the only two, besides the ancient Matilda’s Hospital in St Giles’s Fields, to which bequests were made in the will of Ralph Holland, merchant taylor[188]. Another of the suburban leper-spitals was founded at Highgate by a citizen in 1468[189], and it is not until the reign of Henry VIII. that we hear of the spitals at Mile End, Knightsbridge and Hammersmith[190]. By that time leprosy had ceased to be heard of in England; but another disease, syphilis, had become exceedingly common; and it is known that those spitals, together with the older leper-hospitals, were used for the poorer victims of that disease. Stow is unable to give the exact date of any of these foundations except that at Highgate. He assumes that the others were all built on the occasion of the ordinance of 20 Edward III.; but it is probable that only two of them, the Lock and the Kingsland or Hackney spital were built at that time[191].

An early instance of a leper-spital or refuge apparently without ecclesiastical discipline is mentioned in a charter roll of 1207-8, in which king John grants to the leprosi of Bristol a croft outside the Laffard gate, whereon to reside under the king’s protection and to beg with impunity. On the roads leading to Norwich there were four such shelters, outside the gates of St Mary Magdalene, St Bennet, St Giles and St Stephen respectively; these houses were each under a keeper, and were supported by the alms of the townsfolk or of travellers; only one of the four is alleged to have had a chapel attached. The date of these is unknown, but they were probably late. On the roads leading from Lynn, there were three such erections, at Cowgate, Letchhythe and West Lynn, which are first mentioned in a will of 1432. These non-religious and unendowed leper-spitals were probably rude erections on the outskirts of the town, at the door of which, or on the roadside near, one or more lepers would sit and beg. The liberty of soliciting alms was one of their privileges, only they were not allowed to carry their importunity too far; hence the ordinance of most countries that the lepers were not to enter mills and bake-houses; and hence some ordinances of the Scots parliament limiting the excursions of the leper folk. One of the most considerable privileges to lepers was granted to the lepers of Shrewsbury in 1204 by king John, who did not lose the chance of earning a cheap reputation for Christian charity by his ostentatious patronage of the pauperes Christi: they were entitled to take a handful of corn or flour from all sacks exposed in Shrewsbury market.

Leper-houses in Scotland and Ireland.

Most of the leper-spitals of Scotland would appear to have been of the poorest kind, unendowed and unprovided with priests. The richest foundation for lepers in Scotland was at Kingcase, near Prestwick in Ayrshire, endowed with lands and consisting of a hospital of eight beds. One or more leper-hospitals were built by the rich abbeys on the Tweed (at Aldcambus in Berwickshire and probably at another place). Another great ecclesiastical centre in Scotland, Elgin, had a leper-house at Rothfan, with accommodation for seven lepers, a chaplain, and a servant. After these, the Scots leper-houses may be taken to have been mere refuges, in which the lepers supported themselves by begging. One such secular hospital was in the Gorbals of Glasgow, founded in 1350. Liberton, near Edinburgh, is supposed to mean Leper-town, and to have been a resort of the sick on account of its medicinal spring. The hospital at Greenside, then outside Edinburgh, was built in 1589. There was a leper-spital outside the Gallow-gate of Aberdeen, on a road which still bears the name of the Spital. Similar shelters may be inferred to have existed at Perth, Stirling, Linlithgow and other places. James IV., in his journeys, used to distribute small sums to the sick folk in the “grandgore” (syphilis), to the poor folk, and to the lipper-folk, “at the town end[192].”

There were some leper-hospitals in Ireland, but it is not easy to distinguish them in every case from general hospitals for the sick poor. Thus the hospital built by the monks of Innisfallen in 869 is merely called nosocomium, although it is usually reckoned an early foundation for lepers in Ireland. A hospital at Waterford was “confirmed to the poor” by the Benedictines in 1185. St Stephen’s in Dublin (1344) is specially named as the residence of the “poor lepers of the city” in a deed of gift about 1360-70; a locality of the city called Leper-hill was perhaps the site of another refuge. Lepers also may have been the occupants of the hospitals at Kilbrixy in Westmeath (St Bridget’s), of St Mary Magdalene’s at Wexford (previous to 1408), of the house at “Hospital,” Lismore (1467), at Downpatrick, at Kilclief in county Down, at Cloyne, and of one or more of four old hospitals in or near Cork. The hospital at Galway, built “for the poor of the town” about 1543, was not a leper-house, nor is there reason to take the old hospital at Dungarvan as a foundation specially for lepers[193].

The Prejudice against Lepers.

It will have been inferred, from many particulars given, that the segregation of lepers in the Middle Ages was far from complete, and that many ministered to them without fear and without risk. The same hospital received both leprosi and others, the hospitals were served by staffs of chaplains, clerks and sometimes women attendants; and yet nothing is anywhere said of contagion being feared or of the disease spreading by contagion. The experience of these medieval hospitals was doubtless the same as in the West Indies and other parts of the world in our own day. It is true that the medical writers pronounce the disease to be contagious, ut docet Avicenna; but the public would seem to have been unaware of that, and they certainly lost nothing by their ignorance of the medical dogma, which, in the text-books, is merely the result of a concatenation of verbalist arguments. At the same time it is clear that there was a certain amount of segregation of the leprous. The inmates of the hospital at Lincoln are significantly described as “de ejectibus” of the city. The third Lateran Council based one of its decrees upon what must have been a common experience, namely, that lepers were unable to mix freely with others, and that they were objected to in the same church, and even as corpses in the same churchyard. There are some particular indications of that feeling to be gathered from the chroniclers.

One of the most remarkable histories is that of a high ecclesiastic in the pre-Norman period. In the year 1044, Aelfward, bishop of London, being stricken with leprosy (lepra perfusus) sought an asylum in the monastery of Evesham, of which he was the prior. The monks may have had more than one reason for not welcoming back their prior; at all events they declined to let him stay, so that he repaired to the abbey of Ramsey, where he had passed his noviciate and been shorn a monk. He carried off with him from Evesham certain valuables and relics; and his old comrades at Ramsey, undeterred by his leprosy or counter-attracted by his treasures, took him in and kept him until his death. The incident can hardly be legendary for it is related in the annals of Ramsey Abbey by one who wrote within a hundred years of the event[194].

Another case, which may also be accepted as authentic, is given by Eadmer in his Life of Anselm. Among the penitents who sought counsel and consolation of Anselm while he was still abbot of Bec in Normandy, with a great name for sanctity, was a certain powerful noble from the marches of Flanders. He had been stricken with leprosy in his body, and his grief was all the greater that he saw himself despised beneath his hereditary rank, and shunned by his peers pro obscenitate tanti mali[195].

Besides such notable cases, we find more evidence in the ordinances of the hospital of St Julian at St Albans, which have been preserved more completely than those of any other leper-house. Forasmuch as the disease of leprosy is of all infirmities held the most in contempt, the unfortunate person who is about to be received into the St Albans house is directed to work himself up into a state of the most factitious melancholy; he is reminded, not only of the passage in Leviticus about “Unclean, unclean!”, but also of the blessed Job, who was himself a leper (in the 14th century his boils became identified with the plague, and in the end of the 15th century the patriarch was claimed as an early victim of the lues venerea); and further of the verse in the 53rd of Isaiah: “Et nos putavimus eum leprosum, percussum a Deo, et humiliatum[196].” The St Albans house, with its six beds, appears to have been carefully managed, and its inmates well provided for; but the unreal atmosphere of the place had been too much for the leprous or other patients of the district; for we find it on record that they could hardly be persuaded to don its russet uniform, and submit themselves for the rest of their lives to its discipline.

There can be no question, then, that persons adjudged leprous were shunned, driven out or ostracised by public opinion, and even legislated against. The reality of these practices should not be confounded with a real need for them. Least of all should they be ascribed to a general belief in the contagiousness of the disease. In practice no one heeded the medical dogma of leprous contagion, because no one attached any concrete meaning to it or had any real experience of it. There was prejudice against lepers, partly on account of Biblical tradition, and partly because the “terribilis aspectus” of a leper was repulsive or uncanny. Further, in genuine leprosy, the most wretched part of the victim’s condition was not his appearance (which in a large proportion of cases may present little that is noticeable to passing observation), but his unfitness for exertion, his listlessness, and depression of spirits, owing to the profound disorganisation of his nerves. A leprous member of a family would be a real burden to his relatives; and in a hard and cruel age he would be little better off than the stricken deer of the herd or the winged bird of the flock. To become a beggar was his natural fate; and as a beggar he became privileged, by royal patent or by prescription, while beggars in ordinary were under a ban.

It is undoubted that the privilege of begging accorded to lepers was abused, and was claimed by numbers who feigned to be lepers[197]. The one severe edict against lepers in England was the ordinance of Edward III. for the exclusion of lepers from London in 1346; it is clear, however, from the text of the ordinance that the occasion of it was not any fixed persuasion of the need for isolating leprous subjects, but some intolerable behaviour of lepers or of those who passed as such. The mayor and sheriffs are ordered to procure that all lepers should avoid the city within fifteen days, for the reason that persons of that class, as well by the pollution of their breath, etc. “as by carnal intercourse with women in stews and other secret places, detestably frequenting the same, do so taint persons who are sound, both male and female, to the great injury etc.[198]” That is the old confusion which we have already noticed in Bernard Gordonio and Gilbert; it is an edict against lepra in its generic sense, and against the same class that William Clowes characterizes so forcibly in his book on the morbus Gallicus in 1579. At a date intermediate between those two, in 1488, an order was made by the provost of Paris, that “lepers” should leave the city; but that is too late a date for leprosy, although not too early for syphilis. On the 24th August, 1375, the porters of the City Gates were sworn to prevent lepers from entering the city, or from staying in the same, or in the suburbs thereof; and on the same date, the foreman at ‘Le Loke’ (the Lock Hospital in Southwark) and the foreman at the leper-spital of Hackney took oath that they will not bring lepers, or know of their being brought, into the city, but that they will inform the said porters and prevent the said lepers from entering, so far as they may[199].

When all word of leprosy had long ceased in England the porters of the City Gates had the same duties towards beggars in general. Thus in Bullein’s Dialogue of 1564, the action begins with a whining beggar from Northumberland saying the Lord’s Prayer at the door of a citizen. The citizen asks him, “How got you in at the gates?” whereupon it appears that the Northumbrian had a friend at Court: “I have many countrymen in the city,” among the rest an influential personage, the Beadle of the Beggars[200].

While it cannot be maintained that lepers were tolerated or looked upon with indifference, yet it was for other reasons than fear of contagion that they were objectionable. The prejudices against them have been already illustrated from periods as early as the eleventh century. They were, to say the least, undesirable companions, and in certain occupations they must have been peculiarly objectionable. Thus, on the 11th June, 1372, in the city of London, John Mayn, baker, who had often times before been commanded by the mayor and aldermen to depart from the city, and provide for himself some dwelling without the same, and avoid the common conversation of mankind, seeing that he the same John was smitten with the blemish of leprosy—was again ordered to depart[201]. It does not appear whether the baker departed that time, nor is there any good diagnosis of his leprosy; there was certainly a prejudice against him, but the occasion of it may have been nothing more than the eczematous crusts on the hands and arms, sometimes very inveterate, which men of his trade are subject to.

It is clear also from a singular case in the Foedera, that a false accusation of leprosy was sometimes brought against an individual, perhaps out of enmity, like an accusation of witchcraft. In 1468 a woman accused of leprosy appealed to Edward IV., who issued a chancery warrant for her examination.

The writ of 3rd July, 1468, is to the king’s physicians, “sworn to the safe-keeping of our person,” William Hatteclyff, Roger Marschall, and Dominic de Serego, doctors of Arts and Medicine; and the subject of the inquisition is Johanna Nightyngale of Brentwood in Essex, who was presumed by certain of her neighbours to be infected by the foul contagion of lepra, and for whose removal from the common intercourse of men a petition had been laid in Chancery. She had refused to remove herself to a solitary place, prout moris est; the physicians are accordingly ordered to associate with themselves certain legal persons, to inquire whether the woman was leprous, and, if so, to have her removed to a solitary place honestiori modo quo poteris. On the 1st of November, 1468, the court of inquiry reported that they found the woman to be in no way leprous, nor to have been. The woman had been brought before them: they had passed in review twenty-five or more of the commonly reputed signs of lepra, but they had not found that she could be convicted of leprosy from them, or from a sufficient number of them; again, passing in review each of the four species of lepra (alopecia, tinia, leonina, and elephantia) and the forty or more distinctive signs of the species of lepra, they found not that the woman was marked by any of the species of lepra, but that she was altogether free and immune from every species of lepra[202].

Laws against Lepers.

The ordinance of 21 Edward III. (1346) against the harbouring of lepers in London is the only one of the kind (so far as I know) in English history; the Statutes of the realm contain no reference to lepers or leprosy from first to last; the references in the Rolls of Parliament are to the taxing of their houses and lands. The laws which deprived lepers of marital rights and of heirship appear to have been wholly foreign; in England, leprosy as a bar to succession was made a plea in the law courts. It appears, however, that a law against lepers was made by a Welsh king in the tenth century[203]. It is not easy to realize the state of Welsh society in the tenth century; but we know enough of it in the twelfth century, from the description of Giraldus Cambrensis, to assert with some confidence that “leprosy” might have meant anything—perhaps the “lepra Normannorum[204].”

In Scotland the laws and ordinances, civil and ecclesiastical, against lepers have been more numerous. In 1242 and 1269, canons of the Scots Church were made, ordering that lepers should be separated from society in accordance with general custom. In 1283-84, the statutes of the Society of Merchants, or the Guildry, of Berwick provided that lepers should not enter the borough, and that “some gude man sall gather alms for them.” In 1427 the Parliament of Perth authorised ministers and others to search the parishes for lepers[205].

We conclude, then, that little was made of leprosy by English legislators (rather more by the Scots), just as we have found that in the endowment of charities, the leprous had only a small share, and that share a somewhat exaggerated one owing to the morbid sentimentality of the chivalrous period. The most liberal estimate of the amount of true leprosy at any time in England would hardly place it so high as in the worst provinces of India at the present day. In the province of Burdwan, with a population of over two millions, which may be taken to have been nearly the population of England in the thirteenth century, there are enumerated 4604 lepers, or 2·26 in every thousand inhabitants. But even with that excessive prevalence of leprosy, and with no seclusion of the lepers, a traveller may visit the province of Burdwan, and not be aware that leprosy is “frightfully common” in it. In medieval England the village leper may have been about as common as the village fool; while in the larger towns or cities, such as London, Norwich, York, Bristol, and Lincoln, true lepers can hardly have been so numerous as the friars themselves, who are supposed to have found a large part of their occupation in ministering to their wants. A rigorous scepticism might be justified, by the absence of any good diagnostic evidence, in going farther than this. But the convergence of probabilities does point to a real prevalence of leprosy in medieval England; and those probabilities will be greatly strengthened by discovering in the then habits of English living a vera causa for the disease.

Causes of Medieval Leprosy.

What was there in the medieval manner of life to give rise to a certain number of cases of leprosy in all the countries of Europe? Granting that not all who were called leprosi and leprosae, were actually the subjects of lepra as correctly diagnosed, and that the misnomer was not unlikely to have been applied in the case of princes, nobles and great ecclesiastics, we have still to reckon with the apparition of leprosy among the people in medieval Europe and with its gradual extinction, an extinction that became absolute in most parts of Europe before the Modern period had begun.

Of the “importation” of leprosy into Britain from some source outside there can be no serious thought; the words are a meaningless phrase, which no one with a real knowledge of the conditions, nature and affinities of leprosy would care to resort to. The varying types of diseases, or their existence at one time and absence at another, are a reflex of the variations in the life of the people—in food and drink, wages, domestic comfort, town life or country life, and the like. No one doubts that the birth-rate and the death-rate have had great variations from time to time, depending on the greater or less abundance of the means of subsistence, on overcrowding, or other things; and the variation in the birth-rate and death-rate is only the most obvious and numerically precise of a whole series of variations in vital phenomena, of which the successions, alternations, and novelties in the types of disease are the least simple, and least within the reach of mere notional apprehension or mere statistical management. The apparition and vanishing of leprosy in medieval Europe was one of those vital phenomena. It may be more easily apprehended by placing beside it a simple example from our own times.

The pellagra of the North Italian peasantry (and of Roumania, Gascony and some other limited areas) is the nearest affinity to leprosy among the species of disease. Strip leprosy of all its superficial and sentimental characters, analyse its essential phenomena, reduce its pathology to the most correct outlines, and we shall find it a chronic constitutional malady not far removed in type from pellagra. In both diseases there are the early warnings in the excessive sensibility, excessive redness and changes of colour, at certain spots of skin on or about the face or on the hands and feet. In both diseases, permanent loss of sensibility follows the previous exaggeration, blanching of the skin will remain for good at the spots where redness and discoloration were apt to come and go, and these affections of the end-regions of nerves will settle, in less definite way, upon the nervous system at large,—the cerebro-spinal nervous system, or the organic nervous system, or both together. What makes leprosy seem a disease in a different class from that, is the formation of nodules, or lumps, in the regions of affected skin in a certain proportion of the cases. If leprosy were all anaesthetic leprosy, its affinities to pellagra would be more quickly perceived; it is because about one-half of it has more or less of the tuberculated character that a diversion is created towards another kind of pathology. But the fact that some cases of leprosy develop nodules along the disordered nerves does not remove the disease as a whole from the class to which pellagra belongs. In both diseases we are dealing essentially with a profound disorder of the nerves and nerve-centres, commencing in local skin-affections which come and go and at length settle, proceeding to implicate the nervous functions generally, impairing the efficiency of the individual, and bringing him to a miserable end. The two diseases diverge each along its own path, leprosy becoming more a hopeless disorder of the nerves of tissue-nutrition, and so taking on a structural character mainly but not exclusively, and pellagra becoming more a hopeless disorder of the organic nervous system (digestion, circulation, etc.) with implication of the higher nervous functions, such as the senses, the intellect, and the emotions, and so taking on a functional character mainly but not exclusively. The correlation of structure and function is one that goes all through pathology as well as biology; and here we find it giving character to each of two chronic disorders of the nervous system, according as the structural side or the functional side comes uppermost.

What, then, are the circumstances of pellagra, and do these throw light upon the medieval prevalence of leprosy? Pellagra has been proved with the highest attainable scientific certainty to be due to a staple diet of bread or porridge made from damaged or spoilt maize. It followed the introduction of maize into Lombardy at an interval of two or three generations, and its distribution corresponds closely to the poorer kinds of maize on colder soils, and to the class of the peasantry who get the worst kind of corn or meal for their food. The cases of the disease among the peasantry of Lombardy and some other maize-growing provinces of Northern Italy, were about one hundred thousand when last estimated; the endowed charitable houses and lunatic asylums are full of them. The connexion of the disease with its causes is perfectly well understood; but the economic questions of starvation wages, of truck, of large farms with bailiffs, and of agricultural usage, have proved too much for the chambers of commerce and the Government; so that there is as yet little or no sign of the decline of pellagra in the richest provinces of Italy. This disease is not mentioned in the Bible, therefore it has no traditional vogue; it is not well suited to knight-errantry, because it is a common evil of whole provinces; its causes are economic and social, therefore there is no ready favour to be earned by systematic attempts to deal with them; and there is absolutely no opening for heroism and self-sacrifice of the more ostentatious kind. These are among the reasons why this great object-lesson of a chronic disorder of nutrition, proceeding steadily before our eyes, has been so little perceived. It is in pellagra, however, that we find the key to the ancient problem of leprosy. The two diseases are closely allied in the insidious approach of their symptoms, in their implicating the tissue-nutrition through the nerves, or the nervous functions through the nutrition, in their cumulating and incurable character, and in their transmissibility by inheritance. Thus nosologically allied, they may be reasonably suspected of having analogous causes; and as we know the cause of modern pellagra to be something noxious in the habitual diet of the people, we may look for the cause of medieval leprosy in something of the same kind.

The dietetic cause is not far to seek, and it cannot be stated better than in the following well-known passage by the philosophical Gilbert White in his Natural History of Selborne[206]:—

“It must, therefore, in these days be, to a humane and thinking person, a matter of equal wonder and satisfaction, when he contemplates how nearly this pest is eradicated, and observes that a leper is now [1778] a rare sight. He will, moreover, when engaged in such a train of thought, naturally inquire for the reason. This happy change perhaps may have originated and been continued from the much smaller quantity of salted meat and fish now eaten in these kingdoms; from the use of linen next the skin; from the plenty of bread; and from the profusion of fruits, roots, legumes, and greens, so common in every family. Three or four centuries ago, before there were any enclosures, sown-grasses, field-turnips, or field-carrots, or hay, all the cattle which had grown fat in summer, and were not killed for winter use, were turned out soon after Michaelmas to shift as they could through the dead months; so that no fresh meat could be had in winter or spring. Hence the marvellous account of vast stores of salted flesh found in the larder of the eldest Spencer even so late in the spring as the 3rd of May (600 bacons, 80 carcases of beef, and 600 muttons)[207]. It was from magazines like these that the turbulent barons supported in idleness their riotous swarms of retainers, ready for any disorder or mischief. But agriculture is now arrived at such pitch of perfection, that our best and fattest meats are killed in the winter; and no man needs eat salted flesh, unless he prefers it, that has money to buy fresh.

“One cause of this distemper might be no doubt the quantity of wretched fresh and salt fish consumed by the commonalty at all seasons as well as in Lent, which our poor now would hardly be persuaded to touch.... The plenty of good wheaten bread that now is found among all ranks of people in the south, instead of that miserable sort which used, in old days, to be made of barley or beans, may contribute not a little to the sweetening their blood and correcting their juices.”

Let us add to this, that the meat diet of the poorer class, whether serfs or freemen, would be apt to consist of the more worthless portions, the semi-putrid pieces in the salted sides of bacon, mutton or beef, and that badly-cured pork was in many parts the usual kind of flesh-food; and we shall have no difficulty in finding the noxious element in the diet of the Middle Ages, which the dietetic hypothesis of leprosy requires. Some who have advocated that hypothesis for modern leprosy, have laid themselves open, notwithstanding the ability and industry of their research, to plausible objections which have no bearing if the hypothesis be sufficiently safe-guarded. Leprosy, like every other morbus miseriae, needs a number of things working together to produce it, its more or less uniform specific character or distinctive mark being determined by the presence of one factor in particular. The special factor should be generalised as much as possible, so as to cover the whole circumstances of leprosy: it is not only half-cured or semi-putrid fish[208], but half-cured or semi-putrid flesh of any kind. The most general expression for leprosy is a semi-putrid or toxic character of animal food, just as for the allied pellagra, it is a semi-putrid or toxic character of the bread or porridge. Moreover it is that noxious or unnatural thing in the food, not once and again, or as a bonne bouche, but somewhat steadily from day to day as a chief part of the sustenance, and from year to year. As the rain-drops wear the stones, so the poison in the daily diet tells upon the constitution. Once more, such special causes may be present in a country generally, among the poor of all the towns, villages and hamlets, and yet only one person here and there may show specific effects that are recognisable as a disease to which we give a name. Unless there be present the aiding and abetting things, the special factor will hardly make itself felt; and if there be not the special factor, there may be some other morbus miseriae but there will not be that one. These aiding things are for the most part the usual concomitants of poverty and hardships, wearing out the nerves far more than is commonly supposed and producing in ordinary an excessive amount of nervous affections among the poor. But among the poor themselves, as well as among the well-to-do, there are special susceptibilities in individuals and in families. One person may have the same unwholesome surroundings as another and the same poisonous element in his diet, but he may fall into no such train of symptoms as his leprous neighbour because he is not formed in quite the same way, because he has “no nerves,” or is of a hardier stock, or because his unwholesome manner of life comes out in some other form of disease (scrofula perhaps, less probably gout), or for some other reason deeply hidden in his ancestry and his personal peculiarities. The chances would be always largely against that particular combination of factors needed to make leprosy. It was a morbus miseriae of the Middle Ages, but on the whole not a very common one; and it was easily shaken off by the national life when the conditions changed ever so little. It was all the more easily shaken off by reason of the facilities for divorce, the prohibition of marriage, and the monastic discipline.

The staple diet as a cause of leprosy was suspected in the Middle Ages, and by writers as ancient as Galen. It is not without significance that the minute directions for the dieting of the lepers in the rich hospital of Sherburn, near Durham, urge special caution as to the freshness of the fish: when fresh fish was not to be had, red herrings might be substituted, but only if they were well cured, not putrid nor corrupt. Those directions were in accordance with the best medical teaching of the time on the dietetics of leprosy, or on how to prevent leprosy, as it is given with considerable minuteness in Gordonio and Gilbert[209].

On the other hand we find a singular ordinance of the Scots Parliament at Scone in 1386, or some forty years after the date of the Durham regulations: “Gif ony man brings to the market corrupt swine or salmond to be sauld, they sall be taken by the Bailie and incontinent without ony question sall be sent to the lepper-folke; and gif there be na lepper-folke, they sall be destroyed alluterlie[210].” Nothing could be more significant for the prevalence and persistence of leprosy in Scotland[211]. Putrid fish and pork did actually come to market; the dangers of them as regarded the production of leprosy were unsuspected; and the lepers (genuine or mistaken) were actually directed to be fed with them. Such food for “lepers” could only have fed the disease; and if it be the case that genuine leprosy was met with in Edinburgh and Glasgow more than two centuries after it ceased to be heard of in England, we need be at no loss to assign the reason why the disease was more inveterate in the one country than in the other.

CHAPTER III.

THE BLACK DEATH.

The most likely of the fourteenth-century English annalists to have given us a good account of the Black Death was the historian Ranulphus Higden, author of the Polychronicon, who became a monk of St Werburgh’s abbey at Chester about the beginning of the century, and lived to see the disastrous year of 1349[212]. That part of his history which relates to his own period he brings down year by year to 1348, with less fulness of detail in the later years, as if old age were making him brief. Under the year 1348 he begins the subject of the great mortality, speaks of the incessant rains of the second half of the year from Midsummer to Christmas, refers to the ravages of the plague at Avignon, the then ecclesiastical capital of Christendom, just mentions England and Ireland, and then lets the pen fall from his hand. Higden is believed to have resumed his annals after 1352; but he was then a very old man, and the last entries are unimportant. But the period from 1348 to 1352 is an absolute blank. He comes to the edge of the great subject of that time, as if he had intended to deal with it comprehensively, beginning with a notice of the previous weather, which is by no means irrelevant, and after two or three lines more he breaks off. Most of the monastic chronicles are interrupted at the same point; if there is an entry at all under the year 1349 it is for the most part merely the words magna mortalitas. The prevailing sense of desolation and despair comes out in the record made by a friar of Kilkenny, who kept a chronicle of passing events, and escaped the fate of his brethren in the convent only long enough to record a few particulars of the great mortality[213]:

“And I, friar John Clyn, of the Order of Friars Minor, and of the convent of Kilkenny, wrote in this book those notable things which happened in my time, which I saw with my eyes, or which I learned from persons worthy of credit. And lest things worthy of remembrance should perish with time, and fall away from the memory of those who are to come after us, I, seeing these many evils, and the whole world lying, as it were, in the wicked one, among the dead waiting for death till it come—as I have truly heard and examined, so have I reduced these things to writing; and lest the writing should perish with the writer, and the work fail together with the workman, I leave parchment for continuing the work, if haply any man survive, and any of the race of Adam escape this pestilence and continue the work which I have commenced.”

There is nothing in the English chronicles so directly personal as that, but there are some facts recorded of the mortality in four of them which have contemporary value, or almost contemporary. The best of these accounts, as a piece of history, is that of Henry Knighton, canon of Leicester[214], who acknowledges his indebtedness to Higden’s Polychronicon for the events down to 1326, but after that date either writes from his own observation or takes his facts from some unknown contemporary source. The next in importance is Geoffrey le Baker[215], a clerk of the abbey of Osney, near Oxford, whose account of the arrival of the Black Death in England has obtained wide currency as copied literally in the 1605 edition of Stow’s Annals. The third is Robert de Avesbury[216], whose History of Edward III. serves as a chronicle for the city of London more particularly. The fourth is the Malmesbury monk who wrote, about 1367, the chronicle known as the Eulogium[217].

From the systematic paragraphs of those writers, and from various other incidental notices, an outline of the progress of the pestilence in England, Scotland and Ireland, may be traced. It entered English soil at a port of Dorsetshire—said in the Eulogium to have been Melcombe (Weymouth)—in the beginning of August, 1348. It is said to have spread rapidly through Dorset, Devon and Somerset, almost stripping those counties of their inhabitants, and to have reached Bristol by the 15th of August. The people of Gloucester in vain tried to keep out the infection by cutting off all intercourse with Bristol; from Gloucester it came to Oxford, and from Oxford to London, reaching the capital at Michaelmas, according to one account, or at All Saints (1st November) according to another. Although the 15th of August is definitely given as the date of its arrival at Bristol from the Dorset coast, it must not be assumed that the infection covered the ground so quickly as that in the rest of its progresses. We have a measure of the rate of its advance south-westward through Devonshire to Cornwall, in a contemporary entry in the register of the Church of Friars Minor at Bodmin[218]: confirming the independent statements that the pestilence entered England at the beginning of August, the register goes on to record that it reached the town of Bodmin shortly before Christmas, and that there died in that town about fifteen hundred persons, as estimated.

The corporation records of Bridport, a town near to the place in Dorset where the infection landed, show that four bailiffs held office, instead of two, in the 23rd of Edward III., in tempore pestilentiae; the 23rd of Edward III. would begin 25 Jan. 1349, but the municipal year would probably have extended from September 1348, so that Bridport may have had the infection before the end of that year[219]. It seems probable that the smaller towns, and the villages, all over the South-west, had been infected in the end of 1348, but somewhat later than Bristol and Gloucester. The mandate of Ralph, bishop of Bath and Wells, “On confessions in the time of the pestilence,” is dated Wynchelcomb, 4. id. Jan. M.CCC.XLVIII. (10 January, 1349) and it speaks of the contagion spreading everywhere, and of many parish churches and other cures in his diocese being left without curate and priest to visit the sick and administer the sacraments[220].

The autumn of 1348 may be taken, then, as correct for the South-west; and there is no doubt that the infection had been severe enough in London before the end of that year to move the authorities to action.

“Owing to the increasing severity of the sudden plague day by day at Westminster and places adjoining,” Parliament was prorogued on the 1st of January, 1349[221]. There was a further prorogation on the 10th of March, for the reason given that “the pestilence was continuing at Westminster, in the city of London, and in other places, more severely than before” (gravius solito)[222]. This agrees with Avesbury’s statement that the epidemic in London reached a height (in tantum excrevit) after Candlemas, 1349, and that it was over about Pentecost. One of the best proofs of the season and duration of the Black Death in London is got from the number of wills enrolled in the Husting Court of the city in the successive months. Those who died of the plague leaving wills were, of course, but a small fraction of the whole mortality; but the wills during some eight months of 1349 are ten or fifteen times more numerous than in any other year before or after, excepting perhaps the year of the pestis secunda, 1361. Starting from 3 in November, 1348 (none in December), the probates rise to 18 in January, 1349, 42 in February, 41 in March, none in April (owing to paralysis of business, doubtless), but 121 in May, 31 in June, 51 in July, none in August and September, 18 in October, 27 in November, and then an ordinary average[223]. Thus it would have had a duration of some seven or eight months in the capital, with a curve of increase, maximum intensity, and decrease, just as the great London epidemics of the same disease in the 16th and 17th centuries are known from the weekly bills to have had.

It does not appear to have been felt at all in Norwich and other places in the Eastern Counties until the end of March, 1349, its enormous ravages in that part of England falling mostly in the summer. There is a definite statement that it began at York about the feast of the Ascension, by which time it had almost ceased in London, and that it lasted in the capital of the northern province until the end of July. The infection almost emptied the abbey of Meaux, in Holdernesse, of its monks, and the abbey lands of their tenants; and the date given in the abbey chronicle is the month of August, 1349. The spring and summer of that year appear to have been the seasons of the great mortality all over England, excepting perhaps in the southern counties where the outbreak began; even at Oxford, which is one of the towns mentioned as on the route of the pestilence from Dorsetshire to London, the mortality is entered under the year 1349, which was also the year of its enormous prevalence among the farmers and peasants on the manor of Winslow, in the county of Bucks.

Its invasion of the mountainous country of Wales (by no means exempt from plague in the 17th century) may have been a season later—anno sequenti, says Le Baker, which may mean either 1349 or 1350. In the Irish annals, the first mention of the pestilence is under the year 1348; but it was probably only the rumour of the mortality at Avignon and elsewhere abroad that caused the alarm in Ireland among ecclesiastics and in gatherings of the people. It was first seen on the shores of Dublin Bay, at Howth and Dalkey, and a little farther north on the coast at Drogheda; it raged in Dublin “from the beginning of August until the Nativity[224],” which may mean the year 1348, although the year 1349 is the date given for the great mortality in Ireland in later chronicles.

The experience of Scotland illustrates still farther the slow progression of the plague, and its dependence to some extent upon the season of the year. Two English chroniclers (Le Baker and Knighton) mention that it got among the Scots assembled in the forest of Selkirk for an invasion at the time when the mortality was greatest in the northern counties, the autumn of 1349. But the winter cold must have held it in check as regards the rest of Scotland; for it is clear from Fordoun that its great season in that country generally was the year 1350. Thus the Black Death may be said to have extended over three seasons in the British Islands—a partial season in the south of England in 1348, a great season all over England, in Ireland and in the south of Scotland in 1349, and a late extension to Scotland generally in 1350. The experience of all Europe was similar, the Mediterranean provinces receiving the infection as early as 1347, and the northern countries, on the Baltic and North Seas, as late as 1350.

Symptoms and Type of the Black Death.

This sweeping pestilence was part of a great wave of infection which passed over Europe from the remote East, and of which we shall trace the antecedents in the latter part of this chapter. The type and symptoms of the disease are sufficiently well-known from foreign descriptions—by Guy de Chauliac and Raymond de Chalin, both of Avignon, by Boccaccio, and by the Villani of Florence. It was the bubo-plague, a disease which is known to have existed in Egypt in the time of the Ptolemies, and made its first great incursion from that country into Europe in the reign of Justinian in the year 543 (see Chapter I.). Its second great invasion, but from a new direction, was the Black Death of 1347-9; and from that time it remained domesticated in the soil of Europe for more than three hundred years as “the plague.” The first medical descriptions of it by native British writers are comparatively late. Manuscript treatises or “ordinances” on the plague circulated in England from the reign of Richard II., most of them being copies of a short work of no great value by one John of Burgoyne or John of Bordeaux. There is also extant an English translation in manuscript, assigned to the 14th century (but belonging to the end of it, if not to the 15th), of a really good work on the plague by the bishop of Aarhus, in Denmark, of which I shall have more to say in the next chapter. But none of these give English experience; and the earliest of our 16th century plague-books, by Phaer, is a compilation mostly, if not entirely, from the Danish bishop’s treatise, the latter having been printed in its English form in or near 1480. It is not until we come to the work of Dr Gilbert Skene of Edinburgh, printed in 1568, that we find a treatise on plague showing traces of first-hand observation and reflection. Then follow the essay of Simon Kellwaye on the London plague of 1593, and that of the well-known Elizabethan poet and physician Thomas Lodge, on the plague of 1603. Thus the reign of the plague in Britain was approaching an end before the native medical profession began to write upon it. Its eventful history from its arrival in 1348 down to a comparatively late period has to be constructed from other materials than the records or systematic writings of the faculty.

The type of the Black Death in England is sufficiently indicated by Le Baker, who was probably living at Osney, near Oxford, when the infection began, and indubitably by friar Clyn of Kilkenny. Le Baker mentions the apostemata or swellings in diverse parts, their sudden eruption, and their extreme hardness and dryness, so that hardly any fluid escaped when they were lanced according to the usual method of treating them[225]. He speaks also of a peculiarly fatal form, from which few or none recovered; it was characterised by “small black pustules” on the skin, probably the livid spots or “tokens” which came to be considered the peculiar mark of the plague, and were certainly the index of a malignant type of it, just as the corresponding haemorrhages are in pestilential fever (or typhus) and in yellow fever. The disease, he adds, was swift in doing its work: one day people were in high health and the next day dead and buried. Knighton also says, with special reference to Bristol, that the attack was fatal sometimes within twelve hours, and usually within three days at the most. The treatment, which would have been, according to all subsequent experience, the privilege only of those who could pay for it, would appear to have consisted in lancing the risings or botches in the armpits, neck, or groins; these were the lymph-glands enlarged to the size of a walnut or of a hen’s egg, and of a livid colour,—the most striking and certain of all the plague-signs.

Clyn’s account of the disease, as he saw it at Kilkenny in 1349, is important for including one remarkable symptom on which great importance has been laid as distinctive of the Black Death among the epidemics of bubo-plague, namely haemorrhage from the lungs: “For many died from carbuncles, and boils, and botches which grew on the legs and under the arms; others from passion of the head, as if thrown into a frenzy; others by vomiting blood[226].” It was so contagious, he says, that those who touched the dead, or even the sick, were incontinently infected that they died, and both penitent and confessor were borne together to the same grave. Such was the fear and horror of it that men scarce dared exercise the offices of pity, namely, to visit the sick and bury the dead. Clyn’s list of symptoms includes all the most prominent features of the plague as we shall find them described for the great epidemics of the Stuart period—the botches in the armpits or groins, the carbuncles, the boils (or blains), and the frenzy or delirium, as well as the special symptom of the great mortality—vomiting of blood.

Of the botch, which was the most striking sign of the plague, the following description, by Woodall (1639), may be introduced here, to supplement the more meagre accounts of the bubo-plague on its first appearance. Woodall had himself suffered from the bubo or botch on two occasions, in its comparatively safe suppurating form; his description relates to the hard, tense, and dry botch, especially mentioned by Le Baker for 1349, and always the index of great malignity:

“But the pestilential bubo or boyle commeth ever furiously on, and as in a rage of a Feaver, and as being in haste; sometimes it lighteth on or near the inguen thwart, but more often lower upon the thigh, pointing downward with one end, the upper end towards the belly being commonly the biggest or the fullest part of the bubo, the whole thigh being also inflamed[227].”

Of this disease, says Le Baker, few of the first rank died, but of the common people an incalculable number, and of the clergy and the cleric class a multitude known to God only. It was mostly the young and strong who were cut off, the aged and weakly being commonly spared. No one dared come near the sick, and the bodies of the dead were shunned. Both Le Baker and Knighton speak of whole villages and hamlets left desolate, and of numbers of houses, both great and small, left empty and falling to ruin. It was not merely one in a house that died, says friar Clyn of Kilkenny, but commonly husband, wife, children and domestics all went the same way of death; the friar himself wrote as one inter mortuos mortem expectans. Without naming the locality, Avesbury says that in a single day, twenty, forty, sixty or more corpses were buried in the same trench[228]. The stereotyped phrase in the monastic chronicles is that not more than a tenth part of the people were left alive. However, the author of the Eulogium, a monk of Malmesbury who brought his history down to 1366, gives a numerical estimate at the other extreme. He says that the plague entered England at Melcumbe, destroyed innumerable people in Dorset, Devon and Somerset, and, having left few alive in Bristol, proceeded northwards, leaving no city, nor town, nor hamlet, nor scarcely a house, in which it did not cut off the greater part of the people, or the whole of them; but he adds, somewhat inconsequently, “so that a fifth part of the men, women and children in all England were consigned to the grave[229].” These are the vague contemporary estimates of the mortality—ranging from nine-tenths to one-fifth of the whole population. It is possible, however, to come much nearer to precision by the systematic use of documents; and in that exercise we shall now proceed, in an order from the more general to the more particular.

Estimates of the Mortality.

There are two State documents the language of which favours the more moderate kind of estimate. In a letter of the king[230], dated 1 December, 1349, or after the epidemic was over, to the mayor and bailiffs of Sandwich, ordering them to watch all who took ship for foreign parts so as to arrest the exit of men and money, the preamble or motive is: “Quia non modica pars populi regni nostri Angliae praesenti Pestilentia est defuncta.” (Forasmuch as no mean part of the people of our kingdom of England is dead of the present pestilence.) The Statute of Labourers, 18 November, 1350, begins: “Quia magna pars populi, et maximé operariorum et servientium jam in ultima pestilentia est defuncta.” (Forasmuch as a great part of the people, principally of artisans and labourers, is dead in the late pestilence.) The statute would have emphasized the loss of artizans and labourers as these were its special subjects, but the maximé operariorum et servientium may be fairly taken in a literal sense to mean that the adult and able-bodied of the working class suffered most. One of the contemporary chronicles says that the women and children were sent to take the places of the men in field labour[231]. It is also significant that the “second plague” of 1361 is named by two independent chroniclers the pestis puerorum, or plague of the juveniles, as if it were now their turn. The pestis secunda was also notable, both in England and on the Continent, for the numbers of the nobility which it carried off, and in that respect it was contrasted with the Black Death.

Next we come to certain numerical statements as to the mortality of 1349, which have an air of precision. They relate to Leicester, Oxford, Bodmin, Norwich, Yarmouth and London. In Leicester, according to Knighton, who was a canon there at the time or shortly after, the burials from the Black Death were more than 700 in St Margaret’s churchyard, more than 400 in Holy Cross parish (afterwards St Martin’s), more than 380 in St Leonard’s parish, which was a small one, and in the same proportion in the other parishes, which were three or four in number, and none of them so large as the two first named. Knighton’s round numbers for three parishes are not improbable, considering that Leicester was a comparatively populous town at the time of the poll-tax of 1377: the numbers who paid the tax were 2101, which would give, by the usual way of reckoning, a population of 3939. The population of the same three parishes in 1558, or shortly after the period when English towns were described in the statute of 32 Henry VIII. as being much decayed, would have been about 820 in St Margaret’s, 800 in St Martin’s (Holy Cross), and 160 in St Leonard’s[232]. In 1712, when the hosiery industry had been flourishing for thirty years, the population of St Margaret’s was about 1900 and of St Martin’s about 1750, the estimated population of the whole town having been 6450, or about one-half more than we may assume it to have been in 1349.

In order to realise what the pestilence of 1349 meant to these parishes of Leicester, let us take the actual burials from the parish register of one of them, St Martin’s, in the comparatively mild plague years of 1610 and 1611, a period when the population, as calculated from the annual averages of births and deaths, would have been from 3000 to 3500, probably less, therefore, by some hundreds than it was in the years before the Black Death. In 1610 there were 82 burials in St Martin’s parish, or about twice the average of non-plague years; in 1611 there were 128 burials, or three to four times the annual average[233]. Knighton’s 400 deaths for the same parish in 1349 would mean that the ordinary burials were multiplied about ten times; while his figures for two other parishes would mean a still greater ratio of increase[234].

For Oxford the estimate is not less precise or more moderate. “’Tis reported,” says Anthony Wood, under the year 1349, “that no less than sixteen bodies in one day were carried to one churchyard[235].”

The information for Bodmin, in Cornwall, comes from William of Worcester[236] who read it, about a century after the event, in the register of the Franciscan church in that town. The entry in the register was doubtless made at the time, and as made by Franciscans familiar with burials it deserves some credit for approximate accuracy. The deaths are put down in round numbers at fifteen hundred, which may seem large for Bodmin at that date. But the truth is that the Cornish borough was a place of relatively greater importance then than afterwards. In the king’s writ of 1351, for men-at-arms, in which each town was rated on the old basis before the Black Death, Bodmin comes fourteenth in order, being rated at eight men, while such towns as Gloucester, Hereford and Shrewsbury are rated at ten each. It may well have had a population of three or four thousand, of which the numbers said to have died in the great mortality would be less than one-half.

Perhaps the most satisfactory reckoning of the dead from contemporary statements is that which can be made for London. The disease, as we know, reached the capital at Michaelmas or All Souls (1st November), and its prevalence led to a prorogation of Parliament on the 1st of January, and again on the 10th of March, the reason assigned for the farther prorogation being that the pestilence was raging gravius solito—more severely than usual. The winter mortality must have been considerable, although doubtless the season of the year kept it in check, as in all subsequent experience. But there is evidence that three more burying-places became necessary early in the year 1349. One of these, of no great extent, was on the east side of the City, in the part that is now the Minories[237]; and two were on the north side, not far apart. Of the latter, one formerly called Nomansland, in West Smithfield, was also of small extent[238]; but the other was a field of thirteen acres and a rood, which became in the course of years the property of the Carthusians and the site of the Charterhouse (partly covered now by Merchant Taylors School). The larger burial-ground, called Manny’s cemetery after its donor sir Walter Manny, the king’s minister and high admiral, was consecrated by the bishop of London and opened for use at Candlemas, 1349. Now comes in the testimony of Avesbury, the only chronicler of good authority for London in those years. The mortality increased so much, he says (in tantum excrevit), that there were buried in Manny’s cemetery from the feast of the Purification (when it was opened) until Easter more than 200 in a single day (quasi diebus singulis), besides the burials in other cemeteries[239]. The language of the chronicler implies that the burials in the new cemetery rose to a maximum of 200 in a day. The Black Death must have been like the great London plagues of later times in this respect, at least, that it rose to a height, remained at its highest level for some two, three or four weeks, and gradually declined. A maximum of 200 in a day, in the cemetery which would have at that stage received nearly all the dead, would mean a plague-mortality from first to last, or an epidemic curve, not unlike that of the London plague of 1563, for which we have the exact weekly totals[240]: the five successive weeks at the height of that plague (Sept. 3 to Oct. 8) produced mortalities of 1454, 1626, 1372, 1828 and 1262; and the epidemic throughout its whole curve of intensity from June to December caused a mortality of 17,404. If Avesbury’s figures had been at all near the mark, the Black Death in London would have been a twenty-thousand plague, or to make a most liberal allowance for burials in other cemeteries than Manny’s when the epidemic was at its worst, it might have been a thirty-thousand plague. Even at the smaller of those estimates it would have been a much more severe visitation upon the London of Edward III. than the plague with 17,404 deaths was upon the London of the 5th of Elizabeth.

The mortality of London in the Black Death has been usually estimated at a far higher figure than 20,000 or 30,000. There was a brass fixed to a stone monument in the Charterhouse churchyard (Manny’s cemetery), bearing an inscription which was read there both by Stow and Camden. Stow gives the Latin words, of which the following is a translation: “Anno Domini 1349, while the great pestilence was reigning, this cemetery was consecrated, wherein, and within the walls of the present monastery, were buried more than fifty thousand bodies of the dead, besides many more from that time to the present, on whose souls may God have mercy. Amen.” Camden says the number on the brass was forty thousand, but his memory had probably misled him[241]. This has been accepted as if trustworthy, apparently because it was inscribed upon a monument in the cemetery; and it has been argued that if one cemetery received 50,000 corpses in the plague, the other cemeteries and parish churchyards of London would have together received as many more, so that the whole mortality of London would have been 100,000[242].

But that mode of reckoning disregards alike the scrutiny of documents and the probabilities of the case. The inscription bears upon it that it was written subsequent to the erection of the Carthusian monastery, which was not begun until 1371[243]. The round estimate of 50,000 is at least twenty-two years later than the mortality to which it relates, and may easily have been magnified by rumour in the course of transmission. Even if it had contemporary value we should have to take it as the roughest of guesses. The latter objection applies in a measure to Avesbury’s estimate of 200 burials in a day at the height of the epidemic; but clearly it is easier to count correctly up to 200 in a day than to 50,000 in the space of three or four months. On the ground of probability, also, the number of 50,000 in one cemetery (or 100,000 for all London) is wholly incredible. The evidence to be given in the sequel shows that the mortality was about one-half the population. Assuming one-half as the death-rate, that would have brought the whole population of London in the 23rd of Edward III. up to about 200,000—a number hardly exceeded at the accession of James I., after a great expansion which had proceeded visibly in the Elizabethan period under the eyes of citizens like John Stow, had crowded the half-occupied space between the City gates and the bars of the Liberties, and had overflowed into the out-parishes to such an extent that proclamations from the year 1580 onwards were thought necessary for its restraint[244].

Hardly any details of the Black Death in London are known, but the few personal facts that we have are significant. Thus, in the charter of incorporation of the Company of Cutlers, granted in 1344, eight persons are named as wardens, and these are stated in a note to have been all dead five years after, that is to say, in the year of the Black Death, 1349, although their deaths are not set down to the plague[245]. Again, in the articles of the Hatters’ Company, which were drawn up only a year before the plague began (Dec. 13, 1347), six persons are named as wardens, and these according to a note of the time were all dead before the 7th of July, 1350[246], the cause of mortality being again unmentioned probably because it was familiar knowledge to those then living. It is known also that four wardens of the Goldsmiths’ Company died in the year of the Black Death. These instances show that the plague, on its first arrival, carried off many more of the richer class of citizens than it did in the disastrous epidemics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The same is shown by the number of wills, already given. Perhaps the greatest of the victims of plague in London was Bradwardine, “doctor profundus,” the newly-appointed archbishop of Canterbury, who died at Lambeth, with the fatal botch in the armpits, on 26 Aug. 1349, just a week after landing at Dover from Avignon.

The often-quoted figures for Norwich, 57,374 deaths in the city from the pestilence of 1349, are wholly incredible. They are derived from an entry in the borough records in the Gildhall[247]: “In yis yere was swiche a Dethe in Norwic that there died of ye Pestilence LVII Mil III C LXXIIII besyd Relygius and Beggars.” We should probably come much nearer the truth by reading “XVII Mil.” for “LVII Mil.” It does not appear at what time the entry was made, nor by what computation the numbers were got. Norwich was certainly smaller than London; in the king’s writ of 1351 for men-at-arms, London’s quota is 100, and that of Norwich 60; the next in order being Bristol’s, 20, and Lynn’s, 20. These were probably the old proportions, fixed before the Black Death, and re-issued in 1351 without regard to what had happened meanwhile, and they correspond on the whole to the number of parishes in each city (about 120 in London and 60 in Norwich[248]). Norwich may have had from 25,000 to 30,000 people before the pestilence, but almost certainly not more. The city must have suffered terribly in 1349, for we find, by the returns in the Subsidy Roll showing the amount raised by the poll-tax of 1377 and the numbers in each county and town on whom it was levied, that only 3952 paid the tax in Norwich, whereas 23,314 paid it in London[249]. That is a very different proportion from the 60 to 100, as in the writ for men-at-arms; and the difference is the index of the decline of Norwich down to the year 1377. In that year, the population, by the usual reckoning from the poll-tax, would have been about 7410; and it is conceivable that at least twice that number had died of the plague within the city during the spring and summer of 1349.

The figures given of the mortality at Yarmouth, 7052, are those inscribed upon a document or a brass that once stood in the parish church; it was seen there in the fifteenth century by William of Worcester, a squire of the Fastolf family connected with Yarmouth, who gives the numbers as 7000, giving also the exact dimensions of the great church itself[250]. They are adduced by the burgesses of Yarmouth in a petition of 17 Henry VII. (1502), as follows: “Buried in the parish church and churchyard of the said town 7052 men.” Yarmouth, like Norwich, suffered unusually from the Black Death; in 1377, by the poll-tax reckoning, its population was about 3639. It may be assumed to have lost more than half its people; but it recovered quickly, was made a seat of the wool-staple, and threatened to rival Norwich.

Clyn’s statement that 14,000 died in Dublin from the beginning of August until Christmas may also be taken merely as illustrating the inability of early writers to count correctly up to large numbers.

The most trustworthy figures of mortality in the Black Death which were recorded at the time are those given for the inmates of particular monasteries; and these are such as to give colour to the remark interpolated in Higden’s Polychronicon that “in some houses of religion, of twenty there were left but twain.”

At St Albans, the abbot Michael died of the common plague at Easter, 1349, one of the first victims in the monastery. The mortality in the house increased daily, until forty-seven monks, “eminent for religion,” and including the prior and sub-prior, were dead, besides those who died in large numbers in the various cells or dependencies of the great religious house[251]. At the Yorkshire abbey of Meaux, in Holdernesse, the visitation was in August, although the epidemic in the city of York was already over by the end of July[252]. The abbot Hugh died at Meaux on the 12th of August, and five other monks were lying unburied the same day. Before the end of August twenty-two monks and six lay-brethren had died, and when the epidemic was over there were only ten monks and lay-brethren left alive out of a total of forty-three monks (including the abbot) and seven lay-brethren. The chronicler adds that the greater part of the tenants on the abbey lands died also[253]. In the Lincolnshire monastery of Croxton, all the monks died save the abbot and prior[254]. In the hospital of Sandon, Surrey, the master and brethren all died[255].

At Ely 28 monks survived out of 43[256]. In the Irish monasteries the mortality had been equally severe: in the Franciscan convent at Drogheda, 25 friars died; in the corresponding fraternity at Dublin, 23; and in that of Kilkenny 8 down to the 6th of March[257], with probably others (Clyn himself) afterwards.

The following mortalities have been collected for East Anglian religious houses: At Hickling, a religious house in Norfolk, with a prior and nine or ten canons (‘Monasticon’), only one canon survived. At Heveringham in the same county the prior and canons died to a man. At the College of St Mary in the Fields, near Norwich, five of the seven prebendaries died. Of seven nunneries in Norfolk and Suffolk, five lost their prioress as well as an unknown number of nuns[258]. At the nunnery of Great Winthorp on the Hill, near Stamford, all the nuns save one either died of the plague or fled from it, so that the house fell to ruin and the lands were annexed by a convent near it[259].

The experience of Canterbury appears to have been altogether different, and was perhaps exceptional. In a community of some eighty monks only four died of the plague in 1349[260]. It is known, however, that when the new abbot of St Albans halted at Canterbury on his way to Avignon after his election at Easter, one of the two monks who accompanied him was there seized with plague and died[261].

These monastic experiences in England were the same as in other parts of Europe. At Avignon, in 1348, sixty-six Carmelite monks were found lying dead in one monastery, no one outside the walls having heard that the plague was amongst them. In the English College at Avignon the whole of the monks are said to have died[262].

What remains to be said of the death-rate in the great mortality of 1349 is constructive or inferential, and that part of the evidence, not the least valuable of the whole, has been worked out only within a recent period. The enormous thinning of the ranks of the clergy was recorded at the time, in general terms, by Knighton, and the difficulty of supplying the parishes with educated priests is brought to light by various things, including the founding of colleges for their education at Cambridge (Corpus Christi) and at Oxford (Durham College). The first to examine closely the number of vacancies in cures after the great mortality was Blomefield in the third volume of the History of Norfolk published in 1741. The Institution Book of the diocese of Norwich, he says (with a reference to No. IV. of the Lib. Instit.), shows 863 institutions to benefices in 1349, “the clergy dying so fast that they were obliged to admit numbers of youths, that had only devoted themselves for clerks by being shaven, to be rectors of parishes[263].” A more precise use of Institution Books, but more to show how zealous the clergy had been in exposing themselves to infection than to ascertain the death-rate, was made (1825) for the archdeaconry of Salop. It was found that twenty-nine new presentations, after death-vacancies, had been made in the single year of 1349, the average number of death vacancies at the time having been three in two years[264]. The first systematic attempt to deduce the mortality of 1349 from the number of benefices vacant through death was made in 1865 by Mr Seebohm, by original researches for the diocese of York and by using Blomefield’s collections for the diocese of Norwich[265]. In the archdeaconry of the West Riding there were 96 death vacancies in 1349, leaving only 45 parishes in which the incumbent had survived. In the East Riding 60 incumbents died out of 95 parishes. In the archdeaconry of Nottingham there were deaths of priests in 65 parishes, and 61 survivals. In the diocese of Norwich there were 527 vacancies by death or transfer, while in 272 benefices there was no change. Thus the statement made to the pope by the bishop of Norwich, that two-thirds of the clergy had died in the great mortality is almost exact for his own diocese as well as for the diocese of York. These figures of mortality among the Norfolk clergy were confirmed, with fuller details, by a later writer[266]: the 527 new institutions in the diocese of Norwich fall between the months of March and October—23 before the end of April; 74 in May; 39 from 30th May to 10th June; 100 from 10th June to 4th July; 209 in July; and 82 more to October. According to another enumeration of the same author for East Anglia, upwards of 800 parishes lost their parsons from March 1349 to March 1350, 83 parishes having been twice vacant, and 10 three times.

There is no mistaking the significance of these facts as regards the clergy: some two-thirds of a class composed of adult males in moderate circumstances, and living mostly in country villages, were cut off by the plague in Norfolk and Suffolk, in Yorkshire and Shropshire, and probably all over England. That alone would suffice to show that the virus of the Black Death permeated the soil everywhere, country and town alike. It is this universality of incidence that chiefly distinguishes the Black Death from the later outbreaks of plague, which were more often in towns than in villages or scattered houses, and were seldom in many places in the same year. But there remains to be mentioned, lastly, evidence inferential from another source, which shows that the incidence in the country districts was upon the people at large. That evidence is derived from the rolls of the manor courts.

It was remarked in one of the earliest works (1852) upon the history of an English manor and of its courts, that “the real life or history of a nation is to be gathered from the humble and seemingly trivial records of these petty local courts[267],” and so the researches of the generation following have abundantly proved. Much of this curious learning lies outside the present subject and is unfamiliar to the writer, but some of it intimately concerns us, and a few general remarks appear to be called for.

The manor was the unit of local government as the Normans found it. The lord of the manor and the cultivators of the soil had respectively their rights and duties, with a court to exact them. There are no written records of manor courts extant from a period before the reign of Edward I., when justice began to be administered according to regular forms. But in the year 1279 we find written rolls of a manor court[268]. From the reign of Edward III. these rolls begin to be fairly numerous; for example, there is extant a complete series of them for the manor of Chedzey in Somerset from 1329-30 to 1413-14. The court met twice, thrice, or four times in the year, and the business transacted at each sitting was engrossed by the clerk upon a long roll of parchment. The business related to fines and heriots payable to the lord by the various orders of tenants on various occasions, including changes in tenancy, successions by heirship, death-duties, the marriages of daughters, the births of illegitimate children, the commission of nuisances, poaching, and all matters of petty local government. The first court of the year has usually the longest roll, the parchment being written on one side, perhaps to the length of twenty or twenty-four inches; the margin bears the amount of fines opposite each entry; there are occasionally jury lists where causes had to be tried. Of the community whose business was thus managed a notion may be formed from the instance of the Castle Combe manor[269]: in 1340 it had two open fields, each of about 500 acres, on its hill-slopes, cultivated by 10 freemen tenants, 15 villeins, 11 other bondsmen cultivating a half-acre each; 8 tenants of cottages with crofts, 12 tenants of cottages without crofts, as well as 3 tenants of cottages in Malmesbury.

It will be readily understood that an unusual event such as the great mortality of 1348-49 would leave its mark upon the rolls of the manor courts; the death-vacancies, with their fines and heriots, and all entries relating to changes in tenancy, would be unusually numerous. Accordingly we find in the rolls for that year that there was much to record; at the first glance the parchments are seen to be written within and without, like the roll in the prophet’s vision; and that is perhaps all that the inspection will show unless the student be expert in one of the most difficult of all kinds of ancient handwriting,—most difficult because most full of contractions and conventional forms. But by a few those palaeographic difficulties have been surmounted (doubtless at some cost of expert labour), and the results as regards the great mortality of 1349 have been disclosed.

The manor of Winslow, in Buckinghamshire, belonging to the great abbey of St Albans, was a large and typical one[270]. Besides the principal village it had six hamlets. At the manor courts held in 1348-9 no fewer than 153 holdings are entered as changing hands from the deaths of previous holders, the tenancies being either re-granted to the single heir of the deceased or to reversioners, or, in default of such, retained by the lord. Of the 153 deceased tenants, 28 were holders of virgates and 14 of half-virgates; or, in other words, there died 42 small farmers, cultivating from forty to fifteen acres each, in half-acre strips scattered all over the common fields of the manor. These 42 held twice as much land as all the remaining 111 together; the latter more numerous class were the crofters, who cultivated one or more half-acre strips: they would include the various small traders, artisans and labourers of the village and its hamlets; while the former class represented “the highest grades of tenants in villenage.”

Of both classes together 153 had died in the great mortality. What proportion that number bore to the whole body of tenants on the manor may be inferred from the following: out of 43 jurymen belonging almost exclusively to the class of larger holders, who had served upon the petty jury in 1346, 1347 and 1348, as many as 27 had died in 1349; so that we may reckon three out of every five adult males to have died in the Winslow district, although it would be erroneous to conclude that the same proportion of adult women had died, or of aged persons, or of infants and young children.