A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 1 (of 2)
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Title: A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 1 (of 2)
Author: Charles Creighton
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF EPIDEMICS IN BRITAIN, VOLUME 1 (OF 2) ***
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.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
PESTILENCES PREVIOUS TO THE BLACK DEATH, CHIEFLY FROM FAMINES.
The plague of 664-684 described by Beda, and its probable
relation to the plague of Justinian’s reign, 542- 4
Other medieval epidemics not from famine 9
Chronology of Famine Sicknesses, with full accounts of those
of 1194-7, 1257-9, and 1315-16 15
Few traces of epidemics of Ergotism; reason of England’s
immunity from _ignis sacer_ 52
Generalities on medieval famines in England 65
CHAPTER II.
LEPROSY IN MEDIEVAL BRITAIN.
Medieval meanings of _lepra_ 69
Biblical associations of Leprosy 79
Medieval religious sentiment towards lepers 81
Leprosy-prevalence judged by the leper-houses,--their number
in England, special destination, and duration 86
Leper-houses in Scotland and Ireland 99
The prejudice against lepers 100
Laws against lepers 106
Things favouring Leprosy in the manner of life--Modern analogy
of Pellagra 107
CHAPTER III.
THE BLACK DEATH OF 1348-9.
Arrival of the Black Death, and progress through Britain, with
contemporary English and Irish notices of the symptoms 114
Inquiry into the extent of the mortality 123
Antecedents of the Black Death in the East--Overland China
trade--Favouring conditions in China 142
The Theory of Bubo-Plague 156
Illustrations from modern times 163
Summary of causes, and of European favouring conditions 173
CHAPTER IV.
ENGLAND AFTER THE BLACK DEATH, WITH THE EPIDEMICS TO 1485.
Efforts to renew the war with France 177
Direct social and economic consequences in town and country 180
More lasting effects on farming, industries and population 190
Epidemics following the Black Death 202
Medieval English MSS. on Plague 208
The 14th century chronology continued 215
The public health in the 15th century 222
Chronology of Plagues, 15th century 225
Plague &c. in Scotland and Ireland, 1349-1475 233
CHAPTER V.
THE SWEATING SICKNESS, 1485-1551.
The First invasion of the Sweat in 1485 237
The Second outbreak in 1508 243
The Third Sweat in 1517 245
The Fourth Sweat in 1528 250
Extension of the Fourth Sweat to the Continent in 1529 256
The Fifth Sweat in 1551 259
Antecedents of the English Sweat 265
Endemic Sweat of Normandy 271
Theory of the English Sweat 273
Extinction of the Sweat in England 279
CHAPTER VI.
PLAGUE IN THE TUDOR PERIOD.
Chronology of the outbreaks of Plague in London, provincial
towns, and the country generally, from 1485 to 1556 282
The London Plague of 1563 304
Preventive practice in Plague-time under the Tudors 309
Sanitation in Plantagenet and Tudor times 322
The disposal of the dead 332
Chronology of Plague 1564-1592--Vital statistics of London
1578-1583 337
The London Plague of 1592-1593 351
Plague in the Provinces, 1592-1598 356
Plague in Scotland, 1495-1603--Skene on the Plague (1568) 360
Plague in Ireland in the Tudor period 371
CHAPTER VII.
GAOL FEVERS, INFLUENZAS, AND OTHER FEVERS IN THE TUDOR PERIOD.
The Black Assizes of Cambridge, 1522 375
Oxford Black Assizes, 1577 376
Exeter Black Assizes, 1586 383
Increase of Pauperism, Vagrancy, &c. in the Tudor period 387
Influenzas and other “strange fevers” and fluxes, 1540-1597 397
CHAPTER VIII.
THE FRENCH POX.
Meagreness of English records 414
Evidence of its invasion of Scotland and England, in 1497 and
subsequent years 417
English writings on the Pox in the Elizabethan period, with
some notices for the Stuart period 423
The circumstances of the great European outbreak in 1494--
Invasion of Italy by Charles VIII. 429
CHAPTER IX.
SMALLPOX AND MEASLES.
First accounts of Smallpox in Arabic writings--Nature of the
disease 439
European Smallpox in the Middle Ages 445
Measles in medieval writings--Origin of the names “measles”
and “pocks” 448
First English notices of Smallpox in the Tudor period 456
Great increase of Smallpox in the Stuart period 463
Smallpox in Continental writings of the 16th century 467
CHAPTER X.
PLAGUE, FEVER AND INFLUENZA FROM THE ACCESSION OF JAMES I.
TO THE RESTORATION.
Growth of London in the Tudor and Stuart periods 471
The London Plague of 1603 474
Annual Plague in London after 1603 493
Plague in the Provinces, Ireland and Scotland, in 1603 and
following years 496
Malignant Fever preceding the Plague of 1625 504
The London Plague of 1625 507
Plague in the Provinces in 1625 and following years 520
The London Plague of 1636 529
Fever in London and in England generally to 1643 532
War Typhus in Oxfordshire &c. and at Tiverton, 1643-44 547
Plague in the Provinces, Scotland and Ireland during the
Civil Wars 555
Fever in England 1651-52 566
The Influenzas or Fevers of 1657-59 568
CHAPTER XI.
SICKNESSES OF EARLY VOYAGES AND COLONIES.
Scurvy in the early voyages, north and south 579
The remarkable epidemic of Fever in Drake’s expedition of
1585-6 to the Spanish Main 585
Other instances of ship-fevers, flux, scurvy, &c. 590
Scurvy &c. in the East India Company’s ships: the treatment 599
Sickness of Virginian and New England voyages and colonies 609
Early West Indian epidemics, including the first of Yellow
Fever--The Slave Trade 613
The epidemic of 1655-6 at the first planting of Jamaica 634
CHAPTER XII.
THE GREAT PLAGUE OF LONDON, AND THE LAST OF PLAGUE IN ENGLAND.
Literature of the Great Plague 646
Antecedents, beginnings and progress of the London Plague of
1665 651
Mortality and incidents of the Great Plague--Characters of the
disease 660
Plague near London and in the Provinces, 1665-66 679
The Plague at Eyam 1665-66 682
The Plague at Colchester, 1665-66, and the last of Plague in
England 688
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.
Year Character Authority
679 Three years’ famine in Sussex Beda, _Hist. Eccles._ § 290
from droughts
793 General famine and severe Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, _sub
mortality anno_. Roger of Howden.
Simeon of Durham
897 Mortality of men and cattle Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Florence
for three years during and of Worcester. Annales
after Danish invasion Cambriae (_anno_ 896)
962 Great mortality: “the great Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
fever in London”
976 Famine Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Roger of
Howden
984 } Famine. Fever of men and Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Roger of
986 } murrain of cattle Howden. Simeon of Durham.
987 } Malmesbury. _Gest. Pontif.
Angl._ p. 171. Flor. of
Worcester. Roger of Wendover,
_Flor. Hist._ Bromton (in
Twysden). Higden
1005 Desolation following expulsion Henry of Huntingdon
of Danes
1036 } Famine Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Henry of
1039 } Huntingdon
1044 Famine Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
1046 Very hard winter; pestilence Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
and murrain
1048 } Great mortality of men and Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (_sub
1049 } cattle anno_ 1049). Roger of Howden.
Simeon of Durham (_sub anno_
1048)
1069 Wasting of Yorkshire Simeon of Durham, ii. 188
1086 } Great fever-pestilence. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
1087 } Sharp famine Malmesbury. Henry of
Huntingdon, and most
annalists
1091 Siege of Durham by the Scots Simeon of Durham, ii. 339
1093 } Floods; hard winter; severe Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Annals
1095 } famines; universal of Winchester. William of
1096 } sickness and mortality Malmesbury. Henry of
1097 } Huntingdon. Annals of Margan.
Matthew Paris, and others
1103 } General pestilence and Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Roger of
1104 } murrain Wendover
1105 }
1110 } Famine Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Roger of
1111 } Wendover
1112 “Destructive pestilence” Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Annals
of Osney. Annales Cambriae
1114 Famine in Ireland; flight Annals of Margan
or death of people
1125 Most dire famine in all Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. William
England; pestilence and of Malmesbury, _Gest. Pont._
murrain p. 442. Henry of Huntingdon.
Annals of Margan. Roger of
Howden.
[1130 Great murrain Annals of Margan. Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle (_sub anno_ 1131)]
1137 } Famine from civil war; Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Annals
1140 } mortality of Winchester. Henry of
Huntingdon (1138)
1143 Famine and mortality. Gesta Stephani, p. 98. William
of Newburgh. Henry of
Huntingdon
1171 Famine in London in Spring Stow, _Survey of London_
1172 Dysentery among the troops Radulphus de Diceto, _Imag.
in Ireland Hist._ i. 348
1173 “Tussis quaedam mala et Chronica de Mailros
inaudita”
1175 Pestilence; famine Benedict of Peterborough. Roger
of Howden
1189 Famine and mortality Annals of Margan. Giraldus
Cambrensis, _Itin. Walliae_
1194} Effects of a five years’ Annals of Burton. William of
1195} scarcity; great mortality Newburgh. Roger of Howden
1196} over all England iii. 290. Rigord. Bromton
1197} (in Twysden col. 1271).
Radulphus de Diceto (_sub
anno_ 1197)
1201 Unprecedented plague of Chronicon de Lanercost (probably
people and murrain of relates to 1203)
animals
1203 Great famine and mortality Annals of Waverley. Annals of
Tewkesbury. Annals of Margan.
Ralph of Coggeshall (_sub
anno_ 1205)
1210 Sickly year throughout Annals of Margan
England
1234 Third year of scarcity; Roger of Wendover. Annals of
sickness Tewkesbury
1247 Pestilence from September Matthew Paris. Higden
to November; dearth and Annales Cambriae (_sub anno_
famine 1248)
1257} Bad harvests; famine and Matthew Paris. Annals of
1258} fever in London and the Tewkesbury. Continuator of M.
1259} country Paris (1259). Rishanger
1268 Probably murrain only. Chronicon de Lanercost
(“Lungessouth”)
1271 Great famine and pestilence Continuator of William of
in England and Ireland Newburgh ii. 560 [doubtful]
[1274 Beginning of a great imported Rishanger (also _sub anno_
murrain among 1275). Contin. Fl. of
sheep Worcester _sub anno_ 1276]
1285 Deaths from heat and Rishanger
drought
1294 Great scarcity; epidemics Rishanger. Continuator of
of flux Florence of Worcester p. 405.
Trivet
1315} General famine in England; Trokelowe. Walsingham, _Hist.
1316} great mortality from fever, Angl._ i. 146. Contin.
flux &c.; murrain Trivet, pp. 18, 27. Rogers,
_Hist. of Agric. and Prices_
1322 Famine and mortality in Higden. Annales Londinenses
Edward II.’s army in
Scotland; scarcity in
London
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
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