The Great Plague

A People's History

Evelyn Lord

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780300206203
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Focusing on Britain's peasants, shopkeepers, and other commoners, this history of the deadly Black Plague is a "local account of the countrywide calamity" ( The Times ). In this intimate history of the extraordinary Black Plague pandemic that swept through the British Isles in 1665, Evelyn Lord focuses on the plague's effects on smaller towns, where every death was a singular blow affecting the entire community. Lord's fascinating reconstruction of life during plague times presents the personal experiences of a wide range of individuals, from historical notables Samuel Pepys and Isaac Newton to common folk who tilled the land and ran the shops. The Great Plague brings this dark era to vivid life—through stories of loss and survival from those who grieved, those who fled, and those who hid to await their fate. Includes maps, photos, and illustrations

CHAPTER 1

THE BLACK HORSE OF THE APOCALYPSE AND ITS PALE RIDER

ON 25 JULY 1665 five-year-old John Morley of Holy Trinity parish in Cambridge died. On his chest were found black spots, tokens of the plague. His little brother, who had sat on a stool round-eyed and fearful watching him, also had spots on his face: he was swept from his mother's arms by men dressed in white robes and taken away. He died in the pest house on 5 August 1665, and the distraught parents were shut up in their house with a red cross painted on the door and the words ‘Lord Have Mercy on Us’ written below it. In Cambridge, the nightmare had begun.¹

Although the inhabitants of Cambridge might have basked in the summer sun of 1665, at the back of their minds was the unspoken fear of plague. A pestilence that spread through a community like wildfire as the Black Horse of the Apocalypse with its pale rider picked off its victims. People died from painful tumours in the armpit and groin, from deadly fevers and blood poisoning. There was no known cure, and many saw the pestilence as heralding the end of the world as towns and villages were deserted and the dead lay in the streets with no one left to bury them.

The Black Death as it later became known was first seen in England in July 1348, when a ship carrying infected sailors docked at Melcombe Regis in Dorset. By April 1349 the plague was in Cambridge.² But by 1350 plague deaths ceased, and the country breathed a collective sigh of relief. The crisis was over and life could get back to normal, or as normal as it could be when houses stood empty, fields lay untilled, there were gaps in the tavern, and familiar faces missing from the pumps where women met to draw water and do their washing.

In Cambridge work started on three new colleges to train men for the priesthood and replace those who had died in the plague. Bishop Bateman of Norwich founded Trinity Hall and completed Gonville Hall, and in 1352 Corpus Christi College was founded by the town's gilds and their patron John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster.³ For a time there was full employment in the town, more scholars arrived at the university, there was enough food for everyone, and widows and widowers, agreeing that it was better to share life, remarried. This time of reconstruction was not to last, however, and the plague returned to the town in 1361. It was to reappear in every century of the millennium. In 1447 Henry VI cancelled a visit to Cambridge to lay the foundation stone of King's College because ‘of the air of pestilence which has long reigned in our said university’, and in 1511 the humanist scholar Erasmus left London because of the plague and was trapped in Cambridge until 1513 ‘in the midst of pestilence and hemmed in by robbers’.⁴

When plague appeared in the town, the university suspended lectures and sent the students away. Stourbridge Fair, held on the outskirts of Cambridge, was cancelled by royal proclamation, all entertainment was banned and the social and economic life of the town was severely disrupted. In the seventeenth century if rumours of plague in London reached Cambridge, the town tried to isolate itself and forbade all contact with the capital. On 9 July 1625 Mr Mead of Christ's College, Cambridge wrote to Sir Martin Stuteville in London, ‘It grows very dangerous on both sides to continue an intercourse by letter, not knowing what hands they pass through. Our Hobson and others have been forbidden to go to London.’ He added, ‘Blessed be to God, we are yet well at Cambridge.’ He was too optimistic; on 28 August 1625 the mayor's feast was cancelled because of the plague, and on 20 October all sermons and public assemblies were banned.⁵

The Hobson mentioned in the letter was Thomas Hobson, the university carrier, livery stable keeper, town benefactor and one of seventeenth-century Cambridge's more colourful characters. This is the Hobson of ‘Hobson's Choice’, taken from his practice of hiring out his horses in strict rotation and not allowing his customers to choose, regardless of whether the next horse on the rota was an elderly nag or a spirited young blood too frisky for the customer to control.

Thomas Hobson took over the carrier's business in 1568 and soon proved to be an adept businessman, expanding the business so that a fleet of his carts carried goods, passengers, letters and packages as well as the university's mail and parcels between Cambridge and London. As his business grew so did his wealth, and he began to invest in property in Cambridge and in the surrounding countryside, including Anglesey Abbey, and land in Cottenham and Waterbeach. In 1628 he conveyed land in St Andrew's Street in Cambridge to the town and the university, and provided money to build and equip a workhouse for poor women, which became known as the Spinning House. He also paid for a conduit into the Market Place into which pure spring water flowed from Trumpington Nine Wells. This was part of a scheme jointly designed by the town and the university to have a flow of fresh water through the streets to cleanse the town and, it was hoped, prevent further outbreaks of disease. (The flow of water can still be seen in Trumpington Street, but the conduit has been moved to the corner of Trumpington Street and Lensfield Road.)

Hobson died during the plague outbreak, but not of the plague. The poet John Milton who was studying at Christ's College at the time thought it was because Hobson could not stand the inaction when forbidden to travel to London, and dedicated a poem to him, ‘On the University Carrier Who Sickened in the Time of His Vacancy, being Forbid to go to London, by Reason of the Plague.’⁶

Prior to 1665 the worst outbreak of plague Cambridge had experienced occurred in 1630 and 1631. This was within living memory of many people living in Cambridge in 1665, and others had been told about it by their parents or grandparents. Alderman Samuel Newton of Cambridge, who was to keep a diary from 1662 to 1717, was aged five during the 1630 outbreak and in his late teens during the plagues of 1642 and 1646 so he could remember what it was like to live in a town where pestilence stalked the streets. It was not surprising that, having endured 1665, when plague returned to the town in 1666 he upped sticks and moved his family to Waterbeach in the countryside.⁷

Others heard of it from their parents or grandparents. They were told how people starved because the country folk were too frightened to bring their produce into town, and how daily hundreds of people trooped out of the town to the fields to find grain. They were told how the university's vice-chancellor Dr Butts tried to help the infected sick and the poor, giving them money and employing a German physician to minister to the sick in the pest house, and provided bedding and firing from his own purse. They were told how by May 1630 at least 222 people had died of the plague, and there were nearly 3,000 people on poor relief.⁸

Children were told by their grandparents how, when all hope was lost, a letter was read out in all the parish churches in England asking for a collection to be made for the destitute poor of Cambridge, and money poured in from cities, towns and villages. It came from communities stricken with the plague themselves – £20 from Leicester, £100 from the county of Essex, £57 from St Neots; even tiny villages sent as much as they could afford, and eventually £2,739 7s. 4d was collected (over £200,000 in today's money). The corporation began to disburse this in March 1631 and the crisis was over.⁹

The town had survived one of its worst periods, and it was to survive further outbreaks of the plague in 1637 and 1638, and again in 1642 and 1646 when Cambridge was a garrison town during the Civil War. Then the plague appeared to cease, but by the 1660s ‘there was a notion among the common people that the plague visited every 20 years and must return’.¹⁰ Henry More, a tutor at Christ's College, Cambridge wrote to Lady Conway on 4 January 1663:

… and I am afraid a great mortality is coming upon these Nations. The weather here is as if it were April or May for warmth. Primroses and violets have been a-bloom a good while; the birds sing as in Spring in the orchard. I believe we shall have an ill after-reckoning of all this mirth … There have been many fiery Meteors seen, several rivers and wells dry'd which show that there have been considerable changes in the Entrails of the Earth. I wish these things be not forerunners of some greater Mortality …¹¹

Astrologers predicted the plague's reappearance because of the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in Sagittarius on 9 October 1664 and between Mars and Saturn on 12 November.¹² Astrological predictions were confirmed on 12 November 1664 by the appearance of a harbinger of doom, a comet.

Samuel Newton saw the comet in Cambridge on 17 December 1664:

The same day in the morning from about 2 of the clock to 5 in the morning was seen in the air a Comet, which several days latterly has also been seen: the star itself was very little or not at all bigger than an ordinary star, it had a ray which appeared in the judgement of some to be 20 yards in length, to others the length of a pike, to others the length of King's College Chapel, it appeared south east wards.

He saw the comet again on 3 April 1665 at three in the morning, as he was rising early to go to Hog's Hill.¹³ Some thought that a visitation from the plague was a ‘stroke of God's wrath for the sins of Mankind’, and a broom to sweep the kingdom clean.¹⁴ It was no accident that some of the symptoms of the plague resembled those of venereal disease, the mark of a dissolute life and corrupt society where sexual excess and depravity were common. Others thought that a dose of the clap could be a preventive against the plague and went out of their way to catch it.¹⁵

The most popular theory on the cause of the plague was miasma, ‘the earth belching forth venomous vapours’ – vapours caused by filth, overcrowding, dunghills, excrement, stinking standing water, putrefying churchyards all polluting the air. The vapours could lie dormant in the soil during cold weather and resurface when it became warmer.¹⁶ This was borne out by the patterns of plague deaths which decreased in the winter, only to occur in greater numbers in the summer.

The idea that bad air could cause disease persisted into the nineteenth century, but we now know that plague was caused by a bacillus, Yersinia pestis, identified by Dr Alexandre Yersin in 1894. Helped by the new science of bacteriology he found that the bacillus that caused plague was primarily a disease of rats. Four years later P. Simond recognised that the disease spread to humans through the bite of a rat flea. He found that once the rat host died, the infected flea left to find another warm body to feed on, but as it could not ingest any blood, when it bit the human it injected the lethal bacillus under the skin. Plague was transmitted from flea bites rather than from human to human.¹⁷ However, a secondary infection of the lungs, or pneumonic plague could be spread from human to human by droplets.¹⁸ This was the type of plague referred to in the nursery rhyme ‘Ring a ring o' roses’. The 1665–66 outbreak was almost certainly bubonic plague. William Boghurst records from his observations of plague victims that there was little of the sneezing that there had been in other countries and other times.¹⁹

There was no known cure for the scourge, but the medical profession had many preventive measures that could be used. That august body, the College of Physicians suggested that prevention of the plague started with prayer and repentance, and, if it became necessary to go out into the streets, tobacco, rue or angelica should be chewed and clothes should be perfumed with juniper or cedar wood. Pomanders should be hung around the neck. The college helpfully gave two recipes, one for the poor and one for the rich. The pomander for the poor was made of rue, zedoary (turmeric), myrrh, 2 grains of camphor and 2 grains of laudanum put into a cloth bundle. The richer sort's pomander included citron pills, angelica seeds, zedoary, rose leaves, aloes, 5 grains of laudanum, and 5 drachms of gum dissolved in rose-water and enclosed in an ivory box to be hung on a golden chain.²⁰ Oranges studded with cloves tended to be a more temporary solution.

The college also published a selection of diets that could be used as a preventive. These ranged from fasting to eating a great deal of garlic cooked in butter with bread and sage or summer sorrel. London or Venetian treacle was considered especially beneficial. This was not treacle as we know it, but a compound of seventy-five ingredients, each added with great ceremony and the result taken as a pill.²¹

Non-medical practitioners had their own recipes. Hannah Glasse prescribed plague water. This was an infusion of rue, sage, mint, rosemary, wormwood and lavender in a gallon of wine, which was put into a pot and left to warm in ashes for four or five days, then strained and bottled with camphor. It could be taken by mouth, rubbed on the loins or the temple, or sniffed up. A similar recipe appears in the recipe book of the Barnadistons, a family of apothecaries in Bury St Edmunds. They boiled rue and sugar in muscardine wine and added nutmeg, pepper, treacle and angelica water. Half a spoonful was to be taken in the morning and half in the evening, and then trust in God.²²

When plague was identified the Privy Council swung into action and issued a series of orders to county sheriffs and town councils. The first set of directives was concerned with stopping the infection from spreading, banning all public meetings and cancelling fairs, including Cambridge's Stourbridge Fair. The next order stated that all streets and alleys were to be thoroughly cleansed and fires strewn with sweet herbs were to burn on street corners. No dogs, cats or tame pigeons were allowed out on the streets, and some authorities went so far as to kill all dogs, cats and pigeons in their town. Infected households were to be closed up or the inhabitants sent to a pest house. Wardens were to be appointed to wat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Map of Distribution of Plague Victims, 1665–6
• Plates
• Preface
• 1 The Black Horse of the Apocalypse and its Pale Rider
• 2 Fine Buildings and Bad Smells
• 3 Town and Gown
• 4 Impending Disaster
• 5 The Infected Summer
• 6 Falling Leaves and Sable Skies
• 7 A Rash of Red Crosses
• 8 A Harvest of Death
• 9 The Beginning of the End of the Pestilence
• 10 The Final Toll
• Appendix
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Illustration Acknowledgements
• Acknowledgements
• Index