CHAPTER X

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PLAGUE, FEVER AND INFLUENZA FROM THE ACCESSION OF THE STUART DYNASTY TO THE RESTORATION.

The last period of plague in England, from 1603 to its extinction in 1666, was as fatal as any that the capital, and the provincial towns, had known since the 14th century. The mortalities in London in 1603, 1625, and 1665 are the greatest in the whole history of the City’s epidemics, not, perhaps, relatively to the population, but in absolute numbers. The capital was growing rapidly, having now become the greatest trading community in Europe. The dangers which were foreseen in the proclamation of 1580, of an extension of the City’s borders beyond civic control, had been realized. The old walled city, like Vienna down to a quite recent date, remained both the residential quarter and the centre of trade and commerce: the original suburbs, which were in the Liberties or Freedom of the City, were the slums--the fringe of poverty covered by the poorest class of tenements, unpaved and without regular streets, but penetrated by alleys twisting and turning in an endless maze. The City was not, indeed, without a good deal of building of the same class, especially in the parish of St Stephen, Coleman Street, the most populous parish within the walls. But what was an occasional thing in the City where gardens and other open spaces had been built upon, was the rule in the parishes beyond the walls. It was in the Liberties and outparishes that the plague of 1603 began; its origin in 1625 is less certain; but there can be no question as to the gradual progress of the Great Plague of 1665 from the west end of the town down Holborn and the Strand to the City, to the great parishes on the north-east and east, and across the water to Southwark. From one point of view we may represent the later plagues as incidents in the transition from the medieval to the modern state of the capital--a transition which proceeded slowly and is still unfinished so far as concerns the forms of municipal government. The history of the public health of London is, for nearly two centuries, the history of irregular and uncontrolled expansion, of the failure of old municipal institutions to overtake new duties. Perhaps if Wren’s grand conception of a New London after the fire of 1666 had been taken up and given effect to by Charles II., the Liberties and suburbs might have been joined more organically to the centre and have benefited by the municipal traditions of the latter. The history of the public health in London during the latter part of the 17th century and the whole of the 18th might in that case have been a less melancholy record. That history falls within our next volume; but as it began with the expansion of London under Elizabeth and the Stuarts, this is the place to review the growth of the City from the time when it broke through its medieval limits.

The Growth of London in the Tudor and Stuart Periods[919].

The accession of James I. to the English crown in 1603 corresponds in time with the pretensions of London to be the first city in Europe. “London,” says Dekker, in _The Wonderfull Yeare_, “was never in the highway to preferment till now. For she saw herself in better state than Jerusalem, she went more gallant than ever did Antwerp, was more courted by amorous and lustie suitors than Venice (the minion of Italy); more lofty towers stood about her temples than ever did about the beautiful forehead of Rome; Tyre and Sydon to her were like two thatcht houses to Theobals, the grand Cairo but a hogsty.” That is, of course, in Dekker’s manner; but it can be shown by figures that London took a great start in the end of Elizabeth’s reign and grew still faster under James.

From Richard I. to Henry VII., London was the medieval walled city, as Drayton says, “built on a rising bank within a vale to stand,” with a population between 40,000 and 50,000. Without the walls lay a few city parishes or parts of parishes, including the three dedicated to St Botolph outside Aldgate, Bishopsgate and Aldersgate, respectively, and St Giles’s without Cripplegate, all of these being at the gates or close to the walls. On the western side, however, lay an extensive but sparsely populated suburb, which was erected in 1393 into the Ward of Farringdon Without; it extended westward from the city wall as far as Temple Bar, Holborn Bars and West Smithfield, and was divided into the four great parishes of St Sepulchre’s without Newgate; St Andrew’s, on the other side of Holborn valley, St Dunstan’s in the West (about Chancery Lane and Fetter Lane), and St Bride’s, Fleet Street.

The earliest known bills of mortality, in 1532 and 1535, from which a population of some 62,400 might be deduced, show that the St Botolph parishes, St Giles’s without Cripplegate and the four great parishes in the western Liberties (or, more correctly, in the ward of Farringdon Without) had one-third of the whole deaths, and presumably about one-third of the whole population. In the few memoranda left of the plague-bills of 1563, we find evidence that the population had increased to some 93,276, of which about a sixth or seventh part, or some 12,000 to 15,000 was in the “out-parishes,” or in the parishes not only beyond the walls, but beyond the Bars of the Freedom. The most valuable series of statistics for Elizabethan London are those which give the christenings and burials for five years from 1578 to 1582; from those of the year 1580, which was almost free from the disturbing element of plague, a population of some 123,034 may be deduced by taking the birth-rate at 29 per 1000 living and the death-rate at 23 per 1000, or in each case at a favourable rate corresponding to the large excess of births over deaths.

There is not enough left of the introduction to these old manuscript abstracts of weekly births and deaths to show how many parishes they relate to, or what is the proportion for each division of the capital. But, as the earlier series of bills of mortality from 1563 to 1566 included the City, the Liberties and the out-parishes, it is probable that the series from 1578 to 1582 had done the same. The crowding of the Liberties with a poor class of tenements, and the extension of the out-parishes, are otherwise known from the preamble to the proclamation of 1580, which prohibited all building on new sites within three miles of the City wall. The next figures are for the years 1593, 1594, and 1595, which show a population increased to about 152,000.

From the figures of the plague-year, 1593, it appears that the mortality within the walls, both from plague and from ordinary causes, had now become the smaller half, or somewhat less than that “without the walls and in the Liberties,”--a phrase which is used loosely, even in some official bills, for both Liberties and suburbs. In 1604 we have the exact proportions of deaths in the City, in the Liberties and in the out-parishes respectively:

|96 parishes |16 parishes |8 parishes out| Total |within walls|in Liberties|of the Freedom| --------------|------------|------------|--------------|------ All deaths | 1798 | 2465 | 956 | 5219 Plague deaths | 280 | 368 | 248 | 896 Christenings | -- | -- | -- | 5458

The sixteen parishes of the Liberties are now decidedly ahead of the ninety-six old City parishes, while the eight out-parishes have some 18 per cent. of the whole mortality. The population is best reckoned from the 6504 baptisms of the year after, 1605, by which time the disturbance of the enormous mortality in 1603 had ceased to be felt; at a birth-rate of 29 per 1000, the population would be some 224,275. The proportions in 1605, from the bills of mortality for the year, are 33·8 per cent. in the City, 50 per cent. in the Liberties, and 16·2 per cent. in the out-parishes; so that the City would have contained in that year about 76,000, the Liberties about 114,000, and the out-parishes about 37,000. To those numbers we should have to add some 20,000 or 30,000 for Westminster, Stepney, Lambeth, Newington, etc.

According to Graunt’s contemporary estimate for 1662, the population had grown to 460,000, or to rather more than double that of 1605; and whereas the proportion in 1605 was two-sixths in the City, three-sixths in the Liberties and one-sixth in the out-parishes, he makes it in 1662 to have been one-fifth in the City, three-fifths in the Liberties (including Southwark) and the out-parishes nearest to the Bars, and one-fifth in the out-parishes of Stepney, Redriff, Newington, Lambeth, Islington and Hackney, with the city of Westminster. Thus, whereas in 1535 the City had two-thirds of the whole estimated population, in 1662 it had one-fifth; but with its one-fifth in 1662 it was twice as crowded as with its two-thirds in 1535, the comparatively open appearance given to it by gardens in various localities, as on Tower Hill, having entirely gone.

As early as the plague of 1563, the Liberties were observed to be first infected, and to retain the infection longest; that is alleged of St Sepulchre’s parish by Dr John Jones, from personal knowledge. The history of the plague of 1593 is imperfectly known; but it is clear from Stow’s summation of the deaths during the year, that more died of plague in the Liberties and suburbs than in the City. Of the next plague, that of 1603, we know that it did begin in the Liberties and was prevalent in those skirts of the City for some time before it entered the gates. “Death,” says _The Wonderfull Yeare_, “had pitcht his tents in the sinfully polluted suburbs ... the skirts of London were pitifully pared off by little and little; which they within the gates perceiving,” etc. Then the plague, represented as an invading force, “entered within the walls and marched through Cheapside,” the wealthier inhabitants having escaped meanwhile.

The London Plague of 1603.

The most useful document for the London plague of 1603 is a printed Bill of Mortality which is in the Guildhall Library. The bill, which is in the form of a broadside, is for the week 13-20 October, and purports to be a true copy, according to the report made to the king by the Company of Parish Clerks, and printed by John Winder, printer to the honourable City of London[920]. It is necessary to be thus particular, because the clerk of the Company of Parish Clerks in the end of 1665 (between the Plague and the Fire) published an account of all the statistics of former plagues preserved in his office, and emphatically denied that the Parish Clerks gave in an accompt for the year 1603; they did not resume their series after 1595, he says, until 29th December, 1603. But the clerk was mistaken, as even the most prim of officials will sometimes be. The printed bill which has come down to us gives the usual weekly return of deaths from all causes in one column and those from plague in another, for each of the 96 parishes within their walls, each of the 16 parishes in the Liberties and each of 8 out-parishes. On the right hand margin it gives also a summary statement of the deaths in “the first great plague in our memory” that of 1563, which is the same as in Stow’s _Annales_, and of the deaths in the next great plague, that of 1593, which differs considerably from Stow’s. It then goes on to give the sum of the figures of the year 1603 from 17th December, 1602, and carries the deaths per week from 21st July down to date, the 20th of October, adding some information for the parishes which kept separate bills, namely, Westminster, the Savoy, Stepney, Newington Butts, Islington, Lambeth and Hackney. This extant weekly bill was probably one of a series; for Graunt, in his book of 1662, cites various figures of weekly baptisms throughout the year 1603 which would appear to have been taken from the bills for the respective weeks. But the returns had not been made regularly from all the parishes within the Bills from the beginning of the year 1603. The reason why the weekly figures are not recapitulated farther back than the week ending July 21, is that the outparishes had not sent in their returns until that week. From another source, we know the figures for the City and Liberties from March 10 to July 14, and from the same source we obtain the totals for all parishes within the Bills from October 19 to the end of the year. By putting these figures into one table, we may represent the mortality of 1603, not indeed completely, as follows:

_Weekly Mortalities in London during the plague of 1603._

---------------------------------------------------------- | City and | | Liberties. | Out parishes. | Totals. Week |---------------|---------------|--------------- ending | All | | All | | All | |causes.|Plague.|causes.|Plague.|causes.|Plague. ----------|-------|-------|-------|-------|-------|------- March 17 | 108 | 3 | | | | 24 | 60 | 2 | | | | 31 | 78 | 6 | | | | April 7 | 66 | 4 | | | | 14 | 79 | 4 | | | | 21 | 98 | 8 | | | | 28 | 109 | 10 | | | | May 5 | 90 | 11 | | | | 12 | 112 | 18 | | | | 19 | 122 | 22 | | | | 26 | 112 | 30 | | | | June 2 | 114 | 30 | | | | 9 | 134 | 43 | | | | 15 | 144 | 59 | | | | 23 | 182 | 72 | | | | 30 | 267 | 158 | | | | July 7 | 445 | 263 | | | | 14 | 612 | 424 | | | | 21 | 867 | 646 | 319 | 271 | 1186 | 917 28 | 1312 | 1025 | 398 | 354 | 1710 | 1379 Aug. 4 | 1700 | 1439 | 537 | 464 | 2237 | 1901 11 | 1655 | 1372 | 410 | 361 | 2065 | 1733 18 | 2486 | 2199 | 568 | 514 | 3054 | 2713 25 | 2343 | 2091 | 510 | 448 | 2853 | 2539 Sept. 1 | 2798 | 2495 | 587 | 542 | 3385 | 3037 8 | 2583 | 2283 | 495 | 441 | 3078 | 2724 15 | 2676 | 2411 | 433 | 407 | 3109 | 2818 22 | 2080 | 1851 | 376 | 344 | 2456 | 2195 29 | 1666 | 1478 | 295 | 254 | 1961 | 1732 Oct. 6 | 1528 | 1367 | 306 | 274 | 1834 | 1641 13 | 1109 | 962 | 203 | 184 | 1312 | 1146 20 | 647 | 546 | 119 | 96 | 766 | 642 27 | | | | | 625 | 508 Nov. 3 | | | | | 737 | 594 10 | | | | | 545 | 442 17 | | | | | 384 | 257 24 | | | | | 198 | 105 Dec. 1 | | | | | 223 | 102 8 | | | | | 163 | 55 15 | | | | | 200 | 96 22 | | | | | 168 | 74 ----------------------------------------------------------

These figures may be accepted as real, so far as they go; and they give a total (37,192 from all causes, whereof of the plague, 30,519) which is nearly the same as that usually taken, e.g. by Graunt, for the mortality of the whole year in all London (37,294 from all causes, whereof of the plague, 30,561). But it is clear that important additions have to be made. In the first place, no deaths are included for the weeks previous to March 10. In the second place, no deaths are included from the out-parishes (within the Bills), previous to July 14. In the third place, no deaths at all are included from Westminster, Stepney, Newington, Lambeth, etc. These omissions have to be kept in mind when the plague of 1603 is compared with those of 1625 and 1665, for which the figures are fully ascertained; and we possess various data from which to supply them approximately. One great addition, with nothing conjectural in it, is for the seven parishes outside the general bill of mortality, Stepney being the largest: they kept their own bills, and the figures from them, for the principal part of the year, are given on the margin of the broadside, as quoted below[921]. Another unconjectural addition is the mortality from all causes in the City and Liberties from December 17, 1602, to March 10, 1603, which was 1375, having been mostly non-plague deaths. All these deaths, actually known, bring the total for the year up to 42,945 whereof of the plague about 33,347. The farther additions, which can only be guessed, are the mortality from all causes in the eight out-parishes (within the Bills) previous to July 14, and the mortality in the seven other suburban localities (Westminster, Stepney, etc.) before and after the dates stated in the note for each. Only the former of these additions would have been a considerable figure, the plague being already at 271 deaths a week when the reckoning begins. Thus the totals, 42,945 burials from all causes, and from plague alone, 33,347, are well within the reality.

Some details are extant of the incidence of the disease in particular parishes at certain dates. Thus, in the great parish of Stepney, which extended from Shoreditch to Blackwall, 650 plague-deaths, and 24 from other causes, took place in the single month of September; so that, if the plague began in Stepney about the 25th of March, it had not come to a head until autumn. In St Giles’s Cripplegate, the burials entered in the parish register for the whole year are 2879, the highest mortality having been in the beginning of September, when the burials on three successive days were 36, 26 and 26[922]. In the week 13 to 20 October, for which the printed bill is extant, the proportions of the City, Liberties and 8 out-parishes respectively were, for the week, 351, 296, and 119. Of the parishes without the walls, the most infected were, in their order at that date, St Sepulchre’s, St Saviour’s, Southwark, St Andrew’s, Holborn, St Giles’s, Cripplegate, St Clement’s Danes, St Giles’s in the Fields, St Olave’s, Southwark, St Martin’s in the Fields, St Mary’s, Whitechapel and St Leonard’s, Shoreditch. For St Olave’s, Southwark, we have some particulars of the plague from the minister of the parish.

In a dialogue conveying various instructions on the plague[923], to his parishioners of St Olave’s, James Bamford states that 2640 had died in that parish from May 7 to the date of writing (October 13), and that the burials had fallen from 305 in a week to 51, and from 57 in a day to 4. St Olave’s was a typical parish of the new London. It extended eastwards along the Surrey bank of the river from London Bridge, and had been almost all built within the half-century since the purchase of the Borough of Southwark by the City from the Crown in 1550. In Stow’s _Survey_ of 1598 the parish is thus described: “Then from the bridge along by the Thames eastward is St Olave’s Street, having continual building on both the sides, with lanes and alleys, up to Battle Bridge, to Horsedown and towards Rotherhithe some good half mile in length from London Bridge”--the Bermondsey High Street running south from the Horsleydown end of it. St Olave’s Church, he continues, stood on the bank of the river, “a fair and meet large church, but a far larger parish, especially of aliens or strangers, and poor people.” A mansion of former times, St Leger House, was now “divided into sundry tenements.” Over against the church, the great house that was once the residence of the prior of Lewes, was now the Walnut Tree inn, a common hostelry.

London was now so extensive in area that it becomes of interest to know in what part of it the plague broke out, and in what course the infection proceeded. These things are known for the plague of 1665; but for that of 1603 they cannot be ascertained precisely. Dekker is emphatic that it began in the suburbs. The earliest reference to it in the State papers is under the date of April 18, when the Lord Mayor wrote to the Lord Treasurer to inform him of the steps taken to prevent the spread of the plague in the counties of Middlesex and Surrey. “The parishes in Middlesex and Surrey” was an expression which afterwards came to mean a group of twelve out-parishes beyond the Bars of the Freedom, including St Giles’s in the Fields, Lambeth, Newington and Bermondsey, Stepney, Whitechapel, Shoreditch and Clerkenwell, Islington, Hackney and two others. The phrase used by the mayor may not have had so definite a meaning in 1603, but he can hardly have intended it to apply to the City and Liberties of London, although those were the only divisions of the capital directly under his own jurisdiction. The parish which is associated with the earliest date, in the summary of the epidemic in the broadside of 1603, is Stepney, where the record of deaths from plague and other causes begins from 25th March. It would perhaps be safe to conclude that the plague of 1603 began at the extreme east in Stepney, as that of 1665 certainly did at the extreme west in St Giles’s in the Fields.

An examination of the Table shows that the eight out-parishes had reached a higher plague mortality relative to their population on July 21, than the parishes within the bars of the Freedom: but the maximum of deaths falls in both divisions about the same week. We may take it that the plague broke out in one of the suburbs; and as Dekker speaks of the flight having been westwards, the evidence points on the whole to an eastern suburb, perhaps Whitechapel or Stepney. March is clearly indicated by various things as a time when plague-deaths began to attract notice; and that date of commencement is corroborated by the following passage from the essay of Graunt, based, it would seem, upon a series of weekly bills:--

“We observe as followeth, viz. First, that (when from December 1602 to March following there was little or no plague) then the christenings at a medium were between 110 and 130 per week, few weeks being above the one or below the other; but when the plague increased from thence to July, that then the christenings decreased to under 90.... (3) Moreover we observe that from the 21st July to the 12th October, the plague increasing reduced the christenings to 70 at a medium. Now the cause of this must be flying, and death of teeming women” &c.--the total christenings of the year 1603 having been only 4789, as against some 6000 in the year before the plague, and 5458 in the year after it.

This prevalence of plague in the suburbs and liberties of the City in the spring of 1603 coincides with great political events. Queen Elizabeth died at Richmond on the 24th of March, and was buried at Westminster on the 28th of April; according to Dekker, “never did the English nation behold so much black worn as there was at her funeral.” The approach of king James from Scotland appears to have caused an outburst of gaiety, his accession to the crown, according to the same writer, having led to a marked revival of trade: “Trades that lay dead and rotten started out of their trance.... There was mirth in everyone’s face, the streets were filled with gallants, tabacconists filled up whole taverns, vintners hung out spick and span new ivy-bushes (because they wanted good wine), and their old rain-beaten lattices marched under other colours, having lost both company and colour before.” James made a slow progress from Scotland, paying visits on the way. He arrived at Theobalds, near Cheshunt, on the 3rd of May, and was at Greenwich before the end of the month. On May 29, a proclamation was issued commanding gentlemen to depart the court and city on account of the plague. On June 23, the remainder of Trinity law term was adjourned. On July 10, a letter (one of the series between J. Chamberlain and Dudley Carleton) says: “Paul’s grows very thin [the church aisles where people were wont to meet to exchange news], for every man shrinks away. Our pageants are pretty forward, but most of them are such small-timbered gentlemen that they cannot last long, and I doubt, if the plague cease not sooner, they will riot and sink where they stand.” The Coronation was shorn of its full splendour. On July 18, it was announced that, as the king could not pass through the City--the traditional route being from the Tower to Westminster--all the customary services by the way are to be performed between Westminster Bridge and the Abbey. The ceremony, thus shortened, took place on July 25. On August 8, it was ordered that all fairs within fifty miles of London should be suspended, the more important being Bartholomew fair at Smithfield, and Stourbridge fair near Cambridge. The new Spanish ambassador was unable to approach the king, who moved from place to place,--Hampton Court, Woodstock and Southampton.

These are the traces left by this great epidemic in the state papers of the time. As in the case of the sweating sickness of 1485, which was in London while the preparations were going on for Henry VII.’s coronation, we should hardly have known from public documents that the City was in a state of panic. But in 1603 we are come to a period when other sources of information are available. It remains to put together what descriptions have come down to us of the City of the Plague.

The most graphic touches are those left by Thomas Dekker, the dramatist, of whom it has been said that “he knew London as well as Dickens[924].” To describe first the condition of the “sinfully polluted suburbs,” he takes a walk through the still and melancholy streets in the dead hours of the night. He hears from every house the loud groans of raving sick men, the struggling pangs of souls departing, grief striking an alarum, servants crying out for masters, wives for husbands, parents for children, children for their mothers. Here, he meets some frantically running to knock up sextons; there, others fearfully sweating with coffins, to steal forth dead bodies lest the fatal handwriting of death should seal up their houses. This would have been an evasion of the order, dating from 1547, that no bodies were to be buried between six in the evening and six in the morning--an order which was exactly reversed in the plague of 1665.

When morning comes, a hundred hungry graves stand gaping, and everyone of them, as at a breakfast, hath swallowed down ten or eleven lifeless carcases; before dinner, in the same gulf are twice so many more devoured, and before the sun takes his rest these numbers are doubled,--threescore bodies lying slovenly tumbled together in a muck-pit[925]! One gruesome story he tells of a poor wretch in the Southwark parish of St Mary Overy, who was thrown for dead upon a heap of bodies in the morning, and in the afternoon was found gasping and gaping for life. Others were thrust out of doors by cruel masters, to die in the fields and ditches, or in the common cages or under stalls. A boy sick of the plague was put on the water in a wherry to come ashore wherever he could, but landing was denied him by an army of brown-bill men that kept the shore, so that he had to be taken whence he came to die in a cellar. The sextons made their fortunes, especially those of St Giles’s, Cripplegate, of St Sepulchre’s, outside Newgate, of St Olave’s in Southwark, of St Clement’s at Temple Bar, and of Stepney. Herb-wives and gardeners also prospered; the price of flowers, herbs, and garlands rose wonderfully, insomuch that rosemary, which had wont to be sold for twelve pence an armful, went now for six shillings a handful.

While plague was thus raging in the poor skirts of the City, “paring them off by little and little,” the well-to-do within the walls took alarm and fled, “some riding, some on foot, some without boots, some in slippers, by water, by land, swarm they westwards. Hackneys, watermen and waggons were not so terribly employed many a year; so that within a short time there was not a good horse in Smithfield, nor a coach to be set eyes on.” But they might just as well have remained as trust themselves to the “unmerciful hands of the country hard-hearted hobbinolls.” The sight of a Londoner’s flat-cap was dreadful to a lob: a treble ruff threw a whole village into a sweat. A crow that had been seen on a sunshiny day standing on the top of Powles would have been better than a beacon on fire, to have raised all the towns within ten miles of London for the keeping her out. One Londoner set out for Bristol, thinking not to see his home again this side Christmas. But forty miles from town the plague came upon him, and he sought entrance to an inn. When his case was known, the doors of the inn “had their wooden ribs crushed to pieces by being beaten together; the casements were shut more close than an usurer’s greasy velvet pouch; the drawing windows were hanged, drawn, and quartered; not a crevice but was stopt, not a mouse-hole left open.” The host and hostess tumbled over each other in their flight, the maids ran out into the orchard, the tapster into the cellar. The unhappy Londoner was helped by a fellow-citizen who appeared on the scene, and was carried to die on a truss of straw in the corner of a field; but the parson and the clerk refused him burial, and he was laid in a hole where he had died. According to Stow, Bamford, and Davies of Hereford, such experiences of fugitive Londoners were repeated everywhere in the country, and Dekker gives several other tales of the same sort “to shorten long winter nights.”

Meanwhile, Dekker goes on, the plague had entered the gates of the City and marched through Cheapside; men, women, and children dropped down before him, houses were rifled, streets ransacked, rich men’s coffers broken open and shared amongst prodigal heirs and unworthy servants. Every house looked like St Bartholomew’s Hospital and every street like Bucklersbury: (“the whole street called Bucklersbury,” says Stow, “on both sides throughout is possessed of grocers, and apothecaries towards the west end thereof”), for poor Mithridaticum and Dragon-water were bought in every corner, and yet were both drunk every hour at other men’s cost. “I could make your cheeks look pale and your hearts shake with telling how some have had eighteen sores at one time running upon them, others ten or twelve, many four and five; and how those that have been four times wounded by this year’s infection have died of the last wound, while others, hurt as often, are now going about whole.” Funerals followed so close that three thousand mourners went as if trooping together, with rue and wormwood stuffed into their ears and nostrils, looking like so many boars’ heads stuck with branches of rosemary. A dying man was visited by a friendly neighbour, who promised to order the coffin; but he died himself an hour before his infected friend. A churchwarden in Thames Street, on being asked for space in the churchyard, answered mockingly that he wanted it for himself, and he did occupy it in three days.

One more extract from Dekker will bring us back to the strictly medical history:

“Never let any man ask me what became of our Phisitions in this massacre. They hid their synodical heads as well as the proudest, and I cannot blame them, for their phlebotomies, losinges and electuaries, with their diacatholicons, diacodions, amulets and antidotes, had not so much strength to hold life and soul together as a pot of Pinder’s ale and a nutmeg. Their drugs turned to durt, their simples were simple things. Galen could do no more good than Sir Giles Goosecap. Hippocrate, Avicen, Paracelsus, Rasis, Fernelius, with all their succeeding rabble of doctors and water-casters, were at their wits’ end; for not one of them durst peep abroad.”

Only a band of desperadoes, he goes on, some few empirical madcaps--for they could never be worth velvet caps--clapped their bills upon every door. But besides the empirical desperadoes, who dared the infection for the sake of the golden harvest, some few physicians and surgeons remained at their post, or at least put out essays with prescriptions and rules of regimen. Three such books on the plague were published in London in 1603, of which the most notable was one by Dr Thomas Lodge[926], a poet like Dekker himself, but of the academical school to which Dekker did not belong. The passage quoted about the impotence of the faculty is perhaps aimed at these books, which all abound with the sayings and maxims of Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, and the like, Lodge also quoting the more obscure name of Fernelius, which Dekker has not failed to seize upon.

Lodge confirms the statement about the empirical desperadoes clapping their bills upon every post. One of them, “who underwrit not his bills,” posted them close to Lodge’s house in Warwick Lane, so that the physician was taken by the populace to be himself the advertiser. He was besieged with applicants for his cordial waters, and wrote his book to make his own position clear, being “aggrieved because of that loathsome imposition which was laid upon me to make myself vendible (which is unworthy a liberal and gentle mind, much more ill-beseeming a physician and philosopher), who ought not to prostitute so sacred a profession so abjectly.” Farther confirming Dekker about the greed of the quacks as well as about the strictly business-like attitude of the regular profession, he speaks of “my poor countrymen left without guide or counsel how to succour themselves in extremity; for where the infection most rageth, there poverty reigneth among the commons, which, having no supplies to satisfy the greedy desires of those that should attend them, are for the most part left desolate to die without relief.” The reader must wonder, he says, “why, amongst so many excellent and learned physicians of this city, I alone have undertaken to answer the expectation of the multitude, and to bear the heavy burthen of contentious critiques and depravers.” The explanation was that the regular faculty had for the most part gone out of town, along with magistrates, ministers and rich men. Bamford, the minister of St Olave’s, Southwark, who remained at his post, has no excuse to offer for magistrates or for his clerical brethren, but he is extremely fair to the doctors: “As for physicians, I only propound this question: Whether they be bound in conscience to be resident, in regard of their profession and ability to do good, or they may use their liberty for themselves and (as they think) for their lives, in regard they are no public persons and live (not by a common stipend but) by what they can get.”

Dr Lodge, who dated his book from Warwick Lane on August 19, or when the epidemic would have been at its height, had already won laurels in the field of poetry and romance. He was an Oxonian (Trinity College, 1573) and one of a set with Marlowe and Greene. “At length his mind growing serious,” says Anthony Wood, “he studied physic,” travelling abroad for the purpose and graduating M.D. at Avignon. He had great success in practice, especially among Catholics, to whom he was suspected of belonging. He died of the plague, during the next great epidemic of 1625, at Low Leyton in Essex. His book on the plague would be entitled to a place in medical literature if only that its style is above the average of medical compositions. I cannot forbear quoting the following collect for its structure and euphony:

“But before I prosecute this my intended purpose, let us invocate and call upon that divine bounty, from whose fountain head of mercy every good and gracious benefit is derived, that it will please him to assist this my labor and charitable intent, and so to order the scope of my indevour, that it may redound to his eternal glory, our neighbours’ comfort, and the special benefit of our whole country; which, being now under the fatherly correction of Almighty God, and punished for our misdeeds by his heavy hand, may through the admirable effects and fruits of the sacred art of physic, receive prevention of their danger, and comfort in this desperate time of visitation. To him therefore, King of kings, invisible and only wise, be all honor, majesty and dominion, now and for ever. Amen.”

It is only in dealing with the more public aspects of the plague that Lodge shows any individuality. So far as concerns causes, prognostications, symptoms, remedies, preventives, and precautions, there is little in his essay which is not to be found in the older plague-books, such as the 14th century one of the bishop of Aarhus, his anatomical directions for blood-letting being word for word the same as the bishop’s. Some of his points are the same as in Skene’s Edinburgh essay of 1568, such as the indication of plague about to begin which is got from rats, moles and other underground creatures forsaking their holes. To keep off the infection he advises the wearing of small cakes of arsenic in the armpits, where the buboes usually came. That Paracelsist practice is known to have been tried at Zurich in 1564; it was one of the matters of dispute between the Galenists and the chemical physicians. During the plague of 1603, Dr Peter Turner published a curious tract in defence of it[927].

From a Venetian gentleman Lodge obtained also the formula of a preservative from infection, which contained, among other things, tormentilla root, white dittany, bole Armeniac and oriental pearl: “The gentleman that gave me this assured me that he had given it to many in the time of the great plague in Venice, who, though continually conversant in the houses of those that were infected, received no infection or prejudice by them.”

In his chapter on “The Order and Police that ought to be held in a City during the Plague-time,” he advises the removal of the shambles from within the walls to some remote and convenient place near the river of Thames, to the end that the blood and garbage of beasts that are killed may be washed away with the tide. Lodge lived just on the other side of Newgate Street from the shambles, and could speak feelingly about them, as many more had done since Edward III.’s time. The nobles of Aries, he says, had acted so on the advice of Valenolaes, having built their slaughter-houses to the westward of the city upon the river of Rhone. The chief interest of the book is in the sections on preventing the spread of infection. He quotes an instance from Alexander Benedetti of Venice, of a feather-bed, slept on by one in the plague, having been laid aside for seven years, “and the first that slept upon the same at the end of the same term was suddenly surprised with the plague.” His directions for the cleansing of houses, bedding, clothes, &c. are minute and thorough (