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