A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 1 (of 2): From A.D. 664 to the Extinction of PlagueCreighton, Charles
History
A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 1 (of 2): From A.D. 664 to the Extinction of Plague
Creighton, Charles
Epidemics -- Great Britain -- History
From 1349 to 1361 there is no record of pestilence in England. There was
scarcity or famine in 1353, owing to an unfavourable harvest, but nothing
is said of an unusual amount of sickness. In 1361 came the _pestis
secunda_, which would hardly have been so called had it not presented the
same type as the great bubo-plague. There is little said of it in the
chroniclers; but two of them mention that it was called the _pestis
puerorum_, or plague of the juveniles; and a third gives the names of
several great personages who died of it, including three bishops and
Henry, duke of Lancaster, at his castle of Leicester, in Lent, 1362. This
recrudescence, then, of the seeds of plague in English soil, may be taken
as having cut off the nobles and the young: that is to say, the members of
a class who had, by all accounts, escaped the first plague, and the rising
generation who had either escaped the first plague as infants or had been
born subsequent to it. The same selection of victims was observed,
according to Guy de Chauliac, in the very same year at Avignon; in
contrast to the Black Death, the second plague there cut off the upper and
well-to-do classes, and an innumerable number of children[386]; among the
former, it is said, were five cardinals and a hundred bishops. From
Poland, also, it is reported that the return of the plague, which happened
in 1360, affected mostly, although not exclusively, the upper classes and
children. It is clear from the Continental evidence that the second
pestilence was marked by the same buboes, carbuncles, and other signs as
the first. In some places, at least, it must have been as destructive as
the Black Death itself; thus, in Florence, says Petrarch (with obvious
exaggeration) hardly ten in the thousand remained alive in the city after
the epidemic of 1359, while Boccaccio estimates the mortality of the year
at the equally incredible figure of a hundred thousand. In London many
more wills than usual were enrolled in 1361, but not more than a third of
the number enrolled in 1349: viz. 4 in February, 2 in March, 8 in April, 8
in May, 12 in June, 39 in July, 28 in October, 15 in November, 11 in
December.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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