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
The _pestis secunda_ of 1361, or _pestis puerorum_, may perhaps be pointed
to in the passage where chapmen are blamed for indulging their children,
“ne for no pouste of pestilence correct them overmuch.” The ill-assorted
marriages had doubtless followed the great mortality itself; but the
second pestilence, of 1361, which affected the upper classes especially,
and is said by one chronicler to have cut off more men than women[390],
may have been more specially pointed to in Langland’s reference. Of that
pestilence a chronicle of the next century has preserved a curious
reminiscence: among its victims were men, doubtless of the upper class,
“whose wives, as women out of gouvernance, took as well strangers to their
husbands and other lewd and simple people, the which, forgetting their
awe, worship and birth, coupled and married them with them that were of
low degree and low reputation[391].”
Although Langland, when he speaks of changes “sith the pestilence time,”
means the great mortality of 1349, he means in other places, the second,
third, and perhaps also fourth pestilences[392]. The years of the
pestilences down to the fifth are not the same in all the chronicles;
there are indeed some nine outbreaks that might have been enumerated after
the Black Death to the end of the century. Some of these are clearly
associated with scarcity, and may have been of the old type of
famine-sickness; dysentery is, indeed, mentioned in connexion with the
sickness of 1391[393]. Again, an epidemic in London in 1382 is said by a
chronicler to have affected children (boys and girls), while the same
chronicler is explicit that the sickness in Norfolk the year after was
confined to the young of both sexes under a certain age. Lastly, the
epidemic of 1391 was so severe in the North as to recall the great
mortality itself; but under the same year is the reference to sickness of
the type of dysentery due to rotten fruit; and under the year before,
1390, two chroniclers agree that the epidemic was “mostly among children,”
or that it cut off “more young than old.” It would be unsafe, therefore,
to conclude that all the outbreaks of _pestis_ in England subsequent to
the Black Death, were of bubo-plague itself. The list of sicknesses in
Langland’s poem gives, indeed, as much space to fevers and fluxes, burning
agues and frenzies, as to boils and botches, foul evils, pokkes and
pestilences--by which latter group of synonyms the bubo-plague is meant.
_Pestis_, it is well known, was a generic name in the medieval period,
just as pest and pestilence are generic now. So generic was it that some
may doubt whether bubo-plague, of the type of 1349, was included at all
among the _pestes_ of the generations following. Positive evidence of the
continued existence of bubo-plague in England is, at least, not
superfluous, and this will be the best place to bring it in.
Medical Evidence of the Continuance of Plague.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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