[201]Riley, p. 365.
[202]Rymer’sFoedera, v. pt. 2, p. 166.
[203]Wharton’sAnglia Sacra, 11. Praef. p. 32.
[204]The expression “leprosa Sodomorum” occurs in a Latin poem from a medieval MS. found in Switzerland. The verses are printed in full by Hensler,Geschichte der Lustseuche, p. 307.
[205]These and other particulars relating to lepers in Scotland are given in Simpson’sAntiquarian Notices of Leprosy in Scotland and England(Edin. Med. and Surg. Journ.Oct. 1841, Jan. and April 1842), a series of excellent papers which have been for many years the source of most that has been written of medieval leprosy in this country.
[206]Letter to Barrington, 8 January, 1778.
[207]These numbers seem to stand for the contents of the larders in all the various manors of De Spenser.
[208]Mr Jonathan Hutchinson has been adding, year after year, to the evidence that semi-putrid fish, eaten in that state by preference or of necessity, is the chief cause of modern leprosy, and he has successfully met many of the apparent exceptions. Norway has had leprosy in some provinces for centuries; and it is significant that William of Malmesbury, referring to those who went on the first Crusade, says: “Scotus familiaritatem pulicum reliquit, Noricus cruditatem piscium.” (Gesta Regum, Eng. Hist. Soc.II.533.)
[209]In his sectionDe preservatione a lepra(p. 345) Gilbert advises to avoid, among other things, all salted fish and meat, and dried bacon.
[210]Acts of Robert III. in theRegiam Majestatem, p. 414 (quoted by Simpson,Ed. Med. and Surg. Journ.vol. 57, p. 416).
[211]Dr Gilbert Skene, of Aberdeen, and afterwards of Edinburgh, in his book on the plague (1568), has an incidental remark about “evil and corrupt meats” which may be taken in a literal sense: “As we see dailie the pure man subject to sic calamitie nor the potent, quha are constrynit be povertie to eit evill and corrupte meittis, and diseis is contractit, heir of us callit pandemiall.” (Bannatyne Club edition, p. 6.)
[212]Higden’sPolychronicon. Edited for the Rolls series by Babington and Lumby, vol.VIII.
[213]The Annals of Ireland.By Friar John Clyn, of the Convent of Friars Minor, Kilkenny, and Thady Dowling, Chancellor of Leighlin. Edited from the MSS. etc. by R. Butler, Dean of Clonmacnois. Dublin, 1849 (Irish Archæological Society). The last entry by Clyn himself appears to be the words “magna karistia” etc., under 1349. There is added “Videtur quod author hic obiit;” and then two entries of pestilence made in 1375 in another hand.
[214]Henricus de Knighton,Chronicon Angliae, in Twysden’sDecem Script. Angl.col. 2598et seq.An edition of Knighton’sChronicle, by Lumby, is in progress for the Rolls series.
[215]Chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker.Edited by E. Maunde Thompson, Oxford, 1889.
[216]Robertus de Avesbury,Historia de Mirabilibus Gestis Regis Ed. III., Oxon. 1720. Also in the Rolls series. Edited by E. Maunde Thompson.
[217]Eulogium Historiarum.Rolls series, No. 9. Edited by Haydon,III.213.
[218]Itineraria Symonis Simeonis et Willelmi de Worcestre.Edited by Nasmith from the MSS. in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Cantab. 1778, p. 113: “parum ante nativitatem Domini intravit villam Bodminiae, ubi mortui fuerunt circa mille quingentos per estimacionem.”
[219]Histor. MSS. Commission, vi. 475.
[220]Wilkins,ConciliaII.745: “Contagium pestilentiae moderni temporis undique se dilatans etc.”
[221]Rymer’sFoedera,V.655:—“Quia tamen subita plaga Pestilentiae Mortalis in loco praedicto et aliis partibus circumvicinis adeo indies invalescit, quod de securo accessu Hominum ad locum illum formidatur admodum hiis diebus.”
[222]Ibid.—“Et quia dicta Pestilentia Mortalis in dicto loco Westmonasteriensi ac in civitate Londoniae, ac alis locis circumvicinis, gravius solito invalescit (quod dolenter referimus) per quod accessus Magnatum et aliorum nostrorum Fidelium ad dictum locum nimis periculosus foret,” &c. This second prorogation wassine die.
[223]Calendar of Wills(Husting Court, London), ed. Sharpe, Lond. 1889,I.506-624.
[224]Clyn. But his account for Kilkenny, where he lived, makes the epidemic either earlier or later there than at Dublin: “Ista pestilencia apud Kilkenniam in XLainvaluit; namVIto die Marcii viii fratres predicatores infra diem Natalem obierunt,” the Lent referred to being either that of 1349 or of 1350. The difficulty about assigning the landing of the infection near Dublin in the beginning of August to the year 1348 is that the English importation had only then taken place. But of course Ireland may have got it direct from abroad.
[225]Op. cit.p. 98: “Torserunt illos apostemata e diversis partibus corporis subito irrumpencia, tam dura et sicca quod ab illis decisis vix liquor emanavit; a quibus multi per incisionem aut per longam pacienciam evaserunt. Alii habuerunt pustulos parvos nigros per totam corporis cutem conspersos, a quibus paucissimi, immo vix aliquis, vitæ et sanitati resilierunt.”
[226]“Nam multi ex anthrace et ex apostematibus, et pustulis quae creverunt in tibiis et sub asellis, alii ex passione capitis, et quasi in frenesim versi, alii spuendo sanguinem, moriebantur,” p. 36.
[227]A Treatise faithfully and plainely declaring the way of preventing, preserving from and curing that most fearfull I and contagious disease called the Plague. With the Pestilential Feaver and other the fearful symptomes and accidents incident thereto.By John Woodall, surgeon to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, &c. London, 1639.
[228]Robertus de Avesbury, Rolls ed., p. 177.
[229]Eulogium Historiarum.Rolls ser. No. 9,III.213.
[230]Rymer’sFoedera,V.668.
[231]“Pro quorum defectu [referring to the fugitive villeins] mulieres et parvuli invise missi sunt ad carucas et ad plaustra fuganda.”Eulogium.Rolls ed.III.214.
[232]Nichols,History Of Leicestershire,I.534.
[233]Nichols,l. c.
[234]For a series of years the burials in the St Martin’s register are as follow:
[235]History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford.Ed. GutchI.449. He says also: “The school doors were shut, colleges and halls relinquished, and none scarce left to keep possession or make up a competent number to bury the dead.” The rest of his account of the Black Death is copied from Le Baker’s Chronicle of Osney.
[236]Itinerarium,l. c.
[237]Stow’sSurvey. “Portsoken Ward.”
[238]“Lying without the walls on the north part of the city between the land of the abbot of Westminster and the prior of St John of Jerusalem.” French Chronicle of London (p. 56), as quoted by Stubbs, in preface (p. lxxxi) toAnnales Londonienses, Rolls series, No. 76.
[239]Robertus de Avesbury,Historia Edwardi III.Rolls ed. p. 407. “Quotidie multos vita privavit, et in tantum excrevit quod a festo Purificationis usque post Pascha, in novo tunc facto cimiterio juxta Smithfeld plus quam cc corpora defunctorum, praeter corpora quae in aliis cimiteriis civitatis ejusdem sepeliebantur, quasi diebus singulis sepulta fuerunt.... In festo Pentecostes cessavit Londoniis.”
[240]Stow’sMemoranda. Camden Soc., 1880.
[241]Camden’sBritannia, ed. Gough,II.9.
[242]Rickman,Abstract of the Population Returns of 1831. London, 1832. Introduction, p. 11.
[243]Stow’sSurvey, p. 392.
[244]The population of London is stated on good authority, that of its archdeacon, in a letter to Pope Innocent III. (Petri Blessensis Opera omnia, ed. Giles, vol.II.p. 85), to have been 40,000 about the years 1190-1200, a period of great expansion or activity. By the usual reckoning of the poll-tax in 1377 the population would have been 44,770; and in the year 1349 it was probably not far from those numbers. This matter comes up again in the next chapter.
[245]Memorials of London in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, edited from the Archives of the City,A.D.1246-1419, by H. T. Riley. Lond. 1868, p. 219.
[246]Ibid., pp. 239-40.
[247]Blomefield,History of Norfolk,III.93.
[248]Peter of Blois, who as archdeacon of London was in a position to know, gives in his letter to the pope the number of parish churches in the City at 120.
[249]Popham, “Subsidy Roll of 51 Edward III.,” inArchæologia,VII.(1785) p. 337.
[250]Itineraria, et cet.ed. Nasmith, Cantab. 1778, p. 344. See also Weever,Funeral Monuments, p. 862, according to whom the record of the great mortality was on a chronological table hanging up in the church.
[251]Walsingham,Gesta Abbatum. Rolls ed.II.370. Abbot Michael, he says, “tactus est communi incommodo inter primos de suis monachis qui illo letali morbo percussi sunt.”
[252]Th. Stubbs’Chronicle of Yorkin Twysden, col. 1732.
[253]Chronicon Monasterii de Melsa, Rolls ed.III.36.
[254]Rymer’sFoedera.
[255]Lowth,Life of William of Wykeham, p. 93, with a ref. to Regist. Edyngdon, pt. 1. fol. 49.
[256]Bentham,Hist. of Ely.
[257]Clyn.
[258]Jessopp, “The Black Death in East Anglia” inNineteenth Century, April 1885, p. 602. The sources of these interesting particulars are not given.
[259]Peck’sAntiquarian Annals of Stamford, Bk.XI.p. 47.
[260]Hist. MSS. Commission’s Reports,IX.p. 127: “Hi quatuor tantum moriebantur de pestilencia.” The reporter on the MSS. of the Dean and Chapter conjectures that the monastery may have owed its comparative immunity to the fact that it was supplied with water brought by closed pipes from the hills on the north-east of the city.
[261]Walsingham,Gesta Abbatum.
[262]Knighton.
[263]History of Norfolk,III.94.
[264]Owen and Blakeway,History of Shrewsbury,I.166:—“The average number of institutions to benefices on vacancies by death in the archdeaconry of Salop, for ten years before 1349, and ten years after, is one and a half per annum, or fifteen in the whole; in that year alone the number of institutions on vacancies by death is twenty-nine, besides other institutions the cause of whose vacancies is not specified and therefore may also have been the same.”
[265]F. Seebohm, “The Black Death and its Place in English History,”Fortnightly Review, Sept. 1 and 15, 1865:—“In the library of the Dean and Chapter, at York Minster, are voluminous MSS., known by the name ofTorr’s MSS., which contain the clergy list of every parish in the diocese of York, and which, in by far the greater number of instances, state not only the date of each vacancy, but whether it was caused by death, resignation or otherwise of the incumbent.”L. c.p. 150.
[266]Jessopp, “The Black Death in East Anglia,”Nineteenth Century, April 1885, pp. 600-602. This author remarks that the evidence from manor court rolls and from the Institution Books of the clergy “has hardly received any attention hitherto, its very existence being entirely overlooked, nay, not even suspected.”
[267]G. Poulett Scrope, M.P., F.R.S.,The Manor and Barony of Castle Combe. London, 1852, p. 168.
[268]The court rolls of the Manor of Snitterton, Norfolk, in the British Museum. Professor Maitland has lately edited some of the earliest rolls of manor courts for the Selden Society.
[269]G. Poulett Scrope,op. cit.pp. 151-2.
[270]F. Seebohm,The English Village Community, London, 1882. The Manor Court Rolls of Winslow, upon which Mr Seebohm bases his work, are in the library of the University of Cambridge.
[271]Rev. Augustus Jessopp, D.D. “The Black Death in East Anglia,”Nineteenth Century, Dec. 1884.
[272]Under the heading “The Black Death in Lancashire,” Mr A. G. Little has printed, with remarks, in theEnglish Historical Review, July, 1890, p. 524, the data submitted to a jury of eighteen who had been empannelled to settle a dispute between the archdeacon of Richmond and Adam de Kirkham, dean of Amounderness, touching the account rendered by the dean, as proctor for the archdeacon, of fees received for instituting to vacant livings, for probates of wills, and for administration of the goods of intestates. The dean’s account to the archdeacon is said to run “from the Feast of the Nativity of our Lady [8 September] in the year of our Lord 1349 unto the eleventh day of January next following;” but it may not imply, and almost certainly does not, that the vacancies in benefices, the probates and the letters of administration, or the corresponding deaths of individuals, fell between those dates. The archdeacon alleges what fees Adam de Kirkham had received, but had not accounted for, and the jury find what Adam did actually receive. Nine benefices of one kind or another are mentioned as vacant, three of them twice. The numbers said to have died in the several parishes, with the number of wills and of intestate estates, I have extracted from the data and tabulated as follows:
Of the alleged 300 who died in Preston parish, leaving wills, five married couples are named, the probate fees being respectively ½ marc, 6 sh., 40 d., 4 sh., and 40 d. The archdeacon’s whole claim for the 300 was 20 marcs, which the jury reduced to 10 pounds. Of the alleged 200 intestates in the same parish, two married couples, one woman, and “Jakke o þe hil” are named. In the parish of Garstang, the executors of 6 deceased are named, whose probate fees in all amounted to 16 sh. 10 d., the whole claim of the archdeacon for 400 deceased leaving wills being £10, and the award of the jury 40 sh. In the parish of Kirkham, on a claim of 20 marcs for probate fees not accounted for, “the jury say that he received £4;” on a claim of £10 for quittance, the jury say 20 sh. This was a parish in which 3000 are said to have died, the number of wills being not stated. The numbers had obviously been put in for a forensic purpose, and are, of course, not even approximately correct for the actual mortality, or the actual number of wills proved, or of letters of administration granted. The awards of the jury amounted in all to £48. 10s.See alsoEng. Hist. Review, Jan. 1891.
[273]Thorold Rogers,History of Agriculture and Prices,I.296-7.
[274]Cussan’sHertfordshire, vol.I.Hundred of Odsey, p. 37.
[275]Sat. Rev.16 Jan. 1886, p. 82.
[276]Jessopp,l. c.April 1885, p. 611-12.
[277]The priory of Christ Church, Canterbury, lost the following live stock in the murrain of 1349: oxen, 757, cows and calves, 511, sheep, 4585. (Hist. MSS. Commission,V.444.)
[278]The author of theEulogium, who wrote not later than 1367, and is for his own period an authority like Knighton, gives the following prices: wheat, 12 pence a quarter, barley 9 pence, beans 8 pence; a good horse 16 shillings (used to be 40 sh.), a large ox 40 pence, a good cow 2 sh. or 18 pence. Of the scarcity of servants he says: “Pro quorum defectu mulieres et parvuli invise missi sunt ad carucas et ad plaustra fuganda.”
[279]“The English Manor;” two articles in theSaturday Review, 9th and 16th Jan. 1886, p. 82 [by Professor Sir Frederick Pollock], the sources of information being as yet unpublished. He says: “The prospect of better terms brought in new tenants.”
[280]Stubbs,Constitutional History of England, 1875,II.434. Höniger, dealing with the German evidence of the Black Death, concludes that the great mortality was almost without significance for the political course of affairs; that the great loss of life was unable to check the revival of trade and industry which had already begun or to retard the splendid development of the German free towns; that the low state of morals belonged to the period and was no worse after the epidemic than before; that no new impulse was given or point of view brought out, unless, perhaps, the idea of sanitary regulation; and that the scarcity of labour was merely an incident to be taken advantage of in the struggle against the existing order which was already going on. (Der schwarze Tod in Deutschland.Berlin, 1882, p. 133.)
[281]Richter,Geschichte der Medicin in Russland,I.215.
[282]Histoire des Huns,V.223-4.
[283]Ib.p. 226, note.
[284]Der schwarze Tod im vierzehnten Jahrhundert, Berlin, 1832. Engl. Transl. by Babington, Lond. 1833. This well-known work presents the more picturesque aspects of the Black Death in various countries, without thoroughness for any. England has a large space in the book; but the author has not gone for his information farther than the chapter on the Black Death in Barnes’sLife of Edward III.
[285]Printed in Häser’sArchiv für die gesammte Medicin, 1842,II.pp. 26-59; and reprinted in hisGeschichte der Med. u. epid. Krankheiten,III.157, 3d ed., Jena, 1882.
[286]Geschichte der Medicin, Bd. III. “Epidemische Krankheiten.” Jena, 1882, p. 139. He gives point to this phrase by an account of the local plagues of recent times in Gujerat and Kumaon.
[287]His essay is one of the Escurial MSS., and has been printed, with a German translation, by M. H. Müller, in theSitzungsberichte der Münchener Akad. der Wissensch. 1863.
[288]Voyages d’Ibn Batoutahin 4 vols., for the Société Asiatique, Paris, 1853,I.227-9, andIV.309.
[289]See Sir Henry Yule’sCathay and the Way Thither(2 vols. Hakluyt Society) and his edition ofThe Book of Marco Polo, for numerous particulars of the overland trade to China by the northern parallels, in the 14th century.
[290]The stages, distances, expenses, &c. from Tana to Peking are given in Pegolotti’s mercantile handbook (written about 1340), in Yule’sCathay and the Way Thither, vol.II.
[291]C. A. Gordon, M.D. inReports of Med. Officers to the Imperial Maritime Customs of China, London, 1884.
[292]Gaubil,Histoire de Gentchiscan, Paris, 1739.
[293]The Famine in China, London, 1878—a translation of a Chinese appeal for charity, with illustrations.
[294]Parliamentary Papers, 1878, China, No. 4.
[295]In Yule’sCathay and the Way Thither(Hakluyt Society),I.156.
[296]Etienne Pariset,Causes de la Peste. Paris, 1837.
[297]Volney,Voyages en Syrie et en Egypte. Paris, 1792.
[298]Cornelius de Pauw,Philosophical Reflections on the Egyptians and Chinese, Engl. Transl. Lond. 1795, 2 vols.
[299]It is noteworthy that Herodotus represents the question of disposal of the dead as having been raised by the Egyptians: they decided in favour of embalming and rock entombment, as against cremation or burial, the reason given for the preference being that fire was “a savage beast,” in the one case, while in the other case, the devouring beast was the worm. Bk.III.§ 16.
[300]Curiously enough it was among the Christians of Egypt that the controversy as to thecorruptiblesand theincorruptiblesraged most furiously. See Gibbon.
[301]Clot Bey,Peste en Egypte. Paris, 1840.
[302]Benoit de Maillet,Description de l’Egypte. Paris, 1735, p. 281. See also Wilkinson,Ancient Egyptians,III.456, 465.
[303]Justus Doolittle,Social Life of the Chinese, 2 vols. New York, 1867,I.33, 198, 213.
[304]T. T. Cooper,Travels of a Pioneer of Commerce, Lond. 1871, p. 23, 33.
[305]This is one of the remarks in Dr Gilbert Skene’s treatise on the Plague, Edinburgh, 1568 (reprinted for the Bannatyne Club, 1840):—Among the causes are “deid cariounis unbureit, in speciale of mankynd, quhilkis be similitude of nature is maist nocent to man, as everie brutall is maist infectand and pestilentiall to thair awin kynd,” p. 6.
[306]A. von Kremer, “Ueber die grossen Seuchen des Orients nach arabischen Quellen.”Sitzungsber. der Wien. Akad., Philos.-histor. Classe, Bd. 96 (1880), p. 69.
[307]Ch. M. Doughty,Travels in Arabia Deserta, 2 vols. Cambridge, 1888.
[308]Communicated to Herr von Kremer (l. c.) by Nury Effendi, who visited Assir, and wrote a report preserved in MS. in the Archives at Constantinople.
[309]“Report regarding Mahamurree in Kumaon and Garhwal in 1851-52.” By F. Pearson and Mookerjee. Agra, 1852 (Extracts inInd. Annals of Med. Sc.,I.358). Also extracts (Ib.) from Renny’s Report, 1851.
[310]Planck,Ninth Report of the Sanitary Commissioner, N. W. Prov.Allahabad, 1877, pp. 40-95. (Extracts, p. 39, ofPapers relating to the Plague, Parl. Papers, 1879.)
[311]Baber, inParliamentary Papers, 1878, “China.” No. 6. Rocher (Province Chinoise de Yun-nan) quoted, without the reference, inMed. Reports of Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs, No. 15, 1878, Shanghai, p. 25.
[312]J. H. Lowry,Med. Rep. Chinese Mar. Customs, No. 24, 1882, p. 27.
[313]D. J. Macgowan,Ib.1882. Report for Wenchow.
[314]Thomas Whyte, “Report on the Disease which prevailed in Kattywar, etc. in 1819-20.”Trans. Med. Phys. Soc. Bombay,I.155. Bombay, 1838.
[315]I have curtailed the evidence from Gujerat; it will be found at large in the following writers: Gilder,Bombay Med. Trans.I.193; McAdam,ib.183; F. Forbes,ib.II.|I, and Thesis on Plague, Edin. 1840; Glen,Quart. Journ. Cal. Med. Soc.I.433; Ranken,Report on Pali Plague, Calcutta, 1838; and Whyte, as above.
[316]L. Arnaud,Peste de Benghazi, Constantinople, 1875;Essai sur la Peste, Paris, 1888;Une Mission pour la Peste, Paris, 1888.
[317]T. Farquhar, M.D., “Typhus Fever in the Eusofzai,”Ind. Annals of Med. Sc.II.504; R. Lyell, M.D., “Fever of the Yusufzai Valley,”Ib.II.p. 16.
[318]Surgeon-General J. Murray, M.D., at Epidemiological Society, 11 May, 1878.Med. Times and Gaz.I.1878, p. 597.
[319]Alex. Rittmann,Chronik der Pest.Brünn, 1879.
[320]Thomas Lodge,Treatise of the Plague, Lond. 1603, chap.III.Skene, in his Edinburgh essay on plague in 1568, gives as a sign of impending plague the moles and “serpents” leaving their holes: “As when the moudewart and serpent leavis the eird, beand molestit be the vapore contenit within the bowells of the samin.” He adds what agrees still farther with modern experience in Yun-nan: “If the domesticall fowls become pestilential, it is ane signe of maist dangerous pest to follow.” (Bannatyne Club ed. p. 9).
[321]The writer of the article “Peste” in theDict. Encycl. des Sc. Med., Dr Mahé, inclines on the whole to the view that the poison of plague is somehow related to cadaveric products: “Parmi ces accusations d’insalubrité publique, il en est une qui repose sur un objectif plus positif en apparance” viz. the “miasme des cadavres.”
[322]Sir Tobie Matthews’Letters. Lond. 1660, p. 110.
[323]Epist. de rebus familiar.Lib. viii. epist. 7. The citation of these contemporary illustrations of the Black Death was begun in the last century by Sprengel (Beiträge, &c., p. 37).
[324]Foedera,III.184; it was renewed on 30th June for a year longer.
[325]Avesbury.
[326]Foedera,III.192.
[327]Ib.193.
[328]Ib.200, 201.
[329]Le Baker’sChronicle of Osney. Avesbury.
[330]Foedera,III.221.
[331]Avesbury, Rolls ed. 425.
[332]Blomefield (Hist. of Norfolk,III.) says that the writ to Norwich in 1355 was for 120 men-at-arms to be sent to Portsmouth by Sunday in mid-Lent.
[333]Avesbury, pp. 427-8.
[334]Ib.p. 425.
[335]Ib.p. 461.
[336]Avesbury, p. 431.
[337]Thorold Rogers,Hist. of Agric. and Prices,I.367, “according to an account quoted by Misselden in hisCircle of Commerce.” The sack of wool contained 52 cloves of 7 lbs. each, or 364 lbs. It appears from a statute of 5 Ric. II. that 240 wool-fells were equivalent, for duty, to one sack of wool. In Rogers’ tables, the wool-fell is usually priced at about the value of 1½ lbs. of wool, which was at the same time about the average clip of a sheep. The present average clip would be at least four times as much. The colonial bale of wool is of the same weight as the medieval sack, but would represent 40 to 60 fleeces, instead of about 240. At the smallest of the estimates in the text, the wool of 7,680,000 sheep would have been exported in a year. Avesbury’s estimate would mean an annual export to foreign countries of the clip of about 24,000,000 sheep. The average price of a sack of wool just before the Black Death was about £4 in money of the time; the period immediately following the plague was one of low prices; but from 1364 to 1380, the price was uniformly high.
[338]Foedera,III.186.
[339]Ib.III.191.
[340]Jessopp (l. c.) giving a general reference to theFoedera, and probably having the Sandwich letter in view, says there was “mad, unreasoning, insensate panic among well-to-do classes—the trader and the moneyed man, thebourgeoisieof the towns,” and “a stampede,” (presumably to foreign parts). But the mortality was all over by 1st December, 1349; and the exodus, whatever motive it may have had, was almost certainly deliberate.
[341]Foedera,III.198.
[342]The last clause of the ordinance implies that not only the labourers but also the employers of labour were taking the natural advantage of the situation. There appears to be some particular evidence of this for Bristol (Rev. W. Hunt,Bristol, p. 77): the masters in various crafts and trades were so reduced in numbers that the survivors could charge what they pleased. Thus, the attempt to coerce labourers and skilled workmen was a one-sided affair; although, in practice, it related mostly to farm-labour, where the one-sidedness did not appear.
[343]Foedera,III.210.
[344]Rot. Parl.II.225.
[345]This was the first parliamentary Statute of Labourers (25 Ed. III. cap 2). The king’s ordinance of 18th June, 1350 (re-issued for Suffolk and Lindsey on 18th Nov.), is usually reckoned the first Statute of Labourers, and is invariably assigned to the 23rd year of Edward III., being so entered in theStatutes of the Realm. It is clear, however, from the text of the ordinance in theFoederathat it belongs to the 24th of Edward III., its exact date being 18th June, 1350. Longman, in hisHistory of the Life and Times of Edward III., correctly states in one place (I.309) that the ordinance of 18th June, 1350, was “the first step,” but on the very next page, after stating that the ordinance failed, he proceeds, according to the usual chronology of 23 Ed. III. and 25 Ed. III., to say that “therefore, two years afterwards,” the statute of 25 Ed. III. was made in Parliament. The interval was only some eight months.
[346]Rot. Parl.II.234.
[347]Knighton, in Twysden’sDecem Scriptores,l. c.
[348]Seebohm,The English Village Community. Chapter I.
[349]The Statute of Labourers was re-enacted with increased stringency six years after (31 Ed. III.), and again in 1360 and 1368. All the labour statutes were confirmed in the 12th year of Richard II. (cap. 34). Legislative attempts of the same kind continued to be made as late as the 5th of Elizabeth (1562-3), with particular reference to sturdy beggars. See copious extracts from the Statutes in Sir George Nicholls’sHistory of the English Poor Law, vol.I.Lond. 1854. “An Act for regulating Journeymen Tailors” was made in 7 Geo. I. (cap. 13).
[350]“There is no trace of the villenage described in Glanville and Bracton, among the tenants of a manor 500 years ago. All customary services were commutable for money payments; all villein tenants were secure in the possession of their lands; and the only distinction between socage and villein occupation lay in the liberation of the former from certain degrading incidents which affected the latter.” Thorold Rogers, “Effects of the Black Death, &c.”Fort. Rev.III.(1865) p. 196.
[351]Seebohm,The English Village Community. Lond. 1882. Chapter I.
[352]Seebohm, p. 31. Such attempts by landowners, to go back to personal service from their villein tenants, appear to have become more systematic in the generation following, and to have been a cause of the Peasants’ Rebellion in 1381. See v. Oschenkowski,England’s wirthschaftliche Entwickelung, Jena, 1879, confirming the opinion of Thorold Rogers.
[353]Smith,Lives of the Berkeleys, p. 128: “in 24 Edward III.” (Cited by Denton,England in the 15th Century.)
[354]Morant,Hist. of Essex.
[355]Niebuhr,Lectures on Ancient History. Engl. transl. London, 1852,II., p. 53.
[356]Eulogium Historiarum.Rolls ed.III.230.
[357]Loci e Libro Veritatum, ed. Rogers. Oxon. 1880, p. 202; and, from Gascoigne’s MS., in Anthony Wood,Hist. and Antiq. Univ. Oxford, Ed. Gutch,I.451: “What I shall farther observe is that before it began there were but few complaints among the people, and few pleas; as also few Legists in England, and very few at Oxford.”
[358]Manor and Barony of Castle Combe, sub anno 1361.
[359]Owen and Blakeway,op. cit.I.165.
[360]Clarkson’sHistory of Richmond. Richmond, 1821 (authority not quoted).
[361]Hailstone,History of Bottisham and the Priory of Anglesey. Camb. 1873. (Transact. Camb. Antiq. Soc. 8vo. series, vol.XIV.)
[362]Cited by Jessopp,l. c.
[363]See p. 141.
[364]Clutterbuck,History of Hertfordshire.
[365]Seebohm, for the Manor of Winslow,op. cit., p. 34.
[366]Thorold Rogers,Fort. Rev.III.(1865), p. 196. In hisHistory of Agriculture and Prices,IV., the same learned and sagacious student of English developments thus sums up the agrarian consequences of the Black Death:—“The indirect effects of this great event were even more remarkable. The great landowner ceases to carry on agriculture with his own capital, and farmers’ rents of a fixed and almost invariable amount take the place of the lord’s cultivation by bailiffs. Attempts were made for varying periods of time to continue the old system, especially by corporations. It is possible that the system of stock and land leasing, which became very general after the change commenced, may have been suggested by the hope that the old state of things might be restored.... In the end all the great landowners conformed to the inevitable change, and let their land on short leases, and as a rule at low and almost fixed rents, to capitalist farmers.”
[367]Thorold Rogers,op. cit.,I.376.
[368]Rot. Parl.,II.260. a.
[369]Seebohm,l. c.Fort. Rev.,II.(1865), p. 157.
[370]Blomefield,III.sub anno.
[371]Blomefield,III.sub anno.
[372]Camden’sBritannia. Gough’s ed.II.9.
[373]Hist. MSS. Commission,VI.299. Register of Ely Priory, in Lord Leconfield’s MSS.
[374]Seebohm, “The Black Death and its Place in English History.”Fort. Rev.II.(1865), p. 278.
[375]These and other labour-statutes are collected inA History of the English Poor Law, by Sir George Nicholls, 2 vols. London, 1854,I.37-77.
[376]G. Poulett Scrope,op. cit.
[377]From 1416 to 1424, three different persons were fined at the manor court for keeping a common brothel in their houses. Forestalling of butter, cheese and eggs, on the way to market, came before the court in 1418.
[378]At the manor court in 1417, Thomas Selwin, a butcher, was convicted of throwing offal and other offensive matters into the common street and of making his dung-heap there, to the common hurt; also the said Thomas Selwin “tarde et de novo erexit unam latrinam foetidam in shopa sua ad commune nocumentum. Ideo ipse in misericordia.” The next entry of nuisances, so far as extracts are given, is as late as 1590—various offences in the street and churchyard, and the glover washing his skins in the stream or otherwise befouling the water running by his house.
[379]Cited in Owen and Blakeway’sHistory of Shrewsbury,II.524: “per advenas qui in dicta villa post ultimam pestilenciam de novo sunt inhabitati ... at regimen dictae ville ad se attrahere ... machinantes.” By the “ultima pestilencia” could hardly have been meant the pestis secunda of 1361, the year of the patent, as the learned antiquaries suppose.
[380]Rotul. Parl.IV.60. 7. The petition of Chesterton, near Cambridge: “And also they seiden that there was made gret waste in the same Manor of Chesterton of Housing, that is to say of Halles and of Chambers, and of other houses of office, that were necessary in the same Manor, and none housinge left standing therein, but gif it were a Shepcote or a Berne or a Swynsty and a few houses byside to putte in bestes.”
[381]“After the cessation of the Black Plague a greater fecundity in women was everywhere remarkable—a grand phenomenon which, from its occurrence after every destructive pestilence, proves to conviction, if any occurrence can do so, the prevalence of a higher power in the direction of general organic life. Marriages were almost without exception prolific,” etc.
[382]Eulogium Historiarum,III.213.
[383]Fasciculi Zizan.Rolls series, No. 5, ed. Shirley, p. 263: “Dimitto alias rationes palpabiles: quod exhinc regnum nostrum sensibiliter depauperetur pecunia; quod, praetextu subtractionis hujus thesauri, qui expenderetur in Anglia, decrescit populus;” etc.
[384]Political Songs and Poems, Ed. II.-Ric. II.Rolls series, No. 14, ed. T. Wright,I.2. 53.
[385]The only monograph that I know is Peinlich’sPest in Steiermark, 2 Bde. Graz, 1877-78. From 1349 to 1716, seventy years are marked in the annals of Styria as plague-years. Corradi gives the plague-years in Italy in hisAnnali.
[386]Guy de Chauliac for Avignon, in Häser,III.176. Other foreign references in the same work.
[387]Political Songs and Poems. Ed. II.-Ric. II.Rolls series, No. 14, ed. T. Wright,I.173, 190, &c.
[388]Ibid.I.229, from a MS. in the library of Cambridge University.
[389]The spelling has been modernized, a few old words changed, and the division into verses omitted.
[390]Chronicon Angliae, by a monk of St Albans. Rolls ed.
[391]Harleian MS. No. 1568, “Chronicle of England toA.D.1419.” (Printed with additions at the St Albans press about 1484.)
[392]Skeat, whose great edition of ‘The Vision of Piers the Ploughman,’ has been brought out by the Early English Text Society, thinks that the ironical reference (PassusXIII.248) to the pope sending a salve for the pestilence applies particularly to the “Fourth Pestilence” of 1375 and 1376, which was thepestis tertiaof some chronicles.
[393]Flux and fever from famine are alone mentioned in the poems of John of Bridlington, which cover the period from the Black Death to the reign of Richard II.
[394]Egerton MS. No. 2572, Sloane MS. 443 (“xiv. cent.”), as well as several copies of the 15th century.
[395]Lansdowne MS. 285, fol. 220.
[396]Mr Warner identifies him with the person who invented “Sir John Mandeville” and the travels of Sir John. See an article in theQuarterly Review, April, 1891.
[397]Sloane MS. (British Museum) No. 2276, fol. 191-199.
[398]‘A passing gode lityll boke necessarye and behouefull azenst the Pestilence.’ British Museum, case 31, e. 13, 4to, twelve leaves. The MS. begins as follows: “Here begynneth a lytell boke necessary and behouefull azens the pestylence.”
[399]Dibdin (Antiq. Typogr.II.19) assigns the printing to Machlinia, and reproduces a page as a sample of his common type. Bliss (Reliquiae Hearnianae,II.117) says that this sample page does not correspond with that of the British Museum copy. He adds that there is a fragment of the printed book in the library of St Peter’s College, Cambridge, “pasted within the wooden covers of the binding of an edition (1499) ofDiscipuli Sermones.”
[400]In the earliest printed Latin texts of this work (Antwerp, 1485? Leipzig, 1495? and versified in Albertus Magnus, ‘De Virtute Herbarum,’ 1500?) he is named Kamitus, bishop of Arusia, a city in the realm of Denmark. In the copy of the English version in the British Museum, someone has called him Ramicius, having written on a leaf, “Ramicius Episcopus Arusiensis civitatis Daciae Regimen contra pestem,” with the date 1698. The name of Kamitus, being judged improbable on the face of it, has been changed in the catalogue of the British Museum library into Canutus. But there was no Canutus among the bishops of Aarhus, nor a Kamitus, nor a Ramicius. The two bishops that appear to suit best are Olaus, or Olaf, who was bishop from 1371 to 1388, and Ulricus or Udalricus, or Olric Stycka, who succeeded in 1425 and held the see until 1449. Curiously enough, the latter, when he went to Rome in 1425 to represent Eric, king of Pomerania in a suit with the dukes of Sleswig, figures throughout the records of the suit as “Olaus, episcopus Arosiensis,” although Olaus, bishop of Arusia, belonged to a former generation. It is, of course, the merest guessing; but I am inclined to think that the author of the essay on plague was either bishop Olaus, of 1371-1388, or bishop Udalricus, of 1425-1449, a man of character and ability, who also went by the name of Olaus; and that in any case the manuscript version of the essay in the English tongue is more likely to have been of the early part of the fifteenth century than of the fourteenth. The above facts are collected from various parts of Langbeck’sScript. Rer. Dan.: the “Series Episcoporum Arhusiorum” is in vol.VII.p. 212. Nothing is there said of any bishop of Aarhus having written a book, or having been a physician at Montpellier.
[401]These words (“the impressions”) are contracted in the printed book, exactly as in the manuscript. I have modernised the spelling for the most part.
[402]“When a man feeleth himself infect, as soon as he may, let him be let blood plenteously till he swoon: then stop the vein. For a little letting of blood moveth or stirreth venom.... Let him blood on the side of the body where the swelling appeareth. Therefore if a swelling appear under the right arm, let blood in the middle of the same arm, in the vein calledmediana. If it appear under the left arm, let him blood in midst of the same, or in the vein of the liver which is about the little finger. And if it be about the share, let him blood about the heel upon the same side. If the swelling be in the neck, let him blood in the vein calledcephalica, about the thumb in the hand of the same side; or in the vein the which is calledmedianaof the same arm, or in the hand of the same side about the little finger. And, overmore, if the swelling appear about the ear, let him blood in the vein calledcephalicaof the same side, or in the vein which is between the long finger and the thumb, lest many venomous things go into the brain.” If the swelling is in the shoulders, bleed from themediana: if on the back frompedica magna, and so on.
[403]Walsingham,Hist. Angl.I.309. Adam of Murimuth, Engl. Hist. Soc.
[404]The Stratford bread-carts are explained in Stow’sSurvey of London(“Lime Street Ward”). In the famines of 1512 and 1527, they were besieged on the way by hungry citizens and had to be guarded. The same phrase of bread being “gesen” or scarce, occurs in a letter of 4 September, 1535, from Thomas Broke to Cromwell, secretary of State: “never knew good bread so geason in London at this time of the year; it is so musty, and of so evil wheat, that it is rather poisonous than nourishing; what was sold for a halfpenny, when you were here, is now a penny.” (Cal. State Papers, Henry VIII. vol.IX.§ 274.)
[405]Thorold Rogers.A Short English Chronicle, Camden Soc. 1880:—“45 Edward III. This yere was called the grete dere yere, and that same yere was a quarter of whete at iiii nobles.”
[406]Wilkins,Concilia,III.74: “De orando pro cessatione pestilentiae,” dated Slyndon, 10 Cal. Aug.A.D. MCCCLXVIII.
[407]Sharpe,Cal. of Wills, vol.II.
[408]Otterbourne (ed. Hearne, p. 133) says that thepestis tertiawas in 1368, and that it lasted two years. Nicolas (Chronol. of History, p. 389) gives from a Lansdowne MS. (no. 863, fol. 107) of the time of Charles I., the duration of thepestis tertiaas 2 July—29 Sept., 1369, which should probably read “2 July, 1368—29 Sept. 1369.”