The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

by Christopher Hibbert

  Elsewhere in the country other hospitals were restored and refounded and, while conditions in many of them were little better than they had been in the medieval past, they were slowly improving.

  Plague, however, had become endemic and was now as widely feared as leprosy. At the beginning of the century there had been several outbreaks of what became known as sweating sickness, the last of which, in 1551, started in Shrewsbury and carried off almost a thousand people within a few days. Apart from profuse sweating and ‘grete stynking’, the disease was characterized by a sense of deep foreboding, high fever, a violent headache, dizziness, abdominal pains and, in some sufferers, a vesicular rash, ‘grete pricking in their bodies’ and black spots. Death came with frightening suddenness. A French doctor, who was in England at the time of the first epidemic, recorded:

  We saw two priests standing together and speaking and both of them die suddenly. The wife of a tailor was also taken and died as suddenly. Another young man walking by the street fell down suddenly. Also another gentleman riding out of the city … Also many others the which were too long to rehearse we have known that have died suddenly.27

  In this epidemic ‘a wonderful number’ died in London including the lord mayor and the man elected to succeed him, as well as five aldermen; and there were numerous deaths in other towns as well. In a third epidemic 400 students were reported to have died in Oxford; others perished in Cambridge; several deaths occurred in Cardinal Wolsey’s household and after the king’s Latin secretary died, Sir Thomas More told Erasmus that there was ‘less danger in the ranks of war’ than in London. During a subsequent outbreak the French ambassador was on a visit to the Archbishop of Canterbury in whose household ‘there died eighteen persons in four hours and hardly anyone escaped’. People left the towns to seek safety in the countryside, but the sweating sickness might strike anywhere.28 In 1551 in the small Devonshire parish of Uffculme, where there were thirty-eight burials in the whole year, twenty-seven of them took place in the first fortnight of August and all those interred were listed in the register as having died of ‘the hock-sickness or stop-gallant’. It was known by this name, a contemporary clergyman explained, because it ‘posted through England and spared none. There were some dancing in the court at nine o’clock that were dead at eleven.’29

  Virulent as was the sweating sickness, however, the plague which broke out in England in 1563 was much more so. In that year, so John Stow recorded, there died in London alone ‘of all diseases 70,372, and of the plague, being part of the number aforesaid, 17,404’. There had been previous outbreaks almost as malignant. In 1499–1500 there were 20,000 deaths; in September 1513 the Venetian envoy said that it was perilous to remain in London where there were 200 deaths a day; all the Venetian merchants had taken houses in the country and there was no business doing. In February 1514 Erasmus declared himself disgusted with London where it was unsafe to walk the streets because of plague: in going to St Paul’s the king preferred to be on horseback ‘to avoid contact with the crowd by reason of the plague’. Three years later when contagion returned the court kept away from London altogether until public criticism led to its return in March, whereupon three pages died and it withdrew again to Berkshire. In 1531 it withdrew from London once more, first to Greenwich, then, feeling unsafe there, to Southampton. Four years after this, plague once more drove the court from London to Thornbury in Gloucestershire. On each occasion the richer citizens left with them. ‘I met with wagones, cartes and horses full laden,’ a beggar says in Bulein’s Dialogue of 1564. ‘For years of the blacke Pestilence [they left the city, taking] with them boxes of medicens and sweete perfumes. O God! How fast did they run, and were afraid of eche other for feare of smitying.’ But most could not afford to leave and had nowhere to go; and of these hundreds died.30

  From time to time plague regulations were issued in an attempt to check the spread of the pestilence which was believed to be largely due to ‘stinking carrion … and the corruption of privies cast into the water nigh to cities or towns … the casting of foul things in the streets [which makes] the air corrupt … the keeping of stinking matters in houses or latrines long time’, and the wandering through the streets of infected dogs. In London orders were given to ‘cause all the welles and pumps to be drawen iii times everye weke … and to cast down into the canelles [gutters] at everye such drawying xii bucketts full of water at the least, to cleanse the streets wythall … All persons having dogs in their houses other than hounds, spaniels or mastiffs necessary for the custody or safe keeping of their houses’ were to ‘convey them forthwith out of the city, or cause them to be killed and carried out of the city and buried at the common laystall’. Bonfires containing frankincense and herbs were to be lit in the streets to fumigate the air.31

  A ‘precept issued to the aldermen’ in 1543 contains further regulations:

  That no person who should be afflicted with the plague, should go abroad or into any company for one month after his sickness, and that all others who could not live without their daily labour should as much as in them lay refrain from going abroad …

  That every person whose house had been infected should, after a visitation, carry all the straw and clothes of the infected in the fields to be cured.

  That no housekeeper should put any person diseased out of his house into the street or other place unless they provided housing for them in some other house …

  That the churchwardens of every parish should employ somebody to keep out all common beggars out of churches on holy days, and to cause them to remain without doors.

  That all the streets, lanes, etc. within the wards should be cleansed.

  That the aldermen should cause this precept to be read in the churches.32

  Infected houses were at first distinguished by bundles of hay or straw hanging from the windows, then by a blue – later a red – cross of St Anthony painted on canvas or on board and nailed to the post of the street door with the legend, ‘Lord have mercy on us’. Their occupants were required when walking abroad to carry in their hands a white rod two feet – after 1581a yard – long. With each fresh outbreak the regulations were repeated and grew more severe. More and more dogs were slaughtered, and by 1563 cats, too, were being killed. The regulations of 1568 made quarantine more severe by ordering that ‘all infected persons be shutt up and noe person to come forth in twenty dayes after the infection’; and in 1581 the two ‘honest and discrete matrons’, who were appointed in each parish to examine the bodies of all the dead and report to the parish clerk the names of the victims of plague, were threatened with ‘imprisonment in such sorte as may serve the terror of others’ should they ‘through favour or corruption give a wrong certificate’. For the protection of the queen at Windsor Castle a gallows was set up in the market-place of the town ‘to hang all such as should come there from London’; and it was decreed that ‘no wares to be brought to, or through, or by Windsor; nor anyone on the river by Windsor to carry wood or other stuff to or from London upon pain of hanging without any judgement’. ‘Such people as received any wares out of London into Windsor were turned out of their houses and their houses were shut up.’33

  Yet no measures taken to prevent the spread of plague proved fully effective; and epidemics, if not as frequently as in the past, continued to break out with equal violence until the Great Plague of 1664–5 brought them to a fearful climax. There were at least 10,000 deaths from plague in 1593; and in 1603 almost 3000 people died in the city of London alone. All who had the means fled, but they were not well received in the country: ‘The sight of a Londoner’s flat cap was dreadful, a treble ruff threw a village into a sweat.’ After one outbreak John Taylor, the ‘Water Poet’, wrote:

  Milk maids and farmers’ wives are grown so nice

  They think a citizen a cockatrice.

  In London, so Taylor said,

  All trades are dead, or almost out of breath,

  But such as live by sickness and by death.

  Many,
if not most, physicians fled with the other refugees, and the care of the sick was left in the hands of quacks and herbalists who made large profits, as did the parish sextons. But none of the cures recommended proved effective, though many were tried, including the strapping of cakes of arsenic under the armpits. Water was still polluted by the shambles, most of which were left undisturbed within the city; and orders for the erection of pest houses ‘and other places of abode for infected persons’ were not issued until 1635 when about 10,400 people died in London. When the last epidemic was over it is believed that 156,463 victims in all had been claimed.34

  Meanwhile, people were also dying in large numbers of syphilis, a highly infectious disease which seems to have been reintroduced to Europe from Africa or the West Indies in about 1490 and which became widespread after the return from America of Columbus’s sailors. The disease was at first not always sexually transmitted. King Henry VIII was alleged to have been infected, by the ‘perilous and infective breath’ of Wolsey, according to the Articles of Arraignment which charged the cardinal with all manner of offences. It was known as the Neapolitan disease, since the soldiers of Charles V contracted it in Naples, as the lues venera, as the Spanish pox, but more often as the French pox.35

  If one were to seek among the diseases of the body for that which ought to be awarded the first place, [Erasmus wrote in 1525] it seems to my judgement that it is due to that evil, of uncertain origin, which has now been raging with impunity in all the countries of the world … What clings more tenaciously? What repels more vigorously the art and care of physicians? What passes more easily by contagion to another? What brings more cruel tortures … This lues is a foul, cruel contagious disease, dangerous to life, apt to remain in the system and to break out anew not otherwise than the gout.36

  There was no satisfactory cure. Some doctors prescribed cauterization with red-hot irons, others various medicines. John Barrister, author of a book on ulcers published in 1575, recommended ‘a thinne diet with the decoction of guaiacum or universal unctions ex Hydrargyro’. Many sufferers consulted quacks such as the Flemish mountebank who set up his stall in Gloucester and hung forth ‘his pictures, his flags, his instruments and his letters of mart with long lybells, great tossells, broad scales in boxes and the like counterfeit shows and knacks of knavery, cozening the people of their money, without either learning or knowledge’.37

  William Clowes, surgeon to St Bartholomew’s Hospital and author of A Short and Profitable Treatise touching the Cure of the Disease called (Morbus Gallicus) by Unctions, was as bewildered by the disease, its origins and constitutional effects as anyone else. He believed it was not spread only by sexual licence and wrote of ‘good poor people that be infected by unwary eating or drinking or keeping company with those lewd beasts, and which either for shame will not bewray it, or for lack of good chirurgions know not how to remedy it’. But he believed its main cause was the ‘licentious and beastly disorder of a great number of rogues and vagabonds, the filthye lyfe of many lewd and idell persons, both men and women, and the great number of lewd alehouses which are very nests and harbourers of such filthy creatures … By means of which disordered persons some other of better disposition are many times infected.’

  In St Bartholomew’s alone Clowes claimed to have treated over 1000 patients suffering from the disease; and he spoke ‘nothing of St Thomas Hospital and other howses about the city wherein an infinite multitude [were] dayly in cure’.38

  Occasional measures were taken to combat the spread of the disease. In 1506 an order was given to shut down the stews of Bankside in Southwark where eighteen wooden brothels, their steps running down to the river, were distinguished by painted signs like taverns. Yet twelve of them soon opened their doors again and customers were entertained as usual. By the beginning of the next century, however, syphilis was becoming less virulent and starting to take on its present characteristics as a chronic venereal disease.

  Smallpox, though, was now beginning to be dreaded as much as the plague had once been. The symptoms of this disease were described by Thomas Phaer in his Book of Children as

  … itch and fretting of the skin as if it had been rubbed with nettles, pain in the head and back, sometimes as it were a dry scab or lepry spreading over all the members, other whiles in pushes, pimples and whaylys with much corruption and matter, and with great pains of the face and throat, dryness of the tongue, hoarseness of voice, and in some, quiverings of the heart.

  If the patient were to recover the skin was likely to be badly pitted.

  In treating Edward of Caernarvon, first Prince of Wales, however, John of Gaddesden, his mother’s physician, had prevented the appearance of the characteristic and unsightly marks by adopting an old Arabic custom and wrapping the patient in red cloth and hanging red material over the windows.

  Yet, although Queen Elizabeth I herself contracted smallpox, the disease never became as widespread as either the plague or syphilis in Tudor England. The full effects of its ravages were to be suffered later.

  PART TWO

  The Ages of Shakespeare and Milton

  14 Villagers, Vagrants and Vagabonds

  In the late 1530s the King’s Antiquary, John Leland, ‘a most vainglorious man’ in the opinion of a friend, embarked upon a tour of England which lasted for six years. When his journey was over he told the king:

  I have travelled in your dominions both by the sea coasts and in the middle parts, sparing neither labour nor costs … There is almost neither cape nor bay, haven, creek or pier, river or confluence of rivers, beaches, washes, lakes, meres, fenny waters, mountains, valleys, moors, heaths, forests, woods, cities, boroughs, castles, principal manor places, monasteries and colleges, but I have seen them; and noted in so doing a whole world of things very memorable.1

  He planned to publish his findings in fifty volumes, describing both the present aspect of all the counties of England and Wales and their remains. But before he had finished his exhausting work he was pronounced incurably insane, and it was left to others to bring out his Itinerary from his mountainous assortment of topographical notes.

  Much of the country which Leland saw had altered little from the land that Chaucer knew. It was still open land, without hedges or fences, the huge fields, divided by ridges and grass-covered paths into strips and patches, spreading endlessly across the countryside. There were the same meadows where grass for the hay harvest grew, the same crops of wheat and barley, the same fallow fields and downland pasture, the same waste patches in which pigs snuffled in their endless search for bits of food. For mile after mile in the Midlands, in Northamptonshire and Hampshire, in Berkshire, Wiltshire and Dorset, in Norfolk and elsewhere the landscape rolled away like this, largely unaffected by the passing years. In the still undrained fens of Cambridge, Lincoln and Huntingdon men could be seen moving about over the waterlogged land in skerries or on stilts, going to milk the thin and scrawny cows on the islands surrounding their village or bringing home baskets full of wild duck and geese and the thousands of eels with which they paid their rents. To the north were the moors and dales of Yorkshire, and beyond them the wild border country of the Percy and Neville families, Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, where men, regardless of the laws of the south, rode out on cattle and kidnapping raids through the high grass and heather and the wildernesses of moss. And to the west was Wales, no longer an alien place kept in check by the lords of the marches in their castles along the border, but now an integral part of the country, whose people were proud to retain their language, their music and their poetry but proud also to have supplied in the Tudors a Welsh dynasty for the English throne and content to have their counties represented in the Parliament at Westminster. There were those, of course, who regretted the passing of the old Welsh feudalism and tribalism; and there were those Englishmen who found, as William Camden was to do, that the wild and mountainous parts of the principality were ‘rough all over and unpleasant to see, with craggy stones, hanging rocks and rugged
ways’, that Radnor, in particular was ‘hideous after a sort to behold, by reason of the turning and crooked by-ways and craggy mountains’.2 Yet elsewhere in Wales the countryside was charming, the small farms well tended in the traditional way, the fields, like those in Flintshire, ‘in some places barley, in others wheat, but generally throughout rye … and afterwards four or five crops together of oats’.3

  While the appearance of much of the landscape had remained unchanged for centuries, however, there were large areas that were being transformed by new methods of agriculture which were bringing the common-field system to an end. Large village farms were being split up into various smaller farms; land was being enclosed and fenced to turn arable into pasture; common land was being encroached upon and brought within more profitable holdings. This was happening in several parts of the country, from Essex in the east to Devon in the west; and experts were generally agreed that it made for far more remunerative farming. John Norden, the mapmaker, who toured England some years after Leland had done, estimated that one acre farmed in the new way was half as profitable again as it had been when farmed in the old;4 while Thomas Tusser, the Old Etonian East Anglian farmer, thought that enclosures made land three times as remunerative:

  More plenty of mutton and beef,

  Corn, butter and cheese of the best,

  More wealth anywhere (to be brief)

  More People, more handsome and prest

  Where find ye – go search any coast,

  Than there where enclosure is most.5

  The numbers of sheep to be seen were, indeed, enormous. At one place in Norfolk, so John Norden wrote, there were fed ‘above 30,000 sheep and the place is so fruitful that if overnight a wand or rod be laid upon it, by the morning it shall be covered with grass of that night’s growth and not to be discerned’. The Spencers in Northamptonshire also had 30,000 sheep; and it was upon their flocks that the fortunes of the family were built.6 Between 1540 and 1546 the price of wool rose from 6s 8d a tod (28 lb) to 20s 8d, having already risen between 1510 and 1520; and increasing numbers of landlords converted their land to sheep pasture so as to enjoy the higher profits. It was a process which was widely condemned and held responsible for the inflation of prices which began in about 1530. The author of the Decaye of England expressed a common belief when he wrote: