Part 27

It appears probable that the plague originated in Egypt. From time immemorial to the present day the lower provinces have been subject to this cruel scourge. Wars, intestine commotions, and misrule have too frequently prevented the local authorities from paying proper attention to measures of public salubrity. Herodotus tells us, that when he was at Memphis, Egypt was just liberated from a long-protracted war, during which political economy had been neglected, canals had been abandoned and choked up, and the frontiers of the land were infested with banditti, while the interior was desolated by pestilential disorders. My much esteemed friend Baron Larrey, in his valuable work upon Egypt, has given a topographical description of the country; and the influence that the seasons exercise upon it, must be evident. He informs us that after the spring equinox, and especially towards the beginning of June, the southerly winds are prevalent for about fifty days. Their scorching influence is experienced for upwards of four hours, while they waft with fatal rapidity putrid emanations exhaled by animal and vegetable bodies decomposed in the lakes formed by the receding waters of the Nile. From various observations it has been concluded that the plague is both an endemic and contagious disease in Lower Egypt, but simply contagious in Upper Egypt, Syria, the other Turkish provinces, and Europe. No account of the plague in Abyssinia, Sennaar, or the interior of Africa, is given by any traveller.

The most fatal European plagues were probably those that desolated London in 1664, and Marseilles in 1720. The accounts of these fearful visitations are as curious as they are appalling. In London it broke out in the beginning of December, when two foreigners (Frenchmen it was reported) died of this disorder in Long-Acre, near Drury Lane. The cold weather and frost that followed, seemed to check its progress, until the month of April, when it appeared with intensity in the parishes of St. Andrew, Holborn, and St. Clement Danes. In May, the parish of St. Giles buried a great number. Wood Street, Fenchurch Street, and Crooked Lane, were soon visited, until terror was so general, that crowds of inhabitants panic-struck, on foot, on horse, in coaches, waggons, and carts, were thronging Broad Street and Whitechapel, fleeing from the calamity. To such an extent was migration carried, that not a horse could be bought or hired. Many fugitives, fearful of stopping at inns, carried tents to lie in the fields, and people moved in the centre of the streets, in dread of coming into contact with others sallying forth from their houses. During this state of universal panic, it may be easily imagined that hypocrisy and roguery were busily employed in increasing the evil, at the expense of the credulous. Pretended wizards and cunning people affirmed that a comet had appeared several months previous to the increase of the malady, as a similar meteor had visited London before the great fire; only the fire comet was bright and sparkling, and the plague comet was dull, and of a languid colour. Lilly's Almanac and Gadbury's Astrological Predictions were in general demand; while pamphlets, entitled "Come out of her, my people, lest you be partakers of her plagues," "Fair Warning," and "Britain's Remembrancer," were eagerly circulated, as they denounced the utter ruin of the city. One of these prophets ran about the streets, without the encumbrance of any garment, roaring out, "Yet forty days, and London shall be destroyed;" while another, equally divested of raiment, bellowed out, "Oh! the great and the dreadful God!" Some asserted that they had seen a hand with a flaming sword coming out of the clouds, while others beheld hearses and coffins floating in the air.

The following is a quaint narrative of these absurdities: "One time before the plague was begun, I think it was in March, seeing a crowd of people in the street, I joined with them to satisfy my curiosity, and I found them all staring up in the air to see what a woman told them appeared plain to her, which was an angel clothed in white, with a fiery sword in his hand, waving it and brandishing it over his head. She described every part of the figure to the life, showed them the motions and the form; and the poor people came into it readily. 'Yes, I see it all plainly,' says one; 'there's the sword as plain as can be.' Another saw his very face, and cried out, 'What a glorious creature he was!' One saw one thing, and one another. I looked as earnestly as the rest, and said I could see nothing but a cloud. However, the woman turned from me; called me a profane fellow and a scoffer; told me that it was a time of God's anger, and dreadful judgments were approaching, and that despisers such as I should wonder and perish. Another encounter I had in the open day also, in going through a narrow passage from Petty-France into Bishopsgate churchyard. In this narrow passage stands a man looking through between the palisadoes into the burying-place, and he was pointing now to one place, then to another, and affirming that he saw a ghost walking upon such a grave-stone; he described the shape, the posture, and the movement of it so exactly, crying on a sudden, 'There it is--now it comes this way--now 'tis turned back!' till at length he persuaded the people into so firm a belief of it, that they fancied they saw it; and thus he came every day, making a strange hubbub, till Bishopsgate clock struck eleven, and then the ghost would start and disappear on a sudden."

Such sanctimonious tricks are historical. Don Bernal Dias del Castello tells us, in his account of the Mexican conquest, that St. Jago appeared in the van of the army, mounted on a white horse, and leading the troops on to victory. He frankly owns that he did not see this blessed vision; nay, that a cavalier, by name Francisco de Morla, mounted on a chestnut steed, was fighting in the very place where the patron of Spain was said to have appeared; but, instead of drawing the natural conclusion, that the whole business was got up as an illusion, he devoutly exclaims, "Sinner that I was, what am I that I should have been permitted to behold the blessed apostle!"

These impostures remind us of the story of the wag who, fixing his eyes upon the lion over Northumberland House, exclaimed, "By heaven! it wags--it wags!" and contrived by these means to collect an immense mob in the street, many of whom swore that they did absolutely see the lion wagging his tail.

Crowds of pretended fortune-tellers, and astrologers and cunning men, were soon in good business, and their trade became so generally practised, that they had signs denoting their profession over their doors, with inscriptions announcing, "Here lives a fortune-teller,"--"Here you may have your nativity cast;" and the head of Friar Bacon, Mother Shipton, or Merlin, were their usual signs: and if any unfortunate man of grave appearance, and wearing a black cloak, went abroad, he was immediately assailed by the mob as a necromancer, and supplicated to reveal futurity. At such a period, it may be easily imagined that quacks were not satisfied with mere gleanings; and infallible pills, never-failing preservatives, sovereign cordials, and incomparable drinks, against the plague, were announced in every possible manner; and universal remedies, the only true plague-water, and the royal antidote, became themes of universal discourse. An eminent High Dutch physician, newly come over from Holland, where he resided during all the time of the plague,--an Italian gentlewoman, having a choice secret to prevent infection, and that did wonders in a plague that destroyed twenty thousand people a-day, were announced by bills at every corner.

One ingenious mountebank realized a fortune by announcing that he gave advice to the poor for nothing: crowds flocked to consult him; but he took half-a-crown for his remedy, on the plea that, although his advice was given gratis, he was obliged to sell his physic. While these speculations were going on, all "plays, bear-baiting, games, singing of ballads, and buckler-play," were prohibited; all feasting, "particularly by the companies of this city," was punished; watchmen guarded the doors of the pestiferated, to prevent their egress, and a red cross was painted on their houses. The inhabitants, thus shut up to suffer the pangs of starvation in addition to those of pestilence, made the best of their way out of their prison by every possible stratagem and bribery. While fervent prayers and loud ejaculations for mercy were heard amongst distracted families, the most offensive blasphemy and ribaldry prevailed amongst the gravediggers, dead-cart drivers, and their wanton companions. If any one ventured to rebuke them, he was asked, with a volley of oaths, "what business he had to be alive, when so many better fellows were shovelled in their graves?" to which was added a salutary recommendation to go home and pray, until the dead-cart called for him. The watchmen got their share of ill-usage and abuse.

All the guards had been marched out of town, with the exception of small detachments at Whitehall and the Tower. Robbery of every description was of course in full vigour, and every vice indulged in with impunity, while despair drove many to madness and suicide,--several individuals rushing naked out of their houses, and running to the river to drown themselves if not stopped by the watch. People fell dead while making purchases of provisions in the market; where, instead of receiving the meat from the butcher's hands, each buyer unhooked his purchase, and paid for it by throwing the value in a vessel filled with vinegar. Mothers destroyed their children, and nurses smothered their patients, while the bedclothes were stolen from the couch of the dead.

Among the curious anecdotes of the time, the following is worth insertion: "A neighbour of mine, having some money owing to him from a shopkeeper in Whitecross-street, sent his apprentice, a youth of eighteen years of age, to get the money; he came to the door, and finding it shut, knocked pretty hard until he heard somebody coming down stairs. At length the man of the house came to the door; he had on his breeches or drawers, a yellow flannel waistcoat, no stockings, and a pair of slipt shoes, a white cap on his head, and death in his face. When he opened the door, he said, 'What do you disturb me thus for?'--'I come from such a one, my master,' replied the boy, 'to ask for the money you owe him.'--'Very well, my child,' returns the living ghost; 'call as you go by at Cripple-gate church, and bid them toll the bell.' So saying, he went up stairs again, and died the same hour."

The story of the piper is founded on fact. This poor fellow having made merry in a public-house in Coleman-street, fell fast asleep under a stall near London Wall, Cripplegate; the under-sexton of St. Stephen's, one John Hayward, was going his rounds with his dead-cart, when he espied the piper, and, conceiving him to be a dead man, tumbled him on his heap of corpses, till, arrived at the burying-pit at Mount Hill, as they were about shooting the cart, the musician awoke, and, to the utter terror of the sexton and his comrades, began to set up his pipes.

The following relation of a case of grief is rather remarkable. "A man was so much affected by the death of all his relations, and overcome with the pressure upon his spirits, that by degrees his head sunk into his body so between his shoulders, that the crown of his head was very little seen above the bones of his shoulders, and, by degrees losing both voice and sense, his face looking forward, lay against his collar-bone, and could not be kept up any otherwise unless held up by the hands of other people; and the poor man never came to himself again, but languished near a year in this condition, and died." This was depression with a vengeance!

Some of these unfortunate victims of the pestilential disease seem to have had poetical inspirations, for one of two men who had fled to the country was found dead with the following inscription cut out with his knife on a wooden gate near him:

OmIsErY WE. BoTH ShaLL. DyE WoE. WoE:

and our historian, who fortunately escaped the calamity, terminates his work with the following lines:

A dreadful plague in London was In the year sixty-five, Which swept an hundred thousand souls Away; yet I alive.

Astrologers were of opinion that the plague of London arose from a conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in Sagittarius on the tenth of October, or from a conjunction of Saturn and Mars in the same sign on the twelfth of November.

Great as the mortality was during this affliction, the history of various other pestilences in foreign countries presents as melancholy a result. In Moscow, the plague introduced by the Turkish army carried off 22,000 inhabitants in a single month, and sometimes 12,000 in twenty-four hours. In Morocco, the mortality amounted to 1000 daily; in Old and New Fez, to 1500; in Terodant to 800. The total loss sustained in these cities and in the Mogadore was estimated at 124,500 souls.

The black pestilence of the fourteenth century also caused the most terrific ravages in England. It has been supposed to have borne some resemblance to the cholera, but that is not the case; it derived its name from the dark livid colour of the spots and boils that broke out upon the patient's body. Like the cholera, the fatal disease appeared to have followed a regular route in its destructive progress; but it did not, like the cholera, advance westward, although like that fearful visitation it appears to have originated in Asia.

The black pestilence descended along the Caucasus to the shores of the Mediterranean, and instead of entering Europe through Russia, first spread over the south, and after devastating the rest of Europe penetrated into that country. It followed the caravan, which came from China across Central Asia, until it reached the shores of the Black Sea; thence it was conveyed by ships to Constantinople, the centre of commercial intercourse between Asia, Europe, and Africa. In 1347 it reached Sicily and some of the maritime cities of Italy and Marseilles. During the following year it spread over the northern part of Italy, France, Germany, and England. The northern kingdom of Europe was invaded by it in 1349, and finally Russia in 1351,--four years after it had appeared in Constantinople.

The following estimate of deaths was considered far below the actual number of victims:

Florence lost 60,000 inhabitants Venice " 10,000 " Marseilles " in one month 56,000 " Paris " " 50,000 " Avignon " " 60,000 " Strasburg " " 16,000 " Basle " " 14,000 " Erfurth " " 16,000 " London " " 100,000 " Norwich " " 50,000 "

Hecker states that this pestilence was preceded by great commotion in the interior of the globe. About 1333, several earthquakes and volcanic eruptions did considerable injury in upper Asia, while in the same year, Greece, Italy, France, and Germany suffered under similar disasters. The harvests were swept away by inundations, and clouds of locusts destroyed all that the floods had spared, while dense masses of offensive insects strewed the land.

As in the recent invasion of cholera, the populace attributed this scourge to poison and to the Jews, and these hapless beings were persecuted and destroyed wherever they could be found. In Mayence, after vainly attempting to defend themselves, they shut themselves up in their quarters, where 1200 of them were burnt to death. The only asylum found by them was Lithuania where Casimir afforded them protection; and it is perhaps owing to this circumstance that so many Jewish families are still to be found in Poland.

A curious monumental record of the plague is to be seen at Eyam, an insignificant village in Derbyshire, to the eastward of Tideswell. It is an ancient stone cross of curious form and workmanship, erroneously stated to have been erected to commemorate the extinction of the pestilence which was supposed to have been brought there in a bag of woollen clothes, sent from London to a tailor of the place. The hamlet was soon infected, and its panic-struck inhabitants fled in every direction, scattering death in their flight, until driven back within their boundaries. During the prevalence of this scourge, tradition makes honourable mention of the rector of the parish, William Mompesson. Determined not to abandon his flock in the hour of need, he never quitted the devoted spot. In vain he entreated his wife to remove from the pestilential sphere of action--she would not leave him. Eyam was now cut off from all communication with the neighbourhood. The worthy clergyman addressed the Earl of Devonshire, then residing at Chatsworth, acquainting him with his resolution, and requesting that regular supplies of provisions might be duly placed in certain points of the adjacent hills. If this request was attended to, he pledged himself that none of his parishioners should transgress a given boundary. Troughs and wells, which are still there, were dug to secure water supplied by a stream, which to this day bears the hallowed name of Mompesson brook. The following account of this benevolent pastor's conduct in this emergency is not without interest:

"Aware that any assemblage of people breathing the same air under a confined roof, and coming into immediate contact with each other, must be highly dangerous, he closed the door of the church, availing himself of a nobler substitute "not made with hands,"--a rock that projected from the side of a steep hill, near the village, in a deep and narrow dingle. This rock is excavated through in different directions, the arches being from 12 to 19 feet high. In the middle of this romantic dell, from one of these natural porticoes, three times a week did he read prayers, and twice on Sundays did he address to his death-stricken congregation, the words of eternal life. By his own immediate directions, they arranged themselves on the declivity near the bottom, at the distance of a yard asunder. This spot is deservedly still held sacred, and known by the name of Cucklet church."

The following letter from this worthy clergyman, dated 20th November, 1666, energetically describes the calamity:

"The condition of this place has been so sad, that I persuaded myself it did exceed all history and example. I may truly say that our place has become a Golgotha--the place of a skull; and had there not been a small remnant of us left, we had been as Sodom, and been made like unto Gomorrha; my ears never heard, my eyes never beheld such ghastly spectacles. Now, blessed be God, all our fears are over, for none have died of the infection since the 11th of October, and all the pesthouses have been long empty. I meant, God willing, to spend most of this week in seeing all woollen clothes fumed and purified, as well for the satisfaction as the safety of the country.

"Here has been such burning of goods, that the like I think was never known. I have scarcely left myself apparel to shelter my body from the cold, and have wasted more than needed, merely for example. As for my part, I cannot say that I had ever been in better health than during the time of this dreadful visitation, neither can I say that I have had any symptoms of the disease."