The influence of bubonic plaque in England 1500-1667.

A GOOD DEAL is now known about the incidence of plague in this country during the early modern period, but attempts to probe the wider impact of these epidemics on the general history of the era have been rare. This is curious, for plague occupies a prominent position in tlhe historiography of the later middle ages; but while the disease remained a major factor in the lives of Englishmen for nearly two centuries after the close of the medieval period, the modem historian can find no place for it in his survey of the forces moulding the development of Tudor and Stuart England. This essay is an attempt to examine the demographic, social, economic, and moral impact of plague epidemics. It makes no attempt to cover the chronological and geographical patterns of the disease, or to describe its medical aspects, since these areas are well reviewed by recent published work.' Of course plague was only one among many epidemic diseases which afflicted the period under examination: typhus and dysentery were more common, influenza (particularly in the great pandemic of 1556-59) killed many more people, and the rate of population growth continued to be determined by the many and obscure destroyers of children. Why, then, should we select plague for a special prominence? The answer lies in the uniquely disruptive and disturbing consequences of its epidemics, caused by certain basic characteristics of the disease which deserve prior treatment and are chiefly derived from the peculiar transmission of the organism by means of the rat flea. A most important feature of plague was that it travelled slowly, and crossed open spaces with the greatest difficulty. This was due to the sedentary nature of the black rat, living whenever possible in the roof spaces of houses and averse to wandering across countryside or crossing water. For this reason plague was essentially a disease of towns, for only in such settlements was a concentration of houses, and so of rats, possible: the epizootic among rats which necessarily preceded a human epidemic required that infected rats or their fleas should be able to move easily between one house and the next, not commonly true of villages. When the disease was spread between communities, it was probably taken by infected rats or their fleas, carried involuntarily by carts, packhorses or ships, another factor concentrating infection on ports and towns on major roads. It is this necessarily urban concentration ofplague Alan D. Dyer, B.A., Ph.D., University College of North Wales, Bangor. 1 E.g. Leonard F. Hirst, The conquest of plague, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1953; John F. D. Shrewsbury, A history ofbubonic plague in the British Isles, Cambridge University Press, 1971; J.-N. Biraben, L'homme et la peste, 2 vols., Paris, Mouton, 1975-76; The plague reconsidered, Matlock, Derbyshire, Local Population Studies, 1977.