A HISTORY OF EPIDEMICS IN BRITAIN.
London: C. J. CLAY and SONS,
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE,
AND
H. K. LEWIS,
136, GOWER STREET, W.C.
Cambridge: DEIGHTON, BELL AND CO.
Leipzig: F. A. BROCKHAUS.
New York: MACMILLAN AND CO.
A HISTORY
OF
EPIDEMICS IN BRITAIN
from A.D. 664 to the Extinction of Plague
BY
CHARLES CREIGHTON, M.A., M.D.,
FORMERLY DEMONSTRATOR OF ANATOMY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE.
CAMBRIDGE:
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
1891
[All rights reserved.]
Cambridge:
PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AND SONS,
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
PREFACE.
The title and contents-table of this volume will show sufficiently itsscope, and a glance at the references in the several chapters will showits sources. But it may be convenient to premise a few general remarksunder each of those heads. The date 664 A.D. has been chosen as astarting-point, for the reason that it is the year of the first pestilencein Britain recorded on contemporary or almost contemporary authority, thatof Beda’s ‘Ecclesiastical History.’ The other limit of the volume, theextinction of plague in 1665-66, marks the end of a long era of epidemicsickness, which differed much in character from the era next following. Ator near the Restoration we come, as it were, to the opening of a new sealor the outpouring of another vial. The history proceeds thenceforth onother lines and comes largely from sources of another kind; allowing for alittle overlapping about the middle of the seventeenth century, it mightbe continued from 1666 almost without reference to what had gone before.The history is confined to Great Britain and Ireland, except in ChapterXI. which is occupied with the first Colonies and the early voyages,excepting also certain sections of other chapters, where the history hasto trace the antecedents of some great epidemic sickness on a foreignsoil.
[Pg vi]The sources of the work have been the ordinary first-hand sources ofEnglish history in general. In the medieval period these include themonastic histories, chronicles, lives, or the like (partly in the editionsof Gale, Savile, Twysden, and Hearne, and of the English HistoricalSociety, but chiefly in the great series edited for the Master of theRolls), the older printed collections of State documents, and, for theBlack Death, the recently published researches upon the rolls of manorcourts and upon other records. From near the beginning of the Tudorperiod, the Calendars of State Papers (Domestic, Foreign, and Colonial),become an invaluable source of information for the epidemiologist just asfor other historians. Also the Reports of the Historical ManuscriptsCommission, together with its Calendars of private collections of papers,have yielded a good many facts. Many exact data, relating moreparticularly to local outbreaks of plague, have been found in the county,borou