plague

plague. Bubonic plague is a disease of rats, spread to humans by fleas deserting dead or dying rat hosts. The bacillus Yersinia pestis is either transmitted by direct flea bite or via flea faeces entering the bloodstream. Occurring primarily in the summer, it causes fever, vomiting, and inflammation of the lymphatic glands to give the characteristic swellings or buboes. Bubonic plague kills between 60 and 80 per cent of those infected. Still more lethal is pneumonic plague, which occurs when the bacillus enters the lungs and is then transmitted by droplet infection. Although it might have helped to cause the exceptional mortality of the Black Death in 1348–9, the pneumonic variety played only a minor role in plague epidemics after the early 15th cent.

Plague arrived in England in 1348 as part of a European pandemic that lasted until the early 18th cent. No subsequent plague epidemic had the same ferocious impact as the Black Death. Recent estimates put the death toll at something like 47 per cent of the entire population. The disease returned, albeit with diminished force, in secondary national epidemics in 1360–2, 1368–9, 1375, and 1390–1. After the late 14th cent. plague tended to occur on a regional rather than a national level, although in 1413, 1434, 1439, and 1464 it was country-wide. It remained a frequent scourge: in one 15th-cent. Canterbury priory 16 per cent of all monks died of plague.

The overall impact of plague on the national death rate, however, diminished progressively. From the late 15th cent., plague increasingly became a disease of towns and cities, where man and rat lived in closest proximity, or hit villages located on lines of communication. Between 1544 and the 1660s, no plague epidemic ever affected more than one in five English parishes. Our historical perceptions are coloured by the experiences of those minority of communities which were devastated. Norwich lost a third of its population in 1579. London accounted for one-third of all plague deaths that occurred in England between 1570 and 1670. The capital lost at least 25 per cent of its inhabitants in 1563, and a further 20 per cent or so perished in 1603 and again in 1625. The last ‘Great Plague’ in London in 1665, recorded in Pepys, killed about 56,000 people.

Plague was interpreted as God's punishment on sinful man. Epidemics therefore provoked penitential acts of worship, fastings, and exhortations to moral and religious improvement. In the 17th cent., the increasing identification of the poor as carriers and chief victims of plague reinforced attempts by their social superiors to control and reform their behaviour. The disease disappeared from Britain after the mid-17th cent. Scotland's last serious outbreak was 1645–9, England's was 1665–6. Why the plague disappeared is still debated, but it was probably due to the much more efficient quarantining of ships, which prevented the initial importation of the disease, and to increased use of brick rather than wood in houses, which reduced the contact between humans and rats.

Jeremy Boulton