6 - Pestilence and plague in the 16th century in England

Summary

It is bewildering to read Shrewsbury's (1970) account of diseases in England in the 16th century and one gains the impression that plague was rampant somewhere in almost every year of the century. In an attempt to bring some order from confusion, to separate fact from fiction and to distinguish between the possible different causes of mortality, both infectious and otherwise, we have subdivided the outbreaks of disease into the following categories:

1. (i) The Sweating Sickness that was a scourge for the first half of the century.

2. (ii) Epidemics apparently confined to London and the southeast corner of England.

3. (iii) Years in which outbreaks of infectious disease were widespread in England.

4. (iv) Plagues that were apparently confined to northern England; these are discussed in detail in Chapter 7.

The Sweating Sickness

The strange disease that became known all over Europe as the English Sweat because of the extreme susceptibility of the English (the disease was absent in Scotland) first appeared (presumably as a result of a mutation in the infectious agent) in the autumn of 1485 and a good account of it is given by Wylie & Collier (1981). Creighton (1894) said that ‘the language of historians is that the sweat of 1485 spread over the whole kingdom. We hear of it definitely at Oxford where it lasted but a month or six weeks’.