Man that is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble.
He cometh forth like a flower and is cut down;
He fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not. (Job xiv, 1-2)
Reliable evidence of past plagues and pestilences is scanty, though the reality must have hovered as an ever present threat in the minds of our forebears. Long before there was any understanding of the causes of infectious diseases, limiting their spread had been a human concern for centuries – from the medieval leprosariums to the crude red paint cross on the plague-ridden front door, and the temporary smallpox tent hospitals. It is difficult to learn much about the incidence of, and the responses to, outbreaks of infectious disease in the more distant past, and this account will, of necessity, be very patchy.
Parish registers, in spite of the numerous limitations of their reliability, provide a few hints. Chipping Ongar’s burial register for the sixteenth century is very incomplete, as it was copied into a bound volume at the beginning of the next century from a collection of the loose papers from the previous six decades. Nevertheless, on 28 July 1574, we find the burial of ‘Thomas, a Stranger, Surgeon of London, died of the plague’. Over the next 8 months another nine parishioners were buried, apparently as a result of the same epidemic. It is perhaps of significance that the first victim was a medical man who, knowing the dangers better than most, had tried to save his skin by fleeing from London, probably bringing the infection with him. What we do not know, of course, is whether these ten men did really die from plague as it is most unlikely that Ongar had the ‘searchers’ or ‘viewers of the dead’ who confirmed the diagnosis in the metropolis. It is very probable that any unexpected group of febrile deaths in a rural parish could have been erroneously labelled as plague. After these entries, the Chipping Ongar registers are silent about the causes of death, apart from noting a few accidents and drownings.
Another way of detecting epidemics from parish registers is to add up the annual totals of burials. This works better in a large urban parish where the numbers are larger, and therefore rather less prone to the random variations that occur in a small parish, such as Chipping Ongar which usually buried under ten a year. The risk of the figures being skewed by such variations is illustrated by the spike in burials which occurred in May 1626. Closer scrutiny shows that six of these were from one family, a further two were a mother and infant (probably intra-partum deaths), and one came from another parish. The following months showed no significant increase over the normal level. 1626 was not a recognized plague year, so it is much more likely that this May peak was coincidental rather than infectious.
Moving into the eighteenth century, there is a very large peak of 33 burials in 1744, long after plague had ceased to be prevalent in this country and had been replaced by smallpox as ‘one of the captains of the men of death’. Smallpox, being ever-present in the population, did not take epidemic form. However fever deaths in the London bills of mortality were at their highest ever level in 1741, and other towns noted similar peaks at around the same date. This certainly suggests an infectious epidemic, and contemporary descriptions suggest that it may have been the tick-borne disease, typhus (otherwise known as goal fever, from its high incidence in those crowded and insanitary institutions).
Possible other sources of information, such as letters and diaries, are very scanty indeed for Essex in the seventeenth century. The best evidence is probably from the diary of Ralph Josselin (1616-1683), vicar of Earls Colne. In August 1644 he noted ‘the plague that arrow of death is sadly at Colchester, brought by a woman that came to visitt her freinds, their have already been divers died … lett not our sins, our covetousness … cause thee to be angry with us.’ Later that month he wrote ‘the plague continued and increased at Colchester, our towne yett in safety, Lord keep that destroying arrow from among us.’
Periodically there are other notes about outbreaks of plague which is closely linked to divine retribution for sins and offences, personal and national. Not surprisingly, there are a great many references to plague, the result of divine wrath against man’s sinfulness, from May 1665 onwards. In August, monthly public fasts were begun in an attempt to placate God. A few days later ‘Colchester looketh sadly, by a joiner. Dedham clapt him into a pest house. God spare that place.’ In September he recorded that Londoners were instructed to keep a fire continually burning for three days and nights outside each front door, as a preventative measure. Deaths increased in Colchester in the following month, and plague reached Coggeshall, Halsted, Feering, Kelvedon and Braintree, but his own village ‘sinful Colne’ was spared. In spite of (or perhaps because of!) their sinfulness, his parish collected the very substantial sum of £4 10s for the poor and destitute of Colchester. Though the frosts arrived in mid October, plague deaths in London and Colchester took another two months to dwindle. At the beginning of December Josselin noted ‘publique fast, a very thin audience, yet God good to us in withdrawing his pestilence, and our preservation, sent to Colchester £7 10s collected at our several fasts.’ However his hopes seem to have been premature and he continued to report plague deaths in London and Colchester well into the summer of the following year, continuing into the autumn and early winter in London, Colchester and Braintree. But it disappears completely from his account after early December 1666.
There are both familiar and unfamiliar threads in this story. The familiar one is human generosity to those less fortunate, the search for a remedy (such as lighting fires in doorways) without evidence of efficacy, attempts to isolate victims, and a sense of relief about personal survival. The unfamiliar thread, very alien to our modern way of thinking, was the strong belief that plague was a divine visitation, and a punishment for society’s sinfulness. Today this has perhaps been replaced by blaming the Chinese for their unusual dietary habits, or the ‘bad guys’ swarming over the Mexican border, or government ineptitude. One thing, however, remains unchanged, with London – with its crowded conditions, and central to national and international travel - still being the epicentre of epidemics. But, like most human misfortunes, it will eventually abate and be forgotten until the next time.