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Population, Plague, and the Sweating Sickness: Demographic Movements in Late Fifteenth-Century England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

R. S. Gottfried
R. S. Gottfried*
Affiliation:
Rutgers University
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Extract

Demographic movements remain a controversial and largely unknown facet of medieval studies. This is particularly true for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the later middle ages, which in western Europe coincided with the second and most destructive pandemic of plague in recorded history. Most observers of late medieval England agree that population declined from sometime early in the fourteenth century, and that the decline extended to at least 1450, but the precise causes, extent, and chronology of this decline are still very much in debate. A recent analysis of 20,000 testamentary records from East Anglia, London, and Hertfordshire from 1430 to 1480 indicated that epidemic disease was the primary element in controlling and establishing demographic trends. It also showed, however, that this pattern began to change in the early 1470s when child replacement ratios, the generational measure of parents to progeny at fixed periods in time, began to rise for virtually all socio-geographic groups surveyed. By process of elimination, it was concluded that this was the result of an upturn in fertility. Since population increases generally have been attributed to changes in marriage patterns and/or mortality schedules, and since mortality was the major element in regulating population from 1348, the onset of the Black Death and the second plague pandemic, the postulated fertility rise of the 1470s took on even greater interest. Were the events of the 1470s anomalous, or did the projected fertility rise continue on into the 1480s, and even lead to the long-term period of population growth which occurred in the sixteenth century?

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , Fall 1977 , pp. 12 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1977

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References

1. A good place to start would be Saltmarsh, J. A., “Plague and Economic Decline in England in the Later Middle Ages,” Cambridge Historical Journal, 7 (1941)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bean, J. M. W., “Plague, Population, and Economic Decline in England in the Later Middle Ages,” Economic History Review, 2nd series, XV (1962–1963)Google Scholar. Also, see M. M. Postan, “Some Agrarian Evidence of Declining Population in the Later Middle Ages,” ibid., II (1950).

2. Gottfried, R. S., Epidemic Disease in Fifteenth Century England: The Medical Response and the Demographic Consequences (New York, 1977)Google Scholar. As the book is currently in press, it is not possible to cite page numbers. Chapters will be given instead.

3. See also Gottfried, , “Epidemic Disease in Fifteenth Century England,” Journal of Economic History, XXVI (1976)Google Scholar.

4. For views on why population grew in the early modern era, see the essays in Glass, D. V. and Eversley, D. E. C. (eds.), Population In History (London, 1965)Google Scholar.

5. See, for example, Dulley, A. F., “Four Kentish Towns at the End of the Middle Ages,” Archeologica Cantiana, LXXXI (1966)Google Scholar, and Camp, A. J., Wills and Their Whereabouts (Canterbury, 1963)Google Scholar.

6. Gottfried, Epidemic Disease, Ch. I.

7. Generally, the fees were quite modest. For a schedule, see ibid., Ch. I.

8. This is based on modelling the figures given for Norfolk and Suffolk in Russell, J. C., British Medieval Population (Alburquerque, N.M., 1948)Google Scholar. The methodology of the modelling is discussed in detail in Gottfried, Epidemic Disease, Ch. I, note 27.

9. There has been surprisingly little written about the Sweat. A convenient starting place is Gale, A. H., Epidemic Disease (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1959)Google Scholar. Creighton, Charles, History of Epidemics in Britain, 2 vols. (2nd ed.; London, 1965)Google Scholar, is dated and often inaccurate, but is still a gold mine of information. Shaw, M. B., “A Short History of the Sweating Sickness,” Annals of Medical History, V (1933)Google Scholar, is useful, but the best sources are the contemporary medical treatises: Forestier, Thomas, Tract us contra pestilentia, thenasmonem, et dissenterium (Rouen, 1490)Google Scholar; and Caius, John, A Boke or Counseill against the Disease called the Sweate or Swetynge Sickness (London, 1552)Google Scholar. For the epidemic of 1551, see Fisher, F. J., “Influenza and Inflation in Tudor England,” Economic History Review, 2nd series, XVIII (1965)Google Scholar.

10. Creighton, , History of Epidemics, I, 237–81Google Scholar.

11. Forestier, Tractus. The 1490 printed edition is not paginated, and there are no folio listings. Capitulum VII, entitled ‘De Thenasmone’ is referred to here.

12. Kingsford, C. L. (ed.), Chronicles of London (Oxford, 1905), p. 193Google Scholar.

13. Holinshead, R., Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, III (London, 1810)Google Scholar.

14. Fabyan, Robert, The Neue Chronicle of England and France (The Graduate Library, University of Michigan, Microfilm Ms., STC 39), f. ccxxxGoogle Scholar.

15. Gairdner, James (ed.), The Paston Letters (London, 1904), VI, 86Google Scholar.

16. Riley, H. T. (trans.), Ingulph's Chronicle of the Abbey of Croyland, (London, 1854), p. 495Google Scholar.

17. Kingsford, , Chronicles of London, p. 193Google Scholar. Among the other chronicles which deal with the Sweat in London are: Thomas, A. H., The Great Chronicle of London (London, 1938)Google Scholar; and Stow, John, The Survey of London (London, 1970)Google Scholar.

18. Vergil, Polydore, Anglica Historica, 1485-1537, ed. Hay, Denys, [Camden Society, XLIV] (London, 1950), 7–9Google Scholar.

19. Ibid.

20. The Chronicle of John Harding, ed. Ellis, Henry (London, 1812), p. 550Google Scholar.

21. Great Chronicle, 1485.

22. Forestier, Tractus, Cap. VIII.

23. Ibid. See also Gottfried, Epidemic Disease, Ch. III; and Creighton, , History of Epidemics, I, 238–43Google Scholar.

24. Harding, , Chronicle, p. 550Google Scholar.

25. Ibid.

26. Vergil, Anglica Historica.

27. Any of the more famous descriptions of the 1349-51 epidemic will reveal this. See for example, Chronaca senese attribuita ad Agnolo di Tura del Grasso detta la Chronica Maggtore, eds. Lisini, A. and Iacometti, F. (Bologna, 1931)Google Scholar. For fifteenth-century epidemic descriptions, see Gottfried, Epidemic Disease, Ch. II.

28. See Wrigley, E. A., Population and History (New York, 1969)Google Scholar.

29. Gottfried, Epidemic Disease, Ch. IV.

30. There were a few plague epidemics in the 1480s. Records report it in York in 1485, and in Oxford in 1486. There were also plague epidemics in 1491 and 1493, and a very serious one in 1499 and 1500. Although the author is not aware of their existence, records mentioning an epidemic in East Anglia may indeed exist, or perhaps have been lost.

31. Among others, see Hirst, L. F., The Conquest of Plague (Oxford, 1953)Google Scholar; and Birabon, J. N., Les Hommes et la peste (The Hague, 1975)Google Scholar.

32. An interesting account of typhus in England is Appleby, Andrew, “Disease or Famine? Mortality in Cumberland and Westmoreland, 1580-1640,” Economic History Review, 2nd series, XXIV (1973)Google Scholar.

33. Gottfried, Epidemic Disease, Ch. IV.

34. An interesting social group pattern emerged from the seasonal data. Clerics, the only sample from among over two hundred occupational groups to have had a spring-dominant mortality pattern from 1430 to 1480, had an overwhelmingly spring-dominant pattern in the 1480s. While several groups had overall patterns favoring spring, those of the clergy reached 40%. The reasons for this phenomenon, as in the earlier period, remain obscure. From 1430 to 1480, it was postulated that the clergy, wealthier and more mobile than the bulk of the population, were able to avoid plague epidemics. In the 1480s in East Anglia this type of flight would not have been necessary — yet autumnal mortality frequency remained comparatively low, while spring frequency was higher than ever. Clerical mortality remains something of a mystery.

35. We cannot discuss the replacement ratio concept in depth here. For a more detailed discussion, see Hollingsworth, T. H., Historical Demography (Ithaca, N.Y., 1969), pp. 375–88Google Scholar, and Wrigley, Population and History.

36. This is mentioned by Forestier in the 1485 manuscript edition, British Library, Add. MS 27582; and British Library, Arundel MS 249. It is discussed by Creighton, , History of Epidemics, IGoogle Scholar, in his chapter on the Sweat.

37. Schofield, R. S., “Geographical Distribution of Wealth in England, 1334-1649,” Economic History Review, 2nd series, XVIII (1965)Google Scholar.