Plague epidemics became steadily more widespread, with a greater death toll during the 16th century, as we describe in Chapter 6. The practice of keeping parish registers began during the last 50 years of this period and, together with other documentary sources, they have proved to be invaluable in determining the epidemiological characteristics of the plague. In this chapter, we present a case study of the plague at Penrith in 1597–98, which has previously been assumed to be a major outbreak of bubonic plague (Howson, 1961; Shrewsbury, 1970; Appleby, 1973). We describe the pattern of events there and the ways in which the individuals responded to this terrible visitation of the pestilence. Equally important, as we shall show, this detailed inspection of the data enables us to suggest the epidemiological characteristics of the disease. Armed with this information, we can then interpret the movement of the plague through the metapopulation of England in the 16th and 17th centuries in subsequent chapters, as it spread from population to population.

Penrith was a market town in the Eden Valley in Cumberland in northwest England and, it is said, the population had suffered from an earlier outbreak of plague in 1554. The registers began in 1557 and we have carried out a full family reconstitution from this date until 1812 (Scott & Duncan, 1998); we draw on the data derived therefrom in the following reconstruction of events during 1597–98.