Where was William Dyer during the plagues of 1625?
© 2016 Christy K
Robinson
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The woman's plague bubo is being lanced. Probably
a European illustration, not English.
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Update, September 2020:
I wrote this article in 2016, based on research into 17th-century epidemics. It's amazing to see modern parallels to the deadly pandemic of COVID-19 that has raged across the planet.
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Extraordinary floods, failed crops, pandemics of bubonic
plague, typhus (spotted fever), and dysentery (flux), the death of the old king (from tertian fever, a form of malaria) and late coronation of
the new king. Supplies of food and fuel disrupted. Leaving home in the country and being apprenticed (on trial,
anyway) at age 14 in the big city. William Dyer’s first year away from home was
an annus horribilis.
Midsummer Day in 16th- and 17th-century
England
was a solstice celebration with pagan roots and a Christian blending, on the
Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. Antiquarian John Stowe wrote:
“…[On Midsummer's Day] every man’s door being shadowed with green
birch, long fennel, St John’s
Wort, Orpin, white lilies and such like, garnished upon with garlands of
beautiful flowers.”
There were bonfires lit, and wealthy people supplied cakes
and ale. Trade and craft guilds all over England
participated in candlelit military processions, and London and its many liveries were no
exception.
On Midsummer Day, June 24, 1624, when William Dyer was not
quite 15 years old, he was apprenticed to Westminster
(London)
haberdasher and milliner, Walter Blackborne. William had been born 120 miles
north of there, between Sleaford and Boston in Lincolnshire, and was educated in maths, writing, history,
Latin, literature, religion, and the arts, probably at the Carre Grammar School.
June 24 was a popular day for apprentices to be contracted, so there were
probably initiation ceremonies at the guildhalls, after which the masters and
apprentices prepared for their evening parade. William, enjoying the festival, had no way of knowing what his life would be like in the next year and a half.
In February 1625, there was a super-tidal event, when the
surge up the Thames flooded London.
Westminster Hall had three feet of standing water. Across eastern England, in the lowland fens (marshes) that
stretched up to Boston
and William's home village of Kirkby LaThorpe, the sea and the freshwater rivers and fens surged over
their banks and dikes.
The old King James died of a tertian fever (a form of malaria) on March 27, 1625, when his son and
heir, Charles, was set to marry the princess Henrietta Maria of France.
The princess was a Catholic, and neither the Church of England nor the Puritan
dissenters held any liking for Catholics. Near the end of April,
“the
London
apprentices – a class always foremost in city frays – catching the spirit of
their sires and elders, gave it violent expression, by assaulting the Spanish
ambassador’s house in Bishopsgate
Street, threatening to pull it about his
Excellency's ears, and to take his life in revenge for permitting English
Papists to frequent his chapel.” www.archive.org/stream/.../ecclesiasticalhi01stou_djvu.txt
Ecclesiastical History of England, by
John Stoughton, 1807
We don’t know if William was among that apprentice mob, but as a
15-year-old boy, was probably kept under the strict and watchful eyes of his
master, who lived in Westminster,
two miles away.
“Apprentices
were reliant on their masters for their food, drink, clothing and houses; they
were not to gamble, marry, or stay out to ‘haunt play-houses, taverns or ale
houses’ without permission; they were rarely paid; instead they often paid
their master to take them on in the first place; and this was to last for seven
years – at least. In return, their master would feed, house, clothe and instruct
them.”
http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/apprenticeship-in-early-modern-london-the-economic-origins-and-destinations-of
Apprenticeships
in Early Modern London: Economic Origins and Destinations of Apprentices in the
16th and 17th Centuries, by Dr Patrick Wallis and Dr Christopher Minns,
Gresham College, London, 2012
In May 1625, immediately after King James’ funeral, bubonic plague,
which was a perennial threat but isolated, broke out in the poorest, most
crowded streets of London, where the old, filthy, crowded tenements
met the edge of the Thames, and had been
flooded three months before. The wooden buildings were likely rotting and moldy from damp. Sometimes the infected fleas arrived in bales of cotton or other imported goods, and sometimes the sailors and dock hands spread the disease. The weekly mortality bills show that the confirmed
plague deaths squared and cubed upon themselves.
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These nine panels illustrate the Great Plague of 1665, but they easily fit the 1625 plague, as well.
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On June 12, 1625, Chamberlain writes:
"We
have had for a month together the extremest cold weather ever I knew in this
season." The whole month of June
was a time of "ceaseless rain in London."
In the country, the hay-harvest was spoilt, and the corn-harvest [all grains,
but not American Indian corn] was only a half crop.
“The
deaths from all causes in May and June were so many more than the reported
plague-deaths could account for that those who watched the bills of mortality
(Mead at Cambridge, Salvetti in London) suspected that plague was being
concealed. "It is a strange reckoning," says Mead of the bill for the
week ending June 30: "Are there some other diseases as bad and spreading
as the plague, or is there untrue dealing in the account?" Probably there
were both; at the end of the year the deaths from all causes were some 20,000
more than the plague accounted for; and at least half of that excess was extra
to the ordinary mortality. The spotted fever [typhus] and the flux [bloody
dysentery] doubtless continued side by side with the plague, having been its
forerunners… The plague of 1625 was a
great national event, although historians, as usual, do no more than
mention it. Coinciding exactly with the accession of Charles I, it stopped all trade in the City for a
season and left great confusion and impoverishment behind it; in many
provincial towns and in whole counties the plague of that or the following
years made the people unable, supposing that they had been willing, to take up
the forced loan, and to furnish ships or the money for them.
On June 13, King Charles met his bride Henrietta Maria at Dover, and then sailed up the Thames to Greenwich
by June 19, where he was urged to come no further toward London because of the plague. Parliament met
in Westminster until early July, but thereafter at
Richmond and Oxford,
because there was plague in Westminster.
Was there a Midsummer celebration on June 24, with the
candlelight parade of masters and apprentices, or was it suspended that year
for fear of plague? In the third week of June, there were only 293 plague
deaths, a terrible epidemic, but nothing like they were about to experience.
Magistrates, government officials, merchants, ministers,
doctors, the royal court, and every rich person fled London and its suburbs for the countryside. A Tuscan envoy wrote from Richmond:
“The
magistrates in desperation have abandoned every care; everyone does what he
pleases, and the houses of merchants who have left London are broken into
and robbed." On September 1, Dr Meddus, rector of St
Gabriel's, Fenchurch Street,
wrote: "The want and misery is the greatest here that ever any man living
knew; no trading at all; the rich all gone; housekeepers and apprentices of manual trades begging in the streets, and that in such
a lamentable manner as will make the strongest heart to yearn." The city
an hour after noon was the same as at three in the morning in the month of June, no more people stirring, no more shops open. https://books.google.com/books?id=tXwaAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA512&lpg=PA507&focus=viewport&dq=plague+of+1625&output=text A
History of Epidemics in Britain,
Vol. 1, by Charles Creighton, 1894
But outside of London,
the villages and farms and manors were terrified to accept the city people, who
brought the plague with them, either on fleas and ticks in their possessions,
or by their coughing and sneezing of the pneumonic plague. A magistrate was
having his boots fitted, when the shoemaker fell dead at his
feet. A woman fled London for Cumbria, and died
the day she arrived. Some victims awoke healthy and died by the evening, and
some lingered in agony for days.
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A 1630 woodcut from ‘A
Looking-glasse for City and Countrey’ by H. Gosson
(via Wellcome Images)
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Woodcut images of the time show the skeleton
of death riding along with the coach and horses as they flee the city. The
citizens left by boats, both east and west on the Thames,
and on foot. They had no shelter in the country, not even a barn, for no one
would allow them to stay on their land. Undoubtedly, in this cold and rainy
summer of the Little Ice Age, many died of exposure, typhus, or dysentery,
rather than plague. One man took his seven children with him out of the city,
but when all seven children died, he moved back to his home.
“They
[the Londoners] are driven back by men with bills and halberds, passing through
village after village in disgrace until they end their journey; they sleep in
stables, barns and outhouses, or even by the roadside in ditches and in the
open fields. And that was the lot of comparatively wealthy men. Taylor says that when he was with the queen's barge at Hampton Court and
up the river almost to Oxford,
he had much grief and remorse to see and hear of the miserable and cold
entertainment [hospitality] of many Londoners:
"The name of London now both far and near
Strikes all the towns and villages with fear.
And to be thought a Londoner is worse
Than one that breaks a house, or takes a purse....
Whilst hay-cock lodging with hard slender fare,
Welcome, like dogs into a church, they are.
For why the hob-nailed boors, inhuman blocks,
Uncharitable hounds, hearts hard as rocks,
Did suffer people in the field to sink
Rather than give or sell a draught of drink.”
In the city, most doctors were gone, but quacks posted handbills about their cures of lozenges or syrups. Of the sick, some raved in delirium,
some cried with pain from the buboes.
Church bells tolled relentlessly for funerals, so no one could hear the hours of the
day. Coffin makers, collectors of the dead, sextons and gravediggers did a booming business, as did the men who slaughtered tens
of thousands of dogs and cats in the city. Carts rumbled down the streets every day
to pick up the dead, who were lowered from windows because the doors were
sealed to isolate the sick from the well.
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Plague cure by Thomas Sherwood, Practitioner in physick.
"If any that are ancient or weak shall be infected
with
the Pestilence, it shall not be necessary
to give them any purge, vomit, or
sweat, or to let them bloud;
because they cannot beare the losse of so many
spirits
as are spent by such evacuations. Therefore you may
lay upon the pit of
the stomack of the sicke a young live puppy,
and if the sick can but sleep the
space of
three or foure houres, they shall recover presently,
and the dog shall
die of the Plague.
This I have known approved; and I do believe
that it will be
a cure for all leane, spare, and weake
bodies both yong and old: provided, that
the
dog be yonger then the sick."
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"Poor people, by reason of
their great want, living sluttishly, feeding nastily on offals, or the worst
and unwholesomest meats, and many times, too, lacking food altogether, have
both their bodies much corrupted, and their spirits exceedingly weakened;
whereby they become (of all others) most subject to this sickness. And
therefore we see the plague sweeps up such people in greatest heaps."
https://books.google.com/books?id=tXwaAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA512&lpg=PA507&focus=viewport&dq=plague+of+1625&output=text A
History of Epidemics in Britain,
Vol. 1, by Charles Creighton, 1894
Churchyards’ ground level rose by several feet because the
grounds were full. Fields and commons were designated as cemeteries. Many of us
have seen illustrations and movies which show carts upended, and shrouded
corpses sliding in a heap to the bottom of a pit. But modern archaeology has
shown that to be untrue. The plague pits are arranged in orderly layers, limed for quick decomposition, with
bodies laid out with feet toward the east, just as they’d be in a churchyard or
crypt. They were buried in unmarked graves, but they were treated with respect.
One has to wonder if the overwhelming business of death left the workers with lifelong emotional damage.
Deaths from plague fell precipitously when the winter frost
set in. Who knows if it’s because the fleas died, or if the plague had taken
all the weak it could and the survivors were immune. The government returned to
London in
November, and the coronation of Charles I and Henrietta Maria was held on
Feb. 2, before Lenten season.
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Weekly plague mortality bills for
1625
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Plague deaths per mortality bills
(Christy K Robinson) |
Where was the 15-year-old William Dyer during the 1625
annus horribilis? Did he and the
Blackbornes flee the city, or did they stay in Westminster at their home on Greene’s Alley? (Greene's Alley was a street between the Strand and the river, so it may have flooded in February 1625.) William was officially enrolled in the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers in August
1625 (retroactive to June 1624), the very peak of the plague, which would suggest
that they stayed in (or returned to) London. And how did William's home village, two miles from Sleaford, fare during a plague?
Read it HERE.
And what of his future wife, Mary Barrett, who was about 13
or 14 at this time? We don’t know. But with the descriptions we see above, we
can imagine the horror and the conditions she would have experienced. Were she and
William and the Blackbornes, and all the 35,000 people who emigrated to New England in the 1630s, blessed with genetic mutations
that made them immune to plague, or did they somehow escape and avoid the dread
diseases that preyed upon them? Though they survived deadly pandemics, certainly they lost family members: parents, children, siblings.
The bubonic and pneumonic plague returned in 1630, propelled
by the 30 Years War on the European continent, and ravaged London before spreading to the rest of the
country. It killed 25 percent of the residents of Alford, Lincolnshire, including Elizabeth (age 3) and
Susanna (age 16) Hutchinson, the daughters of Anne and William Hutchinson. (Their next daughter, born in Massachusetts Bay Colony, was named Susanna, and she was the lone survivor of the massacre of August 1643 when she was abducted by Indians and kept for three and a half years until her redemption. She lived with her brother Edward until she married at age 18.)
There were more epidemics of plague in 1635-36, and 1641,
when 30,000 died of plague in London
alone (not counting the rest of the country), and 1645, during the English Civil Wars. The final and most severe
outbreak was in 1665, when about 100,000 people died. After the 1666 Great
Fire, London
was rebuilt with slightly better and less crowded conditions. The bacterium yersinia pestis, which causes plague, wasn't identified until the 19th century, nor were the rat or flea vectors known until then.
Christy K Robinson is author of
these books (click the titles to go to their sales pages):
And of these sites:
Discovering
Love (inspiration and service)
Rooting
for Ancestors (history and genealogy)
William and Mary Barrett Dyer
(17th century culture and history of England and New England)
