Thus in two years, 1478-79, we hear of an epidemic of plague of the first rank in London, an epidemic most severe for the size of the place, at Hull, and epidemics at Southwell, Newcastle and Norwich. This is not unlike the plague-years that we often find in the centuries following. Whether it be that we are merely coming to a time of better records, or that the disease itself was getting worse in English towns, these later years of Edward IV. are comparable to plague-periods under the Tudors and the Stuarts.
The period from the Black Death of 1349 to the reign of Edward IV. witnesses a considerable change in the habits, so to speak, of plague in England. In the earlier part of that period, the epidemics of “pestilence”--although they were not all of plague or wholly of plague--are general throughout England, like the great mortality itself but on a smaller scale. As late as 1407, or perhaps 1439, we still hear of “the disease called the pestilence” being universal and in the homes of the peasantry. The extent of the sickness in 1465, or even the type of it, is not sufficiently known. From that time onwards town and country are contrasted in the matter of plague; it becomes usual to flee to the country so as to escape the pestilential air in town in the summer heats, and the unwholesomeness of the London air becomes on numerous occasions a real reason, or a pretext, for the adjournment of Parliament. All the while, the plague was the lineal descendant of the Black Death,--a virus so potent on its first entry into English soil as to overrun every parish of the land.
Plague and other pestilences in Scotland and Ireland, 1349-1475.
The materials for the history of plague in Scotland, including the Black Death and subsequent outbreaks down to the end of the medieval period, are much fewer than for England. From the English chroniclers (Knighton and Le Baker) we learn that the Black Death in the autumn of 1349 extended from the northern counties to the Scots army in the Forest of Selkirk. According to Fordoun, plague would have been general in Scotland in 1350; but as he includes in his reference “several years before and after” and “divers parts of the world,” his statement that nearly a third part of the human race paid the debt of nature is perhaps a mere echo of the general estimate and without reference specially to Scotland[464]. His next general reference to pestilence is under the year 1362, when the same kind of disease and the same extent of mortality as in 1350 occurred throughout all Scotland[465]. But as he says elsewhere that the visit of David, king of Scots, to Aberdeenshire in 1361, when he took Kildrummy Castle from the earl of Mar, was determined in the first instance by the prevalence of plague in the southern part of his kingdom[466], it may be inferred that the epidemic had begun late in that year in the south, coincident with the _pestis secunda_ of England, and had been interrupted by the coming on of winter, as in the first epidemic of 1349 and 1350. The next mortality recorded by Fordoun he names the fourth (_quarta mortalitas_) and assigns to 1401[467]. The question arises as to the third; and it appears that there were indeed two plague-years in Scotland between 1362 and 1401--namely, 1380 and 1392, both of them corresponding nearly to great plagues in the north of England. In the former year sir John Lyon, lord of Glamis, was unable to hold his court as auditor of the exchequer in certain places owing to the plague[468]. In 1392, also, the custumars of Haddington, Peebles, and Dumbarton did not attend the “chamberlain ayres” on account of the pestilence[469]. In 1402 (not in 1401, as Fordoun has it), the custumars of Stirling were absent from the audit by reason of the plague[470]; and in the same financial year (10 July, 1402, to 18 July, 1403), only one bailie from Dundee attended the audit at Perth, the others being dead in the pestilence[471].