Gregory’s procession has afforded a favourite theme for art. It is the subject of one of the frescoes in the Lady Chapel of Winchester Cathedral executed under the direction of Prior Silkstede at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The scene is also shown in a picture in the Chiesa del San Pietro at Perugia, in a modern picture by the Austrian painter Hiremy Hirsch, and in several others elsewhere. The miniature figured on the opposite page is one of two from a beautiful Livre d’Heures, of the early fifteenth century, and once the property of the Duc de Berry. It is now in the Musée Condé of the Château de Chantilly.
An Italian tradition refers the custom of saying ‘Bless you’, when a person sneezes, to the time of the pestilence of Gregory, in which all those that sneezed were said to have died. Boersch, quoting from the local chronicles of Kleinlauel and of Oseas Schadaeus, would trace its origin to the plague at Strasbourg in A.D. 591.[140] ‘And when any one sneezed, he gave up the ghost forthwith. Hence the saying “God help you”. And when any one yawned, he died. Hence it comes that when any one yawns, one makes the sign of the cross before the mouth.’ Probably the association is even older than this, for Thucydides speaks of sneezing in the plague of Athens. Sneezing and yawning were prominent features of the Sweating Sickness.
[120] _Œuvres de Oribase, Bussemaker et Daremberg_, lib. 44. c. 17.
[121] _De Differ. Febr._ i, tom. vii, p. 2; 96, ed. Kuhn.
[135] _De Gestis Langobardorum_, iii. 24.
[137] This penitential procession has been wonderfully depicted by Dudden in his _Gregory the Great_, vol. i, p. 217.
[140] _Essai sur la mortalité à Strasbourg_, p. 79.
In the summer of A.D. 680 Rome was again gripped in the toils of an appalling plague that had spread over the greater part of Italy. Paul the Deacon[141] says that eclipses of both sun and moon in May were followed by pestilence in the months of July, August, and September. Describing its ravages at Ticinum (Pavia) Paul says that ‘the number of the dead was so great that parents were often carried to burial on the same biers as their children, and brothers along with sisters.... And then many saw with their own eyes a good and a bad angel passing through the city by night. And whenever at the bidding of the good angel, the bad one, who seemed to carry a lance in his hand, struck so many times with his lance on the door of each house, as many of that household would die on the following day. Then it was revealed to some one that the plague would not cease until an altar was set up to Sebastian, saint and martyr, at the church of S. Pietro in Vincoli. This was done, and as soon as the altar was set up, the relics of the martyr-saint Sebastian were brought from Rome, and forthwith the plague ceased.’