| An Apocalypse to Come: The Great Plague in Cambridge |
| On July 1665 five-year-old John Morley of Holy Trinity parish in Cambridge died. On his | Párr. 1 |
| chest were found black spots, tokens of the plague. His little brother, who had sat on a stool |
| round-eyed and fearful watching him, also had spots on his face: he was swept from his |
| mother’s arms by men dressed in white robes and taken away. He died in the pest house on |
| 5 | 5 August 1665, and the distraught parents were shut up in their house with a red cross |
| painted on the door and the words ‘Lord Have Mercy on Us’ written below it. In |
| Cambridge, the nightmare had begun. |
| Although the inhabitants of Cambridge basked in the summer sun of 1665, at the | Párr. 2 |
| back of their minds was the unspoken fear of plague. A pestilence that spread through a |
| 10 | community like wildfire as the Black Horse of the Apocalypse with its pale rider picked off |
| its victims. People died from painful tumours in the armpit and groin, from deadly fevers |
| and blood poisoning. There was no known cure, and many saw the pestilence as heralding |
| the end of the world as towns and villages were deserted and the dead lay in the streets with |
| no one left to bury them. |
| 15 | The Black Death as it later became known was first seen in England in July 1348, | Párr. 3 |
| when a ship carrying infected sailors docked at Melcombe Regis in Dorset. By April 1349 |
| the plague was in Cambridge. But by 1350 plague deaths ceased, and the country breathed |
| a collective sigh of relief. The crisis was over and life could get back to normal, or as |
| normal as it could be when houses stood empty, fields lay untilled, there were gaps in the |
| 20 | tavern, and familiar faces missing from the pumps where women met to draw water and do |
| their washing. In Cambridge work started on three new colleges to train men for the |
| priesthood and replace those who had died in the plague. For a time there was full |
| employment in the town, more scholars arrived at the university, there was enough food for |
| everyone, and widows and widowers, agreeing that it was better to share life, remarried. |
| 25 | This time of reconstruction was not to last, however, and the plague returned to the town in |
| 1361. It was to reappear in every century of the millennium. |
| When plague appeared in the town, the university suspended lectures and sent the | Párr. 4 |
| students away. Stourbridge Fair, held on the outskirts of Cambridge, was cancelled by royal |
| proclamation, all entertainment was banned and the social and economic life of the town |
| 30 | was severely disrupted. In the seventeenth century if rumours of plague in London reached |
| Cambridge, the town tried to isolate itself and forbade all contact with the capital. |
| Prior to 1665 the worst outbreak of plague Cambridge had experienced occurred in | Párr. 5 |
| 1630 and 1631. This was within living memory of many people living in Cambridge in |
| 1665, and others had been told about it by their parents. Children were told by their |
| 35 | grandparents how, when all hope was lost, a letter was read out in all the parish churches in |
| England asking for a collection to be made for the destitute poor of Cambridge, and money |
| poured in from cities, towns and villages. The town had survived one of its worst periods, |
| and it was to survive further outbreaks of the plague in 1637 and 1638, and again in 1642 |
| and 1646 when Cambridge was a garrison town during the Civil War. Then the plague |
| 40 | appeared to cease, but by the 1660s ‘there was a notion among the common people that the |
| plague visited every 20 years and must return’. |
| Astrologers’ predictions pointed to the plague’s reappearance because of the | Párr. 6 |
| conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in Sagittarius on 9 October 1664 and between Mars and |
| Saturn on 12 November. These were confirmed on 12 November 1664 by the appearance of |
| 45 | a harbinger of doom, a comet. Samuel Newton, alderman of Cambridge, saw the comet on |
| 17 December 1664. It was seen again on 3 April 1665. Some thought that a visitation from |
| the plague was a ‘stroke of God’s wrath for the sins of Mankind’, and a broom to sweep the |
| kingdom clean. It was no accident that some of the symptoms of the plague resembled |
| those of venereal disease, the mark of a dissolute life and corrupt society where sexual |
| 50 | excess and depravity were common. Others thought that a dose of the clap could be a |
| preventive against the plague and went out of their way to catch it. |
| The most popular theory on the cause of the plague was miasma, ‘the earth belching | Párr. 7 |
| forth venomous vapours’– vapours caused by filth, overcrowding, dunghills, excrement, |
| stinking standing water, putrefying churchyards all polluting the air. The vapours could lie |
| 55 | dormant in the soil during cold weather and resurface when it became warmer. This was |
| borne out by the patterns of plague deaths which decreased in the winter, only to occur in |
| greater numbers in the summer. |
| The idea that bad air could cause disease persisted into the nineteenth century, but | Párr. 8 |
| we now know that plague was caused by a bacillus, Yersinia pestis, identified by Dr |
| 60 | Alexandre Yersin in 1894. Helped by the new science of bacteriology he found that the |
| bacillus that caused plague was primarily a disease of rats. Four years later P. Simond |
| recognised that the disease spread to humans through the bite of a rat flea. He found that |
| once the rat host died, the infected flea left to find another warm body to feed on, but as it |
| could not ingest any blood, when it bit the human it injected the lethal bacillus under the |
| 65 | skin. Plague was transmitted from flea bites rather than from human to human. However, a |
| secondary infection of the lungs, or pneumonic plague could be spread from human to |
| human by droplets. This was the type of plague referred to in the nursery rhyme ‘Ring a |
| Ring o’ Roses’. The 1665–66 outbreak was almost certainly bubonic plague. William |
| Boghurst records from his observations of plague victims that there was little of the |
| 70 | sneezing that there had been in other countries and other times. |
| Non-medical practitioners had their own recipes. Hannah Glasse prescribed plague | Párr. 9 |
| water. This was an infusion of rue, sage, mint, rose-mary, wormwood and lavender in a |
| gallon of wine, which was put into a pot and left to warm in ashes for four or five days, |
| then strained and bottled with camphor. It could be taken by mouth, rubbed on the loins or |
| 75 | the temple, or sniffed up. |
| When plague was identified the Privy Council swung into action and issued a series | Párr. 10 |
| of orders to county sheriffs and town councils. The first set of directives was concerned |
| with stopping the infection from spreading, banning all public meetings and cancelling |
| fairs, including Cambridge’s Stourbridge Fair. The next order stated that all streets and |
| 80 | alleys were to be thoroughly cleansed and fires strewn with sweet herbs were to burn on |
| street corners. No dogs, cats or tame pigeons were allowed out on the streets, and some |
| authorities went so far as to kill all dogs, cats and pigeons in their town. Infected |
| households were to be closed up or the inhabitants sent to a pest house. Wardens were to be |
| appointed to watch infected houses and supply necessities, and searchers were to be |
| 85 | appointed to identify plague victims. Lastly, there were to be monthly fasts, public prayers |
| every Wednesday and Friday, and collections made in churches for the infected poor, ‘by |
| which means God may be inclined to remove his severe hand from amongst you and us’. |
| Towns took these orders seriously and isolated the infected poor in pest houses, | Párr. 11 |
| which at first were hastily erected sheds where the dead and the dying were close |
| 90 | neighbours, but later were purpose-built structures. In April 1658 the university and town |
| agreed that in case the town should be visited by sickness again they would be prepared by |
| building timber cabins on commons and waste places in the town at their joint expense. |
| These would follow the pattern of the sheds built on Coldham Common, consisting of two |
| timber frames with six lodging rooms, and in every room a brick chimney and an iron bar |
| 95 | to hang pots from. The external walls were to be of brick, two and a half yards high, well |
| covered with tiles and sealed with hair mortar and the rooms to be paved with brick. Each |
| room was to have a door with a lock and windows with wooden shutters. There was to be |
| separate accommodation for overseers and watchers. Few survived the move to a pest |
| house and contemporaries thought it a ‘A Slaughter house for Mankind’. |
| 100 | This is what the inhabitants of Cambridge had to look forward to in 1665: a disease | Párr. 12 |
| without any known cure which could spread like wildfire through the town, and a painful |
| death, either shut up in their own houses with the dead and dying, or locked in a pest house. |
| 1G.L.8 | |