plague prediction from behaviour of

Plague prediction from the behaviour of children, and coffee as a remedy,

1665

In sprucing up a lecture I came across the little pamphlet The

prophecie of one of His Maiesties chaplains, concerning the plague and

black-patches with Mr. Gadburies happy and joyful predictions, for the

decrease of the plague both in the city and suburbs; the time when;

the manner how; by God's permission, and according to natural causes;

the effects and motion of the planets, and what every week may produce

for the thrice-happy and welcome abatement of this sad and dismal

pestilence; and the city of London to be wholly acquit thereof about

(or before) Christmas (1665).

This ill-founded announcement of hopeful news ( the pamphlet gives

both the astrological reasons for the outbreak, and repeats the hopes

Gadbury had raised for an amelioration in August when `the fortunate

Planet Venus ... may so happily contemper the fury of it' by entering

into `a Trine of the Sun' - no such luck, of course) brings together

several oddities. Taking me back to some of my earliest postings on

the fashion for black face patches, the pamphlet mentions a royal

chaplain denouncing them as connected to, and in some sense

responsible for, outbreaks of plague:

"And 'tis worthy of serious consideration, that about 20 years ago,

one of the Chaplains of his late Majesty King Charles the First of

ever blessed memory, did preach at Bristol upon this Text out of Gen

4.15 (`And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain,

vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark

upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him') And in his Sermon

did speak often against black patches and beauty-spots; and, among

other things, said they were Fore runners of other Spots, and Marks of

the Plague; and presently, within a very little while after, the

Plague broke out among them, and all those persons that did wear them,

fled the Town."

If fashion can be connected to the plague, so can all kinds of

behaviours. Arguing rather unconvincingly that God in His infinite

mercy (!) sends warning signs (but the plague nevertheless tends to

arrive `unawares'), the author runs through a few of the bad signs to

look out for:

"Though the Plague cometh unawares, and seizeth upon a man on a

suddain, yet such is the infinite mercy of God, and the providence of

Nature, that it giveth always warning enough to any one that will

diligently observe it ...

... First the Reader may be pleased to observe, the Signs immanent and

approaching of great Mortality; Mr Kelway in the third Chapter of his

Treatise of the Plague printed at London 1593 hath these words: When

we see young Children flocke them selues together in companyes, and

then will faine some one of their company to be dead amongst them and

so will solemnize the buriall in a mournefull sorte, this is a token

which hath bene well obserued in our age, to foreshew great

mortallitie at hand.

The allusion is to Simon Kellwaye's A defensatiue against the plague

contayning two partes or treatises: the first, shewing the meanes how

to preserue vs from the dangerous contagion thereof: the second, how

to cure those that are infected therewith. I in fact had to fill out

the faintly-inked quotation in the 1665 text from the 1593 source.

So, it's a bad sign if you see the children out playing at funerals. I

find this interesting, and, I must confess, to have a faint

possibility of plausibility, like those stories of animals predicting

disasters. William Lilly, in his manuscript `History of his Life and

Times' (I read the 1822 printing of this fascinating work) firmly

believed in this indication of bad times ahead. (I concede that Lilly

firmly believed in all kinds of indications of bad times ahead - that

was his stock-in-trade.) But here he is on the 1625 outbreak (and, at

first, on what has to be a smaller outbreak from his earlier London

years, 1620 onwards):

"I will relate what I observed the spring before it broke forth.

Against our house every night there would come down, about five or six

of the Clock, some hundred or more boys, some playing, others as if in

serious discourse, and just as it grew dark would all be gone home;

many succeeding years there was no such, or any concourse, usually no

more than four or five in a company. In the spring of 1625, the boys

and youths of several parishes in like number appeared again, which I

beheld, called Thomas Sanders, my landlord, and told him, that the

youth and young boys of several parishes did in that nature assemble

and play, in the beginning of the year 1625 `God bless us', quoth I,

`from a plague this year'.

Was there some unrecorded lore among 17^th century children, some

observation they had made? Boys were perhaps close observers of the

behaviour of rats, as a source of sport. Had they noticed (as used to

be the case with local tribes when the plague was still confined to

the steppes) that the population of rodents was diminishing? Before

the plague got out of central Asia, the people there knew that if the

marmots were sick, you stayed well away. I read somewhere that the

Chagatai horde led by Timur-i-Leng (Tamburlaine) swept through,

knowing nothing of this, and freed the bacillus into circulation

across the hemisphere.

The 1665 pamphlet offers the usual desperate remedies - wood fires,

dosing yourself with vinegar, and coffee. Yes, coffee.

"Kindle a wood-fire in the Chimney, to consume and destroy all the

infectious vapours... Venice-Treacle, Vinegar is a most excellent

Antidote against the Plague, and to drink 2 or 3 Spoonfuls in a

Morning is very good ... Coffee is commended against the Contagion."

What a pitiable life they led!