THE BLACK DEATH IN NEW ENGLAND. 29 



that appear in the worst eruptive fevers, with black patches all over 

 the skin, from which the disease received the name Black Death. The 

 patient was next seized with violent vomitings of blood ; he sometimes 

 died at once, and he seldom survived more than two days. It is stated 

 that, toward the end of the pestilence, many lives were saved by punc- 

 turing the boils. 



It was a fearful time. The population of England and Wales num- 

 bered probably between three and four millions, and of these at least 

 one-half, or more than a million persons, perished. Stowe says that 

 the scourge " so wasted and spoyled the people that scarce the tenth 

 person of all sorts was left alive." Another old writer says : " There 

 died an innumerable sort, for no man but God only knew how many." 

 In six months from January 1st there died in the city of Norwich more 

 than 57,000 persons. In the graveyard of Spittle Croft, thirteen acres 

 of land, which was used for the burial of the dead, because the London 

 graveyards were " choke full," there were buried 50,000 persons. Par- 

 liament was prorogued in January, on account of the plague having 

 broken out in Westminster, and again in March, on account of the in- 

 crease of the disease. On the 16th of June, 1350, an important public 

 regulation was made, " because," as the law ran, " a great part of our 

 people is dead of the plague." 



Not only the people but the cattle were infected. The disease was 

 highly contagious. Death was in the air. " The pestilential breath 

 of the sick who spat blood," says Hecker, " caused a terrible contagion 

 far and near, for even the vicinity of those who had fallen of the plague 

 was certain death, so that parents abandoned their infected children, 

 and all the ties of kindred were dissolved ! " 



Half the population, or more than a million souls ! What a stretch 

 of the imagination does it require to cover such an appalling calamity ! 

 Cities were reduced to towns ; towns to hamlets. The work of the 

 husbandman ceased. The dead were unburied, and lay in the fields 

 rotting in the sun. People stayed in their own houses, often half 

 clothed and half famished, waiting for the destroyer to come. 



In the year 1664 a similar visitation of the plague came upon Lon- 

 don. The disease was perhaps not as swift and violent as had been 

 the black death three hundred years before, but it was of the same 

 general character. It broke out in Drury Lane in December. It had 

 been raging for a considerable period in Holland, and the minds of the 

 English people had been filled with apprehension for months. If De- 

 foe's narrative is true, the people believed that they bad supernatural 

 warnings of the impending catastrophe. The symptoms of this disor- 

 der were similar to the black death, except that it was usually preceded 

 by dimness of vision, and the discolored patches on the body were 

 livid, instead of black. At the beginning of the following summer the 

 disease fearfully increased. We may get an idea of the scene at the 

 beginning of the calamity, from some little incidents recorded in the 



