Plague Outbreaks in Wiltshire and Salisbury, England

Date: [unknown] [unknown]
Location: Salisbury, Wiltshire, England

Summary of Plague Outbreaks in Wiltshire and Salisbury, England, from the 1570s to the 1660s.

Epidemics of plague seemed to occurr at regular intervals in Wiltshire for at least a century up to 1666. Because of the fear and panic when outbreaks of the disease came, drastic regulations were laid down by town councils and by quarter sessions in an attempt to prevent any spread of infection by contact with the sick, either personally or through goods and merchandise.

1565 - 1569
Calne Wiltshire at the northwestern extremity of the North Wessex Downs hill range, suffered attacks of plague in 1565 and 1569.

1579
In a plague epidemic in 1579 the landlord of the George Inn in Salisbury was forgiven a debt for outstanding rent of £22 and ten shillings because no visitors were allowed into the city which affected his business. In 1579 as well as later in 1604, the town council of Salisbury changed the place of the mayoral election 'because at the time of this election the plague or sickness is hot in or near the streets adjoining to St. Edmund's church' where the election was usually held. At the same time strangers and visitors avoided the infected town with consequent loss of trade.

1603
In 1603 when the king visited Salisbury and Wilton, fleeing the plague outbreak in London, the town council ordered that no carriages of any wares were to be received into Salisbury.

1604
In Salisbury, in 1604 there were 1,000 deaths from plague.

Poor harvests at this time, together with a slump in the textile industry, created great poverty and such conditions increased the likelihood of disease and death.

Five hundred people died in the parish of St Edmund’s where the weavers lived, 348 people died in the parish of St Thomas, and 150 in the little parish of St Martin’s.

Fisherton was then a suburb and its mortality was not recorded.

In January 1604 the Bishop of Salisbury, acting as justice of the peace, signed an order for the strict execution of the Act against rogues and vagabonds 'on account of the increase of the pestilence which was by daily experience found to grow by the wandering up and down the country of idle and loitering vagabonds'.

At the quarter sessions in the same month complaint was made of people who refused to remain in their houses although they had been in contact with the infection. For the future such persons were to be ordered to the house of correction for a month.

About the same time a number of towns and villages were reported to be infected and many weavers of Salisbury, Devizes, Marlborough, and Fisherton Anger were losing work on this account. At the October quarter sessions the presence of plague in Westbury was reported, the inhabitants, mainly weavers and spinners, were seriously impoverished owing to their isolation. Arrangements were made whereby supplies of corn at market prices should be delivered in or near the markets of Warminster and Market Lavington to certain appointed persons from Westbury.

1607 - 1608
John Noyes of Calne wrote to his wife from London in May 1607 giving her advice on avoiding the sickness which was then increasing in Calne. He particularly counselled her to avoid as much as possible the workers who came to the house. 'Let your spinners and weavers come in at the lower entrie, and so up into the wool lofte and let them come into no other part of your howse.' Plague was also in Devizes in 1607, and in Corsham in 1608.

1610
1610 Bradford petitioned at quarter sessions for relief, having been infected with plague for twenty weeks. In the autumn of 1611 Chippenham suffered the infection.

1625 - 1627
Salisbury organized a stringent day and night watch against strangers entering the town when plague raged in London in 1625, but failed to prevent an outbreak two years later which was the worst recorded in the city and comparable to the Great Plague of London in its effects.

Another deadly wave of the plague struck Salisbury in 1626. The city was cast into a panic and two-thirds of the people fled the city, including, after a vain attempt to preserve their isolation, some of the occupants of the cathedral close. The Mayor of Salisbury, John Ivie, was the only leading dignitary to stay. He did so to organise care for the sick and poor, and to prevent complete lawlessness.

In 1627, Salisbury was hit by a particularly bad outbreak. Three hundred and sixty-nine persons died of the disease. In St Edmund's churchyard alone, 172 victims were buried in one month. Of the leading citizens only the mayor, John Ivie, stayed in the city to organize care for the sick, and to prevent complete lawlessness.

Mayor John Ivie sent his wife and most of his household away, and together with his sergeant at mace, a manservant and an elderly maid, remained at his post to relieve the suffering of the distracted people and to govern the city under most trying circumstances.

The clergy, who at first tried to find safety by shutting the gates of the Close against the people of the city, later joined in the general exodus. History tells that they refused to open the Close gates and allow the people to worship, but a mob forced open the gates and rushed in.

As the plague raged through Salisbury in 1627 Mayor John Ivie took firm action and built a “pesthouse” in the south-east corner of an area called Bugmore in order to forcibly isolate the sick. Ivie had a pest house built at Bugmore to take the most desperate sick. It had previously been the site of a workhouse and was later the site of a smallpox hospital. The name, incidentally, has nothing to do with ‘bugs’ as in germs (unknown in the Middle Ages) but was originally ‘Boggy Moor’ because of its proximity to the flood plain.

Poor harvests at this time, together with a slump in the textile industry, created great poverty and such conditions increase the likelihood of disease and death.

Goods coming in to the city, especially from London, had to be left outside the city. While many of the wealthy fled (documents suggest that at one point 60 wagons a day were leaving the city), strangers were turned away. Ivie closed down all the alehouses and the inns were closed. One which defied the ruling saw all of its regulars dead within a few days.

Mayor Ivie was a Puritan and a Reformer. He claimed the plague was caused by "all the drunkards, whore-masters and lewd fellows of the city" and that the scourge was a perfect opportunity for complete social reform. With his friend, ally and Recorder of Salisbury, Henry Sherfield and Councillor Matthew Bee, he set about not only preaching the virtues of religion, but putting them into practical use for poor relief at a particularly dark time in English history.

As the plague struck, churchyards simply couldn’t cope and mass graves – known as ‘plague pits’- were dug on the outskirts of towns. One of Salisbury’s chosen sites was what is now known as the Greencroft. The precise location of the pits within the Greencroft area is uncertain, but there is a long established principle that subsequent building is not permitted on the plague pits, and this may have protected the Greencroft from development in the following centuries.

1637 - 1638
When plague was widespread in 1636 stringent precautions were taken by the mayor and common council of Marlborough. Three men were appointed every day to patrol the town from sunrise to sunset and to forbid entry to all strangers who could not prove that they came from uninfected places. Each searcher was paid 6d. a day, raised by a tax on householders. Calne also suffered another attack in 1637 when a London physician was engaged by Sir Edward Baynton and other Wiltshire gentlemen then in London. Samuel Smith, the physician, stayed two months in Calne for a fee of £20 and £6 13s. 10d. for medicines dispensed to the poor, and a fortnight's board.

1644 - 1646
Devizes suffered a severe attack in June 1644. Wootton Bassett was infected from 25 April 1645 for sixteen weeks, and the tithings of Wick, Nursteed, Bedborough, and Roundway within the parish of Bishops Cannings suffered both from plague and from plundering about this time. Maiden Bradley and Horningsham were also infected with 'the noysome and contagious disease' of the plague in 1646, and a serious outbreak appears to have occurred at Wilton.

In 1646, in the middle of civil war, the plague had struck with a vengeance in Salisbury and the churchwardens at Thomas’ were desperate to find room for burials.

They were required in December 1645 by the then Mayor to put together a census of the parishioners "by the next Friday"! It doesn’t explain exactly what this was for but it may have been to keep track of matters during the plagues, or to do with requirements for church attendance. But the following month “the scantnes of the burial place in the parish and the multitude of the Inhabitants therein” had them petitioning the Cathedral for space in “the ancient burying place (belonging to the said parish) in the Litten* of the Cathedral Church…”

They were prepared to open up and re-use the graves of dead “lately buryed” but were worried about infection. All this tells a grim tale.

1665 - 1666
This was the worst outbreak of plague in England since the black death of 1348. London lost roughly 15% of its population. While 68,596 deaths were recorded in the city, the true number was probably over 100,000. Other parts of the country also suffered.

The earliest cases of disease occurred in the spring of 1665 in a parish outside the city walls called St Giles-in-the-Fields. The death rate began to rise during the hot summer months and peaked in September when 7,165 Londoners died in one week.

When the disease was at its height in London in 1665, cases also appeared at Donhead St. Mary and Salisbury. The usual orders were issued forbidding the receipt by tradesmen of goods from infected places, compelling suspected persons to remain shut up in their houses, and restraining the travelling of pedlars, tinkers, and fiddlers. The following year, however, plague appeared at Marlborough, Mildenhall, and Wootton Bassett, and the Salisbury outbreak worsened.

King Charles II lived in Malmesbury House in Salisbury's Cathedral Close for the year of 1665 as he escaped the plague in London. It's not open to the public but you can see his oriel window where he would regularly address the humble people of Salisbury.

In September of 1665 King Charles II and his family left Salisbury for Oxford after a few cases of plague were reported there and in October when the above Quarter Sessions were held at Bridport, Parliament met at Oxford instead of London.