Against the Wind

by William Harvey, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

A letter from the Hundred of Hoo, in the plague winter of 1625/6

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To the Worshipful the Doctor, at his lodging by St Bartholomew's Hospital, London. By the Gravesend tilt-boat, with care.

Tunstock in the Hundred of Hoo, the 22nd of January, 1625.

Doctor,

I will give you the numbers first. You said once, over the body of a carter in the cutting-room at the Hospital, that a number does not care who is rector, and I have had cause this month to find out whether that is so.

Since Michaelmas there have died in this parish thirty-one persons of the plague, out of some four hundred souls. I have kept the register these eleven years and I have had the searchers' word on every one, and where I doubted the searchers I went and looked myself, with a cloth over my face and a candle. Of the thirty-one, nineteen died of the swelling sort, that is with the botch under the arm or in the groin or behind the ear, and these took a week or ten days about it, and seven others who had the same swelling lived, and are about the parish now with their scars. So of twenty-six who took the swelling, nineteen died and seven lived.

The other twelve died of what the women here call the spitting sort. There is no swelling, or if there is one it comes first and is forgotten. There is a fever and a pain under the breast and a cough, and then the spittle comes up thin and bright with blood, frothed like the head on small beer. Of the twelve who took it, twelve are dead. None lived. Not one of them lasted above three days from the first cough to the last breath, and the most of them lasted two.

I set these down plain because Mr Elwes our rector says they are one sickness, the same corruption of the air working more violently in some bodies than in others, according to their humours. Perhaps that is so. But a sickness that lets seven in twenty-six go free and a sickness that lets none in twelve go free are not working in the same manner, whatever they are made of, and I would not nurse them in the same manner. That is the whole of my argument. The rest of this letter is the proof of it, as near as a parish clerk can make one.

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Mr Elwes holds that the plague comes up out of the marsh. The fleets and ditches below Water Lane stand full all autumn, and when the wind comes off them it brings the stink, and the stink is the corruption, and the corruption enters at the pores and the mouth. He had tar barrels burned in Water Lane in November, and juniper, and once a load of old rope that set Goodman Best's thatch smouldering. He also said, at Martinmas, from the pulpit, that we should have patience until the frost, for frost locks the ditches and cleanses the air, and in every plague year the sickness slackens with the cold. I wrote that down at the time because I thought it a good test. A man who says what will happen gives you something to count.

The frost came on the 18th of December and has not gone off. The ditches are iron. You can walk on the fleet from the church to the sea-wall. And the swelling sort did slacken, as he said: there has been no new swelling in the parish since St Thomas's day. But the spitting sort did not slacken. It began in the frost. Every one of the twelve took it after the ditches froze.

I do not say this to shame Mr Elwes, who has stayed in his parish when the rector of the next one went off to his brother's in Maidstone. I say it because it is the first thing I counted that would not go into his account.

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Here is the second thing, and it is the one I want you to look at.

The first of the spitting sort was Margery Pett, widow, of Water Lane. She took a swelling under the left arm on the 20th of December and was going the way of the others, slow, when on the 29th she began to cough, and spat blood, and died on the 31st. Her daughter Alice Tufton nursed her and held her head up on the bolster to ease the cough, and Alice began to cough on the 2nd of January and died on the 4th. Alice's husband John Tufton, lighterman, coughed on the 3rd and died on the 6th. Their boy Kit, four years old, who slept in the bed with his mother, coughed on the 4th and died on the 6th, the same morning as his father.

Widow Ambrose, who lives two doors up and came in to sit with Alice, coughed on the 5th and died on the 7th. Mr Hamon our curate went in to Alice on the 3rd to read her the Visitation, and she wished to make a special confession, and he bent down to the bolster to hear it because her voice was nearly gone. He coughed on the 6th and died on the 9th. Robert Ambrose, the widow's son, sat up two nights with his mother, and Susan his wife with him; Robert coughed on the 7th and died on the 9th.

That is seven. I will finish the list and then show you the shape of it.

John Tufton, on the evening of the 3rd, coughing already but not yet bad, went to the Ship and sat by the fire in the little room with Hugh Swaine and Peter Gull, lightermen both, as he had sat every winter evening of his life. Hugh coughed on the 7th and died on the 9th. Peter coughed on the 7th and died on the 10th. Joan Kemsley, Mr Hamon's maid, nursed him at the last; she coughed on the 9th and died on the 11th. Susan Ambrose, who had sat with her husband's mother and then nursed her husband, coughed on the 9th and died on the 12th. Her sister Mary Dawe came over the frozen marsh from Allhallows to nurse Susan, and coughed on the 12th, in Susan's house, and died there on the 14th.

Twelve. I have the days of each in a column if you want them, but I think you will see it without the column.

Every one of the twelve but Margery Pett, who had the swelling first, had been, before they coughed, within an arm's length of the face of one who was already coughing. Every one. I asked each household myself, or the searcher asked for me, and where the sick could still speak I asked them, from the doorway. Who sat by you? Who held your head? Who drank with you? And always there was one, and always that one had the spitting sort first, by two days or three.

Now the wind. Water Lane runs from the hard by the sea-wall at its east end up to the church at its west, and all this frost the wind has stood in the north-east, off the sea-wall and the frozen fleets, and come up the lane from the marsh end to the church end. The Petts and the Tuftons are at the marsh end. If it were the air, Doctor, and the corruption came off the Tufton house as Mr Elwes says it comes off the marsh, then it should have gone up the lane with the wind to the houses above them: the Lovells, the Bests, old Thomas Kember the cooper, the two Godden households. They had the stink of the Tufton house blowing in at their doors for a fortnight, for Alice's things were burned in the yard. Not one of them has had the spitting sort. Not one.

Widow Ambrose lives below the Tuftons, nearer the sea-wall. Upwind. Mr Hamon lodged in the old chantry house on the sea-wall itself, upwind of everybody. The Ship is on the hard, but the little room is round the corner of the house, out of the lane altogether. Mary Dawe lived a mile and a half off, upwind, across the marsh.

It went against the wind. It went from bolster to bolster and from settle to settle. It did not go down the street at all.

I have thought a great deal about you this month, and about the morning you tied up the porter's arm in the Hospital to show us young men which way the blood went in the vein. You drew the ligature tight and the vein swelled below it and not above, and you said the vein had told us its direction, and it was no business of ours to argue with it. You could not see the blood go in under the skin, but you could see where it pooled. I cannot see what goes from Alice Tufton to Widow Ambrose. It is as invisible to me as your passages between the arteries and the veins, which you said must be there because the blood could not get round otherwise. But I can see where it pools. It pools at the head of the bed.

And here is the thing I did not expect to see. In this frost, when a man coughs out of doors, you see his breath go out of him white and hang a moment and spread. On the morning of the 5th I stood in the Tuftons' yard while Goody Rayner the searcher went in, and John Tufton came to the window and coughed, and I watched his breath come out through the broken pane and go a yard into the yard and hang there, and I stepped back from it as from a thrown stone. I do not know that it was the breath. But the breath is the one thing that goes from a face to a face, and it goes no further than an arm's length or two before it is lost, and that is the distance the sickness went.

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I did a thing on the 6th of January that I want you to know of, because without it you might think I have fitted my list to my notion after the event.

On the evening of the 6th, when Mr Hamon began to cough, I wrote down on a paper the names of every person I could find who had been near the face of one of the coughing in the two days before. There were seven names. Beneath them I wrote ten more: persons of Water Lane who lived above the Tuftons, downwind, and had not, so far as I could learn, gone in at any sickroom door. I folded the paper and sealed it with the vestry seal and gave it to Mr Best, who is churchwarden, and asked him to keep it unopened until Candlemas, or until I was dead, whichever came first.

It was being said in the parish by then that the clerk had a list of the dead before they died, and Mr Elwes desired the paper opened, so Mr Best opened it in the vestry on the 15th, before Mr Elwes and me. Of the seven names in the first list, five have since died of the spitting sort: Robert Ambrose, Hugh Swaine, Peter Gull, Joan Kemsley, Susan Ambrose. Two did not take it. One was Will Tufton, John's brother, who stood talking with John at the house door on the 4th; the other was Goody Rayner the searcher, who went in to Alice while she still breathed, to judge whether the house must be shut up. I do not know why those two were spared, and I put them down so that you will not think I have trimmed the sum. Of the ten in the second list, none has taken it.

Mr Elwes said that a man who reads the bills every week may guess who is next as a fisherman guesses the weather, and that it proves nothing as to causes. That is fair. I said only that the fisherman who guessed the weather would be a fool not to stay in port when he had guessed it. He did not answer that, but he did not forbid what I did next, either.

What I did next was this. On the 9th Joan Kemsley began to cough, at her mother's house, for she had gone home from the chantry house when Mr Hamon died. Her mother Bridget sent for me, I think because she had heard that I had my list and she wanted to know if she was on it. She was not, but she would be by the morning. I told her what I had counted. I told her that every person who had held the head of the spitting sort had taken it, and every person who had kept off had not, and that I could not save Joan, because no one has lived of this, but that I thought she might save herself if she would nurse her girl from the foot of the bed and not from the head. That she should have one person only go in, and that one herself. That she should wet a linen in vinegar and tie it over her nose and mouth, doubled, as I do when I view a body, and wet it fresh each time she went in. That she should set the cup and the basin on the stool and push the stool up with her foot. That she should not kiss the girl.

She said that was a cruel thing to ask of a mother. I said I knew it. She did it. Joan died on the 11th, in the forenoon, with her mother standing at the bed's foot holding her ankle through the blanket, because she had promised me she would not come nearer, and that was as near as she would let herself. Bridget Kemsley is alive today, the 22nd. It is eleven days since she was in the room. Every other who nursed one of the spitting sort was coughing within three days.

I told the same to Thomas Dawe and his sister Ann when they came over the marsh on the 12th, on word that Mary was coughing, and they did as Bridget did for the two days she lasted, and neither of them has taken it. And since Mary Dawe began to cough on the 12th, which is ten days gone, there has not been one new case of the spitting sort in this parish or, so far as I can hear, in Allhallows.

So the arithmetic stands thus. Persons who nursed the spitting sort at the head of the bed, or bent to it there, or lay in the bed with it: nine, of whom nine took it. Persons who sat close by a fire with it: two, of whom two took it. Persons who nursed it from the foot with the wet linen: three, of whom none took it. It is a small number. You will say it is too small. I say it is all I have, and I would rather go on with small numbers than with no numbers.

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Mr Elwes preached on the 15th, after the paper was opened, on the text in Habakkuk, in wrath remember mercy, and gave thanks that the Lord had sent the frost to purge the air, as he had told us at Martinmas He would. He did not mention my paper. I do not blame him for it. He is a learned man and a kind one, and he has buried thirty-one of his flock since Michaelmas and read the service over every one himself since Mr Hamon died.

But he also ordered that the fires be lit again in Water Lane for the Sunday following, which is today, to drive off what corruption the frost had left. So this morning after service the tar barrels were set going in a row down the middle of the lane, four of them, with juniper on top, and the parish came out of the church straight down to them, for it is the bitterest day we have had, and there is no fuel in half the houses, and a fire in the open street is a fire for nothing.

I went down with them and stood at the church end and counted. Around the first barrel there were fourteen persons, and around the second eleven, and around the third nine, and around the fourth seven, with the children pushed in to the front to get warm. Forty-one. They stood shoulder to shoulder, close in to the heat, as close as Alice Tufton to her mother's bolster, and talked, for no one has had much talk this month, and they leaned their faces in over the flames to warm them.

It was so cold that every word they spoke came out of them white. I stood off with my hands in my sleeves and watched forty-one breaths go up out of forty-one mouths over the four barrels and run together in the heat and go up into the one smoke.

I have put out the candle twice writing this, for the cold, and lit it again. I will send the column of days by the next boat if you want it.

Your servant, and once a surgeon's boy at the Hospital when you were physician there,

Ralph Sowden, parish clerk of Tunstock.

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THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem tertium Nōnās Octōbrēs (5 October 2026), ā Gulielmō Harvēō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

William Harvey, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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