British Monarchs Who Ended Badly, Part 3: Edward III to Henry V

With the reign of Edward III, we reach the golden age of chivalry. Edward created one of the most famous of chivalric orders: The Order of the Garter, around 1348. His methods of warfare were hardly chivalric, however.  

[Image: Edward III with roll of the Order of the Garter, 15th century drawing, Bruges Garter Book]

The Knights of the Garter were the creme de la creme of the nobility and gentry. Naturally, they loved to plunder, kill, and rape peasants, who were not covered by chivalric rules. A lot like the rules of war today, really. 

Edward III provided his knights with a golden opportunity. He went to war with France. French wars had been a common feature of English life since the Norman Conquest, but Edward's war was different. Earlier kings since 1066 had fought in France to protect or sometimes extend their lands in that country. Edward III wanted more: the French throne. Or so he said. 

Now, if you are a diehard English monarchist, you might say he should have had it -- without a fight. To explain why, we must go back to the previous reign. Edward II married a French princess, Isabella, who gave birth to the future Edward III in 1312. * 

When her brother Charles IV died in 1328 without an heir, his closest male relative was Edward III. But the French bypassed Edward and selected Philip of Valois as King. Why? Because Isabella was not a man. 

French hereditary law held that the throne could not be passed to the descendant of a woman, in this case, Edward. He disputed the decision, to no avail. 

In 1337, he began what historians later called the Hundred Years War. It lasted from 1337 to 1453, which, as you will notice, is 116 years. But the Hundred- and Sixteen-Years War is clumsy and hard to remember.  

The Hundred Years War was actually several wars punctuated by years of peace. During the long reign of Edward III, the English won some great victories, like Crecy (1346) and Poitiers (1356), largely due to the skill of their longbowmen, who were hardly chivalric.

In the later years of Edward III's reign the war went badly for the English. Nature made things worse for everybody. Floods, cold weather, famine, disease added to war. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rode again. 

The worst disaster was the plague, or Black Death, which struck Europe in 1347-49 and returned in 1361. About 30 percent of the population died in Western Europe, perhaps more. The plague came back periodically for another 300 years.

In 1376, Edward III's heir, Edward the Black Prince, died after years of chronic illness, possibly malaria or some other infection. He had been the victor at Poitiers and other battles, and was considered the greatest soldier of his time. He was only 45. [Image: Effigy and Tomb of Edward the Black Prince, Canterbury Cathedral]

Edward III, whose health and mind had been failing for some time, died the following year. He had been monarch for 50 years, the second longest reign of the medieval period. 

The throne passed to the ten-year-old son of the Black Prince, Richard II. For several years, Richard was guided by his uncles. Their guidance was not especially helpful. The war in France went badly. The royal finances were mismanaged. In 1381, England was engulfed by the largest Peasant Revolt in its history. 

Peasants, artisans, and laborers rebelled against a regressive poll tax designed to pay for the French war. They were already reeling from the effects of the war, plague, bad weather and government attempts to keep wages down.

The rebels captured London and terrorized the city for several days. They killed the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Treasurer. They burned the Savoy Palace, the magnificent London home of John of Gaunt, Richard's uncle. 

Young King Richard, now 14, met with their representatives and promised to grant their demands. Alas, it was a ploy. At another meeting, the Mayor of London treacherously killed the peasant leader, Wat Tyler. in the confusion that followed, Richard rode up to the rebels and urged them to follow him away from the scene. They did. The rebellion soon collapsed.

[Image: Richard II, Westminster Abbey]

When Richard came of age, he dismissed his uncles and began to rule as well as reign. In the later 1380s, he started to act arbitrarily, leading to charges of tyranny. In retrospect, his biggest mistake was to exile his cousin Henry of Bolingbroke in 1398.   

Bolingbroke was the eldest son of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. When Gaunt died in early 1399, Richard confiscated his vast estates for the Crown, disinheriting Bolingbroke. The estates remain a major part of the monarchy's portfolio. There is even a cabinet minister in charge of it, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. 

In June 1399, with French help, Bolingbroke returned with an army, to claim his inheritance. He defeated and captured Richard in Wales and called a parliament, which declared Richard deposed. Because Richard had no heir, the parliament declared Bolingbroke king as Henry IV. It was the first time the English Parliament chose a monarch, but not the last.

[Image: Henry IV, Bolingbroke, funeral effigy, with his wife Joan of Navarre, Canterbury Cathedral]

Henry IV was the first of three Lancastrian kings. He had promised the deposed Richard that he could live, but a plot to restore the former king changed that. Richard died in Pontefract Castle in 1400. He was likely murdered, possibly starved to death.

Henry IV's problems, and England's, were hardly over. He spent much of his reign fighting off rebellions, some challenging his claim to the throne, a challenge that was to cause problems for several decades. 

His later years were marked by a series of severe illnesses. He suffered from a disfiguring skin disease, possibly leprosy. Henry IV died unhappily in 1413, perhaps of heart disease, aged 46. He left behind a badly divided England.  

His son and heir Henry V (Shakespeare's Prince Hal) sought to unite the English by restarting the Hundred Years War. In 1415 he invaded France. A meticulous planner and a skilled general, Henry inflicted a decisive defeat on a large French army at Agincourt, and  captured key towns and fortresses. Along the way, he made a few great speeches, if we are to believe Shakespeare, play Henry V. 

The French agreed to a compromise peace in 1421. Henry was named heir to the throne and regent. He married a daughter of the French king to seal the deal. Alas, he died the following year. The stated cause of death, "camp fever," could mean several things. He was only 36, but his body was probably worn out by seven years of ceaseless campaigning. 

[Image: Henry V, painted in late 16th or early 17th century. Gotta love the hairdo!]

Henry V left a nine-month-old son as king of England and presumptive heir to the French throne. As the youngest king of England ever, Henry VI could hardly defend his French claim. English nobles who ruled in his name tried, but they lacked Henry V's charisma and skills. 

Slowly, the English began to lose territory to French soldiers inspired by Joan of Arc. By 1453, the only English territory left in France was the port of Calais, which it held until the 1550s. 

With the war in France over, the English reverted to fighting among themselves. During the previous century, powerful noblemen had created private armies of retainers, mercenaries. Instead of fighting for land, they fought for money. Their employers were fighting for the Crown. 

The Game of Thrones was about to heat up.   

*Mel Gibson Fake History Alert. In Braveheart, we are led to believe that Isabella had a one-night stand with William Wallace and that the future Edward III was the son of Braveheart. Edward III was born seven years after Wallace's execution. It must have been a long pregnancy.   

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Pandemics may be Inevitable: Ignorance is Not

"Migration of man and his maladies is the chief cause of epidemics." Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange, 2003

(Image: Romanticized depiction of the arrival of Columbus in the New World)

Alfred Crosby's words were written in connection with the European discovery of the New World. In the wake of the discovery, Europeans began to migrate to the Americas, first a trickle, then a flood, then a tsunami. The same is true for Africans, although they did not come by choice. 

Both Europeans and Africans unknowingly brought their microbes along, unleashing an explosion of diseases in the New World. All suffered, but the indigenous inhabitants suffered most -- indeed catastrophically. It was like being attacked by several deadly pandemics at once. War and enslavement worsened things.

Native Americans were extremely vulnerable to Old World diseases. Having been isolated from the rest of the world for thousands of years, they had no experience with or immunity to a host of Old World infections. 

Smallpox, measles, influenza, pneumonia, and many other diseases killed Native Americans in huge numbers. The microbial invasion wiped out, or nearly wiped out, many Native American cultures. It was perhaps the worst demographic disaster in world history. 

The Europeans and Africans, in contrast, grew in numbers. Unlike Native Americans, they had experience and some levels of immunity to the diseases they carried from their own regions, many of which had been around for centuries or even millennia. They suffered, too, just not as much. The only major disease that the New World gave to the Old is, possibly, syphilis. The disease exchange was heavily one-sided.

Africans were vulnerable to some European diseases, especially respiratory disorders such as pneumonia and tuberculosis. Europeans were vulnerable to some African diseases, especially tropical fevers such as falciparum malaria and yellow fever. Bad as these could be, they did not prevent population growth among the new arrivals.

As Western peoples moved around the globe during the orgy of imperialism in the 19th century, the same epidemiological patterns were repeated. Remote island peoples, for example in the South Pacific, faced an onslaught of western diseases. Westerners in some regions faced disease tsunamis of their own when they moved into Sub-Sharan Africa and parts of South Asia. 

There are many other examples of disease that spread through human migration. In the 14th century, the Second Plague Pandemic  (Black Death) migrated along trade routes such as the Silk Road and pilgrimages routes. Swift Mongol horsemen also played a role in spreading plague as they conquered much of Eurasia.  

The Cholera Pandemics of the 19th century followed a similar pattern. Originating in British India, cholera crept along trade routes and reached Western Europe and the Americas by the early 1830s, sparking panic. 

The Third Plague Pandemic, which began in China in the late 19th century, spread around the world aided by steamships and railroads. It reached San Francisco and Sydney, Australia by 1900. It was especially deadly in India, killing about ten million. (Image: Plague in Sydney, Australia, 1900: rat killing)

The mass movement of millions of soldiers in World War I famously spread the Great Influenza of 1918-20. American troops aboard crowded ships brought the influenza to Europe, where it mutated. Then they brought the more virulent mutation back to the Americas. (Image: Pandemic Incubator: US troopship returning from Europe, 1918)

That is history, ancient history for many of us. Today the world is battling against another virulent disease that has spread in part through the temporary migration we call tourism. Commercial airliners can spread microbes around the globe faster rate than even steamships and railways. 

Unprecedented numbers of people are constantly on the move, fleeing from violence, oppression, and poverty. Human migration into hitherto sparsely populated regions like rain forests and increased contact with wild animals have helped to create new deadly viruses like Ebola, SARS and now Covid-19. Unlike the first two, coronavirus is highly contagious and becoming ever more so as new strains like Delta and Omicron evolve. 

One of the main means of controlling Covid, or at least slowing its spread, is to restrict human migration, a difficult and sometimes inhumane thing to do. Countries can close their borders to prevent both in migration and out migration. Many have, but often too late. 

The perceived economic cost led most countries to avoid such restrictions for too long. Governments have mastered the art of closing the barn door after the horses have left. Economies are crashing anyway. 

"No one could have predicted this" is a common but largely false claim. Epidemiologists and public health experts have been predicting something like this for decades. WHO has been warning for decades that "disease X" will come from nowhere and we must be prepared for it. Even the film industry warned us, if often in an overly sensationalized form. Contagion (2011) was the best of these.

Those who made the predictions had science on their side, and history as well. But who pays attention to science and history nowadays?

The present combination of overpopulation, mass migration, tourism, and destruction of natural habitats makes the coming of more more "disease X's" and pandemics almost inevitable. The changes necessary to reduce their likelihood may be beyond the capabilities of the global systems we  have created, with their emphasis on maximizing GDP at all cost to the planet. 

Pandemics may be inevitable. Humans have the ability to minimize their damage if we learn the lessons that history and science can teach us. Ignorance is not inevitable, but overcoming it is a huge task. It will be especially difficult as long as sections of the media, especially social media, give free reign to the spread of false information and bizarre conspiracy theories.

 

The Peasants Strike Back

The people had had enough. Endless war, a deadly pandemic, and stagnant wages had pushed them to the edge of revolt. The actions of a selfish oligarchy took them over it. I could be writing about the present time in many places, but the events in question took place in 14th century England.

England had been at war with France almost continuously since King Edward III laid claim to the French throne in the 1330s. Historians call the conflict the Hundred Years War, though no one called it that at the time, obviously. 

The fighting had favoured the English in the early going. They won several lopsided victories, notably at Crecy in 1346 and at Poitiers ten years later. In a treaty of 1360, they gained control of large parts of France. In the 1370s, however, the war resumed, and the French won back what they had lost and more. (Image: Battle of Crecy, 1346. From the Chronicles of Jean Froissart)

In 1376 England's greatest warrior, Edward the Black Prince, died of a lingering disease. He was also heir to the English throne. His father Edward III died the following year. The crown passed to his son, ten-year-old Richard II. During the next few years, actual power was in the hands of councils dominated by overmighty nobles, including Richard's uncles. (Image: Richard II, portrait in Westminster Abbey, 1390s)

In order to pay for the French war, the government raised taxes. It introduced a new tax, a regressive poll tax. Attempts to collect the tax in May 1381 triggered a massive popular uprising. The causes of the revolt go far beyond hatred of the particular tax, however. Unrest and tension had been growing for decades. At its heart was the response of the ruling classes to the effects of the plague pandemic later known as the Black Death.

The plague arrived in England in 1348, having made its way along trade routes from the Far East. By 1349 it had killed between 40 and 60 per cent of the population. Plague returned in 1361, killing off another 20 per cent or so. One effect of this massive mortality was a severe shortage of labour. Peasants and other workers saw an opportunity to improve their condition. They demanded higher wages and an end to serfdom and other injustices.

The landed classes, the lords and gentry who dominated Parliament, responded with the Statute of Labourers (1351). It essentially froze wages at their pre-plague levels. Although not entirely successful, it worked well enough to arouse widespread anger at the government and the aristocrats that controlled it. The sense of injustice contributed to the popularity of egalitarian ideologies.

The revolt broke out in Essex on May 30 with an attack on tax collectors. It spread quickly to Kent and much of the Southeast. The rebels, who included artisans and local officials, burned court records and emptied the jails. Thousands of Kentish rebels marched on nearby London, led by Wat Tyler and a radical priest, John Ball, whom the rebels had released from prison.

At Blackheath, near London, Ball famously exhorted the rebels to fight for equality. "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" he asked. "From the beginning all men were by nature created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of evil men ... now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may ... cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty." (Image: John Ball encouraging the rebels; Wat Tyler is in red at front left. Chronicles of Jean Froissart)

On June 13, sympathetic citizens admitted them into the capital. Together, they destroyed the Savoy Palace, residence of the king's hated uncle John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. They attacked the jails, burned buildings, and killed a number of government officials, including the Lord Chancellor and Lord High Treasurer. Richard II fled to the safety of the Tower of London.

On the 14th, Richard met the rebels' representatives at Mile End and granted most of their demands, including the abolition of serfdom. On the following day he met them again. On this occasion, a confused melee broke out, and a member of the king's party killed Wat Tyler. (Image: The Death of Wat Tyler, Chronicles of Jean Froissart)

In the confusion that followed, Richard managed to calm the rebels and assure them he was on their side. "I am your captain, follow me," he is alleged to have said, and led them away from the scene. Meanwhile, the Lord Mayor of London rallied a militia and confronted the rebel forces. Richard urged them to disperse to their homes, which most did.

The rebellion continued in other locales, but the king's supporters suppressed it during the next few weeks and months. Richard rescinded his promises for change, including the abolition of serfdom. Most of the rebel leaders were hunted down and executed, along with about 1500 others.

The Great Revolt, or Peasants' Revolt, as it is more conventionally known, failed to win the rebels' immediate demands. Yet, the fright it gave to the ruling orders did help bring change. The poll tax was abandoned. Nothing like it was imposed again until the premiership of Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990), who forgot the lesson of 1381. It aroused mass protests, first in Scotland, then in England. It was replaced in 1993 by the Council Tax.

Subsequent Parliaments were reluctant to raise taxes, making it difficult for the government to pay for campaigns in France. Serfdom was not abolished but it gradually died out over the next few decades, as landowners commuted labour services into money rents.

Wages also rose, in spite of the Statute of Labourers. Economic laws of supply and demand proved stronger than the laws of Parliament. Between 1350 and 1450 wages nearly doubled. The 15th century has sometimes been called the Golden Age of the English Peasant. Unfortunately, these gains were largely lost by population growth in the 16th century.

The Peasants' Revolt has continued to fascinate historians, writers, artists, and musicians into our own times. In 1888, the artist, writer, and designer William Morris published a novel about the Great Revolt, A Dream of John Ball. The work centres on Ball and his egalitarian ideology. Below is one of Morris's illustrations for the novel.

In many respects the situation of the UK today resembles that of 1381. The combination of disasters: Brexit, Covid pandemic, the Ukraine war, and an out of touch government has produced economic crises and widespread industrial unrest. Will it all lead to another mass revolt? We will see. 

Finding a Scapegoat for Pandemics: Black Death to Trump Virus

Ever since Donald Trump stopped calling Covid-19/coronavirus a hoax, he has been engaged in an age-old response to disease epidemics and pandemics: finding a scapegoat. Rather than accept his own incompetent response to the pandemic (impossible), he has engaged in blaming a host of nefarious villains. 

Trump's scapegoats have included everyone who "failed to warn him" or "created the virus." The list is long and grows longer by the day: Democrats, immigrants, the "Lamestream" Media, the Chinese, Obama, Hilary, and the World Health Organization (WHO), and Dr. Fauci. Trump, of course, is not alone in scapegoating. Some of his supporters blame all of the above, plus Bill Gates, libruls, commies, gays, single sex marriage, and Jews.

The word "scapegoat" derives from a practice described in the Bible (Leviticus 16). The original scapegoats were actual goats. A rabbi would symbolically load up a goat with all the sins of the community and send it into the wilderness. Goodbye sins.

In more modern times, a scapegoat is usually a person or group of persons blamed for a disaster. The disaster might be a famine, an earthquake, floods, or as in the current case, a deadly disease. Throughout history, people have tended to blame "others" for mysterious deaths, especially on a large scale. The scapegoats have included people of different religions and cultures, minorities, "witches," heretics, women, and the poor.

European Christians often blamed Jews for epidemics, notably during the Black Death of the 14th century. Then and in later outbreaks, Christians claimed the Jews had poisoned the wells. Mobs killed thousands of Jews. Yet the plague was never called the Jewish Disease. 

Nor was it called the Chinese Disease. The plague probably originated in China, but few Europeans were aware of that in the 14th century. In more recent times, Westerners have accused the Chinese (and Asians more generally) for epidemics and pandemics. The 1890s cartoon below, from a San Francisco newspaper, condemns the city's Chinatown and Chinese immigrants as the source of malaria, smallpox, and leprosy. 

  
In 1900, whites in Honolulu and San Francisco blamed the Chinese community for an outbreak of plague in their cities, the first ever in the United States. The entire Chinese population of the two cities was quarantined and demonized. In Honolulu, an attempt to use fires to purify the air and burn out the plague resulted in wildfires and the destruction of 7000 homes in Chinatown. (Below: Quarantine line around Chinatown, Honolulu and fire there, Jan. 1, 1900)

In the USA, many people blamed Jews for the 1892 cholera epidemic, which coincided with the arrival of a large Jewish migration from Russia. Americans also blamed Irish immigrants arriving in the 1830s and 1840s for cholera and other diseases.

In the 1980s, many people blamed gays for the AIDS epidemic. The original name for the disease, GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) did not help. Later, many Americans accused Haitians as the source.

The disease for which blame has been most shared is syphilis, which first broke out in Europe around 1500. The Spanish, who appear to have been the first to experience it, blamed Native Americans, and that remains a common view. Tahitians called it the British disease after Captain Cook's visit in 1769.

The English called it the French Disease, the French called it the Italian Disease, and the Italians reciprocated. The Dutch called it the Spanish Disease, For the Russians, syphilis was the Polish Disease.Turks called it the Christian Disease, the Japanese the Portuguese Disease. 

After the Civil War and emancipation of the enslaved, many Americans viewed syphilis as a black disease. Nearly everybody blamed "loose women" but rarely did anyone blame loose men. Everybody knew that most human troubles originated with Eve and Pandora.

Scientists (especially the mad kind) are another favorite scapegoat for diseases. They have often been accused of producing killer microbes in their labs, then releasing them on the world either intentionally or from absent-minded carelessness. Americans accused Chinese scientists of cooking up the Covid-19 virus. The Chinese government accused American scientists of the same thing. 

A popular explanation among conspiracy theorists, mainly in the US, is that the Chinese 5G network is the culprit. Another is that Bill Gates created it.

London, Coronavirus, and The Great Plague of 1665

The last time London experienced anything like the current coronavirus restrictions was nearly four hundred years ago, in 1665. It became known as the Great Plague of London, although earlier epidemics probably killed a higher proportion of the population. How did the 1665 epidemic compare to what the city is going through in 2020? 

The outbreak of plague began slowly in the spring, accelerated in the summer. and peaked in September. It declined during the late fall. By early 1666 it was all but over. By then it had killed @100,000 people out of a pre-plague population of @450-500,000. At its height in September, 7000 deaths per week were recorded, but that was surely an undercount. Many deaths went unreported.

Nearly half the people fled London during the epidemic, obeying what was thought to be the best prescription of the time: "Flee from the infected." Thus, the mortality rate among those who remained was probably close to 50%. The royal government did not make any attempt to stop the exodus. In fact, the king and his court fled, to Salisbury, then to Oxford.

Fleeing was more feasible for people of means: aristocracy, gentry, and wealthy merchants and professionals, including clergymen and physicians. Most of them had houses in the country, or relatives they could stay with. The physicians could do little against the plague; staying would have had little impact.

People below those groups fled as well, but they often had no fixed place to go. Inhabitants of villages and towns in the areas outside London often chased them away, fearing the spread of the infection. Many people were forced into the woods, to beg, steal, scavenge, and sometimes die of starvation or exposure.

The plague spread anyway, although not as much as during the Black Death of the 14th century. One of the most famous places it spread to the was the tiny village of Eyam, whose inhabitants quarantined themselves to protect nearby villages and towns, at great cost to themselves.

To their credit, the Lord Mayor and most city officials remained at their posts. The city distributed some food aid to the people. Farmers from the nearby countryside brought food. They left it outside the city gates, and negotiated prices at a distance. People who came to buy collect it left coins in buckets filled with water to disinfect them.

There was no official "lockdown" but people were urged to keep their social distance. Just as today, many people refused to observe sensible precautions. The diarist Samuel Pepys recorded with dismay that people continued to gather in businesses and shops and attend large funerals. One evening he stood looking longingly at a jolly group of people socializing in a tavern, but turned away, having decided he did not wish to die for a drink.

The authorities ordered the building of temporary pest houses to quarantine the infected, who would have overwhelmed the few hospitals. The city also employed mandatory house quarantine. Whenever the infection broke out in any household, everyone in the house was shut up with the sick person, which could be a death sentence for all the residents. Crosses would be painted on the house doors to warn others away.

Contemporaries recalled hearing the screams of the sick and terrified in the shut up houses. People naturally tried to escape these confinements, so guards were posted outside the houses to prevent it. Rioters sometimes broke open the houses and released the residents. Sometimes the guards were bribed to let the residents  escape. Most shops eventually closed, because their owners had fled or died.


The streets were eerily quiet except for the dead carts going around to pick up the dead, who were often dumped in mass graves. Grass began to grow in the streets due to the lack of traffic.

As the number of deaths mounted, the authorities closed alehouses and limited the number of lodgers who could stay in a household. They ordered a cull of cats and dogs, in the belief that they might carry the plague. That probably made things worse, since these animals killed many rats, whose fleas were major transmitters to humans. The city government also ordered the burning of fires in the streets, based on the widespread belief that miasma, or bad air, was the cause of the disease. The fires were supposed to disinfect the air.

One of the best accounts of the Great Plague of 1665 in London is a work of fiction. Daniel Defoe wrote The Journal of the Plague Year in 1721. It was what we would call a potboiler today, written due to heightened interest in and fear of plague. A major epidemic of plague had broken out in Marseilles, France, and it was commonly believed that it would move on to London. In the event it did not. The 1665 plague was the last major outbreak in the UK.

Despite being fictional, Defoe's work was soundly based on official documents, eyewitness reports, and a few short written accounts. Defoe lived in London at the time of the plague, although he was only five years old at the time. His uncle, Henry Foe, may have been a major source of information. Foe stayed in London throughout the plague. He was a saddler. Defoe's narrator in the journal is a saddler. At the end of the book are the initials "HF."

The contemporary woodcut below provides some sense of Londoners' experiences during the Great Plague. Death is everywhere, even following those who flee the city. On the far right, those fleeing are being stopped by armed countryfolk telling them to keep out.

As if London hadn't been punished enough, the following year brought the Great Fire of London. The fire raged for five days, between September 2-6 and destroyed 4/5ths of the city inside the old Roman Wall, including St. Paul's Cathedral and 87 parish churches. Amazingly, only six people were killed.

Further Reading: A. Lloyd Moote, Dorothy C. Moote, The Great Plague: The Story of London's Deadliest Year (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).




 

Trump Virus or Kung Flu? Naming Pandemics in History

Last year, Chinese officials and many others accused Donald Trump of racism because he referred to Covid-19, or coronavirus, the "Chinese virus." At his Tulsa rally, he called it "Kung Flu."  "Trump Virus" may be the most accurate name, because he has done more than anyone on the planet to spread it. His rhetoric has also contributed to an upsurge on attacks on Asian Americans. 

Racist or not, and it often is, naming pandemic diseases after their alleged place of origin is an old practice. In 1957 and 1968, two deadly flu pandemics were named the "Asian Flu" and the "Hong Kong Flu." A pandemic flu first reported in St. Petersburg in 1889 was denoted the "Russian Flu." It was later called "Asiatic Flu," although St. Petersburg is a long way from Asia.

When pandemic cholera first made its way from India to the UK in the early 19th century, people called it the "Indian Cholera," as in the broadsheet below from 1831. One reason for adding the adjective "Indian" was to distinguish this new, mysterious disease from an old, familiar one: "cholera infantum," a type of childhood diarrhea. but the name led to Indians being blamed for the disease.

In the cartoon below, also from 1832, the cholera is dressed in Indian garb, trying to enter England, but caught by stout John Bull. The reality was far different for England and the world. A series of cholera pandemics during the 19th and early 20th century killed millions in Asia, Africa, Europe and North America, more than 30 million in India alone.

Later in the 19th century, cholera was often referred to as "Asiatic Cholera."

In 1918-1919, a virulent form of influenza became pandemic, and ultimately killed 50-100 million people worldwide. It quickly became known as the "Spanish Flu," although it probably originated in the USA. But the USA was engaged in World War I and sending thousands of troops to Europe. The press was instructed not to report about the epidemic, lest it lead to demands to stop troop shipments -- the overcrowded ships were excellent incubators for such a disease. 

Most European countries involved in the war similarly kept quiet at first, to avoid hurting morale. Spain, however, was neutral, and its press reported on the outbreak. Spain's reward was to have one of the worst pandemics in history named after it. 

It was also called "Flanders Grippe" in Britain, "Bolshevik Disease" in Poland, "Too much inside sickness" in Hong Kong.

Today, it is usually called the "Great Influenza." Perhaps it should be called the "American Flu."

Interestingly, the greatest and most famous pandemic in world history was not named for a place or nation. That was the pandemic of plague that ravaged Eurasia during the 1340s, killing between 75 and 200 million, It wiped out perhaps as much as 60 percent of the European population. It probably originated in Central or East Asia and traveled west along the Silk Road to the Middle East, Europe, and North Africa. 

The 14th century pandemic is best known today as the Black Death, but that name was not applied to it at the time. Other names for it include, Plague, Great Plague, Black Plague, and Pestilence (La Peste). Before the pandemic, plague and pestilence simply meant a deadly epidemic disease. (Below: The Dance of Death, or Danse Macabre, late medieval, Nuremberg Chronicles).

Syphilis, which struck Europe in pandemic form after 1500, was generally named after other, often disliked, countries. The English called it the French Disease. The French called it the Italian Disease. The Italians returned the compliment. The Dutch called it the Spanish Disease. Russians called it the Polish Disease. Turks called it the Christian Disease. The Japanese called it the Portuguese Disease because Portuguese traders brought it from Europe.  

Coronavirus, Quarantine, and Contagion: A Historical Perspective

The spread of Covid-19, or coronavirus, has led many countries and localities to resort to quarantine as a mechanism to contain this new disease. Medical isolation, as quarantine is often called today, has a long history, and its use owes little to modern medical science. 

Examples of isolation of the sick can be found in the Bible, in the Islamic World from the 7th century, and in medieval Europe. Interestingly, most of the quarantine measures currently being used to contain or delay the spread of coronavirus have been used for centuries or longer.

The practice of isolating people with diseases in the past, as today, was based on the belief that the sick were contagious: that they could infect the healthy. That was correct for some diseases, but not others. Even among those that were contagious, some were much less contagious than others. For this reason, contagion theory was controversial until the role of microbes in many diseases was firmly established in the late 19th century. Before then, contagionists could seldom demonstrate how diseases could be transmitted from person to person (or animal to animal).

Diseases transmitted by mosquitoes, like yellow fever, or by contaminated water, like cholera, complicated things for contagion theory. Opponents of contagionism pointed out that people in close contact with the ill often remained healthy, while people who had no such contact contracted yellow fever or cholera.

Contagionism's main competitor until the establishment of germ theory was the miasmatic theory. Miasmatists believed that most diseases were conveyed in the air, through miasmas, or "bad air" ("mal aria" in Italian). Marshes and swamps were considered to be major sources of miasmas, as was rotting organic matter, including human and animal wastes. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, the miasma theory gained many adherents, partly because the growing, unsanitary, and often polluted urban areas produced powerful, obnoxious odors. The miasma theory was wrong but it often led to draining of marshes and the implementation of sanitary reforms that reduced disease mortality.

In the 19th century, however, many traders used miasma theory to oppose quarantine, which could literally shut down ports for weeks or months. They argued that the source of the disease was not incoming ships or people, but miasmas generated locally by unsanitary conditions. 

As is the case today, a concern for health competed with a concern for the economy. As Benjamin Strobel, a Charleston, South Carolina doctor, wrote in 1840: "Truth and justice have been too often sacrificed to expediency and policy, and never more so than in reference to yellow fever. Has it not occurred, when the disease actually invaded us, that there were men who, regardless of the lives of others, and listening only to the sordid suggestions of avarice, have endeavored to conceal the fact?" (Benjamin B. Strobel, An Essay on the Subject of Yellow Fever, Intended to Prove its Transmissibility, Charleston, 1840, p. 9).

The term "quarantine" derives from the Italian phrase, quaranta giorni, meaning forty days. From the time of the Black Death in the 1340s, the Italian city-states took the lead in what we would call public health. 

During plague epidemics, 15th century Venice began to enforce forty days' isolation on ships entering the port. Passengers and crew could not disembark until that period had ended with no cases appearing. Passengers stranded on cruise ships where coronavirus has broken out will understand what a terrible prospect that was. And modern cruise ships are far more comfortable and clean than ships of the past.

Other ports imitated Venice, and quarantine was later applied to other diseases such as smallpox, yellow fever, and cholera (from the 1830s). The length of quarantine then and since has varied, and is usually shorter than 40 days.

From the 15th century on, many ports created quarantine stations for isolation. These were sometimes on ships, on islands in or near the harbor, or on the mainland at a distance from highly populated areas. Some were old leper hospitals, often know as lazar houses, after the biblical parable of the beggar Lazarus. The stations established to quarantine for plague were often called lazarettos or pest houses -- "pest" coming from the French for plague, la peste. Venice established the first lazaretto in 1403 on one of the nearby islands. (Below: one of Venice's lazarettos and that in Ancona, also in Italy).

The oldest surviving quarantine station in the United States dates from 1799. and is near Philadelphia (below). American ports began establishing pest houses about a century earlier.

Inland localities have often used a cordon sanitaire to restrict movement of people in and out of a town or region, where an epidemic was underway. The authorities close off the access points to and from the place to prevent infected people from spreading the disease. In effect, the whole population inside the cordon was quarantined.

Sanitary cordons were a common measure used to prevent the spread of cholera in the 19th century, and are being used again to curb or slow the spread of the coronavirus. China has used them in the city of Wuhan and Province of Hubei during the current coronavirus outbreak. Italy has cordoned off some towns in the North ("lockdown"), then the North as a whole, and now the entire country.

In most cases where a cordon sanitaire has been used, communities have been isolated against their will. But in at least one famous case, in 1665, the inhabitants of a village agreed to cordon themselves off to protect neighboring towns and villages. In that case, the disease was plague. The village was Eyam in Derbyshire, England. The isolation lasted more than a year and killed at least 260 people, possibly more than half the residents who remained. But the disease did not spread beyond the parish boundaries.

During major epidemics, public facilities for quarantining and caring for the infected often became overwhelmed. Authorities often commandeered private houses or other buildings as temporary pest houses or hospitals for the specific disease, such as plague, smallpox, yellow fever, etc. The image below is of a pest house and plague pit in London's Finsbury Fields. The image dates from 1865 but depicts an earlier period, probably the Great Plague of London in 1665. The plague pit next to the pest house can hardly have been reassuring, but the case mortality rate from plague ranged from about 60-90 percent.

Today, many countries are trying to combat the spread of coronavirus by urging people who think they may be infected or are especially vulnerable, to self-isolate at home. Authorities did the same in earlier times, especially during plague epidemics from the 14th century. The isolation was seldom voluntary. Families were often forcibly shut up when one or more became infected. This could be a death sentence for all of them. Daniel Defoe provides a harrowing description of their suffering in A Journal of the Plague Year (1721), a fictionalized account of the Great Plague of London in 1665.

In conclusion, most of the quarantine measures used today have historical parallels. Just as in the past, quarantine may prove more successful in some places than others. We may have the advantage of a better understanding than our ancestors of how many contagious diseases spread, but in the case of coronavirus, we are battling a microbe that is new and somewhat mysterious.

History as She is Learned: Some of my Students' Greatest Hits

"Visits to Bedlam Lunatic Hospital by prominent socialites and political figures (such as the Prince of Whales) increased the popularity of these visits throughout the general public."

(Image: George, Prince of Wales, by James Gillray)

"The Haitian Revolutionaries defeated the French due to gorilla warfare."

“Thomas Wolsey was born a pheasant and grew up to be a cardinal.”

"The Flagellants flatulated themselves for religion, believing the plaque was the work of God."

"Voltaire argued that forcing people to believe in a particular religion produced hippocrates."

"The Battle of the Nile provided the impotence for Great Britain to exercise a greater hold on their colonies".

"If not for his role in finding Livingstone, Henry Stanley would not have sat on Parliament."

See if you can find Stanley in this picture.

THE END (is near).