Bring
Out
Your
Dead.

Adieu, farewell,
earth's bliss....

Dr. Ronald Fritze
November 14, 2004

When epidemic disease swept a city, public workers would gather corpses and take them for burial in a common grave. As these grim laborers came down the streets they would dolefully shout, "Bring out your dead." Residents would then hand over the bodies of the deceased. Death was an ever-present fact of life for people in the early modern age. It is a circumstance that is hard to understand for those living in an industrialized society at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

People watching the new PBS drama Henry VIII would have noticed that in one scene, someone falling dead from sickness caused panicked cries of "Plague! Plague!" and sent all of the high and mighty of Henry VIII's court fleeing for their lives. Tudor and Stuart England was haunted by outbreaks of the "sweating sickness," influenza, and the bubonic plague. All of these diseases were greatly feared, but the "sweating sickness" was more impressive for the breadth of its contagion rather than its deadliness. Influenza, in fact, was the great killer. Between 1556 and 1560, at least six percent of the English population was swept away by the "new ague," a form of influenza. It was also an equal opportunity killer, with both rich and poor, urban and rural suffering from the fearsome contagion.

Bubonic plague had been a periodic visitor to England since the outbreak of the Black Death in 1348. Although the virulence of the Plague had weakened by the beginning of the sixteenth century, it continued to harry the English people through to the great plague of London in 1665. By the time of the London plague in 1665, the Bubonic plague had become a largely urban disease. After that outbreak, it disappeared when the great fire of London in 1666 caused the city to replace wooden houses with brick ones that provided less congenial environments to plague-bearing rats. It is possible that over 100,000 people died in that last London plague. Earlier visitations of the plague had killed over 30,000 people during the first half of the seventeenth century.

Even when Bubonic plague or influenza did not threaten the people of Tudor and Stuart England, other diseases did. Malaria and Typhus were a frequent threat. Typhoid fever appears to have been the cause of Prince Henry of Wales' death along with many others in 1612.

Life could be short and uncertain. It is no wonder that the Elizabethan man of letters, Thomas Nashe (1567-1601), could write in Summer's Last Will and Testament (1593), the following song or litany. It is variously titled "Adieu, Farewell, Earth's Bliss," "In Time of Pestilence," or "A Litany in Time of Plague."

Adieu, farewell, earth's bliss;
The world uncertain is;
Fond are life's lustful joys;
Death proves them all but toys;
None from his darts can fly;
I am sick, I must die.
     Lord, have mercy on us!

Rich men, trust not in wealth,
Gold cannot buy you health;
Physic himself must fade.
All things to end are made,
The plague full swift goes by;
I am sick, I must die.
     Lord, have mercy on us!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Haste, therefore, each degree,
To welcome destiny;
Heaven is our heritage,
Earth but a player's stage;
Mount we unto the sky.
I am sick, I must die.
     Lord, have mercy on us.

PLANET CLIO is ruled by Dr. Ronald Fritze,
Professor of History at the University of Central Arkansas.
An independent entity in the CornDancer consortium of planets,
Planet Clio is dedicated to the study and exploration of history.

CORNDANCER
is a privately owned, non-commercial developmental website
for the mind and spirit
maintained by webmistress Freddie A. Bowles of the Planet Earth.

Submissions are invited.