The sweating sickness
DAVID HAMBLING finds that the terrifying epidemic of 1485 offers parallels with our current state Unlike other pestilences, it strikes rich and poor alike and leaves most children unharmed
The country is terrified by a disease never seen before, as mysterious as it is deadly. The epidemic spreads rapidly and people flee or isolate themselves for protection. The symptoms are fever, headache, exhaustion – and death. Unlike other pestilences, which disproportionately affect the poor, this one strikes rich and poor alike. Unusually, it leaves most children unharmed. Some blame foreigners for bringing the disease to Britain, while others point the finger at the doctors treating it.
The year is not 2020, but 1485, and the disease is not coronavirus but an unidentified condition popularly known as ‘sweating sickness’ or simply ‘sweat’. Doctors refer to it as Sudor Anglicus (‘English Sweat’); the broadsheets called it ‘the New Acquaintance,’ or ‘stop gallant’ for taking so many rich young men (see FT129:14).
The Sweat killed with incredible speed. Sometimes the onset of symptoms was followed by death just two or three hours later, with one chronicler writing that a victim might be merry at dinner and dead by supper. Another wrote that “there were some dancing in the court at nine o’clock that were dead at eleven’.
The main symptom was profuse and foul-smelling sweat, followed by unconsciousness and death. Anybody surviving 24 hours could expect a full recovery.
John Caius’s A Boke or Counseill against the Disease Commonly Called the Sweate or the Sweating Sickness laid down the cause in no uncertain terms. The English were susceptible because, as has been echoed often in the last 500 years, they had become too soft.
“Children be so brought up, that if they be not all daie by the fire with a toste and butire, and in their furres, they be streight sicke,” Caius grumbled. He also blamed the English diet, in particular drinking beer rather than wine. He claimed the best treatment was to sweat the sickness out. He recommended a variety of herbs to encourage sweating, including tansy, wormwood, and feverfew, and insisted that the patient must be kept warm.
Sweating sickness first appeared in 1485 among troops dispersing after the Battle of Bosworth Field, which ended the Wars of the Roses, brought, some said, by French mercenaries, though the disease was not known in France. It spread rapidly, killing up to a third of the population in some communities, and reaching all corners of the country within a matter of months. Further outbreaks occurred in 1506, 1517, 1528 and finally in 1551.
The Sweat was confined to the English. It did not spread outside the country, stopping at the Scottish border. “It reigneth in no country but the King’s dominion,” wrote Sir Brian Tuke, who survived the disease, adding that it was “not esteemed” by the French. Nor did the Sweat affect foreigners in England, suggesting they had some kind of native immunity. This changed with the 1528 outbreak, which spread to Northern Europe, including modern Germany, Scandinavia, and Poland.
Sweating sickness may have influenced English history. Henry VIII was terrified when the disease reappeared in London in 1528 and fled from the capital to one house after another in quick succession, finally settling in the Hertfordshire home of the Abbot of St Albans. He feared divine punishment, but was not sure whether it was because he was planning to part from his queen, Catherine of Aragon, as Cardinal Wolsey told him, or because his marriage to her was technically incestuous in the first place.
When Henry’s mistress Anne Boleyn came down with the sweating sickness, she was ordered home to Hever Castle. The king wrote frequently, and sent a royal doctor to attend her. When Anne recovered, Henry apparently took it as a sign of divine approval. He went ahead and nullified his marriage to Catherine and married his mistress.
Others were not so fortunate. Henry’s councillor Thomas Cromwell, the protagonist of Hilary Mantell’s Wolf Hall and its sequels, lost his wife and two daughters to the sweating sickness in 1529. Cromwell’s young son Gregory survived – only to die in the 1551 outbreak at the age of 31. Having the disease once did not provide immunity.
After the last epidemic, the Sweat vanished and no further definite cases were reported, leaving its identity a mystery. Contemporary observers distinguished sweating sickness from plague, malaria, and typhus, which were all well known.
There are many lines of speculation. The rapid spread and sudden onset hint at influenza, but there is a curious lack of respiratory symptoms such as coughing or sneezing which would accompany flu. Others have suggested meningitis, which can produce a sudden fever and death, but this also brings skin blotches not seen in sweating sickness.
The outbreaks all occurred in the summer months, typical of diseases spread by animals such as fleas, ticks, or mosquitoes. The summer outbreaks appeared to follow heavy rainfall, a characteristic of mosquitoborne disease. Viral haemorrhagic fever would fit the bill, except for the fact that this too is always accompanied by marks on the skin.
Another theory was formulated in 2001 after terrorists sent anthrax spores through the US mail, causing five deaths through inhalational anthrax. This is a rarely seen condition, and the symptoms turned out to be notably different from the more common cutaneous and gastrointestinal versions of anthrax but notably similar to sweating sickness.
There are many suspects but little evidence. Several researchers have suggested identifying the disease by isolating DNA or RNA from the tombs of known victims. So far all efforts to do this have failed.
One alternative suggestion is that the ‘disease’ was actually the result of English medical practice. Caius’s suggestion that patients should be kept hot and made to sweat could produce potentially lethal dehydration, especially when combined with purging, a common medical treatment at the time. The victims died of a variety of other causes, exacerbated by the treatment.
This would help explain why so many of the victims were wealthy; the poor could not afford expensive (and dangerous) doctors.
Five centuries later, we are far better prepared to deal with pandemics. But the tendency to blame foreigners, to bemoan the country’s lack of grit, and to distrust the medical profession all seem to have stayed with us.
MUMMY MURDER MYSTERY
A mummy in a finely painted coffin was brought back from western Thebes (modern Luxor) by Thomas Greg, 30, son of the High Sheriff of Antrim, who presented it to the Belfast Natural History Society. It was the first mummy ever seen in Ireland and among the first to be unrolled outside Egypt. The unwrapping took place on 27 January 1835 in the upper room of the Society’s museum in College Square North, attended by about 130 “learned men”, and supervised by the museum’s curator, William Darragh (1813-92), a skilled bird taxidermist. The results of a comprehensive scientific examination of the mummy were made public in January 2020, on the 185th anniversary of the unwrapping. A detailed account of the unwrapping appeared in the local press in 1835, including the findings of a phrenological expert who concluded that the mummy was “a person of much firmness and caution of character, and of a high degree of intellectual capacity, but little or no taste [!]”. John Campbell made a coloured sketch of the wrapped body, and William Darragh Jr (1851-1939, son of the curator,) made a watercolour – now in the possession of his great granddaughter, Val Stevenson, sometime FT reviews editor. William Darragh Jr was later Editor of the Northern Whig and Belfast Telegraph ,anda member of the Magic Circle.
The mummy was a young woman in her 20s, 5ft 1in tall, named Takabuti. She was the daughter of Nespare, a priest of Amun, and his wife Tasenirit. At the time of her death in about 660 BC, at the end of the 25th Dynasty, she was married, and had been the mistress of a great house in Thebes. An ornamental cape of faience beads was placed across her chest. The fine linen wrappings were much admired when they were unwrapped in Belfast. A contemporary account says: “The hair was in excellent preservation, being very fine, about 3½ inches long, forming ringlets like those of children, and of a deep auburn shade.” Professor Rosalie David from the University of Manchester said: “Research undertaken 10 years ago showed that her auburn hair was deliberately curled and styled. This must have been a very important part of her identity as she spurned the typical shaven-headed style.”
Takabuti is now the star exhibit of the Ulster Museum in Belfast. The new research revealed that her DNA (genetic footprint H4a1) was more genetically similar to Europeans than to modern Egyptian populations. “The surprising and important discovery of her European heritage throws some fascinating light on a significant turning-point in Egypt’s history,” said Prof David. Takabuti had an extra tooth (33 instead of 32) something that only occurs in 0.02% of the population – and an extra vertebra, which only occurs in 2% of the population. Most dramatically, she was stabbed in the upper back near her left shoulder. “This almost certainly caused her rapid death,” said retired orthopaedic surgeon Dr Robert Loynes. “However, the CT scan also reveals unusual and rare features of her embalming process.”
Her heart, previously thought to have been missing, was found to be intact and perfectly preserved. The mysterious object in her body cavity, at one time identified as her heart, was in fact material used to pack the knife wound. Dr Greer Ramsey, Curator of Archaeology at National Museums (Northern Ireland) said: “The significance of confirming Takabuti’s heart is present cannot be underestimated [he meant overestimated], as in ancient Egypt this organ was removed in the afterlife and
weighed to decide whether or not the person had led a good life. If it was too heavy it was eaten by the demon Ammit and your journey to the afterlife would fail.” We’ll probably never know why her heart was not removed for assessment or indeed why she was stabbed to death. Report by University of Manchester, 27 Jan 2020.
SAINT’S RELICS FOUND
The fragmentary skeleton of Saint Eanswythe, patron saint of Folkestone in Kent, has almost certainly been identified, and are the only surviving remains of a member of the Kentish royal house. She was the daughter of King Eadbald of Kent (616?–640), possibly the present Queen’s great40 grandfather. Eanswythe is believed to have founded and became abbess of the Benedictine Folkestone Priory, England’s first nunnery, in about 660. She was the granddaughter of Bertha, a Christian queen of Kent who, along with St Augustine, was arguably the key individual responsible for helping to convert Anglo-Saxon England to Christianity. Eanswythe died in her late teens or very early 20s, possibly from bubonic plague. Her bones were transferred to a new church in 1138, traditionally on 12 September, which became her Feast Day. She was credited with at least five miracles: she made water run uphill (a story probably developed in order to explain an optical illusion which seemed to show a local aqueduct channelling water up a gradient); she resurrected a dead goose that had been stolen and eaten; and lengthened a wooden beam to construct a church by
calling on Christ to help when a pagan king and his gods had failed to lengthen it. After her death, her ghost allegedly cured a man suffering from leprosy or some other skin disease.
In 1535, the prior of Folkestone (or some of his monks) hid a lead box containing her relics in the church wall beside the altar to protect them from Protestant zealots. The hiding place was forgotten until workmen engaged in modernising the church stumbled across the box in 1885. As there was no way of confirming their identity, the bones – about 50 per cent of a complete skeleton – were stashed away in a specially constructed wall niche and once again began to fade from memory. Scientific investigation this year has shown that the individual was almost certainly female, aged between 17 and 21, and had died in the mid-seventh century. Her teeth showed virtually no pre-death scratches on her tooth enamel, suggesting she had consumed relatively little coarse food. There were no signs of malnutrition, so she was probably a person of high status. The next steps will include DNA analysis. independent. co.uk, Guardian, 7 Mar 2020.
RELIC CENTRAL
This is a story of numinous objects long vanished, and so could be classified as “virtual archaeology”. Battle Abbey in East Sussex, built to commemorate the Battle of Hastings, is now an atmospheric ruin, but was once one of the most abundantly endowed religious establishments in England. Its relics were the most prestigious given to any abbey, more significant even than those at Westminster Abbey. An early 15th century manuscript listing the relics, kept at the Huntingdon Library in California, has been analysed and translated for the first time by Michael Carter, an English Heritage historian. It lists 175 individual relics, many given by the abbey’s founder, William the Conqueror, to atone for the horrific bloodshed of 1066. William “knew that unless he made atonement for this and served the penances imposed on him, he was going to go to Hell,” said Mr Carter.
Many Battle Abbey relics were associated with the story of Christmas. They included objects purporting to be from the ground, swaddling and manger where Jesus was born and (of course) wood from the cross on which he was crucified. There was also a rock used to stone Saint Stephen, whose feast day is Boxing Day, and bones of several of the Holy Innocents killed on the orders of King Herod, a massacre commemorated in the West on 28 December. Saint Nicholas, the original Santa Claus, was represented by a finger bone and fragments from his napkin and hair shirt. In 1200 King John gave a relic of the Holy Sepulchre (Christ’s tomb) and a portrait of the True Cross, both collected by
his bloodthirsty brother Richard the Lionheart, when on crusade in the Holy Land.
Presumably, all these wonderful objects were looted during the dissolution of the monasteries in the reign of Henry VIII. Were they all destroyed, or could some still be knocking around in an attic or shed somewhere? Guardian, 18 Dec 2019.
FICTIONAL MASSACRE
The celebrated archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler had a flair for storytelling, and told a cracker at the height of World War II. After digging up some skeletons in Dorset’s Maiden Castle during an excavation in 1936-37, his 1943 report conjured up one of Britain’s most dramatic and horrific battles: an assault on the Ancient British fortress in AD 43 by a Roman legion led by future emperor Vespasian, leading to a massacre. He described the burials as a “war cemetery”, and claimed the fallen had been hurriedly buried – some with terrible injuries, including arrows through the centre of the skull. He wrote that he found “skeletons in tragic profusion, displaying the marks of
battle and making actual one of the bestknown events in British history: the Roman conquest.”
However, according to Dr Miles Russell, Professor of Archaeology at Bournemouth University, writing in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology: “Most archaeologists know there is absolutely no evidence for such a ‘great battle’ at Maiden Castle, a site which in any case had been largely abandoned a century before the arrival of Rome… The account of a furious but futile defence of property, family and land by the local tribe of the Durotriges, leading eventually to their slaughter or enslavement, is undeniably powerful and remains one of the more potent stories relating to the demise of British prehistory.” Studies show that the idea the bodies were dumped hastily in the graves was false; in fact they were carefully laid in position. Although 38 of the 52 bodies found had died violent deaths, there was a great variation in date ranging from 100 BC to AD 50 “suggesting the population had lived through multiple periods of stress, competition and conflict”. D.Mail, 25 Dec 2019.