Year when nearly half of Newcastle was wiped out
THE Covid-19 pandemic has turned all our lives upside down. For our ancestors, from the 13th to 17th Centuries, a very different infectious disease was a dreaded visitor.
Newcastle and the wider Tyneside area were hit by recurrent outbreaks of plague.
During the 16th and 17th Centuries, as a leading sea port and major coal exporter on the North East coast, Newcastle did brisk trade with London, as well as with ports in Holland and northern Germany.
That trade would enable the spread of the disease. There were notable outbreaks recorded on Tyneside in 154445, 1570-71, 1576, 1579, 1604 and 1625. The worst came in 1636.
Plague would probably have been transmitted by fleas that lived on rats.
After a numbing headache, plague victims would soon succumb to severe vomiting, back pain, sore arms and legs, and an aversion to light.
Taking to their beds, the victims would find their body sprouting burning lumps – often apple-sized – which would turn black and ooze blood and pus.
Internal bleeding would also cause blood to appear in a person’s urine and stools, and black boils would appear all over the body. Within a week, the unfortunate victim would be dead.
In an age before modern medicine, there was little protection – but there was a belief in ‘fumigating’ homes with herbs.
It was also thought storing flatulence in a jar then opening it might disperse the ‘deadly vapours’ of plague!
The 1636 Newcastle outbreak is thought to have arrived, via North Shields, at the filthy, poverty-stricken Sandhill area of the Quayside before ravaging the town.
Everyday life virtually stopped. It was said the streets of Newcastle were covered in grass and “the highways were unoccupied”.
Houses, with the sick inside, were boarded up, and other victims were confined to die in lodges on the Town Moor, well outside the city walls.
Between May and December 1636, 5,631 people from a population of around 12,000 perished.
Newcastle historian and author Steve Ellwood works as a city guide.
Many plague victims were buried in a pit near the main entrance to what is now Newcastle Cathedral.
There were also plague pits at St John’s Church at the bottom of Westgate Road, St Andrew’s on Newgate Street, and the old All Saints’ Church on lower Pilgrim Street.