Page:A litil boke the whiche traytied and reherced many gode thinges necessaries for the infirmite a grete sekeness called Pestilence.djvu/15

 The fifteenth century enjoyed no more immunity from attacks of the plague than did the previous one. All parts of Europe suffered intermittently from it. In England it broke out between 1405 and 1407, carrying off in London, it is said, 30,000 people in the latter year. The next grave attack in England appears to have occurred about 1420. In a petition from the Marches of 1421 we hear of "great numbers of persons dead by the great mortalities and pestilences which have raged for three years past and still reign ". Turning to the Continent one finds that 80,000 persons are stated to have died in 1427 in Dantzig and the neighbouring country. In 1438-39 the plague was still very rife in Germany, its prevalence in Basel being attested by Aeneas Sylvius, afterwards Pope Pius II. England, too, was not exempt from the disease in these years, for between 1430 and 1440 four outbreaks are recorded in London, the last one extending to the whole kingdom. The next visitation of the plague, which began in 1448, appears to have overrun practically the whole of Western Europe. It reached Sweden in 1450, and devastated that country for a period of five years, carrying off in 1455 no fewer than 9,000 persons in Stockholm alone. The autumn of 1464 saw a recurrence of the disease in Sweden, which lasted with dire effects for about two years; the mortality in Stockholm on this occasion is said to have reached a total of 7,000.

The prevalence of the plague in Sweden at this period is of special interest in view of the fact that the treatise here reproduced in facsimile was written (as will appear later)