Page:A litil boke the whiche traytied and reherced many gode thinges necessaries for the infirmite a grete sekeness called Pestilence.djvu/16

 by a bishop of Vasteras in that country, Bengt Knutsson, appointed to the see in 1461, who was doubtless led to compose the work by the terrible ravages of the disease in that land.

The outbreak of the plague that afflicted Sweden in 1464-65 was evidently not confined within any narrow limits, as 40,000 persons are stated to have died in Paris in the year 1466, whilst its presence was recorded in England in 1464, from which time until 1478 the disease seems to have lasted in different parts of the British Isles with but little intermission. In the latter year the mortality in England was so great that we find the plague described as more destructive than the long continued wars. The cities in the north of Italy are said to have suffered from an outbreak that began in 1478 and lasted for a period of seven years. We are thus brought down to 1485, the year when the "sudor Anglicus", the English sweat, made its appearance. As this probably provided the occasion of printing the treatise of Knutsson in English, it will be necessary to examine at somewhat greater length the circumstances of its earliest emergence.

The disease that received the name "sudor Anglicus", because it was commonly believed to have originated in this country, first made its appearance in England in the autumn of 1485, soon after the landing of Henry Tudor in the month of August, as we learn from the account of it given by Polydore Virgil in his history of England.