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Plague on a Page: <I>Lord Have Mercy Upon Us</I> in Early Modern London

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 27; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.7227/tsc.27.3.2

2050-4616

Mark Jenner,

Yersinia bacterium, plague, ectoparasites research

In July 1625, as the death toll of what was to become one of London's most devastating plague epidemics mounted ominously, Thomas Dekker wrote: 'Foure thousand Red-Crosses have frighted the Inhabitants in a very little time: but greater is their number who have beene frighted, and fled out of the City at the setting up of those Crosses'.1 One manifestation of the red cross, he noted with sardonic relish, provoked a physical reaction exceeding even Londoners' fright and flight. A printed bill, 'called, The Red Crosse, or, Englands Lord have mercy upon us, being read to a Farmers Sonne in Essex, hee fell into a swound, and the Calfe had much a doe to be recovered'. If the marginal gloss is to be believed, this 'Essex Calfe' had in fact been killed by his encounter with the broadsheet - a text which evidently communicated disease in more ways than one.2 This death-dealing document [Fig. 1] was printed for John Trundle - the publisher of many of Dekker's pamphlets and of a range of ballads and often sensationalist topical prose works - and sold out of his shop near Smithfield.3 Seemingly something of a generic pioneer, this is the earliest surviving example of a particular kind of inexpensive single-sheet textualization of the plague, almost all of which have 'Lord Have Mercy Upon Us', or some variant thereof in the title.4 The 1625 Red-Crosse was followed by at least five such broadsheets in the plague years of 1636-37 and seven during the epidemic of 1665-66.5 They contain (in varying proportion) accounts of Biblical and historical plagues, as in The Red-Crosse and its later recension, The Mourning-Cross (1665); medical advice and basic prophylactics against the disease, of the kind recommended in the broadside published by Michael Sparke Jnr [Fig. 2]; verses on the need for repentance like those by the balladmakers and pamphleteers, Martin Parker and Humphrey Crouch, in Lord Have Mercy Upon Us and Londons Lord Have Mercy Upon Us, published by Thomas Lambert and Richard Harper in 1636 and 1637 respectively [Figs 3 & 4];6 and full-blooded prose jeremiads like those in Londons Loud Cryes to the Lord... Made by a Reverend Divine (1665) [Fig. 5].Few historians of medicine or of London have devoted more than a paragraph or two to these works. This neglect is surprising. Not only were they 'the cheapest publications concerning plague', but in years of epidemic they may also have been the most plentiful; no fewer than eight copies of Londons Lord Have Mercy Upon Us survive from 1665, a truly remarkable number for such an ephemeral form of print.7 Furthermore, the last decade has seen an efflorescence in the cultural history of disease, and especially of plague, and with it a growing awareness of the ways in which 'the language of ... disease could be used to talk about ... wider social concerns and cultural preoccupations'.8 Examining a wide range of writing, including many works with only a toe-hold in the canons of literature or medicine, scholars such as Ian Munro, Ernest Gilman and Margaret Healy have elucidated the English prose and verse of the plague years, emphasizing the metaphorical uses of the disease in this period and demonstrating how authors shaped the epidemic into narratives which made sense of these calamities.9 But they have generally passed over the Lord Have Mercy Upon Us broadsheets. So too have the numerous scholars who have examined representations and perceptions of the early modern capital, who have highlighted the physiological metaphors used to describe the swelling state of the city and the varied ways in which its space, its hordes and its streets were mapped, chronicled and narrated.10This article, therefore, focuses specifically on this form of print culture and the way in which metropolitan pestilence became embedded within and, to a degree, constituted by it. It pays particular attention to the materiality of these texts, stressing that they should be analysed as cultural artefacts in their own right and not simply as sources of information about something else, not even their apparent referent, plague, and that one therefore needs to attend at least as much to the numerals and woodcuts on the page of a Lord Have Mercy as to its verbal content. …