A mantle wrought with purple spots she wore
Embossed with many a Blane and many a Sore
She had a raving voice, a frantic look,
A noisome Breath, and in her hands she shooke
A venom’d Spear which where it toucheth fills
The veins with poison, and distracts and kills.
—George Wither,Britains RemembrancerThe spring came in with blue skies, warm breezes, and picturesque white
clouds, as if by mockery. April and May were always a reviving time, but this
year the thawing ground and warm air were not happy harbingers. If plague
was about to run rampant through the capital, the moist soil was a likely ma-
jor source of its pestilential poison. In times of plague, common wisdom said,
the bowels of the earth released their “feces” as venomous exhalations from
refuse and other corrupt effluvia in the soil and water. The warm rays of the
midday sun turned the putrefied matter into miasmas, which the gentle
spring breezes carried off to unknown destinations.^1
Now was the season for spring cleaning, when a household’s mistress and
maids worked at airing rooms and ridding them of moths and fleas and all
the other household pests. With spring also came the strongest urge to go
out of doors and greet friends, linger at the local herb market to inspect the
fresh vegetables that had replaced winter’s leftovers, and visit a neighbor-
hood tavern or alehouse for drink and conversation. But this springtime the
master and mistress and their servants were all at risk on the street and even
in their own homes. When the miasmas of plague swooped down on a
neighborhood and sickened a family, it was subsequently thought to spread
Signs and Sources
[57]3