In Search of Precedent in Unprecedented Times
Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons
The first essay I wrote in Cambridge was on the Black Death. As I trawled through the fourteenth-century chroniclers, suffering from a dreadful bout of Freshers’ Flu, I couldn’t help but find descriptions of my symptoms wherever I looked. ‘For several days they spend most of each day asleep, weighed down by drowsiness’, wrote the anonymous author of a German treatise on the plague. That certainly rang true. The bishop of Rochester, Thomas Brinton, insinuated in a sermon of 1375 that my affliction was a punishment for being ‘drowsy, lazy, and sluggish’, in which case, fair enough. My suspicions were supported by a violent cough: the blood and buboes were surely only a matter of time. Like any good late-medieval peasant, I lunged for my bedside