We've seen it all before, says Shropshire historian David
Floods, rampant disease... a terrible year.
But we're not talking about 2020, but of a time in Shropshire's past when Salopians were suffering from all too familiar problems. And they didn't even have the NHS.
In the latest issue of Bicton Village News, local historian David Pannett continues his story of the village's history – he's up to part 153 – and shows how history repeats itself.
"This year the news was first dominated by floods and now it is the progress of that virus. Looking back, some aspects of all this have happened before," he writes.
An Elizabethan chronicler of Shrewsbury reported that in February 1576 there "was a grate fludd in Shrewsberie which dyd great harm especially in Frankwell..."
There was plenty of "greate hurt" downstream at Brydnorthe, Tewkesbery, and Bewdley.
And there was more misery to come.
"This yeare the plage was in Shrewburey in the begyninge of which there died one Mr Haweckswoorth, curat of St Chads, and one Roger Burns, curate of St Aldemoonds in Salop."
It should perhaps be added that in the days before widespread literacy, when it came to spellings, there was none of the standardisation of today.
David writes: "That outbreak of plague in 1576 was but one of several during that century, both locally and in London. Although the famous Black Death had swept Europe some 200 years before, pockets of infection remained, especially in some towns which were notoriously insanitary places."
The 1580s seemed to have been a particularly bad time.
'A strange sickness'
The plague came to Oswestry in 1585, forcing the regular cloth market to take place in Knockin instead.
"Meanwhile, a 'strange sickness' afflicted Shrewsbury, like the plague, but with different symptoms, which led to many deaths."
A little later Shrewsbury was to suffer a "burning Agewe" which David says was probably a form of malaria.
The chronicler summed up the lottery of those times:
"He which had no mischance in '85,
"And in '86 dothe remayne alive,
"He being in '87 unhurt and unslayne,
"And lyving until the year '89,
"He may then specke of a joyfulle tyme."
