During the first half of the sixteenth century, municipal councils across northern France issued ordinances designed to combat outbreaks of plague. The measures contained in these ordinances were extensive and formed the core of urban responses to plague throughout the early modern period. These ordinances did not appear out of a vacuum; rather, they represented the codification of stratagems adopted during the second half of the fifteenth century. This article will describe and account for the growth of the public health system developed by the magistrates of towns lying in the urban belt of northern and north-eastern France from the 1450s to the 1550s. It will concentrate on the towns and cities of Abbeville, Amiens, Beauvais, Paris, Rouen and Tournai, all of which possess good administrative records for the period. In addition to the texts of plague ordinances, the most valuable documents for this study are the registers of municipal deliberations, which allow us to follow the decision-making process that lay behind the development of plague legislation.

Many of the more celebrated measures against pestilence originated in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, and the bulk of our knowledge regarding the ways in which urban administrations reacted to these outbreaks is based on studies of northern Italian cities, such as Florence and Venice. Although historians have expanded the geographical scope of such studies to consider municipal responses to plague in England, Spain, Switzerland, Germany and the Low Countries, little research has been done on France during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

This article will examine and compare the way that society coped with two of the major epidemics to affect Renaissance Italy: plague and the Great Pox. Even though these diseases impacted on Italy as severely as they did on the rest of Europe, different countries devised different solutions to the same problems. Discussing the strategies that Italy adopted in the long fifteenth century is valuable not just to those who work on Italian Renaissance history, but also to historians of countries such as England which developed very different measures. Indeed, in the sixteenth century, in the case of plague, the privy council and statesmen such as William Cecil, Lord Burghley, looked to continental and particularly Italian plague measures as a reflection of their ‘civility’, which made them worthy of imitation.

The main elements which constituted this ‘civility’ will be the subject of the first part of this article, which will examine society's reactions to plague in Renaissance Italy through the prism of how contemporaries understood the nature of the disease. One of the more traditional themes of historical studies of Italian plague is the idea that at the time there was a marked division in beliefs between doctors and health boards about how disease was spread, with the former supporting the idea of infected air, or miasma, and the latter espousing contagionist views. This story is complicated still further from the late fifteenth century by the emergence of the Great Pox.

John Clement, a brewer, entered the Norwich franchise in 1447. Over the next decade he was a constable nine times and a tax collector once, but he never discharged any other civic office. In spite of their important role in administering and maintaining order in English cities, men like Clement have been neglected as a result of English urban historians' tendency to focus on the better-documented and wealthier mercantile elite. Prosopographical analyses of urban political, economic, and social groups have directed some attention towards middling artisans and retailers because of their focus on collective biography, but the relative dearth of information about these groups has made even this approach more effective for understanding the senior officials. Moreover, although these studies have revealed much about civic hierarchies, they have perhaps encouraged the perception that a mercantile elite dominated all aspects of urban political life. Although no one would deny the virtual monopoly of high office by a privileged few, there is considerable evidence that mercantile control was not so comprehensive in the lower levels of civic government.

Non-elite urban officials have received little sustained analysis. Indeed, on the few occasions that mid-level offices have been examined they have generally been cast as part of the cursus honorum or as unwelcome chores rather than as potentially valuable positions. By focusing on a group of non-elite personnel, namely, constables, assessors, collectors, supervisors and searchers in Norwich between 1414 and 1473, this paper demonstrates the essential role played by such individuals and postulates that not all urban office-holders nursed greater ambitions.

The fact that the plague in its bubonic, septicaemic and pneumonic forms is still with us in the twenty-first century often comes as a shock to the general public. Memories of school projects have made them vaguely aware of the great pandemic, which arrived in southern Italy in 1347 and then raged across Europe, reaching England and Norway in 1348, through Oslo in 1348 and then through Bergen in 1349, and European Russia in 1351, where the city state of Novgorod was first infected. But then, surely, it went away? Not quite: outbreaks of plague in this second pandemic, first (allegedly) called the Black Death by Mrs Markham in 1823 in her History of England, from which the horrors of history and the complexities of party politics were removed as not suitable for young minds, lasted in England until the early eighteenth century, whilst in Italy what is generally regarded as its final appearance came at Naja, near Bari, in 1815. Even then the disease did not disappear. It merely became dormant until 1855, when a new pandemic began in China, spreading through the Pacific Rim and in 1899 to the United States where plague had previously been unknown. Indeed, as the well-known World Health Organisation map of plague loci and plague outbreaks 1970–1998 shows, the disease is enzootic or sylvatic (ever-present in certain animal populations and their fleas) in some fifty-eight different regions in the world and can still spread to more susceptible animals, including humans, in epizootic outbreaks.

In Rouen, as in many other major European cities, following the Black Death (1347–50) there was increased anxiety about environmental health, and it was thought necessary to protect the urban population from the spread of disease through corrupt, or miasmatic, air. These preoccupations were linked to growing concerns about cleanliness, stench, ‘infection’ and the elimination of ‘pollution’, as a result of which certain features of civic life appeared particularly dangerous, including vagrant pigs and poultry, open latrines, the slaughter of animals in public places, rotten food, rubbish and contaminated water. Such anxieties were closely linked to the Galenic model of human health and physiology as disseminated in regimina sanitatis, the health manuals that were becoming increasingly popular in the later Middle Ages. In theory at least, these regimina were addressed to the upper echelons of society, as reflected, for example, by their advice regarding the consumption of expensive foodstuffs. While Galen maintained that good health resulted from the internal balance of the four bodily humours, he also devoted considerable attention to the non-naturals, which were external phenomena and psychological states that could either prevent or cause illness. They included the quality of the environment, food and drink, exercise, sleep, the purgation of bodily fluids and emotional wellbeing.

Death is the active subject in this fifteenth-century poem and is portrayed as a multi-faceted character, being both perceptive and learned but also tactile and aggressive. Plague is the agency, or form of attack, by which Death's desires appear to be fulfilled. His targets: everyone. John Lydgate translated this text, he tells us in the ‘Verba tanslatoris’ or prologue to the poem, from a French original ‘Danse macabre in cimetière des Innocents’, which it is presumed he saw when he was in Paris (as a member of the earl of Warwick's administrative staff) in 1426. A slightly revised version was inscribed and decorated with painted images on the cloister walls of the circular Pardon churchyard at St. Paul's cathedral in London, in about 1430, following a request by John Carpenter, the city's common clerk. It was destroyed about 120 years later during the Edwardian Reformation, in 1549. The text, nevertheless, remains extant in twelve manuscripts. In the majority of these manuscripts the figures with whom Death interacts are: a pope, emperor, cardinal, king, patriarch, constable, archbishop, baron, princess, bishop, squire, abbot, abbess, bailiff, astronomer, burgess, canon secular, merchant, Carthusian, sergeant, monk, usurer, poor man, physician, lover, youthful squire, gentlewoman, man of law, Master John Rykill, fool, parson, juror, minstrel, labourer, friar minor, child, young clerk and hermit. Lydgate makes six additions to his French source: the four women, a juror and a conjuror (Master Rykill).

Academic interest in the medieval and later urban environment is by no means a new phenomenon and is apparent, for example, in an historical account of Norwich written by the early eighteenth-century antiquary John Kirkpatrick. The final decades of the last century, however, witnessed a renewed interest in the subject in relation to both medieval and to more modern towns. Many of the resulting studies have concentrated on a specific aspect of the urban landscape and the responses this invoked, and/or on the relationship between the environment and health. This paper, however, aims to look more generally at the state of one particular city in the fifteenth century, and to attempt to assess how it might have felt to live in Norwich at that time, together with how far the civic authorities sought to ameliorate environmental problems. All towns, of course, have their individual characteristics, both physical and social, but Norwich is an interesting case study. In the sixteenth century it was promoted as an exceptionally clean and healthy city and the governing body undertook new initiatives to clear the river and the streets.