LITMIR.BIZ

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to their first child. There is no record of what killed Nicholas, but there was a ready supply of possible causes. At around this time, the practice began of hiring old women – ‘ancient Matrons’ – to roam parishes as ‘searchers of the dead’, recording the number and causes of death for regularly published ‘Bills of Mortality’. There was some controversy about this practice. According to John Graunt, who started analysing these figures in the 1660s, people questioned ‘why the Accompt of Casualties is made’, since death was a divine, not a demographic, matter; its time preordained; its cause the instrument by which God’s will was performed. No intervention, physical or otherwise, could prevent it. ‘This must not seem strange to you,’ advised William Attersoll two years before his son-in-law’s death, ‘for the whole life of a Christian should be nothing but a meditation of death … You must consider that nothing befalleth us by chance or fortune, all things are ruled and guided by the sovereign providence of almighty God.’⁹

      Despite qualms about the searchers’ work, they were diligent in their efforts and came up with an elaborate catalogue of causes: apoplexy, bleach, cancer, execution, fainting in the bath, gout, grief, itch, lethargy, lunacy, murder, palsy (paralysis), poison, sciatica, and ‘suddenly’. But one class of cause prevailed over all these: infectious disease.

      There was no concept of germs in the seventeenth century. Infection was a corruption of the air, a humidity or ‘miasma’ that exuded from the earth, a theory that lingers today in the belief in the benefits of ‘fresh’ or ‘country’ air. Some places were more prone to infection than others because they were near sources of this miasma, such as sewers and swamps. London, with its cramped streets, fetid streams, and cesspits, oozed contagion. But the countryside could be just as dangerous. Some settled rural populations – for example in remote parts of the West Country or on the chalk uplands of the Sussex Downs – had high levels of shared immunity to native bugs and lack of exposure to foreign ones. A village such as Hartland in Devon enjoyed infant mortality and life expectancy rates so low they would not be matched nationally until the 1920s. But other areas were as bad as any urban pesthole, notably large tracts of Sussex and Kent. ‘Marish’ and estuarine terrain, alluvial tracts, swampy low-lying basins, and sluggish rivers were suffused with ‘marsh fever’ or the ‘ague’ – malaria (from the Italian for ‘bad air’). The disease was familiar, and its diagnosis precise, categorized according to the frequency of the feverish attacks that announced its onset: daily (quotidian), every other day (tertian), and every third day (quartan).¹⁰ The convulsions produced by marsh fever, though distressing, were not usually fatal. However, they left sufferers more susceptible to enteric diseases – gut infections such as typhoid and dysentery. These were less clearly differentiated, but more deadly, frequently killing off one in ten of the population of a village in a single year.¹¹

      Just such a crisis seemed to overtake Ockley in 1615 and 1616. Autumn was the killing season for enteric infections, and nearly all of the twenty deaths in the parish during those years occurred between September and December. The summer of 1615 was particularly hot, and the stagnation of water supplies and sewers produced an epidemic of typhoid across the region.¹² Perhaps it was this that carried away Nicholas Culpeper. If so, the sickness would have taken three weeks to pass through its elaborate pageant of pain: innocuous aches at first, possibly accompanied by nosebleeds and diarrhoea; a fortnight or more of high fever and skin rashes, interrupted by brief remissions. This was the first phase. The second was a week of tortuous stomach pains and delirium.

      If he was in this state, very little could be done for him. Mary would have been expected to mix up some palliative medicines, based on recipes she had learned from her mother, or from local women with more experience. Typical remedies known to soothe the symptoms of fever were flowers of camomile beaten into a pulp and mixed with cloves and vervain, to be applied, as one herbal unhelpfully reported, according to ‘mother Bombies rule, to take just so many knots or sprigs, and no more, lest it fall out so that it do you no good’.¹³

      A local ‘wizard’ or ‘cunning woman’ may have come to call. Bishop Latimer had noted in 1552 that ‘A great many of us when we be in trouble or sickness … run hither to witches, or sorcerers … seeking aid and comfort in their hands’.¹⁴ They were still a part of life in rural villages such as Ockham in the early 1600s, promising with remarkable assurance that they could heal a variety of ailments using a combination of magical rituals and semi-religious invocations or spells. Techniques included burning or burying animals alive, immersing sufferers in water flowing in a particular direction, dragging them through bushes, or touching them with a magical talisman or staff. Such methods were justified on the basis of no particular medical or magical theory, though many were inspired by the principle of sympathy – the idea that one thing (such as a disease) had an affinity with another that was similar or connected to it in some way. Thus, to cure a headache, a lock of hair might be taken from the victim and boiled in his or her urine.¹⁵

      However, the Revd Nicholas Culpeper was very unlikely to have allowed such people near him. Their superstitious practices were closely associated with witchcraft, and a Christian minister would have considered them either fraudulent or diabolical. Mary’s attitude may have been different. She was still a comparative stranger in the village, having been in the parish for little more than a year, and was heavily pregnant, expecting to give birth any day. In such a state of isolation and vulnerability, as Nicholas lay unconscious on his sickbed, she may have yielded to the temptation of letting a charismatic healer through the rectory door.

      She may also have called for a doctor, though his chances of success were little better. The nearest large town, Horsham, was ten miles away, and the county town of Guildford a further five, so it would have taken some time and cost for him to come. Had one been summoned, his most likely treatment during the feverish stage of the illness would have been bleeding and purgation – in other words letting blood from the arm and prescribing toxic herbal emetics and laxatives to provoke violent vomiting and the evacuation of the bowels. Mary would have had to administer these medicines both orally and anally according to a strict timetable, and they would have intensified her weak husband’s sufferings, forcing him to endure hours spending blood into a basin, retching over a bucket, and squatting on a chamber pot, until he was finally overcome.

      The Revd Nicholas Culpeper was buried in his own graveyard on 5 October 1616. Less than a fortnight later, at 11 p.m. on 18 October 1616, in the dark of that dismal rectory, the venue for three deaths in thirteen months, his widow gave birth to their son. The boy, baptized six days later at Ockley church, was named Nicholas in honour of the father he would never know.

      Sir Edward Culpeper’s patronage apparently expired along with his relation, and Mary was forced to leave the rectory almost immediately. Some time that winter, mother and infant set off along Stane Street, headed for the village of Isfield in Sussex, forty miles away.

      The handsome parish church of Isfield is at the confluence of the Rivers Uck and Ouse in Sussex. It sits alone in the middle of a water meadow that floods during wet seasons, bringing water lapping up to the church gate. The small village it serves is nearly a mile away to the south-east, on higher ground. According to local lore (now considered doubtful), it moved there following the Black Death in the fourteenth century, to escape the unhealthy miasma thought to rise from the marshy valley bottom.¹⁶ This was the isolated domain of the man who was to be surrogate father to baby Nicholas, his grandfather William Attersoll.

      The Revd William Attersoll was, like his recently deceased son-in-law, a Cambridge scholar, having taken his MA at Peterhouse in 1586. Now in his mid-forties, he had served as rector of Isfield since 1600 in a mood of resentment. The living was, by his estimation, ‘poor’. So was the ‘cottage’ that acted as his rectory. A minister of his education deserved better.

      The deficiencies of his situation

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