Death and disease in Romney Marsh c 1560-1860
Romney Marsh was once described as one of the most unhealthy and sickly places in the whole of Kent. The Kentish topographer, William Lambarde, in his 1570 Perambulation of Kent, reminded readers that 'the place hath in it sundry villages, although not thicke set, nor much inhabited, bicause it is Hyeme malus Aestale molestus, Nunquam bonus, Evill in Winter, grievous in Sommer, and never good.' That evil reputation persisted for another two centuries and it remained widely known that the 'airs and waters' of Romney Marsh were both 'foul and fatal' and the evil-smelling stagnant marshes made dreadful havoc on the health of the inhabitants in 'this sickly and contagious country.’
A generous research grant from the Romney Marsh Trust has enabled me to explore how and why those sundry places were so evil and so grievous for their sparse populations. The original parish registers of all available Romney Marsh parishes have been microfilmed by the staff at the Centre for Kentish Studies and, over the course of this year, I have been analysing these registers and plotting death rates and trends in mortality for the Romney Marsh parishes c 1560-1860.
Lambarde was, indeed, fully justified in making his assertions about the grievous situation. Death rates in Romney Marsh parishes were exceptionally high. From the mid-si,1eenth century through to the mid-eighteenth century, as many as one in three infants born to marsh mothers would die before reaching the age of one year and many died shortly a f ter birth. On average, a baby born in the marshes could only expect to live about 25 years ( compared to over 75 years, today!). The contrast between the marsh mortality and mortality levels in the nearby Wealden or Downland parishes in the period c.1560-1760 was also extraordinary. A baby born perhaps ten or even five miles away, say in one of the little villages nestled on the North Downs or in one of the sprawling Wealden comrnunlties, could expect to live almost twice as long as its marshland counterpart.
The contours of the landscape appeared to parallel the contours of health and death. As Figures l and 2 show, low-lying marshland and estuarine areas were unusually mortal, upland areas were refreshingly healthy. Low and lethal, high and healthy typified the mortality gradients of early modern Kent.
A fascinating part of this project is to understand the reasons why the Romney Marsh parishes, as well as many other marshland communities were so terribly unhealthy in the early modern age. My research has suggested that the prime cause of so much sickness and death was, in fact, malaria, a disease which we now associate with tropical countries but which was once common in marshy areas of Europe. We know today that malaria was carried by the local Anopheles atroparms mosquito which bred in the stagnant marshes of Kent. In past centuries, many people attributed the disease to the smells and' bad air of the stagnant marshes (mal'aria, itself, literally means 'bad air').
CDR is Crude Death Rate, or average annual deaths per 1000 population.
IMR is Infant Mortality Rate, or number of infant deaths per 1000 live births.
The smugglers and lookers of Romney Marsh who were prepared to risk their lives in these foul tracts (most of the 'educated' vicars and landowners sensibly lived above the marsh in the 'contours of health') frequently suffered from malaria, as well as from a host of other life-threatening diseases of the time, including smallpox, typhoid fever, typhus, and bubonic plague. The poor sick marsh folk tried to control their repetitive malarial fevers by dosing themselves and their infants with alcohol, opium and other narcotics. These may have helped them to cope with their terrible bouts of shaking ·but, sadly, over the long term, the toxic effects of such agents only added to the toll of infant and adult death in Romney Marsh.
Although this project has revealed a very bleak picture of the lives and deaths of Romney Marsh inhabitants, the parish register material has also shown that there was a dramatic improvement in expectation of life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Indeed, by the time Victoria came to the throne, Romney Marsh was actually one of the healthiest places in Kent. The causes and chronology of this striking change in mortality levels need to be investigated more fully and I would be delighted to learn more from other researchers working on the drainage, water supply and other environmental and economic changes in Romney Marsh during this period.
Dr. Mary Dobson
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Mary’s researches on Romney Marsh will appear in her forthcoming book, Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England, to be published by Cambridge University Press in the summer of 1996.
