Reconsidering Extinction in Terms of the History of Global Bioethics by Stan Booth Chris Mounsey

Author:Stan Booth, Chris Mounsey [Stan Booth, Chris Mounsey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000380279
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2021-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

A Few Conclusions

Contemporary complaints during stay-at-home-orders proliferated in places like the U.S. and the U.K. when their governments closed many businesses for a month or more in the late winter or early spring of 2020 in order to encourage “social distancing” and to prevent loss of life. Even with a closure of much of the economy for those short 4–6 weeks or so, politicians voiced concerns that the economy would not rebound. It would be unimaginable as to how a contemporary country might cope if forced to close for six months or a year. Yet, that is essentially what Edward did to stop the spread of Yersinia pestis beginning in the winter of 1348–1349. He regulated who came in and out of the ports over the course of the year. He closed the Court of Common Pleas in January and left the King's Bench open since it was in the north, safe from the plague, but only for a few more months.

Much the same was true of late 2019 and early 2020. Western governments knew an epidemic of the virus that was called 2019-nCOV would arrive in late winter and, yet, did not really prepare. This disease was later renamed COVID-19 and the World Health Organization announced as a pandemic. Travel continued unabated until around February from China and other locations where the disease continued to spread, and, yet, globally, governments seem to have miscalculated their medical health systems, running short on basic supplies and life-saving equipment in the spring months of 2020.100 In medieval England, again in parallel to the contemporary pandemic, there is evidence that some individuals or families traveled in an effort to escape the epidemic, moving from “hot spots” to locations with relatively less disease but, unfortunately, often taking the plague with them.

It is difficult to read of the destruction of so many people and families, both contemporary accounts and historic ones. Whole villages in medieval England were wiped out by Yesinia pestis. When the landlord, John Conestable of Halsham became ill with the plague, he:

[B]eing of good memory but afflicted with great weakness and languishing in extremis, about an hour (spacium unius leuce) before the hour of vespers, made his charter touching the said manor [of Halsham] […. He lay] with great weakness for four days preceding, at the time of the mortality then raging (vegetantis) in those parts, languishing in extremis, about that hour of the day called ‘Midovernone,’ made a charter touching the said manor to the above said William [de Holm], John [Culiour, vicar of Aldburgh church], and William [Vescy, chaplain, who] before his death […] had seisin in the manor, except a certain chamber in which the said John died […].101

John Conestable wanted his estate secure because his heir was his 12-year-old son, John. Like so many landholders, John left a minor heir and was not sure if his son would live to become an adult and, so, left a group made up of his friend (relative?), his vicar, and his chaplain in charge.

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