The Plague
The ‘Great’ plague or ‘The Black Death’ as it popularly recalled, was brought ashore from a sailing vessel docking in Weymouth harbour on 25 June 1348.
Its arrival was documented in the Grey Friars Chronicle, ‘In this year 1348 in Melcombe, in the county of Dorset, a little before the feast of St. John the Baptist, two ships, one of them from Bristol came alongside. One of the sailors had brought with him from Gascony the seeds of the terrible pestilence and through him the men of that town of Melcombe were the first in England to be infected’. Not one of Weymouth’s finer moments by any means, it still shows the prominence of the port back in 1348 as well as the town’s inclusion in the shaping of England’s history or probably more accurately, the culling of its population. Ironically, and for far healthier reasons, it was King George III that came to popularise the town some and over 400 years later. It was his belief that the healing qualities of the Town’s salt waters were a marvel of modern medicine, a belief concurred by the physicians of the time.