Quarantine

[petal]

QUARANTINE
If a hundred persons were asked the meaning of the word quarantine, it is highly probable that ninety-nine would answer, 'Oh! it is something connected with shipping the plague and yellow-fever.' Few are aware that it simply signifies a period of forty days; the word, though common enough at one time, being now only known to us through the acts for preventing the introduction of foreign diseases, directing that persons coming from infected places must remain forty days on shipboard before they be permitted to land. The old military and monastic writers frequently used the word to denote this space of time. In a trace between Henry the First of England and Robert Earl of Flanders, one of the articles is to the following effect:—'If Earl Robert should depart from the treaty, and the parties could not be reconciled to the king in three quarantines, each of the hostages should pay the sum of 100 marks.'
From a very early period, the founders of our legal polity in England, when they had occasion to limit a short period of time for any particular purpose, evinced a marked predilection for the quarantine. Thus, by the laws of Ethelbert, who died in 616, the limitation for the payment of the fine for slaying a man at an open grave was fixed to forty nights, the Saxons reckoning by nights instead of days. The privilege of sanctuary was also confined within the same number of days. The eighth chapter of Magna Charta declares that 'A widow shall remain in her husband's capital messuage for forty days after his death, within which time her dower shall be assigned.' The tenant of a knight's fee, by military service, was bound to attend the king for forty days, properly equipped for war. According to Blackstone, no man was in the olden time allowed to abide in England more than forty days, unless he were enrolled in some tithing or decennary. And the same authority asserts that, by privilege of Parliament, members of the House of Commons are protected from arrest for forty days after every prorogation, and forty days before the next appointed meeting. By the ancient Costumale of Preston, about the reign of Henry II, a condition was imposed on every new-made burgess, that if he neglected to build a house within forty days, he should forfeit forty pence.
In ancient prognostications of weather, the period of forty days plays a considerable part. An old Scotch proverb states:

'Saint Swithin's day, gin ye do rain,
For forty days it will remain;
Saint Swithin's day, and ye be fair,
For forty days 'twill rain nae mair.'

There can be no reasonable doubt that this precise term is deduced from the period of Lent, which is in itself a commemoration of the forty days' fast of Christ in the wilderness. The period of forty days is, we need scarcely say, of frequent occurrence in Scripture. Moses was forty days on the mount; the diluvial rain fell upon the earth for forty days; and the same period elapsed from the time the tops of the mountains were seen till Noah opened the window of the ark.
Even the pagans observed the same space of time in the mysteries of Ceres and Proserpine, in which the wooden image of a virgin was lamented over during forty days; and Tertullian relates as a fact, well known to the heathens, that for forty days an entire city remained suspended in the air over Jerusalem, as a certain presage of the Millennium. The process of embalming used by the ancient Egyptians lasted forty days; the ancient physicians ascribed many strange changes to the same period; so, also, did the vain seekers after the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life.

(Book of Days)