[697] Notes and Queries, 6th series, III. 477.
[698] Dunsford’s Historical Memoirs of Tiverton, p. 38.
[699] Bill of Mortality for the week ending October 20, 1603. Broadside in Guildhall Library, with summary, on margin, of the mortalities in 1563 and 1592-93.
[700] Cal. State Papers, 1591-94, p. 312.
[701] Ibid. p. 340.
[702] Ibid. 1595-97, p. 45, May 26, 1595:
“Arguments in proof of the advantages to be derived by the City of London from stopping up the town ditch:—It is the origin of infection, and the only noisome place in the city. In the last great plague, more died about there than in three parishes besides; these fields are the chiefest walks for recreation of the cityzens, and though the ditch were cast every second year, yet the water coming from the kennel and slaughter-houses will be very contagious. It is no material defence for the city, and half the ditch has been stopped these many years.”
[703] London’s Remembrancer, by John Bell, Clerk of the Company of Parish Clerks. London, 1665. He says: “I shall begin with the year 1593, being the first year in which any account of the christenings and burials was kept. I cannot find any record of more antiquity than that of this year in the Company of Parish Clerks Hall.” However we can now point to original weekly bills of mortality of 1532 and 1535, to abstracts of weekly plague-burials in 1563-66, to the figures from one weekly bill of a series in 1574, and to abstracts of 1578-83.
[704] The total of 25,886 was copied, probably from the broadside of 1603, into an anonymous essay of 1665, called Reflections on the Bills of Mortality, the total of plague alone being given as 11,503, evidently by a misprint for 15,003. At the same time a table was given, professing to be of the weekly deaths from all causes, in one column, and from plague in another, from March 13 to December 18, 1593. The column of plague-deaths sums up to 11,110, but the total of 11,503 (which originated in a misprint) is printed at the foot of the column as if that were the summation. The column of deaths from all causes is made to sum up to 25,886, the actual sum being 25,817. But the weekly mortalities in it for those weeks that had little plague are an absurdity for 1593. Whatever the source of this table, it is not genuine for 1593, and was disclaimed by Bell, the clerk of Parish Clerks’ Hall, whose essay was written in 1665 to correct that and other errors about former plagues in London.
[705] Cal. State Papers. Addenda. Elizabeth.