[57] Rudder, A New History of Gloucestershire, 1779, P. 737.
[58] Spelman, De Sepultura. English ed. 1641, p. 28. He cites the burial fees paid to the parson as twice as much for coffined as for uncoffined corpses. This agrees on the whole with the evidence adduced in the former volume of this history, p. 335.
[59] 18 and 19 Car. II. cap. 4; 30 Car. II. (1), cap. 3. These Acts were repealed by 54 Geo. III., cap. 108.
[60] History of England, I. 359.
[61] He has one or two relevant remarks: “But while we suppose common worms in graves, ’tis not easy to find any there; few in churchyards above a foot deep, fewer or none in churches, though in fresh-decayed bodies. Teeth, bones, and hair give the most lasting defiance to corruption. In an hydropsical body, ten years buried in the churchyard, we met with a fat concretion [adipocere] where the nitre of the earth and the salt and lixivious liquor of the body had coagulated large lumps of fat into the consistence of the hardest Castille soap, whereof part remaineth with us. The body of the Marquis of Dorset seemed sound and handsomely cereclothed, that after seventy-eight years was found uncorrupted. Common tombs preserve not beyond powder: a firmer consistence and compage of parts might be expected from arefaction, deep burial, or charcoal.”
[62] One may allege poverty on general grounds, as well as on particular. Thus, in 1636, the mayor was unpopular: “He was a stout man and had not the love of the commons. He was cruel, and not pitying the poor, he caused many dunghills to be carried away; but the cost was on the poor—it being so hard times might well have been spared.” Ormerod, I. 203.
[63] Printed plague-bill, with MS. additions, Harl. MS. 1929.
[64] Haygarth, Phil. Trans., LXVIII. 139.
[65] Cotton Mather’s Magnalia. Ed. of 1853, I. 227.
[66] History of England &c., IV. 707. Evelyn (Diary, 21 May, 1696) says the city was “very healthy,” although the summer was exceeding rainy, cold and unseasonable.