[91] “Autumnali vero tempore, cum jam vestes, lintea, culcitræ, panes, omnis generis obsonia, sub dio, vel in conclavibus patentibus locata talem situ mucorem contraxerunt, qualis oritur in penore, in opacis domus cellis collocato, aut etiam in ipsis cellis diu non repurgatis, pestis præsentes ad nocendum vires habet.” L. I. p. 45. Agricola’s Treatise on the Plague is among the cleverest which the sixteenth century produced.
[92] For example, at the time of the Justinian Plague, and of the Black Death.
[93] Mezeray, T. II. p. 828.
[94] See above, p. 189.
[95] The former mortality was so far from having ceased, yea, rather in the great heat (of summer) was still more vehement, that in some places a third part, and in some even the half of the people were snatched away by death, and that not by one only, but by various and hitherto unheard of diseases. Men caught the burning fever so rapidly and violently, that they thought they must be totally consumed. Some were seized with such severe and insupportable headache that they were deprived of their senses, some with such a violent cough that they expectorated blood incessantly—some with such a very rapid flux, that it broke their hearts: the bodies of some putrefied, and were so offensive that no one could remain near them. And by reason of such extraordinary diseases, it was a most sorrowful and troublous year, and there followed a hard winter, in the which, the cold lasted for three months. Spangenberg, M. Chr. fol. 402. b. Compare Angelus, p. 263, who, following some contemporaries, mentions a comet (doubted by Pingré, I. 479) as having appeared in the year 1504.
[96] From a Poem on Henry VIII. in Herbert of Cherbury.
[97] They found grazing more profitable, and converted large tracts of arable land into pasture. Hume, T. IV. p. 277.
[98] Lemnius, fol. III. b.
[99] Grafton, p. 294. This insurrection is called by the Chroniclers, “Insurrection of Evill May-day.”—Hume, T. IV. 274.
[100] “Of the common sort they were numberless, that perished by it.” Godwyn, p. 23.