Physicians stood aghast, or decamped from scenes of which
they had had no experience. Medicine was no helper, and
its professors were but few ; for London, with its 100,000
inhabitants, could count but thirteen of them in 1513. If it
were so in the ofb-stricken metropolis, who can imagine the
horrors in provincial towns and country places ?

The helpless populace, in their despair, were taught to
believe that the Giver of all good gifts directed pestilences as
ministers to avenge the misdeeds of His creatures, so as to
bring them to more devout communion with Himself. It
was deemed almost a sin to oppose, by human agencies, the
imputed will and purpose of the Divinity in permitting dis-
ease and death to rule for a season, during which unwise
measures were relied on to check the progress of the fatal
disease. Instead of house-to-house inspection, there was, by
orders of the Privy Council, a quarantine on infected houses,
marked, as a caution to passers-by, with the prous exclama-
tion, " Lord, have mercy upon us!" and a cross on the door,
the colour of which was rated of importance, as it was ordered
by Queen Elizabeth to be of blue, and by Charles II, of red
colour. Depressing as such measures were by day, those of
the night were more so, for then the streets resounded with
the rolling of cart-wheels for carr3ring away the dead, to the
melancholy cry of " Bring forth your dead", which were in-
terred within the walls till the churchyards could hold no
more.* On each occasion of an epidemic of plague, the cold

* In 1 580, a Boyal Proclamation was issued afi^ainst new building^
within three miles of the gates of the City, and prohibiting the letting



14 ON OLD LONDON : ITS INSANITARY CONDITIONS

of winter stepped in to cut it short for a season, but not to
extirpate it, as year after year it showed itself again at the
end of the spring. The outburst of 1603 was thus carried on
annually until 1611, and every year there were tens of cases,
until another great epidemic befell in 1625, which dwindled
to no recorded death in 1629, and recrudesced with 1,317
deaths in 1630, and fell to none in the years 1633 and 1635.
