Page:A short history of social life in England.djvu/167

Rh about the size of a bean, in order to draw the evil humours out of the head into the mouth! Small wonder that the doctors were paralysed when confronted with the plague, though some sort of quarantine was now observed for the first time. The door of an infected house was marked with a wisp, which developed later into St. Anthony's cross painted on a small piece of canvas, together with the words "Lord have mercy upon us." If it were necessary for a member of the infected house to go out of doors, he had to carry in his hand a white rod for forty days, while the penalty for concealment of the plague was death, "the man to be hangit, the woman drownit." So far, then, in this age of contradictions, there seems to have been but little material progress in the social lives of our forefathers; it was a period still "instinct with vast animal life, robust health and muscular energy, terrible in its rude and unrefined appetites, its fiery virtues and fierce passions." "It was merry in England before the new learning came up," said the people; but to that new learning and the vast changes it wrought it is interesting now to turn.