Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/247

 Napier of York in 1666 attended, he had recourse to copious bleeding and numerous cordials. The same physician, in a different disease, contented himself with administering almost exclusively a considerable number of the latter mixtures.

The expenses attending the preparation for the grave and the burial of a corpse were probably more serious in the seventeenth century in proportion to the means of the people in that age than they are to-day. About 1650, the charge for a coffin was about one hundred pounds of tobacco; in 1667, it was fifty pounds more, which was equivalent to one pound and a quarter sterling. Thirty years subsequent to this, the coffin in which the remains of Thomas Jefferson, an ancestor of the celebrated statesman of the same name, were laid, cost twelve shillings and six pence, the larger part of which was represented in the charge for carpenter&#8217;s work. In several cases, the price was ten shillings. The charge for a winding-sheet of holland was one hundred pounds of tobacco in 1652, and in the same year the charge for making a grave was twenty pounds. In 1696, it was thirty. The assistance needed by the digger in filling in the grave increased the outlay on this account to ten shillings. The funeral