BoAr:FNQ:17th Century
http://
boar.org.uk/ariwxo3FNQ42.htm Latest edit 2 Sep
2007.
Interactive
version ©2006 R.J.PENHEY
The Bourne Archive
FNQ
Fenland Notes and Queries. This will have been originally in
the quarterly Part 2, July 1889 or 3, October 1889. Edited by
W.H. Bernard Saunders, F.R. Hist. Soc.
Articles 1 to 237 (April 1889 to October 1891) were
re-published as Volume 1, in 1891, by Geo. C. Caster,
This quarterly periodical which, from the second volume
(part 12) became associated with the name of W.D. Sweeting, took the form of a
forum in which people sent in questions about the history, ecology and so on of
the Fens and the region’s
environs and others replied with some sort of answer. Some ‘answers’ seem to
have been spontaneous, so qualifying as ‘notes’. Editorial notes in the form
[note] are those of FNQ; those in the form [note] are
those of RJP.
My thanks to the trustees of the
Willoughby Memorial Library for the loan of the copy from which the following
was transcribed.
Seventeenth
Century and Civil War.
42.
– Four
Hundred Persons destroyed by a Coat at Ramsey. – NOBLE in his Memoirs of the Cromwell’s [sic], vol. i., p. 56,
says, “That Major Cromwell died of the plague at Ramsey, Huntingdonshire, on
the morning of February the 23rd, 1666, and was buried next evening
in the church there. He caught the infection by wearing a coat, the cloth of
which came from London; and the tailor that made the coat, with all his family,
died of the same terrible disorder, as did no less than four hundred people in
Ramsey, as appears by the register, and all owing to this fatal coat.”
C. Golding,
[This date falls during the
latter part of the course of the Great Plague of London, which preceded the
Great Fire. If this cloth had not been the vector responsible, something else
probably would. The effect of the plague was felt several times during the
seventeenth century and in most of the towns of the Fenland region;