ree
dwelling-houses and nine maltings. The want of water and the rapidity
of the flames, with the falling of the houses, being so dreadful,
little good could be done till evening, when the fire was happily
stopped. Upwards of 60 houses in the middle of the town were burnt
down, with all the shops, warehouses, stables, &c., adjoining. It is
generally supposed to have been wilfully occasioned.

1786. June 3rd, the Roy-stone, at Royston, was removed from the Cross
to the Market Hill by order of G. Wortham, surveyor. [Removed to
present site in Institute Garden, 1856.]

There was a remarkable frost in 1786, when among other fatal results of
the rigour of the season, a maltster named Pyman, of Royston, when
returning home from Kelshall, was frozen to death, and a butcher's boy
taking meat from Royston to Morden met with the same fate.

1787. In 1787 the following awful visitation of divine vengeance
befell a man near Hitchin, in Hertfordshire. He had applied to a
Magistrate, and informed him that he had been robbed by such a
gentleman.--"The Magistrate told him that he was committing perjury,
but the miscreant calling God to witness, that if what he had advanced
was not true, he wished that his jaws might be locked and his flesh rot
on his bones; and, shocking to relate, his jaws were instantly
arrested, and after lingering nearly a fortnight in great anguish, he
expired in horrible agonies, his flesh literally rotting on his bones."

1788. A burial ground as a present for winning a law-suit may seem an
odd acknowledgment, but this was what happened in Royston {180} during
last century, when, in 1788, the following obituary notice was
published which explains itself--

"Died in the Workhouse in Royston, Thomas Keightly, and on the
following Friday his remains were interred in the family burying ground
in the Churchyard of that parish. He was the eldest son of the late
Wm. Keightley, Esq., of that place, who some years ago, to his immortal
honour, stood forward on behalf of the parish, and at his own expense
supported a very litigious and expensive law-suit, which he gained and
for which the said parish as an acknowledgment made him and his
posterity a present of the aforesaid burying ground."

What the law-suit was about I am unable to say.

The following remarkable incident is taken from an old newspaper, the
_Cambridge Intelligencer_--

1794. June 15th. On Wednesday last a son and two daughters of the