ate
families, also, as well of one opinion as another, kept family fasts, to
which they admitted their near relations only; so that, in a word, those
people who were really serious and religious applied themselves in a
truly Christian manner to the proper work of repentance and humiliation,
as a Christian people ought to do.

Again, the public showed that they would bear their share in these
things. The very court, which was then gay and luxurious, put on a face
of just concern for the public danger. All the plays and interludes[61]
which, after the manner of the French court,[62] had been set up and
began to increase among us, were forbid to act;[63] the gaming tables,
public dancing rooms, and music houses, which multiplied and began to
debauch the manners of the people, were shut up and suppressed; and the
jack puddings,[64] merry-andrews,[64] puppet shows, ropedancers, and
such like doings, which had bewitched the common people, shut their
shops, finding indeed no trade, for the minds of the people were
agitated with other things, and a kind of sadness and horror at these
things sat upon the countenances even of the common people. Death was
before their eyes, and everybody began to think of their graves, not of
mirth and diversions.

But even these wholesome reflections, which, rightly managed, would have
most happily led the people to fall upon their knees, make confession of
their sins, and look up to their merciful Savior for pardon, imploring
his compassion on them in such a time of their distress, by which we
might have been as a second Nineveh, had a quite contrary extreme in the
common people, who, ignorant and stupid in their reflections as they
were brutishly wicked and thoughtless before, were now led by their
fright to extremes of folly, and, as I said before, that they ran to
conjurers and witches and all sorts of deceivers, to know what should
become of them, who fed their fears and kept them always alarmed and
awake, on purpose to delude them and pick their pockets: so they were as
mad upon their running after quacks and mountebanks, and every
practicing old woman for medicines and remedies, storing themselves with
such multitudes of pills, potions, and preservatives, as they were
called, that they not only spent their money, but poisoned themselves
beforehand, for fear of the poison of the infection, and prepared their
bodies for the plague, instead of preserving them against it. On the
other hand,