In England, during the medieval period, persecutions of
Jews were occasionally resorted to, and here and there we hear of
persecutions of witches; but, as torture was rarely used in
England, there were, from those charged with producing plague,
few of those torture-born confessions which in other countries
gave rise to widespread cruelties. Down to the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries the filthiness in the ordinary mode of life
in England was such as we can now hardly conceive: fermenting
organic material was allowed to accumulate and become a part of
the earthen floors of rural dwellings; and this undoubtedly
developed the germs of many diseases. In his noted letter to the
physician of Cardinal Wolsey, Erasmus describes the filth thus
incorporated into the floors of English houses, and, what is of
far more importance, he shows an inkling of the true cause of the
wasting diseases of the period. He says, "If I entered into a
chamber which had been uninhabited for months, I was immediately
seized with a fever.
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