Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 14, 2025
His French alliances, his declaration of war with the Emperor, hindered the trade with Flanders and secured the hostility of the merchant class. The country at large, galled with murrain and famine and panic-struck by an outbreak of the sweating sickness which carried off two thousand in London alone, laid all its suffering at the door of the Cardinal.
In the earliest systematic account of the western islands of Scotland we read that "the inhabitants here did also make use of a fire called Tin-egin, i.e. a forced fire, or fire of necessity, which they used as an antidote against the plague or murrain in cattle; and it was performed thus: all the fires in the parish were extinguished, and then eighty-one married men, being thought the necessary number for effecting this design, took two great planks of wood, and nine of them were employed by turns, who by their repeated efforts rubbed one of the planks against the other until the heat thereof produced fire; and from this forced fire each family is supplied with new fire, which is no sooner kindled than a pot full of water is quickly set on it, and afterwards sprinkled upon the people infected with the plague, or upon the cattle that have the murrain.
"A murrain on y'r sowl!" said he, "as there's plague in y'r body, and hell in the slide of y'r feet, like the trail of the red spider. And out o' that come ye, Heldon, for I know y're there. Out of that, ye beast! . . . But how can ye go back you that's rolled in that sewer to the loveliest woman that ever trod the neck o' the world!
Several hundred people colored, of course were collected, put aboard a ship, and dumped upon this unknown land. It will surprise no one to learn that pretty soon these people, poisoned by malaria, stung by venomous insects and reptiles, and having scarcely anything to eat, were dying like cattle with the murrain. In the end a ship was sent to bring back the survivors.
I chanced to see him in the court-yard of the palace of Whitehall, and there being several gallants nigh at hand, who I thought would take my part ough! ough! what a plaguey cough I have gotten, to be sure; but 't is all owing to those cursed 'prentices a murrain seize 'em! Your patience, sweet Sir Giles, I am coming to the point ough! ough! there it takes me again.
The vicar of Stamfordham writes thus respecting it: 'When the murrain broke out among the cattle about eighteen years ago, this fire was produced by rubbing two pieces of dry wood together, and was carried from place to place all through this district, as a charm against cattle taking the disease.
Some were eating, some were drinking, and some were puffing at long clay pipes, while others, by twos, locked arm in arm, went swaggering up and down the room, with a huge talking of foreign lands which they had never so much as seen. "A murrain on the luck!" cried Carew, suddenly. "Can I throw nothing but threes and fours?" A muffled stir ran round.
Lieberkuhn, a celebrated physician, there were no veterinary surgeons at that time, was sent to examine into the nature of the disease, which was supposed to be one of the species of murrain that was then committing such ravages among the cattle in various parts of the Continent.
"If thicky galley keeps as she is going for another five minutes, Dick, she'll be stuck so hard and fast in that same mud that she'll have something else to think about than chasing us. Ah!" as the boat luffed round a small mangrove-covered island, and the galley was shut out from view, "there goes their last chance of hitting us with their footy ordnance with a murrain on them!"
"The Dauphin," he went on, "for King he is none, and crowned he will never be, should be in Orleans, leading his men; and lo! he is tied to the belt of fat La Tremouille, and is dancing of ballets at Chinon a murrain on him, and on them that make his music!" Then he fell to cursing his King, a thing terrible to hear, and so to asking me questions about myself.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking