PLACE AND FIELD NAMES OF DERBYSHIRE. 87 
reason why it should have lingered there so long is not far to seek. 
A correspondent of ‘‘ Hone’s Year Book” says, that when on 
a pedestrian tour in that part of the county in the year 1828, 
he was astonished to find, on entering Grasmere Church, that 
the floor was unboarded and unpaved, consisting, in fact, merely 
of the bare earth. The custom would naturally tarry longest 
in that neighbourhood, where it had most recently been a 
necessity. ‘The great majority of our parish churches were 
all paved in the times of the Tudors. The houses of the 
nobility vied with one another in the number of times that 
they replenished their carpetting of rushes. Brand quotes the 
following curious passage from ‘The Festyvall,” 1528, fol. 77, 
in the account of the extravagance of Thomas 4 Becket, when 
Archbishop of Canterbury: “ He was also manfull in his hous- 
hold, for his Hall was every daye in Somer season staved with 
green Russhes, and in Wynter with clene Hey, for to save the 
Knyghtes’ clothes that sate on the Flore for defaute of place 
to syt on.”* It would have been well if Englishmen had 
continued to be thus particular in renewing the rushes. Erasmus, 
writing to a friend, and trying to account for the prevalence 
of that awful visitation of Henry VIII. days—‘the sweating 
sickness,” says: “First of all, Englishmen never build their 
chambers in such a way as to admit of ventilation. . . . The 
floors are in general laid with a white clay, and are covered 
with rushes, occasionally removed, but so imperfectly that the 
bottom layer is left undisturbed, sometimes for twenty years, 
harbouring expectorations, vomitings, the leakage of dogs and 
men, ale-droppings, scraps of fish, and other abominations 
not fit to be mentioned. Whenever the weather changes a 
‘vapour is exhaled, which I consider very detrimental to health. 
'. . I am confident the island would be much better 
the use of rushes were abandoned.’+ After this we may 
* Hone, Year Book, p. 528. Brand, Popular Antiquities, vol. i. p. 436, 
ol. ii. p. 213. Glover, History of Derbyshire, vol. i. p. 305. 
+ Brewer, Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, in the reign of 
‘Henry VIIL., vol. ii. p. 209. 
