of the Seventeenth Century. 17 
take care that a convenient place be had for the burying of the dead, 
it being alledged unto this Cort that the Churchyard is alwayes 
filled and also that watch and ward be duly kept for securing the 
neighbouring inhabitants and country round about them,” &c. 
In the previous September, in London, ten thousand people were 
said to have died in one week. 
In the following year (1667) there was no Spring Assize for 
Hants, but on the 1st March and July 20th I find an order at 
Salisbury Assize relating to the collecting of the rate for the relief of 
the poor infected persons in thatcity in the time of the late plague there. 
At the Summer Assize, August, 1672, there is bitter complaint 
against one John Thorpe, Gaoler of Fisherton Anger, by the prisoners 
for debt, for “ preventing the use of the great courtyard of the prison 
in daytime; charging excessive rates for lodging in the common 
room, and not allowing their friends to relieve them, contrary to 
His Majesty’s late gracious Act of Parliament ; had exacted 2s. a week 
from those who sleep on the boards in the said greate roome; kept 
messengers with provisions waiting two and three hours at one time 
at the gate; stopped up a window whereby provisions have heretore 
been conveyed to your petitioners with much ease; destroyed the 
hearth of the prison rooms whereby no fire may be made; and by 
many other practices contrived subtily to distresse ye poore pe- 
titioners whose estates are consumed and health impaired so that 
for want of ayer and necessaries they must perish unlesse relieved 
by yr. Lordships.” They desire the above matters to be put to 
rights. Thomas Mompesson, Esq., Sir Richard How, Knight, 
William Swanston, and Alexander Thistlethwayte, Justices of peace 
of this County, or any two of them, have it referred to them to 
examine and to certify. 
‘The next extract is one of interest. It tells of the abduction of 
an heiress named Johanna Mortimore. At present I have not been 
able to identify her or connect her family name with Compton 
Cumberwell, which is a property in the parish of Compton Bassett, 
near Calne.! 
1 See Aubrey and Jackson’s Wiltshire Collections, p. 42, and Rev. A.C. Smith’s 
Wiltshire Antiquities, p. 49. 
