An Ordinance of the City of Nuremberg. 885 
dered as tlie best means and remedy in these times of pesti¬ 
lence, and until conditions improve, no bed clothing, garments 
or other things upon which the sick have lain, or which they 
have used and touched, shall by any means be sold secretly or 
publicly on the Sewmarket or other places, but shall be put 
.away and destroyed at once, and shall not be given to other 
healthy persons for use. In the same way, the linen bed¬ 
clothing of the sick persons shall not be washed and cleaned 
in the city in any place, but sucti washing shall be done outside 
of the city, and nowhere else but in the outflowing current of 
the Pegnitz. But the Vischbaeh within and without the city 
shall not at all be used for this, and such linen shall not be 
washed in it, on pain of the irremissible payment of ten gul¬ 
den “Rhenish,” and any one who should not be able to pay this 
fine shall suffer bodily punishment. Let every one keep this 
especially in mind, to preserve himself and his from danger, 
and thus protect himself from such punishment,. 
In the ninth place, in order to avoid such infection of healthy 
persons all the more effectively, the Honorable Council admon¬ 
ishes earnestly that every head of a family shall emphatically 
inform and order his family and tenants not' to go to sick 
people in their houses or in the hospital, and likewise not to be 
present when the dead are buried, and especially is it the opin¬ 
ion of the Honorable Council that it is in these times of mor¬ 
tality an entirely bad and useless custom that so many people 
accompany the corpse, and that it were better to hold the fu¬ 
neral in the most simple manner; also that the artisans should 
refrain from carrying the bodies of the dead, 4 but that this 
should be done, until conditions improve, by the persons and 
carriers appointed by the city for that purpose, through all of 
which much danger might then be avoided everywhere. 
In addition to this, the Honorable Council, aside from the 
provisions made for the carrying away of the sick and the 
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4 This was the special privilege of certain guilds and no doubt they 
were loath to give it up on account of the remuneration connected with 
it. Poor Schiller, by the way, was escorted to the grave in this 1 man¬ 
ner, by the shoemakers’ guild of Weimar in 1805. 
