446; also, for various citations, the second volume of Buckle, History of Civilization in England.
II.

GRADUAL DECAY OF THEOLOGICAL VIEWS REGARDING SANITATION.
We have seen how powerful in various nations especially obedient to theology were the forces working in opposition to the evolution of hygiene, and we shall find this same opposition, less effective, it is true, but still acting with great power, in countries which had become somewhat emancipated from theological control.

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.