Lest any unfavourable report should reach the cardinal, the Recorder and another were ordered to ride in all haste to Sion, where Wolsey was thought to be, and if they failed to find him there, to follow him to Windsor and to report to him the active measures that had been taken to prevent any further insurrection in the city.(1072) "Evil May-day" was long remembered by the citizens, who raised objection to Thomas Semer or Seymer, who had been sheriff at the time, being elected mayor ten years later.(1073) In May, 1547, all householders were straitly charged not to permit their servants any more to go maying, but to keep them within doors.(1074)
With gibbets all over the city, each bearing a ghastly freight, and the summer approaching, it is scarcely surprising that the city should soon again be visited with an epidemic. "At the city gates," wrote an eye-witness, "one sees nothing but gibbets and the quarters of these wretches"--the wretches who had been hanged for complicity in the late disturbance--"so that it is horrible to pass near them."(1075) The "sweating sickness," which had again made its appearance in 1516, and had never really quitted the city (except for a few weeks in winter), now raged more violently than ever, accompanied by measles and small-pox. The king ordered all inhabitants of infected houses to keep indoors and hang out wisps of straw, and when compelled to walk abroad to carry white rods.(1076) This order, however, was badly received in the city and gave rise to much murmuring and dissatisfaction.(1077) The civic authorities did what they could to mitigate the evil by driving out beggars and vagabonds, and removing slaughter-houses outside the city walls,(1078) as well as by administering relief to the poorer classes by the distribution of tokens or licences to solicit alms. These tokens consisted of round "beedes" of white tin, bearing the City's arms in the centre, to be worn on the right shoulder.(1079) In the midst of so much real suffering, there were not wanting those who took advantage of the charitable feeling which the crisis called forth and were not ashamed to gain a livelihood by simulating illness. Such a one was Miles Rose, who on the 11th March, 1518, openly confessed before the Court of Aldermen that he had frequently dissembled the sickness of the "fallyng evyle" (or epilepsy) in divers parish churches in the city, on which occasions "jemewes" of silver, called cramp rings, would as often as not be placed on his fingers by charitable passers-by, with which he would quickly make off, pocketing at the same time many a twopence which had been bestowed upon him.(1080)