The plague of 1563 in the capital was accompanied or followed by several provincial outbreaks, of which few details are known. It is mentioned at Derby[596] in 1563, at Leicester[597] in 1563 and 1564 (a shut-up house in 1563, the first plague-burial in St Martin’s parish on May 11, 1564), at Stratford-on-Avon, at Lichfield[598] and Canterbury[599] in 1564. But it is little more than mentioned at all those places. In the parish register of Hensley, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, a later incumbent, basing upon “an old writing of 1569,” says that the explanation of the year 1563 being a blank in the register was “because in that year the visitation of plague was most hot and fearful, so that many died and fled, and the town of Hensley, by reason of the sickness, was unfrequented for a long season[600].” Preventive Practice in Plague-time under the Tudors. Having now traced the history of plague in London and in the provinces down to the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth, and having found it steady from year to year for many years in London, with an occasional terrific outburst, we are naturally led to ask whether the causes of it, or its favouring things, were understood, and whether any steps were taken to deal with it. This will be in effect a review of the earliest preventive practice. That which was most clearly perceived by all was that the plague began to reign in certain years as the summer heats drew on, that the air of London or Westminster became “intemperate,” or unwholesome, or infectious, and that it was desirable to get out of such air. Accordingly the one great rule, admitted by all and acted upon by as many as could, was to escape from the tainted locality, or as Wolsey expressed it to the earl of Shrewsbury in 1516, to get them “into clean air.” There was no other sovereign prescription but that, and it remained the one great prescription until the last of plague in 1665-6.