Another centre on the east coast was Wisbech. In 1585 it appeared in the hamlet of Guyhirne. In 1586 it entered Wisbech itself, caused the usual shutting up of houses, and so increased in 1587 that there were 42 burials in September and 62 in October[689], being three or four times more than average. It is mentioned also at Ipswich in 1585, and at Norwich in 1588[690]. At Derby, in 1586, there was plague in St Peter’s parish[691]. At Chesterfield in November, 1586, there were plague-deaths, and again in May 1587[692]. At Leominster, in 1587, there was an excessive mortality (209 burials)[693]. The other great centre on the east coast in those years was in Durham and Northumberland[694]. In 1587 the infection began to show at Hartlepool, and in the parishes of Stranton and Hart; at the latter village 89 were buried of the plague, one of them an unknown young woman who died in the street. In 1589 the plague entered Newcastle and raged severely; of 340 deaths in the whole year in St John’s parish, 103 occurred in September; the total mortality of the epidemic to the 1st January, 1590, was 1727. Durham also had a visitation in 1589, plague-huts having been erected on Elvet Moor. Those were years of scarcity, the year 1586 having been one of famine-prices. The great event of the time was the defeat of the Spanish Armada off the French coast from Calais to Gravelines in the last days of July, 1588. A southerly gale sprang up, which drove the magnificent Spanish fleet past the Thames as far as the Orkneys. It was perhaps well for England that the winds parted the two fleets. The English ships, which had come to anchor in Margate Roads to guard the mouth of the Thames, were in two or three weeks utterly crippled by sickness. The disease must have been a very rapid and deadly infection. Lord Admiral Howard writes to the queen: “those that come in fresh are soonest infected; they sicken one day and die the next.” In a previous letter to Burghley he writes: “It is a most pitiful sight to see the men die in the streets of Margate. The Elizabeth Jonas has lost half her crew. Of all the men brought out by Sir Richard Townsend, he has but one left alive.” The ships were so weak that they could not venture to come through the Downs from Margate to Dover[695]. It is doubtful whether any part of this sickness and mortality was due to plague, which was not active anywhere in the south of England in that year. Want of food and want of clothes, and in the last resort the hardness and parsimony of Elizabeth, appear to have been the causes. Lord Howard begs for £1000 worth of new clothing, as the men were in great want, and Lord H. Seymour writes that “the men fell sick with cold.” Dysentery and typhus were doubtless the infections which had been bred, and became communicable to the fresh drafts of men. But in the Spanish ships, beating about on the high seas and unable to land their men or even