When we look for the evidence of this in England we shall have difficulty in finding it. Short’s own abstracts give almost no colour to it; but there are other figures from the parish registers, scattered through the county histories and statistical works, which prove that the seven ill years must have checked population. Thus at Sheffield in the ten years 1691-1700 there was the greatest excess of burials over baptisms in the whole history of the town from 1561--namely, 2856 burials to 2221 baptisms (688 marriages). At Minehead, Somerset, a parish of some 1200 people occupied in weaving, the deaths and births were as follows in four years of the decennium: Baptised. Buried. 1691 57 75 1694 34 55 1695 47 48 1697 35 65 A glimpse of spotted or pestilential fever in Bristol during the years of distress at the end of the 17th century comes from Dr Dover, a man of no academical repute, but at all events an articulate voice. Passing from an account of the spotted pestilential fever at Guayaquil, “when I took it by storm,” he goes on[67]: “About thirty-seven years since [written in 1732], this fever raged much in Bristol, so that I visited from twenty-five to thirty patients a day for a considerable time, besides their poor children taken into their workhouse, where I engaged myself, for the encouragement of so good and charitable an undertaking, to find them physick and give them advice at my own expense and trouble for the two first years. All these poor children in general had this fever, yet no more than one of them died of it of the whole number, which was near two hundred.” --an experience of typhus in children which was strictly according to rule. This had clearly been the occasion of a memorial addressed to the Mayor and Aldermen of Bristol, in 1696, praying that a capacious workhouse should be erected for children and the aged, which “will prevent children from being smothered or starved by the neglect of the parish officers and poverty of their parents, which is now a great loss to the nation[68].” The year 1698 was the climax of the seven ill years. The spring was the most backward for forty-seven years, the first wheat in the ear being seen near London on 16th June. For four months to the end of August the days were almost all rainy, except from the 18th to the 26th July. Whole fields of corn were spoilt. In Kent there was barley standing uncut on 29th September, and some lay in the swathe until December. Much of the corn in the north of England was not got in until Christmas, and in Scotland they were reaping the green empty corn in January[69]. Fevers of the seven ill years in Scotland.