Sweating sickness--a kind of rheumatic fever--struck Oxford hard in 1517. In the following years other loathsome diseases, attributed to the noisome smells which arose from the marshy grounds around the city and the obstructed state of the Thames, manifested themselves and caused the students to fly. Frequent instances are recorded of fellows obtaining permission to leave Oxford on account of the pestilence. In 1513 most of the members of Oriel removed to a farm at Dean; in 1522 the inmates of New College fled on the outbreak of some illness, and the fellows of University College dispersed on the same account in 1525. From Magdalen, in unhealthy seasons, there were frequent migrations of a large portion of the society to Witney or to Brackley, where the hospital had been indicated by the founder as a place to which such migrations might be made. But it was in 1528 that the sweating sickness broke out in its severest form. Many persons died within a few hours of being attacked by the disease; public business was postponed, and the lecture rooms were closed. The Festival of S. John was stopped. It was decreed that all clerks who thought themselves in danger might be absent until October. It might almost have been the influenza (1894). The plague broke out in 1571, so that the University term had to be deferred. It broke out again in the following years, and culminated, in 1577, in the "Black Assizes." Rowland Jencks, a bookbinder, had been seized and sent to London for railing against the Commonwealth and the established religion. His house was searched for "bulls, libels, and suchlike things against the Queen and religion." He was returned to Oxford to be committed to prison. At the Assizes, held in the Court House at the Castle-yard, he was condemned to lose his ears. No sooner was the prisoner removed from the crowded court than, as Wood tells us, "there arose such an infectious damp or breath among the people, that many there present, to the apprehensions of most men, were then smothered and others so deeply infected that they lived not many hours after. Above 600 sickened in one night; and the day after, the infectious air being carried into the next villages, sickened there an hundred more. The number of persons that died in five weeks' space were 300 in Oxford, and 200 and odd in other places; so that the whole number that died in that time were 510 persons, of whom many bled till they expired." The description of the disease given by Wood reminds one of Thucydides' account of the plague at Athens. The outbreak was attributed by some to the Roman Catholics, who were said to have used magic to revenge themselves for the cropping of Jencks' ears, but the explanation suggested by a remark of Bacon is more probable. "The most pernicious infection next to the plague," he says, "is the smell of the Jail, when prisoners have been long and close nastily kept."