In Avignon, the pope found it necessary to consecrate the Rhone, that bodies might be thrown into the river without delay, as the church-yards would no longer hold them;[82] so likewise, in all populous cities, extraordinary measures were adopted, in order speedily to dispose of the dead. In Vienna, where for some time 1200 inhabitants died daily,[83] the interment of corpses in the church-yards and within the churches, was forthwith prohibited; and the dead were then arranged in layers, by thousands, in six large pits outside the city,[84] as had already been done in Cairo and Paris. Yet, still many were secretly buried; for at all times, the people are attached to the consecrated cemeteries of their dead, and will not renounce the customary mode of interment. [82] _Torfaeus._ Loc. cit. [83] According to another account, 960. Chronic. Salisburg, in _Pez._ Loc. cit. T. I. p. 412. [84] According to an anonymous Chronicler, each of these pits is said to have contained 40,000; this, however, we are to understand as only in round numbers. Anonym. Leobiens, in Pez. p. 970. According to this writer, above seventy persons died in some houses, and many were entirely deserted, and at St. Stephen’s alone, fifty-four ecclesiastics were cut off. In many places, it was rumoured that plague patients were buried alive,[85] as may sometimes happen through senseless alarm and indecent haste; and thus the horror of the distressed people was every where increased. In Erfurt, after the church-yards were filled, 12,000 corpses were thrown into eleven great pits; and the like might, more or less exactly, be stated with respect to all the larger cities.[86] Funeral ceremonies, the last consolation of the survivors, were every where impracticable. [85] _Auger. de Biterris_ in _Muratori_. Vol. III. P. II. p. 556. In _Gobelin Person_, the same is said of Paderborn, in _Henr. Meibom._ Rer. Germanic. Script. T. I. p. 286. Helmstadt: 1688. fol. [86] _Spangenberg._ Loc. cit. chap. 287, fol. 336–7.