The earliest mention of a gaol distemper is that quoted by Howard from Stowe, under date 1414, when “the gaolers of Newgate and Ludgate died, and prisoners in Newgate to the number of sixty-four.” In ‘Wood’s History of Oxford’ there is a record of a contagious fever which broke out at the assize of Cambridge in 1521. The justices, gentlemen, bailiffs, and others “resorting thither took such an infection that many of them died, and almost all that were present fell desperately sick, and narrowly escaped with their lives.” After this comes the Black Assize at Oxford in 1577, when, Holinshed says, “there arose amidst the people such a dampe that almost all were smouldered, very few escaping.... the jurors presently dying, and shortly after Sir Robert Bell, Lord Chief Baron.” To this account we may add that in ‘Baker’s Chronicle,’ which states that all present died within forty hours, the Lord Chief Baron, the sheriff, and three hundred more. The contagion spread into the city of Oxford, and thence into the neighbourhood, where there were many more deaths. Stowe has another reference to the fever about this date, and tells us that in the King’s Bench Prison, in the six years preceding the year 1579, a hundred died of a certain contagion called “the sickness of the house.” Another outbreak occurred at Exeter, 1586, on the occasion of holding the city assizes, when “a sudden and strange sickness,” which had appeared first among the prisoners in the gaol, was dispersed at their trial through the audience in court, “whereof more died than escaped,” and of those that succumbed, some were constables, some reeves, some tithing men or jurors. No wonder that Lord Bacon, in writing on the subject, should characterize “the smell of the jail the most pernicious infection, next to the plague. When prisoners have been long and close and nastily kept, whereof we have had in our time experience twice or thrice, both judges that sat upon the trial, and numbers of those that attended the business or were present, sickened upon it and died.”