Dr. Creighton has entered very fully into the history of the various plagues and the different expedients which were adopted to mitigate their severity. His valuable work is so thorough in its treatment of the subject that to a great extent I have drawn the following particulars from his luminous pages. The first plague order, of which the full text is extant, was issued in 1543. The following transcript is taken from an _An Abstract of several Orders relating to the Plague_ (British Museum. Addit. MS., No. 4376):-- '35 Hen. VIII. A precept issued to the aldermen:--That they should cause their beadles to set the sign of the cross on every house which should be afflicted with the plague, and there continue for forty days: that no person who was able to live by himself, and should be afflicted with the plague, should go abroad or into any company for one month after his sickness, and that all others who could not live without their daily labour should as much as in them lay refrain from going abroad, and should for forty days after [illegible] and continually carry a white rod in their hand, two foot long. That every person whose house had been infected should, after a visitation, carry all the straw and [illegible] in the night privately in the fields and burn; they shall also carry clothes of the infected in the fields to be cured. 'That no housekeeper should put any person diseased out of his house into the street or other place unless they provided housing for them in some other house. 'That all persons having any dogs in their house, other than hounds, spaniels or mastiffs necessary for the custody or safe keeping of their houses, should forthwith convey them out of the city, or cause them to be killed and carried out of the city and buried at the common laystal. 'That such as kept hounds, spaniels or mastiffs should not suffer them to go abroad, but closely confine them. 'That the churchwardens of every parish should employ somebody to keep out all common beggars out of churches on holydays, and cause them to remain without doors. 'That all the streets, lanes, etc., within the wards should be cleansed. 'That the aldermen should cause this precept to be read in the churches.' Dr. Creighton says that this order was a development of the measures devised by the King or his Minister before 1518, and probably in the plague of 1513. The wisps put out on the infected houses are replaced by crosses, which above are described simply as 'the sign of the cross.'[173] On 15th November 1547 it was ordered by the Mayor, recorder and aldermen (_vicecomites_) that 'everye howseholder of their severall wardes, which sithe the feast of all seyntes last past hath bein vysyted with the plage ... shall cause to be fyxed upon the uttermost post of their strete dore a certain crosse of saynt Anthonye devysed for that purpose, there to remain xl. dayes after the setting up thereof.'[174]