one man was hanged for concealing a case of plague in his house. Nobody could deal in old clothes or even remove them for washing. The city was cleaned and cleaned again, the streets swept and scrubbed, all vagrants expelled on pain of branding if they ignored the order and death if they came back, because the fear of death easily justified a social cleansing. ‘Timor mortis conturbat me,’ William Dunbar was writing, with reason: ‘I am troubled by the fear of death.’ One more gallows was built, like the one that already warned the lepers what would happen if they strayed, to show that the city
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