Catalogue description The MAYOR and JURATS of RYE to SIR FRANCIS WALSINGHAM.

--According to your Honour's letters "we took a view of the sick and diseased soldiers in Rye, and found eighty and odd persons that rested upon the town's charge eight days in most miserable sort, full of infirmities in their bodies, wonderful sick and weak, some wounded, some their toes and feet rotting off and some lame, the skin and flesh of their feet torn away with continual marching, all of them without money, without apparel to cover their nakedness, all of them full of vermin, which (no doubt) would have devoured them in very short time if we had not given them most speedy supply. Whereby we were constrained to wash their bodies in sweet waters, to take from them all their clothes and strip them into new apparel, both shirts, petticoats, jerkins, breeches and hose, made of purpose for them. Then we appointed them several houses for their diet, and keepers to watch and attend them, and also surgeons to cure their wounds and rottenness ; and by these means have saved some forty-eight of them, which will be able to do her Majesty good service, which otherwise would have perished as the other did, before we could provide the like remedy to them all, and this hath been to the town of Rye so great a burden as we are not able to bear. And that now happeneth amongst us is much to our grief (God of his mercy stay it in his good time), for the persons in whose houses they were lodged and dieted, and the women that did attend and watch them, are for the most part fallen very sick, and every day there dieth four or five of them with the infection which they had from these soldiers."

We therefore humbly pray that the burden of this great charge, performed from charity and duty to God and her Majesty, may not lie upon us, which charge, as appears by the book herewith sent, amounts to the sum of 55l. 11s. 3d., besides the continual charge of the soldiers that remain in Rye, which will be above forty shillings every day. Signed Henry Gaymer, Mayor, William Tolkyn, William Didsburye, Robert Bett, Edward Beale, Richard Ruck. Seal.