People of every age-group, occupation and social rank in early modern England knew they trod the pilgrim's progress of life in the shadow of sickness, disability and death. As they walked through the churchyard on Sunday or listened to the preacher, adults felt all around them the massive evidence of death: tombstones commemorating their grandparents, one or both parents, brothers and sisters who had died in infancy, and not least their own children. Youngsters might grow up wearing the clothes of dead siblings, and it was not uncommon for the newest born to be given the name of an already deceased brother or sister. Christianity itself hinged upon the great mystery of death; funerals were celebrated with infinitely more pomp than marriages or baptisms, and new secular cultural forms also accorded great prominence to mortality, not least newspaper obituary columns [41; 66].

Illness and death loomed large in people's minds. This is amply confirmed by the age's sermons and works of religious comfort, and above all through examination of the fragmentary remains left by individuals in commonplace books, journals, letters and diaries [93]. Such sources are of course socially unrepresentative – they record the thoughts of a minority of exceptional, literate people in a society in which a majority were illiterate. At least before the eighteenth century, our first-hand evidence from women is scanty, and such documents give almost no insight into the minds of children. But letters and diaries do tell us much. Their writers regularly take note of deaths in the community. Illness is a constant theme – that of the diarists themselves, their family and friends.