Letter 2382

Thoresby requests an account of the recent discovery of a large number of Roman coins. He writes of an epidemic that shook ’15 farms […] at Boston [Lincolnshire] the inhabit being all dead’. It reached Lincoln too. The symptoms were unpleasant: ‘tickling under the Eare [and] swelling in the throat’. Thoresby thinks farms were not as affected by the disease as cities. He sends his regards to Mr Chamberlayne. Thoresby was an antiquary and topographer. He expanded his father’s Musaeum Thoresbyanum impressively, and his collection brought him into discussion with many important political and scholarly figures (P. E. Kell, “Thoresby, Ralph (1658-1725)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2006 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27334, accessed 3 June 2011]).