抄録
After the Black Death of the fourteenth century, England was repeatedly attacked by plague. The Privy Council, the headquarters of the central government in the seventeenth century, bore the responsibility of dealing with plague and gave directions to local officers. The Council was concerned about infection among persons and gave orders to segregate infected patients and their family from the rest by shutting up the infected houses. And the Council was also concerned about supposed sources of infectious miasma and gave orders to clean the streets and ditches in time of sickness. The unruly base sort of people and especially Irish vagrants were supposed to transmit the disease and the Council commanded that they should be savagely punished and expelled from towns. The Council endeavoured to prevent the transmission of the disease from town to town, or county to county, by controlling human movements. Through an intensive research on the letters issued by the Privy Council to the local officers in 1630, this article tries to show how the Privy Council tackled the problem of plague infection and how it enforced its policy on the local government.
