Nevertheless, in the absence of other evidence, both the records of wills that were read, and wills that were registered, remain as an indication as to actual mortality, or concern about mortality. During the 1550s plague years of London, the number of wills written rose to well over twice the average.²³

Parish registers were kept after 1538, by law. Each Sunday, the parson and the churchwarden of Loughborough recorded the baptisms, births and burials of the preceding week. However, even the best-kept registers are unlikely to give a complete record of mortality.²⁴ They listed burials in the churchyard, not deaths in the parish, and there is a possibility that the extent of the mortality, particularly during an epidemic, was understated. There are numerous examples of the reluctance's of parishes to contaminate their churchyards with plague corpses, of unregistered burials of plague victims in gardens and fields, and of parochial registration ceasing at the height of the epidemic.²⁵

Therefore, the figures in the recorded tables and graphs should not be taken to imply a certainty and accuracy which the original records do not possess. Likewise, although Elizabethan plague regulations required the priest to record all the deaths from the plague by writing a p in the Register against the names^26, it may be worth considering the diagnostic skills of a priest who was probably examining the body in poor light. In 1578, government imposed stringent restrictions on attendance at funerals. These prescribed the burial of the dead only at dusk, and suggested that ministers officiating should ".. be distant from the danger of infection of the person dead, or of the company that shall bring the corpse to the grave." ²⁷ Thus, ministerial 'plague labelling' should be viewed with caution.

The last reported plague in Loughborough ended in 1648, Nichols reported²⁸ that, "From July 20, 1647, to March 25, 1648, died of the Plague, 83. No more of the plague in 1648." Widespread death in the form of the plague never returned to England once the epidemic beginning in London in 1665 had run its course. It remains a mystery exactly why the plagues ended. However, a tentative hypothesis may include the introduction of effective quarantine measures. Improvements in the environment may also have accelerated the demise of the plagues; "... on the 4th day of June 1622 there was a grievous fire in this town (Loughborough), which burnt down to the ground many houses."²⁹ Fire has remained an extremely efficient and global destroyer of disease. The destruction of wooden, rat-infested dwellings and their subsequent replacement with brick buildings, that separated people from the rats, may have also been a contributory factor. Slack proffers,³⁰ that in 1652 the London bricklayers pointed out that the substitution of brick for timber would reduce the plague.

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