open sea

Chapter 1229 The City Within the City
The Dongyang Military Hospital has gained a lot of understanding of the plague during Chen Shigong's era, such as the fact that the plague needs a parasitic host, and the disease spreads through the contact between the host and others.

Back then in Changsheng Baimahe, Chen Shigong repeated Chen Mu's words many times: People can't see the plague, let alone talk to it, so kill all its hosts, regardless of whether it is a man or a god or a disease, the knife rests on the neck Anyone in the world can understand it.

So that's what he did in Plymouth. He killed everything that could be killed while flying in the sky and running underground. Only war horses were necessities that could not be slaughtered. They were all moved to separate stables around the house, away from the central residential area of ​​the guild hall.

Only no cats.

It's not that Cao Changqing and others knew that the plague was plague, nor did they not kill cats because Emperor Wanli liked cats, and there were no cats in Plymouth.

Not only in Plymouth, but all over England, cats are hard to find.

In England, if these Protestants saw a cat, they would shave it clean, put on a mass robe so that it looked like a priest, and hang it on the gallows as a punishment. Catholic contempt.

First of all, people believe that cats have magical and evil powers. When a cat enters a bakery, the bread will stop expanding; when a fisherman sees a cat on the road when he goes out, he will not be able to catch fish today; This symbol of the devil will die.

On the other hand, it is believed that since cats have such evil powers, mutilating them will provide mystical benefits.

It has been found in medicine that sucking blood from a cat's tail after a serious fall can speed up the recovery; if you keep coughing, mix the blood from the cat's ears with wine; the most terrifying cat's brain can make people invisible.

It is an ancient ritual in architecture to seal cats in walls to protect new homes.

At the same time, because it represents evil power, cats are associated with witches. A farmer broke the legs of a farmer with a stick, as long as he can complain before the farmer, saying that I just found a cat in the barn yesterday and threw things at it. leg, no one would think the farmer was guilty.

On the contrary, the peasant woman will be raped and thrown into the river to prove whether she is a witch or not.

Every morning, Daoist Cao and his disciples would tie up the sleeves and leather gloves, trousers and wide socks of the whole body with the Ming army, and wrap the throat with a cloth towel. The first layer of clothing does not allow the excess skin to be exposed, and then wears the outer layer of clothing, which is also fastened everywhere, and this is considered to complete the protection work.

Tie it around your waist and carry poison sacs of various colors including cinnabar, realgar, and arsenic in your arms, and put the suicide note written the night before in your own room, and then walk out of the independent courtyard one by one. Hurry up, no one is urging you anyway.

All the people gathered in the open area of ​​the guild hall were about the same, and they set up the long banners of the Emperor Ming and the banners of the Dragon and Tiger Daojun. Most of the 19 people in the group carried medicine boxes and talisman boxes on their backs. The work is gathered behind the screen wall at the gate of the Muye Hall.

Burning incense and amulets, ringing the bell and beating the drums, and doing religious rituals to give yourself courage, then under the leadership of Cao Daochang, said goodbye to the merchants, captains, and sailors one by one, and walked out of the Muye Clubhouse as if facing an enemy.

They have to save people.

In this chaotic, unguarded, and ungovernable Plymouth, the town councilors stay out of the way, and the more than [-] residents don't need them to save them. They save themselves by saving others.

The shipyard near Devonport is surrounded by high wooden walls. This is the merchant shipyard that Hawkins acquired when he was the logistics officer of the Royal Navy. The spoils that I got are now stranded on the beach. The construction of the six huge silhouetted warships has stopped, but there are still people walking back and forth on the wooden wall. city.

It is not too much to say that the Muye Hall is a city within a city. England is in a period of rising from poverty to rapid prosperity, and the architectural style of the town is also chaotic.

On the streets of Plymouth, houses with stone walls, wooden sheds and thatched roofs in the Tudor era that can accommodate twenty people or more, with only one bed in the whole room, and three or four people sleeping with pigs, cattle and sheep on the bed at night are no longer Common again, although there are many such houses throughout England, most of them exist only in country farmhouses.

Gone are the days in England when it was all about being together safely and privacy was not a requirement.

Today, two-story houses with separate bedrooms have become common in Plymouth. Although customizing a separate bed is still a symbol of wealth and status, the out-of-workers in the city can afford such expenses. Along the ten-foot-wide street with a well dug, there are even two-story or even three-story mansions of the new commercial aristocrats. Those are marble mansions with twenty or more windows.

But the Muye Guild Hall of the people of the Ming Dynasty is obviously not like that. They bought a huge green space in the southeast corner of the city, and quickly transported ship after ship of blue bricks and black tiles from the sea like magic. Everyone is an outstanding building. They even forbade the guilds from selling wood to them after Plymouth discovered that they did not hire local workers to build houses, and they could quickly pull wood from the sea like magic.

All building materials were shipped from Daming Port in Ireland, where the Alan Restoration Army of Daming fought hard, and immigrants built cities and towns in the northeast, creating a group of complete building materials industries.

For the merchants of the Muye Clubhouse, it is much cheaper to ship bricks and tiles from there than to buy stones directly in Plymouth-they do not burn bricks and rarely make tiles. This is a natural choice.

The Spaniards used to use bricks and tiles, even the newly formed Netherlands, but England neither knew nor needed bricks and tiles, they had just come out of the thatched roof era, and those who had nothing to do with the maritime trade got a good income from it to buy stones Building a stone house that only nobles could live in in the past is just what you want, but people who have nothing to do with maritime trade... you build a house with your head?
The Muye Hall was not intended to accommodate too many people when it was built, so it was just a small enclosure, but it looked more like a castle to the English, so that they strongly asked the merchants of the Hall to lower the castle during the construction process. .

The next moment Cao Changqing led the team out of the Muye Clubhouse in the distance, the guards rang the small clock on the wooden wall of the Plymouth Shipyard, and the haggard Drake stepped up the wooden wall, squinting his eyes nervously looking in the direction of the clubhouse .

In the first few days, he couldn't understand how the people of Daming came out holding banners to treat the sick and save the sick. That should be the job of the priests in the city, not their business.

But God's servants couldn't bear the plague, and the monks praying with the sick died one after another. The worst thing was that yesterday they received news that two plague doctors sent from London were kidnapped by bandits on the road.

Now Plymouth can only rely on these Ming people.

(End of this chapter)