According to Michael J. Olum who wrote The History of the Church and Village of Spaxton, in the mid 1600s the average burial rate for Spaxton was 10 a year but in 1644 there were 40. I have found 41 myself but part of the burial registry is missing, having been torn off. Looking at these records, there is a significant leap in deaths that year. It has been suggested that Somerset lost 50 percent of its population.
Alice Drayton Greenwood in the 'History of the People of England' writes on health and aliens;
Aliens [also] were granted ready access to England, though from Elizabeth (reigned 1558-1603) to Charles I (reigned 1625-1649) Protestant refugees found it hard to procure local permission to settle. From York to Sussex, every place objected to them, nor did they generally retain their nationality through a second generation, except in London and Kent. Laud (Reverend William Laud 1573–1645) at one time wished to constrain them to join the English Church, but the French Huguenots were finally left in possession of their own Church and services. Scotsmen filtered into England throughout this century, Irishmen dared not venture under the Commonwealth. Cromwell's Council debated whether the ancient law amongst the Jews should be repelled, and though it was not, the Jews were tacitly admitted, the law, by Cromwell's order, not being enforced against them.
The Huguenots, at all events, brought both skill and capital into this country; jealousy was the cause of the local objections. More dangerous were the pauper immigrants, Irish and gypsies, who, before 1641, largely reinforced the wandering or tramp population problem. There was no connection between the different county systems, and all that the local constables could do was to move the beggars on into another parish. Sometimes inhuman callousness is revealed by the local records, mothers and babies, in especial, being practically murdered.
Health suffered, for Nemesis came in the plague, which ravaged the land so continuously as to form a permanent terror. London had suffered habitually under Elizabeth; in the two coronation years, 1603 and 1625, the outbreaks were so dreadful as in 1665, and spread almost over the entire country, nor did the plague disappear when the worst fury had spent itself. In Yorkshire, as in London, bad outbreaks are recorded in all the years 1605 to 1610 and 1622 to 1625, and in the south of England in 1641 and 1654. Evidently there was permanent infection. Typhus sometimes accompanied it, and early in the century small-pox, though as yet of a comparatively mild type, was becoming common. The North was devastated by it several times (1630-1646). Possibly the condition of many districts was insanitary, but the experience of Somerset in 1641 seems to show that the wandering beggars were a principal cause of infection, for whereas the open villages near Bridgwater were half depopulated, Taunton saved itself from an outbreak by establishing an isolation camp and forbidding strangers to come into the town.
The Somerset beggars were largely Irish, for the county complained that Bristol - the great port of the south-west for Ireland - was for ever deporting Irishmen whom the skippers (having no food for them) as often as not simply landed on the south bank of the Avon, whence they invaded Somerset, blackmailing the peasantry, till the constables could round them up and deport them to Ireland anew, at the county's expense, from Bridgwater.
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