THE DIARY OF SAMUEL PEPYS M.A.  F.R.S.

CLERK OF THE ACTS AND SECRETARY TO THE ADMIRALTY

Transcribed from the shorthand manuscript in the Pepysian library
Magdalene college Cambridge by the Rev.  Mynors bright M.A.  Late fellow
and president of the college

(Unabridged)

WITH LORD BRAYBROOKE’S NOTES

EDITED WITH ADDITIONS BY

HenryB. Wheatley F.S.A.

Diaryof Samuel Pepys
1660 N.S.  Complete

January
1659-60

[The year did not legally begin in England before the 25th March until the act for altering the style fixed the 1st of January as the first day of the year, and previous to 1752 the year extended from March 25th to the following March 24th.  Thus since 1752 we have been in the habit of putting the two dates for the months of January and February and March 1 to 24—­in all years previous to 1752.  Practically, however, many persons considered the year to commence with January 1st, as it will be seen Pepys did.  The 1st of January was considered as New Year’s day long before Pepys’s time.  The fiscal year has not been altered; and the national accounts are still reckoned from old Lady Day, which falls on the 6th of April.]

Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain, but upon taking of cold.

[Pepys was successfully cut for the stone on March 26th, 1658.  See March 26th below.  Although not suffering from this cause again until the end of his life, there are frequent references in the Diary to pain whenever he caught cold.  In a letter from Pepys to his nephew Jackson, April 8th, 1700, there is a reference to the breaking out three years before his death of the wound caused by the cutting for the stone:  “It has been my calamity for much the greatest part of this time to have been kept bedrid, under an evil so rarely known as to have had it matter of universal surprise and with little less general opinion of its dangerousness; namely, that the cicatrice of a wound occasioned upon my cutting for the stone, without hearing anything of it in all this time, should after more than 40 years’ perfect cure, break out again.”  At the post-mortem examination a nest of seven stones, weighing four and a half ounces, was found in the left kidney, which was entirely ulcerated.]

I lived in Axe Yard,