29 Jan 01 - 11:50 PM
This ballad has always been in my mind but the realities of Covid-19 bring it back as a social reality as much as a historical one.

I wrote 'way up there:
Delivery Boy wouldn't want to be driving around with the grocery order. Still, if it were deliver or lose his job and in the early stages...and just maybe plague was trasmissable earlier in the incubation period through other bodily fluids than cough drops.

Although the ballad itself doesn't mention any delivery person and "sin" may just be 'sun'...
..the notion of spreading plague for financial gain is foremost in our concerns today. Little is new.

As to period lesbianism, I think I may have learned much from the TV show, "Gentleman Jack." It is set in 1832 & based (FWIW) on the diaries of Anne Lister. This tells us that such practices (according to both upper class and common folk) were shocking, shameful and to be scorned. I don't know about sinful or illegal at that time. Lister went to great effort to keep it secret but seemed to have no difficulty finding lovers, anyway.

Certainly, through all that period, homosexuality was a serious or even capital offence for men.