From winter, plague and pestilence, good Lord, deliver us!

The line is cast as a litany-like plea for deliverance from three recurring early modern scourges: harsh winters (often bringing hunger and exposure), and epidemic disease (“plague” and “pestilence,” terms that could overlap but also function as a rhetorical doubling). Its cadence echoes the language of communal prayer and processional supplication, suggesting a public, collective anxiety rather than a private fear. In a Nashean context, such a phrase can work both sincerely—as a cry against real catastrophe—and satirically, as a heightened, almost proverbial formula that dramatizes how people resort to ritual language when confronted with forces beyond human control.