The following instance of a large family by one woman is gravely related by
Master Richard Verstegan, in his _Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in
Antiquities_, p. 3. edit. 1655; and which, it must be confessed, is enough
to frighten any day labourer "out of his seven senses:"--
"There died in the city of Paris in the year of our Lord 1514, a woman
named Yoland Baillie, at the age of eighty-eight years, and in the
eighth year of her widowhood, who there lieth buried in the churchyard
of St. Innocents; by whose epitaph it appeareth, that there were two
hundred, fourscore and fifteen children issued from herself, _while
herself yet lived_!"