Chapter XII

THE GREAT PLAGUE OF LONDON, AND THE LAST OF PLAGUE IN ENGLAND.

Literature of the Great Plague.

The writings called forth directly by the London Plague of 1665 were hardly more numerous or of better quality than those of 1603 and 1625. At its beginning in June, or in August, there appeared a number of tracts by enterprising practitioners, containing a few commonplace remarks on causes and the like, and advertisements of nostrums—by G. Harvey, Kemp, Garrencieres (“Plague is one of the easiest diseases in the world to cure, if” etc.), and Gadbury, an astrologer. The directions drawn up by the College of Physicians in 1636, for the preservation of the sound and recovery of the sick were re-issued, and an excellent set of “cautionary rules” by H. Brooke was published by order of the mayor. The writings which contain accounts of the Great Plague fall under two periods—the years immediately following 1665, and the years 1720 to 1723 when there was a sudden revival of interest in the subject in London owing to the great plague of Marseilles in 1720. To the latter period belongs the most famous work on the plague of 1665, Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, which embodied in a picturesque form the substance of various writings that preceded it, together with traditions known to Defoe. A brief account of those writings that preceded Defoe’s in both periods will serve at the same time to show the sources of a great part of his information.

The weekly bills of mortality issued by Parish Clerks’ Hall, which showed the number of deaths week by week in each of the one hundred and forty parishes of London, with a rough classification of the causes of death, were reprinted at the end of the year 1665 in a volume with the title London’s Dreadful Visitation[1194]. The bills thus collected in convenient form were made great use of by Defoe, and became, indeed, the backbone of his work. Next to them in importance, although it is not certain that Defoe used it, is a treatise on the medical aspects of the Great Plague, which has never had the fortune to be published. The author of it was William Boghurst, a young apothecary practising at the White Hart in St Giles’s-in-the-Fields, who advertised in the Intelligencer on July 31, 1665, at the height of the plague in his parish, that he had treated forty, fifty or sixty patients in a day, that he was prepared to undertake the treatment of cases in the City, the suburbs, or the country, and that he had a water, a lozenge, and an electuary, as well as an antidote at eightpence an ounce[1195].

After the epidemic was over he employed his spare half-hours in writing a book upon his experiences, “considering that none hath printed anything either since this plague, or that forty years since—which I something wonder at.” He professes to have taken nothing from hearsay, or from books, or from the testimonies of others; he writes in English “for general readers and sale,” and he had omitted many things “so as not to make the book too tedious and too dear to bie.” The manuscript was completed for the press, with a title-page, at the foot of which is what appears to be a publisher’s name (the surname now torn off); but it was never published, although the author lived until 1685. It is conceivable that the printed sheets, or the composed type, may have been destroyed in the fire of September, 1666, and the enterprise abandoned. The manuscript came into the possession of Sir Hans Sloane, and is now in the British Museum[1196]. It gives much fuller clinical details of the plague than any other English work, although in somewhat aphoristic form; and it may be allowed the character of originality which the author claims for it, except in some of the more systematic chapters showing the influence of Diemerbroek.

Another medical essay following the plague was that of Dr Hodges, of Watling Street, first written in English in 1666 (May 8) under the title A Letter to a Person of Quality[1197], and expanded in 1671 into a Latin treatise[1198]. Besides a few pages at the beginning, giving some general facts of the London outbreak (which Defoe used), it is mostly a systematic disquisition, although a few cases are interspersed. One other medical piece of 1666 (June 16) is known, by Dr George Thomson, of Duke’s Place near Aldgate, a Paracelsist or chemical physician; it contains the account of a dissection of a plague-body, but is mostly occupied with a polemic against the Galenists, which the author carried on for a number of years in numerous other writings[1199].

Descriptive pieces, in prose or verse, such as the plagues of 1603 and 1625 elicited, are entirely wanting for that of 1665. But there was the usual crop of religious and moral exercises to improve the occasion. These appear to have come mostly, if not exclusively, from Dissenters. “Many useful and pious treatises,” says a Dissenter in 1721, “were published upon the occasion of the last visitation, as by Mr Zach. Crofton, Mr Shaw, Mr Doolittle, and others.” But the only one that attained popularity, having gone through five editions at once, and been often reprinted, even as late as 1851, was God’s Terrible Voice in the City[1200], by the Rev. Thomas Vincent, of Christ Church, Oxford, who had been ejected from his living of St Mary Magdalen, Milk Street, and was then a leader of Dissent. Vincent preached in several parish churches (deserted by their parsons) all through the plague, and ministered constantly among the sick. His book, which moralizes also upon the great fire of 1666, will be drawn upon in the sequel.

We come next to the revival of interest in the Great Plague of London, which was occasioned by the Marseilles epidemic in the summer of 1720, an event that alarmed Western Europe as if the old recurrences of plague were about to begin afresh after a long interval. In London, in 1721, several books were published upon the Marseilles plague itself; and the years from 1720 to 1722 saw a whole crop of writings,—new essays and reprints of old ones,—upon the last London plague of 1665. Among the books reprinted were Hodges’ Loimologia, in an English translation by Quincy, his Letter to a Person of Quality, the Necessary Directions of the College of Physicians, the Orders drawn up by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City (these three in 1721 in a Collection of very Valuable and Scarce Pieces relating to the last Plague in 1665), and Vincent’s God’s Terrible Voice in the City. The new medical books on the Great Plague were by Scarborough, Hancock and Browne.

When Defoe in 1722 wrote his Journal of the Plague Year, he had these recent reprints and original books convenient to his hand. He had to go back to 1665 for the collection of the weekly bills of mortality in the plague-year (in a volume called London’s Dreadful Visitation), and he may have consulted Boghurst’s manuscript, which was probably then in the possession of Sir Hans Sloane. But it is impossible to trace all his copious narrative of the Great Plague to these sources, even if we make due allowance for his legitimate construction of incidents out of the generalities of contemporary writers. It is possible that he may have had some unknown manuscript, less technical than Boghurst’s, to draw from. At all events, he was a likely person to have had many stories of the plague in his memory. He was a child of four when the plague was in London, the son of a butcher named Foe in St Giles’s, Cripplegate, which was one of the most severely visited parishes. The most graphic parts of his Journal are those which contain such tales as he might have been told in boyhood concerning the plague in Cripplegate, the scene of them being carried round to Aldgate, opposite to the Butchers’ Row (still there) in Whitechapel High Street. He must have had some testimony from which to construct the visit to Blackwall, the view of the shipping moored all up and down the Thames, and the other particulars of the river-side population in the plague-time. The rough experiences of the three Stepney men in the country near London are in the manner of Robinson Crusoe, and needed only a few hints from Dekker’s stories, or from the writers of 1625. His account of the burials by the cart-load in plague-pits is also suggestive of Dekker. The somewhat meagre references by Hodges might have sufficed him for his frequent theme of the hardships and horrors of shut-up houses, even if he had not seen two other tracts, of 1665, on the same. The accounts of the Marseilles plague, one of the worst in history, would have kept him right in picturing that of London.

Whatever materials Defoe took from Hodges, Vincent, or the writers on other plagues, he enlarged them by his power of circumstantial construction into a narrative which must be accounted on the whole veracious. He based upon figures, whenever he could get them; he seems even to have sought among the archives of the City for accounts of monies distributed to the poor. He prints in full the orders of the Mayor and Aldermen, and professes to give the text of a formal resolution which they passed to remain at their posts throughout the crisis. His table of the number of plague-deaths in each of twenty-six towns or villages near London does not, indeed, agree with the figures in the parish registers, as the table on a later page will show; but it can hardly have been drawn up at a guess.

The best instance of Defoe’s skilful use of authentic documents is his description of how the infection invaded one part of London after another from the western suburbs to the eastern, so that its intensity was nearly over in one place before it had begun in another. That is the most interesting epidemiological fact in the whole outbreak; and Defoe has done ample justice to it. Boghurst had stated it with equal clearness and emphasis in his manuscript of 1666, which Defoe may or may not have seen[1201]; however the latter deduced it afresh, and illustrated it by numerous tables from the bills of mortality, which showed the incidence of plague upon each of the one hundred and forty parishes from week to week.

Antecedents, Beginnings and Progress of the Plague of 1665.

When the London plague of 1665 had given indications that it would grow to be one of the great outbreaks of that infection, much was made, in the retrospect, of a single death from plague which had occurred towards the end of December, 1664, in a house in or near Long Acre. Connected with that case was one of those trivial chains of evidence which are so often produced as the easy solution of a difficult problem. A bale of silks had come to the house from Holland, and that bale of silks could be traced to the Levant; therefore the seeds of the great plague of London were imported Levantine seeds. This was pretty well for a city which had a continuous record of plague-infection in its soil ever since the Black Death of 1348. But credulity could ignore facts more recent than the history for three centuries. The death in Long Acre in December was a solitary one, and was of no more import for what followed than any of the five other sporadic plague-deaths in 1664[1202]. Only one more death from plague occurred in the bills (in the middle of February), until the last week of April, 1665; even then the progress of the infection was slower for the next two months than it had been in many former seasons of moderate plague, such as the five years 1606-1610 and the eight years 1640-1647, or than it had been in the great plague-years of 1603, 1625 and 1636. An importation from abroad had been alleged as early as the great plague of 1563, namely from Havre, which was then held by an English garrison. But on that occasion the epidemic in London was gaining ground before the sickness at Havre had declared itself plague, and was of the bubonic type while the latter was still a malignant fever. The return of the whole English garrison from Havre, with the seeds of sickness among them, might well have introduced infection; but that return was not until the end of July, by which time the mortality in London had been progressing for two months. There is equally little reason for Stow’s statement that the plague of 1603 was brought to London from Ostend, or for the corresponding theory of origin for the plague of 1625. A foreign source was not thought of unless the plague became one of the greater degree. Year after year in London there were a few cases of plague, and sometimes for a succession of years the plague-deaths kept steadily at a level of from one thousand to three thousand. There are, indeed, few years from 1348 to 1666 in which the infection did not declare its presence in London. Whether the few threatening cases in the spring were to rise to a plague of the greater degree depended upon a concurrence of circumstances—upon the interval since the last great plague, upon the number of strangers crowding to the capital, and upon the kind of weather preceding. In 1665 the various determining things did chance to come together, and a plague of the first degree ensued. The one singular thing in the history is that such a concurrence never happened again, or that the conditions had so far changed (certainly not for the better), that the type of epidemic disease was no longer the bubo-plague.

According to precedent, a great plague was somewhat overdue in the year 1665. Its two great predecessors (not reckoning the smaller plague of 1636) had happened each at the beginning of a new reign—in 1603 on the accession of James I., and in 1625 on the accession of Charles I. The Restoration of 1660 was the time for the next great outburst; but that was delayed for five years. Those five years were occupied with a good deal of fever and other infective disease in London, and the fever in the beginning of 1665 was, according to Sydenham, of a marked pestilential type. It may be said to have led up to the plague; but the bubonic disease itself needed something in addition to the determining causes of spotted fever. It is generally admitted that London was unusually crowded with the poorer classes whose work is required by the luxury of the rich (Defoe says that an enumeration for the Lord Mayor had made out 100,000 ribbon-weavers in the eastern suburbs, although the number is incredible). There was also a general relaxation of morals, which may have predisposed many constitutions to receive the seeds of infection. Another element in the case was the weather.

The summer before had been remarkable for the immense number of house-flies, and of other insects and frogs. From November to the end of March the earth was held in almost continual black frost. Boghurst says the wind was westerly for seven months. No rain fell all the time except a slight sprinkling in the end of April. The dry cold continued after the frost broke, and produced, says Sydenham, an unusual number of cases of pleurisy, pneumonia and angina. Richard Baxter says of the seasons preceding the great plague, that they were “the driest winter, spring and summer that ever man alive knew, or our forefathers ever heard of; so that the grounds were burnt like the highways, the meadow ground where I lived [Acton] having but four loads of hay which before bare forty[1203].” The hay crop was “pitiful,” says Boghurst, in consequence of the long cold and drought. But the summer was made pleasant by refreshing breezes, and there was abundance of all kinds of grain, vegetables and fruit.

It was not until the beginning of June that the deaths from plague in all London, according to the bills of mortality, reached the sum of 43 in the week. But the mortality had been excessive from the beginning of the year, and it was suspected, as in the like circumstances in 1625, that the searchers had been concealing the existence of plague, or calling cases of it by other names, so as to save the infected houses from being shut up. The motive for bribery and concealment doubtless existed; it had been kept in view by the authorities from the first institution of searchers, who were solemnly sworn before the Dean of the Arches to make a true return of the cause of death. In all the great plagues, less so in 1563 and 1603 than in other years, there was reason to suppose that a large proportion of deaths put down to other causes than plague were really cases of plague. However there is no doubt that, in the early months of 1665, just as in the beginning of 1625, there was a great deal of spotted fever in London, not to mention smallpox and dysentery. The season was a sickly one, such a sickly season as often occurred in the latter part of the seventeenth century and throughout the whole of the eighteenth, when there could be no longer any question of plague. The weekly bills contain numerous deaths in the several parishes from “fever” and from “spotted fever” for months before they contain more than an occasional plague-death. There was no reason why these and other maladies should not have swelled the bills to three or four hundred in a week; in the year 1739, when London was probably not a third larger than in 1665, Strother says that fever brought the weekly bill up to near a thousand. It is remarkable, however, that Boghurst claims to have been treating cases of plague from the month of November, 1664; Hodges also says that he was called in the middle of the Christmas holidays to a young man in a fever who acquired, two days after, a plague-botch in each groin as large as a nutmeg, and recovered. Boghurst admits that “tokens,” by which he means the marks of plague other than the botch or bubo, “appeared not much till about the middle of June, and carbuncles not till the latter end of July.” He suspects that the bills of mortality did not tell the whole truth; and, as an instance of evasion, he says that there had been plague in St Giles’s, St Martin’s, St Clement’s, and St Paul’s, Covent Garden, for three or four years before (the bills of mortality give only 12, 9, and 5 deaths respectively for all London in the years 1662, 1663 and 1664), “as I have been certainly informed by the people themselves that had it in their houses in those parishes.”

But, in claiming an earlier beginning for the plague than the bills recognize, and in setting aside the diagnosis of fever as insufficient, Boghurst takes what is known, in the controversies upon the nature and affinities of plague, as the “ontological” view: that is to say, he sees in plague a fixed and uniform entity, and he sees the same in fever. The other view is the developmental, which recognizes transitions from the one type of pestilential disease into the other. The great writers of the time, Willis, Sydenham, and Morton, were none of them “ontologists.” They all taught the scale of malignity, which had simple continued fever at one end, then a severer fever with spots and “parotids,” then a fever with buboes, and at the farthest end of the scale the true plague, with its buboes, carbuncles, and tokens. Nor is it denied by competent observers, such as Boghurst himself, that an epidemic of plague declined as a whole in malignity towards the end, so that the buboes suppurated, and three out of four, or three out of five, patients recovered. If that were the case in the descent of the curve, why should there not have been something corresponding in the ascent? If certain cases of the prevailing fever in the beginning of the year developed buboes which suppurated (as in the case treated by Hodges at Christmas, 1664), should they be called plague or fever? Willis would have answered in favour of fever, until such time, at least, as the “epidemic constitution” of the season changed definitely to plague[1204]; he does in effect answer so in the particular instance of the Oxford fever of 1643, which in some cases was bubonic, whereas, in 1645, he makes no doubt that the disease prevailing in Oxford and Wallingford was true plague.

The more general discussion of this theme will be found in the concluding section of the chapter on the Black Death, where illustrations are given of typhus fever turning to bubonic fever and to plague, from recent and anomalous outbreaks of plague in Arab villages or encampments, in some Indian villages, and elsewhere. The conclusion there come to was that the type of plague, or the bubonic type, prevailed when the infection of the filthy habitations began with change of season to rise from the soil, whereas the form of sickness was typhus fever so long as the infection was primarily in the atmosphere of the dwellings.

We may admit, then, that there was some ambiguity in the naming and classifying of pestilential cases in the early months of 1665. If we follow the bills—and there is nothing else to follow—the plague-deaths in all the parishes of London for the seven weeks from April 18 to June 6 were respectively no more than 2, 0, 9, 3, 14, 17 and 43, the deaths from “fever” and “spotted fever” being much more numerous.

Having thus far determined the date of beginning, we come next to the line of advance of the plague of 1665. It was from the western and northern suburbs towards the City, the eastern suburbs, and Southwark. Boghurst, who practised in St Giles’s-in-the-Fields, says:

“The plague fell first upon the highest ground, for our parish is the highest ground about London, and the best air, and was first infected. Highgate, Hampstead and Acton also all shared in it.” From the west end of the town, Boghurst continues, “it gradually insinuated and crept down Holborn and the Strand, and then into the City, and at last to the east end of the suburbs, so that it was half a year at the west end of the city [in his experience] before the east end and Stepney was infected, which was about the middle of July. Southwark, being the south suburb, was infected almost as soon as the west end.” But the same writer farther explains that “it fell upon several places of the city and suburbs like rain—at the first at St Giles’, St Martin’s, Chancery-lane, Southwark, Houndsditch, and some places within the City, as at Proctor’s-houses.”

The slow progress from west to east has been made much of by Defoe, who used the bills of mortality to ascertain the rise of the infection in the several districts. His conclusion is the same in the main as Boghurst’s contemporary observation; only that he makes the infection of Southwark later, and with reason so far as the bills show:—

“It was now mid-July, and the plague which had chiefly raged at the other end of the town, and as I said before, in the parishes of St Giles’s, St Andrew’s, Holbourn, and towards Westminster, began now to come eastward towards the part where I lived. It was to be observed, indeed, that it did not come straight on toward us; for the City, that is to say within the walls, was indifferent healthy still; nor was it got then very much over the water into Southwark; for though there died that week 1268 of all distempers, whereof it might be supposed above 900 died of the plague [only 725 in the bill], yet there was but 28 in the whole City within the walls, and but 19 in Southwark, Lambeth included; whereas in the parishes of St Giles’ and St Martin’s in the Fields alone, there died 421.... We perceived, I say, the distemper to draw our way; viz. by the parishes of Clerkenwell, Cripplegate, Shoreditch, and Bishopsgate; which last two parishes joining to Aldgate, Whitechapel and Stepney, the infection came at length to spread its utmost rage and violence in those parts, even when it abated at the western parishes where it began. It was very strange to observe that in this particular week, from the 4th to the 13th July, when, as I have observed, there died near 400 of the plague in the two parishes of St Martin’s and St Giles’ in the Fields only, there died in the parish of Aldgate but four, in the parish of Whitechapel three, and in the parish of Stepney but one.” In the following week of July, with a total of 1761 deaths, whereof of the plague 1089, only 16 occurred on the Southwark side. Soon, however, Cripplegate had the infection at its hottest, and at the same time Clerkenwell, St Sepulchre’s parish, St Bride’s and Aldersgate. “While it was in all these parishes, the City and the parishes of the Southwark side of the water, and all Stepney, Whitechapel, Aldgate, Wapping and Ratcliff were very little touched; so that people went about their business unconcerned, carried on their trades, kept open their shops, and conversed freely with one another in all the City, the east and north-east suburbs, and in Southwark, almost as if the plague had not been among us.”

In another passage Defoe brings out the moral of its gradual advance. He had shown

“how it began at one end of the town, and proceeded gradually and slowly from one part to another; and like a dark cloud that passes over our heads, which as it thickens and overcasts the air at one end, clears up at the other end: so while the plague went on raging from west to east, as it went forwards east it abated in the west, by which means those parts of the town which were not seized, or who were left, and where it had spent its fury were, as it were, spared to help and assist the other; whereas had the distemper spread itself all over the City and suburbs at once, raging in all places alike, as it has done since in some places abroad, the whole body of the people must have been overwhelmed” etc.

That is how Defoe constructs a concrete picture from the dry statistics of the weekly bills. He has defined the stages, and pointed the moral, with a firmer hand than the reality would most likely have warranted. But no scientific writer could have apprehended more correctly the general fact of a gradual invasion from the west end of the town.

These striking facts of the gradual advance of the Great Plague of London from west to east will be found to suit that theory of the plague-virus which has been illustrated in various parts of this volume. The virus of plague is a soil-poison, or the ground is its habitat; its quiescence or activity depends upon whether or not the state of the soil favours the fermentation of the special organic matters therein, which special organic matters we here take to be the products of cadaveric decomposition. The conclusion that the poison of plague lay in the soil, and that it rose into the air in emanations or effluvia, was forced upon all those who thought much about the matter from the medieval period onwards. Thus, the apothecary Boghurst, says in his first chapter: “And therefore my opinion falls in wholly with those who make the earth the seminary and seed-plot of these venomous vapours and pestiferous effluvia, which vitiate and corrupt the air, and consequently induce the pestilence.” And again: “The plague is a most subtle, insinuating, venomous, deleterious exhalation, arising from the maturation of the ferment of the forces (?) of the earth, extracted into the air by the heat of the sun.” It is true that Boghurst, like the sixteenth-century writers abroad, such as Ambroise Parè, locates the venom in mysterious cavities and bowels of the earth, and dwells upon the agency of earthquakes in setting it free. But he comes to more ordinary causes in his enumeration of favouring things—“dunghills, excrements, dead bodies lying unburied, putrefying churchyards too full,” and again “breaking up tombs and graves where dead bodies have been long buried.” As telling against the last, however, he adds: “When the charnel-house at St Paul’s was demolished, there was a thousand cart-loads of dead men’s bones carried away to Finsbury, yet no plague followed it.”

The activity of this soil-poison depends upon processes in the soil which go on so slowly that the link of cause and effect is easily overlooked. In the last resort, they are dependent on the rise and fall of the ground-water. It was observed beyond all doubt as the law in Lower Egypt, that the plague came forth annually after the Nile had begun to fall, and that it reached its height in the months of March, April and May, when the soil was driest, or the pores of the ground occupied solely by air after having been full of water. It was observed, also, that the plague-area and the inundation-area were co-extensive. Lower Egypt is, of course, somewhat peculiar (Lower Bengal coming near to it) in these regular alternations of air alone and water alone in the pores of the ground. But other countries have the same sharp contrast occasionally, and London had the contrast very decidedly in the years 1664 and 1665. The months from November 1664 to June 1665, some of which ought to have brought snow or rain to raise the wells and springs to their highest periodic water-mark early in the year, were quite remarkable for drought: Richard Baxter says that no one remembered the like. The ground-water, instead of rising all through the winter, must have fallen lower and lower as the spring and summer advanced. The pores of the ground had been occupied with air to an unusual depth of the subsoil, and the presence of air in these circumstances had given occasion to that ferment-activity in the special organic matters of an old-inhabited soil which produced the virus of plague. The stratum of subsoil would become dry first in the more elevated parts; and as the ground-water continued to fall, the air would reach in due course an unwonted stratum in the lower situations. Defoe says that they came to water at eighteen feet in digging the Whitechapel plague-pits. The same seasonal march of a soil-infection from the higher ground to the lower has been observed in modern times in other cities, and in other diseases than plague. The drought for seven months from November to June would not, of itself, have caused a great plague. But it was an essential member of the co-operating group of things; and it probably determined of itself the season when the great plague was once more to come and take away the enormous increase of poor people.

Mortality and Incidents of the Great Plague.

The plague of 1665 was justly called the Great Plague, and is sometimes spoken of as “the plague of London,” as if it were unique. But it was not much more severe than those of 1603 and 1625 had been for the London of their generation; and there had been many plagues when London was a small capital, such as those of 1407, 1479, 1500, 1513 and 1563, which had cut off as large a proportion (one-fifth to one-sixth) of the population. The inhabitants in 1665 were not far short of half a million, nearly twice as many as in 1603, and about a third more than in 1625. The increased mortality in 1665 was somewhat more than proportionate to the increase of inhabitants, as the following table shows:—

Year Estimated population Total deaths Plague deaths Highest mortality in a week Worst week

1603 250,000 42,940 33,347 3385 25 Aug.-1 Sept.

1625 320,000 63,001 41,313 5205 11-18 Aug.

1665 460,000 97,306 68,596 8297 12-19 Sept.

Reckoned from the christenings and burials in the bills of Parish Clerks’ Hall, the population in 1605 would have been 224,275, and in 1622, 272,207. But in those years (and until after 1636) certain of the newer parishes (known as the Seven Parishes), including Stepney and Westminster, kept separate bills, of which some figures for 1603 and 1625 are given at p. 477 and p. 511. The population of the Seven Parishes appears to have been about one-ninth of the whole metropolis in 1603, and about one-seventh in 1625, while Graunt, a contemporary, makes it one-fifth in 1662. These fractions have been added in the table, so as to make 1603 and 1625 comparable with 1665. In 1603 and 1625, the highest mortality in a week does not show the deaths in those parishes (Westminster, Stepney &c.) which did not send their returns to the general bill until 1636, but their figures have been included in the totals for those years. It will be seen that the plague of 1665 fully kept pace with the increase of population. The old City within the walls had 15,207 deaths in the year from all causes. It had become crowded since the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign by its gardens and churchyards being built upon, and its mansions turned into tenement-houses for a poorer class; and yet in 1563 the mortality from plague and other causes in the City and its Liberties, with a population hardly exceeding that of the City alone in 1665, was 20,372. The enormous total of 1665 was largely made up from the populous suburbs of Cripplegate, Whitechapel, Stepney, St Martin’s in the Fields, St Giles’s in the Fields, Southwark and Westminster, which would have contributed but little to the total down to the middle third of the sixteenth century.

The following tables will show the progress of the epidemic from week to week, the weekly deaths from all causes and from plague, and the incidence upon the several parts of London. The so-called ordinary deaths are much in excess of the average, and must have included many that were really cases of plague. Part of the excess, however, was due to the great prevalence of fever and spotted fever, which made a heavy mortality in the early months before the plague began. Bowel complaint also is credited with a good many deaths. The other more important items in the bills are consumption and infantile troubles. Boghurst, however, says: “Almost all other diseases turned into the plague. For five or six months together there was hardly any other disease seen but the plague and a few casualties, whatever the Bills say; and Thucydides says the same of the plague at Athens.” As to the total of deaths in the year from all causes (97,306), Hodges thinks that it does not show the whole mortality. The largest number of burials in one week is 8297; but he thinks that 12,000 were buried in that week, and that 4000 were buried in one day and night. But there seems to be no reason to set aside the tally of the sextons to that extent; the returns were made weekly from one hundred and forty parishes, and might easily have been exact to within a few in each.

Bill of Mortality of the Plague-year 1665 in London.

Week ending Christened Buried Plague

Dec. 27 229 291 1

Jan. 3 239 349 0

10 235 394 0

17 223 415 0

24 237 474 0

31 216 409 0

Feb. 7 221 393 0

14 224 462 1

21 232 393 0

28 233 396 0

Mar. 7 236 441 0

14 236 433 0

21 221 363 0

28 238 353 0

Apr. 4 242 344 0

11 245 382 0

18 287 344 0

25 229 398 2

May 2 237 388 0

9 211 347 9

16 227 353 3

23 231 385 14

30 229 400 17

June 6 234 405 43

13 206 558 112

20 204 615 168

27 199 684 267

July 4 207 1006 470

11 197 1268 725

18 194 1761 1089

25 193 2785 1843

Aug. 1 215 3014 2010

8 178 4030 2817

15 166 5319 3880

22 171 5568 4237

29 169 7496 6102

Sept. 5 167 8252 6988

12 168 7690 6544

19 176 8297 7165

26 146 6460 5533

Oct. 3 142 5720 4929

10 141 5068 4327

17 147 3219 2665

24 104 1806 1421

31 104 1388 1031

Nov. 7 95 1787 1414

14 113 1359 1050

21 108 905 652

28 112 544 333

Dec. 5 123 428 210

12 133 442 243

19 147 525 281

9,967 97,306 68,596

Incidence on Parishes of the Plague in 1665.

Ninety-seven Parishes within the Walls.

All deaths Plague deaths

97 City parishes 15,207 9,877

(The parishes with heaviest mortalities were St Anne’s, Blackfriars; Christ Church, Newgate; St Stephen’s, Coleman St; St Martin’s, Vintry; Allhallows Barking, the Great, and in-the-Wall; St Andrew’s, Wardrobe).

Sixteen Parishes without the Walls and in the Liberties.

St Giles’s, Cripplegate 8069 4838

St Botolph’s, Aldgate 4926 4051

St Olave’s, Southwark 4793 2785

St Sepulchre’s 4509 2746

St Saviour’s, Southwark 4235 3446

St Andrew’s, Holborn 3958 3103

St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate 3464 2500

St Bride’s, Fleet Street 2111 1427

St George’s, Southwark 1613 1260

St Botolph’s, Aldersgate 997 755

St Dunstan’s in the West 958 665

St Bartholomew the Great 493 344

St Thomas’s, Southwark 475 371

Bridewell Precinct 230 179

St Bartholomew the Less 193 139

Trinity, Minories 168 123

Pesthouse 159

Twelve Out-parishes in Middlesex and Surrey.

Stepney 8598 6583

Whitechapel 4766 3855

St Giles’s in the Fields 4457 3216

St Leonard’s, Shoreditch 2669 949

St Magdalen’s, Bermondsey 1943 1362

St James’s, Clerkenwell 1863 1377

St Mary’s, Newington 1272 1004

St Katharine’s, Tower 956 601

Lambeth 798 537

Islington 696 593

Rotherhithe 304 210

Hackney 232 132

Five Parishes in the City and Liberties of Westminster.

St Martin’s in the Fields 4804 2883

St Margaret’s 4710 3742

St Clement’s Danes 1969 1319

St Paul’s, Covent Garden 408 281

St Mary’s, Savoy 303 198

Pesthouse 156

The Great Plague brought back all the familiar incidents of 1603 and 1625, and revealed no new feature. As before, all that could afford to do so made their escape at the outset. Sydenham, who fled with the rest, says that two-thirds of the population left; which may be true of the City proper, but certainly not of the populous Liberties and suburbs on both sides of the water, as Defoe points out. The poorer classes were left stranded, and bore the brunt of the calamity, as they had always done. Flight was, doubtless, the best step to take, the motive being to get “into clean air,” as cardinal Wolsey expressed it in 1515. Those that were left behind knew that they were in bad air, and knew that it mattered little whether they came into contact with the sick or not[1205]. Their employments and wages mostly ceased as the plague extended from suburb to suburb and to the City, so that with starvation on the one side and plague on the other, they held their lives cheaply and bore themselves with an unconcern which was strange to the rich. Their desperate case explains, as Defoe correctly saw, the ease with which the mayor could always get men to undertake for pay the disagreeable and risky work of day and night watchmen to the multitude of shut-up houses, of bearers of the dead, of buriers, of nurses, and distributors of the public charity. As soon as any fell in these humble ranks, others were willing to take their place; so that at no period of the epidemic was there any break-down in the work of expeditious burial or any failure in good order and decency. To carry the poor through the great crisis much money was needed; Defoe says that it was forthcoming from all parts of England and he estimates the distribution of relief at thousands of pounds weekly, although he failed to find the exact accounts, which, he thinks, had been destroyed in the fire of 1666. A thousand pounds a week, he says, was given from the king’s purse. The whole of this great system of relief was under the direction of the Lord Mayor, Sir John Lawrence, who proved himself worthy of the best traditions of his office. In the out-parishes there were Justices of the Peace who discharged the like duties.

The regular clergy for the most part left the town, but two are honourably mentioned as having stayed with the plague-stricken people, Dr Anthony Walker, of St Mary Aldermanbury, and Mr Meriton[1206].

Sometime in August Lord Arlington wrote to the bishop of London that the king was informed of many ministers and lecturers being absent from their posts during this time of contagion, and that nonconformists had thrust themselves into their pulpits to preach seditions and doctrines contrary to the Church. His majesty wishes the bishop to prevent such mischiefs to Church and State[1207]. The bishop replied, from Fulham, 19 August, that the sober clergy remain, that he had refused some that offered to supply vacancies, suspecting them to be of the factious party, though they promised to conform, that most of his officers had deserted him and gone into the country, but he could not learn that any nonconformists had invaded the pulpit[1208]. The bishop, however, was not likely to hear much within his garden walls at Fulham of what was passing at Aldgate. There can be no question that Church pulpits were occupied during the plague by ministers who had been ejected in 1662. Chief among them was Thomas Vincent, formerly minister of St Magdalen’s, Milk Street, who preached in St Botolph’s, Aldgate, Great St Helen’s, and Allhallows Staining[1209]. Vincent says that it was the opportunity of irregular practitioners both in the Church and in medicine, and he is disposed to say a good word for the latter from a fellow feeling with them. Besides Vincent, says Richard Baxter[1210], there were “some strangers that came thither since they were silenced, as Mr Chester, Mr Janeway, Mr Turner, Mr Grimes, Mr Franklin, and some others.” These all became prominent in London Nonconformity; and Baxter clearly traces their subsequent power to the opportunity that the plague gave them:

“But one great benefit the plague brought to the city, that is, it occasioned the silenced ministers more openly and laboriously to preach the Gospel to the exceeding comfort and profit of the people; in so much that to this day [1670] the freedom of preaching which this occasioned, cannot, by the daily guards of soldiers, nor by the imprisonments of multitudes be restrained. The ministers that were silenced for Nonconformity had ever since 1662 done their work privately.”

Baxter knew of none among the Nonconformist ministers remaining in London who fell victims to the plague, except “Mr Grunman, a German, a very humble, holy, able minister, but being a silenced Nonconformist, was so poor that he was not able to remove his family.” Two others of the sect, who fled, lost their lives—“Mr Cross, flying from the plague into the country died with his wife and some children as soon as he came thither, in the house of that learned worthy man, Mr Shaw, another silenced minister,” and Mr Roberts, “a godly Welsh minister, who also flying from the plague, fell sick as far off as between Shrewsbury and Oswestry and died in a little straw, but none durst entertain him.” Baxter himself found refuge in the house of the Hampdens, in Bucks[1211], leaving his family, as he says, in the midst of plague at Acton. Defoe draws from the incident of the Nonconformists in Church pulpits a somewhat sentimental moral; he sees nothing aggressive in it, but merely the levelling of differences by affliction, and a short-lived prospect of reconciliation.

The irregular practitioners of physic would appear to have been in great force, just as in former plagues, when their bills were on every post. Defoe professes to give specimens of their advertisements, which he might have adapted from actual advertisements in the news-sheets, the ‘Intelligencer’ and the ‘Newes.’ The empirics were of both sexes, and of foreign extraction as well as native.

Among the regular physicians who practised for a time, at least, in the plague were the famous Professor Glisson, Dr Nathan Paget (an intimate friend of Milton and cousin of Elizabeth Minshull whom the poet, in 1664, had married for his third wife), Dr Wharton, of St Thomas’s Hospital, a distinguished anatomist, Dr Berwick or Barwick, Dr Brooke, Dr Hodges, and Dr Conyers. The last was one of two of his order who died of the plague. Two Paracelsist or chemical physicians, Dr Dey and Dr Starkey, died of it: and Dr George Thomson says that he survived three several attacks of the buboes, the first sore lasting for four months. A considerable number of chirurgeons and apothecaries are said (by Defoe) to have fallen victims. Pepys says that at the first meeting of Gresham College (the Royal Society) since the plague, held on January 22, 1666, Dr Goddard “did fill us with talk in defence of his and his fellow physicians’ going out of town in the plague-time,” his plea being that their particular patients were out of town, and they left at liberty. But that excuse ignores the fact that the time was a great emergency, and puts the defence upon the wrong ground.

Goddard had attended Cromwell in the Irish and Scottish campaigns as physician to the army. For a short time he had been a member of the Council of State, and for several years was master of a College at Oxford. He was Gresham professor of physic, and one of the original council of the Royal Society. This eminent man of science was the inventor and proprietor of “Goddard’s drop,” the secret of which he sold to Charles II. for a large sum, said to have been £6000. Dr Martin Lister says that the king showed him the receipt, and that the drops were nothing more than the volatile spirit of raw silk rectified with oil of cinnamon, and no better than ordinary spirit of hartshorn. Another writer says that the drops contained also skull of a person hanged and dried viper. According to Sydenham, Goddard’s drops were preferable to other volatile spirits for the particular purpose, namely, the recovery of people from faintings of various kinds. Even if Dr Goddard had remained in town, he would have been a trafficker in nostrums as much as the empirics; nor is it probable, from all that we know, that he could have brought epidemiological principles to bear upon the management of the epidemic among the poor. The best teaching of the time counselled that which he himself practised, namely, flight.

Defoe says that the Lord Mayor (Sir John Lawrence), the Sheriffs (Sir George Waterman and Sir Charles Doe), the Court of Aldermen and certain of the Common Council, or their deputies, came to a resolution and published it, viz.:

“That they would not quit the City themselves, but that they would be always at hand for the preserving of good order in every place, and for the doing justice on all occasions; as also for the distributing the public charity to the poor; and, in a word, for the doing the duty and discharging the trust reposed in them by the citizens to the utmost of their power.”

The minutes are extant of numerous meetings of the Mayor and Council, with the orders made (on May 11, June 17, 19, and 27, July 12, and at short intervals thereafter)[1212]. Two of the Aldermen died of plague.

It appears to be admitted by all, that good order was kept, the dead buried expeditiously, day and night watchmen provided for an immense number of infected houses (until, as Vincent says, the infected houses became so many that there was no use shutting them up), bearers of the dead and grave-diggers engaged to fill the places of those who died, and applications heard for relief. One of the things that justly excited the admiration of Defoe was the abundant supply of all the markets, and the almost unvarying weight of the penny wheaten loaf, which is given every week at the foot of the bill of mortality. The Parish Clerks brought out their bill regularly, although Hodges says that the sextons failed at length to keep an accurate account of the number of corpses. All the dead were buried at first in coffins and with full ceremony; but when the infection became hottest in August and September, especially in the crowded East-end and in Southwark, the bodies are said to have been brought to the pits in cartloads and thrown in, sometimes without even a covering[1213]. That is alleged by the writers on the plagues of 1603 and 1625, and the same must have happened to some extent in 1665, but whether to the extent that Defoe’s graphic account implies may be doubted.

The burials took place over night until, as Vincent says, “now the nights are too short to bury the dead.” This was a reversal of the order, first issued in 1547 and probably carried out in the plague of 1603, that no burial was to take place between six in the evening and six in the morning. Even at the worst time, coffins would seem to have been got for most. Vincent says, “Now we could hardly go forth but we should meet many coffins,” and he mentions one woman whom he met with a little coffin under her arm. Evelyn enters in his diary on September 7, the worst week of the epidemic: “I went all along the City and suburbs from Kent Street to St James’s, a dismal passage and dangerous, to see so many coffins exposed in the streets now thin of people.” Defoe’s weird description of the Aldgate plague-pit at midnight, with seven or eight lanterns set on the heaps of earth round the edge, and of the constant journeys to and fro of the dead-carts, has probably made the most of the realities of the case.

A letter of Pepys to Lady Carteret, written from Woolwich on September 4, gives us a glimpse of the state of the City:

“I having stayed in the city till about 7400 died in one week, and of them above 6000 of the plague, and little noise heard day nor night but tolling of bells; till I could walk Lumber-Street and not meet twenty persons from one end to the other, and not fifty upon the Exchange; till whole families, 10 and 12 together, have been swept away; till my very physician, Dr Burnet, who undertook to secure me against any infection, having survived the month of his own being shut up, died himself of the plague; till the nights, though much lengthened, are grown too short to conceal the burials of those that died the day before, people being thereby constrained to borrow daylight for that service.” The butcheries are everywhere visited, his brewer is shut up, and his baker dead with his whole family.

On September 20, he writes in his diary:

“But Lord! what a sad time it is to all: no boats upon the river, and grass grows all up and down Whitehall Court, and nobody but poor wretches in the streets.”

Some three weeks later (October 11) Evelyn writes in his diary: “Went through the whole city, having occasion to alight out of the coach in several places about business of money, when I was environed with multitudes of poor pestiferous creatures begging alms. The shops universally shut up.” Vincent says that he would meet “many with sores and limping in the streets,” (from the suppurating buboes in the groins). Again:

“It would be endless to speak what we have seen and heard of:—some in their frenzy rising out of their beds and leaping about their rooms; others crying and roaring at their windows; some coming forth almost naked into the streets”

—the delirium being sometimes of the gentle or foolish kind, and sometimes violent. These incidents are much enlarged upon by Defoe, who makes out the cries and groans (mentioned by Dekker and others for the earlier plagues) to have been from the pain of the hard and tense buboes. Boghurst says that the treatment by actual cautery and other escharotics caused more pain than the buboes.

As a set-off to the more horrible picture given by Defoe of the inmates of a house all dying together, their bodies being found by the watchmen and taken away in the dead-cart, we may turn to Vincent’s plain account of what happened in the house where he lodged, probably in the neighbourhood of Aldgate or Bishopsgate, when he came up from Islington to minister to the sick.

“We were eight in the family—three men, three youths, an old woman and a maid; all which came to me, hearing of my stay in town, some to accompany me, others to help me [he was a celebrity in the religious world with a large following]. It was the latter end of September before any of us were touched.... But at last we were visited.... At first our maid was smitten; it began with a shivering and trembling in her flesh, and quickly seized on her spirits.... I came home and the maid was on her death-bed; and another crying out for help, being left alone in a sweating fainting-fit. It was on Monday when the maid was smitten; on Thursday she died full of tokens. On Friday one of the youths had a swelling in his groin, and on the Lord’s day died with the marks of the distemper upon him. On the same day another youth did sicken, and on the Wednesday following he died. On the Thursday night his master fell sick of the disease, and within a day or two was full of spots, but strangely recovered.... The rest were preserved.”

The two boys appear to have been conscious to the end, and to have died in the placid mood that often came on in the last hours of plague, as in other prostrating infections such as yellow fever and cholera. In those two weeks at the end of September and beginning of October the burials in all London were 6460 (of plague 5533) and 5720 (of plague 4929).

The chief preventive measure which the mayor had to give effect to was the shutting-up of infected houses. Defoe says that he carried out that odious policy considerately. The policy was a traditional one, and may or may not have had its origin in medical prescription. It was practised, as we have seen in a former chapter, early in the reign of Henry VIII., if not even before that. The doctrine underlying it was the contagiousness of plague, which was much more a doctrine of the faculty than of the people, and was most of all a doctrine of the Court. Originally the dogma of contagiousness, in all its rigour, had been made for the persons of the Tudor monarchs, and as late as 1665 it was in the atmosphere of the Court that the contagion of plague was invested with the most powerful properties. The common people of London gave no heed to it, because they saw every hour that it was a matter of indifference; the middle classes held it in a qualified way, knowing that there was less to fear from plague-bodies than from plague-infected ground; but kings took the comprehensive view of it, allowing no exceptions or scientific reservations, and the Court doctors, such as Mead in the 18th century, at length succeeded in making the high doctrine of plague-contagion to pass current. Two instances are known from extant petitions, of its rigorous application upon Court servants in 1665: one in the case of a trumpeter of the king, and the other in the case of the barber to the household. In the latter case, apparently when the Court was at Salisbury in the autumn, a stranger supposed to be visited with the sickness ran into the barber’s tent in his absence; whereon the tent and all his goods and instruments of livelihood were burnt, he himself confined, and his servants sent away, according to the orders for the preservation of the Court, “so that he lost his trade and was utterly ruined[1214].”

The more discriminating of the profession knew and taught that the seeds of plague could lurk in a bundle of clothes, or of bedding, or in other effects, or in bales of goods, and that they became the more virulent through the fermentation that goes on in these circumstances. The contagion was understood to be per fomitem and per distans; on the other hand, experience was rather against a contagion from the exhalations of the sick: the immunity of nurses was as striking as it has been in many other contagions. The people were instinctively right in their belief that they mostly caught the plague because the infection was in the air of the place; so long as they were living on a plague-stricken spot, they were exposed to the risk; and if there were any difference in safety between dwelling-houses, and the streets, markets or shops, the preference seemed to lie with the former. The traditional or official doctrine, however, was that the plague-stricken were the sources of contagion, that all who had come near them were suspect, and that the safety of the well depended upon the rigorous shutting-up of the sick and the suspected together. The experience of epidemic after epidemic might have shown that this theoretical reasoning, so attractive to the “thorough” order of mind, was worthless in practice. A great plague pursued its course until the infected houses became too many for shutting up; if many plague-years did not develop epidemics of the first degree, that was in accordance with some epidemiological law, and not because the preventive measures were one year effective and another year ineffective. However, a traditional doctrine will always survive a good deal of adverse experience; and the shutting-up of houses, which had signally failed in 1563, 1593, 1603, 1625 and 1636, was resorted to once more in 1665, and perhaps with more rigour than ever so as to give it a fair chance. Defoe has stated with great fairness the hardships of it, and he follows Hodges and Boghurst in pronouncing it a mistake and a failure. Most of the horrible incidents of the plague came from the shutting-up of houses; those which Defoe introduces in that connexion do not exceed probability. It is hard to say whether the condemnation of shutting-up, which found wide currency during and immediately after the plague of 1665, would have at length made any difference to the traditional doctrine and practice. The occasion did not arise again in London except for a few months in 1666, when the old practice seems to have been enforced. The corresponding doctrine and practice that arose in its place, was quarantine against foreign importation; that rested firstly upon the sophistical assertion of the all-powerful Mead, that plague had been an exotic to England, and secondly upon the doctrine of plague-contagion in its most comprehensive and least discriminating form. But the quarantine law dates really from the Queen Anne period, and the curious history of its rise, progress, and overthrow belongs to another part of this work.

The other general preventive measure besides the shutting-up of “visited” houses was the burning of fires in the streets, which was also a tradition from Tudor times. The mayor loyally carried out that also; until in the beginning of autumn a concurrence of things made an end of the practice. These adverse influences were first, the heavy showers of rain, which put the fires out; secondly, the differences in medical opinion whether coal-fires or wood-fires were the better, and whether fires were to be recommended at all; and thirdly the popular perception that the fires made no difference to the progress of the epidemic.

In the way of individual protection and treatment, the College of Physicians issued a tract full of directions and prescriptions, which Boghurst says were all old, being taken from De Vigo († 1520). It is not necessarily against methods of practice that they are old; but one cannot fail to observe how closely the medieval teaching about plague, cause and cure together, was followed to the last in England: for two centuries the writers on plague reproduced the chapters and paragraphs almost without change that we find in the treatise of the bishop of Aarhus, which circulated in manuscript in England in the 15th century and was first printed about 1480. The most popular preventive was something “to smell to,” not sweet but aigre. Hence the use of civet-boxes, pouncet-boxes, and pomanders, which were made to suit all purses. There were also plague-waters, one of which, “the plague-water of Matthias,” figures among the prescriptions of the College of Physicians both in a cheap and in an expensive form. The College’s prescription “to break the tumour” is as follows:

“Take a great onion, hollow it, put into it a fig, rue cut small, and a dram of Venice treacle; put it close stopt in a wet paper, and roast it in the embers; apply it hot unto the tumour; lay three or four, one after another; let one lie three hours.”

The Paracelsist or chemical physician, Thomson, gives a prescription which brings out the mystical tendencies of that otherwise meritorious sect. It relates to a method of curing plague by means of a toad.

“The great difficulty to bring this animal to a true Zenexton lies in an exquisite preparation of it, the manner whereof that great investigator of verity, Van Helmont, hath thus delivered, as he received instructions from Butler, an Irishman who (to Helmont’s knowledge) had cured some thousands of the pest in London. He gave directions that a large Bufo, taken in the afternoon in the month of June, should be hung up by the legs, nigh the fire, over a vessel of yellow wax” etc.

Tobacco, smoked or chewed, came into great vogue in 1665 as a preservative from the plague. Hearne, the antiquary, says:

“I have been told that in the last great plague at London [1665] none that kept tobacconists shops had the plague. It is certain that smoaking it was looked upon as a most excellent preservative; in so much that even children were obliged to smoak. And I remember that I heard formerly Tom Rogers, who was yeoman beadle, say that when he was that year, when the plague raged, a schoolboy at Eaton, all the boys of that school were obliged to smoak in the school every morning, and that he was never whipped so much in his life as he was one morning for not smoaking[1215].”

The best medical details of the Great Plague come from Boghurst, who claims that the observations were all his own.

With regard to its incidence he says: “About the beginning most men got it with fuddling, surfeiting, over heating themselves, and disorderly living.” Again: “Those that married in the heat of the disease (if they had not had the disease before) almost all fell into it in a week or a fortnight after it, both in the city and in the country, of which most died, especially the men.” One of Dekker’s stories of the year 1603 is an illustration of the same thing. “It usually went through a whole kindred, though living in several places; which was the cause it swept away many whole families.... In some houses ten out of twelve died, and sixteen out of twenty.” Melancholy for the loss of friends predisposed to it, while cheerfulness and courage fortified some against it. Old people that had many sores upon them, especially carbuncles, almost all died. The natural constitution, disposition, or complexion “did much to make or mar the disease.” People with hollow eyes commonly died. Those who drank brandy and strong waters grew mad, looked about them wildly, and died quickly in two days. “All that I saw that were let blood, if they had been sick two, three, four or five days or more, died the same day.” Teeming women fared miserably; they were not more subject than others: but scarce one in forty lived (this is enlarged upon by Defoe). Many people had the spotted fever and the plague both together, and many the French pox and the plague both together, and yet both sorts commonly lived (someone says that men caught the French pox of purpose[1216]). All sorts died, but more of the good than the bad, more men than women, more of dull complexion than fair. “Of all the common hackney prostitutes of Luteners-lane, Dog-yard, Cross-lane, Baldwin-gardens, Hatton-garden and other places, the common criers of oranges, oysters, fruits etc., all the impudent drunken drabbing bayles and fellows, and many others of the rouge route, there is but few missing—verifying the testimony of Diemerbroeck that the plague left the rotten bodies and took the sound[1217].” It fell not very thick upon old people till about the middle or slake of the disease, and most in the decrease and declining of the disease. Cats, dogs, cattle, poultry, etc., were free from infection.

Some died in twelve or twenty days, but most in five or six. In summer about one-half that were sick, died; but towards winter, three of four lived. None died suddenly as stricken by lightning: “I saw none die under twenty or twenty-four hours.” After one rising, or bubo, was broke and run, commonly another and another would rise in several parts of the body, so that many had the disease upon them half a year; some risings would not break under half a year, being so deep in the flesh.

This explains Dekker’s statement in 1603 that some had buboes repeatedly, and that one person had eighteen sores. Dr Thomson himself had buboes thrice. Hodges, also, knew of many cases fatal at the third seizure, the later attacks being not relapses but new infections; some even fell at the fifth or sixth time, being before well recovered. In one of the earlier London plagues, that of 1563, Jones saw a case of a woman near Temple Bar that ended fatally at the third attack, the buboes having suppurated twice, but not at the third time. Boghurst goes on:

Of evil omen was “a white, soft, sudden, puffed up tumour on the neck behind the ears, in the armpit, or in the flank;” also a “large extended hard tumour under the chin, swelling downwards upon the throat and fetching a great compass” (the brawny swelling of the submaxillary salivary glands and surrounding tissues). Tokens came out after a violent sweat, which was often induced of purpose by nurses, who said, ‘Cochineal is a fine thing to bring out the tokens.’ Nurses often killed their patients by giving them cold drinks. Many also were killed by the shutting-up of houses, by wickedness (of nurses ?), by confident and ignorant mountebanks, by over-hasty cutting and burning of buboes. Servants and poor people removed to the pest-house or to other houses in their sickness, took harm therefrom. People using corrosives, actual cauteries and many intolerable applications put their patients to more pain than the disease did.

The botches, or buboes (swollen lymph-glands in the neck, armpits or groins), were the most distinctive sign of the plague, having given to it the old name of “the botch.” Besides these, there were the “tokens” (specially limited in meaning to livid spots on the skin), carbuncles and blains. Carbuncles, says Boghurst, commonly rose upon the most substantial, gross, firm flesh, as the thighs, legs, backside, buttock; they never occurred, that he saw, on the head among the hair, or on the belly. They were not seen until the end of July, were most rife in September and October, commonly in old people, never in children.

Hodges saw one carbuncle on the thigh, the size of two handbreadths, with a large blister on it, “which being opened by the chirurgeon and scarification made where the mortification did begin, the patient expired under the operation.” But most commonly carbuncles did not exceed the breadth of three or four fingers. Boghurst continues:

“Blains are a kind of diminutive carbuncle, but are not so hard, black, and fiery; sometimes there is a little core in them. Generally they are no bigger than a two penny piece, or a groat at the biggest, with a bladder full of liquor on the top of them, which, if you open but a little, will come out whitish or of a lemon or straw colour.” “Besides a blain there is a thing you may call a blister, puffing up the skin, long like one’s finger in figure, like a blister raised with cantharides; and such usually die.” The following experience is remarkable, but it is doubtful whether Boghurst has not taken it from Diemerbroek: “Towards the latter end of a plague, many people that stayed, and others that returned, have little angry pustules and blains rising upon them, especially upon the hands, without being sick at all. But such never die, nor infect others; and I remember Diemerbroeck saith, etc.” Can this be the meaning of “smallpox” following the plague, as in the 16th century books by Alphanus, Kellwaye and others?

The tokens proper, according to Hodges, were spots on the skin “proceeding from extravasated blood.” The body of the youth dissected by Thomson was “beset with spots, black and blue,” some of which when opened “contained a coagulated matter.” The tokens, as the name implies, were made the most distinctive sign of the plague; but they were far from being so constant as the botches or buboes. Boghurst says that “tokens appeared not much until about the middle of June;” and, according to a letter of September 14, they must have been very variable even at the height of the plague: “The practitioners in physic stand amazed to meet with so many various symptoms which they find among their patients; one week the general distempers are blotches and boils, the next week as clear-skinned as may be, but death spares neither; one week full of spots and tokens, and perhaps the succeeding bill none at all[1218].”

The account of the dissection by Thomson, of a youth dead of the plague, is perhaps all the morbid anatomy that has come down to us. He found what appear to have been infarcts in the lungs; the surface was “stigmatised with several large ill-favoured marks, much tumified and distended,” from which, on section, there issued “sanious, dreggy corruption and a pale ichor destitute of any blood.” The stomach contained a black, tenacious matter, like ink. The spleen gave out on section an ichorish matter. The liver was pallid and the kidneys exsanguine. There were “obscure large marks” on the inner surface of the intestines and stomach. The peritoneal cavity contained a “virulent ichor or thin liquor, yellowish, or greenish.” There was a decoloured clot in the right ventricle, but “not one spoonful of that ruddy liquor properly called blood could be obtained in this pestilential body.” In all other cadavers that he ever dissected he had found that the right ventricle had blackish blood condensed, but this one had a pale clot “like a lamb-stone cut in twain,” which puzzled him greatly; perhaps it came, he conjectures, from a sumption of mere crude milk which an indiscreet nurse had given the boy not long before he died.

Among the symptoms of a fatal issue, Boghurst mentions the following: Hiccough, continual vomiting, sudden looseness, or two or three stools in succession, shortness of breath, stopping of urine, great inward burning and outward cold, continual great thirst, faltering in the voice, speaking in the throat and occasionally sighing, with a slight pulling-in one side of the mouth when they speak, sleeping with the eyes half-open, trembling of the lips and hands and shaking of the head, staggering in going about rooms, unwillingness to speak, hoarseness preventing speech, cramp in the legs, stiffness of one side of the neck, contraction of the jaws, the vomit running out from the side of the mouth, prolonged bleeding at the nose, the sores decreasing and turning black on a sudden.

It is to be remarked that Boghurst says very little of the gentle or the violent delirium, on which Defoe enlarges picturesquely; nor does he emphasize the extreme pain of the hard and tense buboes, which is another of Defoe’s themes. Hodges, however, says that “some of the infected run about staggering like drunken men, and fall and expire in the streets; while others lie half-dead and comatous.... Some lie vomiting as if they had drunk poison.”

The progress of the epidemic would seem to have been little influenced by the weather or by what was done, unless the shutting-up of houses had helped to intensify the virus. Boghurst says: “If very hot weather followed a shower of rain, the disease increased much;” and again: “If, in the heat of the disease the wind blew very sharp and cold, people died very quickly, many lying sick but one day.” We are told, however, by Hodges that “the whole summer was refreshed with moderate breezes,” and that “the heat was too mild to encourage corruption and fermentation.” The air itself, he says, “remained uninfected.” Rain fell from time to time in the end of summer, copious enough to put out the fires in the streets. There was at least one very hot day, near the beginning of the epidemic, the 5th of June, which Pepys says was “the hottest day that I ever felt in my life.” On September 20, however, he says that the increase of the plague could not have been expected “from the coldness of the late season.”

The plague lingered in London throughout the year 1666, causing 1998 deaths in all. In January 1666 it was still at as high a figure as 158 deaths in a week, and in the week ending September 18 it rose again to the exceptional height of 104 deaths. In the first three weeks of December, the deaths were 2, 4, and 3; and from that low level the plague never rose again in London. A few annual deaths continued to appear in the bills down to 1679, when they finally disappeared.

Plague near London in 1665.

Meanwhile various parts of England were affected with plague during and after the great epidemic, and in one or two instances a little before it. In the immediate neighbourhood of the capital all the towns and villages usually implicated by the exodus from the City had cases of plague, as the following table shows. It has been compiled from the parish registers, as extracted in Lysons’ Environs of London, Defoe’s widely discrepant figures being given for comparison in the third column.

All causes Plague Defoe’s list.

Barking 230 200

Barnes 27

Barnet and Hadley 43

Battersea 113

Beckenham 18

Brentford 103 432

Brentwood 70

Bromley 27 7

Camberwell 133

Charlton 7 3

Chertsey 18

Chiselhurst 21

Clapham 28

Croydon 141 61

Deptford 548 374 623

Ealing 286 244

Edmonton 19

Eltham 44 32 85

Enfield 176 32

Epping 26

Finchley 38

Greenwich 416 231

Hampstead 214

Heston 48 13

Hodsdon 30

Hertford 90

Hornsey 53 43 85

Islewort 195 149

Kensington 62 25

Kingston 122

Lewisham 56

Mortlake 197 170

Newington, Stoke 17

Norwood 12 2

Putney 74

Romford 90 109

St Albans 121

Stratford-Bow 139

Staines 82

Tottenham no entries 42

Twickenham 21

Uxbridge 117

Waltham Abbey 23

Walthamstow 68

Wandsworth 245

Ware 160

Watford 45

Windsor 103

Woodford 33

The most striking fact that comes out is that most of the parishes around London had actually fewer deaths from plague in 1665 than in 1603. The exceptions to this rule in 1665 are the villages on or near the Thames above London-Battersea, Wandsworth, Putney, Mortlake, Brentford, Isleworth, and Ealing, which had all a very high mortality, Barnes being almost exempt. On the lower reaches of the Thames, Barking on the Essex shore, and Deptford, Greenwich and Lewisham on the other side, had the infection in them very severely; but these three places in Kent had a still more severe visitation in 1666, along with other towns in that county.

On September 9, Evelyn wrote from his Deptford house, Sayes Court, that “near thirty houses are visited in this miserable village.” The infection got also among the ships of the navy; on August 29, on board the ‘Loyal Subject’ at Deal, Captain Fortescue and six men died suddenly, it was feared of the plague.

Plague in the Provinces in 1665-6.

The earliest accounts of plague in the provinces come from Yarmouth in November, 1664. On the 18th it is said to have been brought in a vessel from Rotterdam; three died in one house, of whom one had the plague. On November 30, the plague was spreading, if the searchers (drunken women, however) were to be credited. On February 8, 1665, there was another death from plague, and as the summer wore on the mortality increased rapidly. On June 16, thirty had died in the week, the inhabitants had fled, the town was like a country village, and the poor left behind were lamenting at once the lack of work and of charity. On August 21, the king wrote from Salisbury to the bailiffs of Yarmouth concerning the plague. In the weeks ending August 30 and September 6, there were 117 deaths (96 from plague) and 110 deaths (100 from plague), and as late as November 6, there had been 22 plague-deaths in the week. In March, 1666, the epidemic came to an end[1219]. Smaller outbreaks occurred in the autumn of 1665 and spring of 1666 at Lynn, Norwich, Ipswich and Harwich. The great epidemic at Colchester began in summer, 1665, but fell mostly in 1666, at a time when there was little plague elsewhere, so that it practically closes the history of plague in England, and will come naturally at the end of the chapter.

Most of the provincial outbreaks in 1665 were of small extent, and were probably due to introduction of the virus from London. The valley of the Tyne, which had often experienced severe plagues, had a slight epidemic, said to have originated from the colliers returned from the Thames. On July 18, there were seven houses shut up at Sunderland, one at Wearmouth and one at Durham[1220]. A paragraph in the ‘Newes,’ from Durham, October 13, says that the sickness in the north is now much assuaged. Newcastle remained almost free (although Defoe says different), two houses being shut up on January 30, 1666, and two at Gateshead. The whole north-west and west of England, which had suffered most during the last plague-period, in the Civil Wars, appears to have escaped altogether.

In the south, there was a good deal of the infection at Southampton in the summer and autumn of 1665; on July 6, “the poor will not suffer the rich to quit the town and leave them to starve[1221].” It is heard of, also, at Poole and Sherborne in Dorset (in November), at Salisbury, where the Court lay for some weeks, and at Battle[1222] in Sussex; but in none of these places to any great extent. Various places in Kent had cases in 1665—Rochester, Chatham, Sandwich, Eastry, Westwell, Deal, Dover and Canterbury[1223]; but it was only the naval stations that had more than a few cases in 1665; while all of them had it far worse in 1666. Other centres in 1665 were in Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire.

At Peterborough, Oundle and Newport Pagnell, there was a visitation of the severer kind, with flight of the richer inhabitants, and the usual arrest of work and trade. The parish register of Yardley, Hastings, records that 60 persons died of plague in that town from June 5, 1665, to January 3, 1666. There was also a sharp epidemic in Cambridge and in the country around, of which we get a glimpse in a letter of October 19, 1665, written from Clare Hall to one of the fellows of Clare[1224]:

“Alderman Mynell the brewer and one of his children died of the plague this last Monday; he hath had four children in all dead of it. Clayton, the barber in Petty Cury, and one of his children, died last Saturday of the sickness. It is newly broken out sadly by Christ’s (though they have all fled from the Colledge upon Mr Bunchly, their manciple, dying of the plague)—where Nicholson the smith, his wife and two children are dead within three days, his other children being deadly sick in the house. But it most rageth in St Clement’s parish, where seldom a day passeth without one dead of the sickness.... Poor Mr Brown, the old man that is one of the University musicians, and Mr Saunders that sings the deep bass, are shut up in Mr Saunders’ house in Green Street, whose child died last week suspected. Two houses at Barton are infected by two of Alderman Mynell’s children, that are dead there. Ditton is broke out just by the butcher, from whom we had our meat, which made us hastily remove to Grantchester. H. Glenton, the carrier, fled from this town to Shelford, where he died within two or three days, suspected.... Royston is sadly in two or three places, the last of which is just in the middle of the town. The infection, they say, was brought thither by a Cambridge man, whom they caught, and shut him up; but he hath since made his escape.”

The Epidemic of Plague at Eyam, 1665-6.

Another of the English towns visited by plague in 1665 was Derby; whether the cases were many or few, they caused great alarm, the town being forsaken, the streets grass-grown, and the market set up on a new stance, to which the farmers and traders came primed with a plug of tobacco in their mouths as a preservative. But the epidemic in Derby itself was totally eclipsed in interest by an extraordinary outbreak of plague in the small village of Eyam, at the opposite end of the county, in the North Peak, some twelve miles to the west of Sheffield. The plague of Eyam is, indeed, the most famous of all English plagues; the story of it has been told many times in prose and verse, its traditional incidents being well suited to minor poets and moral writers, and the whole action of the drama conveniently centered within a circuit of half a mile in a cup of the heathy hills[1225].

Eyam was a village of some three hundred and fifty inhabitants, standing among meadows around which the hills towered. It had no resident doctor, but it had two ministers. The one was the rector, the Rev. William Mompesson, a young man of twenty-seven, with a wife and two children, who had been settled in Eyam only a year and did not like it; the other was the former rector, the Rev. Thomas Stanley, who had been ejected for nonconformity in 1662, and had remained to carry on his ministrations as a Dissenter among such of his old flock as adhered to him. The wealthier householders resided at the western and higher end of the village, on the other side of a brook which crossed under the road; as we shall see, they escaped the infection almost if not altogether. The annual village wake had been held in August, 1665, with more than the usual concourse of people from villages near. On the 2nd or 3rd September a box arrived from London to the village tailor, who lived in a small house at the western end of the churchyard; it contained old clothes which someone in London is supposed to have bought for him cheap, and some tailors’ patterns of cloth. This box is assumed to have been opened by one George Vicars, a servant, who was certainly the first victim of plague. He found the contents to be damp and hung them up at the fire to dry. He was quickly seized with violent sickness, became delirious, developed buboes in his neck and groin, a plague-token on his breast the third day, and died in a wretched state on September 6. His body, which is said to have become soon putrid, was buried in the churchyard on the 7th. Nearly a fortnight passed before another case occurred, that of a youth supposed to have been the tailor’s son, who was buried on the 22nd September. Before the 30th four more had died, and in the course of October twenty-two more were buried of the plague. The deaths in November declined to seven, and in December they were nine. There was now snow on the ground, with hard frost, and at the beginning of January, 1666, the plague was confined to two houses. Four died in January, eight in February, six in March, nine in April, and only three in May. On June 2, another burial occurred, and then there was another pause. But in a week or more the epidemic broke out with renewed power, three having been buried on the 12th of June, three on the 15th, one on the 16th, three on the 17th, and so on until the total for June reached nineteen. The wealthier villagers at the west end had taken the alarm before and had mostly fled in the spring; those who stayed kept within their houses or at least did not cross the stream. Now that the infection was revived in the hot weather of June, the rector’s wife also proposed flight, but on her husband’s refusal, she resolved to remain with him, and to send her two children to a relative in Yorkshire. At the same time the villagers in general were instinctively moved to escape from the tainted spot; but Mompesson used his authority to prevent them, and a boundary line was drawn round the village, about half a mile in circuit and marked by various familiar objects, beyond which no one was to go. Mompesson’s motive appears to have been to prevent the spread of the infection to the country around, and his parishioners submitted passively. After the end of June the villagers would have found it difficult to escape, owing to the terror which the very name of their village caused in all the country round. Some of them quitted their cottages and took up their abode in shelters built along the side of a rocky glen within the cordon. The earl of Devonshire, then at Chatsworth, promised Mompesson that the village should not be left without supplies; and people from the villages near brought their market produce to certain stated points on the boundary, where the Eyam people came to fetch it, the money paid being dropped into water. Thus shut up in their narrow valley, the villagers perished helplessly like a stricken flock of sheep. By the end of June ceremonial burials came to an end, the church and the churchyard were closed, the dead were carried out wrapped in sheets by one of the villagers noted for his herculean strength, and laid in shallow graves in the meadows or on the hill-sides. In July the deaths mounted up to five or six on some days, and the total for the month to fifty-seven. In August the dead numbered seventy-eight, among them the rector’s wife on the 25th, after a walk with her husband through the meadows, during which she is said to have made the ominous remark that the air smelled sweet[1226]. September added twenty-four to the total, and there were now only about forty-five left alive in the place. Of these, fifteen died to the 11th October, when the mortality ceased. Some of the survivors had passed through an attack of the plague, among them the rector’s man, whose buboes suppurated. Mompesson himself, who had an issue open in his leg all the time, escaped the infection, as well as his maid-servant. A young woman of Eyam, married in the village of Corbor, two miles off, came one day to see her mother, whom she found sick of the plague; on her return home she took the sickness and died, but no one else in Corbor had it. A man was also at large in the neighbourhood suspected of plague, to whom the earl of Devonshire sent a doctor. The doctor and patient met by appointment on the opposite banks of a stream, and the diagnosis made across the water acquitted the man of plague; even in these unconventional circumstances the consultation did not end without a prescription (still extant) for a bottle of “stuff.” Seventy-six households in Eyam were infected, and out of these two hundred and fifty-nine persons were buried of the plague. During the time that the infection lasted eight more died from other causes. When the sickness had ceased Mompesson set about burning the infected articles in the empty cottages. Three years after, in 1669, he was presented to the better living of Eakring, in Notts; but on arriving to enter on his duties he was refused admission by the villagers, and had to take up his residence in a temporary hut in Rufford Park, until such time as the prejudices of his new parishioners had been overcome. He married another wife, and for thirty-nine years held the living of Eakring, where he died on March 7, 1708. Stanley, his Dissenting colleague at Eyam, died there a few years after the plague.

Several things combined to magnify the disaster at Eyam. The story of the box of clothes from London is entirely credible, and can be matched by many other instances in the history of plague and of cholera[1227]. Nothing intensifies the virus of such diseases so much as fermentation without air in the textures of clothes or linen; a whiff from the opened box or bundle suffices soon to prostrate the person who breathes it. The poison at Eyam was a powerful one from the first, and it is credible that the body of the earliest victim did become quickly putrid. The heavy mortality, with few recoveries, which followed after a fortnight’s interval, and continued all through the winter, also shows a virus raised to no ordinary potency. But, for the revival of the infection in June, 1666, we must seek other causes. Eyam was one of those basins which, on a large scale or on a small, have often been observed to keep infection in their soil. The virus must have passed into the pores of the ground after the first sixty or more burials in the churchyard down to the lull of the epidemic in winter; with the rise of the ground-water in spring, it would be comparatively inactive; but in June, when the water was again sinking in the soil and the great heat was raising emanations from the dry ground, it broke forth with an intensity which poisoned the whole air of the valley. The burials, after the end of June, without coffins and in shallow graves in the meadows or on the hill-side, were so much ferment added to a soil already permeated by it. Flight from such a place was the only safety, and the rector, with the best motives, counselled the people to remain. Mompesson’s conduct has always been held up as a pattern of heroism, as if the circumstances had been desperate like those of the Trojans when the Greeks were in their streets and houses:

No word of detraction should be spoken of anyone who does manfully what he conceives to be his duty to his neighbours; but the villagers of Eyam were sacrificed, all the same, to an idea, and to an idea which we may now say was not scientifically sound. When the impulse came upon them to flee, they might have left their tainted soil without much risk to the country around so long as they did not collect in one spot or carry with them bedding or the like susceptible articles: those who did flee from the houses at the upper end of the village are not known to have carried the infection to other places, and the young woman who brought it to Corbor gave it to no one else. But the wisdom of flight may be regarded by some as still disputable; while it will be admitted by all that Mompesson acted for the best according to his lights.

The plague in 1666 raged severely in a number of towns, while it lingered on in London. The information from Winchester is vague; it is said that the dead were carried out in carts and buried on the downs to the eastward[1228]; the epidemic was over by the 1st of December, so that the College resumed[1229]. Pepys enters in his Diary (April 4, 1667): “One at the table [the duke of Albemarle’s] told an odd passage in the late plague, that at Petersfield (I think he said), one side of the street had every house almost infected through the town, and the other not one shut up.” There may have been other such centres of plague, and equally interesting observations made on them; but it appears to be the merest chance whether anything is recorded of them at all, or whether one has the luck to come across the record.

The great centres of plague in 1666 had some connexion with the fleet, and were mostly in Kent and Essex. Deptford and Greenwich had more plague that year than the year before, the total deaths at the former having been 715 (of plague 522) and at the latter 423. Eltham and Lewisham were also visited in proportion. The other intense centre of infection in Kent was Deal. On the 26th August, seven died of the plague, and twenty in the whole week. At that date there were said to be only 16 houses which had not had plague in them. On December 9, all the houses were clear, although the crews of ships still avoided the town. Next to Deal, Sandwich, Dover, Canterbury and Maidstone had considerable outbreaks in the autumn. At Portsmouth also there was a sharp outbreak in the summer of 1666, twenty-one having died of plague in a week at the beginning of July.

In the Eastern Counties, plague revived to a considerable extent in 1666 at Norwich, Ipswich, Harwich and Woodbridge, the Yarmouth outbreak, which had been the great one in that quarter the year before, having come to an end in the spring. But it was at Colchester that the epidemic engrossed attention in 1666. Colchester had, indeed, two successive seasons of plague, or rather a continuous prevalence of it from the summer of 1665 to December, 1666. The plague at Colchester in 1665-66 was the greatest of all provincial plagues since the Black Death, unless, indeed, we credit the numbers (11,000 or 12,000) given for a plague at York in 1390. It reproduced the mortality of the Great Plague of London on a scale more than proportionate to its size, and it doubtless called forth the same class of incidents—flight of the wealthier classes, and almost total extermination of the poor. No documents remain, however, of this plague except the oaths administered to searchers and bearers of the dead (printed below) and the weekly totals of deaths from plague and from other causes[1230]. The weekly bills are, indeed, as eloquent a testimony as any detailed description could have been; and as they are the most complete of the kind for a provincial town, I have transcribed them from the manuscript record in full. The small number of deaths from ordinary causes points to the emptiness of the better quarters of the town; the total deaths in seventeen months, 5345, including 4817 plague-deaths and 528 from other causes, must have meant an enormous clearance of the poorer classes. Colchester was then a place of considerable wealth, with a thriving Dutch trade and a considerable Dutch colony. Perhaps the connexion with Holland, where plague had been rife in the years just before, may explain the origin of the outbreak; but local conditions of soil, overcrowding, and the like must be looked to for the cause of its extraordinary persistence and fatality.