It was about the beginning of September,
1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard
in ordinary discourse that the plague was returned
again in Holland; for it had been very violent there,
and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the
year 1663, whither, they say, it was brought, some
said from Italy, others from the Levant, among some
goods which were brought home by their Turkey fleet;
others said it was brought from Candia; others from
Cyprus. It mattered not from whence it came;
but all agreed it was come into Holland again.
We had no such thing as printed newspapers
in those days to spread rumours and reports of things,
and to improve them by the invention of men, as I
have lived to see practised since. But such things
as these were gathered from the letters of merchants
and others who corresponded abroad, and from them
was handed about by word of mouth only; so that things
did not spread instantly over the whole nation, as
they do now. But it seems that the Government
had a true account of it, and several councils were
held about ways to prevent its coming over; but all
was kept very private. Hence it was that this
rumour died off again, and people began to forget
it as a thing we were very little concerned in, and
that we hoped was not true; till the latter end of
November or the beginning of December 1664 when two
men, said to be Frenchmen, died of the plague in Long
Acre, or rather at the upper end of Drury Lane.
The family they were in endeavoured to conceal it
as much as possible, but as it had gotten some vent
in the discourse of the neighbourhood, the Secretaries
of State got knowledge of it; and concerning themselves
to inquire about it, in order to be certain of the
truth, two physicians and a surgeon were ordered to
go to the house and make inspection. This they
did; and finding evident tokens of the sickness upon
both the bodies that were dead, they gave their opinions
publicly that they died of the plague. Whereupon
it was given in to the parish clerk, and he also returned
them to the Hall; and it was printed in the weekly
bill of mortality in the usual manner, thus
Plague, 2. Parishes
infected, 1.
The people showed a great concern
at this, and began to be alarmed all over the town,
and the more, because in the last week in December
1664 another man died in the same house, and of the
same distemper. And then we were easy again for
about six weeks, when none having died with any marks
of infection, it was said the distemper was gone; but
after that, I think it was about the 12th of February,
another died in another house, but in the same parish
and in the same manner.
This turned the people’s eyes
pretty much towards that end of the town, and the
weekly bills showing an increase of burials in St Giles’s
parish more than usual, it began to be suspected that
the plague was among the people at that end of the
town, and that many had died of it, though they had
taken care to keep it as much from the knowledge of
the public as possible. This possessed the heads
of the people very much, and few cared to go through
Drury Lane, or the other streets suspected, unless
they had extraordinary business that obliged them to
it
This increase of the bills stood thus:
the usual number of burials in a week, in the parishes
of St Giles-in-the-Fields and St Andrew’s, Holborn,
were from twelve to seventeen or nineteen each, few
more or less; but from the time that the plague first
began in St Giles’s parish, it was observed
that the ordinary burials increased in number considerably.
For example:
From December 27 to January 3 { St Giles’s 16
" { St Andrew’s 17
" January 3 " " 10 { St Giles’s 12
" { St Andrew’s 25
" January 10 " " 17 { St Giles’s 18
" { St Andrew’s 28
" January 17 " " 24 { St Giles’s 23
" { St Andrew’s 16
" January 24 " " 31 { St Giles’s 24
" { St Andrew’s 15
" January 30 " February 7 { St Giles’s 21
" { St Andrew’s 23
" February 7 " " 14 { St Giles’s 24Whereof one of the plague.
The like increase of the bills was
observed in the parishes of St Bride’s, adjoining
on one side of Holborn parish, and in the parish of
St James, Clerkenwell, adjoining on the other side
of Holborn; in both which parishes the usual numbers
that died weekly were from four to six or eight, whereas
at that time they were increased as follows:
From December 20 to December 27 { St Bride’s 0
" { St James’s 8
" December 27 to January 3 { St Bride’s 6
" { St James’s 9
" January 3 " " 10 { St Bride’s 11
" { St James’s 7
" January 10 " " 17 { St Bride’s 12
" { St James’s 9
" January 17 " " 24 { St Bride’s 9
" { St James’s 15
" January 24 " " 31 { St Bride’s 8
" { St James’s 12
" January 31 " February 7 { St Bride’s 13
" { St James’s 5
" February 7 " " 14 { St Bride’s 12
" { St James’s 6Besides this, it was observed with
great uneasiness by the people that the weekly bills
in general increased very much during these weeks,
although it was at a time of the year when usually
the bills are very moderate.
The usual number of burials within
the bills of mortality for a week was from about 240
or thereabouts to 300. The last was esteemed a
pretty high bill; but after this we found the bills
successively increasing as follows:
Buried. Increased.
December the 20th to the 27th 291 ...
" " 27th " 3rd January 349 58
January the 3rd " 10th " 394 45
" " 10th " 17th " 415 21
" " 17th " 24th " 474 59
This last bill was really frightful,
being a higher number than had been known to have
been buried in one week since the preceding visitation
of 1656.
However, all this went off again,
and the weather proving cold, and the frost, which
began in December, still continuing very severe even
till near the end of February, attended with sharp
though moderate winds, the bills decreased again,
and the city grew healthy, and everybody began to
look upon the danger as good as over; only that still
the burials in St Giles’s continued high.
From the beginning of April especially they stood
at twenty-five each week, till the week from the 18th
to the 25th, when there was buried in St Giles’s
parish thirty, whereof two of the plague and eight
of the spotted-fever, which was looked upon as the
same thing; likewise the number that died of the spotted-fever
in the whole increased, being eight the week before,
and twelve the week above-named.
This alarmed us all again, and terrible
apprehensions were among the people, especially the
weather being now changed and growing warm, and the
summer being at hand. However, the next week there
seemed to be some hopes again; the bills were low,
the number of the dead in all was but 388, there was
none of the plague, and but four of the spotted-fever.
But the following week it returned
again, and the distemper was spread into two or three
other parishes, viz., St Andrew’s, Holborn;
St Clement Danes; and, to the great affliction of
the city, one died within the walls, in the parish
of St Mary Woolchurch, that is to say, in Bearbinder
Lane, near Stocks Market; in all there were nine of
the plague and six of the spotted-fever. It was,
however, upon inquiry found that this Frenchman who
died in Bearbinder Lane was one who, having lived
in Long Acre, near the infected houses, had removed
for fear of the distemper, not knowing that he was
already infected.
This was the beginning of May, yet
the weather was temperate, variable, and cool enough,
and people had still some hopes. That which encouraged
them was that the city was healthy: the whole
ninety-seven parishes buried but fifty-four, and we
began to hope that, as it was chiefly among the people
at that end of the town, it might go no farther; and
the rather, because the next week, which was from the
9th of May to the 16th, there died but three, of which
not one within the whole city or liberties; and St
Andrew’s buried but fifteen, which was very low.
’Tis true St Giles’s buried two-and-thirty,
but still, as there was but one of the plague, people
began to be easy. The whole bill also was very
low, for the week before the bill was but 347, and
the week above mentioned but 343. We continued
in these hopes for a few days, but it was but for
a few, for the people were no more to be deceived thus;
they searched the houses and found that the plague
was really spread every way, and that many died of
it every day. So that now all our extenuations
abated, and it was no more to be concealed; nay, it
quickly appeared that the infection had spread itself
beyond all hopes of abatement. That in the parish
of St Giles it was gotten into several streets, and
several families lay all sick together; and, accordingly,
in the weekly bill for the next week the thing began
to show itself. There was indeed but fourteen
set down of the plague, but this was all knavery and
collusion, for in St Giles’s parish they buried
forty in all, whereof it was certain most of them
died of the plague, though they were set down of other
distempers; and though the number of all the burials
were not increased above thirty-two, and the whole
bill being but 385, yet there was fourteen of the
spotted-fever, as well as fourteen of the plague;
and we took it for granted upon the whole that there
were fifty died that week of the plague.
The next bill was from the 23rd of
May to the 30th, when the number of the plague was
seventeen. But the burials in St Giles’s
were fifty-three a frightful number! of
whom they set down but nine of the plague; but on
an examination more strictly by the justices of peace,
and at the Lord Mayor’s request, it was found
there were twenty more who were really dead of the
plague in that parish, but had been set down of the
spotted-fever or other distempers, besides others concealed.
But those were trifling things to
what followed immediately after; for now the weather
set in hot, and from the first week in June the infection
spread in a dreadful manner, and the bills rose high;
the articles of the fever, spotted-fever, and teeth
began to swell; for all that could conceal their distempers
did it, to prevent their neighbours shunning and refusing
to converse with them, and also to prevent authority
shutting up their houses; which, though it was not
yet practised, yet was threatened, and people were
extremely terrified at the thoughts of it.
The second week in June, the parish
of St Giles, where still the weight of the infection
lay, buried 120, whereof though the bills said but
sixty-eight of the plague, everybody said there had
been 100 at least, calculating it from the usual number
of funerals in that parish, as above.
Till this week the city continued
free, there having never any died, except that one
Frenchman whom I mentioned before, within the whole
ninety-seven parishes. Now there died four within
the city, one in Wood Street, one in Fenchurch Street,
and two in Crooked Lane. Southwark was entirely
free, having not one yet died on that side of the water.
I lived without Aldgate, about midway
between Aldgate Church and Whitechappel Bars, on the
left hand or north side of the street; and as the
distemper had not reached to that side of the city,
our neighbourhood continued very easy. But at
the other end of the town their consternation was
very great: and the richer sort of people, especially
the nobility and gentry from the west part of the city,
thronged out of town with their families and servants
in an unusual manner; and this was more particularly
seen in Whitechappel; that is to say, the Broad Street
where I lived; indeed, nothing was to be seen but
waggons and carts, with goods, women, servants, children,
&c.; coaches filled with people of the better sort
and horsemen attending them, and all hurrying away;
then empty waggons and carts appeared, and spare horses
with servants, who, it was apparent, were returning
or sent from the countries to fetch more people; besides
innumerable numbers of men on horseback, some alone,
others with servants, and, generally speaking, all
loaded with baggage and fitted out for travelling,
as anyone might perceive by their appearance.
This was a very terrible and melancholy
thing to see, and as it was a sight which I could
not but look on from morning to night (for indeed
there was nothing else of moment to be seen), it filled
me with very serious thoughts of the misery that was
coming upon the city, and the unhappy condition of
those that would be left in it.
This hurry of the people was such
for some weeks that there was no getting at the Lord
Mayor’s door without exceeding difficulty; there
were such pressing and crowding there to get passes
and certificates of health for such as travelled abroad,
for without these there was no being admitted to pass
through the towns upon the road, or to lodge in any
inn. Now, as there had none died in the city for
all this time, my Lord Mayor gave certificates of
health without any difficulty to all those who lived
in the ninety-seven parishes, and to those within the
liberties too for a while.
This hurry, I say, continued some
weeks, that is to say, all the month of May and June,
and the more because it was rumoured that an order
of the Government was to be issued out to place turnpikes
and barriers on the road to prevent people travelling,
and that the towns on the road would not suffer people
from London to pass for fear of bringing the infection
along with them, though neither of these rumours had
any foundation but in the imagination, especially
at-first.
I now began to consider seriously
with myself concerning my own case, and how I should
dispose of myself; that is to say, whether I should
resolve to stay in London or shut up my house and flee,
as many of my neighbours did. I have set this
particular down so fully, because I know not but it
may be of moment to those who come after me, if they
come to be brought to the same distress, and to the
same manner of making their choice; and therefore
I desire this account may pass with them rather for
a direction to themselves to act by than a history
of my actings, seeing it may not he of one farthing
value to them to note what became of me.
I had two important things before
me: the one was the carrying on my business and
shop, which was considerable, and in which was embarked
all my effects in the world; and the other was the
preservation of my life in so dismal a calamity as
I saw apparently was coming upon the whole city, and
which, however great it was, my fears perhaps, as well
as other people’s, represented to be much greater
than it could be.
The first consideration was of great
moment to me; my trade was a saddler, and as my dealings
were chiefly not by a shop or chance trade, but among
the merchants trading to the English colonies in America,
so my effects lay very much in the hands of such.
I was a single man, ’tis true, but I had a family
of servants whom I kept at my business; had a house,
shop, and warehouses filled with goods; and, in short,
to leave them all as things in such a case must be
left (that is to say, without any overseer or person
fit to be trusted with them), had been to hazard the
loss not only of my trade, but of my goods, and indeed
of all I had in the world.
I had an elder brother at the same
time in London, and not many years before come over
from Portugal: and advising with him, his answer
was in three words, the same that was given in another
case quite different, viz., ‘Master, save
thyself.’ In a word, he was for my retiring
into the country, as he resolved to do himself with
his family; telling me what he had, it seems, heard
abroad, that the best preparation for the plague was
to run away from it. As to my argument of losing
my trade, my goods, or debts, he quite confuted me.
He told me the same thing which I argued for my staying,
viz., that I would trust God with my safety and
health, was the strongest repulse to my pretensions
of losing my trade and my goods; ‘for’,
says he, ’is it not as reasonable that you should
trust God with the chance or risk of losing your trade,
as that you should stay in so eminent a point of danger,
and trust Him with your life?’
I could not argue that I was in any
strait as to a place where to go, having several friends
and relations in Northamptonshire, whence our family
first came from; and particularly, I had an only sister
in Lincolnshire, very willing to receive and entertain
me.
My brother, who had already sent his
wife and two children into Bedfordshire, and resolved
to follow them, pressed my going very earnestly; and
I had once resolved to comply with his desires, but
at that time could get no horse; for though it is
true all the people did not go out of the city of
London, yet I may venture to say that in a manner
all the horses did; for there was hardly a horse to
be bought or hired in the whole city for some weeks.
Once I resolved to travel on foot with one servant,
and, as many did, lie at no inn, but carry a soldier’s
tent with us, and so lie in the fields, the weather
being very warm, and no danger from taking cold.
I say, as many did, because several did so at last,
especially those who had been in the armies in the
war which had not been many years past; and I must
needs say that, speaking of second causes, had most
of the people that travelled done so, the plague had
not been carried into so many country towns and houses
as it was, to the great damage, and indeed to the ruin,
of abundance of people.
But then my servant, whom I had intended
to take down with me, deceived me; and being frighted
at the increase of the distemper, and not knowing
when I should go, he took other measures, and left
me, so I was put off for that time; and, one way or
other, I always found that to appoint to go away was
always crossed by some accident or other, so as to
disappoint and put it off again; and this brings in
a story which otherwise might be thought a needless
digression, viz., about these disappointments
being from Heaven.
I mention this story also as the best
method I can advise any person to take in such a case,
especially if he be one that makes conscience of his
duty, and would be directed what to do in it, namely,
that he should keep his eye upon the particular providences
which occur at that time, and look upon them complexly,
as they regard one another, and as all together regard
the question before him: and then, I think, he
may safely take them for intimations from Heaven of
what is his unquestioned duty to do in such a case;
I mean as to going away from or staying in the place
where we dwell, when visited with an infectious distemper.
It came very warmly into my mind one
morning, as I was musing on this particular thing,
that as nothing attended us without the direction or
permission of Divine Power, so these disappointments
must have something in them extraordinary; and I ought
to consider whether it did not evidently point out,
or intimate to me, that it was the will of Heaven I
should not go. It immediately followed in my thoughts,
that if it really was from God that I should stay,
He was able effectually to preserve me in the midst
of all the death and danger that would surround me;
and that if I attempted to secure myself by fleeing
from my habitation, and acted contrary to these intimations,
which I believe to be Divine, it was a kind of flying
from God, and that He could cause His justice to overtake
me when and where He thought fit.
These thoughts quite turned my resolutions
again, and when I came to discourse with my brother
again I told him that I inclined to stay and take
my lot in that station in which God had placed me,
and that it seemed to be made more especially my duty,
on the account of what I have said.
My brother, though a very religious
man himself, laughed at all I had suggested about
its being an intimation from Heaven, and told me several
stories of such foolhardy people, as he called them,
as I was; that I ought indeed to submit to it as a
work of Heaven if I had been any way disabled by distempers
or diseases, and that then not being able to go, I
ought to acquiesce in the direction of Him, who, having
been my Maker, had an undisputed right of sovereignty
in disposing of me, and that then there had been no
difficulty to determine which was the call of His
providence and which was not; but that I should take
it as an intimation from Heaven that I should not
go out of town, only because I could not hire a horse
to go, or my fellow was run away that was to attend
me, was ridiculous, since at the time I had my health
and limbs, and other servants, and might with ease
travel a day or two on foot, and having a good certificate
of being in perfect health, might either hire a horse
or take post on the road, as I thought fit.
Then he proceeded to tell me of the
mischievous consequences which attended the presumption
of the Turks and Mahometans in Asia and in other places
where he had been (for my brother, being a merchant,
was a few years before, as I have already observed,
returned from abroad, coming last from Lisbon), and
how, presuming upon their professed predestinating
notions, and of every man’s end being predetermined
and unalterably beforehand decreed, they would go
unconcerned into infected places and converse with
infected persons, by which means they died at the
rate of ten or fifteen thousand a week, whereas the
Europeans or Christian merchants, who kept themselves
retired and reserved, generally escaped the contagion.
Upon these arguments my brother changed
my resolutions again, and I began to resolve to go,
and accordingly made all things ready; for, in short,
the infection increased round me, and the bills were
risen to almost seven hundred a week, and my brother
told me he would venture to stay no longer. I
desired him to let me consider of it but till the next
day, and I would resolve: and as I had already
prepared everything as well as I could as to my
business, and whom to entrust my affairs with, I had
little to do but to resolve.
I went home that evening greatly oppressed
in my mind, irresolute, and not knowing what to do.
I had set the evening wholly apart to consider
seriously about it, and was all alone; for already
people had, as it were by a general consent, taken
up the custom of not going out of doors after sunset;
the reasons I shall have occasion to say more of by-and-by.
In the retirement of this evening
I endeavoured to resolve, first, what was my duty
to do, and I stated the arguments with which my brother
had pressed me to go into the country, and I set,
against them the strong impressions which I had on
my mind for staying; the visible call I seemed to
have from the particular circumstance of my calling,
and the care due from me for the preservation of my
effects, which were, as I might say, my estate; also
the intimations which I thought I had from Heaven,
that to me signified a kind of direction to venture;
and it occurred to me that if I had what I might call
a direction to stay, I ought to suppose it contained
a promise of being preserved if I obeyed.
This lay close to me, and my mind
seemed more and more encouraged to stay than ever,
and supported with a secret satisfaction that I should
be kept. Add to this, that, turning over the Bible
which lay before me, and while my thoughts were more
than ordinarily serious upon the question, I cried
out, ‘Well, I know not what to do; Lord, direct
me I’ and the like; and at that juncture I happened
to stop turning over the book at the gist Psalm, and
casting my eye on the second verse, I read on to the
seventh verse exclusive, and after that included the
tenth, as follows: ’I will say of the Lord,
He is my refuge and my fortress: my God, in Him
will I trust. Surely He shall deliver thee from
the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence.
He shall cover thee with His feathers, and under His
wings shalt thou trust: His truth shall be thy
shield and buckler. Thou shalt not be afraid for
the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth
by day; nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness;
nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.
A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand
at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.
Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the
reward of the wicked. Because thou hast made the
Lord, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy
habitation; there shall no evil befall thee, neither
shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling,’ &C.
I scarce need tell the reader that
from that moment I resolved that I would stay in the
town, and casting myself entirely upon the goodness
and protection of the Almighty, would not seek any
other shelter whatever; and that, as my times were
in His hands, He was as able to keep me in a time
of the infection as in a time of health; and if He
did not think fit to deliver me, still I was in His
hands, and it was meet He should do with me as should
seem good to Him.
With this resolution I went to bed;
and I was further confirmed in it the next day by
the woman being taken ill with whom I had intended
to entrust my house and all my affairs. But I
had a further obligation laid on me on the same side,
for the next day I found myself very much out of order
also, so that if I would have gone away, I could not,
and I continued ill three or four days, and this entirely
determined my stay; so I took my leave of my brother,
who went away to Dorking, in Surrey, and afterwards
fetched a round farther into Buckinghamshire or Bedfordshire,
to a retreat he had found out there for his family.
It was a very ill time to be sick
in, for if any one complained, it was immediately
said he had the plague; and though I had indeed no
symptom of that distemper, yet being very ill, both
in my head and in my stomach, I was not without apprehension
that I really was infected; but in about three days
I grew better; the third night I rested well, sweated
a little, and was much refreshed. The apprehensions
of its being the infection went also quite away with
my illness, and I went about my business as usual.
These things, however, put off all
my thoughts of going into the country; and my brother
also being gone, I had no more debate either with
him or with myself on that subject.
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,
St Andrew’s, Holborn, and towards Westminster,
began to now come eastward towards the part where
I lived. It was to be observed, indeed, that
it did not come straight on towards us; for the city,
that is to say, within the walls, was indifferently
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 600 died of the plague, yet there was but twenty-eight
in the whole city, within the walls, and but nineteen
in Southwark, Lambeth parish included; whereas in
the parishes of St Giles and St Martin-in-the-Fields
alone there died 421.
But we perceived the infection kept
chiefly in the out-parishes, which being very populous,
and fuller also of poor, the distemper found more
to prey upon than in the city, as I shall observe afterwards.
We perceived, I say, the distemper to draw our way,
viz., by the parishes of Clarkenwell, Cripplegate,
Shoreditch, and Bishopsgate; which last two parishes
joining to Aldgate, Whitechappel, 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 11th
of July, when, as I have observed, there died near
400 of the plague in the two parishes of St Martin
and St Giles-in-the-Fields only, there died in the
parish of Aldgate but four, in the parish of Whitechappel
three, in the parish of Stepney but one.
Likewise in the next week, from the
11th of July to the 18th, when the week’s bill
was 1761, yet there died no more of the plague, on
the whole Southwark side of the water, than sixteen.
But this face of things soon changed, and it began
to thicken in Cripplegate parish especially, and in
Clarkenwell; so that by the second week in August,
Cripplegate parish alone buried 886, and Clarkenwell
155. Of the first, 850 might well be reckoned
to die of the plague; and of the last, the bill itself
said 145 were of the plague.
During the month of July, and while,
as I have observed, our part of the town seemed to
be spared in comparison of the west part, I went ordinarily
about the streets, as my business required, and particularly
went generally once in a day, or in two days, into
the city, to my brother’s house, which he had
given me charge of, and to see if it was safe; and
having the key in my pocket, I used to go into the
house, and over most of the rooms, to see that all
was well; for though it be something wonderful to
tell, that any should have hearts so hardened in the
midst of such a calamity as to rob and steal, yet certain
it is that all sorts of villainies, and even levities
and debaucheries, were then practised in the town
as openly as ever I will not say quite as
frequently, because the numbers of people were many
ways lessened.
But the city itself began now to be
visited too, I mean within the walls; but the number
of people there were indeed extremely lessened by
so great a multitude having been gone into the country;
and even all this month of July they continued to
flee, though not in such multitudes as formerly.
In August, indeed, they fled in such a manner that
I began to think there would be really none but magistrates
and servants left in the city.
As they fled now out of the city,
so I should observe that the Court removed early,
viz., in the month of June, and went to Oxford,
where it pleased God to preserve them; and the distemper
did not, as I heard of, so much as touch them, for
which I cannot say that I ever saw they showed any
great token of thankfulness, and hardly anything of
reformation, though they did not want being told that
their crying vices might without breach of charity
be said to have gone far in bringing that terrible
judgement upon the whole nation.
The face of London was now
indeed strangely altered: I mean the whole mass
of buildings, city, liberties, suburbs, Westminster,
Southwark, and altogether; for as to the particular
part called the city, or within the walls, that was
not yet much infected. But in the whole the face
of things, I say, was much altered; sorrow and sadness
sat upon every face; and though some parts were not
yet overwhelmed, yet all looked deeply concerned;
and, as we saw it apparently coming on, so every one
looked on himself and his family as in the utmost
danger. Were it possible to represent those times
exactly to those that did not see them, and give the
reader due ideas of the horror ’that everywhere
presented itself, it must make just impressions upon
their minds and fill them with surprise. London
might well be said to be all in tears; the mourners
did not go about the streets indeed, for nobody put
on black or made a formal dress of mourning for their
nearest friends; but the voice of mourners was truly
heard in the streets. The shrieks of women and
children at the windows and doors of their houses,
where their dearest relations were perhaps dying,
or just dead, were so frequent to be heard as we passed
the streets, that it was enough to pierce the stoutest
heart in the world to hear them. Tears and lamentations
were seen almost in every house, especially in the
first part of the visitation; for towards the latter
end men’s hearts were hardened, and death was
so always before their eyes, that they did not so
much concern themselves for the loss of their friends,
expecting that themselves should be summoned the next
hour.
Business led me out sometimes to the
other end of the town, even when the sickness was
chiefly there; and as the thing was new to me, as
well as to everybody else, it was a most surprising
thing to see those streets which were usually so thronged
now grown desolate, and so few people to be seen in
them, that if I had been a stranger and at a loss
for my way, I might sometimes have gone the length
of a whole street (I mean of the by-streets), and
seen nobody to direct me except watchmen set at the
doors of such houses as were shut up, of which I shall
speak presently.
One day, being at that part of the
town on some special business, curiosity led me to
observe things more than usually, and indeed I walked
a great way where I had no business. I went up
Holborn, and there the street was full of people,
but they walked in the middle of the great street,
neither on one side or other, because, as I suppose,
they would not mingle with anybody that came out of
houses, or meet with smells and scent from houses
that might be infected.
The Inns of Court were all shut up;
nor were very many of the lawyers in the Temple, or
Lincoln’s Inn, or Gray’s Inn, to be seen
there. Everybody was at peace; there was no occasion
for lawyers; besides, it being in the time of the
vacation too, they were generally gone into the country.
Whole rows of houses in some places were shut close
up, the inhabitants all fled, and only a watchman
or two left.
When I speak of rows of houses being
shut up, I do not mean shut up by the magistrates,
but that great numbers of persons followed the Court,
by the necessity of their employments and other dependences;
and as others retired, really frighted with the distemper,
it was a mere desolating of some of the streets.
But the fright was not yet near so great in the city,
abstractly so called, and particularly because, though
they were at first in a most inexpressible consternation,
yet as I have observed that the distemper intermitted
often at first, so they were, as it were, alarmed
and unalarmed again, and this several times, till
it began to be familiar to them; and that even when
it appeared violent, yet seeing it did not presently
spread into the city, or the east and south parts,
the people began to take courage, and to be, as I
may say, a little hardened. It is true a vast
many people fled, as I have observed, yet they were
chiefly from the west end of the town, and from that
we call the heart of the city: that is to say,
among the wealthiest of the people, and such people
as were unencumbered with trades and business.
But of the rest, the generality stayed, and seemed
to abide the worst; so that in the place we calf the
Liberties, and in the suburbs, in Southwark, and in
the east part, such as Wapping, Ratcliff, Stepney,
Rotherhithe, and the like, the people generally stayed,
except here and there a few wealthy families, who,
as above, did not depend upon their business.
It must not be forgot here that the
city and suburbs were prodigiously full of people
at the time of this visitation, I mean at the time
that it began; for though I have lived to see a further
increase, and mighty throngs of people settling in
London more than ever, yet we had always a notion
that the numbers of people which, the wars being over,
the armies disbanded, and the royal family and the
monarchy being restored, had flocked to London to
settle in business, or to depend upon and attend the
Court for rewards of services, preferments, and the
like, was such that the town was computed to have
in it above a hundred thousand people more than ever
it held before; nay, some took upon them to say it
had twice as many, because all the ruined families
of the royal party flocked hither. All the old
soldiers set up trades here, and abundance of families
settled here. Again, the Court brought with them
a great flux of pride, and new fashions. All
people were grown gay and luxurious, and the joy of
the Restoration had brought a vast many families to
London.
I often thought that as Jerusalem
was besieged by the Romans when the Jews were assembled
together to celebrate the Passover by which
means an incredible number of people were surprised
there who would otherwise have been in other countries so
the plague entered London when an incredible increase
of people had happened occasionally, by the particular
circumstances above-named. As this conflux of
the people to a youthful and gay Court made a great
trade in the city, especially in everything that belonged
to fashion and finery, so it drew by consequence a
great number of workmen, manufacturers, and the like,
being mostly poor people who depended upon their labour.
And I remember in particular that in a representation
to my Lord Mayor of the condition of the poor, it
was estimated that there were no less than an hundred
thousand riband-weavers in and about the city, the
chiefest number of whom lived then in the parishes
of Shoreditch, Stepney, Whitechappel, and Bishopsgate,
that, namely, about Spitalfields; that is to say, as
Spitalfields was then, for it was not so large as now
by one fifth part.
By this, however, the number of people
in the whole may be judged of; and, indeed, I often
wondered that, after the prodigious numbers of people
that went away at first, there was yet so great a multitude
left as it appeared there was.
But I must go back again to the beginning
of this surprising time. While the fears of the
people were young, they were increased strangely by
several odd accidents which, put altogether, it was
really a wonder the whole body of the people did not
rise as one man and abandon their dwellings, leaving
the place as a space of ground designed by Heaven for
an Akeldama, doomed to be destroyed from the face of
the earth, and that all that would be found in it
would perish with it. I shall name but a few
of these things; but sure they were so many, and so
many wizards and cunning people propagating them,
that I have often wondered there was any (women especially)
left behind.
In the first place, a blazing star
or comet appeared for several months before the plague,
as there did the year after another, a little before
the fire. The old women and the phlegmatic hypochondriac
part of the other sex, whom I could almost call old
women too, remarked (especially afterward, though
not till both those judgements were over) that those
two comets passed directly over the city, and that
so very near the houses that it was plain they imported
something peculiar to the city alone; that the comet
before the pestilence was of a faint, dull, languid
colour, and its motion very heavy, Solemn, and slow;
but that the comet before the fire was bright and
sparkling, or, as others said, flaming, and its motion
swift and furious; and that, accordingly, one foretold
a heavy judgement, slow but severe, terrible and frightful,
as was the plague; but the other foretold a stroke,
sudden, swift, and fiery as the conflagration.
Nay, so particular some people were, that as they
looked upon that comet preceding the fire, they fancied
that they not only saw it pass swiftly and fiercely,
and could perceive the motion with their eye, but
even they heard it; that it made a rushing, mighty
noise, fierce and terrible, though at a distance, and
but just perceivable.
I saw both these stars, and, I must
confess, had so much of the common notion of such
things in my head, that I was apt to look upon them
as the forerunners and warnings of God’s judgements;
and especially when, after the plague had followed
the first, I yet saw another of the like kind, I could
not but say God had not yet sufficiently scourged the
city.
But I could not at the same time carry
these things to the height that others did, knowing,
too, that natural causes are assigned by the astronomers
for such things, and that their motions and even their
revolutions are calculated, or pretended to be calculated,
so that they cannot be so perfectly called the forerunners
or foretellers, much less the procurers, of such events
as pestilence, war, fire, and the like.
But let my thoughts and the thoughts
of the philosophers be, or have been, what they will,
these things had a more than ordinary influence upon
the minds of the common people, and they had almost
universal melancholy apprehensions of some dreadful
calamity and judgement coming upon the city; and this
principally from the sight of this comet, and the
little alarm that was given in December by two people
dying at St Giles’s, as above.
The apprehensions of the people were
likewise strangely increased by the error of the times;
in which, I think, the people, from what principle
I cannot imagine, were more addicted to prophecies
and astrological conjurations, dreams, and old wives’
tales than ever they were before or since. Whether
this unhappy temper was originally raised by the follies
of some people who got money by it that
is to say, by printing predictions and prognostications I
know not; but certain it is, books frighted them terribly,
such as Lilly’s Almanack, Gadbury’s Astrological
Predictions, Poor Robin’s Almanack, and the like;
also several pretended religious books, one entitled,
Come out of her, my People, lest you be Partaker of
her Plagues; another called, Fair Warning; another,
Britain’s Remembrancer; and many such, all, or
most part of which, foretold, directly or covertly,
the ruin of the city. Nay, some were so enthusiastically
bold as to run about the streets with their oral predictions,
pretending they were sent to preach to the city; and
one in particular, who, like Jonah to Nineveh, cried
in the streets, ’Yet forty days, and London
shall be destroyed.’ I will not be positive
whether he said yet forty days or yet a few days.
Another ran about naked, except a pair of drawers
about his waist, crying day and night, like a man that
Josephus mentions, who cried, ‘Woe to Jerusalem!’
a little before the destruction of that city.
So this poor naked creature cried, ’Oh, the
great and the dreadful God!’ and said no more,
but repeated those words continually, with a voice
and countenance full of horror, a swift pace; and
nobody could ever find him to stop or rest, or take
any sustenance, at least that ever I could hear of.
I met this poor creature several times in the streets,
and would have spoken to him, but he would not enter
into speech with me or any one else, but held on his
dismal cries continually.
These things terrified the people
to the last degree, and especially when two or three
times, as I have mentioned already, they found one
or two in the bills dead of the plague at St Giles’s.
Next to these public things were the
dreams of old women, or, I should say, the interpretation
of old women upon other people’s dreams; and
these put abundance of people even out of their wits.
Some heard voices warning them to be gone, for that
there would be such a plague in London, so that the
living would not be able to bury the dead. Others
saw apparitions in the air; and I must be allowed to
say of both, I hope without breach of charity, that
they heard voices that never spake, and saw sights
that never appeared; but the imagination of the people
was really turned wayward and possessed. And
no wonder, if they who were poring continually at
the clouds saw shapes and figures, representations
and appearances, which had nothing in them but air,
and vapour. Here they told us they saw a flaming
sword held in a hand coming out of a cloud, with a
point hanging directly over the city; there they saw
hearses and coffins in the air carrying to be buried;
and there again, heaps of dead bodies lying unburied,
and the like, just as the imagination of the poor
terrified people furnished them with matter to work
upon. So hypochondriac fancies represent Ships,
armies, battles in the firmament; Till steady eyes
the exhalations solve, And all to its first matter,
cloud, resolve.
I could fill this account with the
strange relations such people gave every day of what
they had seen; and every one was so positive of their
having seen what they pretended to see, that there
was no contradicting them without breach of friendship,
or being accounted rude and unmannerly on the one
hand, and profane and impenetrable on the other.
One time before the plague was begun (otherwise than
as I have said in St Giles’s), I think it was
in March, seeing a crowd of people in the street,
I joined with them to satisfy my curiosity, and found
them all staring up into the air to see what a woman
told them appeared plain to her, which was an angel
clothed in white, with a fiery sword in his hand,
waving it or brandishing it over his head. She
described every part of the figure to the life, showed
them the motion and the form, and the poor people
came into it so eagerly, and with so much readiness;
‘Yes, I see it all plainly,’ says one;
’there’s the sword as plain as can be.’
Another saw the angel. One saw his very face,
and cried out what a glorious creature he was!
One saw one thing, and one another. I looked
as earnestly as the rest, but perhaps not with so much
willingness to be imposed upon; and I said, indeed,
that I could see nothing but a white cloud, bright
on one side by the shining of the sun upon the other
part. The woman endeavoured to show it me, but
could not make me confess that I saw it, which, indeed,
if I had I must have lied. But the woman, turning
upon me, looked in my face, and fancied I laughed,
in which her imagination deceived her too, for I really
did not laugh, but was very seriously reflecting how
the poor people were terrified by the force of their
own imagination. However, she turned from me,
called me profane fellow, and a scoffer; told me that
it was a time of God’s anger, and dreadful judgements
were approaching, and that despisers such as I should
wander and perish.
The people about her seemed disgusted
as well as she; and I found there was no persuading
them that I did not laugh at them, and that I should
be rather mobbed by them than be able to undeceive
them. So I left them; and this appearance passed
for as real as the blazing star itself.
Another encounter I had in the open
day also; and this was in going through a narrow passage
from Petty France into Bishopsgate Churchyard, by
a row of alms-houses. There are two churchyards
to Bishopsgate church or parish; one we go over to
pass from the place called Petty France into Bishopsgate
Street, coming out just by the church door; the other
is on the side of the narrow passage where the alms-houses
are on the left; and a dwarf-wall with a palisado
on it on the right hand, and the city wall on the
other side more to the right.
In this narrow passage stands a man
looking through between the palisadoes into the burying-place,
and as many people as the narrowness of the passage
would admit to stop, without hindering the passage
of others, and he was talking mightily eagerly to
them, and pointing now to one place, then to another,
and affirming that he saw a ghost walking upon such
a gravestone there. He described the shape, the
posture, and the movement of it so exactly that it
was the greatest matter of amazement to him in the
world that everybody did not see it as well as he.
On a sudden he would cry, ‘There it is; now it
comes this way.’ Then, ‘Tis turned
back’; till at length he persuaded the people
into so firm a belief of it, that one fancied he saw
it, and another fancied he saw it; and thus he came
every day making a strange hubbub, considering it
was in so narrow a passage, till Bishopsgate clock
struck eleven, and then the ghost would seem to start,
and, as if he were called away, disappeared on a sudden.
I looked earnestly every way, and
at the very moment that this man directed, but could
not see the least appearance of anything; but so positive
was this poor man, that he gave the people the vapours
in abundance, and sent them away trembling and frighted,
till at length few people that knew of it cared to
go through that passage, and hardly anybody by night
on any account whatever.
This ghost, as the poor man affirmed,
made signs to the houses, and to the ground, and to
the people, plainly intimating, or else they so understanding
it, that abundance of the people should come to be
buried in that churchyard, as indeed happened; but
that he saw such aspects I must acknowledge I never
believed, nor could I see anything of it myself, though
I looked most earnestly to see it, if possible.
These things serve to show how far
the people were really overcome with delusions; and
as they had a notion of the approach of a visitation,
all their predictions ran upon a most dreadful plague,
which should lay the whole city, and even the kingdom,
waste, and should destroy almost all the nation, both
man and beast.
To this, as I said before, the astrologers
added stories of the conjunctions of planets in a
malignant manner and with a mischievous influence,
one of which conjunctions was to happen, and did happen,
in October, and the other in November; and they filled
the people’s heads with predictions on these
signs of the heavens, intimating that those conjunctions
foretold drought, famine, and pestilence. In the
two first of them, however, they were entirely mistaken,
for we had no droughty season, but in the beginning
of the year a hard frost, which lasted from December
almost to March, and after that moderate weather, rather
warm than hot, with refreshing winds, and, in short,
very seasonable weather, and also several very great
rains.
Some endeavours were used to suppress
the printing of such books as terrified the people,
and to frighten the dispersers of them, some of whom
were taken up; but nothing was done in it, as I am
informed, the Government being unwilling to exasperate
the people, who were, as I may say, all out of their
wits already.
Neither can I acquit those ministers
that in their sermons rather sank than lifted up the
hearts of their hearers. Many of them no doubt
did it for the strengthening the resolution of the
people, and especially for quickening them to repentance,
but it certainly answered not their end, at least
not in proportion to the injury it did another way;
and indeed, as God Himself through the whole Scriptures
rather draws to Him by invitations and calls to turn
to Him and live, than drives us by terror and amazement,
so I must confess I thought the ministers should have
done also, imitating our blessed Lord and Master in
this, that His whole Gospel is full of declarations
from heaven of God’s mercy, and His readiness
to receive penitents and forgive them, complaining,
’Ye will not come unto Me that ye may have life’,
and that therefore His Gospel is called the Gospel
of Peace and the Gospel of Grace.
But we had some good men, and that
of all persuasions and opinions, whose discourses
were full of terror, who spoke nothing but dismal
things; and as they brought the people together with
a kind of horror, sent them away in tears, prophesying
nothing but evil tidings, terrifying the people with
the apprehensions of being utterly destroyed, not
guiding them, at least not enough, to cry to heaven
for mercy.
It was, indeed, a time of very unhappy
breaches among us in matters of religion. Innumerable
sects and divisions and separate opinions prevailed
among the people. The Church of England was restored,
indeed, with the restoration of the monarchy, about
four years before; but the ministers and preachers
of the Presbyterians and Independents, and of all
the other sorts of professions, had begun to gather
separate societies and erect altar against altar,
and all those had their meetings for worship apart,
as they have now, but not so many then, the Dissenters
being not thoroughly formed into a body as they are
since; and those congregations which were thus gathered
together were yet but few. And even those that
were, the Government did not allow, but endeavoured
to suppress them and shut up their meetings.
But the visitation reconciled them
again, at least for a time, and many of the best and
most valuable ministers and preachers of the Dissenters
were suffered to go into the churches where the incumbents
were fled away, as many were, not being able to stand
it; and the people flocked without distinction to
hear them preach, not much inquiring who or what opinion
they were of. But after the sickness was over,
that spirit of charity abated; and every church being
again supplied with their own ministers, or others
presented where the minister was dead, things returned
to their old channel again.
One mischief always introduces another.
These terrors and apprehensions of the people led
them into a thousand weak, foolish, and wicked things,
which they wanted not a sort of people really wicked
to encourage them to: and this was running about
to fortune-tellers, cunning-men, and astrologers to
know their fortune, or, as it is vulgarly expressed,
to have their fortunes told them, their nativities
calculated, and the like; and this folly presently
made the town swarm with a wicked generation of pretenders
to magic, to the black art, as they called it, and
I know not what; nay, to a thousand worse dealings
with the devil than they were really guilty of.
And this trade grew so open and so generally practised
that it became common to have signs and inscriptions
set up at doors: ‘Here lives a fortune-teller’,
’Here lives an astrologer’, ‘Here
you may have your nativity calculated’, and the
like; and Friar Bacon’s brazen-head, which was
the usual sign of these people’s dwellings,
was to be seen almost in every street, or else the
sign of Mother Shipton, or of Merlin’s head,
and the like.
With what blind, absurd, and ridiculous
stuff these oracles of the devil pleased and satisfied
the people I really know not, but certain it is that
innumerable attendants crowded about their doors every
day. And if but a grave fellow in a velvet jacket,
a band, and a black coat, which was the habit those
quack-conjurers generally went in, was but seen in
the streets the people would follow them in crowds,
and ask them questions as they went along.
I need not mention what a horrid delusion
this was, or what it tended to; but there was no remedy
for it till the plague itself put an end to it all and,
I suppose, cleared the town of most of those calculators
themselves. One mischief was, that if the poor
people asked these mock astrologers whether there
would be a plague or no, they all agreed in general
to answer ‘Yes’, for that kept up their
trade. And had the people not been kept in a
fright about that, the wizards would presently have
been rendered useless, and their craft had been at
an end. But they always talked to them of such-and-such
influences of the stars, of the conjunctions of such-and-such
planets, which must necessarily bring sickness and
distempers, and consequently the plague. And some
had the assurance to tell them the plague was begun
already, which was too true, though they that said
so knew nothing of the matter.
The ministers, to do them justice,
and preachers of most sorts that were serious and
understanding persons, thundered against these and
other wicked practices, and exposed the folly as well
as the wickedness of them together, and the most sober
and judicious people despised and abhorred them.
But it was impossible to make any impression upon
the middling people and the working labouring poor.
Their fears were predominant over all their passions,
and they threw away their money in a most distracted
manner upon those whimsies. Maid-servants especially,
and men-servants, were the chief of their customers,
and their question generally was, after the first
demand of ‘Will there be a plague?’ I
say, the next question was, ’Oh, sir I for the
Lord’s sake, what will become of me? Will
my mistress keep me, or will she turn me off?
Will she stay here, or will she go into the country?
And if she goes into the country, will she take me
with her, or leave me here to be starved and undone?’
And the like of menservants.
The truth is, the case of poor servants
was very dismal, as I shall have occasion to mention
again by-and-by, for it was apparent a prodigious
number of them would be turned away, and it was so.
And of them abundance perished, and particularly of
those that these false prophets had flattered with
hopes that they should be continued in their services,
and carried with their masters and mistresses into
the country; and had not public charity provided for
these poor creatures, whose number was exceeding great
and in all cases of this nature must be so, they would
have been in the worst condition of any people in the
city.
These things agitated the minds of
the common people for many months, while the first
apprehensions were upon them, and while the plague
was not, as I may say, yet broken out. But I
must also not forget that the more serious part of
the inhabitants behaved after another manner.
The Government encouraged their devotion, and appointed
public prayers and days of fasting and humiliation,
to make public confession of sin and implore the mercy
of God to avert the dreadful judgement which hung over
their heads; and it is not to be expressed with what
alacrity the people of all persuasions embraced the
occasion; how they flocked to the churches and meetings,
and they were all so thronged that there was often
no coming near, no, not to the very doors of the largest
churches. Also there were daily prayers appointed
morning and evening at several churches, and days
of private praying at other places; at all which the
people attended, I say, with an uncommon devotion.
Several private families also, as well of one opinion
as of another, kept family fasts, to which they admitted
their near relations only. So that, in a word,
those people who were really serious and religious
applied themselves in a truly Christian manner to
the proper work of repentance and humiliation, as
a Christian people ought to do.
Again, the public showed that they
would bear their share in these things; the very Court,
which was then gay and luxurious, put on a face of
just concern for the public danger. All the plays
and interludes which, after the manner of the French
Court, had been set up, and began to increase among
us, were forbid to act; the gaming-tables, public
dancing-rooms, and music-houses, which multiplied and
began to debauch the manners of the people, were shut
up and suppressed; and the jack-puddings, merry-andrews,
puppet-shows, rope-dancers, and such-like doings,
which had bewitched the poor common people, shut up
their shops, finding indeed no trade; for the minds
of the people were agitated with other things, and
a kind of sadness and horror at these things sat upon
the countenances even of the common people. Death
was before their eyes, and everybody began to think
of their graves, not of mirth and diversions.
But even those wholesome reflections which,
rightly managed, would have most happily led the people
to fall upon their knees, make confession of their
sins, and look up to their merciful Saviour for pardon,
imploring His compassion on them in such a time of
their distress, by which we might have been as a second
Nineveh had a quite contrary extreme in
the common people, who, ignorant and stupid in their
reflections as they were brutishly wicked and thoughtless
before, were now led by their fright to extremes of
folly; and, as I have said before, that they ran to
conjurers and witches, and all sorts of deceivers,
to know what should become of them (who fed their
fears, and kept them always alarmed and awake on purpose
to delude them and pick their pockets), so they were
as mad upon their running after quacks and mountebanks,
and every practising old woman, for medicines and
remedies; storing themselves with such multitudes
of pills, potions, and preservatives, as they were
called, that they not only spent their money but even
poisoned themselves beforehand for fear of the poison
of the infection; and prepared their bodies for the
plague, instead of preserving them against it.
On the other hand it is incredible and scarce to be
imagined, how the posts of houses and corners of streets
were plastered over with doctors’ bills and
papers of ignorant fellows, quacking and tampering
in physic, and inviting the people to come to them
for remedies, which was generally set off with such
flourishes as these, viz.: ’Infallible
preventive pills against the plague.’ ’Neverfailing
preservatives against the infection.’ ’Sovereign
cordials against the corruption of the air.’
’Exact regulations for the conduct of the body
in case of an infection.’ ‘Anti-pestilential
pills.’ ’Incomparable drink against
the plague, never found out before.’ ‘An
universal remedy for the plague.’ ‘The
only true plague water.’ ’The royal
antidote against all kinds of infection’; and
such a number more that I cannot reckon up; and if
I could, would fill a book of themselves to set them
down.
Others set up bills to summon people
to their lodgings for directions and advice in the
case of infection. These had specious titles also,
such as these:
’An eminent High Dutch physician,
newly come over from Holland, where he resided during
all the time of the great plague last year in Amsterdam,
and cured multitudes of people that actually had the
plague upon them.’
’An Italian gentlewoman just
arrived from Naples, having a choice secret to prevent
infection, which she found out by her great experience,
and did wonderful cures with it in the late plague
there, wherein there died 20,000 in one day.’
’An ancient gentlewoman, having
practised with great success in the late plague in
this city, anno 1636, gives her advice only to the
female sex. To be spoken with,’ &c.
’An experienced physician, who
has long studied the doctrine of antidotes against
all sorts of poison and infection, has, after forty
years’ practice, arrived to such skill as may,
with God’s blessing, direct persons how to prevent
their being touched by any contagious distemper whatsoever.
He directs the poor gratis.’
I take notice of these by way of specimen.
I could give you two or three dozen of the like and
yet have abundance left behind. ’Tis sufficient
from these to apprise any one of the humour of those
times, and how a set of thieves and pickpockets
not only robbed and cheated the poor people of their
money, but poisoned their bodies with odious and fatal
preparations; some with mercury, and some with other
things as bad, perfectly remote from the thing pretended
to, and rather hurtful than serviceable to the body
in case an infection followed.
I cannot omit a subtility of one of
those quack operators, with which he gulled the poor
people to crowd about him, but did nothing for them
without money. He had, it seems, added to his
bills, which he gave about the streets, this advertisement
in capital letters, viz., ’He gives advice
to the poor for nothing.’
Abundance of poor people came to him
accordingly, to whom he made a great many fine speeches,
examined them of the state of their health and of
the constitution of their bodies, and told them many
good things for them to do, which were of no great
moment. But the issue and conclusion of all was,
that he had a preparation which if they took such a
quantity of every morning, he would pawn his life
they should never have the plague; no, though they
lived in the house with people that were infected.
This made the people all resolve to have it; but then
the price of that was so much, I think ’twas
half-a-crown. ‘But, sir,’ says one
poor woman, ’I am a poor almswoman and am kept
by the parish, and your bills say you give the poor
your help for nothing.’ ’Ay, good
woman,’ says the doctor, ’so I do, as I
published there. I give my advice to the poor
for nothing, but not my physic.’ ‘Alas,
sir!’ says she, ’that is a snare laid
for the poor, then; for you give them advice for nothing;
that is to say, you advise them gratis, to buy your
physic for their money; so does every shop-keeper
with his wares.’ Here the woman began to
give him ill words, and stood at his door all that
day, telling her tale to all the people that came,
till the doctor finding she turned away his customers,
was obliged to call her upstairs again, and give her
his box of physic for nothing, which perhaps, too,
was good for nothing when she had it.
But to return to the people, whose
confusions fitted them to be imposed upon by all sorts
of pretenders and by every mountebank. There is
no doubt but these quacking sort of fellows raised
great gains out of the miserable people, for we daily
found the crowds that ran after them were infinitely
greater, and their doors were more thronged than those
of Dr Brooks, Dr Upton, Dr Hodges, Dr Berwick, or
any, though the most famous men of the time.
I And I was told that some of them got five pounds
a day by their physic.
But there was still another madness
beyond all this, which may serve to give an idea of
the distracted humour of the poor people at that time:
and this was their following a worse sort of deceivers
than any of these; for these petty thieves only deluded
them to pick their pockets and get their money, in
which their wickedness, whatever it was, lay chiefly
on the side of the deceivers, not upon the deceived.
But in this part I am going to mention, it lay chiefly
in the people deceived, or equally in both; and this
was in wearing charms, philtres, exorcisms, amulets,
and I know not what preparations, to fortify the body
with them against the plague; as if the plague was
not the hand of God, but a kind of possession of an
evil spirit, and that it was to be kept off with crossings,
signs of the zodiac, papers tied up with so many knots,
and certain words or figures written on them, as particularly
the word Abracadabra, formed in triangle or pyramid,
thus:
ABRACADABRA
ABRACADABR Others had the Jesuits’
ABRACADAB mark in a cross:
ABRACADA I H
ABRACAD S.
ABRACA
ABRAC Others nothing but this
ABRA mark, thus:
ABR
AB
A {}I might spend a great deal of time
in my exclamations against the follies, and indeed
the wickedness, of those things, in a time of such
danger, in a matter of such consequences as this, of
a national infection. But my memorandums of these
things relate rather to take notice only of the fact,
and mention only that it was so. How the poor
people found the insufficiency of those things, and
how many of them were afterwards carried away in the
dead-carts and thrown into the common graves of every
parish with these hellish charms and trumpery hanging
about their necks, remains to be spoken of as we go
along.
All this was the effect of the hurry
the people were in, after the first notion of the
plaque being at hand was among them, and which may
be said to be from about Michaelmas 1664, but more
particularly after the two men died in St Giles’s
in the beginning of December; and again, after another
alarm in February. For when the plague evidently
spread itself, they soon began to see the folly of
trusting to those unperforming creatures who had gulled
them of their money; and then their fears worked another
way, namely, to amazement and stupidity, not knowing
what course to take or what to do either to help or
relieve themselves. But they ran about from one
neighbour’s house to another, and even in the
streets from one door to another, with repeated cries
of, ’Lord, have mercy upon us! What shall
we do?’
Indeed, the poor people were to be
pitied in one particular thing in which they had little
or no relief, and which I desire to mention with a
serious awe and reflection, which perhaps every one
that reads this may not relish; namely, that whereas
death now began not, as we may say, to hover over
every one’s head only, but to look into their
houses and chambers and stare in their faces.
Though there might be some stupidity and dulness of
the mind (and there was so, a great deal), yet there
was a great deal of just alarm sounded into the very
inmost soul, if I may so say, of others. Many
consciences were awakened; many hard hearts melted
into tears; many a penitent confession was made of
crimes long concealed. It would wound the soul
of any Christian to have heard the dying groans of
many a despairing creature, and none durst come near
to comfort them. Many a robbery, many a murder,
was then confessed aloud, and nobody surviving to
record the accounts of it. People might be heard,
even into the streets as we passed along, calling upon
God for mercy through Jesus Christ, and saying, ’I
have been a thief, ’I have been an adulterer’,
‘I have been a murderer’, and the like,
and none durst stop to make the least inquiry into
such things or to administer comfort to the poor creatures
that in the anguish both of soul and body thus cried
out. Some of the ministers did visit the sick
at first and for a little while, but it was not to
be done. It would have been present death to
have gone into some houses. The very buriers of
the dead, who were the hardenedest creatures in town,
were sometimes beaten back and so terrified that they
durst not go into houses where the whole families
were swept away together, and where the circumstances
were more particularly horrible, as some were; but
this was, indeed, at the first heat of the distemper.
Time inured them to it all, and they
ventured everywhere afterwards without hesitation,
as I shall have occasion to mention at large hereafter.
I am supposing now the plague to be
begun, as I have said, and that the magistrates began
to take the condition of the people into their serious
consideration. What they did as to the regulation
of the inhabitants and of infected families, I shall
speak to by itself; but as to the affair of health,
it is proper to mention it here that, having seen the
foolish humour of the people in running after quacks
and mountebanks, wizards and fortune-tellers, which
they did as above, even to madness, the Lord Mayor,
a very sober and religious gentleman, appointed physicians
and surgeons for relief of the poor I mean
the diseased poor and in particular ordered the College
of Physicians to publish directions for cheap remedies
for the poor, in all the circumstances of the distemper.
This, indeed, was one of the most charitable and judicious
things that could be done at that time, for this drove
the people from haunting the doors of every disperser
of bills, and from taking down blindly and without
consideration poison for physic and death instead of
life.
This direction of the physicians was
done by a consultation of the whole College; and,
as it was particularly calculated for the use of the
poor and for cheap medicines, it was made public,
so that everybody might see it, and copies were given
gratis to all that desired it. But as it is public,
and to be seen on all occasions, I need not give the
reader of this the trouble of it.
I shall not be supposed to lessen
the authority or capacity of the physicians when I
say that the violence of the distemper, when it came
to its extremity, was like the fire the next year.
The fire, which consumed what the plague could not
touch, defied all the application of remedies; the
fire-engines were broken, the buckets thrown away,
and the power of man was baffled and brought to an
end. So the Plague defied all medicines; the
very physicians were seized with it, with their preservatives
in their mouths; and men went about prescribing to
others and telling them what to do till the tokens
were upon them, and they dropped down dead, destroyed
by that very enemy they directed others to oppose.
This was the case of several physicians, even some
of them the most eminent, and of several of the most
skilful surgeons. Abundance of quacks too died,
who had the folly to trust to their own medicines,
which they must needs be conscious to themselves were
good for nothing, and who rather ought, like other
sorts of thieves, to have run away, sensible of their
guilt, from the justice that they could not but expect
should punish them as they knew they had deserved.
Not that it is any derogation from
the labour or application of the physicians to say
they fell in the common calamity; nor is it so intended
by me; it rather is to their praise that they ventured
their lives so far as even to lose them in the service
of mankind. They endeavoured to do good, and
to save the lives of others. But we were not
to expect that the physicians could stop God’s
judgements, or prevent a distemper eminently armed
from heaven from executing the errand it was sent
about.
Doubtless, the physicians assisted
many by their skill, and by their prudence and applications,
to the saving of their lives and restoring their health.
But it is not lessening their character or their skill,
to say they could not cure those that had the tokens
upon them, or those who were mortally infected before
the physicians were sent for, as was frequently the
case.
It remains to mention now what public
measures were taken by the magistrates for the general
safety, and to prevent the spreading of the distemper,
when it first broke out. I shall have frequent
occasion to speak of the prudence of the magistrates,
their charity, their vigilance for the poor, and for
preserving good order, furnishing provisions, and
the like, when the plague was increased, as it afterwards
was. But I am now upon the order and regulations
they published for the government of infected families.
I mentioned above shutting of houses
up; and it is needful to say something particularly
to that, for this part of the history of the plague
is very melancholy, but the most grievous story must
be told.
About June the Lord Mayor of London
and the Court of Aldermen, as I have said, began more
particularly to concern themselves for the regulation
of the city.
The justices of Peace for Middlesex,
by direction of the Secretary of State, had begun
to shut up houses in the parishes of St Giles-in-the-Fields,
St Martin, St Clement Danes, &c., and it was with
good success; for in several streets where the plague
broke out, upon strict guarding the houses that were
infected, and taking care to bury those that died
immediately after they were known to be dead, the plague
ceased in those streets. It was also observed
that the plague decreased sooner in those parishes
after they had been visited to the full than it did
in the parishes of Bishopsgate, Shoreditch, Aldgate,
Whitechappel, Stepney, and others; the early care
taken in that manner being a great means to the putting
a check to it.
This shutting up of houses was a method
first taken, as I understand, in the plague which
happened in 1603, at the coming of King James the First
to the crown; and the power of shutting people up in
their own houses was granted by Act of Parliament,
entitled, ’An Act for the charitable Relief
and Ordering of Persons infected with the Plague’;
on which Act of Parliament the Lord Mayor and aldermen
of the city of London founded the order they made
at this time, and which took place the 1st of July
1665, when the numbers infected within the city were
but few, the last bill for the ninety-two parishes
being but four; and some houses having been shut up
in the city, and some people being removed to the
pest-house beyond Bunhill Fields, in the way to Islington, I
say, by these means, when there died near one thousand
a week in the whole, the number in the city was but
twenty-eight, and the city was preserved more healthy
in proportion than any other place all the time of
the infection.
These orders of my Lord Mayor’s
were published, as I have said, the latter end of
June, and took place from the 1st of July, and were
as follows, viz.:
ORDERS CONCEIVED AND PUBLISHED BY THE LORD MAYOR AND ALDERMEN OF THE
CITY OF LONDON CONCERNING THE INFECTION OF THE PLAGUE, 1665.
’Whereas in the reign of our
late Sovereign King James, of happy memory, an Act
was made for the charitable relief and ordering of
persons infected with the plague, whereby authority
was given to justices of the peace, mayors, bailiffs,
and other head-officers to appoint within their several
limits examiners, searchers, watchmen, keepers, and
buriers for the persons and places infected, and to
minister unto them oaths for the performance of their
offices. And the same statute did also authorise
the giving of other directions, as unto them for the
present necessity should seem good in their directions.
It is now, upon special consideration, thought very
expedient for preventing and avoiding of infection
of sickness (if it shall so please Almighty God) that
these officers following be appointed, and these orders
hereafter duly observed.
Examiners to be appointed in every Parish.
’First, it is thought requisite,
and so ordered, that in every parish there be one,
two, or more persons of good sort and credit chosen
and appointed by the alderman, his deputy, and common
council of every ward, by the name of examiners, to
continue in that office the space of two months at
least. And if any fit person so appointed shall
refuse to undertake the same, the said parties so
refusing to be committed to prison until they shall
conform themselves accordingly.
The Examiner’s Office.
’That these examiners he sworn
by the aldermen to inquire and learn from time to
time what houses in every parish be visited, and what
persons be sick, and of what diseases, as near as
they can inform themselves; and upon doubt in that
case, to command restraint of access until it appear
what the disease shall prove. And if they find
any person sick of the infection, to give order to
the constable that the house be shut up; and if the
constable shall be found remiss or negligent, to give
present notice thereof to the alderman of the ward.
Watchmen.
’That to every infected house
there be appointed two watchmen, one for every day,
and the other for the night; and that these watchmen
have a special care that no person go in or out of
such infected houses whereof they have the charge,
upon pain of severe punishment. And the said
watchmen to do such further offices as the sick house
shall need and require: and if the watchman be
sent upon any business, to lock up the house and take
the key with him; and the watchman by day to attend
until ten of the clock at night, and the watchman
by night until six in the morning.
Searchers.
’That there be a special care
to appoint women searchers in every parish, such as
are of honest reputation, and of the best sort as can
be got in this kind; and these to be sworn to make
due search and true report to the utmost of their
knowledge whether the persons whose bodies they are
appointed to search do die of the infection, or of
what other diseases, as near as they can. And
that the physicians who shall be appointed for cure
and prevention of the infection do call before them
the said searchers who are, or shall be, appointed
for the several parishes under their respective cares,
to the end they may consider whether they are fitly
qualified for that employment, and charge them from
time to time as they shall see cause, if they appear
defective in their duties.
’That no searcher during this
time of visitation be permitted to use any public
work or employment, or keep any shop or stall, or be
employed as a laundress, or in any other common employment
whatsoever.
Chirurgeons.
’For better assistance of the
searchers, forasmuch as there hath been heretofore
great abuse in misreporting the disease, to the further
spreading of the infection, it is therefore ordered
that there be chosen and appointed able and discreet
chirurgeons, besides those that do already belong
to the pest-house, amongst whom the city and Liberties
to be quartered as the places lie most apt and convenient;
and every of these to have one quarter for his limit;
and the said chirurgeons in every of their limits
to join with the searchers for the view of the body,
to the end there may be a true report made of the disease.
’And further, that the said
chirurgeons shall visit and search such-like persons
as shall either send for them or be named and directed
unto them by the examiners of every parish, and inform
themselves of the disease of the said parties.
’And forasmuch as the said chirurgeons
are to be sequestered from all other cures, and kept
only to this disease of the infection, it is ordered
that every of the said chirurgeons shall have twelve-pence
a body searched by them, to be paid out of the goods
of the party searched, if he be able, or otherwise
by the parish.
Nurse-keepers.
’If any nurse-keeper shall remove
herself out of any infected house before twenty-eight
days after the decease of any person dying of the
infection, the house to which the said nurse-keeper
doth so remove herself shall be shut up until the
said twenty-eight days be expired.’
ORDERS CONCERNING INFECTED HOUSES AND PERSONS SICK OF THE PLAGUE.
Notice to be given of the Sickness.
’The master of every house,
as soon as any one in his house complaineth, either
of blotch or purple, or swelling in any part of his
body, or falleth otherwise dangerously sick, without
apparent cause of some other disease, shall give knowledge
thereof to the examiner of health within two hours
after the said sign shall appear.
Sequestration of the Sick.
’As soon as any man shall be
found by this examiner, chirurgeon, or searcher to
be sick of the plague, he shall the same night be
sequestered in the same house; and in case he be so
sequestered, then though he afterwards die not, the
house wherein he sickened should be shut up for a
month, after the use of the due preservatives taken
by the rest.
Airing the Stuff.
’For sequestration of the goods
and stuff of the infection, their bedding and apparel
and hangings of chambers must be well aired with fire
and such perfumes as are requisite within the infected
house before they be taken again to use. This
to be done by the appointment of an examiner.
Shutting up of the House.
’If any person shall have visited
any man known to be infected of the plague, or entered
willingly into any known infected house, being not
allowed, the house wherein he inhabiteth shall be shut
up for certain days by the examiner’s direction.
None to be removed out of infected Houses, but, &C.
’Item, that none be removed
out of the house where he falleth sick of the infection
into any other house in the city (except it be to the
pest-house or a tent, or unto some such house which
the owner of the said visited house holdeth in his
own hands and occupieth by his own servants); and
so as security be given to the parish whither such
remove is made, that the attendance and charge about
the said visited persons shall be observed and charged
in all the particularities before expressed, without
any cost of that parish to which any such remove shall
happen to be made, and this remove to be done by night.
And it shall be lawful to any person that hath two
houses to remove either his sound or his infected
people to his spare house at his choice, so as, if
he send away first his sound, he not after send thither
his sick, nor again unto the sick the sound; and that
the same which he sendeth be for one week at the least
shut up and secluded from company, for fear of some
infection at the first not appearing.
Burial of the Dead.
’That the burial of the dead
by this visitation be at most convenient hours, always
either before sun-rising or after sun-setting, with
the privity of the churchwardens or constable, and
not otherwise; and that no neighbours nor friends
be suffered to accompany the corpse to church, or
to enter the house visited, upon pain of having his
house shut up or be imprisoned.
’And that no corpse dying of
infection shall be buried, or remain in any church
in time of common prayer, sermon, or lecture.
And that no children be suffered at time of burial
of any corpse in any church, churchyard, or burying-place
to come near the corpse, coffin, or grave. And
that all the graves shall be at least six feet deep.
’And further, all public assemblies
at other burials are to be foreborne during the continuance
of this visitation.
No infected Stuff to be uttered.
’That no clothes, stuff, bedding,
or garments be suffered to be carried or conveyed
out of any infected houses, and that the criers and
carriers abroad of bedding or old apparel to be sold
or pawned be utterly prohibited and restrained, and
no brokers of bedding or old apparel be permitted
to make any outward show, or hang forth on their stalls,
shop-boards, or windows, towards any street, lane,
common way, or passage, any old bedding or apparel
to be sold, upon pain of imprisonment. And if
any broker or other person shall buy any bedding,
apparel, or other stuff out of any infected house within
two months after the infection hath been there, his
house shall be shut up as infected, and so shall continue
shut up twenty days at the least.
No Person to be conveyed out of any infected House.
’If any person visited do fortune,
by negligent looking unto, or by any other means,
to come or be conveyed from a place infected to any
other place, the parish from whence such party hath
come or been conveyed, upon notice thereof given,
shall at their charge cause the said party so visited
and escaped to be carried and brought back again by
night, and the parties in this case offending to be
punished at the direction of the alderman of the ward,
and the house of the receiver of such visited person
to be shut up for twenty days.
Every visited House to be marked.
’That every house visited be
marked with a red cross of a foot long in the middle
of the door, evident to be seen, and with these usual
printed words, that is to say, “Lord, have mercy
upon us,” to be set close over the same cross,
there to continue until lawful opening of the same
house.
Every visited House to be watched.
’That the constables see every
house shut up, and to be attended with watchmen, which
may keep them in, and minister necessaries unto them
at their own charges, if they be able, or at the common
charge, if they are unable; the shutting up to be
for the space of four weeks after all be whole.
’That precise order to be taken
that the searchers, chirurgeons, keepers, and buriers
are not to pass the streets without holding a red
rod or wand of three feet in length in their hands,
open and evident to be seen, and are not to go into
any other house than into their own, or into that
whereunto they are directed or sent for; but to forbear
and abstain from company, especially when they have
been lately used in any such business or attendance.
Inmates.
’That where several inmate,-c
are in one and the same house, and any person in that
house happens to be infected, no other person or family
of such house shall be suffered to remove him or themselves
without a certificate from the examiners of health
of that parish; or in default thereof, the house whither
he or they so remove shall be shut up as in case of
visitation.
Hackney-Coaches.
’That care be taken of hackney-coachmen,
that they may not (as some of them have been observed
to do after carrying of infected persons to the pest-house
and other places) be admitted to common use till their
coaches be well aired, and have stood unemployed by
the space of five or six days after such service.’
Orders for cleansing and keeping
of the streets sweet.
The Streets to be kept Clean.
’First, it is thought necessary,
and so ordered, that every householder do cause the
street to be daily prepared before his door, and so
to keep it clean swept all the week long.
That Rakers take it from out the Houses.
’That the sweeping and filth
of houses be daily carried away by the rakers, and
that the raker shall give notice of his coming by the
blowing of a horn, as hitherto hath been done.
Laystalls to be made far off from the City.
’That the laystalls be removed
as far as may be out of the city and common passages,
and that no nightman or other be suffered to empty
a vault into any garden near about the city.
Care to be had of unwholesome Fish or Flesh, and of
musty Corn.
’That special care be taken
that no stinking fish, or unwholesome flesh, or musty
corn, or other corrupt fruits of what sort soever,
be suffered to be sold about the city, or any part
of the same.
’That the brewers and tippling-houses
he looked unto for musty and unwholesome casks.
’That no hogs, dogs, or cats,
or tame pigeons, or conies, be suffered to be kept
within any part of the city, or any swine to be or
stray in the streets or lanes, but that such swine
be impounded by the beadle or any other officer, and
the owner punished according to Act of Common Council,
and that the dogs be killed by the dog-killers appointed
for that purpose.’
ORDERS CONCERNING LOOSE PERSONS AND IDLE ASSEMBLIES.
Beggars.
’Forasmuch as nothing is more
complained of than the multitude of rogues and wandering
beggars that swarm in every place about the city, being
a great cause of the spreading of the infection, and
will not be avoided, notwithstanding any orders that
have been given to the contrary: It is therefore
now ordered, that such constables, and others whom
this matter may any way concern, take special care
that no wandering beggars be suffered in the streets
of this city in any fashion or manner whatsoever,
upon the penalty provided by the law, to be duly and
severely executed upon them.
Plays.
’That all plays, bear-baitings,
games, singing of ballads, buckler-play, or such-like
causes of assemblies of people be utterly prohibited,
and the parties offending severely punished by every
alderman in his ward.
Feasting prohibited.
’That all public feasting, and
particularly by the companies of this city, and dinners
at taverns, ale-houses, and other places of common
entertainment, be forborne till further order and allowance;
and that the money thereby spared be preserved and
employed for the benefit and relief of the poor visited
with the infection.
Tippling-houses.
’That disorderly tippling in
taverns, ale-houses, coffee-houses, and cellars be
severely looked unto, as the common sin of this time
and greatest occasion of dispersing the plague.
And that no company or person be suffered to remain
or come into any tavern, ale-house, or coffee-house
to drink after nine of the clock in the evening, according
to the ancient law and custom of this city, upon the
penalties ordained in that behalf.
’And for the better execution
of these orders, and such other rules and directions
as, upon further consideration, shall be found needful:
It is ordered and enjoined that the aldermen, deputies,
and common councilmen shall meet together weekly,
once, twice, thrice or oftener (as cause shall require),
at some one general place accustomed in their respective
wards (being clear from infection of the plague), to
consult how the said orders may be duly put in execution;
not intending that any dwelling in or near places
infected shall come to the said meeting while their
coming may be doubtful. And the said aldermen,
and deputies, and common councilmen in their several
wards may put in execution any other good orders that
by them at their said meetings shall be conceived and
devised for preservation of his Majesty’s subjects
from the infection.
’Sir John Lawrence, Lord Mayor.
SIR GEORGE WATERMAN
Sir Charles Doe, Sheriffs.’
I need not say that these orders extended
only to such places as were within the Lord Mayor’s
jurisdiction, so it is requisite to observe that the
justices of Peace within those parishes and places
as were called the Hamlets and out-parts took the
same method. As I remember, the orders for shutting
up of houses did not take Place so soon on our side,
because, as I said before, the plague did not reach
to these eastern parts of the town at least, nor begin
to be very violent, till the beginning of August.
For example, the whole bill from the 11th to the 18th
of July was 1761, yet there died but 71 of the plague
in all those parishes we call the Tower Hamlets, and
they were as follows:
-- The next week And to the 1st
-- was thus: of Aug. thus:
Aldgate 14 34 65
Stepney 33 58 76
Whitechappel 21 48 79
St Katherine, Tower 2 4 4
Trinity, Minories 1 1 4
-- ---- ---- ----
-- 71 145 228
It was indeed coming on amain, for
the burials that same week were in the next adjoining
parishes thus:
-- The next week
prodigiously To the 1st of
increased, as: Aug. thus:
St Leonard’s, Shoreditch 64 84 110
St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate 65 105 116
St Giles’s, Cripplegate 213 421 554
-- ---- ---- ----
-- 342 610 780This shutting up of houses was at
first counted a very cruel and unchristian method,
and the poor people so confined made bitter lamentations.
Complaints of the severity of it were also daily brought
to my Lord Mayor, of houses causelessly (and some maliciously)
shut up. I cannot say; but upon inquiry many
that complained so loudly were found in a condition
to be continued; and others again, inspection being
made upon the sick person, and the sickness not appearing
infectious, or if uncertain, yet on his being content
to be carried to the pest-house, were released.
It is true that the locking up the
doors of people’s houses, and setting a watchman
there night and day to prevent their stirring out or
any coming to them, when perhaps the sound people
in the family might have escaped if they had been
removed from the sick, looked very hard and cruel;
and many people perished in these miserable confinements
which, ’tis reasonable to believe, would not
have been distempered if they had had liberty, though
the plague was in the house; at which the people were
very clamorous and uneasy at first, and several violences
were committed and injuries offered to the men who
were set to watch the houses so shut up; also several
people broke out by force in many places, as I shall
observe by-and-by. But it was a public good that
justified the private mischief, and there was no obtaining
the least mitigation by any application to magistrates
or government at that time, at least not that I heard
of. This put the people upon all manner of stratagem
in order, if possible, to get out; and it would fill
a little volume to set down the arts used by the people
of such houses to shut the eyes of the watchmen who
were employed, to deceive them, and to escape or break
out from them, in which frequent scuffles and some
mischief happened; of which by itself.
As I went along Houndsditch one morning
about eight o’clock there was a great noise.
It is true, indeed, there was not much crowd, because
people were not very free to gather together, or to
stay long together when they were there; nor did I
stay long there. But the outcry was loud enough
to prompt my curiosity, and I called to one that looked
out of a window, and asked what was the matter.
A watchman, it seems, had been employed
to keep his post at the door of a house which was
infected, or said to be infected, and was shut up.
He had been there all night for two nights together,
as he told his story, and the day-watchman had been
there one day, and was now come to relieve him.
All this while no noise had been heard in the house,
no light had been seen; they called for nothing, sent
him of no errands, which used to be the chief business
of the watchmen; neither had they given him any disturbance,
as he said, from the Monday afternoon, when he heard
great crying and screaming in the house, which, as
he supposed, was occasioned by some of the family
dying just at that time. It seems, the night
before, the dead-cart, as it was called, had been stopped
there, and a servant-maid had been brought down to
the door dead, and the buriers or bearers, as they
were called, put her into the cart, wrapt only in a
green rug, and carried her away.
The watchman had knocked at the door,
it seems, when he heard that noise and crying, as
above, and nobody answered a great while; but at last
one looked out and said with an angry, quick tone,
and yet a kind of crying voice, or a voice of one
that was crying, ’What d’ye want, that
ye make such a knocking?’ He answered, ’I
am the watchman! How do you do? What is
the matter?’ The person answered, ’What
is that to you? Stop the dead-cart.’
This, it seems, was about one o’clock. Soon
after, as the fellow said, he stopped the dead-cart,
and then knocked again, but nobody answered.
He continued knocking, and the bellman called out
several times, ‘Bring out your dead’; but
nobody answered, till the man that drove the cart,
being called to other houses, would stay no longer,
and drove away.
The watchman knew not what to make
of all this, so he let them alone till the morning-man
or day-watchman, as they called him, came to relieve
him. Giving him an account of the particulars,
they knocked at the door a great while, but nobody
answered; and they observed that the window or casement
at which the person had looked out who had answered
before continued open, being up two pair of stairs.
Upon this the two men, to satisfy
their curiosity, got a long ladder, and one of them
went up to the window and looked into the room, where
he saw a woman lying dead upon the floor in a dismal
manner, having no clothes on her but her shift.
But though he called aloud, and putting in his long
staff, knocked hard on the floor, yet nobody stirred
or answered; neither could he hear any noise in the
house.
He came down again upon this, and
acquainted his fellow, who went up also; and finding
it just so, they resolved to acquaint either the Lord
Mayor or some other magistrate of it, but did not offer
to go in at the window. The magistrate, it seems,
upon the information of the two men, ordered the house
to be broke open, a constable and other persons being
appointed to be present, that nothing might be plundered;
and accordingly it was so done, when nobody was found
in the house but that young woman, who having been
infected and past recovery, the rest had left her
to die by herself, and were every one gone, having
found some way to delude the watchman, and to get
open the door, or get out at some back-door, or over
the tops of the houses, so that he knew nothing of
it; and as to those cries and shrieks which he heard,
it was supposed they were the passionate cries of
the family at the bitter parting, which, to be sure,
it was to them all, this being the sister to the mistress
of the family. The man of the house, his wife,
several children, and servants, being all gone and
fled, whether sick or sound, that I could never learn;
nor, indeed, did I make much inquiry after it.
Many such escapes were made out of
infected houses, as particularly when the watchman
was sent of some errand; for it was his business to
go of any errand that the family sent him of; that
is to say, for necessaries, such as food and physic;
to fetch physicians, if they would come, or surgeons,
or nurses, or to order the dead-cart, and the like;
but with this condition, too, that when he went he
was to lock up the outer door of the house and take
the key away with him, To evade this, and cheat the
watchmen, people got two or three keys made to their
locks, or they found ways to unscrew the locks such
as were screwed on, and so take off the lock, being
in the inside of the house, and while they sent away
the watchman to the market, to the bakehouse, or for
one trifle or another, open the door and go out as
often as they pleased. But this being found out,
the officers afterwards had orders to padlock up the
doors on the outside, and place bolts on them as they
thought fit.
At another house, as I was informed,
in the street next within Aldgate, a whole family
was shut up and locked in because the maid-servant
was taken sick. The master of the house had complained
by his friends to the next alderman and to the Lord
Mayor, and had consented to have the maid carried
to the pest-house, but was refused; so the door was
marked with a red cross, a padlock on the outside,
as above, and a watchman set to keep the door, according
to public order.
After the master of the house found
there was no remedy, but that he, his wife, and his
children were to be locked up with this poor distempered
servant, he called to the watchman, and told him he
must go then and fetch a nurse for them to attend
this poor girl, for that it would be certain death
to them all to oblige them to nurse her; and told
him plainly that if he would not do this, the maid
must perish either of the distemper or be starved
for want of food, for he was resolved none of his
family should go near her; and she lay in the garret
four storey high, where she could not cry out, or
call to anybody for help.
The watchman consented to that, and
went and fetched a nurse, as he was appointed, and
brought her to them the same evening. During this
interval the master of the house took his opportunity
to break a large hole through his shop into a bulk
or stall, where formerly a cobbler had sat, before
or under his shop-window; but the tenant, as may be
supposed at such a dismal time as that, was dead or
removed, and so he had the key in his own keeping.
Having made his way into this stall, which he could
not have done if the man had been at the door, the
noise he was obliged to make being such as would have
alarmed the watchman; I say, having made his way into
this stall, he sat still till the watchman returned
with the nurse, and all the next day also. But
the night following, having contrived to send the
watchman of another trifling errand, which, as I take
it, was to an apothecary’s for a plaister for
the maid, which he was to stay for the making up, or
some other such errand that might secure his staying
some time; in that time he conveyed himself and all
his family out of the house, and left the nurse and
the watchman to bury the poor wench that
is, throw her into the cart and take care
of the house.
I could give a great many such stories
as these, diverting enough, which in the long course
of that dismal year I met with that is,
heard of and which are very certain to
be true, or very near the truth; that is to say, true
in the general: for no man could at such a time
learn all the particulars. There was likewise
violence used with the watchmen, as was reported,
in abundance of places; and I believe that from the
beginning of the visitation to the end, there was not
less than eighteen or twenty of them killed, or so
wounded as to be taken up for dead, which was supposed
to be done by the people in the infected houses which
were shut up, and where they attempted to come out
and were opposed.
Nor, indeed, could less be expected,
for here were so many prisons in the town as there
were houses shut up; and as the people shut up or
imprisoned so were guilty of no crime, only shut up
because miserable, it was really the more intolerable
to them.
It had also this difference, that
every prison, as we may call it, had but one jailer,
and as he had the whole house to guard, and that many
houses were so situated as that they had several ways
out, some more, some less, and some into several streets,
it was impossible for one man so to guard all the
passages as to prevent the escape of people made desperate
by the fright of their circumstances, by the resentment
of their usage, or by the raging of the distemper
itself; so that they would talk to the watchman on
one side of the house, while the family made their
escape at another.
For example, in Coleman Street there
are abundance of alleys, as appears still. A
house was shut up in that they call White’s Alley;
and this house had a back-window, not a door, into
a court which had a passage into Bell Alley.
A watchman was set by the constable at the door of
this house, and there he stood, or his comrade, night
and day, while the family went all away in the evening
out at that window into the court, and left the poor
fellows warding and watching for near a fortnight.
Not far from the same place they blew
up a watchman with gunpowder, and burned the poor
fellow dreadfully; and while he made hideous cries,
and nobody would venture to come near to help him,
the whole family that were able to stir got out at
the windows one storey high, two that were left sick
calling out for help. Care was taken to give them
nurses to look after them, but the persons fled were
never found, till after the plague was abated they
returned; but as nothing could be proved, so nothing
could be done to them.
It is to be considered, too, that
as these were prisons without bars and bolts, which
our common prisons are furnished with, so the people
let themselves down out of their windows, even in
the face of the watchman, bringing swords or pistols
in their hands, and threatening the poor wretch to
shoot him if he stirred or called for help.
In other cases, some had gardens,
and walls or pales, between them and their neighbours,
or yards and back-houses; and these, by friendship
and entreaties, would get leave to get over those
walls or pales, and so go out at their neighbours’
doors; or, by giving money to their servants, get
them to let them through in the night; so that in short,
the shutting up of houses was in no wise to be depended
upon. Neither did it answer the end at all, serving
more to make the people desperate, and drive them
to such extremities as that they would break out at
all adventures.
And that which was still worse, those
that did thus break out spread the infection farther
by their wandering about with the distemper upon them,
in their desperate circumstances, than they would otherwise
have done; for whoever considers all the particulars
in such cases must acknowledge, and we cannot doubt
but the severity of those confinements made many people
desperate, and made them run out of their houses at
all hazards, and with the plague visibly upon them,
not knowing either whither to go or what to do, or,
indeed, what they did; and many that did so were driven
to dreadful exigencies and extremities, and perished
in the streets or fields for mere want, or dropped
down by the raging violence of the fever upon them.
Others wandered into the country, and went forward
any way, as their desperation guided them, not knowing
whither they went or would go: till, faint and
tired, and not getting any relief, the houses and
villages on the road refusing to admit them to lodge
whether infected or no, they have perished by the roadside
or gotten into barns and died there, none daring to
come to them or relieve them, though perhaps not infected,
for nobody would believe them.
On the other hand, when the plague
at first seized a family that is to say, when any
body of the family had gone out and unwarily or otherwise
catched the distemper and brought it home it
was certainly known by the family before it was known
to the officers, who, as you will see by the order,
were appointed to examine into the circumstances of
all sick persons when they heard of their being sick.
In this interval, between their being
taken sick and the examiners coming, the master of
the house had leisure and liberty to remove himself
or all his family, if he knew whither to go, and many
did so. But the great disaster was that many
did thus after they were really infected themselves,
and so carried the disease into the houses of those
who were so hospitable as to receive them; which, it
must be confessed, was very cruel and ungrateful.
And this was in part the reason of
the general notion, or scandal rather, which went
about of the temper of people infected: namely,
that they did not take the least care or make any scruple
of infecting others, though I cannot say but there
might be some truth in it too, but not so general
as was reported. What natural reason could be
given for so wicked a thing at a time when they might
conclude themselves just going to appear at the bar
of Divine justice I know not. I am very well
satisfied that it cannot be reconciled to religion
and principle any more than it can be to generosity
and Humanity, but I may speak of that again.
I am speaking now of people made desperate
by the apprehensions of their being shut up, and their
breaking out by stratagem or force, either before
or after they were shut up, whose misery was not lessened
when they were out, but sadly increased. On the
other hand, many that thus got away had retreats to
go to and other houses, where they locked themselves
up and kept hid till the plague was over; and many
families, foreseeing the approach of the distemper,
laid up stores of provisions sufficient for their
whole families, and shut themselves up, and that so
entirely that they were neither seen or heard of till
the infection was quite ceased, and then came abroad
sound and well. I might recollect several such
as these, and give you the particulars of their management;
for doubtless it was the most effectual secure step
that could be taken for such whose circumstances would
not admit them to remove, or who had not retreats
abroad proper for the case; for in being thus shut
up they were as if they had been a hundred miles off.
Nor do I remember that any one of those families miscarried.
Among these, several Dutch merchants were particularly
remarkable, who kept their houses like little garrisons
besieged suffering none to go in or out or come near
them, particularly one in a court in Throgmorton Street
whose house looked into Draper’s Garden.
But I come back to the case of families
infected and shut up by the magistrates. The
misery of those families is not to be expressed; and
it was generally in such houses that we heard the
most dismal shrieks and outcries of the poor people,
terrified and even frighted to death by the sight
of the condition of their dearest relations, and by
the terror of being imprisoned as they were.
I remember, and while I am writing
this story I think I hear the very sound of it, a
certain lady had an only daughter, a young maiden
about nineteen years old, and who was possessed of
a very considerable fortune. They were only lodgers
in the house where they were. The young woman,
her mother, and the maid had been abroad on some occasion,
I do not remember what, for the house was not shut
up; but about two hours after they came home the young
lady complained she was not well; in a quarter of
an hour more she vomited and had a violent pain in
her head. ‘Pray God’, says her mother,
in a terrible fright, ’my child has not the
distemper!’ The pain in her head increasing,
her mother ordered the bed to be warmed, and resolved
to put her to bed, and prepared to give her things
to sweat, which was the ordinary remedy to be taken
when the first apprehensions of the distemper began.
While the bed was airing the mother
undressed the young woman, and just as she was laid
down in the bed, she, looking upon her body with a
candle, immediately discovered the fatal tokens on
the inside of her thighs. Her mother, not being
able to contain herself, threw down her candle and
shrieked out in such a frightful manner that it was
enough to place horror upon the stoutest heart in
the world; nor was it one scream or one cry, but the
fright having seized her spirits, she fainted
first, then recovered, then ran all over the house,
up the stairs and down the stairs, like one distracted,
and indeed really was distracted, and continued screeching
and crying out for several hours void of all sense,
or at least government of her senses, and, as I was
told, never came thoroughly to herself again.
As to the young maiden, she was a dead corpse from
that moment, for the gangrene which occasions the spots
had spread [over] her whole body, and she died in
less than two hours. But still the mother continued
crying out, not knowing anything more of her child,
several hours after she was dead. It is so long
ago that I am not certain, but I think the mother
never recovered, but died in two or three weeks after.
This was an extraordinary case, and
I am therefore the more particular in it, because
I came so much to the knowledge of it; but there were
innumerable such-like cases, and it was seldom that
the weekly bill came in but there were two or three
put in, ‘frighted’; that is, that may
well be called frighted to death. But besides
those who were so frighted as to die upon the spot,
there were great numbers frighted to other extremes,
some frighted out of their senses, some out of their
memory, and some out of their understanding.
But I return to the shutting up of houses.
As several people, I say, got out
of their houses by stratagem after they were shut
up, so others got out by bribing the watchmen,
and giving them money to let them go privately out
in the night. I must confess I thought it at
that time the most innocent corruption or bribery that
any man could be guilty of, and therefore could not
but pity the poor men, and think it was hard when
three of those watchmen were publicly whipped through
the streets for suffering people to go out of houses
shut up.
But notwithstanding that severity,
money prevailed with the poor men, and many families
found means to make sallies out, and escape that way
after they had been shut up; but these were generally
such as had some places to retire to; and though there
was no easy passing the roads any whither after the
1st of August, yet there were many ways of retreat,
and particularly, as I hinted, some got tents and set
them up in the fields, carrying beds or straw to lie
on, and provisions to eat, and so lived in them as
hermits in a cell, for nobody would venture to come
near them; and several stories were told of such, some
comical, some tragical, some who lived like wandering
pilgrims in the deserts, and escaped by making themselves
exiles in such a manner as is scarce to be credited,
and who yet enjoyed more liberty than was to be expected
in such cases.
I have by me a story of two brothers
and their kinsman, who being single men, but that
had stayed in the city too long to get away, and indeed
not knowing where to go to have any retreat, nor having
wherewith to travel far, took a course for their own
preservation, which though in itself at first desperate,
yet was so natural that it may be wondered that no
more did so at that time. They were but of mean
condition, and yet not so very poor as that they could
not furnish themselves with some little conveniences
such as might serve to keep life and soul together;
and finding the distemper increasing in a terrible
manner, they resolved to shift as well as they could,
and to be gone.
One of them had been a soldier in
the late wars, and before that in the Low Countries,
and having been bred to no particular employment but
his arms, and besides being wounded, and not able
to work very hard, had for some time been employed
at a baker’s of sea-biscuit in Wapping.
The brother of this man was a seaman
too, but somehow or other had been hurt of one leg,
that he could not go to sea, but had worked for his
living at a sailmaker’s in Wapping, or thereabouts;
and being a good husband, had laid up some money,
and was the richest of the three.
The third man was a joiner or carpenter
by trade, a handy fellow, and he had no wealth but
his box or basket of tools, with the help of which
he could at any time get his living, such a time as
this excepted, wherever he went and he
lived near Shadwell.
They all lived in Stepney parish,
which, as I have said, being the last that was infected,
or at least violently, they stayed there till they
evidently saw the plague was abating at the west part
of the town, and coming towards the east, where they
lived.
The story of those three men, if the
reader will be content to have me give it in their
own persons, without taking upon me to either vouch
the particulars or answer for any mistakes, I shall
give as distinctly as I can, believing the history
will be a very good pattern for any poor man to follow,
in case the like public desolation should happen here;
and if there may be no such occasion, which God of
His infinite mercy grant us, still the story may have
its uses so many ways as that it will, I hope, never
be said that the relating has been unprofitable.
I say all this previous to the history,
having yet, for the present, much more to say before
I quit my own part.
I went all the first part of the time
freely about the streets, though not so freely as
to run myself into apparent danger, except when they
dug the great pit in the churchyard of our parish of
Aldgate. A terrible pit it was, and I could not
resist my curiosity to go and see it. As near
as I may judge, it was about forty feet in length,
and about fifteen or sixteen feet broad, and at the
time I first looked at it, about nine feet deep; but
it was said they dug it near twenty feet deep afterwards
in one part of it, till they could go no deeper for
the water; for they had, it seems, dug several large
pits before this. For though the plague was long
a-coming to our parish, yet, when it did come, there
was no parish in or about London where it raged with
such violence as in the two parishes of Aldgate and
Whitechappel.
I say they had dug several pits in
another ground, when the distemper began to spread
in our parish, and especially when the dead-carts began
to go about, which was not, in our parish, till the
beginning of August. Into these pits they had
put perhaps fifty or sixty bodies each; then they
made larger holes wherein they buried all that the
cart brought in a week, which, by the middle to the
end of August, came to from 200 to 400 a week; and
they could not well dig them larger, because of the
order of the magistrates confining them to leave no
bodies within six feet of the surface; and the water
coming on at about seventeen or eighteen feet, they
could not well, I say, put more in one pit. But
now, at the beginning of September, the plague raging
in a dreadful manner, and the number of burials in
our parish increasing to more than was ever buried
in any parish about London of no larger extent, they
ordered this dreadful gulf to be dug for
such it was, rather than a pit.
They had supposed this pit would have
supplied them for a month or more when they dug it,
and some blamed the churchwardens for suffering such
a frightful thing, telling them they were making preparations
to bury the whole parish, and the like; but time made
it appear the churchwardens knew the condition of
the parish better than they did: for, the pit
being finished the 4th of September, I think, they
began to bury in it the 6th, and by the 20th, which
was just two weeks, they had thrown into it 1114 bodies
when they were obliged to fill it up, the bodies being
then come to lie within six feet of the surface.
I doubt not but there may be some ancient persons
alive in the parish who can justify the fact of this,
and are able to show even in what place of the churchyard
the pit lay better than I can. The mark of it
also was many years to be seen in the churchyard on
the surface, lying in length parallel with the passage
which goes by the west wall of the churchyard out of
Houndsditch, and turns east again into Whitechappel,
coming out near the Three Nuns’ Inn.
It was about the 10th of September
that my curiosity led, or rather drove, me to go and
see this pit again, when there had been near 400 people
buried in it; and I was not content to see it in the
day-time, as I had done before, for then there would
have been nothing to have been seen but the loose
earth; for all the bodies that were thrown in were
immediately covered with earth by those they called
the buriers, which at other times were called bearers;
but I resolved to go in the night and see some of
them thrown in.
There was a strict order to prevent
people coming to those pits, and that was only to
prevent infection. But after some time that order
was more necessary, for people that were infected
and near their end, and delirious also, would run
to those pits, wrapt in blankets or rugs, and throw
themselves in, and, as they said, bury themselves.
I cannot say that the officers suffered any willingly
to lie there; but I have heard that in a great pit
in Finsbury, in the parish of Cripplegate, it lying
open then to the fields, for it was not then walled
about, [many] came and threw themselves in, and expired
there, before they threw any earth upon them; and
that when they came to bury others and found them there,
they were quite dead, though not cold.
This may serve a little to describe
the dreadful condition of that day, though it is impossible
to say anything that is able to give a true idea of
it to those who did not see it, other than this, that
it was indeed very, very, very dreadful, and such
as no tongue can express.
I got admittance into the churchyard
by being acquainted with the sexton who attended;
who, though he did not refuse me at all, yet earnestly
persuaded me not to go, telling me very seriously (for
he was a good, religious, and sensible man) that it
was indeed their business and duty to venture, and
to run all hazards, and that in it they might hope
to be preserved; but that I had no apparent call to
it but my own curiosity, which, he said, he believed
I would not pretend was sufficient to justify my running
that hazard. I told him I had been pressed in
my mind to go, and that perhaps it might be an instructing
sight, that might not be without its uses. ‘Nay,’
says the good man, ’if you will venture upon
that score, name of God go in; for, depend upon it,
’twill be a sermon to you, it may be, the best
that ever you heard in your life. ’Tis a
speaking sight,’ says he, ’and has a voice
with it, and a loud one, to call us all to repentance’;
and with that he opened the door and said, ‘Go,
if you will.’
His discourse had shocked my resolution
a little, and I stood wavering for a good while, but
just at that interval I saw two links come over from
the end of the Minories, and heard the bellman, and
then appeared a dead-cart, as they called it, coming
over the streets; so I could no longer resist my desire
of seeing it, and went in. There was nobody, as
I could perceive at first, in the churchyard, or going
into it, but the buriers and the fellow that drove
the cart, or rather led the horse and cart; but when
they came up to the pit they saw a man go to and again,
muffled up in a brown Cloak, and making motions with
his hands under his cloak, as if he was in great agony,
and the buriers immediately gathered about him, supposing
he was one of those poor delirious or desperate creatures
that used to pretend, as I have said, to bury themselves.
He said nothing as he walked about, but two or three
times groaned very deeply and loud, and sighed as
he would break his heart.
When the buriers came up to him they
soon found he was neither a person infected and desperate,
as I have observed above, or a person distempered in
mind, but one oppressed with a dreadful weight of grief
indeed, having his wife and several of his children
all in the cart that was just come in with him, and
he followed in an agony and excess of sorrow.
He mourned heartily, as it was easy to see, but with
a kind of masculine grief that could not give itself
vent by tears; and calmly defying the buriers to let
him alone, said he would only see the bodies thrown
in and go away, so they left importuning him.
But no sooner was the cart turned round and the bodies
shot into the pit promiscuously, which was a surprise
to him, for he at least expected they would have been
decently laid in, though indeed he was afterwards convinced
that was impracticable; I say, no sooner did he see
the sight but he cried out aloud, unable to contain
himself. I could not hear what he said, but he
went backward two or three steps and fell down in a
swoon. The buriers ran to him and took him up,
and in a little while he came to himself, and they
led him away to the Pie Tavern over against the end
of Houndsditch, where, it seems, the man was known,
and where they took care of him. He looked into
the pit again as he went away, but the buriers had
covered the bodies so immediately with throwing in
earth, that though there was light enough, for there
were lanterns, and candles in them, placed all night
round the sides of the pit, upon heaps of earth, seven
or eight, or perhaps more, yet nothing could be seen.
This was a mournful scene indeed,
and affected me almost as much as the rest; but the
other was awful and full of terror. The cart had
in it sixteen or seventeen bodies; some were wrapt
up in linen sheets, some in rags, some little other
than naked, or so loose that what covering they had
fell from them in the shooting out of the cart, and
they fell quite naked among the rest; but the matter
was not much to them, or the indecency much to any
one else, seeing they were all dead, and were to be
huddled together into the common grave of mankind,
as we may call it, for here was no difference made,
but poor and rich went together; there was no other
way of burials, neither was it possible there should,
for coffins were not to be had for the prodigious
numbers that fell in such a calamity as this.
It was reported by way of scandal
upon the buriers, that if any corpse was delivered
to them decently wound up, as we called it then, in
a winding-sheet tied over the head and feet, which
some did, and which was generally of good linen; I
say, it was reported that the buriers were so wicked
as to strip them in the cart and carry them quite naked
to the ground. But as I cannot easily credit
anything so vile among Christians, and at a time so
filled with terrors as that was, I can only relate
it and leave it undetermined.
Innumerable stories also went about
of the cruel behaviours and practices of nurses who
tended the sick, and of their hastening on the fate
of those they tended in their sickness. But I
shall say more of this in its place.
I was indeed shocked with this sight;
it almost overwhelmed me, and I went away with my
heart most afflicted, and full of the afflicting thoughts,
such as I cannot describe just at my going out of the
church, and turning up the street towards my own house,
I saw another cart with links, and a bellman going
before, coming out of Harrow Alley in the Butcher
Row, on the other side of the way, and being, as I
perceived, very full of dead bodies, it went directly
over the street also toward the church. I stood
a while, but I had no stomach to go back again to
see the same dismal scene over again, so I went directly
home, where I could not but consider with thankfulness
the risk I had run, believing I had gotten no injury,
as indeed I had not.
Here the poor unhappy gentleman’s
grief came into my head again, and indeed I could
not but shed tears in the reflection upon it, perhaps
more than he did himself; but his case lay so heavy
upon my mind that I could not prevail with myself,
but that I must go out again into the street, and
go to the Pie Tavern, resolving to inquire what became
of him.
It was by this time one o’clock
in the morning, and yet the poor gentleman was there.
The truth was, the people of the house, knowing him,
had entertained him, and kept him there all the night,
notwithstanding the danger of being infected by him,
though it appeared the man was perfectly sound himself.
It is with regret that I take notice
of this tavern. The people were civil, mannerly,
and an obliging sort of folks enough, and had till
this time kept their house open and their trade going
on, though not so very publicly as formerly:
but there was a dreadful set of fellows that used
their house, and who, in the middle of all this horror,
met there every night, behaved with all the revelling
and roaring extravagances as is usual for such
people to do at other times, and, indeed, to such an
offensive degree that the very master and mistress
of the house grew first ashamed and then terrified
at them.
They sat generally in a room next
the street, and as they always kept late hours, so
when the dead-cart came across the street-end to go
into Houndsditch, which was in view of the tavern windows,
they would frequently open the windows as soon as
they heard the bell and look out at them; and as they
might often hear sad lamentations of people in the
streets or at their windows as the carts went along,
they would make their impudent mocks and jeers at
them, especially if they heard the poor people call
upon God to have mercy upon them, as many would do
at those times in their ordinary passing along the
streets.
These gentlemen, being something disturbed
with the clutter of bringing the poor gentleman into
the house, as above, were first angry and very high
with the master of the house for suffering such a fellow,
as they called him, to be brought out of the grave
into their house; but being answered that the man
was a neighbour, and that he was sound, but overwhelmed
with the calamity of his family, and the like, they
turned their anger into ridiculing the man and his
sorrow for his wife and children, taunted him with
want of courage to leap into the great pit and go
to heaven, as they jeeringly expressed it, along with
them, adding some very profane and even blasphemous
expressions.
They were at this vile work when I
came back to the house, and, as far as I could see,
though the man sat still, mute and disconsolate, and
their affronts could not divert his sorrow, yet he
was both grieved and offended at their discourse.
Upon this I gently reproved them, being well enough
acquainted with their characters, and not unknown in
person to two of them.
They immediately fell upon me with
ill language and oaths, asked me what I did out of
my grave at such a time when so many honester men were
carried into the churchyard, and why I was not at home
saying my prayers against the dead-cart came for me,
and the like.
I was indeed astonished at the impudence
of the men, though not at all discomposed at their
treatment of me. However, I kept my temper.
I told them that though I defied them or any man in
the world to tax me with any dishonesty, yet I acknowledged
that in this terrible judgement of God many better
than I were swept away and carried to their grave.
But to answer their question directly, the case was,
that I was mercifully preserved by that great God
whose name they had blasphemed and taken in vain by
cursing and swearing in a dreadful manner, and that
I believed I was preserved in particular, among other
ends of His goodness, that I might reprove them for
their audacious boldness in behaving in such a manner
and in such an awful time as this was, especially for
their jeering and mocking at an honest gentleman and
a neighbour (for some of them knew him), who, they
saw, was overwhelmed with sorrow for the breaches
which it had pleased God to make upon his family.
I cannot call exactly to mind the
hellish, abominable raillery which was the return
they made to that talk of mine: being provoked,
it seems, that I was not at all afraid to be free
with them; nor, if I could remember, would I fill
my account with any of the words, the horrid oaths,
curses, and vile expressions, such as, at that time
of the day, even the worst and ordinariest people
in the street would not use; for, except such hardened
creatures as these, the most wicked wretches that
could be found had at that time some terror upon their
minds of the hand of that Power which could thus in
a moment destroy them.
But that which was the worst in all
their devilish language was, that they were not afraid
to blaspheme God and talk atheistically, making a
jest of my calling the plague the hand of God; mocking,
and even laughing, at the word judgement, as if the
providence of God had no concern in the inflicting
such a desolating stroke; and that the people calling
upon God as they saw the carts carrying away the dead
bodies was all enthusiastic, absurd, and impertinent.
I made them some reply, such as I
thought proper, but which I found was so far from
putting a check to their horrid way of speaking that
it made them rail the more, so that I confess it filled
me with horror and a kind of rage, and I came away,
as I told them, lest the hand of that judgement which
had visited the whole city should glorify His vengeance
upon them, and all that were near them.
They received all reproof with the
utmost contempt, and made the greatest mockery that
was possible for them to do at me, giving me all the
opprobrious, insolent scoffs that they could think
of for preaching to them, as they called it, which
indeed grieved me, rather than angered me; and I went
away, blessing God, however, in my mind that I had
not spared them, though they had insulted me so much.
They continued this wretched course
three or four days after this, continually mocking
and jeering at all that showed themselves religious
or serious, or that were any way touched with the sense
of the terrible judgement of God upon us; and I was
informed they flouted in the same manner at the good
people who, notwithstanding the contagion, met at the
church, fasted, and prayed to God to remove His hand
from them.
I say, they continued this dreadful
course three or four days I think it was
no more when one of them, particularly he
who asked the poor gentleman what he did out of his
grave, was struck from Heaven with the plague, and
died in a most deplorable manner; and, in a word, they
were every one of them carried into the great pit
which I have mentioned above, before it was quite
filled up, which was not above a fortnight or thereabout.
These men were guilty of many extravagances,
such as one would think human nature should have trembled
at the thoughts of at such a time of general terror
as was then upon us, and particularly scoffing and
mocking at everything which they happened to see that
was religious among the people, especially at their
thronging zealously to the place of public worship
to implore mercy from Heaven in such a time of distress;
and this tavern where they held their dub being within
view of the church-door, they had the more particular
occasion for their atheistical profane mirth.
But this began to abate a little with
them before the accident which I have related happened,
for the infection increased so violently at this part
of the town now, that people began to be afraid to
come to the church; at least such numbers did not
resort thither as was usual. Many of the clergymen
likewise were dead, and others gone into the country;
for it really required a steady courage and a strong
faith for a man not only to venture being in town
at such a time as this, but likewise to venture to
come to church and perform the office of a minister
to a congregation, of whom he had reason to believe
many of them were actually infected with the plague,
and to do this every day, or twice a day, as in some
places was done.
It is true the people showed an extraordinary
zeal in these religious exercises, and as the church-doors
were always open, people would go in single at all
times, whether the minister was officiating or no,
and locking themselves into separate pews, would be
praying to God with great fervency and devotion.
Others assembled at meeting-houses,
every one as their different opinions in such things
guided, but all were promiscuously the subject of
these men’s drollery, especially at the beginning
of the visitation.
It seems they had been checked for
their open insulting religion in this manner by several
good people of every persuasion, and that, and the
violent raging of the infection, I suppose, was the
occasion that they had abated much of their rudeness
for some time before, and were only roused by the
spirit of ribaldry and atheism at the clamour which
was made when the gentleman was first brought in there,
and perhaps were agitated by the same devil, when
I took upon me to reprove them; though I did it at
first with all the calmness, temper, and good manners
that I could, which for a while they insulted me the
more for thinking it had been in fear of their resentment,
though afterwards they found the contrary.
I went home, indeed, grieved and afflicted
in my mind at the abominable wickedness of those men,
not doubting, however, that they would be made dreadful
examples of God’s justice; for I looked upon
this dismal time to be a particular season of Divine
vengeance, and that God would on this occasion single
out the proper objects of His displeasure in a more
especial and remarkable manner than at another time;
and that though I did believe that many good people
would, and did, fall in the common calamity, and that
it was no certain rule to judge of the eternal state
of any one by their being distinguished in such a time
of general destruction neither one way or other; yet,
I say, it could not but seem reasonable to believe
that God would not think fit to spare by His mercy
such open declared enemies, that should insult His
name and Being, defy His vengeance, and mock at His
worship and worshippers at such a time; no, not though
His mercy had thought fit to bear with and spare them
at other times; that this was a day of visitation,
a day of God’s anger, and those words came into
my thought, Jer. v 9: ’Shall I not visit
for these things? saith the Lord: and shall not
My soul be avenged of such a nation as this?’
These things, I say, lay upon my mind,
and I went home very much grieved and oppressed with
the horror of these men’s wickedness, and to
think that anything could be so vile, so hardened,
and notoriously wicked as to insult God, and His servants,
and His worship in such a manner, and at such a time
as this was, when He had, as it were, His sword drawn
in His hand on purpose to take vengeance not on them
only, but on the whole nation.
I had, indeed, been in some passion
at first with them though it was really
raised, not by any affront they had offered me personally,
but by the horror their blaspheming tongues filled
me with. However, I was doubtful in my thoughts
whether the resentment I retained was not all upon
my own private account, for they had given me a great
deal of ill language too I mean personally;
but after some pause, and having a weight of grief
upon my mind, I retired myself as soon as I came home,
for I slept not that night; and giving God most humble
thanks for my preservation in the eminent danger I
had been in, I set my mind seriously and with the
utmost earnestness to pray for those desperate wretches,
that God would pardon them, open their eyes, and effectually
humble them.
By this I not only did my duty, namely,
to pray for those who despitefully used me, but I
fully tried my own heart, to my fun satisfaction,
that it was not filled with any spirit of resentment
as they had offended me in particular; and I humbly
recommend the method to all those that would know,
or be certain, how to distinguish between their zeal
for the honour of God and the effects of their private
passions and resentment.
But I must go back here to the particular
incidents which occur to my thoughts of the time of
the visitation, and particularly to the time of their
shutting up houses in the first part of their sickness;
for before the sickness was come to its height people
had more room to make their observations than they
had afterward; but when it was in the extremity there
was no such thing as communication with one another,
as before.
During the shutting up of houses,
as I have said, some violence was offered to the watchmen.
As to soldiers, there were none to be found.
The few guards which the king then had, which were
nothing like the number entertained since, were dispersed,
either at Oxford with the Court, or in quarters in
the remoter parts of the country, small detachments
excepted, who did duty at the Tower and at Whitehall,
and these but very few. Neither am I positive
that there was any other guard at the Tower than the
warders, as they called them, who stand at the gate
with gowns and caps, the same as the yeomen of the
guard, except the ordinary gunners, who were twenty-four,
and the officers appointed to look after the magazine,
who were called armourers. As to trained bands,
there was no possibility of raising any; neither, if
the Lieutenancy, either of London or Middlesex, had
ordered the drums to beat for the militia, would any
of the companies, I believe, have drawn together,
whatever risk they had run.
This made the watchmen be the less
regarded, and perhaps occasioned the greater violence
to be used against them. I mention it on this
score to observe that the setting watchmen thus to
keep the people in was, first of all, not effectual,
but that the people broke out, whether by force or
by stratagem, even almost as often as they pleased;
and, second, that those that did thus break out were
generally people infected who, in their desperation,
running about from one place to another, valued not
whom they injured: and which perhaps, as I have
said, might give birth to report that it was natural
to the infected people to desire to infect others,
which report was really false.
And I know it so well, and in so many
several cases, that I could give several relations
of good, pious, and religious people who, when they
have had the distemper, have been so far from being
forward to infect others that they have forbid their
own family to come near them, in hopes of their being
preserved, and have even died without seeing their
nearest relations lest they should be instrumental
to give them the distemper, and infect or endanger
them. If, then, there were cases wherein the
infected people were careless of the injury they did
to others, this was certainly one of them, if not
the chief, namely, when people who had the distemper
had broken out from houses which were so shut up,
and having been driven to extremities for provision
or for entertainment, had endeavoured to conceal their
condition, and have been thereby instrumental involuntarily
to infect others who have been ignorant and unwary.
This is one of the reasons why I believed
then, and do believe still, that the shutting up houses
thus by force, and restraining, or rather imprisoning,
people in their own houses, as I said above, was of
little or no service in the whole. Nay, I am
of opinion it was rather hurtful, having forced those
desperate people to wander abroad with the plague
upon them, who would otherwise have died quietly in
their beds.
I remember one citizen who, having
thus broken out of his house in Aldersgate Street
or thereabout, went along the road to Islington; he
attempted to have gone in at the Angel Inn, and after
that the White Horse, two inns known still by the
same signs, but was refused; after which he came to
the Pied Bull, an inn also still continuing the same
sign. He asked them for lodging for one night
only, pretending to be going into Lincolnshire, and
assuring them of his being very sound and free from
the infection, which also at that time had not reached
much that way.
They told him they had no lodging
that they could spare but one bed up in the garret,
and that they could spare that bed for one night, some
drovers being expected the next day with cattle; so,
if he would accept of that lodging, he might have
it, which he did. So a servant was sent up with
a candle with him to show him the room. He was
very well dressed, and looked like a person not used
to lie in a garret; and when he came to the room he
fetched a deep sigh, and said to the servant, ’I
have seldom lain in such a lodging as this. ’However,
the servant assuring him again that they had no better,
‘Well,’ says he, ’I must make shift;
this is a dreadful time; but it is but for one night.’
So he sat down upon the bedside, and bade the maid,
I think it was, fetch him up a pint of warm ale.
Accordingly the servant went for the ale, but some
hurry in the house, which perhaps employed her other
ways, put it out of her head, and she went up no more
to him.
The next morning, seeing no appearance
of the gentleman, somebody in the house asked the
servant that had showed him upstairs what was become
of him. She started. ‘Alas I,’
says she, ’I never thought more of him.
He bade me carry him some warm ale, but I forgot.’
Upon which, not the maid, but some other person was
sent up to see after him, who, coming into the room,
found him stark dead and almost cold, stretched out
across the bed. His clothes were pulled off, his
jaw fallen, his eyes open in a most frightful posture,
the rug of the bed being grasped hard in one of his
hands, so that it was plain he died soon after the
maid left him; and ’tis probable, had she gone
up with the ale, she had found him dead in a few minutes
after he sat down upon the bed. The alarm was
great in the house, as anyone may suppose, they having
been free from the distemper till that disaster, which,
bringing the infection to the house, spread it immediately
to other houses round about it. I do not remember
how many died in the house itself, but I think the
maid-servant who went up first with him fell presently
ill by the fright, and several others; for, whereas
there died but two in Islington of the plague the
week before, there died seventeen the week after, whereof
fourteen were of the plague. This was in the
week from the 11th of July to the 18th.
There was one shift that some families
had, and that not a few, when their houses happened
to be infected, and that was this: the families
who, in the first breaking-out of the distemper, fled
away into the country and had retreats among their
friends, generally found some or other of their neighbours
or relations to commit the charge of those houses
to for the safety of the goods and the like. Some
houses were, indeed, entirely locked up, the doors
padlocked, the windows and doors having deal boards
nailed over them, and only the inspection of them
committed to the ordinary watchmen and parish officers;
but these were but few.
It was thought that there were not
less than 10,000 houses forsaken of the inhabitants
in the city and suburbs, including what was in the
out-parishes and in Surrey, or the side of the water
they called Southwark. This was besides the numbers
of lodgers, and of particular persons who were fled
out of other families; so that in all it was computed
that about 200,000 people were fled and gone.
But of this I shall speak again. But I mention
it here on this account, namely, that it was a rule
with those who had thus two houses in their keeping
or care, that if anybody was taken sick in a family,
before the master of the family let the examiners
or any other officer know of it, he immediately would
send all the rest of his family, whether children or
servants, as it fell out to be, to such other house
which he had so in charge, and then giving notice
of the sick person to the examiner, have a nurse or
nurses appointed, and have another person to be shut
up in the house with them (which many for money would
do), so to take charge of the house in case the person
should die.
This was, in many cases, the saving
a whole family, who, if they had been shut up with
the sick person, would inevitably have perished.
But, on the other hand, this was another of the inconveniences
of shutting up houses; for the apprehensions and terror
of being shut up made many run away with the rest
of the family, who, though it was not publicly known,
and they were not quite sick, had yet the distemper
upon them; and who, by having an uninterrupted liberty
to go about, but being obliged still to conceal their
circumstances, or perhaps not knowing it themselves,
gave the distemper to others, and spread the infection
in a dreadful manner, as I shall explain further hereafter.
And here I may be able to make an
observation or two of my own, which may be of use
hereafter to those into whose bands these may come,
if they should ever see the like dreadful visitation.
(1) The infection generally came into the houses of
the citizens by the means of their servants, whom
they were obliged to send up and down the streets
for necessaries; that is to say, for food or physic,
to bakehouses, brew-houses, shops, &c.; and who going
necessarily through the streets into shops, markets,
and the like, it was impossible but that they should,
one way or other, meet with distempered people, who
conveyed the fatal breath into them, and they brought
it home to the families to which they belonged. (2)
It was a great mistake that such a great city as this
had but one pest-house; for had there been, instead
of one pest-house viz., beyond Bunhill
Fields, where, at most, they could receive, perhaps,
two hundred or three hundred people I say,
had there, instead of that one, been several pest-houses,
every one able to contain a thousand people, without
lying two in a bed, or two beds in a room; and had
every master of a family, as soon as any servant especially
had been taken sick in his house, been obliged to send
them to the next pest-house, if they were willing,
as many were, and had the examiners done the like
among the poor people when any had been stricken with
the infection; I say, had this been done where the
people were willing (not otherwise), and the houses
not been shut, I am persuaded, and was all the while
of that opinion, that not so many, by several thousands,
had died; for it was observed, and I could give several
instances within the compass of my own knowledge,
where a servant had been taken sick, and the family
had either time to send him out or retire from the
house and leave the sick person, as I have said above,
they had all been preserved; whereas when, upon one
or more sickening in a family, the house has been
shut up, the whole family have perished, and the bearers
been obliged to go in to fetch out the dead bodies,
not being able to bring them to the door, and at last
none left to do it.
(3) This put it out of question to
me, that the calamity was spread by infection; that
is to say, by some certain steams or fumes, which the
physicians call effluvia, by the breath, or by the
sweat, or by the stench of the sores of the sick persons,
or some other way, perhaps, beyond even the reach
of the physicians themselves, which effluvia affected
the sound who came within certain distances of the
sick, immediately penetrating the vital parts of the
said sound persons, putting their blood into an immediate
ferment, and agitating their spirits to that degree
which it was found they were agitated; and so those
newly infected persons communicated it in the same
manner to others. And this I shall give some
instances of, that cannot but convince those who seriously
consider it; and I cannot but with some wonder find
some people, now the contagion is over, talk of its
being an immediate stroke from Heaven, without the
agency of means, having commission to strike this
and that particular person, and none other which
I look upon with contempt as the effect of manifest
ignorance and enthusiasm; likewise the opinion of others,
who talk of infection being carried on by the air
only, by carrying with it vast numbers of insects
and invisible creatures, who enter into the body with
the breath, or even at the pores with the air, and
there generate or emit most acute poisons, or poisonous
ovae or eggs, which mingle themselves with the blood,
and so infect the body: a discourse full of learned
simplicity, and manifested to be so by universal experience;
but I shall say more to this case in its order.
I must here take further notice that
nothing was more fatal to the inhabitants of this
city than the supine negligence of the people themselves,
who, during the long notice or warning they had of
the visitation, made no provision for it by laying
in store of provisions, or of other necessaries, by
which they might have lived retired and within their
own houses, as I have observed others did, and who
were in a great measure preserved by that caution;
nor were they, after they were a little hardened to
it, so shy of conversing with one another, when actually
infected, as they were at first: no, though they
knew it.
I acknowledge I was one of those thoughtless
ones that had made so little provision that my servants
were obliged to go out of doors to buy every trifle
by penny and halfpenny, just as before it began, even
till my experience showing me the folly, I began to
be wiser so late that I had scarce time to store myself
sufficient for our common subsistence for a month.
I had in family only an ancient woman
that managed the house, a maid-servant, two apprentices,
and myself; and the plague beginning to increase about
us, I had many sad thoughts about what course I should
take, and how I should act. The many dismal objects
which happened everywhere as I went about the streets,
had filled my mind with a great deal of horror for
fear of the distemper, which was indeed very horrible
in itself, and in some more than in others. The
swellings, which were generally in the neck or groin,
when they grew hard and would not break, grew so painful
that it was equal to the most exquisite torture; and
some, not able to bear the torment, threw themselves
out at windows or shot themselves, or otherwise made
themselves away, and I saw several dismal objects
of that kind. Others, unable to contain themselves,
vented their pain by incessant roarings, and such loud
and lamentable cries were to be heard as we walked
along the streets that would pierce the very heart
to think of, especially when it was to be considered
that the same dreadful scourge might be expected every
moment to seize upon ourselves.
I cannot say but that now I began
to faint in my resolutions; my heart failed me very
much, and sorely I repented of my rashness. When
I had been out, and met with such terrible things
as these I have talked of, I say I repented my rashness
in venturing to abide in town. I wished often
that I had not taken upon me to stay, but had gone
away with my brother and his family.
Terrified by those frightful objects,
I would retire home sometimes and resolve to go out
no more; and perhaps I would keep those resolutions
for three or four days, which time I spent in the most
serious thankfulness for my preservation and the preservation
of my family, and the constant confession of my sins,
giving myself up to God every day, and applying to
Him with fasting, humiliation, and meditation.
Such intervals as I had I employed in reading books
and in writing down my memorandums of what occurred
to me every day, and out of which afterwards I took
most of this work, as it relates to my observations
without doors. What I wrote of my private meditations
I reserve for private use, and desire it may not be
made public on any account whatever.
I also wrote other meditations upon
divine subjects, such as occurred to me at that time
and were profitable to myself, but not fit for any
other view, and therefore I say no more of that.
I had a very good friend, a physician,
whose name was Heath, whom I frequently visited during
this dismal time, and to whose advice I was very much
obliged for many things which he directed me to take,
by way of preventing the infection when I went out,
as he found I frequently did, and to hold in my mouth
when I was in the streets. He also came very
often to see me, and as he was a good Christian as
well as a good physician, his agreeable conversation
was a very great support to me in the worst of this
terrible time.
It was now the beginning of August,
and the plague grew very violent and terrible in the
place where I lived, and Dr Heath coming to visit me,
and finding that I ventured so often out in the streets,
earnestly persuaded me to lock myself up and my family,
and not to suffer any of us to go out of doors; to
keep all our windows fast, shutters and curtains close,
and never to open them; but first, to make a very strong
smoke in the room where the window or door was to be
opened, with rozen and pitch, brimstone or gunpowder
and the like; and we did this for some time; but as
I had not laid in a store of provision for such a retreat,
it was impossible that we could keep within doors entirely.
However, I attempted, though it was so very late,
to do something towards it; and first, as I had convenience
both for brewing and baking, I went and bought two
sacks of meal, and for several weeks, having an oven,
we baked all our own bread; also I bought malt, and
brewed as much beer as all the casks I had would hold,
and which seemed enough to serve my house for five
or six weeks; also I laid in a quantity of salt butter
and Cheshire cheese; but I had no flesh-meat, and the
plague raged so violently among the butchers and slaughter-houses
on the other side of our street, where they are known
to dwell in great numbers, that it was not advisable
so much as to go over the street among them.
And here I must observe again, that
this necessity of going out of our houses to buy provisions
was in a great measure the ruin of the whole city,
for the people catched the distemper on these occasions
one of another, and even the provisions themselves
were often tainted; at least I have great reason to
believe so; and therefore I cannot say with satisfaction
what I know is repeated with great assurance, that
the market-people and such as brought provisions to
town were never infected. I am certain the butchers
of Whitechappel, where the greatest part of the flesh-meat
was killed, were dreadfully visited, and that at least
to such a degree that few of their shops were kept
open, and those that remained of them killed their
meat at Mile End and that way, and brought it to market
upon horses.
However, the poor people could not
lay up provisions, and there was a necessity that
they must go to market to buy, and others to send
servants or their children; and as this was a necessity
which renewed itself daily, it brought abundance of
unsound people to the markets, and a great many that
went thither sound brought death home with them.
It is true people used all possible
precaution. When any one bought a joint of meat
in the market they would not take it off the butcher’s
hand, but took it off the hooks themselves. On
the other hand, the butcher would not touch the money,
but have it put into a pot full of vinegar, which
he kept for that purpose. The buyer carried always
small money to make up any odd sum, that they might
take no change. They carried bottles of scents
and perfumes in their hands, and all the means that
could be used were used, but then the poor could not
do even these things, and they went at all hazards.
Innumerable dismal stories we heard
every day on this very account. Sometimes a man
or woman dropped down dead in the very markets, for
many people that had the plague upon them knew nothing
of it till the inward gangrene had affected their
vitals, and they died in a few moments. This
caused that many died frequently in that manner in
the streets suddenly, without any warning; others
perhaps had time to go to the next bulk or stall,
or to any door-porch, and just sit down and die, as
I have said before.
These objects were so frequent in
the streets that when the plague came to be very raging
on one side, there was scarce any passing by the streets
but that several dead bodies would be lying here and
there upon the ground. On the other hand, it
is observable that though at first the people would
stop as they went along and call to the neighbours
to come out on such an occasion, yet afterward no
notice was taken of them; but that if at any time
we found a corpse lying, go across the way and not
come near it; or, if in a narrow lane or passage, go
back again and seek some other way to go on the business
we were upon; and in those cases the corpse was always
left till the officers had notice to come and take
them away, or till night, when the bearers attending
the dead-cart would take them up and carry them away.
Nor did those undaunted creatures who performed these
offices fail to search their pockets, and sometimes
strip off their clothes if they were well dressed,
as sometimes they were, and carry off what they could
get.
But to return to the markets.
The butchers took that care that if any person died
in the market they had the officers always at band
to take them up upon hand-barrows and carry them to
the next churchyard; and this was so frequent that
such were not entered in the weekly bill, ‘Found
dead in the streets or fields’, as is the case
now, but they went into the general articles of the
great distemper.
But now the fury of the distemper
increased to such a degree that even the markets were
but very thinly furnished with provisions or frequented
with buyers compared to what they were before; and
the Lord Mayor caused the country people who brought
provisions to be stopped in the streets leading into
the town, and to sit down there with their goods, where
they sold what they brought, and went immediately away;
and this encouraged the country people greatly-to
do so, for they sold their provisions at the very
entrances into the town, and even in the fields, as
particularly in the fields beyond Whitechappel, in
Spittlefields; also in St George’s Fields in
Southwark, in Bunhill Fields, and in a great field
called Wood’s Close, near Islington. Thither
the Lord Mayor, aldermen, and magistrates sent their
officers and servants to buy for their families, themselves
keeping within doors as much as possible, and the
like did many other people; and after this method was
taken the country people came with great cheerfulness,
and brought provisions of all sorts, and very seldom
got any harm, which, I suppose, added also to that
report of their being miraculously preserved.
As for my little family, having thus,
as I have said, laid in a store of bread, butter,
cheese, and beer, I took my friend and physician’s
advice, and locked myself up, and my family, and resolved
to suffer the hardship of living a few months without
flesh-meat, rather than to purchase it at the hazard
of our lives.
But though I confined my family, I
could not prevail upon my unsatisfied curiosity to
stay within entirely myself; and though I generally
came frighted and terrified home, vet I could not
restrain; only that indeed I did not do it so frequently
as at first.
I had some little obligations, indeed,
upon me to go to my brother’s house, which was
in Coleman Street parish and which he had left to my
care, and I went at first every day, but afterwards
only once or twice a week.
In these walks I had many dismal scenes
before my eyes, as particularly of persons falling
dead in the streets, terrible shrieks and screechings
of women, who, in their agonies, would throw open their
chamber windows and cry out in a dismal, surprising
manner. It is impossible to describe the variety
of postures in which the passions of the poor people
would express themselves.
Passing through Tokenhouse Yard, in
Lothbury, of a sudden a casement violently opened
just over my head, and a woman gave three frightful
screeches, and then cried, ‘Oh! death, death,
death!’ in a most inimitable tone, and which
struck me with horror and a chillness in my very blood.
There was nobody to be seen in the whole street, neither
did any other window open, for people had no curiosity
now in any case, nor could anybody help one another,
so I went on to pass into Bell Alley.
Just in Bell Alley, on the right hand
of the passage, there was a more terrible cry than
that, though it was not so directed out at the window;
but the whole family was in a terrible fright, and
I could hear women and children run screaming about
the rooms like distracted, when a garret-window opened
and somebody from a window on the other side the alley
called and asked, ‘What is the matter?’
upon which, from the first window, it was answered,
‘Oh Lord, my old master has hanged himself!’
The other asked again, ‘Is he quite dead?’
and the first answered, ’Ay, ay, quite dead;
quite dead and cold!’ This person was a merchant
and a deputy alderman, and very rich. I care
not to mention the name, though I knew his name too,
but that would be an hardship to the family, which
is now flourishing again.
But this is but one; it is scarce
credible what dreadful cases happened in particular
families every day. People in the rage of the
distemper, or in the torment of their swellings, which
was indeed intolerable, running out of their own government,
raving and distracted, and oftentimes laying violent
hands upon themselves, throwing themselves out at
their windows, shooting themselves &c.; mothers murdering
their own children in their lunacy, some dying of
mere grief as a passion, some of mere fright and surprise
without any infection at all, others frighted into
idiotism and foolish distractions, some into despair
and lunacy, others into melancholy madness.
The pain of the swelling was in particular
very violent, and to some intolerable; the physicians
and surgeons may be said to have tortured many poor
creatures even to death. The swellings in some
grew hard, and they applied violent drawing-plaisters
or poultices to break them, and if these did not do
they cut and scarified them in a terrible manner.
In some those swellings were made hard partly by the
force of the distemper and partly by their being too
violently drawn, and were so hard that no instrument
could cut them, and then they burnt them with caustics,
so that many died raving mad with the torment, and
some in the very operation. In these distresses,
some, for want of help to hold them down in their
beds, or to look to them, laid hands upon themselves
as above. Some broke out into the streets, perhaps
naked, and would run directly down to the river if
they were not stopped by the watchman or other officers,
and plunge themselves into the water wherever they
found it.
It often pierced my very soul to hear
the groans and cries of those who were thus tormented,
but of the two this was counted the most promising
particular in the whole infection, for if these swellings
could be brought to a head, and to break and run,
or, as the surgeons call it, to digest, the patient
generally recovered; whereas those who, like the gentlewoman’s
daughter, were struck with death at the beginning,
and had the tokens come out upon them, often went
about indifferent easy till a little before they died,
and some till the moment they dropped down, as in
apoplexies and epilepsies is often the case.
Such would be taken suddenly very sick, and would
run to a bench or bulk, or any convenient place that
offered itself, or to their own houses if possible,
as I mentioned before, and there sit down, grow faint,
and die. This kind of dying was much the same
as it was with those who die of common mortifications,
who die swooning, and, as it were, go away in a dream.
Such as died thus had very little notice of their being
infected at all till the gangrene was spread through
their whole body; nor could physicians themselves
know certainly how it was with them till they opened
their breasts or other parts of their body and saw
the tokens.
We had at this time a great many frightful
stories told us of nurses and watchmen who looked
after the dying people; that is to say, hired nurses
who attended infected people, using them barbarously,
starving them, smothering them, or by other wicked
means hastening their end, that is to say, murdering
of them; and watchmen, being set to guard houses that
were shut up when there has been but one person left,
and perhaps that one lying sick, that they have broke
in and murdered that body, and immediately thrown
them out into the dead-cart! And so they have
gone scarce cold to the grave.
I cannot say but that some such murders
were committed, and I think two were sent to prison
for it, but died before they could be tried; and I
have heard that three others, at several times, were
excused for murders of that kind; but I must say I
believe nothing of its being so common a crime as
some have since been pleased to say, nor did it seem
to be so rational where the people were brought so
low as not to be able to help themselves, for such
seldom recovered, and there was no temptation to commit
a murder, at least none equal to the fact, where they
were sure persons would die in so short a time, and
could not live.
That there were a great many robberies
and wicked practices committed even in this dreadful
time I do not deny. The power of avarice was so
strong in some that they would run any hazard to steal
and to plunder; and particularly in houses where all
the families or inhabitants have been dead and carried
out, they would break in at all hazards, and without
regard to the danger of infection, take even the clothes
off the dead bodies and the bed-clothes from others
where they lay dead.
This, I suppose, must be the case
of a family in Houndsditch, where a man and his daughter,
the rest of the family being, as I suppose, carried
away before by the dead-cart, were found stark naked,
one in one chamber and one in another, lying dead
on the floor, and the clothes of the beds, from whence
’tis supposed they were rolled off by thieves,
stolen and carried quite away.
It is indeed to be observed that the
women were in all this calamity the most rash, fearless,
and desperate creatures, and as there were vast numbers
that went about as nurses to tend those that were sick,
they committed a great many petty thieveries in the
houses where they were employed; and some of them
were publicly whipped for it, when perhaps they ought
rather to have been hanged for examples, for numbers
of houses were robbed on these occasions, till at
length the parish officers were sent to recommend
nurses to the sick, and always took an account whom
it was they sent, so as that they might call them to
account if the house had been abused where they were
placed.
But these robberies extended chiefly
to wearing-clothes, linen, and what rings or money
they could come at when the person died who was under
their care, but not to a general plunder of the houses;
and I could give you an account of one of these nurses,
who, several years after, being on her deathbed, confessed
with the utmost horror the robberies she had committed
at the time of her being a nurse, and by which she
had enriched herself to a great degree. But as
for murders, I do not find that there was ever any
proof of the facts in the manner as it has been reported,
except as above.
They did tell me, indeed, of a nurse
in one place that laid a wet cloth upon the face of
a dying patient whom she tended, and so put an end
to his life, who was just expiring before; and another
that smothered a young woman she was looking to when
she was in a fainting fit, and would have come to
herself; some that killed them by giving them one thing,
some another, and some starved them by giving them
nothing at all. But these stories had two marks
of suspicion that always attended them, which caused
me always to slight them and to look on them as mere
stories that people continually frighted one another
with. First, that wherever it was that we heard
it, they always placed the scene at the farther end
of the town, opposite or most remote from where you
were to hear it. If you heard it in Whitechappel,
it had happened at St Giles’s, or at Westminster,
or Holborn, or that end of the town. If you heard
of it at that end of the town, then it was done in
Whitechappel, or the Minories, or about Cripplegate
parish. If you heard of it in the city, why,
then it happened in Southwark; and if you heard of
it in Southwark, then it was done in the city, and
the like.
In the next place, of what part soever
you heard the story, the particulars were always the
same, especially that of laying a wet double clout
on a dying man’s face, and that of smothering
a young gentlewoman; so that it was apparent, at least
to my judgement, that there was more of tale than
of truth in those things.
However, I cannot say but it had some
effect upon the people, and particularly that, as
I said before, they grew more cautious whom they took
into their houses, and whom they trusted their lives
with, and had them always recommended if they could;
and where they could not find such, for they were
not very plenty, they applied to the parish officers.
But here again the misery of that
time lay upon the poor who, being infected, had neither
food or physic, neither physician or apothecary to
assist them, or nurse to attend them. Many of
those died calling for help, and even for sustenance,
out at their windows in a most miserable and deplorable
manner; but it must be added that whenever the cases
of such persons or families were represented to my
Lord Mayor they always were relieved.
It is true, in some houses where the
people were not very poor, yet where they had sent
perhaps their wives and children away, and if they
had any servants they had been dismissed; I
say it is true that to save the expenses, many such
as these shut themselves in, and not having help,
died alone.
A neighbour and acquaintance of mine,
having some money owing to him from a shopkeeper in
Whitecross Street or thereabouts, sent his apprentice,
a youth about eighteen years of age, to endeavour to
get the money. He came to the door, and finding
it shut, knocked pretty hard; and, as he thought,
heard somebody answer within, but was not sure, so
he waited, and after some stay knocked again, and then
a third time, when he heard somebody coming downstairs.
At length the man of the house came
to the door; he had on his breeches or drawers, and
a yellow flannel waistcoat, no stockings, a pair of
slipped-shoes, a white cap on his head, and, as the
young man said, ‘death in his face’.
When he opened the door, says he,
‘What do you disturb me thus for?’ The
boy, though a little surprised, replied, ’I come
from such a one, and my master sent me for the money
which he says you know of.’ ’Very
well, child,’ returns the living ghost; ’call
as you go by at Cripplegate Church, and bid them ring
the bell’; and with these words shut the door
again, and went up again, and died the same day; nay,
perhaps the same hour. This the young man told
me himself, and I have reason to believe it.
This was while the plague was not come to a height.
I think it was in June, towards the latter end of
the month; it must be before the dead-carts came about,
and while they used the ceremony of ringing the bell
for the dead, which was over for certain, in that parish
at least, before the month of July, for by the 25th
of July there died 550 and upwards in a week, and
then they could no more bury in form, rich or poor.
I have mentioned above that notwithstanding
this dreadful calamity, yet the numbers of thieves
were abroad upon all occasions, where they had found
any prey, and that these were generally women.
It was one morning about eleven O’clock, I had
walked out to my brother’s house in Coleman
Street parish, as I often did, to see that all was
safe.
My brother’s house had a little
court before it, and a brick wall and a gate in it,
and within that several warehouses where his goods
of several sorts lay. It happened that in one
of these warehouses were several packs of women’s
high-crowned hats, which came out of the country and
were, as I suppose, for exportation: whither,
I know not.
I was surprised that when I came near
my brother’s door, which was in a place they
called Swan Alley, I met three or four women with
high-crowned hats on their heads; and, as I remembered
afterwards, one, if not more, had some hats likewise
in their hands; but as I did not see them come out
at my brother’s door, and not knowing that my
brother had any such goods in his warehouse, I did
not offer to say anything to them, but went across
the way to shun meeting them, as was usual to do at
that time, for fear of the plague. But when I
came nearer to the gate I met another woman with more
hats come out of the gate. ’What business,
mistress,’ said I, ‘have you had there?’
‘There are more people there,’ said she;
‘I have had no more business there than they.’
I was hasty to get to the gate then, and said no more
to her, by which means she got away. But just
as I came to the gate, I saw two more coming across
the yard to come out with hats also on their heads
and under their arms, at which I threw the gate to
behind me, which having a spring lock fastened itself;
and turning to the women, ‘Forsooth,’ said
I, ’what are you doing here?’ and seized
upon the hats, and took them from them. One of
them, who, I confess, did not look like a thief ’Indeed,’
says she, ’we are wrong, but we were told they
were goods that had no owner. Be pleased to take
them again; and look yonder, there are more such customers
as we.’ She cried and looked pitifully,
so I took the hats from her and opened the gate, and
bade them be gone, for I pitied the women indeed;
but when I looked towards the warehouse, as she directed,
there were six or seven more, all women, fitting themselves
with hats as unconcerned and quiet as if they had
been at a hatter’s shop buying for their money.
I was surprised, not at the sight
of so many thieves only, but at the circumstances
I was in; being now to thrust myself in among so many
people, who for some weeks had been so shy of myself
that if I met anybody in the street I would cross
the way from them.
They were equally surprised, though
on another account. They all told me they were
neighbours, that they had heard anyone might take them,
that they were nobody’s goods, and the like.
I talked big to them at first, went back to the gate
and took out the key, so that they were all my prisoners,
threatened to lock them all into the warehouse, and
go and fetch my Lord Mayor’s officers for them.
They begged heartily, protested they
found the gate open, and the warehouse door open;
and that it had no doubt been broken open by some
who expected to find goods of greater value: which
indeed was reasonable to believe, because the lock
was broke, and a padlock that hung to the door on
the outside also loose, and not abundance of the hats
carried away.
At length I considered that this was
not a time to be cruel and rigorous; and besides that,
it would necessarily oblige me to go much about, to
have several people come to me, and I go to several
whose circumstances of health I knew nothing of; and
that even at this time the plague was so high as that
there died 4000 a week; so that in showing my resentment,
or even in seeking justice for my brother’s
goods, I might lose my own life; so I contented myself
with taking the names and places where some of them
lived, who were really inhabitants in the neighbourhood,
and threatening that my brother should call them to
an account for it when he returned to his habitation.
Then I talked a little upon another
foot with them, and asked them how they could do such
things as these in a time of such general calamity,
and, as it were, in the face of God’s most dreadful
judgements, when the plague was at their very doors,
and, it may be, in their very houses, and they did
not know but that the dead-cart might stop at their
doors in a few hours to carry them to their graves.
I could not perceive that my discourse
made much impression upon them all that while, till
it happened that there came two men of the neighbourhood,
hearing of the disturbance, and knowing my brother,
for they had been both dependents upon his family,
and they came to my assistance. These being,
as I said, neighbours, presently knew three of the
women and told me who they were and where they lived;
and it seems they had given me a true account of themselves
before.
This brings these two men to a further
remembrance. The name of one was John Hayward,
who was at that time undersexton of the parish of
St Stephen, Coleman Street. By undersexton was
understood at that time gravedigger and bearer of
the dead. This man carried, or assisted to carry,
all the dead to their graves which were buried in that
large parish, and who were carried in form; and after
that form of burying was stopped, went with the dead-cart
and the bell to fetch the dead bodies from the houses
where they lay, and fetched many of them out of the
chambers and houses; for the parish was, and is still,
remarkable particularly, above all the parishes in
London, for a great number of alleys and thoroughfares,
very long, into which no carts could come, and where
they were obliged to go and fetch the bodies a very
long way; which alleys now remain to witness it, such
as White’s Alley, Cross Key Court, Swan Alley,
Bell Alley, White Horse Alley, and many more.
Here they went with a kind of hand-barrow and laid
the dead bodies on it, and carried them out to the
carts; which work he performed and never had the distemper
at all, but lived about twenty years after it, and
was sexton of the parish to the time of his death.
His wife at the same time was a nurse to infected
people, and tended many that died in the parish, being
for her honesty recommended by the parish officers;
yet she never was infected neither.
He never used any preservative against
the infection, other than holding garlic and rue in
his mouth, and smoking tobacco. This I also had
from his own mouth. And his wife’s remedy
was washing her head in vinegar and sprinkling her
head-clothes so with vinegar as to keep them always
moist, and if the smell of any of those she waited
on was more than ordinary offensive, she snuffed vinegar
up her nose and sprinkled vinegar upon her head-clothes,
and held a handkerchief wetted with vinegar to her
mouth.
It must be confessed that though the
plague was chiefly among the poor, yet were the poor
the most venturous and fearless of it, and went about
their employment with a sort of brutal courage; I must
call it so, for it was founded neither on religion
nor prudence; scarce did they use any caution, but
ran into any business which they could get employment
in, though it was the most hazardous. Such was
that of tending the sick, watching houses shut up,
carrying infected persons to the pest-house, and,
which was still worse, carrying the dead away to their
graves.
It was under this John Hayward’s
care, and within his bounds, that the story of the
piper, with which people have made themselves so merry,
happened, and he assured me that it was true.
It is said that it was a blind piper; but, as John
told me, the fellow was not blind, but an ignorant,
weak, poor man, and usually walked his rounds about
ten o’clock at night and went piping along from
door to door, and the people usually took him in at
public-houses where they knew him, and would give
him drink and victuals, and sometimes farthings; and
he in return would pipe and sing and talk simply,
which diverted the people; and thus he lived.
It was but a very bad time for this diversion while
things were as I have told, yet the poor fellow went
about as usual, but was almost starved; and when anybody
asked how he did he would answer, the dead cart had
not taken him yet, but that they had promised to call
for him next week.
It happened one night that this poor
fellow, whether somebody had given him too much drink
or no John Hayward said he had not drink
in his house, but that they had given him a little
more victuals than ordinary at a public-house in Coleman
Street and the poor fellow, having not
usually had a bellyful for perhaps not a good while,
was laid all along upon the top of a bulk or stall,
and fast asleep, at a door in the street near London
Wall, towards Cripplegate-, and that upon the same
bulk or stall the people of some house, in the alley
of which the house was a corner, hearing a bell which
they always rang before the cart came, had laid a
body really dead of the plague just by him, thinking,
too, that this poor fellow had been a dead body, as
the other was, and laid there by some of the neighbours.
Accordingly, when John Hayward with
his bell and the cart came along, finding two dead
bodies lie upon the stall, they took them up with the
instrument they used and threw them into the cart,
and, all this while the piper slept soundly.
From hence they passed along and took
in other dead bodies, till, as honest John Hayward
told me, they almost buried him alive in the cart;
yet all this while he slept soundly. At length
the cart came to the place where the bodies were to
be thrown into the ground, which, as I do remember,
was at Mount Mill; and as the cart usually stopped
some time before they were ready to shoot out the
melancholy load they had in it, as soon as the cart
stopped the fellow awaked and struggled a little to
get his head out from among the dead bodies, when,
raising himself up in the cart, he called out, ‘Hey!
where am I?’ This frighted the fellow that attended
about the work; but after some pause John Hayward,
recovering himself, said, ’Lord, bless us!
There’s somebody in the cart not quite dead!’
So another called to him and said, ‘Who are you?’
The fellow answered, ‘I am the poor piper.
Where am I?’ ‘Where are you?’ says
Hayward. ’Why, you are in the dead-cart,
and we are going to bury you.’ ‘But
I an’t dead though, am I?’ says the piper,
which made them laugh a little though, as John said,
they were heartily frighted at first; so they helped
the poor fellow down, and he went about his business.
I know the story goes he set up his
pipes in the cart and frighted the bearers and others
so that they ran away; but John Hayward did not tell
the story so, nor say anything of his piping at all;
but that he was a poor piper, and that he was carried
away as above I am fully satisfied of the truth of.
It is to be noted here that the dead-carts
in the city were not confined to particular parishes,
but one cart went through several parishes, according
as the number of dead presented; nor were they tied
to carry the dead to their respective parishes, but
many of the dead taken up in the city were carried
to the burying-ground in the out-parts for want of
room.
I have already mentioned the surprise
that this judgement was at first among the people.
I must be allowed to give some of my observations on
the more serious and religious part. Surely never
city, at least of this bulk and magnitude, was taken
in a condition so perfectly unprepared for such a
dreadful visitation, whether I am to speak of the civil
preparations or religious. They were, indeed,
as if they had had no warning, no expectation, no
apprehensions, and consequently the least provision
imaginable was made for it in a public way. For
example, the Lord Mayor and sheriffs had made no provision
as magistrates for the regulations which were to be
observed. They had gone into no measures for
relief of the poor. The citizens had no public
magazines or storehouses for corn or meal for the
subsistence of the poor, which if they had provided
themselves, as in such cases is done abroad, many
miserable families who were now reduced to the utmost
distress would have been relieved, and that in a better
manner than now could be done.
The stock of the city’s money
I can say but little to. The Chamber of London
was said to be exceedingly rich, and it may be concluded
that they were so, by the vast of money issued from
thence in the rebuilding the public edifices after
the fire of London, and in building new works, such
as, for the first part, the Guildhall, Blackwell Hall,
part of Leadenhall, half the Exchange, the Session
House, the Compter, the prisons of Ludgate, Newgate,
&c., several of the wharfs and stairs and landing-places
on the river; all which were either burned down or
damaged by the great fire of London, the next year
after the plague; and of the second sort, the Monument,
Fleet Ditch with its bridges, and the Hospital of
Bethlem or Bedlam, &c. But possibly the managers
of the city’s credit at that time made more
conscience of breaking in upon the orphan’s
money to show charity to the distressed citizens than
the managers in the following years did to beautify
the city and re-edify the buildings; though, in the
first case, the losers would have thought their fortunes
better bestowed, and the public faith of the city have
been less subjected to scandal and reproach.
It must be acknowledged that the absent
citizens, who, though they were fled for safety into
the country, were yet greatly interested in the welfare
of those whom they left behind, forgot not to contribute
liberally to the relief of the poor, and large sums
were also collected among trading towns in the remotest
parts of England; and, as I have heard also, the nobility
and the gentry in all parts of England took the deplorable
condition of the city into their consideration, and
sent up large sums of money in charity to the Lord
Mayor and magistrates for the relief of the poor.
The king also, as I was told, ordered a thousand pounds
a week to be distributed in four parts: one quarter
to the city and liberty of Westminster; one quarter
or part among the inhabitants of the Southwark side
of the water; one quarter to the liberty and parts
within of the city, exclusive of the city within the
walls; and one-fourth part to the suburbs in the county
of Middlesex, and the east and north parts of the
city. But this latter I only speak of as a report.
Certain it is, the greatest part of
the poor or families who formerly lived by their labour,
or by retail trade, lived now on charity; and had
there not been prodigious sums of money given by charitable,
well-minded Christians for the support of such, the
city could never have subsisted. There were,
no question, accounts kept of their charity, and of
the just distribution of it by the magistrates.
But as such multitudes of those very officers died
through whose hands it was distributed, and also that,
as I have been told, most of the accounts of those
things were lost in the great fire which happened
in the very next year, and which burnt even the chamberlain’s
office and many of their papers, so I could never
come at the particular account, which I used great
endeavours to have seen.
It may, however, be a direction in
case of the approach of a like visitation, which God
keep the city from; I say, it may be of
use to observe that by the care of the Lord Mayor
and aldermen at that time in distributing weekly great
sums of money for relief of the poor, a multitude
of people who would otherwise have perished, were relieved,
and their lives preserved. And here let me enter
into a brief state of the case of the poor at that
time, and what way apprehended from them, from whence
may be judged hereafter what may be expected if the
like distress should come upon the city.
At the beginning of the plague, when
there was now no more hope but that the whole city
would be visited; when, as I have said, all that had
friends or estates in the country retired with their
families; and when, indeed, one would have thought
the very city itself was running out of the gates,
and that there would be nobody left behind; you may
be sure from that hour all trade, except such as related
to immediate subsistence, was, as it were, at a full
stop.
This is so lively a case, and contains
in it so much of the real condition of the people,
that I think I cannot be too particular in it, and
therefore I descend to the several arrangements or
classes of people who fell into immediate distress
upon this occasion. For example:
1. All master-workmen in manufactures,
especially such as belonged to ornament and the less
necessary parts of the people’s dress, clothes,
and furniture for houses, such as riband-weavers and
other weavers, gold and silver lace makers, and gold
and silver wire drawers, sempstresses, milliners,
shoemakers, hatmakers, and glovemakers; also upholsterers,
joiners, cabinet-makers, looking-glass makers, and
innumerable trades which depend upon such as these; I
say, the master-workmen in such stopped their work,
dismissed their journeymen and workmen, and all their
dependents.
2. As merchandising was at a
full stop, for very few ships ventured to come up
the river and none at all went out, so all the extraordinary
officers of the customs, likewise the watermen, carmen,
porters, and all the poor whose labour depended upon
the merchants, were at once dismissed and put out
of business.
3. All the tradesmen usually
employed in building or repairing of houses were at
a full stop, for the people were far from wanting to
build houses when so many thousand houses were at
once stripped of their inhabitants; so that this one
article turned all the ordinary workmen of that kind
out of business, such as bricklayers, masons, carpenters,
joiners, plasterers, painters, glaziers, smiths, plumbers,
and all the labourers depending on such.
4. As navigation was at a stop,
our ships neither coming in or going out as before,
so the seamen were all out of employment, and many
of them in the last and lowest degree of distress;
and with the seamen were all the several tradesmen
and workmen belonging to and depending upon the building
and fitting out of ships, such as ship-carpenters,
caulkers, ropemakers, dry coopers, sailmakers, anchorsmiths,
and other smiths; blockmakers, carvers, gunsmiths,
ship-chandlers, ship-carvers, and the like. The
masters of those perhaps might live upon their substance,
but the traders were universally at a stop, and consequently
all their workmen discharged. Add to these that
the river was in a manner without boats, and all or
most part of the watermen, lightermen, boat-builders,
and lighter-builders in like manner idle and laid by.
5. All families retrenched their
living as much as possible, as well those that fled
as those that stayed; so that an innumerable multitude
of footmen, serving-men, shopkeepers, journeymen, merchants’
bookkeepers, and such sort of people, and especially
poor maid-servants, were turned off, and left friendless
and helpless, without employment and without habitation,
and this was really a dismal article.
I might be more particular as to this
part, but it may suffice to mention in general, all
trades being stopped, employment ceased: the
labour, and by that the bread, of the poor were cut
off; and at first indeed the cries of the poor were
most lamentable to hear, though by the distribution
of charity their misery that way was greatly abated.
Many indeed fled into the counties, but thousands
of them having stayed in London till nothing but desperation
sent them away, death overtook them on the road, and
they served for no better than the messengers of death;
indeed, others carrying the infection along with them,
spread it very unhappily into the remotest parts of
the kingdom.
Many of these were the miserable objects
of despair which I have mentioned before, and were
removed by the destruction which followed. These
might be said to perish not by the infection itself
but by the consequence of it; indeed, namely, by hunger
and distress and the want of all things: being
without lodging, without money, without friends, without
means to get their bread, or without anyone to give
it them; for many of them were without what we call
legal settlements, and so could not claim of the parishes,
and all the support they had was by application to
the magistrates for relief, which relief was (to give
the magistrates their due) carefully and cheerfully
administered as they found it necessary, and those
that stayed behind never felt the want and distress
of that kind which they felt who went away in the manner
above noted.
Let any one who is acquainted with
what multitudes of people get their daily bread in
this city by their labour, whether artificers or mere
workmen I say, let any man consider what
must be the miserable condition of this town if, on
a sudden, they should be all turned out of employment,
that labour should cease, and wages for work be no
more.
This was the case with us at that
time; and had not the sums of money contributed in
charity by well-disposed people of every kind, as well
abroad as at home, been prodigiously great, it had
not been in the power of the Lord Mayor and sheriffs
to have kept the public peace. Nor were they
without apprehensions, as it was, that desperation
should push the people upon tumults, and cause them
to rifle the houses of rich men and plunder the markets
of provisions; in which case the country people, who
brought provisions very freely and boldly to town,
would have been terrified from coming any more, and
the town would have sunk under an unavoidable famine.
But the prudence of my Lord Mayor
and the Court of Aldermen within the city, and of
the justices of peace in the out-parts, was such, and
they were supported with money from all parts so well,
that the poor people were kept quiet, and their wants
everywhere relieved, as far as was possible to be
done.
Two things besides this contributed
to prevent the mob doing any mischief. One was,
that really the rich themselves had not laid up stores
of provisions in their houses as indeed they ought
to have done, and which if they had been wise enough
to have done, and locked themselves entirely up, as
some few did, they had perhaps escaped the disease
better. But as it appeared they had not, so the
mob had no notion of finding stores of provisions
there if they had broken in as it is plain they were
sometimes very near doing, and which: if they
bad, they had finished the ruin of the whole city,
for there were no regular troops to have withstood
them, nor could the trained bands have been brought
together to defend the city, no men being to be found
to bear arms.
But the vigilance of the Lord Mayor
and such magistrates as could be had (for some, even
of the aldermen, were dead, and some absent) prevented
this; and they did it by the most kind and gentle methods
they could think of, as particularly by relieving
the most desperate with money, and putting others
into business, and particularly that employment of
watching houses that were infected and shut up.
And as the number of these were very great (for it
was said there was at one time ten thousand houses
shut up, and every house had two watchmen to guard
it, viz., one by night and the other by day),
this gave opportunity to employ a very great number
of poor men at a time.
The women and servants that were turned
off from their places were likewise employed as nurses
to tend the sick in all places, and this took off
a very great number of them.
And, which though a melancholy article
in itself, yet was a deliverance in its kind:
namely, the plague, which raged in a dreadful manner
from the middle of August to the middle of October,
carried off in that time thirty or forty thousand
of these very people which, had they been left, would
certainly have been an insufferable burden by their
poverty; that is to say, the whole city could not
have supported the expense of them, or have provided
food for them; and they would in time have been even
driven to the necessity of plundering either the city
itself or the country adjacent, to have subsisted
themselves, which would first or last have put the
whole nation, as well as the city, into the utmost
terror and confusion.
It was observable, then, that this
calamity of the people made them very humble; for
now for about nine weeks together there died near a
thousand a day, one day with another, even by the
account of the weekly bills, which yet, I have reason
to be assured, never gave a full account, by many
thousands; the confusion being such, and the carts
working in the dark when they carried the dead, that
in some places no account at all was kept, but they
worked on, the clerks and sextons not attending for
weeks together, and not knowing what number they carried.
This account is verified by the following bills of
mortality:
-- Of all of the
-- Diseases. Plague
From August 8 to August 15 5319 3880
" " 15 " 22 5568 4237
" " 22 " 29 7496 6102
" " 29 to September 5 8252 6988
" September 5 " 12 7690 6544
" " 12 " 19 8297 7165
" " 19 " 26 6460 5533
" " 26 to October 3 5720 4979
" October 3 " 10 5068 4327
-- ------- --------
-- 59,870 49,705
So that the gross of the people were
carried off in these two months; for, as the whole
number which was brought in to die of the plague was
but 68,590, here is 50,000 of them, within a trifle,
in two months; I say 50,000, because, as there wants
295 in the number above, so there wants two days of
two months in the account of time.
Now when I say that the parish officers
did not give in a full account, or were not to be
depended upon for their account, let any one but consider
how men could be exact in such a time of dreadful distress,
and when many of them were taken sick themselves and
perhaps died in the very time when their accounts
were to be given in; I mean the parish clerks, besides
inferior officers; for though these poor men ventured
at all hazards, yet they were far from being exempt
from the common calamity, especially if it be true
that the parish of Stepney had, within the year, 116
sextons, gravediggers, and their assistants; that
is to say, bearers, bellmen, and drivers of carts for
carrying off the dead bodies.
Indeed the work was not of a nature
to allow them leisure to take an exact tale of the
dead bodies, which were all huddled together in the
dark into a pit; which pit or trench no man could come
nigh but at the utmost peril. I observed often
that in the parishes of Aldgate and Cripplegate, Whitechappel
and Stepney, there were five, six, seven, and eight
hundred in a week in the bills; whereas if we may believe
the opinion of those that lived in the city all the
time as well as I, there died sometimes 2000 a week
in those parishes; and I saw it under the hand of
one that made as strict an examination into that part
as he could, that there really died an hundred thousand
people of the plague in that one year whereas in the
bills, the articles of the plague, it was but 68,590.
If I may be allowed to give my opinion,
by what I saw with my eyes and heard from other people
that were eye-witnesses, I do verily believe the same,
viz., that there died at least 100,000 of the
plague only, besides other distempers and besides
those which died in the fields and highways and secret
Places out of the compass of the communication, as
it was called, and who were not put down in the bills
though they really belonged to the body of the inhabitants.
It was known to us all that abundance of poor despairing
creatures who had the distemper upon them, and were
grown stupid or melancholy by their misery, as many
were, wandered away into the fields and Woods, and
into secret uncouth places almost anywhere, to creep
into a bush or hedge and die.
The inhabitants of the villages adjacent
would, in pity, carry them food and set it at a distance,
that they might fetch it, if they were able; and sometimes
they were not able, and the next time they went they
should find the poor wretches lie dead and the food
untouched. The number of these miserable objects
were many, and I know so many that perished thus,
and so exactly where, that I believe I could go to
the very place and dig their bones up still; for the
country people would go and dig a hole at a distance
from them, and then with long poles, and hooks at
the end of them, drag the bodies into these pits, and
then throw the earth in from as far as they could
cast it, to cover them, taking notice how the wind
blew, and so coming on that side which the seamen
call to windward, that the scent of the bodies might
blow from them; and thus great numbers went out of
the world who were never known, or any account of
them taken, as well within the bills of mortality as
without.
This, indeed, I had in the main only
from the relation of others, for I seldom walked into
the fields, except towards Bethnal Green and Hackney,
or as hereafter. But when I did walk, I always
saw a great many poor wanderers at a distance; but
I could know little of their cases, for whether it
were in the street or in the fields, if we had seen
anybody coming, it was a general method to walk away;
yet I believe the account is exactly true.
As this puts me upon mentioning my
walking the streets and fields, I cannot omit taking
notice what a desolate place the city was at that
time. The great street I lived in (which is known
to be one of the broadest of all the streets of London,
I mean of the suburbs as well as the liberties) all
the side where the butchers lived, especially without
the bars, was more like a green field than a paved
street, and the people generally went in the middle
with the horses and carts. It is true that the
farthest end towards Whitechappel Church was not all
paved, but even the part that was paved was full of
grass also; but this need not seem strange, since
the great streets within the city, such as Leadenhall
Street, Bishopsgate Street, Cornhill, and even the
Exchange itself, had grass growing in them in several
places; neither cart or coach were seen in the streets
from morning to evening, except some country carts
to bring roots and beans, or peas, hay, and straw,
to the market, and those but very few compared to
what was usual. As for coaches, they were scarce
used but to carry sick people to the pest-house, and
to other hospitals, and some few to carry physicians
to such places as they thought fit to venture to visit;
for really coaches were dangerous things, and people
did not care to venture into them, because they did
not know who might have been carried in them last,
and sick, infected people were, as I have said, ordinarily
carried in them to the pest-houses, and sometimes
people expired in them as they went along.
It is true, when the infection came
to such a height as I have now mentioned, there were
very few physicians which cared to stir abroad to
sick houses, and very many of the most eminent of the
faculty were dead, as well as the surgeons also; for
now it was indeed a dismal time, and for about a month
together, not taking any notice of the bills of mortality,
I believe there did not die less than 1500 or 1700
a day, one day with another.
One of the worst days we had in the
whole time, as I thought, was in the beginning of
September, when, indeed, good people began to think
that God was resolved to make a full end of the people
in this miserable city. This was at that time
when the plague was fully come into the eastern parishes.
The parish of Aldgate, if I may give my opinion, buried
above a thousand a week for two weeks, though the bills
did not say so many; but it surrounded
me at so dismal a rate that there was not a house
in twenty uninfected in the Minories, in Houndsditch,
and in those parts of Aldgate parish about the Butcher
Row and the alleys over against me. I say, in
those places death reigned in every corner. Whitechappel
parish was in the same condition, and though much less
than the parish I lived in, yet buried near 600 a
week by the bills, and in my opinion near twice as
many. Whole families, and indeed whole streets
of families, were swept away together; insomuch that
it was frequent for neighbours to call to the bellman
to go to such-and-such houses and fetch out the people,
for that they were all dead.
And, indeed, the work of removing
the dead bodies by carts was now grown so very odious
and dangerous that it was complained of that the bearers
did not take care to dear such houses where all the
inhabitants were dead, but that sometimes the bodies
lay several days unburied, till the neighbouring families
were offended with the stench, and consequently infected;
and this neglect of the officers was such that the
churchwardens and constables were summoned to look
after it, and even the justices of the Hamlets were
obliged to venture their lives among them to quicken
and encourage them, for innumerable of the bearers
died of the distemper, infected by the bodies they
were obliged to come so near. And had it not
been that the number of poor people who wanted employment
and wanted bread (as I have said before) was so great
that necessity drove them to undertake anything and
venture anything, they would never have found people
to be employed. And then the bodies of the dead
would have lain above ground, and have perished and
rotted in a dreadful manner.
But the magistrates cannot be enough
commended in this, that they kept such good order
for the burying of the dead, that as fast as any of
these they employed to carry off and bury the dead
fell sick or died, as was many times the case, they
immediately supplied the places with others, which,
by reason of the great number of poor that was left
out of business, as above, was not hard to do.
This occasioned, that notwithstanding the infinite
number of people which died and were sick, almost
all together, yet they were always cleared away and
carried off every night, so that it was never to be
said of London that the living were not able to bury
the dead.
As the desolation was greater during
those terrible times, so the amazement of the people
increased, and a thousand unaccountable things they
would do in the violence of their fright, as others
did the same in the agonies of their distemper, and
this part was very affecting. Some went roaring
and crying and wringing their hands along the street;
some would go praying and lifting up their hands to
heaven, calling upon God for mercy. I cannot
say, indeed, whether this was not in their distraction,
but, be it so, it was still an indication of a more
serious mind, when they had the use of their senses,
and was much better, even as it was, than the frightful
yellings and cryings that every day, and especially
in the evenings, were heard in some streets. I
suppose the world has heard of the famous Solomon
Eagle, an enthusiast. He, though not infected
at all but in his head, went about denouncing of judgement
upon the city in a frightful manner, sometimes quite
naked, and with a pan of burning charcoal on his head.
What he said, or pretended, indeed I could not learn.
I will not say whether that clergyman
was distracted or not, or whether he did it in pure
zeal for the poor people, who went every evening through
the streets of Whitechappel, and, with his hands lifted
up, repeated that part of the Liturgy of the Church
continually, ’Spare us, good Lord; spare Thy
people, whom Thou has redeemed with Thy most precious
blood.’ I say, I cannot speak positively
of these things, because these were only the dismal
objects which represented themselves to me as I looked
through my chamber windows (for I seldom opened the
casements), while I confined myself within doors during
that most violent raging of the pestilence; when,
indeed, as I have said, many began to think, and even
to say, that there would none escape; and indeed I
began to think so too, and therefore kept within doors
for about a fortnight and never stirred out.
But I could not hold it. Besides, there were
some people who, notwithstanding the danger, did not
omit publicly to attend the worship of God, even in
the most dangerous times; and though it is true that
a great many clergymen did shut up their churches,
and fled, as other people did, for the safety of their
lives, yet all did not do so. Some ventured to
officiate and to keep up the assemblies of the people
by constant prayers, and sometimes sermons or brief
exhortations to repentance and reformation, and this
as long as any would come to hear them. And Dissenters
did the like also, and even in the very churches where
the parish ministers were either dead or fled; nor
was there any room for making difference at such a
time as this was.
It was indeed a lamentable thing to
hear the miserable lamentations of poor dying creatures
calling out for ministers to comfort them and pray
with them, to counsel them and to direct them, calling
out to God for pardon and mercy, and confessing aloud
their past sins. It would make the stoutest heart
bleed to hear how many warnings were then given by
dying penitents to others not to put off and delay
their repentance to the day of distress; that such
a time of calamity as this was no time for repentance,
was no time to call upon God. I wish I could repeat
the very sound of those groans and of those exclamations
that I heard from some poor dying creatures when in
the height of their agonies and distress, and that
I could make him that reads this hear, as I imagine
I now hear them, for the sound seems still to ring
in my ears.
If I could but tell this part in such
moving accents as should alarm the very soul of the
reader, I should rejoice that I recorded those things,
however short and imperfect.
It pleased God that I was still spared,
and very hearty and sound in health, but very impatient
of being pent up within doors without air, as I had
been for fourteen days or thereabouts; and I could
not restrain myself, but I would go to carry a letter
for my brother to the post-house. Then it was
indeed that I observed a profound silence in the streets.
When I came to the post-house, as I went to put in
my letter I saw a man stand in one corner of the yard
and talking to another at a window, and a third had
opened a door belonging to the office. In the
middle of the yard lay a small leather purse with two
keys hanging at it, with money in it, but nobody would
meddle with it. I asked how long it had lain
there; the man at the window said it had lain almost
an hour, but that they had not meddled with it, because
they did not know but the person who dropped it might
come back to look for it. I had no such need
of money, nor was the sum so big that I had any inclination
to meddle with it, or to get the money at the hazard
it might be attended with; so I seemed to go away,
when the man who had opened the door said he would
take it up, but so that if the right owner came for
it he should be sure to have it. So he went in
and fetched a pail of water and set it down hard by
the purse, then went again and fetch some gunpowder,
and cast a good deal of powder upon the purse, and
then made a train from that which he had thrown loose
upon the purse. The train reached about two yards.
After this he goes in a third time and fetches out
a pair of tongs red hot, and which he had prepared,
I suppose, on purpose; and first setting fire to the
train of powder, that singed the purse and also smoked
the air sufficiently. But he was not content with
that, but he then takes up the purse with the tongs,
holding it so long till the tongs burnt through the
purse, and then he shook the money out into the pail
of water, so he carried it in. The money, as I
remember, was about thirteen shilling and some smooth
groats and brass farthings.
There might perhaps have been several
poor people, as I have observed above, that would
have been hardy enough to have ventured for the sake
of the money; but you may easily see by what I have
observed that the few people who were spared were
very careful of themselves at that time when the distress
was so exceeding great.
Much about the same time I walked
out into the fields towards Bow; for I had a great
mind to see how things were managed in the river and
among the ships; and as I had some concern in shipping,
I had a notion that it had been one of the best ways
of securing one’s self from the infection to
have retired into a ship; and musing how to satisfy
my curiosity in that point, I turned away over the
fields from Bow to Bromley, and down to Blackwall
to the stairs which are there for landing or taking
water.
Here I saw a poor man walking on the
bank, or sea-wall, as they call it, by himself.
I walked a while also about, seeing the houses all
shut up. At last I fell into some talk, at a
distance, with this poor man; first I asked him how
people did thereabouts. ‘Alas, sir!’
says he, ’almost desolate; all dead or sick.
Here are very few families in this part, or in that
village’ (pointing at Poplar), ’where half
of them are not dead already, and the rest sick.’
Then he pointing to one house, ’There they are
all dead’, said he, ’and the house stands
open; nobody dares go into it. A poor thief’,
says he, ’ventured in to steal something, but
he paid dear for his theft, for he was carried to
the churchyard too last night.’ Then he
pointed to several other houses. ‘There’,
says he, ’they are all dead, the man and his
wife, and five children. There’, says he,
‘they are shut up; you see a watchman at the
door’; and so of other houses. ‘Why,’
says I, ‘what do you here all alone?’ ‘Why,’
says he, ’I am a poor, desolate man; it has
pleased God I am not yet visited, though my family
is, and one of my children dead.’ ‘How
do you mean, then,’ said I, ‘that you
are not visited?’ ‘Why,’ says he,
‘that’s my house’ (pointing to a
very little, low-boarded house), ’and there my
poor wife and two children live,’ said he, ’if
they may be said to live, for my wife and one of the
children are visited, but I do not come at them.’
And with that word I saw the tears run very plentifully
down his face; and so they did down mine too, I assure
you.
‘But,’ said I, ’why
do you not come at them? How can you abandon your
own flesh and blood?’ ‘Oh, sir,’
says he, ’the Lord forbid! I do not abandon
them; I work for them as much as I am able; and, blessed
be the Lord, I keep them from want’; and with
that I observed he lifted up his eyes to heaven, with
a countenance that presently told me I had happened
on a man that was no hypocrite, but a serious, religious,
good man, and his ejaculation was an expression of
thankfulness that, in such a condition as he was in,
he should be able to say his family did not want.
‘Well,’ says I, ’honest man, that
is a great mercy as things go now with the poor.
But how do you live, then, and how are you kept from
the dreadful calamity that is now upon us all?’
‘Why, sir,’ says he, ’I am a waterman,
and there’s my boat,’ says he, ’and
the boat serves me for a house. I work in it
in the day, and I sleep in it in the night; and what
I get I lay down upon that stone,’ says he, showing
me a broad stone on the other side of the street,
a good way from his house; ’and then,’
says he, ’I halloo, and call to them till I make
them hear; and they come and fetch it.’
‘Well, friend,’ says I,
’but how can you get any money as a waterman?
Does any body go by water these times?’ ‘Yes,
sir,’ says he, ’in the way I am employed
there does. Do you see there,’ says he,
’five ships lie at anchor’ (pointing down
the river a good way below the town), ’and do
you see’, says he, ’eight or ten ships
lie at the chain there, and at anchor yonder?’
(pointing above the town). ’All those ships
have families on board, of their merchants and owners,
and such-like, who have locked themselves up and live
on board, close shut in, for fear of the infection;
and I tend on them to fetch things for them, carry
letters, and do what is absolutely necessary, that
they may not be obliged to come on shore; and every
night I fasten my boat on board one of the ship’s
boats, and there I sleep by myself, and, blessed be
God, I am preserved hitherto.’
‘Well,’ said I, ’friend,
but will they let you come on board after you have
been on shore here, when this is such a terrible place,
and so infected as it is?’
‘Why, as to that,’ said
he, ’I very seldom go up the ship-side, but
deliver what I bring to their boat, or lie by the side,
and they hoist it on board. If I did, I think
they are in no danger from me, for I never go into
any house on shore, or touch anybody, no, not of my
own family; but I fetch provisions for them.’
‘Nay,’ says I, ’but
that may be worse, for you must have those provisions
of somebody or other; and since all this part of the
town is so infected, it is dangerous so much as to
speak with anybody, for the village’, said I,
’is, as it were, the beginning of London, though
it be at some distance from it.’
‘That is true,’ added
he; ’but you do not understand me right; I do
not buy provisions for them here. I row up to
Greenwich and buy fresh meat there, and sometimes
I row down the river to Woolwich and buy there; then
I go to single farm-houses on the Kentish side, where
I am known, and buy fowls and eggs and butter, and
bring to the ships, as they direct me, sometimes one,
sometimes the other. I seldom come on shore here,
and I came now only to call on my wife and hear how
my family do, and give them a little money, which
I received last night.’
‘Poor man!’ said I; ‘and
how much hast thou gotten for them?’
‘I have gotten four shillings,’
said he, ’which is a great sum, as things go
now with poor men; but they have given me a bag of
bread too, and a salt fish and some flesh; so all
helps out.’ ‘Well,’ said I,
’and have you given it them yet?’
‘No,’ said he; ’but
I have called, and my wife has answered that she cannot
come out yet, but in half-an-hour she hopes to come,
and I am waiting for her. Poor woman!’
says he, ’she is brought sadly down. She
has a swelling, and it is broke, and I hope she will
recover; but I fear the child will die, but it is
the Lord ’
Here he stopped, and wept very much.
‘Well, honest friend,’
said I, ’thou hast a sure Comforter, if thou
hast brought thyself to be resigned to the will of
God; He is dealing with us all in judgement.’
‘Oh, sir!’ says he, ’it
is infinite mercy if any of us are spared, and who
am I to repine!’
‘Sayest thou so?’ said
I, ‘and how much less is my faith than thine?’
And here my heart smote me, suggesting how much better
this poor man’s foundation was on which he stayed
in the danger than mine; that he had nowhere to fly;
that he had a family to bind him to attendance, which
I had not; and mine was mere presumption, his a true
dependence and a courage resting on God; and yet that
he used all possible caution for his safety.
I turned a little way from the man
while these thoughts engaged me, for, indeed, I could
no more refrain from tears than he.
At length, after some further talk,
the poor woman opened the door and called, ‘Robert,
Robert’. He answered, and bid her stay a
few moments and he would come; so he ran down the
common stairs to his boat and fetched up a sack, in
which was the provisions he had brought from the ships;
and when he returned he hallooed again. Then he
went to the great stone which he showed me and emptied
the sack, and laid all out, everything by themselves,
and then retired; and his wife came with a little
boy to fetch them away, and called and said such a
captain had sent such a thing, and such a captain
such a thing, and at the end adds, ‘God has
sent it all; give thanks to Him.’ When the
poor woman had taken up all, she was so weak she could
not carry it at once in, though the weight was not
much neither; so she left the biscuit, which was in
a little bag, and left a little boy to watch it till
she came again.
‘Well, but’, says I to
him, ’did you leave her the four shillings too,
which you said was your week’s pay?’
‘Yes, yes,’ says he; ‘you
shall hear her own it.’ So he calls again,
‘Rachel, Rachel,’ which it seems was her
name, ’did you take up the money?’ ‘Yes,’
said she. ‘How much was it?’ said
he. ’Four shillings and a groat,’
said she. ‘Well, well,’ says he, ‘the
Lord keep you all’; and so he turned to go away.
As I could not refrain contributing
tears to this man’s story, so neither could
I refrain my charity for his assistance. So I
called him, ‘Hark thee, friend,’ said
I, ’come hither, for I believe thou art in health,
that I may venture thee’; so I pulled out my
hand, which was in my pocket before, ‘Here,’
says I, ’go and call thy Rachel once more, and
give her a little more comfort from me. God will
never forsake a family that trust in Him as thou dost.’
So I gave him four other shillings, and bid him go
lay them on the stone and call his wife.
I have not words to express the poor
man’s thankfulness, neither could he express
it himself but by tears running down his face.
He called his wife, and told her God had moved the
heart of a stranger, upon hearing their condition,
to give them all that money, and a great deal more
such as that he said to her. The woman, too, made
signs of the like thankfulness, as well to Heaven
as to me, and joyfully picked it up; and I parted
with no money all that year that I thought better bestowed.
I then asked the poor man if the distemper
had not reached to Greenwich. He said it had
not till about a fortnight before; but that then he
feared it had, but that it was only at that end of
the town which lay south towards Deptford Bridge;
that he went only to a butcher’s shop and a
grocer’s, where he generally bought such things
as they sent him for, but was very careful.
I asked him then how it came to pass
that those people who had so shut themselves up in
the ships had not laid in sufficient stores of all
things necessary. He said some of them had but,
on the other hand, some did not come on board till
they were frighted into it and till it was too dangerous
for them to go to the proper people to lay in quantities
of things, and that he waited on two ships, which he
showed me, that had laid in little or nothing but
biscuit bread and ship beer, and that he had bought
everything else almost for them. I asked him if
there was any more ships that had separated themselves
as those had done. He told me yes, all the way
up from the point, right against Greenwich, to within
the shore of Limehouse and Redriff, all the ships that
could have room rid two and two in the middle of the
stream, and that some of them had several families
on board. I asked him if the distemper had not
reached them. He said he believed it had not,
except two or three ships whose people had not been
so watchful to keep the seamen from going on shore
as others had been, and he said it was a very fine
sight to see how the ships lay up the Pool.
When he said he was going over to
Greenwich as soon as the tide began to come in, I
asked if he would let me go with him and bring me back,
for that I had a great mind to see how the ships were
ranged, as he had told me. He told me, if I would
assure him on the word of a Christian and of an honest
man that I had not the distemper, he would. I
assured him that I had not; that it had pleased God
to preserve me; that I lived in Whitechappel, but
was too impatient of being so long within doors, and
that I had ventured out so far for the refreshment
of a little air, but that none in my house had so
much as been touched with it.
Well, sir,’ says he, ’as
your charity has been moved to pity me and my poor
family, sure you cannot have so little pity left as
to put yourself into my boat if you were not sound
in health which would be nothing less than killing
me and ruining my whole family.’ The poor
man troubled me so much when he spoke of his family
with such a sensible concern and in such an affectionate
manner, that I could not satisfy myself at first to
go at all. I told him I would lay aside my curiosity
rather than make him uneasy, though I was sure, and
very thankful for it, that I had no more distemper
upon me than the freshest man in the world. Well,
he would not have me put it off neither, but to let
me see how confident he was that I was just to him,
now importuned me to go; so when the tide came up
to his boat I went in, and he carried me to Greenwich.
While he bought the things which he had in his charge
to buy, I walked up to the top of the hill under which
the town stands, and on the east side of the town,
to get a prospect of the river. But it was a surprising
sight to see the number of ships which lay in rows,
two and two, and some places two or three such lines
in the breadth of the river, and this not only up
quite to the town, between the houses which we call
Ratcliff and Redriff, which they name the Pool, but
even down the whole river as far as the head of Long
Reach, which is as far as the hills give us leave to
see it.
I cannot guess at the number of ships,
but I think there must be several hundreds of sail;
and I could not but applaud the contrivance: for
ten thousand people and more who attended ship affairs
were certainly sheltered here from the violence of
the contagion, and lived very safe and very easy.
I returned to my own dwelling very
well satisfied with my day’s journey, and particularly
with the poor man; also I rejoiced to see that such
little sanctuaries were provided for so many families
in a time of such desolation. I observed also
that, as the violence of the plague had increased,
so the ships which had families on board removed and
went farther off, till, as I was told, some went quite
away to sea, and put into such harbours and safe roads
on the north coast as they could best come at.
But it was also true that all the
people who thus left the land and lived on board the
ships were not entirely safe from the infection, for
many died and were thrown overboard into the river,
some in coffins, and some, as I heard, without coffins,
whose bodies were seen sometimes to drive up and down
with the tide in the river.
But I believe I may venture to say
that in those ships which were thus infected it either
happened where the people had recourse to them too
late, and did not fly to the ship till they had stayed
too long on shore and had the distemper upon them
(though perhaps they might not perceive it) and so
the distemper did not come to them on board the ships,
but they really carried it with them; or it was in
these ships where the poor waterman said they had
not had time to furnish themselves with provisions,
but were obliged to send often on shore to buy what
they had occasion for, or suffered boats to come to
them from the shore. And so the distemper was
brought insensibly among them.
And here I cannot but take notice
that the strange temper of the people of London at
that time contributed extremely to their own destruction.
The plague began, as I have observed, at the other
end of the town, namely, in Long Acre, Drury Lane,
&c., and came on towards the city very gradually and
slowly. It was felt at first in December, then
again in February, then again in April, and always
but a very little at a time; then it stopped till
May, and even the last week in May there was but seventeen,
and all at that end of the town; and all this while,
even so long as till there died above 3000 a week,
yet had the people in Redriff, and in Wapping and
Ratcliff, on both sides of the river, and almost all
Southwark side, a mighty fancy that they should not
be visited, or at least that it would not be so violent
among them. Some people fancied the smell of
the pitch and tar, and such other things as oil and
rosin and brimstone, which is so much used by all trades
relating to shipping, would preserve them. Others
argued it, because it was in its extreamest violence
in Westminster and the parish of St Giles and St Andrew,
&c., and began to abate again before it came among
them which was true indeed, in part.
For example
From the 8th to the 15th August
-- St Giles-in-the-Fields 242
-- Cripplegate 886
-- Stepney 197
-- St Margaret, Bermondsey 24
-- Rotherhith 3
-- Total this week 4030
From the 15th to the 22nd August
-- St Giles-in-the-Fields 175
-- Cripplegate 847
-- Stepney 273
-- St Margaret, Bermondsey 36
-- Rotherhith 2
-- Total this week 5319
N.B. That it was observed
the numbers mentioned in Stepney parish at that time
were generally all on that side where Stepney parish
joined to Shoreditch, which we now call Spittlefields,
where the parish of Stepney comes up to the very wall
of Shoreditch Churchyard, and the plague at this time
was abated at St Giles-in-the-Fields, and raged most
violently in Cripplegate, Bishopsgate, and Shoreditch
parishes; but there was not ten people a week that
died of it in all that part of Stepney parish which
takes in Limehouse, Ratdiff Highway, and which are
now the parishes of Shadwell and Wapping, even to
St Katherine’s by the Tower, till after the
whole month of August was expired. But they paid
for it afterwards, as I shall observe by-and-by.
This, I say, made the people of Redriff
and Wapping, Ratcliff and Limehouse, so secure, and
flatter themselves so much with the plague’s
going off without reaching them, that they took no
care either to fly into the country or shut themselves
up. Nay, so far were they from stirring that
they rather received their friends and relations from
the city into their houses, and several from other
places really took sanctuary in that part of the town
as a Place of safety, and as a place which they thought
God would pass over, and not visit as the rest was
visited.
And this was the reason that when
it came upon them they were more surprised,
more unprovided, and more at a loss what to do than
they were in other places; for when it came among
them really and with violence, as it did indeed in
September and October, there was then no stirring
out into the country, nobody would suffer a stranger
to come near them, no, nor near the towns where they
dwelt; and, as I have been told, several that wandered
into the country on Surrey side were found starved
to death in the woods and commons, that country being
more open and more woody than any other part so near
London, especially about Norwood and the parishes
of Camberwell, Dullege, and Lusum, where, it seems,
nobody durst relieve the poor distressed people for
fear of the infection.
This notion having, as I said, prevailed
with the people in that part of the town, was in part
the occasion, as I said before, that they had recourse
to ships for their retreat; and where they did this
early and with prudence, furnishing themselves so
with provisions that they had no need to go on shore
for supplies or suffer boats to come on board to bring
them, I say, where they did so they had
certainly the safest retreat of any people whatsoever;
but the distress was such that people ran on board,
in their fright, without bread to eat, and some into
ships that had no men on board to remove them farther
off, or to take the boat and go down the river to
buy provisions where it might be done safely, and
these often suffered and were infected on board as
much as on shore.
As the richer sort got into ships,
so the lower rank got into hoys, smacks, lighters,
and fishing-boats; and many, especially watermen, lay
in their boats; but those made sad work of it, especially
the latter, for, going about for provision, and perhaps
to get their subsistence, the infection got in among
them and made a fearful havoc; many of the watermen
died alone in their wherries as they rid at their roads,
as well as above bridge as below, and were not found
sometimes till they were not in condition for anybody
to touch or come near them.
Indeed, the distress of the people
at this seafaring end of the town was very deplorable,
and deserved the greatest commiseration. But,
alas I this was a time when every one’s private
safety lay so near them that they had no room to pity
the distresses of others; for every one had death,
as it were, at his door, and many even in their families,
and knew not what to do or whither to fly.
This, I say, took away all compassion;
self-preservation, indeed, appeared here to be the
first law. For the children ran away from their
parents as they languished in the utmost distress.
And in some places, though not so frequent as the
other, parents did the like to their children; nay,
some dreadful examples there were, and particularly
