Chapter VIII: Part 8

This running of distempered people about the streets was very
dismal, and the magistrates did their utmost to prevent it; but
as it was generally in the night and always sudden when such
attempts were made, the officers could not be at hand to prevent
it; and even when any got out in the day, the officers appointed
did not care to meddle with them, because, as they were all
grievously infected, to be sure, when they were come to that
height, so they were more than ordinarily infectious, and it was
one of the most dangerous things that could be to touch them. On
the other hand, they generally ran on, not knowing what they did,
till they dropped down stark dead, or till they had exhausted
their spirits so as that they would fall and then die in perhaps
half-an-hour or an hour; and, which was most piteous to hear,
they were sure to come to themselves entirely in that half-hour
or hour, and then to make most grievous and piercing cries and
lamentations in the deep, afflicting sense of the condition they
were in. This was much of it before the order for shutting up of
houses was strictly put in execution, for at first the watchmen
were not so vigorous and severe as they were afterward in the
keeping the people in; that is to say, before they were (I mean
some of them) severely punished for their neglect, failing in
their duty, and letting people who were under their care slip
away, or conniving at their going abroad, whether sick or well.
But after they saw the officers appointed to examine into their
conduct were resolved to have them do their duty or be punished
for the omission, they were more exact, and the people were
strictly restrained; which was a thing they took so ill and bore
so impatiently that their discontents can hardly be described.
But there was an absolute necessity for it, that must be
confessed, unless some other measures had been timely entered
upon, and it was too late for that.

Had not this particular (of the sick being restrained as above)
been our case at that time, London would have been the most
dreadful place that ever was in the world; there would, for aught
I know, have as many people died in the streets as died in their
houses; for when the distemper was at its height it generally
made them raving and delirious, and when they were so they would
never be persuaded to keep in their beds but by force; and many
who were not tied threw themselves out of windows when they found
they could not get leave to go out of their doors.

It was for want of people conversing one with another, in this
time of calamity, that it was impossible any particular person
could come at the knowledge of all the extraordinary cases that
occurred in different families; and particularly I believe it was
never known to this day how many people in their deliriums
drowned themselves in the Thames, and in the river which runs
from the marshes by Hackney, which we generally called Ware
River, or Hackney River. As to those which were set down in the
weekly bill, they were indeed few; nor could it be known of any
of those whether they drowned themselves by accident or not. But
I believe I might reckon up more who within the compass of my
knowledge or observation really drowned themselves in that year,
than are put down in the bill of all put together: for many of
the bodies were never found who yet were known to be lost; and
the like in other methods of self-destruction. There was also one
man in or about Whitecross Street burned himself to death in his
bed; some said it was done by himself, others that it was by the
treachery of the nurse that attended him; but that he had the
plague upon him was agreed by all.

It was a merciful disposition of Providence also, and which I
have many times thought of at that time, that no fires, or no
considerable ones at least, happened in the city during that
year, which, if it had been otherwise, would have been very
dreadful; and either the people must have let them alone
unquenched, or have come together in great crowds and throngs,
unconcerned at the danger of the infection, not concerned at the
houses they went into, at the goods they handled, or at the
persons or the people they came among. But so it was, that
excepting that in Cripplegate parish, and two or three little
eruptions of fires, which were presently extinguished, there was
no disaster of that kind happened in the whole year. They told us
a story of a house in a place called Swan Alley, passing from
Goswell Street, near the end of Old Street, into St John Street,
that a family was infected there in so terrible a manner that
every one of the house died. The last person lay dead on the
floor, and, as it is supposed, had lain herself all along to die
just before the fire; the fire, it seems, had fallen from its
place, being of wood, and had taken hold of the boards and the
joists they lay on, and burnt as far as just to the body, but had
not taken hold of the dead body (though she had little more than
her shift on) and had gone out of itself, not burning the rest of
the house, though it was a slight timber house. How true this
might be I do not determine, but the city being to suffer
severely the next year by fire, this year it felt very little of
that calamity.

Indeed, considering the deliriums which the agony threw people
into, and how I have mentioned in their madness, when they were
alone, they did many desperate things, it was very strange there
were no more disasters of that kind.

It has been frequently asked me, and I cannot say that I ever
knew how to give a direct answer to it, how it came to pass that
so many infected people appeared abroad in the streets at the
same time that the houses which were infected were so vigilantly
searched, and all of them shut up and guarded as they were.

I confess I know not what answer to give to this, unless it be
this: that in so great and populous a city as this is it was
impossible to discover every house that was infected as soon as
it was so, or to shut up all the houses that were infected; so
that people had the liberty of going about the streets, even
where they pleased, unless they were known to belong to
such-and-such infected houses.

It is true that, as several physicians told my Lord Mayor, the
fury of the contagion was such at some particular times, and
people sickened so fast and died so soon, that it was impossible,
and indeed to no purpose, to go about to inquire who was sick and
who was well, or to shut them up with such exactness as the thing
required, almost every house in a whole street being infected,
and in many places every person in some of the houses; and that
which was still worse, by the time that the houses were known to
be infected, most of the persons infected would be stone dead,
and the rest run away for fear of being shut up; so that it was
to very small purpose to call them infected houses and shut them
up, the infection having ravaged and taken its leave of the house
before it was really known that the family was any way touched.

This might be sufficient to convince any reasonable person that
as it was not in the power of the magistrates or of any human
methods of policy, to prevent the spreading the infection, so
that this way of shutting up of houses was perfectly insufficient
for that end. Indeed it seemed to have no manner of public good
in it, equal or proportionable to the grievous burden that it was
to the particular families that were so shut up; and, as far as I
was employed by the public in directing that severity, I
frequently found occasion to see that it was incapable of
answering the end. For example, as I was desired, as a visitor or
examiner, to inquire into the particulars of several families
which were infected, we scarce came to any house where the plague
had visibly appeared in the family but that some of the family
were fled and gone. The magistrates would resent this, and charge
the examiners with being remiss in their examination or
inspection. But by that means houses were long infected before it
was known. Now, as I was in this dangerous office but half the
appointed time, which was two months, it was long enough to
inform myself that we were no way capable of coming at the
knowledge of the true state of any family but by inquiring at the
door or of the neighbours. As for going into every house to
search, that was a part no authority would offer to impose on the
inhabitants, or any citizen would undertake: for it would have
been exposing us to certain infection and death, and to the ruin
of our own families as well as of ourselves; nor would any
citizen of probity, and that could be depended upon, have stayed
in the town if they had been made liable to such a severity.

Seeing then that we could come at the certainty of things by no
method but that of inquiry of the neighbours or of the family,
and on that we could not justly depend, it was not possible but
that the uncertainty of this matter would remain as above.

It is true masters of families were bound by the order to give
notice to the examiner of the place wherein he lived, within two
hours after he should discover it, of any person being sick in
his house (that is to say, having signs of the infection)—but
they found so many ways to evade this and excuse their negligence
that they seldom gave that notice till they had taken measures to
have every one escape out of the house who had a mind to escape,
whether they were sick or sound; and while this was so, it is
easy to see that the shutting up of houses was no way to be
depended upon as a sufficient method for putting a stop to the
infection because, as I have said elsewhere, many of those that
so went out of those infected houses had the plague really upon
them, though they might really think themselves sound. And some
of these were the people that walked the streets till they fell
down dead, not that they were suddenly struck with the distemper
as with a bullet that killed with the stroke, but that they
really had the infection in their blood long before; only, that
as it preyed secretly on the vitals, it appeared not till it
seized the heart with a mortal power, and the patient died in a
moment, as with a sudden fainting or an apoplectic fit.

I know that some even of our physicians thought for a time that
those people that so died in the streets were seized but that
moment they fell, as if they had been touched by a stroke from
heaven as men are killed by a flash of lightning—but they found
reason to alter their opinion afterward; for upon examining the
bodies of such after they were dead, they always either had
tokens upon them or other evident proofs of the distemper having
been longer upon them than they had otherwise expected.

This often was the reason that, as I have said, we that were
examiners were not able to come at the knowledge of the infection
being entered into a house till it was too late to shut it up,
and sometimes not till the people that were left were all dead.
In Petticoat Lane two houses together were infected, and several
people sick; but the distemper was so well concealed, the
examiner, who was my neighbour, got no knowledge of it till
notice was sent him that the people were all dead, and that the
carts should call there to fetch them away. The two heads of the
families concerted their measures, and so ordered their matters
as that when the examiner was in the neighbourhood they appeared
generally at a time, and answered, that is, lied, for one
another, or got some of the neighbourhood to say they were all in
health—and perhaps knew no better—till, death making it
impossible to keep it any longer as a secret, the dead-carts were
called in the night to both the houses, and so it became public.
But when the examiner ordered the constable to shut up the houses
there was nobody left in them but three people, two in one house
and one in the other, just dying, and a nurse in each house who
acknowledged that they had buried five before, that the houses
had been infected nine or ten days, and that for all the rest of
the two families, which were many, they were gone, some sick,
some well, or whether sick or well could not be known.

In like manner, at another house in the same lane, a man having
his family infected but very unwilling to be shut up, when he
could conceal it no longer, shut up himself; that is to say, he
set the great red cross upon his door with the words, ‘Lord have
mercy upon us’, and so deluded the examiner, who supposed it had
been done by the constable by order of the other examiner, for
there were two examiners to every district or precinct. By this
means he had free egress and regress into his house again and out
of it, as he pleased, notwithstanding it was infected, till at
length his stratagem was found out; and then he, with the sound
part of his servants and family, made off and escaped, so they
were not shut up at all.

These things made it very hard, if not impossible, as I have
said, to prevent the spreading of an infection by the shutting up
of houses—unless the people would think the shutting of their
houses no grievance, and be so willing to have it done as that
they would give notice duly and faithfully to the magistrates of
their being infected as soon as it was known by themselves; but
as that cannot be expected from them, and the examiners cannot be
supposed, as above, to go into their houses to visit and search,
all the good of shutting up houses will be defeated, and few
houses will be shut up in time, except those of the poor, who
cannot conceal it, and of some people who will be discovered by
the terror and consternation which the things put them into.

I got myself discharged of the dangerous office I was in as soon
as I could get another admitted, whom I had obtained for a little
money to accept of it; and so, instead of serving the two months,
which was directed, I was not above three weeks in it; and a
great while too, considering it was in the month of August, at
which time the distemper began to rage with great violence at our
end of the town.

In the execution of this office I could not refrain speaking my
opinion among my neighbours as to this shutting up the people in
their houses; in which we saw most evidently the severities that
were used, though grievous in themselves, had also this
particular objection against them: namely, that they did not
answer the end, as I have said, but that the distempered people
went day by day about the streets; and it was our united opinion
that a method to have removed the sound from the sick, in case of
a particular house being visited, would have been much more
reasonable on many accounts, leaving nobody with the sick persons
but such as should on such occasion request to stay and declare
themselves content to be shut up with them.

Our scheme for removing those that were sound from those that
were sick was only in such houses as were infected, and confining
the sick was no confinement; those that could not stir would not
complain while they were in their senses and while they had the
power of judging. Indeed, when they came to be delirious and
light-headed, then they would cry out of the cruelty of being
confined; but for the removal of those that were well, we thought
it highly reasonable and just, for their own sakes, they should
be removed from the sick, and that for other people’s safety they
should keep retired for a while, to see that they were sound, and
might not infect others; and we thought twenty or thirty days
enough for this.

Now, certainly, if houses had been provided on purpose for those
that were sound to perform this demi-quarantine in, they would
have much less reason to think themselves injured in such a
restraint than in being confined with infected people in the
houses where they lived.

It is here, however, to be observed that after the funerals
became so many that people could not toll the bell, mourn or
weep, or wear black for one another, as they did before; no, nor
so much as make coffins for those that died; so after a while the
fury of the infection appeared to be so increased that, in short,
they shut up no houses at all. It seemed enough that all the
remedies of that kind had been used till they were found
fruitless, and that the plague spread itself with an irresistible
fury; so that as the fire the succeeding year spread itself, and
burned with such violence that the citizens, in despair, gave
over their endeavours to extinguish it, so in the plague it came
at last to such violence that the people sat still looking at one
another, and seemed quite abandoned to despair; whole streets
seemed to be desolated, and not to be shut up only, but to be
emptied of their inhabitants; doors were left open, windows stood
shattering with the wind in empty houses for want of people to
shut them. In a word, people began to give up themselves to their
fears and to think that all regulations and methods were in vain,
and that there was nothing to be hoped for but an universal
desolation; and it was even in the height of this general despair
that it Pleased God to stay His hand, and to slacken the fury of
the contagion in such a manner as was even surprising, like its
beginning, and demonstrated it to be His own particular hand, and
that above, if not without the agency of means, as I shall take
notice of in its proper place.

But I must still speak of the plague as in its height, raging
even to desolation, and the people under the most dreadful
consternation, even, as I have said, to despair. It is hardly
credible to what excess the passions of men carried them in this
extremity of the distemper, and this part, I think, was as moving
as the rest. What could affect a man in his full power of
reflection, and what could make deeper impressions on the soul,
than to see a man almost naked, and got out of his house, or
perhaps out of his bed, into the street, come out of Harrow
Alley, a populous conjunction or collection of alleys, courts,
and passages in the Butcher Row in Whitechappel,—I say, what
could be more affecting than to see this poor man come out into
the open street, run dancing and singing and making a thousand
antic gestures, with five or six women and children running after
him, crying and calling upon him for the Lord’s sake to come
back, and entreating the help of others to bring him back, but
all in vain, nobody daring to lay a hand upon him or to come near
him?

This was a most grievous and afflicting thing to me, who saw it
all from my own windows; for all this while the poor afflicted
man was, as I observed it, even then in the utmost agony of pain,
having (as they said) two swellings upon him which could not be
brought to break or to suppurate; but, by laying strong caustics
on them, the surgeons had, it seems, hopes to break them—which
caustics were then upon him, burning his flesh as with a hot
iron. I cannot say what became of this poor man, but I think he
continued roving about in that manner till he fell down and died.

No wonder the aspect of the city itself was frightful. The usual
concourse of people in the streets, and which used to be supplied
from our end of the town, was abated. The Exchange was not kept
shut, indeed, but it was no more frequented. The fires were lost;
they had been almost extinguished for some days by a very smart
and hasty rain. But that was not all; some of the physicians
insisted that they were not only no benefit, but injurious to the
health of people. This they made a loud clamour about, and
complained to the Lord Mayor about it. On the other hand, others
of the same faculty, and eminent too, opposed them, and gave
their reasons why the fires were, and must be, useful to assuage
the violence of the distemper. I cannot give a full account of
their arguments on both sides; only this I remember, that they
cavilled very much with one another. Some were for fires, but
that they must be made of wood and not coal, and of particular
sorts of wood too, such as fir in particular, or cedar, because
of the strong effluvia of turpentine; others were for coal and
not wood, because of the sulphur and bitumen; and others were for
neither one or other. Upon the whole, the Lord Mayor ordered no
more fires, and especially on this account, namely, that the
plague was so fierce that they saw evidently it defied all means,
and rather seemed to increase than decrease upon any application
to check and abate it; and yet this amazement of the magistrates
proceeded rather from want of being able to apply any means
successfully than from any unwillingness either to expose
themselves or undertake the care and weight of business; for, to
do them justice, they neither spared their pains nor their
persons. But nothing answered; the infection raged, and the
people were now frighted and terrified to the last degree: so
that, as I may say, they gave themselves up, and, as I mentioned
above, abandoned themselves to their despair.

But let me observe here that, when I say the people abandoned
themselves to despair, I do not mean to what men call a religious
despair, or a despair of their eternal state, but I mean a
despair of their being able to escape the infection or to outlive
the plague which they saw was so raging and so irresistible in
its force that indeed few people that were touched with it in its
height, about August and September, escaped; and, which is very
particular, contrary to its ordinary operation in June and July,
and the beginning of August, when, as I have observed, many were
infected, and continued so many days, and then went off after
having had the poison in their blood a long time; but now, on the
contrary, most of the people who were taken during the two last
weeks in August and in the three first weeks in September,
generally died in two or three days at furthest, and many the
very same day they were taken; whether the dog-days, or, as our
astrologers pretended to express themselves, the influence of the
dog-star, had that malignant effect, or all those who had the
seeds of infection before in them brought it up to a maturity at
that time altogether, I know not; but this was the time when it
was reported that above 3000 people died in one night; and they
that would have us believe they more critically observed it
pretend to say that they all died within the space of two hours,
viz., between the hours of one and three in the morning.

As to the suddenness of people’s dying at this time, more than
before, there were innumerable instances of it, and I could name
several in my neighbourhood. One family without the Bars, and not
far from me, were all seemingly well on the Monday, being ten in
family. That evening one maid and one apprentice were taken ill
and died the next morning—when the other apprentice and two
children were touched, whereof one died the same evening, and the
other two on Wednesday. In a word, by Saturday at noon the
master, mistress, four children, and four servants were all gone,
and the house left entirely empty, except an ancient woman who
came in to take charge of the goods for the master of the
family’s brother, who lived not far off, and who had not been
sick.

Many houses were then left desolate, all the people being carried
away dead, and especially in an alley farther on the same side
beyond the Bars, going in at the sign of Moses and Aaron, there
were several houses together which, they said, had not one person
left alive in them; and some that died last in several of those
houses were left a little too long before they were fetched out
to be buried; the reason of which was not, as some have written
very untruly, that the living were not sufficient to bury the
dead, but that the mortality was so great in the yard or alley
that there was nobody left to give notice to the buriers or
sextons that there were any dead bodies there to be buried. It
was said, how true I know not, that some of those bodies were so
much corrupted and so rotten that it was with difficulty they
were carried; and as the carts could not come any nearer than to
the Alley Gate in the High Street, it was so much the more
difficult to bring them along; but I am not certain how many
bodies were then left. I am sure that ordinarily it was not so.

As I have mentioned how the people were brought into a condition
to despair of life and abandon themselves, so this very thing had
a strange effect among us for three or four weeks; that is, it
made them bold and venturous: they were no more shy of one
another, or restrained within doors, but went anywhere and
everywhere, and began to converse. One would say to another, ‘I
do not ask you how you are, or say how I am; it is certain we
shall all go; so ’tis no matter who is all sick or who is sound’;
and so they ran desperately into any place or any company.

As it brought the people into public company, so it was
surprising how it brought them to crowd into the churches. They
inquired no more into whom they sat near to or far from, what
offensive smells they met with, or what condition the people
seemed to be in; but, looking upon themselves all as so many dead
corpses, they came to the churches without the least caution, and
crowded together as if their lives were of no consequence
compared to the work which they came about there. Indeed, the
zeal which they showed in coming, and the earnestness and
affection they showed in their attention to what they heard, made
it manifest what a value people would all put upon the worship of
God if they thought every day they attended at the church that it
would be their last.

Nor was it without other strange effects, for it took away, all
manner of prejudice at or scruple about the person whom they
found in the pulpit when they came to the churches. It cannot be
doubted but that many of the ministers of the parish churches
were cut off, among others, in so common and dreadful a calamity;
and others had not courage enough to stand it, but removed into
the country as they found means for escape. As then some parish
churches were quite vacant and forsaken, the people made no
scruple of desiring such Dissenters as had been a few years
before deprived of their livings by virtue of the Act of
Parliament called the Act of Uniformity to preach in the
churches; nor did the church ministers in that case make any
difficulty of accepting their assistance; so that many of those
whom they called silenced ministers had their mouths opened on
this occasion and preached publicly to the people.

Here we may observe and I hope it will not be amiss to take
notice of it that a near view of death would soon reconcile men
of good principles one to another, and that it is chiefly owing
to our easy situation in life and our putting these things far
from us that our breaches are fomented, ill blood continued,
prejudices, breach of charity and of Christian union, so much
kept and so far carried on among us as it is. Another plague year
would reconcile all these differences; a close conversing with
death, or with diseases that threaten death, would scum off the
gall from our tempers, remove the animosities among us, and bring
us to see with differing eyes than those which we looked on
things with before. As the people who had been used to join with
the Church were reconciled at this time with the admitting the
Dissenters to preach to them, so the Dissenters, who with an
uncommon prejudice had broken off from the communion of the
Church of England, were now content to come to their parish
churches and to conform to the worship which they did not approve
of before; but as the terror of the infection abated, those
things all returned again to their less desirable channel and to
the course they were in before.

I mention this but historically. I have no mind to enter into
arguments to move either or both sides to a more charitable
compliance one with another. I do not see that it is probable
such a discourse would be either suitable or successful; the
breaches seem rather to widen, and tend to a widening further,
than to closing, and who am I that I should think myself able to
influence either one side or other? But this I may repeat again,
that ’tis evident death will reconcile us all; on the other side
the grave we shall be all brethren again. In heaven, whither I
hope we may come from all parties and persuasions, we shall find
neither prejudice or scruple; there we shall be of one principle
and of one opinion. Why we cannot be content to go hand in hand
to the Place where we shall join heart and hand without the least
hesitation, and with the most complete harmony and affection—I
say, why we cannot do so here I can say nothing to, neither shall
I say anything more of it but that it remains to be lamented.

I could dwell a great while upon the calamities of this dreadful
time, and go on to describe the objects that appeared among us
every day, the dreadful extravagancies which the distraction of
sick people drove them into; how the streets began now to be
fuller of frightful objects, and families to be made even a
terror to themselves. But after I have told you, as I have above,
that one man, being tied in his bed, and finding no other way to
deliver himself, set the bed on fire with his candle, which
unhappily stood within his reach, and burnt himself in his bed;
and how another, by the insufferable torment he bore, danced and
sung naked in the streets, not knowing one ecstasy from another;
I say, after I have mentioned these things, what can be added
more? What can be said to represent the misery of these times
more lively to the reader, or to give him a more perfect idea of
a complicated distress?

I must acknowledge that this time was terrible, that I was
sometimes at the end of all my resolutions, and that I had not
the courage that I had at the beginning. As the extremity brought
other people abroad, it drove me home, and except having made my
voyage down to Blackwall and Greenwich, as I have related, which
was an excursion, I kept afterwards very much within doors, as I
had for about a fortnight before. I have said already that I
repented several times that I had ventured to stay in town, and
had not gone away with my brother and his family, but it was too
late for that now; and after I had retreated and stayed within
doors a good while before my impatience led me abroad, then they
called me, as I have said, to an ugly and dangerous office which
brought me out again; but as that was expired while the height of
the distemper lasted, I retired again, and continued close ten or
twelve days more, during which many dismal spectacles represented
themselves in my view out of my own windows and in our own
street—as that particularly from Harrow Alley, of the poor
outrageous creature which danced and sung in his agony; and many
others there were. Scarce a day or night passed over but some
dismal thing or other happened at the end of that Harrow Alley,
which was a place full of poor people, most of them belonging to
the butchers or to employments depending upon the butchery.

Sometimes heaps and throngs of people would burst out of the
alley, most of them women, making a dreadful clamour, mixed or
compounded of screeches, cryings, and calling one another, that
we could not conceive what to make of it. Almost all the dead
part of the night the dead-cart stood at the end of that alley,
for if it went in it could not well turn again, and could go in
but a little way. There, I say, it stood to receive dead bodies,
and as the churchyard was but a little way off, if it went away
full it would soon be back again. It is impossible to describe
the most horrible cries and noise the poor people would make at
their bringing the dead bodies of their children and friends out
of the cart, and by the number one would have thought there had
been none left behind, or that there were people enough for a
small city living in those places. Several times they cried
‘Murder’, sometimes ‘Fire’; but it was easy to perceive it was
all distraction, and the complaints of distressed and distempered
people.

I believe it was everywhere thus as that time, for the plague
raged for six or seven weeks beyond all that I have expressed,
and came even to such a height that, in the extremity, they began
to break into that excellent order of which I have spoken so much
in behalf of the magistrates; namely, that no dead bodies were
seen in the street or burials in the daytime: for there was a
necessity in this extremity to bear with its being otherwise for
a little while.

One thing I cannot omit here, and indeed I thought it was
extraordinary, at least it seemed a remarkable hand of Divine
justice: viz., that all the predictors, astrologers,
fortune-tellers, and what they called cunning-men, conjurers, and
the like: calculators of nativities and dreamers of dream, and
such people, were gone and vanished; not one of them was to be
found. I am verily persuaded that a great number of them fell in
the heat of the calamity, having ventured to stay upon the
prospect of getting great estates; and indeed their gain was but
too great for a time, through the madness and folly of the
people. But now they were silent; many of them went to their long
home, not able to foretell their own fate or to calculate their
own nativities. Some have been critical enough to say that every
one of them died. I dare not affirm that; but this I must own,
that I never heard of one of them that ever appeared after the
calamity was over.

But to return to my particular observations during this dreadful
part of the visitation. I am now come, as I have said, to the
month of September, which was the most dreadful of its kind, I
believe, that ever London saw; for, by all the accounts which I
have seen of the preceding visitations which have been in London,
nothing has been like it, the number in the weekly bill amounting
to almost 40,000 from the 22nd of August to the 26th of
September, being but five weeks. The particulars of the bills are
as follows, viz.:—

From August the 22nd to the 29th 7496
” ” 29th ” 5th September 8252
” September the 5th ” 12th 7690
” ” 12th ” 19th 8297
” ” 19th ” 26th 6460
————
38,195

This was a prodigious number of itself, but if I should add the
reasons which I have to believe that this account was deficient,
and how deficient it was, you would, with me, make no scruple to
believe that there died above ten thousand a week for all those
weeks, one week with another, and a proportion for several weeks
both before and after. The confusion among the people, especially
within the city, at that time, was inexpressible. The terror was
so great at last that the courage of the people appointed to
carry away the dead began to fail them; nay, several of them
died, although they had the distemper before and were recovered,
and some of them dropped down when they have been carrying the
bodies even at the pit side, and just ready to throw them in; and
this confusion was greater in the city because they had flattered
themselves with hopes of escaping, and thought the bitterness of
death was past. One cart, they told us, going up Shoreditch was
forsaken of the drivers, or being left to one man to drive, he
died in the street; and the horses going on overthrew the cart,
and left the bodies, some thrown out here, some there, in a
dismal manner. Another cart was, it seems, found in the great pit
in Finsbury Fields, the driver being dead, or having been gone
and abandoned it, and the horses running too near it, the cart
fell in and drew the horses in also. It was suggested that the
driver was thrown in with it and that the cart fell upon him, by
reason his whip was seen to be in the pit among the bodies; but
that, I suppose, could not be certain.

In our parish of Aldgate the dead-carts were several times, as I
have heard, found standing at the churchyard gate full of dead
bodies, but neither bellman or driver or any one else with it;
neither in these or many other cases did they know what bodies
they had in their cart, for sometimes they were let down with
ropes out of balconies and out of windows, and sometimes the
bearers brought them to the cart, sometimes other people; nor, as
the men themselves said, did they trouble themselves to keep any
account of the numbers.

The vigilance of the magistrates was now put to the utmost
trial—and, it must be confessed, can never be enough acknowledged
on this occasion also; whatever expense or trouble they were at,
two things were never neglected in the city or suburbs either:—

(1) Provisions were always to be had in full plenty, and the
price not much raised neither, hardly worth speaking.

(2) No dead bodies lay unburied or uncovered; and if one walked
from one end of the city to another, no funeral or sign of it was
to be seen in the daytime, except a little, as I have said above,
in the three first weeks in September.

This last article perhaps will hardly be believed when some
accounts which others have published since that shall be seen,
wherein they say that the dead lay unburied, which I am assured
was utterly false; at least, if it had been anywhere so, it must
have been in houses where the living were gone from the dead
(having found means, as I have observed, to escape) and where no
notice was given to the officers. All which amounts to nothing at
all in the case in hand; for this I am positive in, having myself
been employed a little in the direction of that part in the
parish in which I lived, and where as great a desolation was made
in proportion to the number of inhabitants as was anywhere; I
say, I am sure that there were no dead bodies remained unburied;
that is to say, none that the proper officers knew of; none for
want of people to carry them off, and buriers to put them into
the ground and cover them; and this is sufficient to the
argument; for what might lie in houses and holes, as in Moses and
Aaron Alley, is nothing; for it is most certain they were buried
as soon as they were found. As to the first article (namely, of
provisions, the scarcity or dearness), though I have mentioned it
before and shall speak of it again, yet I must observe here:—

(1) The price of bread in particular was not much raised; for in
the beginning of the year, viz., in the first week in March, the
penny wheaten loaf was ten ounces and a half; and in the height
of the contagion it was to be had at nine ounces and a half, and
never dearer, no, not all that season. And about the beginning of
November it was sold ten ounces and a half again; the like of
which, I believe, was never heard of in any city, under so
dreadful a visitation, before.

(2) Neither was there (which I wondered much at) any want of
bakers or ovens kept open to supply the people with the bread;
but this was indeed alleged by some families, viz., that their
maidservants, going to the bakehouses with their dough to be
baked, which was then the custom, sometimes came home with the
sickness (that is to say the plague) upon them.

In all this dreadful visitation there were, as I have said
before, but two pest-houses made use of, viz., one in the fields
beyond Old Street and one in Westminster; neither was there any
compulsion used in carrying people thither. Indeed there was no
need of compulsion in the case, for there were thousands of poor
distressed people who, having no help or conveniences or supplies
but of charity, would have been very glad to have been carried
thither and been taken care of; which, indeed, was the only thing
that I think was wanting in the whole public management of the
city, seeing nobody was here allowed to be brought to the
pest-house but where money was given, or security for money,
either at their introducing or upon their being cured and sent
out—for very many were sent out again whole; and very good
physicians were appointed to those places, so that many people
did very well there, of which I shall make mention again. The
principal sort of people sent thither were, as I have said,
servants who got the distemper by going on errands to fetch
necessaries to the families where they lived, and who in that
case, if they came home sick, were removed to preserve the rest
of the house; and they were so well looked after there in all the
time of the visitation that there was but 156 buried in all at
the London pest-house, and 159 at that of Westminster.

By having more pest-houses I am far from meaning a forcing all
people into such places. Had the shutting up of houses been
omitted and the sick hurried out of their dwellings to
pest-houses, as some proposed, it seems, at that time as well as
since, it would certainly have been much worse than it was. The
very removing the sick would have been a spreading of the
infection, and rather because that removing could not effectually
clear the house where the sick person was of the distemper; and
the rest of the family, being then left at liberty, would
certainly spread it among others.

The methods also in private families, which would have been
universally used to have concealed the distemper and to have
concealed the persons being sick, would have been such that the
distemper would sometimes have seized a whole family before any
visitors or examiners could have known of it. On the other hand,
the prodigious numbers which would have been sick at a time would
have exceeded all the capacity of public pest-houses to receive
them, or of public officers to discover and remove them.

This was well considered in those days, and I have heard them
talk of it often. The magistrates had enough to do to bring
people to submit to having their houses shut up, and many ways
they deceived the watchmen and got out, as I have observed. But
that difficulty made it apparent that they would have found it
impracticable to have gone the other way to work, for they could
never have forced the sick people out of their beds and out of
their dwellings. It must not have been my Lord Mayor’s officers,
but an army of officers, that must have attempted it; and the
people, on the other hand, would have been enraged and desperate,
and would have killed those that should have offered to have
meddled with them or with their children and relations, whatever
had befallen them for it; so that they would have made the
people, who, as it was, were in the most terrible distraction
imaginable, I say, they would have made them stark mad; whereas
the magistrates found it proper on several accounts to treat them
with lenity and compassion, and not with violence and terror,
such as dragging the sick out of their houses or obliging them to
remove themselves, would have been.

This leads me again to mention the time when the plague first
began; that is to say, when it became certain that it would
spread over the whole town, when, as I have said, the better sort
of people first took the alarm and began to hurry themselves out
of town. It was true, as I observed in its place, that the throng
was so great, and the coaches, horses, waggons, and carts were so
many, driving and dragging the people away, that it looked as if
all the city was running away; and had any regulations been
published that had been terrifying at that time, especially such
as would pretend to dispose of the people otherwise than they
would dispose of themselves, it would have put both the city and
suburbs into the utmost confusion.

But the magistrates wisely caused the people to be encouraged,
made very good bye-laws for the regulating the citizens, keeping
good order in the streets, and making everything as eligible as
possible to all sorts of people.

In the first place, the Lord Mayor and the sheriffs, the Court of
Aldermen, and a certain number of the Common Council men, or
their deputies, came to a resolution and published it, viz., that
they would not quit the city themselves, but that they would be
always at hand for the preserving good order in every place and
for the doing justice on all occasions; as also for the
distributing the public charity to the poor; and, in a word, for
the doing the duty and discharging the trust reposed in them by
the citizens to the utmost of their power.

In pursuance of these orders, the Lord Mayor, sheriffs, &c., held
councils every day, more or less, for making such dispositions as
they found needful for preserving the civil peace; and though
they used the people with all possible gentleness and clemency,
yet all manner of presumptuous rogues such as thieves,
housebreakers, plunderers of the dead or of the sick, were duly
punished, and several declarations were continually published by
the Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen against such.

Also all constables and churchwardens were enjoined to stay in
the city upon severe penalties, or to depute such able and
sufficient housekeepers as the deputy aldermen or Common Council
men of the precinct should approve, and for whom they should give
security; and also security in case of mortality that they would
forthwith constitute other constables in their stead.

These things re-established the minds of the people very much,
especially in the first of their fright, when they talked of
making so universal a flight that the city would have been in
danger of being entirely deserted of its inhabitants except the
poor, and the country of being plundered and laid waste by the
multitude. Nor were the magistrates deficient in performing their
part as boldly as they promised it; for my Lord Mayor and the
sheriffs were continually in the streets and at places of the
greatest danger, and though they did not care for having too
great a resort of people crowding about them, yet in emergent
cases they never denied the people access to them, and heard with
patience all their grievances and complaints. My Lord Mayor had a
low gallery built on purpose in his hall, where he stood a little
removed from the crowd when any complaint came to be heard, that
he might appear with as much safety as possible.

Likewise the proper officers, called my Lord Mayor’s officers,
constantly attended in their turns, as they were in waiting; and
if any of them were sick or infected, as some of them were,
others were instantly employed to fill up and officiate in their
places till it was known whether the other should live or die.

In like manner the sheriffs and aldermen did in their several
stations and wards, where they were placed by office, and the
sheriff’s officers or sergeants were appointed to receive orders
from the respective aldermen in their turn, so that justice was
executed in all cases without interruption. In the next place, it
was one of their particular cares to see the orders for the
freedom of the markets observed, and in this part either the Lord
Mayor or one or both of the sheriffs were every market-day on
horseback to see their orders executed and to see that the
country people had all possible encouragement and freedom in
their coming to the markets and going back again, and that no
nuisances or frightful objects should be seen in the streets to
terrify them or make them unwilling to come. Also the bakers were
taken under particular order, and the Master of the Bakers’
Company was, with his court of assistants, directed to see the
order of my Lord Mayor for their regulation put in execution, and
the due assize of bread (which was weekly appointed by my Lord
Mayor) observed; and all the bakers were obliged to keep their
oven going constantly, on pain of losing the privileges of a
freeman of the city of London.

By this means bread was always to be had in plenty, and as cheap
as usual, as I said above; and provisions were never wanting in
the markets, even to such a degree that I often wondered at it,
and reproached myself with being so timorous and cautious in
stirring abroad, when the country people came freely and boldly
to market, as if there had been no manner of infection in the
city, or danger of catching it.