Great Plague of London

“ As in the case of the ague, a reasonable assumption would be that the plague existed in seventeenth-century Virginia. The Great Plague of London (1665) carried away 69,000 persons, and other cities of Europe had even more disastrous epidemics. During the two years before the first settlers arrived at Jamestown, over 2000 victims were buried in London. The accounts of the ocean voyage indicate rat-infested ships. Ships of the London Company reported plague and death aboard. ”

“ In London itself it ceased after 1666, not only in the City which was the part burned down in September of that year, but in St Giles’s, where the Great Plague began, in Cripplegate, Whitechapel and Stepney, where it was always worst, in Southwark, Bermondsey and Newington, in Lambeth and Westminster. Nor can it be said that the City was the source from which the infection used to spread to the Liberties and out-parishes. All the later plagues of London, perhaps even that of 1563, began in the Liberties or out-parishes and at length invaded the City. ”

“ In its common form the disease showed itself in swellings and carbuncles under the arm and in the groin. These were either few and large—being at times as large as a hen's egg—or smaller and distributed over the body of the sufferer. In this the disease does not appear to have been different from the ordinary bubonic plague, which ravaged Europe during many centuries, and which is perhaps best known in England as so destructive to human life in the great plague of London in 1665. ”

“ At the first breaking out of the infection there was, as it is easy to suppose, a very great fright among the people, and consequently a general stop of trade, except in provisions and necessaries of life; and even in those things, as there was a vast number of people fled and a very great number always sick, besides the number which died, so there could not be above two thirds, if above one half, of the consumption of provisions in the city as used to be. ”

“ In those good old times, every little while, whole cities would be smitten with a terrible disease called the plague. Perhaps you already know about the Great Plague of London in 1665, when seventy thousand people perished, and the dead lay in the streets because the living were too few to bury them. ”

“ It is most certain, that if, by the shutting up of houses, the sick had not been confined, multitudes, who in the height of their fever were delirious and distracted, would have been continually running up and down the streets; and even as it was, a very great number did so, and offered all sorts of violence to those they met, even just as a mad dog runs on and bites at every one he meets. ”

“ The plague, like a great fire, if a few houses only are contiguous where it happens, can only268 burn a few houses; or if it begins in a single, or, as we call it, a lone house, can only burn that lone house where it begins; but if it begins in a close-built town or city, and gets ahead, there its fury increases, it rages over the whole place, and consumes all it can reach. ”

“ This, I say, was only a rumor, and it was very well it was no more; but it was not so far off from being a reality as it has been thought, for in a few weeks more the poor people became so desperate by the calamity they suffered, that they were with great difficulty kept from running out into the fields and towns, and tearing all in pieces wherever they came. And, as I have observed before, nothing hindered them but that the plague raged so violently, and fell in upon them so furiously, that they rather went to the grave by thousands than into the fields in mobs by thousands ”

“ In the first volume of this history I have collected evidence that plague was endemic or steady for long periods of the 15th and 16th centuries in London, with greater outbursts at intervals, and that in the 17th century it came chiefly in great explosions. Something must have served to keep the virus in the country, and more especially in the towns, until at length it was exhausted. An exotic infection, or one that had not arisen from indigenous conditions, and would probably never have so arisen, does not remain indefinitely in the country to which it is imported. ”

“ The soil of all England in 1348-9 was filled with multitudes of the dead laid in trenches, and there were several general revivals of plague in the fifty or sixty years following. In London there were plague-pits opened in the suburbs in many great epidemics during three centuries. Even when there was no epidemic the dead were laid in the ground in such a manner that their resolution was speedy, and the diffusion of the products unchecked. ”

“ About fifty thousand people died of the disease in that city, and great alarm was felt in London lest the infection should reach England. Here was a journalistic chance that so experienced a newspaper man as Defoe could not let slip. Accordingly, on the 17th of March, 1722, appeared his "Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations or Memorials of the most Remarkable Occurrences, as well Publick as Private, which happened in London during the Last Great Visitation in 1665. Written by a Citizen who continued all the while in London. ”

“ The plague was itself very terrible, and the distress of the people very great, as you may observe of what I have said, but the rumor was infinitely greater; and it must not be wondered that our friends abroad, as my brother's correspondents in particular, were told there (namely, in Portugal and Italy, where he chiefly traded) , that in London there died twenty thousand in a week; that the dead bodies lay unburied by heaps; that the living were not sufficient to bury the dead, or the sound to look after the sick ”

“ There were, however, more special occasions when a higher degree of malignancy than ordinary was bred or cultivated among the classes at large who were habitually liable to typhus. But even the old pestilential spotted fever which used to precede, accompany, and follow the plague itself, was fatal to a comparatively small proportion of all who had it. Thus, towards the end of the great London plague of 1625, on 18th October, Sir John Coke writes to Lord Brooke: “In London now the tenth person dieth not of those that are sick, and generally the plague seems changed into an ague [176] .” ”

“ They also continued their cess-pools, their narrow lanes, and their kennels filled with refuse of all kinds. Yet in the eighteenth century there was no plague. Let us also point out that parts of all great cities in Europe were, and are still, extremely crowded and filthy, yet no plague. In other words, it is dangerous to be unwashed, but not in itself a sufficient cause of plague. There must have been causes, of which one knows nothing, why the Plague should take hold of the City on four separate occasions in one century, and after devastating it on a grand scale, should go away for good. ”

“ Three great national events, which have not yet lost their interest, are recorded in this Diary. These are the plague, the great fire of London, and the successful enterprise of De Ruyter and the Dutch fleet at Chatham. The account of the plague will be read with much interest, especially at the present time, when another terrible epidemic has been raging through the streets and lanes of the metropolis. The progress of the plague through Europe seems, in many respects, to have resembled that of the cholera. ”

“ For it is to be observed, that though the occasions of relief and the objects of distress were very many more in the time of the violence of the plague than now, after all was over, yet the distress of the poor was more now a great deal than it was then, because all the sluices of general charity were shut. People supposed the main occasion to be over, and so stopped their hands ”

“ The revival of plague in London, after the great epidemic of 1563, was probably in 1568. In the city records there are orders relating to searchers, shutting up of houses, and collections for infected households, dated 12 October, 1568 (10 Elizabeth) , 27 March and 19 October, 1569. But in 1568 the regulations, like the proposal for quarantine of shipping, may have been made more against the importation of cases from outside than on account of cases actually in London. ”

“ That is confirmed for London, in a letter of October 26, 1658: “A world of sickness in all countries round about London. London is now held the wholesomest place;” but on January 4, 1659: “There is much sickness in the town, especially feavers, agues, and smallpox [1119] .” In Short’s tables, the registers of market towns bear the same traces of much sickness in 1657 and 1658 as those of country parishes.
A high mortality from fever and spotted fever continued in London every year from 1658 to the year of the great plague. ”

“ The alarm was great in the house, as any one 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 80remember how many died in the house itself; but I think the maidservant 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 nineteen the week after, whereof fourteen were of the plague. ”

“ I had in my family only an ancient woman that managed the house, a maidservant, 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 objects128 which happened everywhere as I went about the streets had filled my mind with a great deal of horror, for fear of the distemper itself, which was indeed very horrible in itself, and in some more than others. ”

“ In 1854, the total number of deaths from cholera and diarrhœa in London, extending over a period of six months, with a population of 2,517,048, was 14,806. The epidemic was at its height during the first fourteen days of September, when 4,371 persons were carried off. The mortality in the epidemic of 1849 was somewhat greater, viz. 18,036, the period again extending over several months. Even in the great plague year, 1665, when 68,590 persons died in London, and the city [8] was nearly abandoned, the mortality never rose higher than 7,165 in a week ”

“ I must confess myself to have been very much dejected just before this happened; for the prodigious numbers that were taken sick the week or two before, besides those that died, was351 such, and the lamentations were so great everywhere, that a man must have seemed to have acted even against his reason if he had so much as expected to escape; and as there was hardly a house but mine in all my neighborhood but what was infected, so, had it gone on, it would not have been long that there would have been any more neighbors to be infected. ”

“ Others set up bills to summon people to their lodgings for direction 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. ”

“ The days of the Dutch war were some of the most unhappy Pg 427 that England has ever known. In the summer and autumn of 1665, the land was smitten with the worst outbreak of pestilence that it has ever suffered. The "Great Plague" raged in London with awful severity. The crowded and ill-built city, utterly destitute of any sanitary appliances, and foul with the accumulated filth of centuries, became a very hotbed of contagion. Whole streets and parishes were swept clear of their inhabitants by death or desertion; the clergy fled from their cures, the physicians from their patients. ”

“ In the British Museum there is a MS. of some importance (Sloane MS., 349) , entitled ‘Loimographia, an account of the Great Plague of London in the year 1665, by William Boghurst, apothecary.’ This was first referred to by Mr. E. W. Brayley in his edition of Defoe’s Plague Year, and it was analysed by Dr. Creighton in his work on Epidemics. Dr. Payne printed an edition of the tract in 1894. Mr. ”

“ The next reference is to the great epidemic of 1499-1500, in London and apparently also in the country. Fabyan, who was then an alderman and likely to know, puts the deaths in London at twenty thousand [549] ; Polydore Virgil says thirty thousand [550] ; and others say thirty thousand deaths from plague and other diseases together [551] . The smaller total is the more likely to be nearest the mark. There is reason to think that the population of London a generation later was little over 60,000 ”

“ An ancient gentlewoman having practiced with great success in the late plague in this city, anno 1636, gives her advice only to the female sex. To be spoken with, etc.
An experienced physician, who has long studied the doctrine of antidotes against all sorts of poison and infection, has, after forty years' practice, arrived at such skill as may, with God's blessing, direct persons how to prevent being touched by any contagious distemper whatsoever. He directs the poor gratis. ”

“ Anatomie of the Bodie of Man, ed. Furnivall, App. 161.
[175] Ibid., pp. 163, 164.
[176] Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, vii. 749.
[177] Creighton, vol. i. p. 316.
[178] Vicary, App. iii. p. 166.
[179] Mr. Power refers me to the fact that isolated cases of plague and local epidemics occurred long after the Great Fire.
[180] In a broadside referring to ‘The Plague of London, printed by Peter Cole, at the printing office in Cornhill, near the Royal Exchange, 1665,’ the number of deaths from plague in 1603, 1625 and 1636 are given as follows:—1603, 30,561 persons ”