History of the Plague in London

by Daniel Defoe

himself and wife, five children, twoapprentices, and a maidservant. He had not been returned to his houseabove a week, and began to open his shop and carry on his trade, but thedistemper broke out in his family, and within about five days they alldied except one: that is to say, himself, his wife, all his fivechildren, and his two apprentices; and only the maid remained alive.

  But the mercy of God was greater to the rest than we had reason toexpect; for the malignity, as I have said, of the distemper was spent,the contagion was exhausted, and also the wintry weather came on apace,and the air was clear and cold, with some sharp frosts; and thisincreasing still, most of those that had fallen sick recovered, and thehealth of the city began to return. There were indeed some returns ofthe distemper, even in the month of December, and the bills increasednear a hundred; but it went off again, and so in a short while thingsbegan to return to their own channel. And wonderful it was to see howpopulous the city was again all on a sudden; so that a stranger couldnot miss the numbers that were lost, neither was there any miss of theinhabitants as to their dwellings. Few or no empty houses were to beseen, or, if there were some, there was no want of tenants for them.

  I wish I could say, that, as the city had a new face, so the manners ofthe people had a new appearance. I doubt not but there were many thatretained a sincere sense of their deliverance, and that were heartilythankful to that Sovereign Hand that had protected them in so dangerousa time. It would be very uncharitable to judge otherwise in a city sopopulous, and where the people were so devout as they were here in thetime of the visitation itself; but, except what of this was to be foundin particular families and faces, it must be acknowledged that thegeneral practice of the people was just as it was before, and verylittle difference was to be seen.

  Some, indeed, said things were worse; that the morals of the peopledeclined from this very time; that the people, hardened by the dangerthey had been in, like seamen after a storm is over, were more wickedand more stupid, more bold and hardened in their vices and immoralities,than they were before; but I will not carry it so far, neither. It wouldtake up a history of no small length to give a particular of all thegradations by which the course of things in this city came to berestored again, and to run in their own channel as they did before.

  Some parts of England were now infected as violently as London had been.The cities of Norwich, Peterborough, Lincoln, Colchester, and otherplaces, were now visited, and the magistrates of London began to setrules for our conduct as to corresponding with those cities. It is true,we could not pretend to forbid their people coming to London, becauseit was impossible to know them asunder; so, after many consultations,the lord mayor and court of aldermen were obliged to drop it. All theycould do was to warn and caution the people not to entertain in theirhouses, or converse with, any people who they knew came from suchinfected places.

  But they might as well have talked to the air; for the people of Londonthought themselves so plague-free now, that they were past alladmonitions. They seemed to depend upon it that the air was restored,and that the air was like a man that had had the smallpox,--not capableof being infected again. This revived that notion that the infection wasall in the air; that there was no such thing as contagion from the sickpeople to the sound; and so strongly did this whimsey prevail amongpeople, that they run altogether promiscuously, sick and well. Not theMohammedans, who, prepossessed with the principle of predestination,value[311] nothing of contagion, let it be in what it will, could bemore obstinate than the people of London. They that were perfectlysound, and came out of the wholesome air, as we call it, into the city,made nothing of going into the same houses and chambers, nay, even intothe same beds, with those that had the distemper upon them, and were notrecovered.

  Some, indeed, paid for their audacious boldness with the price of theirlives. An infinite number fell sick, and the physicians had more workthan ever, only with this difference, that more of their patientsrecovered, that is to say, they generally recovered; but certainly therewere more people infected and fell sick now, when there did not dieabove a thousand or twelve hundred a week, than there was[312] whenthere died five or six thousand a week, so entirely negligent were thepeople at that time in the great and dangerous case of health andinfection, and so ill were they able to take or except[313] of theadvice of those who cautioned them for their good.

  The people being thus returned, as it were, in general, it was verystrange to find, that, in their inquiring after their friends, somewhole families were so entirely swept away that there was no remembranceof them left. Neither was anybody to be found to possess or show anytitle to that little they had left; for in such cases what was to befound was generally embezzled and purloined, some gone one way, someanother.

  It was said such abandoned effects came to the King as the universalheir; upon which we are told, and I suppose it was in part true, thatthe King granted all such as deodands[314] to the lord mayor and courtof aldermen of London, to be applied to the use of the poor, of whomthere were very many. For it is to be observed, that though theoccasions of relief and the objects of distress were very many more inthe time of the violence of the plague than now, after all was over, yetthe distress of the poor was more now a great deal than it was then,because all the sluices of general charity were shut. People supposedthe main occasion to be over, and so stopped their hands; whereasparticular objects were still very moving, and the distress of thosethat were poor was very great indeed.

  Though the health of the city was now very much restored, yet foreigntrade did not begin to stir; neither would foreigners admit our shipsinto their ports for a great while. As for the Dutch, themisunderstandings between our court and them had broken out into a warthe year before, so that our trade that way was wholly interrupted; butSpain and Portugal, Italy and Barbary,[315] as also Hamburg, and all theports in the Baltic,--these were all shy of us a great while, and wouldnot restore trade with us for many months.

  The distemper sweeping away such multitudes, as I have observed, many ifnot all of the outparishes were obliged to make new burying grounds,besides that I have mentioned in Bunhill Fields, some of which werecontinued, and remain in use to this day; but others were left off, and,which I confess I mention with some reflection,[316] being convertedinto other uses, or built upon afterwards, the dead bodies weredisturbed, abused, dug up again, some even before the flesh of them wasperished from the bones, and removed like dung or rubbish to otherplaces. Some of those which came within the reach of my observations areas follows:--

  First, A piece of ground beyond Goswell Street, near Mountmill, beingsome of the remains of the old lines or fortifications of the city,where abundance were buried promiscuously from the parishes ofAldersgate, Clerkenwell, and even out of the city. This ground, as Itake it, was since[317] made a physic garden,[318] and, after[319] that,has been built upon.

  Second, A piece of ground just over the Black Ditch, as it was thencalled, at the end of Holloway Lane, in Shoreditch Parish. It has beensince made a yard for keeping hogs and for other ordinary uses, but isquite out of use as a burying ground.

  Third, The upper end of Hand Alley, in Bishopsgate Street, which was thena green field, and was taken in particularly for Bishopsgate Parish,though many of the carts out of the city brought their dead thither also,particularly out of the parish of St. Allhallows-on-the-Wall. This placeI cannot mention without much regret. It was, as I remember, about two orthree years after the plague was ceased, that Sir Robert Clayton[320]came to be possessed of the ground. It was reported, how true I know not,that it fell to the King for want of heirs (all those who had any rightto it being carried off by the pestilence), and that Sir Robert Claytonobtained a grant of it from King Charles II. But however he came by it,certain it is the ground was let out to build on, or built upon by hisorder. The first house built upon it was a large fair house, stillstanding, which faces the street or way now called Hand Alley, which,though called an alley, is as wide as a street. The houses in the samerow with that house northward are buil
t on the very same ground where thepoor people were buried; and the bodies, on opening the ground for thefoundations, were dug up, some of them remaining so plain to be seen,that the women's skulls were distinguished by their long hair, and ofothers the flesh was not quite perished; so that the people began toexclaim loudly against it, and some suggested that it might endanger areturn of the contagion; after which the bones and bodies, as fast asthey[321] came at them, were carried to another part of the same ground,and thrown altogether into a deep pit, dug on purpose, which now is to beknown[322] in that it is not built on, but is a passage to another houseat the upper end of Rose Alley, just against the door of a meetinghouse,which has been built there many years since; and the ground ispalisadoed[323] off from the rest of the passage in a little square.There lie the bones and remains of near two thousand bodies, carried bythe dead carts to their grave in that one year.

  Fourth, Besides this, there was a piece of ground in Moorfields, by