The Time Traveller’s Guide to Restoration Britain

by Ian Mortimer

  As you are probably aware, the plague is caused by a bacterium, Yersinia pestis, which lives in the guts of fleas, which in turn live on the black rats that infest households in every town and village in Britain. When the fleas bite a human, they pass on the infection. If the infected person himself has fleas, these too can become infected when they bite him. They may then carry the plague to the next person to wear his clothes. People at the time do not know that rats and fleas are the agents of their doom; they suspect dogs of conveying the disease.

  If you catch the plague, your temperature will rise to about 40°C. You will vomit, suffer headaches and become feverish and perhaps delirious. A blackish-green carbuncle will develop on the skin where the flea bit you, and the lymph nodes in your groin, neck and/or armpit will swell into black buboes. After a while you will develop the ‘tokens’ of the plague: a mass of large subcutaneous spots that can be almost any colour from orange and purple to blue and black. Most diagnoses of plague are made by ‘searchers’ – two women in every parish who visit the house of a deceased person carrying white wands and, for the fee of one groat (4d), will examine the corpse to discover what he or she died of, and inform the authorities.

  The Great Plague of 1665 is, of course, not the first epidemic to hit Britain. London has suffered many minor outbreaks over the previous hundred years or so, with major ones occurring in 1563, 1603 and 1625. All three of those killed more than one-fifth of the population. Each new onslaught is termed ‘the Great Plague’, as the immediate suffering is considered worse than anything that has ever happened before. The same is true of the plague of 1665, although, proportionally speaking, isn’t quite as deadly as the three outbreaks mentioned above.23 People have short memories. Indeed, it is precisely this shortness of memory that contributes to the spread of the plague in 1665. Past experience has led to the development of a series of Orders about what magistrates should do to control the disease when it is found in a locality. They are to meet every three weeks, consult the searchers, arrange for the killing of dogs and levy a local tax for the maintenance of the sick. If the searchers find an infected person, the house is to be closed up with all the occupants inside; a red cross is to be painted on the door and a watchman set to ensure that no one goes in or comes out. Dire punishment is threatened on those who leave: to escape is to commit a felony for which you can be hanged, whether or not you have the plague. Such orders are, of course, aimed squarely at preventing the spread of the disease, but in 1665 some people don’t remember how deadly an outbreak can be. They see the incarceration of victims as cruel and uncharitable. In April, one of the first houses to be infected is in the parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields. The magistrates order it to be sealed up but the neighbours object to such unchristian behaviour: they obliterate the red cross on the door, force the padlock that has been placed on it and release all the inhabitants as if they were victims of an injustice.24 You can understand their feelings but they are making a terrible mistake. The infected victims emerge and mingle with their rescuers – and the plague spreads rapidly through the parish. More than 3,000 people die in St Giles-in-the-Fields as a consequence.

  If you visit London in the latter half of 1665, your memory of the experience will probably never leave you. The sight of the painted red crosses – sometimes whole streets of doors boarded up, one after the other, with watchmen standing by – is deeply disturbing. Seeing some of the noble town houses in Covent Garden piazza so marked is no less disquieting than the boarding-up of old wooden houses in the alleys. Nowhere is safe. The streets are empty, many of the shops are shut. Parish bells ring out constantly, especially at night as corpse after corpse is carried to burial. Bodies are left in coffins in the lanes. People are found dead in their houses or lying in the streets, on the steps of wharves or floating in the river. People in the street cover their faces, avoiding even the gaze of the searchers with their white wands as they go from house to house. Fires are lit in the streets to fumigate the air. Men of substance who can leave the city do so; those who cannot, for reasons of business, send their wives and families into the country. Each day they gather in coffee houses and eagerly reach for the Bills of Mortality to find out if there is any abatement in the disease, only to find it growing worse and worse. Some weeks in August they read that more than 6,000 have died. At the height of the epidemic, in September, more than 8,000 die every week. By then there is no longer any hope of shutting up all the victims, and fear takes hold as people realise that those whom they meet in the street might have the disease. On 7 September, John Evelyn travels through the city to St James and says it is ‘dangerous to see so many coffins exposed in the streets, now thin of people; the shops shut up and all in mournful silence, not knowing whose turn it might be next’.25 By this time there is grass growing in some of the roads. Boats and wherries lie unused at the riverbanks, their watermen dead, or fled for fear that those who would employ them are carrying the pestilence. The following month Pepys writes:

  But Lord, how empty the streets are, and melancholy, so many poor sick people in the streets, full of sores, and so many sad stories overheard as I walk, everybody talking of this dead and that man sick, and so many in this place and so many in that. And they tell me that in Westminster there is never a physician and but one apothecary left, all being dead.26

  Across the whole of England, 86,859 more people are buried in 1665 than on average in each of the previous five years. The mortality in and around the capital accounts for the great majority of these deaths. But the rest of the country is not unaffected. There is terror in the provincial towns as their inhabitants realise that those fleeing London may well be bringing the plague with them. Fairs and gatherings of people are banned. Inns are closed, the inn signs removed by order in towns such as Northampton, so that travellers will not linger.27 Exeter forbids access to all men and merchants arriving from London.28 Along the highways men and women expire and, in some cases, are left to rot by the country folk, who fear to touch the dead bodies. A man who walks all the way from London to Dorchester is denied entry to the town and dies in a small hovel on a farm. Rather than bury him, the local people dig a huge hole beside the hovel and tip it and its dead occupant into it, burying the building as well as the man. Outside the well-guarded gates of Southampton, a family of three dies on a hillside, the wife’s last act being to scratch a hole in the ground with her bare fingers for her dead husband, leaving his body half-buried as she herself dies.29

  Over the course of 1665 and 1666, the disease breaks the defences of many towns. In Ipswich more than 1,000 of its 8,000 inhabitants are swept away. In Colchester the pestilence kills 4,817 people, half the population.30 But the place that will probably stick in your mind more than any other is the village of Eyam, in Derbyshire. A parcel of cloth from London is opened in September 1665 by a servant, George Viccars, who, on finding the contents damp, unpacks everything and hangs it before the fire. After three days, the tokens of the plague are clearly visible on him; on 6 September he dies. Before the month is out, five more have died of plague. Twenty-two die in October. The disease continues at a lower level through the cold months, killing a few people every week, but everyone knows that the death toll will rise sharply when May and June bring warmer weather. Some suggest fleeing to the towns but the rector, William Mompesson, warns them that they thereby risk infecting many thousands more people. Instead he persuades them to isolate their entire village. A line marked by boundary stones around the parish is not to be crossed by anyone coming to or leaving Eyam. Food is to be brought to a certain point and paid for by money left in a stone cistern, where it is washed by running water. And then the terrible wait begins. Nineteen die in June 1666, fifty-six in July. Helpless and alone, the people of Eyam perish in their self-imposed isolation, tended only by each other and their minister. One woman, Elizabeth Hancock, loses her husband and all six of her children in the space of one week in August 1666 – and buries them all with her own hands near her house. Later that month, Wil
liam Mompesson loses his beloved wife, Catherine. He writes to his patron, Sir George Savile:

  This is the saddest letter that ever my pen did write, the destroying angel having taken up his quarters within my habitation. My dearest dear is gone to her eternal rest, and is invested with the crown of righteousness, having made a most happy end. Had she loved herself as well as me, she had fled from the pit of destruction with her sweet infants, and might have prolonged her days. But she was resolved to die a martyr for my interest.

  The final burial from the plague in Eyam takes place on 11 October 1666. As Mompesson writes in his closing words on the tragedy: ‘Our town has become a Golgotha, the place of a skull. My ears have never heard such doleful lamentations – my nose never smelled such horrid smells, and my eyes never beheld such ghastly spectacles.’ In total, 267 people in Eyam perish due to the plague – 38 per cent of the population, twice the proportion that dies in London.31

  OTHER DISEASES AND AILMENTS

  The disease most likely to kill you in the seventeenth century is consumption – or tuberculosis, as you know it – which is the cause of death for more than one in six people in London and probably most of the urban and suburban areas of Britain too. People do not know that it is infectious: when several members of the same household contract it, people think the family has an inherited weakness. John Evelyn is convinced that the ‘thick, dirty, smoggy air’ that hangs over London is at least partly responsible, he declares in Fumifugium. ‘This makes them vulnerable to thousands of diseases, corrupting their lungs and disordering their bodies, so that catarrh, coughs and tuberculosis are more prevalent in this city than any other in the world.’ However, the actual cause is a bacterium. This is spread through infected cow’s milk and the sneezing and coughing of those who already have the disease – hence its concentration in densely populated areas. Parish churches also encourage the disease to spread. Evelyn writes, ‘is there under Heaven such coughing and snuffing to be heard as in the London churches and assemblies of the people, where the … spitting is incessant’.32 Symptoms vary enormously – the swelling of the lymph nodes in the neck that typify the King’s Evil are a form of tuberculosis – but the classic ones are coughing up blood, weakness of the limbs, weight loss, sweating at night and fever. According to Nicholas Culpeper’s Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, remedies include eating green walnuts, a bezoar stone (a concretion formed in the stomach of a goat) or the flowers of mallow bruised and boiled with honey and taken with a liquorice stick.33 However, the physician John Symcotts notes in his casebook:

  Those that have a long, dry cough, wax lean and thin, feel unequal heats, especially after meals, have a quick and small pulse, covet the fire much, yet are hot within, and being [away] from the fire grow cold in hands and face, look pale and are often or continually troubled with a hoarseness, I never saw recovered.34

  So, if you catch tuberculosis, it looks as though you are doomed – even if you do swallow the hardened product of a goat’s gastrointestinal system.

  ‘Ague and fever’ comprises the third most common cause of death in the Thames region, but in the coastal marshes of Essex, Kent and Sussex, the Fens of Lincolnshire and Norfolk, the Ribble district of Lancashire, the Somerset Levels and the Holderness of Yorkshire, it accounts for more suffering than any other type of disease. The reason is that ‘ague and fever’ includes malaria, the greatest killer in human history. As you will no doubt be aware, malaria is spread by mosquitoes carrying the Plasmodium parasite. People living in the areas mentioned above often describe the disease as ‘marsh fever’; other descriptions are ‘tertian ague’ (because it recurs every third day, counting inclusively, so every 48 hours) or ‘quartan ague’ (every fourth day, or 72 hours). This reflects the regular bursting of red blood cells in the body after they have been infected. Symptoms are shaking, high temperature, profuse sweating, headache, vomiting and diarrhoea. The one efficacious remedy is quinine, which, as we have seen earlier, is contained in Jesuit’s bark. There are many dozens of alternative recipes and pills prescribed by physicians and apothecaries, but none are likely to do you any good.

  ‘Griping in the guts’ is a disease with which you are probably not familiar. It is better known to you as a form of dysentery, like ‘the bloody flux’, which is separately recorded in the Bills of Mortality but is far less common in Restoration London. The infection is carried by a bacterium and is particularly associated with the faeces: eating with your fingers and not washing your hands thoroughly, or washing your hands with contaminated water, is thus potentially fatal. You will surely know if you have dysentery by the bloody diarrhoea that follows. Culpeper suggests a large number of remedies, from vine leaves to pomegranate flowers and sorrel seeds.35 Richard Tomlinson, another apothecary, suggests just as many in his Medicinal Dispensatory, from comfrey to cinquefoil and wild mulberries, but the high death rate in London testifies to the shortage of effective remedies. The same applies to dropsy. This ailment, being a swelling of part of the body, is a consequence of other maladies and thus has a wide range of causes. Go to an apothecary complaining of dropsy and you may well be given a pill containing such things as ‘spurge-olive macerated in vinegar’, dwarf-elder seeds, milwort roots and agaric.36 Agaric, in case you are wondering, is a white fungus that grows on the larch tree in Italy and opens your bowels as effectively as the spa waters of Harrogate and Epsom. Otherwise it has no medicinal value whatsoever.

  The Bills of Mortality group smallpox and measles together for the years 1687–1700. The reason for this is perhaps because they are both associated with children and young people, and in both diseases the skin is marked with disfiguring spots. Both are viral infections – not that seventeenth-century people know that – and are easily confused in the early stages. However, there are significant differences between them, not the least of which is their deadliness. In the period prior to 1687, smallpox kills more than ten times as many Londoners as measles: an average of 1,199 per year, compared to 109. But there are epidemics of both diseases from time to time, which increase your likelihood of infection. In 1674 no fewer than 795 citizens die of measles (the following year just one person does). In 1681 smallpox claims 2,982 lives; in 1666 just 38 die of it. Robert Hooke’s servant Tom Giles is diagnosed with measles by Dr Diodati in 1677 but, when the red spots turn into the telltale pustules, it is clear that in fact he has smallpox. When he starts pissing blood, Dr Diodati advises him to be let blood at the nose and mouth: two surgeons accordingly remove 7oz of blood from his arm and from under his tongue. He continues to cough up blood and, when the doctors next come, they break the news to him that he is going to die. He expires shortly afterwards.37 Hooke’s beloved niece and housekeeper, Grace Hooke, recovers from the measles that same year, only to catch smallpox in 1679. She is prescribed ‘Gascoyne powder’, a fashionable new remedy, which makes her sweat profusely, and eventually she recovers. Even if you survive, you may well be marked for life with the scars of hundreds of pustules across your face. The good news is that, if you recover from the disease, you are immune thereafter. Evelyn, who loses two daughters to smallpox in 1685, comments on a woman whom he sees that year encouraging other young children to play with an infected child, in the hope of them catching the disease while still very young.38

  The last major fatal disease in the Bills of Mortality is ‘teeth’. In order to try and avoid your teeth killing you, you can use a dentifrice (a tooth powder) like the one sold by Robert Turner of London, which is supposed to ‘scour and clean the teeth, making them white as ivory … it fastens the teeth, sweetens the breath, and preserves the gums and mouth from cankers and impostumes’.39 An ‘impostume’ is an abscess, and this is why the teeth are such a big killer. Pus-filled abscesses form inside the tooth or near the root when there is poor dental hygiene (and it has to be said that the tooth cloths of the day aren’t up to keeping people’s mouths clean). If the infection turns to blood poisoning, or swells and blocks the airway, it can prove fatal. If you have unbearable
toothache, you have a range of options. You can try to ignore the problem and risk an abscess. You can ask a blacksmith to yank out the offending tooth with a pair of pliers. Or you can go to a tooth-drawer, a surgeon or an ‘operator for the teeth’ such as Peter de la Roche (one of the two royal dentists) and ask him to use a specialist instrument to remove the problematic tooth.40 One such instrument is a ‘pelican’ – a metal claw fixed to a metal arm that is hinged to a support: the claw is placed around the tooth, the support is jammed against the jaw, and the tooth is levered out as the surgeon holds the patient’s head firmly between his knees. Another instrument is a ‘key’: a hook that protrudes sideways from the barrel of a key-like tool. Using a left-hand and a right-hand key in conjunction, the dextrous surgeon can remove a tooth with greater precision than someone using a pelican. To say all such extractions are painful is to state the obvious: the advantage of this form of dentistry is not that it stops the pain but that it might save your life. Pain relief is available in the form of opium compounds (if you can afford them) or substantial quantities of alcohol. Apothecaries also have a large number of medicines for fastening the teeth, for loosening a tooth prior to having it pulled out, and for making all your teeth fall out. According to Culpeper, tooth removal may be brought about through the application of powdered earthworms. When Ralph Josselin’s wife, Jane, is plagued with toothache, rather than earthworms, she reaches for that other good old cure-all, tobacco.41

  You might want to watch out for a few other diseases too. Rickets is a skeletal deformity in children: it appears out of nowhere about 1630 and thereafter increases in prevalence. You are no doubt aware that the cause is not being exposed to enough sunlight, resulting in a deficiency in vitamin D. The development of the disease is thus a consequence of increasing urbanisation in the city of London – a quite avoidable problem – yet between 300 and 500 children die from it every year. ‘The French pox’, otherwise known as syphilis, is a sexually transmitted disease that, unsurprisingly, is on the rise in the capital. In the 1650s only six people were reported to die from it each year. But in the swinging 1660s, under the rule of the merry monarch, the average annual number of deaths reported in London is at least ten times this number.