The Great Plague of London

Plague struck London again in 1665. The National Archives puts the toll of 1665 and 1666 at possibly more than 100,000 Londoners, and an estimated quarter of the city's people died. Writing to the government official Joseph Williamson, the newsletter writer Henry Muddiman passed on one week's figures: 8,252 burials, 6,978 of them from plague, in 118 infected parishes.

Such numbers came from the weekly Bills of Mortality, parish-by-parish counts of burials compiled by the Company of Parish Clerks. The causes of death were reported by searchers, parish women appointed to inspect the dead. London's surveillance of deaths went back to an order of the Crown during the plague of 1519, and it recorded numbers, not names, where some other European cities kept rolls of individual victims. The printer E. Cotes gathered the year's 52 weekly bills and an annual summary into London's Dreadful Visitation.

Rules and orders published by the king's special command, in a printed version the National Archives dates to 1666, told every city and town to set aside a place away from houses where a pest-house, huts or sheds could be put up. Sworn searchers and examiners were to look for the signs of plague, swellings under the ears or armpits or in the groin. The sick were to go to the pest-house, and an infected house, even one where no one had died, was to be shut up for forty days with a red cross and the words Lord have mercy upon us on the door. Warders were to bring the household what it needed and keep its members from mixing with the healthy. The orders also demanded that no more alehouses be licensed than were strictly necessary.

The system was only as good as its searchers. Muddiman's letter told of a butcher in Newgate Market whom searchers had declared dead of plague. Left in an upper room overnight, he called to his daughter for ale because he was cold, smoked a pipe, ate a rabbit, and on Sunday went to church to give thanks.