Baxter knew of none among the Nonconformist ministers remaining in London who fell victims to the plague, except “Mr Grunman, a German, a very humble, holy, able minister, but being a silenced Nonconformist, was so poor that he was not able to remove his family.” Two others of the sect, who fled, lost their lives—“Mr Cross, flying from the plague into the country died with his wife and some children as soon as he came thither, in the house of that learned worthy man, Mr Shaw, another silenced minister,” and Mr Roberts, “a godly Welsh minister, who also flying from the plague, fell sick as far off as between Shrewsbury and Oswestry and died in a little straw, but none durst entertain him.” Baxter himself found refuge in the house of the Hampdens, in Bucks[1211], leaving his family, as he says, in the midst of plague at Acton. Defoe draws from the incident of the Nonconformists in Church pulpits a somewhat sentimental moral; he sees nothing aggressive in it, but merely the levelling of differences by affliction, and a short-lived prospect of reconciliation.

The irregular practitioners of physic would appear to have been in great force, just as in former plagues, when their bills were on every post. Defoe professes to give specimens of their advertisements, which he might have adapted from actual advertisements in the news-sheets, the ‘Intelligencer’ and the ‘Newes.’ The empirics were of both sexes, and of foreign extraction as well as native.

Among the regular physicians who practised for a time, at least, in the plague were the famous Professor Glisson, Dr Nathan Paget (an intimate friend of Milton and cousin of Elizabeth Minshull whom the poet, in 1664, had married for his third wife), Dr Wharton, of St Thomas’s Hospital, a distinguished anatomist, Dr Berwick or Barwick, Dr Brooke, Dr Hodges, and Dr Conyers. The last was one of two of his order who died of the plague. Two Paracelsist or chemical physicians, Dr Dey and Dr Starkey, died of it: and Dr George Thomson says that he survived three several attacks of the buboes, the first sore lasting for four months. A considerable number of chirurgeons and apothecaries are said (by Defoe) to have fallen victims. Pepys says that at the first meeting of Gresham College (the Royal Society) since the plague, held on January 22, 1666, Dr Goddard “did fill us with talk in defence of his and his fellow physicians’ going out of town in the plague-time,” his plea being that their particular patients were out of town, and they left at liberty. But that excuse ignores the fact that the time was a great emergency, and puts the defence upon the wrong ground.

Goddard had attended Cromwell in the Irish and Scottish campaigns as physician to the army. For a short time he had been a member of the Council of State, and for several years was master of a College at Oxford. He was Gresham professor of physic, and one of the original council of the Royal Society. This eminent man of science was the inventor and proprietor of “Goddard’s drop,” the secret of which he sold to Charles II. for a large sum, said to have been £6000. Dr Martin Lister says that the king showed him the receipt, and that the drops were nothing more than the volatile spirit of raw silk rectified with oil of cinnamon, and no better than ordinary spirit of hartshorn. Another writer says that the drops contained also skull of a person hanged and dried viper. According to Sydenham, Goddard’s drops were preferable to other volatile spirits for the particular purpose, namely, the recovery of people from faintings of various kinds. Even if Dr Goddard had remained in town, he would have been a trafficker in nostrums as much as the empirics; nor is it probable, from all that we know, that he could have brought epidemiological principles to bear upon the management of the epidemic among the poor. The best teaching of the time counselled that which he himself practised, namely, flight.

Defoe says that the Lord Mayor (Sir John Lawrence), the Sheriffs (Sir George Waterman and Sir Charles Doe), the Court of Aldermen and certain of the Common Council, or their deputies, came to a resolution and published it, viz.:

The minutes are extant of numerous meetings of the Mayor and Council, with the orders made (on May 11, June 17, 19, and 27, July 12, and at short intervals thereafter)[1212]. Two of the Aldermen died of plague.

It appears to be admitted by all, that good order was kept, the dead buried expeditiously, day and night watchmen provided for an immense number of infected houses (until, as Vincent says, the infected houses became so many that there was no use shutting them up), bearers of the dead and grave-diggers engaged to fill the places of those who died, and applications heard for relief. One of the things that justly excited the admiration of Defoe was the abundant supply of all the markets, and the almost unvarying weight of the penny wheaten loaf, which is given every week at the foot of the bill of mortality. The Parish Clerks brought out their bill regularly, although Hodges says that the sextons failed at length to keep an accurate account of the number of corpses. All the dead were buried at first in coffins and with full ceremony; but when the infection became hottest in August and September, especially in the crowded East-end and in Southwark, the bodies are said to have been brought to the pits in cartloads and thrown in, sometimes without even a covering[1213]. That is alleged by the writers on the plagues of 1603 and 1625, and the same must have happened to some extent in 1665, but whether to the extent that Defoe’s graphic account implies may be doubted.

The burials took place over night until, as Vincent says, “now the nights are too short to bury the dead.” This was a reversal of the order, first issued in 1547 and probably carried out in the plague of 1603, that no burial was to take place between six in the evening and six in the morning. Even at the worst time, coffins would seem to have been got for most. Vincent says, “Now we could hardly go forth but we should meet many coffins,” and he mentions one woman whom he met with a little coffin under her arm. Evelyn enters in his diary on September 7, the worst week of the epidemic: “I went all along the City and suburbs from Kent Street to St James’s, a dismal passage and dangerous, to see so many coffins exposed in the streets now thin of people.” Defoe’s weird description of the Aldgate plague-pit at midnight, with seven or eight lanterns set on the heaps of earth round the edge, and of the constant journeys to and fro of the dead-carts, has probably made the most of the realities of the case.

A letter of Pepys to Lady Carteret, written from Woolwich on September 4, gives us a glimpse of the state of the City:

On September 20, he writes in his diary:

Some three weeks later (October 11) Evelyn writes in his diary: “Went through the whole city, having occasion to alight out of the coach in several places about business of money, when I was environed with multitudes of poor pestiferous creatures begging alms. The shops universally shut up.” Vincent says that he would meet “many with sores and limping in the streets,” (from the suppurating buboes in the groins). Again:

—the delirium being sometimes of the gentle or foolish kind, and sometimes violent. These incidents are much enlarged upon by Defoe, who makes out the cries and groans (mentioned by Dekker and others for the earlier plagues) to have been from the pain of the hard and tense buboes. Boghurst says that the treatment by actual cautery and other escharotics caused more pain than the buboes.

As a set-off to the more horrible picture given by Defoe of the inmates of a house all dying together, their bodies being found by the watchmen and taken away in the dead-cart, we may turn to Vincent’s plain account of what happened in the house where he lodged, probably in the neighbourhood of Aldgate or Bishopsgate, when he came up from Islington to minister to the sick.

The two boys appear to have been conscious to the end, and to have died in the placid mood that often came on in the last hours of plague, as in other prostrating infections such as yellow fever and cholera. In those two weeks at the end of September and beginning of October the burials in all London were 6460 (of plague 5533) and 5720 (of plague 4929).

The chief preventive measure which the mayor had to give effect to was the shutting-up of infected houses. Defoe says that he carried out that odious policy considerately. The policy was a traditional one, and may or may not have had its origin in medical prescription. It was practised, as we have seen in a former chapter, early in the reign of Henry VIII., if not even before that. The doctrine underlying it was the contagiousness of plague, which was much more a doctrine of the faculty than of the people, and was most of all a doctrine of the Court. Originally the dogma of contagiousness, in all its rigour, had been made for the persons of the Tudor monarchs, and as late as 1665 it was in the atmosphere of the Court that the contagion of plague was invested with the most powerful properties. The common people of London gave no heed to it, because they saw every hour that it was a matter of indifference; the middle classes held it in a qualified way, knowing that there was less to fear from plague-bodies than from plague-infected ground; but kings took the comprehensive view of it, allowing no exceptions or scientific reservations, and the Court doctors, such as Mead in the 18th century, at length succeeded in making the high doctrine of plague-contagion to pass current. Two instances are known from extant petitions, of its rigorous application upon Court servants in 1665: one in the case of a trumpeter of the king, and the other in the case of the barber to the household. In the latter case, apparently when the Court was at Salisbury in the autumn, a stranger supposed to be visited with the sickness ran into the barber’s tent in his absence; whereon the tent and all his goods and instruments of livelihood were burnt, he himself confined, and his servants sent away, according to the orders for the preservation of the Court, “so that he lost his trade and was utterly ruined[1214].”

The more discriminating of the profession knew and taught that the seeds of plague could lurk in a bundle of clothes, or of bedding, or in other effects, or in bales of goods, and that they became the more virulent through the fermentation that goes on in these circumstances. The contagion was understood to be per fomitem and per distans; on the other hand, experience was rather against a contagion from the exhalations of the sick: the immunity of nurses was as striking as it has been in many other contagions. The people were instinctively right in their belief that they mostly caught the plague because the infection was in the air of the place; so long as they were living on a plague-stricken spot, they were exposed to the risk; and if there were any difference in safety between dwelling-houses, and the streets, markets or shops, the preference seemed to lie with the former. The traditional or official doctrine, however, was that the plague-stricken were the sources of contagion, that all who had come near them were suspect, and that the safety of the well depended upon the rigorous shutting-up of the sick and the suspected together. The experience of epidemic after epidemic might have shown that this theoretical reasoning, so attractive to the “thorough” order of mind, was worthless in practice. A great plague pursued its course until the infected houses became too many for shutting up; if many plague-years did not develop epidemics of the first degree, that was in accordance with some epidemiological law, and not because the preventive measures were one year effective and another year ineffective. However, a traditional doctrine will always survive a good deal of adverse experience; and the shutting-up of houses, which had signally failed in 1563, 1593, 1603, 1625 and 1636, was resorted to once more in 1665, and perhaps with more rigour than ever so as to give it a fair chance. Defoe has stated with great fairness the hardships of it, and he follows Hodges and Boghurst in pronouncing it a mistake and a failure. Most of the horrible incidents of the plague came from the shutting-up of houses; those which Defoe introduces in that connexion do not exceed probability. It is hard to say whether the condemnation of shutting-up, which found wide currency during and immediately after the plague of 1665, would have at length made any difference to the traditional doctrine and practice. The occasion did not arise again in London except for a few months in 1666, when the old practice seems to have been enforced. The corresponding doctrine and practice that arose in its place, was quarantine against foreign importation; that rested firstly upon the sophistical assertion of the all-powerful Mead, that plague had been an exotic to England, and secondly upon the doctrine of plague-contagion in its most comprehensive and least discriminating form. But the quarantine law dates really from the Queen Anne period, and the curious history of its rise, progress, and overthrow belongs to another part of this work.

The other general preventive measure besides the shutting-up of “visited” houses was the burning of fires in the streets, which was also a tradition from Tudor times. The mayor loyally carried out that also; until in the beginning of autumn a concurrence of things made an end of the practice. These adverse influences were first, the heavy showers of rain, which put the fires out; secondly, the differences in medical opinion whether coal-fires or wood-fires were the better, and whether fires were to be recommended at all; and thirdly the popular perception that the fires made no difference to the progress of the epidemic.

In the way of individual protection and treatment, the College of Physicians issued a tract full of directions and prescriptions, which Boghurst says were all old, being taken from De Vigo († 1520). It is not necessarily against methods of practice that they are old; but one cannot fail to observe how closely the medieval teaching about plague, cause and cure together, was followed to the last in England: for two centuries the writers on plague reproduced the chapters and paragraphs almost without change that we find in the treatise of the bishop of Aarhus, which circulated in manuscript in England in the 15th century and was first printed about 1480. The most popular preventive was something “to smell to,” not sweet but aigre. Hence the use of civet-boxes, pouncet-boxes, and pomanders, which were made to suit all purses. There were also plague-waters, one of which, “the plague-water of Matthias,” figures among the prescriptions of the College of Physicians both in a cheap and in an expensive form. The College’s prescription “to break the tumour” is as follows:

The Paracelsist or chemical physician, Thomson, gives a prescription which brings out the mystical tendencies of that otherwise meritorious sect. It relates to a method of curing plague by means of a toad.

Tobacco, smoked or chewed, came into great vogue in 1665 as a preservative from the plague. Hearne, the antiquary, says:

The best medical details of the Great Plague come from Boghurst, who claims that the observations were all his own.

This explains Dekker’s statement in 1603 that some had buboes repeatedly, and that one person had eighteen sores. Dr Thomson himself had buboes thrice. Hodges, also, knew of many cases fatal at the third seizure, the later attacks being not relapses but new infections; some even fell at the fifth or sixth time, being before well recovered. In one of the earlier London plagues, that of 1563, Jones saw a case of a woman near Temple Bar that ended fatally at the third attack, the buboes having suppurated twice, but not at the third time. Boghurst goes on:

Hodges saw one carbuncle on the thigh, the size of two handbreadths, with a large blister on it, “which being opened by the chirurgeon and scarification made where the mortification did begin, the patient expired under the operation.” But most commonly carbuncles did not exceed the breadth of three or four fingers. Boghurst continues:

The tokens proper, according to Hodges, were spots on the skin “proceeding from extravasated blood.” The body of the youth dissected by Thomson was “beset with spots, black and blue,” some of which when opened “contained a coagulated matter.” The tokens, as the name implies, were made the most distinctive sign of the plague; but they were far from being so constant as the botches or buboes. Boghurst says that “tokens appeared not much until about the middle of June;” and, according to a letter of September 14, they must have been very variable even at the height of the plague: “The practitioners in physic stand amazed to meet with so many various symptoms which they find among their patients; one week the general distempers are blotches and boils, the next week as clear-skinned as may be, but death spares neither; one week full of spots and tokens, and perhaps the succeeding bill none at all[1218].”

The account of the dissection by Thomson, of a youth dead of the plague, is perhaps all the morbid anatomy that has come down to us. He found what appear to have been infarcts in the lungs; the surface was “stigmatised with several large ill-favoured marks, much tumified and distended,” from which, on section, there issued “sanious, dreggy corruption and a pale ichor destitute of any blood.” The stomach contained a black, tenacious matter, like ink. The spleen gave out on section an ichorish matter. The liver was pallid and the kidneys exsanguine. There were “obscure large marks” on the inner surface of the intestines and stomach. The peritoneal cavity contained a “virulent ichor or thin liquor, yellowish, or greenish.” There was a decoloured clot in the right ventricle, but “not one spoonful of that ruddy liquor properly called blood could be obtained in this pestilential body.” In all other cadavers that he ever dissected he had found that the right ventricle had blackish blood condensed, but this one had a pale clot “like a lamb-stone cut in twain,” which puzzled him greatly; perhaps it came, he conjectures, from a sumption of mere crude milk which an indiscreet nurse had given the boy not long before he died.

Among the symptoms of a fatal issue, Boghurst mentions the following: Hiccough, continual vomiting, sudden looseness, or two or three stools in succession, shortness of breath, stopping of urine, great inward burning and outward cold, continual great thirst, faltering in the voice, speaking in the throat and occasionally sighing, with a slight pulling-in one side of the mouth when they speak, sleeping with the eyes half-open, trembling of the lips and hands and shaking of the head, staggering in going about rooms, unwillingness to speak, hoarseness preventing speech, cramp in the legs, stiffness of one side of the neck, contraction of the jaws, the vomit running out from the side of the mouth, prolonged bleeding at the nose, the sores decreasing and turning black on a sudden.

It is to be remarked that Boghurst says very little of the gentle or the violent delirium, on which Defoe enlarges picturesquely; nor does he emphasize the extreme pain of the hard and tense buboes, which is another of Defoe’s themes. Hodges, however, says that “some of the infected run about staggering like drunken men, and fall and expire in the streets; while others lie half-dead and comatous.... Some lie vomiting as if they had drunk poison.”

The progress of the epidemic would seem to have been little influenced by the weather or by what was done, unless the shutting-up of houses had helped to intensify the virus. Boghurst says: “If very hot weather followed a shower of rain, the disease increased much;” and again: “If, in the heat of the disease the wind blew very sharp and cold, people died very quickly, many lying sick but one day.” We are told, however, by Hodges that “the whole summer was refreshed with moderate breezes,” and that “the heat was too mild to encourage corruption and fermentation.” The air itself, he says, “remained uninfected.” Rain fell from time to time in the end of summer, copious enough to put out the fires in the streets. There was at least one very hot day, near the beginning of the epidemic, the 5th of June, which Pepys says was “the hottest day that I ever felt in my life.” On September 20, however, he says that the increase of the plague could not have been expected “from the coldness of the late season.”

The plague lingered in London throughout the year 1666, causing 1998 deaths in all. In January 1666 it was still at as high a figure as 158 deaths in a week, and in the week ending September 18 it rose again to the exceptional height of 104 deaths. In the first three weeks of December, the deaths were 2, 4, and 3; and from that low level the plague never rose again in London. A few annual deaths continued to appear in the bills down to 1679, when they finally disappeared.

Plague near London in 1665.

Meanwhile various parts of England were affected with plague during and after the great epidemic, and in one or two instances a little before it. In the immediate neighbourhood of the capital all the towns and villages usually implicated by the exodus from the City had cases of plague, as the following table shows. It has been compiled from the parish registers, as extracted in Lysons’ Environs of London, Defoe’s widely discrepant figures being given for comparison in the third column.

The most striking fact that comes out is that most of the parishes around London had actually fewer deaths from plague in 1665 than in 1603. The exceptions to this rule in 1665 are the villages on or near the Thames above London-Battersea, Wandsworth, Putney, Mortlake, Brentford, Isleworth, and Ealing, which had all a very high mortality, Barnes being almost exempt. On the lower reaches of the Thames, Barking on the Essex shore, and Deptford, Greenwich and Lewisham on the other side, had the infection in them very severely; but these three places in Kent had a still more severe visitation in 1666, along with other towns in that county.

On September 9, Evelyn wrote from his Deptford house, Sayes Court, that “near thirty houses are visited in this miserable village.” The infection got also among the ships of the navy; on August 29, on board the ‘Loyal Subject’ at Deal, Captain Fortescue and six men died suddenly, it was feared of the plague.

Plague in the Provinces in 1665-6.

The earliest accounts of plague in the provinces come from Yarmouth in November, 1664. On the 18th it is said to have been brought in a vessel from Rotterdam; three died in one house, of whom one had the plague. On November 30, the plague was spreading, if the searchers (drunken women, however) were to be credited. On February 8, 1665, there was another death from plague, and as the summer wore on the mortality increased rapidly. On June 16, thirty had died in the week, the inhabitants had fled, the town was like a country village, and the poor left behind were lamenting at once the lack of work and of charity. On August 21, the king wrote from Salisbury to the bailiffs of Yarmouth concerning the plague. In the weeks ending August 30 and September 6, there were 117 deaths (96 from plague) and 110 deaths (100 from plague), and as late as November 6, there had been 22 plague-deaths in the week. In March, 1666, the epidemic came to an end[1219]. Smaller outbreaks occurred in the autumn of 1665 and spring of 1666 at Lynn, Norwich, Ipswich and Harwich. The great epidemic at Colchester began in summer, 1665, but fell mostly in 1666, at a time when there was little plague elsewhere, so that it practically closes the history of plague in England, and will come naturally at the end of the chapter.

Most of the provincial outbreaks in 1665 were of small extent, and were probably due to introduction of the virus from London. The valley of the Tyne, which had often experienced severe plagues, had a slight epidemic, said to have originated from the colliers returned from the Thames. On July 18, there were seven houses shut up at Sunderland, one at Wearmouth and one at Durham[1220]. A paragraph in the ‘Newes,’ from Durham, October 13, says that the sickness in the north is now much assuaged. Newcastle remained almost free (although Defoe says different), two houses being shut up on January 30, 1666, and two at Gateshead. The whole north-west and west of England, which had suffered most during the last plague-period, in the Civil Wars, appears to have escaped altogether.

In the south, there was a good deal of the infection at Southampton in the summer and autumn of 1665; on July 6, “the poor will not suffer the rich to quit the town and leave them to starve[1221].” It is heard of, also, at Poole and Sherborne in Dorset (in November), at Salisbury, where the Court lay for some weeks, and at Battle[1222] in Sussex; but in none of these places to any great extent. Various places in Kent had cases in 1665—Rochester, Chatham, Sandwich, Eastry, Westwell, Deal, Dover and Canterbury[1223]; but it was only the naval stations that had more than a few cases in 1665; while all of them had it far worse in 1666. Other centres in 1665 were in Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire.

At Peterborough, Oundle and Newport Pagnell, there was a visitation of the severer kind, with flight of the richer inhabitants, and the usual arrest of work and trade. The parish register of Yardley, Hastings, records that 60 persons died of plague in that town from June 5, 1665, to January 3, 1666. There was also a sharp epidemic in Cambridge and in the country around, of which we get a glimpse in a letter of October 19, 1665, written from Clare Hall to one of the fellows of Clare[1224]:

The Epidemic of Plague at Eyam, 1665-6.

Another of the English towns visited by plague in 1665 was Derby; whether the cases were many or few, they caused great alarm, the town being forsaken, the streets grass-grown, and the market set up on a new stance, to which the farmers and traders came primed with a plug of tobacco in their mouths as a preservative. But the epidemic in Derby itself was totally eclipsed in interest by an extraordinary outbreak of plague in the small village of Eyam, at the opposite end of the county, in the North Peak, some twelve miles to the west of Sheffield. The plague of Eyam is, indeed, the most famous of all English plagues; the story of it has been told many times in prose and verse, its traditional incidents being well suited to minor poets and moral writers, and the whole action of the drama conveniently centered within a circuit of half a mile in a cup of the heathy hills[1225].

Eyam was a village of some three hundred and fifty inhabitants, standing among meadows around which the hills towered. It had no resident doctor, but it had two ministers. The one was the rector, the Rev. William Mompesson, a young man of twenty-seven, with a wife and two children, who had been settled in Eyam only a year and did not like it; the other was the former rector, the Rev. Thomas Stanley, who had been ejected for nonconformity in 1662, and had remained to carry on his ministrations as a Dissenter among such of his old flock as adhered to him. The wealthier householders resided at the western and higher end of the village, on the other side of a brook which crossed under the road; as we shall see, they escaped the infection almost if not altogether. The annual village wake had been held in August, 1665, with more than the usual concourse of people from villages near. On the 2nd or 3rd September a box arrived from London to the village tailor, who lived in a small house at the western end of the churchyard; it contained old clothes which someone in London is supposed to have bought for him cheap, and some tailors’ patterns of cloth. This box is assumed to have been opened by one George Vicars, a servant, who was certainly the first victim of plague. He found the contents to be damp and hung them up at the fire to dry. He was quickly seized with violent sickness, became delirious, developed buboes in his neck and groin, a plague-token on his breast the third day, and died in a wretched state on September 6. His body, which is said to have become soon putrid, was buried in the churchyard on the 7th. Nearly a fortnight passed before another case occurred, that of a youth supposed to have been the tailor’s son, who was buried on the 22nd September. Before the 30th four more had died, and in the course of October twenty-two more were buried of the plague. The deaths in November declined to seven, and in December they were nine. There was now snow on the ground, with hard frost, and at the beginning of January, 1666, the plague was confined to two houses. Four died in January, eight in February, six in March, nine in April, and only three in May. On June 2, another burial occurred, and then there was another pause. But in a week or more the epidemic broke out with renewed power, three having been buried on the 12th of June, three on the 15th, one on the 16th, three on the 17th, and so on until the total for June reached nineteen. The wealthier villagers at the west end had taken the alarm before and had mostly fled in the spring; those who stayed kept within their houses or at least did not cross the stream. Now that the infection was revived in the hot weather of June, the rector’s wife also proposed flight, but on her husband’s refusal, she resolved to remain with him, and to send her two children to a relative in Yorkshire. At the same time the villagers in general were instinctively moved to escape from the tainted spot; but Mompesson used his authority to prevent them, and a boundary line was drawn round the village, about half a mile in circuit and marked by various familiar objects, beyond which no one was to go. Mompesson’s motive appears to have been to prevent the spread of the infection to the country around, and his parishioners submitted passively. After the end of June the villagers would have found it difficult to escape, owing to the terror which the very name of their village caused in all the country round. Some of them quitted their cottages and took up their abode in shelters built along the side of a rocky glen within the cordon. The earl of Devonshire, then at Chatsworth, promised Mompesson that the village should not be left without supplies; and people from the villages near brought their market produce to certain stated points on the boundary, where the Eyam people came to fetch it, the money paid being dropped into water. Thus shut up in their narrow valley, the villagers perished helplessly like a stricken flock of sheep. By the end of June ceremonial burials came to an end, the church and the churchyard were closed, the dead were carried out wrapped in sheets by one of the villagers noted for his herculean strength, and laid in shallow graves in the meadows or on the hill-sides. In July the deaths mounted up to five or six on some days, and the total for the month to fifty-seven. In August the dead numbered seventy-eight, among them the rector’s wife on the 25th, after a walk with her husband through the meadows, during which she is said to have made the ominous remark that the air smelled sweet[1226]. September added twenty-four to the total, and there were now only about forty-five left alive in the place. Of these, fifteen died to the 11th October, when the mortality ceased. Some of the survivors had passed through an attack of the plague, among them the rector’s man, whose buboes suppurated. Mompesson himself, who had an issue open in his leg all the time, escaped the infection, as well as his maid-servant. A young woman of Eyam, married in the village of Corbor, two miles off, came one day to see her mother, whom she found sick of the plague; on her return home she took the sickness and died, but no one else in Corbor had it. A man was also at large in the neighbourhood suspected of plague, to whom the earl of Devonshire sent a doctor. The doctor and patient met by appointment on the opposite banks of a stream, and the diagnosis made across the water acquitted the man of plague; even in these unconventional circumstances the consultation did not end without a prescription (still extant) for a bottle of “stuff.” Seventy-six households in Eyam were infected, and out of these two hundred and fifty-nine persons were buried of the plague. During the time that the infection lasted eight more died from other causes. When the sickness had ceased Mompesson set about burning the infected articles in the empty cottages. Three years after, in 1669, he was presented to the better living of Eakring, in Notts; but on arriving to enter on his duties he was refused admission by the villagers, and had to take up his residence in a temporary hut in Rufford Park, until such time as the prejudices of his new parishioners had been overcome. He married another wife, and for thirty-nine years held the living of Eakring, where he died on March 7, 1708. Stanley, his Dissenting colleague at Eyam, died there a few years after the plague.

Several things combined to magnify the disaster at Eyam. The story of the box of clothes from London is entirely credible, and can be matched by many other instances in the history of plague and of cholera[1227]. Nothing intensifies the virus of such diseases so much as fermentation without air in the textures of clothes or linen; a whiff from the opened box or bundle suffices soon to prostrate the person who breathes it. The poison at Eyam was a powerful one from the first, and it is credible that the body of the earliest victim did become quickly putrid. The heavy mortality, with few recoveries, which followed after a fortnight’s interval, and continued all through the winter, also shows a virus raised to no ordinary potency. But, for the revival of the infection in June, 1666, we must seek other causes. Eyam was one of those basins which, on a large scale or on a small, have often been observed to keep infection in their soil. The virus must have passed into the pores of the ground after the first sixty or more burials in the churchyard down to the lull of the epidemic in winter; with the rise of the ground-water in spring, it would be comparatively inactive; but in June, when the water was again sinking in the soil and the great heat was raising emanations from the dry ground, it broke forth with an intensity which poisoned the whole air of the valley. The burials, after the end of June, without coffins and in shallow graves in the meadows or on the hill-side, were so much ferment added to a soil already permeated by it. Flight from such a place was the only safety, and the rector, with the best motives, counselled the people to remain. Mompesson’s conduct has always been held up as a pattern of heroism, as if the circumstances had been desperate like those of the Trojans when the Greeks were in their streets and houses:

Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem.

No word of detraction should be spoken of anyone who does manfully what he conceives to be his duty to his neighbours; but the villagers of Eyam were sacrificed, all the same, to an idea, and to an idea which we may now say was not scientifically sound. When the impulse came upon them to flee, they might have left their tainted soil without much risk to the country around so long as they did not collect in one spot or carry with them bedding or the like susceptible articles: those who did flee from the houses at the upper end of the village are not known to have carried the infection to other places, and the young woman who brought it to Corbor gave it to no one else. But the wisdom of flight may be regarded by some as still disputable; while it will be admitted by all that Mompesson acted for the best according to his lights.

The plague in 1666 raged severely in a number of towns, while it lingered on in London. The information from Winchester is vague; it is said that the dead were carried out in carts and buried on the downs to the eastward[1228]; the epidemic was over by the 1st of December, so that the College resumed[1229]. Pepys enters in his Diary (April 4, 1667): “One at the table [the duke of Albemarle’s] told an odd passage in the late plague, that at Petersfield (I think he said), one side of the street had every house almost infected through the town, and the other not one shut up.” There may have been other such centres of plague, and equally interesting observations made on them; but it appears to be the merest chance whether anything is recorded of them at all, or whether one has the luck to come across the record.

The great centres of plague in 1666 had some connexion with the fleet, and were mostly in Kent and Essex. Deptford and Greenwich had more plague that year than the year before, the total deaths at the former having been 715 (of plague 522) and at the latter 423. Eltham and Lewisham were also visited in proportion. The other intense centre of infection in Kent was Deal. On the 26th August, seven died of the plague, and twenty in the whole week. At that date there were said to be only 16 houses which had not had plague in them. On December 9, all the houses were clear, although the crews of ships still avoided the town. Next to Deal, Sandwich, Dover, Canterbury and Maidstone had considerable outbreaks in the autumn. At Portsmouth also there was a sharp outbreak in the summer of 1666, twenty-one having died of plague in a week at the beginning of July.

In the Eastern Counties, plague revived to a considerable extent in 1666 at Norwich, Ipswich, Harwich and Woodbridge, the Yarmouth outbreak, which had been the great one in that quarter the year before, having come to an end in the spring. But it was at Colchester that the epidemic engrossed attention in 1666. Colchester had, indeed, two successive seasons of plague, or rather a continuous prevalence of it from the summer of 1665 to December, 1666. The plague at Colchester in 1665-66 was the greatest of all provincial plagues since the Black Death, unless, indeed, we credit the numbers (11,000 or 12,000) given for a plague at York in 1390. It reproduced the mortality of the Great Plague of London on a scale more than proportionate to its size, and it doubtless called forth the same class of incidents—flight of the wealthier classes, and almost total extermination of the poor. No documents remain, however, of this plague except the oaths administered to searchers and bearers of the dead (printed below) and the weekly totals of deaths from plague and from other causes[1230]. The weekly bills are, indeed, as eloquent a testimony as any detailed description could have been; and as they are the most complete of the kind for a provincial town, I have transcribed them from the manuscript record in full. The small number of deaths from ordinary causes points to the emptiness of the better quarters of the town; the total deaths in seventeen months, 5345, including 4817 plague-deaths and 528 from other causes, must have meant an enormous clearance of the poorer classes. Colchester was then a place of considerable wealth, with a thriving Dutch trade and a considerable Dutch colony. Perhaps the connexion with Holland, where plague had been rife in the years just before, may explain the origin of the outbreak; but local conditions of soil, overcrowding, and the like must be looked to for the cause of its extraordinary persistence and fatality.

Weekly mortalities in Colchester, August 14, 1665, to December 14, 1666, from plague and other diseases.

1665