The Plagues Of Old London

Distinguished historian Gillian Tindall sent me this fascinating history of the Plague in London from her self-isolation

‘Bring Out Your Dead,’ A Street in London 1665, by Edmund Evans, 1864

Inhabitants of modern developed countries too easily lose sight of the essential fragility of human life. If you are fortunate enough to live in a society with a decent health service, effective drugs readily available and an average life-expectancy well beyond the Biblical three-score years and ten, you may accept this state of affairs as normal. Until just recently …

Yet our ancestors, for centuries and centuries, knew better – or perhaps I should say ‘knew worse’ ? Their common experience was that life was fragile and easily destroyed. Epidemics of fatal sickness were not exceptional events of once a century but frequent scourges lasting years, better at one time then suddenly worse at another, and never really going away.

So much was made of the Black Death of the fourteenth century by chroniclers a generation later that their estimates of how many died, in London and elsewhere, are now believed to have been exaggerated for dramatic effect. What is more significant is that the Bubonic Plague stayed around for the next three centuries. Consequently, the history of London through the Tudor period and into the Stuarts’ had a great many ‘plague years’.

Nor was this plague the only major affliction. A ‘sweating sickness’ appeared which no one today has yet satisfactorily identified. Dean Colet, the founder of St Paul’s School, died of it in 1519 in the midst of an otherwise healthy life – though this might, in retrospect, have been a blessing. Colet’s younger friend Thomas More, sharing the same religious and political views, was beheaded fifteen years later for disagreeing with Henry VIII. The sweating sickness appears to have disappeared by the following century as mysteriously as it had come. Malaria which had been an endemic nuisance and destroyer of health, as it still is in some parts of the world today, also declined, probably because many of the mosquito-haunted marshes and fens were drained.

But Bubonic Plague returned to London, on a regular basis, in the troubled times of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell, finally reaching its zenith in the Great Plague of 1665, which has become our bench-mark for all other epidemics.

Recently, a neighbour of mine, contemplating the notion of social isolation, emailed me, saying `Our niece has just brought us some soup! She never normally visits us. Do you think that if we painted “Lord have mercy upon us” on the front door other people would bring us free food?’

In the Great Plague, whole households were shut up to die together because the infection was believed to be airborne. There was indeed an airborne version of pastorella pestis and the earlier Black Death may have been that, but it is now evident that the Great Plague was a visitation of the common plague, passed by the fleas, lice, rats and mice that lived in close proximity with Londoners. The angry inhabitant who declared ‘As soon as any house is infected, all the sound people should be out of it and not shut up therein to be murdered,’ actually got it right.

The illusion that Plague was transmitted from person-to-person has created myths of heroism, in particular relating to the village of Eyam in Derbyshire. Although it was understood at the time that the Plague arrived in flea-infested cloth ordered from London by a tailor, the wrong conclusion was drawn. When the tailor’s assistant became ill, not only were his family shut up to die but the entire village as well. Encouraged by a high-minded Vicar,  they incarcerated themselves, thinking to save the neighbouring villages. As a result, over half – or possibly more- of the population of Eyam died.

Yet almost everywhere else in country districts the Plague died out quickly – a natural consequence, as we now recognise, of people living in less-crowded and less-infested conditions. In the summer of 1665, a stonemason who had been working in London, rode home to his village in the Cotswolds with the Plague upon him. He died and so did the rest of his immediate household.  Their deaths are marked ‘plague’ in the burial register but no one else died in the parish that August, except for one very old man.

Meanwhile in London, a few intelligent and observant people got the message. In the parish of St Giles in the Fields where the Plague first manifested itself (infested cloth again, from Rotterdam), William Boghurst, a local apothecary, stayed on duty throughout, ministering to his customers. As he wrote later in his book on the sickness (entitled Loimographia but actually quite readable), he had been at bedsides taking pulses and blood, holding up the choking and dying, even dressing sores. Like the doctors and surgeons far grander than he, he had no cure to administer yet he remained plague-free himself, having accurately recognised the conditions that exacerbated the problem as –

‘thickness of inhabitants, those living as many families in a house, living in cellars, want of fitting accommodations as good fires, good dyett, washing, want of all good conveyances of filth, standing and stinking waters, dung hills, excrements, dead bodies lying unburied and putrefying, churchyards too full crammed …’

He added, ‘exceptionally hot weather,’ and remarked how there had been, ‘such a multitude of flies that they lined the insides of the houses… and swarms of ants covered the highways.’

Boghurst’s remedy? He advocated keeping a clean house, disposing of human waste at a distance, consuming only the freshest meat and milk, and being particularly careful about clean water. More than two centuries before it was generally accepted that diseases came from microscopic organisms, he was already practising the correct methods. He was also in favour of eating fresh fruit and vegetables, of which many of his contemporaries were unaccountably wary. He was also, beyond any doubt, a great advocate of hand-washing.

(The Dance of Death that follows is by Luke Clennell 1825)

The Desolation

The Queen

The Pope

The Cardinal

The Elector

The Canon

The Canoness

The Priest

The Mendicant Friar

The Councillor or Magistrate

The Astrologer

The Physician

The Merchant

The Wreck

The Swiss Soldier

The Charioteer or Waggoner

The Porter

The Fool

The Miser

The Gamesters

The Drunkards

The Beggar

The Thief

The Newly Married Pair

The Husband

The Wife

The Child

The Old Man

The Old Woman

Gillian Tindall’s new book The Pulse Glass and the Beat of Other Hearts is published by Chatto & Windus 

You may like to read these other stories by Gillian Tindall

The Bones of Old London

Wenceslaus Hollar At Old St Paul’s

Memories of Ship Tavern Passage

Gillian Tindall’s Wartime Memories

At Captain Cook’s House in Mile End

In Stepney, 1963

Stepney’s Lost Mansions

Where The White Chapel Once Stood

The Old South Bank

Leonard Fenton, Actor

In Old Deptford

Lifesaving in Limehouse

From Bedlam To Liverpool St

Smithfield’s Bloody Past

The Tunnel Through Time