The Great London Plague

This series has six easy 5 minute installments. This first installment: Comet Foretells Death.

Introduction
None of the great visitations of disease that have afflicted Europe within historic times has wholly spared England. But from the time of the “Black Death” (1349) the country experienced no such suffering from any epidemic as that which fell upon London in 1665. That year the “Great Plague” is said to have destroyed the lives of nearly one hundred thousand people in England’s capital. The plague had previously cropped up there every few years, from lack of proper sanitation. At the time of this outbreak the water-supply of the city was notoriously impure. In 1665 the heat was uncommonly severe. Pepys said that June 7th of that year was the hottest day that he had ever known.

The plague of 1665 is said, however, to have been brought in merchandise directly from Holland, where it had been smoldering for several years. Its ravages in London have often been described, and Defoe found in the calamity a subject for a special story on history. Probably he was not more than six years old when the plague appeared; but he assumes throughout the pose of a respectable and religious householder of the period. All his own recollections, all the legends of the time, and the parish records are grouped in masterly fashion to form a single picture. The account has been described as a “masterpiece of verisimilitude.”

This selection is from History of the Plague in London by Daniel Defoe. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) was a writer whose books became classics. He wrote fiction such as Robinson Crusoe and non-fiction such as this.

Time: 1665
Place: London

In the first place a blazing star or comet appeared for several months before the plague, as there did the year after, a little before the great fire; the old women and the weak-minded portion of the other sex, whom I could almost call old women too, remarked — especially afterward, though not till both those judgments were over — that those two comets passed directly over the city, and that so very near the houses that it was plain they imported something peculiar to the city alone; that the comet before the pestilence was of a faint, dull, languid color, and its motion very heavy, solemn, and slow; but that the comet before the fire was bright and sparkling, or, as others said, flaming, and its motion swift and furious; and that, accordingly, one foretold a heavy judgment, slow, but severe, terrible, and frightful, as the plague was; but the other foretold a stroke, sudden, swift, and fiery, like the conflagration. Nay, so particular some people were that, as they looked upon that comet preceding the fire, they fancied that they not only saw it pass swiftly and fiercely, and could perceive the motion with the eye, but they even heard it; that it made a rushing, mighty noise, fierce and terrible, though at a distance and but just perceivable.

I saw both these stars, and I must confess, had so much of the common notion of such things in my head that I was apt to look upon them as the forerunners and warnings of God’s judgments; and especially, when after the plague had followed the first, I yet saw another of the like kind, I could not but say, God had not yet sufficiently scourged the city.

But I could not at the same time carry these things to the height that others did, knowing, too, that natural causes are assigned by the astronomers for such things; and that their motions, and even their evolutions, are calculated, or pretended to be calculated; so that they cannot be so perfectly called the forerunners or foretellers, much less the procurers of such events as pestilence, war, fire, and the like.

But let my thoughts, and the thoughts of the philosophers, be or have been what they will, these things had a more than ordinary influence upon the minds of the common people, and they had, almost universally, melancholy apprehensions of some dreadful calamity and judgment coming upon the city; and this principally from the sight of this comet, and the little alarm that was given in December by two people dying in St. Giles.

The apprehensions of the people were likewise strangely increased by the error of the times; in which, I think the people, from what principles I cannot imagine, were more addicted to prophecies, and astrological conjurations, dreams, and old wives’ tales, than ever they were before or since. Whether this unhappy temper was originally raised by the follies of some people who got money by it–that is to say, by printing predictions and prognostications–I know not; but certain it is books frightened them terribly; such as Lilly’s Almanack, Gadbury’s Allogical Predictions, Poor Robin’s Almanack, and the like; also several pretended religious books — one entitled Come out of her, my people, lest you be partaker of her plagues; another, called Fair Warning; another, Britain’s Remembrancer; and many such, all or most part of which foretold directly or covertly the ruin of the city: nay, some were so enthusiastically bold as to run about the streets with their oral predictions, pretending they were sent to preach to the city; and one in particular, who like Jonah to Nineveh, cried in the streets, “Yet forty days, and London shall be destroyed.” I will not be positive whether he said “yet forty days” or “yet a few days.”

Another ran about naked, except a pair of drawers about his waist, crying day and night. As a man that Josephus mentions, who cried, “Woe to Jerusalem!” a little before the destruction of that city, so this poor naked creature cried, “O the great and the dreadful God!” and said no more, but repeated these words continually, with a voice and countenance full of horror, a swift pace; and nobody could ever find him to stop or rest or take any sustenance, at least that ever I could hear of. I met this poor creature several times in the streets, and would have spoken to him, but he would not enter into conversation with me, or anyone else, but held on his dismal cries continually. These things terrified the people to the last degree; and especially when two or three times, as I have mentioned already, they found one or two in the bills dead of the plague at St. Giles.

The justices of peace for Middlesex, by direction of the secretary of state, had begun to shut up houses in the parishes of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, St. Martin’s, St. Clement Danes, etc., and it was with good success; for in several streets where the plague broke out, after strictly guarding the houses that were infected, and taking care to bury those that died immediately after they were known to be dead, the plague ceased in those streets. It was also observed that the plague decreased sooner in those parishes, after they had been visited in detail, than it did in the parishes of Bishopsgate, Shoreditch, Aldgate, Whitechapel, Stepney, and others; the early care taken in that manner being a great check to it.

This shutting up of houses was a method first taken, as I understand, in the plague which happened in 1603, on the accession of King James I to the crown; and the power of shutting people up in their own houses was granted by an act of Parliament entitled “An act for the charitable relief and ordering of persons infected with the plague.” On which act of Parliament the lord mayor and aldermen of the city of London founded the order they made at this time, viz., June, 1665; when the numbers infected within the city were but few, the last bill for the ninety-two parishes being but four. By these means, when there died about one thousand a week in the whole, the number in the city was but twenty-eight; and the city was more healthy in proportion than any other place all the time of the infection.

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