1665. Its two great predecessors (not reckoning the smaller plague of

1636) had happened each at the beginning of a new reign--in 1603 on the accession of James I., and in 1625 on the accession of Charles I. The Restoration of 1660 was the time for the next great outburst; but that was delayed for five years. Those five years were occupied with a good deal of fever and other infective disease in London, and the fever in the beginning of 1665 was, according to Sydenham, of a marked pestilential type. It may be said to have led up to the plague; but the bubonic disease itself needed something in addition to the determining causes of spotted fever. It is generally admitted that London was unusually crowded with the poorer classes whose work is required by the luxury of the rich (Defoe says that an enumeration for the Lord Mayor had made out 100,000 ribbon-weavers in the eastern suburbs, although the number is incredible). There was also a general relaxation of morals, which may have predisposed many constitutions to receive the seeds of infection. Another element in the case was the weather. The summer before had been remarkable for the immense number of house-flies, and of other insects and frogs. From November to the end of March the earth was held in almost continual black frost. Boghurst says the wind was westerly for seven months. No rain fell all the time except a slight sprinkling in the end of April. The dry cold continued after the frost broke, and produced, says Sydenham, an unusual number of cases of pleurisy, pneumonia and angina. Richard Baxter says of the seasons preceding the great plague, that they were “the driest winter, spring and summer that ever man alive knew, or our forefathers ever heard of; so that the grounds were burnt like the highways, the meadow ground where I lived [Acton] having but four loads of hay which before bare forty[1203].” The hay crop was “pitiful,” says Boghurst, in consequence of the long cold and drought. But the summer was made pleasant by refreshing breezes, and there was abundance of all kinds of grain, vegetables and fruit. It was not until the beginning of June that the deaths from plague in all London, according to the bills of mortality, reached the sum of 43 in the week. But the mortality had been excessive from the beginning of the year, and it was suspected, as in the like circumstances in 1625, that the searchers had been concealing the existence of plague, or calling cases of it by other names, so as to save the infected houses from being shut up. The motive for bribery and concealment doubtless existed; it had been kept in view by the authorities from the first institution of searchers, who were solemnly sworn before the Dean of the Arches to make a true return of the cause of death. In all the great plagues, less so in 1563 and 1603 than in other years, there was reason to suppose that a large proportion of deaths put down to other causes than plague were really cases of plague. However there is no doubt that, in the early months of 1665, just as in the beginning of 1625, there was a great deal of spotted fever in London, not to mention smallpox and dysentery. The season was a sickly one, such a sickly season as often occurred in the latter part of the seventeenth century and throughout the whole of the eighteenth, when there could be no longer any question of plague. The weekly bills contain numerous deaths in the several parishes from “fever” and from “spotted fever” for months before they contain more than an occasional plague-death. There was no reason why these and other maladies should not have swelled the bills to three or four hundred in a week; in the year 1739, when London was probably not a third larger than in 1665, Strother says that fever brought the weekly bill up to near a thousand. It is remarkable, however, that Boghurst claims to have been treating cases of plague from the month of November, 1664; Hodges also says that he was called in the middle of the Christmas holidays to a young man in a fever who acquired, two days after, a plague-botch in each groin as large as a nutmeg, and recovered. Boghurst admits that “tokens,” by which he means the marks of plague other than the botch or bubo, “appeared not much till about the middle of June, and carbuncles not till the latter end of July.” He suspects that the bills of mortality did not tell the whole truth; and, as an instance of evasion, he says that there had been plague in St Giles’s, St Martin’s, St Clement’s, and St Paul’s, Covent Garden, for three or four years before (the bills of mortality give only 12, 9, and 5 deaths respectively for all London in the years 1662, 1663 and 1664), “as I have been certainly informed by the people themselves that had it in their houses in those parishes.” But, in claiming an earlier beginning for the plague than the bills recognize, and in setting aside the diagnosis of fever as insufficient, Boghurst takes what is known, in the controversies upon the nature and affinities of plague, as the “ontological” view: that is to say, he sees in plague a fixed and uniform entity, and he sees the same in fever. The other view is the developmental, which recognizes transitions from the one type of pestilential disease into the other. The great writers of the time, Willis, Sydenham, and Morton, were none of them “ontologists.” They all taught the scale of malignity, which had simple continued fever at one end, then a severer fever with spots and “parotids,” then a fever with buboes, and at the farthest end of the scale the true plague, with its buboes, carbuncles, and tokens. Nor is it denied by competent observers, such as Boghurst himself, that an epidemic of plague declined as a whole in malignity towards the end, so that the buboes suppurated, and three out of four, or three out of five, patients recovered. If that were the case in the descent of the curve, why should there not have been something corresponding in the ascent? If certain cases of the prevailing fever in the beginning of the year developed buboes which suppurated (as in the case treated by Hodges at Christmas, 1664), should they be called plague or fever? Willis would have answered in favour of fever, until such time, at least, as the “epidemic constitution” of the season changed definitely to plague[1204]; he does in effect answer so in the particular instance of the Oxford fever of 1643, which in some cases was bubonic, whereas, in 1645, he makes no doubt that the disease prevailing in Oxford and Wallingford was true plague. The more general discussion of this theme will be found in the concluding section of the chapter on the Black Death, where illustrations are given of typhus fever turning to bubonic fever and to plague, from recent and anomalous outbreaks of plague in Arab villages or encampments, in some Indian villages, and elsewhere. The conclusion there come to was that the type of plague, or the bubonic type, prevailed when the infection of the filthy habitations began with change of season to rise from the soil, whereas the form of sickness was typhus fever so long as the infection was primarily in the atmosphere of the dwellings. We may admit, then, that there was some ambiguity in the naming and classifying of pestilential cases in the early months of 1665. If we follow the bills--and there is nothing else to follow--the plague-deaths in all the parishes of London for the seven weeks from April 18 to June 6 were respectively no more than 2, 0, 9, 3, 14, 17 and 43, the deaths from “fever” and “spotted fever” being much more numerous. Having thus far determined the date of beginning, we come next to the line of advance of the plague of 1665. It was from the western and northern suburbs towards the City, the eastern suburbs, and Southwark. Boghurst, who practised in St Giles’s-in-the-Fields, says: “The plague fell first upon the highest ground, for our parish is the highest ground about London, and the best air, and was first infected. Highgate, Hampstead and Acton also all shared in it.” From the west end of the town, Boghurst continues, “it gradually insinuated and crept down Holborn and the Strand, and then into the City, and at last to the east end of the suburbs, so that it was half a year at the west end of the city [in his experience] before the east end and Stepney was infected, which was about the middle of July. Southwark, being the south suburb, was infected almost as soon as the west end.” But the same writer farther explains that “it fell upon several places of the city and suburbs like rain--at the first at St Giles’, St Martin’s, Chancery-lane, Southwark, Houndsditch, and some places within the City, as at Proctor’s-houses.” The slow progress from west to east has been made much of by Defoe, who used the bills of mortality to ascertain the rise of the infection in the several districts. His conclusion is the same in the main as Boghurst’s contemporary observation; only that he makes the infection of Southwark later, and with reason so far as the bills show:-- “It was now mid-July, and the plague which had chiefly raged at the other end of the town, and as I said before, in the parishes of St Giles’s, St Andrew’s, Holbourn, and towards Westminster, began now to come eastward towards the part where I lived. It was to be observed, indeed, that it did not come straight on toward us; for the City, that is to say within the walls, was indifferent healthy still; nor was it got then very much over the water into Southwark; for though there died that week 1268 of all distempers, whereof it might be supposed above 900 died of the plague [only 725 in the bill], yet there was but 28 in the whole City within the walls, and but 19 in Southwark, Lambeth included; whereas in the parishes of St Giles’ and St Martin’s in the Fields alone, there died 421.... We perceived, I say, the distemper to draw our way; viz. by the parishes of Clerkenwell, Cripplegate, Shoreditch, and Bishopsgate; which last two parishes joining to Aldgate, Whitechapel and Stepney, the infection came at length to spread its utmost rage and violence in those parts, even when it abated at the western parishes where it began. It was very strange to observe that in this particular week, from the 4th to the 13th July, when, as I have observed, there died near 400 of the plague in the two parishes of St Martin’s and St Giles’ in the Fields only, there died in the parish of Aldgate but four, in the parish of Whitechapel three, and in the parish of Stepney but one.” In the following week of July, with a total of 1761 deaths, whereof of the plague 1089, only 16 occurred on the Southwark side. Soon, however, Cripplegate had the infection at its hottest, and at the same time Clerkenwell, St Sepulchre’s parish, St Bride’s and Aldersgate. “While it was in all these parishes, the City and the parishes of the Southwark side of the water, and all Stepney, Whitechapel, Aldgate, Wapping and Ratcliff were very little touched; so that people went about their business unconcerned, carried on their trades, kept open their shops, and conversed freely with one another in all the City, the east and north-east suburbs, and in Southwark, almost as if the plague had not been among us.” In another passage Defoe brings out the moral of its gradual advance. He had shown “how it began at one end of the town, and proceeded gradually and slowly from one part to another; and like a dark cloud that passes over our heads, which as it thickens and overcasts the air at one end, clears up at the other end: so while the plague went on raging from west to east, as it went forwards east it abated in the west, by which means those parts of the town which were not seized, or who were left, and where it had spent its fury were, as it were, spared to help and assist the other; whereas had the distemper spread itself all over the City and suburbs at once, raging in all places alike, as it has done since in some places abroad, the whole body of the people must have been overwhelmed” etc. That is how Defoe constructs a concrete picture from the dry statistics of the weekly bills. He has defined the stages, and pointed the moral, with a firmer hand than the reality would most likely have warranted. But no scientific writer could have apprehended more correctly the general fact of a gradual invasion from the west end of the town. These striking facts of the gradual advance of the Great Plague of London from west to east will be found to suit that theory of the plague-virus which has been illustrated in various parts of this volume. The virus of plague is a soil-poison, or the ground is its habitat; its quiescence or activity depends upon whether or not the state of the soil favours the fermentation of the special organic matters therein, which special organic matters we here take to be the products of cadaveric decomposition. The conclusion that the poison of plague lay in the soil, and that it rose into the air in emanations or effluvia, was forced upon all those who thought much about the matter from the medieval period onwards. Thus, the apothecary Boghurst, says in his first chapter: “And therefore my opinion falls in wholly with those who make the earth the seminary and seed-plot of these venomous vapours and pestiferous effluvia, which vitiate and corrupt the air, and consequently induce the pestilence.” And again: “The plague is a most subtle, insinuating, venomous, deleterious exhalation, arising from the maturation of the ferment of the forces (?) of the earth, extracted into the air by the heat of the sun.” It is true that Boghurst, like the sixteenth-century writers abroad, such as Ambroise Parè, locates the venom in mysterious cavities and bowels of the earth, and dwells upon the agency of earthquakes in setting it free. But he comes to more ordinary causes in his enumeration of favouring things--“dunghills, excrements, dead bodies lying unburied, putrefying churchyards too full,” and again “breaking up tombs and graves where dead bodies have been long buried.” As telling against the last, however, he adds: “When the charnel-house at St Paul’s was demolished, there was a thousand cart-loads of dead men’s bones carried away to Finsbury, yet no plague followed it.” The activity of this soil-poison depends upon processes in the soil which go on so slowly that the link of cause and effect is easily overlooked. In the last resort, they are dependent on the rise and fall of the ground-water. It was observed beyond all doubt as the law in Lower Egypt, that the plague came forth annually after the Nile had begun to fall, and that it reached its height in the months of March, April and May, when the soil was driest, or the pores of the ground occupied solely by air after having been full of water. It was observed, also, that the plague-area and the inundation-area were co-extensive. Lower Egypt is, of course, somewhat peculiar (Lower Bengal coming near to it) in these regular alternations of air alone and water alone in the pores of the ground. But other countries have the same sharp contrast occasionally, and London had the contrast very decidedly in the years 1664 and 1665. The months from November 1664 to June 1665, some of which ought to have brought snow or rain to raise the wells and springs to their highest periodic water-mark early in the year, were quite remarkable for drought: Richard Baxter says that no one remembered the like. The ground-water, instead of rising all through the winter, must have fallen lower and lower as the spring and summer advanced. The pores of the ground had been occupied with air to an unusual depth of the subsoil, and the presence of air in these circumstances had given occasion to that ferment-activity in the special organic matters of an old-inhabited soil which produced the virus of plague. The stratum of subsoil would become dry first in the more elevated parts; and as the ground-water continued to fall, the air would reach in due course an unwonted stratum in the lower situations. Defoe says that they came to water at eighteen feet in digging the Whitechapel plague-pits. The same seasonal march of a soil-infection from the higher ground to the lower has been observed in modern times in other cities, and in other diseases than plague. The drought for seven months from November to June would not, of itself, have caused a great plague. But it was an essential member of the co-operating group of things; and it probably determined of itself the season when the great plague was once more to come and take away the enormous increase of poor people. Mortality and Incidents of the Great Plague. The plague of 1665 was justly called the Great Plague, and is sometimes spoken of as “the plague of London,” as if it were unique. But it was not much more severe than those of 1603 and 1625 had been for the London of their generation; and there had been many plagues when London was a small capital, such as those of 1407, 1479, 1500, 1513 and 1563, which had cut off as large a proportion (one-fifth to one-sixth) of the population. The inhabitants in 1665 were not far short of half a million, nearly twice as many as in 1603, and about a third more than in 1625. The increased mortality in 1665 was somewhat more than proportionate to the increase of inhabitants, as the following table shows:-- Highest Year Estimated Total Plague mortality Worst population deaths deaths in a week week 1603 250,000 42,940 33,347 3385 25 Aug.-1 Sept. 1625 320,000 63,001 41,313 5205 11-18 Aug. 1665 460,000 97,306 68,596 8297 12-19 Sept. Reckoned from the christenings and burials in the bills of Parish Clerks’ Hall, the population in 1605 would have been 224,275, and in 1622, 272,207. But in those years (and until after 1636) certain of the newer parishes (known as the Seven Parishes), including Stepney and Westminster, kept separate bills, of which some figures for 1603 and 1625 are given at p. 477 and p. 511. The population of the Seven Parishes appears to have been about one-ninth of the whole metropolis in 1603, and about one-seventh in 1625, while Graunt, a contemporary, makes it one-fifth in