prodigious numbers which would have been sick at a time would have
exceeded all the capacity of public pest-houses to receive them, or of
public officers to discover and remove them.
This was well considered in those days, and I have heard them talk
of it often. The magistrates had enough to do to bring people to
submit to having their houses shut up, and many ways they deceived
the watchmen and got out, as I have observed. But that difficulty
made it apparent that they t would have found it impracticable to have
gone the other way to work, for they could never have forced the sick
people out of their beds and out of their dwellings. It must not have
been my Lord Mayor’s officers, but an army of officers, that must have
attempted it; and tile people, on the other hand, would have been
enraged and desperate, and would have killed those that should have
offered to have meddled with them or with their children and
relations, whatever had befallen them for it; so that they would have
made the people, who, as it was, were in the most terrible distraction
imaginable, I say, they would have made them stark mad; whereas the
magistrates found it proper on several accounts to treat them with
lenity and compassion, and not with violence and terror, such as
dragging the sick out of their houses or obliging them to remove
themselves, would have been.
This leads me again to mention the time when the plague first
began; that is to say, when it became certain that it would spread over
the whole town, when, as I have said, the better sort of people first
took the alarm and began to hurry themselves out of town. It was
true, as I observed in its place, that the throng was so great, and the
coaches, horses, waggons, and carts were so many, driving and
dragging the people away, that it looked as if all the city was running
away; and had any regulations been published that had been terrifying
at that time, especially such as would pretend to dispose of the people
otherwise than they would dispose of themselves, it would have put
both the city and suburbs into the utmost confusion.
But the magistrates wisely caused the people to be encouraged,
made very good bye-laws for the regulating the citizens, keeping good
order in the streets, and making everything as eligible as possible to
all sorts of people.
In the first place, the Lord Mayor and the sheriffs, the Court of
Aldermen, and a certain number of the Common Council men, or
their deputies, came to a resolution and published it, viz., that they
would not quit the city themselves, but that they would be always at
hand for the preserving good order in every place and for the doing
justice on all occasions; as also for the distributing the public charity
to the poor; and, in a word, for the doing the duty and discharging the
trust reposed in them by the citizens to the utmost of their power.
In pursuance of these orders, the Lord Mayor, sheriffs, &c., held
councils every day, more or less, for making such dispositions as they
found needful for preserving the civil peace; and though they used the
people with all possible gentleness and clemency, yet all manner of
presumptuous rogues such as thieves, housebreakers, plunderers of the
dead or of the sick, were duly punished, and several declarations were
continually published by the Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen
against such.
Also all constables and churchwardens were enjoined to stay in the
city upon severe penalties, or to depute such able and sufficient
housekeepers as the deputy aldermen or Common Council men of the
precinct should approve, and for whom they should give security; and
also security in case of mortality that they would forthwith constitute
other constables in their stead.
These things re-established the minds of the people very much,
especially in the first of their fright, when they talked of making so
universal a flight that the city would have been in danger of being
entirely deserted of its inhabitants except the poor, and the country of