restored again, and to run in their own channel as they did before.
Some parts of England were now infected as violently as London
had been; the cities of Norwich, Peterborough, Lincoln, Colchester,
and other places were now visited; and the magistrates of London
began to set rules for our conduct as to corresponding with those
cities. It is true we could not pretend to forbid their people coming to
London, because it was impossible to know them asunder; so, after
many consultations, the Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen were
obliged to drop it. All they could do was to warn and caution the
people not to entertain in their houses or converse with any people
who they knew came from such infected places.
But they might as well have talked to the air, for the people of
London thought themselves so plague-free now that they were past all
admonitions; they seemed to depend upon it that the air was restored,
and that the air was like a man that had had the smallpox, not capable
of being infected again. This revived that notion that the infection
was all in the air, that there was no such thing as contagion from the
sick people to the sound; and so strongly did this whimsy prevail
among people that they ran all together promiscuously, sick and well.
Not the Mahometans, who, prepossessed with the principle of
predestination, value nothing of contagion, let it be in what it will,
could be more obstinate than the people of London; they that were
perfectly sound, and came out of the wholesome air, as we call it, into
the city, made nothing of going into the same houses and chambers,
nay, even into the same beds, with those that had the distemper upon
them, and were not recovered.
Some, indeed, paid for their audacious boldness with the price of
their lives; an infinite number fell sick, and the physicians had more
work than ever, only with this difference, that more of their patients
recovered; that is to say, they generally recovered, but certainly there
were more people infected and fell sick now, when there did not die
above a thousand or twelve hundred in a week, than there was when
there died five or six thousand a week, so entirely negligent were the
people at that time in the great and dangerous case of health and
infection, and so ill were they able to take or accept of the advice of
those who cautioned them for their good.
The people being thus returned, as it were, in general, it was very
strange to find that in their inquiring after their friends, some whole
families were so entirely swept away that there was no remembrance
of them left, neither was anybody to be found to possess or show any
title to that little they had left; for in such cases what was to be found
was generally embezzled and purloined, some gone one way, some another.
It was said such abandoned effects came to the king, as the universal
heir; upon which we are told, and I suppose it was in part true, that the
king granted all such, as deodands, to the Lord Mayor and Court of
Aldermen of London, to be applied to the use of the poor, of whom
there were very many. For it is to be observed, that though the
occasions of relief and the objects of distress were very many more in
the time of the violence of the plague than now after all was over, yet
the distress of the poor was more now a great deal than it was then,
because all the sluices of general charity were now shut. People
supposed the main occasion to be over, and so stopped their hands;
whereas particular objects were still very moving, and the distress of
those that were poor was very great indeed.
Though the health of the city was now very much restored, yet
foreign trade did not begin to stir, neither would foreigners admit our
ships into their ports for a great while. As for the Dutch, the
misunderstandings between our court and them had broken out into a