the particulars or answer for any mistakes, I shall give as distinctly
as I can, believing the history will be a very good pattern for any poor
man to follow, in case the like public desolation should happen here;
and if there may be no such occasion, which God of His infinite mercy
grant us, still the story may have its- uses so many ways as that
it will, I hope, never be said that the relating has been unprofitable.
I say all this previous to the history, having yet, for the present,
much more to say before I quit my own part.
I went all the first part of the time freely about the streets, though
not so freely as to run myself into apparent danger, except when they
dug the great pit in the churchyard of our parish of Aldgate. A terrible
pit it was, and I could not resist my curiosity to go and see it. As near
as I may judge, it was about forty feet in length, and about fifteen or
sixteen feet broad, and at the time I first looked at it, about nine feet
deep; but it was said they dug it near twenty feet deep afterwards in
one part of it, till they could go no deeper for the water; for they had,
it seems, dug several large pits before this. For though the plague was
long a-coming to our parish, yet, when it did come, there was no
parish in or about London where it raged with such violence as in the
two parishes of Aldgate and Whitechappel.
I say they had dug several pits in another ground, when the
distemper began to spread in our parish, and especially when the
dead-carts began to go about, which was not, in our parish, till the
beginning of August. Into these pits they had put perhaps fifty or sixty
bodies each; then they made larger holes wherein they buried all that
the cart brought in a week, which, by the middle to the end of August,
came to from 200 to 400 a week; and they could not well dig them
larger, because of the order of the magistrates confining them to leave
no bodies within six feet of the surface; and the water coming on at
about seventeen or eighteen feet, they could not well, I say, put more
in one pit. But now, at the beginning of September, the plague raging
in a dreadful manner, and the number of burials in our parish
increasing to more than was ever buried in any parish about London of
no larger extent, they ordered this dreadful gulf to be dug – for such
it was, rather than a pit.
They had supposed this pit would have supplied them for a month or
more when they dug it, and some blamed the churchwardens for
suffering such a frightful thing, telling them they were making
preparations to bury the whole parish, and the like; but time made it
appear the churchwardens knew the condition of the parish better than
they did: for, the pit being finished the 4th of September, I think, they
began to bury in it the 6th, and by the 20th, which was just two weeks,
they had thrown into it 1114 bodies when they were obliged to fill it
up, the bodies being then come to lie within six feet of the surface. I
doubt not but there may be some ancient persons alive in the parish
who can justify the fact of this, and are able to show even in what
place of the churchyard the pit lay better than I can. The mark of it
also was many years to be seen in the churchyard on the surface, lying
in length parallel with the passage which goes by the west wall of the
churchyard out of Houndsditch, and turns east again into Whitechappel,
coming out near the Three Nuns’ Inn.
It was about the 10th of September that my curiosity led, or rather
drove, me to go and see this pit again, when there had been near 400
people buried in it; and I was not content to see it in the day-time,