or no service in the whole. Nay, I am of opinion it was rather hurtful,
having forced those desperate people to wander abroad with the
plague upon them, who would otherwise have died quietly in their beds.
I remember one citizen who, having thus broken out of his house in
Aldersgate Street or thereabout, went along the road to Islington; he
attempted to have gone in at the Angel Inn, and after that the White
Horse, two inns known still by the same signs, but was refused; after
which he came to the Pied Bull, an inn also still continuing the same
sign. He asked them for lodging for one night only, pretending to be
going into Lincolnshire, and assuring them of his being very sound
and free from the infection, which also at that time had not reached
much that way.
They told him they had no lodging that they could spare but one bed
up in the garret, and that they could spare that bed for one night, some
drovers being expected the next day with cattle; so, if he would accept
of that lodging, he might have it, which he did. So a servant was sent
up with a candle with him to show him the room. He was very well
dressed, and looked like a person not used to lie in a garret; and when
he came to the room he fetched a deep sigh, and said to the servant, ‘I
have seldom lain in such a lodging as this. ‘However, the servant
assuring him again that they had no better, ‘Well,’ says he, ‘I must
make shift; this is a dreadful time; but it is but for one night.’ So he sat
down upon the bedside, and bade the maid, I think it was, fetch him
up a pint of warm ale. Accordingly the servant went for the ale, but
some hurry in the house, which perhaps employed her other ways, put
it out of her head, and she went up no more to him.
The next morning, seeing no appearance of the gentleman,
somebody in the house asked the servant that had showed him upstairs
what was become of him. She started. ‘Alas l’ says she, ‘I never
thought more of him. He bade me carry him some warm ale, but I
forgot.’ Upon which, not the maid, but some other person was sent up
to see after him, who, coming into the room, found him stark dead and
almost cold, stretched out across the bed. His clothes were pulled off,
his jaw fallen, his eyes open in a most frightful posture, the rug of the
bed being grasped hard in one of his hands, so that it was plain he
died soon after the maid left him; and ’tis probable, had she gone up
with the ale, she had found him dead in a few minutes after he sat
down upon the bed. The alarm was great in the house, as anyone may
suppose, they having been free from the distemper till that disaster,
which, bringing the infection to the house, spread it immediately to
other houses round about it. I do not remember how many died in the
house itself, but I think the maid-servant who went up first with him
fell presently ill by the fright, and several others; for, whereas there
died but two in Islington of the plague the week before, there died
seventeen the week after, whereof fourteen were of the plague. This
was in the week from the 11th of July to the 18th.
There was one shift that some families had, and that not a few,
when their houses happened to be infected, and that was this: the
families who, in the first breaking-out of the distemper, fled away into
the country and had retreats among their friends, generally found
some or other of their neighbours or relations to commit the charge of
those houses to for the safety of the goods and the like. Some houses
were, indeed, entirely locked up, the doors padlocked, the windows
and doors having deal boards nailed over them, and only the
inspection of them committed to the ordinary watchmen and parish