few weeks more the poor people became so desperate by the calamity
they suffered that they were with great difficulty kept from g out into
the fields and towns, and tearing all in pieces wherever they came;
and, as I have observed before, nothing hindered them but that the
plague raged so violently and fell in upon them so furiously that they
rather went to the grave by thousands than into the fields in mobs by
thousands; for, in the parts about the parishes of St Sepulcher,
Clarkenwell, Cripplegate, Bishopsgate, and Shoreditch, which were
the places where the mob began to threaten, the distemper came on so
furiously that there died in those few parishes even then, before the
plague was come to its height, no less than 5361 people in the first
three weeks in August; when at the same time the parts about
Wapping, Radcliffe, and Rotherhith were, as before described, hardly
touched, or but very lightly; so that in a word though, as I said before,
the good management of the Lord Mayor and justices did much to
prevent the rage and desperation of the people from breaking out in
rabbles and tumults, and in short from the poor plundering the rich, – I
say, though they did much, the dead-carts did more: for as I have said
that in five parishes only there died above 5000 in twenty days, so
there might be probably three times that number sick all that time; for
some recovered, and great numbers fell sick every day and died
afterwards. Besides, I must still be allowed to say that if the bills of
mortality said five thousand, I always believed it was near twice as
many in reality, there being no room to believe that the account they
gave was right, or that indeed they were among such confusions as I
saw them in, in any condition to keep an exact account.
But to return to my travellers. Here they were only examined, and
as they seemed rather coming from the country than from the city,
they found the people the easier with them; that they talked to them,
let them come into a public-house where the constable and his
warders were, and gave them drink and some victuals which greatly
refreshed and encouraged them; and here it came into their heads to
say, when they should be inquired of afterwards, not that they came
from London, but that they came out of Essex.
To forward this little fraud, they obtained so much favour of the
constable at Old Ford as to give them a certificate of their passing
from Essex through that village, and that they had not been at London;
which, though false in the common acceptance of London in the
county, yet was literally true, Wapping or Ratcliff being no part either
of the city or liberty.
This certificate directed to the next constable that was at Homerton,
one of the hamlets of the parish of Hackney, was so serviceable to
them that it procured them, not a free passage there only, but a full
certificate of health from a justice of the peace, who upon the
constable’s application granted it without much difficulty; and thus
they passed through the long divided town of Hackney (for it lay then
in several separated hamlets), and travelled on till they came into the
great north road on the top of Stamford Hill.
By this time they began to be weary, and so in the back-road from
Hackney, a little before it opened into the said great road, they
resolved to set up their tent and encamp for the first night, which they
did accordingly, with this addition, that finding a barn, or a building
like a barn, and first searching as well as they could to be sure there
was nobody in it, they set up their tent, with the head of it against the
barn. This they did also because the wind blew that night very high,
and they were but young at such a way of lodging, as well as at the
managing their tent.
Here they went to sleep; but the joiner, a grave and sober man, and