people of the village opposed his driving the cart along; but with some
arguings and some force, the men that drove the cart along got
through the street up to the door of the house. There the constable
resisted them again, and would not let them be brought in. The man
caused the goods to be unloaden and laid at the door, and sent the cart
away; upon which they carried the man before a justice of peace; that
is to say, they commanded him to go, which he did. The justice
ordered him to cause the cart to fetch away the goods again, which he
refused to do; upon which the justice ordered the constable to pursue
the carters and fetch them back, and make them reload the goods and
carry them away, or to set them in the stocks till they came for further
orders; and if they could not find them, nor the man would not
consent to take them away, they should cause them to be drawn with
hooks from the house-door and burned in the street. The poor
distressed man upon this fetched the goods again, but with grievous
cries and lamentations at the hardship of his case. But there was no
remedy; self-preservation obliged the people to those severities which
they would not otherwise have been concerned in. Whether this poor
man lived or died I cannot tell, but it was reported that he had the
plague upon him at that time; and perhaps the people might report that
to justify their usage of him; but it was not unlikely that either he or
his goods, or both, were dangerous, when his whole family had been
dead of the distempers so little a while before.
I know that the inhabitants of the towns adjacent to London were
much blamed for cruelty to the poor people that ran from the
contagion in their distress, and many very severe things were done, as
may be seen from what has been said; but I cannot but say also that,
where there was room for charity and assistance to the people, without
apparent danger to themselves, they were
willing enough to help and relieve them. But as every town were
indeed judges in their own case, so the poor people who ran abroad in
their extremities were often ill-used and driven back again into the
town; and this caused infinite exclamations and outcries against the
country towns, and made the clamour very popular.
And yet, more or less, maugre all the caution, there was not a town
of any note within ten (or, I believe, twenty) miles of the city but what
was more or less infected and had some died among them. I have
heard the accounts of several, such as they were reckoned up, as follows: –
In Enfield 32 In Uxbridge 117
” Hornsey 58 ” Hertford 90
” Newington 17 ” Ware 160
” Tottenham 42 ” Hodsdon 30
” Edmonton 19 ” Waltham Abbey 23
” Barnet and Hadly 19 ” Epping 26
” St Albans 121 ” Deptford 623
” Watford 45 ” Greenwich 231
” Eltham and Lusum 85 ” Kingston 122
” Croydon 61 ” Stanes 82
” Brentwood 70 ” Chertsey 18
” Rumford 109 ” Windsor 103
” Barking Abbot 200
” Brentford 432 Cum aliis.
Another thing might render the country more strict with respect to
the citizens, and especially with respect to the poor, and this was what
I hinted at before: namely, that there was a seeming propensity or a
wicked inclination in those that were infected to infect others.
There have been great debates among our physicians as to the
reason of this. Some will have it to be in the nature of the disease,
and that it impresses every one that is seized upon by it with a kind of
a rage, and a hatred against their own kind – as if there was a
malignity not only in the distemper to communicate itself, but in the
very nature of man, prompting him with evil will or
an evil eye, that, as they say in the case of a mad dog, who though the