watchmen and the poor people shut up, besides those I formerly
mentioned about escaping. Sometimes the watchmen were absent,
sometimes drunk, sometimes asleep when the people wanted them,
and such never failed to be punished severely, as indeed they
deserved.
But after all that was or could be done in these cases, the shutting up
of houses, so as to confine those that were well with those that were
sick, had very great inconveniences in it, and some that were very
tragical, and which merited to have been considered if there had been
room for it. But it was authorised by a law, it had the public good in
view as the end chiefly aimed at, and all the private injuries that were
done by the putting it in execution must be put to the account of the
public benefit.
It is doubtful to this day whether, in the whole, it contributed
anything to the stop of the infection; and indeed I cannot say it did, for
nothing could run with greater fury and rage than the infection did
when it was in its chief violence, though the houses infected were shut
up as exactly and as effectually as it was possible. Certain it is that if
all the infected persons were effectually shut in, no sound person
could have been infected by them, because they could not have come
near them. But the case was this (and I shall only touch it here):
namely, that the infection was propagated insensibly, and by such
persons as were not visibly infected, who neither knew whom they
infected or who they were infected by.
A house in Whitechappel was shut up for the sake of one infected
maid, who had only spots, not the tokens come out upon her, and
recovered; yet these people obtained no liberty to stir, neither for air
or exercise, forty days. Want of breath, fear, anger, vexation, and all
the other gifts attending such an injurious treatment cast the mistress
of the family into a fever, and visitors came into the house and said it
was the plague, though the physicians declared it was not. However,
the family were obliged to begin their quarantine anew on the report
of the visitors or examiner, though their former quarantine wanted but
a few days of being finished. This oppressed them so with anger and
grief, and, as before, straitened them also so much as to room, and for
want of breathing and free air, that most of the family fell sick, one of
one distemper, one of another, chiefly scorbutic ailments; only one, a
violent colic; till, after several prolongings of their confinement, some
or other of those that came in with the visitors to inspect the persons
that were ill, in hopes of releasing them, brought the distemper with
them and infected the whole house; and all or most of them died, not
of the plague as really upon them before, but of the plague that those
people brought them, who should have been careful to have protected
them from it. And this was a thing which frequently happened, and
was indeed one of the worst consequences of shutting houses up.
I had about this time a little hardship put upon me, which I was at
first greatly afflicted at, and very much disturbed about though, as it
proved, it did not expose me to any disaster; and this was being
appointed by the alderman of Portsoken Ward one of the examiners of
the houses in the precinct where I lived. We had a large parish, and
had no less than eighteen examiners, as the order called us; the people
called us visitors. I endeavoured with all my might to be excused
from such an employment, and used many arguments with the
alderman’s deputy to be excused; particularly I alleged that I was
against shutting up houses at all, and that it would be very hard to
oblige me to be an instrument in that which was against my
judgement, and which I did verily believe would not answer the end it
was intended for; but all the abatement I could get was only, that
whereas the officer was appointed by my Lord Mayor to continue two