DANIEL DEFOE. A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR

above 3000 people died in one night; and they that would have us

believe they more critically observed it pretend to say that they all

died within the space of two hours, viz., between the hours of one and

three in the morning.

As to the suddenness of people’s dying at this time, more than

before, there were innumerable instances of it, and I could name

several in my neighbourhood. One family without the Bars, and not

far from me, were all seemingly well on the Monday, being ten in

family. That evening one maid and one apprentice were taken ill and

died the next morning – when the other apprentice and two children

were touched, whereof one died the same evening, and the other two

on Wednesday. In a word, by Saturday at noon the master, mistress,

four children, and four servants were all gone, and the house left

entirely empty, except an ancient woman who came in to take charge

of the goods for the master of the family’s brother, who lived not far

off, and who had not been sick.

Many houses were then left desolate, all the people being carried

away dead, and especially in an alley farther on the same side beyond

the Bars, going in at the sign of Moses and Aaron, there were several

houses together which, they said, had not one person left alive in

them; and some that died last in several of those houses were left a

little too long before they were fetched out to be buried; the reason of

which was not, as some have written very untruly, that the living were

not sufficient to bury the dead, but that the mortality was so great in

the yard or alley that there was nobody left to give notice to the

buriers or sextons that there were any dead bodies there to be buried.

It was said, how true I know not, that some of those bodies were so

much corrupted and so rotten that it was with difficulty they were

carried; and as the carts could not come any nearer than to the Alley

Gate in the High Street, it was so much the more difficult to bring

them along; but I am not certain how many bodies were then left. I

am sure that ordinarily it was not so.

As I have mentioned how the people were brought into a condition

to despair of life and abandon themselves, so this very thing had a

strange effect among us for three or four weeks; that is, it made them

bold and venturous: they were no more shy of one another, or

restrained within doors, but went anywhere and everywhere, and

began to converse. One would say to another, ‘I do not ask you how

you are, or say how I am; it is certain we shall all go; so ’tis no matter

who is all sick or who is sound’; and so they ran desperately into any

place or any company.

As it brought the people into public company, so it was surprising

how it brought them to crowd into the churches. They inquired no

more into whom they sat near to or far from, what offensive smells

they met with, or what condition the people seemed to be in; but,

looking upon themselves all as so many dead corpses, they came to

the churches without the least caution, and crowded together as if

their lives were of no consequence compared to the work which they

came about there. Indeed, the zeal which they showed in coming, and

the earnestness and affection they showed in their attention to what

they heard, made it manifest what a value people would all put upon

the worship of God if they thought every day they attended at the

church that it would be their last.

Nor was it without other strange effects, for it took away, all manner

of prejudice at or scruple about the person whom they found in the

pulpit when they came to the churches. It cannot be doubted but that

many of the ministers of the parish churches were cut off, among

others, in so common and dreadful a calamity; and others had not