had at the beginning. As the extremity brought other people abroad, it
drove me home, and except having made my voyage down to
Blackwall and Greenwich, as I have related, which was an excursion,
I kept afterwards very much within doors, as I had for about a
fortnight before. I have said already that I repented several times that
I had ventured to stay in town, and had not gone away with my brother
and his family, but it was too late for that now; and after I had
retreated and stayed within doors a good while before my impatience
led me abroad, then they called me, as I have said, to an ugly and
dangerous office which brought me out again; but as that was expired
while the height of the distemper lasted, I retired again, and continued
dose ten or twelve days more, during which many dismal spectacles
represented themselves in my view out of my own windows and in our
own street – as that particularly from Harrow Alley, of the poor
outrageous creature which danced and sung in his agony; and many
others there were. Scarce a day or night passed over but some dismal
thing or other happened at the end of that Harrow Alley, which was a
place full of poor people, most of them belonging to the butchers or to
employments depending upon the butchery.
Sometimes heaps and throngs of people would burst out of the alley,
most of them women, making a dreadful clamour, mixed or
compounded of screeches, cryings, and calling one another, that we
could not conceive what to make of it. Almost all the dead part of the
night the dead-cart stood at the end of that alley, for if it went in it
could not well turn again, and could go in but a little way. There, I
say, it stood to receive dead bodies, and as the churchyard was but a
little way off, if it went away full it would soon be back again. It is
impossible to describe the most horrible cries and noise the poor
people would make at their bringing the dead bodies of their children
and friends out of the cart, and by the number one would have thought
there had been none left behind, or that there were people enough for
a small city living in those places. Several times they cried ‘Murder’,
sometimes ‘Fire’; but it was easy to perceive it was all distraction, and
the complaints of distressed and distempered people.
I believe it was everywhere thus as that time, for the plague raged
for six or seven weeks beyond all that I have expressed, and came
even to such a height that, in the extremity, they began to break into
that excellent order of which I have spoken so much in behalf of the
magistrates; namely, that no dead bodies were seen in the street or
burials in the daytime: for there was a necessity in this extremity to
bear with its being otherwise for a little while.
One thing I cannot omit here, and indeed I thought it was extraordinary,
at least it seemed a remarkable hand of Divine justice: viz., that all
the predictors, astrologers, fortune-tellers, and what they called
cunning-men, conjurers, and the like: calculators of nativities
and dreamers of dream, and such people, were gone and vanished;
not one of them was to be found. I am verily persuaded that
a great number of them fell in the heat of the calamity,
having ventured to stay upon the prospect of getting great estates;
and indeed their gain was but too great for a time, through the madness
and folly of the people. But now they were silent; many of them went
to their long home, not able to foretell their own fate or to calculate
their own nativities. Some have been critical enough to say that
every one of them died. I dare not affirm that; but this I must own,
that I never heard of one of them that ever appeared after the
calamity was over.
But to return to my particular observations during this dreadful part
of the visitation. I am now come, as I have said, to the month of