the direction of that part in the parish in which I lived, and where as
great a desolation was made in proportion to the number of
inhabitants as was anywhere; I say, I am sure that there were no dead
bodies remained unburied; that is to say, none that the proper officers
knew of; none for want of people to carry them off, and buriers to put
them into the ground and cover them; and this is sufficient to the
argument; for what might lie in houses and holes, as in Moses and
Aaron Alley, is nothing; for it is most certain they were buried as soon
as they were found. As to the first article (namely, of provisions, the
scarcity or dearness), though I have mentioned it before and shall
speak of it again, yet I must observe here: –
(1) The price of bread in particular was not much raised; for in the
beginning of the year, viz., in the first week in March, the penny
wheaten loaf was ten ounces and a half; and in the height of the
contagion it was to be had at nine ounces and a half, and never dearer,
no, not all that season. And about the beginning of November it was
sold ten ounces and a half again; the like of which, I believe, was
never heard of in any city, under so dreadful a visitation, before.
(2) Neither was there (which I wondered much at) any want of
bakers or ovens kept open to supply the people with the bread; but this
was indeed alleged by some families, viz., that their maidservants,
going to the bakehouses with their dough to be baked, which was then
the custom, sometimes came home with the sickness (that is to say the
plague) upon them.
In all this dreadful visitation there were, as I have said before, but
two pest-houses made use of, viz., one in the fields beyond Old Street
and one in Westminster; neither was there any compulsion used in
carrying people thither. Indeed there was no need of compulsion in
the case, for there were thousands of poor distressed people who,
having no help or conveniences or supplies but of charity, would have
been very glad to have been carried thither and been taken care of;
which, indeed, was the only thing that I think was wanting in the
whole public management of the city, seeing nobody was here
allowed to be brought to the pest-house but where money was given,
or security for money, either at their introducing or upon their being
cured and sent out – for very many were sent out again whole; and
very good physicians were appointed to those places, so that many
people did very well there, of which I shall make mention again. The
principal sort of people sent thither were, as I have said, servants who
got the distemper by going of errands to fetch necessaries to the
families where they lived, and who in that case, if they came home
sick, were removed to preserve the rest of the house; and they were so
well looked after there in all the time of the visitation that there was
but 156 buried in all at the London pest-house, and 159 at that of
Westminster.
By having more pest-houses I am far from meaning a forcing all
people into such places. Had the shutting up of houses been omitted
and the sick hurried out of their dwellings to pest-houses, as some
proposed, it seems, at that time as well as since, it would certainly
have been much worse than it was. The very removing the sick would
have been a spreading of the infection, and the rather because that
removing could not effectually clear the house where the sick person
was of the distemper; and the rest of the family, being then left at
liberty, would certainly spread it among others.
The methods also in private families, which would have been
universally used to have concealed the distemper and to have
concealed the persons being sick, would have been such that the
distemper would sometimes have seized a whole family before any
visitors or examiners could have known of it. On the other hand, the