第36章 Part 3(14)

Two things besides this contributed to prevent the mob doing any mischief.One was,that really the rich themselves had not laid up stores of provisions in their houses as indeed they ought to have done,and which if they had been wise enough to have done,and locked themselves entirely up,as some few did,they had perhaps escaped the disease better.But as it appeared they had not,so the mob had no notion of finding stores of provisions there if they had broken in.as it is plain they were sometimes very near doing,and which:if they bad,they had finished the ruin of the whole city,for there were no regular troops to have withstood them,nor could the trained bands have been brought together to defend the city,no men being to be found to bear arms.

But the vigilance of the Lord Mayor and such magistrates as could be had (for some,even of the aldermen,were dead,and some absent)prevented this;and they did it by the most kind and gentle methods they could think of,as particularly by relieving the most desperate with money,and putting others into business,and particularly that employment of watching houses that were infected and shut up.And as the number of these were very great (for it was said there was at one time ten thousand houses shut up,and every house had two watchmen to guard it,viz.,one by night and the other by day),this gave opportunity to employ a very great number of poor men at a time.

The women and servants that were turned off from their places were likewise employed as nurses to tend the sick in all places,and this took off a very great number of them.

And,which though a melancholy article in itself,yet was a deliverance in its kind:namely,the plague,which raged in a dreadful manner from the middle of August to the middle of October,carried off in that time thirty or forty thousand of these very people which,had they been left,would certainly have been an insufferable burden by their poverty;that is to say,the whole city could not have supported the expense of them,or have provided food for them;and they would in time have been even driven to the necessity of plundering either the city itself or the country adjacent,to have subsisted themselves,which would first or last have put the whole nation,as well as the city,into the utmost terror and confusion.

It was observable,then,that this calamity of the people made them very humble;for now for about nine weeks together there died near a thousand a day,one day with another,even by the account of the weekly bills,which yet,I have reason to be assured,never gave a full account,by many thousands;the confusion being such,and the carts working in the dark when they carried the dead,that in some places no account at all was kept,but they worked on,the clerks and sextons not attending for weeks together,and not knowing what number they carried.This account is verified by the following bills of mortality:-Of all of the Diseases.Plague From August 8to August 1553193880""15"2255684237""22"2974966102""29to September 582526988"September 5"1276906544""12"1982977165""19"2664605533""26to October 357204979"October 3"1050684327----------

59,87049,705

So that the gross of the people were carried off in these two months;for,as the whole number which was brought in to die of the plague was but 68,590,here is 50,000of them,within a trifle,in two months;I say 50,000,because,as there wants 295in the number above,so there wants two days of two months in the account of time.

Now when I say that the parish officers did not give in a full account,or were not to be depended upon for their account,let any one but consider how men could be exact in such a time of dreadful distress,and when many of them were taken sick themselves and perhaps died in the very time when their accounts were to be given in;I mean the parish clerks,besides inferior officers;for though these poor men ventured at all hazards,yet they were far from being exempt from the common calamity,especially if it be true that the parish of Stepney had,within the year,116sextons,gravediggers,and their assistants;that is to say,bearers,bellmen,and drivers of carts for carrying off the dead bodies.

Indeed the work was not of a nature to allow them leisure to take an exact tale of the dead bodies,which were all huddled together in the dark into a pit;which pit or trench no man could come nigh but at the utmost peril.I observed often that in the parishes of Aldgate and Cripplegate,Whitechappel and Stepney,there were five,six,seven,and eight hundred in a week in the bills;whereas if we may believe the opinion of those that lived in the city all the time as well as I,there died sometimes 2000a week in those parishes;and I saw it under the hand of one that made as strict an examination into that part as he could,that there really died an hundred thousand people of the plague in that one year whereas in the bills,the articles of the plague,it was but 68,590.

If I may be allowed to give my opinion,by what I saw with my eyes and heard from other people that were eye-witnesses,I do verily believe the same,viz.,that there died at least 100,000of the plague only,besides other distempers and besides those which died in the fields and highways and secret Places out of the compass of the communication,as it was called,and who were not put down in the bills though they really belonged to the body of the inhabitants.It was known to us all that abundance of poor despairing creatures who had the distemper upon them,and were grown stupid or melancholy by their misery,as many were,wandered away into the fields and Woods,and into secret uncouth places almost anywhere,to creep into a bush or hedge and die.