Plague near London in 1665.
Meanwhile various parts of England were affected with plague during and after the great epidemic, and in one or two instances a little before it. In the immediate neighbourhood of the capital all the towns and villages usually implicated by the exodus from the City had cases of plague, as the following table shows. It has been compiled from the parish registers, as extracted in Lysons’ Environs of London, Defoe’s widely discrepant figures being given for comparison in the third column.
| All causes | Plague | Defoe’s list. | ||||
| Barking | 230 | 200 | ||||
| Barnes | 27 | |||||
| Barnet and Hadley | 43 | |||||
| Battersea | 113 | |||||
| Beckenham | 18 | |||||
| Brentford | 103 | 432 | ||||
| Brentwood | 70 | |||||
| Bromley | 27 | 7 | ||||
| Camberwell | 133 | |||||
| Charlton | 7 | 3 | ||||
| Chertsey | 18 | |||||
| Chiselhurst | 21 | |||||
| Clapham | 28 | |||||
| Croydon | 141 | 61 | ||||
| Deptford | 548 | 374 | 623 | |||
| Ealing | 286 | 244 | ||||
| Edmonton | 19 | |||||
| Eltham | 44 | 32 | 85 | |||
| Enfield | 176 | 32 | ||||
| Epping | 26 | |||||
| Finchley | 38 | |||||
| Greenwich | 416 | 231 | ||||
| Hampstead | 214 | |||||
| Heston | 48 | 13 | ||||
| Hodsdon | 30 | |||||
| Hertford | 90 | |||||
| Hornsey | 53 | 43 | 85 | |||
| Islewort | 195 | 149 | ||||
| Kensington | 62 | 25 | ||||
| Kingston | 122 | |||||
| Lewisham | 56 | |||||
| Mortlake | 197 | 170 | ||||
| Newington, Stoke | 17 | |||||
| Norwood | 12 | 2 | ||||
| Putney | 74 | |||||
| Romford | 90 | 109 | ||||
| St Albans | 121 | |||||
| Stratford-Bow | 139 | |||||
| Staines | 82 | |||||
| Tottenham | no entries | 42 | ||||
| Twickenham | 21 | |||||
| Uxbridge | 117 | |||||
| Waltham Abbey | 23 | |||||
| Walthamstow | 68 | |||||
| Wandsworth | 245 | |||||
| Ware | 160 | |||||
| Watford | 45 | |||||
| Windsor | 103 | |||||
| Woodford | 33 |
The most striking fact that comes out is that most of the parishes around London had actually fewer deaths from plague in 1665 than in 1603. The exceptions to this rule in 1665 are the villages on or near the Thames above London-Battersea, Wandsworth, Putney, Mortlake, Brentford, Isleworth, and Ealing, which had all a very high mortality, Barnes being almost exempt. On the lower reaches of the Thames, Barking on the Essex shore, and Deptford, Greenwich and Lewisham on the other side, had the infection in them very severely; but these three places in Kent had a still more severe visitation in 1666, along with other towns in that county.
On September 9, Evelyn wrote from his Deptford house, Sayes Court, that “near thirty houses are visited in this miserable village.” The infection got also among the ships of the navy; on August 29, on board the ‘Loyal Subject’ at Deal, Captain Fortescue and six men died suddenly, it was feared of the plague.