“Some with their carbuncles and sores new burst
Are fed with hope they have escaped the worst.”
But the best hope was in flight, as Bradwell was candid enough to say, although he remained behind with his shilling powders and half-crown electuaries. Cito cede, longé recede, tardé redi—is the proverbial advice which he quotes.
However, the people in their flight, unless they were nobles or squires with country houses, fared but ill in the provinces. The story of their reception in country towns and villages is so like that of 1603 that one might suppose in this, as in other things, that the writers of 1625 were copying from Dekker. One of the versifiers, Brewer, has a section specially devoted to a “Relation of the many miseries that many of those that fly the City do fall into in the country.” They are driven back by men with bills and halberds, passing through village after village in disgrace until they end their journey; they sleep in stables, barns and outhouses, or even by the roadside in ditches and in the open fields. And that was the lot of comparatively wealthy men. Taylor says that when he was with the queen’s barge at Hampton Court and up the river almost to Oxford, he had much grief and remorse to see and hear of the miserable and cold entertainment of many Londoners:
“The name of London now both far and near
Strikes all the towns and villages with fear.
And to be thought a Londoner is worse
Than one that breaks a house, or takes a purse ...
Whilst hay-cock lodging with hard slender fare,
Welcome, like dogs into a church, they are.
For why the hob-nailed boors, inhuman blocks,
Uncharitable hounds, hearts hard as rocks,
Did suffer people in the field to sink
Rather than give or sell a draught of drink.
Milkmaids and farmers’ wives are grown so nice
They think a Citizen a cockatrice,
And country dames are waxed so coy and brisk
They shun him as they shun a basilisk.”
Taylor gives various instances in prose:
“A man sick of an ague lying on the ground at Maidenhead in Berkshire, with his fit violently on him, had stones cast at him by two men of the towne (whom I could name), and when they could not cause him to rise, one of them tooke a hitcher, or long boat-hook, and hitched in the sick man’s breeches, drawing him backward with his face grovelling on the ground, drawing him so under the bridge in a dry place, where he lay till his fit was gone, and having lost a new hat, went his way.”
One at Richmond was drawn naked in the night by his own wife and boy, and cast into the Thames, where the next day the corpse was found. The village of Hendon distinguished itself by relieving the sick, burying the dead, and collecting eight pounds, at the least (being but a small village) for the poor of St Andrew’s, Holborn, besides allowing good weekly wages to two men to attend and bury such as died. The village of Tottenham appears to have been equally hospitable; but as it was on the road to Theobalds, and some of his majesty’s servants dwelt there, the Privy Council on July 19, wrote to the justices of Middlesex to order the inhabitants of Tottenham, who had received into their houses “multitudes of inmates,” to remove the new-comers and not to receive any in future[1019]. Although the king was not at Richmond, yet as there was a royal residence there, the inhabitants sought to drive away citizens on the ground of the warrant forbidding them to approach any of his majesty’s houses[1020]. At Woodstock, where the Court was in August, no one was allowed to go from thence to London, nor any to come thither, and for contraveners a gibbet was set up at the Court gate[1021]. It was hardly possible to get a letter smuggled into London[1022]; in the provinces “no one comes into a town without a ticket, yet there are few free places.” At Southampton on August 27, a stranger died in the fields: “He came from London. He had good store of money about him, which was taken before he was cold[1023].” Dr Donne, the dean of St Paul’s, confirms these experiences in a letter of November 25, from Chelsea[1024]:
“The citizens fled away as out of a house on fire, and stuffed their pockets with their best ware, and threw themselves into the highways, and were not received so much as into barns, and perished so: some of them with more money about them than would have bought the village where they died. A justice of the peace told me of one that died so with £1400 about him.”
Meddus, rector of St Gabriel’s, heard of one sad case of a citizen in Leadenhall-street who removed to the country with his seven children, “but having buried all there is come again hither,” in July[1025]. In October, the people began to come back, although the infection was by no means over; Salvetti, who was himself near Huntingdon, says that many of the returning artisans caught the infection in the city, which is probable enough, as it happened also in 1665. On October 15, a correspondent of Mead’s wrote that in his passing through London he found the streets full of people, and the highways full of passengers, horse and foot. On October 24, we hear of great distress among tradesmen, artificers and farmers round London, and of discontent at the forced loan[1026]; although the Court itself was in as great extremity during the plague for want of money as any private house could have been. On November 22, the lord mayor and aldermen wrote to the Privy Council that the great mortality, although it had taken many poor people away, yet had made more poverty by decay of tradesmen, the want and misery being still very great[1027]. Still, the effect of this great plague on London, cutting off some fifty thousand in a year, or more than a fifth part of the population, must have been, like that of all other great plagues in London, to cut off the fringe of poverty and broken fortunes, and to raise the general average of well-being of those that remained. Trade would come back; but the submerged tenth, or sixth, or fourth, or whatever fraction they made, were drowned for good.
London soon filled up the gaps made by the plague, doubtless by fresh blood from the country. In 1627, the christenings were again at 8,408, having been at a maximum of 8,299 the year before the plague. In 1629 they actually exceeded the burials by more than a thousand (9,901 to 8,771), and continued to be slightly in excess until the next plague of 1636.