After 1666 the old churchyards were not less crowded than before, but more crowded, perhaps because coffined corpses occupied more space and decayed more slowly. On 17 October, 1672, Evelyn paid a visit to Norwich: “I observed that most of the churchyards (tho’ some of them large enough) were filled up with earth, or rather the congestion of dead bodys one upon another, for want of earth, even to the very top of the walls, and some above the walls, so as the churches seemed to be built in pitts.” The same day he had visited Sir Thomas Browne, the author of the famous essay on urn burial or cremation, (suggested to him by the digging up of forty or fifty funeral urns in a field at Old Walsingham). The essay is full of curious learning and equally curious moralizing. But Sir Thomas, though a physician, has not a word to say on so proximate a topic as the state of the Norwich churchyards, which came under his eyes and perhaps under his nose every day of his life[61].
The practice of burying in coffins, which came at length within the means of all classes, may seem too paltry a cause to assign, even in part, for so remarkable an effect as the absolute disappearance of plague after a duration of more than three centuries. My view of the matter is that the virus would have died out of itself had it not been continually augmented, or fed by its appropriate pabulum, and that the gradual change in the mode of interment helped to check such augmentation or feeding.
But the more elaborate interment of the dead was itself an index of the greater spending power of the community, and it may be said that it was the better condition of the people, and not this one particular thing in it, which put an end to the periodical recurrences of plague. In all but its earliest outbursts in the fourteenth, and perhaps the fifteenth century, plague had been peculiarly an infection of the poor, being known as “the poor’s plague.” Perhaps the chief reason why the richer classes usually escaped it was that they fled from the plague-tainted place, leaving the poorer classes unable to stir from their homes, exposed to the infectious air, and all the more exposed that their habitual employments and wages would cease, their sustenance become precarious, their condition lowered, and their manners reckless. Again, it was not unusual for the plague to break out in a season of famine or scarcity, during which the ordinary risks of the labouring class would be aggravated. Famines ceased (except in Ireland, where there had been comparatively little plague), and scarcities became less common. The sieges and occupations of the Civil Wars in the middle of the 17th century, which undoubtedly were the occasion of the last outbursts of plague in many of the towns, were a brief experience, followed by unbroken tranquillity. Whatever things were tending to the removal of plague in all its old seats had free course thereafter.
On the other hand, one may make too much of the increase of well-being among the labouring class which coincided with the cessation of plague. As a check upon population plague worked in a very remarkable way. In London, as well as in towns like Newcastle and Chester, plague towards the end of its reign arose perhaps once in a generation and made a clean sweep of a fifth or a fourth part of the inhabitants, including hardly any of the well-to-do. It destroyed, of course, many bread-winners and many that were not absolutely sunk in poverty; but its broad effect was to cut off the margin of poverty as if by a periodical process of pruning. The Lord Mayor of London wrote to the Privy Council at the end of the great plague of 1625: “The great mortality, although it had taken many poor people away, yet had made more poverty by decay of tradesmen”—a decay of trade which they might reasonably expect to recover from before long. No such ruthless shears was ever applied at intervals to the growing fringe of poverty in after times. The poor were a more permanent residue, pressing more upon each other; but they did not press more upon the rich, except through the poor rate; on the contrary, the separation of classes became more marked.
Perhaps I ought to give an illustration of this, so as not to leave so radical a change in the vague and disputable form of a generality. I shall take the instance of Chester; its circuit of walls, remaining from the Roman conquest, is something fixed for the imagination to rest upon amidst changes within and without them.
Passing over its medieval and its not infrequent Tudor experiences of epidemic sickness, let us come to the beginning of the 17th century. In two or three successive seasons from 1602 to 1605 it lost 1,313 persons by plague, as well as about 250 from other causes. The population was then mostly within the walls, and probably did not exceed 5000. There was a shipping quarter on the west side, with egress by the Water-gate to the landing-places on the Dee; a millers’ quarter, with corn-market and hostelries, on the south, connecting by the South gate and bridge with a hamlet across the river along the road to Wales; a Liberty or Freedom of the city outside the walls on the east, along the road to Warrington and Manchester, with a Bar, a short distance out, as in London, to mark the limit of the mayor’s jurisdiction; and on the north side, within the walls, the cattle-market and shambles, with the market for country produce, and a few straggling houses without the gate on the road leading to Liverpool. Chester was a characteristic county town, with its cathedral clergy, its garrison, its resident nobility and gentry, its professional classes, its tradesmen, market people and populace, with the addition of a shipping trade to Ireland and afterwards to foreign and colonial ports. Plague continuing from 1602 to 1605 cut off a fourth or a fifth of its population, and these the poorest. The gaps in the population would gradually have filled up, and the fringe of poverty grown again[62].
The plague came again in 1647, and cut off 2053 in the short space of twenty-three weeks from 22 June to 30 November. The bills of it are extant[63], and show on what parishes the plague fell most. All the parishes were originally within the walls but one, St John’s, the ancient collegiate church of Mercia, built upon a rocky knoll in the south-east angle made by the walls with the river. The other nine parish churches and their graveyards were within the walls; but the parishes of three of them extended beyond the gates, just as the three parishes dedicated to St Botolph at the gates of London did. These three were St Oswald’s, which included the Liberty on the east side, Trinity, which included the shipping quarter on the west as well as the houses along the Liverpool road on the north, and St Mary’s, which included the millers’ suburb across the Dee on the south. Hollar’s map, made a few years after the plague of 1647, shows very few houses beyond the walls, except in the ancient Liberty on the east. But it will appear from the following table that the parishes which had extended beyond the walls must either have been very crowded close up to the walls (as the Gate parishes were always apt to be), or there must have actually been a greater population outside the gates than the contemporary map shows:
Burials from Plague in the several Parishes of Chester in 23 weeks, June 22-Nov. 30, 1647.
| 5 parishes wholly within the walls. | ||||||
| Total. | First week. | Worst (7th) week. | ||||
| St Peter | 75 | 0 | 14 | |||
| St Bridget | 85 | 7 | 9 | |||
| St Martin | 173 | 9 | 23 | |||
| St Michael | 133 | 26 | 9 | |||
| St Olave | 59 | 3 | 5 | |||
| 3 parishes extending beyond the walls. | ||||||
| St Oswald | 396 | 11 | 37 | |||
| St Mary | 314 | 5 | 20 | |||
| Trinity | 232 | 1 | 32 | |||
| 1 parish wholly without the walls. | ||||||
| St John | 358 | 2 | 26 | |||
| Pesthouse | 228 | 0 | 34 | |||
| 2053 | 64 | 209 | ||||
This was the last plague of Chester, but for a small outbreak in 1654. The next vital statistics that we get for the city are more than a century after, in 1774[64]. The population of 14,713 was then divided into two almost distinct parts, separated by the wall. The old city was being rebuilt, all but some ancient blocks of buildings held in the dead hand of the cathedral chapter; it was becoming a model 18th century place of residence for a wealthy and refined class, who were remarkably healthy and not very prolific, the parishes wholly within the walls having 3502 inhabitants. The poorer class had gone to live mostly outside the walls in new and mean suburbs, the three parishes at the Gates and extending now far beyond the walls, together with the original extramural parish of St John’s, having a population of 11,211. There was no town in Britain where the separation of the rich from the poor was more complete; there was hardly another town of the size where the health of the rich was better; and although the health of the populace was not so bad as in the manufacturing towns of Lancashire and Cumberland, close at hand, yet it is hardly possible to find so great a contrast as that between the clean and wholesome residential quarter within the walls and the mean fever-stricken suburbs as described by Haygarth in 1774: