I believe it was everywhere thus at that time, for the plague raged for six or seven weeks beyond all that I have expressed, and came even to such a height, that, in the extremity, they began to break into that excellent order of which I have spoken so much in behalf of the magistrates, namely, that no dead bodies were seen in the streets, or burials in the daytime; for there was a necessity in this extremity to bear with its being otherwise for a little while.

One thing I cannot omit here, and indeed I thought it was extraordinary, at least it seemed a remarkable hand of divine justice; viz., that all the predictors, astrologers, fortune tellers, and what they called cunning men, conjurers, and the like, calculators of nativities, and dreamers of dreams, and such people, were gone and vanished; not one of them was to be found. I am verily persuaded that a great number of them fell in the heat of the calamity, having ventured to stay upon the prospect of getting great estates; and indeed their gain was but too great for a time, through the madness and folly of the people: but now they were silent; many of them went to their long home, not able to foretell their own fate, or to calculate their own nativities. Some have been critical enough to say[251] that every one of them died. I dare not affirm that; but this I must own, that I never heard of one of them that ever appeared after the calamity was over.

But to return to my particular observations during this dreadful part of the visitation. I am now come, as I have said, to the month of September, which was the most dreadful of its kind, I believe, that ever London saw; for, by all the accounts which I have seen of the preceding visitations which have been in London, nothing has been like it, the number in the weekly bill amounting to almost forty thousands from the 22d of August to the 26th of September, being but five weeks. The particulars of the bills are as follows: viz.,—

Aug. 22 to Aug. 297,496
Aug. 29 to Sept. 58,252
Sept. 5 to Sept. 127,690
Sept. 12 to Sept. 198,297
Sept. 19 to Sept. 266,460
38,195

This was a prodigious number of itself; but if I should add the reasons which I have to believe that this account was deficient, and how deficient it was, you would with me make no scruple to believe that there died above ten thousand a week for all those weeks, one week with another, and a proportion for several weeks, both before and after. The confusion among the people, especially within the city, at that time was inexpressible. The terror was so great at last, that the courage of the people appointed to carry away the dead began to fail them; nay, several of them died, although they had the distemper before, and were recovered; and some of them dropped down when they have been carrying the bodies even at the pitside, and just ready to throw them in. And this confusion was greater in the city, because they had flattered themselves with hopes of escaping, and thought the bitterness of death was past. One cart, they told us, going up Shoreditch, was forsaken by the drivers, or, being left to one man to drive, he died in the street; and the horses, going on, overthrew the cart, and left the bodies, some thrown here, some there, in a dismal manner. Another cart was, it seems, found in the great pit in Finsbury Fields, the driver being dead, or having been gone and abandoned it; and the horses running too near it, the cart fell in, and drew the horses in also. It was suggested that the driver was thrown in with it, and that the cart fell upon him, by reason his whip was seen to be in the pit among the bodies; but that, I suppose, could not be certain.

In our parish of Aldgate the dead carts were several times, as I have heard, found standing at the churchyard gate full of dead bodies, but neither bellman, or driver, or any one else, with it. Neither in these or many other cases did they know what bodies they had in their cart, for sometimes they were let down with ropes out of balconies and out of windows, and sometimes the bearers brought them to the cart, sometimes other people; nor, as the men themselves said, did they trouble themselves to keep any account of the numbers.

The vigilance of the magistrate was now put to the utmost trial, and, it must be confessed, can never be enough acknowledged on this occasion; also, whatever expense or trouble they were at, two things were never neglected in the city or suburbs either:—

1. Provisions were always to be had in full plenty, and the price not much raised neither, hardly worth speaking.

2. No dead bodies lay unburied or uncovered; and if any one walked from one end of the city to another, no funeral, or sign of it, was to be seen in the daytime, except a little, as I have said, in the first three weeks in September.

This last article, perhaps, will hardly be believed when some accounts which others have published since that shall be seen, wherein they say that the dead lay unburied, which I am sure was utterly false; at least, if it had been anywhere so, it must have been in houses where the living were gone from the dead, having found means, as I have observed, to escape, and where no notice was given to the officers. All which amounts to nothing at all in the case in hand; for this I am positive in, having myself been employed a little in the direction of that part of the parish in which I lived, and where as great a desolation was made, in proportion to the number of the 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.