History of the Plague in London

by Daniel Defoe

1. The price of bread in particular was not much raised; for in the beginning of the year, viz., in the first week in March, the penny wheaten loaf was ten ounces and a half, and in the height of the contagion it was to be had at nine ounces and a half, and never dearer, no, not all that season; and about the beginning of November it was sold at ten ounces and a half again, the like of which, I believe, was never heard of, in any city under so dreadful a visitation, before.

2. Neither was there, which I wondered much at, any want of bakers or ovens kept open to supply the people with bread; but this was indeed alleged by some families, viz., that their maidservants, going to the bakehouses with their dough to be baked, which was then the custom, sometimes came home with the sickness, that is to say, the plague, upon them.

In all this dreadful visitation there were, as I have said before, but two pesthouses made use of; viz., one in the fields beyond Old Street, and one in Westminster. Neither was there any compulsion used in carrying people thither. Indeed, there was no need of compulsion in the case, for there were thousands of poor distressed people, who having no help, or conveniences, or supplies, but of charity, would have been very glad to have been carried thither and been taken care of; which, indeed, was the only thing that, I think, was wanting in the whole public management of the city, seeing nobody was here allowed to be brought to the pesthouse but where money was given, or security for money, either at their introducing,[252] or upon their being cured and sent out; for very many were sent out again whole, and very good physicians were appointed to those places; so that many people did very well there, of which I shall make mention again. The principal sort of people sent thither were, as I have said, servants, who got the distemper by going of errands to fetch necessaries for the families where they lived, and who, in that case, if they came home sick, were removed to preserve the rest of the house; and they were so well looked after there, in all the time of the visitation, that there was but one hundred and fifty-six buried in all at the London pesthouse, and one hundred and fifty-nine at that of Westminster.

By having more pesthouses, I am far from meaning a forcing all people into such places. Had the shutting up of houses been omitted, and the sick hurried out of their dwellings to pesthouses, as some proposed it seems at that time as well as since, it[253] would certainly have been much worse than it was. The very removing the sick would have been a spreading of the infection, and the rather because that removing could not effectually clear the house where the sick person was of the distemper; and the rest of the family, being then left at liberty, would certainly spread it among others.

The methods, also, in private families which would have been universally used to have concealed the distemper, and to have concealed the persons being sick, would have been such that the distemper would sometimes have seized a whole family before any visitors or examiners could have known of it. On the other hand, the prodigious numbers which would have been sick at a time would have exceeded all the capacity of public pesthouses to receive them, or of public officers to discover and remove them.

This was well considered in those days, and I have heard them talk of it often. The magistrates had enough to do to bring people to submit to having their houses shut up; and many ways they deceived the watchmen, and got out, as I observed. But that difficulty made it apparent that they would have found it impracticable to have gone the other way to work; for they could never have forced the sick people out of their beds and out of their dwellings: it must not have been my lord mayor's officers, but an army of officers, that must have attempted it. And the people, on the other hand, would have been enraged and desperate, and would have killed those that should have offered to have meddled with them or with their children and relations, whatever had befallen them for it; so that they would have made the people (who, as it was, were in the most terrible distraction imaginable), I say, they would have made them stark mad: whereas the magistrates found it proper on several occasions to treat them with lenity and compassion, and not with violence and terror, such as dragging the sick out of their houses, or obliging them to remove themselves, would have been.

This leads me again to mention the time when the plague first began,[254] that is to say, when it became certain that it would spread over the whole town, when, as I have said, the better sort of people first took the alarm, and began to hurry themselves out of town. It was true, as I observed in its place, that the throng was so great, and the coaches, horses, wagons, and carts were so many, driving and dragging the people away, that it looked as if all the city was running away; and had any regulations been published that had been terrifying at that time, especially such as would pretend to dispose of the people otherwise than they would dispose of themselves, it would have put both the city and suburbs into the utmost confusion.

The magistrates wisely caused the people to be encouraged, made very good by-laws[255] for the regulating the citizens, keeping good order in the streets, and making everything as eligible as possible to all sorts of people.

In the first place, the lord mayor and the sheriffs,[256] the court of aldermen, and a certain number of the common councilmen, or their deputies, came to a resolution, and published it; viz., that they would not quit the city themselves, but that they would be always at hand for the preserving good order in every place, and for doing justice on all occasions, as also for the distributing the public charity to the poor, and, in a word, for the doing the duty and discharging the trust reposed in them by the citizens, to the utmost of their power.

In pursuance of these orders, the lord mayor, sheriffs, etc., held councils every day, more or less, for making such dispositions as they found needful for preserving the civil peace; and though they used the people with all possible gentleness and clemency, yet all manner of presumptuous rogues, such as thieves, housebreakers, plunderers of the dead or of the sick, were duly punished; and several declarations were continually published by the lord mayor and court of aldermen against such.