But now came the awful pestilence of 1665; the streets were so deserted that grass grew in them, and nothing was to be seen but coffins, pest-carts, link-men, and red-crossed doors. The air resounded with the tolling of bells, the screams of distracted mourners crying from the windows, “Pray for us!” and the dismal call of the searchers, “Bring out your dead!”[626]
The plague broke out in its most malignant form among the poor of St. Giles’s;[627] and Dr. Hodges and Sir Richard Manningham, both first-rate authorities on this subject, agree in this assertion.
In August 1665 an additional rate to the amount of £600 was levied. Independent of this, very large sums were subscribed by persons resident in, or interested in, the parish. The following are a few of the items:—
There are also these ominous entries:—
| August.— | Paid the searchers for viewing the corpse of Goodwife Phillips, who died of the plague | £0 | 0 | 6 | |
| Laid out for Goodman Phillips and his children, being shut up and visited | 0 | 5 | 0 | ||
| Laid out for Lylla Lewis, 3 Crane Court, being shut up of the plague; and laid out for the nurse, and for the nurse and burial | 0 | 18 | 6 |
In July 1666 the constables, etc. were ordered to make an account of all new inmates coming to the parish, and to take security that they would not become burdensome. They were also directed to be careful to prevent the infection spreading for the future by a timely guard of all “that are or hereafter may happen to be visited.”
“During the plague time,” says an eye-witness, “nobody put on black or formal mourning, yet London was all in tears. The shrieks of women and children at the doors and windows of their houses where their dearest relations were dying, or perhaps dead, were enough to pierce the stoutest hearts. At the west end of the town it was a surprising thing to see those streets which were usually thronged now grown desolate; so that I have sometimes gone the length of a whole street (I mean bye streets), and have seen nobody to direct me but watchmen[628] sitting at the doors of such houses as were shut up; and one day I particularly observed that even in Holborn the people walked in the middle of the street, and not at the sides—not to mingle, as I supposed, with anybody that came out of infected houses, or meet with smells and scents from them.”
Dr. Hodges, a great physician, who shunned no danger, describes even more vividly the horrors of that period. “In the streets,” he says, “might be seen persons seized with the sickness, staggering like drunken men; here lay some dozing and almost dead; there others were met fatigued with excessive vomiting, as if they had drunk poison; in the midst of the market, persons in full health fell suddenly down as if the contagion was there exposed to sale. It was not uncommon to see an inheritance pass to three heirs within the space of four days. The bearers were not sufficient to inter the dead.”[629]
It is supposed that till the Leper Hospital was suppressed, the St. Giles’s people used the oratory there as their parish church. Leland does not mention any other church, although he lived and wrote about the time of the suppression, and even made an effort to save the monastic MSS. by proposing to have them placed in the king’s library. The oratory had probably a screen walling off the lepers from the rest of the congregation. It boasted several chantry chapels, and a high altar at the east end, dedicated to St. Giles, before which burnt a great taper called “St. Giles’s light,” and towards which, about A.D. 1200, one William Christemas bequeathed an annual sum of twelvepence. There was also a Chapel of St. Michael, appropriated to the infirm, and which had its own special priest.