By DANIEL DE FOE.
+Source.+--Bohn Edition, pp. 14-16, 44-48.
The city itself began now to be visited too, I mean within the walls;
but the number of people there were indeed extremely lessened, by so
great a multitude having been gone into the country; and even all this
month of July, they continued to flee, though not in such multitudes as
formerly. In August, indeed, they fled in such a manner, that I began to
think there would be really none but magistrates and servants left in
the city.
As they fled now out of the city, so I should observe, that the court
removed early, viz., in the month of June, and went to Oxford, where it
pleased God to preserve them; and the distemper did not, as I heard of,
as much as touch them; for which I cannot say that I ever saw they
showed any great token of thankfulness, and hardly anything of
reformation, though they did not want being told that their crying vices
might, without breach of charity, be said to have gone far in bringing
that terrible judgment upon the whole nation.
The face of London was now indeed strangely altered, I mean the whole
mass of buildings, city, liberties, suburbs, Westminster, Southwark, and
altogether; for, as to the particular part called the city, or within
the walls, that was not yet much infected; but in the whole, the face of
things, I say, was much altered; sorrow and sadness sat upon every face,
and though some parts were not yet overwhelmed, yet all looked deeply
concerned; and as we saw it apparently coming on, so every one looked on
himself, and his family, as in the utmost danger: were it possible to
represent those times exactly, to those that did not see them, and give
the reader due ideas of the horror that everywhere presented itself, it
must make just impressions upon their minds, and fill them with
surprise. London might well be said to be all in tears; the mourners did
not go about the streets indeed, for nobody put on black, or made a
formal dress of mourning for their nearest friends; but the voice of
mourning was truly heard in the streets; the shrieks of women and
children at the windows and doors of their houses, where their nearest
relations were, perhaps dying, or just dead, were so frequent to be
heard, as we passed the streets, that it was enough to pierce the
stoutest heart in the world to hear them. Tears and lamentations were
seen almost in every house, especially in the first part of the
visitation; for towards the latter end, men's hearts were hardened, and
death was so always before their eyes, that they did not so much concern
themselves for the loss of their friends, expecting that themselves
should be summoned the next hour.
Business led me out sometimes to the other end of the town, even when
the sickness was chiefly there; and as the thing was new to me, as well
as to everybody else, it was a most surprising thing to see those
streets, which were usually so thronged, now grown desolate, and so few
people to be seen in them, that if I had been a stranger, and at a loss
for my way, I might sometimes have gone the length of a whole street, I
mean of the by-streets, and see nobody to direct me, except watchmen set
at the doors of such houses as were shut up; of which I shall speak
presently.
One day, being at that part of the town, on some special business,
curiosity led me to observe things more than usually; and indeed I
walked a great way where I had no business; I went up Holborn, and there
the street was full of people; but they walked in the middle of the
great street, neither on one side or other, because, as I suppose, they
would not mingle with anybody that came out of houses, or meet with
smells and scents from houses that might be infected.
The inns of court were all shut up, nor were very many of the lawyers in
the Temple, or Lincoln's-inn, or Gray's-inn, to be seen there. Everybody
was at peace, there was no occasion for lawyers; besides, it being in
the time of the vacation too, they were generally gone into the country.
Whole rows of houses in some places were shut close up, the inhabitants
all fled, and only a watchman or two left.
When I speak of rows of houses being shut up, I do not mean shut up by
the magistrates; but that great numbers of persons followed the court,
by the necessity of their employments, and other dependencies; and as
others retired, really frighted with the distemper, it was a mere
desolating of some of the streets: but the fright was not yet near so
great in the city, abstractedly so called; and particularly because,
though they were at first in a most inexpressible consternation, yet, as
I have observed, that the distemper intermitted often at first, so they
were as it were alarmed, and unalarmed again, and this several times,
till it began to be familiar to them; and that even when it appeared
violent, yet seeing it did not presently spread into the city, or the
east or south parts, the people began to take courage, and to be, as I
may say, a little hardened. It is true, a vast many people fled, as I
have observed, yet they were chiefly from the west end of the town, and
from that we call the heart of the city, that is to say, among the
wealthiest of the people; and such persons as were unincumbered with
trades and business. But of the rest, the generality stayed, and seemed
to abide the worst; so that in the place we call the liberties, and in
the suburbs, in Southwark, and in the east part, such as Wapping,
Ratcliff, Stepney, Rotherhithe, and the like, the people generally
stayed, except here and there a few wealthy families, who, as above, did
not depend upon their business.
It must not be forgot here, that the city and suburbs were prodigiously
full of people at the time of this visitation, I mean at the time that
it began; for though I have lived to see a farther increase, and mighty
throngs of people settling in London, more than ever; yet we had always
a notion that numbers of people, which, the wars being over, the armies
disbanded, and the royal family and the monarchy being restored, had
flocked to London to settle in business, or to depend upon, and attend
the court for rewards of services, preferments, and the like, was such
that the town was computed to have in it above a hundred thousand people
more than ever it held before; nay, some took upon them to say, it had
twice as many, because all the ruined families of the royal party
flocked hither; all the soldiers set up trades here and abundance of
families settled here; again, the court brought with it a great flux of
pride and new fashions; all people were gay and luxurious, and the joy
of the restoration had brought a vast many families to London.
I went all the first part of the time freely about the streets, though
not so freely as to run myself into apparent danger, except when they
dug the great pit in the churchyard of our parish of Aldgate. A terrible
pit it was, and I could not resist my curiosity to go and see it; as
near as I may judge, it was about forty feet in length, and about
fifteen or sixteen feet broad; and, at the time I first looked at it,
about nine feet deep; but it was said, they dug it near twenty feet deep
afterwards, in one part of it, till they could go no deeper for the
water; for they had, it seems, dug several large pits before this; for,
though the plague was long a coming to our parish, yet, when it did
come, there was no parish in or about London where it raged with such
violence as in the two parishes of Aldgate and Whitechapel.
I say they had dug several pits in another ground when the distemper
began to spread in our parish, and especially when the dead-carts began
to go about, which was not in our parish till the beginning of August.
Into these pits they had put perhaps fifty or sixty bodies each, then
they made larger holes, wherein they buried all that the cart brought in
a week, which, by the middle to the end of August, came to from two
hundred to four hundred a week; and they could not well dig them larger,
because of the order of the magistrates, confining them to leave no
bodies within six feet of the surface; and the water coming on at about
seventeen or eighteen feet, they could not well, I say, put more in one
pit; but now, at the beginning of September, the plague raging in a
dreadful manner, and the number of burials in our parish increasing to
more than was ever buried in any parish about London, of no larger
extent, they ordered this dreadful gulf to be dug, for such it was
rather than a pit.
They had supposed this pit would have supplied them for a month or more,
when they dug it, and some blamed the churchwardens for suffering such a
frightful thing, telling them they were making preparations to bury the
whole parish, and the like; but time made it appear the churchwardens
knew the condition of the parish better than they did; for the pit being
finished the 4th of September, I think they began to bury in it the 6th,
and by the 20th, which was just two weeks, they had thrown into it 1,114
bodies, when they were obliged to fill it up, the bodies being then come
to lie within six feet of the surface. I doubt not but there may be some
ancient persons alive in the parish, who can justify the fact of this,
and are able to show even in what place of the churchyard the pit lay
better than I can; the mark of it also was many years to be seen in the
churchyard on the surface, lying in length, parallel with the passage
which goes by the west wall of the churchyard, out of Houndsditch, and
turns east again, into Whitechapel, coming out near the Three-Nuns inn.
It was about the 10th of September, that my curiosity led, or rather
drove me to go and see this pit again, when there had been near four
hundred people buried in it; and I was not content to see it in the day
time, as I had done before, for then there would have been nothing to
have been seen but the loose earth; for all the bodies that were thrown
in were immediately covered with earth, by those they called the
buriers, which at other times were called bearers; but I resolved to go
in the night, and see some of them thrown in.
There was a strict order to prevent people coming to those pits, and
that was only to prevent infection; but, after some time, that order was
more necessary, for people that were infected, and near their end, and
delirious also, would run to those pits wrapt in blankets, or rugs, and
throw themselves in, and, as they said, bury themselves. I cannot say
that the officers suffered any willingly to lie there; but I have heard,
that in a great pit in Finsbury, in the parish of Cripplegate, it lying
open then to the fields, for it was not then walled about, many came and
threw themselves in, and expired there, before they threw any earth upon
them; and that when they came to bury others, and found them there, they
were quite dead, though not cold.
This may serve a little to describe the dreadful condition of that day,
though it is impossible to say anything that is able to give a true idea
of it to those who did not see it, other than this; that it was indeed,
very, very, very dreadful, and such as no tongue can express.
I got admittance into the churchyard by being acquainted with the sexton
who attended, who, though he did not refuse me at all, yet earnestly
persuaded me not to go: telling me very seriously, for he was a good
religious and sensible man, that it was, indeed, their business and duty
to venture, and to run all hazards, and that in it they might hope to be
preserved; but that I had no apparent call to it but my own curiosity,
which, he said, he believed I would not pretend, was sufficient to
justify my running that hazard. I told him I had been pressed in my mind
to go, and that, perhaps, it might be an instructing sight, that might
not be without its uses. Nay, says the good man, if you will venture
upon that score, Name of God, go in; for, depend upon it, it will be a
sermon to you, it may be, the best that ever you heard in your life. It
is a speaking sight, says he, and has a voice with it, and a loud one,
to call us all to repentance; and with that he opened the door, and
said, Go, if you will.
His discourse had shocked my resolution a little, and I stood wavering
for a good while, but, just at that interval, I saw two links come over
from the end of the Minories, and heard the bellman, and then appeared a
dead-cart, as they called it, coming over the streets; so I could no
longer resist my desire of seeing it, and went in. There was nobody as I
could perceive at first, in the churchyard, or going into it, but the
buriers, and the fellow that drove the cart, or rather led the horse and
cart, but when they came up to the pit, they saw a man go to and again,
muffled up in a brown cloak, and making motions with his hands, under
his cloak, as if he was in great agony; and the buriers immediately
gathered about him, supposing he was one of those poor delirious, or
desperate creatures, that used to pretend, as I have said, to bury
themselves; he said nothing as he walked about, but two or three times
groaned very deeply, and loud, and sighed as he would break his heart.
When the buriers came up to him, they soon found he was neither a person
infected and desperate, as I have observed above, or a person
distempered in mind, but one oppressed with a dreadful weight of grief
indeed, having his wife and several of his children, all in the cart,
that was just come in with him, and he followed in an agony and excess
of sorrow. He mourned heartily, as it was easy to see, but with a kind
of masculine grief, that could not give itself vent by tears; and,
calmly desiring the buriers to let him alone, said he would only see the
bodies thrown in, and go away, so they left importuning him; but no
sooner was the cart turned round, and the bodies shot into the pit,
promiscuously, which was a surprise to him, for he at least expected
they would have been decently laid in, though indeed, he was afterwards
convinced that was impracticable; I say, no sooner did he see the sight,
but he cried out aloud, unable to contain himself. I could not hear what
he said, but he went backwards two or three steps, and fell down in a
swoon; the buriers ran to him and took him up, and in a little while he
came to himself, and they led him away. He looked into the pit again, as
he went away, but the buriers had covered the bodies so immediately with
throwing in earth, that nothing could be seen.
This was a mournful scene indeed, and affected me almost as much as the
rest; but the other was awful, and full of terror; the cart had in it
sixteen or seventeen bodies, some were wrapt up in linen sheets, some in
rugs, some little other than naked, or so loose, that what covering they
had fell from them, in the shooting out of the cart, and they fell quite
naked among the rest; but the matter was not much to them, or the
indecency much to anyone else, seeing they were all dead, and were to be
huddled together into the common grave of mankind, as we may call it,
for here was no difference made, but poor and rich went together; there
was no other way of burials, neither was it possible there should be,
for coffins were not to be had for the prodigious numbers that fell in
such a calamity as this.
It was reported, by way of scandal upon the buriers, that if any corpse
was delivered to them, decently wound up, as we called it then, in a
winding sheet tied over the head and feet, which some did, and which was
generally of good linen; I say, it was reported, that the buriers were
so wicked as to strip them in the cart, and carry them quite naked to
the ground: but, as I cannot credit anything so vile among Christians,
and at a time so filled with terrors, as that was, I can only relate it,
and leave it undetermined.