The plague came early to London; the first recorded instance is from the seventh century. Between the years 1563 and 1603 there were five severe attacks, in the latter year killing some 30,000 Londoners when “Feare and Trembling (the two Catch-polles of Death) arrest every one … no voyce heard but Tue Tue, Kill, Kill” and Watling Street was “like an empty Cloyster.” No one was ever safe. No one was ever entirely well in a city “full of pits and sloughs, very perilous and noyous,” dirty and filled with “corrupt savours.” London itself had become a sink of disease. Yet nothing in its history could have prepared its citizens for the events which unfolded between the fated and fateful years of 1664 and 1666.
There had been intimations of catastrophe. In 1658 Walter Costello wrote that “if fire make not ashes of the city, and thy bones also, conclude me a liar for ever. Oh London! London!” In the following year a Quaker tract entitled A Vision concerning London contained the prophecy that “And as for the city herself, and her suburbs, and all that belonged to her, a fire was kindled therein; but she knew not how, even in all her goodly places, and the kindling of it was in the foundation of all her buildings and there was none could quench it.” In his Monarchy Or No Monarchy, published in 1651, the London astrologer William Lilly inserted an hieroglyphical plate “representing on one side persons in winding streets digging graves; and on the other a large city in flames.” Wenceslaus Hollar had noticed the vigour and energy of the citizens in 1647 but, on his return in 1652, “he found the countenances of the people all changed, melancholy, spight full, as if bewitched.” Mother Shipton predicted a general conflagration, and a Quaker walked naked through Bartholomew Fair with a pan of fire and brimstone on his head as a prophecy. A man in a narrow passage by Bishopsgate convinced all those around him that a ghost there was making “signs to the houses, and to the ground” suggesting plainly that “abundance of people should come to be buried in that churchyard.”
There is an area adjacent to Goswell Road known as Mount Mills. It is now an open space, used as a car park. It is unusual in this part of London to find what is essentially a patch of waste ground. The answer lies in its history. Here, according to Daniel Defoe in A Journal of the Plague Year, on “a piece of ground beyond Goswell Street, near Mount Mill … abundance were buried promiscuously from the parishes of Aldersgate, Clerkenwell, and even out of the city.” It was a plague pit, in other words, where, during the Great Plague of 1664 and 1665, thousands were taken in “dead carts” and dumped in the loose soil.
It was comparable to the burial pit in Houndsditch, about forty feet in length, sixteen feet broad and twenty feet in depth, containing more than a thousand corpses. Some of the bodies “were wrapt up in linen sheets, some in rags, some little other than naked, or so loose that what covering they had fell from them in the shooting out of the cart.” It was reported that the living, out of despair, sometimes flung themselves among the dead. The Pye tavern was very close to the Houndsditch pit itself and when, at night, the drunken heard the rumble of the dead cart and the noise of the iron bell they came to the window and jeered at anyone who mourned for the newly dead. They also uttered “blasphemous expressions” such as There is no God or God is a devil. There was one driver who “When he had any children in his dead cart could cry ‘Faggots, faggots, five for sixpence’ and take up a child by the leg.”
The area of Mount Mills is waste ground still.
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These reports are all taken from Defoe’s chronicle. He was only six years old at the time of the visitation, and much of his evidence is anecdotal, but there are also contemporary accounts which furnish additional material for contemplation. Any observer willing to enter the city during the plague would first have noticed the silence; there was no traffic except for the dead carts, and all the shops and markets were closed. Those who had not fled had locked themselves within their houses, and the river was deserted. Any citizens who did venture upon the streets walked in the middle, down the kennel, away from the buildings; they also avoided chance meetings. It was so quiet that the rush of the water beneath the bridge could distinctly be heard throughout the old City. Great bonfires were placed at intersections and in the middle of main thoroughfares, so that the streets were filled with smoke as well as the miasma of the dead and dying. The life of London seemed to be over.
