A Bill of Mortality for the Great Plague of London in 1665. The official returns record 68,596 cases of plague, but a reasonable estimate suggests this figure is 30,000 short. [3230 × 5499]
by LosMere
A Bill of Mortality for the Great Plague of London in 1665. The official returns record 68,596 cases of plague, but a reasonable estimate suggests this figure is 30,000 short. [3230 × 5499]
by LosMere
4 Comments
[Great Plague of London](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plague_of_London)
There was no duty to report a death to anyone in authority. Each parish appointed “searchers of the dead”, whose duty was to inspect a corpse and determine the cause of death.
Searchers would typically learn about a death from local churches. Those who did not report a death to their local church would not be included in the official records.
Searchers are not trained for the job. They faced considerable dangers and many died from the diseases the corpses carried.
Some take bribes to change the cause of death. No one wished to be known as having had a death by plague in their household. Especially when a quarantine of 40 days was introduced as the Plague spread.
During quarantine, any house where someone had died from plague would be locked up and no one allowed to enter or leave for 40 days. This frequently led to the deaths of the other inhabitants, by neglect if not from the plague.
A plague house was marked with a red cross on the door with the words “Lord have mercy upon us”, and a watchman stood guard outside.
> Now there is a dismal solitude in London-streets, every day looks with the face of a Sabbath day, observed with greater solemnity than it used to be in the City. Now shops are shut in, people rare and very few that walk about, in so much that the grass begins to spring up in some places, and a deep silence almost in every place, especially within the walls; no ratling Coaches, no prancing Horses, no calling in Customers, nor offering Wares; no London cries sounding in the ears; if any voice be heard, it is the groans of dying perions, breathing forth their last, and the funeral knells of them that are ready to be carried to their graves. Now shutting up of visited houses (there being so many) is at an end, and most of the well are mingled among the sick which other∣wise would have got no help.
> Now in some places where the people did generally stay; not one house in an hundred but is infected; and in many houses half the family is swept away; in some the whole, from the eldest to the youngest; few escape with the death of but one or two: never did so many husbands and wives die together; never did so many parents carry their children with them to the grave, and go together into the same house under earth; who had lived together in the same house upon it. Now the nights are too short to bury the dead, the whole day though at so great a length is hardly sufficient to light the dead that fall therein into their beds.
[God’s terrible voice in the city by Thomas Vincent.](https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A64990.0001.001?rgn=main;view=fulltext) Printed in the year 1667
What a fascinating document. Had to look up quite a few of the terms. And the description of London could read like a modern recounting of the city during Covid pandemic!
Blasted. Distracted. Frighted. Or Rising of the Lights. Which way would you choose to go?