A Journal of the Plague Year

D >> Daniel Defoe >> A Journal of the Plague Year


I scarce need tell the reader that from that moment I resolved that I
would stay in the town, and casting myself entirely upon the goodness
and protection of the Almighty, would not seek any other shelter
whatever; and that, as my times were in His hands, He was as able to
keep me in a time of the infection as in a time of health; and if He did
not think fit to deliver me, still I was in His hands, and it was meet
He should do with me as should seem good to Him.

With this resolution I went to bed; and I was further confirmed in it
the next day by the woman being taken ill with whom I had intended to
entrust my house and all my affairs. But I had a further obligation laid
on me on the same side, for the next day I found myself very much out
of order also, so that if I would have gone away, I could not, and I
continued ill three or four days, and this entirely determined my stay;
so I took my leave of my brother, who went away to Dorking, in
Surrey, and afterwards fetched a round farther into Buckinghamshire or
Bedfordshire, to a retreat he had found out there for his family.

It was a very ill time to be sick in, for if any one complained, it was
immediately said he had the plague; and though I had indeed no symptom
of that distemper, yet being very ill, both in my head and in my
stomach, I was not without apprehension that I really was infected;
but in about three days I grew better; the third night I rested well,
sweated a little, and was much refreshed. The apprehensions of its being
the infection went also quite away with my illness, and I went about my
business as usual.

These things, however, put off all my thoughts of going into the
country; and my brother also being gone, I had no more debate either
with him or with myself on that subject.

It was now mid-July, and the plague, which had chiefly raged at the
other end of the town, and, as I said before, in the parishes of St
Giles, St Andrew's, Holborn, and towards Westminster, began to now come
eastward towards the part where I lived. It was to be observed, indeed,
that it did not come straight on towards us; for the city, that is to
say, within the walls, was indifferently healthy still; nor was it got
then very much over the water into Southwark; for though there died that
week 1268 of all distempers, whereof it might be supposed above 600 died
of the plague, yet there was but twenty-eight in the whole city, within
the walls, and but nineteen in Southwark, Lambeth parish included;
whereas in the parishes of St Giles and St Martin-in-the-Fields alone
there died 421.

But we perceived the infection kept chiefly in the out-parishes, which
being very populous, and fuller also of poor, the distemper found
more to prey upon than in the city, as I shall observe afterwards. We
perceived, I say, the distemper to draw our way, viz., by the parishes
of Clarkenwell, Cripplegate, Shoreditch, and Bishopsgate; which last two
parishes joining to Aldgate, Whitechappel, and Stepney, the infection
came at length to spread its utmost rage and violence in those parts,
even when it abated at the western parishes where it began.

It was very strange to observe that in this particular week, from the
4th to the 11th of July, when, as I have observed, there died near
400 of the plague in the two parishes of St Martin and St
Giles-in-the-Fields only, there died in the parish of Aldgate but four,
in the parish of Whitechappel three, in the parish of Stepney but one.

Likewise in the next week, from the 11th of July to the 18th, when the
week's bill was 1761, yet there died no more of the plague, on the whole
Southwark side of the water, than sixteen. But this face of things soon
changed, and it began to thicken in Cripplegate parish especially, and
in Clarkenwell; so that by the second week in August, Cripplegate parish
alone buried 886, and Clarkenwell 155. Of the first, 850 might well be
reckoned to die of the plague; and of the last, the bill itself said 145
were of the plague.

During the month of July, and while, as I have observed, our part of
the town seemed to be spared in comparison of the west part, I went
ordinarily about the streets, as my business required, and particularly
went generally once in a day, or in two days, into the city, to my
brother's house, which he had given me charge of, and to see if it was
safe; and having the key in my pocket, I used to go into the house,
and over most of the rooms, to see that all was well; for though it be
something wonderful to tell, that any should have hearts so hardened in
the midst of such a calamity as to rob and steal, yet certain it is that
all sorts of villainies, and even levities and debaucheries, were
then practised in the town as openly as ever--I will not say quite as
frequently, because the numbers of people were many ways lessened.

But 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, so 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 judgement 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 mourners was
truly heard in the streets. The shrieks of women and children at the
windows and doors of their houses, where their dearest 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 seen 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 scent 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 dependences; 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, abstractly 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 and 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 people as were unencumbered with
trades and business. But of the rest, the generality stayed, and seemed
to abide the worst; so that in the place we calf 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 further increase, and mighty
throngs of people settling in London more than ever, yet we had always a
notion that the 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 old soldiers set up trades here, and abundance
of families settled here. Again, the Court brought with them a
great flux of pride, and new fashions. All people were grown gay and
luxurious, and the joy of the Restoration had brought a vast many
families to London.

I often thought that as Jerusalem was besieged by the Romans when the
Jews were assembled together to celebrate the Passover--by which means
an incredible number of people were surprised there who would otherwise
have been in other countries--so the plague entered London when
an incredible increase of people had happened occasionally, by the
particular circumstances above-named. As this conflux of the people to
a youthful and gay Court made a great trade in the city, especially
in everything that belonged to fashion and finery, so it drew by
consequence a great number of workmen, manufacturers, and the like,
being mostly poor people who depended upon their labour. And I remember
in particular that in a representation to my Lord Mayor of the condition
of the poor, it was estimated that there were no less than an hundred
thousand riband-weavers in and about the city, the chiefest number of
whom lived then in the parishes of Shoreditch, Stepney, Whitechappel,
and Bishopsgate, that, namely, about Spitalfields; that is to say, as
Spitalfields was then, for it was not so large as now by one fifth part.

By this, however, the number of people in the whole may be judged of;
and, indeed, I often wondered that, after the prodigious numbers of
people that went away at first, there was yet so great a multitude left
as it appeared there was.

But I must go back again to the beginning of this surprising time. While
the fears of the people were young, they were increased strangely by
several odd accidents which, put altogether, it was really a wonder
the whole body of the people did not rise as one man and abandon their
dwellings, leaving the place as a space of ground designed by Heaven for
an Akeldama, doomed to be destroyed from the face of the earth, and that
all that would be found in it would perish with it. I shall name but a
few of these things; but sure they were so many, and so many wizards and
cunning people propagating them, that I have often wondered there was
any (women especially) left behind.

In the first place, a blazing star or comet appeared for several months
before the plague, as there did the year after another, a little before
the fire. The old women and the phlegmatic hypochondriac part of the
other sex, whom I could almost call old women too, remarked (especially
afterward, though not till both those judgements were over) that those
two comets passed directly over the city, and that so very near the
houses that it was plain they imported something peculiar to the city
alone; that the comet before the pestilence was of a faint, dull,
languid colour, and its motion very heavy, Solemn, and slow; but that
the comet before the fire was bright and sparkling, or, as others said,
flaming, and its motion swift and furious; and that, accordingly, one
foretold a heavy judgement, slow but severe, terrible and frightful,
as was the plague; but the other foretold a stroke, sudden, swift, and
fiery as the conflagration. Nay, so particular some people were, that as
they looked upon that comet preceding the fire, they fancied that they
not only saw it pass swiftly and fiercely, and could perceive the motion
with their eye, but even they heard it; that it made a rushing,
mighty noise, fierce and terrible, though at a distance, and but just
perceivable.

I saw both these stars, and, I must confess, had so much of the common
notion of such things in my head, that I was apt to look upon them as
the forerunners and warnings of God's judgements; and especially when,
after the plague had followed the first, I yet saw another of the like
kind, I could not but say God had not yet sufficiently scourged the
city.

But I could not at the same time carry these things to the height
that others did, knowing, too, that natural causes are assigned by
the astronomers for such things, and that their motions and even their
revolutions are calculated, or pretended to be calculated, so that they
cannot be so perfectly called the forerunners or foretellers, much less
the procurers, of such events as pestilence, war, fire, and the like.

But let my thoughts and the thoughts of the philosophers be, or have
been, what they will, these things had a more than ordinary influence
upon the minds of the common people, and they had almost universal
melancholy apprehensions of some dreadful calamity and judgement coming
upon the city; and this principally from the sight of this comet, and
the little alarm that was given in December by two people dying at St
Giles's, as above.

The apprehensions of the people were likewise strangely increased by the
error of the times; in which, I think, the people, from what principle
I cannot imagine, were more addicted to prophecies and astrological
conjurations, dreams, and old wives' tales than ever they were before or
since. Whether this unhappy temper was originally raised by the
follies of some people who got money by it--that is to say, by printing
predictions and prognostications--I know not; but certain it is, books
frighted them terribly, such as Lilly's Almanack, Gadbury's Astrological
Predictions, Poor Robin's Almanack, and the like; also several pretended
religious books, one entitled, Come out of her, my People, lest you
be Partaker of her Plagues; another called, Fair Warning; another,
Britain's Remembrancer; and many such, all, or most part of which,
foretold, directly or covertly, the ruin of the city. Nay, some were
so enthusiastically bold as to run about the streets with their oral
predictions, pretending they were sent to preach to the city; and one in
particular, who, like Jonah to Nineveh, cried in the streets, 'Yet forty
days, and London shall be destroyed.' I will not be positive whether he
said yet forty days or yet a few days. Another ran about naked, except
a pair of drawers about his waist, crying day and night, like a man that
Josephus mentions, who cried, 'Woe to Jerusalem!' a little before the
destruction of that city. So this poor naked creature cried, 'Oh, the
great and the dreadful God!' and said no more, but repeated those words
continually, with a voice and countenance full of horror, a swift pace;
and nobody could ever find him to stop or rest, or take any sustenance,
at least that ever I could hear of. I met this poor creature several
times in the streets, and would have spoken to him, but he would not
enter into speech with me or any one else, but held on his dismal cries
continually.

These things terrified the people to the last degree, and especially
when two or three times, as I have mentioned already, they found one or
two in the bills dead of the plague at St Giles's.

Next to these public things were the dreams of old women, or, I should
say, the interpretation of old women upon other people's dreams; and
these put abundance of people even out of their wits. Some heard voices
warning them to be gone, for that there would be such a plague in
London, so that the living would not be able to bury the dead. Others
saw apparitions in the air; and I must be allowed to say of both, I hope
without breach of charity, that they heard voices that never spake, and
saw sights that never appeared; but the imagination of the people was
really turned wayward and possessed. And no wonder, if they who were
poring continually at the clouds saw shapes and figures, representations
and appearances, which had nothing in them but air, and vapour. Here
they told us they saw a flaming sword held in a hand coming out of
a cloud, with a point hanging directly over the city; there they saw
hearses and coffins in the air carrying to be buried; and there
again, heaps of dead bodies lying unburied, and the like, just as the
imagination of the poor terrified people furnished them with matter to
work upon. So hypochondriac fancies represent Ships, armies, battles in
the firmament; Till steady eyes the exhalations solve, And all to its
first matter, cloud, resolve.


I could fill this account with the strange relations such people gave
every day of what they had seen; and every one was so positive of their
having seen what they pretended to see, that there was no contradicting
them without breach of friendship, or being accounted rude and
unmannerly on the one hand, and profane and impenetrable on the other.
One time before the plague was begun (otherwise than as I have said in
St Giles's), I think it was in March, seeing a crowd of people in the
street, I joined with them to satisfy my curiosity, and found them all
staring up into the air to see what a woman told them appeared plain
to her, which was an angel clothed in white, with a fiery sword in his
hand, waving it or brandishing it over his head. She described every
part of the figure to the life, showed them the motion and the form,
and the poor people came into it so eagerly, and with so much readiness;
'Yes, I see it all plainly,' says one; 'there's the sword as plain as
can be.' Another saw the angel. One saw his very face, and cried out
what a glorious creature he was! One saw one thing, and one another.
I looked as earnestly as the rest, but perhaps not with so much
willingness to be imposed upon; and I said, indeed, that I could see
nothing but a white cloud, bright on one side by the shining of the sun
upon the other part. The woman endeavoured to show it me, but could not
make me confess that I saw it, which, indeed, if I had I must have
lied. But the woman, turning upon me, looked in my face, and fancied I
laughed, in which her imagination deceived her too, for I really did
not laugh, but was very seriously reflecting how the poor people were
terrified by the force of their own imagination. However, she turned
from me, called me profane fellow, and a scoffer; told me that it was a
time of God's anger, and dreadful judgements were approaching, and that
despisers such as I should wander and perish.

The people about her seemed disgusted as well as she; and I found there
was no persuading them that I did not laugh at them, and that I should
be rather mobbed by them than be able to undeceive them. So I left them;
and this appearance passed for as real as the blazing star itself.

Another encounter I had in the open day also; and this was in going
through a narrow passage from Petty France into Bishopsgate Churchyard,
by a row of alms-houses. There are two churchyards to Bishopsgate church
or parish; one we go over to pass from the place called Petty France
into Bishopsgate Street, coming out just by the church door; the other
is on the side of the narrow passage where the alms-houses are on the
left; and a dwarf-wall with a palisado on it on the right hand, and the
city wall on the other side more to the right.

In this narrow passage stands a man looking through between the
palisadoes into the burying-place, and as many people as the narrowness
of the passage would admit to stop, without hindering the passage of
others, and he was talking mightily eagerly to them, and pointing now
to one place, then to another, and affirming that he saw a ghost walking
upon such a gravestone there. He described the shape, the posture,
and the movement of it so exactly that it was the greatest matter of
amazement to him in the world that everybody did not see it as well
as he. On a sudden he would cry, 'There it is; now it comes this way.'
Then, 'Tis turned back'; till at length he persuaded the people into so
firm a belief of it, that one fancied he saw it, and another fancied he
saw it; and thus he came every day making a strange hubbub, considering
it was in so narrow a passage, till Bishopsgate clock struck eleven,
and then the ghost would seem to start, and, as if he were called away,
disappeared on a sudden.

I looked earnestly every way, and at the very moment that this man
directed, but could not see the least appearance of anything; but so
positive was this poor man, that he gave the people the vapours in
abundance, and sent them away trembling and frighted, till at length
few people that knew of it cared to go through that passage, and hardly
anybody by night on any account whatever.

This ghost, as the poor man affirmed, made signs to the houses, and
to the ground, and to the people, plainly intimating, or else they so
understanding it, that abundance of the people should come to be buried
in that churchyard, as indeed happened; but that he saw such aspects
I must acknowledge I never believed, nor could I see anything of it
myself, though I looked most earnestly to see it, if possible.

These things serve to show how far the people were really overcome with
delusions; and as they had a notion of the approach of a visitation, all
their predictions ran upon a most dreadful plague, which should lay the
whole city, and even the kingdom, waste, and should destroy almost all
the nation, both man and beast.

To this, as I said before, the astrologers added stories of the
conjunctions of planets in a malignant manner and with a mischievous
influence, one of which conjunctions was to happen, and did happen, in
October, and the other in November; and they filled the people's heads
with predictions on these signs of the heavens, intimating that those
conjunctions foretold drought, famine, and pestilence. In the two first
of them, however, they were entirely mistaken, for we had no droughty
season, but in the beginning of the year a hard frost, which lasted from
December almost to March, and after that moderate weather, rather warm
than hot, with refreshing winds, and, in short, very seasonable weather,
and also several very great rains.

Some endeavours were used to suppress the printing of such books as
terrified the people, and to frighten the dispersers of them, some of
whom were taken up; but nothing was done in it, as I am informed, the
Government being unwilling to exasperate the people, who were, as I may
say, all out of their wits already.