DEFOE'S JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR PT 3

PART 3

In the third part of my twitterised abridgement, lockdown is imposed in London, mass graves are dug and the dreaded dead carts make their appearance.

The power of shutting people up in their own houses was a method first taken in 1603 & was granted by Act of Parliament, on which the Lord Mayor & aldermen of the city now founded the order they made on 1^st of July 1665 when there died nearly 1000 a week.

Shutting up houses was at first counted a very unchristian method & the poor people so confined made bitter lamentations. Setting a watchman there night and day to prevent their stirring out looked very hard & cruel & many people perished in these miserable confinements.

This put the people on all manner of stratagem in order to get out. It would fill a little volume to set down the arts used to deceive the watchmen to escape or break out from them, in which frequent scuffles & some mischief happened.

Violences were committed & injuries offered to the men set to watch the houses shut up; people broke out by force in many places. But it was a public good that justified the private mischief & there was no obtaining the least mitigation

In one place they blew up a watchman with gunpowder & burned the poor fellow dreadfully & while he made hideous cries & no one would come near to help the whole family got out at the windows a storey high, two that were left sick calling out for help.

But many families foreseeing the approach of the distemper laid up stores of provisions sufficient for their whole families & shut themselves up voluntarily & were neither seen nor heard of till the infection was quite ceased & then came abroad sound and well.

Among these several Dutch merchants were particularly remarkable for keeping their houses like little garrisons besieged & suffering none to go in or out or come near, particularly one on Throgmorton St whose house looked into Draper’s Garden.

In between being taken sick & the examiners coming the master of the house had leisure & liberty to remove his family, if he knew whither to go & many did so. The great disaster was that they so carried the disease to those so hospitable as to receive them

There were many ways of retreat. Some got tents and set them up in fields carrying beds or straw to lie on & provisions to eat & so lived as hermits in a cell as nobody would venture near them. Several tales were told of such some comical some tragical.

I went all the first part of the time freely about the streets, though not so freely as to run myself into danger, except when they dug the great pit in the churchyard of our parish at Aldgate. A terrible pit it was & I could not resist my curiosity to go and see it.

The mark of the pit was for many years to be seen 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 as far as the 3 Nuns’ Inn.

As near as I may judge it was about 40 feet in length & about 15 or 16 broad & about 9 feet deep. But they said they dug it near 20 feet deep afterwards till they could no deeper for the rising water. They had it seemed dug several smaller pits before this.

Into these pits they buried all that the dead-cart brought in a week which by the end of August came to from 200 to 400. With the water coming in at a depth of about 17 feet they could not well put more in one pit & so this dreadful gulf was dug, for such it was rather than a pit.

Some blamed the churchwardens for suffering such a frightful thing, asking were they preparing to bury the whole parish? But time made it appear that the churchwardens knew the condition of the parish & the plague better than they did.

The pit being finished they began to bury and by just 2 weeks they had thrown into it 1114 bodies, always by night, before they were obliged to fill it up, the bodies being then within 6 feet of the surface

My curiosity led, or rather drove, me to go back in the night & see some of them thrown in. It is impossible to give a true idea other than that it was very, very, very dreadful such as no tongue can express.

I got admittance to the churchyard by being acquainted with the sexton. ‘’Tis 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 & said ‘Go in, if you will.’

I saw 2 links [torch-bearers] come over from the end of the Minories & heard the bellman, & then appeared a dead-cart. So I went in. There was a man oppressed with a dreadful weight of grief indeed having his wife and several of his children all in the cart.

The buriers came up to him but calmly defying them to let him alone said he would quietly see the bodies thrown in and go away. But no sooner was the cart turned around and the bodies shot into the pit promiscuously but he cried aloud & fell down in a swoon.

The buriers ran up to him and took him up & in a little while he came to himself & they took him to the Pie Tavern over against the end of Houndsditch. He looked into the pit as he went away but the buriers had covered the bodies with earth so nothing could be seen.

This was a mournful scene indeed. The cart had in it 16 or 17 bodies some wrapped in linen sheets, some in rags, some little other than naked. But there was no other way of burials for coffins were not to be had for the prodigious numbers that fell.