The Great Plague of London, 1665

The Great Plague of London, 1665

Old Saint Paul’s: A Tale of the Plague and the Fire. From the holdings of Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library—Harvard College Library.

The Great Plague of London in 1665 was the last in a long series of plague epidemics that first began in London in June 1499. The Great Plague killed between 75,000 and 100,000 of London’s rapidly expanding population of about 460,000.

First suspected in late 1664, London’s plague began to spread in earnest eastwards in April 1665 from the destitute suburb of St. Giles through rat-infested alleys to the crowded and squalid parishes of Whitechapel and Stepney on its way to the walled City of London.

The Great Plague at Its Peak

By September 1665, the death rate had reached 8,000 per week. Helpless municipal authorities threw their earlier caution to the wind and abandoned quarantine measures. Houses containing the dead and dying were no longer locked. London’s mournful silence was broken by the noise of carts carrying the dead for burial in parish churches or communal plague pits such as Finsbury Field in Cripplegate and the open fields in Southwark.

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Well-off residents soon fled to the countryside, leaving the poor behind in impoverished and decrepit parishes. Tens of thousands of dogs and cats were killed to eliminate a feared source of contagion, and mounds of rotting garbage were burned. Purveyors of innumerable remedies proliferated, and physicians and surgeons lanced buboes and bled black spots in attempts to cure plague victims by releasing bad bodily humors.

Plague Orders, first issued by the Privy Council in 1578, were still effective in 1665. These edicts prohibited churches from keeping dead bodies on their premises during public assemblies or services, and carriers of the dead had to identify themselves and could not mix with the public.

Samuel Pepys and William Boghurst: Eyewitness Accounts

In his famous diary, Samuel Pepys, a naval administrator and Member of Parliament, conveyed the melancholy image of desperate people wandering the streets in search of relief from the ravages of the plague. His notes during 1665 often intimate the severity of London’s Great Plague epidemic. In July, he lamented “the sad news of the death of so many in the parish of the plague, forty last night, the bell always going . . . either for deaths or burials.” A month later, when London’s mortality rate rose sharply, Pepys noted that survivors “are fain to carry the dead to be buried by daylight, the nights not sufficing to do it in.”

In another eyewitness account, Loimographia (1665), William Boghurst, a general practitioner who accurately described the symptoms of plague and predicted its demise in 1666, attributed the plague’s causes to filth and squalor, inadequate disposal of sewage, and poor nutrition among London’s impoverished residents. He criticized the standard treatments of bleeding, purging, and fumigating houses and objected to quarantining infected households since this had “oft [been] enough tried and always found ineffectual.”

The Plague Subsides and the Government Reacts

By February 1666, the Great Plague had nearly run its course. It died out during the Great Fire that same year and never returned. Central parts of London were rebuilt with wider streets to relieve crowding and better sewage systems to improve sanitation. London’s Privy Council issued new Plague Orders in May 1666, which banned the burial of future plague victims in parish churches and small churchyards, enforced the use of quicklime at designated burial sites, and strictly prohibited opening graves less than one year after interment as a safeguard against the spread of infection.

The Great Plague in Fictional Literature

The Great Plague appears in fictional works, such as William Harrison Ainsworth’s Old Saint Paul’s (1847) and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), in which he describes London as “quite abandoned to despair.”

Selected Contagion Resources

This is a partial list of digitized materials available in Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics. For additional materials on the topic “The Great Plague of London, 1665,” click here or search the collection’s Catalog and Full Text databases.