Fleeing or Staying? • 83Dilemmas
Question: Is it lawful to depart from our own place and habitations in time of
plague?
Answer: Provided a man be not tyed by the relation of a Husband to a Wife, a
Father to his Children, a Master to his Family, a Governor and Overseer of
good Order in the place he lives in, and bee otherwise free, hee may Fly.
—Richard Kephale,Medela Pestilentiae(London, 1665 )Seeking to recapture that frantic moment of his early childhood, Daniel De-
foe opens his Journal of the Plague Yearwith two brothers arguing about
whether to flee or stay. “H.F.” is a city-dwelling saddler with an eerie likeness
to Daniel’s late uncle Henry Foe, whose saddler shop in 1665 lay on the road
out of Aldgate to the Essex countryside. H.F.’s argumentative brother is an
international merchant who has returned from Portugal with a healthy re-
spect for the hazards to life in the Mediterranean world. The fictional dia-
logue between the siblings remains the most believable recreation of how
middle-class tradespeople actually thought, felt, and acted in the panicky
days of June 1665.^12
The merchant’s travels make him suspicious of anything that resembles
the fatalism about plague he has witnessed in the Muslim world.^13 He has
only one word of advice to the saddler: “Save Thyself!” This merchant’s wife
and children are already safe in the country, and he is winding up his affairs
to join them. H.F. has his shop and his faith, however. He will stay with his
trade and his goods—“all I had in the world.” He misses one chance after
another to arrange for a person with fewer resources to guard his shop in his
absence and, finally, as he wavers, opens his Bible randomly at Psalm 91.
“Thou shall not be afraid of the terror by night, nor the arrow that flieth by
day,” he reads. “There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come
nigh to thy dwelling.” He decides to await his destiny. In real life one can im-
agine many Bible-reading Londoners putting on the same providentialist ar-
mor against the pestilential steams of that early summertime.
H.F.’s brother thought his reasoning utter nonsense; he was surely tempt-
ing God to let him die by risking plague so directly. In real life that was the
way many persons saw things. An Anglican bishop put fleeing Londoners’
consciences at ease with a simple question: “You say [plague] is God’s Visit-
ation? What evil is not? Because death will overtake us, shall we run and
meet him?”^14