The Great Plague. The Story of London\'s Most Deadly Year

84 • Confusion

One would have had to be blind and deaf not to be pulled in contrary di-
rections as the debate over flight raged in print and voice.^15 Single-sheet

broadsides appeared like magic that June, with the sad title, “Lord Have
Mercy Upon Us,” repeating the words placed on the door of every shut-up
household to signal it was infected with the plague. The borders of these
tracts were peppered with hourglasses, pick and shovel, and skull and cross-

bones. To drive home the point that no one could escape God’s judgment,
even through flight, there was almost always an Avenging Angel holding a
poisoned arrow. Crammed into the corners were hackneyed verses pillorying
hard-hearted citizens for not giving generously to plague relief. The most ar-

resting feature of these sheets was their lists of burial totals from previous
great plagues in London, capped by a column of figures for 1665 , week by
week, down to the time of printing. Surviving broadsheets often have sub-

sequent weeks’ totals penned in by the people who bought them.^16
Beyond these scary images lay moral concerns. “If we go away,” one tract
asks with disarming rhetoric, “what’s that to you?” The response is swift and
unyielding:

What sottish question is’t this Carter asks?

When Doctors leave their patients, Priests their tasks,

Is’t nothing to the Sheep [that] their shepherds leave them?

Is’t nothing to the sick, if Doctors deceive them?^17

Practical issues compounded these ethical dilemmas.The Run-Awayes Re-
turnmade people think twice of taking to their heels:

What fury dogs and hunts you up and down,

First from the City and then the Country Town?

But when you’r there, you are afraid to stay,

And a nimble pace do Run away...

For suppos’d Safety, yet you are much worse,

Having both Plague of Body and of Purse.

A well-known woodcut from earlier plague traumas portrayed the tension
between city anguish and country inhospitality with stunning images: coun-
try officials attach ropes to the feet of deceased Londoners and drag the

bodies to an open pit; in contrast, a city funeral cortege moves in quiet grief
to a neatly tended churchyard where a single marked grave awaits. Up in Ox-
ford, an avid collector of news, Anthony Wood, paused over a newly printed
London tract with the eye-catching title,Iter Boreale, the Country Clown,

which excoriated rural “barbarity” toward fleers. At nighttime, Wood saw the