Fleeing or Staying? • 89Refugees and Rescuers
Question: How are men to fly into the country?
Answer: No one should depart his house except to an house of such distance as
that he may conveniently travel thither without lying by the way.
—Kephale,Medela Pestilentiae“All Doors and Passages are thronged for escape,” Dr. Hodges exclaimed.^25
Three thousand watermen turned London into a Venice of the North, as
venturesome persons took up residence on boats anchored in the Thames
River and pressed every available boatman into service for their ongoing
needs. The noise and dust from horses’ hooves on the city’s narrow, crooked
streets evoked memories of Civil War battles, as Londoners fled by the tens
of thousands during the last week of June and the first week in July.
Horse-drawn coaches jockeyed for room with wagons piled high with
baggage. Squeezing in between were laborers on foot, taking their chance of
bedding down by a country hedge. As traffic converged at the city gates, the
severity of the bottlenecks was beyond anything in memory. London Bridge
was a madhouse. Out in Westminster, carters transported mattresses, furni-
ture, and clothes to the country and turned around to do it again. Peers and
gentry accustomed to smooth rides in their elegant carriages found the broad
suburban passages clogged beyond belief. The exodus would continue right
through summer, reaching 200 , 000 if Graunt’s estimates from past plagues
(repeated in two new editions of his Observations on the Bills of Mortality)
held for this epidemic.^26
This mass migration, the largest London had ever experienced, affected
every class, trade, and occupation in the city and suburbs. After his own
flight from Westminster, Dr. Sydenham claimed that “at least two-thirds of
the inhabitants had retired to the country to avoid infection.” The wealthy
area around Whitehall, which sustained a population of twenty-five thou-
sand or more through employment and service associated with the royal
court,^27 was emptied out. Almost all of its noble and gentry families fled, fol-
lowed by most of the professional lawyers, notaries, merchants, and other
middling residents who catered to their needs. Covent Garden parish was
“very empty,” Reverend Patrick recalled later on, “all the gentry and better
sort of tradesmen being gone.”^28 The other center of metropolitan wealth,
within the walls, experienced a considerable exodus of the merchant and pro-