It is now day. Let us look forth and try what consolation rises with the sun. Not
any. For before the jewel of the morning be fully set in silver, a hundred hungry
graves stand gaping and every one of them, as at a breakfast, hath swallowed down
ten or eleven lifeless carcasses. Before dinner in the same gulf are twice so many
more devoured. And before the sun takes his rest those numbers are doubled.
—Thomas Dekker,The Wonderful Year( 1603 )The Rising Toll
“The most extraordinary hot that I ever knew,” Samuel Pepys recorded in his
diary in mid-July. The intense heat seemed to be drawing the infection right
out of the ground, just as people said happened in a pestilential season.
“Plague grows hott,” Ralph Josselin penned in his journal two weeks later.
“Persons fall down in London streets.” In two short weeks the official plague
count had doubled, from 1 , 089 to 2 , 010. Plague victims were dying in all the
suburban parishes and almost half of the parishes within the walls. And with
the hot, dry weather came the specter of another disaster. Farmers were re-
porting an extremely meager hay crop, the lifeblood of healthy livestock.
Shortages of vegetables, fruit, dairy products, and meat loomed. Even if the
summer harvest were normal, what farmers would dare bring their vegeta-
bles and fruits and livestock into the infected capital? “The country feares all
trade with London,” Josselin observed. Fortunately, there was a break in the
weather. Showers cooled the city air, and in the countryside crops grew far
better than anyone expected. By early August Josselin wrote: “God good in
the season. Harvest comes in well. A great rain which the earth needed.”^1
The relief was short-lived. In London the heat and sickness began striking
Plague’s Progress
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