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

118 • Confusion

Parish Responses

The prayers of the church are continued and ye persons attending as yor worship

was informed... Great complaint there is of necessity [among the poor].

—Stephen Bing,petty canon of Saint Paul’s cathedral,

to Dean Sancroft, July 27 , 1665

From the outside, these neighborhood churches appeared idle between serv-
ices. But often someone was busily engaged inside. The governing body of
priest and vestry had met several times in May and June to set up relief and

burial procedures and to establish the weekly wages for searchers, nurses,
warders, and buriers. After that, the vestry rarely met as a body; it was too
risky to come together, and the churchwardens would know how to carry on.
They had the parish account books and cash and the authority to improvise

if the needs outgrew the means.
Bells had to be repaired and broken ropes replaced from the constant ring-
ing for deaths and burials. Sheds were needed in every churchyard to house
the buriers and searchers away from the public. The parish clerk attended

burials and kept a running account in the register of all deaths, occasional
christenings, and even less frequent weddings. The collection of poor taxes
by “collectors of the poor” and their disbursement by the overseers of the
poor at the command of the churchwardens were crucial lifelines. Gifts from

inside and out of the parish provided further aid. Most of the money, in one
way or another, was linked inexorably to dying.^10
In July the contours of death emerged all too clearly in the Bills of Mor-
tality posted each Thursday morning in parishes and many public places.

The most widely infected parishes were now the densely populated Saint
Giles in the Fields, Saint Giles Cripplegate, and Saint Margaret Westmin-
ster (table 4 ).^11 During a normal, nonplague year, the clerk at Saint Marga-
ret’s recorded 10 to 20 burials a week. In 1665 the toll climbed from 14 the

first week of the outbreak to 411 by late summer. By the year’s end the official
total would be 4 , 710. Many more residents died without being registered, and
another 78 succumbed to plague the next year. Hearth tax accounts identify
3 , 061 heads of household in Saint Margaret’s. At the plague’s peak, the poor

tax and other means would pay for the care, feeding, and/or burial of up to
1 , 700 persons in a single week.^12
In Saint Margaret’s churchwardens’ account book for 1665 ,^13 every item of
expense was tabulated, down to the candles that lit the night for the grave-