Plague’s Progress • 121the parish register. During the week of the twenty-ninth, Marie Gale, pre-
sumably of the same family, was sent to the pesthouse along with her neigh-
bor Nicholas Snow and his wife, followed by Margaret Gale. A porter was
paid three shillings ten pence for removing them.^16
A warder was promptly dispatched to Long Ditch to guard its infected
houses. People above the servant class who fell sick were permitted the dig-
nity of dying at home. The Gales did not qualify; they may have been board-
ers in a rooming house. The Snows were probably also on a low rung of the
social ladder. After surviving the infection, they became keepers of the pest-
house, at five shillings a week.
The parish printed a map to the pesthouse after the first acknowledged
victim, Mary Fennel, was interred on June 14 at the parish’s expense. But the
week before Mary’s death, Alice Fennel had also been buried (the cause not
stated in the parish register), leaving Katherine Fennel, who was taken to the
pesthouse with an allowance of two shillings for her expenses for the week.
Katherine’s home was in Bell Alley, today the site of beautiful Parliament
Square, but then a stifling cul-de-sac of decaying wooden houses.^17 Knights-
bridge was also burying plague victims, with thirteen falling in five days. Ex-
aminers went out in pairs to check on run-down houses suspected of being
infected; wealthy residents a few streets away did not want to think about the
nearby danger.
During the week of Mary Fennel’s death, June 13 – 20 , seven plague burials
were listed in the parish register. The next week, plague claimed twenty-six
of a total of thirty-eight fatalities—officially. The real death toll that week
must have been close to fifty or sixty. The infection had spread heavily
through Long Ditch, Bell Alley, Thieving Lane, and Knightsbridge. The
pesthouse already had a score of inmates—mostly women and their children.Facing page
Fig. 6 .A page from Saint Margaret Churchwarden Plague Accounts for 1665 , show-
ing expenditures for the weeks of July 17 and 24. This sheet lists pounds, shillings, and
pence given for persons at the Westminster pesthouse and many individuals and fam-
ilies shut up or otherwise in need; for drink and work of bricklayers, straw and a bed
at the pesthouse; to nurses, searchers, and a gravemaker; to the constable and clerk of
Knightsbridge “for the visited there,” the Westminster justices of the peace for a
plague order, and the dog killer for burying five hundred dogs.City of Westminster
Archives