128 • ConfusionAugust’s Bitter Harvest
Now in some places where the people did generally stay [on], not one house in a
hundred but is infected, and in many houses half the Family is swept away... The
nights are too short to bury the dead; the long summer dayes are spent from
morning into the twilight in conveying the vast number of dead bodies unto the
bed of their graves.
—Thomas Vincent,God ’s Terrible Voice in the City( 1667 )Late in July a Cambridge student went by house after house shut up in Lon-
don, “all over the city almost,” he reported back to his college tutor. He had
come down to check on his father’s house in Saint Giles in the Fields but
could not get in. The family home had been shut up for a week, and the ser-
vants left in charge by his absent father were dying along with hundreds of
neighbors. If Saint Giles’s sexton tolled the bell for every death, “the bell
would hardly ever leave ringing,” the son moaned, “and so they ring not at
all.” The contagion had spread beyond the suburbs into the villages and
towns along the Great Northern Road. Outside the city, he saw people lying
sick in a thatched cottage “all most starved, so great a dread it strikes into
people.” The only thing that was keeping healthy people in London now, he
exclaimed, was fear of thieves ransacking their houses if they joined the tens
of thousands who had fled during the first mass exodus a month before.^30 By
the end of August, only four parishes in Greater London had escaped the in-
fection. The figures reveal the extent of the sickness (table 5 ).^31
Death marked the calendar of the month, week, and day now. The week
began with Sunday prayers of repentance and propitiation, and church bells
tolling each new death in the parish punctuated the hours of the day. On
Thursdays citizens braved the open air to consult the latest Bill of Mortality,
and on the first Wednesday of each month they ate sparingly at home and
went to their churches for the Fast Day worship and collection for the in-
fected poor. On Wednesday, August 9 , Symon Patrick knew only too pain-
fully what day it was: “There dyed, as you will see by tomorrow in the bills,
20 in this parish, whereof 16 of the plague,” he wrote to Elizabeth Gauden.
His sermon earlier that day was the draft of a tract for parishioners shut up
with the plague.^32
At the infected seaport of Deptford, John Evelyn made a special diary
entry to mark August’s Fast Day: “A solemn feast throughout England to
deprecate God’s displeasure against this land by pestilence and war.” The