132 • Confusionof town, and White Cross parallel to it, ran northward. Fore Street stretched
eastward, and Barbican ran to the northwest. West of Red Cross Street re-
sided wealthy families with stately mansions and fine gardens. To the east the
neighborhood became progressively more crowded and poor until one
reached Moorfields and the hospital for the insane, Bethlehem or Bedlam.^41
Cripplegate may have been the largest of all the metropolitan parishes, with
its forty-four acres and twenty thousand inhabitants on both sides of the
northwestern wall. Nearly half would be dead before the end of the year.
Cripplegate’s disaster was greater in sheer numbers than anything occurring
in Westminster or the city, and the losses struck at the heart of its economic
life, decimating one local trade after another and creating a ripple effect
throughout the metropolis.
Daniel Defoe was born to a butcher on Fore Street just before the Great
Plague. The Puritan poet John Milton, author of Paradise Lost,had seen to it
that his daughters learned a trade under the direction of Cripplegate weav-
ers. Cloth making was a major industry, and victualers, brewers, and vintners
supplied food and drink on both sides of the city wall. Tanners, glovers, and
pinmakers flourished. In the homes of these skilled workers’ well-to-do em-
ployers, five or more servants were busy with household chores and errands.
Other merchants with businesses in the city (the founder of the Vyner gold-
smith firm, for example) lived in Cripplegate with large household staffs.
One source of wealth was sadly missing in Cripplegate. Most of the great
families that once had lived in palatial estates in Cripplegate’s western half
had relocated to the best parts of royal Westminster. The parish poor-tax roll
was badly shrunken, an ominous sign for a community dependent on the
health and employment of working people. The earl of Bridgewater was one
of the last noble holdouts, feeling secure in his thirty-six-hearth mansion
with its prized gardens and thick walls. But Red Cross Street lay just to the
east, with its 645 dwellings and inns averaging a modest three hearths. That
spring, as plague approached his parish, the earl heard that his goldsmith
neighbor had died of suspicious causes. Before the old man was buried with
pomp and ceremony by his nephew, Robert Vyner, who ran the goldsmith
firm, Bridgewater took the Great Northern Road to his country estate in
Hertfordshire. The earl’s letters to his Cripplegate house manager barely
mentioned the plague and then only to make sure that a nephew who had
slept in an infected London house didn’t visit him.^42
The parish that Bridgewater left behind kept a remarkable register of its
experience with the infection, opening up the world of London’s workers like
no other written account.^43 Alone among parish clerks, Nicholas Pyne rou-