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

Business Not as Usual • 161

With this windfall, Pepys continued on his merry way through the city
and the better suburbs to pay down his debts and maintain his reputation as

a person worth doing business with, even in this worst of times. Savoring the
luxury of a pullet dinner at home that night, he recalled the pleasure of stop-
ping at the Golden Fleece. “I called upon Sir W Turner,” he said proudly, “so
I may prove I did what I could as soon as I had money to answer all bills.”^6

Counting the Loss

[I] stayed in the city... till I could find neither drink nor meat safe, the butcheries

being everywhere visited, my brewer’s house shut up, and my baker with his whole

family dead of the plague.

—Samuel Pepysto Lady Carteret, Woolwich, September 4 , 1665

Silence marked the struggle for survival by poor working people, whose serv-
ices were helping Turner and Pepys ride out the plague in comfortable style.
No diary entries were recorded in the city’s cheapest rented quarters in pes-

tered alleys. Here unlettered hands of textile and leather workers performed
their stage of the manufacturing process for a merchant-employer. If they
were extremely lucky, they would receive a weekly subsistence wage right
through the epidemic on material that for some unknown reason was ex-

tremely contagious. All too frequently their luck ran out. Many merchants
fled to the country, leaving their workers at the mercy of parish relief and any
odd job they could find. The fear of starvation would follow them, week af-
ter week, unless death from plague released the entire household from that

specter.
Master craftsmen in the metal and wood trades were more secure finan-
cially because they controlled the entire production of their line of work and

sold directly to the public. But their work involved risks to life and livelihood
that were far beyond those that Turner reported in his correspondence and
Pepys in his diary. No blacksmith hammering utensils on a forge took up a
pen to mark the dwindling number of customers who ventured down his for-

bidding, narrow lane as July gave way to August and the death count among
his fellow craftsmen neighbors soared. Nor was it likely that a city carpenter,
after arriving home with bread and beer from a day of emergency labor on a
churchyard shed to house the parish buriers, recorded the windfall of a few

pennies that had staved off dipping into his small savings for another week.