Business Not as Usual • 163and services produced by the nation’s three million workers, he concluded
“that 100 , 000 persons dying of plague, above the ordinary number, is [£] 7
millions loss to the kingdom.”^9
While Petty was calculating this economic waste at his country retreat, the
parish clerks of London were counting the human losses. Chance seemed to
play a role in determining who caught the infection and who struggled on.
But increased risks came from running errands, visiting market stalls, work-
ing near the city waterfront in the brewing and victualing trades, or laboring
as cloth workers and tanners in the city’s blind alleys and shabby suburban
lean-tos. On the Strand and in Little Britain by Cripplegate, large numbers
of workers in the printing trade succumbed. Watermen and their families by
the Thames in John Allin’s Southwark parish suffered appalling mortality.
The inmates of crowded tenements near Saint Paul’s churchyard were dying
by the dozens, while the dean’s staff and Sir William Turner in far better
quarters nearby were virtually unscathed.
Near the Tower stood the comfortable city residences of Pepys and Gaud-
en. Their families and servants were safe in the country. But many of their
neighbors’ help were not so fortunate. Their masters were the middling sort
of professional people, members of the merchant guilds, and navy admin-
istrators—persons who could afford three or four servants and maids. These
domestic servants and apprentices were the unfortunates for whom the Saint
Olave Hart Street church bell was tolling five or six times a day, each toll giv-
ing Pepys a shudder of fear. They were not alone, however, as July gave way
to August and August to September. An accountant right on Seething Lane
was among the plague fatalities, and a few streets away the aspiring assistant
to Backwell, London’s premier goldsmith, died.
Working-class Cripplegate’s burial register reveals the stark contours of
death in the occupations listed for 723 of the parish’s 2 , 300 plague victims in
August (see appendix C).^10 William Pratt, left behind to mind Bridgewater
House, was followed to the parish churchyard by 288 other servants. The
clerk acknowledged plague as the cause in many cases; other victims suc-
cumbed in households with many fatalities, suggesting contagion as the
likely cause. Widows also sadly represented working-class vulnerability.
Elizabeth Pike was the first of 163 widowed women to succumb to the pesti-
lential distemper during August. Forty single women and two spinsters were
also listed, among them maids and nurses. In the household of an absent
deputy alderman of the ward, seven of his maids and servants died keeping
watch over his empty abode.
Knowing the danger they left behind, some fleeing masters gave detailed