164 • The Abyssinstructions. “I pray you use all possible care to preserve yourself and my
house,” a departing auditor of the Exchequer told his clerk after fleeing with
the court on the fifth of July. The clerk was to keep the porter out, to see that
every morning the servants took some London treacle or a kernel of walnut
with salt and rue roasted in a fig, and to let no one out of doors on an empty
stomach. The warning ended with instructions to exterminate rats, keep the
household’s small cats inside, and kill or cast off the large cats.^11
The vulnerability of servants tested the limits of a master’s compassion.
Dr. Burnet sent his servant to the pesthouse and then shut himself up with
his household, setting an example of social responsibility that others of his
class found difficult to follow. Pepys panicked when his trusty assistant and
former servant Will Hewer dropped by in the middle of the day and lay
down on a bed complaining of a headache. A vision of Will visiting his ail-
ing father in infected Saint Sepulchre put Pepys “into extraordinary fear.” He
finally got his household help to ease Will out of the house without upset-
ting him too much. The next day Will was back with Pepys, working on navy
business; it had been a false alarm.^12
Servants suffered the most, but a large number of skilled trades were also
vulnerable, led by cloth working. Almost everyone knew stories of plague en-
tering communities via cloth, especially light-colored fabric. Every aspect of
cloth making had its dangers. In August 208 persons listed as cloth and
clothing workers died in Cripplegate, including 90 weavers, 28 glovers, 18
buttonmakers, 17 tailors, and 10 printmakers or needlemen. A few early
plague fatalities in a cloth-working family might be misdiagnosed, but when
children, parents, and servants succumbed one after another, the parish reg-
ister acknowledged pestilence as the cause of the last fatalities. John Barber,
a weaver, died along with four others in his household. Another weaver,
Richard Green, died of “surfeit” according to Mr. Pyne. Five days later one
of his servants succumbed, and the next day another servant, probably all of
the plague. Usually, the servants fell to the infection first (probably because
their errands took them into dangerous haunts), followed by the family.
Some plague tracts accused masters of deserting their servants, but this was
certainly not the case with these artisan masters, who stayed on as one ser-
vant after another succumbed. The one constant dread among the cloth
workers of Cripplegate was that the entire household might expire. Six
weeks after the passing of the Green family’s head, that household’s toll
reached eleven: seven family members and four servants.
Workers in the building trade also faced extreme danger because their jobs
took them into many plague-infested areas. Carpenters, joiners, bricklayers,