166 • The Abysspenned a somber note: “I will content myself with hanging one room, where
I lye, and let the rest alone.”^14
Here was the crux of the survival problem for professional persons like Sy-
mon Patrick in Covent Garden and the ejected minister and unlicensed phy-
sician John Allin in Southwark, who never complained of the lack of money.
Both of them could afford the necessities and could get by for a while with-
out most of the things usually made or finished by London artisans. Other
material needs, however, were important for everyday living, and some were
vital to their very existence. Someone had to be providing them, or else Pa-
trick and Allin and the two hundred thousand or more persons still alive in
the capital in September would be at even greater risk.^15
Patrick never liked to dwell on such mundane things, preferring to focus
on the spiritual blessings that were guiding him through this catastrophe to
whatever end God intended for him. But material survival did prey on his
mind. If he became sick, he did not know how to find a nurse, though he
knew friends would do all they could to get a reliable woman. As for the
handyman, Symon finally admitted to Mrs. Gauden, “I have inquired, I as-
sure you, about a man to do my business here sometimes, but the towne is
empty of all such persons; and he that was wont to do it is dead, I am sure,
for I buried him.”^16
Food and drink were another matter. Patrick managed to find both, enough
to meet his needs. But he avoided telling Elizabeth where he went except to
the church and churchyard and on rare day trips across the river to see his
brother and her husband, Denis, in Surrey. Then he let the cat out of the bag
by describing a plague doctor on the Strand leading thirty recovered persons
from the local pesthouse. “But now I have told tales of myself, and confessed
that I go sometimes abroad,” he admitted. He must buy stockings, though the
infection might be clinging to them. For that matter, he couldn’t do without
beer and wine, whose vessels might also be infected. But especially bread, he
added forlornly, was most attracted to the infection. There was no way out;
buy bread he must, “for I know not how otherwise to have it.”^17
Where could he purchase his bread and beer and victuals when the food
workers of Greater London were dying like the flies that Boghurst had seen
last autumn? Twenty-four fatalities were listed as food handlers during the
peak of Cripplegate’s epidemic. If they were at all representative of the situ-
ation elsewhere, the crisis touched the entire victualing industry: grocers,
butchers, cooks, cheesemongers, and millers are recorded in the burial reg-
ister, and some simply as “victualers.” How many more died without being
listed?