168 • The Abyssthrough the heavily infected suburbs to Pepys and Turner or even to the mass
of the surviving laboring population in Cripplegate and other working-class
suburbs? Many farmers who normally carted their own products to the mar-
kets inside London’s walls to reduce middleman costs must have balked at
going through the infected suburbs to reach their accustomed drop-off spots.
Probably many left their produce at the edge of the suburbs, desperate to
avoid the infection but even more desperate to unload their perishable goods
at the best price offered. From there, city carters, eager for any job in this
economic slowdown, probably brought most of the produce to places in the
suburbs where extralegal marketing normally took place or through the walls
to the major metropolitan markets clustered in the old city. Vegetables and
fruit could also be barged from upstream market gardening communities.
Again, economic survival outweighed the risk of death, and the transport
workers opportunistically raised their fees sky high for their vital services
while gambling on escaping contagion on London’s plague-ridden docks.
Shipping produce down the east coast to the capital was more difficult. An
Essex shipowner might wish to unload his valuable cargo on the London
docks, but he risked being quarantined along with his London goods on his
return home. It might be better to take his local produce elsewhere and hope
he could dispose of most of it.
No one wrote about this massive operation; the evidence is gleaned from
rural legends and city records. Grain for the bakeries came in regularly, hold-
ing up the weight at a steady 9 ½ounces for each penny loaf or three half-
penny loaves. A few bakers cheated on the weight, but the records show no
more miscreants than usual. Samuel Pepys’ baker was typical in staying at his
bake oven and holding to the legal weight out of deference to his customers,
the law, and perhaps a sense of honor—until he and all his family perished.^21
Oral tradition holds that the farmers of Edmonton Hundred up in Mid-
dlesex brought their vegetables seven miles in. Whether they acted out of
necessity alone or mixed with concern for other human beings in trouble,
Covent Garden’s victualers rewarded them after the epidemic with free mar-
ket stalls. Gardeners to the west of London and Westminster are said to have
left their produce at Hyde Park Corner. Their counterparts at Barnes and
other places on the upper Thames barged their goods downstream to the city
docks. One curious legend rings hollow. Hertfordshire’s gardeners, it was
said, were given the “privilege” of supplying the London markets in return
for carrying corpses back to the country. It seems unlikely that gardeners
would have considered acting as buriers, especially of plague victims. Perhaps