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

Business Not as Usual • 169

the story was twisted in its constant retelling and embellishment over several
generations.^22

At the urban end of this makeshift network, London’s porters and carters
joined thousands of other persons eager to transport food for a few pennies.
The transportation force included unskilled laborers, servants left adrift,
hawkers of goods (whose famous “London cries” had been stilled and laden

baskets emptied by mayoral order in June), and housewives venturing farther
than usual in search of the day’s needs. There are a few allusions in tracts,
letters, and sermons to people starving to death, but most were of dubious
authenticity. They may be tales of earlier plague times.

The bakers’ hall was closed in August. But bakeries remained open until
they were infected and shut up, and enough bakers survived to feed each
neighborhood. Two parishes away from the Pepys, two men donated thirty
dozen loaves of bread on three occasions to the poor of Saint Katherine

Creechurch.^23 All of the merchant guilds kept their quotas of grain and coal
for the city poor, on orders from the Guildhall.^24 The watermen and light-
ermen continued to ply the Thames with passengers and goods. They told
their wives that, if they died of this pestilence, their survivor was to pay no

further taxes. They had given their all for the survival of their social betters,
their city, and the metropolis.

The Balancing Act

As to myself, I am very well, only in fear of the plague. My late gettings have been

very great, to my great content and [I] am likely to have yet a few more profitable

jobs in a little while.

—Samuel Pepys,Diary,August 31 , 1665

If anyone could ride out this pestilential season comfortably in the city, it was

likely to be Sir William Turner. There was, first of all, his solid business base
as a major trader in fine cloth and a past master of the Merchant Taylors’
Guild. His public position as a leading alderman and prominent member of
the Guildhall’s emergency medical committee kept him on top of the dete-

riorating business climate in the capital. Turner’s overseas resources were also
a powerful anchor. His network of partners and brokers stretched from
Dover and Calais to Paris, Brussels, Genoa, and Florence. Then there were