178 • The Abyssfrom the doomed metropolis. The experiment lasted almost three days, until
a chance downpour extinguished the flames.
During the following week the total fatalities in the Bill of Mortality were
down by 562 , but plague still claimed more than 6 , 500. The exact figures no
longer mattered, since hundreds of burials were not listed in the bill that
week. Hundreds died daily with no names recorded, and nonconformists and
Quakers were not listed. Then came the week of September 12 – 19 —the
grimmest week for burials in London’s long history.
Albemarle had the figures from the Guildhall on Tuesday evening, an in-
credibly fast delivery. Pepys was at the Cockpit the next day, making yet
another visit from his temporary downriver abode. The city scene was a
worse assault on his senses than anything he had experienced thus far: “But
Lord, what a sad time it is, to see no boats upon the River—and grass grow
all up and down Whitehall-court—and nobody but poor wretches in the
streets.” Not even a sudden dip in the temperature and more showers had
muted the death scene. “Worst of all,” Pepys declared in total astonishment,
“the Duke showed us the number of the plague this week, brought in the last
night from the Lord Mayor.” The increase was about six hundred over the
previous week, “which is contrary to all our hopes and expectations from the
coldness of the late season.” The total was 8 , 297 , and of the plague 7 , 165.^1 Dr.
Hodges in the city and Albemarle at the Cockpit estimated the total count at
perhaps as many as fifteen thousand. Between one and two thousand bodies
were being disposed of every night into the waking hours of the morning.
The parish clerks tried to record all names of residents who were lowered
into a grave in their churchyards. Individual graves were in great demand,
however, and in shockingly short supply. The euphemism in parish reg-
isters—“buryed in the lower churchyard” or, in Cripplegate’s case, the “upper
churchyard”—hid mass burials in cavernous holes dug under cover of dark-
ness. If people living near Saint Bride’s lower churchyard peered over the
brick wall, they could see pieces of wood and bones from old coffins strewn
about. The gravediggers had dug through existing graves to create pits large
enough to hold fifty, sixty, or even seventy bodies.
In densely populated Saint Botolph Bishopsgate, just outside the north-
east wall, a tidal wave of plague fatalities engulfed the parish clerk, who for
years had kept one of the best registers of christenings, marriages, and buri-
als in all of London. On June 26 he put down the fifty-third fatality for the
month, double the usual June toll at Bishopsgate. The clerk’s name should
have been next in the register, for he was fatally struck by the plague. But the
listing of fatalities stopped that day and did not resume until the next year.