Requiem for London• 179For the next six months, an uncertain hand recorded (or rather misspelled)
the few christenings and marriages of this barren season, but the substitute
clerk gave up on inscribing anything on the burial pages of the register. Still,
he did not shirk on his most important duty of the visitation: he kept a run-
ning count of all the fatalities known to him. What is more, he noted the
causes of death reported by the searchers, probably tabulating them with
strokes of his pen next to the columns of causes of death on the backside of
the metropolitan Bill of Mortality broadsheet. Every week, as the parish’s
plague toll mounted, crested, and then declined, he trudged through the
Bishopsgate to the central office of the parish clerks to report his figures for
the printed metropolitan bill and returned to the church to receive the
searchers’ latest reports.
The stark figures of Saint Botolph Bishopsgate’s fatalities in the weekly
bills reveal all too clearly the enormity of this clerk’s task. In mid-July, the
week’s toll of all causes was 65 ; the next week it reached 105. Two weeks later
it soared to 180 , peaking at 368 during the last week of August and 354 dur-
ing the first week of September. For the entire year of 1665 , the total number
of fatalities for Bishopsgate was 3 , 464 , according to the metropolitan bills.
Modern demographers calculate this as 6. 7 times the average mortality in the
parish over the previous decade according to the same bills. But the increase
in 1665 surely far exceeded that figure. The total number of fatalities for
Bishopsgate reported to the metropolitan bills for the year was eight times
the annual average of fatalities recorded for the previous ten years in the par-
ish’s register.^2 Even that figure masks the immensity of the parish’s mortality
crisis. The reported mortality count of 3 , 464 persons represented two-thirds
to three-quarters of the parish’s total population, if one could trust the tax as-
sessors’ count of 898 households, suggesting a population of 4 , 000 to 5 , 000
persons. Assuming that the tax officials missed many families and individ-
uals in this extremely poor parish (with a mean of only 2. 6 hearths), its
plaguetime mortality was considerably less than total but far greater than
listed in the printed Bills of Mortality.^3
At Saint Margaret Westminster, the clerk made many individual entries
without names and some family listings without the number of deceased.
Ann Smith “and her children” were buried. Someone was identified only as
“buried in the morning,” an ignominy reserved for bodies left over after
nighttime burials. On June 21 three unknown bodies were interred, and on
July 20 eight more, all plague deaths. On July 30 fifteen unknown souls were
put to rest, and on August 5 the body of Hannah Lawrence was lowered into
the ground along with twenty-three nameless plague victims.