Requiem for London • 181How did Saint Margaret’s only clerk feel as he registered those twenty-
three nameless fatalities on that fateful day? The parish toll peaked in mid-
August with 269 fatalities recorded of all causes, ten times the normal weekly
number. The clerk struggled on but gave up the attempt to record nameless
burials. Perhaps their numbers made the gesture too much for him to bear.
Or maybe these anonymous dead were being picked up by a bearer and taken
to a plague pit before a searcher could view their bodies and notify the clerk
of the cause of death.
These searchers were experiencing their own difficulties and the con-
flicting emotions that accompanied them. Numbed by climbing the stairs
of crowded tenements to view body after body during the terrible months of
August and September, some of them began to report every fatality as
plague. Who could blame them for not looking closely for buboes or tokens?
It was unlikely that any neighbors came out to answer an inquisitive search-
er’s questions about the illness. Grieving family members might have been
too overcome to be of any help.
Other searchers, wearied by the constant sight of diseased bodies, un-
doubtedly sympathized with the inability of the survivors in yet another in-
fected dwelling to admit that plague was in their home. Even worse for a
family at the height of this contagion was the humiliation of seeing a loved
one strapped down and taken away on a board, sling, or barrow. This was not
the parting from life to which a culture steeped in religious symbols and rit-
uals was accustomed. Searchers could be forgiven in September as they had
been in June for the simple courtesy of identifying a warm corpse with some-
thing other than the common sickness.
Were these women searchers driven by neglect, indifference, and greed, as
Dr. Hodges believed? He did the best he could for the poor people he saw on
behalf of the Guildhall. Hodges thought that searchers who would pocket a
shilling to lie were almost as bad as the “wicked” nurses he said were known
to strangle their patients for their money and tell the searcher they had died
of distemper in the throat. One man, Hodges declared, was stripped of his
clothes and money and left to die, only to recover after the nurse fled.^4
Whatever the motivations of London’s searchers, who had no way to
speak in self-defense, they reported a total of 309 deaths in Greater London
as “feaver” for the most fateful week of the year, September 12 – 19. Another
101 deaths were attributed to “spotted fever.” Early childhood deaths, fre-
quent in any year, soared that week, with “teeth” accounting for 121 fatalities.
That tabulation undoubtedly was closer to the real number of childhood fa-