Requiem for London • 185message thirty times in seven days, all but one for plague victims. He had just
come back from burying five parishioners that evening. The neighboring
parish of Saint Martin in the Fields, which had six times the number of
households and shared their common pesthouse, rang its bells for 286 burials
that same week. Where were all these bodies going? Covent Garden’s over-
seer of the poor, Thomas Rugge, knew the answer: many poor persons from
these two parishes and others nearby were carted off to the pesthouse plague
pit.^10
For many, a church bell sounded the only acknowledgment of their depar-
ture. The rhythmic, pulsating sound broke the silence of empty shops in
Cheapside and the abandoned navy office on Seething Lane. Samuel Pepys
listened in spite of himself, knowing it might indicate how many persons in
Saint Olave Hart Street had died that day. But he soon gave up the counting,
thinking that the poor were too great in number to be accounted for. Nor
could anyone measure the toll among the Quakers and other dissenters, “that
will not have any bell ring for them.” Pepys estimated that the full bill for the
last week in August must be a quarter more than reported.^11
At a rare meeting of the vestry of Saint Giles Cripplegate in September,
the few members who gathered agreed it was God’s punishment on the sins
of the nation “and in a special manner this our parish.”^12 How else to account
for the second highest parish mortality in this Great Plague? In two decades,
the parish had laid 28 , 000 bodies to rest; 8 , 069 of these interments came in
- Cripplegate’s toll was greater than in any previous epidemic, in part be-
cause of the recent surge in population (see table 6 ).
Table 6.Saint Giles Cripplegate Burials
in Plague Years, 1603–1665Year Total Burials