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

186 • The Abyss

Funeral fees formed a large part of the year’s poor relief budget at Saint
Giles Cripplegate. Families that could afford it paid generously for their bur-

ials: A total of £282 14s. 4 d. was received for “mortuaries,” and £13 5s. 6 d. was
donated for “hearse cloaths.” The parish took in £710 19s. 10 d. from the poor
tax and gifts, and spent £663 1s. 7. 5 d. The surplus was largely on paper; a pa-
rishioner had loaned £ 200 at 6 percent interest and had to be repaid.

The constant bell ringing placed a heavy burden on parish funds. Cripple-
gate had six large and mid-sized bells. Their repairs absorbed 22 percent of
the operating budget:^13

Expended to the carters when the bell went to be raised .......£ 100

Paid for raising the said bells, to Mr. Hudson .................£ 27

To James Allen for taking downe and hanging the great bell..... £ 5

Paid more for taking down the Treble and mending it ..........£ 4

For bell clappers and ropes and mending the clock .............£ 8

On the gentle slope of Cornhill lay Samuel and Elizabeth Pepys’ parish
church. An observant passerby today may notice a mound in the churchyard.
The ground was opened in 1891 for construction and then closed on the sight
of uncoffined remains.^14 Entering the churchyard archway, one can look up-

ward and reflect on the relief of skulls and crossbones, a grisly reminder of
the toll in Hart Street and Seething Lane. When the plague finally withdrew
from the parish, Samuel would look back on this time with a shudder. “It
frightened me to see so many graves lie so high upon the Churchyard where

people have been buried of the plague.” He hoped the churchyard would be
covered over with lime as required by the Guildhall as a health precaution.^15
Roger L’Estrange’s biweekly newssheets kept up a holier-than-thou
drumbeat. In July they claimed that poverty and sluttishness caused half the

plague deaths in the metropolis; in August, they saw little appearance of the
infection in the main streets. The greatest mortality, L’Estrange asserted, was
in “the sluttish parts of those parishes where the poor are crowded up to-
gether and in multitudes infect one another.”^16

Saint Olave Hart Street’s death scene revealed a more complex and unset-
tling reality. Plague deaths had mounted from three in July to seventeen in
August, climbed to sixty-four in September, and held at fifty-one in Oc-
tober. These bare statistics fail to reveal the reality that entire families were

extinguished. John Hayward lost three daughters and a son to the infection
in five days in September. A lodger, Edmund Poole, saw four sons and a
daughter succumb between September 10 and 21 ; then he joined them in the
churchyard. The Greenops, a poor family, lost five members.