Requiem for London • 187Nor were the poor alone in this wholesale destruction of life. Saint Olave’s
well-to-do churchwardens and their families joined the dead. The upper
churchwarden, Simon Giles, followed his son and wife to a fresh grave. His
colleague George Green expired along with his son. A third churchwarden,
William Poole, saw life slip from his wife and daughter; they were placed in
a single coffin and lowered into the family vault. The parish clerk took pity
on the surviving churchwarden: no pwas placed beside the names of the two
Elizabeth Pooles in the church register.^17
The clerk, Mr. Hadley, survived the loss of two churchwardens but was
overburdened with the official counts that he had earlier tried to hide in the
published bills. When it was over, Saint Olave Hart Street’s official count for
the year in the Bills of Mortality stood at 160 plague burials and 234 total in-
terments. Hadley’s parish register included many more: 362 deaths from all
causes that year. He had kept up his count for the parish’s register, even when
he didn’t report accurately for the printed bill. Only 162 of the fatalities in the
register were listed as interred in Saint Olave Hart Street’s two churchyard
areas, leaving two hundred others buried somewhere else. The parish bearers
must have picked up scores of bodies in the streets, back ways, and aban-
doned houses and taken them to a nearby communal grave, keeping only a
rough running count of the numbers. Among the dead were probably many
lodgers and servants and some nurses. At the height of Saint Olave’s epi-
demic in September and October, a bearer appeared with a dead-cart and
hauled away a body from a terrified household, with little said on either side
and no viewing by a searcher. This was part of the breakdown of the munic-
ipal order to shut up every infected house.
The total of 362 fatalities at Saint Olave Hart Street was stunning for a
parish of only 274 households. If all the householders had stayed to wait out
the plague, the mortality would have been the equivalent of more than one
per family. But many substantial householders and their families were out of
town. The true mortality rate may have been 40 percent or more of those
who remained. And this was in a relatively wealthy parish, with a mean
hearth number of 5. 1. How might L’Estrange explain that deviation from his
rosy picture of London’s better neighborhoods escaping the infection?^18
Trying to describe the increased tempo of the pestilence and the reality of
an epidemic threatening to break down basic social norms, Nathaniel
Hodges pictured family inheritances passing to three or four heirs in as many
days.^19 Too many dwellings were infected to be taken care of by nurses and
watchers. Little wonder that Mayor Lawrence spread the word for healthy
citizens to stay indoors after dark so that shut-up families could come out for