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

188 • The Abyss

air and exercise. Pepys began to suspect strangers he passed on the street of
having plague sores on them. The mayor, who prided himself on greeting pe-

titioners at his door, addressed them from his balcony instead. The Guildhall
was all but abandoned, the court of aldermen rarely meeting. The city’s
chamberlain juggled accounts so he could divert money to the parishes that
had run out of relief funds and pay for new burial grounds and the brick wall

closing them off from nearby dwellings.^20

A Journey into Eternity

That the Burial of the dead... be at most convenient hours, always either before

Sunrising, or after Sun-setting, with the privity of the churchwardens or consta-

bles, and not otherwise.

—Orders Conceived and Published by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen

of the City of London concerning the infection of the Plague, 1665

The Guildhall called them “tumultuary burials.” Londoners knew them as
“pitts.” Whatever the name, they marked a rupture in the human civility to

which surviving Londoners clung in their grief. Rugge referred to “a great
hole” next to the Covent Garden–Saint Martin pesthouse; the other four
pesthouses had similar pits for their dead, and Rugge again recorded the use
of buriers from neighboring parishes. How many other cavernous holes were

there around London? Rugge heard of pits “at every end of town” set aside
for the numerous parishes whose churchyards were filled.^21
Daniel Defoe remembered the legend of a “dreadful gulph” east of the
wall, estimating its dimensions as forty feet long by fifteen feet wide. At

twenty feet into the ground, the diggers struck water. If his sources and
memory can be trusted, the pit was filled within two weeks in September,
holding 1 , 114 bodies. To this day, Anglican rectors and vicars mention oral
traditions of pits outside their churches, as at a circle in front of Saint John’s

Wood. With great assurance London taxi drivers show the curious where the
Great Plague’s pits were located. No two drivers report the same location.
Open fields near the new pesthouse sheds on the periphery of the capital had
plenty of vacant land to receive mass burials in 1665.

Plague pits in Finsbury Field within Cripplegate parish are thought to
have held twenty-two hundred plague corpses. Communal graves have been
found as far to the east as Chadwell and Wapping. Southwark’s open fields