Requiem for London • 191infected parishes to build their own plague facilities with a special levy on
their householders.
Saint Giles in the Fields located a sizable plot north of the parish at Mut-
ton Fields in the village of Marylebone. To placate villagers, the council had
Saint Giles construct a separate path, ditch, and bridge for the entry of in-
fected persons. A wall was built around the facility, and a well was dug for
the inmates. A final proviso stipulated that all structures were to be torn
down after the plague left.^28
Saint Martin in the Fields agreed to share the erection of a pesthouse with
neighboring Covent Garden, whose first plague deaths had been kept secret.
The two parishes chose Clay Field, a five-acre plot in Soho Field. Its pest-
house became the largest plague hospital in the metropolitan area, accom-
modating up to ninety patients. Later, when the contagion took an enor-
mous toll east of the city wall, a small facility was built in Stepney for the
working-class eastern suburbs and infected prisoners and soldiers from the
Tower of London.^29 The densely packed laboring suburbs across the Thames
River in Southwark, where John Allin saw bodies entering the plague pit day
after day, never had any pesthouse facility.
London’s original pesthouse, constructed in Elizabeth I’s time in Saint
Giles Cripplegate next to Allen’s Almshouses on Old Street, quickly proved
inadequate for the sick poor within the walls and in the northern suburbs. Its
makeshift burial ground was more accommodating, doubling as an adjunct
to Cripplegate’s overcrowded churchyard area. In June the mayor of London
ordered new “shedds” to be added to the Cripplegate facility “with all con-
venient speed for the reception and accommodation of such persons as shall
be sent thither from infected houses.” The burden of death on the parish and
pesthouse was such that the next year Cripplegate closed its overcrowded
and odiferous churchyard for seven years.^30
The old Westminster pesthouse at the Tothill Fields end of Saint Marga-
ret parish was inadequate even for that parish’s needs. The parish refitted the
existing sheds and added ten “rooms” as the number of inmates soared. Two
carpenters and a bricklayer, blacksmith, and ditch digger went to work for
pay ranging from two to thirty-seven pounds for the completed job. Still, the
expanded quarters were far too small for the cots and trundle beds crammed
inside. In September eighty patients each week occupied the pesthouse.
Westminster’s Gatehouse prison took the overflow. A French physician, Dr.
Grant, took charge of patients, dying in service.^31
A veil of secrecy hung over London’s five pesthouses. The three new facil-
ities were not listed in the Bills of Mortality, and the weekly death counts