194 • The Abyssing August, 254 of their dead were taken from homes and prisons across town
for burial. September witnessed 478 Friends falling from the sickness. In ad-
dition to deaths in the prisons, 27 men and women died on the Black Eagle
prison ship that September. George Whitehead found them crowded to-
gether on their deathbeds and dispirited but lifted up by his visit. The total
number of Friends who died in this terrible “visitation” came to 1 , 117 , a heavy
burden for this widely scattered community of a few thousand.^33
How many other religious dissenters fell during the Great Plague is un-
known.^34 A Quaker in the city informed a country Friend at the peak of the
epidemic, “Thousands more died than are in the bills.”^35 He could not have
been thinking only of their own congregations. Pepys alluded to others who
would not have the bell rung for them. Presbyterians, Congregationalists,
and Baptists were the main nonconformist communities of faith whose
members vanished without a trace that summer. Some were buried in the
parish ground near their homes, and a few in the Quaker burial grounds. The
communal graves accepted anyone regardless of religious preference. The
Dutch congregation of Austin Friars, including Mayor Lawrence, had
mostly assimilated to the Anglican communion and the corridors of power.
Some members took it upon themselves to stay and help; others followed
English neighbors to the country.^36
Virtually nothing is known about the fate of the Jewish community of
London, which numbered a few hundred persons. They were not scapegoats,
as Jews had been during the Black Death. They worshiped quietly at their
Sephardic Synagogue in Creechurch Lane. On at least one occasion, Pepys
attended a service there. The Jewish Historical Society has records of seven
plague victims at their burial ground east of Aldgate and Mile End, but the
sharply reduced attendance at synagogues after the epidemic suggests a much
heavier mortality.^37
The Last Reckoning
Many are sick and few escape. [Plague] raigned most heretofore in alleys, etc; now
it dominates in ye open streets.
—John Tillisonto Dean Sancroft, September 14 , 1665According to the Bills of Mortality, the epidemic in London reached its peak
in mid-September. Yet death continued to stalk the city and suburbs, giving