I leave to your consideration whether it will be safe to stay a night in your house
[in Clapham] till the plague be more abated. It is the last place I lay in after my
owne lodgings, save that night only when I left you before you went away.
—Symon Patrickto Elizabeth Gauden, December 16 , 1665Safe Havens?
In early summer, the city’s broadsheets called it a “Great Plague of London.”
By September, when astrologers were preparing their almanacs for the next
year, it was a great plague of the nation. William Lilly’s wistful prediction
that Londoners would soon lose their fear of plague and return to trade
masked a cruel truth he knew full well. The recent spread of contagion be-
yond the capital was hampering London’s recovery as much as the lingering
of infection in the city and suburbs.^1 “God’s Angel hath drawn his sword,”
John Tanner wrote with a dramatic flourish, “and with a great stroke hath
smote the Nation with the plague.” His fellow astrologer Thomas Trigge
predicted that the devouring enemy of humankind would strike more
fiercely at the countryside than it had the capital.^2
The Great Plague had stopped trade from London to the interior and ma-
rooned ships that normally took London’s manufactured goods to provincial
ports. Now the reverse flow halted because of contagion in the countryside.
New cloth was no longer coming in from Colchester and the other cloth-
making towns of Essex. Ships from Europe that had stopped as usual at a
Contagion in the
Countryside
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