Contagion in the Countryside• 201cool October air to banish the miasmas that hung over Greater London and
make it possible to go home. Symon knew Elizabeth’s temperament only too
well, and that worried her also. He would be imagining the worst as the time
since her last letter grew longer and longer.^8
The View from the Country
That one parish of St. Giles [in the Fields] hath done us all this mischiefe.
—Sir Thomas Peyntonto the royal court at Salisbury, August 7 , 1665Thirty miles beyond Brentwood, Ralph Josselin’s anxiety mounted. He had
begun August conducting the Fast Day service and collection at Earls Colne
for “distressed London.” A week later his diary entries grew ominous: the
weather had turned violent with a sad, strong wind; Saint Giles Cripplegate’s
latest toll was 690 ; and the Colne valley’s market center at Colchester had
become infected.^9 In the farther reaches of East Anglia, plague spread from
Yarmouth to the interior of Norfolk and closed down the colleges of Cam-
bridge. Elsewhere in the land scarcely a county remained unaffected. The
Great Plague in England continued through the cold winter and all the next
year, adding 100 , 000 victims in the provinces to the same number in Greater
London in 1665 and several thousand additional fatalities in the capital in
- When the pestilence moved northward through the Midlands, it ma-
rooned the countess of Huntingdon’s son-in-law and grandchildren in
Northamptonshire. The parish authorities in Hertfordshire, where the earl
of Bridgewater had fled from Cripplegate, erected a pesthouse in the heart of
the county. The distemper was approaching the cathedral city of Durham
and the coal towns of Newcastle and Sunderland in the far northeast of Eng-
land. Panicked rumors of contagion circulated in Dorset and Devon in the
southwest. On the west coast, the major port of Bristol remained on alert for
plague-bearing ships and infected inland travelers alike.
The coastal trade sped the contagion’s spread. Sick sailors and Dutch pris-
oners brought the plague into Evelyn’s hospitals in Middlesex and Kent and
his colleague Sir William Doyly’s makeshift facilities in Essex and Suffolk.
From the Cockpit in Westminster, Captain General Albemarle gave orders
to Pepys and Evelyn to double their efforts to supply and succor their
charges, but there was no more room to house the sick and wounded, and