Contagion in the Countryside• 205way Saint Paul’s cathedral did that of Middlesex and Surrey. England’s coun-
try towns were all vastly inferior to London in population, commerce, and
industry, but Colchester, the first capital of Roman Britain, was at the top of
the second tier of provincial centers, exceeded in population only by Bristol,
Exeter, Newcastle, Norwich, and York.^15
Three times a week Colchester’s markets beckoned to villagers with pro-
duce, livestock, and grain. A cluster of inns outside the town’s six gates and
on High Street catered to affluent visitors. Poorer country folk and urban la-
borers frequented the cheaper alehouses dotting the parishes just outside the
town center. Shoppers crowded High Street, seeking fabrics and draperies
made by the large Dutch and Flemish immigrant community and household
stuffs and luxury items that arrived from London via the Roman road or via
merchant vessels to the small port at the Hythe. The town’s trade with Euro-
pean ports across the North Sea was brisk and lucrative. In two years, how-
ever, Colchester lost half its population, a catastrophe that a prominent local
historian judges to be “the most destructive outbreak experienced by any
large town in early modern England.”^16
Ralph Josselin knew the town’s economic vibrancy from his many visits for
goods and services, and he probably also sensed its major economic vulner-
ability: dependence on the volatile cloth-making industry. But it was plague
that brought the town to its knees in August 1665. The locals could only
guess whether the infection came in by sea or land, on infected goods and
persons from Yarmouth to the north, or from London to the south. The
mouth of the Colne River loomed as a highly likely flash point after a Col-
chester distiller helped a boatload of refugees from London slip past a sus-
picious constable.^17 Or the sickness might have accompanied the two thou-
sand Dutch sailors captured during the battle of Lowestoft and brought to
the castle jail by Evelyn’s fellow commissioner, Sir William Doyly. A few es-
caped, and Doyly let it be known that, if any more got loose, the entire area
was likely to be infected. The local Dutch population had their own contacts
with families and friends in infected Amsterdam as well as London. One of
them could easily have brought in the sickness with imported goods, espe-
cially cloth and clothing.^18
The plague may have slipped in at several entry points. Cloth making in
the Dutch quarter collapsed as workers died in huge numbers and their
masters fled up the Colne valley.^19 A modern historian describes the down-
turn in the starkest of terms: “Manufacturing, trade, local government, and
formal religious worship virtually ceased while the plague was at its height.”
Doyly wrote in panic to Evelyn: “The sickness is broken out most fiercely.