206 • The AbyssThe present mayor hath noe authority to rule this numerous people.” Like
Albemarle at the Cockpit, Doyly at Colchester castle feared that the dissent-
ing population, English and Dutch alike, would try to rise up under cover of
the chaos created by the plague.^20
Many of Colchester’s forty-eight council members fled to neighboring vil-
lages, and the few attempts to call the town assembly into session at the
Moothall on High Street were pitiful affairs. But perhaps town deliberations
were not really necessary to set up the controls that the townspeople knew
from previous experiences with plague. Despite Doyly’s fears and the mayor’s
precipitous flight, in one key respect the assembly members were in a better
position to fight this invader than were Albemarle and Lawrence in London.
They had authority over the entire municipality, including its suburban lib-
erties and adjacent semirural parishes.
Three men remained at the Moothall on High Street day in and day out,
week after week, month upon month. The signatures of Deputy Mayor
Moore and Aldermen Lamb and Tenneth appear throughout the pages of
the thick assembly book beneath the columns of money they handed to the
churchwardens and overseers of the poor from Colchester’s sixteen parishes.
As the crisis deepened, they took direct charge of many functions that in
London were handled by the parish officers. A hurried scribe squeezed a list
of their acts onto the bottom of the folio pages in a hand that became more
and more crabbed and tiny until it was scarcely decipherable. They disbursed
plague-relief taxes collected from an ever-widening arc of the surrounding
countryside directly to needy persons who could still walk to the town center
for their weekly handout. They hired masons and carpenters and glaziers and
roofers to build two pesthouses. They paid doctors, apothecaries, and sur-
geons for physick and lancing of buboes.
No one seemed beyond the reach of these three men, who worked as hard
and long as Alderman Turner and Dr. Hodges inside London’s wall. When
not gathering in and handing out money, they put on their judicial robes as
justices of the peace and sentenced the few men and women brought before
them by the town constables for breaches of the peace and defiance of plague
regulations. In the Dutch quarter of town, lusty singing and carousing in
taverns went on long after the nighttime curfew. Some individuals defied the
constables to their face, and one called the justices foul names when hauled
before their improvised court. The unraveling of mayoral authority that the
outsider commissioner Doyly had predicted never occurred, however.
Colchester was famous for the Peasants Revolt after the Black Death, pre-