Contagion in the Countryside• 207Reformation Lollards, and the summary execution of two arch-royalists at
the castle wall by angry Puritans during the Civil War. Yet the town re-
mained peaceful throughout the plague. For one thing the town government
had by now assimilated prominent merchants and tradesmen from Dutch
and other immigrant sects, making their dissenting rank and file less likely to
cause trouble than in the past. Also, the heavily populated Dutch part of
town suffered the greatest fatalities among the inhabitants; sickness and grief
left little energy to resist plague controls.
Survivors of the terrible mortality in the pestered Dutch quarters by the
river pooled their resources with all the vigor of wealthier citizens around
High Street. Quakers and Baptists took care of their own. The Dutch Con-
gregation (the town’s only legal dissenter body) succored its sick and poor
members. The sixteen Anglican churches of Colchester became the head-
quarters of official plague relief for their parishes, just like the 130 churches in
Greater London. Warders, searchers, nurses, and buriers took up their paro-
chial tasks. Overseers of the poor went to the Moothall and out into the
country to collect money for the “visited poor” of their parish. Churchwar-
dens kept their accounts. Every relief unit was badly shrunken by deaths and
desertions, but some eighty courageous souls took up the slack, keeping or-
der, burying the dead, and offering comfort to the living. When parishes ran
out of poor-tax money and a plague-tax supplement, levies on the surround-
ing area and gifts from Josselin’s and other churches saw them through the
worst period of the epidemic. The total relief income for this hard-hit pro-
vincial center came to twenty-seven hundred pounds, a prodigious sum.^21
The small graveyard of Saint Peter’s parish could not hold all the parish’s
691 plague victims. Even the ingenuity of the gravediggers at Saint Bride’s in
London would have been insufficient for the task. The bodies must have
been taken somewhere out of town. Townspeople today speak of a plague pit
off the Mersey road, where there is a suspicious-looking mound.^22 There are
many likely spots. Possibly, there were common burial grounds adjacent to
Colchester’s two pesthouses, one in rural Mile End parish and the other
closer in at Saint Mary at the Wall. (The location is better remembered for
the royal cannon “Humpty Dumpty” that fell from the church wall during a
Civil War siege, inspiring the nursery rhyme.) In 1665 and 1666 , the loss of
40 – 50 percent of the town’s population (estimated at five thousand persons)
doubled the attrition ratio in metropolitan London. Colchester held the un-
happy distinction also of having the longest visitation in the entire country,
officially from mid-August 1665 to the first week of December 1666.