Contagion in the Countryside• 213metropolitan bill had dropped for four weeks running: from 4 , 929 to 4 , 327 ,
then to 2 , 665 , and in this week’s bill down to only 1 , 421 burials. Symon had
buried more than a dozen persons, however, during each of those weeks. It
was just as well that Elizabeth remain at Hutton Hall.^38
Happier events greeted others in the country. “This morninge,” John Eve-
lyn’s father-in-law, Sir Richard Browne, wrote to him at Sayes Court, “at half
an hour past four I was awakened with the happy newes of the safe delivery
of [your] daughter. The goodiest childe that ever your eyes beheld, and the
mother (God be praised) in as good a state of health, strength and temper as
can be desired... with the assistance of our Country midwife.” That evening
the father received the news by express mail. John Evelyn was overjoyed, and
the timing of his daughter’s arrival at his brother’s place in Wotton could not
have been better. It was the first of October, contagion had lessened in Lon-
don, and Sayes Court remained miraculously uninfected. His servant’s illness
had been nothing but surfeit. John could travel to Wotton without worrying
about carrying the infection.
Unfortunately, the sickness at Deptford kept his family from going home.
After a joyous reunion John Evelyn took the road back to Sayes Court and
his navy duties. Mary Evelyn broke the news to her father, who had recently
come down from Oxford. “I find by Mr. Evelyn wee cannot with safety
think of Deptford yet a while, the sicknesse being more dispersed than ever
in towne.” Mary carried on gamely at her brother-in-law’s house: “The sep-
aration of friends is not the least misfortune I am sensible of in this sad
time.”^39
From his windows overlooking the plague pit of Southwark, a middle-
aged widower contemplated a different move. In August, John Allin had re-
jected the pleas of his friends in Rye to return to his old country parish. God
had called him to give medical and spiritual help to poor dissenters in Saint
Olave Southwark. Then plague broke out as fiercely at Rye as in Southwark,
making it all the more imperative for his closest friends in the Sussex town,
Jeake and Fryth, to keep watching over his three young children in his ab-
sence. Parliament’s Five Mile Act made him change his plans again. As a
dissenting minister Allin was now banned from all incorporated communi-
ties, London as well as Rye. He thought of moving to rural Sussex, he wrote
Fryth, “but where I doe not know. If you can learne some place for me, some-
what about five miles from you, with honest people, you may doe well to let
me know of it, where I may practice physicke.”^40
The Evelyn brothers, wives, and children celebrated Christmas and New
Year’s together at Wotton. Then John returned in the snow to Sayes Court