230 • SurvivingPart of their success was creative financing. Wealthy parishioners helped
by loaning one hundred pounds without the guarantee of the absent church-
warden. In the end it was not needed, but it had given the churchwardens a
cushion of financial and emotional security. The other source of their sol-
vency was the chamberlain sitting in the Guildhall week after week juggling
the city’s accounts. Sir Thomas Player kept dipping into the city’s cash re-
serves, sometimes on his own, at other times at the direction of Mayor Law-
rence. City bills that could be deferred were left unpaid. Dr. Hodges would
not receive the last of his salary until 1667 , a delay that unfortunately con-
tributed to a slide into bankruptcy as his health deteriorated and his practice
suffered. Other emergency bills mounted for labor and bricks to build a wall
around a new common burial ground and various laborers’ fees for the pest-
house buildings. Most crucial of all were the needs of the poorest and most
plague-stricken parishes in the city and its liberties. In July, Mayor Lawrence
had warned of the “extremity of ye people” in the liberties and the “great dis-
order and danger” for the city if their needs were not met. In September the
needs were spiraling out of the churchwardens’ control.^29
Fortunately for the city and its parishes, the chamberlain had not fled with
his knowledge and skills like the elusive Saint Bride’s churchwarden. And Sir
Thomas Player had the good fortune to receive large donations from all over
England for the infected poor of the capital at the time of the greatest need.
Some towns sent in more than a hundred pounds. The sums went directly to
the most desperate parishes inside the walls and adjacent outparishes.
The citizens who benefited never witnessed the weekly treks across town
by their churchwarden or overseer of the poor to the chamberlain waiting in-
side the Guildhall. He stretched the Elizabethan Poor Law in a way that its
creators could never have imagined. The parish officer came with his out-
standing bills and the week’s receipts from the plague-tax levy on resident
householders. The chamberlain calculated where the need was greatest and
transferred the excess plus the gift money from the countryside to these par-
ishes. The lists remain in a city plague account book, cross-referenced with
churchwardens’ account books. Saint Giles Cripplegate and Saint Olave
Southwark received the most. Saint Bride’s was at the middle level of sup-
port; the ten to fifty pounds it received each week in July through September
carried the ill-fated Clarke brothers through the worst of their parish’s epi-
demic.^30 By then its weekly toll had dipped below one hundred, but it and
other parishes were still suffering greatly as October began.
That month the financial fortunes of the city and its parishes sank to their
lowest level. The cash fund was extremely low, the city’s credit strained, the