252 • Survivinga surgical bill of thirty pounds; it had been approved three years before. In
Westminster the king presented handsomely inscribed silver plates to West-
minster’s small public medical corps for their treatment of sick householders
and pesthouse patients. These official acts and a jumble of other accounts tell
us something of the enormous monetary outlay for the Great Plague.
Guildhall accounts listed more than twelve thousand pounds spent on the
city’s medical team and supplies, pesthouse and burial-ground construction
and maintenance, and subsidies to needy parishes. Another fifteen hundred
pounds came in from the countryside to the Guildhall for distribution.^17 The
merchant guilds contributed money, grain supplies, and other necessities for
the poor. Expenses of the 130 parishes, ranging from a few hundred pounds
in the smallest parish units to more than fifteen hundred pounds for large
parishes like Saint Bride’s and Saint Margaret’s, added greatly to the expen-
ditures. Assuming a modest average of two hundred pounds per parish for
expenses on plague-related items not paid from city funds, the parishes’ total
would have been twenty-six thousand pounds. And, finally, there were the
unknown sums that Albemarle and Craven, from his own resources, spent on
the suburbs.
The grand total for the Greater London area was clearly much higher
than the “few thousands of pounds” that historian Walter George Bell esti-
mated went to public relief and interments during this great plague in Lon-
don. The real bill came to forty thousand pounds, probably more.^18 For a
metropolitan area whose economy had come to a standstill and whose popu-
lation was reduced 20 percent by deaths plus perhaps 40 percent by flight,
that financial outlay was impressive. To be sure, it fell considerably short of
what must have been spent on rebuilding London after the Great Fire gutted
the center of the metropolis a few months later, and it paled by comparison
with the astronomical cost of the Dutch war, which, by Pepys’ itemized ac-
counting, came to more than one million pounds just for the six-month pe-
riod of April to September 1665.^19 Restoring the capital materially from its
smoldering ruins and combating the nation’s greatest commercial rival on
the sea counted far more with those in power than did fighting an uncon-
querable disease, which victimized mostly poor people. Given the Poor
Law’s goal of minimal maintenance of the “deserving poor,” however, hold-
ing to that level of assistance amid the horrific mortality and loss of employ-
ment in the capital in 1665 constituted a considerable commitment of finan-
cial resources.^20
It was true that Samuel Pepys kept virtually all of the more than three
thousand pounds he made in 1665 , with only a few pounds going to the poor.