254 • Survivingpounds (at an estimate of fifty thousand pounds for transporting and main-
taining the evacuees), but it would save fifteen times that amount in human
labor preserved.^25
Other reformers turned their wrath on the double scandal of shut-up
houses and inadequate pesthouse space. At the peak of the contagion, the
five metropolitan pesthouses could have accommodated no more than 300 or
400 , suggesting a total occupancy of 5 , 000 at most for the entire epidemic.
The other 65 , 000 plague victims acknowledged by the Bills of Mortality,
plus an estimated 10 , 000 unrecorded ones, succumbed either unattended or
shut up with the rest of their household. While no estimate of the number of
shut-up households was possible then or now, this massive confinement of
the healthy with the infected failed to stop the spread of the plague and, at
the height of the epidemic, proved unenforceable in parts of the city and
suburbs.
Hodges fumed at the inhumanity of cutting off healthy persons from eve-
ryone except sick inmates, making them emotionally “easier prey to the de-
vouring enemy.” Boghurst talked of friends “growing melancholy” due to
their separation and this sadness contributing to the spread of the disease
through an entire family. The double standard of allowing de facto exemp-
tions to privileged citizens rankled. Many peers had avoided finger pointing
by leaving the capital. Mayor Lawrence eluded the stigma of the red cross on
his infected household; neighbors who tried to shut up his house on their
own were promptly arrested.^26
In February 1666 the king and his council asked the earl of Craven to sur-
vey the enforcement of existing regulations with the two chief justices and
thirty-three justices of the peace from the metropolitan area. The easiest so-
lution appeared to be the elimination of pestered places. When Craven’s in-
vestigators took a closer look, however, they met resistance from everyone:
landlords who brandished their contractual agreements, tenants who faced
eviction without other affordable housing, and employers who needed their
cheap labor. The proposal to clear out cellars and restore multi-unit tene-
ments to their original single-family state was abandoned.^27
Undaunted, Craven set his sights on a radical shift in focus. Contagion,
not miasmas, caused plague, he told the king. That being so, the royal gov-
ernment must embark on a major anticontagion project too expensive for lo-
cal government to undertake on its own. Craven envisaged plague hospital
facilities for England’s capital on the grand scale that Charles I’s French phy-
sician had envisaged and that Evelyn had seen in Italy. Craven’s words fell on
deaf ears.^28