Prologue • 15of plague relief.^38 The parish was to be the prime source of assistance in Lon-
don during the Great Plague of 1665.
The story that we tell in this book is really two stories intertwined, a tale of
two Londons. One was the city of the working poor who lived in alleys and
cellars and tenements throughout this bustling metropolis. Their story has
never been told because they were unlettered, and there was no one like the
tanner of Barcelona to record their actions and feelings.^39 Something of their
struggle emerges from parish records and the personal observations of people
in the other London, however. That other London was the city of the rich
and titled as well as the middling merchant and professional people, whose
struggles are revealed in the accounts written by our protagonists. Many of
them lived cheek to jowl with the poor, on the main streets and courts of the
old merchant guild center inside London’s wall and the fast-growing suburbs
that radiated into the countryside. How the struggles of these two Londons
made them interdependent—if unconscious of the bond between them—
will become apparent as the plague story unfolds.
Some of our readers may anticipate the darkest of tales, recalling the great
Renaissance storyteller, Giovanni Boccaccio, describing popular reactions to
Florence’s Black Death in The Decameron:“All tended to a very barbarous
conclusion, namely, to shun and flee from the sick and all that pertained to
them, and thus doing, each thought to secure immunity for himself...
Brother forsook brother, uncle nephew and sister brother and oftentimes
wife husband; nay (what is yet more extraordinary and well nigh incredible)
fathers and mothers refused to visit or tend their very children, as they had
not been theirs.”^40
This view of plague epidemics as catastrophic events has long prevailed in
literary and historical writing because it rings true.^41 Some have gone so far
as to see plague as an inversion of the normal order, with criminal elements
among the poor threatening the powerful and others among the lower orders
fatalistically laughing at death. “Like carnival, plague inverted the normal
world,” suggests Brian Pullan, a distinguished historian of the rich and poor
in early modern Venice.^42 But without exploring how individuals reacted to
them, can we truly call these events disasters that undermined political, so-
cial, and economic order? Historical demographers come at the issue from an
opposite vantage point, contending that early modern plagues were not dis-
asters at all because the population shot up within a few years after every epi-
demic. These exponents of viewing the “long run” in history have a point, but
perhaps this view goes too far in concluding that “the dramatic nature of the