The Great Plague. The Story of London\'s Most Deadly Year

32 • Beginnings

Cheapside, like other parts of the walled city, blended merchants, artisans,
and laborers; travelers, lodgers, and tenement families lived among some of

the most illustrious members of Restoration society.^41
The city boasted a dozen markets inside the walls, all of them just a short
walk away for householders. “Herb markets” featured vegetables and fruit,
and “white markets” offered poultry; there were “flesh markets” for meat and

fish markets. Housewives had the pick of the market from six to eight in the
morning. After that, street traders bought perishables to carry in baskets on
their heads as they hawked their wares. The city contained numerous bakers’
shops and taverns and inns, for bread and beer were staples for everyone.

Full-fledged markets were scarcer in the suburbs, and the best of these
were in the aristocratic neighborhoods of royal Westminster. Suburban mar-
kets had followed a population shift within the metropolis that made em-
inent sense to the courtier class but could not have pleased Turner’s civic

pride and business interests. He and Pepys tolerated the coal smoke con-
stantly blowing into the city from industries and housing in the western sub-
urbs. But those same conditions had been too much for the last great noble

residents inside the walls and others with independent incomes. For some
time upper-class Londoners had been leaving the city’s congested streets and
polluted air for new luxury housing outside the western wall. They still
bought fine cloth from Turner and played a role in Pepys’ business affairs, but

their lives were centered in royal Westminster, a cultural and political world
apart from the city of guilds.

Royal Westminster

Up and abroad to Paul’s churchyard, to see the last of my books new-bound—

among others The Rise and Fall of the Family of Stewarts.Thence in Mr. Grey’s

Coach to Westminster, where I hear the King met the Houses [of Lords and

Commons] to pass the great bill for £ 2 , 500 , 000. After doing a little business, I

home.

—Pepys,Diary,February 10 , 1665

Economically, the city and suburbs depended on each other, but they had no
common political structure to bind them together. Only the weekly Bill of
Mortality provided the illusion of shared public space, with its tabulation of
the total numbers of christenings, marriages, and burials that had occurred

during the previous seven days throughout the metropolis. Even these vital