44 • BeginningsThe harsh winter had placed an exceptional burden on the year’s poor-tax
income of £ 160. Symon’s patrons, the Bedfords, dutifully paid their £ 416 s.,
and Lady Abergavenny and Lord Brouncker their £ 2. But other ratepayers
were delinquent and were about to shirk their duty again when the new as-
sessment came around. Privileged Covent Garden parish was running a
poor-relief program with arrears averaging 15 percent of the budgeted
amount. The parish’s church-related priorities also cost money from the
pockets of the same people. The collection plate at Sunday and midweek
“Fast Day” observances and incidental income from such things as burial
plots and nuptials had to take care of everything from the minister’s salary to
the gravediggers and crude wooden coffin that the parish poor could not af-
ford when their loved ones departed this life. Reverend Patrick’s salary of
£ 150 just about equaled the poor-tax assessment. His hard-working clerk,
whose duties ranged from assisting at every funeral to recording the parish
baptisms, marriages, and burials in his register, was paid an annual salary of
fifteen pounds and twelve shillings (twenty shillings to a pound).^8
The budgetary problems at Saint Paul Covent Garden paled by compari-
son with those at the largest suburban parishes. Nearby Saint Margaret
Westminster, for example, had six times the documented households of Co-
vent Garden and a large number of unlisted poor persons. There were prob-
ably fifteen thousand persons in this one parish, more than in virtually every
English city outside the capital. When icy winds swept in from the river in
November 1664 and again in February as the Thames became a sheet of ice,
Saint Margaret’s overseers of the poor scoured the courtier quarters in search
of a Lady Bountiful or Lord Charitable to meet the exceptional needs of the
season. “The court of Whitehall is mostly in St. Margaret parish,” they
pleaded with Charles II. His father had given the parish one hundred
pounds every year, they said, and his brother’s wife, the duchess of York, was
giving generously, as she always did to this and other suburban parishes in
need. These pleas failed to move the king, even when the overseers pointed
to the extra medical costs Saint Margaret’s absorbed in treating sick or in-
jured royal troops who were quartered in the parish.^9
Throughout the metropolis the unusually cold winter of 1664 – 65 strained
to the limit the health and income of the poor. Coal for heating and cooking
was in such demand and its price so high that cooks began to use wood. That
other great sustainer of life in winter, when vegetables and fruit were
scarce—one’s daily bread—was jeopardized by a shortage of grain. The
Guildhall and Whitehall responded as best they could. Following an old
practice, the Guildhall set the weight of a penny loaf of wheaten bread or