The Other London • 45three halfpenny white loaves every week. As temperatures plunged in Janu-
ary and February and the supply of flour in city bakeries dwindled, Alder-
man Turner and his colleagues decreased the weight from its normal 11 ½
ounces to 10 ½ounces and in March to 9 ½ounces. The weight was listed in
each week’s metropolitan Bill of Mortality, so bakers in the suburbs as well as
the city observed it. For coal, the control was over the price. The king’s privy
council became concerned at the end of the winter when seacoals became too
expensive for poor families. The king’s councilor for such matters, the earl of
Craven, ordered the price of a bushel of coal down to twenty-eight shil-
lings.^10
These stopgap measures could do only so much in the face of an ever re-
stricting vicious cycle. The wretched weather had increased sickness and
unemployment, pushing ratepayers below the poverty line and triggering
new shortfalls in poor-tax collections when the need was greatest. By March,
a desperate lord mayor turned to the merchant guilds to lay in new stores of
grain for the bakers in the city. The next day, Mayor Lawrence dipped into
the well of inducements for additional charity. Playing on the “hard season
and dearness of coles, and ye smallness of the [poor tax] collection” in city
parishes, he asked the masters and wardens of the guilds to make a “liberall
and charitable contribution for the number and necessitys of the poore in
every parish... in a time of so greate extremity.”^11
Easter Sunday, March 26 , was fast approaching, when the vestry of each
parish must elect its officials and make a new poor-tax assessment. No one
looked forward to that task when collections for the past year were badly lag-
ging. The prospects were bleak. The Royal Navy ship the London,which the
city had paid for, accidentally blew up on its way out to sea to fight the
Dutch. Eighty brass cannon and three hundred men went down with the
city’s man-of-war. The king needed every available warship to fight the
Dutch. Its replacement, the Loyal London,would cost city merchants an as-
tronomical sum.^12
The mayor and aldermen soldiered on. Turner and his colleagues solicited
subscriptions for the new ship from their guilds and exhorted the better-off
city parishes to make liberal poor-tax assessments so that some of the money
could be transferred to needier parishes inside the walls and in the liberties.
The deadline for the new budget lists was May 8.^13
When that date arrived, something more foreboding than escalating pov-
erty and poor-tax shortfalls was on the minds of the city fathers. Plague had
turned up in the metropolis and was spreading. Those who had experienced
the last major epidemic in 1625 recalled that it had concentrated in filth-rid-