50 • Beginnings“fumes” to sober up drunkards. There now stands a Crowders Well Pub on
the Cripplegate well site, dispensing drinks that are undoubtedly more salu-
brious to the well-being of today’s patrons. Land leading up to the well had
been appropriated for burials in 1662.^25
Horses for riding and drawing coaches and all sorts of wagons and carts
were kept in stables throughout the area, and cattle, swine, and goats were
herded through the streets to the city slaughtering yards. People in the sub-
urbs kept their own domestic animals. When neighbors complained of hogs
roaming the streets or the smell of the slaughtering areas near Newgate, the
government fined the offending owner and had the parish scavenger remove
the animals or carcasses. Otherwise, people shrugged their shoulders; these
sorts of “nuisances” were part of city life.^26 Unless plague came, as was hap-
pening now.
Apprehension
These [orders] are in His Majesty’s name to be given to all inhabitants within
your ward that from henceforth every morning they cause the streets and chan-
nels before their doores to be watered, swept and cleansed of all manner of dirt,
filth and rubbish.
—Order of the Lord Mayor of London to the city aldermen, May 11 , 1665The new infestation was tracing a path eerily similar to that of the Black
Death three centuries before. From its seat in Asia, the pestilence had trav-
eled westward in epidemic form. At Naples 300 , 000 were said to have died
in five months in 1658 , and at Genoa 60 , 000 for the year. During the next
four years, the disease raged in Spain, France, and Germany. By 1663 it had
traveled via the European interior and Atlantic coast all the way to major
ports dotting the North and Baltic Seas—vital sources of timber and cloth
for England’s war fleet. That fall, word reached the Great Coffee House on
Cornhill that the king would forbid any Dutch ships to sail up the Thames,
Holland being England’s nearest trading partner and rival—and heavily in-
fested with plague.
England’s first line of defense against the threat of plague from abroad was
an external quarantine, and Pepys and his navy friends knew it better than
did the rumormongers sipping coffee on Cornhill. By the end of 1663 , the
king’s council ordered all ships from Amsterdam to be detained at the mouth
of the Thames for a thirty-day “triantine.” Early in 1664 Rotterdam was ad-