The Other London • 55who tended rich and poor patients in the city, traced the beginnings to “a
parcel of skins brought out of Holland into St. Giles.” Dr. Nathaniel Hodges
weighed in with the fullest explanation. The disease was definitely con-
tagious, he argued, and not just carried through the air by miasmas. It had
doubtless come in on “packs of merchandice” from Holland; the original
source was likely to have been Turkish “bailes of cotton or silk which is a
strange preserver of the Pestilential Steams.” On plague’s arrival in West-
minster, he continued, the local authorities had failed to shut up the first in-
fected house. Some “timorous neighbors, under apprehension of the con-
tagion, removed into the city of London, who unfortunately carried along
with them the pestilential taint.” The Bearbinder Lane fatality was the inev-
itable result.^35
Over time this story became embellished. We next pick it up during the
plague epidemic at Marseilles in 1722. As Londoners braced themselves
against the prospect of another Great Plague, Daniel Defoe wove the Bear-
binder Lane episode into his Journal of the Plague Year.The journal begins
with the riveting fictional account of two “French-men” living at the juncture
of Drury Lane and Long Acre in Saint Giles in the Fields who die of plague
in December 1664. In the spring, a Frenchman living “near the infected
houses” in Long Acre, where the plague had claimed its initial French immi-
grants, flees across town to Bearbinder Lane. There he dies, “to the great af-
fliction of the city.”^36 Defoe’s whodunit omitted only one tantalizing detail:
the strong link between immigrant status and religious dissent. Perhaps the
Frenchman who carried the plague across town was a Quaker, like the neigh-
bors of the person he unwittingly infected.
Other storytellers copied Defoe’s version more or less verbatim during the
rest of the eighteenth century. The old reference to Frenchmen opening in-
fected goods from Holland gradually took on the mythic truth of legend.^37 It
remains so to this day.^38 The truth will probably never be known.
The king and mayor were informed of the Bearbinder Lane fatality a week
before it came out in the Bill of Mortality for May 2 – 9 .On May 4 , White-
hall quietly ordered the city’s justices of the peace to shut up all infected
houses. The Guildhall was empowered to take all action to stay the progress
of the plague. A week later, when the plague death became public knowl-
edge, the mayor ordered all householders and shopkeepers in the city and
liberties to clean the street in front of their places every day. Like the king,
the mayor of London was following old Plague Orders to the letter. There
was no time to review past policies and try something new. Sir John Law-
rence had to hope that daily street sweeping and scouring would be more