Preface • xixThe anonymous accounts Dorothy had requested began with phrases like
this: “As Told by a Citizen who continued all the while in London,never
made public before.” More than one historian of plague has picked up such a
tract and been so taken by the drama that it became one of the “true stories”
of that scholar’s account of the Great Plague. Dorothy fell victim to such an
account in another library. The story was of a grocer who had food delivered
secretly to his door at night and who would send forth a blast of gunpowder
as the food was transferred through a trap door (to decontaminate the food).
The occupants were allowed out in the back garden at night to take in the
fresh night air, which (it was hoped) was not miasmatic. After hours of Dor-
othy’s transcribing, an archivist suggested that this story had the marks of the
master storyteller Daniel Defoe. So much for avoiding pitfalls!
Another memorable moment came in the manuscripts room at London’s
Guildhall Library. Wishing to give a human face to those who had died of
plague, Dorothy requested the parish death register of Saint Giles Cripple-
gate for 1665. There were four reasons for wanting these records. First, Saint
Giles was an immense parish of twenty thousand inhabitants, larger than all
but a handful of provincial cities and with fatalities in 1665 claiming half its
residents. Second, its bulging register sometimes listed the street, lane, or al-
ley after a plague victim’s name, so we could use the register to develop a sim-
plified epidemiological map. Third, sometimes the register listed the occupa-
tion of the deceased, which gave a window onto which occupations proved
the most hazardous. Last, no one has done a detailed account of this huge
parish.
A large rectangular volume arrived, and Dorothy began with a page listing
all the parish’s burials for the first three months of 1665. Beside many of the
names, the parish clerk had added the cause of death, whereas many parishes
in London listed only plague (often with a p). As one goes through the pages
until May, the numbers of the dead slowly increase, with a variety of causes
listed several times. The number of pages for the summer months increases
dramatically until August, when 101 pages are needed to list all the fatalities,
by then mostly of plague. A sense of the immensity of the calamity, with row
after row of victims’ names neatly inscribed, began to overtake us. Few dis-
coveries in the archives since then have affected either of us as strongly.
There were other exceptional discoveries in the archives. Lloyd wanted to
know what happened to business when plague sent the poor to their death
and the wealthy to country havens. As far as we could tell, no historian had
been able to track merchants trying to carry on. As Lloyd looked through the