xx • Prefacecard catalogues at the Guildhall Library, he discovered plaguetime ledgers,
business correspondence, and a rare merchant-family journal. As he read
through George Boddington’s remembrances of growing up, he turned a
page to see, in bold letters at the top of a two-page entry: “Then was the Year
of the Great Plague.” He stood up, overcome with excitement.
In 1994 the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine’s library pur-
chased, at a handsome price, a letter from a London businessman writing in
1665 to his brother in the country about the threat to the brother’s son if he
stayed on in the capital as an apprentice during this plague season. The busi-
nessman assured his brother that his care for the boy would be as if he were
his own son. Chris Hilton, associate curator of Western manuscripts, shared
this newly arrived letter with us. The account is now part of our story of liv-
ing through the Great Plague.
We can only begin to describe some of the bountiful archives that are
available in London. At the top of the list is the Muniments’ Room of West-
minster Abbey, where ancient chests are kept bound with three to eight or
more straps, each with its own lock and key; each key must be kept by a sin-
gle person, and all keyholders must be present for the opening of a chest.
Manuscripts and other special records were kept here over the centuries. In
the room below, reached by a flight of stairs, are dozens of floor-to-ceiling,
freestanding, timeworn wooden bookshelves, crammed with bound volumes.
Commanding the entire room is an imposing oil painting of Charles II,
England’s ruler during the Great Plague. The manuscript room above is en-
tered by a spiral staircase in a back corner and an old door some twenty-five
feet above the floor. Here, helpful archivists, amused by Dorothy’s American
astonishment at the antiquity of the surroundings, opened Saint Margaret
Westminster’s invaluable records of the Great Plague.
After a harvest festival at Saint Mary at Hill church one Sunday, we by
chance met Iain and Jane Radford. They took us around to numerous Chris-
topher Wren churches, ending with All Hallows on the Wall by the Tower of
London. The crypt was on view that day, with the original register opened to
reveal the parish fatalities during the Great Plague—providential for our
work as well as our relationship with these two delightful people. Iain was so
enthusiastic about our project that he gave us the plague statistics for Barnes,
an upstream provisioning town for London, and (with a smile) loaned us an
unpublished history of the surrounding countryside during the Great
Plague—a secondary source that only a few local historians knew about.
Our immersion in the Great Plague actually began at Colchester in Essex,
where we rented a flat arranged by Lloyd’s friend Ludmilla Jordinova, who