190 • The AbyssSeptember 19 , the daily death count dropped to nineteen as the plague
passed on to new territory; the pits had served their purpose.^25
Death played no favorites, but final resting places were less egalitarian. In
Covent Garden Reverend Patrick saw to it that his faithful parish clerk’s wife
and children had their own plots and prayers. When a noble lady’s coachman
and the churchwarden succumbed, their bodies were coffined up and placed
in individual graves. For the poor, a single coffin was often used over and
over again to transport bodies to the burial ground, where many were in-
terred in a simple shroud. How much worse might the accoutrements of
death have been for someone sent off to die in a pesthouse? Covent Garden’s
register bears no trace of where the Widow Page and the daughter of Widow
Thorn were placed after they expired in the nearby pesthouse.^26
Inside London’s wall, cries of desperation from churchwardens reached
the Guildhall. Ground was not available in any churchyards and space was
lacking in the large burying ground next to the Bethlehem mental hospital.
The city purchased vacant land in Finsbury Field north of the wall and put
the keeper of Bethlehem’s grounds under orders to “smother and suppress
the stenches” from its mass grave and bury the bones and burn the coffin
boards that had been dug up to make new room. In a time of critical need for
burying space, the court of aldermen insisted that Bethlehem’s keeper revert
to single graves—a totally unrealistic command that he surely ignored.^27
Strangely, no mention had been made at the Guildhall after June of expand-
ing the city pesthouse, including its burial ground.
Pesthouses
Sheds to be erected round the [city] pesthouse ground... in case the sicknesse
continue to increase within the city and liberties.
—Order of the Lord Mayor of London, June 17 , 1665Pesthouse facilities had been on the minds of the king’s councilors since Ap-
ril, but they put off action for six weeks, until the plague’s spread from Saint
Giles in the Fields to Saint Martin in the Fields threatened the courtier
quarters of Westminster. The sole suburban pesthouse at the far end of Saint
Margaret’s was a long way from the site of the infection in the outlying par-
ishes of Saint Giles and Saint Martin. To avoid having sick persons pass by
the Piazza and Whitehall to that facility, the royal council ordered the two