Signs and Sources• 65priest). The parish clerk tallied the burials for the week and their causes and
took his figures to the head office of the parish clerks in central London.
The searchers were widely considered the weak link in the chain, garner-
ing an unsavory reputation as unreliable old women, usually on the parish
dole and occasionally befogged by drink. Why bother to depend on such un-
trustworthy sources? Because someone had to undertake this disagreeable
task, and the parish authorities were able to dragoon these poor women into
service with the threat of withholding their pensions, food, and clothing. In
times of plague, the searchers were segregated from the public out of fear of
contamination and were forced to share lean-tos with gravediggers in the
neighborhood’s burial ground.
But were these parish pariahs so untrustworthy at fulfilling their sworn
duties? The head clerk of the company of parish clerks said the bills were “of
great use and necessity,” and these “ancient women” were chosen by “some of
the eminentest men of the parish.”^22 If that sounded like a defensive tactic to
save the reputation of the bills, one could not say the same about the bal-
anced opinion of John Graunt, whose work on the bills had won him a seat
at the prestigious Royal Society.
Graunt gave the searchers a mixed grade. He judged them competent
enough to determine most causes of death, from old age and the falling sick-
ness to gout and palsy. One could easily forgive them their quaint way of de-
scribing these diseases. What difference did it make if they described a
corpse as “very lean and worn away” rather than saying that the person died
of consumption? They erred badly on plague, however, Graunt said, underre-
porting it by 25 percent during the Great Plague of 1625. They had obviously
put down other causes of death in many cases when they should have listed
plague. They were doing the same now, judging by the jump in nonplague
mortality in April and May over the figures for the years just past. Graunt
left the matter there, not wanting to probe human motivations. He was a
demographer, not a mind reader. The only thing he would suggest as an ex-
planation was that these old women were “perhaps ignorant and careless.”^23
But if they were less than candid about plague, so were most Londoners.
Denial took second place only to fright. Samuel Pepys kept his mind off the
emerging epidemic by steadfast devotion to his pleasures and obsessive at-
tention to his profits. Yet he could recognize a bubo as well as anyone.
Denial easily found support in good intentions. The Reverend Symon Pa-
trick and his parish clerk had colluded in covering up the plague death of Dr.
Ponteus’s daughter, which the parish searcher had dutifully reported. They