5 ms·

Defoe's account of people being buried in heaps is not necessarily at odds with this excavation of neat coffin burials. The plague didn't instantly reach full

Defoe's account of people being buried in heaps is not necessarily at odds with this excavation of neat coffin burials. The plague didn't instantly reach full intensity on day one. During the early phases of the epidemic, deaths were not yet widespread enough to require mass graves, and burials proceeded semi-normally. During the later, more intense phases, things were much worse. There were both more bodies needing to be buried and fewer available funerary service providers such as coffinmakers and undertakers around to deal with them, since many had themselves either died of the plague or fled the city. Faced with growing heaps of rotting infectious corpses in the streets, hastily dug mass graves were often resorted to by the survivors.

oh_sigh 10y ago
I'm sure there were socio-economic factors in burial as well. I suspect the lower class were much more likely to be thrown into mass graves than more well to do merchants
- pjlegato 10y ago
  Well to do people could also much more readily flee the city to their country houses and escape infection, while poorer people had nowhere else to go.
  - hga 10y ago
    Are you really sure about that? Back then, most would have roots in some farm. Heck, that's true for many many people today, my parents, for example, my mother's home is still a working farm.... Now, if you had to become a serf again to go back to the farm....
    - pjlegato 10y ago
      Of course, not all poor people were confined to the city. As you say, some came from a village where they still had relatives... who were not going to be very happy when a walking disease vector showed up from London and recent exposure to the Great Plague, even if he had a few pennies to contribute to his upkeep. Many were, however, unable to leave because they had nowhere to go. Many came from families that had been in the city for generations and now had no contact with their ancestral villages. There was no Facebook or telephones, and poor people could usually neither write nor afford postage even if they could write. Moreover, families were frequently fractured. Unwanted children were simply turned out into the street, or they might wind up there when their parents died. They then had no clue who their relatives were or what village they'd come from. Classical medieval serfdom had largely died out by the 17th century in England, but the villages were still often grindingly poor. There wasn't enough food to feed the (poor) people who lived there normally. Even during normal times, some penniless distant cousin showing up from London would often be despised as yet another mouth to feed (which is why they'd moved to the city in the first place.) Many others just couldn't afford the trip. The sheer level of extreme poverty in which most Londoners lived at the time is hard to imagine for westerners today. Travel itself was expensive and dangerous during normal times, even for those who had some place to go. The plague made it more expensive and more dangerous. For bottom-rung workers ekeing out a marginal sub-subsistence existence, for people who went hungry several days each week anyway during the best times, hiring a horse was out of the question. Their only option was to walk, perhaps for weeks, with whatever food and money they could carry. Poor people (read: almost everyone) had no access to banking services, so if they lost that money, they were screwed. (This wasn't a problem for most, as they didn't have any money to begin with.) They not only faced highway robbery at every turn, but hostile peasants. No rural village was opening its arms to take in people who had just come directly from plague-ridden London. Such people were seen as dangerous threats, walking disease vectors likely to infect the whole town and kill everyone if they were not immediately driven off. Wealthy people, by contrast, had horses, carriages, servants, guards, private food stores, and gated country estates.
      - hga 10y ago
        Ah, yeah, I'm sure you're more in the right, although I suspect you underestimate people's resourcefulness. Somehow I missed the "this is the 1665 plague" (and forgot about, for example, Newton went back home when Cambridge University closed as a precaution), and was thinking back to the big initial wave in the 14th Century (the Black Death) when England and London weren't quite as advanced; kinda scary it kept hitting in waves for 3+ centuries....
    - oh_sigh 10y ago
      Take note of bocaccios decameron, which is set in the fleeing of the wealthy class to an out of the way farm during a plague.
ZeroGravitas 10y ago
Defoes version was a novel, though written in the form of a diary (it may have been based on the diary of his uncle apparently) so which bits are accurate and which are inventions of the author are tricky to determine.
- BorisVSchmid 10y ago
  Samuel Pepys was another diary writer at that time. Pretty interesting read, and you can get a quick overview of how much he was occupied by the plague from the following site: https://goldin.shinyapps.io/Search_Pepys/ https://goldin.shinyapps.io/Search_Pepys/ (enter plague as keyword, click on the tab marked histogram, or browse the entries)

oh_sigh 10y ago

I'm sure there were socio-economic factors in burial as well. I suspect the lower class were much more likely to be thrown into mass graves than more well to do merchants

pjlegato 10y ago
Well to do people could also much more readily flee the city to their country houses and escape infection, while poorer people had nowhere else to go.
- hga 10y ago
  Are you really sure about that? Back then, most would have roots in some farm. Heck, that's true for many many people today, my parents, for example, my mother's home is still a working farm.... Now, if you had to become a serf again to go back to the farm....
  - pjlegato 10y ago
    Of course, not all poor people were confined to the city. As you say, some came from a village where they still had relatives... who were not going to be very happy when a walking disease vector showed up from London and recent exposure to the Great Plague, even if he had a few pennies to contribute to his upkeep. Many were, however, unable to leave because they had nowhere to go. Many came from families that had been in the city for generations and now had no contact with their ancestral villages. There was no Facebook or telephones, and poor people could usually neither write nor afford postage even if they could write. Moreover, families were frequently fractured. Unwanted children were simply turned out into the street, or they might wind up there when their parents died. They then had no clue who their relatives were or what village they'd come from. Classical medieval serfdom had largely died out by the 17th century in England, but the villages were still often grindingly poor. There wasn't enough food to feed the (poor) people who lived there normally. Even during normal times, some penniless distant cousin showing up from London would often be despised as yet another mouth to feed (which is why they'd moved to the city in the first place.) Many others just couldn't afford the trip. The sheer level of extreme poverty in which most Londoners lived at the time is hard to imagine for westerners today. Travel itself was expensive and dangerous during normal times, even for those who had some place to go. The plague made it more expensive and more dangerous. For bottom-rung workers ekeing out a marginal sub-subsistence existence, for people who went hungry several days each week anyway during the best times, hiring a horse was out of the question. Their only option was to walk, perhaps for weeks, with whatever food and money they could carry. Poor people (read: almost everyone) had no access to banking services, so if they lost that money, they were screwed. (This wasn't a problem for most, as they didn't have any money to begin with.) They not only faced highway robbery at every turn, but hostile peasants. No rural village was opening its arms to take in people who had just come directly from plague-ridden London. Such people were seen as dangerous threats, walking disease vectors likely to infect the whole town and kill everyone if they were not immediately driven off. Wealthy people, by contrast, had horses, carriages, servants, guards, private food stores, and gated country estates.
    - hga 10y ago
      Ah, yeah, I'm sure you're more in the right, although I suspect you underestimate people's resourcefulness. Somehow I missed the "this is the 1665 plague" (and forgot about, for example, Newton went back home when Cambridge University closed as a precaution), and was thinking back to the big initial wave in the 14th Century (the Black Death) when England and London weren't quite as advanced; kinda scary it kept hitting in waves for 3+ centuries....
  - oh_sigh 10y ago
    Take note of bocaccios decameron, which is set in the fleeing of the wealthy class to an out of the way farm during a plague.

ZeroGravitas 10y ago

Defoes version was a novel, though written in the form of a diary (it may have been based on the diary of his uncle apparently) so which bits are accurate and which are inventions of the author are tricky to determine.

BorisVSchmid 10y ago
Samuel Pepys was another diary writer at that time. Pretty interesting read, and you can get a quick overview of how much he was occupied by the plague from the following site: https://goldin.shinyapps.io/Search_Pepys/ https://goldin.shinyapps.io/Search_Pepys/ (enter plague as keyword, click on the tab marked histogram, or browse the entries)