An interview with Justin Champion
This interview with Justin Champion (JCh) was carried out by Juniper Communications (JC) for the Channel 4 programme The Great Plague. Justin Champion is a reader in the history of early modern ideas at Royal Holloway College, University of London.
Contents
• The evidence of parish records
• The recorders of history
• Solomon Eagle and other apocalyptic figures
• The effect of the plague on London
• The effect of the plague on individuals
• Crime and punishment
• Sex and drugs
• The poor without the élite
The evidence of parish records
JC: When you looked at the church wardens' and vestry minutes, what was it that moved you the most?
JCh: The major response to having looked at these crusty fragments of ordinary lives is the ubiquity of death. Death is everywhere. Death destroys families.
You get to know individuals. You've read the hearth tax accounts. You know where they live. You know they've got a small house, maybe one fireplace. Then you look at the burial registers, and you can see – week by week, perhaps day by day – the names being crossed off from that family. Perhaps you see in the church warden's account a payment for making a burial cloth for a small child. It makes you reflect on your own circumstances.
But I think that the most powerful emotions in me are produced by how disciplined, how self-controlled the 'lower orders' are in this community. They govern themselves; they look after themselves. There is, in one sense, an abdication of responsibility by the élite during the Great Plague and in the earlier plagues. We can see these small communities turning to their own resources to make a living, to get by.
I would hate to think of the social catastrophe that would take place in a 21st- century sophisticated culture if a quarter of London's population went down with some mysterious disease in the space of three months. We saw the hysteria and scape-goating that happened in the early years of AIDS ...
Well, this community had to cope with something as powerful, if not more powerful, and they coped both emotionally and physically. I think that's what my research brought home to me.
The other thing was simply seeing the names. I entered most of the names on a computer – perhaps 60,000. I like to think of that research as preserving the little fragments of those people's lives. We know all about [Samuel] Pepys. We know about Charles II and the great and the good, but in that database, which is publicly available, you can recover a little bit of early modern London. That's what being an historian is about – empathising, experiencing and thinking through those ordinary, everyday lives.
The recorders of history
JC: What about the church wardens themselves? The people who actually sat and wrote these accounts? How did they strike you?
JCh: One of the consequences of looking at these sources is that one has enormous respect for the church wardens who actually compiled the accounts that we use. These are literate individuals. They're not always keen to have their jobs. They're nominated because they're literate.
There are some sad stories – church warden's accounts that change hand halfway through, and you check the burial register and find that the church warden has died. But these are people who are looking after the community's welfare, their material welfare. They're recording in meticulous detail.
One only needs to go to the Guildhall and look at the church warden's account of St Margaret's Westminster or St Botolph's Bishopsgate, and see the detail. You can literally recover the experience – almost minute by minute – of that plague. I have in my mind an image of a man who's concerned to keep a record for himself but also, very self-consciously, for the parish and for posterity. It shows the minutiae of how a culture and a community governed itself.
And it gives us a message. We don't really participate in our own government today; somebody else does it. It's done facelessly with a computer. Well, in 17th- century London, a large community of over half a million people, people participated. These were little republics in some sense.
I have an enormous admiration for these people who governed and compiled. To many, they're boring clerks recording how much a padlock cost and another shilling for the barbed wire that was keeping the fence together. But that's what life's made of, those little incremental bits of data. For historians, nothing beats a good church warden's account.
Solomon Eagle and other apocalyptic figures
JC: Who was Solomon Eagle?
JCh: Solomon Eagle – or Solomon Eccles as I prefer to think of him – is one of the great figures in [Daniel] Defoe's Journal of a Plague Year [1722], which was an amazing reconstruction of what it may have been like to live in urban London. You know, Defoe's work is based on historical sources. It's not just a work of fiction. It's a very clever synthesis of contemporary records.
[Defoe wrote: 'I suppose the world has heard of the famous Solomon Eagle, an enthusiast. He, though not infected at all but in his head, went about denouncing of judgment upon the city in a frightful manner, sometimes quite naked, and with a pan of burning charcoal on his head. What he said, or pretended, indeed I could not learn.'] Solomon Eccles was a Quaker, a man prosecuted numerous times during the Restoration for civil disobedience. He would worship with other Quakers. The law that was passed in the early 1660s said that, if more than three people got together in a room for religious worship, this was a seditious, wicked activity. In May 1665, Solomon Eccles was arrested in Southwark, even though he probably lived in the middle of the City of London, and was put away in prison – probably in the Clink on the South Bank – for about two to three months.
But we know that the Quakers, in a very millennial, apocalyptic sense, reacted to traumas in the natural world by attempting to test their own religious prowess, their own religious identity. This could involve having fasting matches with Anglican priests, stripping naked in a churchyard or branding themselves to show their true piety. Defoe conjures up an image of 'Solomon Eagle' walking round with a burning brazier of coals on his head. A lot of 18th-century representations show him Christ-like with his burning coals. I found no contemporary record ascribing this to Solomon Eccles, but it's the sort of thing that went on quite frequently. We have to remember that the early 1660s was a very apocalyptic time.
The area that we're talking about – Holborn, St Dunstan's in the West – was where, in the 1660s, there were Fifth Monarchists: mad, violent, committed Christians who believed Christ's rule was going to come on earth. In 1661, they tried to encourage Christ's rule by killing all the wealthy they could find. These were 17th-century David Koreshes who would use any form of public controversy to gain their own authority within the community. Burning braziers might have been a bit painful, but it's a test, it's a sign, if you like, of one's true faith.
The effect of the plague on London
JC: How did the plague affect London, in the larger sense?
JCh: London suffered a probable 20% loss in its population – 98,000 [both the dead and those who left the city]. However, we know that the population of London recovered two to four years later.
There was disruption to the economy. There were lots of bankruptcies – you can look at the exchange records. But within two to three years, London was again a thriving community. Cock and Key Alley was exactly the sort of place that was replenished by new blood, by younger people coming in.
What is amazing is that by December/January of the following year, everything is back working smoothly. And then another catastrophe hits – it all goes up in smoke ...
The effect of the plague on individuals
JC: You paint a picture of London surviving, but I would like you to contrast that with the individuals whose whole families were wiped out.
JCh: We can talk very confidently about the urban economy and the civil structures of London surviving the epidemic, but that misses out the personal tragedies that we see in the church wardens' accounts in the burial registers. Whole families were destroyed. Many of those in poorer areas were scraping a living in a marginal way, and once they were dead, they were gone. The only testament, the only remnant of their existence is in those little fragments of records in the Guildhall Library or the Public Record Office.
We have to remember that, for contemporaries, they lived with death. Death was a pretty ubiquitous experience. Young kids would die more often than not before they reached any sort of maturity, in their first months of life. So, the early modern person was a pretty tough cookie.
The tragedy for historians is that we can't really get into the minds of those poor people. We only see them when they come into conflict or when they're recorded by the parish officials. We know, for example, that many women were driven to commit acts of burglary on people who were dying. One can imagine these women perhaps like today's poor single parents being driven to steal from a shop.
Crime and punishment
JC: Were there were any executions during the plague, and if there were, why?
JCh: One of the problems, especially for the élite, especially during an epidemic, is that you don't want large groups of poor people gathering together. Now this caused a sort of tension in élite ideology. Because one of the ways of instilling discipline and order is by regularly executing the poor, the vagrant, the criminal. But during the plague, all those sorts of activities – public executions, public funerals, any sort of form of sociability among the lowers – were stopped. They had become the possible source another dangerous problem: disorder.
In one sense, the state actually sacrificed some of its majesty. You can't display your majesty because you're too scared to be there to do it. The normal rules were in a state of hold.
Now it's only a suspicion and I can't give hard and fast figures, but from anecdotes in the Middlesex Quarter Sessions records, after the plague is finished, there's certainly a feeling of 'Let's catch up with the backlog of criminals.' That's when we see, for example, the prosecution of women who have been felons stealing goods from the wealthy in their shut-up houses.
Sex and drugs
JC: Venereal disease was rumoured to give you immunity to the plague. It made me imagine a sort of apocalyptic hedonism, rather like Boccaccio's visions in The Decameron. Has that ever struck you?
JCh: One of the areas that hasn't been researched in enormous detail is the emotional release that a great crisis might bring to a community. One can certainly think of parallels, say, in the 1650s, when there were minor plague epidemics and the emotional cultural crisis of overturning the established order, seen in groups like the Ranters. People who celebrated fornication, who saw it as enacting an sacrament. So being drunk, swearing, dancing, smoking were all forms of religious experience.
One religious response is to get on with it. If everything is down to providence, if God is killing every single individual, then get on with it. Do what you want because God is influencing everything that is happening.
Having said that, I can't think of any examples of massive rave parties on the South Bank. Partially I think this is because these forms of experience, or indulgence, would have taken place in private because of the overwhelming concern with maintaining public order and public discretion.
The literary works of élite figures of the time give a picture of London at the height of the plague in August and September. It's a quiet place. There's nobody moving about. People are fearful of looking other people in the eye. Pepys has enormous shock when he went out in a sedan chair and somebody else was there. Grass is growing up through the main thoroughfare. It's desolate.
But think about it statistically. About 70,000 people died. Maybe another 30,000-50,000 people left. But there's still a quarter of million people living there. And they had emotional lives, and one can imagine how religious therapy would cope with a lot of that.
Certainly Presbyterian figures moved into London during the plague to tend to those sorts of spiritual needs. But I think the legacy of the Interregnum – 'the world turned upside down' – would have meant that some people responded to this catastrophe by saying, 'Well, stuff it. This is the end of the world. We'll go out with a bang.' And that's the image we see in Defoe's account of Solomon Eccles with his burning fires.
Were people drunk in cellars? Who knows? I imagine quite a few people were. I mean, the question one ought to pose is: 'What would you do in those circumstances? How would you react?'
One might become enormously pious. Many of the medical therapies of the time were about regulating the body, being moderate, not drinking too much, wearing fine linen. But if you're a poor person and you've got to spend all day chucking dead bodies into a graveyard, I imagine that, at the end of the day, you'd probably want a bit of a drink and a smoke, and you may not get out of bed too early in the morning.
JC: And were 'recreational' drugs being used as preventatives and cures at the time?
JCh: Oh, yes. Look at some of the therapies advised in mainstream texts, like the Book of Orders, which also had directions from the physicians, and also in the recipe books. There's a huge battle during 1665 for providing the right drug. It's a bit like the hayfever battles today – 'This one will really work.' If we look at some of the 17th-century remedies, they're full of opium and beer. If you were wealthy, you drank fine wines – a good Madeira would presumably help you get very drunk, and also stave off the pain.
And remember: there is huge pain. If you're suffering from the plague, you're in massive, massive pain. It's a nasty, nasty way to die. Many of the combinations of drugs that are provided by apothecaries are soporifics and pain killers. So there were other ways of coping as well. One suspects that it's not only the ill, but also the healthy, who are taking those things too.
The poor without the élite
JC: Is there one thing that has particularly impressed you about this period?
JCh: I suppose one of the powerful things that studying the plague has really brought home to me is that the wealthy, the élite, got out as quickly as possible. And what we have in the late summer of 1665 is an abandoned community. The élite, the hierarchy, those people who are meant to create discipline and order have gone. But what we see is not a society that crumbles into corrupt decay and fornication and disorder. It's a society that fights. It's a society that looks after itself. It's a society that survives. So it shows the enormous resilience of poor, marginal people.
We'll never be able to recover most of that because, again, it's the experience of everyday, ordinary life that we're missing. It's not recorded in Pepys.
But these people did survive. They presumably worked together in communities. They looked after each other. It's a story about self-government. After a revolution that took 20 years and that probably killed over 800,000 people, here are the ordinary people governing and living peaceably and successfully among themselves, without the élite.
