An interview with Vanessa Harding
This interview with Vanessa Harding (VH) was carried out by Juniper Communications (JC) for the Channel 4 programme The Great Plague. Dr Vanessa Harding is a senior lecturer in the history of London at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Contents
• Causes of death
• Knowledge and fear of plague
• Burial before the plague
• How burials began to change
• Searchers and bearers
• Plague pits
• The nurses and history
• The churchwardens' accounts
JC: What did people commonly die from in 17th-century London?
VH: Before the Great Plague, or in times when plague was not rampant in London, people seemed to die from about four different groups of things.
The most significant one was simply the deaths of infants and children – they'd probably die of some gastric complaint or infection they couldn't resist. Then there's quite a small proportion who died from accidents – people died from broken legs and falls and things like that, in a way they wouldn't now.
There were people who died from diseases such as typhus and gastric diseases – things that you can clearly perceive are illnesses that cause death. And then there are an awful lot of deaths attributed to some cause that we wouldn't recognise as a cause of death – such as fright or a thought or a planet struck or something like that. And those were probably ways of explaining deaths that were otherwise inexplicable.
JC: In London in 1665, how many people died?
VH: In the whole year, nearly 100,000 people die in London. Something like 70,000 of those are said to have died of plague.
JC: So what was the common idea of plague – did people know about the Black Death, for example?
VH: People certainly have a very strong idea that there is a disease, which they call plague, to which you respond in certain ways – socially and in terms of your own health and hygiene and so on. Whether they clearly identify something that we in the 21st century would identify accurately is another question.
I think they probably group a number of diseases together, and that the margins of diagnosis are quite wide.
JC: So how do we know – from the Bills of Mortality, for example – that 17th-century Londoners were afraid of the plague?
VH: Plague is the most easily identified disease from the Bills of Mortality. It's the only one that's picked out as being a special cause of death, and they only added in notification of the other causes of death at quite a late stage. The Bills were founded in the 16th century because the government at Westminster wanted to know changes in mortality attributed to plague because that was a sign to get out of town.
JC: And there are all these other diseases on the Bills of Mortality. Those figures go up at the time of the plague – why?
VH: The numbers of people dying from all causes rise during plague. It isn't just that you add plague on to a normal total; the normal total is greatly enhanced. That must be partly because there are undiagnosed plague deaths, but probably also because there are other diseases that are running at the same time. There are certainly some that seem to be quite similar to plague – there are lots of deaths attributed to 'spotted fever' and so on.
There must also simply be people dying because of the social and familial disruption caused by the plague. Old people, people with minor diseases who suffer from want of care, infants – I'm sure many of these would have died.
JC: That sounds terribly sad.
VH: Yes, I think you could say that the plague exaggerates the numbers of deaths from all causes, as well as from plague itself. And if you look at parish records, you will find that they are burying individuals who died in the street – a body found dead at this person's door, or in this back alley. It is clear that it's a very dramatically experienced disease for people – even for households that don't suffer it. They must see it going on all around.
JC: What would a burial have been like in 1665, before the plague came?
VH: Before the plague, and indeed for most of the early modern period, burial is very important to Londoners. It sometimes seems surprising to us that, with death so present, with everybody experiencing lots of deaths in the family, they pay quite so much attention to people being buried properly in a place that seems appropriate, with the right kind of service, and the right kind of attendance.
But it certainly seems that they did. People had as good a burial as they could afford. And that even when parishes were paying charitably for the burial of the poor, they treated them with some care and sensitivity. The community as a whole had a notion that death was something that must be responded to in a certain way.
JC: What was the paraphernalia of an ordinary decent burial?
VH: Supposing we're talking about a man or a women who's died at home, in a family that's able to look after them. The body would stay at home for perhaps a couple of days before it was buried. In the middle classes, by the 1660s, almost everybody's being buried in their own coffin. So the body's going to be washed and shrouded and put in the coffin.
Then it will be taken to the church with a group of friends and neighbours, who will attend a service, and then the coffin would be taken out to the burial ground or buried within the church, whatever was appropriate.
JC: Would you say that even the poor and working classes had pride about how they were buried?
VH: If people could afford [a good burial], they would have one. But clearly there are some people for whom even the cost of a winding sheet to be buried in, a shroud and not a coffin, is more than they can afford, because we certainly find parishes paying for shrouding the poor.
But it's interesting that, even at some of the pauper funerals, the parishes pay for a small distribution of drink or some kind of celebration for neighbours, which again suggests that they are concerned about these people as individuals.
JC: The parish would pay for a decent burial for the poor who couldn't afford a shroud themselves?
VH: The parish is the welfare state of the 16th and 17th centuries. The Elizabethan poor law says that it's the parish that has to support the poor within its bounds. Therefore they have to support the poor in life, and they have to bury them if they die because nobody else is going to.
If people can't afford to bury themselves, then – both as a matter of hygiene and also as a matter of charity – the parish will step in. But on the whole, although they will try to give them a decent burial, they won't give them anything like the class of burial that somebody of the middle classes who's paying for their own burial might have.
One of the things that is bound to happen is that the poor will be buried either in the parish churchyard, or perhaps in one of the extra-mural churchyards, away from the centre. They are being pushed out towards the edge of the city by this date.
JC: When the plague began to hit hard, how did the burials start to change?
VH: It looks as though they hung on to what they would normally do for as long as possible. Even throughout the epidemic, there are individuals who are managing to bury the members of their family with appropriate trappings, if not with much ceremonial.
At St Dunstan's, there are enough families still paying for their own burials, still managing funerals, to suggest that there's normal burial at the same time. And there are a good many parishes in the City centre that never have to dig pits, that just don't experience such a serious mortality.
But increasingly the parish is having to take over. It's having to bury more people at the parish's cost simply because, if people have suffered from disease for some period, they haven't got any savings or resources left.
The parish also has to take over the organisation of burial. It ultimately decides that it can't afford to bury people in single graves, but has to find some more economical way of using the ground and of getting rid of the bodies.
JC: How did the normal standards of burial disappear?
VH: Burial during the plague certainly has to change, simply because of the pressure of numbers. Probably the first thing to change is that they're burying people more quickly if they possibly can. You can't afford to wait two or three days, because in two or three days, there'll be another dozen bodies to bury, so they're certainly burying people more quickly.
The plague orders suggest they should be buried at night – I think because of the fear of infection if there are funerals going through the public street. As the parishes begin to dig pits to bury their local dead, that obviously is quite a change from the way in which people had been buried in single graves before.
The parishes stopped burying people inside churches, which had always been an option for the better off. They also probably stopped burying in coffins – or a much larger proportion are buried in shrouds rather than in coffins – partly because of space, partly because of cost.
JC: When the plague starts to hit, did churchyards start to fill up quite quickly?
VH: Yes, but it takes a little time for it to get going, when the plague begins to hit in May, early June. The numbers being buried week by week in a parish like St Dunstan will go up from, say, half a dozen to 10-12 – not an impossible pressure. But once they're burying 20, 30, 40 people a week, clearly the amount of space and the ability to dig graves fast enough are bound to change.
JC: Did they stop allowing mourners to come, or was that later?
VH: The plague orders say that there shouldn't be big public funerals, but every account we have suggests that that really doesn't work. If there are people there to be mourners, that's what they will do. Obviously there must have been a lot of burials for which there was nobody to attend apart from, say, the minister and the sexton. But there must be a large number of cases in which the surviving family would want to be there. In a moment of great trauma like that, the familiarity and comfort of the funeral ritual was probably very important.
JC: When a family is shut up in their house and one or successive members die, what would happen from the moment they die until they were buried?
VH: We can only talk about what would happen to a shut-up family in terms of what was supposed to happen. We very rarely know in detail what actually went on.
The house would be visited by a searcher to certify that the dead person had died of the plague or not, as the case might be. Then the parish bearers would come and take the body away for burial – as promptly as they could because you simply can't afford not to. You have to collect the dead through the night in order to bury them before morning.
JC: Who were the people who carried the bodies of the plague dead?
VH: We don't know the names of the bearers of the plague dead. They're employed by the parish. It's clearly a way of earning money at a time when other sources of income have disappeared. So they're presumably among the poorer people of the parish who simply have no option – if they're not going to starve to death, they have to take on some of these extremely unattractive and unpleasant tasks. So a parish like St Dunstan would have hired four or six men on a long-term basis – or as long as they survived.
JC: It seems that being a plague bearer or a searcher was a very dangerous job.
VH: The people who carried the plague dead seem to have died very frequently. I don't mean that, if you start at the beginning of the epidemic, you might not survive it, but it's at least as dangerous an occupation as any other. The parishes found somewhere for them to live, or they built temporary accommodation in the churchyard for them. They probably tried to keep them at a distance, thus identifying them as being very closely associated with dead bodies and with the dangers that are to be found in dead bodies.
JC: And how physically did the bearers manipulate these infectious plague bodies?
VH: It's interesting that, although dead bodies are seen to be dangerous, they're obviously not untouchable. It almost looks as though people are as frightened of clothing that has touched the dead, or that belonged to the dead, as of the body itself.
They must have carried the bodies in slings, which might have been canvas hammocks. In normal times, you would carry a body in a coffin on men's shoulders, but you presumably can't do that with a recently deceased plague body.
JC: Where are the plague pits in London?
VH: Plague pits are one of the great urban myths of London. Every time you dig up a body that you don't expect to find, people say: 'This must be a plague pit.' But nine times out of ten, it's just a burial ground that people have forgotten. A great many of the pits within which people were buried in 1665 seem to have been dug in parish churchyards – exactly where you might expect.
However, there must have been some dug on the fringes of the city, in places like Finsbury Fields, possibly outside Bishopsgate, outside Aldgate and so on.
But in a community in which every scrap of land is identified and belongs to somebody, you can't just go and dig a plague pit in the fields, because the fields belong to somebody.
JC: In a parish like St Dunstan, how many plague pits were dug?
VH: If we read the churchwarden's accounts, we can see that the parish of St Dunstan dug plague pits on several occasions. They start off by digging at least three pits in mid-August; a few weeks later, they're digging another one and then another two. And it looks as though all of those are within the parish churchyard. They're digging a big hole into which they can put a lot of bodies, rather than a series of small holes into which they can put one or two at a time.
JC: What about plague pits generally in London? Where would you dig a plague pit if you didn't dig it in the churchyard?
VH: There was still a certain amount of green space outside London, and this seems to be where plague pits were dug. But they were probably always being dug under some kind of supervision, with some kind of authority, because you can't otherwise dig a large hole, you have to organise people to do it.
Because record keeping is breaking down by August/September in London, we don't know exactly where these were dug, or exactly who paid for them to be dug. But they were probably quite limited in number, and not a sign of chaos but a sign of organisation.
JC: So could you point to a place today we could definitely say is a plague pit from 17th-century London?
VH: There are one or two places that are recorded in contemporary documents as being places where people were buried during the plague and that have subsequently been excavated. For example, before the 19th century, on the site of the Broadgate development – the former Broad Street station – was the New Churchyard, which was opened in 1569 to take plague burials, and was used in every successive plague, and in the intervening years.
JC: How big were the plague pits?
VH: The pits that a parish like St Dunstan was digging in its own churchyard probably only held 30 or 40 bodies. But we do have evidence – or at least [Daniel] Defoe tells us, and he may or may not be accurate – that there was a great pit dug in the churchyard of St Botolph Aldgate, in the east of the City, in which nearly 1,200 bodies were buried. But that must have been unusual.
JC: What were the tools of the trade for the grave-maker?
VH: Grave-makers seem to have dug graves, first, with picks to break the ground, and then with shovels or spades.
JC: What was the impact on you of seeing in the churchwardens' accounts that shovels and picks were being replaced?
VH: One of the things that's very dramatic in these accounts is to see not only that they're replacing grave diggers and bearers, but they're also having to replace the implements with which they dig the graves – presumably because these are simply wooden implements that are worn out with overuse.
JC: Who were the nurses?
VH: In London at this time, one way that older, poorer women found to earn a living was by nursing. And in the plague, when many of their other sources of income might have disappeared, there must have been a lot of people who would take on the role of nurse because there was nothing else for them to do.
JC: What sort of reputation did the nurses have?
VH: The professional middle-class men who wrote narratives of the plague seemed to imply that the nurses were grasping, vicious, untrustworthy, wicked, dangerous, extremely unpleasant.
But it's very difficult to separate this rhetoric from the reality of what it would have been like to be an older, destitute woman trying to make a living in the most appalling human catastrophe that anybody could experience. The men who wrote about them attributed to the nurses a lot of the fears that they had about the epidemic, and laid on their shoulders some of the sense of social disruption that clearly all Londoners at that time had.
JC: You brought up the rich, male version of history. Explain the different sorts of accounts you get from writers such as Pepys and the parish records and churchwardens' accounts?
VH: We get several different pictures of the plague. One is from the literate people who lived though it and were able to write about their experiences, like Pepys, who clearly sees it as a frightening time, but doesn't experience it very closely. We also have all the 'medical journalists', the people who are trying to sell cures for the plague, or to sell their narrative of the plague in order to establish themselves as successful doctors.
But I think the truest account of the plague that we get is by reading the records that were written by people who had no sense that they were writing history. They were simply writing down what they needed to do to keep going.
VH: What sorts of records were kept?
VH: The churchwardens were keeping two kinds of records at this time. They were keeping accounts of all the money that they received and spent. It's in those accounts that you can see them paying for bearers, or paying to have pits dug. You can see them paying out for individual families who were being locked up in their houses and had to be supported.
The churchwardens also kept vestry minutes, which are the records of the decisions and deliberations made at vestry meetings. For example, whether they were going to hire another two grave diggers; whether they were going to shut up further houses; whether they were going to allow burial in the churchyard any more – or what else they had to do, faced with this tremendous calamity.
There are also the records simply of the dead, the parish registers that everybody knows, which are kept by the clerk or the sexton. These record, day by day, the numbers of individuals buried: sometimes with the letter P, indicating that they've died of plague; sometimes with no indication; often with a name, but occasionally without.
JC: How did it strike you to see the list of nameless dead in these accounts?
VH: It was very dramatic to read through the parish registers and see the way in which they shift from naming the dead to saying 'Two bodies', 'Three bodies', 'A man who died in the street'. It gives you a very frightening feeling about what it was like to be alive in London at that moment.
JC: What would it mean to someone to be buried without their name?
VH: It must have been shocking to people at the time that there were individuals who'd died without a name, without a family. That prospect of dying alone, and of being buried in a mass with other people, must have been one of the most frightening things about the disease – that it could overtake you so completely and destroy your social identity as well as your life.
JC: Do we know anything about how the churchwardens or parish clerks might have felt about what was happening to their communities?
VH: Parish records are fairly matter of fact. They don't reveal emotion in most cases. They are simply an account of increasing numbers of deaths and burials, including the deaths of churchwardens and bearers and people who were clearly known to those who were writing down the names day by day. But they seem to remain calm, detached perhaps, because that's the kind of record it is – it's not the place in which you can write about what a horrible experience it is to be going through.
Just occasionally, in some parish records, you get an exclamation of despair, or grief, or horror – but on the whole they seem to be fairly factual. But the tale that they tell is a terrible one.
