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Justin Champion answered questions about the Great Plague. Dr Champion is reader in the history of early modern ideas at the Department of History, Royal Holloway College, University of London. There seems to be a general belief that the plague in London was stopped by the Great Fire. Is this true? There is a great deal of speculation here. The common belief is that, somehow, the fire cleansed the disease from the City either by driving rats and fleas away or killing the bugs that caused it. And certainly there was substantial rebuilding of the City after 1666. However, the geography of the disease does not really fit with this argument. Most of the deaths were in the poor suburban parishes east, north and south of the City walls. The fire destroyed the built environment within the City walls and by the riverside. The disappearance of the plague from London after 1665 is still a great mystery. Mutation of the bacteria, improvements in diet and health, the changing built environment may all have had a role. What do you think of the new theory that the plague was not spread by rats and fleas but was caused by a virus similar to the Ebola virus? My own research and, more recently, that of biologists at the University of Liverpool does suggest that the traditional model of diffusion – from rats to fleas to humans – seems untenable with the observed patterns of death. Too many people died too soon in too many different places for the disease to have been spread by the very slow vectors of infection in the rat population. There were lots of different diseases all operating at the same time. Water-borne intestinal disease looks a likely candidate to have hit so many people so swiftly. It is said that the plague killed one third of the population living in London – that is, about 100,000 deaths. How accurate are these statistics? Being exact about the size of the population and mortality (deaths) so long ago is fraught with problems. Although there was a national system of registration of births, marriages and deaths, some families – for reasons of religious dissent or moral conscience – avoided the process. One can estimate a population in the City of London of about 450,000-500,000, but this would have varied due to the constant process of inward migration (for work) and high death rates associated with an unhealthy urban life. However, we can have pretty solid confidence in the raw numbers of deaths because of another contemporary record – the Bills of Mortality – which were collected weekly by each parish clerk in London. Statistical comparison with burial registers and other records suggest that these figures are trustworthy. Did recovery from the plague confer immunity? If it did, were those who were immune in demand during the next outbreak? Since we don't really know what caused the disease, it is rather difficult to say! In general, because the resident population of London was so mobile and young it is unlikely that the reservoir of people with immunities to various urban diseases was large. Replenishing the City and suburban population with young people from the provinces meant that they were constantly exposed to danger. People did survive the plague as contemporary reports tell us (sometimes two or three times), but they attributed their survival to God's providence rather than biological processes. Why do you think people obeyed the Plague Orders – for example, the locking-in of infected families – with virtually no dissent? In essence, they had no choice. Early modern society was profoundly hierarchical, ordered and disciplined. Everyone from husband to servant knew their place in the natural order. Anxieties about disorder and dissent, especially after the turbulent years of the English revolution (that is, the Civil Wars), meant there was a natural predisposition to obey. The parish-based management of the epidemic, while brutal (to our eyes, in any case), was acceptable in terms of preserving the common good. The parish also supplied medical and food supplies to those it locked up. Did the plague hospital system on the Continent cut down transmission of the disease? If so, why wasn't it adopted more widely in England? There is little evidence that the systems of care had very much impact on the spread of the disease. Medical therapy delivered in communal hospitals was a product of a different understanding of charity and community. Certainly separating the sick from the healthy would appear to be a more sensible policy, and by 1665, many in London were agitated by the business of 'shutting up'. But both these policies were driven by social and political ambitions rather than purely medical care: preserving order was more important than curing patients. Evidence from the plague in London on the clustering of deaths in 'shut up' households is rather inconclusive. It may have caused a higher proportion of inhabitants in infected households to die, but it may also have stopped the transmission of disease to others. There are an unknown number of plague pits around London. Is there any danger of the disease surviving in them to this day? Historians and archaeologists used to do good business verifying the presence of pits whenever new building developments took place. So it would now be possible to map with some accuracy the location of most of the larger burial pits. On the question of any persisting danger of these locations, the answer really depends on what the disease was. Certainly when burials were excavated and disinterred in Spitalfields recently, the workers contracted all sorts of illnesses. However, this was probably because of the way the bodies were buried in that place rather than the virulence of any particular disease. If the disease was something like anthrax, then the spores that carry it have been shown to be viable for centuries. If it was bubonic plague, we're safe – the bacteria would have died hundreds of years ago. What effect did the plague have on the ability of London's residents to fight and endure the Great Fire the following year? One of the amazing things about early modern London was its resilience. Repeatedly struck by political crises, war, revolution, epidemics, poverty, it always recovered swiftly and effectively. There were a number of reasons for this. The political and social élite were very effective at preserving themselves (by swift flight in the case of the plague). This meant that, when a crisis had subsided, they were alive to resume their duties of government. The powerful ideology of order and obedience also reinforced this ability to resume government swiftly. Similarly, the merchant and labouring communities had a huge amount invested in London as a trading and manufacturing city: although many died, there were many more willing and waiting to take their places and the opportunity for achievement. Certainly contemporaries were anxious about the meaning of the plague and fire – it was commonly perceived as providential punishment or, at the very least, a warning to reform – but these doubts drove people on to cope with the crises. I am constantly impressed by the abilities of early modern Londoners to look after themselves in such difficult times without the support of modern facilities and services. I have been doing my own research into the health of the people in
Liverpool in the 19th century. I was shocked to read the Chadwick report,
which showed that your life expectancy as a labourer in Liverpool –
only 15 years – was a fraction of that outside cities. Are there
any estimates for the life expectancy of people living in London, by class,
for the 17th century? The best place to start in answering this question is the work of Wrigley and Schofield: The Population History of England. Obviously making estimates of life expectancy across early modern England is quite complex. Making even more refined calculations according to class, gender and geographical location is very difficult, mainly because the sources are either incomplete or vague and inconsistent. However, as a rough guide, the average male life expectancy was between 30 and 40, with women a touch higher. These aggregate figures were very different according to urban and rural contexts: one study of various London parishes estimates a range of 21-34 years. The main driving force behind this lower rate was the enormously high infant mortality rate in towns. Again, estimates vary according to the historical source. Perhaps the best London figures can be seen in Roger Finlay's wonderful little book Population and Metropolis: The demography of London 1580-1650 (1981). Is it possible that the plague left London and the rest of Europe because of better pest control, such as the use of arsenic as rat poison? Plague epidemics left Britain in 1665, but isolated outbreaks still occurred into the 20th century, admittedly usually prompted by the introduction of the disease by travellers. Plague did not leave Europe in any significant way until the late 19th century – for instance, there were massive epidemics in France in the 1720s and in Russia throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. There is still an ongoing debate about whether rats and fleas were the vectors of the epidemics. Many French historians (especially Biraben) argue that the disease was spread by the human louse, rather than rats and fleas. And studies of 18th-century epidemic disease in London (John Lander's books) show that other horrible afflictions – such as smallpox – became more virulent. The causes for the disappearance of the plague in London is still a mystery. Plausible explanations are that the specific disease lost its virulence, and that the population became somehow immune. Rats certainly live on into the 21st century! • See What is plague? for information on a brand new theory on the cause of plague. Apart from building work that has discovered the pits used for burials,
are there any records to show where the pits were? If so, where? And would
they contain any infectious material after so many years? The majority of records for the location of burial pits are piecemeal and parochial. Most parishes had to resort to larger pits simply because of the sheer number of bodies they had to dispose of. These pits can be traced in the parish churchwarden's accounts, where payment for digging was recorded. It's then a question of consulting the various 17th-century maps and identifying the location. Some books on London burial sites were published in the late 19th-century, but because of property development, many of these sites have since been built over. The question of continuing infection is tricky. The sensible answer is: 'It depends on what the disease was.' If it was bubonic plague, the pits are very unlikely to be dangerous since the bacilli would have died long ago. If it was something like anthrax, the spores might still be viable even after centuries. Following recent excavations in Spitalfields, some of the workers contracted a horrible illness, but this was because the bodies had been buried in lead-lined coffins and had turned into a very unpleasant, smelly liquid. The programme on the Plague mentioned the lord mayor's imposition
of a single night's curfew for the hale, to allow those shut up to emerge.
What sources refer to this event and which night was it? On what day in August 1665 were the 'sick' allowed on to the streets
of London, and how did they get them to return? I am not sure about this! John Toba, the programme's producer, must have tracked down an accurate reference. There are suggestions from a number of contemporary sources (the correspondence of the vicar of Covent Garden, Simon Patrick, for example) that the ill were allowed to walk about in mid-September, led by a priest carrying a white stick, to ward off any healthy people. If the event was a mayoral proclamation, it would be recorded in the journals and repertory books of the City of London kept in the Corporation of London Record Office. Certainly the descriptions of this event suggest that it was prompted more by religious piety (warning the healthy of the dangers of sin) than because of any concern for the afflicted. We have no records for how the diseased would have been encouraged back into their houses. One could speculate that small groups of people were walked around under close supervision, but I suspect that most of them would have been too ill to walk. In hindsight from the modern day, is there any remedial action that would have been more effective than that taken in 1665? Would it have been possible to come up with a better solution within the time frame? Well, with modern hindsight, the best thing to have done would have been to apply antibiotics – if identified early enough, the disease is very easily treated. However, even today, in places like the US, people still die because doctors are unfamiliar with the disease and treat it too late. Given the state of medical knowledge at the time, some of the preventive methods (cleaning the environment with smoke and lime, for example) may have had a beneficial effect. The policy of 'shutting up' was pretty brutal, but if you think back to the first incidences of AIDS in Europe and Australia, the initial public reaction was to suggest that all those afflicted should be locked away. Probably the best thing to have done was to run away as soon as the plague was identified in the City. The problem with this was: (1) the diagnosis was pretty vague and almost certainly covered up for the first few weeks; and (2) this was not an option for the majority of poor Londoners because of economic constraints. What proportion of the population fled London at the time of the Plague? It's hard to be accurate. The procedure for leaving London after June 1665 was by obtaining a pass indicating good health. Unfortunately no records of the issue of these certificates was kept. Studies of localities such as the City of Westminster suggest that perhaps as much as 15-20% of a local community left. The source for this is a record of charitable relief drawn up in September 1665 where an indication of the wealth of each household is made. Many of the households are identified as 'gone'. Unsurprisingly most of these were in the more wealthy streets. Other records of parish administration – vestry records and wardmote minutes – show that the usual parish officers had disappeared. Could plague be made into a biological weapon? Not really, because the vectors for spreading an epidemic are so sensitive to temperature and humidity. The conditions have to be exactly right for the rats to get infected and die (the so-called 'epizootic' that precedes the epidemic in the human population) and then for the fleas to breed in the right numbers to bite all the humans. Pneumonic plague, spread by airborne droplets, might be a bit more effective, but again the vectors for spreading the disease are very difficult to control. However, it is now clear that these bacteria can be genetically modified to more hostile purposes, so there may well be possibilities. The programme showed the names of victims. Have these been published
as names rather than statistics or do we all have to trawl the registers? Some of the burial registers have been published with a useful index. Lots of Victorian local historians produced many of these editions for county record societies. Otherwise, I am afraid that it is a question of working through the burial registers week by week looking for a name. The Centre for Metropolitan History at the University of London does preserve some of the records for London in 1665 on computer files, which can be searched too. I learned that the dead were buried in places such as 'Black heath', hence the name. Is this true, and where else were the bodies buried? The idea that Blackheath got its name from its use as a burial pit goes all the way back to the medieval period, when it was almost certainly used for the disposal of the dead during the 'Black Death'. Virtually every part of London has a local tradition about plague pits under, say, the local school or the bakers. Certainly there were pits dug all over the place. The sheer number of bodies meant that the traditional church yards became, as one contemporary put it, 'overstuft' very quickly. I thought I heard that the plague still exists in Africa and California.
Is this true? And China too! I believe Yellowstone Park in the US (covering parts of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming) has signs warning people, if they are bitten by any local insects or scratched by the squirrels, to attend a local medical centre that will be familiar with the symptoms. To a doctor elsewhere, who would see 'plague' symptoms rarely if ever, the early illness would probably look a bit like very bad flu. One of the most enduring and haunting images of the Great Plague is the beaked mask worn by the apothecaries. Apart from probably terrifying even more their hapless patients, did the mask serve any useful purpose? Or were the wearers just as likely to succumb to the Plague as anyone else? A very good question. The strange masks were filled up will all sorts of herbs and chemicals to ward of the miasma (bad smells). The heavy coats may have ensured that the fleas could not penetrate to the skin. No one has done a systematic study of the carers and medics. My own work suggests that, if you were an unprotected nurse 'shut up' with the ill and dying, your life expectancy was drastically reduced. Other contemporary evidence from various apothecaries and medical societies indicates that there was keen competition for trade. Advertisements were circulated for particular cures and potions saying that they had been successful. Rival concerns sometime published counter-claims with lists of all their opponents who had died – thus showing that their cures didn't work! There was certainly money to be made out of providing medicine. Did the plague of 1665 affect Linton in Cambridgeshire? I have had a look through the standard general accounts (books such as William Bell's The Great Plague of 1911, reprinted in a very cheap modern edition) and can find no record of Linton. However, it would be exceptional for even the most far-flung and isolated rural parishes to escape the impact of the disease. The integration of the rural economy into a national market (driven especially by the need to feed the huge population in the City of London) meant that even the smallest village was connected by a network of roads and local markets. Very often the movement of goods – wool, rope, foodstuffs – also carried the disease. The place to start to find out about what went on in the parish is the churchyard. Many rural parishes put up plague crosses marking exceptional epidemics, usually with a list of the dead. Have a look inside the church, too: if any wealthy or élite figures were casualties, there may be a commemorative stone or plaque. Next on your list would be to check out the burial registers and churchwardens' accounts. The local records office ought to be able to tell you whether these still exist. It may even be that the burial registers have been transcribed and published. Good luck. I would like to know more about Intelligencer publications
in regard to the plague. The Intelligencer was one of the national newspapers closely controlled by the various secretaries of state to mediate news and information to the community. Roger L'Estrange, licenser for the press and grovelling courtier, wrote the paper (published on Mondays). It was a small quarto size ranging between 8 and 16 pages and mainly filled with details about military engagements and foreign politics. There was an element of domestic news, as well as advertisements (for all sorts of things: lost horses, medicinal products, inns). From various merchant and naval sources, L'Estrange first reported news of the plague in the Low Countries (significant for people in London because of the great amount of trade originating there, although after February 1665, this was terminated because the two countries were at war!). L'Estrange avoided commenting on the outbreak in London until 5 June 1665, although the weekly Bills of Mortality had been indicating a steady spread of the disease in the suburban parishes. The editor saw it as his role to 'manage' the news to avoid panic in the City. By the time the epidemic was fierce, all types of news was posted in the newspaper – doctors advertising their services (interestingly, apothecary adverts offering plague remedies were in the paper before the editor had acknowledged the outbreak!), innkeepers indicating that they were shut for trade, individuals denying they or their relatives had died of the plague. There are many surviving editions of the newspapers, and reading through them gives a vivid picture of the times. Can you tell me where Cock & Key Alley would lie in today's London?
I work in Blackfriars and have not found it (after a search), but other
streets mentioned in the same timeframe, such as Fetter Lane and Chancery
Lane, are still in existence. In 'Find out more' on the Plague website, you will find a link to my online paper on the impact of the disease in St Dunstans in the West. Read this and you will have a better view of where the alley was. As a semi-permanent set of structures, it is more than likely that it was swept away after the Great Fire. Various contemporary records (in particular the Wardmote Records that give details of the civil administration of the parish) note the occupants of Cock & Key Alley. Further secondary material can be found in William Bell's book The Fleet through Seven Centuries. If you can get hold of The A to Z of Restoration London (1992), edited by R Hyde, and turn to page 32 (left-hand side), you will see a plan of the precinct of Whitefriars, just off Fleet Street and bounded by Water Lane. I believe Cock & Key Alley was in the area between Fleet Street and Dodwell Court. I think today there are various office buildings built over it. Given the arguments regarding plague being a virus as opposed to a
bacterial infection, does this mean that the opportunities for the disease
to be used in biological or chemical warfare are now lesser or greater? As any one who has been reading the newspapers might appreciate, I think the opportunities for all sorts of biological warfare have expanded massively in recent years because of developments in genetic technology. However, the difficulty in using any of these biological means is the 'mode of delivery'. Many of the disease-causing bacteria and viruses are so temperature- and environment-sensitive that predicting how they will react in 'real' places is difficult. Perhaps the evidence of the plague epidemics (which may have been driven by water-borne microbes) shows that one of the most powerful ways of damaging a community is by tampering with its water supply. Certainly in the conditions that water was circulated in the early modern period, any number of disasters were waiting to happen. Do you have any idea why the plague came in 20-year cycles? A very difficult question to answer. The cycle of epidemics that seems to have hit urban London fairly regularly was driven by a number of factors – the impact of a specific disease (or, more likely, a combination of different illnesses), the general health of the population, the environmental health of the City, the cycles in trade and harvest. All of these factors combined to form what historians and demographers call an 'epidemiological regime' – that is, the epidemics were the result of a relationship between a human community, a physical environment and a disease. The waves of epidemic crisis reflect changes and cycles within each of these factors. One answer may that, after a massive outbreak, there was some sort of residual immunity, but as the population of London was re-established by inward migration, this immunity was weakened and the community was again liable to a disease that remained endemic (that is, always there). Another factor is the virulence of the disease itself: this clearly changed and mutated over time. Another suggestion has been the impact of sun-spots affecting the weather conditions and passing comets, but as an historian, these sound rather fanciful to me. Is it true that the plague ended in Gravesend in Kent, and that is
where it gets its name? Or is this just an urban myth? I'm afraid this is probably just another urban myth, probably based on the fact that Gravesend and places like Deptford were significant areas of trade and naval operations. Consequently they were often identified as places where the plague might start or end. I was a bit concerned about the phrasing of the answer to the question about plague pits: 'Certainly when burials were excavated and disinterred in Spit alfields recently, the workers contracted all sorts of illnesses.' There has always been the problem that there are two very well-known Spit alfields sites: (a) the Christchurch crypt excavation as long ago as 1985; and (b) the more recent priory excavation, which first gained international renown through the discovery of the Roman woman's grave. At Christchurch, spores were found sealed in lead coffins, and the Natural History Museum staff involved were innoculated against smallpox as a precaution. At the priory excavation, great care was taken to observe all health and safety precautions, and to my knowledge, no one was ever taken ill. There were concerns that the lead Roman coffin might (a) contain bacteria from the past, and (b) endanger people because of its lead content. Therefore, all diggers were suited up, and experts/media were relegated to a separate room where they could watch the excavation of the coffin on closed circuit TV. (There was also the problem that we might contaminate the grave, and so render DNA analyses futile!) During the last 10 years, archaeologists have become very safety conscious.
The Museum of London Archaeology Service (MoLAS) retains a health and
safety consultant, who inspects every major site, and all the large archaeological
contractors do the same. Exposing site workers to substances suspected
of being harmful would be a massive dereliction of duty, liable to prosecution! This is very interesting. I worked closely with the forensic archaeologist Margaret Cox who, I believe, was part of the team involved in the 1985 excavations at Spitalfields (pretty recent by historical standards!). I expect my remarks were mis-remembered conversations about how smelly the process was. Of course, I did not mean to suggest that there was any negligence on the part of the museum. I think this is another example of the still powerful grip that the plague holds on our imaginations. Myths about Blackheath and Gravesend, or about still virulent plague pits under London school grounds, resurface with surprising frequency. Recently, I was asked to testify about the 'potential' dangers of developing a supermarket on grounds where plague burials had been made in the 17th century. The persistence of these fears is manifest even more obviously in the deep anxieties about the threat of biological warfare that is front-page news at the moment. Where were the plague pits located in which the victims were buried?
Are they still there or were the bodies removed and reinterred? As I indicated in an earlier answer, plague pits were scattered all over the country, in both rural and urban areas. The main reason for them was the sheer numbers of daily deaths. The churchwardens, bearers and gravediggers simply couldn't cope in the ordinary manner. Extra hands were employed to dig and prepare the pits. Lime was used to dampen the stench. Corpses were still, in general, treated with respect – evidence from the parish accounts suggests they were still purchasing shrouds to wrap the bodies in. The Plague Orders gave little instruction about methods of burial, and although the City government issued some instructions about preparing burial grounds outside the City walls, most the dead were disposed of in the traditional churchyards. On the Continent, there were various regulations about burying those who died of the plague in a separate place from 'normal' deaths: certainly they were often excluded from burial in church or churchyard. And, in fact, there is some evidence to suggest that some bodies (usually people of high status) were later disinterred and reburied in the usual place. The historian who is undertaking very interesting comparative research into these means of disposal of the dead is Vanessa Harding, who appeared in the programme. The full version of her interview gives a more detail, but she also published a paper in an online collection. A larger study will follow, which promises to be definitive. If you are interested in examining broader attitudes to burial and death, the work of Claire Gittings, Ralph Houlbrooke and Nigel Llewellyn are very good (and widely available). The programme ended with the fact that, in 1998, the bubonic plague
found in East Africa was resistant to antibiotics. Could this mean it
is a potential threat in the future as we would, like the people in the
17th century, have no preventative measures? I think that unlikely. I believe the bacillus, Y. pestis, like all such things is not a stable organism but evolves and mutates. As has been generally noted, the tendency to treat even minor conditions with various forms of antibiotics has resulted in the bugs adapting themselves to the threat. The battle between man (and woman) and microbes will go on for eternity: I have every confidence in the resourcefulness and scientific skills of modern society to combat these constantly moving targets, just like the 17th-century London people did in their own way. The distinct advantage we hold today is the vast array of scientific knowledge and, especially, genetic technology. I imagine in the future the simplest way to control bacilli like Y. pestis is to compromise them genetically rather than fight them externally. As you say, though, our modern culture is still vulnerable to new diseases: the rise and impact of AIDS is ample evidence of that. Many of the modern historians studying how society reacted to the first outbreaks of AIDS drew specific parallels with the reactions to earlier epidemics of plague and tuberculosis. As we have seen in the last decade, scientific research and pharmaceutical products are being developed slowly and carefully to counter the symptoms, if not (yet) cure the illness. In the 17th century, many women were accused of being witches and
were blamed for 'evils' that would occur in their villages: a person struck
with a serious illness, a dead cow, etc. Since people in the 17th century
did not know or understand the causes of the plague, was there ever a
popular belief that 'witches' were to blame for it? This is a very good question. Early modern people were convinced that both God and the Devil acted in the world. Providence and miracles usually confirmed some important divine message. Illness, misfortune and disaster might be caused by God punishing a sinful individual or community, or might happen as the result of dark forces tempting or destroying the Godly. Most of the responses to the impact of the plague in London in 1665 adopted the providential rather than the dark forces explanation. So many titles – such as London's Dreaded Visitation and God's Voice in the City – gave an explicitly providential interpretation: God was punishing the people of London for their evil ways. One author gave a catalogue of sins, detailing why different parts of the city had suffered disproportionately – as usual, there was perceived to be more sin in the poor suburbs than in the wealthy centre! Individuals often used these providential ideas to explain their difficulties: records of men such as Pepys or the clergyman Ralph Josselin show people pondering the meaning of afflictions. On a more neighbourly level, individual cases of illness and death were often attributed to malevolent actions by witches and cunning folk, but there is little evidence to suggest that massive outbreaks were thought of in this way. How did the plague change medicine with respect to medical theories,
practices and the structure of the medical profession? In one sense, it didn't have much effect at all. Rival medical theories of disease – which relied on an understanding of illness spread by humours in the body or by miasma (bad smells) or by more constitutional and chemical means – used the evidence of the plague to confirm their own understandings of how the world worked. Lots of contemporaries thought they knew what was going on and designed all sorts of remedies, ranging from drinking fine wines and eating toads to bathing in milk. One new development in the period was the business of medical anatomies. A number of works were published describing the post-mortem autopsies of various plague victims with an explanation of what the anatomist thought was going on. Certainly up until 1665, the plague was good (if dangerous) business for the medics and associated apothecaries and chemists. Evidence of contemporary records indicates that many made large fortunes providing therapy and care. Certainly the impact of an epidemic saw an explosion in the provision of cures. Daniel Defoe's Journal of a Plague Year is very good on the variety of quack doctors and empirics who offered an increasing range of products. One unusual insight into this process is provided in the records of one John Allin, a Nonconformist minister living in Southwark, who also dabbled in chemical medicine. He was convinced that certain sorts of toad skin would provide an effective cure. His correspondence (which is in the East Sussex record office) shows the efforts he went to collect and process the stuff. He survived the plague in 1665, so perhaps we can say his tactics worked? Why did more women than men die in 1665? This is one of the conundrums of the impact of the disease in 1665. The evidence of the Bills of Mortality shows a reversal in the normal gender distribution of deaths. This can only be accounted for by social conditions rather than bio-medical factors, though there is some evidence that fleas are attracted to women during different stages of the menstrual cycle. My own research suggests that, as a consequence of the social management of the plague (in particular, shutting up and tending to the sick with nurses), women were exposed more frequently to the illness. The position of women in the urban economy was marginal (employed in service industries such as inns, washing and food preparation), so when the epidemic destroyed the economy of London, many thousands of women became unemployed. Because of their lack of resources, they could rarely afford to flee the City and so were driven into caring for the sick and dying. The result was that many of them died, too. Men tended to be employed in different environments – burying the dead, watching the shut-up houses – all which brought contact but not intimacy with the diseased and dying. |
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The plague was spread by fleas
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