There was one unhappy citizen within my knowledge who had been visited in a dreadful manner,so that his wife and all his children were dead,and himself and two servants only left,with an elderly woman,a near relation,who had nursed those that were dead as well as she could.This disconsolate man goes to a village near the town,though not within the bills of mortality,and finding an empty house there,inquires out the owner,and took the house.After a few days he got a cart and loaded it with goods,and carries them down to the house;the people of the village opposed his driving the cart along;but with some arguings and some force,the men that drove the cart along got through the street up to the door of the house.There the constable resisted them again,and would not let them be brought in.The man caused the goods to be unloaden and laid at the door,and sent the cart away;upon which they carried the man before a justice of peace;that is to say,they commanded him to go,which he did.The justice ordered him to cause the cart to fetch away the goods again,which he refused to do;upon which the justice ordered the constable to pursue the carters and fetch them back,and make them reload the goods and carry them away,or to set them in the stocks till they came for further orders;and if they could not find them,nor the man would not consent to take them away,they should cause them to be drawn with hooks from the house-door and burned in the street.The poor distressed man upon this fetched the goods again,but with grievous cries and lamentations at the hardship of his case.But there was no remedy;self-preservation obliged the people to those severities which they would not otherwise have been concerned in.Whether this poor man lived or died I cannot tell,but it was reported that he had the plague upon him at that time;and perhaps the people might report that to justify their usage of him;but it was not unlikely that either he or his goods,or both,were dangerous,when his whole family had been dead of the distempers so little a while before.
I know that the inhabitants of the towns adjacent to London were much blamed for cruelty to the poor people that ran from the contagion in their distress,and many very severe things were done,as may be seen from what has been said;but I cannot but say also that,where there was room for charity and assistance to the people,without apparent danger to themselves,they were willing enough to help and relieve them.But as every town were indeed judges in their own case,so the poor people who ran abroad in their extremities were often ill-used and driven back again into the town;and this caused infinite exclamations and outcries against the country towns,and made the clamour very popular.
And yet,more or less,maugre all the caution,there was not a town of any note within ten (or,I believe,twenty)miles of the city but what was more or less infected and had some died among them.I have heard the accounts of several,such as they were reckoned up,as follows:-In Enfield 32In Uxbridge 117"Hornsey 58"Hertford 90"Newington 17"Ware 160"Tottenham 42"Hodsdon 30"Edmonton 19"Waltham Abbey 23"Barnet and Hadly 19"Epping 26"St Albans 121"Deptford 623"Watford 45"Greenwich 231"Eltham and Lusum 85"Kingston 122"Croydon 61"Stanes 82"Brentwood 70"Chertsey 18"Rumford 109"Windsor 103"Barking Abbot 200
"Brentford 432Cum aliis.
Another thing might render the country more strict with respect to the citizens,and especially with respect to the poor,and this was what I hinted at before:namely,that there was a seeming propensity or a wicked inclination in those that were infected to infect others.
There have been great debates among our physicians as to the reason of this.Some will have it to be in the nature of the disease,and that it impresses every one that is seized upon by it with a kind of a rage,and a hatred against their own kind -as if there was a malignity not only in the distemper to communicate itself,but in the very nature of man,prompting him with evil will or an evil eye,that,as they say in the case of a mad dog,who though the gentlest creature before of any of his kind,yet then will fly upon and bite any one that comes next him,and those as soon as any who had been most observed by him before.
Others placed it to the account of the corruption of human nature,who cannot bear to see itself more miserable than others of its own species,and has a kind of involuntary wish that all men were as unhappy or in as bad a condition as itself.
Others say it was only a kind of desperation,not knowing or regarding what they did,and consequently unconcerned at the danger or safety not only of anybody near them,but even of themselves also.
And indeed,when men are once come to a condition to abandon themselves,and be unconcerned for the safety or at the danger of themselves,it cannot be so much wondered that they should be careless of the safety of other people.
But I choose to give this grave debate a quite different turn,and answer it or resolve it all by saying that I do not grant the fact.On the contrary,I say that the thing is not really so,but that it was a general complaint raised by the people inhabiting the outlying villages against the citizens to justify,or at least excuse,those hardships and severities so much talked of,and in which complaints both sides may be said to have injured one another;that is to say,the citizens pressing to be received and harboured in time of distress,and with the plague upon them,complain of the cruelty and injustice of the country people in being refused entrance and forced back again with their goods and families;and the inhabitants,finding themselves so imposed upon,and the citizens breaking in as it were upon them whether they would or no,complain that when they were infected they were not only regardless of others,but even willing to infect them;neither of which were really true -that is to say,in the colours they were described in.