But they might as well have talked to the air,for the people of London thought themselves so plague-free now that they were past all admonitions;they seemed to depend upon it that the air was restored,and that the air was like a man that had had the smallpox,not capable of being infected again.This revived that notion that the infection was all in the air,that there was no such thing as contagion from the sick people to the sound;and so strongly did this whimsy prevail among people that they ran all together promiscuously,sick and well.
Not the Mahometans,who,prepossessed with the principle of predestination,value nothing of contagion,let it be in what it will,could be more obstinate than the people of London;they that were perfectly sound,and came out of the wholesome air,as we call it,into the city,made nothing of going into the same houses and chambers,nay,even into the same beds,with those that had the distemper upon them,and were not recovered.
Some,indeed,paid for their audacious boldness with the price of their lives;an infinite number fell sick,and the physicians had more work than ever,only with this difference,that more of their patients recovered;that is to say,they generally recovered,but certainly there were more people infected and fell sick now,when there did not die above a thousand or twelve hundred in a week,than there was when there died five or six thousand a week,so entirely negligent were the people at that time in the great and dangerous case of health and infection,and so ill were they able to take or accept of the advice of those who cautioned them for their good.
The people being thus returned,as it were,in general,it was very strange to find that in their inquiring after their friends,some whole families were so entirely swept away that there was no remembrance of them left,neither was anybody to be found to possess or show any title to that little they had left;for in such cases what was to be found was generally embezzled and purloined,some gone one way,some another.
It was said such abandoned effects came to the king,as the universal heir;upon which we are told,and I suppose it was in part true,that the king granted all such,as deodands,to the Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen of London,to be applied to the use of the poor,of whom there were very many.For it is to be observed,that though the occasions of relief and the objects of distress were very many more in the time of the violence of the plague than now after all was over,yet the distress of the poor was more now a great deal than it was then,because all the sluices of general charity were now shut.People supposed the main occasion to be over,and so stopped their hands;whereas particular objects were still very moving,and the distress of those that were poor was very great indeed.
Though the health of the city was now very much restored,yet foreign trade did not begin to stir,neither would foreigners admit our ships into their ports for a great while.As for the Dutch,the misunderstandings between our court and them had broken out into a war the year before,so that our trade that way was wholly interrupted;but Spain and Portugal,Italy and Barbary,as also Hamburg and all the ports in the Baltic,these were all shy of us a great while,and would not restore trade with us for many months.
The distemper sweeping away such multitudes,as I have observed,many if not all the out-parishes were obliged to make new burying-grounds,besides that I have mentioned in Bunhill Fields,some of which were continued,and remain in use to this day.But others were left off,and (which I confess I mention with some reflection)being converted into other uses or built upon afterwards,the dead bodies were disturbed,abused,dug up again,some even before the flesh of them was perished from the bones,and removed like dung or rubbish to other places.Some of those which came within the reach of my observation are as follow:
(1)A piece of ground beyond Goswell Street,near Mount Mill,being some of the remains of the old lines or fortifications of the city,where abundance were buried promiscuously from the parishes of Aldersgate,Clerkenwell,and even out of the city.This ground,as I take it,was since made a physic garden,and after that has been built upon.
(2)A piece of ground just over the Black Ditch,as it was then called,at the end of Holloway Lane,in Shoreditch parish.It has been since made a yard for keeping hogs,and for other ordinary uses,but is quite out of use as a burying-ground.
(3)The upper end of Hand Alley,in Bishopsgate Street,which was then a green field,and was taken in particularly for Bishopsgate parish,though many of the carts out of the city brought their dead thither also,particularly out of the parish of St All-hallows on the Wall.This place I cannot mention without much regret.It was,as Iremember,about two or three years after the plague was ceased that Sir Robert Clayton came to be possessed of the ground.It was reported,how true I know not,that it fell to the king for want of heirs,all those who had any right to it being carried off by the pestilence,and that Sir Robert Clayton obtained a grant of it from King Charles II.But however he came by it,certain it is the ground was let out to build on,or built upon,by his order.The first house built upon it was a large fair house,still standing,which faces the street or way now called Hand Alley which,though called an alley,is as wide as a street.