The Great Plague of 1665

Outbreak in St Giles, Spring 1665

In April 1665 plague was reported in the London parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields, just outside the western City wall. The disease — we now know it was bubonic plague spread by the fleas of black rats — would prove the worst outbreak London had seen in a generation. By September deaths were running at over 7,000 a week, the court had left London, and the rich who could leave were leaving. The poor, tied to their parishes by the law, stayed.

Contemporary Explanations

Seventeenth-century Londoners had no germ theory. Most believed in miasma — foul air rising from rotting matter, drains and graveyards. Others blamed God’s judgement on a sinful city; clergy preached repentance and the king proclaimed days of fasting. Astrologers pointed to the comet seen in 1664 and to unusual conjunctions of the planets. Some accused Dutch spies. None of these explanations led to effective action against rats and fleas, the actual carriers, but the miasma theory did encourage useful measures such as burning fires, removing rotting refuse and avoiding crowds.

Key Fact

Contemporary Londoners explained the 1665 plague through miasma (bad air), divine punishment for sin, the comet of 1664 and unusual conjunctions of the planets. The outbreak peaked in August–September 1665 with over 7,000 burials a week recorded in the Bills of Mortality.

Bills of Mortality and the Records

London’s parishes had kept printed weekly Bills of Mortality since 1603. They listed deaths in each parish, broken down by reported cause. Older women paid as ‘searchers of the dead’ visited bodies and judged the cause — a poorly trained role open to bribery and error. The Bills probably underestimated plague deaths, because families paid searchers to record other causes (to avoid having their houses shut up) and because hundreds of Dissenters and Jews were buried outside the parish system. Modern historians estimate around 100,000 Londoners died, perhaps a fifth or a quarter of the city’s population.

Measures to Combat the Plague

The Lord Mayor and the Privy Council issued orders combining sensible precautions with desperate ones. Houses with infected residents were boarded up under guard, the door painted with a red cross and the words ‘Lord have mercy upon us’; the family was kept inside for forty days, often dying together. This practice of shutting up infected houses was deeply unpopular and probably accelerated deaths inside the affected households. Other measures targeted miasma: bonfires were lit in the streets, refuse was cleared, theatres and large gatherings were closed, and the city’s many stray dogs and cats were ordered killed (an order that almost certainly worsened the rat problem). Mass plague pits were dug at Aldgate, Finsbury and elsewhere as parish churchyards filled.

Each parish appointed a searcher of the dead, normally an older woman from the poorhouse. They were paid by the parish a few pence per body and were expected to inspect every corpse. The role was open to bribery: families paid them to record ‘fever’ or ‘consumption’ instead of plague, hoping to avoid the shutting-up order. Defoe’s later ‘Journal of the Plague Year’ (1722) is a fictional retelling but draws on real records and gives a vivid sense of how unreliable the system was.

Pepys, the Court and the Rich

Charles II and his court left for Salisbury in July 1665, then moved to Oxford for the autumn and winter. The wealthy who could afford it fled too, often to country estates. Samuel Pepys, the naval administrator, stayed in London for work and walked or boated to his office at the Navy Office while his family was sent to Greenwich. His diary records the streets growing ‘mighty empty’ and the panic of seeing crosses on doors. Around half of London’s clergy fled (the parishes worst affected often had their ministers leave); a number of Dissenter ministers, ejected in 1662, came back to fill the gap, preaching plague sermons in defiance of the Five Mile Act. The episode helped ease later attitudes to Dissenters in the City.

In late summer 1665 plague reached the Derbyshire village of Eyam, carried in a bundle of cloth sent up from London. The rector, William Mompesson, persuaded the villagers to quarantine themselves rather than flee and risk infecting neighbouring villages. Around 260 of the village’s 800 inhabitants died over fourteen months. Eyam is the most famous voluntary quarantine of the period and shows that plague was not only a London story; the disease followed trade routes into provincial towns and villages whose responses varied widely.

Results and Aftermath

The peak passed in October 1665. Cold weather killed off the fleas and the outbreak faded. By February 1666 the king felt safe to return to Whitehall. The total death toll — around 100,000 from a population of roughly 460,000 — ranks the Great Plague of 1665 as one of the worst single demographic shocks in English urban history. Importantly, plague did not return on this scale. The 1665 outbreak was London’s last major plague epidemic, although why is still debated — better quarantine of shipping, the changing balance of rat species after the Fire, and the changing relationship between rats and humans in rebuilt brick housing have all been suggested. The Plague did NOT cause the Great Fire of 1666; nor did the Fire end the Plague, which had already declined sharply before the Fire began on 2 September 1666.