Editing Great Plague of London (section)

===Height of the epidemic===
[[File:Death for the year 1665 Wellcome L0000352.jpg|thumb|upright|left|A [[Bills of Mortality|Bill of Mortality]] for the plague in 1665]]
In the last week of July, the London Bill of Mortality showed 3,014 deaths, of which 2,020 had died from the plague. The number of deaths as a result of plague may have been underestimated, as deaths in other years in the same period were much lower, at around 300. As the number of victims affected mounted up, burial grounds became overfull, and pits were dug to accommodate the dead. Drivers of dead-carts travelled the streets calling "Bring out your dead" and carted away piles of bodies. The authorities became concerned that the number of deaths might cause public alarm and ordered that body removal and interment should take place only at night.<ref name=Leasor145>Leasor (1962), pp. 141–145.</ref> As time went on, there were too many victims, and too few drivers, to remove the bodies which began to be stacked up against the walls of houses. Daytime collection was resumed and the plague pits became mounds of decomposing corpses. In the parish of Aldgate, a great hole was dug near the churchyard, fifty feet long and twenty feet wide. Digging was continued by labourers at one end while the dead-carts tipped in corpses at the other. When there was no room for further extension it was dug deeper until ground water was reached at twenty feet. When finally covered with earth it housed 1,114 corpses.<ref name=Leasor175>Leasor (1962), pp. 174–175.</ref>

[[Plague doctor]]s traversed the streets diagnosing victims, many of them without formal medical training. Several [[public health]] efforts were attempted. Physicians were hired by city officials and burial details were carefully organized, but panic spread through the city and, out of the fear of contagion, bodies were hastily buried in overcrowded pits. The means of transmission of the disease were not known but thinking they might be linked to the animals, the City Corporation ordered a cull of dogs and cats.<ref>Moote, Lloyd and Dorothy: ''The Great Plague: The Story of London's Most Deadly Year'', Baltimore, 2004. p. 115.</ref> This decision may have extended the length of the epidemic since those animals could have helped keep in check the rat population carrying the fleas which transmitted the disease. Thinking bad air was involved in transmission, the authorities ordered giant bonfires to be burned in the streets and house fires to be kept burning night and day, in the hope that the air would be cleansed.<ref name=Leasor169>Leasor (1962), pp. 166–169.</ref> Tobacco was thought to be a [[Prophylaxis#Prophylaxis|prophylactic]] and it was later said that no London [[tobacconist]] had died from the plague during the epidemic.<ref>{{cite book |title=The Great Plague |last=Porter |first=Stephen |year=2009 |publisher=Amberley Publishing |isbn=978-1-84868-087-6 |page=39 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=x2EBkPNnUXEC&q=%22Great+Plague%22+tobacco&pg=PA7 }}</ref>
[[File:Two women lying dead in a London stree Wellcome V0010608.jpg|thumb|Two women lying dead in a London street]]
Trade and business had dried up, and the streets were empty of people except for the dead-carts and the dying victims, as witnessed and recorded by Samuel Pepys in his diary: "Lord! How empty the streets are and how melancholy, so many poor sick people in the streets full of sores… in Westminster, there is never a physician and but one apothecary left, all being dead."<ref>{{Cite book|title=The Concise Pepys|last=Pepys|first=Samuel|publisher=Wordsworth Editions Ltd|year=1996|isbn=978-1853264788|pages=363, 16 September 1665}}</ref> That people did not starve was down to the foresight of Sir John Lawrence and the [[City of London Corporation|Corporation of London]] who arranged for a commission of one [[Farthing (English coin)|farthing]] to be paid above the normal price for every quarter of corn landed in the Port of London.<ref name=Leasor101>Leasor (1962), pp. 99–101.</ref> Another food source was the villages around London which, denied of their usual sales in the capital, left vegetables in specified market areas, negotiated their sale by shouting, and collected their payment after the money had been left submerged in a bucket of vinegar to "disinfect" the coins.<ref name=Leasor101/>

Records state that plague deaths in London and the suburbs crept up over the summer from 2,000 people per week to over 7,000 per week in September. These figures are likely to be a considerable underestimate. Many of the sextons and parish clerks who kept the records themselves died. [[Quakers]] refused to co-operate and many of the poor were just dumped into mass graves unrecorded. It is not clear how many people caught the disease and made a recovery because only deaths were recorded and many records were destroyed in the [[Great Fire of London]] the following year. In the few districts where intact records remain, plague deaths varied between 30% and over 50% of the total population.<ref name=Leasor156>Leasor (1962), pp. 155–156.</ref>

Vincent wrote:{{blockquote|it was very dismal to behold the red crosses, and read in great letters "LORD, HAVE MERCY UPON US" on the doors, and watchmen standing before them with halberds...people passing by them so gingerly, and with such fearful looks as if they had been lined with enemies in ambush to destroy them...a man at the corner of Artillery-wall, that as I judge, through the dizziness of his head with the disease, which seized upon him there, had dasht his face against the wall; and when I came by, he lay hanging with his bloody face over the rails, and bleeding upon the ground...I went and spoke to him; he could make no answer, but rattled in the throat, and as I was informed, within half an hour died in the place. It would be endless to speak of what we have seen and heard, of some in their frenzy, rising out of their  beds, and leaping about their rooms; others crying and roaring at their windows; some coming forth almost naked, and running into the streets...scarcely a day passed over my head for, I think, a month or more together, but I should hear of the death of some one or more that I knew. The first day that they were smitten, the next day some hopes of recovery, and the third day, that they were dead.<ref name="Vincent" />}}

The outbreak was concentrated in London, but it affected other areas as well. Perhaps the best known example occurred in the village of [[Eyam]] in [[Derbyshire]]. The plague allegedly arrived with a merchant carrying a parcel of cloth sent from London. The villagers imposed a quarantine on themselves to stop the further spread of the disease. This prevented the disease from moving into surrounding areas, but around 33% of the village's inhabitants died over a period of fourteen months.<ref>{{Cite news |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/03/02/bubonic-plague-coronavirus-quarantine-eyam-england |title=Eyam, England quarantined itself during bubonic plague deadlier than coronavirus - the Washington Post |newspaper=[[The Washington Post]] |access-date=4 March 2020 |archive-date=3 March 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200303203853/https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/03/02/bubonic-plague-coronavirus-quarantine-eyam-england/ |url-status=dead }}</ref> Other places hit hard included [[Derby plague of 1665|Derby]] and [[Norwich]].<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://norfolkrecordofficeblog.org/2020/08/01/plague-blog-1/|title=Fighting the Plague in Tudor Norwich|newspaper=Norfolk Record Office|date=1 August 2020|access-date=22 October 2021}}</ref> In [[Bristol]] strenuous efforts by the City Council seems to have limited the death rate to c.0.6 per cent during an outbreak lasting from April to September 1666.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://archive.org/details/beardplague|title=Documents Relating to the Great Plague of 1665-1666 in Bristol|date=22 September 2021|publisher=Bristol Record Society|access-date=22 October 2021|website=Archive.org}}</ref>