A cup of ale could change what London's plague records said killed you
The Great Plague of 1665 to 1666 killed an estimated 100,000 Londoners, almost a quarter of the city, in 18 months. Yet the death counts were shaky: parish searchers, often poor illiterate women, could be bribed with ale and an extra coin to record plague as something less shameful.
Plague was a recurring presence in seventeenth-century London. Outbreaks killed some 30,000 people in 1603 and 35,000 in 1625, so the 1665 epidemic was not unprecedented; it was far smaller than the Black Death. It earned the label great mainly because it was the last widespread bubonic outbreak in England during the Second Pandemic, a wave of epidemics that began in Central Asia in 1331 and lingered until 1750.
The city was primed for disease. Roughly 448 acres sat inside the old wall, bounded by the Thames, with open drains running down crowded streets and smoke pouring from breweries, soap works and thousands of household fires. More than a quarter of a million people lived in unsanitary shanty suburbs beyond the wall, and grand houses abandoned by fleeing Royalists had been carved into rat-ridden tenements. Nobody understood the cause; people blamed foul vapours, odd weather or plagues of frogs and flies, and a bright comet in late 1664 had already put Londoners on edge.
Counting the dead was a problem in itself. There was no census, so the best population figure comes from John Graunt, an early Fellow of the Royal Society and a pioneer of demography, who estimated 384,000 residents in 1662 from the weekly Bills of Mortality. Deaths were recorded by parish searchers paid a small fee per body. Graunt noted how often they wrote consumption, and suspected a drink plus a doubled fee of two groats could shift a verdict, since no family wanted a plague death on record.
Authorities did try to keep it out. From November 1663, ships arriving from plague-hit Amsterdam and Hamburg had to wait 30 days near Canvey Island, extended to forty days in May 1664. The culprit, the bacterium Yersinia pestis, was not identified until Alexandre Yersin found it in 1894, and DNA analysis confirmed its role in London's epidemic only in 2016.
Source: Great Plague of London
