Legacy of Disasters and Modernity

Want to walk the halls of Anne Bleyn's childhood home? or explore the castles that made up Henry VI's English stronghold With a subscription to History Hit, you can dive into our Tutor past alongside the world's leading historians and archeologists You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week coovering everything from the ancient world World War II Just visit history hit. com For slash, suubbscribe I'm Professor Susanna Lipbskom and welcome to Not just the Tudors from History Hood The podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyin to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenotos, from Shakespeare to Samuraise relelieved by regular doses of murder, espionage, and witchcraard. In other words, just the tutors But most definitely also the tudors In the summer of sixteen sixty five, London began to die. At first, quietly, a few suspicious deaths in the crowded parishes outside the city walls, the liberties The city carried on, markets still traded. Provisioned with men and supplies, some readying for the Scond Anglo Dutch War still crowded the Thames. Coffee houses buzz with gossip and speculation. The King Charles II hunted. Church bells rang out for baptisms and marriages, but not yet the dead But the suspicious deaths began to grow. Death came inside the city walls, first recorded in Bar Binder Alley Within months, plague had torn through London with terrifying speed Tens of thousands were dead, entntire households vanished Grass reportedly grew in the streets around the exchange, the much trered primary centre of commerce, finance and trade in London And as fear spread, So too did rumors. divine punishment, fororeign plots, poisoned air Was this a disease of the poor? Or was it a disease born on the wealth of international trade with the continent and beyond? Did the king and his council know more than they let on about its spread and containment or were they frozen in fear albeit in their palaces and homes far from the city. parishes compiled bills of mortality, contemporary death sheets of the number who had died And these bills provide an incredible source to monitor the growth of the pestulent But even at times of such loss deeath was political. and outsiders, Jews, Quakers found no place in their ty. What those who dad stay to stay for they have not the means to flee witnessed was truly devastating As the numbers surged the plague also gave birth to life Scientists like Isaac Newton and Robert Hook experienced the most fruitful periods of their working life to date. The College of Royal Physicians gathered new evidence about treating epidemics, and what is fascinating about the pllague of sixteen sixty five is that it was never an isolated catastrophe As the research of today's guest reveals, the plue coincided with war, political instability and the Great Fire of London a cascading national crisis and sequence of disasters that reshaped England forever. This is a story about a society under unbearable pressure. But it is also about how ordinary people experience terror about what catastrophe did to the human mind better and worse So today we're traveveling into the fear and uncertainty of Restoration England to ask What did it actually feel like to live through the play gear? How was it experienced on the ground by those who lived and died? and how did one of the darkest moments in English history transform the country that emerged afterwards I'm delighted to say that joining me is the historian and author, Rebecca Radill Rebecca is author of sixteen sixty six Plague, War and Hellfire, which draws on original archival research and little known sources to take readers on a thrilling journey through a crucial turning point in English history, as seen through the eyes of an extraordinary cast of historical characters Rebecca has forensically unearthed the stories of many individuals to help appreciate theseese seismic is from the ground up merchants like Povey, Pident of the Tanger Committee Mr. Delks, the wateraterman. Matthew and Thomas Aldred purveyors of potions for those with melancholy and distraction Artist Mary Bele and writer Margaret Cavendish are but a few of those who make up a fingertip of the research It goes into Rebecca's work So as the city began to die and as it experienced one of the worst plague epidemics in history, whilst caught up in a war with the Dutch It is through their eyes that we see London Join us as we adventure into this Most significant of years I'm professor, is Isel Lipbsskom and this is not just the Tutors from History Head Becca, it's lovely to see you Lovely to see you too, and thank you for such a rich and detailed overview of the story. I feel like I was transported back there myself than Well, that is what I felt when I was reading your book because you open your book sixteen and sixty six with such a sort of sensury placing of the reader into the metropolis of London sights and sounds and smells and the textures of buildings. I mean even the weather It's almost cinematic So I was wondering what research enabled you to develop such an immersive opening. What sources help a historian to paint such a picture? It Well, as you know, there are different types of history and when you do a microhistory, which sixteen sixty six is, and I do frudge it a little bit with a title because it definitely starts in sixteen sixty five, but we'll leave that aside for now But when you do a microhistory, you have the opportunity to go really deep into the source material and really deep into the archives and draw from things that you probably would not have the chance to ordinarily, you'd maybe have to skirt over because there's too much detail. letters were one of the sources that I used state papers, of course as well Just a whole raft of things parish records were the richest source for piecing people's lives together. And also whether, that's the thing, because I always feel like if you're writing a narrative history You don't necessarily need the weather for the historical It's an argument, but it's a great way to set a scene and to place the reader into a space And you can have weather in all different types of accounts. I was dealing with the Navy, so we have a lot of weather details from the Navy, but also Samuel Peps as well and other writers from the time would remark on the state of the weather at the time And you introduce us, as I alluded to a wonderful array of people, diverse individuals from George Gray, Barbara and Perrywigmaker, the two Thomases who run a coach service to Epsam fishermen, coffs, sweet seellers, the many migrants who swirellled London's ranks, what prompted you to open your work with their lives I wanted to give a real overview, so I wanted to people to feel as though they were walking or rambling through London themselves. And those particular individuals or most of the individuals that you've mentioned there I found them in either the well not the London Gazertte because that didn't exist straight away, but I found them within newsbooks. So people would place advertisements or within standalone kind of pamphlets where people were advertising their wares And when you find somebody that's practicing you know, treating people for melancholy, you can't help but dig a little bit deeper into that and think, well, actually, that's That's really fascinating. Obviously, melancholy is It's not a mental health condition that we understand today, but in many ways it's a precursor or a kind of proto version of depression or something like that And the idea that there was a space that people could go to in London to have potentially therapy as we might understand it today. I just found it really fascinating. So a lot of them are from advertisements, which I would highly recommend to anyone that's interested in researching the seventeenth century is yes, the news is great, but if you dip into those advertisements, you get a real glimpse into what people were doing and trades and things like that Before we get into the events of ' sixteen sixty five. Should we talk a little bit about Sys of belief and politics of the time, what do we need to appreciate if we're going to understand the people of the Zera Well I think the big thing is religion. So we live in a largely secular society today. Religion is still very strong, but it is nowhere near as strong as it was in the seventeenth century. So I think I always try to say that If you understand people living then as People understanding their lives has being one part of an immortal journey and that faith and a belief in God is integral to everybody's lives and that if things are going wrong they will reflect on their own behaviour or the behaviour of society as a way to rationalize that and understand why there might be a plague or a great fire or some other devastation, a bad harvest. So I think that's the key key big thing, but then also if we think a little bit more politically We're in a time period in the sixteen sixties where we've had a return of the monarchy, Charles II has returned after a period of Republican rule and Oliver Cromwell,'s going into all of that, but it's a different feeling and there's certainly I don't want to overstate it because this is a very London centric story, but certainly within London we are seeing cultural changes and I think Just the simple fact of having professional actresses on the stage was a huge change and having the theatres reopened. So it's a place in fllux. It's a time where people are changing and culture and politics are changing, but that religious belief is still firmly there Now when we think about the plague We are most of us going to think about what we know scientifically about it, fleas and rats and bacteria So let's that out of the way. Let's talk about what actually happens in a plague and then think about how Our knowledge of that challenges our study plague in the past. Yeah, so we understand it today is a bacterial disease and it's very contagious. It spreads through being infected by a bite from a flea or even a lice and it could be a human lice as well bite from the fu or lice and the toxin will then spread through the body via the bloodstream It affects the lymphatic glands. so if you have plague, To start with, you probably will feel like you've got flu or something like that The things that are slightly different are will tend to feel a little bit of delirium and the fever will be particularly noticeable The thing that is very obvious on the body is that often you're glands will swell and this is where we see the things that are known as buubos in the seventeenth century. and it can progress from there. It was very deadly in before there was a cure, we do have treatment for it now So the death rate was very high, sixty seventy per, maybe eighty percent in some instances And towards the end of your symptoms, you might start to get these things called that they would call them tokens. There're basically lots of spots along the body where your capillaries have exploded underneath the skin or broken underneath the skin. and so if you're ever looking at the plague or anyone's ever researching it and you see these things Bubos and tokens, the buubos are the swollen lymphatic glands and the tokens are these little spots that are all over the body. But they didn't know what spread it. I mean I guess we'll come back to think about that. but does that When you are thinking from a twenty first century perspective about the seventeenth century. how does that knowledge burden your understanding of the past? It's tricky because we are locked into our own idea of medicine and we've grown up understanding germ theory. We understand how things are spread and It's easy to judge people in the past for their beliefs and think, well you how silly? How silly to have thought that disease could spread that way? But why would why would it be so strange? So what people believed in the early modern period and for centuries before and a couple of centuries afterwards was that contagious diseases could spread via bad air or masma And so if something had a foul smell, you would be You know, it might be linked to plague or other other diseases of that sort actually I mean in theory, the theory is wrong. It's incorrect But in practice, the measures that they brought into place to prevent the spread ' not dissimilar to what we have done in similar pandemics and epidemics. So it's tricky, but I think you really need to need to ground yourself in their understanding, which is this idea of bad air and they're locked into Galanic medicine, which is this understanding of classical medicine, whereby the body is made up of four humours. So if something was off or somebody was ill, it would be a case of balancing out those humors. So blood, black bile, yellow bile plan. So you really have to get into that mindset, I think, if you're looking at the seventeenth century and sixteen sixty five. And although we talk about the Great Plague, sixteen sixty five People at the time have any sense that this would be such a significant event takes recurred Yeah, so play with endemic And it's tricky when it comes to sixteen sixty five in London because hadn't actually been a significant plague outbreak for two or three decades People did In general, live, you know, they died a little bit younger than they do today And so it was for most people just outside of living memory So were they probably should have expected to have outbreaks and they did in physician Nathaniel Hodges who remained in the city during the Great Plague said himself that it was the common understanding that plague would return every twenty years Many people probably hadn't had experience of it and so it was Probably just a shocking and novel. and I do feel like it felt like a novelty to Samuel Peepes in his diary because he makes a note of when he sees his first shut up house. and it's a curiosity for him because he obviously has not experienced that before. But that being said, it was a pattern of life in the early modern period. There had been plagues before, and there had been plagues that in terms of How do we measure the great what's great when it comes to a plague And in terms of death rate proportionally, we do think that actually probably the sixteen oh three plague was more deadly Even though the sixteen sixty five blade killed more people, obviously with population increase that changes. Yeah, that's probably a long way and a rambling way of saying that They thought it was something extraordinary because many haven't experienced it before But in the grand sweep of the seventeenth century and sixteenth century, it wasn't necessarily super unusual to have an epidemic. of that scale given us some sense of The symptoms, the booos, the tokens. What's the courseuse of the illness over a period of time? How quickly does this sort of thing develop It's around a week or so, but what we see Later on in the plague is that people are starting or at least The physician who remains in the city and the familyel Hodgers who have mentioned already He starts to believe that people are dying quicker And that could be that it's mutated or transformed into pneumemonic plague as well, which is spread via breath is not so dissimilar to this idea of bad air and good air so it could be because of that. but around a week to ten days people would generally have the disease for and then either perish or survive, most people would perish. And it would get worse and worse and worse. and one of the cruelest things about the disease. I mean, there's so many cruel things about it. It's probably one of the most inhumane ways to die But it' this it's this delirium and the way in which people are no longer themselves I mean, I think you can you can bear pain. anybody can bear pain because you have to. The idea that you are transformed into something that isn't you. I find that quite terrifying myself. And there were accounts of this is quite graphic. So for a moment if you don't want to hear it, but there are accounts of people going to railings and bashing their own heads in because they're so distraught by And' so much not themselves and so distressed by them. The symptoms of plague, there's another account of somebody setting fire to their own house or their own rooms because they was so they'd rather die than experience the continuing pain of plague. So I think this dehumanising side of things is the bit that always struck me. It struck me when I was researching it and it stays with you, I think Contemporary views are that the plague spared no one, no matter their rank or age or sex. Do you think that's accurate I think from a medical point of view, it's accurate, but in practice, from a social point of view No, it was horror people did tend to die more frequently just because of the things that have been mentioned already, they couldn't they didn't have the same means to leave the city, so they were in the epicenter. The other thing that we see is that it seems like women are victims more often than men, women and children more often than men. And there've been plenty of theories put forward as to why this might be the case The main one and I think the most convincing one is that they were more often in the home So if a place was infected, they were more likely to pick up the infection than the men in the house or the male adults in the house So Yes, technically it could affect anybody. In reality, it was those poorer in more confined spaces that would have been affected by plague more time often than not I mentioned in the introduction that one crucial source for plaguecistorones is the bills of mortality. And we did podcasts actually of years back, three years back with Professor Vanessa Harding about the bills So Some listeners may remember that, but otherwise, could you remind us what those bills were and how useful they were to Londoners in the spring of sixteen sixty five So Londoners at that time would have thought that they were extremely useful. And in fact, there's a statistician called John Graunt or Grant, I've never quite known how to pronounce his name that wrote a tract just before the Great Plague of sixteen sixty five, where he said that the rich, I'm paraphrasing now, the rich would monitor the bills of mortality to see when they should leave And I think that's essentially why they were useful. People could see which parishes were affected and could make decisions based on that Now depending on your financial means, your decisions might be more limited. But I think that was why it was so useful. There are issues with the bills of mortality. Some of those issues have been stressed by contemporaries someort of labored these issues a little bit too much some contemporaries, so John Grant himself moaned about the women that were tasked with being searchers, he said that, you know, they could easily be bribed and put a different cause of death down if somebody had died of plague or threatened to put down plague if they had you know, if they didn't like the people So Yeah, there there are issues, but there's no doubt that there are incredibly useful for researchers and anyone that's studying Cid today, that is the baseline. That's what we go to. We look at those statistics that have been gathered by searchers have been fed to the parish clerks and then counted up and then put into these bills of mortality They include people that were buried within pish within parish churches. so there's lots of people that are excluded from the list, people that were non conformists or Jews or you know other religions that that did not fall within the Anglican faith as well. And it's in may sixteen sixty five. Bill of mortalalsity first records the death inside the city walls and at this point the Lord mayayor took action It might be useful to know who was responsible for public health measures at the time. And why is it only when a death occurs within the walls that they act? Yeah, so within the city walls, traditionally it's a little bit richer. People do tend to have a little bit more money there and that's where civic power is based. There are a few out parishes that fall under the mayor's jurisdiction. so these are a few parishes that are outside the city walls as well. but it gets a bit messy when it comes to the different parishes because London's constantly growing There are a number of out pishes within the Lord Mayor's control and then obviously everything that's within the city Why then? Well, it's because it's on at people's doorsteps, isn it? It's on powers that Be's doorsteps. So they bring in measures whereby they clean the streets. They think that they're thinking about this idea of bad air and smells. and being able to carry the disease so they clean streets, they order it Houses that are affected be shut up and have this cross put on the door. I should say though even with the earlier case in April ed in St. Char's in the fields, they did still demand that spaces were shut up and crosses put on the door that have been affected by plague the serious public health measures come in place when it enters the city of London. In terms of the authority, it's a civic issue You do see attention, which flows into the Great Fire as well, you do see a tension between civic authority and regal authority because the monarch is very much present in London at this time Charles II, the main place where he stays and lives is Whitehall where before people move back out to Hampton Court and and stuff. So there is att tention there and you can see that Charles is interested in the progress of plague. There are a few references to him inquiring about things and saying that people that are breaking out of houses, initially, they need to be dealt with in a very severe way, almost to make an example of them. The Lord Mayor, but you do see the king making suggestions as well and Given some indications there, but talk please about the measures that are taken and the advice of the College of Physians You know, how do they think they can stop the disease? What does it reveal about contemporary understandings of the causes of the illness Yeah, so I don't think they can cure it. There's a number of people that come forward with kind of quack remedies, but maybe I'll get onto that a little bit later. In terms of the public health measures So the guidance is for quarantine, if somebody is infected, Win a household, that whole household will be shut up for a period of forty days, quarantine coming from fall So that's one thing. And then within that, we have instructions that outside each of the infected houses there will be a guard. So that guard is there to make sure people stay within the household, but also to be the conduit through which supplies can be ferried into the households. Nurses are supposed to attend the sick as well. This becomes less feasible as plague progresses They're not allowed to remove the bedding and the sheets and things from people's homes. They have to keep them as they are and within the household And one is the One of the hard things about this is because you have if you have an affected house and you have a guard outside the house, it's very visible to those neighboring premises and if it's popping up on the bills of mortality as well, people tended to leave those areas. So it left and this is something that one of the commentators noted at the time, it left the people within these infected houses even more vulnerable because they weren't able to access the supplies that they might need. So wonder I do wonder whether we did have a number of deaths owing to starvation as well as plague. during this time There's one one case actually where physician notes that he's seen A young girl that was emaciated, a young girl of fourteen fifteen. So I think that might have had an effect at the time as well. So they're the public health measures. We have more broadly, people leaving London and wanting to enter other cities and other towns, we start to see measures being brought in in places like Norwich, other significant cities whereby they will need a pass to prove that they haven't got plague or they haven't come from infected. place as well. So public health measures within the city and then more broadly around England too And is there any evidence that the King and his council knew more than they let on about the outbreak of the disease? I mean those who having lived through the COVID pandemic may feel there's some sort of echoes here. notot of the King government. But what do we know about this period Yeah, so I think those crucial months of April and May mayaybe even March are really interesting. And obviously what we don't have are those conversations that happened in private and were not recorded But we do have some minutes from meetings that have been recorded And there is an awareness of pllague, and there's no doubt that the king was aware of it and aware that it was in more parishes than just Staint Giles in the fields before public health measures were brought in. and I write about this in my book because I find it fascinating that Even if you have the understanding that plagues spread by bad air and you don't have a contemporary understanding of disease You still probably wouldn't want people all congregating in the same place And in actual fact, bans on that did come into place, but people are still going to the theatre when the king knows that it's spreading So yes, I do think they knew a little bit more But it's spread at speed. Once we get to May and June, it's really rising quite rapidly and people are leaving the city then. And so it's undeniable, even if they'd known a little bit more beforehand it reminds me of going to a wedding, I think it was about a week before lockdown in twenty twenty where everybody was notot shaking hands, but you know, elbow bumping and then standing really close together for a photograph Anyway, sure is the suuest freder event Let's take a little detour into London life as it continued in sixteen sixty five One person I'd like to fix on that you talk about in your book is Robert Hook, who's in his early thirties at this point. You describe him as a fledging star of the Royal Society, Why was he a rising star? And Why were his experiments Compound microscopes in particular so horrifingly timely in May of sixteen sixty five. I know, it's so frustrating. I was going through, so I'll tell you who he is for. So Robert Hook is a scientist, natural philosopher of the seventeenth century, he was the protege of Robert Boyle. so he got his break through him and being connected to him And as a consequence of that, when people were thinking about the Royal Society and thinking about what it could be, this is even before sixteen sixty. And he was always on the radar. And from sixteen sixty onwards, he'd had a job or a role as being the kind of I forgot the exact term, but he was the one that conducted all the experiments. He was employed to conduct lots of experiments I mean, it's the dream job for a research scientist, I think. He was just paid to follow his interests and the interests of other members as well One of those things, his kind of masterpiece, so to speak, was using these new microscopes that he'd developed further. to look really closely at matter. so it could be plant matter, animal matter, household objects even, and you would zoom in to such a degree that you get really minute detail. thenen he was an artist as well, which is always useful if you're a scientist, I think, in some respects, but he was an artist as well, so he would then Observe these different objects. and draw them in really intricate detail in these beautiful kind of fold out pictures that were compiled into a book which was named Micrographia. was circulating in manuscript form before it was published in I think maybe late sixteen sixty four, very early sixteen sixty five and Samuel Peeps got hold of an early copy And one of the things that he focused in on, Robert Hook was the flea. And it's stunning. It's the key image of this book. it's the star of the show and it's a really beautiful image and he talks about it in detail. He says how he can see certain bits and pieces. I mean,'s beautif, but it's also terrifying since it's fully up close. But what's really, really frustrating And I' still not quite worked out why The Royld Society doesn't seem to be as interested in Disease medicine as you would want it to be in these early years. If you look through the journal that they established in sixteen sixty five, it's called Philosophical Transactions. It's the longest running science journal in history. It still exists today But if you look at all the early articles in there, there are very few on disease V very few. And if they are there, they're about diseases that are in colonized spaces, so they're kind of wrapped up in a lot of Racist anthropology, I would say, and it's diseases that are affecting peoples that people from England are coming into contact with for the first time. There's lots of things about enslaved individuals as well. But it's not they don't seem to be looking everyday diseases that are experienced in London. I still don't know why. And I don't know when the change happens. Maybe it's in the eighteenth century outside of my time period, but it's so frustrating because we now know Almost certainly the primary vector of pl was the fleas on rats and obviously human life as well. So we've got this zoomed in close up of fully, the culprit but nobody is able to connect the dots. And what's even more frustrating as well, speaking of connecting dots is when we have references to the tokens, these kind of speckles that are over people's bodies in the last stages of plague, A physician called Nathaniel Hodges even says, o, they're like a flea bite They are not the flea bites, but it's just having the word flea so close to plague It's frustrating, but they're not they're not armed with the science that we have today, those connections, I don't think would ever have been made, but it's one of those What if moments So lately And I'm struck by the fact that we've got this being produced also I'm thinking of the poetry of John Donn just anyway, the flea. Yeah There' this time. Lots of thought about fleas, just not in the right way. Yeah Another side quest I'd like us to go on is the conflict between the English and the Dutch. We see the first Sat on june sixteen sixty five. So can you outlightine briefly? what happened and why? if we're thinking about the plague, it's important to consider this. Yeah. so I think I'm probably one of maybe ten people in the whole world that's interested in the seconde Anglo Dutch war. it's not a war that many people go back to. But anyway, it's important because we think the root of plague Well, we think plague arrived in England via Dutch merchant ships. That's the strongest hypothesis because there had been a significant outbreak of plague In Amsterdam in sixteen sixty four, there had beenross across Europe, but it seems to have made its way up towards Amsterdam and then probably across to England. So that's the significance in terms of the connection with the Dutch. The Dutch were a huge merchant trading nation and England was a little bit behind on that, but they were very competitive And these trading posts that they were competing over are very much linked in with the transratlantic slave trade, which is probably a subject for a whole other episode what's important is We have this rivalry because the two nations are at war The plague has probably come to England because of the Dutch But as soon as it arrives in London, the Dutch newspapers, well some of them anyway, seem to be quite gleeful that London's crippled by plague. I think there's one account that says that the English nation could just be flicked over with your finger It's that vulnerable because of plague And so I think it's quite widely known that as pllague numberbers soared Thousands fed the capital. We shouldn't Imagine that London has become a ghost town. I mean, there's something like four hundred thousand, doesnn't it? Remain? So what are the challenges facing London's authorities and its physicians? How did they cope Yeah, I mean, it it's really difficult. We have lots of written material. So there there's lots of people that stayed within the city that thankfully left accounts of their time there. and frustratingly, most of the accounts seem to be from men. There are letters from women that are writing to people, you know giving instructions to people going into the city that they need to take certain charms with them or and where an certain cense on them to prevent plague being caught, but we have we have accounts from Samuel Pepes. We have accounts from an apothecry called William Boghurst who remain behind and also the physician Nathaniel Hodges as well we have some really favorite accounts actually from a non conformist called Thomas Vincent and he's just so He's so passionate. You don't get religious passion and fervor like you do in the seventeenth century. Everything is awful and everybody's fault, but not his so we do have lots of accounts of what it was like There are certain things that When I was writing the books, it's nearly ten years ago now. In fact it was ten years ago that I found at Hs. But it's not that I found it hard to appreciate. I didn't appreciate so descriptions of grass growing back on roads. I wrote about it in my book But since experiencing COVID Seeing things like that with your own eyes is it's quite chilling and it's quite strange and it's quite dystopian in a strange way So we see that and we see that people struggle, people are struggling to bury all of the bodies, all of the victims that have died as a consequence There is a smell from the bodies not being buried so fast We see certain instances where Samuel Pepes is is curious to see. bodies, he goes and wanders around and has a look around in more fields and places. Then And There's one entry in his diaries I think might be january sixteen sixty six. I might be wrong. There's an entry after the main part of plague, after the kind of The worst of it is over And he talks about speaking to somebody that he knew and them saying that they'd been meeting up the whole time in a coffee house that they'd just been going, even though it was forbidden So I think people find a kind of Gallow's humour, a way of coping amongst all the horror because it was horrible as well. And if we go back to the bills of mortality for a second As the death rate became so vast Who on earth was keeping count? How are they doing it? I mean, you've pointed out that the count is not fully accurate because it's only incorporating those who are attending the Angrlican church, but Tell me about it Yeah, so it's these searchers so women that are hired by the parish to keep a track of causes of death. So they will go into households, they will assess a body, they'll be given instructions from the physicians, so the physicians that remain behind and are in charge as to what to look out for, but they've been doing this for a long while. Often, these parish women have been searchers for decades And they will go in, they'll assess the body and they will write down what they think the cause of death is. They'll add up a little tally. They're probably be going around lots of houses in a day or over a few days. They get paid per body And then they feed that information back to the parish clerk. We do see lots of changing of handwriting in the parish records because these clerks are very vulnerable as are the searchers and they're changing because they're dying So they're fed back to the parish clerk and then that information is fed into the bills of mortality which is then printed and circulated. others to see. But it is an impossibly difficult task because there are so many deaths. We have thousands of deaths in the weeks of August and September, thousandousands of deaths per week. I think one week it goes up to eight thousand So it's an extraordinarily job Usually two searches per parish within London and the out parishes. within that jurisdiction. You mentioned William Boghurst and I know he's one person who creates this amazing list of possible ways to prevent plague or signs that foretell plague Can you talk to me about him and also about sort of the range of preventative remedies and medicines that are flooding London in sixteen sixty five. Yeah, so William Bolkus was an apothecary and apotheces have a good reputation when it comes to plague in some ways, because whereas the Royal College of Physicians and phhysicians are notorious throughout the seventeenth century for fleeing London at times of plague and following their patrons, apotheores have tended to do the opposite and in actual fact If we go back to sixteen o three, it's because they manyany of them remained behind that they were able to form their guild. They were able to do that in the same way as physicians. and surgeons So he stays behind in sixteen sixty five. He's treating people, he's got lots of remedies as many people do, but he's also talking about things in his account of plague that people should look out for as almost portence of plague coming again. and some of these are quite. interesting. He talks about women miscarrying at any slight occasion. He talks about fruit and food going rotten unusually. He talks about spotted fever growing rife and there been more instances of that as well lotots of changes in the weather, but then we get to other things like an increase in mice and flies and ants and stuff. And this this is Again, one of those frustrating things because in tandem, we have Samuel Peeps writing his diary about hearing mice in his house So it's again, one of those strange almost sliding doors moments where you wish people were able to connect the dots, but of course they can't. But another thing that Boghurst refers to is the idea of comets and that there willll be unusual things going on in the sky. And this is this is refuted by Nathaniel Hodges, who's a physician who stays behind in London during that same plague year. He says that There was less mischief from the stars and more from the star gazers. kind of propagating these ideas that comets and things could imply something awful was going to happen Nathaniel Hodges argues that it's the common people that are believing these things You can see if you read between the texts, you read between the lines, there is a lot of discord between the different medical disciplines, the apotheces, the physicians and then the physicians feeling very frustrated with nurses caring for the sick. so we do have some wonderful accounts of plague from sixteen sixty five. I was really struck also by your mention of what it It felt like when we lived through COVID and saw grass growing up in the centre of London and saw those empty streets I think we have a better ability to empathize with people of sixteen and sixty five because we've experienced that. Were there any accounts from sixteen sixty five that have stayed with you about the emotional and mental impact of the disease on individuals Yeah, and empathize is the absolute right word because before twenty twenty I could only sympathize with the experiences. COVID is not the only pandemic that we've experienced within our lifetimes. We are still in an HIV and AIDS pandemic. But in terms of my personal own experience of feeling constrained by an epidemic. COVID is the one as it is for a lot of people, I think. And yeah, this I was moved by them at the time. I was moved by them when I was I was researching I was moved by seeing names in the parish records that were repeated Surnames that were repeated again and again until you got to the last individual and it was just their surname because there was no one else there to remember their first name. And that was weird Yeah, it's really sad and it's You have to take a beat to just process that because these are and They've died in awful circumstances and died lonely, and I think that always tugs at anyone's heartstreams And it certainly did with mine And so you feel very moved by it. And there was one account that was written by a man who in the pamphlet is called Thomas Clarkke. And he writes about his experiences. It's a short ish pamphlet very flowery writing, that he writes about his experiences of being in a house that's shut up in sixteen sixty six his experience comes from. So this is when we have a small peak in early sixteen six of plague And it's really sad. He talks about How his children are So the house is shut up, but then his children in separate rooms When it's something that's so deadly like plague And knowing that your child and his children did die Knowing that they're dying but you need to stay apart from them I just It got me at the time, but then During COVID, it really It stayed with me because it's just one of those awful things. Do you go in and comfort them and then risk everybody else or It's just horrible. It's an awful awful scenario. And so that really did stay with me.' that those small tragedies because if you look at the big figures, it's you can't really ground yourself in that, but it's too big The small stories are what get you, I think Yeah, that's really helpful to think about the small stories that underpin every single figure that we see Every recorded death And actually one of the things I was struck by in reading your work is just how far the plague of sixteen sixty five spreads we think about it as a London thing. but actually it is Its really widespread. it's affecting huge numbers of people Bath and Derbyshire and Yarmouth and Scotland. How were the regions responding to the disease in the same way, they were fearful of it approaching. so as I said they brought in measures wherey any strangers they would have to have a passport to say that they've not come from an affected place So the measures were very, very similar, Yeah, it did spread. It kind of spread outside of London and along the highways and down the river Cambridge was badly affected during this time. Oxford wasn't strangely during sixteen sixty five. It had suffered plague in the past terribly in the past. So yes, it spread, it spread to port towns. Obviously England was at war, so there were higher populations within these port, cities, even them than usual And you get accounts of people dying as they're tralling, as well, dying along the highways because they've clearly taken plague with them. The other thing is really get frustrated with Charles II and the royal court because We know they went to Oxford. That's kind of the story that I think fixes in everybody's minds. But before they went to Oxford, they went to Salisbury And I think they did take plague with them because there are a few people out and theyre kind of on the peripheries that were dying or suspected of having plague, and then as soon as thet, the royal court arrived in Salisbury Salisbrey was put in lockdown. The only people that were allowed to leave was Charles and the few courtiers. so it's just They brought the disease and now they're shutting everything down. So yeah, it did travel, it traveled far. It was fascinating to learn also that This epidemic, like as many people said of the twenty twenty lockdown was a highly productive time Aid theyake spread Isaac Newton, who was a Cambridge University student at the time the most academically productive exon of his life. Is it fair to say that without the plague There would not have been some world changing discoveries by people we call scientists. Oh, that's a really tough one. and I guess In Isaac Newton's case, no, I think he was always going to do it. I think I play with the myth of Isaac Newton in my book about the apple falling, which he kind of seemed to love quite like that story. I play with that idea, but that was not an idea that just sprung into his mind you know randomly, he'd been thinking about that for a long time, likewise with his investigations into light and how that works and how it moves through glass and different objects He did conduct a lot of experiments into that, the light side of things and optics in sixteen sixty five and sixteen sixty six. So it was very productive. Would he have done that anyway? Well, that's the big what if? I think probably yes. It might have taken a little more time. mayaybe something would have happened to him. I don't know. but certainly if we stick with the facts he was very productive then and we do get his work into optics. during that time Likewise, we have individuals like John Milton, who has been working on Paradise Lost for a long time John Milton is blind by this point. so he's using and he had been for a few years, he's using assistance. he dictates to assistance, so they write down what he once written for Paradise Lost and he finishes this during his escape from pllague in sixteen sixty five So we have lots of people using that time to finish stuff or pursue interests that they probably would have completed in due cause, but they had the opportunity then By january sixteen sixty six, you say a semblance of normality begun to return to London The Daths are starting to fall. the city's fumigated And again, after COVID, many people talked about the new normal Was the same true for Londoners in sixteen sixty five? or the social the economic landscape shifted for the individuals you opened your work with Yeahes, so some of them had changed. some I mean, I tried as much as I could with the source material that had to going to the lives of everyday people. I say everyday, they weren't necessarily the very, very poor because it's hard to access those records. So its kind of the merchant class, I suppose. I have a lot of accounts from And we do have instances of mayaybe two merchant families having a betrothal between the families that's had to shift to a younger son because the older son has died of plague. So we see these small changes as a consequence and there is a sense in sixteen sixty six, that things are returning to normal. Thomas Vincent, the Puritan preacher that I mentioned before, is very very shocked by this. He thinks it's absolutely awful that everybody is returning to everyday life because they've forgotten you know, that it was their habits and then the vice and things that had brought this plag on in the first place as a kind of act from God in his view tricky thing is We have another huge catastrophe in sixteen sixty six, so we don't have the time to judge how far things had returned before something else really affects the daily lives of of London. Yes, of course, we have the fire and we on this podcast three years ago about the Great Power of London, which listeners might want to go back and listen to. But we've got this sort of series of overlapping disasters This may feel a little As if I'm speaking with the enormous condescension of posterity, but do you I feel like these disasters collectively push Restoration England towards modernity Yeah, this is such a big question. And it's also I think often we think Often implicit in the word and term modernity is that it's a good thing. It's pro.. Yeah. And Let's think of it as ambiguous and It may not necessarily be a good thing. It can be a bad thing too And it certainly is a bad thing with regards to the imperial ambitions of England and Britain and the growth of the transatlantic slave trade, I mentioned the Anglo Dutch War, the secondcond Ango Dutch War. They're fighting over over key locations along the West African coast where We know the slave trade is going to grow in terms of England and later Britain's involvement in it. So yes, that war is very important in terms of England holding on to key locations or aining them London itself It becomes a modern city aesthetically after the Great Fire of London. It was moving that way anyway. We do see little pockets where and especially along the strand where we're getting architecturally houses and homes that we would probably recognizeed as being more eighteenth century than seventeenth century The G Plague I think it's so hard with a great plague because It was the final huge epidemic in London, but there are hints from the accounts that are left behind that had Beeen another plague authorities would have dealt with it differently positive experience And this again is another one of those what ifs. We're going down kind of counter history here. Nathaniel Hodges speaks in his account about how he thought that quuarantining the well or the seemingly well with the sick, keeping them locked in or shut up together meant that many people that would have survived died. And he suggested that perhaps in future plagues there should be a space outside of the city for those who are well but from afflicted houses to go and stay for a spell until people knew whether they would get better or not He also was pushing back against certain medical approaches to the G Plague, so certain things like minerals that were brought over from France there was one that was seed to be killing people faster than the pllague was anyway. So there could have been changes, but we never had Thankfully And there was never reason to test them out So as we come to an end, I'd like to ask you to reflect on something which I think has been coming out in the course of this conversation You say it's been a decade since your book was published Of course, as we've said, COVID has happened in that time If you were going to revisit your research Is there anything you'd like to develop or reframe. today Gys That's really hard It's really hard because Yeah I'd like to see the long tail of it psychologically. I think that's what I would like to look into. I'd like to see How much of an effect And I think living through COVID is the reason why I would like to see that because I'm fascinated by impact of COVID and how we're probably still impacted we're the influenced by it but we don't necessarily realize it how behaviourors might have changed, but in such a subtle way or become so normalised so quickly that we don't question them anymore. And I'd like to see And I don't even know how you would begin because a lot of it is internal I would like to into that a little bit more Well, that sounds amazing. I'd like you to do that too. I'd also like someone to do it about us and COVID and to understand ourselves a bit better But thank you very much, particularly for your sensitive distinction between sympathize and empathise, I think that's Really, really fascinating It's been such a pleasure to talk to you again, as it always is, Rebecca, and your book is sixteen sixty six for those who would like to find out more. Thank you Thank you. Thankks