The idea for Anna Abney’s debut novel came from the “wider implications” of the Plague of 1665: the responses to the disease and its social effects. Then, editing her book during Covid, she was struck by the similarities between the ways the two pandemics affected people, as she tells Historia.
I was teaching Daniel Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year to English Lit undergraduates when I was bitten by the idea for my first novel, The Master of Measham Hall. It wasn’t just the bubonic plague that infected my imagination, it was the wider implications of the epidemic that intrigued me.
Having written the novel long before Covid struck, I was also surprised, when editing it, how many similarities there were in both the responses to and the social effects of these two very different illnesses.
The 1665 plague was, of course, more devastating, wiping out over 15 per cent of the London population (and my focus here is on the capital).
The real numbers are hard to verify because the deaths of Anabaptists, Jews and Quakers were not recorded. The cause of death was also sometimes falsified so that the rest of the household could avoid being shut up in an infected building for 40 days.
This form of quarantining was controversial and disputes raged through pamphlet wars, an early form of social media. The apothecary William Boghurst described it as “murder” to shut the healthy in with the sick, but the practice continued (with disbursements being made to support those confined).
The poorest areas, as always, were the worst hit by the illness and its economic effects. All over London businesses, shops and lodging houses were closed and “seeing all Employment at an End, and no Work or Wages to be had” many decided to flee “the dreadful infection” to seek sanctuary in an often-hostile countryside (Defoe).
The reasons for the ‘Covid exodus’ from the capital that sparked recent headlines may not have been as desperate as those of 1665, but, according to the Irish Times London’s population fell by 700,000 in 2020 as immigrants, the first to lose their jobs, left the city. And then, as now, a certificate of health was required in order to travel.
The physician Francis Herring warned rich gentlemen that they would not escape “Scotfree” unless they could also outrun their own sins and entreated them to look after their poor brethren by providing them with food and medicine. “Idle vagabonds”, meanwhile, should be prevented from “wandering up and down” spreading infection (Preservatives Against the Plague, 1665).
This did not stop the College of Surgeons moving out of London, appointing an apothecary to work on their behalf. The physicians of wealthy clients fled with their patients, while most Anglican clergy also left the city, leaving non-conformist ministers to tend (illegally) to the spiritual demands of their anxious flocks. The court of Charles II moved to Oxford.
Herring was, unusually, a keen proponent of hand washing, advocating an early-modern form of sanitiser – rose-vinegar and water. He advised anyone who had been out visiting to wash their hands and face and lay aside the clothes they had been wearing for some considerable time.
There is nothing new about social distancing. Stephen Bradwell, a London physician, advised during an earlier outbreak: “Be contented to live as solitary as your calling and business will give leave… if you stand to talk with another be distant from him the space of two yards. But if you suspect the party to be infected, let the space of four yards part you.” (A Watch-Man for the Pest, 1625).
The Lord Mayor, Sir John Lawrence, even had a glass case made, which he stood inside when receiving visitors.
Orders were issued by the City of London aldermen to ban “all Players, Bear-baitings, Games, Singing of Ballads, Buckler-play, or such like causes of Assemblies of people”. Curfews were imposed on taverns.
Though, as Margaret Calverton in The Master of Measham Hall notes, the authorities, then as now, could be worryingly slow to act.
The streets were cleaned, getting rid of sewage and refuse, and fires were burnt to purify the air, both inside and out. Margaret follows the sort of recipe Bradwell recommends, using pitch, tar, turpentine and rosin – strong stuff.
Some people used masks, while others carried medicinal posies of herbs and flowers. Bradwell warns against wearing absorbent material like wool or leather but thought women’s whalebone bodices were “good armour” against the plague. Recipes and advertisements for plague waters, lozenges and “Antipestilential Tinctures” abounded. Many wore amulets containing quicksilver (mercury).
Toads were also popular. The physician, George Thomson, claimed to have survived catching the plague by just such a method. “This Toad, sowed up in a linnen cloth was placed about the Region of my Stomach, where after it had remained for some hours it became so tumefied and distended to that bignesse that it was an object of wonder to those that beheld it.”
While in 2020 Nightingale Hospitals were erected to treat patients with Covid, in 1665 the Earl of Craven had pesthouses built in what are now the grounds of Westminster School and Marshall Street Leisure Centre, Soho.
The Tothill Fields pesthouses in Westminster were erected at a cost of £250 (the equivalent of about £27,000 today). The seven Nightingale Hospitals cost over £530 million and have also mostly been decommissioned or repurposed (though rather more rapidly).
Those sent to the pesthouses were not expected to survive, however; they were built as a means of containment, whereas the Nightingales were intended to ‘bring hope’.
The ability of wealthy Londoners to ignore what was going on around them and continue with life as usual is notable in Pepys’s diaries.
A Captain Cocke complained to Pepys about “the ill government of our Kingdom” and “every body minding their particular profit or pleasures, the King himself minding nothing but his ease.” After a night of merry-making followed by a morning spent strolling in the park and eating fruit out of the King’s garden, Pepys was troubled as he passes a farm where twenty-one people had died of the plague and a watch had been set to keep the rest in, the plague “making us cruel as doggs, one to another,” he observed.
The recent pandemic did not provoke quite such cruelty, but then, we were not tested to the same degree. I’ll leave it to other writers to predict the future.
The Master of Measham Hall by Anna Abney is published in paperback on 23 June, 2022.
Anna Abney (who also writes under the name Madeline Dewhurst) was born and raised in London and lived in Ireland, North and South, for thirteen years before returning to the Big Smoke. She now lives in rural Kent.
For more about the Plague of 1665, you may also like reading Health and Hellfire: Personalising the Plague in 17th Century London by Deborah Swift, or Elizabeth Fremantle‘s review of 1666: Plague, War and Hellfire by Rebecca Rideal.
Deborah Swift has written for Historia about Pepys and his diary in And so to bed – a goodbye to Pepys’s diary.
Other features looking at aspects of the Restoration period include The monarch with the magic touch by Andrew Taylor and two pieces about Catherine of Braganza by Isabel Stilwell and Linda Porter. Linda also writes about Charles II’s last mistress.
Images:
- Carrying coffins: detail from a facsimile reproduction of a 1665 broadside from The Great Plague in London in 1665 by Walter George Bell: Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia (CC BY 4.0)
- Page from London’s dreadful visitation: or, a collection of all the Bills of Mortality for this present year (December 1664 to December 1665): Wellcome Collection (public domain)
- Fleeing London: detail from a facsimile reproduction of a 1665 broadside from The Great Plague in London in 1665 by Walter George Bell: Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia (CC BY 4.0)
- Part of the title page of A watch-man for the pest by Stephen Bradwell, 1625: Wellcome Collection (public domain)
- Title page to a statistical analysis of mortality during the plague epidemic in London of 1665, etching,19th century: Wellcome Collection (public domain)
- ‘Pest house’ (isolation hospital in times of plague), Tothill Fields, Westminster, London, lithograph, c1840 Wellcome Collection (public domain)
