Great Plague of London

In 1665 and 1666 an outbreak of bubonic plague swept through London, killing perhaps 100,000 people in about eighteen months, close to a quarter of the city's inhabitants. It was the last major plague epidemic in England, the closing chapter of a long series of outbreaks that had recurred since the Black Death arrived in 1348. Its name reflects that finality more than its scale, which was far smaller than the fourteenth-century catastrophe.

Seventeenth-century London was used to plague. Earlier outbreaks had killed tens of thousands in 1603 and 1625. The walled City was surrounded by sprawling, poorly built suburbs home to more than 250,000 people living without sanitation. Nobody understood what caused the disease: people blamed foul air, the weather or the earth itself. The bacterium Yersinia pestis was only identified in 1894, and DNA analysis confirmed it as the cause of the London epidemic in 2016. Scholars now think human body lice, as well as rat fleas, may have spread it.

The infection probably came from the Dutch Republic, where Amsterdam had suffered a severe epidemic in 1663 and 1664. England had imposed quarantine on ships from Dutch ports, but a few suspicious deaths occurred in the poor parish of St Giles in late 1664 and early 1665. In April 1665 the Privy Council ordered that infected houses be shut up, and a crowd in St Giles broke open the first one sealed. The diarist Samuel Pepys recorded the first fears in the City at the end of April.

As the weather warmed, deaths rose sharply. By July the plague was raging, and the wealthy fled, among them King Charles II and his court, who went first to Salisbury and later to Oxford. The Lord Mayor, Sir John Lawrence, and most aldermen remained. Infected houses were marked with a red cross and the words "Lord have mercy upon us", and locked for forty days with the family inside. Carts collected the dead, and huge pits were dug; one at Aldgate held 1,114 bodies. The authorities ordered the killing of dogs and cats and lit bonfires to purify the air. Weekly plague deaths climbed from about 2,000 to more than 7,000 by September.

Deaths were recorded by parish "searchers", often poor elderly women, and published in the weekly Bills of Mortality. These recorded 68,596 plague deaths in 1665, but families and clerks hid cases to avoid quarantine, and the true figure was probably far higher. The Lord Chancellor, Clarendon, thought it about double. The disease also struck other towns, including Norwich and Colchester, and the Derbyshire village of Eyam, which famously isolated itself.

Deaths fell during the autumn, and the king returned in February 1666. Sporadic cases continued until the middle of that year. In September 1666 the Great Fire of London laid waste to much of the City; it was long credited with ending the plague, but the epidemic had largely subsided by then, and most late cases were in suburbs the fire did not reach. London's population recovered within a few years through migration from the countryside. The last recorded plague death came in 1679.

Our 1650 and 1700 maps show the Kingdom of England, with London as its capital, in the decades around the epidemic.