5th September - On this day in 1538, Henry VIII’s
Vicar-General Thomas Cromwell mandated the keeping by parish clerks of records
of births, deaths and marriages - to which we owe much of what we now know of
everyday past life in London.
The Parish Clerks’ “Bills of
Mortality” for the Plague Year of 1665 are examined at All Hallows Staining on our Friday morning walk “London Wall”.
According to
these records, 68596 people died of the
plague in London in 1665, including 112
in the parish of All Hallows Staining (the church collapsed in 1671, it is said
on account of undermining of its
foundations by plague burials). A further 4808 people died of “consumption and
tiffick”, which might actually have been the pneumonic strain of the
plague. And 5 died of being
“distracted”!
Keeping records of deaths at this
time was in itself a dangerous
undertaking. There is a story in my
family that my twelve times great-aunt’s first husband, Robert Mickell, contracted the plague while going
about his business a part-time? parish
clerk, and died on 17th
September, 1665 (he was evidently only
too aware of his mortality as he wrote in his will, only weeks earlier, “I
Robert Mickell … being well in body … praised bee God for the same but
considering the frailty of man’s life and not knowing how soon it may please
Almighty God my creator to call me out of this transitory world doe make and
ordayne this my last will and testament … ”).
He died as the epidemic reached it’s peak, killing around a thousand
people a day. At this point, probably to
conceal the scale of what was unfolding, the authorities ordered that burials should take
place at night, and without the tolling of bells. And it grew
so deathly quiet that throughout the City the River Thames could be
heard flowing under the nineteen arches of Old London Bridge.
No comments:
Post a Comment