The Great Plague of London

Plague has been the most feared disease across Europe since the Black Death in the 1340s. Dreaded because of the scale of the mortality and its sheer foulness, its periodic outbreaks had a devastating impact. London’s last and most destructive attack came in 1665, when, according to Bishop Gilbert Burnet, ‘a most terrible plague broke out, that depopulated the city of London, ruined the trade of the nation, and swept away about a hundred thousand persons’. Roughly one-fifth of the city’s population died, most of them within just eight months. The epidemic was not confined to London; East Anglia and southern England also suffered, and it spread as far north as Tyneside and Wearside. Places such as Colchester, Winchester, Southampton, Norwich and, the most famous case of all, Eyam in Derbyshire, suffered a higher proportion of deaths than did London. It is small wonder that Daniel Defoe described 1665 as ‘this calamitous Year’.