A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 1 (of 2): From A.D. 664 to the Extinction of PlagueCreighton, Charles
History
A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 1 (of 2): From A.D. 664 to the Extinction of Plague
Creighton, Charles
Epidemics -- Great Britain -- History
Of that London epidemic a weekly record was kept by the Company of Parish
Clerks, and published by them, beginning with the weekly bill of 21st
December, 1592. The clerk of the Company of Parish Clerks, writing in
1665, had the annual bill for 1593 before him, with the plague-deaths and
other deaths in each of 109 parishes in alphabetical order, and the
christenings as well[703]. For the next two years, 1594 and 1595, he
appears to have had before him not only the annual bills but also a
complete set of the weekly bills of burials and christenings according to
parishes. The same documents were used by Graunt in 1662, and had
doubtless been used by John Stow at the time when they were published. The
originals are all lost, and only a few totals extracted from them remain
on record. To begin with Stow’s. The mortality of 17,844 from all causes
in 1593 is given as for the City and Liberties only. But there was already
a considerable population in the parishes immediately beyond the Bars of
the Liberties, which were known as the nine out-parishes, namely those of
St Clement Danes, St Giles in the Fields, St James, Clerkenwell, St
Katharine at the Tower, St Leonard, Shoreditch, St Martin in the Fields,
St Mary, Whitechapel, St Magdalen, Bermondsey, and the Savoy. Besides
these there were important parishes still farther out--the Westminster
parishes, Lambeth, Newington, Stepney, Hackney and Islington. Of these,
Whitechapel, Stepney, Shoreditch, Clerkenwell and some of the western
parishes contributed largely to the plague-bills of the epidemics next
following, in 1603 and 1625, and it is known from the parish registers of
some of them that they contributed to the mortality of 1593. It is
probably to these parishes that we should ascribe the difference between
the above total of 17,844 (for City and Liberties) and the much larger
total of deaths “in and about London,” given on the margin of a broadside
of 1603: “And in the last visitation from the 20th of December, 1592 to
the 23rd of the same month in the year 1593, died in all 25,886--of the
plague in and about London 15,003.” The addition for the parishes beyond
the Bars would thus be 8,042 deaths from all causes, and from plague
alone 4,541--numbers which will seem not inadmissible if they be compared
with the figures for the corresponding parishes ten years after, in 1603,
Stepney alone having had 2,257 deaths in that plague-year[704].
For the two years next following 1593, Graunt’s book of 1662 has preserved
the totals of deaths from all causes and from plague in the 97 old
parishes within the walls and in 16 parishes of the Liberties and suburbs;
he has omitted the christenings, although he had the figures before him.
Taking these along with the figures already given for 1593, we get the
following table for three consecutive years:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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