Historical fiction; London (England) -- History -- 17th century -- Fiction; Plague -- Fiction
1. All master workmen in manufactures, especially such as belonged to
ornament and the less necessary parts of the people's dress, clothes,
and furniture for houses; such as ribbon-weavers and other weavers, gold
and silver lacemakers, and gold and silver wire-drawers, seamstresses,
milliners, shoemakers, hatmakers, and glovemakers, also upholsterers,
joiners, cabinet-makers, looking-glass-makers, and innumerable trades
which depend upon such as these,--I say, the master workmen in such
stopped their work, dismissed their journeymen and workmen and all their
dependents.
2. As merchandising was at a full stop (for very few ships ventured to
come up the river, and none at all went out[150]), so all the
extraordinary officers of the customs, likewise the watermen, carmen,
porters, and all the poor whose labor depended upon the merchants, were
at once dismissed, and put out of business.
3. All the tradesmen usually employed in building or repairing of houses
were at a full stop; for the people were far from wanting to build
houses when so many thousand houses were at once stripped of their
inhabitants; so that this one article[151] turned out all the ordinary
workmen of that kind of business, such as bricklayers, masons,
carpenters, joiners, plasterers, painters, glaziers, smiths, plumbers,
and all the laborers depending on such.
4. As navigation was at a stop, our ships neither coming in or going out
as before, so the seamen were all out of employment, and many of them in
the last and lowest degree of distress. And with the seamen were all the
several tradesmen and workmen belonging to and depending upon the
building and fitting out of ships; such as ship-carpenters, calkers,
ropemakers, dry coopers, sailmakers, anchor-smiths, and other smiths,
blockmakers, carvers, gunsmiths, ship-chandlers, ship-carvers, and the
like. The masters of those, perhaps, might live upon their substance;
but the traders were universally at a stop, and consequently all their
workmen discharged. Add to these, that the river was in a manner without
boats, and all or most part of the watermen, lighter-men, boat-builders,
and lighter-builders, in like manner idle and laid by.
5. All families retrenched their living as much as possible, as well
those that fled as those that staid; so that an innumerable multitude of
footmen, serving men, shopkeepers, journeymen, merchants' bookkeepers,
and such sort of people, and especially poor maidservants, were turned
off, and left friendless and helpless, without employment and without
habitation; and this was really a dismal article.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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