“A Kind of Nothing”: Plague Time in Early Modern London

Abstract

In 1603, plague killed one in five Londoners in the space of a few months.² Over thirty thousand died, and thousands more fled the city, causing London virtually to stop. Its streets were deserted, except for the dying and the dead. Houses were boarded shut with the infected and their families inside. Heaps of bodies were buried in shallow graves, or left to rot in the streets and the fields. In the words of Thomas Dekker, the preeminent Jacobean plague writer, to be in London at this time was to be hung in “a vast silent Charnell-house,” surrounded by a thousand fresh and decaying corpses.³

Haue not we made an Idoll of this Citie, which hath stood 2733 yeares, and being infected with the number of our people Dauids sinne: boasted of the multitudes of heads, riches, buildings: that this was the Imperiall Citie of the Kingdome Chamber of the King, that with Laodicea wee were rich, encreased with goods, and had need of nothing: that with Tytus our Citie hath beene replenished, the haruest of the time her reuenue, a ioyous Citie: her Merchants Princes, her Traffique the Honourable of the earth. Haue not Parents gloried in the number of their children, and set too much their hearts vpon them?

(Samuel Price Londons Remembrancer)¹

Sicinius. What is the city but the people?

(Coriolanus 3.1.197)