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Making History
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Tuesday 3.00-3.30 p.m |
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Vanessa Collingridge and the team answer listener’s historical queries and celebrate the way in which we all ‘make’ history. |
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Programme 2 |
7 October 2008 |
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Vanessa Collingridge and the team explore themes from Britain’s past thanks to queries raised by listener’s own historical research. |
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The Plague Pits of London
Making History listener Sally Browne recalls stories from her youth about shrubs marking the spot where plague victims were buried in the City of London. Is this true and what was the extent of the burial sites she asks?
Making History consulted Professor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway College, University of London.
June 7th 1665: This day, much against my Will, I did in Drury-lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and "Lord have mercy upon us" writ there which was a sad sight to me, being the first of that kind that to my remembrance I ever saw. It put me into an ill conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy some roll tobacco to smell and to chaw which took away the apprehension.
From the diaries of Samuel Pepys
It’s estimated that as many as 100,000 Londoners died from the plague in 1665. People had little understanding of how the disease spread. Those who were ill and their families were locked up and their houses marked with a cross, others took refuge on boats on the Thames. The great and the good – including Parliament - left town. It was a long hot summer and soon London’s burial grounds couldn’t cope. The church authorities tried to give the dead a proper funeral but more often than not the deceased were taken to mass graveyards on the outskirts of the city. Although it was written in 1722, Daniel Defoe’s “A Journal of the Plague Year” remains a convincing account of the events of 1665.
Professor Champion has heard many rumours of plague pits all over London. However, he reminds us that London was geographically much smaller in the seventeenth century and many of today’s rumours surround places that would have been in open countryside in 1665 and would not have experienced the severe pressure on burial grounds that the City did.
Useful links
The houses many records and papers from 1665 including the Bills of Mortality
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Contact Making History |
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Use this link to email Vanessa Collingridge and the team: email Making History
Write to: Making History
ѿý Radio 4
PO Box 3096
Brighton
BN1 1TU
Telephone: 08700 100 400
Making History is produced by Nick Patrick and is a Pier Production. |
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See AlsoThe ѿý is not responsible for the content of external sites |
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Vanessa has presentedscience and current affairs programmes for ѿý, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Discovery and has presented for ѿý Radio 4 & Five Live and a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday, Scotsman and Sunday Herald.