The Prime Minister has said coronavirus is likely to...
When Covid-19 hit the UK...
..the seriousness of the situation.
..it seemed a uniquely terrible event.
..you can recover.
For others, it can be deadly.
But it wasn't the first time we'd suffered a deadly epidemic.
In a frightening parallel, 350 years earlier, we endured
one of the greatest tragedies in British history - the Great Plague.
Over 18 months, beginning in 1665,
this horrific disease killed an estimated 100,000 people in London
alone, a quarter of the entire population,
and a further 100,000 as it spread across the country.
BELL TOLLS
Over three programmes, we're telling the horrifying story
of how the catastrophe unfolded day by day,
week by week.
We filmed this series as Covid-19 began its spread across the world
and for me, the connections between the two pandemics are remarkable.
It's a frightening lesson from history.
I'm Xand van Tulleken, and in this first programme I track the early
days of the Great Plague epidemic, and trace it back to its source.
It all kicked off right here.
John Sergeant discovers the terrible symptoms of the Plague,
and investigates its transmission.
This is the cause of the whole thing we can see in this bedroom?
This is the centre of it all.
And Raksha Dave uncovers extraordinary new evidence
which reveals how the disease really spread.
So, you think that these have been spreading the Plague?
Just one is enough to be sick and even, to die.
This is the story of the Great Plague.
SIREN WAILS
21st century London is a world away from the city of the 1600s.
But in secret corners of the modern city,
we can still find traces of what happened here in 1665,
the deadliest epidemic in Britain's history.
The Great Plague.
With my knowledge as a doctor of modern infectious disease,
I'll be investigating how the Plague devastated, first London,
and then, large parts of the country.
The first thing I need to figure out,
as with any disease outbreak, is how and where it started.
And this book, A Journal Of The Plague Year by Daniel Defoe,
the famous author of Robinson Crusoe,
has some important information for me.
Defoe was just a child at the time of the Great Plague,
but his book is believed to be based on the account of his uncle.
He tells us that two men, said to be Frenchmen, died of the Plague
in Long Acre, or rather, at the upper end of Drury Lane.
Well, Long Acre runs down there. This is the upper end of Drury Lane.
It all kicked-off right here.
It's believed the Frenchmen were weavers who imported
the Plague into London in an infected shipment of cotton.
The first two deaths were in December 1664.
But then, there were no more until four months later
in April 1665,
when two more people died.
All four of those early deaths occurred here,
in an area around Drury Lane called St Giles in the Fields.
It seemed like an outbreak was brewing.
Today, this is the heart of London's theatre and nightlife,
but 350 years ago, it was a new suburb,
recently sprung up outside the official City of London.
In the 50 years before the Great Plague,
countryside around London had been swallowed up as the population
doubled from 200 to 400,000 people.
Like many of the suburbs that sprung up outside the ancient city walls,
St Giles was one of the poorest areas of London.
Here, slightly better off people would have lived on one of the main,
wider streets but off those streets were narrow alleys, like this one.
They were crammed with illegally built slum housing,
and in late April 1665, it was in these back alleys where
cases of Plague began to multiply.
Families of up to ten people were crammed into two-room houses.
They worked as weavers, labourers, servants and porters.
Diseases like small pox, tuberculosis and typhus were common.
Even the Plague wasn't unfamiliar.
In the previous 300 years, there had been 18 major outbreaks in London.
But this one would surpass them all.
In the first week of May,
the Plague spread to several streets around St Giles in the Fields,
and there were nine more deaths.
This rising death toll confirmed to Londoners
that a Plague epidemic had begun and it struck terror into their hearts.
Older residents would have seen friends and family
suffer with this horrific disease before and they knew what to expect.
John Sergeant is discovering why the symptoms of this disease
held such dread.
JOHN: I'm meeting specialist Dr Chris Conlon
at the Weald and Downland Museum,
where many houses dating to the time of the Great Plague
have been preserved.
Why was the Plague so frightening?
Well, it was a terrible disease for people and it had a very high
death rate so it caused huge devastation and terror.
There was a bubonic type which is to do with lymph nodes,
a septicaemic type which, when it gets into your bloodstream,
and a pneumonic type that affects your lungs
and they're all pretty terrible. In fact, it does still exist today.
What, across the world? Yeah.
For example a big outbreak a couple of years ago, in Madagascar.
Been outbreaks in China. And, you even get it in south-west USA.
In 1665, it was predominantly Bubonic Plague that swept
through London.
It was a bacterial infection, unlike Covid-19,
which is caused by a virus.
Plague was incredibly infectious
and killed about 70% of those who caught it.
With the help of prosthetic make-up artist, Florence Carter,
Dr Conlon is going to show me
what a victim of this type of Plague would have endured.
If I did have the Plague, doctor, what would I feel like?
You'd be a bit pale. Right.
And a bit sweaty.
At the same time, you'd be getting a headache.
In addition to that, you'd be developing aches and pains in your
muscles and joints, and you might even shiver.
And then, as the disease progresses, you are going to get a very high
fever, maybe up to 40 degrees.
You might even get confused or delirious,
and then, you'd probably start noticing some pain in your neck
where your lymph node is starting to enlarge.
Right, so here?
And how quickly would that really develop?
That could come up over a few hours or a day or so.
So, this is a terrifying moment, isn't it?
This is the first real signs of the Plague. That's right.
It's the bubo of the Bubonic Plague. The Bubo. Yeah. Oh, God.
And you would feel that if you had to turn your head to the right,
it would be too painful to do. Yeah.
So your head would be, sort of, tilted to one side
to avoid the pain.
I'm aware of the fact that just the loneliness of it
would be so striking, wouldn't it? It'd be terrifying, wouldn't it?
It would be, "You're going to die and by the way, we can't do
"anything for you, and just stay there and think about nothing else."
And would the pain be growing all the time?
Yes, because it's getting larger all the time. Yeah.
And you might actually get a rash as the bacteria
spreads into the skin a bit.
And these bacteria are multiplying rapidly,
but more importantly, this bacteria is now in your bloodstream.
When it gets into the bloodstream, it's bad news
and most people in those days wouldn't survive.
So, what's happening here is that your nose circulation is
being infected and the tip of your nose no longer has any blood supply.
So the skin and the tissue underneath is dying
and becoming gangrenous,
and will turn blue and then black.
Once people know that this is spreading you can see why
people just panic and go sort of mad. Yes. That's right.
And to see these symptoms appearing,
these big lumps in people's necks and groins and the rash and the
gangrene are pretty horrifying sights.
So, from the time that I fell ill to now, how long has it been?
This is probably three or four days
after you started feeling a bit hot and sweaty and achy.
And probably five or six days after you first got infected.
This is a very rapidly progressive illness.
It's time, I suppose, for the inevitable question,
At this stage, Doc, how long have I got?
You'll be dead within 24 hours, if not sooner.
So, this is the really end stage of this terrible disease.
Is there any hope at all?
No hope at this stage at all.
By early May 1665, 13 people had died of Plague,
and thousands more were now at risk from this incurable disease.
And fear was stalking the streets of London.
FAINT CHATTER
XAND: By May 1665,
the Plague had taken hold in London,
and in the cramped back-alleys of the capital
it was spreading rapidly.
SHE COUGHS WEAKLY
In the four months since the first reported case,
13 people had died and many more were now infected.
LABOURED BREATHING
Londoners feared this was only the beginning.
In a terrible foreshadowing of the events of 2020,
they had watched with growing concern
as the epidemic headed towards Britain.
An eruption of Plague in Turkey in 1661
had spread to the great ports of Holland, where, in 1663,
tens of thousands had died.
To stop it crossing the Channel,
a blockade was set up at Tilbury Fort,
20 miles downstream from the city.
Any ship that arrived without a certificate of health
was held in quarantine for 30 days.
Not just that, but in fact, two Navy ships were set to patrol
the Thames all the way up to London Bridge here.
And for a year, those measures worked but then, as we know,
the Plague breached those defences and made its way into London.
The deadly Plague bacteria produced symptoms in around three days...
..and killed more than half of those who contracted it.
Back then, they didn't know about bacteria.
They only knew this disease by its horrific effects.
Now, of course, we know rather more.
And Raksha is going meet this most deadly of diseases, face-to-face.
RAKSHA: Understandably, there aren't many places in Britain today where
you can find Yersinia pestis -
the bacteria that causes Bubonic Plague.
Morning!
But I've managed to get special access to the top-secret
Ministry of Defence research facility at Porton Down,
where countermeasures against chemical and biological weapons
are developed.
They're working with Plague
in one of their high-level containment labs.
I'm not allowed inside,
so have to watch through the door with research scientist, Diane.
So Chris has taken the sealed box containing the plates,
the agar plates, with cultured Plague on them.
Oh, gosh! So, that's actually Plague in the box?
I've excavated lots and lots of Plague victims
and this is the first time I've seen it up close.
Quite glad that this door's here! Yes, it's a very natural reaction.
Plague is very, very dangerous and that's why
we handle it in this containment Level Three lab and safety cabinet.
So, how much of that bacteria would I have to ingest
to become infectious?
We're talking about 10-100 organisms,
a tiny amount, which will cause a rapid infection.
It's quite unbelievable, isn't it? Because it's a very,
very tiny amount could just set off this huge chain reaction.
That's true. And thousands of people can be affected within days.
Of course. That's why Plague has been such a successful pathogen
to infect people.
Plague evolved about 10,000 years ago, in Asia.
Unlike coronavirus, it spread no further for millennia.
It first reached Europe along trade routes in 541 AD
as the Roman Empire declined.
This was the first of three great pandemics.
The first pandemic lasted 200 years
with repeated outbreaks killing up to 50 million people.
A second pandemic swept to Europe 700 years later in the 14th century.
Known as The Black Death, there were two centuries of outbreaks,
including the Great Plague that we're looking at.
The third Plague pandemic engulfed the world at the end
of the 19th century.
Only then, did scientists finally figure out
what they thought was spreading the disease.
In 1894, Yersin, the founder of the now Institut Pasteur in Paris,
identified the bacterium, identified that Plague
was transmitted by rats, and rat fleas to humans.
Yersin, of course, gave his name to the bacteria, Yersinia pestis.
And did a lot of early work on the epidemiology of Plague.
Yersin's research in Asia revealed rats infected with Plague
passed it on to their fleas.
When the rats died of the disease,
the fleas were forced to feed on people,
passing it on to them.
And then, it's assumed, from that pandemic, that that's the way
that it was transmitted in earlier pandemics?
Yes. The knowledge that arose from that discovery was then
retrospectively fitted to the second and the first pandemics, yes.
XAND: So, for the last 100 years,
rats and their fleas have been blamed
for spreading the Great Plague through London
in the spring of 1665.
In the week to the 15th May, there were three more deaths.
A small increase, but significantly the disease was now
spreading beyond the parish of St Giles in the Fields,
and the first case was reported within London's city walls.
TRAFFIC HUMS
The first death, in the Square Mile,
within the ancient city walls of London, occurred here
on Mansion House Place, which back then was called Bearbinder Lane.
And again, the author, Daniel Defoe, blamed the French,
saying the man who died here was a Frenchman who had selfishly
fled the outbreak in the suburb of St Giles.
Plague wasn't just in the slums any more.
Bearbinder Lane is just around the corner from this -
the Royal Exchange,
the financial heart of the city.
It's where London's elite came to do business,
and they were now horrified that the Plague threatened THEM.
We know people are getting worried because they tell us so.
Famous diarist Samuel Pepys describes going to a coffee house
where everybody is talking about the Plague.
Another eye witness, a priest called Thomas Vincent, tells us
that, by now, everyone is really frightened.
Thomas Vincent was a Puritan minister who
lived in Spitalfields with a group of his congregation.
He believed the Plague was a punishment from God,
inflicted on Londoners because of their promiscuous behaviour.
Samuel Pepys lived in rather more comfortable surroundings
with his wife and servants, just north of the Tower of London.
He didn't blame the Plague on the Almighty,
but instead wrote, only God could save them from the disease.
Both men knew from experience
the rising death toll indicated
a terrible epidemic was coming.
In the last week of May, the number of Plague deaths reported
increased to 17.
Most victims were in still in St Giles,
in the alleys near Drury Lane.
Despite the growing fear,
normal life in the area continued.
Ale houses, coffee houses,
and theatres were still packed with customers.
This is the famous Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.
It's the oldest theatre in London,
and, at the moment, is undergoing a massive refurbishment.
But the original theatre was built on this site,
two years before the outbreak.
It was established by King Charles II himself,
hence the "Royal" in the name.
The theatre was located just a stone's throw
from the epicentre of the epidemic.
Despite that, each night, 700 people crammed into a building
only 34 metres long and 18 metres wide.
But it gradually became clear
that normal public life couldn't continue.
It was at this point, in June 1665, that the rising death toll finally
forced King Charles to close the theatres.
To find out how people were reacting to the rapidly escalating
epidemic, I'm meeting historian, Vanessa Harding.
We're here in St Giles in the Fields
and it's this parish where the Plague began in 1665.
How are people in London feeling at this stage?
I think they're starting to get really quite worried.
The number of deaths by the end of May is as many as the last
six or seven years put together.
And people do have a lot of experience of Plague in London
and they know that if deaths start to rise in the late spring,
early summer, and don't go down again,
then there's a good chance they're in for a bad epidemic.
Why does it begin here?
At the time, this is a western suburb of London.
We don't know why it starts here
but one of the things that's really interesting is that this
is about as far as you can get from the port areas of London.
So, if Plague is being imported from abroad on fleas,
on rats on ships, if that were true, then you would expect it to
start down by the waterside or in the East End.
This is almost the last place you'd expect it to begin.
OK, so that's quite mysterious.
This is one of many inconsistencies that have led historians
and scientists to question the assumption that the Great Plague
was only spread by rats and their fleas.
What have you learned from looking at parish records
about how the Plague was spreading in this part of London?
We have a lot of records surviving from this time and one of the
things that comes through from that is that it often seems to cluster in
households and it's not spreading in a sort of even geographical ripple.
It doesn't infect every house in one street.
Some families are infected but by no means all.
So, that, to me, would suggest it's spreading person-to-person,
rather than having rats which you'd expect would move it
all the way along a street?
Yes. Yes, it certainly looks like that.
So, you've got these inconsistencies with the geographic location
with the way it's spreading.
Are we sure this is Bubonic Plague?
We do know that now.
There have been quite a lot of excavations of buried bodies,
of human remains from Plague sites over the last few years,
and analysis of the ancient DNA
shows that Yersinia pestis was present.
So, we know it's Plague but the inconsistencies remain.
Yes. And I think that means we have to look again
at what we think we know about Yersinia Pestis
and its being spread by rats and rat fleas,
and think about whether there might be other ways
in which it's being spread.
So, what you're suggesting is that we have to rethink everything
we know about Bubonic Plague and how it spreads?
Yeah. Wow!
In the first week of June 1665,
43 people died of Plague in London,
more than double the previous week's total.
This rate of increase confirmed that the epidemic was accelerating.
For 100 years, it's been believed that only rats and rat fleas
were spreading the disease, but there's now new evidence
suggesting Plague was actually transmitted in a different way.
RAKSHA: In Marseille, on France's Mediterranean coast,
scientists have been investigating a new theory.
A terrible Plague epidemic struck here in 1720,
55 years after London's Great Plague.
100 000 people were killed.
It was Europe's last ever epidemic of the disease
and since then, Marseille University has been at the cutting edge
of research into its causes.
Recently, they've made some astonishing discoveries.
The work here was overseen by Professor Drancor.
He's taking me to see the animals
he has identified as Plague transmitters...
Oh, here we go!
..and they're not rats.
Right.
They're bred in a secure room in the university's basement.
Wow!
Is that where they are more comfortable, then?
Latching on to cloth?
Body lice are similar to head lice,
but these blood-suckers have
adapted to live on clothes rather than in hair.
While head lice are still widespread in Europe today,
modern laundry methods have almost eradicated body lice.
So, you think that these little bugs have been spreading the Plague?
And how did you figure that out?
So how long does it take for the rabbits that didn't have the
Plague, to then be infected by the Plague?
Oh, 24 hours!
Wow!
And there's another human parasite bred here that's also been
proved can spread Bubonic Plague directly,
without any rats involved.
So, fleas can spread Plague without rats being involved at all?
When I was first taught about the Plague at school,
I was told that it was incontrovertible scientific fact
that it was the rats and its fleas that was spreading the Plague
but what I've just learnt has turned all of that on its head!
This ground-breaking research from Marseille allows us
to look at the Great Plague in a completely new light.
The way the disease spread, the stories eye witnesses told,
and the preventative measures taken in the 17th century,
could all make a lot more sense if we put less emphasis on the rat
and look more closely at human fleas and lice.
With this in mind, I've come to the archives of the London Guildhall.
Records here allow us to track the Plague's spread through the capital.
So, this is the Bills Of Mortality for London from 1665.
And I used to have the job,
basically compiling a book like this.
I was a surveillance, Epidemic Surveillance Officer
for the World Health Organisation
and I was doing what they're doing here, which is recording the number
of deaths from particular illnesses from every parish in London.
So, I've got here the 20th June 1665.
What's so striking is St Giles in the Fields,
that very poor Parish where Plague began,
has got 143 deaths from Plague this week.
But what's even more disturbing is that the Plague has spread.
So, if I look at neighbouring Holborn, 37 deaths,
15 are from Plague.
Aldgate, four deaths, three are from Plague.
If we look in Westminster, we've got 38 deaths
but 26 of them are from Plague.
All of these are poor neighbourhoods,
they're outside the city walls.
But if I look at the parishes that are within the city walls,
the more affluent areas,
what's very striking is that there's almost no deaths from Plague
in those wealthier neighbourhoods.
We can see St Olave, Hart Street, no deaths.
And that is where our friend, the diarist Samuel Pepys lived.
It was in this month, June,
1665, that Samuel Pepys had his first brush with Plague.
He was taking a carriage into the city when the driver was suddenly
taken ill and Pepys wrote that he suddenly was unable to stand,
he collapsed, he was taken blind,
and Pepys was understandably, absolutely terrified
that he had had this encounter with a probable Plague victim.
I don't think London's walls were somehow physically holding back the
infection from inner city parishes like Pepys's.
The fact is that the older, more established parishes
inside the city walls were much more affluent.
And the disease was spreading in the illegally built slums and the
back alleys that had recently sprung up outside the city walls.
This was noticed at the time.
It was even called the Poor's Plague.
Now the crucial difference, for me,
between the living conditions of rich on that side of the wall,
and the poor on this side of the wall,
was the number of fleas and lice they were infested with.
Why did the living conditions of London's poor
make them so vulnerable?
John Sergeant has gone to find out.
I'm visiting a reconstructed 17th century house with historian,
Professor Catherine Richardson.
This is something like
a poor family would have inhabited in modern London. Yeah.
So, we've got one room downstairs for the whole family,
and one room upstairs.
So, it's small if you've got a big family? That's right. Yes.
We've got perhaps six, seven, eight,
nine people, all living in this space... All crammed in here. Yeah.
So, what made these poorer homes
more likely to add to the spread of the Plague, then?
So, the most important things we need to look at are upstairs.
Right.
So, here we are.
Now, if we're looking for a breeding ground for lice
and fleas in this house I think this is where we need to be looking.
Right, so why more for the poor than for the rich
in the same circumstances?
This is one of the rooms where you can see most clearly
the difference between the social groups.
So, if you imagine a rich bedroom,
it's much bigger than this.
Erm, it's got a four-poster bed with curtains around it
to keep them warm. Clean linen.
It's got feather beds, it's got no end of linen.
It's got linen that's worth more than this house.
Here...
..we've got a mattress of sorts but it's straw.
So, the fleas like the straw, don't they? Yeah.
These sheets, they'll be infested with lice.
And, of course, if they have got sheets,
one, perhaps a maximum two, sheets.
So, we're not going to be washing them very often
and then here, we've got, perhaps, all the children sleeping together,
it's companionable and it's warm.
But, of course, from our point of view, thinking about,
about insects, that's a marvellous environment for them to be growing.
So, yeah, you take off your outer garments when you've finished
work and you might put them on top of the bed to keep you even
warmer but you're likely to leave on your inner garments, your linens.
This is the breeding ground for the fleas
and the lice which means the Plague spreads.
I mean this is, this is the cause of the whole thing
we can see in this bedroom.
If you like, this is the centre of it all.
XAND: These conditions fuelled the Plague's relentless advance,
and families across London watched in fear as the disease
approached their neighbourhoods.
By mid June 1665, the Plague was accelerating through London
and 168 people a week were now dying.
HE COUGHS
We've established body lice and human fleas can transmit
the Bubonic Plague,
and we know many 17th century Londoners were infested.
But I'm looking for a clinching piece of evidence to confirm
they spread the Great Plague, not rats.
To do this, I've come to the location of a much more
recent Plague outbreak.
In 1900, there was an outbreak of Bubonic Plague here,
in the Gorbals district of Glasgow.
It was part of the third Plague pandemic,
which had started in Asia and spread around the world in the 1880s.
This much more recent outbreak was much better documented,
and it gives us incredible insights into how the disease spread.
Now, amazingly, living conditions in tenements like these behind me
in Glasgow in 1900 were not very different
to 17th century London slums.
This means investigating the 1900 outbreak in Glasgow's slums
will allow us to see if the lice and flea theory stacks up.
It was a family who lived in one of these tenements, the Bogies,
who fell sick first.
To discover what happened, I'm meeting historian
Dr Clifford Williamson at a reconstructed tenement flat.
So, this is the kind of room that the Plague started in in Glasgow?
Absolutely, this is your typical Glaswegian tenement
kitchen-living room apartment.
So, you could have a family of ten living in one or two rooms
this size?
Absolutely and it would be incredibly commonplace.
Now, talk to me about the Bogie family, who, were they?
They live on the bottom rung of the ladder.
The father is a docker, the granny sells fish outside pubs
at closing time just to make ends meet.
So, who falls ill first?
It's the grandmother that falls ill first and a grandchild.
And it just appears to be another infectious disease which is
something which they will see constantly throughout their lives.
So, the grandmother and the granddaughter die.
Talk me through what's happening in the wake.
You've got people visiting, where are the bodies?
The body is right in the centre of the room
cos that's the focus of attention.
And hundreds of people are coming through
the doors like it's a football turnstile.
At the time, there were reports they were kissing
the face of the corpses.
Apparently, that's part of the ritual of the wake.
If you've got a body laid out on this table that's just
died of Plague and lice leaving that body, that is a catastrophe.
Oh, it is a disaster waiting to happen.
So, people disperse from the wake. Yep. What happens then?
Well, the infection becomes mobile.
It's now got carriers who will then start to create little
hot spots of infection all on their very own.
Families across Glasgow began to fall sick with Plague.
To find details of how the disease was spreading,
I've come to look at documents held by the NHS Glasgow Archives.
So, this is what I've really come here for.
This is the report on certain cases of Plague
occurring in Glasgow in 1900.
It's absolutely an extraordinary document.
There's a page of photos of Plague victims.
We have armpit buboes, necrosis involving the skin.
A young boy, probably about my son's age,
and the picture is to show his facial expression,
the kind of exhausted, worn-out, drained look on his face.
You get a sense of how much fear this disease causes.
There's an extraordinary section here which catalogues all
the cases that were recognised as Plague.
So, we start with Mrs B, patient zero, that's Mrs Bogie,
age 57, she lives at 71 Rose Street and she's a fish hawker.
But this column here is figuring out how
they caught the disease in the first place.
This feels like a very modern thing to do.
So, even now we would do contract tracing.
So, first of all we have the husband of the first patient,
so that's Mr Bogie.
But then we have someone who's a relative
and helped to nurse first patient.
A neighbour, then people who attended the wakes,
people who attended the funeral service.
52 Dale Street, we have a man who dies
and when he dies, his bed is gifted to a neighbour and a week later
the man who got the bed gets sick from Plague and he ends up dying.
Now, that's someone who's got Plague without any direct
contact with someone who has Plague.
So, the bed is the vehicle for the Plague.
The picture that is built up through this document is that every
person affected, they were able to trace back to some contact
with an infected person, or with an infected item.
But the most interesting line to me in the report is the final
paragraph and they say, "In Glasgow, whatever the source of the original
"infection may have been, there was no evidence that rats played
"any part carrying it amongst those who were attacked by the disease."
And in fact, they rounded up 236 rats caught within the Plague
area and could not find any evidence in the infection in the rats.
That to me is feeling pretty conclusive.
This is a picture of the Plague team -
the doctors and nurses who were looking after the patients.
They all would have known how dangerous the illness was.
They're doing something that's extremely courageous.
36 people in Glasgow contracted Plague...
..16 of them tragically died.
They were living in squalid, overcrowded houses.
Just like the slums of 17th century London,
infested with lice and human fleas.
Which convinces me it was primarily human parasites
that had so rapidly spread the Bubonic Plague
to 20 London parishes by the 26th June, 1665.
The weekly death rate had jumped to 267
and was almost doubling every week.
There was no local government in the 17th century,
so it was officials from the parish churches who had to try
and deal with this spiralling epidemic.
One of the few buildings that has miraculously
survived from the time of the Great Plague
is St Bartholomew The Great, London's oldest parish church.
Now like all of London's parish churches,
Great St Bart's played an important role in the response to the Plague.
Parish officers organised money and food relief for the poor.
They also recorded all Plague deaths in their area.
And they had to bury the ever-increasing numbers of dead.
Each of those deaths was marked by a tolling of the church bell.
The actual bell that rang out here during the Great Plague survives.
It dates to the early 1500s and it still works.
I mean, this is amazing.
So, this is the great bell that is going to ring,
but before it does, I'm just going to get in my ear defenders
cos I think it is going to be pretty loud.
Tower Captain Paul Norman still rings the bell today,
just as his predecessors did 350 years ago.
You can imagine it ringing out all over London.
For me, its pretty magical, I have to say.
But that sound ringing out during the Great Plague,
I think it would have felt very different hearing it then.
BELL TOLLS
The infamous death knells rang out from every London church
to mark each death in their parish.
As the epidemic intensified in early July,
the bells in the worst-hit parishes were tolling over 20 times a day.
Death knells like that from parish churches would've been heard
all across London.
There was no traffic noise to drown them out.
And as they began to ring with more and more frequency,
it would've been a forbidding reminder
of the ever-increasing onslaught of the Plague.
And as the bells closer to your neighbourhood began to ring,
you could literally hear the Plague approaching.
It must have been terrifying.
As the bells continued to ring out, they triggered panic
and the greatest mass exodus London has ever seen.
In the next episode, we'll be investigating this
flight from London and continue the story as the epidemic exploded.
I think people find this whole thing of large numbers of bodies
just being tossed in together very, very disturbing.
We'll reveal the heroism of nurses and medics.
There's a clear understanding that she put herself at risk
to care for patients.
We explore the extreme measures taken to stem the contagion.
This scares the bejesus out of me.
We'll uncover new evidence that explains how the disease spread...
Lice would be in this underlayer next to the skin.
..and trace the Plague's relentless advance, first across London,
then across the country.
The Prime Minister says coronavirus is likely to spread...
When Covid-19 hit the UK... ..the seriousness of the situation.
..it seemed a uniquely terrible event.
..can recover. For others, it can be deadly.
But it wasn't the first time we'd suffered a deadly epidemic.
In a frightening parallel, 350 years earlier,
we endured one of the greatest tragedies in British history,
the Great Plague.
Over 18 months, beginning in 1665,
this horrific disease killed
an estimated 100 000 people in London alone,
a quarter of the entire population, and a further
100,000, as it spread across the country.
Over three programmes, we're telling the horrifying story of how
the Great Plague unfolded - day by day, week by week.
Last time, we revealed extraordinary
new evidence showing the Great Plague was spread
not by rats - as traditionally thought -
but by human fleas and body lice,
which live in people's clothes.
This time, we continue the story as the epidemic explodes.
I think people find this whole thing of large numbers of bodies
just being tossed in together
very, very disturbing.
We explore the extreme measures taken to stem the contagion...
This scares the bejesus out of me.
..discover how the poor were left to fend for themselves...
COUGHING
..and trace the plague's relentless advance -
first, across London,
then across the country.
I'm Xand van Tulleken and this is the story of the Great Plague.
In April 1665, people began to die
of plague here, in what was then the poor suburb
of St Giles-in-the-Fields, on the very outskirts of London.
And as the spring grew warmer, the number of cases began to skyrocket.
Two months into the outbreak,
the number of plague deaths was doubling every fortnight.
By the beginning of July,
470 people a week were dying, and
thousands more were falling sick.
The deaths were overwhelmingly
in the poor suburbs to the west of
the walled City of London,
but the contagion was now spreading east.
Terrified by this spiralling epidemic,
most better-off Londoners now decided to try and escape the city.
Tens of thousands of people fled London,
in the greatest exodus in the city's history.
The people that fled were those that could afford to -
the merchants, the lawyers, the professional classes.
And the streets were clogged with coaches
and carts piled high with servants, clothing and prized possessions.
Almost every noble family also escaped London,
including King Charles II, who fled to his palace
at Hampton Court, ten miles away.
COUGHING
Mostly, it was the poor who were left behind.
They had no choice.
They needed to keep working to survive
and they had nowhere else to go.
And it was in the back-alley slums where they lived
that the plague was already most rampant.
St Barts Hospital was one of the few places that the poor,
who were trapped in London, could come, hoping to receive treatment.
I'm here to have a look at their archives
to see what they tell us about the care they received.
Archivist Kate Jarman has found
original documents revealing that
even hospitals offered limited help
to plague victims.
So, Kate, this is the hospital journal,
is that right? That's right.
It's actually the minutes of the board of governors of the hospital.
So, it's really a record of
the day-to-day life of the hospital, activities of the staff.
So, it's like the hospital diary. Yeah.
And what does it say about the Great Plague? The record says
the hospital did not admit incurable patients.
So, it's probably unlikely that they were
admitting patients for the plague.
These may well have been patients admitted with other symptoms,
or who developed the symptoms of the plague while they were here.
In fact, the hospital was implementing measures to keep
contagion out, locking the gates early and making sure that
goods brought into the hospital were as risk-free as possible.
One of the interesting things is the record of what was happening
with the medical staff.
So, here, we can see
the governors have ordered that
the hundred pounds due to
Dr Micklethwaite and Dr Tearnes
not be paid to them. And that's because they'd actually left London.
They decided that the city was too contagious
and, in common with a lot of people of their class,
they would have got out of town. I mean, I can understand
why they left, but it doesn't feel like what doctors
should be doing. Yeah, but I think what's also interesting really
is the stories of those who did stay. People like
Margaret Blague, who was the matron of the hospital
at that time. So, she was responsible for
the 15 nursing sisters who looked after the wards of the hospital.
The record says, "Having respect towards Margaret Blague,
matron, for her attendant and constant great pains about the poor,
in making them broths, caudles
and other like comfortable things
for their accommodation in these late, contagious times,
wherein she had adventured herself
to the great risk of her life."
Wow, I love that!
She "adventured herself to the great risk of her life". You know,
there's a clear understanding that she put herself at risk
to care for patients. Just like NHS nurses today.
Absolutely.
You definitely feel very aware that
the less-paid, less-trained, less-valued health care workers
have stayed and done the heroic work. Absolutely.
Other physicians did bravely stay in London throughout the Great Plague.
One was William Boghurst, an apothecary,
an early type of pharmacist.
He made a vivid record of his attempts
to treat up to 40 patients a day.
He dressed buboes, the swellings
that formed on necks and groins.
He held people as they thrashed and raged,
overcome by unimaginable
pain and fever.
And he stayed with them in their final hours,
closing their eyes when they died.
So, apart from a handful of heroes, almost everyone in authority
seems to have chosen to abandon
the poor of London
to their fate. The outbreak
was only just beginning.
Things were about to get worse than anyone could imagine.
In mid-July 1665,
the official number of weekly deaths
in London surpassed a thousand.
54 of the capital's 130 parishes
were now infected.
With most aristocrats and professionals
attempting to escape London, it was mainly people such as
labourers and servants who were left behind.
Before King Charles fled to the countryside,
he handed responsibility for plague relief and control
to the Lord Mayor of London, who was based right here,
at the great Guildhall.
The Mayor was Sir John Lawrence,
a wealthy merchant, who'd been elected the previous year.
He now had to enforce regulations
to try and control the spread of the disease.
One of the Lord Mayor's jobs was to issue certificates of health
to the thousands of people wanting to flee London.
Without these certificates, they'd be turned away from inns,
they might even be turned away from towns and villages by guards.
So, thousands of people gathered here,
desperate to prove they weren't sick and to get their certificates.
The author Daniel Defoe tells us there was no getting
to the Lord Mayor's door here without exceeding difficulty,
such was the pressing and the crowding.
But unfortunately, those conditions are ideal
for the transfer of human body lice,
and many of the people trying to escape the plague
may have caught it right here.
This is the Great Hall, where the Lord Mayor conducted business,
and it seems he took
sensible precautions to avoid catching the plague himself.
We're told the Mayor had a special gallery built.
He would stand on it, keeping himself removed from
the mass of people that had come to petition him.
It allowed him to be seen, but at a suitably safe distance.
Sir John didn't know plague was spreading
through body lice and human fleas,
but he had learnt from experience
that social-distancing worked.
And despite dealing with hundreds, maybe thousands, of people
and working here throughout the Great Plague,
Sir John lived for another 27 years.
It seems his gallery did the trick.
To control the spread, the Mayor had ordered
the "shutting up" of infected houses,
a system of quarantine established in earlier plague
epidemics. It's the ancestor of the
measures used to combat Covid-19.
Searchers were employed to visit houses
where sickness had been reported,
to verify it was plague.
They carried a white stick to identify themselves,
so everyone else could avoid them.
So many had lost their jobs when employers fled London,
there was no shortage of desperate people willing to take on
this dangerous job.
If a plague victim was found...
..the house was locked up, with the entire family inside,
whether they were sick or not.
A red cross was then painted on the door...
..along with the prayer "Lord, have mercy upon us".
Watchers then guarded the house day and night
to ensure no-one escaped.
If rats - not body lice - were spreading plague,
this system would have been not only brutal, but pointless.
Rats could still have moved around freely,
spreading the disease between houses.
But would enforced quarantine have stopped transmission
by body lice and human fleas?
Raksha has gone to investigate.
I've come to the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
I'm meeting Professor James Logan to learn more about
the behaviour of human lice
and fleas.
The thing about lice
is that they're hugely adapted to living on us and they can't
survive when they're not on us,
and the reason that they live on us is because they suck our blood.
There are different types of lice that you can have.
So, we're very familiar with head lice, but there is
a very closely related species. In fact, it's kind of
the same species, really - the body louse.
And it's very similar in terms of its behaviour,
but body lice, they've kind of evolved to live
on clothing. So, one thing we know about body lice, in particular,
is that they're capable of transmitting diseases. So, head lice
can't really do it, but body lice can. And some of these diseases
are pretty serious - like typhus or trench fever - and, of course, now
we know that they're also capable of transmitting the plague.
So, I can actually show you some. I've got some live lice here.
These are head lice. Body lice are
incredibly rare in Britain today.
Let me see if I can just find one
that looks nice and active. So, I'll put my arm under
the microscope here and pop it on... OK.
It's grim. It's completely
latched on, hasn't it? Oh, yeah.
Yeah, it's going for it.
It's actually feeding off you! Yeah.
Look, can you see the blood there?
Yeah. It's, like, pulsating in.
Rather you than me. Eurgh!
If a body louse is infected with plague,
their bite injects the bacteria into the victim,
which then travels to the nearest lymph node,
where they multiply rapidly to produce buboes,
the swellings that give bubonic plague its name.
If you've got body lice, how then do you then spread it to me?
They are incredibly infectious.
They're designed not just to live on us but, also,
to spread to other people as well.
They've got hooks on the end of
their feet - essentially, on the end of their legs - which they use
not just to cling on, but to cling on to something passing by as well.
Imagine if I had thousands of lice, they would get onto you
pretty easily. But some of them can actually even crawl.
We reckon they can crawl sort of four or five metres in a day,
and when they're off the host, they're incredibly uncomfortable,
so they'll do everything that they possibly can to get back
onto something that's alive and going to give them blood.
If sick people's clothes were infested with body lice,
they could spread the disease by simply brushing past someone.
And following death, the infected lice would leave
the corpse, in search of a new host.
OK. So, that was lice. What about fleas?
Well, I've got some fleas here.
There are lots of different types of fleas. So, some fleas are
adapted to live on us and feed on our blood.
Other fleas are designed to live on other animals,
like rats, or cats, or dogs.
For 100 years, it was believed only
rat fleas could spread plague,
but the new research has revealed
human fleas can pass it
directly, person-to-person.
Look, it's got those jumpy long legs, hasn't it? Yeah, that's right,
and that's what everybody associates with fleas,
is their brilliant ability to jump and hop around the place,
and that's how they get onto us. So, they don't live on us
like body lice do. These guys actually live in the environment.
So, they'll live in your home,
in any sort of upholstery or textiles. Then when a host
comes along and it feels the vibration and it senses
the carbon dioxide given off by our breath, it kind of wakes it up
and it will come out and start to blood-feed on us.
The don't tend to go very far.
They will move around a little bit,
but they wouldn't tend to move from house to house themselves.
The behaviour of human fleas and lice
suggests that quarantining would
have been effective at preventing
wider plague transmission,
but the disease would've torn through families
trapped in infested homes with sick relations.
Shutting up...
would have been horrific for the unfortunate families.
It would have been a probable death sentence. But...
it would have stopped the disease spreading to other families.
But just as with self-isolation
during the coronavirus epidemic,
for the system to be effective,
it required compliance.
In 1665, people
widely concealed cases of plague
to avoid being shut up,
and many others distracted watchers and escaped.
The rejection of the system was strikingly demonstrated
here, at The Ship Tavern, in Holborn.
In the spring of 1665, there was an outbreak of plague
in this 450-year-old tavern.
Now, the landlord and his family were shut up by the authorities,
a red cross was painted on the door and watchmen were put on guard.
Well, this did not go down well with the locals,
who rioted to set them free.
It was reported that the door was opened
"in a vicious manner" and the people of the house permitted
"to goe abroad into the streets promiscuously, with others".
Well, this enraged the authorities,
who ordered that the Justices of the Peace inflict upon the rioters
"the severest of punishments".
The failure of shutting up
to contain the epidemic was clear,
as the death rate spiralled ever higher...
..so a range of additional regulations
was issued by the Lord Mayor.
So, this is an original copy of the orders,
"conceived and published by the Lord Mayor,
concerning the infection of the plague."
So, we've got the watchmen here.
We've got the searchers.
We've got shutting up of houses.
But a lot of these orders
don't seem to make any sense,
if you believe that plague is spread by rats.
It looks more like the superstitions
of ignorant people.
But if the plague is being spread
by human body lice, then these
orders read quite differently.
So this, maybe, to me, is the most special one.
The order says, "No infected stuff to be uttered".
Well, let me explain what that means. It says,
"No clothes, stuff, bedding or garments
should be carried or conveyed out of any infected houses".
Effectively, they have shut down the second-hand clothing trade.
You can't display them, you can't take any money for them
And if you buy clothes from infected houses,
your own house will be "shut up as infected",
and that shall continue shut up for 20 days "at the least".
So, this order reflects the widespread conviction
at the time that clothes and garments were responsible
for spreading the plague. Now, they hadn't made the exact connection
with human body lice, but they did seem to know
more than we thought about the way the disease was spread.
And John Sergeant has gone to look at what people were wearing
in the 17th century, and the role that played in spreading the plague.
Susan Vincent has researched the link between body lice and clothes,
and how the different clothing worn by rich and poor
determined how vulnerable they were to plague.
Well, hello. Hello, John. Nice to see you.
You look terrific. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Right, so you're dressed as, what, a very well-off woman?
I would be a woman of the upper-middling sort.
So, rather wealthy, but not of the very elite.
Right. Now, you're all dressed up,
but I'm not. What would I be wearing? Ah, well,
we have some clothes here for you to try on. Yes.
This is going to be... Ha! This should be fun.
Right. OK, see you in a moment. Good luck.
Like Susan, I'm dressing
as a wealthy Londoner.
Right, well, what do you think? John, terrific. That's wonderful.
I don't feel very dressed. Well, the reason I've kept you
in the underwear is that this is very important for the plague
because lice would be in this underlayer,
next to your skin. Right. And the lice would be,
like to be living next to my skin. They do want a good feed.
And so, being wealthy, you would be able to
change your underwear layer daily and, in doing so, this would get
rid of any potential lice problems. Right. So, I wouldn't know about
the connection with the plague, or anything like that. I'd just think,
"Oh, I want to change my clothes..." Yes.
"..and I've got plenty of clothes." And it's the decent and clean
and hygienic thing to do.
Pepys, he had trouble, didn't he, with lice? He did on one occasion.
It was very rare for him, and he writes about it in his diaries,
just because it is so rare.
The famous diarist Samuel Pepys
stayed in London through most of
the Great Plague to continue his crucial work
as a senior naval administrator.
He didn't flee the city
when most people of his class did.
His lice infestation occurred a few years after the plague.
The story is that he'd been feeling itchy for nearly a week,
and he went to Elisabeth and asked her
to check his clothing and check his hair and, indeed,
he did have lice. They found about 20, which
he says was more than he had had
in 20 years, and worried him because
he didn't know where they'd come from. But...
he shifted his clothes, he took his shirt off,
changed his undergarments and had Elisabeth cut his hair close,
to get rid of the head lice.
Right, so, even the great Peyps...
Even the great Peyps. ..had lice?
Right, so how's that feeling, then, John? That's good. No, it's great.
Terrific. Well, you're not quite there yet.
We still have one more piece to come... Right.
..and that's your wig, or your periwig. Periwig?
Right. Sometimes, they called it a peruke.
OK. How's that? I don't want to
cover your eyes there. Wow!
So, the wig is rather splendid, but you do have to be careful with wigs
because Peyps had just begun to wear wigs
and he was particularly worried during the plague
that the hair had been cut off someone who had died of the plague.
A good cheap source of hair. Ooh, grim. Grim, indeed.
The rich, like Pepys, were understandably deeply concerned
about the possible ways of contracting plague.
But the fact body lice infestations, for them, were so rare
made them much less susceptible to the disease.
Right, well... Oh.
However, it was a very different situation for the poor.
How does that feel, then? Ha!
It's good, but it's quite smart, isn't it?
Well, you've got to remember that this might be your only
outfit of clothes. So, it's looking good now,
but after you've worn it continually during the day,
it would be a lot less smart.
And when I go to bed at night, what happens then? Well,
your shirt underneath, if you were very poor,
you would sleep in your shirt.
So, if there were lice inside the shirt and this was my only shirt,
I would go to bed and the lice would breed...
And you would be stuck with them sitting against your body
day and night. Yeah, pretty awful. Definitely.
But while the poor would suffer most
as the plague continued its rampage,
soon, no-one would be safe,
and that included those rich people
who had decided to stay in London.
By the end of July 1665,
nearly 300 Londoners a day
were dying of plague.
The disease had spread from the western suburbs
to almost every area of the city.
The northern suburbs of Clerkenwell
and Shoreditch were now the worst hit.
The death toll reached 6,774.
Samuel Pepys was one of the few wealthy elite
who had stayed in London.
Although still predominantly affecting the poor neighbourhoods,
plague now reached his wealthy parish of St Olave Hart Street.
He says he heard the death knell ringing out
from his church five or six times a day.
Along with everyone else who could,
he self-isolated and rarely left his home.
And this was just one of the ways that the people who stayed in London
began to change their behaviour, in an effort to save themselves.
When they did have to leave the house, they tried to stay
in the centre of the street, to avoid getting infected
from the houses on either side.
And the streets became increasingly deserted.
And if you did encounter anyone, you tried to keep a safe distance.
People still needed food and supplies,
and some shops remained open.
The rich, like Pepys, sent their servants.
Everyone instinctively took precautions.
Morning. Morning, sir.
Can I get a shoulder of lamb, please? You certainly can.
Now, when people came to the butchers shop to get fresh meat,
they had to put their payment in coins into vinegar,
rather than handing the money over directly.
There you go...
Unlike Covid-19, plague is
a bacterium, not a virus,
and vinegar does have anti-bacterial properties,
although it's not known if it kills plague.
Thank you very much. Shoulder of lamb's hanging just over there, sir.
The shopper would then take their purchase directly off the hook,
avoiding any personal contact with the butcher.
It's the same social-distancing we use in epidemic control today.
Although at the time, people weren't sure how plague was being
transmitted, through experience, they knew to keep away from others.
And because body lice are transferred
by close contact, this would have been effective.
Particularly extreme precautions are believed to have been taken
by those doctors that didn't leave London.
It's thought that they wore a downright sinister
protective outfit when visiting plague patients.
Raksha has gone to find out if this outfit really existed,
and how effective it may have been.
I've come to the London Dungeons. Here, they have
a replica of a plague doctor's clothing, as part of their creepy
Plague Street experience.
But this outfit is so horrific,
I wonder if it's a myth, part of this
spooky Halloween version of the plague.
To find out, I'm meeting historian
Dr Philippa Hellawell.
Well, I'm not going to lie, this scares the bejesus
out of me. I can see that'd be a really good
fancy-dress costume, but how is this based in reality?
So, there are a lot of sources from the 17th century which suggest
that plague doctors walked around
in an outfit similar to this.
So, where does this costume actually originate from, then?
It was developed by a French physician called Charles de Lorme,
who served three successive French monarchs. This is actually
a German source talking about the use of this costume.
The gentleman here is described as Dr Beak.
So, this outfit relates to
the very common theory
of miasma, which is the idea the disease is caused
through poisonous vapours going through the air,
and we can see that reflected in the mask.
This kind of beaked quality of
the mask, it's designed to actually
store sweet-smelling substances.
Perfumes, things like lavender,
which are designed to protect the wearer
from the bad, those poisonous, foul-smelling odours
from coming into the body.
And also, we see that the majority of the body
is covered as well. What was this all made out of?
So, this would typically be made out of cotton,
or linen, which was sealed with wax. It's quite interesting, isn't it?
Because in the 17th century, they wouldn't have known about bacteria
being spread through lice and fleas,
and if this was covered in wax, this would be a barrier.
They would just literally drop off. It's pretty effective.
We do have the 17th-century monk in Genoa, who is saying how
wearing something like this protects him from being bitten by fleas
and lice, and so it certainly had its practical advantages.
I'm going to put this on. THEY LAUGH
Ooh!
Do you know what? It's quite effective,
because it's sealed at the bottom.
I mean, you can't see very much, but if you've got glass on that,
then it would protect you from people sneezing on you, wouldn't it?
Mm, yeah. I think what comes through is actually the logic of it all.,
Covering the skin and covering the face, having glasses, lenses
over your eyes was seen as quite an effective way to protect yourselves.
So, as scary as this seems and as ridiculous as it looks,
it's almost like a modern-day hazmat suit. I mean, it's quite effective,
isn't it? There's definitely method to the madness.
So, while a version of this outfit was worn in Europe, there's
no evidence doctors were stalking the streets of London wearing it.
No-one from the time mentions it,
and I think they probably would.
In the second week of August 1665,
there were a shocking 3,880
plague deaths. About 6% of Londoners
who'd stayed had now died.
It was still the poor northern suburbs
around Shoreditch that were
bearing the brunt, and a majority
of their population were now falling sick.
The worst-affected parishes were also overwhelmed by dead.
Some of them had to somehow bury 600 people a week.
They didn't have the manpower to collect all the bodies or dig
all the graves, and many of the churchyards were completely full.
The Lord Mayor realised that soon, thousands of bodies
would be left unburied in houses and in the streets.
So, a burial operation on an almost industrial scale was begun.
Dozens of carters were hired to collect the dead.
These "dead carts" patrolled the streets at night.
A bell ringer walked ahead - to call to families
to bring out their dead - but also, to warn others
to steer clear of the infected corpses they carried.
These were then transported to huge
burial pits that had been
dug outside the city walls.
According to the famous author Daniel Defoe,
one of the greatest pits of all
was dug here, next to the church of
St Botolph in Aldgate,
just outside the old eastern city wall.
Daniel Defoe tells us that this "dreadful gulf"
was actually beneath my feet.
It was 40-feet long, extending almost to the end of the alley.
It was 15-feet wide, so about the width of this alley.
And it was 20-feet deep.
They only stopped digging when they hit the water table.
To find out who was buried in this pit, I'm meeting
plague historian Vanessa Harding.
Hi, Vanessa.
Very nice to see you.
I've just been pacing out the plague pit outside.
I think you've got the church records from the same period?
Yes, these are the registers for
September, 1665. And what kind of things are we seeing at that time?
This is one of the largest parishes
and it's one of the highest death tolls anywhere.
If we start on this page, this is September 8th, this is one day.
Starts there... Mm-hm. ..and runs right down this page.
Something like 90 people are buried in one day.
I mean, that's amazing. Yes.
So, 90 deaths in a single day. Yes. There's no way you can put
those people in normal traditional graves and have funerals, is there?
No. No. They're not even burying in coffins any more.
And they're in mass graves, they're in plague pits at this point?
Most of them, yes. It's clearly one of the traumatic sides
of the epidemic as a whole,
is that it destroys the ways in which people are used to
taking care of the dead, paying proper respect,
being able to see them into a grave.
I think people find this whole thing of large numbers of bodies
just being tossed in together very, very disturbing.
So, Defoe says that that huge pit out there,
in two weeks, it was filled with bodies,
that they had 1,114 people in that pit. Does that fit with
the data you've got from the register? Absolutely yes. Wow.
So, what do you see if you look at the list of names here?
We can see that it's right across the parish,
but they're also mostly coming from the poorer areas, from the alleys.
So, there's Woolsack Alley,
Harrow Alley, Three Kings Alley,
Gravel Lane, Squirrel Alley,
Still Alley. So, the wealthier people would have lived
on the high street... Yes. ..and we don't see the high street
coming up very much here. Just one or two names.
This was because, by this time, most of the rich houses
on the high street would have been empty...
..because by midsummer, up to 20% of
London's population had fled.
By the end of August,
a shocking 7% of those
who remained had died,
and over 6,000 more
were dying each week.
Anyone who'd stayed in the city
was now losing friends and family.
Thomas Vincent was a puritan minister who lived in Spitalfields
throughout the plague, in a household of eight people.
He'd had 16 close friends he used to see every week.
Now, only four were left alive.
That August, from his window,
he witnessed terrible scenes of tragedy every day,
including a woman forced to bury - with her own hands - her last child.
You couldn't walk through London that terrible August
without coming across plague-ridden people limping through the streets.
So, Samuel Pepys preferred to travel by boat on the Thames, to avoid
the sick, but he got a terrible shock one evening
coming up the steps from the river when he stumbled upon
a plague corpse in the darkness.
By midsummer, it's thought that 80,000 people had fled London,
and hundreds more were holed up on boats
lined all the way along the Thames, as far as the eye could see.
But the countryside was no longer a safe haven.
The refugees had taken the plague with them
and the epidemic would spread across Britain.
In the first week of September 1665,
7,000 people died of the plague here in London.
It was a far higher death toll than on any previous week.
31,000 people had already died in London alone...
..and worse was to come, because now the disease
began appearing in other towns.
I believe people fleeing London
had carried it with them,
on their lice-infested clothes.
Most towns near London saw outbreaks.
Infected goods were blamed for causing
particularly severe epidemics
in the cloth-making towns of Braintree,
Colchester and Norwich.
Most were in the south
and east of England,
but one outbreak stands out
from all the others.
Eyam is a picturesque village,
far from London, tucked away in a valley deep in
the Derbyshire Peak District.
Even today, it's miles from anywhere.
Looking at the village down there,
it couldn't be further removed from the crowds and grime of London.
And that was as true 350 years ago as it is today.
But that pretty village would suffer one of the most terrible
outbreaks of the Great Plague in all of Britain.
In the 17th century, Eyam was home to about
700 people. It was in these
actual cottages that the Great Plague arrived in Eyam,
in the first week of September, 1665.
And this was intriguingly early because it hadn't even reached
some parishes in London at this point and yet, somehow,
it had jumped all the way up here, to the heart of the Peak District.
And once again, the outbreak was blamed on a consignment of cloth.
The story goes, that consignment was sent from London
to a tailor in Eyam.
A servant, George Viccars, opened the box
and discovered the goods were damp.
He was ordered to dry them out by the fire.
By doing this, he somehow tragically contracted the plague.
In recent times, the story has been dismissed as a myth.
The crucial question for me is, could plague really be spread
by shipments of cloth and clothing?
It's blamed in so many outbreaks and it only really makes sense
if you believe, like I do, that the disease is mainly spread
by human clothes lice, rather than by rats.
But any infected lice in the box
wouldn't have been able to feed.
There was no-one to suck blood from.
So, could they have survived the many days it would have taken
a cart to travel from London to Eyam?
Raksha has gone to find out.
I've returned to see Professor James Logan,
who's been running an experiment on lice survival.
So, we know that this box of damp cloth
arrived from London to Eyam.
What are the chances of body lice actually surviving
in that consignment of cloth? So, basically,
we wanted to find out how long these guys can survive
when they're off the hosts.
It's very hard to get hold of body lice, so we've used head lice,
which are very similar. So, we managed to get some head lice
ten days ago.
We put them in an incubator, at their optimum temperature
and optimum humidity.
After 24 hours, about 80% of them
had actually died. After two days,
90% had died. But by day five,
there was still one louse alive.
It was quite incredible. That's remarkable, isn't it? Yeah, yeah.
We know head lice tend not to survive as long as body lice
and, yet, even in this experiment,
we've shown that one louse could survive five days.
So, with body lice, they'd be surviving a good few days
beyond that as well, so I would be very convinced that there would be
lice still alive under those conditions, in that box.
But there is potentially another way that it could be transmitted,
and that's through their faeces. There's one thing about insects
that feed on blood, and that's that they poo a lot. Oh, gosh!
And you can see all the poo on that
piece of paper. Let's have a look at it under the microscope.
So, you can see how much poo there is, there. I mean,
they're absolutely minuscule, you can barely see an individual... Mm.
..poo with the naked eye. But there,
you can see how many there are.
And inside that poo, the bacteria
can actually survive and be transmitted onwards.
And basically, what happens - because it's really, really dusty,
if you were to sort of shake the cloth, the poo would be airborne,
it could go into your lungs and infect you that way.
Or if you've got a cut on the skin, the poo could get in that way,
which means the bacteria would get in, and that's another way
that the infection possibly could have started.
This experiment has shown the story of how
the contagion spread to Eyam may be true.
The box could have contained lice-infested clothes
from a plague victim, or the person who packed it could have been ill.
And even if no lice had survived,
their faeces may have infected the servant, George Viccars.
And his death, shortly after unpacking the box,
began a terrible chain of events in Eyam.
We know from wills and parish records
that the first person to die - the servant, George Viccars -
lived in that cottage, there.
A fortnight later, Edward Cooper - only four years old,
who also lived in that cottage - died.
A day later, Peter Hawksworth - their neighbour at that end - died.
And then a few days after that, Thomas Thorpe
and his daughter, Mary - the neighbours on this side - also died.
This was only the beginning
for the villagers.
The disease would continue to spread
and, next time, we'll discover how it led to an extraordinary act
of self-sacrifice by the people of Eyam.
BELL RINGS
In London, the death rate remained unrelentingly high.
By September 11th, over
37,000 people had died.
In desperation the Lord Mayor ordered great bonfires be lit
in the streets, in the belief that the smoke would drive out
the miasmas thought to be spreading the disease.
Samuel Pepys watched in awe and fear
as they blazed across the city.
But of course, it was hopeless.
The epidemic still
had not reached its peak.
In the next episode, we discover how
the plague overwhelmed the authorities.
Almost worse to have survived it
than having lost five children and your husband.
We investigate the medical treatments plague victims endured.
You could heat that up,
place it into the bubo to burn it.
The pain would have been agonising.
We learn how the villagers of Eyam
made the ultimate sacrifice.
It's almost like facing a certain death.
And we'll discover how the country
finally began to emerge
from the horrific pandemic.
The Prime Minister says coronavirus is likely to spread...
When Covid-19 hit the UK...
..the seriousness of the situation...
..it seemed a uniquely terrible event.
..can recover, but for others it can be deadly.
But it wasn't the first time we'd suffered a deadly epidemic.
In a frightening parallel, 350 years earlier, we endured
one of the worst tragedies in British history, the Great Plague.
Over 18 months, beginning in 1665, this horrific disease killed
an estimated 100,000 people in London alone,
a quarter of the entire population.
And a further 100,000 as it spread across the country.
Over three programmes, we're telling the horrifying
story of how the Great Plague unfolded day by day, week by week.
In the first episode, we revealed extraordinary new evidence
showing how the disease was spread not by rats,
as traditionally thought, but by human fleas and body lice.
This time, we continue the story four months into the epidemic,
as the death rate reaches its terrible peak.
We explore how the scale of fatalities overwhelmed
the authorities.
Almost worse to have survived it,
than having lost five children and your husband.
We investigate the medical treatments
desperate plague sufferers endured.
You could heat that up and place it into the buboe to burn it.
The pain would have been agonising.
We tell the astonishing story of Eyam,
where the villagers made the ultimate sacrifice.
It's almost like facing a certain death.
And we discover how the country finally began to emerge
from the horrific pandemic.
I'm Xand van Tulleken and this is the story of the Great Plague.
In the first week of September 1665,
bubonic plague was raging through the streets of London.
The death rate in the city had reached unprecedented levels.
Four months into the epidemic,
almost 7,000 Londoners a week were dying.
It had already killed more than 30,000,
around 8% of the city's population.
Each week, the death rate increased remorselessly with no end in sight.
With over 1,000 people dying every single day, the onslaught
began to overwhelm attempts to cope with and control the outbreak.
A brutal system of "shutting up"
had been established in an attempt to prevent the disease spreading.
Entire families were physically locked into their homes
by the authorities,
if just one of the household was identified as having plague.
But, by September, there were
so many cases it was impossible to police them.
The system of shutting up was abandoned,
to the horror of the famous diarist Samuel Pepys,
who had bravely stayed in London when many of the wealthy had left.
Pepys saw people stumbling through the streets,
and was terrified he was coming into contact with those who,
in his words, "had plague upon them."
Another famous writer of the time, Daniel Defoe, describes
the scenes that unfolded on London's streets as order collapsed.
Defoe's book about the Great Plague is thought to be
based on the experiences of his uncle, Henry Foe.
We're told that, at the height of the outbreak,
Henry Foe was holed up in his house right here on Aldgate High Street.
It would've been where the tube station is.
Now, like other better-off people, he lived on the wide, main street,
but from his window he could see Harrow Alley, still here.
This was one of London's infamous back-alley slums,
where body lice and human flea infestations
allowed the disease to run rampant.
This is what Defoe tells us was going on in this very spot,
at the height of the plague.
"Scarce a day or night passed but some dismal thing happened
"at the end of that Harrow Alley," which was a place full of poor.
"Throngs of people would burst out, most them women,
"making a dreadful clamour, a mixture of screeches and crying."
On one occasion, Henry Foe saw a man with plague,
overwhelmed by insufferable pain,
run naked out here from Harrow Alley
and set off down the high street.
He was chased by five or six women and children, crying out for him
to come back and trying to persuade others to help them stop him.
But no-one, not even his family, was prepared to touch him,
and Henry Foe, watching from his window just over there,
saw them all disappear off down the street.
BELL TOLLS
By September, the city authorities
were also struggling to deal with the dead.
There weren't enough "dead carts" to collect
all the bodies each night for burial.
A crisis made worse because the carters themselves
were also dying of plague.
Desperate families resorted to
carrying their own loved ones to the graveyards.
But many churchyards were already full, including the one
outside Samuel Pepys' local church,
St Olave's, Hart Street.
This is the street where Pepys was living in September 1665,
Seething Lane.
Now, Pepys' home was just down there.
It's long gone, replaced by modern buildings,
but his parish church still survives.
This grim gate is the one Pepys would've walked through
to get to his church.
But even this foreboding gate paled in comparison to what Pepys
found on the other side.
He tells us that so many plague victims were buried here,
one on top of the other, that the ground level actually rose.
And it frightened him so much,
he refused to walk through the churchyard any more.
Churchyards across London were said to be three feet higher than
they were before the Great Plague.
Incredibly, the level of this churchyard is still raised.
I have to walk down these steps to get into Pepys' church.
I'm meeting historian Vanessa Harding to discover
what the church's burial registers reveal about life in Pepys' parish
at the height of the epidemic.
These are the parish registers,
the burial registers from the period that Pepys lived here.
And it's extremely good.
It's extremely rich in detail for the period of the plague.
Unusually, the parish clerk marks every single plague burial
with the letter P.
You can see the first page there are quite a few plague deaths,
but there are quite a few that aren't.
But by the time we turn the page and get into August and then into
September, you can see that almost every death is a plague death.
And people would have seen the plague moving through a family,
clearing an entire household in a fortnight. Yes.
And presumably that's what you see through the whole parish,
that the place begins to... It feels like the apocalypse.
Yes, it must have done. I mean, particularly, I think, in some ways,
because it's a wealthy parish,
people may have thought they would escape.
I mean, it's overwhelmingly clear from this book that,
once it gets going,
even in a wealthy parish like this, no-one is safe.
That every part of London is affected. Yes.
And there are some very dramatic and tragic stories here.
For example, on the 10th September, Zachary, the son of Edmund Poole,
died of plague and was buried in the churchyard.
And, then, the next day, his brother Henry,
the son of Edmund Poole, also died of plague.
Zachary was about 12, and Henry was about 14.
I mean, quite hard to think about as a parent.
Zachary is a year older than my son,
and, in 24 hours, Edmund Poole has buried two of his kids.
That's right, but I'm afraid it gets worse.
Just a few days later, we have Elizabeth,
daughter of Edmund Poole,
and her brother Edward,
son of Edmund Poole, both of them died of plague 20th September.
And, then, we have on the 21st of September, John,
the son of Edmund Poole, buried in the churchyard,
all of these marked as plague burials.
So, in 11 days, Edmund Poole's buried five of his children.
Yes. Probably all five of his children.
We don't think he had any more. Wow.
And, then, just a few days later on the 25th September, Edmund Poole
himself dies of plague, and is buried in the churchyard.
Is there a mother? Does he have a wife?
We know that his wife's called Elizabeth,
and there is an Elizabeth Poole, a widow, living in the parish,
in March the following year.
We find her as a householder.
So, I think it's quite likely she is the widow,
the mother of this family.
Almost worse to have survived it,
than having lost five children
and your husband. Yes.
Wow. Wow.
But the fatalities were still rising.
And, soon, the epidemic would reach its terrible peak.
In mid-September 1665, four and half months
since the epidemic began engulfing London, the plague reached its peak.
In just one week, between the 12th and 18th of September,
plague killed 7,165 Londoners.
Deaths were reported across the city, in 126 parishes.
And those are just the official figures.
Many cases of plague were either misdiagnosed or deliberately
passed off as something else.
The real figure for that week was probably 10,000 cases.
More than 1,400 a day.
But, as deaths in the capital spiked, it wasn't only Londoners
who were suffering.
The disease had spread to other towns and cities
across the south and east of England.
Worst affected were those with trade links to London,
the plague carried there by the flow of people and goods.
Essex cloth-trading towns suffered dreadfully.
In Braintree, 865 people died, a third of the population.
In Colchester, it was even worse.
There were over 5,000 plague deaths here, half the population,
a higher proportion than any other major town, including London.
From there, the disease was transmitted
to the university town of Cambridge,
where, in a foreshadowing of the events of 2020,
the students were sent home.
Maritime trade with London took the disease to ports including
Portsmouth and Southampton.
And ships even carried it as far north as Newcastle.
In all these places, the graph of deaths was heading
upwards in the hot summer of 1665.
Death rates peaking in late summer was a pattern seen in earlier
plague outbreaks in Britain.
The relationship between the weather and the plague was
noticed by William Boghurst,
an apothecary who worked here on Drury Lane,
throughout the Great Plague, where the outbreak began.
Now, his shop would have been a stall inside this pub.
It's not the original building, but in fact there has been
a White Hart pub here since the 15th century.
Apothecaries were early pharmacists.
They dispensed complex herbal remedies
and performed simple medical treatments.
Boghurst noticed death rates changed according to the seasons.
They increased if hot conditions were followed by rain.
While frosty weather caused a massive decline in fatalities.
This is the opposite of infections like flu and coronavirus.
It seems the plague thrived in warm, humid conditions
but it didn't like it too hot, too cold or too dry.
The records show the summer of 1665 was both hot and humid.
Could this relationship, along with the massive death toll
in summer 1665, be related to the culprits
that I think are responsible for spreading the plague?
Human body lice and fleas.
Well, Raksha has gone to investigate.
I've come to meet Professor James Logan at the London School
Of Hygiene And Tropical Medicine to find out
if these insects' behaviour changes at different times of year.
In 1665, we're seeing this spike of plague cases,
in the summer.
Is there a link between temperature and insect behaviour?
Yeah, absolutely.
Temperature is hugely important to any insects including fleas.
So, we've actually set up an experiment, and what
we're going to do is have a look at the activity of the fleas
to see whether they're more active or less active
in the higher or lower temperature.
James has had one set of fleas kept at an autumn temperature
of 14 degrees centigrade for two days.
And some other fleas have spent two days at a hot summer
temperature of 28 degrees.
Ah-ha. These are the ones kept at 28 degrees
and these were kept at 14.
Brilliant. OK, thanks very much.
Right, well, this tube certainly feels colder. OK.
And it's just been brought out of the cold conditions.
So, these guys, you can see,
are crawling about, they're jumping around. Very, very active.
Whereas these guys are pretty slow.
In fact, lots of them are just not moving at all.
So you can see that ones that would be in the cold conditions,
in cold weather, would just be sort of chilling out.
Whereas the ones that you can see have been kept at 28 degrees
are super-active. So, does this explain why we see this big
spike in the plague being transmitted in the summer of 1665?
Yeah, I think that is absolutely a real possibility.
At that sort of temperature, in the height of summer, these
guys are going to be jumping around the place, they're going
to be jumping on and off the host, they're going to be feeding more.
And it's actually a bit more than that as well. They'll be
reproducing a little bit quicker.
And I think the transmission would've been quite high.
The other plague transmitting insects, body lice,
are also far less active, and breed more slowly, in cool temperatures.
And this helps explain why the death rate in London finally began
to decline as summer turned to autumn in 1665.
In the week to the 25th September,
5,533 Londoners died of plague,
around 1,500 fewer than the previous week.
It was a glimmer of hope that the worst had passed.
William Boghurst was one of the few medical men
left in London by this point.
Most doctors and surgeons had joined the great
exodus of professionals who'd fled the city.
At the time, this cowardice
horrified the abandoned people of London.
But because doctors then didn't understand bacterial disease,
and had no drugs to treat plague,
even the ones who stayed didn't much help the situation.
John Sergeant has headed to the St Bartholomew Hospital
Pathology Museum to see what treatments doctors attempted.
Among the 5,000 medical specimens kept here,
there are some from 19th century plague epidemics.
This is a rat infected by the plague.
That's gruesome, kept in formaldehyde.
And this is even more poignant,
this is a human lung from a plague victim.
I'm meeting Kevin Goodman,
an expert in early medicine and surgery
who's collected a vast array of 17th century medical instruments.
Well, this is an amazing collection of objects. Some of them,
I must say, rather sinister,
but these are all the medical tools of the trade at the time.
Yes.
So, what does that do? That's a fleam.
Now, a fleam was normally used for bleeding, for opening a vein.
For treatment of buboes,
you would perforate the buboe.
So, if you had the buboe here, you'd just stick it in you. Yes.
But this is all incredibly painful.
Oh, yes. OK, so how would you get the pus out?
I would then heat a cup up, place it on the buboe and, then, as it
cooled, the vacuum would draw out all the nasty pus, full of germs.
Oh, right.
So, you put this on, so this would go through there,
and the idea is to break the buboe,
that's the bit.
OK. Right, so they would think they were doing something useful.
So, what else have we got? What are all these things here?
I've got a selection of cauterising irons here.
You could heat that up,
place it into the middle of the buboe to burn it.
Horrible, isn't it? Making it so hot that the flesh burns.
Yes, the pain would've been agonising.
And, don't forget, there's going to be no pain control with this.
You had to bite down and endure it.
But would any of these methods actually work?
No. If you're going to start cutting into buboes or burning into them,
you're going to start letting out lots of germ-infested pus.
You're going to increase the risk of other people catching it.
Also, you're increasing the risk of infection. Right.
So, actually they're making things worse with all this stuff. Indeed.
At the time, people would be so fearful.
There'd be so much terror, that they'd sort of say give me
anything you can to help me,
because they were so desperate.
It is a time of desperation,
complete and utter.
I thought nothing could be more terrible than having the plague,
but it seems being treated for it could have been worse.
While these 17th century medical interventions may have done
more harm than good, we're about to discover
if other methods for controlling plague may have been more
effective than we ever imagined.
As the weather cooled in the autumn of 1665,
plague deaths in London continued to fall.
By mid-October, 4,500 fewer people a week
were dying, compared to a month earlier.
Most deaths were now in the eastern parishes of Aldgate
and Whitechapel, which were poorer parishes outside the city walls.
The disease had passed like a wave from the west
of the city to the east.
In the western parishes, where the outbreak began,
the vulnerable had already died,
and those who'd recovered now had some resistance to the disease.
It's thought that up to 80,000 people had fled London,
20% of the population.
And, among those who'd stayed, about one in five had died.
For those still alive, the city had changed beyond all recognition.
This was observed by puritan minister Thomas Vincent, one of
the few who continued to preach to his congregation and visit the sick.
He wrote that the terror of the disease had broken societal bonds,
and drained people's hearts of love and pity.
He was horrified to see families abandoning their loved ones.
In Spitalfields, his household of eight
had managed to escape the disease.
But, then, he tells us, plague came in dreadfully upon them.
Over the course of two weeks,
three of his household fell ill and died.
A story which was echoed in thousands of homes across the city,
many of which now stood empty.
The Lord Mayor now had to somehow deal
with these infected houses.
I'm going to take a look at the orders
he issued detailing how they should be disinfected.
I'm interested to discover if the methods would've been effective
against the human fleas and body lice we now know spread the plague.
There were instructions about what to do with these
abandoned, infected houses.
And the first was to keep them uninhabited for 40 days.
That's very effective against human body lice.
If they don't eat for 40 days, they die.
But there were other instructions as well.
Each infected house was to be fumed,
washed and whited with lime.
Now, whited with lime means whitewashed and fumed,
we have a description of what that is here.
And the recipe for fuming is to take "saltpetre, amber, brimstone,
"each of two parts, juniper one part, mix them in a powder,
"put thereof upon a red-hot iron or coals a little at once."
A Frenchman, James Angier,
had introduced this fumigation recipe to London,
claiming the smoke successfully decontaminated houses in Paris.
Now, I'm very curious to know if fuming or washing with lime
could possibly help in controlling the plague.
It seems unlikely that whitewash, commonly painted outside
and inside houses in the 17th century,
would have much effect on the plague bacteria.
Hi, Sam.
So, Raksha's putting it to the test with Dr Sam Willcocks.
So, what we have here are these three wooden tiles.
They're our pseudo, 17th-century walls, aren't they?
That's right.
Sam coats each tile with a spray of bacteria.
It's similar to plague, but not deadly, and then allows them to dry.
This spray is going to simulate a cough or body fluids that
have landed on a surface.
We treat one with modern anti-bac,
one with water,
and one with our limewash.
So, let's see if this one works.
Then we swab each one down, and transfer them
to agar plates to see if any bacteria will grow.
Two days later the results are in.
So, here are the plates.
Ooh, let's have a look, then.
That's our anti-bac.
That's right, this is our household anti-bac spray,
and there's no colony growth at all on that plate.
Which is what we were hoping for. It's clean as a whistle.
Our next plate was the sterile water that we sprayed on to the tiles,
and you can see some colonies growing quite nicely on the plate.
I can clearly see spots on that so that is the bacteria growing.
That's right, yeah.
Right, so, what about our final experiment?
OK. Well, the limewash, did kill all the bacteria.
SHE GASPS I can't see any colonies on there at all. It is as good as
the anti-bac spray that we use nowadays. It really is!
So, they kind of knew what they were doing, didn't they?
It worked. It worked.
I'm going to start limewashing my kitchen now.
SHE LAUGHS
In the 17th century, they wouldn't have known how it worked,
but, amazingly, they'd learnt from experience -
limewashing houses controlled disease.
But what about fumigation?
Our experiment this time is being carried out
in a very different location - a farm shed on the South Downs,
by pyrotechnics expert Mike Sansom.
Hello, Mike. Hi, there, how are you doing?
Talk about plague and pestilence,
you've definitely got a flood here, haven't you?
I know. Shocking day, isn't it?
I don't say this very often, but I've got fleas.
Oh, nice.
What I want to do is see if we can
recreate 17th-century fumigation.
I want to know if it was really effective in killing
fleas and lice, cos we know that these are the carrier of the plague.
Right, so I've got the chemicals that
I know were used for fumigation in the 17th century.
Brimstone, first of all. Sulphur.
So, the reason it was called brimstone was
because it was found on the brim of volcanos.
And then we've got the saltpetre, potassium nitrate,
which is a strong oxidising agent and I know these two
burn really well together because they're the main components
of gunpowder. They burn quite ferociously.
And then produce quite a noxious gas called sulphur dioxide.
Let's do it.
This shed will act as our infested 17th-century room.
It's a lovely little shed you've got here.
The lid of the flea container
is a porous mesh that will allow in the fumes.
So, this is a plume of gas coming out at a steady rate.
It's filling this whole shed up now, isn't it? Exactly, yeah.
They certainly don't look very active now, do they? No.
Oh, I just saw one drop.
They're all dropping!
They're dropping like fleas!
Let's have a look here. Right.
Woohoo. Smokey stuff.
Oh, gosh, they're definitely dead, aren't they?
I think that's worked really well.
It has. I mean, it's pretty spectacular, isn't it,
that in the 17th century they were using this method
to fumigate houses.
It's incredible.
It's a really effective insecticide.
They were getting rid of the things, the fleas and the lice,
that were killing and passing on the plague to other people.
Pretty amazing.
They didn't know how it was working, but this simple disinfection
method would've helped normality slowly to return to London.
And, in late October 1665, some life returned to the streets.
But things had changed.
Diarist Samuel Pepys says he walked to the Royal Exchange
and heard only conversations about who had died and who was still ill.
He also tells us there were still plague victims in the streets.
Although by now, the death rate was heading steadily downwards.
From the September peak of over 1,000 deaths a day,
by October 30th plague fatalities had dropped to 1,000 deaths a week.
The declining death rate encouraged the many thousands,
who'd fled to the countryside, to begin returning to London.
Daniel Defoe says they were tired of being away from London
so long, and were so eager to get back, they flocked into the city
here without any thought or fear.
This influx caused a brief spike in deaths in early November
because, as more people came back to the city, there were also
more people vulnerable to catching the infection.
But, from mid-November, plague deaths fell every week.
By mid-winter 1665,
the cold weather had reduced the death rate to around 40 a day.
After a year, the Great Plague epidemic in London
was coming to an end.
Finally, after Christmas, King Charles
and his court returned to his palace at Westminster.
They'd spent most of the year in Oxford, which, unlike many
towns in southern England, hadn't seen a single case of plague.
And that's probably because royal guards were posted
day and night on each of the four bridges that led in and out of town,
and they didn't let anyone in.
This was a highly effective form of quarantine,
and King Charles seems to have had a pleasant time in Oxford,
even managing to get one of his mistresses pregnant.
But his abandonment of his capital in its hour of need
didn't go down well with its inhabitants.
While London had now seen the worst of the epidemic,
the rest of the country was not so lucky.
In the spring of 1666,
towns across Britain were hit by plague again.
Like Oxford, many towns around the country
tried to quarantine themselves.
They stopped all trade with London, and armed volunteers
prevented strangers from entering towns and villages.
But they were often weren't as successful as the royal troops.
Plague again swept through towns like Colchester and Cambridge,
which had suffered terribly the previous year,
and, this time, the outbreaks were even more severe.
But it was the villagers of Eyam,
deep in the Derbyshire Peak District,
who would become famous for their heroic response to the disease.
I'm about to find out what they did.
Plague arrived here in Eyam in early September 1665.
It was brought in a shipment of clothing that was delivered
to a tailor who lived in the village.
The clothes in the shipment probably contained plague-infected body lice.
It began a chain of events which put all 700 of the village's
inhabitants at risk.
By December 1665,
28 of them had died.
Just like in London,
the cold of winter brought about a significant reduction in the deaths.
The disease bubbled along.
Two or three people died each month.
But the people in the village were relieved,
thinking the worst was over.
But, as spring turned to summer, the number of cases rocketed.
A story of extraordinary heroism
and self-sacrifice now unfolded in Eyam over the summer of 1666.
The instigator was the village vicar,
the Reverend William Mompesson.
When Mompesson realised that winter hadn't put an end
to the outbreak in the village, he sent his wife Catherine
and his children away to stay with friends in Yorkshire.
But Catherine returned to support her husband.
In late May 1666, Mompesson made a decision that would have
terrible consequences for everyone in the village.
To discover what happened, I'm meeting Joan Plant,
whose family have lived in Eyam since the time of the plague.
Tell me about this extraordinary decision made by Mompesson.
He'd seen instances of plague in the country before.
He got together with the previous minister, Stanley,
and they made a plan. They would close the church,
close the churchyard, and close the village.
And this is what Mompesson had to ask the village to do,
simply to contain the disease.
And they agreed, which was just incredible.
What does that mean to close a village back then?
Well, it means you put a border the whole way round,
nobody comes in and nobody goes out.
Tell me about the significance of this particular place.
So, Mompesson's Well is a running water well, and this
was the northern boundary point when they closed the village.
And the village people would leave money here for the provisions
that would be brought along the road from the Earl of Devonshire
and surrounding villages.
Families could've chosen to flee the infected village to save
themselves, just as happened in London.
But, incredibly, they chose to stay,
hoping to prevent the disease spreading and, so,
save the neighbouring villages and towns from the same fate.
I think the older I get, the more I think about that,
and think how brave and courageous they must have been.
It's almost like facing a certain death.
The villagers knew the terrible sacrifice they were making
because dozens of their neighbours had already fallen ill,
and the contagion was accelerating.
The price they paid for their selfless decision can be
seen in the parish church registers.
So, this is the record of deaths
in Eyam during the period of the plague.
So, you can see here it says,
"Here follows the names with
"the numbers of persons who died of the plague."
And we start with the first victim,
George Viccars, September 7th of 1665.
But it really gets going in the summer of the next year.
If I turn to June, we see we've got 21 deaths,
then, in July there are 58 deaths,
and, then, turning to August,
we get 80 deaths.
This entire page filled with families completely wiped out.
In a small village, that's extraordinary, and that trajectory
is the same thing we saw in London
in the summer of the previous year.
Of course, it's an extraordinary document in terms of public health,
in terms of data about how the epidemic spread,
but the other thing that's so overwhelming
when you look at it is the number of deaths in a small community.
All these people friends and family.
It must have been absolutely
horrific living through this, completely terrifying.
This isolated burial plot,
on a hillside overlooking the village,
gives some sense of the horrific scale of these tragedies.
I'm visiting with Dr Lilith Whittles, who's investigated
if the plague in Eyam was spread here
in the same way as it spread in London.
Seven members of the Hancock family are buried here,
near where they lived.
Six children and their father,
who all died within one week of each other.
Only the mother, Elizabeth, survived.
It's a pretty bleak image, isn't it?
Elizabeth Hancock up here, she's not doing fancy gravestones or anything.
She's digging holes and dragging her family members into them.
And there's no funeral, there's no vicar, there's no mourners.
It's just her. Well, the social distancing measures
the villagers had taken meant
they weren't coming to funerals,
they weren't helping out with burials. They couldn't.
So, what you're able to do with the computer is simulate
what if the epidemic was spread by rats,
what if it was spread in different ways?
And you can figure out what the most likely way of it spreading was.
Exactly that. And what do you find?
The most likely explanation for the transmission was
the plague being transmitted from human to human,
through ectoparasites, such as human lice and human fleas.
For a long time, there's been this story that the villagers of Eyam
kind of pointlessly quarantined themselves.
They quarantined themselves against a disease
that wasn't spread by humans, it was spread by rats.
And, actually, your modelling suggests
that what they did was really important. Absolutely.
If the plague was spread by human to human contact
through their ectoparasites,
then, by distancing themselves from the surrounding area,
they stopped the spread of plague to places like Sheffield,
where, if an infected person had started an outbreak there,
we could have seen many, many more deaths,
like we did in the London outbreak.
So, I kind of imagine Elizabeth Hancock up here
digging these graves,
and I guess now we can see she is doing something really important.
She saved a lot of lives. Absolutely. They all did
something extraordinary, the villagers of Eyam. Wow.
So, now we know Eyam's quarantine was both heroic and worthwhile.
The village's last plague victim was buried on the 1st November 1666.
In total, 257 people died of the disease,
about 40% of the population.
William Mompesson, the vicar who instigated the village's
quarantine, also paid a heavy price.
His wife Catherine, who'd returned to support her husband's work
in Eyam, died of plague in August.
As the vicar's wife, she was the only person
allowed to be buried in the churchyard.
While the plague raged in Eyam in the summer of 1666,
London was reporting few cases.
Fatalities had dropped by 95%,
and life was returning to normal.
But, then, unbelievably, the capital was hit by another tragedy.
In September, the Great Fire destroyed much of the walled city.
Although it's widely believed
that this burnt the plague out of London...
..the statistics suggest it was a coincidence.
The epidemic was already ending by the time the flames took hold.
We'll never know for certain how many Londoners
died during the Great Plague,
but the official estimate of around 70,000 is undoubtedly too low.
Many cases of plague were misidentified
and many burials went unrecorded.
So, it's actually thought that over 100,000 Londoners
died during the plague.
That's around a quarter of the population.
The last plague death recorded in London was in 1679,
and there were no other outbreaks in Britain until the early 1900s,
when the third plague pandemic swept the world.
From 1900, there were plague deaths in port towns,
including Glasgow, Cardiff, and Liverpool.
The most recent plague outbreak in Britain was in Suffolk in 1918.
None of the outbreaks of plague in 20th-century Britain
turned into epidemics, and that's because modern hygiene means
there aren't the body lice or human fleas around to fuel the spread.
But plague isn't the only pandemic we face,
and, in fact, coronavirus itself is only one of the many diseases
that have swept the world since the 17th century.
Through most of human history,
disease has killed far more than war or natural disasters.
Epidemics like cholera, smallpox,
and tuberculosis killed hundreds of millions in the 20th century alone.
Modern medicine has helped bring about a massive reduction
in these ancient pandemic diseases.
But, as Covid-19 reminds us, new diseases emerge all the time.
And, in fact, with modern travel, population growth,
and environmental destruction,
we now face more outbreaks than ever before.
In 1918, the Spanish Flu killed up to 50 million people.
Since 1980, we've suffered SARS, MERS, Ebola and, the deadliest,
Aids, which has so far killed an estimated 32 million people.
And now there's Covid-19.
The methods that we use to respond initially to these disasters
are the same ones we used during the Great Plague -
quarantine and social distancing.
But we now also have modern science, which has successfully controlled,
and, in some cases, defeated almost every disease humanity has faced.
New diseases will continue to emerge,
but, unlike our ancestors during the Great Plague,
we are now in a much better position to fight back.