PLAGUE¹

See Also: DISEASES; LOCAL GOVERNMENT Vestries, The Bills of Mortality; VACCINATION Variolation; MENU

The Black Death arrived in Mediterranean harbours in 1347. It came to Britain in November 1348. The initial outbreak lasted for nine months. There were four major ones during the next 25 years and then plenty of smaller ones.

In the wake of the Black Death there a number of social changes. In 1362 it was declared that English would be used in the courts and the following year in Parliament.

The rat population would grow, cats would feed on them and have their own population grow. People believed that the cats were causing the plague.

Working in Hong Kong Alexandre Yersin (1863-1943), a Swiss physician and bacteriologist who had trained under Pasteur in Paris concluded that the principal vector of transmission for the bacterium Yersinia pestis were the fleas that lived primarily on rats. However, Anglo-French rivalry meant that the British authorities took some years to accept this insight.

In 2015 the journal Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences that Boris Schmid, Nils Stenseth and a group at the University of Oslo had concluded that the initial mammal vector for the Great Plague had been the great gerbils of north-western China and not rats. Climate fluctuations had prompted the populations of gerbils along the Silk Road to wax and wane. The researchers had correlated instances of the disease with tree ring data that indicated climate conditions in Central Asia. Therefore, the disease may have been subsequently reintroduced into Europe several times.

¹. From 1910 to 1918 an outbreak of plague occurred in south-east Suffolk, the first case being reported in Freston, a village to the south of Ipswich. The outbreak was probably connected with the plague which broke out in China in the 1850s.

The Great Plague of 1665

See Also: CEMETERIES Bunhill Fields Burial Grounds

St Giles-in-the-Fields

The Great Plague is reputed to have first broken out in the Parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields. Numerous corpses had to be buried in a short period of time. The sheer volume had the effect of unsettling the graveyard's soil. In 1733 the church had to be rebuilt because of subsidence.¹

See Also: CHURCH OF ENGLAND CHURCHES; WESTMINSTER ABBEY Memorials and Graves of Notables, Doctors

¹. It has been claimed that the section of the District Line between Knightsbridge and South Kensington was constructed so as to avoid a series of plague pits that were dug and filled in 1665. (This is unlikely since there would have been places nearer to London s historic core that could have been used as burial sites.)

David Backhouse 2024