The Great Plague of London 1665

Have you ever wondered about the history of a place and the stories it has to tell as you wander through it? The streets of London are jam-packed with stories and tales about the past.  Finding out a little about some of them can help us learn from the past (yes, some things that happened continue to hold lessons for us), appreciate why things are the way they are today, and to give us some context for what we can do to improve urban life in future (if you are interested in improving urban environments and urban resilience, visit surediscities.com). I used to live in London and I still spend a lot of time in this city. For quite a few years, I have spent many hours walking (and running and cycling along) its streets, envisaging how historic events unfurled, and I am always adding to my knowledge. 

Traces of what happened during the plague epidemic of 1665 (and 1666) remain in modern London – you just need to know where to look. The information in this page provides an outline that can be used for a meandering walk through London's streets to learn about The Great Plague of London 1665. This walk can start at any number of points - my preferred route commences at St Giles in the Fields church and winds its way through Longacre to Drury Lane, around Aldwych and Holborn, down Fleet Street and through various parts of the City of London. I have not listed all of the stories and tales about the 1665 Plague on this page, just some "points of interest". If you want to know how the whole story links together, you'll have to walk the route with me, to discover facts (as far as we know them to be facts), stories and tales about life in 17th century London and in particular during the 1665 Plague are pointed out along the way. The way Londoners dealt with the outbreak of this excruciatingly painful and deadly disease in 1665 (and indeed before and afterwards) shows some surprising parallels to how governments, cities and citizens responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. London lost roughly 15% of its population to the 1665 plague outbreak. A total of 68,596 deaths were recorded in the city Bills of Mortality, however the real number of deaths in the city was probably over 100,000 (remembering also that other parts of England - do you know about the story of the village of Eyam? - and other countries also suffered).

If you want to go on a professional London guided walking tour, check the options available from the teams at London Walks, London Guided Walks and Look Up London Walks as well as Blue Badge Guides (I do not provide any opinions one way or the other - find what works for you).

The plague can be bubonic, septicaemic, or pneumonic in nature – and all types had very troubling symptoms and a high mortality rate back in the seventeenth century.  In 1665 the disease that took hold was primarily the bubonic plague.

The plague is caused by a bacteria called Yersinia pestis (Y. pestis). Y. pestis is what is called a coccobacillus bacterium, without spores, that is related to both Yersinia pseudotuberculosis and Yersinia enterocolitica. Y. pestis is a facultative anaerobic organism that is known to infect humans via the Oriental rat flea. The Oriental rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopis), also called the tropical rat flea, is a parasite of rodents and is a primary vector for bubonic plague as well as murine typhus. Transfer occurs when a flea that has fed on an infected rodent then bites a human (this flea can in fact live on a wide range of warm-blooded mammals).

Through modern science, it has been proven that only a tiny amount of the Y. Pestis bacteria is required to spread the plague rapidly amongst a population. Today, antibiotics such as streptomycin, gentamicin, doxycycline, or ciprofloxacin are used to treat plague. Isolated cases continue to occur in some parts of the world. For example, there was a small outbreak in 2003 in Algeria (which identified 18 infected people, all of whom recovered). The total worldwide reservoir of the infection is still not clearly known. Prevention actions and early-warning programs continue to take place around the world. 

At the time of The Great Plague of London in 1665, physicians had only rudimentary knowledge about many types of diseases – and the conclusions they drew about them was, in fact, often wrong. It was not known, for example, that the bubonic plague was caused by bacteria or that it was spread by fleas. It would be centuries later, in 1894, through the diligent work of Alexandre Yersin, that the world would know the nature of the disease, and the bacteria that cause it (Yersin originally named the bacteria Pasteurella pestis in honour of Louis Pasteur; it was subsequently renamed Yersinia Pestis in 1944). 

Read this piece from the BBC about the cause of the plague for more information.

Historians, history buffs and followers of history offer different “starting points and dates” for The Great Plague of London 1665. In 1664 there had been a small number recorded deaths caused by the plague in the city. The Great Plague’s official start date in London is generally thought to be early 1665 but some place it earlier. Some historians believe the disease arrived on the banks of London’s ports from Dutch trading ships carrying bales of cotton from Amsterdam (London was home to a strong textiles industry employing many weavers). Amsterdam had been ravaged by the plague in 1661 and in 1663-1664, with some 50,000 deaths. London's docks plus the city's areas where poor workers crowded into dirty areas were ideal sites for the plague (and other diseases) to take hold.

It is generally accepted that plague was an endemic “hazard" or "risk of life” in the 1600s, especially in a dirty, grimy, unhealthy urban environment like London. By 1664 (with Kings Charles II on the throne of England, Scotland and Ireland at the time) the plague was one of many forms of mortal disease – it was not a stand-out area of focus at the time, and many medical practitioners and apothecaries did not have direct personal experience of treating it. Medical training varied from those who had attended the Royal College of Physicians, to apothecaries who also acted as doctors (many were good, some were outright charlatans). 

So, medical people were busy treating many diseases of the time, including for example an outbreak of smallpox in 1663. All these factors added to the difficulty of identifying the true beginning of the epidemic that we now call the Great Plague of London 1665. Modern research suggests cases of plague were occurring through the cold winter of 1664-65, some of which were fatal but a number of which did not display the virulence seen throughout 1665. That winter in London was a harsh one: the ground was frozen from December through to March, and river traffic on the Thames was twice blocked by ice. Some commentators suggest that the cold weather pinned the plague’s spread back until it got warmer.

A ”prophet of doom” flashes across the sky in late 1664…

A comet was seen flashing across the London sky in late 1664. Prior to the 1600s, and indeed afterwards, comets have been associated by people with disaster events (including Halleys Comet in 1066 and in 1910). After The Great Plague 1665, some claimed that the comet seen in December 1664 brought its wrath upon the city. 

Ever wondered what London used to look like in the 1600s? This video is a great 3-minute fly-through imagining what the streets of London could have been like in the 17th century...

In this short video, Senior Curator (Post-Medieval) Hazel Forsyth talks about the objects from the collection of the Great Plague historian Walter G. Bell, which are currently with the Museum of London (a terrific museum to visit). This includes a 17th-century plague bell, Bills of Mortality and broadside describing how the plague affected the city.