Following 1636’s outbreak, the plague cast a shadow over London’s life for almost ten years. Data collected from the Bills of Mortality by the Death By Numbers Project suggests that most summers witnessed a plague flare-up between 1638 and 1647. Though in the late 1630s these summer spikes were mild, the occurrence of the plague increased in intensity in the early 1640s up to 1647.¹ Indeed, each summer during the 1640s, weekly deaths in London consistently reached into the hundreds, peaking at 250 in the years 1646 and 1647.² Moreover, during the consecutive years of 1641-1642 and 1646-1647, the yearly outbreaks adopted a bi-annual cyclical pattern. Londoners endured the threat of the plague year-round, with fewer deaths in winter and a larger number of casualties during late summer. By the 1650s, however, the plague had nearly vanished, only to return forcefully during the notorious Great Plague of 1665-1666.

Death on Two Legs: Analyzing the initial 20 weeks of the 1636 London plague outbreak using time-to-event analysis. During the seventeenth century, England experienced multiple plague outbreaks. Although milder than the 1603 and 1624 plague crisis, London’s outbreak of 1636 claimed the lives of roughly 10,400 individuals, approximately 7.5% of the population in London and its liberties.¹ In this blog post, I delve into the first stages of the 1636 outbreak, by scrutinizing the propagation of the plague through London’s city subdivisions, with the aid of time-to-event analysis. The results suggest that, although all parish groups encountered at least one case of the plague in the initial two weeks of the outbreak, the propagation of the plague in the parishes within the walls of London came to a relative halt. In contrast, the outbreak’s trajectory became significantly steeper in the remaining parts of the city, namely the parishes without the walls, the parishes in Middlesex and Surrey, and the outer parishes of Westminster. The analysis aligns with existing literature that highlights a prevalent spatial pattern for plague outbreaks in the seventeenth century: specifically, a milder impact within the city walls and harsher consequences in London’s peripheral areas.² This spatial pattern can be attributed to a combination of factors, including stricter public health strategies–quarantines and isolation–implemented by the city government in the late sixteenth century, as well as the sociodemographic characteristics of early modern London. Furthermore, the analysis unveils that the implementation of containment measures led to a spatially differentiated trajectory of the outbreak: early plague deaths within the walls of London didn’t amount to a propagation of the plague with the same speed as the parts of the city outside the walls.

On the Bill of Mortality for the week of November 14-21st, 1665, plague deaths were finally decreasing from a horrific summer. The total number of plague deaths was still a staggering six hundred and fifty-two, but that did not stop parish officials from recording all the other ways that Londoners were dying. One death stood out as an intriguing mystery: starved in White Lyon prison at St George in Southwark. Who was this person? Can we figure it out based on online historical sources? Researching the bills of mortality not only gives the stark numbers of death but also opens historical questions about specific outliers in the numbers, like the one starvation death in prison noted amongst hundreds of deaths due to plague. What can the numbers from the Bills of Mortality tell us, and what can they not?