Loading summary
Transcript80 lines
- [00:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Want to walk the halls of Anne Boleyn's childhood home? Or explore the castles that made up Henry VIII's English stronghold? With a subscription to History hit, you can dive into our Tudor past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe
- [00:35]
Paylocity Advertiser
when everything is moving all at once. Your workforce, your tech stack, your business. You don't need more tools. You need one solution. That's why Paylocity built a single platform to connect hr, finance and IT with AI driven insights and automated workflows that simplify the complex and power. What's next? Because when everything comes together in one place, growth comes easy experience. One place for all your HCM needs. Start now at paylocity.com1.
- [01:05]
Wayfair Advertiser
Hey there, it's Wayfair here, where delivery and setup are as easy as a few taps on your phone. You're relaxing in an old hammock, scrolling Wayfair's app when you spot it. A brand new patio set. Next thing you know, Wayfair delivers it right to your patio and sets it up. Oh, you need a new grill too. Alright, Wayfair's got you covered. With Wayfair's room of choice delivery and fast expert setup on qualifying orders, life gets a little easier. Visit Wayfair.com or the Wayfair app.
- [01:31]
Rebecca Riddell
Wayfair Every style, Every home.
- [01:34]
Carvana Customer
I sold my car in Carvana last night.
- [01:36]
Rebecca Riddell
Well, that's cool.
- [01:36]
Carvana Customer
No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. Real offer down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong.
- [01:43]
Rebecca Riddell
So what's the problem?
- [01:44]
Carvana Customer
That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes as smoothly. I'm waiting for the catch.
- [01:48]
Rebecca Riddell
Maybe there's no catch.
- [01:49]
Carvana Customer
That's exactly what a catch would want me to think.
- [01:52]
Rebecca Riddell
Wow. You need to relax.
- [01:53]
Carvana Customer
I need to knock on wood. Do we have wood? Is this table wood?
- [01:55]
Rebecca Riddell
I think it's laminate.
- [01:56]
Carvana Customer
Okay, yeah, that's good. That's close enough.
- [01:58]
Rebecca Riddell
Car selling without a catch. Sell your car today on Carvana.
- [02:02]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Pick up.
- [02:03]
Rebecca Riddell
These may apply.
- [02:08]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit. The podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn the to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. In the summer of 1665, London began to die. At first quietly. A few suspicious deaths in the crowded parishes outside the city walls. The liberties the city carried on. Markets still traded, ships provisioned with men and supplies. Some readying for the Second Anglo Dutch War still crowded the Thames. Coffee houses buzzed with gossip and speculation. The King Charles II hunted. Church bells rang out for baptisms and marriages. But not yet the dead. But the suspicious deaths began to grow. Death came inside the city walls, first recorded in Bear Binder Alley. Within months, plague had torn through London with terrifying speed. Tens of thousands were dead. Entire households vanished. Grass reportedly grew in the streets around the Exchange, the much tread primary centre of commerce, finance and trade in London. And as fear spread, so too did rumors, divine punishment, foreign plots, poisoned air. Was this a disease of the poor? Or was it a disease borne on the wealth of international trade with the continent and beyond? Did the King and his council know more than they let on about its spread in containment? Or were they frozen in fear, albeit in their palaces and homes? Far from the city, parishes compiled bills of mortality, contemporary death sheets of the number who had died. And these bills provide an incredible source to monitor the growth of the pestilence. But even at times of such loss, death was political. And outsiders, Jews, Quakers, found no place in their tally. What those who dared stay, or had to stay, for they had not the means to flee witnessed, was truly devastating. Yet as the numbers surged, the plague also also gave birth to life. Scientists like Isaac Newton and Robert Hook experienced the most fruitful periods of their working life to date. The College of Royal Physicians gathered new evidence about treating epidemics. And what is fascinating about the plague of 1665 is that it was never an isolated catastrophe. As the research of today's guest reveals, the plague coincided with war, political instability and the Great Fire of London. A cascading national crisis and sequence of disasters that reshaped England forever. This is a story about a society under unbearable pressure. But it is also about how ordinary people experience terror, about what catastrophe did to the human mind, for better and worse. So today we're traveling into the fear and uncertainty of Restoration England to ask, what did it actually feel like to live through the plague year? How was it experienced on the ground by those who lived and died? And how did one of the darkest moments in English history transform the country and that emerged afterwards? I'm delighted to say that joining me is the historian and author Rebecca Riddiel. Rebecca is author of 1666 Plague, War and Hellfire, which draws on original archival Research and little known sources to take readers on a thrilling journey through a crucial turning point in English history, as seen through the eyes of an extraordinary cast of historical characters. Rebecca has forensically unearthed the stories of many individuals to help appreciate these seismic years from the ground up. Merchants like Thomas Povey, president of The Tangier Committee, Mr. Delks, the Waterman, Matthew and Thomas Aldred, purveyors of potions for those with melancholy and distraction. Artist Mary Beale and writer Margaret Cavendish are but a few of those who make up a fingertip of the research. It goes into Rebecca's work. So as the city began to die and as it experienced one of the worst plague epidemics in history whilst caught up in a war with the Dutch, it is through their eyes that we see London. Join us as we adventure into this most significant of years. I'm Professor Cesar Lipscomb and this is not just the Tudors from history hit. Rebecca, it's lovely to see you.
- [06:46]
Rebecca Riddell
Lovely to see you too. And thank you for such a rich and detailed overview of the story. I feel like I was transported back there myself, so thank you.
- [06:55]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, that is what I felt when I was reading your book, because you open your book, 1666, with such a sort of century placing of the reader into the metropolis of London. Sights and sounds and smells and the textures of buildings. I mean, even the weather. And it's almost cinematic. So I was wondering what research enabled you to develop such an immersive opening? What sources help a historian to paint such a picture?
- [07:24]
Rebecca Riddell
Well, as you know, there are different types of history, and when you do a micro history, which 1666 is, and I do fudge it a little bit with the title because it definitely starts in 1665, but we'll leave that aside for now. But when you do a micro history, you have the opportunity to go really deep into the source material and really deep into the archives and draw from things that you probably would not have the chance to ordinarily you'd maybe have to skirt over because there's too much detail. So letters were one of the sources that I used. State papers, of course, as well. Just a whole raft of things. Parish records were the richest source for piecing people's lives together. But and also weather, that's the thing, because I always feel like if you're writing a narrative history, you don't necessarily need the weather for the historical facts and argument, but it's a great way to set a scene and to place the reader into a space and you can have weather in all different Types of accounts. I was dealing with the navy, so we have a lot of weather details from the navy, but also Samuel Pepys as well. And other writers from the time would remark on the state of the weather at the time.
- [08:37]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you introduce us, as I alluded to a wonderful array of people, diverse individuals from George Grey, Barber and Periwigmaker, the two Thomases who run a coach service to Epsom fishermen, cough sweet sellers, the many migrants who swirled London's ranks. What prompted you to open your work with their lives?
- [08:57]
Rebecca Riddell
I wanted to give a real overview, so I wanted people to feel as though they were walking or rambling through London themselves. And those particular individuals, or most of the individuals that you've mentioned there, I found them in either the. Well, not the London Gazette, because that didn't exist straight away, but I found them within news books, so people would place advertisements or within standalone kind of pamphlets where people are advertising their wares. And when you find somebody that's practicing, you know, treating people for melancholy, you can't help but dig a little bit deeper into that and think, well, actually, that's really fascinating. Obviously, melancholy is. It's not a mental health condition that we understand today, but in many ways it's a precursor or a kind of proto version of depression or something like that. And the idea that there was a space that people could go to in London to speak and have potentially therapy, as we might understand it today, I just found it really fascinating. So a lot of them are from advertisers, which I would highly recommend to anyone that's interested in researching. The 17th century is, yes, the news is great, but if you dip into those advertisements, you get a real glimpse into what people were doing and trades and things like that.
- [10:17]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Before we get into the events of 1665, should we talk a little bit about systems of belief and politics at the time? What do we need to appreciate if we're going to understand the people of this era?
- [10:30]
Rebecca Riddell
Well, I think that the big thing is religion. So we live in a largely secular society today. Religion is still very strong, but it is nowhere, nowhere near as strong as it was in the 17th century. So I think I always try to say that if you understand people living, then as people understanding their lives as being one part of an immortal journey, and that faith and a belief in God is integral to everybody's lives and that if things are going wrong, they will reflect on their own behavior or the behavior of society as a way to rationalize that and understand why there might be a plague or a great Fire or some other devastation, a bad harvest. So I think that's the key big thing. But then also, if we think a little bit more politically, we're in a time period in the 1660s where we've had a return of the monarchy. Charles II has returned after a period of republican rule, and Oliver Cromwell don't need to go into all of that. But it's a different feeling. And there's certainly. I don't want to overstate it because this is a very London centric story. But certainly within London, we are seeing big cultural changes. And I think just the simple fact of having professional actresses on the stage was a huge change and having the theaters reopened. So it's a place in flux. It's a time where people are changing and culture and politics are changing, but that religious belief is still firmly there.
- [11:59]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Now, when we think about the plague, we are most of us going to think about what we know scientifically about it. Fleas and rats and bacteria. So let's get that out of the way. Let's talk about what actually happens in a plague and then think about how our knowledge of that challenges our study of the plague in the past.
- [12:23]
Rebecca Riddell
Yeah. So we understand it today. It's a bacterial disease and it's very contagious. It spreads through being infected by a bite from a flea or even a lice. And it could be a human lice as well, from a bite from a flea or lice. And the toxin will then spread through the body via the bloodstream. It affects the lymphatic glands. So if you have plague to start with, you probably will feel like you've got flu or something like that. The things that are slightly different are you will tend to feel a little bit of delirium and the fever will be particularly noticeable. The thing that is very obvious on the body is that often your glands will swell. And this is where we see the things that are known as buboes in the 17th century. And it can progress from there. It was very deadly before there was a cure. We do have treatment for it now. So the death rate was very high. 60, 70, maybe 80% in some instances. And towards the end of your symptoms, you might start to get these things called tokens. They would call them tokens. They're basically lots of spots along the body where your capillaries have exploded underneath the skin or broken underneath the skin. And so if you're ever looking at the plague or anyone's ever researching it, and you see these things, you know, buboes and tokens the bubos are the swollen lymphatic glands and the tokens are these, these little spots that are all
- [13:48]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
over the body, but they didn't know what spread it. I mean, well, I guess we'll come back to think about that. But does that, when you are thinking from a 21st birthday century perspective about the 17th century, how does that knowledge burden your understanding of the past?
- [14:08]
Rebecca Riddell
It's tricky because we are locked into our own idea of medicine. We've grown up understanding germ theory. We understand how things are spread and it's easy to judge people in the past for their beliefs and think, well, how silly, how silly to have thought that disease could spread that way. But why would it? Why would it be so strange? So what people believed in the early modern period and for centuries before and a couple of centuries afterwards, was that contagious diseases could spread via bad air or miasma. And so if something had a foul smell, you would be, you know, it might be linked to plague or other diseases of that sort. And actually, I mean, in theory, the theory is wrong, it's incorrect, but in practice, the measures that they brought into place to prevent the spread is not dissimilar to what we have done in similar pandemics and epidemics. So it's tricky, but I think you really need to need to ground yourself in their understanding, which is this idea of bad air. And they're locked into galanic medicine, which is this understanding of classical medicine whereby the body is made up of four humors. So if something was, or somebody was ill, it would be a case of balancing out those humours. So blood, black bile, yellow bile, phlegm. So you really have to get into that mindset. I think if you're looking at the 17th century and 1665, and although we
- [15:37]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
talk about the Great Plague of 1665, did people at the time have any sense that this would be such a significant event? Plagues recurred. Yeah.
- [15:48]
Rebecca Riddell
So plague was endemic. And it's tricky when it comes to 1665 in London, because there hadn't actually been a significant plague outbreak for two or three decades. People did in general live, you know, they died a little bit younger than they do today. And so it was for most people just outside of living memory, so where they probably should have expected to have outbreaks, and they did. And physician Nathaniel Hodges, who remained in the city during the great plague, said himself that it was the common understanding that plague would return every 20 years. Many people probably hadn't had experience of it, so it was probably just as shocking and novel. And I do feel like it felt like a novelty to Samuel Pepys in his diary because he makes a note of when he sees his first shut up house. And it's a curiosity for him because he obviously has not experienced that before. But that being said, it was a pattern of life in the early modern period. There had been plagues before and there had been plagues that started in terms of how do we measure the great, you know, what's great when it comes to a plague. And in terms of death rate, proportionally, we do think that actually probably the 1603 plague was more deadly, even though the 1665 plague killed more people. Obviously with population increase, that changes. So, yeah, that's probably a long way. And a rambling way of saying that they thought it was something extraordinary because many hadn't experienced it before. But in the grand sweep of the 17th century and 16th century, it wasn't necessarily super unusual to have an epidemic of that scale.
- [17:30]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you've given us some sense of the symptoms, the buboes, the tokens. What's the course of the illness over a period of time. How quickly does this sort of thing develop?
- [17:40]
Rebecca Riddell
It's around a week or so. But what we see later on in the plague is that people are starting, or at least the physician who remains in the city, Nathaniel Hodges, who have mentioned already, he starts to believe that people are dying quicker. And that could be that it's mutated or transformed into pneumonic plague as well, which is spread via breath, which is not so dissimilar to this idea of bad air and good air. So it could be because of that. But around a week to 10 days, people would generally have the disease for and then either perish or survive. Mostly most people would. Would perish and it would get worse and worse and worse. And one of the cruelest things about the disease, I mean, there's so many cruel things about it. It's probably one of the most inhumane ways to die. But it's this. It's this delirium and the way in which people are no longer themselves. I mean, I think you can. You can bear pain, anybody can bear pain, because you have to. But the idea that you are transformed into something that isn't you, I find that quite terrifying myself. And there are accounts of this is quite graphic, so skip for a moment if you don't want to hear it. But there are accounts of people going to railings and bashing their own heads in because they're so distraught by and there's so much not themselves, and so distressed by the. The symptoms of plague. There's another account of somebody setting fire to their own house or their own rooms because they were. So they'd rather die than experience the continuing pain of plague. So I think this dehumanizing side of things is the bit that always struck me. It struck me when I was researching it, and it stays with you, I
- [19:23]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
think, and contemporary views are that the plague spared no one, no matter their rank or age or sex. Do you think that's accurate?
- [19:32]
Rebecca Riddell
I think from a medical point of view, it's accurate, but in practice, from a social point of view, no, it was horror. People did tend to die more frequently just because of the things that have been mentioned already. They couldn't. They didn't have the same means to leave the city, so they were in the epicenter. The other thing that we see is that it seems like women are victims more often than men, women and children more often than men. And there have been plenty of theories put forward as to why this might be the case. The main one, and I think the most convincing one, is that they were more often in the home. So if a place was infected, they were more likely to pick up the infection than the men in the house or the male adults in the house. So, yes, technically it could affect anybody, but in reality, it was those poorer in more confined spaces that would have been affected by plague more often than not.
- [20:28]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I mentioned in the introduction that one crucial source for plague histerones is the bills of mortality. And we did podcasts actually, a couple of years back, three years back, with Professor Vanessa Harding about the bills. So some listeners may remember that, but otherwise, could you remind us what those bills were and how useful they were to Londoners in the spring of 1665?
- [20:52]
Rebecca Riddell
So Londoners at that time would have thought that they were extremely useful. And in fact, there's a statistician called John Graunt, or Grant, I've never quite known how to pronounce his name, that wrote a tract just before the great plague of 1665 where he said that the rich, I'm paraphrasing now, the rich would monitor the bills of mortality to see when they should leave. And I think that's essentially why they were useful. People could see which parishes were affected and could make decisions based on that. Now, depending on your financial means, your decisions might be more limited, but I think that was why it was so useful. There are issues with the bills of mortality. Some of those issues have been stressed by contemporaries Some have labored these issues a little bit too much, some contemporaries. So John Graunt himself, himself moaned about the women that were tasked with being searchers. He said that, you know, they could easily be bribed and, and put a different cause of death down if somebody had died of plague or threatened to put down plague, if they had, you know, if they didn't like the people. So, yeah, there are, there are issues, but there's no doubt that they're incredibly useful for researchers and anyone that's studying plague today, that is the, the baseline. That's what we go to. We look at those statistics that have been gathered by searchers, have been fed to the parish clerks and then counted up and then put into these bills of mortality. They include people that were buried within the parish, within parish churches. So there's lots of people that are excluded from the list and people that were non conformists or Jews or, you know, other religions that did not fall within the Anglican faith as well.
- [22:33]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And it's in May 1665 that a bill of mortality first records a death inside the city walls. And at this point the Lord Mayor took action. It might be useful to know who was responsible for public health measures at the time and why Is it only when a death occurs within the walls that they act?
- [22:51]
Rebecca Riddell
Yeah, so within the city walls, traditionally it's a little bit richer. People do tend to have a little bit more money there and that's where civic power is based. There are a few out parishes that fall under the mayor's jurisdiction, so these are a few parishes that are outside the city walls as well. But it gets a bit messy when it comes to the different parishes because London's constantly growing, but there are a number of outparishes within the Lord Mayor's control and then obviously everything that's within the city. Why then? Well, it's because it's on people's doorsteps then, isn't it? It's on powers that be's doorstep. So they bring in measures whereby they clean the streets. They think that they're thinking about this idea of bad air and smells and being able to carry the disease. So they clean streets, they order that house that are affected be shut up and have this cross put on the door. I should say, though, even with the earlier case in April that happened in St. Giles in the fields, they did still demand that spaces were shut up and crosses put on the door that had been affected by plague. But the serious public health measures come in place when it enters the City of London in terms of the authority. It's a civic issue. You do see a tension which flows into the Great Fire as well. You do see a tension between civic authority and regal authority, because the monarch is very much present in London at this time. Charles ii, the main place where he stays and lives is Whitehall, where before people move back out to Hampton Court and stuff. So there is a tension there. And you can see that Charles is interested in the progress of plague. There were a few references to him inquiring about things and saying that people that are breaking out of houses initially, they need to be dealt with in a. In a very severe way, almost to make an example of them. So technically, the lord mayor, but you do see the king making suggestions as
- [24:43]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
well, and you've given some indications there. But talk, please, about the measures that are taken and the advice of the College of Physicians. You know, how do they think they can stop the disease? What does it reveal about contemporary understandings of the causes of the illness?
- [25:03]
Rebecca Riddell
Yeah, so I don't think they can cure it. There's a number of people that come forward with kind of quack remedies, but maybe I'll get onto that a little bit later in terms of the public health measures. So the guidance is for quarantine. If somebody is infected within a household, that whole household will be shut up for a period of 40 days, quarantine coming from four. So that's one thing. And then within that, we have instructions that outside each of the infected houses there will be a guard. So that guard is there to make sure people stay within the household, but also to be the conduit through which supplies can be ferried into the households. Nurses are supposed to attend the sick as well. This becomes less feasible as plague progresses. They're not allowed to remove the bedding and the sheets and things from people's homes. They have to keep them as they are and within the household. And one of the hard things about this is because if you have an affected house and you have a guard outside the house, it's very visible to those neighboring the premises. And if it's popping up on the bills of mortality as well, people tended to leave those areas. So it left. And this is something that one of the commentators noted at the time. It left the people within these infected houses even more vulnerable because they weren't able to access the supplies that they might need. So I wonder. I do wonder whether we did have a number of deaths owing to starvation as well as plague during this time. I think there's one case actually, where A physician notes that he's seen a young girl that was emaciated, a young girl of 14, 15. So I think that might have had an effect at the time as well. So they're the public health measures we have more broadly, people leaving London and wanting to enter other cities and other towns. We start to see measures being brought in in places like Norwich, other significant cities, whereby they will need a pass to prove that they haven't got plague or they haven't come from an infected place as well. So public health measures within the city and then more broadly around England too.
- [27:16]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And is there any evidence that the King and his council knew more than they let on about the outbreak of the disease? I mean, those who are having lived through the COVID pandemic may feel there's some sort of echoes here, but not the King, the government. But what do we know about this period?
- [27:35]
Rebecca Riddell
Yeah, so I think those crucial months of April and May, maybe even March, are really interesting. And obviously what we don't have are those conversations that happened in private and were not recorded. But we do have some minutes from meetings that have been recorded. And there is an awareness of plague and there's no doubt that the King was aware of it and aware that it was in more parishes than just St. Giles in the field before public health measures were brought in. And I write about this in my book because I find it fascinating that even if you have the understanding that plagues spread by bad air and you don't have a contemporary understanding of disease, you still probably wouldn't want people all congregating in the same place. And in actual fact, bans on that did come into place, but people are still going to the theater when the King knows that it's spreading. So, yes, I do think they knew a little bit more, but it spread at speed. Once we get to May and June, it's really rising quite rapidly and people are leaving the city then. And so it's undeniable, even if they'd known a little bit more beforehand.
- [28:46]
Wayfair Advertiser
Hey there, it's Wayfair here, where delivery and setup are as easy as a few taps on your phone. You're relaxing in an old hammock, scrolling Wayfair's app when you spot it. A brand new patio set. Next thing you know, Wayfair delivers it right to your patio and sets it up. Oh, you need a new grill too. Alright, Wayfair's got you covered. With Wayfair's room of choice delivery and fast expert setup on qualifying orders, life gets a little easier. Visit Wayfair.com or the Wayfair app Wayfair
- [29:13]
Rebecca Riddell
Every style, every home
- [29:18]
Echoes of History Host
land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes and of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week.
- [30:16]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It reminds me of going to a wedding. I think it was about a week before lockdown in 2020, where everybody was not shaking hands but, you know, elbow bumping and then standing really close together for a photograph. Anyway, sure, it was a super spreader event. Let's take a little detour into London life as it continued in 1665. One person I'd like to focus on that you talk about in your book is Robert Hook, who's in his early 30s. At this point. You describe him as a fledging star of the Royal Society. Why was he a rising star? And why were his experiments with compound microscopes in particular so horrifyingly timely in the May of 1665?
- [31:02]
Rebecca Riddell
I know, it's so frustrating. I was going through so. So I'll tell you who he is first. So Robert Hooke is a scientist, natural philosopher of the 17th century. He was the protege of Robert Boyle. So he got his break through him and being connected to him. And as a consequence of that, when people were thinking about the Royal Society and thinking about what it could be, this is even before 1660, he was always on the radar. And from 1660 onwards, he'd had a job or a role as being the kind of. I've forgotten the exact term, but he was the one that conducted all the experiments. He was employed to conduct lots of experiments and I mean, it's the dream job for a research scientist. I think he was just paid to follow his interests and the interests of other members as well. One of those things, his kind of masterpiece, so to speak, was using these new microscopes that he'd developed further to look really closely at matter. So it could be plant matter, animal matter, household objects even, and he would zoom in to such a degree that you get really minute detail. And then he was an artist, artist as well, which is always useful if you're a scientist, I think, in some respects. But he was an artist as well. So he would then observe these different objects and draw them in really intricate detail in these beautiful kind of fold out pictures that were compiled into a book which was named Micrographia. This book was circulating in manuscript form before it was published in I think maybe late 1664, very early 1665. And Samuel Pepys got hold of an early copy and one of the things that he focused in on Robert Hook was the flea. And it's stunning. It's the key image of this book. It's the star of the show. And it's a really beautiful image. And he talks about it in detail. He says how he can see certain bits and pieces. I mean, it's beautiful, but it's also terrifying because it's a flea up close. But what's really, really frustrating, and I've still not quite worked out why the Royal Society doesn't seem to be as interested in disease and medicine as you would want it to be in these early years. If you look through the journal that they established in 1665, it's called philosophical Transactions, it's the longest running science journal in history. It still exists today. But if you look at all the early articles in there, there are very few on disease, very few. And if they are there, they're about diseases that are in colonized spaces. So they're kind of wrapped up in a lot of racist anthropology, I would say. And it's diseases that are affecting peoples, that people from England are coming into contact with for the first time. There's lots of things about enslaved individuals as well, but it's not. They don't seem to be looking at everyday diseases that are experienced in London. And I still don't know why, and I don't know when the change happens. Maybe it's in the 18th century, outside of my time period. But it's so frustrating because we now know that almost certainly the primary vector of plagues was the fleas on rats, obviously human lice as well. So we've got this zoomed in close up of a flea, the culprit, but nobody is able to connect the dots. And what's even more frustrating as well, well, speaking of connecting dots is when we have references to the tokens, these kind of speckles that are over people's bodies in the last stages of plague. A physician called Nathaniel Hodges even says, oh, they're like a flea bite. And they are not the flea bites, but it's just having the Word flea. So close to plague. It's frustrating, but they're not. They're not armed with the science that we have today, so. And those connections I don't think would ever have been made, but it's one of those what if moments.
- [35:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Absolutely. And I'm struck by the fact that we've got this being produced. Also, I'm thinking of the poetry of John Donne. Just. Anyway, the flea. Just time. Lots of thought about fleas, just not in the right way.
- [35:14]
Rebecca Riddell
Yeah.
- [35:15]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Another side quest I'd like us to go on is the conflict between the English and the Dutch. We see the first sea battle in June 1665. So can you outline briefly what happened and why? If we're thinking about the plague, it's important to consider this.
- [35:29]
Rebecca Riddell
Yeah. So I think I'm probably one of maybe ten people in the whole world that's interested in the second Anglo Dutch War. It's not a war that many people go back to, but anyway, it's important because we think the root of plague came. Well, we think plague arrived in England via Dutch merchant ships. That's the strongest hypothesis, because there had been a significant outbreak of plague in Amsterdam in 16 1964. There had been across Europe, but it seems to have made its way up towards Amsterdam and then probably across to England. So that's the significance in terms of the connection with the Dutch. The Dutch were a huge merchant trading nation and England was a little bit behind on that, but they were very competitive. And these trading posts that they were competing over are very much linked in with the transatlantic slave trade, which is probably a subject for a whole other episode. But what's important is we have this rivalry because the two nations are at war. The plague has probably come to England because of the Dutch, but as soon as it arrives in London, the Dutch newspapers, well, some of them anyway, seem to be quite gleeful that London's crippled by plague. I think there's one. One account that says that the English nation could just be flicked over with your finger. It's that vulnerable because of plague.
- [36:53]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So, yeah, I think it's quite widely known that as plague numbers soared, thousands fled the capital. But we shouldn't imagine that London's become a ghost town. I mean, there's something like 400,000. Doesn't it remain? So what are the challenges facing London's authorities and its physicians? How did they cope?
- [37:13]
Rebecca Riddell
Yeah, I mean, it's really difficult. We have lots of written material, so there's lots of people that stayed within the city that thankfully left accounts of their time there. And frustratingly, most of the accounts seem to be from men. There are letters from women that are writing to people, you know, giving instructions to people going into the city that they need to take certain charms with them or wear certain scents on them to prevent plague being caught. But we have accounts from Samuel Pepys. We have accounts from an apothecary called William Boghurst, who remained behind, and also the physician Nathaniel Hodges as well. We have some really my favorite accounts actually from a non conformist called Thomas Vincent. And he's just so. He's so passionate. You don't get religious passion and fervor like you do in the 17th century. Everything is awful and everybody's fault, but not his. So we do have lots of accounts of what it was like. There are certain things that are. When I was writing the books, it's nearly 10 years ago now. In fact, it was 10 years ago that I found it hard. It's not that I found it hard to appreciate. I didn't appreciate. So descriptions of grass growing back on roads. I wrote about it in my book. But since experiencing Covid, seeing things like that with your own eyes, it's quite chilling and it's quite strange and it's quite dystopian in a strange way. So we see that and we see that people struggle. People are struggling to bury all of the bodies, all of the victims that have died as a consequence. There is a smell from the bodies not being buried so fast. We see certain instances where Samuel Pepys is curious to see plague bodies. He goes and wanders around and has a look around more fields and places. But then there's one entry in his diaries I think might be January 1666. I might be wrong. There's an entry after the main part of plague, after the kind of, the worst of it is over. And he talks about speaking to somebody that he knew and them saying that they'd been meeting up the whole time in a coffee house, that they'd just been going, even though it was forbidden. So I think people find a kind of gallows humor, a way of coping amongst all the horror, because it was horrible as well.
- [39:36]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And if we go back to the bills of mortality for a second, as the death rate became. Became so vast, who on earth was keeping count? How are they doing it? I mean, you've pointed out that the count is not fully accurate because it's only incorporating those who are attending the Anglican church. But tell me about it.
- [39:56]
Rebecca Riddell
Yeah, so it's these searchers, so women that are hired by the parish to keep a track of causes of death. So they will go into households, they will assess a body, they'll be given instructions from the physicians. So the physicians that remain behind and were in charge as to what to look out for. But they've been doing this for a long while. Often these parish women have been searchers for decades. And they will go in, they'll assess the body and they will write down what they think the cause of death is. They'll add up a little tally. They're probably going around lots of houses in a day or over a few days. They get paid per body and then they feed that information back to the parish clerk. We do see lots of changing of handwriting in the parish records because these clerks are very vulnerable, as are the searchers, and they're changing because they're dying. So they're fed back to the parish clerk and then that information is fed into the bills of mortality, which is then printed and circulated for others to see. But it is an impossibly difficult task because there are so many deaths. We have thousands of deaths in the weeks of August and September. Thousands of deaths per week. I think one week it goes up to 8,000. So it's an extraordinarily difficult job. But yeah, usually two, two searches per parish within London and the outparishes within that jurisdiction.
- [41:28]
ActiveCampaign Advertiser
Activecampaign is the marketing automation platform built for big swings and big dreams. Generate ideas and in seconds import your brand and create full campaigns with simple prompts. Get started for free@activecampaign.com hey there, it's
- [41:44]
Wayfair Advertiser
Wayfair here, where delivery and setup are as easy as a few taps on your phone. You're relaxing in an old hammock, scrolling Wayfair's app when you spot it. A brand new patio set. Next thing you know, Wayfair delivers it right to your patio and sets it up. Oh, you need a new grill too. All right, Wayfair got you covered. With Wayfair's room of choice delivery and fast expert setup on qualifying orders, life gets a little easier. Visit Wayfair.com or the Wayfair app.
- [42:10]
Rebecca Riddell
Wayfair every style, every home.
- [42:23]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
You mentioned William Boghurst and I know he's one, one person who creates this amazing list of possible ways to prevent plague or signs that foretell a plague. Can you talk to me about him and also about sort of the range of preventative remedies and medicines that are flooding London in 1665?
- [42:45]
Rebecca Riddell
Yeah. So William Bulkhurst was an apothecary and apothecaries have a good reputation when it comes to plague, and in some ways, because whereas the Royal College of Physicians and Physicians are notorious throughout the 17th century for fleeing London at times of plague and following their patrons, apothecaries have tended to do the opposite. And in actual fact, if we go back to 1603, it's because they, many of them remained behind that they were able to form their guild. They were able to do that in the same way as. As physicians and surgeons. So he stays behind in 1665. He's treating people, he's got lots of remedies, as many people do. But he's also talking about things in his account of plague that people should look out for as almost portents of plague coming again. And some of these are quite interesting. He talks about women miscarrying at any slight occasion. He talks about fruit and food going rotten unusually. He talks about spotted fever growing rife and there being more instances of that as well. Lots of changes in the weather. But then we get to other things, like an increase in mice and flies and ants and stuff. And this is again one of those frustrating things, because in tandem we have Samuel Pepys writing his diary about hearing mice in his house. So it's again one of those strange, almost sliding doors moments where you wish people were able to connect the dots, but of course, they can't. But another thing that Boghus refers to is the idea of comets and that there'll be unusual things going on in the sky. And this is refuted by Nathaniel Hodges, who's a physician who stays behind in London during that same plague year. He says that. That there was less mischief from the stars and more from the stargazers, kind of propagating these ideas that comets and things could imply something awful was going to happen. But Nathaniel Hodges argues that it's the common people that are believing these things. But you can see if you read between the texts, you read between the lines, there was a lot of discord between the different medical disciplines, the apothecaries, the physicians, and then the physicians feeling very frustrated with nurses caring for the sick. So we do have some wonderful accounts of plague from 1665.
- [45:12]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I was really struck also by your mention of what it felt like when we lived through Covid and saw grass growing up in the center of London. We saw those empty streets. I think we have a better ability to empathize with people of 1665 because we've experienced that. Were there any accounts from 1665 that have stayed with you about the emotional and Mental impact of the disease on individuals.
- [45:42]
Rebecca Riddell
Yeah. And empathise is the absolute right word, because before 2020, I could only sympathise with the experiences. Covid is not the only pandemic that we've experienced within our lifetimes. We are still in an HIV and AIDS pandemic. But in terms of my personal own experience of feeling constrained by an epidemic, Covid is. Is the one as it is for a lot of people, I think. And, yeah, there's. I was moved by them at the time. I was moved by them when I was. I was researching. I was moved by seeing names in the parish records that were repeated, surnames that were repeated again and again until you got to the last individual and it was just their surname because there was no one else there to remember their first name. And that was really. Yeah, it's really sad and it's. It's. You have to take a beat to just process that, because these are people and they've died in awful circumstances and died lonely. And I think that always tugs at anyone's heartstrings, and it certainly did with mine. And so you feel very moved by it. And there was one account that was written by a man who, in the pamphlet is called Thomas Clark, and he writes about. About his experiences. It's a shortish pamphlet, it's very flowery writing, but he writes about his experiences of being in a house that's shut up in 1666. His experience comes from. So this is when we have a small peak in early 1606 of plague. And it's really sad. He talks about how his children are. So the house is shut up, but then his children are in separate rooms. When it's something that's so deadly, like plague, and knowing that your child and his children did die, knowing that they're dying, but you need to stay apart from them. I just. It got me at the time, but then during COVID it really. It stayed with me because it's just one of those awful things. Do you go in and comfort them and then risk everybody else or. It's just horrible. It's an awful, awful scenario. And so that really did stay with me. It's that. Those small tragedies, because if you look at the big figures, you can't really ground yourself in that. It's too big. But the small stories are what get you. I think.
- [47:57]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yeah, that's really helpful to think about. The small stories that underpin every single figure that we see, every recorded death. And actually, one of the things I was struck by in reading your work is just how far the plague of 1665 spreads. We think about it as a London thing, but actually it is, is really widespread. It's affecting huge numbers of people. Bath and Derbyshire and Yarmouth and Scotland. So you know, how were the regions responding to the disease?
- [48:24]
Rebecca Riddell
Much in the same way they were fearful of it approaching. So as I said, they brought in measures whereby any strangers, they would have to have a passport to say that they've not come from an affected place. So the measures were very, very similar. But you know, it did spread. It kind of spread outside of London and along the highways and down the river. Cambridge was badly affected during this time. Oxford wasn't, strangely during 1665. It had suffered plague in the past, terribly in the past. So yes, it spread, it spread to port towns. Obviously England was at war, so there were higher populations within these port cities even than usual. And you get accounts of people dying as they're traveling as well, dying along the highways because they've clearly taken plague with them. The other thing is I really get frustrated with Charles II and the royal court because we know they went to Oxford. That's kind of the story that I think fixes in everybody's minds. But before they went to Oxford, they went to Salisbury and I think they did take plague with them because there were a few people outside, like kind of on the peripheries that were dying or suspected of having plague. And then as soon as the court, the royal court arrived in Salisbury, Salisbury was put in lockdown. But the only people that were allowed to leave was Charles and a few courtiers. So it's just they brought the disease and now they're shutting everything down. So yeah, it did travel, it traveled far.
- [49:53]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It was fascinating to learn also that this epidemic, like as many people said of the 2020 lockdown, was a highly productive time as the plague spread. Isaac Newton, who was a Cambridge University student at the time, had the most academically productive exile of his life. Is it fair to say that without the plague there would not have been some world changing discoveries by people we call scientists?
- [50:22]
Rebecca Riddell
Oh, that's a really tough one. I guess in Isaac Newton's case. No, I think he was always going to do it. I think I play with the myth of Isaac Newton in my book about the apple falling, which he kind of seemed to quite like that story. I play with that idea, but. But that was not an idea that just sprung into his mind randomly. He'd been thinking about that for a long time. Likewise with his investigations into light and how that works and how it moves through glass and different objects. He did conduct a lot of experiments into that, the light side of things and optics in 1665 and 1666. So it was very productive. Would he have done that anyway? Well, that's the big what if? I think probably yes, it might have taken a little more time. Maybe something would have happened to him, I don't know. But certainly if we stick with the facts, he was very productive then and we do get his work into optics during that time. Likewise, we have individuals like John Milton, who has been working on Paradise Lost for a long time. John Milton is blind by this point. So he's using, and he had been for a few years, he's using assistance, he dictates to assist. And so they write down what he wants written for Paradise Lost. And he finishes this during his escape from plague in 1665. So we have lots of people using that time to finish stuff or pursue interests that they probably would have completed in due course, but they had the opportunity then.
- [51:56]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
By January 1666, you say, a semblance of normality had begun to return to London. Plague deaths were starting to fall. The cities fumigated. And again after Covid, many people talked about the new normal. So was the same true for Londoners in 1665? Had the political, the social, the economic landscape shifted for the individuals you opened your work with?
- [52:20]
Rebecca Riddell
Yeah, so some of them had changed. I mean, I tried as much as I could with the source materials that I had to going to the lives of everyday people. I say everyday, they weren't necessarily the very, very poor because it's hard to access those records. So kind of the merchant class, I suppose. I have a lot of accounts from. And we do have instances of maybe two merchant families having a betrothal between the families that's had to shift to a younger son because the elder son has died of plague. So we see these small changes as a consequence. And there is a sense in 1666 that things are returning to normal. Thomas Vincent, the Puritan preacher that I mentioned before, is very, very shocked by this. He thinks it's absolutely awful that everybody is returning to everyday life because they've forgotten, you know, that it was their habits and their vice and things that had brought this plague on in the first place as a kind of act from God, in his view. But the tricky thing is we have another huge catastrophe in 1666, so we don't get the time to judge how far things had returned before. Something else really affects the daily lives Of Londoners.
- [53:37]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, of course we have the fire. And we talked on this podcast three years ago about the Great Fire of London, which listeners might want to go back and listen to. But we've got this sort of series of overlapping disasters. This may feel a little as if I'm speaking with the enormous condescension of posterity, but do you feel like these disasters collectively push Restoration England towards modernity?
- [54:06]
Rebecca Riddell
Yeah, this is such a big question. And it's also, I think, often. We think often implicit in the word and term modernity is that it's a good thing. It's pro God. Yes, yes, that. And let's think of it as ambiguous. And it may not necessarily be a good thing. It can be a bad thing, too, and it certainly is a bad thing. With regards to the imperial ambitions of England and Britain and the growth of the transatlantic slave trade. I mentioned the Anglo Dutch War, the Second Anglo Dutch War. They're fighting over. Over key locations along the West African coast where. Where we know the slave trade is going to grow in terms of England and later Britain's involvement in it. So, yes, that war is very important in terms of England holding on to key locations or obtaining them. London itself, it becomes a modern city aesthetically. After the Great Fire of London, it was moving that way anyway. We do see little pockets where. And especially along the Strand, where we're getting architecturally houses and homes that we would probably recognize as being more 18th century than 17th century. The great Plague. I think it's so hard with the Great Plague because it was the final huge epidemic in London. But there are hints from the accounts that are left behind that had there been another plague, authorities would have dealt with it differently because of experience. And this again is another one of those what ifs, we're going down kind of counter history here. But Nathaniel Hodges speaks in his account about how he thought that quarantining the well, or the seemingly well with the sick, keeping them locked in or shut up together, meant that many people that would have survived, died. And he suggested that perhaps in future plagues, there should be a space outside of the city for those who are well, but from afflicted houses to go and stay for a spell until people knew whether they would get better or not. He also was pushing back against certain medical approaches to the Great Plague. So certain things, like minerals that were brought over from France, there was one that was. Seemed to be killing people faster than the plague was anyway. So there could have been changes, but we never had. Thankfully, there was never the reason to test them out.
- [56:45]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So as we come to an end, I'd like to ask you to reflect on something which I think has been coming out in the course of this conversation. You say it's been a decade since your book was published, and of course, as we've said, Covid has happened in that time. If you were going to revisit your research, is there anything you'd like to develop or reframe today?
- [57:10]
Rebecca Riddell
Gosh, that's really hard. It's really hard because, yeah, I'd like to see the long tail of it psychologically. I think that's what I would like to look into. I'd like to see. See how much of an effect it had. And I think living through Covid is the reason why I would like to see that, because I'm fascinated by the impact of COVID and how we're probably still impacted by it, influenced by it, but we don't necessarily realize it. How behaviors might have changed, but in such a subtle way or become so normalized so quickly that we don't question them anymore. And I'd like to see. And I don't even know how you would begin because a lot of it is internal. I would like to look into that a little bit more, I think.
- [58:02]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, that sounds amazing. I'd like you to do that, too. I'd also like someone to do it about us and Covid and to understand ourselves a bit better. But thank you very much, particularly for your sensitive distinction between sympathize and empathize. I think that's really, really fascinating. It's been such a pleasure to talk to you again, as it always is, Rebecca, and Your book is 1666. For those who would like to find out more. Thank you.
- [58:31]
Rebecca Riddell
Thank you. Thanks.
- [58:36]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors From History. Hit. Thank you also to my researcher, Max Wintool, my producer Rob Weinberg, and to Amy Haddo, who edited this episode. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line@notjusthetorshistoryhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tutors from History. Hit.
- [59:13]
ActiveCampaign Advertiser
Activecampaign is the marketing automation platform built for big swings and big dreams. Generate ideas in seconds, import your brand, and create full campaigns with simple prompts. Get started for free@activecampaign.com hey there.
- [59:28]
Wayfair Advertiser
It's Wayfair here, where delivery and setup are as easy as a few taps. On your phone. You're relaxing in an old hammock, scrolling Wayfair's app when you spot it. A brand new patio set. Next thing you know, Wayfair delivers it right to your patio and sets it up. Oh, you need a new grill too. Alright, Wayfair's got you covered. With Wayfair's room of choice delivery and fast expert setup on qualifying orders, life gets a little easier. Visit Wayfair.com or the Wayfair app.
- [59:54]
Rebecca Riddell
Wayfair Every style, Every home.