It burned down in 1666. Parish Clerks were licensed as a guild in 1233 and called the Fraternity of St Nicholas.

weekly Bill of Mortality: Defoe’s key statistical source for the Journal. The Bills began in ad hoc fashion in the sixteenth century and assumed the form in which Defoe consulted them around the plague outbreak of 1636. Compiled and published by the Company of Parish Clerks, they reported the cause and number of deaths in 97 city parishes, 16 outside the walls, 12 in Middlesex and Surrey, and 5 in the city and liberties of Westminster—a total of 130. H.F. doubts their accuracy and in Applebee’s Journal, 18 November 1721, Defoe attacks ‘those ridiculous Legends, call’d Bills of Mortality’, promising to demonstrate their ‘scandalous Deficiency’ in 1665. He probably consulted the Bills in the 1665 compilations, John Graunt’s London’s Dreadful Visitation and John Bell’s London’s Remembrancer. The 1721 A Collection of Very Valuable and Scarce Pieces included John Graunt’s 1665 Reflections on the Weekly Bills of Mortality, another possible source.

Spotted-Feaver: ‘a politic word’ for the plague, as Defoe called it in The Review, no. 151, 29 Jan. 1706, echoing Thomas Dekker’s earlier remark in London Looke Backe (1630): ‘a fine Gentleman like name … as if it had beene a Beautifull faire skind sickenesse’ (Dekker, Plague Pamphlets, ed. F. P. Wilson (1925), 179). The phrase, apparently coined in Spain in the seventeenth century, was loosely applied in England to typhus or any fever involving petechial eruptions. Defoe’s contemporaries thought it ‘cousin-germane’ to and herald of the bubonic plague. The confused medical views of fever in the period are reflected in Blackmore’s ‘Account of Malignant Fevers’, included in his 1721 Discourse. Dr Nathaniel Hodges wrote: ‘Very many were puzzled to distinguish aright between these Marks [the tokens of bubonic plague] and the Petechiae Pestilentiales, or Pestilential Appearances in Spotted Fevers’ (An Account of the First Rise … of the Plague, reprinted in A Collection of Very Valuable and Scarce Pieces, 27–8). Willis, Sydenham, and Richard Morton, contemporary authorities, ranged fevers in a scale of ascending severity: putrid, malignant, pestilential. Sydenham wrote of malignant fever: ‘Its true affinities are with plague … and from the true plague it is distinguished only by its difference in degree’ (Works, ed. R. G. Latham, for the Sydenham Society (1848), i. 98). John Hancocke, prebendary of Canterbury and chaplain to the Duke of Bedford, was a popular proponent of the view that the plague is a fever, curable by cold water. His book, Febrifugum Magnum: or, Common Water the best Cure for Fevers, and probably for the Plague (1722), went quickly into six editions. William Boghurst, an apothecary, denied that the plague is a putrid fever: ‘though wee may fancy it is putrefaction in the highest degree of exaltation … [feaver] is not the essence and constitution of it, but a consequent and effect’ (Loimographia, 10).

Apprehensions … Summer being at Hand: from Hippocrates descended the idea of a special relationship between climate or seasons and disease. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the prevailing view was that plague originated in hot climates, flourished in the heat of summer, and abated ‘in the Cold of Winter’ (R. Brookes, History of the Most Remarkable Distempers (1721), 36). Dr George Thomson: ‘So efficacious do we find cold Seasons … in powerfully restraining this feral Disease, the Pest, that in this part of the World there hath seldom any great Mortality reigned amongst us in a very sharp Winter’ (Loimotomia: Or the Pest Anatomized (1666), 22). However, Blackmore asserted that the feared plague then raging in the south of France consisted of ‘a more exalted and active Poyson’ such as might with stand the cold of winter.