He thought that the rigorous season could check or abate the malignity of a plague but with the return of hot weather a pestilence could recover its vigour (Discourse, 38-9).

Liberties: the City (that part of London within the old walls) was almost surrounded by Liberties whose relationship to the City authorities varied: the Minories, the Liberty and precinct of the Tower, St Katherine’s by the Tower, Duke’s Place, the Old Artillery Ground, Norton Folgate, Glashouse Street, St Martin’s le-Grand, the Temple, Blackfriars, and Whitefriars—all were Liberties. John Graunt, Natural and Political Observations, estimated the population of the eleven Liberties to be 179,000 in 1661.

Weather set in hot: Pepys noted the hot weather on 7 June: ‘the hottest day that ever I felt in my life, and it is confessed so by all other people the hottest they ever knew in England in the beginning of June’. On this day Pepys saw for the first time two or three houses in Drury Lane ‘marked with a red cross upon the doors, and “Lord have mercy upon us” writ there’. H.F.’s remark that ‘the Infection spread in a dreadful Manner’ is supported by the Bills of Mortality, which show that deaths from the plague increased from 17 the last week of May to 43 the first week of June, a notably warm week.

Articles of the Feaver, Spotted-Feaver, and Teeth … swell: not wholly in accordance with the Bills of Mortality. The mortality figures for the last week of May for the three maladies in the order named are 30, 23, and 19, for the first week in June, 43, 16, 25. But the increase in fever was significant because the plague was considered a ‘pestilential fever’. Teeth: Dr John Arbuthnot, Fellow of the College of Physicians and of the Royal Society, and the friend and collaborator of Pope and Swift, wrote: ‘Above a tenth part of Infants die in Teething, by the Symptoms proceeding from the Irritation of the Tender Parts of the Jaws, occasioning Inflamations, Fevers, Convulsions, Looseness, with Green Stools … and in some, Gangrene’ (Practical Rules of Diet in the Various Constitutions and Diseases of Human Bodies (1732), 408). Joseph Hurlock, an eighteenth-century surgeon, canvassed the subject of death from ‘teeth’ in his Practical Treatise upon Dentition (1742).

throng’d out of Town: Pepys, Diary, 21 June 1665: ‘all the towne almost going out of towne, the coaches and waggons being all full of people going into the country’.

Certificates of Health: issued by the Lord Mayor and at times by parish officers, these certifications that the bearer was free of the plague were not always honoured by the authorities of some towns and cities, where any traveller from plague-ridden London was suspect. Defoe presents the problem in Due Preparations for the Plague (1722, ed. Aitken (1895), xv. 156): ‘And though they [the brother and sister] had gotten certificates of health from the Lord Mayor, the city began now to be so infected, that nobody would receive them, no inn would lodge them on the way.’

Turn-pikes: spiked barriers.

Saddler: a craftsman who made saddles, or, as in H.F.’s case, a tradesman who, in addition to selling saddles, was a dealer in other supplies needed by travellers, such as pillows, straps, stirrups, horsecloths, and leather bottles.

Master save thy self: Matthew 27: 40; Mark 15: 30.

Relations in Northamptonshire: Defoe’s paternal grandparents lived in the villages of Peakirk and Etton, Northamptonshire.

Turks and Mahometans … predestinating Notions: whether a Christian may flee the plague was a hotly debated question in 1665, and it dated back at least to Luther and Calvin. By the time of the plague of 1665 the refusal to flee had become a ‘Turkish heresy’, or, as Blackmore termed it in his Discourse, ‘a Doctrine of fatal Necessity’ (p. 85). Defoe owned a copy of Kemp’s A Brief Treatise … of the Pestilence, which states: ‘The Turks are perswaded, that every ones fate is written in his fore-head, and hath a fatal destiny appointed by God, which is impossible for any to avoid; so that they believe, those that shall die by the Plague, cannot be slain in War, nor drown’d in Water, and those that shall die in Battel, cannot be kill’d by the Plague; by which credulity, they slight and neglect all care of avoiding the infection, conversing with one another, and buying the goods out of infected houses, and wearing the apparel of them that lately died. I shall not trouble my self to confute this Opinion, since at Grand Cayre and Constantinople there have been thousands that have suffered death, and multitudes that have been executed by the Plague for this Heresie’ (p. 15).

happen’d to stop … 91st Psalm: Sortes Biblicae, divination by means of the Bible, an old practice among Christians and at times condemned by councils of the Church. Defoe used the device in Robinson Crusoe, where Crusoe found comfort—and eventual penitence—by randomly opening the Bible at Psalm 50.

none but Magistrates and Servants: Kephale, Medela Pestilentiae, answered ‘theological queries concerning the Plague’. He includes among those who may not flee without offending God both magistrates and servants: magistrates because they are needed ‘for keeping good orders’, and servants because they ‘are under command’ (p. 27).

Court removed … June: the Court, Pepys records in his Diary on 29 June, was ‘full of waggons and ready to go out of towne’. It went first to Hampton Court and thence to Salisbury (Diary, 27 July), finally setting out for Oxford the last week of September. The King was back at Whitehall on 1 Feb. (Diary, 31 Jan. and 2 Feb. 1666, and Anthony Wood, Life and Times, ed. Andrew Clark (1892), ii. 46).

hardly any thing of Reformation: observing the King and his courtiers at Oxford during the Plague, Anthony Wood noted in his diary: ‘The greater part of the courtiers were high, proud, insolent … To give a further character of the court, they thought they were neat and gay in their apparell, yet they were nasty and beastly … Rude, rough, whoremongers; vaine, empty, carelesse’ (Life and Times, ii. 68).

crying Vices … Judgment: cf. Bishop Burnet; ‘All the King’s enemies, and the enemies of monarchy, said, here [i.e. the plague] was a manifest character of God’s displeasure upon the nation; as indeed the ill life the King led, and the viciousness of the whole court, gave but a melancholy prospect’ (History of his own Times (1818), i. 242).