In 1721 Blackmore writes: ‘There is another Preservative against Contagion, which is a lively and cheerful Disposition of Mind; for when the Spirits are put into a pleasing Motion … a Person is better prepar’d for his Defence … timorous, diffident, and weak-hearted Persons are … half dead before the Adversary approaches’ (Discourse, 76). George Pye: ‘whoever is frighted and terrified will become more liable to the Pestilential Impressions’ (A Discourse of the Plague (1721), sect. iv, p. 17).

unhappy Breaches … in … Religion: a reference to the Clarendon Code (the Corporation Act, 1661; the Conventicle Act, 1664; the Five-Mile Act, 1665) and the Test Act, 1673, all of which imposed penalties and made worship difficult for non-Anglicans.

Dissenters … into the Churches: Thomas Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City (1667), refers to the many Anglican clergymen who fled and ‘left the greatest part of their flock without food or physick, in the time of their greatest need’ (1722 edn., p. 37). Vincent, an ejected minister, preached in Defoe’s parish church in Aldgate during the plague. Of the many tracts written about the plague of 1665, his was one of the most frequently reprinted. In an introduction to this tract, the Revd John Evans wrote that ‘the main Body of the Clergy … left their pulpits vacant’ and Noncomformist clergymen ‘preached thro’ several parts of the city … to vast congregations’ (sig. A2). Vincent’s eulogy of the Dissenting clergy for their courage in ministering to the spiritual needs of the people in the crisis (pp. 55 ff.) is conceivably one of Defoe’s sources. Bishop Gilbert Burnet reports that many of the parish churches were shut ‘when the inhabitants were in a more than ordinary disposition to profit by good sermons [and] some of the nonconformists upon that went into the empty pulpits, and preached … with good success’ (History of his own Time (1818 edn.), i. 249).

running about to Fortune-tellers, Cunning-men, and Astrologers: Hodges attacked the ‘Traitors who frighten the credulous Populace with the Apprehensions of an approaching Plague, by idle and groundless Reports and Predictions; for the Propagation of the late Sickness was too notoriously assisted by this Means, to want any arguments to prove it’ (Loimologia, 206). Cunning men were pretenders to magical or astrological knowledge.

Fryar Bacons’s Brazen-Head: Roger Bacon’s fame in magic and alchemy was legendary in the seventeenth century. The story that he had constructed a brazen head with power of speech often appeared in print, notably in Robert Greene’s play, The Honourable History of Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay (1594). Ben Jonson refers to it in Every Man in his Humour (1598). Sir Thomas Browne discusses it in his History of Vulgar Errors (1646), and Samuel Butler mentions Friar Bacon’s ‘noodle’ of brass in Hudibras (II. i. 530–2; ed. J. Wilders, 1967).

Mother Shipton: a reputed prophetess, possibly a mythical person, whose prophecies were published as early as 1641, one of which presumably foretold the Great Fire of London, 1666. Some of her meteorological predictions were quoted by the astrologer William Lilly, in his Collection of Ancient and Modern Prophecies (1645). In 1667 Richard Head published what purported to be an account of her life and death. Some of her prophecies appeared in chapbooks.

Merlin’s Head: Merlin Ambrosius, or Myrddin Embrys, a legendary enchanter and bard, first mentioned in the Historic Britonum (attributed to Nennius, fl. 796). He came down to later ages mainly from the pages of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (1137) and the Arthurian romances.

Band: a collar or ruff.

publick Prayers … fasting … Humiliation: in L’Estrange’s Newes, 13 July 1665, is reported a royal proclamation ‘for a General Fast to the end that Prayers and Supplications may everywhere be offered up unto Almighty God for the removal of the heavy Judgment of Plague and Pestilence’. The fast was to be kept in the cities of London and Westminster and places adjacent on the first Wednesday of each month until the plague ended. At the same time a form of common prayer and an ‘Exhortation fit for the times’ were issued, along with an injunction that collections should be made on these fast days for relief of the poor visited by the plague (Calendar of State Papers Domestic, Car. II, 1664–1665, 466).

Jack-puddings, Merry-andrews … Rope-dancers: the first two are synonymous terms meaning a clown, buffoon, or jester to a mountebank. Rope-dancing, an ancient ‘art’, is mentioned by several classical authors, including Terence, who refers to it in the Prologue to his comedy Hecyra (165 BC).