This money, loaned to Charles II, was thought to be endangered, and moves were made in Parliament and elsewhere in the 1670s and later to protect it.

Welfare of those … left behind: Defoe’s account of large sums spent on relief of the poor may be optimistic. The picture is confused by the fact that charity was dispensed by various agencies: the livery companies, parishes, the city, private persons. Parliament itself took no action, and the tradition that Charles II ‘ordered a thousand Pounds a Week to be distributed’ seems to be unsubstantiated. Note that H.F. himself says that he can speak of it only ‘as a Report’. Funds coming in from the poor rate and the pest rate, from fast-day collections, from private persons, and from the livery companies (required by a Lord Mayor’s Proclamation, 28 July, to devote a third of the money saved from their prohibited dinners and entertainments) cannot be accurately estimated. See Bell, The Great Plague in London, 130 and 195–9, who discounts Defoe’s figures. He does, however, quote from a letter written by Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey who, after indicting some of the courtiers, nobility, and gentry for forgetting ‘their charity’, says, ‘I believe they [i.e., the poor] were never so well relieved in any Plague time whatsoever’ (p. 197).

legal Settlements: i.e. having a legal residence in a particular parish by virtue of residing in the parish for a certain length of time or paying taxes or serving in an annual office. A legal settlement entitled one to claim against the poor rates. See also the second note to p. 107.

thirty or forty Thousand: if Defoe’s estimate of the number of poor who died from the plague in the nine weeks, 8 August to 10 October, is correct, we can understand why the epidemic was called ‘the poor’s plague’. He repeats accurately the figures of total deaths and deaths from the plague as they were reported in the Bills of Mortality, but his estimate that roughly 60 to 80 per cent of the deaths were of the poor can only be a guess, if not his own then from an unidentified source. Such figures were not available.

Grass growing: Pepys commented on the desolation in London streets in September: ‘But, Lord! what a sad time it is to see no boats upon the River; and grass grows all up and down White Hall court, and nobody but poor wretches in the streets!’ (Diary, 20 Sept. 1665). Cf. Thomas Vincent: ‘Now there is a dismal solitude in London streets.… Now shops are shut in, people rare, and very few that walk about, insomuch that the grass begins to spring up in some places … no rattling coaches, no prancing Horses’ (God’s Terrible Voice in the City, 42). Cf. Defoe, The Review, no. 8, 26 Aug. 1712: ‘Grass grew in the Streets, in the Markets, and on the Exchange; and nothing but death was to be seen in every place.’

Coaches … dangerous things: H.F.’s remark that coaches were scarce and dangerous is supported by entries in Pepys’s Diary, 25 July 1665: ‘Thence to my office awhile, full of business, and thence by coach to the Duke of Albermarle’s, not meeting one coach going nor coming from my house thither and back again, which is very strange.’ On 27 November Pepys took a hackney coach: ‘the first I have durst to go in many a day, and with great pain now for fear’.

Solomon Eagle an Enthusiast: see the fourth note to p. 20. ‘Enthusiast’ in the sense of a fanatical dissenter. The fumes of the burning charcoal were intended to purify the pestilential air.

People … Danger … Worship of God: the Bishop of London to Lord Arlington, 19 August 1665: ‘Many of those who never attended divine service are now present’ (Calendar State Papers Domestic, Car. II, 1664–1665, 524).

Dissenters … in the very Churches: the government grew alarmed over the appearance of the ejected clergy in the parish churches. In July, Lord Arlington, Secretary of State, wrote to the Bishop of London: ‘The King is informed that many ministers and lecturers having been absent from their posts during this time of contagion, nonconformists have thrust themselves into their pulpits, to preach sedition, and doctrines contrary to the Church; His Majesty wishes to prevent such mischiefs to Church and State’ (Calendar State Papers Domestic, Car. II, 1664–1665, 497). On 19 August the Bishop of London replied that ‘the sober clergy remain’ and that he ‘cannot learn that any nonconformists have invaded the pulpit’ (ibid. 524).

ten thousand … sheltered here: very unlikely.