Pepys does not mention this massing of ships in the Thames and there are no other contemporary references to such a scene.

Wo … Child … Day: Matthew 24: 19. Cf. Boghurst, Loimographia: ‘Teeming women fared miserably in the disease … scarce one in forty lived, for the disease and sweating forced them to miscarry, and the miscarriage drew in the disease again.… Hippocrates saith to this purpose that women with child fare ill in occult and epidemicall diseases’ (p. 25). Kephale’s Medela Pestilentiae maintained that women are more susceptible to the plague than men and that pregnant women are the most susceptible, ‘for their bodies are full of excrementious humours, and much heat withal, which is as oyle and flame put together’ (pp. 55–6). But virgins fare little better according to Kephale: ‘Virgins, that are ripe for marriage, are apt to receive infection; and being stricken, seldom or never escape without great means.… Their blood being hot, and their seed retain’d for want of copulation, the one will soon be inflam’d, the other corrupted; from thence infection.’ Those least likely to be infected are old people, ‘confident spirits’, milch-nurses, those who have the gout, or issues or ulcers or haemorrhoids, or women who ‘have their courses abundantly’ (pp. 56 ff.).

kill all the Dogs and Cats: the plague orders regularly called for the destruction of domestic animals. In 1543 all dogs, except hounds, spaniels, or mastiffs, were ordered killed or removed from London. The task of killing stray animals was entrusted to a parish official or to one appointed for the purpose. Defoe’s figures—40,000 dogs and five times as many cats—are suspect.

Lepers of Samaria: 2 Kings 7: 3–4; Luke 17: 12.

last legal Settlement: the brief ‘legal’ quibble in this passage refers to the laws of vagrancy. Elizabethan legislation concerning the poor was amplified by Acts in 1662 and 1667 (14 Car. II, cap. xii; 18–19 Car. II, cap. ix). The remark by Thomas concerns the power of a justice to remove from a parish any newcomer who might become an object of parochial charity. A vagrant’s last legal settlement, that is, his established residence, was that parish where he was last domiciled as servant, apprentice, householder, or sojourner for a period of forty days. In the early months of 1707 Defoe, writing in The Review, was critical of a Bill pending in Parliament designed to modify the Act of Settlement.

Beginning of July: Defoe’s account of the slow spread of the plague follows contemporary accounts. Cf. Boghurst: ‘it gradually insinuated, and crept down Holborne and the Strand [from the western parishes], and then into the City, and at last to the East end of the Suburbs; soe that it was half a yeare at the West end of the City before the East end and Stepney was infected, which was about the middle of July’ (Loimographia, 28). H.F.’s statement that no one had died of the plague in Stepney parish is not borne out by the Bills of Mortality. They record three deaths by 4 July.

died … 5361 People: this is the total number of deaths in the five parishes mentioned from all causes during the first three weeks in August. The number dying of the plague alone was 3,570.

the Boarded-River: the ‘river’ made by Sir Hugh Middleton, 1608–13, to supply London with water. It was so called because of the wooden arches built to support the troughs carrying the water.

King’s Highway: an ancient and intricate legal concept dating perhaps from the eighth or ninth century, at which time it applied to the four great through roads. It later came to apply to all highways. The concept is related to the concept of the King’s Peace and implied the King’s protection for his subjects travelling on the King’s Highway. ‘To the citizen of the twelfth, the fifteenth, or even the eighteenth century, the King’s Highway was a more abstract conception. It was not a strip of land, or any corporeal thing, but a legal and customary right—as the lawyers said, “a perpetual right of passage in the sovereign, for himself and his subjects, over another’s land” … What existed, in fact, was not a road, but what we might almost term an easement—a right of way, enjoyed by the public at large from village to village, along a certain customary course, which, if much frequented, became a beaten track.’ See Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government: The Story of the King’s Highway (1913), 5, 10, n. 2.

Higlers: i.e.