hucksters, mercenary people.

parched Corn … Bread of it: Joshua 5: 11.

Tilts and Bales: awnings and bales of merchandise.

Violence … Town: In H.F.’s parish of St Botolph, Aldgate, 65 died of the plague in the last week of July. The figures for the four weeks in August are 81, 173, 212, 46. Deaths from all causes, which rarely rose above 20 before August, are reported in the Bills as 103, 207, 238, 374. These figures support H.F.’s contention that the Bills did not accurately reflect the number of deaths from the plague.

Exchange … not kept shut: on 18 July Pepys went ‘to the ’Change, where a little business and a very thin Exchange’. At the end of July the Exchange was closed for a period of approximately two months.

Fires … lost: the Lord Mayor’s Proclamation of 2 September 1665 ordered fires to be kept burning continuously for three days and nights, beginning 5 September, in all streets, courts, lanes, and alleys of the City and Suburbs. Pepys, going by river to see the Duke of Albemarle, reports ‘all the way fires on each side of the Thames’ (Diary, 6 Sept.). On the ninth he records ‘a most cursed rainy afternoon’; this is the rain which extinguished the plague-fires and, as Pepys says, ‘almost spoiled my silke breeches’.

not only no Benefit, but injurious: Defoe reflects the controversy over the value of fires. In the epidemics of 1563, 1603, and 1625 fires were lit in the streets of London, and the authorities followed suit in 1665. Hodges argued against the practice in 1665, as did Mead and Blackmore in 1721; but the Hippocratic tradition was strong and the legend that Hippocrates had freed Athens of the plague by fires appealed to many. See Philip Rose, A Theruo-Practical, Miscellaneous, and Succinct Treatise of the Plague: ‘We have an Account of him, that he did free Greece from the Plague; for which Service the Athenians decreed and paid him the same Honours as to Hercules. We are informed, that he did set several Forests on fire, to purify the Air; which in my Judgment, was [a] ready way to destroy and carry off the Pestilential Effluviums in a great Measure’ (pp. 26–7). To Hodges, fires were ‘showy and expensive … and of no effect’ (Loimologia, 19).

Fires … Wood … Coal: Boghurst writes that ‘Wood fires are accounted best’, and he names twenty-eight kinds of wood suitable. He adds: ‘Yet I know noe reason why Sea coale fires also should be discontinued’ (Loimographia, 61–2).

Dog-days … Dog-Star: a period of about five weeks commonly said to begin on 3 July with the heliacal rising of Sirius in the Constellation of the Greater Dog, long noted for being a hot and unwholesome period and a time in which malignant influences prevailed.

The Act of Uniformity: received royal assent 19 May 1662. Its provisions and required oaths led to the ejection of many, perhaps a fifth, of the Anglican beneficed clergy, one of whom was Dr Samuel Annesley, family pastor of the Foes, then living in St Giles, Cripplegate. The family and Defoe (aged 2) followed Annesley out of the Established Church into Nonconformity. For a brief general statement of Defoe’s attitude toward this Act, the Test Act, and the practice known as occasional conformity, see The Review, 22 Nov. 1705.

almost 40,000: Defoe here uses the number of deaths from all causes as reported in the Bills of Mortality. The number of deaths attributed to the plague for the five weeks was 32,332.

no Funeral … in the Day-time: Pepys reports: ‘Thence by water to the Duke of Albemarle’s … and strange to see in broad daylight two or three burials upon the Bankeside, one at the very heels of another: doubtless all of the plague; and yet at least forty or fifty people going along with every one of them’ (Diary, 6 Sept. 1665).

Price of Bread … not much raised: the assize of bread by order of the Lord Mayor and the Court of Aldermen was reported weekly in the Bills of Mortality. H.F.’s facts are accurate. To conserve fuel during the plague and to adjust to the demands of a decreased population, the Bakers’ Company ruled in 1665 that ‘wives’ bread, that is, bread baked from the customer’s own dough, would be limited to three days. See Sylvia Thrupp, A Short History of the Worshipful Company of Bakers of London (1933), 114.

two Pest-houses: see second note to p. 33. The Westminster pest-house was in Tothill Fields.

Bakers Company: see second note to p. 155. The government and discipline of the Worshipful Company of Bakers of London were in the hands of the Master and Wardens and the Court of Assistants, the Court consisting of ex-wardens and others chosen from the livery.

publish’d in Latin: a reference to Dr Nathaniel Hodges, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, whose Loimologia was translated by John Quincy and published in 1720. For Hodges, see first note to p. 29.

four Thousand in one Night: the figure is from Hodges, Loimologia, 24–5, where he laments the ill-advised action of the authorities in ordering fires in the streets for three days. Hodges suggests that the damp weather and the ‘suffocative effluvia of the coals’ had dire consequences the night of 9 September.