H.F.’s scepticism is justified. With 6,088 deaths reported for the entire week it is not likely that 4,000 died in a single night.

Air … corrupted and infected: here and in the following pages Defoe views the plague from the vantage of a contagionist rather than a miasmatist. The miasmatic conception, to which H.F. takes exception, was well stated by Boghurst in Loimographia: ‘The Plague is the perfection of putrefaction, or if you like it better in more words, thus: The Plague or Pestilence is a most subtle, peculiar, insinuating, venomous, deleterious Exhalation of the Foeces of the Earth extracted into the Aire by the heat of the sun, and difflated from place to place by the winds, and most tymes gradually but sometymes immediately agressing apt bodyes’ (p. 19).

Turkish Predestinarianism: see note to p. 12.

natural Causes: in his ‘Observations on the Bills of Mortality’, appended to London’s Remembrancer (1665) (a work Defoe may have used), John Bell quotes ‘our famous English Oratour, Bishop Andrews’: ‘The Plague (saith he) is caused by Gods wrath against Sin.… So that if there be a Plague, God is angry; and if there be a great Plague, God is very angry, & c. Ask the Physician the cause of it, and he will tell you the cause is in the air; the air is infected, the humours corrupted, the Contagion of the sick, coming to and conversing with the sound, and they be all true causes. But as we acknowledge these to be true, That in all Diseases, and even in this also there is a natural cause, so we say there is somewhat more, some what Divine and above Nature; as somewhat for the Physician, so some work for the Priest, and more too (it may be) for whosoever doth not acknowledge the ringer of God in this sickness, over and above all causes Natural, looketh not deeply enough into the cause thereof’ (sig. D2). See also second note to p. 65.

Swellings broke: see first note to p. 71.

Breath … infectious: H.F. reflects the confusion and uncertainty in plague literature over whether the breath of an infected person can transmit the disease. The belief of Hodges that this might be possible was rejected by Dr George Pye, in A Discourse of the Plague (1721), who asserted that the plague was not contagious in the sense that it can be communicated from one person to another: ‘it is not caused, nor propagated in that manner’ (p. 3). Cf. Thomas Phaer’s A Treatise of the Plague: ‘for the venimous aire it self, is not half so vehement to infect, as is the conversation or breth of them that are already infected’ (p. 12). The bubonic plague in its pneumonic stage is infectious.

no Microscopes: in fact simple microscopes existed as early as the 1590s.

cold Winter … long Frost: cf. Thomas Sydenham: ‘After an extremely cold winter, and after a dry frost that lasted without intermission until spring … peripneumonies, pleurisies, quinsies, and all such inflammatory diseases, suddenly caused a great mortality’ (Works (1848), i. 97).

lend to the Lord … repay them: Proverbs 19: 17.

Cripplegate … 17800 Pounds: an unlikely sum. See note to p. 81.

twenty thousand a Day … Naples: Defoe’s source was probably An Account of the Plague at Naples, in 1656, of which there died in one Day 20,000 Persons, reprinted in A Collection of Very Valuable and Scarce Pieces. In Due Preparations for the Plague Defoe repeats this figure with a denial.

woolen Manufactures … retentive … Bodies: it was widely believed that certain goods had an affinity with the ‘venomous particles’ which caused the plague. ‘even Packs and Bails of Goods carry the poisonous Miasmata about with them … nothing is more likely to preserve it than animal Substances, as Hair, Wool, Leather, Skins, &c. because the very Manner of its Production, and Nature of its Origin, seems to give it a greater Affinity with such Substances than any other, and to dispose it to rest therein until by Warmth, Ventilation, or any other Means of Dislodgement, it is put into Motion, and raised again into the ambient Air’ (John Quincy, An Essay on … Pestilential Diseases (3rd edn., 1720), 52–3). Mead’s list contained, in addition, cotton, hemp, flax, paper or books, silk of all kinds, linen, feathers. He recommended that all such goods should be kept in quarantine and exposed to fresh air for forty days (Short Discourse, 24–5). In Applebee’s Journal, 29 July 1721, Defoe refers to ‘the poor unhappy city of Toulon, who had the Distemper brought among them in a Bale of Silk from Marseilles’. For a denial of this view, see J.