Original subtitles

NEWSREEL: Prime Minister says Covid is likely to spread...

When Covid-19 hit the UK...

The seriousness of the situation...

..it seemed a uniquely terrible event.

..can recover, for others, it can be deadly.

But it wasn't the first time we'd suffered a deadly epidemic.

In a frightening parallel 350 years earlier,

we endured one of the greatest tragedies in British history,

the Great Plague.

Over 18 months, beginning in 1665,

this horrific disease killed an estimate 100,000 people

in London alone,

a quarter of the entire population

and a further 100,000 as it spread across the country.

We're telling the horrifying story of how the catastrophe unfolded

day by day, week by week.

We filmed this series as Covid-19 began its spread

across the world,

and, for me, the connections between the two pandemics are remarkable.

It's a frightening lesson from history.

I'm Xand van Tulleken,

and I'm tracking the epidemic back to its source...

It all kicked off right here.

..and telling the stories of its victims.

Almost worse to have survived it

and having lost five children and your husband.

John Sergeant discovers the terrible symptoms of the plague...

It's the bubo of the bubonic plague. The bubo, yeah. Oh, God.

..and investigates whether medical treatments did more harm than good.

You could heat that up, place it into the bubo to burn it.

The pain would have been agonising.

Raksha Dave uncovers extraordinary new evidence

which reveals how the disease really spread.

So you think that these have been spreading the plague?

Just one is enough to be sick and even to die.

This is the story of the Great Plague.

21st century London is a world away from the city of the 1600s.

But in secret corners of the modern city,

we can still find traces of what happened here in 1665,

the deadliest epidemic in Britain's history,

the Great Plague.

With my knowledge as a doctor of modern infectious disease,

I'll be investigating how the plague devastated

first London and then large parts of the country.

The first thing I need to figure out,

as with any disease outbreak,

is how and where it started.

And this book, A Journal Of The Plague Year by Daniel Defoe,

the famous author of Robinson Crusoe,

has some important information for me.

Defoe was just a child at the time of the Great Plague,

but his book is believed to be based on the account of his uncle.

He tells us that two men, said to be Frenchmen,

died of the plague in Long Acre,

or rather the upper end of Drury Lane.

Well, Long Acre runs down there,

this is the upper end of Drury Lane.

It all kicked off right here.

It's believed the Frenchmen were weavers

who imported the plague into London in an infected shipment of cotton.

The first two deaths were in December 1664,

but then there were no more until four months later,

in April 1665,

when two more people died.

All four of those early deaths occurred here,

in an area around Drury Lane called St Giles in the Fields.

It seemed like an outbreak was brewing.

Today, this is the heart of London's theatre and nightlife,

but 350 years ago, it was a new suburb,

recently sprung up, outside the official City of London.

In the 50 years before the Great Plague,

countryside around London had been swallowed up,

as the population doubled from 200,000 to 400,000 people.

Like many of the suburbs that sprung up outside

the ancient city walls,

St Giles was one of the poorest areas of London.

Here, slightly better off people would have lived

on one of the main wider streets,

but off those streets were narrow alleys like this one.

They were crammed with illegally built slum housing

and in late April, 1665,

it was in these back alleys where cases of plague

began to multiply.

Families of up to ten people were crammed into two room houses.

They worked as weavers, labourers, servants and porters.

Diseases like smallpox, tuberculosis and typhus were common.

Even the plague wasn't unfamiliar,

in the previous 300 years,

there had been 18 major outbreaks in London.

But this one would surpass them all.

In the first week of May,

the plague spread to several streets around St Giles in the Fields

and there were nine more deaths.

The rising death toll confirmed to Londoners

that a plague epidemic had begun,

and it struck terror into their hearts.

Older residents would have seen friends and family suffer

with this disease before, and they knew what to expect.

John Sergeant is discovering why the symptoms of this disease

held such dread.

I'm meeting specialist, Doctor Chris Conlon,

at the Weald and Downland Museum,

where many houses dating to the time of the Great Plague

have been preserved.

Why was the plague so frightening?

Well, it was a terrible disease for people,

and it had a very high death rate,

so it caused huge devastation and terror.

There was a bubonic type,

which is to do with lymph nodes, a septicaemic type,

which is when it gets into your bloodstream,

and a pneumonic type that affects your lungs.

And they're all pretty terrible, in fact it does still exist today.

What, across the world? Yeah, for example,

a big outbreak a couple of years ago in Madagascar,

been outbreaks in China and even get it in southwest USA.

In 1665, it was predominantly bubonic plague

that swept through London.

It was a bacterial infection,

unlike Covid-19, which is caused by a virus.

Plague was incredibly infectious

and killed about 70% of those who caught it.

With the help of prosthetic make-up artist,

Florence Carter, Doctor Conlon is going to show me

what a victim of this type of plague would have endured.

If I do have the plague, Doctor, what would I feel like?

You'd be a bit pale. Right.

And find you'll be a bit sweaty.

At the same time, you'd be getting a headache.

In addition to that,

you'd be developing aches and pains in your muscles and joints,

and you might even shiver.

And then, as the disease progresses,

you're going to get a very high fever, maybe up to 40 degrees,

you might even get confused or delirious.

Then you'll probably start noticing some pain in your neck,

where your lymph node is starting to enlarge.

Right, so here?

And how quickly would that really develop?

That could come up over a few hours to a day or so.

So this is a terrifying moment, isn't it?

Yeah. This is the first real signs of the plague?

That's right, it's the, it's the bubo of the bubonic plague.

The bubo, yeah. Oh, God.

And you would feel that if you had to turn your head to the right,

it would be too painful to do. Yeah.

So your head would be sort of tilted to one side to avoid the pain.

I'm aware of the fact that just the loneliness of it

would be so striking, wouldn't it?

Yeah, it would be terrifying. It would be...

..you're going to die, and by the way, we can't do anything for you

and just stay there and think about nothing else.

Yeah, yeah.

And would the pain be growing all the time?

Yes, cos it's getting larger all the time.

Yeah. And you might actually get a rash as the bacteria spreads

into the skin a bit.

And these bacteria are multiplying rapidly,

but more importantly,

this bacteria is now in your bloodstream.

When it gets into the bloodstream,

it's bad news, and most people in those days wouldn't survive.

So what's happening here is that your nose circulation

has been affected, and the tip of your nose

no longer has any blood supply,

so the skin and the tissue underneath is dying

and becoming gangrenous and will turn blue and then black.

Once people know that this is spreading,

it just...you can see why people just panic and go sort of mad.

Yes, that's right, and to see these symptoms appearing,

these big lumps on peoples' necks and groins

and the rash and the gangrene are pretty horrifying sights.

So from the time that I fell ill to now, how long's it been?

This is probably three or four days after you first started

feeling a bit hot, and sweaty and achy

and probably five or six days after you first got infected.

This is a very rapidly progressive illness.

It's time, I suppose, for the inevitable question.

At this stage, Doc, how long have I got?

You'll be dead within 24 hours, if not sooner.

So this is the really end stage of this terrible disease.

Is there any hope at all?

No hope at this stage at all.

By early May 1665,

13 people had died of plague,

and thousands more were now at risk from this incurable disease.

And fear was stalking the streets of London.

By May 1665,

the plague had taken hold in London,

and in the cramped back alleys of the capital,

it was spreading rapidly.

In the four months since the first reported case,

13 people have died and many more are now infected.

In the week to the 15th of May,

there were three more deaths,

a small increase, but significantly,

the disease was now spreading beyond the parish of

St Giles in the Fields.

And the first case was reported within London city walls.

The first death in the square mile,

within the ancient city walls of London,

occurred here on Mansion House Place,

which back then was called Bearbinder Lane.

And again, the author Daniel Defoe blamed the French,

saying the man who'd died here

was a Frenchman who had selfishly fled the outbreak

in the suburb of St Giles.

Plague wasn't just in the slums any more.

Bearbinder Lane was just around the corner from this,

the Royal Exchange, the financial heart of the city.

It's where London's elite came to do business,

and they were now horrified that the plague threatened them.

We know people are getting worried because they tell us so.

Famous diarist, Samuel Pepys, describes going to a coffee house

where everybody is talking about the plague.

Another eye witness, a priest called Thomas Vincent,

tells us that by now, everyone is really frightened.

Thomas Vincent was a puritan minister who lived in Spitalfields

with a group of his congregation.

He believed the plague was a punishment from god,

inflicted on Londoners because of their promiscuous behaviour.

Samuel Pepys lived in rather more comfortable surroundings

with his wife and servants,

just north of the Tower of London.

He didn't blame plague on the almighty,

but instead wrote "only god could save them" from the disease.

Both men knew from experience,

the rising death toll indicated a terrible epidemic was coming.

In the last week of May,

the number of plague deaths reported increased to 17.

Most victims were still in St Giles, in the alleys near Drury Lane.

Despite the growing fear,

normal life in the area continued.

Ale houses, coffee houses and theatres

were still packed with customers.

This is the famous Theatre Royal Drury Lane,

it's the oldest theatre in London

and at the moment is undergoing a massive refurbishment.

But the original theatre was built on this site

two years before the outbreak.

It was established by King Charles II himself,

hence the royal in the name.

The theatre was located just a stone's throw

from the epicentre of the epidemic.

Despite that, each night, 700 people

crammed into a building only 34 metres long and 18 metres wide.

But it gradually became clear that normal public life

couldn't continue.

It was at this point, in June 1665,

that the rising death toll finally forced King Charles

to close the theatres.

To find out how people were reacting to

the rapidly escalating epidemic,

I'm meeting historian Vanessa Harding.

We're here in St Giles in the Fields,

and it's this parish where the plague began in 1665.

How are people in London feeling at this stage?

I think they're starting to get really quite worried.

The number of deaths by the end of May

is as many as the last six or seven years put together.

And people do have a lot of experience of plague in London,

and they know that if deaths start to rise

in the late spring, early summer and don't go down again,

then there's a good chance they're in for a bad epidemic.

Why does it begin here?

At the time, this is a western suburb of London.

We don't know why it starts here,

but one of the things that's really interesting is that

this is about as far as you can get from the port areas of London.

So if plague is being imported from abroad on fleas,

on rats, on ships,

if that were true, then you would expect it to start

down by the waterside or in the east end.

This is almost the last place you'd expect it to begin.

OK, so that's quite mysterious.

This is one of many inconsistencies

that have led historians and scientists to question

the long held assumption that the Great Plague,

known scientifically as Yersinia pestis,

was spread by rats and their fleas.

What have you learned from looking at parish records

about how the plague was spreading in this part of London?

We have a lot of records surviving from this time,

and one of the things that comes through from that is that

it often seems to cluster in households.

And it's not spreading in a sort of even geographical ripple,

it doesn't infect every house in one street,

some families are infected but by no means all.

So that, to me, would suggest it's spreading person to person,

rather than having rats,

which you'd expect would move all the way along a street.

Yes, yes, it certainly looks like that.

So you've got these inconsistencies with the geographic location,

with the way it's spreading,

are we sure this is bubonic plague?

We do know that now.

There have been quite a lot of excavations of buried bodies,

of human remains,

from plague sites over the last few years,

and analysis of the ancient DNA shows that Yersinia pestis

was present.

So we know it's plague, but the inconsistencies remain?

Yes.

And I think that means we have to look again at what we think we know

about Yersinia pestis and its being spread by rats and rat fleas

and think about whether there might be other ways

in which it's being spread.

So what you're suggesting is that we have to rethink

everything we know about bubonic plague and how it spreads?

Yeah. Wow.

For 100 years, it's been believed that only rats and rat fleas

were spreading the disease,

but there's now new evidence

suggesting plague was actually transmitted in a different way.

Raksha Dave is in Marseille, on France's Mediterranean Coast,

to meet the scientists investigating a new theory.

A terrible plague epidemic struck here in 1720,

55 years after London's Great Plague.

100,000 people were killed.

It was Europe's last ever epidemic of the disease

and since then, Marseille University

has been at the cutting edge of research into its causes.

Recently, they've made some astonishing discoveries.

The work here was overseen by Professor Drankor.

He's taking me to see the animals

he has identified as plague transmitters.

Oh, here we go.

And they're not rats.

Right.

They're bred in a secure room in the university's basement.

Wow.

Ugh.

Is that where they are more comfortable then,

latching onto cloth?

Body lice are similar to head lice,

but these blood suckers have adapted

to live on clothes rather than in hair.

While head lice are still widespread in Europe today,

modern laundry methods have almost eradicated body lice.

So you think that these little bugs have been spreading the plague?

And how did you figure that out?

So how long does it take for the rabbits that didn't have the plague

to then be infected by the plague?

24 hours?!

Wow.

And there's another human parasite bred here

that's also been proved can spread bubonic plague directly

without any rats involved.

So fleas can spread plague without rats being involved at all?

When I was first taught about the plague at school,

I was told that it was incontrovertible scientific fact

that it was rats and its fleas that were spreading the plague.

But what I've just learned has just turned all of that on its head.

This ground-breaking research from Marseille

allows us to look at the Great Plague in a completely new light.

The way the disease spread,

the stories eye witnesses told

and the preventive measures taken

in the 17th century could all make a lot more sense

if we put less emphasis on the rat

and look more closely at human fleas and lice.

By mid-June 1665,

the plague was accelerating through London,

and 168 people a week were now dying.

There was no local government in the 17th century,

so it was officials from the parish churches

who had to try and deal with this spiralling epidemic.

One of the few buildings that has miraculously survived

from the time of the Great Plague is St Bartholomew the Great,

London's oldest parish church.

Now, like all of London's parish churches,

Great St Bart's played an important role in the response to the plague.

Parish officers organised money and food relief for the poor.

They also recorded all plague deaths in their area.

And they had to bury the ever increasing numbers of dead.

Each of those deaths was marked by a tolling of the church bell.

The actual bell that rang out here during the Great Plague survives.

It dates to the early 1500s.

And it still works.

I mean, this is amazing.

So this is the great bell that's going to ring,

but before it does,

I'm just going to get in my ear defenders,

cos I think it's going to be pretty loud.

Tower Captain, Paul Norman, still rings the bell today,

just as his predecessors did 350 years ago.

BELL TOLLS

You can imagine it ringing out all over London.

For me it's pretty magical, I have to say,

but that sound ringing out during the Great Plague,

I think it would have felt very different hearing it then.

The infamous death knells rang out from every London church

to mark each death in their parish.

As the epidemic intensified in early July,

the bells of the worst hit parishes

were tolling over 20 times a day.

Death knells like that, from parish churches,

would have been heard all across London.

There was no traffic noise to drown them out.

And as they began to ring with more and more frequency,

it would have been a forbidding reminder

of the ever-increasing onslaught of the plague.

And as the bells closer to your neighbourhood began to ring,

you could literally hear the plague approaching.

Must have been terrifying.

As the bells continued to ring out,

they triggered panic

and the greatest mass exodus London has ever seen.

Two months into the outbreak,

the number of plague deaths was doubling every fortnight.

By the beginning of July,

470 people a week were dying

and thousands more were falling sick.

The deaths were overwhelmingly in the poor suburbs

to the west of the walled City of London,

but the contagion was now spreading east.

Terrified by this spiralling epidemic,

most better off Londoners now decided to try and escape the city.

Tens of thousands of people fled London

in the greatest exodus in the city's history.

The people that fled were those that could afford to,

the merchants, the lawyers, the professional classes,

and the streets were clogged with coaches and carts,

piled high with servants, clothing and prized possessions.

Almost every noble family also escaped London,

including King Charles II,

who fled to his palace at Hampton Court, ten miles away.

Mostly it was the poor who were left behind.

They had no choice.

They needed to keep working to survive,

and they had nowhere else to go.

And it was in the back alley slums where they lived

that the plague was already most rampant.

St Bart's Hospital was one of the few places

that the poor, who were trapped in London,

could come hoping to receive treatment.

I'm here to have a look at their archives,

to see what they tell us about the care they received.

Archivist Kate Jarman has found original documents revealing

that even hospitals offered limited help to plague victims.

So, Kate, this is the hospital journal, is that right?

That's right, it's actually the minutes of the Board of Governors

of the hospital, so it's really a record of the day to day life

of the hospital, activities of the staff.

So it's like the hospital diary? Yeah.

And what does it say about the Great Plague?

The record says the hospital did not admit incurable patients,

so it's probably unlikely that they were admitting patients

for the plague.

These may well have been patients admitted with other symptoms,

or who developed the symptoms of the plague while they were here.

In fact, the hospital was implementing measures

to keep contagion out, locking the gates early,

and making sure that goods brought into the hospital

were as risk free as possible.

One of the interesting things is the record of what was happening

with the medical staff.

So here we can see the governors have ordered

that the hundred pounds due to Doctor Micklethwaite

and Doctor Tearnes not be paid to them.

And that's because they'd actually left London.

They'd decided that the city was too contagious,

and in common with a lot of people of their class,

they would've got out of town.

I mean, I can understand why they left,

but it doesn't feel like what doctors should be doing.

Yeah, but I think what's also interesting, really,

is the stories of those who did stay.

People like Margaret Blague,

who was the matron of the hospital at that time.

So she was responsible for the 15 nursing sisters

who looked after the wards of the hospital.

The record says, "Having respect towards Margaret Blague,

"Matron, for her attendant and constant great pains about the poor,

"in making them broths, cordials and other light, comfortable things

"for their accommodation in these late contagious times,

"wherein she has adventured herself to the great risk of her life."

Wow, I love that.

She adventured herself to the great risk of her life.

You know, there's a clear understanding that she'd

put herself at risk to care for patients.

Just like NHS nurses today.

Absolutely.

You definitely feel very aware that the less paid,

less trained, less valued health care workers

have stayed and done the heroic work.

Absolutely.

Other physicians did bravely stay in London

throughout the Great Plague.

One was William Boghurst,

an apothecary, an early type of pharmacist.

He made a vivid record of his attempts to treat

up to 40 patients a day.

He dressed buboes,

the swellings that formed on necks and groins.

He held people as they thrashed and raged,

overcome by unimaginable pain and fever.

And he stayed with them in their final hours,

closing their eyes when they died.

So apart from a handful of heroes,

almost everyone in authority seems to have chosen

to abandon the poor of London to their fate.

The outbreak was only just beginning,

things were about to get worse than anyone could imagine.

In mid-July, 1665,

the official number of weekly deaths in London surpassed 1,000.

54 of the capital's 130 parishes were now infected.

With most aristocrats

and professionals attempting to escape London,

it was mainly people such as labourers and servants

who were left behind.

Before King Charles fled to the countryside,

he handed responsibility for plague relief and control

to the Lord Mayor of London,

who was based right here at the Great Guildhall.

The Mayor was Sir John Lawrence,

a wealthy merchant who'd been elected the previous year.

He now had to enforce regulations

to try and control the spread of the disease.

One of the Lord Mayor's jobs was to issue certificates of health

to the thousands of people wanting to flee London.

Without these certificates, they'd be turned away from inns,

they might even be turned away from towns and villages by guards.

So thousands of people gathered here,

desperate to prove they weren't sick and to get their certificates.

The author Daniel Defoe tells us there was no getting

to the Lord Mayor's door here without exceeding difficulty,

such was the pressing and the crowding.

But unfortunately, those conditions are ideal

for the transfer of human body lice,

and many of the people trying to escape the plague

may have caught it right here.

This is the great hall,

where the Lord Mayor conducted business,

and it seems he took sensible precautions

to avoid catching the plague himself.

We're told the mayor had a special gallery built.

He would stand on it, keeping himself removed

from the mass of people that had come to petition him.

It allowed him to be seen, but at a suitably safe distance.

Sir John didn't know plague was spreading

through body lice and human fleas,

but he had learned from experience that social distancing worked.

And despite dealing with hundreds, maybe thousands of people,

and working here throughout the Great Plague,

Sir John lived for another 27 years.

It seems his gallery did the trick.

To control the spread,

the mayor had ordered the shutting up of infected houses,

a system of quarantine established in earlier plague epidemics.

It's the ancestor of the measures used to combat Covid-19.

Searchers were employed to visit houses where sickness

had been reported to verify it was plague.

They carried a white stick to identify themselves,

so everyone else could avoid them.

So many had lost their jobs when employers fled London,

there was no shortage of desperate people

willing to take on this dangerous job.

If a plague victim was found...

..the house was locked up with the entire family inside,

whether they were sick or not.

A red cross was then painted on the door.

Along with the prayer, "Lord, have mercy upon us."

Watchers then guarded the house day and night,

to ensure no-one escaped.

Shutting up...

..would've been horrific for the unfortunate families,

it would have been a probable death sentence,

but it would have stopped the disease spreading to other families.

But, just as with self-isolation during the Coronavirus epidemic,

for the system to be effective, it required compliance.

In 1665, people widely concealed cases of plague,

to avoid being shut up,

and many others distracted watchers and escaped.

The rejection of the system was strikingly demonstrated here,

at the Ship Tavern in Holborn.

In the spring of 1665,

there was an outbreak of plague in this 450-year-old tavern.

Now the landlord and his family were shut up by the authorities,

a red cross was painted on the door

and watchmen were put on guard.

Well this did not go down well with the locals,

who rioted to set them free.

It was reported that the door was opened in a vicious manner,

and the people of the house permitted to go abroad

into the streets, promiscuously, with others.

Well this enraged the authorities,

who ordered that the Justices of the Peace

inflict upon the rioters the severest of punishments.

The failure of shutting up to contain the epidemic was clear

as the death rate spiralled ever higher.

No-one in the city was safe.

By the end of July 1665,

nearly 300 Londoners a day were dying of plague.

The disease had spread from the western suburbs

to almost every area of the city.

The northern suburbs of Clerkenwell and Shoreditch

were now the worst hit.

The death toll reached 6,774.

Samuel Pepys was one of the few wealthy elite

who had stayed in London.

Although still predominantly affecting the poor neighbourhoods,

plague now reached his wealthy parish of St Olave Hart Street.

He says he heard the death knell ringing out from his church

five or six times a day.

Along with everyone else who could,

he self-isolated and rarely left his home.

And this was just one of the ways that the people who stayed in London

began to change their behaviour in an effort to save themselves.

When they did have to leave the house,

they tried to stay in the centre of the street

to avoid getting infected from the houses on either side.

And the streets became increasingly deserted.

And if you did encounter anyone, you tried to keep a safe distance.

People still needed food and supplies

and some shops remained open.

The rich, like Pepys, sent their servants.

Everyone instinctively took precautions.

Morning. Morning, sir.

Can I get a shoulder of lamb, please?

You certainly can.

Now, when people came to the butcher shop to get fresh meat,

they had to put their payment in coins into vinegar,

rather than handing the money over directly.

There you go.

Vinegar does have anti-bacterial properties,

although it's not known if it kills plague.

Thank you very much, shoulder of lamb's hanging just over there, sir.

The shopper would then take their purchase directly off the hook,

avoiding any personal contact with the butcher.

It's the same social distancing we use in epidemic control today.

Although at the time,

people weren't sure how plague was being transmitted,

through experience, they knew to keep away from others.

And because body lice are transferred by close contact,

this would have been effective.

Particularly extreme precautions are believed

to have been taken by those doctors that didn't leave London.

It's thought that they wore a downright sinister

protective outfit when visiting plague patients.

Raksha has gone to find out if this outfit really existed

and how effective it may have been.

I've come to the London Dungeons.

Here, they have a replica of a plague doctor's clothing

as part of their creepy plague street experience.

But this outfit is so horrific,

I wonder if it's a myth,

part of the spooky Halloween version of the plague?

To find out, I'm meeting historian Doctor Philippa Hellawell.

Well, I'm not going to lie, this scares the bejesus out of me.

I can see that it would be a really good fancy dress costume,

but how is this based in reality?

So there are a lot of sources from the 17th century

which suggests that plague doctors walked around

in an outfit similar to this.

So where does this costume actually originate from then?

It was developed by a French physician called Charles de Lorme

who served three successive French monarchs.

This is actually a German source

talking about the use of this costume.

The gentleman here is described as Doctor Beak.

So this outfit relates to the very common theory of miasma,

which is the idea the disease is caused through

poisonous vapours going through the air.

And we can see that reflected in the mask,

this kind of beaked quality of the mask,

it's designed to actually store sweet smelling substances,

perfumes, things like lavender,

which are designed to kind of protect the wearer

from the bad, the poisonous,

foul smelling odours from coming into the body.

And also we see that the majority of the body is covered as well.

What was this all made out of?

So this would typically be made out of cotton or linen,

which was sealed with wax.

I mean, it's quite interesting, isn't it,

because in the 17th century, they wouldn't have known about bacteria

being spread through lice and fleas.

And if this was covered in wax, this would be a barrier.

They would just literally drop off, it's pretty effective.

We do have a 17th century monk in Genoa

who is saying how wearing something like this, you know,

protects him from being bitten by fleas and lice,

and so it certainly had its practical advantages.

Now I'm going to put this on.

Oop.

Do you know what, it's quite effective,

cos it's sealed at the bottom.

I mean, you can't see very must, but if you're got glass on that,

then it would protect you from people sneezing on you, wouldn't it?

Mm-hm, yeah.

I think what comes through is actually the logic of it all,

covering the skin and covering the face,

having glasses, lenses over your eyes

was seen as quite an effective way to protect yourselves.

So as scary as this seems and as ridiculous as it looks,

it's almost like a modern day Hazmat suit.

I mean, it's quite effective, isn't it?

There's definitely method to the madness.

So while a version of this outfit was worn in Europe,

there's no evidence doctors were stalking the streets of London

wearing it.

No-one from the time mentions it,

and I think they probably would.

Coming up...

..the outbreak overwhelms the authorities...

I think people find this whole thing of large numbers of bodies

just being tossed in together very, very disturbing.

..and spreads beyond the capital to the rest of the country.

It's almost like facing a certain death.

In the second week of August, 1665,

there were a shocking 3,880 plague deaths.

About 6% of Londoners who'd stayed had now died.

It was still the poor northern suburbs around Shoreditch

that were bearing the brunt,

and a majority of their population were now falling sick.

The worst affected parishes were also overwhelmed by dead,

some of them had to somehow bury 600 people a week.

They didn't have the manpower to collect all the bodies

or dig all the graves

and many of the churchyards were completely full.

The Lord Mayor realised that soon, thousands of bodies would be left

unburied in houses and in the streets.

So a burial operation on an almost industrial scale was begun.

Dozens of carters were hired to collect the dead.

These dead carts patrolled the streets at night.

A bell ringer walked ahead to call to families

to bring out their dead,

but also to warn others to steer clear

of the infected corpses they carried.

These were then transported to huge burial pits

that had been dug outside the city walls.

According to Daniel Defoe,

one of the greatest pits of all was dug here,

next to the Church of St Botolph in Aldgate,

just outside the old eastern city wall.

Daniel Defoe tells us that this dreadful gulf

was actually beneath my feet.

It was 40 feet long, extending almost to the end of the alley,

it was 15 feet wide, so about the width of this alley,

and it was 20 feet deep.

They only stopped digging when they hit the water table.

To find out who was buried in this pit,

I'm meeting up again with Vanessa Harding.

Hi, Vanessa, very nice to see you.

I've just been pacing out the plague pit outside,

I think you've got the church records from the same period.

Yes, these are the registers for September 1665.

And what kind of things are we seeing at that time?

This is one of the largest parishes,

and it's one of the highest death tolls anywhere.

You start on this page, this is the 8th of September,

this is one day, starts there.

Mm-hm. Runs right down this page,

something like 90 people are buried in one day.

I mean, that's amazing. Yes.

So 90 deaths in a single day?

Yes.

There's no way you can put those people in normal,

traditional graves and have funerals, is there?

No, no.

They're not even burying in coffins anymore.

And they're in mass graves?

They're in plague pits at this point?

Most of them, yes.

It's clearly one of the traumatic sides of

the epidemic as a whole,

is that it destroys the ways in which people are used to

taking care of the dead, paying proper respect,

being able to see them into a grave.

I think people find this whole thing of large numbers

of bodies just being tossed in together, very, very disturbing.

So Defoe says that that huge pit out there,

in two weeks, it was filled with bodies,

that they had 1,114 people in that pit.

Does that fit with the data you've got from the register?

Absolutely, yes.

Wow.

So what do you see if you look at the list of names here?

We can see that it's right across the parish,

but they're also mostly coming from the poorer areas,

from the alleys, so it's Woolsack Alley,

Harrow Alley, Three Kings Alley, Gravel Lane,

Squirrel Alley, Still Alley.

So the wealthier people would have lived on the High Street?

Yes. And we don't see the High Street coming up very much here.

Just one or two names.

This was because, by this time,

most of the rich houses on the High Street would've been empty.

Because by midsummer, up to 20% of London's population had fled.

By the end of August, a shocking 7% of those who remained had died,

and over 6,000 more were dying each week.

Anyone who'd stayed in the city was now losing friends and family.

Puritan Minister, Thomas Vincent,

remained in Spitalfields throughout the plague

in a household of eight people.

He'd had 16 close friends he used to see every week.

Now only four were left alive.

That August, from his window,

he witnessed terrible scenes of tragedy every day,

including a woman forced to bury, with her own hands, her last child.

You couldn't walk through London that terrible August

without coming across plague-ridden people

limping through the streets.

So Samuel Pepys preferred to travel by boat

on the Thames to avoid the sick,

but he got a terrible shock one evening,

coming up the steps from the river,

when he stumbled upon a plague corpse in the darkness.

By midsummer, it's thought that 80,000 people had fled London

and hundreds more were holed up on boats,

lined all the way along the Thames, as far as the eye could see.

But the countryside was no longer a safe haven,

the refugees had taken the plague with them,

and the epidemic would spread across Britain.

I believe people fleeing London had carried it with them

on their lice infested clothes.

Most towns near London saw outbreaks,

infected goods were blamed for causing

particularly severe epidemics in the cloth making towns of Braintree,

Colchester and Norwich.

Most were in the south and east of England,

but one outbreak stands out from all the others.

Eyam is a picturesque village, far from London,

tucked away in a valley deep in the Derbyshire Peak District.

Even today, it's miles from anywhere.

Looking at the village down there,

it couldn't be further removed from the crowds and grime of London,

and that was a true 350 years ago as it is today.

But that pretty village would suffer

one of the most terrible outbreaks of the Great Plague

in all of Britain.

In the 17th century, Eyam was home to about 700 people.

It was in these actual cottages that the Great Plague arrived in Eyam

in the first week of September, 1665.

And this was intriguingly early,

because it hadn't even reached some parishes in London

at this point, and yet,

somehow it had jumped all the way up here

to the heart of the Peak District.

And once again, the outbreak was blamed on a consignment of cloth.

The story goes that consignment was sent from London

to a tailor in Eyam.

A servant, George Vickers,

opened the box and discovered the goods were damp.

He was ordered to dry them out by the fire,

by doing this he somehow, tragically,

contracted the plague.

In recent times, the story has been dismissed as a myth.

The crucial question for me is could plague really be spread

by shipments of cloth and clothing?

It's blamed in so many outbreaks,

and it only really makes sense if you believe,

like I do, that the disease is mainly spread by human clothes lice,

rather than by rats.

But any infected lice in the box

wouldn't have been able to feed,

there was no-one to suck blood from.

So could they have survived the many days it would have taken

a cart to travel from London to Eyam?

Raksha has gone to find out.

She's at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

to meet Professor James Logan,

who's been running an experiment on lice survival.

So we know that this box of damp cloth arrived from London to Eyam.

What are the chances of body lice actually surviving

in that consignment of cloth?

So basically, we wanted to find out how long these guys can survive

when they're off the hosts.

It's very hard to get hold of body lice,

so we've used head lice, which are very similar.

So we managed to get some head lice ten days ago.

We put them in an incubator at their optimum temperature

and optimum humidity.

After 24 hours, about 80% of them had actually died.

After two days 90% had died.

But by day five, there was still one louse alive.

It was quite incredible. That's remarkable, isn't it? Yeah, yeah.

You know, we know head lice tend not to survive as long as

body lice and, yet, even in this experiment,

we've shown that one louse could survive five days.

So with body lice, they'd be surviving a good few days

beyond that as well,

so they would...I would be very convinced that there would be lice

still alive, under those conditions, in that box.

But there is potentially another way that it could be transmitted,

and that's through their faeces.

There's one thing about insects that feed on blood

and that's that they poo a lot. Oh gosh, and that's that?

And you can see all the poo on that piece of paper.

Let's have a look at it under the microscope.

So you can see how much poo there is there.

I mean, they're absolutely minuscule,

you can barely see an individual poo... Mm.

..with the naked eye. But there you can see how many there are.

And inside that poo, the bacteria can actually survive

and be transmitted onwards.

And basically, what happens, because it's really, really dusty,

if you were to sort of shake the cloth,

the poo would be airborne,

it could go into your lungs and infect you that way,

or if you've got a cut on the skin,

the poo could get in that way, which means the bacteria would get in

and that's another way that the infection

possibly could have started.

This experiment has shown the story of how the contagion spread

to Eyam may be true.

The box could have contained lice infested clothes

from a plague victim,

or the person who packed it could've been ill.

And even if no lice had survived,

their faeces may have infected the servant, George Vickers.

And his death, shortly after unpacking the box,

began a terrible chain of events in Eyam.

We know from wills and parish records

that the first person to die, the servant George Vickers,

lived in that cottage there.

A fortnight later, Edward Cooper, only four years old,

who also lived in that cottage, died.

A day later, Peter Hawksworth,

their neighbour at that end, died,

and then a few days after that,

Thomas Thorpe and his daughter, Mary,

the neighbours on this side, also died.

This was only the beginning for the villagers.

The disease would continue to spread.

And we'll discover how it led to an extraordinary act

of self-sacrifice by the people of Eyam.

In London, the death rate remained unrelentingly high.

By the 11th of September,

over 37,000 people had died.

In desperation, the Lord Mayor ordered great bonfires

be lit in the streets,

in the belief that the smoke would drive out the miasmas

thought to be spreading the disease.

Samuel Pepys watched in awe and fear as they blazed across the city.

But, of course, it was hopeless.

The epidemic still had not reached its peak.

In the first week of September 1665,

bubonic plague was raging through the streets of London.

The death rate in the city had reached unprecedented levels.

Four months into the epidemic,

almost 7,000 Londoners a week were dying.

It had already killed more than 30,000,

around 8% of the city's population.

Each week, the death rate increased remorselessly,

with no end in sight.

With over 1,000 people dying every single day,

the onslaught began to overwhelm attempts to

cope with and control the outbreak.

The system of shutting up was abandoned,

to the horror of Samuel Pepys.

Pepys saw people stumbling through the streets

and was terrified he was coming into contact with those who,

in his words, had plague upon them.

In his book, A Journal of the Plague Year,

Daniel Defoe describes the scenes that unfolded

on London streets as order collapsed.

The account is thought to be based on the experiences of his uncle,

Henry Foe.

We're told that at the height of the outbreak,

Henry Foe was holed up in his house,

right here on Aldgate High Street,

it would've been where the tube station is.

Now, like other better off people,

he lived on the wide main street,

but from his window, he could see Harrow Alley, still here.

This was one of London's infamous back alley slums,

where body lice and human flea infestations

allowed the disease to run rampant.

This is what Defoe tells us was going on in this very spot

at the height of the plague.

"Scarce a day or night passed that some dismal thing happened

"at the end of that Harrow Alley."

Which was a place full of poor.

"Throngs of people would burst out, most of them women,

"making a dreadful clamour, a mixture of screeches and crying."

On one occasion, Henry Foe saw a man with plague overwhelmed

by insufferable pain,

run naked out here from Harrow Alley and set off down the high street.

He was chased by five or six women and children,

crying out for him to come back and trying to persuade others

to help them stop him,

but no-one, not even his family,

was prepared to touch him.

Henry Foe, watching from his window over there,

saw them all disappear off down the street.

By September, the city authorities were also struggling

to deal with the dead.

There weren't enough dead carts

to collect all the bodies each night for burial,

a crisis made worse

because the carters themselves were also dying of plague.

Desperate families resorted to carrying their own loved ones

to the graveyards.

But many churchyards were already full,

including the one outside Samuel Pepys local church,

Saint Olave Hart Street.

This is the street where Pepys was living in September 1665,

Seething Lane.

Now Pepys' home was just down there,

it's long gone, replaced by modern buildings,

but his parish church still survives.

This grim gate is the one Pepys would have walked through

to get to his church.

But even this foreboding gate paled in comparison

to what Pepys found on the other side.

He tells us that so many plague victims were buried here,

one on top of the other,

that the ground level actually rose,

and it frightened him so much,

he refused to walk through the churchyard anymore.

Churchyards across London were said to be three feet higher

than they were before the Great Plague.

Incredibly, the level of this churchyard is still raised,

I have to walk down these steps to get into Pepys' church.

I'm meeting Vanessa Harding to discover what the church's

burial registers reveal about life in Pepys' parish

at the height of the epidemic.

These are the parish registers, the burial registers,

from the period that Pepys lived here, and its extremely good,

it's extremely rich in detail for the period of the plague.

Unusually, the parish clerk marks every single plague burial

with the letter P.

You can see the first page, there are quite a few plague deaths,

but there are quite a few that aren't,

but by the time we turn the page and get into August

and then into September,

you can see that almost every death is a plague death.

And people would have seen the plague moving through a family.

Yes. Clearing an entire household in a fortnight. Mm.

And presumably that's what you see through the whole parish,

that the place begins to... Yeah. ..it feels like the apocalypse.

Yes, it, it must have done. I mean particularly,

I think, in some ways cos it's a wealthy parish,

people may have thought they would escape.

I mean, it's, it's overwhelmingly clear from this book

that once it gets going,

even in a wealthy parish like this, no-one is safe,

that every part of London is affected.

Yes, and there are some very dramatic and tragic stories here.

So, for example, on the 10th of September,

Zachary, the son of Edmund Poole,

died of plague and was buried in the churchyard.

And then the next day, his brother, Henry,

the son of Edmund Poole, also died of plague.

Zachary was about 12, and Henry was about 14.

I mean, quite hard to think about as a parent,

Zachary is a year older than my son,

and in 24 hours,

Edmund Poole has buried two of his kids.

That's right.

But I'm afraid it gets worse.

Just a few days later, we have Elizabeth,

daughter of Edmund Poole, and her brother,

Edward, son of Edmund Poole, both of them died of plague,

20th of September.

And then we have, on the 21st of September, John,

the son of Edmund Poole, buried in the churchyard.

All of these marked as plague burials.

So in 11 days, Edmund Poole has buried five of his children.

Yes, probably all five of his children.

Yeah. We don't think he had any more.

Wow.

And then, just a few days later,

on the 25th of September,

Edmund Poole himself dies of plague and is buried in the churchyard.

Is there a mother? Does he have a wife?

We know that his wife's called Elizabeth,

and there is an Elizabeth Poole, a widow,

living in the parish in March the following year,

we find her as a householder.

So I think it's quite likely she is the widow,

the mother of this family.

Almost worse to have survived it,

and having lost five children and your husband.

Yes.

Wow.

Wow.

But the fatalities were still rising.

In mid-September 1665,

four and a half months since the epidemic began engulfing London,

the plague reached its peak.

In just one week,

between the 12th and the 18th of September,

plague killed 7,165 Londoners.

Deaths were reported across the city in 126 parishes.

And those are just the official figures,

many cases of plague were either misdiagnosed

or deliberately passed off as something else.

The real figure for that week was probably 10,000 cases,

more than 1,400 a day.

Death rates peaking in late summer was a pattern seen in earlier

plague outbreaks in Britain.

The relationship between the weather and the plague

was noticed by William Boghurst,

an apothecary who worked here on Drury Lane

throughout the great plague, where the outbreak began.

Now his shop would've been a stall inside this pub.

It's not the original building,

but, in fact, there has been a White Hart pub here

since the 15th century.

Boghurst noticed death rates changed according to the seasons,

they increased if hot conditions were followed by rain,

while frosty weather caused a massive decline in fatalities.

This is the opposite of infections like flu and coronaviruses.

It seems the plague thrived in warm, humid conditions,

but it didn't like it too hot, too cold or too dry.

The records show the summer of 1665 was both hot and humid...

..weather conditions that may have exacerbated

the severity of the epidemic.

In the week to the 25th of September,

5,533 Londoners died of plague.

Around 1,500 fewer than the previous week.

It was a glimmer of hope that the worst had passed.

William Boghurst was one of the few medical men

left in London by this point.

Most doctors and surgeons had joined the great exodus

of professionals who'd fled the city.

At the time, this cowardice horrified

the abandoned people of London.

But, because doctors didn't then understand bacterial disease

and had no drugs to treat plague,

even the ones who stayed didn't much help the situation.

John Sergeant had headed to the

Saint Bartholomew Hospital Pathology Museum

to see what treatments doctors attempted.

Among the 5,000 medical specimens kept here,

there are some from 19th century plague epidemics.

This is a rat infected by the plague,

that's gruesome, kept in formaldehyde.

And this is even more poignant,

this is a human lung from a plague victim.

I'm meeting Kevin Goodman,

an expert in early medicine and surgery,

who's collected a vast array of 17th century medical instruments.

Well, this is an amazing collection of objects,

some of them, I must say, rather sinister.

But these are all medical tools of the trade at the time?

Yes.

So what does that do? That's a fleam.

Now, a fleam was normally used for bleeding,

for opening a vein.

For treatment of buboes, you would perforate....

Right. ..the bubo.

So if you had the bubo here, they'd just stick it in you?

Yes. God, but this is all incredibly painful, eugh. Oh, yes.

OK, so how would you get the pus out?

I would then heat a cup up,

place it on the bubo,

and then, as it cooled,

the vacuum would draw out all the nasty pus full of germs.

Oh, right, right.

So you'd put this on.

So this would go through there? Yeah.

And the idea is to break the bubo, that's the bit?

Yeah. OK, right.

So they would think they were doing something useful.

So what else have we got? What are all these things here?

I've got a selection of cauterising irons here.

Yu could heat that up,

place it into the middle of the bubo to burn it.

Horrible, isn't it?

Making it so hot that the flesh burns.

Yes, the pain would have been agonising.

And don't forget, there's going to be no pain control with this,

you had to just bite down and endure it.

But would any of these methods actually work?

No. If you're going to start cutting into buboes,

or burning into them, you're going to start letting out lots of

germ infested pus,

you're going to increase the risk of other people catching it,

also you're increasing the risk of infection.

Right, so actually, they're making things worse with all this stuff?

Indeed. At the time, people would be so fearful,

there would be so much terror that they'd just sort of say,

give me anything you can to help me,

because they were so desperate.

It is a time of desperation, complete and utter.

I thought nothing could be more terrible

than having the plague,

but it seems being treated for it could've been worse.

While these 17th century medical interventions

may have done more harm than good,

we're about to discover if other methods for controlling plague

may have been more effective than we ever imagined.

As the weather cooled in the autumn of 1665,

plague deaths in London continued to fall.

By mid-October, 4,500 fewer people a week were dying,

compared to a month earlier.

Most deaths were now in the eastern parishes

of Aldgate and Whitechapel,

which were poorer parishes outside the city walls.

The disease had passed like a wave,

from the west of the city to the east.

In the western parishes, where the outbreak began,

the vulnerable had already died,

and those who'd recovered now had some resistance to the disease.

It's thought that up to 80,000 people had fled London,

20% of the population.

And among those who'd stayed,

about one in five had died.

For those still alive,

the city had changed beyond all recognition.

This was observed by puritan minister Thomas Vincent,

one of the few who continued to preach to his congregation

and visit the sick.

He wrote that the terror of the disease had broken societal bonds

and drained peoples hearts of love and pity.

He was horrified to see families abandoning their loved ones.

In Spitalfields, his household of eight

had managed to escape the disease,

but then he tells us,

plague came in dreadfully upon them.

Over the course of two weeks,

three of his household fell ill and died.

A story which was echoed in thousands of homes across the city,

many of which now stood empty.

The Lord Mayor now had to somehow deal with these infected houses.

I'm going to take a look at the orders he issued,

detailing how they should be disinfected.

I'm interested to discover if the methods

would have been effective against the human fleas

and body lice we now know spread the plague.

There were instructions about what to do

with these abandoned infected houses.

And the first was to keep them uninhabited for 40 days,

now that's very effective against human body lice,

if they don't eat for 40 days, they die.

But there were other instructions as well.

Each infected house was to be fumed,

washed and whited with lime.

Now whited with lime means whitewashed,

and fumed, we have a description of what that is here.

And the recipe for fuming is to take saltpetre,

amber, brimstone, each of two parts,

juniper one part, mix them in a powder,

put thereof upon a red hot iron or coals, a little at once.

A Frenchman, James Angier had introduced this fumigation

recipe to London,

claiming the smoke successfully decontaminated houses in Paris.

Now I'm very curious to know if fuming or washing with lime

could possibly help in controlling the plague.

It seems unlikely that whitewash,

commonly painted outside and inside houses in the 17th century,

would have much effect on the plague bacteria.

So Raksha's putting it to the test with Doctor Sam Willcocks...

Hi, Sam.

..at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

So what we have here are these three wooden tiles.

They're our pseudo 17th century walls, aren't they?

That's right.

Sam coats each tile with a spray of bacteria.

It's similar to plague, but not deadly, and then allows them to dry.

This spray is going to simulate,

a cough or body fluids that have landed on a surface.

We treat one with modern anti-bac,

one with water and one with our limewash.

So, let's see if this works.

Then we swab down each one and transfer them to agar plates

to see if any bacteria will grow.

Two days later, the results are in.

So here are the plates.

Ooh, let's have a look then.

That's our anti-bac. That's right, this is our,

our household anti-bac spray.

And there's no colony growth at all on that plate,

which is what we were hoping for. It's clean as a whistle.

Our next plate was the sterile water that we sprayed on to the tiles,

you can see some colonies growing there quite nicely on the plates.

I can clearly see spots on that, so that's the bacteria growing.

That's right, yeah.

Right, so what about our final experiment?

OK. Well, the limewash did kill all the bacteria.

I can't see any colonies on there at all,

it's as good as the anti-bac spray that we use nowadays.

It really is.

So they kind of knew what they were doing, didn't they?

It worked, it worked.

I'm going to start limewashing my kitchen now. Yeah.

THEY LAUGH

In the 17th century,

they wouldn't have known how it worked,

but amazingly, they'd learnt from experience.

Limewashing houses controlled disease.

But what about fumigation?

Our experiment this time is being carried out

in a very different location,

a farm shed on the South Downs,

by pyrotechnics expert, Mike Sanson.

Hello, Mike. Hi, there, how you doing?

Talk about plague and pestilence,

you've definitely got a flood here, haven't you?

I know, a shocking day, isn't it?

I don't say this very often, but I've got fleas.

Oh, nice.

But what I wanted to do is see if we can recreate

17th century fumigation.

I want to know if it was really effective in killing fleas and lice,

cos we know that these are the carrier of the plague.

Right, so I've got the chemicals that I know were used

for fumigation in the 17th century.

Brimstone, first of all, sulphur.

So, the reason it was called brimstone

was because it was found on the brim of volcanoes.

And then we've got the saltpetre, potassium nitrate,

which is a strong oxidising agent.

And I know these two burn really well together,

because they're the main components of gunpowder.

They burn quite ferociously,

and then it produces quite a noxious gas called sulphur dioxide.

Let's do it.

The shed will act as our infected 17th century room.

It's a lovely little shed you've got here.

The lid of the flea container is a porous mesh

that will allow in the fumes.

So there's this plume of gas coming out at a steady rate.

It's filling this whole shed up now, isn't it?

Exactly, yeah.

They certainly don't look very active now, do they? No.

Oh, I just saw one drop.

Oh, they're all dropping, they're all dropping.

They're dropping like fleas.

Let's have a look. Yeah, right.

Ooh, smoky still. Whoa-ho.

Oh gosh, they're definitely dead, aren't they?

I think that's worked really well.

It has.

I mean, it's pretty spectacular, isn't it,

that in the 17th century,

they were using this method to fumigate houses?

That is incredible. It's a really effective insecticide.

They were getting rid of the things,

the fleas and the lice,

that were killing and passing on the plague to other people.

Amazing.

They didn't know how it was working,

but this simple disinfection method

would have helped normality slowly to return to London.

And in late October, 1665, some life returned to the streets.

But things had changed.

Diarist Samuel Pepys says he walked to the Royal Exchange

and heard only conversations about who had died

and who was still ill.

He also tells us there were still plague victims

in the streets.

Although, by now, the death rate was heading steadily downwards.

From the September peak of over PPLAUSE,000 deaths a day,

by October the 30th,

plague fatalities had dropped to PPLAUSE,000 deaths a week.

The declining death rate encouraged the many thousands

who'd fled to the countryside

to begin returning to London.

Daniel Defoe says they were tired of being away from London so long

and were so eager to get back,

they flocked into the city here, without any thought or fear.

This influx caused a brief spike in deaths in early November,

because, as more people came back to the city,

there were also more people vulnerable

to catching the infection.

But, from mid-November,

plague deaths fell every week.

By mid-winter 1665,

the cold weather had reduced the death rate to around 40 a day.

After a year,

the Great Plague epidemic in London was coming to an end.

Finally, after Christmas,

King Charles and his court returned to his palace at Westminster.

They'd spent most of the year in Oxford,

which unlike many towns in southern England,

hadn't seen a single case of plague,

and that's probably because royal guards were posted

day and night on each of the four bridges

that led in and out of town, and they didn't let anyone in.

This was a highly effective form of quarantine,

and King Charles seems to have had a pleasant time in Oxford,

even managing to get one of his mistresses pregnant.

But his abandonment of his capital in its hour of need

didn't go down well with its inhabitants.

While London had now seen the worst of the epidemic,

the rest of the country was not so lucky.

In the spring of 1666,

towns across Britain were hit by plague again.

Like Oxford, many towns around the country

tried to quarantine themselves.

They stopped all trade with London

and armed volunteers prevented strangers

from entering towns and villages.

But they often weren't as successful as the royal troops.

Plague, again, swept through towns like

Colchester and Cambridge,

which had suffered terribly the previous year.

And this time, the outbreaks were even more severe.

But it was the villagers of Eyam,

deep in the Derbyshire Peak District,

who would become famous for their heroic response

to the disease.

I'm about to find out what they did.

In the summer of 1666,

a story of extraordinary heroism and self-sacrifice

unfolded here in Eyam in Derbyshire.

The instigator was the village vicar,

the Reverend William Mompesson.

When Mompesson realised that winter hadn't put an end

to the outbreak in the village,

he sent his wife, Catherine, and his children away

to stay with friends in Yorkshire.

But Catherine returned to support her husband.

In late May, 1666,

Mompesson made a decision that would have terrible consequences

for everyone in the village.

To discover what happened,

I'm meeting Joan Plant,

whose family have lived in Eyam since the time of the plague.

Tell me about this extraordinary decision made by Mompesson?

He'd seen instances of plague in the country before.

He got together with the previous minister,

Stanley, and they made a plan.

They would close the church,

close the churchyard and close the village.

And this is what Mompesson had to ask the village to do,

simply to contain the disease.

And they agreed, which was just incredible.

What does that mean to close a village back then?

Well, it means you put a border the whole way round,

nobody goes, comes in, and nobody goes out.

Tell me about the significance of this particular place.

So Mompesson's Well is a running water well,

and this was the northern boundary point when they closed the village.

And the village people would leave money here

for the provisions that would be brought along the road

from the Earl of Devonshire and surrounding villages.

Families could have chosen to flee the infected village

to save themselves, just as happened in London.

But, incredibly, they chose to stay,

hoping to prevent the disease spreading

and so save the neighbouring villages and towns

from the same fate.

I think the older I get,

the more I think about that and think how brave

and courageous they must have been.

Because it's almost like facing a certain death.

The villagers knew the terrible sacrifice they were making,

because dozens of their neighbours had already fallen ill,

and the contagion was accelerating.

The price they paid for their selfless decision

can be seen in the parish church registers.

So this is the record of deaths in Eyam during

the period of the plague.

So you can see here, it says, "Here follows the names with

"the numbers of persons who died of the plague."

And we start with the first victim,

George Viccars, on September the 7th of 1665.

But it really gets going in the summer of the next year.

If I turn to June,

we see we've got 21 deaths,

then in July, there are 58 deaths,

and then turning to August,

we get 80 deaths.

This entire page...

..filled with families completely wiped out.

In a small village, it's extraordinary,

and that trajectory is the same thing we saw

in London in the summer of the previous year.

Of course, it's an extraordinary document

in terms of public health, in terms of data,

about how the epidemic spread.

But the other thing that's so overwhelming when you look at it,

is the number of deaths in a small community.

All these people friends and family,

it must have been absolutely horrific living through this,

completely terrifying.

This isolated burial plot

on a hillside overlooking the village

gives some sense of the horrific scale of these tragedies.

I'm visiting with Doctor Lilith Whittles,

whose investigated if the plague in Eyam was spread here

in the same way as it spread in London.

Seven members of the Hancock family are buried here,

near where they lived.

Six children and their father,

who all died within one week of each other.

Only the mother, Elizabeth, survived.

It's a pretty bleak image, isn't it?

Elizabeth Hancock up here,

she's not doing fancy gravestones or anything,

she's digging holes and dragging her family members into them.

Yep. And there's no funeral, there's no vicar, there's no mourners.

Nope. It's just her.

Well, the social distancing measures that the villagers had taken

meant that they weren't coming to funerals

and weren't helping out in burials, they couldn't.

So what you're able to do with a computer is simulate

what if the epidemic was spread by rats,

what if it was spread in different ways,

and to figure out what the most likely way of it spreading was.

Exactly that. And what do you find?

The most likely explanation for the transmission

was the plague being transmitted from human to human through

ectoparasites, such as human lice and human fleas.

For a long time, there's been this story that

the villagers of Eyam

kind of pointlessly quarantined themselves.

They'd quarantined themselves against a disease

that was not spread by humans, it was spread by rats.

Yep. And actually your modelling suggests that what they did

was really important. Absolutely.

If the plague was spread by human to human contact,

through their ectoparasites,

then by distancing themselves from the surrounding area,

they stopped the spread of plague to places like Sheffield,

where if an infected person had started an outbreak there,

we could have seen many, many more deaths,

like we did in the London, outbreak.

So I kind of imagine Elizabeth Hancock up here,

digging these graves and I guess,

now, at least, we can see she is doing something really important,

she saved a lot of lives.

Absolutely, they all did something extraordinary, the villages of Eyam.

Wow.

So now we know Eyam's quarantine was both heroic

and worthwhile.

The village's last plague victim was buried

on the 1st of November 1666.

In total, 257 people died of the disease,

about 40% of the population.

William Mompesson, the vicar who instigated the village's quarantine

also paid a heavy price.

His wife, Catherine,

who'd returned to support her husband's work in Eyam,

died of plague in August.

As the vicar's wife, she was the only person allowed

to be buried in the churchyard.

While the plague raged in Eyam in the summer of 1666,

London was reporting few cases.

Fatalities had dropped by 95%,

and life was returning to normal.

But then, unbelievably,

the capital was hit by another tragedy.

In September, the Great Fire destroyed much of the walled city.

Although it's widely believed that this burnt the plague out of London,

the statistics suggest it was a coincidence.

The epidemic was already ending by the time the flames took hold.

We'll never know for certain how many Londoners died

during the Great Plague,

but the official estimate of around 70,000 is undoubtedly too low.

Many cases of plague were misidentified

and many burials went unrecorded.

So it's actually thought that over 100,000 Londoners

died during the plague.

That's around a quarter of the population.

The last plague death recorded in London was in 1679,

and there were no other outbreaks in Britain until the early 1900s,

when the third plague pandemic swept the world.

From 1900, there were plague deaths in port towns,

including Glasgow, Cardiff and Liverpool.

The most recent plague outbreak in Britain was in Suffolk in 1918.

None of the outbreaks of plague in 20th century Britain

turned into epidemics,

and that's because modern hygiene means that

there aren't the body lice or the human fleas around

to fuel the spread.

But plague isn't the only pandemic we face,

and, in fact, Coronavirus itself is only one of the many diseases

that have swept the world since the 17th century.

Through most of human history,

disease has killed far more than war or natural disasters.

Epidemics like cholera,

smallpox and tuberculosis killed hundreds of millions

in the 20th century alone.

Modern medicine has helped bring about a massive reduction

in these ancient pandemic diseases.

But, as Covid-19 reminds us,

new diseases emerge all the time.

And in fact, with modern travel,

population growth and environmental destruction,

we now face more outbreaks than ever before.

In 1918, the Spanish Flu killed up to 50 million people.

Since 1980, we've suffered SARS, MERS,

Ebola and the deadliest, AIDS,

which has so far killed an estimated 32 million people.

And now there's Covid-19.

The methods that we use to respond initially

to these disasters are the same ones we used

during the Great Plague, quarantine and social distancing.

But we now also have modern science,

which has successfully controlled and, in some cases, defeated

almost every disease humanity has faced.

New diseases will continue to emerge,

but unlike our ancestors during the Great Plague,

we are now in a much better position to fight back.

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