I saw this yesterday, and I’ve thought about it a lot. Pepys was and is considered quite wise. Although here, he shows how ill advised and wrong everyone was about the speed of the plague .

Plague had been around for several centuries in England by the time Pepys was born.

Despite this, no one knew how plague spread. Doctors were able to define what plague was, they could easily diagnose it, but they had no clue how it spread.

We all know the nursery rhyme associated with the plague?

“Ring-a-ring of roses,
A pocketful of posies,
Attischo, Attischo,
We all fall down.”

In the 14th Century they believed plague spread by a gas called miasma. It could only be stopped if you carried flowers; the smell of the flowers overpowering germs carried by the miasma.

The miasma theory was only really dropped in the 19th century.

But by the 17th century, when Pepys wrote his diaries, other theories were prevelant, including that plague spread person to person.

The quarantining of ships from infected ports had some effect. So, any family that had one member infected by plague was locked in their home for forty days and nights.

A red cross was painted on the door to warn others of the plight of those in the house. No one was allowed in.

The 1665 outbreak began in London in February. Within seven months 100,000 Londoners (20% or one-fifth of the population) were dead.

London’s population had continued to grow; many lived in squalor & poverty. The only way to get rid of rubbish was to throw it out into the streets. This included household waste as well as human waste. London was a filthy place. Perfect for breeding rats who lived off the waste.

People’s lives and businesses suffered terribly because so many were shut in their homes. One eyewitness said that London became so quiet that every day was like a Sunday and grass started to grow in the streets.

Many were forced to beg or steal food and money because the plague had such a bad effect on trade.
Between one and three people died in most infected homes. In extreme cases whole families died. People were terrified of the disease.

Some threw sick servants into the streets, others refused to help sick friends and family.

Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary, ‘the plague is making us cruel as dogs to one another.’

Sounds familiar?

Of course we know now that it was a bite from certain type of flea, not even any flea, from black rats that were the cause of plague.

Cotton bales from infected ships probably carried rats and fleas which moved the disease around the globe, it’s why quarantining helped.

But Pepys was unlikely to have ever been bitten by a flea from a rat in the pub. More likely it would have been when he slept in his bed at night. But it was the poor who shared their homes with black rats, not the wealthy.

Having a dram in the pub would have made no difference.