test parts of the kingdom.

The women and servants that were turned off from their places were
employed as nurses to tend the sick in all places, and this took off a
very great number of them.

And which,[153] though a melancholy article in itself, yet was a
deliverance in its kind, namely, the plague, which raged in a dreadful
manner from the middle of August to the middle of October, carried off
in that time thirty or forty thousand of these very people, which, had
they been left, would certainly have been an insufferable burden by
their poverty; that is to say, the whole city could not have supported
the expense of them, or have provided food for them, and they would in
time have been even driven to the necessity of plundering either the
city itself, or the country adjacent, to have subsisted themselves,
which would, first or last, have put the whole nation, as well as the
city, into the utmost terror and confusion.

It was observable, then, that this calamity of the people made them very
humble; for now, for about nine weeks together, there died near a
thousand a day, one day with another, even by the account of the weekly
bills, which yet, I have reason to be assured, never gave a full account
by many thousands; the confusion being such, and the carts working in
the dark when they carried the dead, that in some places no account at
all was kept, but they worked on; the clerks and sextons not attending
for weeks together, and not knowing what number they carried. This
account is verified by the following bills of mortality:--

Of All Diseases. Of the Plague.
Aug. 8 to Aug. 15 5,319 3,880
Aug. 15 to Aug. 22 5,668 4,237
Aug. 22 to Aug. 29 7,496 6,102
Aug. 29 to Sept. 5 8,252 6,988
Sept. 5 to Sept. 12 7,690 6,544
Sept. 12 to Sept. 19 8,297 7,165
Sept. 19 to Sept. 30 6,400 5,533
Sept. 27 to Oct. 3 5,728 4,929
Oct. 3 to Oct. 10 5,068 4,227
------ ------
59,918 49,605

So that the gross of the people were carried off in these two months;
for, as the whole number which was brought in to die of the plague was
but 68,590, here is[154] 50,000 of them, within a trifle, in two
months: I say 50,000, because as there