My relationship with London Black Death history started, oddly enough, with a badly drawn rat. I was about ten. A primary school project, one of those sugar-paper posters with titles in bubble writing: “THE PLAGUE!!!” I remember sketching a sort of mutant mouse with red eyes and being told the Black Death came, lots of people died, then the Great Fire burned away the infection and everything was fine again.
That simplified story stayed in my head for years, long after I should have known better. Plague as a horrible but brief episode, like a storm: comes, rages, passes. Only when I started working in museums in my twenties and kept tripping over plague references in London records did it start to crumble. This wasn’t a one-off disaster. It was something that rewired the city.
Walking around London now, you don’t see many obvious “plague sites”. There’s no giant rat statue on Cheapside (give it time). But the Black Death – and later plague rounds – are baked into the way the place grew, where people lived, how they worked, even which streets still exist. If you know where to look, you can still walk London’s plague streets.
The schoolbook version tends to go like this: the Black Death hits London in 1348–9. It’s carried by fleas on rats from ships. A third of the population dies, maybe half. Then, centuries later, 1665 brings the Great Plague, and in 1666 the Great Fire conveniently “cleanses” the city. Cue the rise of modern London.
Pieces of that are true. Yes, there were rats (though the story is more complicated and might involve human fleas and lice too). Yes, mortality was appalling. And London did burn in 1666.
But the idea of plague as two or three big spikes massively understates things. Once the Black Death arrived in 1348, plague became a recurring fact of life in London for over three hundred years. Between 1348 and the early eighteenth century, there were at least forty serious outbreaks. Some hit particular parishes, some the whole city. A Londoner born in 1500 grew up with the knowledge that a bad year could cut down a quarter of their neighbours.
That sort of constant threat does something to a city. It changes where you bury people. It changes which trades thrive. It changes who gets to move into the good houses when their owners die. It even changes how people think about fresh air.
I didn’t really grasp the scale until I saw a display at the Museum of London years ago. They’d excavated part of the 14th-century plague cemetery at East Smithfield, near the Tower. The skeletons had been buried in ordered rows, bodies side by side, a bit like sardines in a tin. No coffins, just shrouds. One trench had over fifty people packed into a space you could cross in a dozen strides.
This was one of at least two emergency plague grounds set up by the city in 1348–9 on land outside the city walls. Chroniclers talk about people dying so quickly that churchyards could not cope. One account, by Henry Knighton, talks about “pits” in which bodies were laid “one beside another” until they were full, then covered over and another pit dug.
Behind that horror is something quite practical: London simply ran out of burial space. The existing churchyards around places like St Paul’s and St Mary Woolnoth were already crammed. If you walk past old city churches now and wonder why so many have such oddly small or raised graveyards, plague is part of that story. Graveyards had been filling for centuries. The Black Death turned a slow squeeze into an emergency.
So the city pushed burials outwards. East Smithfield then sat beyond the wall by the Tower; another ground lay north of it. Over time, that idea of pushing the dead to the edges stuck. Later, when new parish churchyards were created during population booms, they tended to go further from the heart of things. The 19th-century explosion of big cemeteries – Highgate, Kensal Green and the rest – is obviously long after plague, but you can see the mental shift starting in the 14th century: central space is for the living; the dead get moved out.
And because London built over almost everything, those plague graves lie under streets and offices. When Crossrail construction cut through part of the Charterhouse Square plague cemetery, the archaeologists found orderly rows plus a stack of bodies tossed into a pit – maybe after a particularly bad week when there was no time for neatness. If you walk around that quiet square now, you are literally on top of part of London Black Death history used again in the 17th century Great Plague.
The numbers are so enormous that it’s easy to lose sight of people.
Take someone like Alice, a fictitious but typical Londoner, the wife of a cordwainer (shoemaker) living near Cheap in 1348. Before plague, their life was cramped but stable: husband working in a small workshop at the front of the house, apprentices sleeping in the garret, Alice managing the household, maybe helping with sales.
By autumn 1348, rumours of death in Dorset had reached London. By the winter, people in the city were dying. Alice would have seen it in small ways first: a neighbour’s shop shuttered; a cart taking away bedding; gossip over the water barrel about swelling in the groin and armpit, about a cook who went from feverish to dead in a day.
The city authorities tried to keep some order. We have records of wills being drawn up in haste, property changing hands between autumn 1348 and spring 1349 at a rate that suggests many families collapsed in months. Parish priests – who often kept good records – died in droves, which ironically means the paperwork for the worst of the plague is sometimes thinner than usual because the people who did the writing were buried in the trenches.
For Alice, this translated into very immediate decisions: did you stay and hope, or flee if you had kin outside the city? Did you keep the shop open and risk infection from customers? If your husband died, could you legally keep trading? (Sometimes yes, sometimes no, depending on guild rules and your capacity to argue.)
Textbooks talk vaguely about “labour shortages”. On the street, that meant suddenly there were fewer apprentices and competitors, and if Alice survived she might find herself running an expanded business inheriting another family’s tools. Wages rose in some trades after the first Black Death – we know from later ordinances that the authorities tried to cap them – but the benefit went unevenly. If you had a trade that people still needed in a crisis (bakers, butchers, gravediggers), you might do well. If your line of work relied on luxury spending, the city’s sudden poverty could finish you off.
One of the more awkward truths about London Black Death history is that catastrophe redistributed wealth upwards as well as downwards.
We tend to emphasise the “good” side of plague for workers: fewer people, higher wages, more bargaining power. There’s some truth there, and you can see it in surviving wage orders and in the anxiety of the 1351 Statute of Labourers, which tried to pin pay at pre-plague levels.
But in dense urban London, where property was everything, plague also opened the way for consolidation. When whole families died, their houses reverted to landlords or passed to distant kin who promptly sold. Monasteries and powerful guilds – the Mercers, the Drapers – picked up strings of properties at advantageous prices. Layers of tenancy grew more complex. By the fifteenth century, you can see in deeds that one wealthy Londoner might control houses scattered from Cornhill to Fleet Street, rented out to a stream of poorer residents.
And then there were the doctors.
Later plagues gave us the theatrical “plague doctor” outfit – the beaked mask stuffed with herbs, the waxed coat – but in the fourteenth century most medical help came from barber-surgeons or physicians offering bloodletting and purging. If you were well-off, you could pay someone to lance your buboes and pray it did more good than harm. If you were poor, your medical options often came down to herbal remedies, charms and perhaps the parish priest reading prayers over you.
So plague sharpened divides. In cramped tenements by the river, whole families died unseen. In wealthy houses with their own wells and better diet, some people survived – partly by luck, partly because distance and nutrition matter with infectious disease. The city we ended up with was shaped by who made it through and what they owned.
Plague didn’t bulldoze London. It nudged, thinned and redirected it.
Parish records show some districts losing far more people than others. Densely packed riverside parishes and those close to market streets had higher mortality than quieter corners. Over time, that uneven loss affected where people wanted to live.
If you stand on Lombard Street or Cornhill now, it’s hard to picture them as semi-residential spaces, but in the fourteenth century merchants often lived above or behind their shops. After repeated waves of plague, wealthier families started to drift westwards, into newer suburbs like Holborn and later towards what we now call the West End. The City became steadily more commercial and less domestic.
You can see the long-term effects in parish mergers after the Great Fire. When Christopher Wren rebuilt city churches, many tiny parishes were simply folded into others because their populations had shrunk or moved. Plague had done some of that work in advance. Those oddly large combined parish names – “St Edmund the King and Martyr and St Nicholas Acons”, for instance – hint at streets thinned out long before 1666.
Even at street level, plague left fingerprints. Narrow courts that once housed multiple households might be blocked off, their entrances incorporated into neighbouring houses. Some vanished entirely, leaving odd dog-legs in the map. When archaeologists dig beneath roads in places like Bishopsgate or Moorgate, they often find foundations from tenements that don’t match the modern street line. A few may have been abandoned or rationalised in the wake of demographic collapse.
Medieval and early modern Londoners didn’t understand germs, but they were very alert to smells. “Miasma” – bad air – was blamed for disease. That might sound daft now, but when you walk past a modern bin lorry on a hot day and instinctively hold your breath, you’re not so far from a fourteenth-century nose.
Repeated plague helped turn vague anxieties about air into concrete action. City authorities passed and re-issued rules against keeping dung-heaps in the street, slaughtering animals in certain lanes, or dumping waste directly outside your door. They rarely managed full compliance, but the effort kept returning each time plague recurred.
By the time of the 1603 and 1625 outbreaks, London had a fairly developed – if patchily enforced – set of “plague orders”. These included:
All of this changed the feel of certain streets during bad years. Imagine walking along Drury Lane in 1603: a row of houses, some with doors nailed shut from the outside, red crosses painted on them. Searchers going door to door, while people with a bit of money quietly hired carts to spirit relatives away to lodging houses in the countryside.
That sense of certain parishes as “plague-ridden” stuck. Areas that had bad reputations in one outbreak tended to retain them. Landlords lowered rents, poorer tenants moved in, and those districts could be hit hard again next time. You start to see a geography of sickness: the places where disease keeps landing, and the people who cannot afford to leave.
When you live with recurring, inexplicable death, you reach for explanations. Londoners did too, and those explanations left marks on the city’s religious life.
During the first Black Death, processions of penitence were organised. Chroniclers describe people walking through the streets barefoot, priests carrying relics, prayers said at every major church. The idea was simple: plague is God’s punishment; perhaps public humility will stop it.
At the same time, some groups were blamed. In parts of continental Europe, Jewish communities were massacred. In England, Jews had already been expelled in 1290, but scapegoating still happened: for “sinful women”, for foreign traders, for anyone who looked like they might bring in bad air or bad luck.
Parishes also developed rituals around plague. Special prayers, votive offerings to saints associated with protection from disease, like St Sebastian. Some London churches gained side chapels or altars paid for in thanks for deliverance. The stone is long gone in many cases, but the records survive.
There’s a human dimension here that doesn’t fit neatly into demographic charts. Imagine families like Alice’s making promises: if this child survives, we’ll donate a candle every year; if the sickness passes our door, we’ll leave money for the poor. The city’s charitable foundations, almshouses and chantries are intertwined with those acts of fear and gratitude.
Fast-forward to 1665 and what most Londoners now think of when they hear “plague”: Pepys burying his gold in the garden, “Bring out your dead”, plague carts and so on.
There’s good evidence that by then Londoners had elaborate, if brutal, systems for handling plague. Bills of mortality listed weekly deaths by parish, and people watched them as anxiously as we watched Covid case numbers. When the figures climbed, those who could fled. The court famously left for Oxford. Many physicians followed.
The next part of the story often goes: the Great Fire of 1666 burned away the filth and the rats, and that’s why plague ended. It’s tidy. It makes for an easy narrative arc.
The trouble is, it doesn’t quite work. Plague was already ebbing before the fire started. Large areas hit hard in 1665, like the northern suburbs, did not burn. Parts of Europe where no such fire occurred also saw plague recede in the later seventeenth century.
Modern historians and epidemiologists suggest more complex causes: shifts in rat populations, changes in trade routes, bacterial evolution, people’s growing habit of isolating the sick, maybe even the rise of brown rats displacing black rats. There is still argument about the details. What we can say is that blaming – or crediting – the fire oversimplifies London Black Death history into a moral tale about “cleansing flame” and civic rebirth.
Yet the myth influenced planning. When London was rebuilt, wide, straight streets and brick houses were praised partly because they seemed healthier. Airy streets equal less plague. That belief helped shape the City core we know: grid-like, more regular than the medieval warren beneath.
The past you can still touch is the only kind that really sticks in my head. Reading about plague is one thing; standing on a street that owes its crooked curve to lost tenements and abandoned plots hits differently.
Years ago, I walked from the Tower up towards Aldgate with a printout of the 1560s “Agas” map of London. The modern traffic was ridiculous, but every so often the line of an alley or a church tower would match. Outside Aldgate tube, if you squint at the map and ignore the Pret, you can place roughly where that first East Smithfield plague cemetery lay. The idea that a field full of emergency graves had turned, in stages, into a tangle of wharves, warehouses and now offices lodged in my mind far more firmly than any statistic.
London Black Death history isn’t a ghost story about rats and masks. It’s in parish boundaries, in who got to own what after a bad year, in the way rich and poor streets still lie close but live very different lives. Plague didn’t create inequality or overcrowding in the city, but it magnified both and left deep grooves that later generations followed.
If you want to go beyond the textbook version, the Museum of London has a good summary of the East Smithfield excavations and plague burials in this report. For an accessible overview of London’s diseases more broadly, Jerry White’s book London in the Eighteenth Century has a sharp chapter on how earlier plagues set up later anxieties. And if you find yourself near Charterhouse Square or Aldgate, it’s worth pausing for a moment and remembering how many people beneath your feet never had the luxury of leaving when the sickness came.
History classes tend to treat the Black Death as a single, dreadful event. Walking London’s plague streets – or even just tracing them on old maps from your sofa – makes it clear it was something else: a long-term condition the city lived with, adapted to, profited from and suffered under. Once you see that, the modern city looks slightly different. Less inevitable. A little more fragile.
