After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Great Plague of London

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

What was it like living in London, 1665, when the plague first crept in?Within weeks, the gruesome symptoms were being spotted around London, crosses were marked on the doors of the damned, and King Charles II had fled the city.To take us back to this time and find out how the city reacted, Anthony and Maddy are joined by historian and author Rebecca Rideal.Edited by Tim Arstall. Produced by Stuart Beckwith. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Please vote for us for Listeners' Choice at the British Podcast Awards! Follow this link, and don’t forget to confirm the email. Thank you!You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

Hello, After Dark listeners. Now come here to me because we have some news. We are going on tour. You can enjoy After Dark Live for the very first time this September the 5th at the London Podcast Festival. We'll have more details for you coming very, very soon, but you can expect myself and Anthony and some very dark history. So follow the links in the show notes for more information

and get your tickets before they go and they are already going very fast. See you in September. Travis fell in love with the perfect woman. She listened. She cared. There was just one catch. She wasn't human.

She was an AI companion. But when her behavior takes a disturbing turn, Travis finds himself at the center of a much darker story. This is Flesh and Code, a true story of love, loss, and the temptations of technology. Listen to Flesh and Code wherever you get your podcasts. Well, hello there and welcome to After Dark. In today's episode, we'll be talking about one of the most infamous plagues in history, the Great Plague of London. And so, to begin, let Maddie transport you back to London in the summer of 1665. in the summer of 1665. The air is heavy, the city is still, not with peace, but with dread.

In his house on Seething Lane, a civil servant named Samuel Pepys stands at his window. He listens. Each toll is a death, each silence between a waiting room for the next. He writes, It was a sad noise to hear, all night long, the bell ringing for burials and the poor crying out for help. Outside carts creak through narrow lanes piled high with the dead. Houses are marked with red crosses. Lord have mercy upon us,

squalled in desperate paint. Watchmen guard the doors. The infected are locked inside for 40 days, assuming they lived that long, of course. From his window, Peeps watches the city unravel. He hears corpses hurled into pits, the streets deserted but for the brave, the foolish, and the doomed. Even the king has fled. And still, he writes, I did go by boat, and saw a man dead and naked thrown into the ditch, and a woman weeping over her husband. This is not a medieval horror story. This is the beating heart of 17th century London, gripped by its final great plague.

This is the story of a city on the edge of collapse and of the people who struggled for survival. This is after dark and this is the great plague of London. This is After Dark, and this is the Great Plague of London. ["The Great Plague of London"] I'm Anthony. And I'm Maddie. And today I am looking out the window in my office and I'm so much happier than when we've been recording the Plague episodes previously because it is slightly raining, it's significantly

cooler and the skies are grey, which is perfect for plague talk, I think. Now, we have spent a lot of time talking about plagues this month and looking at what the individual differences were from time to time and from place to place. And one of the plagues, I suppose, that's most well known is, of course, the Great Plague of London. We're talking 1665 into 1666. Now, to help us discover a little bit more about this and what sets it apart from all the other plagues, we have the historian and author of 1666, Plague, War and Hellfire. So nobody better to talk about this subject than Rebecca Radeel. Rebecca, welcome to After Dark. Thank you for having me. Now, we know that you are also really in love with this time period, with this subject and with the kind the darker side of

history. But what I want to get to first before we get into the topic is, for those who might not be so well aware, what exactly is happening in London in the 1660s? Give us an idea of that flavour of the time. LW – Yeah, so it's a really interesting time. We have a regime change in 1660 when Charles II returns to England to be declared king once more, King of England, Ireland and Scotland. Well, he was already crowned in Scotland in 1651 in actual fact, but that's a side story. London's really exciting because with this regime change, we also have a cultural boom in the sense that we have actresses able to perform on the stage in a professional capacity. We have lots of playwrights writing new witty plays, comedy of manners plays, figures like George Etheridge, Afra-Bairn, etc. It's

a different kind of time. It's an exciting time to be in London. It feels hopeful and optimistic and that's right up until 1665. The population in London at the time, Rebecca, is relatively large, isn't it? I think it's up to 400,000 people and it is growing, right? So what are the conditions like for the majority of people living there? Yeah, so it is a growing population and it's an interesting place. I tend to call it a metropolis rather than a city because it's got various

components going on. We have the city, the old walled city of London, and that's kind of like the mercantile heart of England. And we also have the suburbs that are kind of around this city of London and the city of Westminster as well. So nowadays the Strand probably feels like it's, for people that visit London, the Strand probably feels almost in the centre. It was actually going out towards the west. So it's growing, conditions vary depending on your social class. We can have really grand houses along the strand where the nobility are beginning to build up the area with these fashionable buildings, bringing in delftware from the continent to kit out their kitchens and wherever else. But then we

can have poorer areas, so places like St Giles in the Fields, which was quite close to the theatre district actually, where we have lots of migrant communities living there. Samuel Piepz's parents in law lived there for a time. So it's very varied and it really does depend on where you live and your standing in life. Now we've been talking about plates and we've been talking about kind of this idea of, for want of a better word, scientific progress, right? To bring us into an idea of germ theory. Now we don't have that in the 1660s, but what are the shifting patterns of scientific stirrings?

What is the thinking at this time? Are there any huge scientific movements happening in London in the 1660s? Yeah, well, you'll all be familiar with the Royal Society, I'm sure. This is established in the 1660s. So we have lots of polymaths. You can't move for polymaths in 1660s London. So we have people like Newton, later on, Hooke, various figures. And they're really starting to think methodically about research and about looking into things. So the microscope is a big thing, a big deal in the 17th century. But frustratingly, people aren't using it in a medical way. They're

using it as Hooke suggests to look closer at God's creation. So we're seeing things like this. We're seeing people meeting to look at dissections as well around the city. Charles II loved a dissection, so we've got all of that going on. People are starting to think about the way the body works a little bit more. So there's developments when it comes to the circulation of blood, for example. A little bit later, we're starting to see attempts to have transfusions from animal to human. Obviously, people aren't understanding that that's not going to be a good thing. Interestingly, they actually think that people can take on the attributes of whatever is giving you something. So with transfusions, you could almost be dog-like if you're having a dog transfusion. Similar concepts are around when it comes

to wet nurses and children and things. But I feel like I've digressed. There's loads of stuff going on scientifically, but it might not necessarily be what we want. I'd love to think that they've got microscopes, so they're going to start looking at germs, but no, we don't get that yet. You paint, Rebecca, such a rich and vivid picture of this time. You mentioned at the start of our conversation that there has been a regime change. And I wonder what's the political mood in England, and certainly in London itself at this time, we know that the Second Anglo-Dutch War is going on that runs from I think 1665 to 67. There's lots of sort of international politics. What's going on at home and what is the newly restored Charles

the Second doing about it? How secure is his power in this moment? He's very secure. He's very secure. He probably doesn't feel secure, but with hindsight, and hindsight is a wonderful thing sometimes, he is very secure in his position from the 1660s onwards. He's remarkably secure throughout his reign. There are moments when people, other historians might argue that he was in a more precarious situation, but I disagree. I think he was very secure and he was throughout, and especially in the sixteen sixties. In terms of what's going on politically, domestically, as I described before it's a really exciting time culturally, but it could be quite a scary time religiously. So if you don't conform to the established church, the Church of England, the Anglican

faith, if you are what they would call a non-conformist or a Quaker or a Puritan is another word that's used as well, and you refuse to pledge your allegiance or conform to the Church of England, then you could find yourself on the sharp end of the law. So there's a series of measures that are brought in, in the early 1660s. It's called the Claringdon Code after the Earl of Claringdon, but he's not really behind it. So you find measures whereby people can be separated, so certain nonconformists. If you're a nonconformist and you're preaching, you can't do it within five miles of another nonconformist. There's a huge clampdown on Quakers. Quakers are like the big scary religious group for the authorities at this time. And it's quite scary if you are a Quaker because you can have meetings raided, you can be imprisoned, and then you can be forced into indentured

servitude and shipped across the Atlantic to the newly established plantations over there as well. So yes, it is exciting, as I said, but I'm contradicting myself here. It can be quite scary if you are part of these marginalised groups. Look, history is nothing if it's not one contradiction after another. We find ourselves in contradictions all the time. So don't worry about it at all, Rebecca. Now, I want to talk to you about the plague specifically, and I want to get a feeling for how if this particular plague,

which I believe begins in 1665, is this different to other plague starts or is this something we see all throughout history? And what I'm talking about here is, are we talking about rat-infested trade ships? That's one of the things that's really been common throughout all of our conversations on plague. And I want to know if this is what's happening in London at this time, too. Yeah, well, I think there's always new scientific theories when it comes to plague. Yes, it more than likely is trade ships. Whether they're rats on board, other rodents, or whether the

plague's being transported by human fleas or human life, that's a separate question and in my opinion an unanswerable question. But with 1665, the so-called Great Plague, everything points towards it being a consequence of merchant ships. MS. REBECCA. Rebecca, you mentioned earlier about the geography of the cityscape that we're dealing with, and we still have the city walls themselves in place, at least in part, I guess, in this

moment. And of course you have people living on the outskirts and then the more fashionable housing in the centre. Am I right in thinking that the first recorded death actually happens in St Giles in the Fields, which is outside the city walls, isn't it? Yeah, it does. It happens in St Giles in the Fields and then you start to get a trickling of a few more deaths. What's quite interesting is that you have people like peeps who are kind of gently curious about the arrival of plague outside the city, but it's only when it's inside the city that's when they start to get bothered because this is our territory now, this is

actually serious now that it might affect people higher up the social order. But yeah, first one is instant Giles and it spreads quite quickly and measures are brought in relatively fast as well. You know, we haven't been able to help but draw these comparisons between plague and what we experienced during COVID. And you're talking about the spread there, Rebecca, and with the spread will come deaths. Now, we know that they kept a bill of mortality. And basically that was a weekly report of deaths. And this was published by parish authorities. And it just really reminded me of that kind of ticking number that we used to see during COVID on our screens.

It almost seems a little bit, I'm not sure that has aged very well, actually, as I talk about it now. It was such a staple thing during that time, but now this kind of ticking number, it's a strange, strange thing. But talk to me about that spread in 1665 into 66 and talk to me about the symptoms that people are experiencing as the spread occurs. Yeah, so I think you intimated this that there is a novelty aspect to it. So I think people are interested in following the plague and tracking the plague because of a novelty. And it's very easy not to think about the human toll when you're just looking at figures. So I think that's part of it as well. And that's definitely part of what we experience with COVID. So symptoms, kind of like flu-like symptoms really to start with, and then you start to

get high fevers, then your groin and your armpits would start to swell because it affects the lymphatic glands and sometimes burst. It would be kind of a dark, shadowy colour around these areas. That's why it's named the Black Death because of these black marks and shadows. And then yeah, you would go into almost a feverish kind of a hallucination. We've got stories of people setting fire to their own houses just to kind of suppress the pain and to end things sooner. We have people walking around. I mean, this is quite dark, but that's the name of your podcast. We have one individual, there's a story of a man who walked towards one section of London and he was witness bashing his own head into a railing. So just really bizarre and troubling

behaviour from people because it's such a devastating and awful disease. I always think that the plague is probably one of the most inhumane ways to die. Most people would have died from plague and then it would spread within households. And it would also spread from households to other households through clothing. People didn't really understand how it spread, but they had something that was quite close. They understood disease through the idea of miasma and the four humours. So miasma basically essentially means that air can transport disease. And if air smells bad, then you're probably going to be diseased by going into that space. Hence these iconic plague doctor images that we see. There is no evidence of them being in London in 1665, but they have

that beaked element to the mask whereby herbs and incense would be packed into them to kind of avoid these bad airs, the bad miasma. But if you think about it really, it's not so dissimilar in a way to germs. I mean, you know, you're trying to avoid places that usually if something doesn't smell very nice, there's something wrong. So that's what people are understanding. They're not necessarily understanding that it could spread from person to person in the same way. But it does. It spreads around the city, gets into the city of London itself and causes devastation for people living there. LW in this world of the 17th century, there is such strict hierarchy and organization in terms

of society, in terms of individual households, how space is used in buildings, in the city in general, is so closely monitored and designed. And I just wonder how the city and how the state in particular responds to what you've laid out there, some pretty extraordinary behaviour, presumably panic is starting to spread along with the disease. There are people setting fire to their houses, people locking other families in their homes in a bid to avoid catching the disease. It seems to me that the city is almost at breaking point pretty quickly, and that those hierarchies and those rules by which society is organised are threatening to break down. So what is done to try and control this? There's a number of measures which won't feel very foreign to us now. The shutting

up of houses, remaining in quarantine. It's an age old method for tackling disease. We used it very recently. It comes with many challenges, which we all know about. The loneliness is one that I think all of us would probably empathise with a little bit more now. And there was one document that I, when I was writing my book, it made me sad already. It was about a man called Thomas Clarke who'd been shut up in his house with a couple of his children and his wife. And he speaks about how one of his children was shut up within the house as well. So one of the children was suffering from plague. At one point he asks for locks, somebody delivered

locks so I can only assume that they'd locked the child into a specific room. And he talks about how it was really sad that you can't comfort your own child when they're dying. I got a greater sense of the loneliness. Obviously the sadness is universal of a child dying or somebody you love dying, but the loneliness is something that I think I can appreciate a bit more and I think most of us can. So I think there was that, the shutting up of houses. People were tasked with checking the dead as well. So this is where we have women entering the scene. They were tasked with being searchers or nurses to those that were dying or suspected of having plague. So they would enter the houses. They were usually women who'd been searchers for a number of years and they would

identify whether a person had a plague or not or whether they died from something else. We see a rise in things like spotted fever during 1665 as well and I can only assume that yeah, there's probably a natural rise in it, but also I'm sure a few of those cases are people asking for their loved ones to be written down as spotted fever deaths rather than plague deaths too. So we have all of that going on. The city is deserted by those that can. So anyone that is able to leave will leave with a couple of exceptions. So there's an individual called George Monk who orchestrated essentially the restoration, Charles II's return to London. He remains in the city in 1665 and is applauded for doing so afterwards. We have a doctor called Nathaniel

Hodges who remains in the city and writes an account of his time treating and looking after people with plague, seeing them quite regularly. We also have an apothecary called Nathaniel Boghurst that remains in the city as well and writes an account of his time. So they bring these measures in to start with, but I think as people are starting to leave and vacate the city, I imagine, although we cannot know for sure, but I imagine In a world where swords were sharp And hygiene was… actually probably better than you think it is, two fearless historians Me, Matt Lewis And me, Dr. Eleanor Yonaga, dive headfirst into the mud, blood, Matt Lewis, and me, Dr Eleanor Janaga, dive headfirst into the mud, blood and very strange customs of the Middle Ages.

So for plagues, crusades and Viking raids, and plenty of other things that don't rhyme, subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm imagining the soundscape, Rebecca, to the city where we have these bells tolling, the kind of warnings of death, plague death. And again, I'm just reminded of pots and pans banging in our own time during COVID. I think in 400 years time when people are writing about that, that's going to seem like a very strange soundscape that we decided to show. Now, obviously, they're demonstrating different things in the two very different cases, and it shows that you can't always draw parallels between our experiences during COVID and plague. But nonetheless, it brings to life, I think, some of what's being experienced on the streets in London at the time. Now you're talking there, Rebecca, about people

leaving. And I'm just wondering, again, when we were experiencing our lockdowns, there was a lot of resentment over people who decided to take it upon themselves to leave those areas that they were supposed to stay in. Did this build up some kind of class resentment in the 17th century? Was this something people were like, well, hold on, you're able to do this. We have to stay here and therefore potentially die. Or is just this something they expected? Look, you're elite, of course you're going to go and off you go. Well, obviously you both know as historians, it's really tricky to access the words and

writings of people who are right at the bottom of the social order. The only way we usually get that is through criminal records. So it's very hard to know what somebody that may have been later termed working class would have thought about this situation. The class system as we know it today was still developing in the 17th century. We don't have that same hierarchy. We have a kind of middling sort and those lower down and those higher up. So I assume there must have been. I mean, how could there not have been? But I think there's also something that we need to consider as well when we think about 17th century plague. It's so tempting to think that it's kind of like for like with COVID in terms of the

way that we experienced it. But I just think there's fear. I mentioned before about this idea about smell. So if you're seeing more cases of plague in ramshackle areas where poorer people are living, then it's going to start to breed resentment and stigma among those that aren't in those areas. So we see that fear growing. And I think it's interesting. We've lived through two pandemics in our lifetime, we're still living through one of them, COVID, and the AIDS pandemic. And we don't often make those parallels with AIDS when it comes to the plague, but we always do with COVID. But I think that fear and that stigma is something that we need to think

about with plague, because I think it was there as well. That's a really interesting comparison and one that we haven't necessarily brought to this conversation before. So thank you for that. That's, yeah, I'm going to sit and think about that for a little while, I think, after our conversation. Rebecca, you talked about how inevitably it's hard to access the words, the thoughts, the feelings of the lower classes in this era, and indeed many other eras, in terms of the historical record. And I think one of the ways that we can perhaps capture something of the mood in London or the perceived mood is through visual culture of the time. And Anthony, in true after dark tradition, I have an image for you to

describe. And I think it's one that we may have encountered before actually on this podcast. But I want you to tell us about it because I think it gives a sense of, I suppose the apocalyptic fear that is taking hold and we know that one of the people who has left the city of course is the king himself. And I just wonder if there's a sense of the world ending that hierarchy dissolving as the king leaves and London is sort of left behind to fend for itself. So tell us what you're looking at in this image, please. It's a great image. Do you know what I was thinking before you asked me about it, Maddie, I was like, I had never seen this before. And then you said, I think we've seen this before. I was like, we probably have. And I've just totally forgotten

about it. That would be quite difficult. But I'll treat it like I've never seen it before. Because I feel like I've never seen it before. It is an image with a skeletal form at the very center of it. And he is standing on coffins. He is representing death. We have arrows, broken arrows in both his bony hands. Behind him, we see the city of London and the words above the city say, Lord, have mercy on London. It is overshadowed by a gray cloud and it seems to be quite badly rendered lightning question mark coming out of it, striking London below.

Then around death, who is standing on these black coffins, these very 17th century renderings of coffins, we have workers in the field. And I think this is characterized by the haystacks that they are. Well, it seems like they're lying in. But actually, when I look at the words above it, it says we die. So it's obviously saying that these people are dying of plague. And then death is saying I follow. So where they die, he's following them around.

And then the other villagers are saying we fly and death is following them. Of course, that's who he's following. He's following the villagers that are living on the outskirts of the city. You're trying to get in somewhere else to be not so close to the plague. But at the very right hand side, as those people try to leave, we have people with pikes and they are trying to keep them in and saying, keep out. And they do not want these people coming to their areas. You know, as you're saying, Maddie, and Rebecca, it's very

difficult to get these words, but here's a rendering of that kind of tension that the movement of people is having at this time. It's fascinating, isn't it? Maddie, any thoughts on this that I haven't covered? I love all the 17th century spelling on this image. I know. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, I mean, there's a really moving pair in the bottom left corner. It's a mother and child who are lent against a haystack. And the mother has sort of opened her clothing up and revealed her chest and you can see the bubo is actually on her. And it's really kind of tragic imagery. They're

just sort of left lying there dead in the field. Rebecca, how does the plague eventually stop? Because obviously, we're not still suffering from it in Britain, thank goodness. So what is it that kills it? Because I know there's a lot of mythology around this. There's this idea, you know, of a certain event that happens in 1666 that eradicates this from the city. But tell us what the actual facts are on the ground. The thing is, I can't because we don't know. And I think if anyone tells you they do know, eradicates this from the city, but tell Justinian Plague. There's the second one, which is our plague pandemic, and 1665 is towards the end of that. And then there's the third plague pandemic, which happened in more recent times. We don't know why it ended. We don't know why it didn't come back the next year or the year after

that because plague was endemic in Britain. It was endemic across Europe and most of the world at this point in time. It was something that was expected. It was not pleasant. It wasn't liked. People didn't like living through an outbreak or an epidemic, but it wasn't something that was foreign and unknown. So we don't know why it didn't return. We have learned on After Dark previously, Rebecca, that is probably very little evidence for the idea that the Great Fire of London, which, you know, if you're to ask a lot of people just on the street, they would probably think it was ended by the Great Fire of London, which, you know, if you're to ask a lot of people just on the street, they would probably think it was ended by the Great Fire of London

in 1666. And we have an old episode on that to go back and find that and listen through. We talked there about how that doesn't really add up. The fire doesn't really destroy the areas that are most affected by plague. So we're talking about Whitechapel or Southwark. So it's so much easier, isn't it, Rebecca, to say what's not the cause of the plague ending rather than what is. However, we do know that by February 1666, Charles II feels that it is safe now to return to London. So, there is a sense of normality returning. Rebecca, talk to me then about once he returns, once Charles returns, and there's the sense

that it's fading. What are the kind of immediate legacies of this particular plague? Confusion. So people, we're in the 17th century, people are still extremely religious. Your mortal life is just one part of an immortal journey. So anything that you do on earth, anything that's happening to you on earth, anything like a big plague or a big fire, there has to be a reason for that. It has to be God somehow. And if there is a reason for it and you've experienced a plague and a dreadful war and also a fire as well, why is that happening? So people start to search their own souls and start to think about what is it that we've done that could warrant this? Was it because

we killed Charles I a couple of decades ago? Is it the licentious way that the court's living? Is it the fact that Charles II is married but flaunting his decades ago? Is it the licentious way that the court's living? Is it the fact that Charles II is married but flaunting his mistresses? Is it something that I have done personally? We see a lot of this and we see a lot of religious tracts emerging. And one of my favourite ones actually is by a guy called Thomas Vincent. He's a nonconformist preacher and he writes this tract and he's basically chastising everybody when they return for going back to their old ways, for living as they'd lived before. And that tells us a lot actually. It tells us that people did return to normality quite

quickly but it also says that obviously there were certain people that thought that this was the wrong thing to do. I do think what we don't see in reading between the lines is a kind of trauma from this. And I don't think we're enough out of the events of 2020, 2021, 2022 to recognise the collective trauma that we've all been through as a consequence. But I think there's a lot of that going on also. But the theatres started again, actresses were on stage once more, the country kind of moved on. It's interesting, Rebecca, that you say to a certain extent, people returned to the life that they had before, but I wonder how much of a turning point this is. I'm thinking about, you

know, as an 18th centuryist, this is the moment when the city of London that I would recognise in the time period that I spend a lot of time in starts to emerge. We have Sir Christopher Wren commissioned to repair St Paul's Cathedral very famously after the Great Fire and the medieval winding streets, the close wooden buildings, they don't totally disappear of course, but the ones that have been destroyed by fire are rebuilt in brick as well as in wood and in stone and there's a sense of a new world emerging. And I wonder if, as a historian of the 17th century, you see these short years of plague and fire as, I suppose, a turning

point in the emergence of a new modern world. I think the fire is, how do I phrase this, I agree with what you're saying, but I think that's more down to the fire and the re-landscaping of London than the plague. I think that would have happened with or without the plague, and if the fire hadn't happened, we probably would have seen that change at a slower pace over the course of the 18th century anyway. It's a really difficult question because there are so many different answers to it. We're seeing changes that are going on anyway. People like to draw divides between different periods, but I think we see the emergence of coffee houses, for example, and the culture of coffee houses, the development of political parties. Well, you could probably

trace those routes back to the Civil War, if not earlier. Were they escalated as a consequence of the fire? Well, there seemed to be more coffee houses after the Great Fire, but is that just because there was more real estate? Who knows? I think, yeah, we are seeing changes. We do definitely see a change in the way people are living. We've also got some really exciting new-ish research, I think from the University of Cambridge, which we all know if we're studying the 17th century or the early modern period, but it's nice to see it in facts and figures that actually the industrial revolution was well underway in the 17th century. It's not just an 18th century thing to think about. So we've got those changes going on also. But it's kind of like how long is a piece

of string? Where do you want to make that division? And what are you looking at, at that particular point? What are you measuring? We've heard an awful lot about different plagues. And often, I definitely last week when I was recording, I definitely had a moment of going, wait, we've spoken about this already, because there's so much in common between a lot of the plagues. You know, you hear about the buboes, you hear about the trade, you hear about all those things that are forming different experiences, but they are nonetheless interconnected.

As a parting thought, I'd love to hear what you think sets this particular plague apart. Why is this, or is it different? I think we have a lot of documentation for this plague, so I think that's really interesting. We get a real sense of how people experienced it through writers like Johnny Evelyn and Samuel Pepys. What I would like people to recognise and remember as well is that the bills of mortality are so important to anyone studying early modern disease, but those bills of mortality are built on the work of women whose names sometimes we won't know. We might know them if we look into parish records or dig into them a little bit more, but just regular women who've had this dreadful task of going into people's homes to find out what they've died from and then reporting it back to the parish. And then it's put into these little bundles of bills of mortality. So that kind of real

heavy lifting, that painful and awful job that most of us wouldn't want. I'd quite like people to remember that, I think, about the Great Plague of 1665 and earlier ones. It doesn't quite answer your question but I guess that's my parting thought when it comes to plague. Well, there you have it listeners. That's a great note to end on. Thank you to our guests today, Rebecca Rodeal, and thank you for listening along wherever you are. If you want to get in touch with us with episode suggestions or feedback, you can do so at afterdark at historyhit.com. See you next time.

Travis fell in love with the perfect woman. She listened. She cared. There was just one catch. She wasn't human. She was an AI companion. But when her behavior takes a disturbing turn, Travis finds himself at the center of a much darker story. This is Flesh and Code, a true story of love, loss, and the temptations of technology. Listen to Flesh and Code wherever you get your podcasts.