it in their own persons, without taking upon me to either vouch the
particulars or answer for any mistakes, I shall give as distinctly as I
can, believing the history will be a very good pattern for any poor man
to follow in case the like public desolation should happen here. And if
there may be no such occasion, (which God of his infinite mercy grant
us!) still the story may have its uses so many ways as that it will, I
hope, never be said that the relating has been unprofitable.

I say all this previous to the history, having yet, for the present,
much more to say before I quit my own part.

I went all the first part of the time freely about the streets, though
not so freely as to run myself into apparent danger, except when they
dug the great pit in the churchyard of our parish of Aldgate. A terrible
pit it was, and I could not resist my curiosity to go and see it. As
near as I may judge, it was about forty feet in length, and about
fifteen or sixteen feet broad, and at the time I first looked at it
about nine feet deep. But it was said they dug it near twenty feet deep
afterwards, in one part of it, till they could go no deeper for the
water; for they had, it seems, dug several large pits before this; for,
though the plague was long a-coming[109] to our parish, yet, when it did
come, there was no parish in or about London where it raged with such
violence as in the two parishes of Aldgate and Whitechapel.

I say they had dug several pits in another ground when the distemper
began to spread in our parish, and especially when the dead carts began
to go about, which was not in our parish till the beginning of August.
Into these pits they had put perhaps fifty or sixty bodies each; then
they made larger holes, wherein they buried all that the cart brought in
a week, which, by the middle to the end of August, came to from two
hundred to four hundred a week. And they could not well dig them larger,
because of the order of the magistrates, confining them to leave no
bodies within six feet of the surface; and the water coming on at about
seventeen or eighteen feet, they could not well, I say, put more in one
pit. But now, at the beginning of September, the plague raging in a
dreadful manner, and the number of burials in our parish increasing to
more than was[110] ever buried in any parish about London of no larger
extent, they ordered this dreadful gulf to be dug, for such it was
rather than a pit.

They had supposed th