is pit would have supplied them for a month or more
when they dug it; and some blamed the churchwardens for suffering such a
frightful thing, telling them they were making preparations to bury the
whole parish, and the like. But time made it appear, the churchwardens
knew the condition of the parish better than they did: for, the pit
being finished the 4th of September, I think they began to bury in it
the 6th, and by the 20th, which was just two weeks, they had thrown into
it eleven hundred and fourteen bodies, when they were obliged to fill it
up, the bodies being then come to lie within six feet of the surface. I
doubt not but there may be some ancient persons alive in the parish who
can justify the fact of this, and are able to show even in what place of
the churchyard the pit lay, better than I can: the mark of it also was
many years to be seen in the churchyard on the surface, lying in length,
parallel with the passage which goes by the west wall of the churchyard
out of Houndsditch, and turns east again into Whitechapel, coming out
near the Three Nuns Inn.

It was about the 10th of September that my curiosity led, or rather
drove, me to go and see this pit again, when there had been near four
hundred people buried in it. And I was not content to see it in the
daytime, as I had done before,--for then there would have been nothing
to have been seen but the loose earth, for all the bodies that were
thrown in were immediately covered with earth by those they called the
"buriers," which at other times were called "bearers,"--but I resolved
to go in the night, and see some of them thrown in.

There was a strict order to prevent people coming to those pits, and
that was only to prevent infection. But after some time that order was
more necessary; for people that were infected and near their end, and
delirious also, would run to those pits wrapped in blankets, or rugs,
and throw themselves in, and, as they said, "bury themselves." I cannot
say that the officers suffered any willingly to lie there; but I have
heard that in a great pit in Finsbury, in the parish of Cripplegate (it
lying open then to the fields, for it was not then walled about), many
came and threw themselves in, and expired there, before they threw any
earth upon them; and that when they came to bury others, and found them
there, they were quite dead, though not cold.

This may serve a little to describe the dreadful condition of that day,
though it is