could be exact in such a time of dreadful distress,
and when many of them were taken sick themselves and perhaps died in
the very time when their accounts were to be given in; I mean the parish
clerks, besides inferior officers; for though these poor men ventured
at all hazards, yet they were far from being exempt from the common
calamity, especially if it be true that the parish of Stepney had,
within the year, 116 sextons, gravediggers, and their assistants; that
is to say, bearers, bellmen, and drivers of carts for carrying off the
dead bodies.

Indeed the work was not of a nature to allow them leisure to take an
exact tale of the dead bodies, which were all huddled together in the
dark into a pit; which pit or trench no man could come nigh but at
the utmost peril. I observed often that in the parishes of Aldgate and
Cripplegate, Whitechappel and Stepney, there were five, six, seven,
and eight hundred in a week in the bills; whereas if we may believe the
opinion of those that lived in the city all the time as well as I, there
died sometimes 2000 a week in those parishes; and I saw it under the
hand of one that made as strict an examination into that part as he
could, that there really died an hundred thousand people of the plague
in that one year whereas in the bills, the articles of the plague, it
was but 68,590.

If I may be allowed to give my opinion, by what I saw with my eyes and
heard from other people that were eye-witnesses, I do verily believe the
same, viz., that there died at least 100,000 of the plague only, besides
other distempers and besides those which died in the fields and highways
and secret Places out of the compass of the communication, as it was
called, and who were not put down in the bills though they really
belonged to the body of the inhabitants. It was known to us all that
abundance of poor despairing creatures who had the distemper upon them,
and were grown stupid or melancholy by their misery, as many were,
wandered away into the fields and Woods, and into secret uncouth places
almost anywhere, to creep into a bush or hedge and die.

The inhabitants of the villages adjacent would, in pity, carry them food
and set it at a distance, that they might fetch it, if they were able;
and sometimes they were not able, and the next time they went they
should find the poor wretches lie dead and the food untouched. The
number of these miserable objects were many, and I know so many that
perished th