ayor and
justices did much to prevent the rage and desperation of the people
from breaking out in rabbles and tumults, and in short from the poor
plundering the rich,--I say, though they did much, the dead-carts did
more: for as I have said that in five parishes only there died above
5000 in twenty days, so there might be probably three times that number
sick all that time; for some recovered, and great numbers fell sick
every day and died afterwards. Besides, I must still be allowed to say
that if the bills of mortality said five thousand, I always believed it
was near twice as many in reality, there being no room to believe that
the account they gave was right, or that indeed they were among such
confusions as I saw them in, in any condition to keep an exact account.

But to return to my travellers. Here they were only examined, and as
they seemed rather coming from the country than from the city, they
found the people the easier with them; that they talked to them, let
them come into a public-house where the constable and his warders
were, and gave them drink and some victuals which greatly refreshed and
encouraged them; and here it came into their heads to say, when they
should be inquired of afterwards, not that they came from London, but
that they came out of Essex.

To forward this little fraud, they obtained so much favour of the
constable at Old Ford as to give them a certificate of their passing
from Essex through that village, and that they had not been at London;
which, though false in the common acceptance of London in the county,
yet was literally true, Wapping or Ratcliff being no part either of the
city or liberty.

This certificate directed to the next constable that was at Homerton,
one of the hamlets of the parish of Hackney, was so serviceable to
them that it procured them, not a free passage there only, but a
full certificate of health from a justice of the peace, who upon the
constable's application granted it without much difficulty; and thus
they passed through the long divided town of Hackney (for it lay then
in several separated hamlets), and travelled on till they came into the
great north road on the top of Stamford Hill.

By this time they began to be weary, and so in the back-road from
Hackney, a little before it opened into the said great road, they
resolved to set up their tent and encamp for the first night, which they
did accordingly, with this addition, that finding a barn, or a bu