4 - The response to plague in early modern England: public policies and their consequences

Summary

We may keep our Shipping to strict Quarantaine, we may form Lines, and cut off all Communication with the Infected, we may barricadoe up our Cities and our Towns, and shut ourselves up in our Houses, Death will come up into our Windows, and enter into our Palaces, and cut off our Children from without, and the young Men from the Streets.

William Hendley, Loimologia Sacra, 1721

As it turned out, William Hendley was wrong. Death in the form of plague did not return to England during the 1720s, despite the scares aroused by its savage attack on Marseilles and other parts of southern France. Yet his profound scepticism about the policies adopted to control plague in England was widely shared; and it had been voiced by critical observers ever since those policies began in the sixteenth century. For quarantine had plainly not always protected England from the import of infection from the continent. Neither had strict watches against goods and travellers from London, when there were visitations there, prevented epidemics in provincial towns. The enforced isolation of infected families in their own houses, with their doors nailed up and guards outside them, had similarly failed to stop the movement of plague from household to household in stricken cities. Indeed, many critics had argued, such measures could not be expected to work.