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deaths from plague prior to that year; but if a comparison were made of
the burials recorded in this parish with those registered in the parishes of
Mortlake and Wandsworth, of persons who are said to have died of the
pestilence in the year of its greatest intensity, viz., 1665, it would be seen
that the disease was much less fatal in Putney than in either of the lastnamed
parishes. Upon the authority of a local historian of the last century,
who appears to have well analysed the parochial records of most of
the suburban districts south of the Thames, it has been recorded that, in
the year 1665, the ravages of the plague were 'very great' at Mortlake,
greater even than at Wandsworth, relatively to the population of the two
parishes. In the above year there are entries of 197 burials in the
Mortlake register, or about 170 more than the average of that period. In
the months of September and October alone there were 122 burials in this
small parish, sometimes seven in one day! In the same year, the number
of registered burials of persons dying of the plague in Putney, was
only 74 during the entire twelve months.
Of the two parishes, Putney and Mortlake, it is pretty certain that the
former always possessed the largest population, and it must be presumed
that the intercommunication between London and Putney, at the period
to which I have referred, was much more frequent than betweeu London
and Mortlake, since the road between the former places was always looked
upon as a very considerable thoroughfare. This being the case, the
a priori inference is, that the pestilence, but for the more healthy influences
prevailing in Putney, would have spread much more rapidly in this parish
than in Mortlake; or that, at all events, there would have been concurrent
circumstances favouring the evolution and propagation of the disease in
an equal degree in both parishes, seeing that they both border the river
Thames. At each outbreak of the modern pestilence, cholera, within the
present century, the intimate relation existing between the activity of the
disease and the proximity of cities and towns to rivers has been most
marked. Hamburgh and the river Elbe, Berlin and the river Spree, and
in this country, Hull and the river Humber, are familiar instances of this
fact. Hamburgh is intersected by numerous canals, and where these
canals concentrate and pour into the Elbe the excreta of 175,000 people,
the cholera is said to have raged so violently in 1832 as to destroy, on the
authority of Mr. Grainger, 3.01 per cent. of the inhabitants. Whether the
closer pioximity of Mortlake to the river than the greater part of Putney,
and the difference in the elevation of the two parishes, can have had any
influence in producing this disparity in the death-rates from plague, I am
unable to determine, but certain it is the latter did escape in a remarkable
manner the fatality which fell so heavily on the former; and it is not a
little singular that the number of victims carried off by the pestilence in
the contiguous parishes of Putney and Barnes should have been so few,
whilst at the same period the population of the water-side districts, on
both sides of them, was being literally decimated by the disease.*
* Notwithstanding the comparatively small fatality from plague in Putney, it would
seem, if we are to believe the following very curious item in the parish accounts, that
but few, if any, of its inhabitants escaped attacks of the disease of greater or less
severity.
"1025.—Paid to Commynge, for his charges going to London to get two women to
come up to keep the sicke, the people being all sicke, 2s. 6d."
It was a lamentable state of things, assuredly, to have all the people sick, and if this