Claire Turner on 'Hearing the Plague in Seventeenth-Century London

 

Hearing the Plague in Seventeenth-century London

The Many-headed Monster has been one of the most successful internet blogs of recent years. Its founders, Mark Hailwood, Laura Sangha, Brodie Waddell and Jonathan Willis, were all products of the important school of social history at the University of Warwick and have contributed positively to the dissemination of research about the economy, society, culture and beliefs of English people in the early modern period. More recently, they have attracted a number of postgraduate contributors to offer posts on their ongoing research, thereby widening the scope of their site and adding to its vigour. One of these, Claire Turner, a second-year postgraduate student at the University of Leeds has composed a fascinating piece on ‘Pestilential Soundscapes: Hearing the Plague in Seventeenth-Century London’ and published it five days ago on the Monster’s site. No such piece or research would have been contemplated when I was a postgraduate, which is partly why I find it so intriguing.

Her analysis begins with a description of the experiences in 1625 of George Bicker-staffe, a tailor on his way to Lord Windsor’s house in Mugwell Street, London, who heard a disturbance caused by a fawn which had escaped within the peer’s house and who was left breathless and almost speechless as a result: eleven days later, Bicker-staffe died as a consequence of the plague which he had contracted after his strange and frightening experience. This account leads on to a description of the sounds one was likely to have heard in a plague-stricken urban environment, the sounds of incarcerated victims calling out from their flimsy windows and the fears of passers-by that they might be infected by the poisonous vapours escaping from windows or from infected plasters deliberately thrown out by plague victims. Astrologers, dramatists and diarists alike warned of the risks of passing the contagion on that windows posed to those outside affected households.

 

It is a short piece of writing but one that vividly conjures up the world of urban society in the seventeenth-century capital. Like all good pieces of research, it makes me wish to learn more as I trust I shall when Claire Turner’s thesis is completed.

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