ABSTRACT
Early modern plague remains a complex topic, with many inconsistencies and puzzling elements in an apparently widely-accepted narrative. In London, official responses, in the form of Bills of Mortality, Plague Orders, and other pronouncements, indicate that contemporaries saw plague as a single disease entity but also as one with multiple and varied causes and characteristics. London experienced at least six major epidemics of plague between 1563 and 1665, but their severity varied from episode to episode and from area to area, and did not increase over time; and while plague often disappeared after a single terrible epidemic year, on two or three occasions it lingered for several years, killing a significant number over several consecutive years but never flaring into a citywide epidemic. Charting the chronology of plague mortality suggests a more complex pattern of infection and diffusion than is revealed by focus on the great epidemic years alone. Likewise, the correlation between environment and plague mortality is far from simple: though the quality and healthfulness of London housing almost certainly deteriorated over the period, plagues did not get successively worse in relation to population size. The recent identification of the plague bacillus, Yersinia pestis, in seventeenth-century plague burials is important, but does not resolve all the difficulties with aligning early modern plague with the characteristics and behaviour of bubonic plague in the Third Plague Pandemic.
