The Great Plague of Lowestoft (1603)

Many readers will know know something of London’s so-called “Great Plague”, which began in May 1665 and stretched into January 1666, and in which an estimated 100,000 people may have died out of a population of 350,000-400,000. A total of 68,596 burials  is accounted for in parish records, but so intense was the rate of death from July to September that many people’s burials went unrecorded. If a population of 375,000 inhabitants is taken as the mid-point and the number of 100,000 deaths accepted, then 27% of the City’s population perished - an extremely high proportion which was partly the result of the crowded urban conditions in which people lived (rich and poor alike). Not on the scale of the Black Death (1348-9) which probably killed 50-60% of a much smaller population of around 80,000, but still horribly significant. If a lesser number of 75,000 deaths is accepted (as is sometimes suggested), that is still 20% of London’s residents.

The Bubonic Plague (Yersinia pestis bacillus) which struck the City may have emanated from The Netherlands, coming in on vessels involved in maritime trade - in spite of England being involved in the Second Dutch War (March 1665 to July 1667). It was at its worst from July to September (plague always having its peak during the summer months), with King Charles II and his court leaving London during the former month to go to Salisbury. Which they then left for Oxford during September, when plague broke out in their place of refuge! The royal entourage eventually returned to London during February 1666. Samuel Pepys, the diarist, stayed in London throughout the plague and gives a fascinating account of the rampant disease in his descriptions and reactions.

Lowestoft escaped a large mid-17th epidemic, but had experienced two earlier ones - the worst of which occurred in 1603 and may be termed the town’s own “Great Plague” (leaving the Black Death aside, which probably killed half of its estimated population of 500 people). Using the New Style Gregorian calendar introduced in England on 2 September 1752 (with the year running 1 January to 31 December, instead of 25 March to 24 March), there were 310 or 311 burials recorded - this the result of one uncertain entry. There were five burials only, January to March, followed by a sudden jump to twenty-one in May. An even more pronounced increase came in June, with seventy-nine burials, while July registered 101! August followed with fifty-five, September with twenty-five, October with eleven, November with nine and December with five. It cannot be said with certainty that the autumn-early winter “tailing-off” period had every death due to plague - but, within the broad terms of this article, they will be taken as such.

With the five January-March burials not counted, and subtracting them from 310, a notional total of 305 plague deaths is arrived. On best estimates of the town’s population number, based on family reconstitution off the parish registers, a total of some 1,500 people lived in Lowestoft at the end of the 16th century and beginning of the 17th. The loss of inhabitants caused by the 1603 epidemic therefore comes to 20%. It seems to have been part of a local pattern, since Great Yarmouth (some seven or eight miles to the north) was also badly affected - reputedly, via trade links with Amsterdam. While, further down the local coastline, the town of Southwold suffered even more than Lowestoft with 373 deaths recorded during the year - and this was given as the reason why the Vicar did not submit a return to Norwich Diocese of communicant members of St. Edmund’s parish church. Beccles was also hit hard during 1602 (ninety-two burials) and 1603 (seventy-two), though not to the same degree as  Lowestoft.

The nearby village of Corton had been badly affected by plague during 1602, with thirty of 

its 150 or so inhabitants (20%) dying of the disease from the end of August to the beginning of November. The deaths are indicated in the parish register book of 1579-1783 with the word “plague” appended to the name of each deceased person. And it is possible that Corton was the source of the 1603 Lowestoft outbreak. The rat fleas which carried the fatal bacillus tended to go into hibernation during November, with a number of them dying off over the winter depending on the severity of the weather. The recovery of surviving insects and their consequent increase in numbers could then regenerate the infection - and not necessarily in the home parish (because of resistance  to the disease built up in the survivors), but in nearby communities unaffected during the previous year. And, so, it could well be that Corton people, who would have had regular contact with Lowestoft (through some of its menfolk working there on fishing vessels and trading craft and through visits by both men and women to the local Wednesday market - as well as for other reasons), created the Lowestoft plague outbreak of 1603 by means of what has sometimes been described as “sleeping infection”. 

All of the Lowestoft deaths are entered in the parish register of the time as burials. The man who carried out this task was the parish clerk Stephen Philip(s), who was also Master of the town’s Free Grammar School - appointed on its creation in the year 1570 by  the legacy of Thomas Annot (merchant) and who had taken over the other occupation in 1584. The vicar William Bentley’s burial entry is the only one for 25 August, so it is mere guesswork as to who gave any kind of funeral rites for the deceased after that - though it could have been Philip(s) himself since he was an ordained Church of England clergyman. Then there is the matter of burial of the dead themselves. Until various extensions to the churchyard took place during the 1870s and also in 1916 and 1928, it was quite small - being just an acre or more in area (“God’s acre” often being a term once used of churchyards in general) - and in no way able to accommodate the sheer number of corpses created by the 1603 epidemic. A problem compounded by the manpower needed to dig the graves during a time of great sickness.

Given the fact that Lowestoft has long been a parish mainly covered with urban development of one kind or another, no “plague pit”, or mass grave, has ever been found during construction work as has been the case in other communities (London most notably, but not solely). So, where were the town’s dead laid to rest? Granted that this suggestion is theoretical, to a degree, but it seems reasonable to postulate burial at sea - with the bodies either shrouded in some way or simply dressed in their usual clothing. It would have been comparatively easy to have placed them into ferryboats (used for loading and offloading cargoes from vessels anchored in the inshore roads and also for longshore fishing) and taken them out beyond the Holm Sand into deeper water, weighted them down and committed them to the waters of the North Sea.

And the year 1603 was not the end of Lowestot’s contact with bubonic plague on a large scale, A generation later, in 1635, 154 deaths occurred between 29 March and 30 October - with a single burial recorded in November, followed by six in December. On best estimates deriving from family reconstitution of the parish registers, the town’s population was probably around 1200 people at the time - so, taking the 154 deaths as resulting from plague, 13% of an already depleted population was killed. The Vicar  at the time was Robert Hawys [Hawes], who had been appointed in 1610 and who died in 1639, and he regularly signed his name in the register in both baptismal and burial entries during his incumbency. The problem of disposal of the dead would have been the same in 1635 as it had been in 1603 (though of lesser scale) and burial at sea is again a strong possibility. The effect of both outbreaks of the dreaded disease took the town quite some time to recover from demographically and economically and it was not until the last quarter of the seventeenth century that the population had reached a total of around 1,650 people. 

The scholarly journal, Notes and Queries, vol. CXCVIII, pp. 384-6 (1953) contains an article by A.G.E. Jones entitled ‘Plagues in Suffolk in the Seventeenth Century’, which says that Lowestoft suffered as severely from the disease during the first half of the seventeenth century as any community in England. Reference to this particular piece was later referred to in J.F.D. Shrewsbury’s book, A History of the Bubonic Plague in the British Isles (1970) pp. 212 & 372. Thus, the town’s sufferings drew a wider attention than just that of local people, who may have known about them through familiarity with either the original parish registers themselves or F.A. Crisp’s printed copies published 1898-1902.  Hugh Lees, in his book The Chronicles of a Suffolk Parish Church (1948), pp. 234-37, produces the list of 1603 burials in full - but makes only a passing reference on p. 241 to the number of people who died in 1635.

The introductory picture of a skeletal figure holding an arrow is sometimes found referred  to as Death’s Dart and was used as a grim reminder of human fragility and mortality. The image of the hooded phantom carrying a scythe, known as the Grim Reaper, is probably even more familiar - and both seem to have originated in Western European art during the second half of the 14th century, following the ravages of the Black Death, and were well established in the popular imagination by the late 15th and early 16th. The representation of Death’s Dart used here has a direct connection with St. Margaret’s Church and an account of its origins is well worth giving. Not only does it generate a feeling for the particular age in which it was created, but also provides some sense of the internal upheavals and changes in the building’s interior which have taken place over the years.

The figure was once part of the grave-slab of the merchant, Thomas Annot - referred to  five paragraphs above, who was buried inside the church on 15 November 1577 aged ninety years - and it appears to have been been carved into either a small stone tablet or  sheet of brass of roughly coffin shape. This writer has an original copy of Edmund Gillingwater’s An Historical Account of the Ancient Town of Lowestoft (1790), which was rebound at some point with engravings of the local area executed by Joseph Lambert (done in 1822) added to it. It also has an inserted leaf - between pp. 298 & 299 - depicting Annot’s funerary memorial, drawn and engraved by the leading Norwich School artist John Sell Cotman who lived locally for a time on Southtown Road, Gorleston. Cotman first published a book entitled Engravings of Sepulchral Brasses in Norfolk and Suffolk in 1819, followed by an enlarged two-volume work of the same name in 1838. There is no way of telling which copy the image(s) of Annot’s memorial came from, but it is shown in full below at the end of this article.

The grave slab is described by Gillingwater as being the second monument in the “South Isle” [Aisle] - starting from the east end and working westwards. Part of it (the upper third) is still in place, near the organ. Hugh Lees (p. 93) makes reference to finding this in 1939 and goes on to say, “This is the upper portion of the slab, containing the matric [matrix] of the fillet and inscription with that of two merchants’ marks. Only a few brass rivets remain, however.” One of the merchants’ marks (top right) was obviously still in place when Cotman made his drawing and spaces for the two at the bottom of the memorial are also to be seen. The matrix of the figure of Thomas Annot himself is clearly visible in the middle of the slab, with further removed wording below his feet. His effigy and what lay beneath could well have been removed by the iconoclast Francis Jessop in June 1645, when he came to Lowestoft to remove “superstitious images” from within the parish church (see The Missing Brasses of St. Margaret’s Church), with the figure of Death being left in place because it did not represent anything which was unacceptable doctrinally to the Puritan point of view.

Significantly, perhaps, skeletal Death is shown on Annot’s left side with his deadly arrow ready to strike - this, because of the superstitions attaching to anything left-sided or left-handed being unlucky or even evil in nature. This idea is sometimes said to have originated in the Roman world, with the Latin word dextermeaning “right” or “favourable” and sinister indicating the opposite: “left”, or “unlucky” and “bad”. The superstition goes back much further than that and is found in many other cultures. It’s just that the Roman Empire lasted about 500 years and had a profound effect on the countries it occupied. We’re still left in no doubt, today, about the meaning of the word sinister.  CREDIT:David Butcher