The plague arrived in Peterborough in 1665 in the guise of an unknown woman who had travelled to the area from London. Simon Gunton, vicar of St John's, captured this fact and the deaths of everyone assumed to have died from the plague in laborious detail in the parish records.
The first named person to die of the plague was Katherine Hambleton. She was buried on 22nd September 1665. For the first few weeks the outbreak appears to have been isolated to the woadgrounds, which is where they were also buried. So where and what were the woadgrounds? To answer this, we need to look at the plant itself, look back at the history of woad growing, and at the history of the area.
Woad is a very hungry crop and grew very well in the fertile fields throughout the fens in more modern times but it's not grown commercially nowadays. Parson Drove is known locally as the last location that woad was grown in and there are a few images to show the process including this evocative painting
https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co65223/woad-mill-at-parson-drove-oil-painting
Woad is used to create blue dye, a skill that was used as far back as the Iron Age (yes, those naked, blue warriors), but with synthetic dyes its use has become largely obsolete. The plant is reasonably small for its first year - around the size of an outspread hand - with small plantain-like leaves, followed by metre-tall bracts of yellow flowers, quite like oil seed rape, in its second year. However it is also incredibly invasive with a long root that can be difficult to destroy (think of a dandelion with a super-sized tap root) which can make crop rotation a bit of a nightmare.
Less than a hundred years before the plague arrived in Peterborough Queen Elizabeth I had decreed how much woad was allowed to be grown in each parish, with a limit of the number of acres grown and the amount individuals could grow. This was to ensure that enough food was grown in the country and fertile land wasn't being damaged by the continued use of the very hungry crop. As usual, the increased wealth of the few was at the expense of the poor who were struggling to grow enough food to survive on.
She also decreed how far away from towns and cities the crop could be grown and processed, stating it had to be at least four miles away. The process of picking, drying, grinding and mixing the leaves created an unpleasant smell further worsened by the addition of urine or manure for fermentation to release the blue dye, which was not popular with nearby residents. Her decrees did not have the expected response and so she reduced the limit to three miles at the beginning of the seventeenth century.
As is still the case in farming, the personal side of this production was that the land owners growing the crop became incredibly rich, but the people farming the land remained incredibly poor. These were seasonal workers. They would have prepared the land before sewing the seed, then harvested several crops of the leaves in the first year and potentially a little in the second (the amount of dye in the leaves diminished in the second year) before harvesting the seeds after the flowers. The processing of the crop took place in the same location as the growing of the crop, so we can assume that the labourers in the fields also worked in the production too. This would have made the workers exceedingly smelly, stained, and therefore isolated - potentially shunned - from other workers. (For more information about the Parson Drove process follow this link http://www.woad.org.uk/html/woad_mills.html )
It is therefore fascinating that the first cases should be identified in the people working the woadgrounds. These were people living on the margins of the town in an industry that was disliked. When they died they were not buried in the town but in the ground they worked and lived on. Of the first 12 deaths from 22nd September to 2nd November, ten of them were stated to be buried in or lived at the woadgrounds. Three Carews - Richard, his wife Julian, and son Thomas - died within five days of each other in September. Three Gregorys - Walter, Hannah, and Joan - succumbed in October. This tells us that families were living together at the woadgrounds, working the land together. Eight of the 12 people who died were women, four of those were daughters.
It is difficult to know exactly where the woadgrounds were, but there are some clues. Firstly, the fifth person buried - Walter - wasn't placed in the woadgrounds, where he lived, but in Newark (largely lost under Perkins Parkway), possibly suggesting that the woadgrounds were near to Newark. Secondly, the plague then moved on to Crawthorne Hill. This is another location that is lost to time, but we do still have Crawthorne Road, which joined Lincoln Road and Eastfield Road. A few references exist for Crawthorne Hill, including Pigot's Directory of 1840, and we know it was land somewhere north of Crawthorne Road. So, it is possible that the woadgrounds were located somewhere between modern Crawthorne Road and modern Oxney Road. Thirdly, the fens were still in the first few decades of drainage and it's likely that a crop that required two years of care would not have been well-suited to the still precarious fenland to the east of Car Dyke. This was a crop that needed to survive through the winter and would not have fared well in the soggy peat during the winter. It's therefore highly unlikely that the woadgrounds were east of Car Dyke. With all of those considerations, the woadgrounds were likely somewhere in the modern Eastfield or Park districts of Peterborough, so if you live there, be cautious if you come across a body in your garden!
The woadgrounds would not have been a permanent feature like a park or garden. The growing of woad stripped the soil of many nutrients and was therefore rotated with other crops, the plants fed to sheep at the end of the season. But unlike other crops there was a small industry built up around the growing and processing of woad, a small hamlet of workers living in the grounds for the season. These few tragic deaths have helped to illuminate a long-forgotten industry, forgotten places, and a marginalised group of people. Again, we must thank Simon Gunton for his diligence in recording every death.
Image: woad growing in the author's garden 2021
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