The Plague Arrives in Peterborough

This is the longer ramble of a shorter post on the Peterborough Women’s History Group blog here, which focussed on women during the plague. This post is where I delve into more of the wider context of the plague in Peterborough and consider where the pesthouse once was. Huge thanks must go to Gail Richardson (no relation) at Peterborough Archives who first pointed out the fascinating church accounts detailing every victim of the deadly virus and suggested I should investigate it.

The plague arrived in Peterborough in September 1665. The bringer of the great pestilence was a woman. She was a stranger who had travelled up from London and died in September 1665. It seems very likely that the woman who cared for this sick stranger in her final hours was Katherine Hambleton, for she was the first victim in Peterborough. All we know about her was that she was the wife of Cornelius Hambleton and that after her death a small cross was marked against her name in St John’s church register, a cross that would be scratched hundreds of times over the next couple of years.

OS Map of Newark, Near Peterborough, 1889

Interestingly, the plague didn’t first appear in the centre of town, where you might expect a weary traveller to arrive at an inn, but just north of the town. Although no location was given to the burial location of the unnamed woman, or indeed Mistress Hambleton, the disease spread to the woadgrounds and then on to Newark (the name is preserved in Newark Hill School). The woadgrounds was an area where people were growing woad plants to extract the vivid blue dye from them. (For more information see my earlier post 'Woad You Believe It'). It was smelly, dirty, backbreaking work and it’s possible that the woman had arrived to offer much needed support at harvest or processing time and was a temporary part of their small community. Alternatively, she was taken in by the transient community who were likely ostracised from the town due to the processing of woad, but who were happy to help a woman in need.

It should be no surprise that it was mainly women and children who died first. The key to these deaths, and to so many more, is that women provided (and still provide) the lion’s share of all caring work, be it tending to the sick, the elderly, or indeed their own children. The proximity of care and physical touch was what led to a higher rate of women dying than men: 58% or 266 of the recorded burials were women.

The Dance of Death

Another interesting factor, and part of the wider context of this outbreak of the plague, is that many people had died during the Civil Wars and in considerable numbers after them. We naturally think of the soldiers who were killed in combat, but war is more than the battles won and lost; the whole country was weakened by the events of war. Families found themselves in poverty, former soldiers were traumatised or injured: this was a particularly bad time for the plague to arrive.

There aren’t any specific figures for the number of Peterborough men who died in warfare during that period, but it is likely that a diminished male population contributed to the gender differences in the reported deaths with only 42% or 194 of the plague burials of males in the city. These figures are not large – Peterborough was a small market town in the 17^th century – but when we consider that the total population of the city was roughly 2,000 people then the female deaths alone represented around 13% of the population. Combined with the males, this gives a figure of 23% which is similar to the death rate elsewhere in the country.[1]

In addition to this, those with money, other properties, or family were able to move out of the city to nearby villages, country manors and safer towns. Peterborough Feoffees’ account books, which ran through the 17^th century, were notably blank during the plague. The feoffees were the cream of society, the men trusted to make important decisions on welfare and town improvements, but they did not remain in the city. None of them were on the list of the dead. None of their families were on the list of the dead.

However, the Feoffees had made an important decision in 1642 by agreeing to create a pesthouse in the city. Deadly infectious diseases were common until vaccinations were created, so a pesthouse – a building where those with infectious diseases could be isolated and cared for – was always going to be a sensible addition to any town or city. There are clues in the Feoffees’ accounts that tell us where it might have been. In 1646 a reference to the pesthouse was recorded when Widdow Tinkerson rented ‘two closes neare the Pesthouse in Westgate and a cottage’ and later to a ‘Pesthouse close’ situated at ‘Peterborough Westfield’ in 1683, approximately 13 years after it had been dismantled.[2] This doesn’t give us an exact location for the house, but a quick view of John Speed’s 1610 map of Peterborough does show us that Westgate finished roughly where Lincoln Road starts now, with fields and only a couple of cottages further west. 

A map of Peterborough is at the bottom right of John Speed's larger map - zoom in if you can

This is interestingly in the vicinity of medieval St Leonard’s Leper Hospital, which was located close to the eastern side of what is now Midland Road. Westgate used to continue west (hence its name) from the city, and is likely to have passed through what is now Rathbone Crescent and/or Granary Close, to the east of Midland Road, which is where an archaeological dig was carried out in advance of the house build in 2014.[3] The dig did not reveal St Leonard’s Hospital but it did reveal a mass grave with skeletons from several time periods, sadly none from the 17^th century. It’s believed that St Leonard’s was no longer used after the dissolution, but there were other suggestions that the site – or a nearby site – became used as a pesthouse. This means the gravesite of the plague victims is likely to be close to the location of the leprosy victims and could potentially be sitting under houses, industrial buildings, or even the East Coast Mainline…

Westgate travels from right on left on the picture and would have crossed Midland Road on the left of the picture

The last woman to die from the plague in Peterborough was Alice Hall, who was buried on 28^th April 1667. Unusually, nothing much is known about her either – the fatigue of the pandemic had no doubt taken its toll. Most women were described by the man they were related to – daughter of, wife of, widow of – but Alice had no such attribution. Following the wars there was a rise in the number of independent women, for there was never going to be enough men to make wives of them all. And of the single men who had returned from war, a widow, perhaps with wealth inherited from her husband and a proven record of child rearing was a better prospect. So there were more single women, too old to still belong to their fathers, but never married.

Sadly, it was not declared where Alice had been buried either. The grounds of the pesthouse, where hundreds of the deceased had been buried, was undoubtedly full, but without the detail of a burial in her own grounds, it is likely that the pest house was her resting place. As an unattributed woman she is less likely to have been buried by family, and even less likely to have been buried on family land, particularly because there are no other Halls in the records.

The last person to die from the plague in Peterborough was a child, a little boy named Roger Whittington. He was the son of Roger Whittington and was buried in an undisclosed location on 9 May 1667.

In a final note, it is worth adding that there was a surge of weddings and baptisms once the plague appeared to be over. After years of fear, the people of Peterborough wanted to celebrate their unions and new arrivals in the sight of God and what remained of their congregation. The human desire to enjoy the good and find hope descends through all generations.

If you want to look at the St John’s church records, then Ancestry.co.uk is the best place to look. You can do so for free on a computer in Peterborough Archives, where you will find the Feoffees Accounts, old maps, and microfilm of church records. If you’re looking for more local church registers with evidence of the plague, good places to explore are Oundle and St Martin’s, Stamford Baron. 

Images:

OS Map of Newark printed in 1889 from maps.nls.uk

Dance of Death by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

John Speed’s Map from Wiki Commons

OS Map of Westgate, Peterborough from maps.nls.uk

[1] The vast majority of statistical data from the time period is based on estimates and extrapolations. London statistics are the most frequently shared, but even they are open to interpretation. A population loss of 23% is certainly at the higher end of supposed population loss and could suggest that the population of Peterborough was in fact higher than 2,000, but it could mean that the city was hit hard and in a particularly weakened state. There is a good chance that the recorded number of people who died in Peterborough from the plague was incorrect, as people buried their family privately or they were missed from the records in times of overwhelming stress. We should also consider that there are no deaths of infants or the elderly that we would expect to see in the records, so there will have been other deaths/burials unrecorded, in addition to the plague deaths.

[2] As an aside, the wood from the pesthouse was kept for some time in the belfry of St John’s after the building had been dismantled, presumably to be used again elsewhere. This, and other facts, are from the Feoffees Accounts.

[3] https://peterborougharchaeology.org/st-leonards-leper-hospital/

Woad You Believe It

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

References: 

Iqbal, N.F.K., Ambivalent Blues: Woad and Indigo in Tension in Early Modern Europe, University of Alberta 

https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/constellations/index.php/constellations/article/download/19050/14723/45331 

woad.org.uk