Civilization of England in the 17th

Century
Choose a significant event in the
17th century England and discuss
how it influenced the politics,
economy, culture or society of that
era
 During the Interregnum, which was the period between the
execution of Charles I and the arrival of his son Charles II, England
was under republican government. Oliver Cromwell was installed
as Lord Protector, however, there were some aspects of the failure
of democracy; the minority (Puritans) managed to impose its
opinions on the majority (Protestant). Life became so hard in
England because all people were forced to obey the instruction of
the Puritans who advocated an austere lifestyle, so the instructions
of the Puritans were not accepted by the majority. They could not
endure the strict system of them. Furthermore, the position of Lord
Protector which should be democratic and elective, it became
hereditary, so the republic government system failed to maintain
democracy because it ended up by choosing the son of Oliver
Cromwell as a successor. In 1660, General George Monck acted
on behalf of many English people and brought Charles II’s son out
of exile and onto the throne. The parliament imposed its demands
on King Charles II to restore him to England, and he accepted its
authority and power.

By the 1660s, London was by far the largest city in Britain

with an estimated half a million inhabitants. However, owing to the
Great Plague of London, its population had declined during the
previous winter. John Evelyn, comparing London with the Baroque
magnificence of Paris, called it “wooden, northern and inartificial
house congestion” and expressed concern about the fire hazards
raised by wood and congestion. By "inartificial," Evelyn meant
unplanned and inappropriate, the product of organic development
and unchecked urban sprawl.

London had been a Roman town for four centuries and had
become increasingly crowded within its protective wall of the city. It
had spread beyond the wall to squalid extramural slums such as
Shoreditch, Holborn, and Southwark, and extended far enough to
include the independent City of Westminster.

By the end of the 17th century, the City — the area enclosed by
the City Wall and the River Thames — was still part of London,
occupying some 700 acres and home to some 80,000 people, or
one-sixth of London's inhabitants. The City was surrounded by a
ring of inner suburbs where most Londoners were living.

The City was then, as it is now, the commercial center of the

city, England's largest market and busiest port, dominated by the
trading and manufacturing groups.

The aristocracy shunned the City and lived either in the

countryside beyond the slum suburbs or in the exclusive district of
Westminster (the modern West End), the seat of King Charles II's
court in Whitehall. Wealthy people preferred to live in a convenient
distance from the busy, polluted, unsafe city, especially after the
devastating outbreak of bubonic plague in the Plague Year of
1665.

The relationship between the City and the Crown was often
tense. During the Civil War (1642–51), the City of London was a
stronghold of republicanism, and the wealthy and economically
competitive capital still had the ability to challenge Charles II, as
evidenced by many republican uprisings in London in the early
1660s.The City magistrates were of the generation that fought in
the Civil War, and they could recall how Charles I took absolute
power and led to that national trauma.

They were determined to thwart any similar tendencies in his

son, and when the Great Fire threatened the City, they refused the
offerings made by Charles of soldiers and other resources. Even in
such an emergency, the idea of making the hated Royal Army
ordered into the City was political dynamite. By the time Charles
took charge of the inept Lord Mayor, the fire was out of charge.

The Great Plague, which lasted from 1665 to 1666, was the last
major epidemic of the bubonic plague in England. The Great
Plague killed an estimated 100,000 people — nearly a quarter of
the population of London — in 18 months. The plague was caused
by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which is usually transmitted
through the bite of an infected rat flea. The epidemic of 1665-66
was much smaller than the earlier Black Death pandemic; it was
later remembered as the "great" plague, mainly because it was the
last widespread outbreak of bubonic plague in England. As in
many European cities of the time, the plague was endemic to
London in the 17th century. There were 30,000 deaths due to the
plague in 1603, 35,000 in 1625, and 10,000 in 1636, as well as
fewer deaths in other years.

At that time, the bubonic plague was a much-feared disease,

but its cause was not understood. The Great Plague in London has
long been suspected to be a bubonic plague caused by Yersinia
pestis, as confirmed by DNA tests in 2016.

In order to judge the severity of the epidemic, it is first

necessary to know the size of the population in which it occurred.
There was no official population census to provide this number,
and the best contemporary account comes from the work of John
Graunt (1620–1674), one of the early Fellows of the Royal Society
and one of the first demographers, who introduced a practical
approach to the collection of statistics. It was estimated in 1662
that 384,000 people were living in the City of London. In 1665, he
revised his estimate to "not more than 460,000." Other
contemporaries put the figure higher, with the French Ambassador,
for example, proposing 600,000, but without a mathematical basis
to support their estimates.

The total number of people dying in London in the first four

months of 1665 showed a marked increase. At the end of April,
only four deaths were recorded, two in St. Giles parish, but total
deaths per week increased from around 290 to 398. The plague
affected the poor in large part, as the wealthy were able to escape
the city either by fleeing to their country estates or by staying with
relatives in other parts of the country. The poor have always been
the biggest victims of the plague. While the rich could flee to the
countryside, the poor were forced to stay behind in the close
quarters of cities where it was virtually impossible to avoid a
contract with rats, animals and other infected citizens.

In July 1665, the plague was rife in the City of London. The rich
had fled, including King Charles II of England, his family and his
husband, who had left the city for Salisbury, and had moved to
Oxford in September, when some of the plagues had occurred in
Salisbury. Aldermen and most of the other city officials have
elected to remain in their positions. The Lord Mayor of London, Sir
John Lawrence, has also decided to live in the area. Businesses
were closed as merchants and professionals fled. Defoe wrote,
"Nothing could be seen but wagons and carts, with goods, women,
servants, children, coaches full of better people, and horsemen
attending, and all rushing away." Poor people were also alarmed
by the contagion, and some left the city, but it wasn't easy for them
to leave their homes and livelihoods for an uncertain future
elsewhere.

Before leaving the city gates, they were required to have a

certificate of good health signed by the Lord Mayor, which became
increasingly difficult to obtain. As time went by and the number of
victims of the plague increased, people living in villages outside
London started to hate the evacuation and were no longer
prepared to accept London citizens with or without a certificate.
The refugees were turned back, as they were not allowed to pass
through the cities, so they had to travel across the country, and
they were forced to live hard on what they could steal or scavenge
from the fields. Many died in the miserable circumstances of
starvation and thirst in the dry summer to be followed.

Plague doctors crossed the streets to diagnose the victims,

many of them without formal medical training. Several public
health campaigns have been attempted. Physicists have been
employed by city authorities, and burial details have been carefully
arranged, but hysteria has spread across the city and, out of fear
of contagion, bodies have been hurriedly buried in overcrowded
pits. The means of transmission of the disease were not identified,
but, fearing that they could be related to livestock, the City
Corporation ordered the slaughter of dogs and cats.

This decision may have affected the length of the epidemic,

since these animals could have helped to keep in check the
population of rats carrying fleas that transmitted the disease.
Thinking that bad air was actually involved in the transmission, the
authorities ordered huge bonfires to be burned in the streets and
house fires to be kept burning night and day, hoping that the air
would be cleaned up. Tobacco was believed to be a prophylactic,
and it was later said that no London tobacconist had died of the
plague during the outbreak. Trade and commerce had dried up,
and the streets were empty of people but dead carts and dying
victims, as Samuel Pepys experienced and reported in his diary:
"Lord, how barren the streets are and how sad, so many poor sick
people in the streets full of sores ... in Westminster, there is no
doctor left but one apothecary, all of them dead."

The fact that people did not starve was due to the foresight of
Sir John Lawrence and the Corporation of London, which arranged
for a commission of one farthing to be paid above the normal price
for every quarter of corn landed in the Port of London. Another
food source was the villages around London, which, refused their
normal selling in the capital, left vegetables in designated market
areas, negotiated their selling by yelling, and received their
payment after the money had been left in a bucket of vinegar to
"disinfect" the coins.

Plague cases remained intermittent at a moderate pace until

mid-1666. That September, the Great Fire of London destroyed a
lot of the City of London, and some people thought the fire would
bring an end to the epidemic. It is now thought that the plague had
largely subsided before the fire occurred. Most of the later cases of
the plague were found in the suburbs, and the fire devastated the
City of London. According to the Bills of Mortality, there were a
total of 68,596 deaths from the plague in 1665 in England. Lord
Clarendon estimated that the true number of deaths was probably
twice that, estimating that the total number of deaths from the
plague in 1665 and 1666 was around 200,000. The population of
England in 1650 was approximately 5.25 million, which decreased
to about 4.9 million by 1680, to just over 5 million by 1700. Many
diseases, such as smallpox, also had a heavy toll on the
population without the contribution of the plague. The higher death
rate in cities, both in general and specifically due to the plague,
was the result of continuous migration from small to larger towns
and from the countryside to cities.
 One of the most significant effects of the plague in England was
a shortage of agricultural workers and a resulting rise in wages.
The medieval world view was unable to understand these
developments in terms of socio-economic growth, and then it was
popular to blame declining morals. Because the plague was mostly
afflicted the poor and killed a large portion of their population, the
majority of the victims came from the lower class, and this led to a
rarity in the working hands and peasants. Since the working hands
became rarity, the landed gentry competed to get more peasants.
The landed gentry and nobles found it difficult to find enough
working hands to work in their lands. Thus, this gave this class an
opportunity to impose its demands for better living and
improvement. Therefore, they sought more rights and privileges.
They imposed their demands, and their salaries were increased,
so that they can manage to send their sons to be educated in
schools to develop their cultural level. Also, they were given the
right to set up their own small projects, and as a result, they got
engaged in trade and business, thus they gained more wealth. All
these factors reinforced the middle class on the political and
economic level.

The Great Plague of 1665—6 was followed by the Great Fire of

London, in which within four days more than 13,000 houses were
destroyed. After the Plague, the Great Fire of London and various
defeats of the English by the Dutch Navy, it was difficult to sustain
the optimism of the first years of the Restoration.

The Great Fire of London raged through the main parts of the
English city from Sunday, September 2 to Thursday, September 6,
1666. The fire raged through the medieval city of London within the
old Roman city wall. It threatened but did not enter Westminster
Town, Charles II's Whitehall Palace, or any of the suburban slums.
It destroyed 13,200 homes, 87 parish churches, St. Paul's
Cathedral, and much of the city's schools. It is estimated that
70,000 of the city's 80,000 residents have lost their homes.
 The death toll is unknown, but has traditionally been thought to
be relatively small, as only six verified deaths have been recorded.
This argument has recently been questioned on the grounds that
the deaths of poor and middle-class people have not been
recorded; however, the heat of the fire could have cremated many
victims, leaving no recognizable remains. The melted pottery on
display at the Museum of London, discovered by archaeologists in
Pudding Lane, where the fire began, shows that the temperature
was 1,250 ° C (2,280 ° F; 1,520 K).

The Great Fire started in the bakery (or baker 's house) of
Thomas Farriner (or Farynor ) on Pudding Lane shortly after
midnight on Sunday, 2 September, and spread quickly west across
the City of London. The key firefighting tactic of the time was to
build firebreaks by demolition; this was desperately postponed due
to the indecisiveness of Sir Thomas blood worth, Lord Mayor of
London. By the time large-scale demolition was ordered on
Sunday night, the wind had already fanned the bakery fire into a
fire tower that had defeated such measures. On Monday, the fire
pushed north into the heart of the city.

Order broke down in the streets as rumors arose about

suspicious aliens setting fire. The fears of the homeless centered
on the French and Dutch, the enemies of England in the ongoing
Second Anglo-Dutch War; these large immigrant groups became
victims of lynching and street violence. On Tuesday, the fire
spread through much of the area, destroying St. Paul's Cathedral
and leaping over the River Fleet, threatening King Charles II's
court in Whitehall. Coordinated firefighting efforts were quickly
mobilized; two factors were considered to have won the battle to
quench the fire: Strong easterly winds died, and the Tower of
London garrison used gunpowder to create effective firebreaks to
stop further eastward spread.

The social and economic problems created by the disaster

have been overwhelming. Evacuation from London and
resettlement elsewhere is strongly promoted by Charles II, who
feared a London uprising among dispossessed refugees. Given a
variety of radical ideas, London was largely rebuilt on the same
street plan used before the fire.

The Great Fire destroyed much of London's official city (which

was geographically smaller than modern-day London), but it did
not touch other outer metropolitan areas, such as Whitechapel,
Clerkenwell, and Southwark, which were also affected by the
plague. It indicates that even though the fire wiped out rats in the
436 acres that it burned, it did not reach far enough to wipe out all
the plague-spread rats in Greater London.

In fact, the data show that the fire had no effect on the plague.
Plague deaths in London have been decreasing since the fire
began, and people have also continued to die of the plague after
the fire. It's not clear when people started to say that the fire ended
the epidemic, but people didn't seem to believe it at the time.

The frustrating fact is that historians just don't know why the
Great Plague began. After the fire, London reinforced the old
building codes that favored brick over wood because it was less
flammable. Brick is also more difficult for rats to burrow in, but as
Meriel Jeater, curator of the London Museum, notes, there were no
concomitant hygienic or sanitary improvements with this use of
brick that might have explained the eradication of the plague.

Some places had been smoldering for months afterwards.

Just 51 churches and some 9000 houses have been restored. St.
Paul's Cathedral was ruined, as was the Guildhall (Lord Mayor's
Office) and 52 livery company halls (the delivery companies were
London-based organizations).

It took almost 50 years to rebuild the burnt area of London. The

Cathedral of St. Paul was not completed until 1711. The city and
the cathedral looked very different after this view of London in the
1700s. Throughout 1667, people cleared the debris and surveyed
the burned town. A lot of time has been spent planning new street
layouts and drawing up new building regulations. At the end of the
year, only 150 new houses had been built. Public buildings, like
churches, were paid for with money from a new tax on coal.
 The new law was intended to avoid the recurrence of such a
catastrophe. Houses had to be placed in brick instead of wood.
Some streets have been widened and two new streets have been
built. Pavements and new sewers were laid, and the quaysides of
London improved. The results were noticeable: '(London) is not
only the finest, but the healthiest city in the world,' said one proud
Londoner.

The last third of the century saw changes in London

architecture, home decorations, and social habits. The return of
the courtiers from France, followed by the destruction of the city of
London by the Great Fire, the expansion of international trade, the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes (which brought many Huguenot
workmen to England) and after 1688 the presence of Dutch
courtiers, resulted in new fashions, new buildings, new
workmanship, new ideas of comfort, and the spread of continental
tastes beyond the Court to the wealthy. Coffee, chocolate and tea
were first introduced to London by the coffee houses which began
opening in the late Interregnum; by the end of the century the new
drinks had become fashionable among the upper classes.

Although London still had open sewers and slops continued to

be tossed from windows into the streets, housing had become
more sophisticated. The Elizabethan great hall had now
diminished to a large vestibule, and the ground floor of a large
house would include a reception room, parlour, dining-room and a
room to which the guests could withdraw after eating. The
bedroom, which from the Jacobean period onwards was becoming
separated from the upstairs long gallery, now became a distinct
room leading off the landing and no longer one of a sequence of
rooms in a passage. There was more privacy, comfort, and
furniture; mirrors and chests of drawers became normal, while
such furnishings as the settee, the dressing-table, the card-table,
the day-bed and various cabinets and cupboards were introduced.
Walnut, especially walnut veneer and patterned inlays, began to
be used in place of oak for the new delicate furniture. Chairs
became common and were often upholstered. Parquetry floors,
chandeliers, sash windows, glass wall-mirrors, stoneware and
Chinese porcelain were among the new fashions.

Domestic architecture had become classical; the larger houses

had formal gardens with fountains and trimmed hedges and lawns
on the European model. Although Christopher Wren’s hopes after
the Great Fire to redesign the pattern of London streets according
to a master plan were defeated by property owners, he and his
pupil John Webb (1611—72) rebuilt over fifty of the ninety
destroyed churches and were responsible for the use of Portland
stone, from the Isle of Portland, in Berkeley, St James and
Grosvenor Squares. Wren’s elaboration of Jones’s sombre
classicism into a more Baroque manner, also seen in the wood
carvings of Grinling Gibbons (1648—1720), was continued by
Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661—1736) and Sir John Vanbrugh in the
final decades of the century.

The plague remains a serious disease even in the 21st century.

Between August and November 2017, the outbreak of the plague
in Madagascar resulted in 2,417 infections and 209 deaths.
Antibiotic treatment is highly successful against the disease, but if
the disease is not treated or antibiotics are not available, it can still
be very deadly, just as it was back in 1665 and 1666.

The 16th century was an eventful time, especially from 1664 to

1666. There was a great plague at first in 1664 and 1665. After a
brief recovery, London was burnt down by the Great Fire until
September 1666. All the people had been affected this period. You
can see London burning in many pictures, and many books have
diary entries of people who lived to see the Plague and the
Flames. Architecture was also especially influenced. Most of the
houses of the Middle Ages were burned down in such a way that a
new architecture with stone houses was built.
 REFERENCE LIST
1. King, Bruce. Seventeenth-century English literature. 1983.
2. http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/application/files/
6514/5511/5493/whar-happened-great-fire-london
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plague_of_London
4. http://ww.kgs-tornesch.de/dokumente/upload/London
%20Texte%20Un/The%20Great%20Plague%20and%20the
%20Great%20the%20Great%20Fire-12A.pdf