Great Linford and the plague

When we think of the plague, our first thought is likely to be “the great plague” which famously struck in 1665/1666, with particularly deadly consequences for London. However, various strains of the disease had flared up periodically before this, most notably the so-called “black death”, which arrived in 1348 and is thought to have wiped out up to half the country’s population. There appear to be no records that specifically reference the impact of the Black Death on Buckinghamshire in the 1300s, but we do know that when the plague struck again in the mid-1660s, Newport Pagnell, only a little less than two miles to the north-east of Great Linford, became a hotbed of infection.

What was the plague?

Though the plague of 1348 is now generally referred to as the “Black Death”, the term was not actually coined until the 17th century, and at the time of the outbreak, it was commonly referred to as the “Great Pestilence" or the "Great Mortality.”  We now know that two main variants of the disease were prevalent, bubonic and pneumonic plague. The Yersinia pestis bacteria that caused the illness was spread by fleas that were carried by infected rats, while pneumonic plague was spread from person to person. Originating in Asia, the plague arrived by ship, the first case generally thought to have been brought to the Dorset coast from Gascony in France.

Pneumonic plague has a mortality rate of near 100%, but though the bubonic plague was only half as lethal, its symptoms were by far the more terrifying, characterised by painful swellings called buboes that erupted in the lymph nodes found in the armpits, groin and neck. Sufferers could also exhibit headaches, vomiting, fever and black fingertips.

Lacking any understanding of the cause of the plague, there was little chance of arresting the remorseless advance of the disease, and it seems entirely likely that the plague of 1348 would have claimed victims in and around the area we now think of as Great Linford.

What effect did the plague of 1666 have on Great Linford?

The figures for deaths in Newport Pagnell, as calculated from the parish burial records, are truly sobering. In 1665, there were 33 burials recorded; the following year, the figure leapt up to an astounding total nearing 700 persons. Just as it is possible to calculate the excess deaths in Newport Pagnell from parish burial records, so we can attempt the same for Great Linford, except for the surprising fact that, with one notable exception (see later in this blog post), the village appears to have emerged unscathed from the plague of 1665/66. Looking at the tally of yearly deaths in the village throughout much of the 1660s, we find an average of just four deaths per year, which in itself provides an interesting insight into the minuscule population of the parish compared to Newport Pagnell.

As there was no spike in deaths in Great Linford when other towns and villages, including Newport Pagnell, were being ravaged, the obvious question arises: how did Great Linford avoid the same fate? Possibly, the village benefited from its relative isolation compared to Newport Pagnell, which, as a major coaching town, would have been far more susceptible to travellers spreading the contagion. Another possibility is that the parish was placed under quarantine. The rector at the time was John Fountaine, and the Lord of the Manor Sir Richard Napier. Conceivably, one or both of these men may have had the foresight to lock down the village, thereby keeping the epidemic at bay.

​A curious connection to the plague in Newport Pagnell

Though a quarantine seems the most likely explanation for Great Linford’s good fortune during the plague years, the theory is called into question by an unusual fragment of a memorial stone nestled in the North Chapel of St. Andrew’s Church. The inscription is clearly the surviving middle third of a much larger memorial, but though only a few isolated words and phrases are now legible, we are lucky that the full text was recorded before the memorial stone was broken up and moved from its original position.

The book, A History of Newport Pagnell by Frederick William Bull, published in 1900, provides the following information. "On a cracked freestone under the lowest window on the North side of the North Chapel of Great Linford Church is an inscription commencing with a Greek phrase as to the mortality of mankind." Though the Greek phrase is sadly unrecorded, the balance of the text was noted by Frederick Bull, as follows.

Here lyeth the Bodies of Richard and Martha Peter, who as they were here joyned in Marriage, Anno 1636, so it pleased God to lay them together in this Bed of Mould, Anno 1666, both dying in this parish. She on the 14, He on the 16 of Sept: being removed from Newport by Reason of a Raging Plague. Matt. xix. vi.

The "Freestone" mentioned previously is defined as a stone that may be cut freely without splitting, while the term "Bed of Mould" in the inscription can be interpreted as a reference to a decorative stone surround. The reference to Matthew 19.6 relates to the biblical passage “So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate" 

Here then is unequivocal evidence that during the height of the plague of 1666, two persons were removed to Great Linford from Newport Pagnell. That both died within days of each other strongly implies they were already ill upon their arrival, presumably with plague. We also know from the parish records that Martha was interred on September 15th, and Richard on the 19th.

There are so many questions we are never likely to answer satisfactorily about Richard and Martha. Why were they “removed” to Great Linford with all the attendant risk implied? Were they the only residents of Newport Pagnell so afforded the opportunity to flee the town, where were they billeted in the village and were any precautions taken to minimise the chance of infection?

We can tentatively uncover some information about Richard Peter, as a person of this name is mentioned in a substantial number of legal documents pertaining to land and property sales, mostly in and around Newport Pagnell in the 1600s, though several also concern transactions in Cambridgeshire. Most of these documents describe him as a draper of Newport Pagnell, though one document also connects him to London. As a draper, he would have been involved in the buying and selling of cloth.
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One intriguing document, concerning the deeds of Moulsoe’s Farm in Great Linford, includes a conveyance between Richard Peter and George Smith to a Ralph Smith of Milton Keynes village. Does this imply a familial connection? Certainly, given that the inscription states that Richard and Mathea “were here joyned in Marriage, Anno 1636,” implies that the couple had a firm connection to Great Linford. Might it be that Martha’s maiden name was Smith, and might we even speculate that it was to Moulsoe’s Farm that the couple had fled?
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The various legal documents that mention Richard Peter frequently cite considerable sums of money, running into the thousands of pounds. Coupled with the description of the impressive memorial stone when it was intact, and the fact of their internment within the Church, leads to the conclusion that the couple must have been quite wealthy by the standards of the time.

​Were there ever any plague cases in Great Linford?

While the evidence points to Great Linford having avoided the plague in and around 1666, there is one interesting outlier to be found in the parish records that reveals a period of abnormally high mortality rates  The earliest date we have for burials in the parish is 1653, when five burials are recorded, though it should be noted that the first internment is dated October, suggesting the parish records were established on or perhaps a little before that date, hence the total for the year may have been higher. What is clear, however, is that something unusual happened between 1657 and 1660, with a gradual but statistically intriguing uptick in burials, reaching a high of 20 in 1658, before declining back to the normal average of four per year in 1661.

Was this an earlier visitation of the plague? Looking in detail at the records of 1660, with 15 burials recorded, one family in particular stands out, the Sansoms. On January 23rd, a Thomas Sansom was buried, followed on the 28th by a Mary Sansom and her infant son, the entry noting that both were buried in the same grave. This does imply that something had torn through a single household, and there are several other instances that same year of closely spaced deaths of people with the same surname.

The increase in deaths might easily be dismissed as a statistical anomaly, the result of happenstance and bad luck, except that, turning back to the burial records for Newport Pagnell, we do find an intriguing synchronicity with Great Linford. Between 1653 and 1656, the average number of burials in Newport Pagnell stood at around 65 per year, but in 1657, there was a marked jump to 175, followed by 123 in 1658. Unfortunately, the burial records for 1659 and 1660, as extracted from the familyhistory.org website, appear to be fragmentary, presumed largely lost, so we do not know if burials continued to be abnormally high for these years, though it is clear that from 1663 the normal cadence of burials had resumed.

However, the available evidence does seem to strongly imply that beginning in 1657, both Great Linford and Newport Pagnell were in the grip of an epidemic, presumably the plague. Perhaps it was this earlier brush with the disease that convinced the village leaders to take a firmer approach to protecting the population when the Great Plague struck less than a decade later.