The malady in London began to decline in the latter part of September, and at the end of the year it ceased, when the City soon filled again, resuming its wonted aspect of activity and bustle, and the beneficed clergy who had fled reappeared in their pulpits. The minister of St. Olave's, where Pepys attended, was the first to leave, the last to return; and the minute chronicler informs us, that when he went with his wife to church, to hear this Divine preach to his long-neglected flock, he "made but a very poor and short excuse, and a bad sermon."[473]
The Plague, when it left London, visited, with its horrors, many other parts of England.
It is curious to find that the Corporation of Norwich gave orders to the parish clerks, not to toll for the dead, any bell, but one belonging to the parish in which the person died; because it had become a practice for the citizens in one parish to have the bells tolled for deceased friends in another parish, so that all the church steeples were sometimes ringing out a knell for the same individual.
As in London, so in the country, the ejected clergy[474] watched for opportunities of usefulness, but they were often thwarted in their laudable efforts. Owen Stockton, ejected at Colchester, when he saw many, "even the shepherds of the flock, hastening their flight," offered, if the magistrates "would indulge him the liberty of a public church, to stay and preach,"--"till either God should take him away by death, or cause the pestilence to cease." The magistrates had no power to set aside the law, and the privilege asked being denied, the Puritan confessor, from the study of the words in the Book of Isaiah--"Hide thyself as it were for a little moment until the indignation be overpast"--satisfied himself as to the lawfulness of removing from place to place, in time of peril, and hastened with his family to the retired village of Chattisham, in Suffolk.[475]
A touching story is told of a clergyman at Eyam, in Derbyshire. A box of cloth was sent from London to a tailor in the village, who, soon after he had emptied the package, fell sick, and died. The pestilence presently swept away all in his house except one. It spread from cottage to cottage, and a grave-stone remains to tell the story of seven persons of the name of Hancock, who died within eight days. As the churchyard did not suffice for the burial of the dead, graves were dug in the fields and upon the hill-side, where corpses were hastily interred. The clergyman was Mr. Mompesson, a young man of twenty-eight, whose wife, alarmed for the safety of her husband and their two children, besought him to flee, but he would not leave his flock. With heroic love, whilst seeking his safety, she exposed herself to imminent danger; and consenting to the removal of the children, resolved to abide in the parsonage, where they remained for seven months. In conjunction with the Earl of Devonshire, the patron of the living, the Incumbent arranged that all communication with neighbouring places should be cut off, that no one should go beyond a boundary marked by stones, where people came and left provisions, and where the buyer put his money in a vessel of water. Combining singular prudence with ardent zeal, Mompesson provided for the continuance of religious services, without hazarding the health of his parishioners by bringing them into a crowded church, and wisely performed Divine service in the open air. In Cucklet Dale, by the side of a running brook, with a rock for his pulpit, with craggy hills on one side, and lofty trees on the other for the walls of his temple, he assembled his flock for worship, and was wonderfully preserved from contagion; but just as the Plague began to decline, his noble wife fell a victim to its power.[476]