9. The Great Plague of London, which was followed by the Great Fire of London eighteen months later, culled around one-quarter of the poorer inhabitants of London in just eighteen months
The Great Plague of London, lasting from 1665 to 1666, was the last major outbreak of the bubonic plague in England. Lasting just eighteen months the plague is estimated to have been responsible for the deaths of approximately 100,000 people, amounting to almost one-quarter of the total population of London. Carried, as was typical of bubonic plague, by infected rat fleas, the outbreak was thwarted, inadvertently, by the onset of the Great Fire of London in September 1666. The resultant conflagration destroyed ninety percent of London houses, helping to cleanse the city of the pandemic ravaging it.
Unlike other previous pandemics, the Great Plague atypically affected mostly the poor. London, with a population of around 400,000, was more than twelve times larger than the next most populous city of England: Norwich. When the outbreak started, the wealthy retreated to their country estates whilst the poor, crammed into shanty towns with no sanitation, were left to rot. In the years prior to the Great Plague, outbreaks in the slums were not uncommon, with 30,000 deaths in 1603, 35,000 in 1625, and 10,000 in 1636. Worse still, with the exodus of the rich, as Samuel Pepys recorded, ” in Westminster, there is never a physician and but one apothecary left”.