Urban Plague with Death By Numbers Lesson Plan

Lesson plan created by Dan Howlett.

Before class:

  1. Read “The London Bills of Mortality” by Dan Howlett and Jessica Otis to introduce students to the Bills.
  2. Read “London, 1665: Living in a Deathtrap” by Cecilia Ward.
  3. Read “Of Fires, Great and Small” by Jessica Otis.
  4. Read various Samuel Pepys’s diary entries related to plague from the summer of 1665, including August 31, 1665.
  5. Read Samuel Pepys’s diary entries related to the Great Fire from September 1666.

I. Begin class by asking students to think about the primary source readings and what Pepys’s diary reveals about life in London during two disasters.

  • How do you think the population of London changed during these two disasters? Ask students to think about what Pepys meant by his “family to lie there continually” in Woolwich during the plague and why people might leave certain areas of the city.
  • Pepys mentions the Bills of Mortality related to the Plague but not the fire. What do you expect to see when we look at Bills from each of these disasters? What changes do you expect?

II. Maps of early modern London

Use Death By Number’s “Mapping Burials and Plague” visualization to explore the spread of plague in the city of London. Look at parish level data for various years and compare how plague deaths versus other burials in each parish change over time. Ask students what they notice about the smaller parishes packed into the dense population center versus the outlying parishes.

Compare the plague map to Wikimedia’s map of the Great fire of London. Use these two maps to discuss the risks of living in the center of an early modern city center compared to suburbs or rural areas. Why might historical actors accept these risks?

III. Effect on the Bills

Ask students to browse through the Wellcome Bills for the years 1665-1666 and notice how the demographics of early modern London change. How do they see the effects of the Great Fire in the parish burial reports? Can you tell what parishes were lost during the fire? Use the Parish Names Authority File to identify parishes lost during the fire.

IV. Other Possible Discussion Questions

  • Samuel Pepys mentions a lot of locations in his diary. How accurate are his descriptions compared to data collected in the Bills?
  • What places did Pepys know about and where were those the places most impacted by the plague and fire? Where, if anywhere, did Pepys miss and what accounts for his geographic knowledge of disasters?
  • Where would you choose to live in the city and what are the tradeoffs of living within the walls or out of the walls?

V. After class assignment

Use the Death By Numbers database and parish maps to track the spread of plague in a different year, such as the 1636 outbreak. Ask students to reflect on how the geography of plague is similar or different to 1665.

Suggested citation

Please use the following as a suggested citation:

Dan Howlett, “Urban Plague with Death By Numbers Lesson Plan,” Death by Numbers, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University (2025): https://deathbynumbers.org/teaching/urban-data/.