Great Plague of London

And I hold dear because she lived this blessing.

I started saying when we were in lockdown in COVID because she lived through the Great Plague.

And these are words that she likely wrote in the Great Plague.

And they, turns out, still resonate.

So...

Why can't there be the same in alien species? I don't know what his name

is, but can you imagine, like, you know, the quorum of tereleptiles, you know, back on the home planet going, oh, what are they up to now? They've been to the Earth, stirring up the Great Plague, the bloody Gits.

They're giving us all a

bad name.

The plague did not end after the first great outbreak.

It returned again and again, in waves, every few years or decades, for more than 300 years, until the last great outbreaks in Western Europe in the 17th century, among them the Great Plague of London in 1665 and 1666.

For generation after generation, people lived with the knowledge that the plague might return at any time, and sweep away their families and their neighbours without warning.

Death was no longer something that came, in its own time, at the end of a long life.

And the rats are everywhere, especially the ones carrying fleas, especially the fleas carrying plague.

The Great Plague of 1665 hits London like a hammer.

Within months, it kills perhaps 100,000 people, one fifth of the population.

Imagine one out of every five people you know simply disappearing.

So the term to be buried six feet under, apparently, I've looked into it, comes from the plague.

So during the Great Plague of 1665 to 1666...

there was an order sent out to bury all the bodies six feet underground in order to prevent the spread of disease and stop animals from disturbing any remains.

Okay,

I just want to ask, you know, we were talking about this idea of seeds of disease, right? That's what you talked about, the idea of contagion.

And I was kind of astonished to realize that a quarter of the population of London died in 1665-66 due to the Great Plague.

But then you went on to say there were at least six major plague outbreaks in Can you talk to us a bit about the plague, especially now that we've experienced our own pandemic, right? In our lifetime, we have some sense of what it means for a disease to break out of its container and kind of a new disease, something we don't have antibiotics for right away, right? As I was

reading, whenever I would get to another plague outbreak, I would yell, too soon! Too soon, yes!

Okay, I've got the quote.

So, well, A, Shakespeare, a lot of his relatives died during the Great Plague in the UK.

And also...

the village, the town he was born in, his birth certificate is there.