READING TEXT
The plague that killed 100,000 Londoners
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Original educational text. Factual background sources are linked below; reflections and questions are written for this lesson.
London's Great Plague of 1665 is commonly associated with an estimated death toll of around 100,000. Surviving mortality records are indispensable, but they do not provide a perfectly complete count. London Museum notes limitations in reporting and classification, including people missing from the records. The familiar number should therefore be understood as an estimate, not as a list in which every death was identified with certainty.
For a reader, that distinction changes the role of an archive. A document can preserve valuable evidence while reflecting the institutions and exclusions through which it was created. A missing entry is not evidence that a missing life did not matter. Equally, recognising incompleteness does not make the surviving records useless. It makes comparison and interpretation necessary. The scale of the disaster is difficult to imagine, and a rounded number helps communicate it. Historical understanding also requires asking how that number was reached and whose experience remains harder to recover behind it.
