Hello you're listening to Witness on the BBC World Service and today we're going back to London in the summer of 1665

when the city was gripped by one of the worst epidemics in its history.

I'm Lucy Burns and I've been looking back at eyewitness accounts of what became known as the Great Plague.

Great fear of the sickness here in the city. It is being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us all.

That's famous diarist Samuel Peeps, who was one of half a million Londoners, all terrified by the spread of the plague.

This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors and,

Lord have mercy upon us writ there. Which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that I ever saw.

It put me into an ill conception of myself and my smell,

so that I was forced to buy some roll tobacco to smell and chew,

which took away the apprehension.

Vanessa Harding is professor of London history at Birkbeck University of London.

Plague is an epidemic disease that clearly spreads quite rapidly from person to person. It kills the majority of those who experience it

and it has some very unpleasant and painful symptoms including swellings and bubos in the armpits and in the groin and often spots on the body.

This wasn't London's first experience with the plague.

They'd had a number of outbreaks ever since the black death in the 14th century

had killed nearly a third of the UK population.

And also Europe in the 1660s had had several reports of plague. London vicar Reverend John Allen wrote about it in a letter to a friend.

The sickness is said to increase in Holland as it also does here.

The bill mentioned three last week and 14 this week, but it is

rather believed to be treble the number. At the upper end of the town, persons

high and low are very fearful of it. The city swung into action with a series of plague orders, which are things like clearing the streets,

killing dogs and cats, shutting up those who are infected, preventing crowds, telling people they must attend,

...