Surprisingly for the city of Shakespeare and Dickens, London produced no great plague chroniclers on the order of Agnolo di Tura or Giovanni Boccaccio. But Thomas Vincent’s evocative description of London during a later outbreak of plague suggests what the city must have been like in the terrible winter and spring of 1349. “Now, there is a dismal solitude,” wrote Vincent. “Shops are shut . . . people rare, very few walk about . . . and there is a deep silence in almost every place. If any voice can be heard, it is the groans of the dying, and the funeral knell of them that are ready to be
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