could go no deeper, for the water.

They had dug several pits in another ground when the distemper began to
spread in our parish, and especially when the dead-carts began to go about,
which in our parish was not till the beginning of August. Into these pits
they had put perhaps fifty or sixty bodies each; then they made larger
holes, wherein they buried all that the cart brought in a week, which, by
the middle to the end of August, came to from two hundred to four hundred
a week. They could not dig them larger, because of the order of the
magistrates confining them to leave no bodies within six feet of the
surface. Besides, the water coming on at about seventeen or eighteen feet,
they could not well put more in one pit. But now at the beginning of
September, the plague being at its height, and the number of burials in our
parish increasing to more than were ever buried in any parish about London
of no larger extent, they ordered this dreadful gulf to be dug, for such it
was, rather than a pit.

They had supposed this pit would have supplied them for a month or more
when they dug it, and some blamed the churchwardens for suffering such a
frightful thing, telling them they were making preparations to bury the
whole parish, and the like; but time made it appear the church-wardens
knew the condition of the parish better than they did; for the pit being
finished September 4th, I think they began to bury in it on the 6th, and by
the 20th, which was just two weeks, they had thrown into it one thousand
one hundred fourteen bodies, when they were obliged to fill it up, the
bodies being within six feet of the surface.

It was about September 10th that my curiosity led or rather drove me to
go and see this pit again, when there had been about four hundred people
buried in it; and I was not content to see it in the daytime, as I had done