This definitions covers Key Terms You Must Know within The Great Plague for GCSE History. Revise The Great Plague in Medicine Through Time for GCSE History with 8 exam-style questions and 5 flashcards. This topic appears less often, but it can still be a useful differentiator on mixed-topic papers. It is section 8 of 13 in this topic. Make sure you can use the exact wording confidently, because definition marks are often lost through vague language.
Topic position
Section 8 of 13
Practice
8 questions
Recall
5 flashcards
📖 Key Terms You Must Know
- Great Plague (1665)
- A major outbreak of bubonic plague in England, centred on London. At its peak in September 1665, over 7,000 Londoners died per week. The total death toll in London was approximately 100,000 — roughly 15-20% of the city's population. The plague arrived from the Netherlands, first appearing in St Giles-in-the-Fields parish in spring 1665. It subsided by 1666, partly due to the Great Fire of London (September 1666) which destroyed much of the overcrowded housing that harboured rats.
- Bills of Mortality
- Weekly printed lists recording the number of deaths in each London parish, organised by cause of death. First regularly published in the 16th century, they became the primary tool for tracking the Great Plague in 1665. Searchers (old women employed to examine bodies) reported causes of death to parish clerks, who compiled the Bills. They represent the first systematic public health surveillance in English history — a forerunner of modern epidemiology. John Graunt used them to conduct early statistical analysis of disease patterns.
- Plague orders
- Official instructions issued by the Lord Mayor of London in 1665 to manage the epidemic. Key measures included: compulsory quarantine of infected houses for 40 days, red crosses painted on doors of infected properties, watchmen posted to enforce quarantine, banning of public gatherings, orders to kill dogs and cats (mistakenly — rats were the real vector), quick burial of bodies in mass graves. The plague orders represent the most organised government response to disease seen in England to this point.
- Searchers
- Women (usually older and poorer) employed by parish authorities during the Great Plague to examine corpses and determine the cause of death. Their findings fed into the Bills of Mortality. Their identifications were often inaccurate — they lacked medical training and had to work quickly — but they represented the first systematic attempt to record and categorise disease deaths at a population level.
- Continuity and change
- The key analytical framework for comparing the Black Death (1348) and the Great Plague (1665). Continuity (what stayed the same): miasma theory still dominant, same treatments (bleeding, purging, theriac), same religious responses (prayer). Change (what was different): more organised government response, Bills of Mortality, systematic quarantine enforcement. This framework — identifying what changed and what did not, and explaining WHY — is the core skill tested by AQA on this topic.