Interpretation Analysis Practice

📜 Interpretation Analysis Practice

How Convincing Is This?

Supporting evidence: Charles II did leave London for Oxford. Around 100,000 people died — roughly a quarter of the city's population. Shutting up houses was widely evaded and trapped healthy people with plague victims. Bills of Mortality under-reported cases as families concealed infections to avoid quarantine.

Challenging evidence: No government in 1665 possessed the medical knowledge to stop plague — germ theory arrived 200 years later. The measures taken (quarantine, Bills of Mortality, banning public gatherings) were consistent with best practice across Europe. The plague did end within a year, and London recovered.

Grade 9 Model Paragraph:

This interpretation is convincing to an extent because Charles II's departure for Oxford left London without central leadership during its worst crisis, and the policy of shutting up houses almost certainly made death tolls higher by trapping healthy people with the infected — roughly 100,000 died, a quarter of the population. However, the interpretation is less convincing as a judgement of failure because no 17th-century government had the scientific knowledge to stop plague: germ theory did not exist until Pasteur in the 1860s. Blaming the authorities for not doing what was impossible is an unfair standard.