The Bubonic Plague and the Great Fire of London

The Bubonic Plague and the Great Fire of London Two disasters struck London during the 1660s with the first being an

outbreak of bubonic plague, the last and worst of a series that had

started in the 1300s. The latter disaster was the great fire of London

in which a Bakery broke out in flames near to the London Bridge when

many of London's houses became sources of combustion as the fire took

hold of their wooden structures. Various source materials exist for

the events of the 1660s which include history books, biographies,

autobiographies and narratives, of which one source of history

material is the diary of Samuel Pepys, which shows hundreds of scenes

from his life including civil servants committees, Members of

Parliament in debate, concerts and music, friends on a river outing,

assignations that he attended, domestic tiffs, and current national

issues. Pepys diary is composed of his observations of people instead

of just facts and figures, that help a reader to relate to and share

his life experiences. I think this creates a quality historical

record.

For my study on Pepys diary I am going to re-write and explain two

extracts from his diary in the form of modern English. The first

extract is the 27-28 December 1664. "I went to bed leaving my wife

with all her family. I awoke at 6am to find that my wife had not yet

come to bed and I had no pot to go to the toilet in. I was forced to

go in the chimney in the bitter cold before going back to sleep. I

awoke again at 8am as my wife came to bed, this annoyed me a little

but I did n...

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...ern English was manhood or penis, as my

reasoning for this is that I thought that the word main might have

been a word used to describe manhood or a male's feature, although my

ideas could deferent to others. I know that cunny is an older term for

the modern word fanny. The detailed interpretation in my own

understanding for this was "I was with my penis in her fanny." But

since looking into this in more detail, I have discovered that this

single word in the middle of an old English sentence was the French

word for hand. Samuel would have wrote this to stop prying eyes from

his wife Elizabeth. As I have previously mentioned he tried to hide

his perjury from her and often doing so by the use of other languages.

Elizabeth was not as well educated as Samuel was, so may not of been

able to translate this part in his diary.