Edward and Margery Box; Plague in Sutton Benger?

Plague in Sutton Benger?

The 1684 Parish Register for Sutton Benger makes interesting - but sad - reading. The second entry on the page shows the marriage of Edward Box and Margery Pokridge on 18 April; but the very next line records the death of Edward just a week later, on 25 April. And two lines later we see the death of Margery Box, widow, on 4 May. There are no records of their births or baptisms in the registers, but there is a gap in the registers for about 3 years around 1660; if this is when they were both born, they were less than 24 years old when they married and died.

The parish death / burial records show an average of 6 deaths per year in the parish from December 1679 to December 1683. In the following year there were 8 deaths, including Edward and Margery, and the following year there were 16 deaths - a significant number in a population as low as 200-300. It seems highly likely that there was a minor outbreak of an infectious disease, such as plague.

When we think of 'the plague' we tend to think of the major outbreaks, such as the Black Death (between 1347 and 1353) and the outbreak in 1665 which preceded the Fire of London in 1666. But there were other major outbreaks, such as in 1563, 1593 and 1625, and frequent smaller outbreaks, such as in 1596 when William Shakespeare's son, Hamnet, died. We will never know any more details about their short lives, or deaths, but finding small stories like this reminds us what life was like in Sutton Benger in the 1600s.

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