A ‘right honorable and christian prouision’: The Purpose of the Pesthouse in Early Modern England

This is the first systematic study of plague pesthouses in early modern England, based on a comprehensive survey of municipal and parish records. It demonstrates that pesthouses were used in England earlier, more widely and more persistently than historians have recognised. Their development was locally driven. New establishments peaked between c.1550 and c.1624—decades before the national Plague Orders of 1666 made their provision compulsory. In contrast to celebrated Italian responses, English pesthouses were integrated into wider containment regimes centred on household quarantine. Pesthouse patients were defined by the absence of available domestic care. Account books and staffing lists indicate that pesthouses operated less as punitive sites of confinement than as rudimentary hospitals, routinely employing nurses, surgeons, and apothecaries. By reinterpreting pesthouses as centres of isolation and organised care, the article revises narratives of English plague governance and reframes these institutions as practical expressions of Christian charity.