London·1665
One Monday in the Plague Summer
2 hr 2 min·7 May 2026·6 sources
In 1665, during the Great Plague of London, Samuel Pepys called the parish nurses thieves. The records of one Westminster parish say he was wrong.
This documentary follows a real woman through a single Monday in the plague summer — Margery Stiffany, a parish-paid nurse whose name appears seven times in the surviving St. Margaret’s Westminster ledger, with one extra sentence next to it that no other woman in the book received. We walk her morning through her night: the white stick she carried by law, the houses she entered alone, the ledger that recorded her work, and the recent scholarship that has finally begun to read her name properly.
Built from primary sources — the churchwarden’s plague accounts at Westminster City Archives, the weekly Bills of Mortality, the diary of Samuel Pepys, the letters of John Allin from Southwark, and the recent doctoral work of Dr Lara Thorpe at Royal Holloway. The history is current as of publication. Where the record is silent, the silence is named.
A long, careful walk through one ordinary day, three hundred and sixty years ago.
Sources
as published with the film- St. Margaret’s Westminster Churchwarden’s Accounts, 1665 — Westminster City Archives
- Bills of Mortality, 1665 — Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks, Guildhall Library
- The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 1665 — Latham & Matthews critical edition
- William Boghurst, Loimographia (1665) — Sloane MS. 349, British Museum
- John Allin, Letters to Philip Frith, 1665 — East Sussex Record Office (FRE 5421-5634)
- Lara Thorpe, “At the mercy of a strange woman: Plague Nurses, Marginality, and Fear during the Great Plague of 1665” — in Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam University Press, 2019)
Something wrong here? Tell us — corrections are made in public.