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23 September 2020 / Nicholas Dobson
Issue: 7903 / Categories: Features , Profession
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Law stories: a plague upon us!

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27993
Nicholas Dobson searches for relief from COVID-19 by revisiting the Great Plague

‘Go to jail! Go directly to jail! Do not pass Go. Do not collect £200!’ But since the PM’s initial shock broadcast last March, things had been struggling to get back to normal, what with confused government messaging and patchy ‘Simon says’ local lockdowns. And then, into reverse gear again! So with abundant COVID-19 legislation still in force, it’s still largely a case of ‘Lord! how empty the streets are and melancholy’, as Samuel Pepys remarked while the Great Plague raged in October 1665.

Blotch or purple

But while we have had our own extensive series of ‘must do’ and ‘mustn’t do’ regulations (issued effectively be decree),, 1665 London had its own detailed strictures. So Daniel Defoe in his 1772 historical fiction, Journal of the Plague Year, details the ‘Orders conceived and published by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City Of London concerning the infection of the Plague’. These were extensive. When ‘any one

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