Some of the city's necessities, such as coal, arrived by barge, but most came by road. The stench was overwhelming, and people walked around with handkerchiefs or nosegays pressed against their nostrils. The City Corporation employed "rakers" to remove the worst of the filth, and it was transported to mounds outside the walls, where it accumulated and continued to decompose. The cobbles were slippery with animal droppings, rubbish and the slops thrown out of the houses they were muddy and buzzing with flies in summer, and awash with sewage in winter. There was no sanitation, and open drains flowed along the centre of winding streets. In the poorer parts of the city, filled with overcrowded tenements and garrets, hygiene was impossible to maintain. There were gates in the wall at Ludgate, Newgate, Aldersgate, Cripplegate, Moorgate, Bishopsgate and Aldgate, and the Thames was crossable at London Bridge. London at that time was a city of about 448 acres surrounded by a city wall that had originally been built to keep out raiding bands, and, in the south, by the River Thames. In late 1664, a bright comet was seen in the sky, and the people of London became fearful, wondering what evil event it portended. There were 30,000 deaths due to the plague in 1603, 35,000 in 1625, 10,000 in 1636, and smaller numbers in other years.
The disease periodically erupted into massive epidemics. The plague was endemic in 17th-century London, as it was in other European cities at the time. Map of London by Wenceslaus Hollar, c.1665 It became known afterwards as the "great" plague mainly because it was the last widespread outbreak of bubonic plague in England during the 400-year Second Pandemic. The 1665–66 epidemic was on a much smaller scale than the earlier Black Death pandemic. The plague was caused by the Yersinia pestis bacterium, which is usually transmitted through the bite to a human by a flea or louse. The Great Plague killed an estimated 100,000 people-almost a quarter of London's population-in 18 months. It happened within the centuries-long Second Pandemic, a period of intermittent bubonic plague epidemics that originated in Central Asia in 1331 (the first year of the Black Death), and included related diseases such as pneumonic plague and septicemic plague, which lasted until 1750. The Great Plague of London, lasting from 1665 to 1666, was the last major epidemic of the bubonic plague to occur in England. Collecting the dead for burial during the Great Plague
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