4 ideas
A biscuit-baker, his brother (a sailmaker) and a joiner leave plague-struck London with almost nothing. They walk into Essex, where every town bars strangers from the city, so they bluff that they are an armed party, pick up other fugitives, and build huts near Epping Forest. Local people supply them food at a distance, and all of them survive because they keep strict separation from others and share their labour and resources.
Magistrates locked infected households inside with a watchman at the door, which confined the healthy with the sick and turned whole families into casualties. People desperate to avoid confinement bribed or attacked the watchmen, escaped, and hid their symptoms. The compulsory quarantine therefore scattered the infection it was meant to contain, carried by the people who fled it.
The visibly sick were avoided, so they were not what drove transmission. The infection moved through people who looked well and did not know they carried it, and they passed it on in markets, churches and homes. Any defence based on spotting and avoiding the obviously ill therefore failed, because the danger could not be seen.
A narrator placed on the scene (here a saddler, invented by an author who was five in 1665) stitches weekly mortality bills, official orders and circulating anecdotes into first-person testimony. Doubts, repetitions and admissions of hearsay make the account read as authentic. Reading this way shows how documentary authority can be manufactured through the texture of witnessing rather than through actual presence.