A Journal of the Plague Year

True or False?

Defoe reported that at Cripplegate, some who were still alive, “buried” themselves by jumping into the pit and dying there.
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True:

I cannot say that the officers suffered any willingly to lie there; but I have heard that in a great pit in Finsbury, in the parish of Cripplegate, it lying open then to the fields, for it was not then walled about, [many] came and threw themselves in, and expired there, before they threw any earth upon them; and that when they came to bury others and found them there, they were quite dead, though not cold.

Source(s)

A Journal of the Plague Year