Dominic Cummings’s escape to the country during lockdown was a particularly deplorable move, but his case is not an isolated one. From the epicentres of the UK’s coronavirus crisis, hundreds fled the contagion of the city for the calm of the country. North Devon MP Selaine Saxby relayed reports of urban getaways sneaking into Devon “under the cover of darkness.” Even the (now former) Scottish chief medical officer couldn’t resist two minibreaks to Fife, an hour outside of her Edinburgh residence, despite plastering TV screens advising people to stay home.
Fleeing the city during epidemics is no new phenomenon, nor is incredulity towards the exodus of city people to the countryside. During 16th and 17th-century plague outbreaks, mass relocation provoked such controversy that fleeing one’s place of residence earned itself a popular term: flight.
Images from plague broadsheets—quasi-newspapers detailing the disease’s spread and mortality rate—depict well-dressed citizens escaping London. Death personified reigns over those trapped within the city’s walls, while fleeing citizens are met by the pikes of angry countrymen barring them entry. The exodus of wealthy citizens left well-off London streets desolate. According to Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of The Plague Year, “Whole rows of houses in some places were shut close up, the inhabitants all fled...” The “wealthiest" people and those "unencumbered with trades and business” departed, whilst “the rest, the generality stayed, and seemed to abide the worst.” The priest Simon Patrick recorded how only “the ordinary sort of people” remained in Covent Garden, all the “gentry…being gone.”
Flight was a hotly contested topic. Supporters considered it a necessary measure to curtail urban infection rates. Its critics, however, fervently remarked on the evident inequality. After all, only the wealthy could flee. Meanwhile the poor endured the urban hotspots of contagion where cramped and unhygienic living quarters spread disease like wildfire. As Bishop Hooper of Gloucester and Worcester observed, “the poorer sort of people that have no friends nor place to flee unto” could not escape.
The wealth disparity between fleers and remainers provoked debates over the social and moral responsibility of citizens. By fleeing, wealthy people neglected their duties of neighbourliness and charity—much of which rested on their shoulders or, more accurately, in their pockets. According to curate Benjamin Spencer’s pamphlet, fleeing Londoners revealed their “unkindness, uncharitableness and distrustfulness." Thomas Dekker, playwright and pamphleteer, laid bare the situation: “How shall the lame, and blind, and half-starved be fed?...You are fled that are to feed them…This is not good, it is not charitable, it is not Christian like.” He declared “the run-aways from London…fly to save [them]selves, and in that flight undo others."
Writers employed theological language to convey flight’s injustice. When the poor could only stay, was it right for the rich to leave? Dekker made his feelings clear: “Why should any man, (nay, how dare any man) presume to escape this Rod of Pestilence, when…houses are shut up, coar[p]ses born forth, and coffins brought in?” The physician Francis Herring warned, “Let not gentlemen and rich citizens by flying…think to escape scotfree…The Lord will find them out…” Satirical pamphleteer Samuel Rowland writes a poem that is similarly macabre and moralising. In it, the figure of death proclaims: “From empty houses many hundreds flying: / Each faculty, profession, and degree, / Took counsel with their legs to run from me /…‘Where can they run, but I am still behind-them?” By threatening God’s ultimate justice through death, writers hammered home the injustice of flight in attempts to admonish fleers.
Despite the critical barrage levied against it, flight remained prevalent. This owed, in large part, to the government and medical authorities’ view of flight as a measure to limit urban infection rates. Flight was controversial because of its complexity. No clear answer emerged as to whether reducing infection trumped helping those in need, especially when many considered plague God’s punishment for sin (thus neglecting Christian duties might endanger more lives). A murkier political undertone also guaranteed flight’s practice. Governing and middling classes were precisely those who benefited from fleeing. Flight critics berated those priests, physicians, magistrates, and aldermen who, by fleeing, neglected their obligations. They praised those who remained. In curate Benjamin Spenser’s pamphlet, London laments “But the higher my childrens groans rise, the more I look about me, and the more help I still miss. Where be my chyrurgions [surgeons] now…?”
The continual departure of the powerful and wealthy produced a vicious cycle. The urban poor suffered most from plague and, therefore, bore the brunt of the government’s preventative measures (such as the resented policy of “shutting up”—aka quarantining—households). Plague became associated with poverty. Ultimately, the plight of the urban poor lost to the interests of the privileged.
In this respect, perhaps not much has changed. Modern-day flight reveals the same injustices to ring true. Setting up camp in a second residence requires privileges: owning two homes or the funds to rent another; the freedom to instantly relocate, and the ability to work from home. Essential workers cannot simply up-and-leave. People living in poverty are suffering disproportionately from Covid-19, but also from lockdown’s repercussions: cramped living conditions, depleted incomes, and plummeting mental health. Meanwhile, high-profile figures continue to showcase their luxury second homes on social media whilst moaning, like Gordon Ramsay from his Cornwall retreat, that every day is “groundhog day.”
Early modern flight critics were acutely sensitive to the inequalities inherent in flight. They remind us that epidemics do discriminate, and disproportionately affect the poorest communities. Contrary to Madonna’s observation, coronavirus is far from “the great equaliser.” The insensitive flaunting of high-profile figures and Cummings’ display of hypocrisy in flight show, then as now, the inequality in crisis. Perhaps, then, one message to take from critics of plague flight is the value of sensitivity. Nearly 400 years ago Dekker addressed his criticism of flight to London’s "run-aways" to "put you in mind of our miseries, whom you have left behind you." Now is the time to keep each other in mind.
