Trapped in Tombland.

Alright?

I hate to ask, but I need a favour: Last week’s email landed in the dreaded spam folder for a few of our readers.

Weirdly, you can help to prevent that from happening again by replying to this email. Just reply with the one word you’d use to describe the Secret Norwich Newsletter (sorry, but voluptuous is already taken).

I know (from your wonderful feedback) that some of you read this whilst enjoying your Sunday breakfast. Please continue to butter your crumpets, but be warned: Today’s story is grotesque. It’s probably the most gruesome story Norwich has to offer.

It may also be a total fabrication, but I’ll cover that in due course.

Dig out your plague mask and fasten it tightly: We’re heading to Tombland.

Who lives in a house like this?

“The wonky building on Tombland” is usually enough to describe Augustine Steward House to anyone who’s even vaguely familiar with the area.

For those still head-scratching, it’s this one:

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that it was built by an exceedingly wealthy bloke named Augustine Steward, who was the MP and Mayor of Norwich at various points throughout the 1500s.

The most interesting (and traumatic) thing that happened to him was that during Kett’s rebellion in 1549, the rebels invaded his home, stripped him naked and threatened to kill him.

After realising he might be useful, these same rebels sent him to negotiate with the King’s troops on their behalf, but he betrayed his captors and told the invading forces how to recapture the city instead. Very Game of Thrones-esque.

Augustine Steward died in 1571 and was buried alongside his two wives just up the road on Elm Hill.

Right then, see you next week.

(Oh wait, there’s more.)

An unwelcome return.

Augustine Steward House might’ve been named after the man who built it, but it’s the family who moved in after his death that tends to steal the headlines (and subject lines, as is the case with today’s email).

The year is 1578. The plague has returned to Norwich. Not because of some Tudor “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme, but probably due to a Royal Visit from Queen Elizabeth v1.

This time it’s really bad. The most deadly wave of the plague that Norwich has seen since the original outbreak in 1349.

Around 5,000-9,000 people in Norwich will die in less than a year. But this isn’t a story about the people who died. It’s a story about one particular girl who didn’t.

Quarantine.

Dealing with the plague must’ve been tough, particularly because the germ wouldn’t be discovered until about 300 years after the events covered in today’s email.

It’s all the more impressive, then, that the authorities at the time used quarantine as a way of preventing the spread.

Invented in Venice for ships entering the port, the quarantine system was as simple as it was brutal:

Step 1) Someone gets the plague. Let’s call this poor, hypothetical person Kevin.

Step 2) Kevin - and everyone Kevin lives with - gets locked in his house. The doors are bolted, the windows are boarded. Nobody gets in or out. A red cross is painted on the door, which basically means “this house is riddled”.

Step 3) Kevin - and whoever was locked in with him - would be left for 40 days (fun fact: ‘Quarantine’ comes from the word ‘Quaranta’, which means ‘forty’ in Italian). After 40 days, the corpses would be removed.

In 1578, a member of the family living in Augustine Steward House went and pulled a Kevin. Illness, bubos, the lot. Wealthy as they were, there were no exceptions. The doors were bolted, the windows were boarded, and a red cross was painted on their door.

See you in 40 days.

The girl who lived.

One of the big problems with the quarantine system during the plague was that not everyone would die from it.

Some victims just got lucky, but others carried a genetic mutation that made them resistant to the plague. They would still catch it, but the symptoms were far less severe.

(By the way, it’s assumed that quite a lot of Europeans still have plague-resistant genes, in large part because of the lopsided survival rates of these gene carriers hundreds of years ago).

The young daughter of the family living in the bolted, boarded Augustine Steward House was one such person. It didn’t matter that her Mother and Father would eventually succumb to the plague: She would only suffer from a mild illness.

When the nurses unsealed the house to exhume the bodies 40 days later, they were surprised to find that the daughter’s corpse showed none of the telltale signs of the plague. Her fingernails were intact. Her skin was clear. Her hair was as healthy as hair could be back in the 1500s.

Confused, they examined the body more closely. There, lodged in the back of her throat, were chunks of flesh.

After a closer look at her parents’ remains, it didn’t take long to connect the dots. Unable to get out of her sealed home and desperate to survive, the girl had resorted to eating the bodies of her dead parents. In doing so, she had choked to death.

How’re those crumpets?

Or so the story goes…

This is all very gross, shocking and tragic. It’s also more folklore than fact.

There’s no evidence to support this story, and whilst some sources will offer embellished details, none I’ve found corroborate with historical records.

Which begs the question: Why does this story exist in the first place?

For me, the reason this story is so harrowing is because there’s a chilling feasibility about it all. Even if it didn’t happen to a girl living in Augustine Steward House, it feels entirely possible that it happened somewhere else.

We’re used to hearing about the plague through the clinical lens of facts and figures. By focusing on the individual rather than the many, this story succeeds where the facts fail. It gives us a small insight into the horror of it all.

Until next time…

If you enjoyed this story, you’ll hear plenty of gruesome tales like this on the Norwich Pub Tour. After the first one in August sold out in record time, they’ve just announced another tour on Sunday, 31st August. Click the button below to book onto it:

I’ll be back next week. Remember, if you could take a second to reply to this email, I’d be really grateful.

Secret Norwich.