Defoe's account of people being buried in heaps is not necessarily at odds with this excavation of neat coffin burials.<p>The plague didn't instantly reach full intensity on day one. During the early phases of the epidemic, deaths were not yet widespread enough to require mass graves, and burials proceeded semi-normally.<p>During the later, more intense phases, things were much worse. There were both more bodies needing to be buried and fewer available funerary service providers such as coffinmakers and undertakers around to deal with them, since many had themselves either died of the plague or fled the city. Faced with growing heaps of rotting infectious corpses in the streets, hastily dug mass graves were often resorted to by the survivors.