No not really, we have written records here from Roman times onwards, including records of all the plagues here which sadly were many ( big one 664-689 BCE) the one people tend to remember as being the first was in 1350 BCE, It came back in 1361-64, 1368, 1371, 1373-75, 1390, 1405 and continued into the fifteenth century. There was also the 'London' Plagues of 1563, 1592, 1603 and 1625. The next biggest the 'Great Plague' was 1665-66, another in 1775-76 then 1832 then 1854 cholera.
There's 500 years worth of written parliamentary records stored in the House of Commons alone. the National Archives has written records for the past thousand years. anyone can have access to them, I use them quite often for information as I am a historian by inclination, these include
- Documents from the central courts of law from the twelfth century onwards, including the Court of King's Bench, the Court of Common Pleas, the Court of Chancery, the Court of Exchequer, the Supreme Court of Judicature, the Central Criminal Court, Assizes, and many other courts
- Medieval, early modern and modern records of central government
- A large and disparate collection of maps, plans and architectural drawings
- Records for family historians including wills, naturalisation certificates and criminal records
- Service and operational records of the armed forces War Office, Admiralty etc.
- Foreign Office and Colonial Office correspondence and files
- Cabinet papers and Home Office records
- Statistics of the Board of Trade
- The surviving records of (mainly) the English railway companies, transferred from the British Railways Record Office
I was writing that more to 'annoy' XS again! 
