A Trip to Eyam: The Plague Village by Fay Bound Alberti

Eyam is a beautiful village in the Peak District National Park. It is most famous for an outbreak of bubonic plague that occurred in 1665, a year before the Great Fire of London. The present village was founded by Anglo-Saxons, though lead had been mined in the area since Roman times. The village was once industrial but now most of its economy is based on its status as ‘the plague village.’

That story began when a local tailor obtained a flea-infested bundle of cloth from London. Within a week the tailor’s assistant, George Vicars was dead, and more began dying in the household soon after. By pure coincidence when we stopped at Eyam we parked next to the ‘plague house’ where the outbreak had started. This house - like the others in the village where many people died - are a kind of living monument. People living there now must be used to visitors gawking up at the windows, trying to imaging how it would have been to live alongside loved ones dying of the plague: the smells, the sounds, the sights, the fear.

As the plague spread rapidly through the village, precautions were taken at the advice of the Reverend William Mompesson, the village rector and his Puritan Minister, Thomas Stanley. St Lawrence church was central to the lives of villagers, just as the church was generally for people in the seventeenth century, many of whom viewed the plague as God’s punishment for wrong doing (a particularly challenging thought so soon after the English Civil Wars). It was there that baptisms, weddings and funerals as well as the daily homilies on obedience and devotion reminded one of one’s place in the temporal and spiritual realms. Standing in the small church today, looking up at the now-faded wall paintings that would once have been brightly painted, one has a sense of how narrow and limited the world would have seemed if one was trapped there. Mompesson started to hold his services outside the church, as people were increasingly reluctant to stand shoulder to shoulder with their neighbours.

   

It was Mompesson who encouraged the villagers to isolate themselves from the outside world, quarantining its population rather than allowing the disease to spread further. The sacrifice of the people is told in a stained-glass window commemorating Eyam’s story. The number who died is disputed, but we know that at least half the village died to the plague – upwards of 273 people (the number recorded in the Eyam church register). The danger lasted for fourteen months, and it was far longer before anything like normalcy was resumed.

Survival was random. Several who remained alive had close contact with those who died from the plague but did not contract the disease themselves. One Elizabeth Hancock was uninfected though she buried six children and her husband in eight days. The unofficial village gravedigger Marshall Howe also survived.

Critics of the village’s quarantine have recently pointed out that wealthier residents were able to circumvent the ban.  Indeed, Mompesson sent his own children away to Sheffield so that that could escape the quarantine. He wanted his wife to go with them, but she refused, deciding instead to stay with her husband and tend to the people of Eyam. Catherine died of the plague and her grave still stands in the churchyard. Mompesson himself was forever associated with the plague and not universally welcomed at his next parish. He did remarry, however and eventually became Prebendary of Southwell, Nottinghamshire.