It’s 1665 and the last major outbreak of bubonic plague in England is currently ravaging London,
causing terror and misery amongst the capital’s residents. It’s not going to stay there though.
Soon it’s travelled to the sleepy village of Eyam in Derbyshire where it will wreak havoc
on the small population. The villagers’ reaction to this situation is remarkable though and it’s
why what happened in Eyam when the plague came to town is remembered even today, as the inhabitants
instituted the original lockdown in order to protect their neighbouring towns and villages
from infection. This is History Calling and in this video we’re going to look at the causes and
symptoms of this horrific and deadly illness and in particular at how one village fought
the plague at an enormous personal cost and in so doing, earned themselves a spot in history.
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Thanks to DNA testing carried out in 2016 on the bones of London victims of the plague,
we now know that it was caused by the Yersinia pestis bacterium.
This was carried by fleas which were in turn carried by rats. In the capital,
the bodies piled up as the disease killed around 100,000 people, or 1/5 of the city’s population.
Symptoms included painful swellings of the lymph nodes, muscle cramps, a high temperature,
vomiting (sometimes of blood) and delirium. Once a person was infected through a flee bite
they could potentially infect others by coughing and sneezing, or even by fleas and
lice moving from one individual to another. This was the illness which came to Eyam.
Tradition has it that the plague arrived in a bundle of cloth sent from London to the
village’s tailor. When a servant opened up the parcel, the cloth was found to be damp
and so it was hung by the fire to dry. This action released the plague. The servant died,
as did everyone else in the household save the tailor’s wife. The pestilence then spread
around the village. This story only appeared nearly six decades after the event however,
in a 1722 publication written by this man, a London doctor named Richard Mead. Mead though,
did claim to have his information from the son of the man who had been Eyam’s minister
during the outbreak, as well as another unnamed gentleman and so we can’t discount this tale.
The minister was called William Mompesson and he’ll feature heavily in our story.
The population of the parish of Eyam in 1665 has been the subject of some debate.
Mead put it at 200-300, but modern estimates, which have used the village’s baptism,
death and hearth tax records, have arrived at a conservative estimate of around 700 people.
By the end of the following year, the number was significantly lower.
As historian Patrick Wallis noted in 2006, there are actually very few primary sources relating to
what happened in the village between September 1665 and November 1666, when the plague raged
and it can be difficult to pick out the facts from the many romantised fictions which have sprung up
in the centuries since. All we really have are the parish burial records (which are actually a
later copy of the originals), 3 letters written by William Mompesson and the gravestones in the
village. As we’ve seen, there is then Richard Mead’s 1722 account, which has some claim to
veracity as he said he spoke to Mompesson’s son and one other contemporary witness and another
account written by a William Bagshaw and published 20 years earlier in 1702. Bagshaw is potentially
useful because he also claimed to have spoken to the son of a man living in Eyam at that time.
That man was the Reverend Thomas Stanley who had been Eyam’s minister before Mompesson,
only to be replaced because of his non-conforming views (in other words he was a Protestant,
but he wasn’t Anglican). Other sources date from much later and often rely on oral history
which can’t now be authenticated, or even make things up to create a better story. An 1842 book
by William Wood for instance, is where a lot of the unverifiable stories about Eyam come from.
From the original sources we have, we can construct the following timeline.
The plague had indeed arrived by September 1665,
though how it made its way to Eyam is not known for sure. Its first victim was George Viccars,
who was buried on 7th of that month and who is therefore assumed to be the tailor’s servant,
if we believe the story about the cloth from London being the source of the contagion.
It then cut a brutal swath through the village’s population. In 14 months approximately 260 men,
women and children died from it. I say approximately because different sources
give slightly different numbers. The chart you see here is based on the list of names
given on the Eyam museum website which I’ll leave linked below for you. There was an initial small
peak in October 1665, then the disease lay fairly quiet until the following summer, when a second,
far more severe wave kicked in. Between June and October 1666 was when most of the deaths occurred.
Various reasons have been postulated for this pattern, among them the idea that
rodent and flee activity are lower in the winter than in the summer
and that human interactions may have picked up as the days became longer and warmer too.
The villagers’ response to this deadly threat is what has made the case of Eyam so famous,
for at some point during this outbreak they initiated what we would now call a lockdown. We
don’t know the exact dates this occurred between, though Wood claimed it started in June 1666.
Mead’s book gives credit for this measure to the roughly 28 year old Mompesson,
saying that the illness ‘was restrained from reaching beyond that Parish by the Care of the
Rector …This Clergyman advised, that the Sick should be removed into Hutts on Barracks built
upon the Commons, and procuring by the Interest of the then Earl of Devonshire, that the People
should be well furnished with Provisions, he took effectual Care, that no one should go out
of the Parish, and by this means he protected his Neighbours from Infection with compleat Success.’
Bagshaw however, gives credit to Thomas Stanley for taking care of the village,
saying that even though he had been stripped of his post for his non-conformist views ‘When he
could not serve his People publickly, some (yet alive) will Testifie, how helpful he was to ‘em
in private; especially when the Sickness (by way of Eminency so called, I mean the Pestilence)
prevailed in that Town, he continuing with ‘em, when as it is written, 259 Persons of ripe Age,
and 58 Children were cut off thereby. … the whole Country should in more than Words testifie their
Thankfulness to him, who together with his Care of the Town, had taken such Care, as no one else did
[so Mompesson isn’t getting any credit here], to prevent the Infection of the Towns adjacent.’
The fact that Mead and Bagshaw spoke to the sons of Mompesson and Stanley respectively may well
account for their differing views of the lockdown and who initiated it, but they do both agree that
measures were taken to stop the infection spreading and the high mortality rate in the
village certainly suggests that for many months, no one was leaving it except through death.
Some people evidently did escape though. Wallis has noted that the slightly wealthier families
in the village didn’t die in as high numbers as the poorest, suggesting that they fled before any
quarantine was initiated. Mompesson too, sent his young children, George and Elizabeth, to Yorkshire
for safety, while he stayed behind with his wife, who he later wrote, refused to leave him.
Questions have also been raised as to the voluntary nature of this lockdown.
Wallis suggests that the Earl of Devonshire, living nearby at Chatsworth,
may have only agreed to provide provisions for the village if the residents stayed put.
Regarding provisions, there is a well outside the village, known as Mompesson’s well, in which it is
said the villagers put coins to pay for supplies which were left for them, but this information is
not mentioned in any original source. Likewise, a location known as Cucklet Church is supposedly
where Mompesson preached to his flock, having deemed indoor gatherings in their church
too dangerous. Again, there is no mention of this in the 17th or even early 18th century documents.
These tales may still be true, having been passed down through verbal story-telling and only making
it into the written accounts much later, but there is no way to verify that now. I would be even more
sceptical about some of the stranger stories you hear about the villagers, including the tale of a
woman named Margaret Blackwell who supposedly survived the plague by drinking bacon fat.
Nowadays, visitors to Eyam can still see the impact of the disease.
Dotted around the village are so-called plague cottages, where victims once resided
and many have plaques outside stating who lived and died there. In the village churchyard, one
of the most prominent tombs is that of Catherine Mompesson, wife of William, who died on 25 August
1666. Her husband was heartbroken at her loss and of the three letters we have from him which
discuss the plague, two detail Catherine’s death (including one to their infant children,
extolling their mother’s virtues). The third letter, written to William’s uncle,
John Beilby on 20 November 1666 is the most interesting though for a study of the wider
impact of the plague on the other inhabitants of Eyam. Mompesson told his relation that:
The condition of this place has been so sad, that I persuade myself it did exceed
all history and example. I may truly say that our town has become a Golgotha, the place of a scull;
and had there not been a small remnant of us left, we had been as Sodom, and like unto Gomorrah
[these are all Biblical references]. My ears never heard such doleful lamentations – my nose never
smelled such horrid smells, and my eyes never beheld such ghastly spectacles! Here have been
seventy-six families visited within my parish, out of which two hundred and fifty-nine persons died!
There are a couple of discrepancies between what Mompesson says happened and what the
burial records state. His tally of 259 deaths is one less than the other source and he goes on to
say that no one had died of the plague since 11 October, whereas the burial records list plague
victims up to the 1 November. Possibly there was a delay between death and burial (this might account
for the smell he reported), otherwise the end date given by one of these sources is incorrect.
As for the numbers, they’re so close that Mompesson may have just miscounted,
or perhaps he believed one victim to have died of another cause.
Mompesson continued that the infections appeared to be over and that he and the other villagers
had burnt many of their belongings in an attempt to prevent the return and spread of the illness.
Indeed he himself had hardly any clothes left to wear,
having burnt more than he thought necessary in order to set a good example.
Assuming the population was originally around 700, the disease had killed approximately 37%
of the village’s inhabitants. Mompesson survived however and moved away, becoming the minister
at Eakring, Nottinghamshire, in 1669 where this memorial to him still exists. His new parishioners
were so frightened that he might have brought the plague with him however that they forced
him to live in a hut at first. He remarried, had another two daughters and died in March 1709.
The story of Eyam lay nearly forgotten until the late 18th century, when interest in it began
to increase and a number of books were published which took up and elaborated on the story. By the
mid nineteenth century the bravery and sacrifice of the villagers was commemorated each year
and the village gradually became the tourist attraction it is today.
As for the plague in general, 1665-6 was the last major outbreak of this illness in England.
Some have speculated that the Great Fire of London in 1666 helped to eradicate it,
but in fact it was already subsiding by that point.
The reasons it finally disappeared, after being an intermittent problem for three centuries
are still debated. Some theories include better cleanliness, effective quarantines, improved
immunity amongst rats (so the rats didn’t die of plague and their fleas didn’t migrate to humans)
and improved immunity amongst humans through a gradual process of evolution.
I hope you’ve found this little trip back to 17th century England interesting. Remember to
give the video a like, subscribe to the channel and let me know in the comments what you think
of the Eyam villagers’ reaction to the plague. If you’d like to hear about another, less deadly
but much stranger affliction, see my video on the dancing plagues of early modern Europe.
I’ll be back next week with a new offering and until then, keep learning.