Eyam revisited: lessons from a plague village

By Patrick Wallis

Small villages in Derbyshire rarely feature in international news. But today the heroic behaviour associated with one of them, Eyam, during a plague outbreak over 350 years ago, is held up as an example to the world of how we can tackle the coronavirus pandemic. Eyam has a powerful story: it reputedly chose to isolate itself from neighbouring communities when plague broke out in the village in 1666. The voluntary quarantine cost the lives of many but it stopped plague spreading across the region.

The parallels between Eyam’s self-imposed quarantine and today’s social isolation has found its way into stories as far afield as the Washington Post, France 24 and Canadian TV. Simon Armitage, Britain’s poet laureate, wrote a poem in response to the outbreak of coronavirus, starting with the moment a parcel of cloth brought the plague to the village: “in the warp and weft of soggy cloth/by the tailor’s hearth/in ye olde Eyam”. The example of Eyam forces us to reflect on how much we can achieve as communities in the face of a pandemic. Could we equal the selflessness of these villagers or have we lost our morality and honour? Can successful isolation be left to our sense of citizenship, our awareness of our duty to our neighbours?

The real history of Eyam’s plague is different from the heroic version reported in these news stories and retold in countless histories, novels and plays. Its lesson for fighting epidemics is not a simple one about the value of valiant leadership and the virtue of self-sacrifice. The true story of the plague village shows the problem of drawing on half-remembered histories for guidance on how to respond to extraordinary and rare events like the coronavirus outbreak we are now living through.

By the time plague reached Eyam in autumn 1665, London and several other cities had already been devastated by the disease. Around 50,000 people had died in the metropolis’s “Great Plague”, about one in five of its population. No one in England was in any doubt about the severity of the threat. This was a society with centuries of experience in responding to epidemics that had recurred with deadly regularity since the Black Death of 1348. Separating the sick from the healthy was widely understood to be an effective technique and the government was well versed in its application. Our current quarantine regulations, including isolation to slow the spread of coronavirus, are a direct legacy of this period.

Yet against the backdrop of this pus-filled history, the story of Eyam still stands out. It was a small lead-mining village; by some accounts it had just 330 residents. By the time the plague subsided in November 1666, 259 of them were dead. Houses stood empty where entire families had been struck down. In choosing to stay in their village, the villagers preserved the lives of their countrymen. But the cost was great. “Our town has become Golgotha, the place of a skull,” wrote William Mompesson, its vicar.

In Britain we tend to think about quarantine on a household basis, and the nailed-up doors marked with a red cross that Daniel Defoe portrayed in his famous “A Journal of the Plague Year” (1722). But larger areas could also be cut off. The cordon sanitaire around Eyam was similar to controls imposed by local magistrates on a number of parishes and villages in the 1660s. When the country seemed threatened by the plague of 1722, Richard Mead, a prominent physician, argued for isolating outbreaks in just this way, using Eyam as one of his examples.

Eyam’s epidemic has more than corpses to its history. It has star-crossed lovers: Emmott and her sweetheart Rowland, from neighbouring Middleton Dale, who came to look yearningly at each other each day across the quarantine boundary, until one day Emmott failed to appear. The desperate Rowland returned every day; only after the quarantine was lifted did he discover that Emmott had died months before. There was a bucolic cast of villagers who together dedicated themselves to protecting the region, surviving by buying food from outside with coins left in vinegar-filled holes on a stone boundary-marker. A tragic leader, Mompesson, lost his wife Catherine to plague, yet continued to shepherd his flock through the darkness, leading them in prayer in a grassy dell rather than the dangerous confines of the church. There was even a rival for Mompesson, in the non-conformist priest Thomas Stanley, who had only recently been ejected from the parish vicarage for refusing to accept the restoration of the Anglican church after the civil war.

But many elements of this colourful history are missing from contemporary accounts. They are more story than history. This includes the village’s central claim to heroic sacrifice: its choice to cut itself off. That the village was quarantined is not in question. But the notion that the villagers heroically imposed isolation on themselves has no foundation in any of the early sources. The spirit of self-sacrifice that we are now being asked to emulate is a myth.

None of the original sources, including Mompesson’s letters, mentions the village choosing its own quarantine. They instead note the success of that isolation and the leadership it demanded. That is not surprising, from the perspective of the period. By the 1660s quarantine was a well-established public health technique, but it was something enforced by the state, not enacted by public spirited communities – in part because, for some, the temptation to break out was always too strong.

If the story of Eyam sounds like a romantic novel, that’s because large parts of it were invented. The spirit of the story owes much to the imagination of Anna Seward, a noted 18th-century poet whose description of the plague – in a letter written in 1765 – appeared in an edition of her letters edited by Walter Scott, a historical novelist. Seward was the daughter of the village vicar, and had been powerfully moved by Mompesson’s letters. “Your heart will expand over this faithful picture of elevated worth,” she wrote. Yet most details of the story first appeared in writing only two centuries after the events they describe, when William Wood, a local historian and tax-collector, published a popular local history book, “The History and Antiquities of Eyam” (1842). Even Wood eventually grew concerned about the accuracy of these stories: later editions bore the title “Legends of the Plague” instead.

Wood’s writings helped nurture Eyam’s place in the popular imagination. More than 10,000 people attended a remembrance service there in 1934. By the time of the Festival of Britain in 1951, the village’s heritage had become such a staple of British history that plaques with the names of villagers who had died in the plague were arbitrarily placed on the walls of village houses, though there was almost no evidence of who had lived in which cottage. Today its 1,000 inhabitants host tens of thousands of visitors a year, and the local brewery offers the thirsty a choice of craft ales: “Bubonic Orange”, “Quarantine” and “Black Death”. Eyam has continued to capture the creative imagination. In October 2018 “Eyam”, a new play based on the plague, was performed at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. The story “is a fascinating one – do look it up, it’s all true” read one review.

Only a few thin strands of evidence connect the rich stories that have been woven around Eyam’s epidemic with recorded history. The sum total of records from the plague itself is scanty: three letters by Mompesson written in 1666, the parish’s burial register and inscriptions on graves scattered around the village. Only two other written sources, one from 1702 and another from 1722, have credible claims to drawing on actual witnesses, and even they are second-hand, from the sons of the two priests, Mompesson and Stanley.

Though there is no source for the claim that the village isolated itself, there is evidence that points in the other direction: people did flee Eyam to escape the plague. Deaths were concentrated among poor households, suggesting that many wealthier villagers who could afford to leave had made a run for it before the quarantine was imposed. Mompesson had sent his own children to his uncle in Yorkshire. Tellingly, one of the few sources surviving from a neighbouring community suggests that Eyam’s remaining villagers may have been given no chance to leave (much as Chinese troops blocked people from leaving the city of Wuhan after a lockdown was imposed there in February). There are records showing that the city of Sheffield employed officials to restrict movement, paying constables to keep people from nearby Fullwood Spa “in the time that the sickness was at Eyam”.

If the villagers did not isolate themselves does it make them any less heroic? Perhaps not. Even if constables stood on parish boundaries, complying with the quarantine demanded a thousand everyday acts of bravery by those affected. These are a quieter form of heroism, but no less courageous for it.

If the villagers did struggle to keep going and remain within the confines of their parish, and if it took the threat of force to remind them of the need to stay inside its boundaries, then they offer a more realistic guide to how we may act now. It is easier to serve the greater good if we don’t have to seek within ourselves all the discipline that this demands. The risk that covid-19 poses to most of us is slight compared with the dangers that Eyam’s villagers faced. For all that, we should be careful not to ask too much of each other. Effective quarantines need both external and internal reinforcements if they are to succeed. Heroism is not a substitute for government action: we need both.■

Photos: Alamy, Getty