Can we learn from history?
The Bubonic Plague - 1665
Eyam England
1665 plague outbreak
Main article:
Great Plague of London
See also:
Protective sequestration
The history of the plague in the village began in 1665 when a
flea-infested bundle of cloth arrived from London for Alexander Hadfield, the local tailor.
[14] Within a week his assistant George Viccars, who noticing the bundle was damp, had opened it up.
[15] Before long he was dead and more began dying in the household soon after.
[16]
As the disease spread, the villagers turned for leadership to their
rector, the
Reverend William Mompesson, and the
ejected Puritan minister Thomas Stanley. They introduced a number of precautions to slow the spread of the illness from May 1666. The measures included the arrangement that families were to bury their own dead and relocation of church services to the natural amphitheatre of Cucklett Delph,
[17] allowing villagers to separate themselves and so reducing the risk of infection. Perhaps the best-known decision was to
quarantine the entire village to prevent further spread of the disease.
The plague ran its course over 14 months and one account states that it killed at least 260 villagers, with only 83 surviving out of a population of 350.
[16] That figure has been challenged on a number of occasions, with alternative figures of 430 survivors from a population of around 800 being given.
[16] The church in Eyam has a record of 273 individuals who were victims of the plague.
[18]
Survival among those affected appeared random, as many who remained alive had close contact with those who died but never caught the disease. For example, Elizabeth Hancock was uninfected despite burying six children and her husband in eight days. The graves are known as the Riley graves after the farm where they lived.
[14] The unofficial village
gravedigger, Marshall Howe, also survived, despite handling many infected bodies.
[16]
The village's actions prevented the disease from moving into surrounding areas.
[19]