Death in Eyam - The Plague Village

After a recent visit to this charming English village in the beautiful Derbyshire countryside, here is a little history about this unusual place. A bit depressing but very interesting.

Eyam, nestled in the Peak District, is best known for being the plague village that chose to isolate itself when the plague was found in the village in August 1665, rather than let the infection spread. Bubonic Plague had been brought to the village in a flea-infested bundle of cloth that was delivered to Eyam's tailor, George Viccars. The cloth was damp and was hung out in front of the fire to dry, thus releasing the plague infested fleas. Within a week George Viccars was dead.

After the initial deaths, the townspeople turned to their rector, the Reverend William Mompesson and the Puritan Minister Thomas Stanley. They introduced a number of precautions to slow the spread of the illness. These included the arrangement that families were to bury their own dead and the relocation of church services from the parish church of St. Laurence to Cucklett Delph to allow villagers to separate themselves, 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 raged in the village for 16 months and killed at least 260 villagers: only 83 villagers survived out of a population of 350.

When the first outsiders visited Eyam a year later, they found that fewer than a quarter of the village had survived the plague. Survival appeared random, as many plague survivors had close contact with the bacterium, but never caught the disease. For example, Elizabeth Hancock never became ill, despite burying six children and her husband in eight days (the graves are known as the Riley graves). The unofficial village grave digger also survived, despite handling many infected bodies.

Eyam can boast various plague related places of interest such as the Boundary Stone, a stone in which money, usually soaked in vinegar, which was believed to kill the infection, was placed in exchange for food and medicine, and the Riley graves as mentioned above.

The church in the centre of the village has many relics of the Plague, including Mompesson's Chair, gravestones of plague victims and the Parish Register recording the deaths. Within the church there is a small exhibition about the plague. The church has two Norman columns, and may be built on Saxon foundations, but dates mostly from the 13th and 14th centuries. In the churchyard there is a magnificent Saxon cross.