354YRS ON FROM
Mirror’s Amanda at Eyam
Eyam seems like a place untouched by the world’s ills – an unspoilt country village of quaint sandstone cottages and dry stone walls, nestling in a remote, craggy valley.
But this beautiful place in the Peak District knows more about lockdown – and the horrors of a worldwide pandemic – than any other place in the country.
It was September 1665 when the bubonic plague arrived in this wild corner of Derbyshire, in a parcel of infected cloth delivered to the house of the village tailor.
As the plague took hold and claimed more lives, the villagers famously took the desperate and selfless decision to shut themselves off from the rest of the world, putting themselves in mortal danger – to protect others. It’s a stark contrast to the actions of the Government’s chief advisor Dominic Cummings during modern lockdown.
Their lockdown lasted 14 long months, during which time pestilence ravaged the community, killing six people a day at its height.
By the time the villagers finally allowed themselves to venture outside again, 260 of Eyam’s 700 residents had died. But their sacrifice undoubtedly stopped the spread of the plague to the nearby towns and cities of Manchester, Sheffield and Buxton, saving thousands of lives.
Today some of the villagers are still direct descendants of survivors of the plague. And they say even Matt Hancock himself has ancestors who perished in the village.
Genealogy firm Finders International has begun a search of parish records to draw the Hancock family tree. Company founder Danny Currany said: “Our early stages of research have found one of his ancestors, John Hancock born in a neighbouring village in 1690, just 25 years after the plague.”
Farmers’ wife Elizabeth Hancock suffered probably the most appalling tragedy of all, burying her husband and six children within
eight days. Plague-time rules dictated she could have no help – so had to dig the graves and bury their bodies herself.
More than 350 years later, Eyam went into lockdown with the rest of the country but, with their tragic history still very much part of this village’s identity, residents knew more than anyone why they had to make sacrifices to protect others.
NStained glass tribute to those who died
PLAQUE Memorial to Hancocks
ine generations ago, retired church warden Joan Plant’s relatives were quarantined here. One of them, Margaret Blackwell, is rumoured to have survived the plague because she drank a jug of boiling bacon fat believing it to be milk, provoking instant vomiting.
And that is why many are disappointed and angry at the actions of Dominic Cummings, who broke the rules he helped make, to travel 260 miles from London to Durham.
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Joan, 73, says made her sad.
“She says: “It they can stick tw rules and q Cummings’ nam his hand in a f would all do the