Eyam recalls lessons from 1665 battle with plague
In the fields between the Derbyshire villages of Eyam and Stoney Middleton sits a gritstone boulder known as the “boundary stone”. During the bubonic plague outbreak of 1665-6, the inhabitants of Eyam quarantined themselves, in a famous act of self-sacrifice, to prevent the spread of the plague. Villagers would come to place money in six holes drilled into the top of the boundary stone to pay for food and medicine left by their anxious neighbours.
By the end of the outbreak, more than a quarter of the village’s population of almost 1,000 were dead. The plague, however, was contained.
For residents of Eyam today, in the midst of the escalating coronavirus pandemic, which has already touched a nearby village, the lessons of that self-imposed isolation have powerful echoes.
Standing by the boundary stone, Ian Smith, who volunteers at the local museum, describes how the village had adopted a process that has become familiar around the world in the last few weeks – “social distancing”.
“In some respects,” says Smith, “the villagers were well ahead of their time. They didn’t know what the affliction was, but they reasoned that close contact with other people was how the illness was passing from one to another.” (In fact, infected fleas had been brought into the village in a bundle of cloth.) “They recognised the necessary business of keeping apart from other people.”
He applies the lesson to the current crisis. “We should be very aware that mass movement of people from one community to another is not a good thing. Like football matches, where you take fans from one area to mix with others quite closely. It’s mad.”
Even as Smith is ruminating on this fact, English football, perhaps belatedly, is in the process of being suspended.
On Friday, the day after prime minister Boris Johnson’s press conference, the stories of two pandemics, one historical and one current, were colliding in Eyam. The green tourist information placards outside homes with names like “Plague Cottage” have been joined in recent weeks by a prominent new poster in the village centre giving information on coronavirus and its symptoms.
At one point a middle-aged couple walk past, discussing an acquaintance facing self-isolation. And villagers wonder what will happen when their popular museum reopens next weekend after the winter closure; whether the thousands of schoolchildren who annually visit will appear this year.
What is clear to many, however, is that Eyam’s story remains a powerful example not only of how diseases are transmitted – then as now via trade routes and centres – but also of how successful social immobilisation can contain outbreaks.
For the Derbyshire villagers in the mid-1660s, the trade that brought the plague was cloth, and the source of it was London, where thousands were already dying.
Confronted by mounting deaths, the village’s newly arrived priest, William Mompesson, was able – in an uneasy alliance with his ejected Puritan predecessor Thomas Stanley – to convince villagers that the right thing to do was quarantine the village, and face a high probability of death, rather than spread the plague.
And in 17th-century Eyam, “social distancing” in the midst of a plague outbreak meant not only isolation – as Francine Clifford, the local historian, points out – but also open-air funeral services that reduced physical proximity, and families burying their own dead in fields and gardens rather than the village graveyard.
As Clifford explains, Eyam’s quarantine was finally imposed after a monthlong lull in plague deaths that had first begun in the autumn of 1665.
“It was June [1666] and the deaths started to go up again,” she explains. “It was then William Mompesson realised that it was going to get a heck of a lot worse before it got better. He knew if he didn’t stop people leaving the village in panic, it would spread to the villages and the towns. If it got to Sheffield or Manchester, it would be back to the London proportions.”
The experience of those villagers has become pertinent again as families, communities, towns and even countries engage with the concept of quarantine. The word is derived from the Italian quaranta giorni,in reference to the practice during the 14th century of requiring plague-infected ships from Venice to sit at anchor for 40 days before landing.
Ironically, perhaps, it was a quarantine in China – once again for plague, in Harbin in 1910 – that would inform most modern approaches, not least in China, where, like Eyam, it became embedded in myth.
The 1910 Harbin outbreak, in a centre of the fur trade, saw 95% of infected patients die. The quarantine was managed by a celebrated doctor named Wu Lien-teh, dispatched to Harbin from what is now Malaysia.
In Harbin he implemented not just a strict lockdown, including the suspension of transport links with
Russia and Japan, but introduced measures still used today, including dedicated quarantine centres and hygienic burials, with his approach recorded meticulously in his notes.
Eugenia Tognotti, a historian of quarantine who wrote an essay on the subject for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, believes we still have much to learn from quarantines of the past.
Currently under lockdown herself in Italy, the European country worst hit by coronavirus, she emphasises that successful quarantines like Eyam’s require “social acceptance” and other conditions that vary according to geography and political context, pointing out that they are rarely uncontroversial. “Let’s not forget that quarantine measures raise many ethical issues,” she says, referring to the Sars outbreak in 2002, an even more deadly if less widespread coronavirus than the one causing the current pandemic.
She adds: “In China, compared to other affected countries, there was stronger control of the social strata at risk”; village-level governments were empowered to isolate travellers from Sars-infected areas, and enforce quarantines on people suspected of having contact with Sars patients.
“That raised many questions regarding the impact of isolation and quarantine measures, and possible discrimination against certain social categories and minorities. The present emergency and the rigid measures adopted pending the Covid-19 epidemic will give us more lessons.”
And Tognotti poses the question that has been troubling many political leaders and commentators. “Can the kind of quarantines applied in China – with the rigid measures – work in the western democratic countries?”
She answers her own question with a big “if” – one that is becoming increasingly apparent. “Only if countries were not caught unprepared and if they recognised the enormous importance of planning.”
She adds: “We can learn from the past. In time of plague and cholera, well-trained and experienced public health officials were quick to recognise the crisis and launch an emergency public health response to contain outbreaks. A well-organised educational campaign to inform and calm a panicking and frightened public, and combat misinformation and fake news, is extremely important. It’s the effort that Italy is making right now with some success.”
And it was exactly that which Mompesson – who lost his wife in the outbreak – and Stanley achieved: communicating the difficult necessity of social immobilisation to a village of poor miners.
On a hill above the village, overlooking the boundary stone, are the socalled “Riley graves”, named after the local farm where Elizabeth Hancock buried her husband and six children in a field. It’s a poignant reminder of Mompesson’s success as a public health leader.
Tourists Karen and Paul Senior are visiting the village from Newcastle. “Everyone is going into a panic because of the coronavirus and we’re actually in a plague village where everyone voluntarily self-isolated,” says Karen.
“The timing’s been a bit bizarre,” says Paul. “We planned this visit before the coronavirus. Maybe we’re being taught an existential lesson.”
Asked what thoughts the visit has inspired, he replies: “It’s a question of humanity.
“There’s the juxtaposition of looking after your own family,” he adds, referring to the fact that Mompesson sent his children away. “Wanting to save your own skin and the bigger picture. If they left Eyam, they could have spread the disease. You want to do the best for the community, but there’s a strong desire to survive.”