When the PLAGUE came to town in 1665 | Eyam, the original lockdown | how 1 village fought the plague

This is the TRAGIC AND REMARKABLE story of what happened in the village of Eyam, England, when the plague came to town in 1665 and how the villagers (led by their minister, William Mompesson and former minister Thomas Stanley), instituted the original lockdown, complete with what we would now call social distancing, in order to stem the tide of deaths and protect their neighbours from infection. The tale of how one village fought the Great Plague of 1665, supposedly brought in from London in a bundle of cloth has become legendary and many of the buildings and other locations familiar to those alive in the seventeenth century are still in existence today, including Mompesson’s Well, where the villagers supposedly left money for outsiders to pay for food, Cucklet church (an outdoor area where services were held when gatherings in the real church were felt to be too dangerous), the so-called plague cottages where many victims lived and died and the graveyard at Eyam Church, where they were often buried, their tombs still visible to modern viewers. As well at looking at the story of Eyam, this documentary from History Calling will also answer questions including what was the plague, what caused the plague, what were the symptoms of the plague which made it so deadly and horrific and how was the plague stopped, not just in this sleepy English village, but more generally?

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LEARN MORE:

Eyam Museum, https://www.eyam-museum.org.uk/

Lilith K. Whittles and Xavier Didelot, ‘Epidemiological analysis of the Eyam plague outbreak of 1665–1666’ in Proceedings: Biological Sciences, vol. 283, no. 1830 (2016), pp 1-9. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27170...

Patrick Wallis, ‘A Dreadful Heritage: Interpreting Epidemic Disease at Eyam, 1666-200’ in History Workshop Journal, No. 61 (2006), pp 31-56. https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article-...

THUMBNAIL: photo of Catherine Mompesson’s tomb my own. All rights reserved. A physician wearing a 17th century plague preventive: Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark

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