The Plague and The Fire by Leasor James

Author:Leasor, James [Leasor, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: James Leasor Limited
Published: 2011-06-30T23:00:00+00:00

1. This was no exaggeration; a London merchant, writing to a rich client on August 17th, remarked that not one merchant in a hundred was left in London.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Plague at Eyam

The story of London under the shadow of plague, not notably heroic or charitable, is relieved by events that occurred in a remote hamlet, 160 miles away; the village of Eyam, north of Bakewell in Derbyshire, high in the bleak cloudy peaks of the Pennines.

Eyam had a population of barely 350 people living in homely little stone cottages, that stood sheltered in a valley unusually rich with trees. The cottages were clustered on each side of a short village street, which at its western end crossed a stream over Fiddler's Bridge. Most of the men and some of the women worked on farms and smallholdings.

The fact that Londoners were being carried to mass graves in their thousands throughout that terrible August meant nothing to the people of Eyam. London was only a name to them, a city that by no means all had even heard of, and which probably none had ever seen. Yet by a strange irony this remote, unlikely hamlet was to suffer a far greater loss in proportion to its size than London; and to give an example of heroism that is still remembered.

Early in September a box of old clothes and tailors' patterns was delivered by coach to the home of Edward Cooper, the local tailor, near the church. He told his servant, George Vicars, to break the cord and open it. They then discovered that the contents felt damp and fusty after their long, slow journey north. Vicars shook out the clothes and hung them round the kitchen fire to dry.

This box brought more than old clothes to Eyam; it brought the plague. Vicars was taken ill within forty-eight hours of unpacking it; four days later he was dead. Cooper died two weeks afterwards. By the end of the month, seven more households had become infected, and twenty-six more people died. Only then did Eyam begin to understand that this strange sudden illness, for which there seemed no cure, must be the plague, the dreaded disease of which they had heard rumours from coaches and carriers' carts driving up from the South.

The lateness of the year and the hardness of the Derbyshire winter saved the village from immediate extinction. But even in the cold of November, with icy winds sweeping across the snow-covered Pennines, seven more died. December brought heavy frost - and nine further deaths. The local churchyard, which usually had barely half a dozen burials in one year - and those only of old people - was already overcrowded, with forty-four deaths in less than four months. By Christmas the whole village lay in the grip of a fear as hard and relentless as the frost.

In the following spring - long after plague had left London -Eyam met its full ferocity. Those who had relatives and friends in other parts of the country went to stay with them.

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