The Brave Men of Eyam
ON the last Sunday in August the inhabitants of the Derbyshire Peak region flock towards the little village of Eyam. If you ask them the cause of all this commotion you will be told Eyam is keeping its annual Plague Sunday celebrations to remind Derbyshire of the Brave Men.
The mounds, spangled with hare-bells and scabious, are silent and keep their secret, as in that awful summer when Eyam was wrestling with death, for the plague that decimated London in 1665 reached this lonely Derbyshire village at the same time. Rumours of the horrors in London must have reached even to Eyam. The scourge was known to begin with what resembled a feverish cold, and was followed by swellings in breast and groin, which were fatal unless they could be brought to a head and made to discharge. No one could have dreamt that Eyam was in danger. However, in the autumn of 1665 a parcel had chanced to reach Eyam from London, addressed to a cottage, still called the Plague House, which stands in the village street between the church and the hall. Packets from town were rare : there must have been a ripple of excitement and pleasant expectation in the little, low-roomed house when the parcel was opened and the family could study the latest fashions of the gay world. Who sent the clothes ? No one knows. Perhaps a servant whose employer had died of the plague. Possibly they had been taken from a house left ownerless, the door unlatched, its contents at the mercy of any chance passer-by. The clothes were as the fatal gift sent by Medea to the Queen, and those who handled them died.
The Rector knew what the symptoms portended, and he immediately sent his two young children away, but Mistress Monpesson stayed by her husband's side. According to the parish register—which is said to be a copy—there were a few other deaths from the plague, and then, apparently, the autumnal chill that sets in early in' the Peak land stopped its progress. How- ever, when the violets and primroses were fading, and Mistress Monpesson's apple trees were bursting into blossom in the walled-in garden, and she began to count on her babes' speedy return, news reached the Rector that other members of his small flock of four hundred folk had been taken with ominous shiverings. Panic seized on the villagers, but the Rector did not lose his head. He shut up the church lest it should 'prove a source of contagion, gathered together all the heads' of families, chiefly small farmers and their labourers, and addressed them, possibly in the field below the old Hall, which during the ensuing summer became the burying- ground, and told them what he believed to be his duty and theirs. Probably he said to his beloved friends and Parishioners that as it had pleased Almighty God to permit this awful visitation, they were to 'endure His will With courage and resignation. He must have appealed to the heroism latent in a race nurtured in lonely dales and hill-country. He told them that if they scattered some of them would in truth escape; but 'the plague would 'spread. If all would promise to remain and fight the foe' within the parish boundaries he,' for his part, would see that provisions and all else they needed reached them. ' Apkals to self-sacrifice meet what is finest in huinan nature.' There seems to have been no dissentient voice, nor anyone who went back on his promise among the Brave Men of Eyam. As summer wore to its close the population of four Hundred fell to one hundred and twenty, and Mistress Monpesson was among those who' died of the !plitgu-e. We may still see the low-roofed deep-silled parlour where she sewed, and the kitchen where she made her preserves, and the bedroom where she died. Below her room is the little study where the Rector sat and wrote of her death to his friends. Numerous letters gave the Rector an outlet to his pent-up emotions, his loneliness, and strain. Life had become a nightmare, and when he came home, worn 'out in body and mind, he was greeted by a silent garden, an empty parlour. No wonder that he wrote letters,. long, and to our standards rather verbose. One would like to know how he dealt with the thorny question of the disinfection. of correspondence. History does not help us, but no cases of plague resulted from his letters. The Rector had his hands too full to permit of undue brooding On his personal griefs. His familiar figure in cassock, wig, and bands—probably .the worse for wear, and needing a woman's fingers—was seen everywhere in the village ; on him fell the combined duties of priest, sister of mercy, and grave-digger.
As one strolls through the village on a sunny evening, and sees the shoe-factory hands and labourers going homewards in groups, and visitors going and coming in their cars, it is difficult to realize the agony of the 1666 summer days. Yet some of the horror of that far-off time must lurk in the little study, with its window looking on to the walled garden, and above all, in the fatal field, when August brings • round the day called the Plague Sunday, and a short and solemn little service is held in the burial ground where the martyrs lie, called still by Derbyshire folk the brave men of Eyam.
L. C. STREATFEILD.
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