Commenmorating a Heroic Act

Pilgrims honor villagers who gave their lives to save others

Gerald Phizackerley, an Anglican archdeacon, stood last week near a rocky outcrop, surrounded by the heathclad hills and moors of the English Midlands, reciting a nursery rhyme:

Ring-a-ring of roses, A pocketful of posies, Atishoo! Atishoo! We all fall down.

There was no laughter from the congregation of 600 gathered in the field outside the village of Eyam. Some worshipers seemed close to tears, for this was a service to commemorate a rare act of heroism at the time of the Great Plague that struck England more than 300 years ago. The rhyme's four bitter lines refer to the rosy mark on the chest of plague victims, the nosegays that people carried thinking to prevent infection, convulsive sneezing--and then death.

The plague, caused by bacteria usually spread by fleas carried on rats, raged through London in the summer of 1665, killing 68,500 people, a sixth of the city's population. Two-thirds fled the city, carrying the disease with them. Tiny and remote, Eyam seemed safe. But that September a village tailor received an infested bolt of cloth from London. Within a few days the tailor died. Soon dozens of others were seized by raging fever, vomiting, giddiness and excruciating buboes (swollen glands). But by the end of May the pestilence seemed to have run its course, with only 77 dead.

Then in the late spring of 1666, the plague erupted again in Eyam. By then the few townsfolk rich enough to have homes elsewhere were long gone. Now even the common folk, most with nowhere to go, decided to flee the town.

It was then that Village Rector William Mompesson spoke up. Knowing that the departing villagers would spread the disease, he exhorted them to quarantine themselves in Eyam to save the rest of Derbyshire. Such was the authority of the clergy, the power of faith and the eloquence of the 28-year-old rector that the people of Eyam agreed. A circle was marked out with stones around the town a half-mile in radius. The Earl of Devonshire agreed to provide most of the necessary food and other goods, which outsiders left nervously on the perimeter every week.

Figuring that indoor meetings were dangerous, Mompesson moved Sunday worship into a nearby field. When pious townspeople gathered to pray for deliverance, they stood at some distance from each other. The rector and a Nonconformist minister were the only visitors to console the sick, grieving and terrified residents.

By the time the plague had run its course 259 of the 350 villagers had died. One of the last victims was Mompesson's wife Catherine. Assuming he was also destined to die, he wrote a farewell letter: "I thank God, I am content to shake hands with all the world, and I have many comfortable assurances that God will accept me." To avoid contamination, he dictated the letter by shouting on the moor to a visiting clergyman. Mompesson did not die. Three years after the plague subsided, he was reassigned to the village of Eakring, where the residents at first feared that he might still infect them.

Successive waves of plague, which swept across Europe starting in the mid-14th century, produced much human cruelty, in addition to tens of millions of deaths. There were hysterical and savage flare-ups of antiSemitism, frenzied self-lacerations by groups of Flagellants, who thought the end of the world had come, and countless acts of terrified selfishness. But each year pilgrims from all over England still gather in the same field where Mompesson preached, to honor a priest and people who, as the service notes, "counted not their lives dear to themselves, but laid them down for their friends."

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