Guest Post: The Plague Village of Eyam: A Story of Courage and Self-Sacrifice
Lisa Manterfield and I have been following each other around the internet for a long time now. She’s a novelist with an appealing “voice”, an eye (or perhaps an ear?) for an intriguing concept, and the story-telling chops to pull them off. (The magic is in the storytelling, not the idea.) Her newest novel, The Smallest Thing, is not a historical novel, but is inspired by a historical incident. Lisa is with us today to share that story with you.
Take it away, Lisa:
Most of my school field trips have faded from my memory, save for a few outstanding moments. I remember a visit to a local farm, because a girl in my class was bitten by a Shetland pony, and a daytrip to the coast, because all my teachers went into the North Sea without taking off their nylons. One trip I do recall vividly was a visit to the Plague Village of Eyam, not because anything unusual or catastrophic happened that day, but because of what happened in the village and to its courageous inhabitants more than 350 years ago.
In 1665, bubonic plague was tearing through London, on its way to claiming the lives of more than 100,000 of that city’s residents. But 150 miles away in the tiny village of Eyam, the catastrophe was nothing more than the occasional snippet of news brought in by traveling merchants. All that changed when the local tailor received a bolt of flea-infested cloth from the capital and inadvertently brought the plague to Eyam. Within a week, the tailor’s assistant, George Viccars, became the village’s first plague victim.
The disease spread, well, like the plague, and soon took the life of the young son of George’s landlady, before hopping the wall and infecting the neighboring family. As more villagers became ill, the local rector—the allegedly unpopular Reverend Mompesson—recruited the help of the more amicable former rector to implement a plan. He proposed that, in order to prevent the spread of the disease to neighboring farms and villages, and perhaps to the thriving market town of Sheffield, the village of Eyam should put itself under voluntary quarantine. Despite the increased risk to their own lives, every villager ultimately agreed.
The rector set up an ingenious trade system of leaving money at the boundary in a vinegar-filled trough that became known as Mompesson’s Well, to be exchanged for provisions from the outside. To slow the spread of the disease within the village, church services were moved to an outdoor site at nearby Cucklett Delf, burials in the churchyard were halted, and a rule was imposed that each family must bury its own dead.
The plague ravaged the village for fourteen months, claiming the lives of 260 of the estimated 350 residents, including Mompesson’s wife, Catherine. The disease wiped out entire families, but also randomly skipped over others. Elizabeth Hancock of Riley Farm buried her husband and six children within the space of eight days, but never contracted the disease herself. Marshall Howe took on the role of gravedigger (reportedly in exchange for a share of the dead’s possessions), but despite handling countless bodies, he never succumbed to the illness. He did, however, take it home to his wife and children. They did not survive.
What has stuck with me all these years are the personal stories of loss and courage. Despite the almost certain death sentence, the villagers did not break the quarantine. One young woman, Emmott Syddall, maintained a long-distance courtship with her fiancé, Rowland Torre, who lived outside the village. Their secret rendezvous across the safety of Cucklett Delf is commemorated in a stained glass window in Eyam church. It’s said that Rowland was one of the first people brave enough to enter the village after the quarantine was lifted. Only then did he learn that Emmott had not survived.
I have thought about these stories often over the years, and wondered, had I been in that situation, would I have been so courageous and unselfish? More recent research suggests that some wealthier citizens were able to leave, and some reports claim that Mompesson sent his own children to safety in Sheffield. Would I have stayed for the benefit of others or would I have done whatever it took to save my own life? I imagined the scenario long enough that it finally became the basis for a novel. And when the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa brought deadly viruses back into the news, I reimagined the story of Eyam in the present day. The result is The Smallest Thing, a contemporary retelling of the story of Emmott Syddall and the plague village of Eyam.
Today, much of the village of Eyam remains as it was in 1665. The Plague Cottages, where the story began, are still inhabited. You can find the stained glass window depicting the story in the beautiful Eyam church and Catherine Mompesson’s grave in the churchyard. It’s a short drive to see Mompesson’s Well and the Riley Graves, and a fifteen-minute walk will take you to Cucklett Delf to see the natural church. A commemoration service is held there on the last Sunday in August, a reminder of the sacrifices made by the villagers, and the untold lives they saved.
Lisa Manterfield is the award-winning author of A Strange Companion and I’m Taking My Eggs and Going Home: How One Woman Dared to Say No to Motherhood. Her work has also appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Los Angeles Times, and Psychology Today. Originally from northern England, she now lives in Southern California with her husband and over-indulged cat.
You can find out more about Lisa and The Smallest Thing at her website: http://lisamanterfield.com/ 
The Hello Girls of WWI
As I’ve mentioned before here in the Margins, now and then a bit of history begins to track me down. A name, event, or idea piques my interest and suddenly I stumble across it everywhere. Or at least in the footnotes to books on tangentially related subjects.
Lately the “Hello Girls” of the first World War have been dogging my heels.
I had long known that the U.S. Navy had enlisted young women as yeomen in the war, with the idea that they would “free a man to fight”. (You’ve probably seen the posters.) I had no idea that the army “enlisted” female telephone operators to serve on the western front.*
The telephone transformed military communications in the first World War, just as the telegraph did in the Crimea War and the American Civil War. For the first time, commanders could be in instant communication with front line officers hundreds of miles away, connected by lightweight wire and the help of an operator.
General John Pershing soon realized that the operators were the weak point in the system. When the United States entered the war, the army’s Signal Corps had 55 officers and 1,570 enlisted men–most of whom were involved in maintaining telegraph cables.** Adding trained operators to the system wasn’t as simple as recruiting men from AT&T.*** Eighty percent of American telephone operators were women. If the army was going to use the telephone, they needed to recruit women.
Pershing placed a request with the US Department of War for one hundred uniformed female telephone operators who spoke fluent French.**** While upper level bureaucrats and military lawyers fussed over whether the women would be the army equivalent of “yeomen-ettes” or civilian contractors, more than 7600 trained women operators applied for the first hundred positions. (Just for the record, the original advertisement, sent out by a Lieutenant responding to Pershing’s request, called for women to serve overseas in the army.)
Called “Hello Girls” by the soldiers, they made army communications possible. Most worked behind the lines, but a few traveled with Pershing. Like the soldiers with whom they worked, they risked their lives. Unlike those soldiers, they had to fight to be recognized by their country when they returned. *Sigh*
If you’re interested in a more detailed account of the Hello Girls, I recommend Elizabeth Cobb’s The Hello Girls: America’s First Women Soldiers.
*I put enlisted in quotations because there was a great deal of ambiguity about the relationship between the army and the women who worked for them as switchboard operators. Ambiguity that was not resolved until 1979, when they were finally recognized as World War I veterans–too late to do most of them any good.
**Armies always prepare to fight the last war.
***Though the army did just that. Fourteen Bell Battalions, staffed entirely by AT&T employees with their supervisors as officers, joined the Signal Corps. But they weren’t operators. Their job was installing and maintaining equipment alongside the advancing armies. No small task.
****In addition to being ham-handed at managing the switchboard, hastily trained enlisted men for the most part didn’t speak French, a liability when working with their counterparts in the French telephone system.
The Empress Maud (aka Matilda)
I was first introduced to the Empress Maud and her battles to regain the throne of England by mystery writer Ellis Peters.(1) The war between Maud and her cousin Stephen is the immediate background against which her Brother Cadfael mysteries are set. (One step behind that stand the Crusades–a deft way to place her stories within their larger historical context and to give her main character a broader view of the world than many of the people around him.) Both Maud and Stephen are distant figures in the book and Peter’s main characters are Stephen supporters, so for years I never thought about why a medieval noblewoman would feel she had a right to the crown.
Since then I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about Maud within the context of women warriors.(2) It turns out she had a good reason to claim the crown. Here’s the short version.
Born in 1102 CE, Maud was the daughter of Henry I of England and Normandy.(3) When she was twelve, she was married to the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry V, who was almost twenty years her senior.(4) By all accounts, she was a hardworking empress and well-regarded by her people: her German subjects called her “the good Matilda”. She may have even been happy.
In 1125, the Emperor Henry died. If he had left an underaged son as heir to the throne, Maud would no doubt have served as the child’s regent.(5) Since they were childless, she was left as a dowager empress at the relatively young age of 23. The options for a surplus empress were limited, though Maud clung to the title, calling herself “Matilda the Empress, daughter of King Henry”.
In fact, the death of her brother some years previously meant that Maud was once again a factor in Henry I’s dynastic calculations. Henry could have named one of his twenty-some illegitimate sons as his successor or one of his numerous nephews, Instead he called his now-marriageable daughter home, named her as his successor, and forced his council of nobles and bishops to swear fealty to her as “lady of England and Normandy”. He then made the mistake of arranging another political marriage for her, this time to the teenaged son of the Count of Anjou, whose lands lay next to Normandy.
When Henry died in 1135, Maud was in Normandy. Her cousin Stephen of Blois had himself crowned in Westminster Abbey before a very pregnant Maud could hurry across the Channel and claim her throne, plunging England into nineteen years of civil war, known as the Anarchy. (6) The English nobility took sides, and sometimes changed sides depending on who seemed to be winning.
Finally the war ended with a compromise. Stephen kept the crown accepted Maud’s young son, the future Henry II, as his heir. (Which, if truth be told, was probably Henry’s intention in naming Maud his heir–women who inherited thrones or titles were often seen as the conduit between two generations of men.) The Empress Maud settled for the title Lady of the English.
As for me, I’m now squarely on team Maud.
(1) I realize not all hard-core history buffs agree, but I find that well done historical fiction is an excellent doorway to history itself. If you want to see my full opinion on the subject, you can find it here. No need to repeat myself.
(2) She was the first woman that I had to cut from the book because she didn’t fit even my broadest definition of woman warrior. Just about broke my heart.
(3) Just to help you keep track: He was the son of William the Conqueror. Hard to tell the players without a program.
(4) That sounds horrible enough to a modern reader. Consider this: she was betrothed to him at the age of eight and sent immediately to Germany. Once there, her future husband sent away her English attendants and did his best to turn her into a good German. Now picture yourself at eight.
(5) Mothers were often preferred over uncles or grandfathers as regents, under the (usually correct) assumption that they were less likely to get ambitious and/or greedy and seize the throne for themselves.
(6) He claimed that Henry had changed his mind and named Stephen his heir on his deathbed. It may even have been true–primogeniture was not yet a settled theory of inheritance and thrones tended to go to the man most able to seize them. (There are echoes here of the rival claims to the English throne that led to the Norman Conquest. Or is that just me?)