At Your Service: Sacrifice of the village of skulls

THE contagious clich about avoiding like the plague may never have applied to Eyam, where last summer Sunday, we attended a memorable morning service. In Eyam they had few alternatives, and died in great numbers as a result.

It's a hillside village in Derbyshire, once lead mining country. The plague is thought to have arrived in Eyam in September 1665, spread by fleas brought up from London on a bale of cloth for the tailor.

In the capital, the Great Plague was already raging, the Lord Mayor's order to destroy all cats and dogs leaving the rats - the real culprits - in some sort of pestilential paradise.

Some fled Eyam when the disease was confirmed. Of the 400 or so who remained, it is supposed that only 83 lived to recall those horrors. Elizabeth Hancock buried her husband and six children within eight days; all nine of the Thorpe family perished within weeks. Among those who chose to remain in the plague village were William Mompesson, the 28-year-old rector, and his wife Catherine, three years his senior.

"I can truly say that our town has become a Golgotha, a place of skulls," he wrote subsequently. "Had there not been a small remnant of us left, we would have been as Sodom and like unto Gomorrah. My nose has never smelt such noisome smells, and my eyes beheld such ghastly spectacles."

Mompesson's father had been vicar of Seamer, near Scarborough. William himself had briefly been vicar of nearby Scalby. Catherine - young, beautiful but in delicate health - was the daughter of Ralph Carr of Cocken Hall, near Chester-le-Street.

As the plague took its fearsome grip, the rectory children - aged three and two - were sent to stay with friends. Begged to join them, Catherine insisted that her place was at her husband's side and in helping minister to his desperately needy parishioners. She paid with her life.

Mompesson and other villagers had decreed that the church should be closed, services held out of doors and Eyam effectively quarantined. If they were to die, at least they might spare others. No greater love...

The following summer, Eyam's death rate peaked: 56 died in July, 67 in August. Catherine had worked tirelessly alongside her husband but soon the destroying angel (as the rector put it) took up quarters in his own habitation.

"Had she loved herself as well as me, she had fled from the pit of destruction with her sweet infants but she was resolved to die a martyr for my interest," wrote Mompesson. (He found God, he added, more good than ever he could have thought or imagined.)

Seeing his wife fading and incoherent ("I gave her several sweating antidotes, which had no kind operation") he tested her in divinity - "by whom and on what account she expected salvation and what assurance she had of certainty thereof" - and was much pleased.

She was, he wrote to his family, the most indulgent mother that poor children ever had. "I do believe she was the kindest wife in the world."

Catherine's is the only surviving "plague" gravestone in Eyam churchyard, garlanded at the annual memorial service with red roses.

THE annual open air remembrance service for the plague victims of Eyam - pronounced Eem - is on the last Sunday in August. We went on the third Sunday in June, expecting an elderly congregation of 20 or so and were thus very greatly surprised.

The large, 12th century church was wholly welcoming and almost completely full, including a chap who bore a marked resemblance to the present Archbishop of Canterbury, perhaps moonlighting at morning prayer.

They are what church folk call "evangelical", bible-based and mission zealous. Eyam church attracts worshippers from as far away as Sheffield to the east and Buxton to the west, many of them high achieving professionals. "We've three professors and seven PhDs," someone said and thought it, if anything, a bit of a problem.

David Shaw, rector for 28 years, retired recently. The big screen service is led by lay reader Bob Barton and preceded by the music group, the ecclesiastical equivalent of the warm-up man before television programmes are recorded.

The warm-up man, it has often been said, is the most enlivening part of the occasion.

The service still embraces some Church of England essentials. Hymns are both ancient and modern, though the tune to which Tell Out My Soul is sung might have been more suited to a town hall tea dance than to the greatness of the Lord.

An announcement that Eyam primary school is out of "special measures" - a sort of educational intensive care - is warmly applauded; the prayers are lucid, incisive and carefully considered. The intercessor, it transpires, is one of the professors.

Steve Timmis, a minister with an inner-city Christian project in Sheffield, speaks for 40 minutes - finger jabbing, bullet pointing, arms waving. He's very effective.

By noon, visitors drawn by Eyam's gruesome past are heading for the museum and gathering around the grave of Catherine Mompesson, the County Durham squire's daughter who, unto death, stood by her man.

William Mompesson wrote also of her fulfilment. "She is a saint in heaven."

WHOEVER supposed that desperate times needed desperate measures could have been thinking of the black plague. The "cures" were almost as fearful as the illness.

Magic was tried, of course, and "charms" no more greatly appealing. The College of Physicians, no less, advocated applying to the tumour a hot roasted onion, hollowed and filled with fig, rue and a dram of "Venice treacle".

Walnuts were thought efficacious if first steeped in white wine for eight days, herbs were plentifully prescribed, charlatans abounded.

Other remedies were later explored in The Fireside Book of Deadly Diseases - discomfortingly named - in which one physician prescribed that a large mastiff be laid for several hours on the patient's chest.

"She was a big woman," he helpfully explained later, "and could stand it".

The most drastic of all, however, may have involved putting the rump of a live chicken against the mouth of the plague sore - "so that it's vent may be placed on it and it will draw the infection into the body of the chicken, in so much that it will die".

Some supposed that a pigeon, its tail feathers first removed, might serve a similar purpose. If nothing else were to hand, a toad might even be conscripted.

When one of the poor animals died, it was explained, another could be applied in the same way. "When they cease to die," claimed the curers, "it is a sign that the poison is exhausted".

The poor chicken might have been a bit jiggered, an' all.