Lore - Episode 186: Invisible Boundaries

Episode Date: November 22, 2021

One of the most frightening aspects of our lives is something that’s hidden from our eyes. And yet its impact is so powerful and destructive that we’ve spent centuries running in fear from it. Well, except for one brave community, that is. ———————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to [e-mail], or visit our listing here.

There's nothing more frightening than getting sick. It's an all too common occurrence for most of us, but that doesn't mean it's any less irritating. When we're sick, life sort of grinds to a halt. We stay home from work or school, and if you're like me, you probably don't even like leaving your bed. Depending on the symptoms and how long the illness can last, getting sick for a lot of people can even be frightening.

And I honestly don't have to tell you that, do I? If the events of the last couple of years have taught us anything, it's just how vulnerable we all are to various illnesses. While scientists seem to be regularly putting old maladies into the history books, as they have with polio, whooping cough, and smallpox, for example, it seems like new and more deadly threats are always waiting in the shadows to take their place. And as a culture, we've learned to be afraid, haven't we? Just look at all the disease-related movies that have come out of Hollywood over the last

few decades. From mainstream hits like 12 Monkeys and I Am Legend, to horror classics like Zombie Land and Resident Evil, the risk has captured our imaginations and left us crossing our fingers that our life never imitates that specific art. History, though, shows us that our hope might be misplaced. During the thousands of years that they spent building civilizations all around this planet, our ancestors had to wrestle with a nearly constant onslaught of disease. And oftentimes, it was absolutely devastating.

One outbreak, though, stands out above most in terms of the impact it had on society, and within it is a story that's both deeply inspiring and utterly terrifying. But whether or not you're ready to hear it, there's one thing we can all agree on. Fear, just like sickness, can often be contagious. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. Allow me to set the stage. There have been a number of periods in English history, usually named after a specific monarch or dynastic family.

Edwardian, Victorian, you've heard those names before. Another was the Stuart period. Stretching from the reign of James I of England, which began in 1603, all the way to the death of Queen Anne in 1714, it covered a pretty tumultuous century of English history. The Stuart period had such classic hits as witchcraft trials, the First English Civil War, the Second English Civil War, and the Restoration of the Monarchy. Oh, and a few people lost their heads along the way. But diving down into the finer details, life in the Stuart period was anything but glamorous.

A lot of that had to do with a population boom that happened right before the Stuarts took control. Overcrowding and fewer jobs than workers meant that earning a living wage was oftentimes impossible. Those who could find work only earned enough to cover their rent and groceries, and even that was a stretch for most. Folks were turning to their communities for help, and almost no one was able to save up enough money to actually buy a home.

Desperate people often turned to begging. The English Civil War didn't help much either. Since hungry soldiers crawled across the country like ants, they plundered food from people lucky enough to have saved a bit, and because the war was more important to the government than basic needs, those people often starved. There was one bit of irony, though. The wealthiest in England enjoyed a diet of food made from meats and sugar, while the poorest in the land had to settle for beans and other vegetables.

As a result, the lower class was often much more healthy than the elites. It might not shock you to learn, though, that the average person's life expectancy then was a lot shorter than it is today. Infant mortality rates were high, and even childbirth itself proved to be a serious risk to expectant mothers. And everyone, and I mean everyone, had parasites like lice and fleas. People dealt with life as best they could, though. They still married, usually for love, but sometimes for money if they could find it,

and there were all sorts of distractions to take their mind off suffering, like bear-baiting, cockfights, and public executions. Honestly, it sounds like a Disney theme park, but with more blood sports and public health issues. And that was life in Stuart, England. If you were lucky enough to have a job, you were probably a farmer or laborer, but there was a chance you might land a gig as a smithy, a shoemaker, a porter or a glover, or like George Vickers as the assistant to a tailor.

George lived in the small village of Eam, located to the north in Derbyshire. He worked under the tutelage of Taylor Alexander Hadfield, doing everything you might imagine a tailor would have done in 1665. And on this particular day in late August, that included managing a delivery of cloth that had just arrived from London. George unrolled the bundle and then hung it up in front of the large fireplace so that he could inspect it and let it air out from its journey. It was the same thing he had done with every new bundle of cloth, all parts of his monotonous

role as assistant. But just a week later, George Vickers would be dead. There are three different types of plague. Each of them are caused by the bacterium known as Yersenia pestis, but they manifest in different ways. We've all heard of the bubonic plague, of course. That form is distinguished by the large, pus-filled swellings known as buboes. Septicemic plague is what happens when the infected lymph nodes drain into a person's

bloodstream, infecting the whole system. And pneumonic plague is what happens when the infection settles down in the lungs, coughing and sneezing, send contagious droplets into the air, where others might inhale them and become infected themselves. It's all the plague, but each form has unique symptoms and ways of spreading. And for George Vickers, that vector was most likely fleas embedded in the new cloth he took delivery of from London. A London, by the way, that was already under assault by a massive outbreak of the plague.

The reaction in London had been utter panic. The wealthiest people in the city just packed up and left, believing they were safer out in the countryside. Even the elected officials left their post, essentially taking off for vacation while the majority of their citizens were fearing for their own lives. At the time, the people of Eam heard what had happened to poor George Vickers. It was too late. It was a small village of just 800 people, and every single one of them was at risk

before they even knew it. After Vickers died, he was followed by a young boy named Edward Cooper. Then Peter Hawksworth passed away, followed by Thomas Thorpe and his 12-year-old daughter. In fact, before the outbreak was over, the entire Thorpe family would be gone. By December of that year, 42 other villagers had died, and those deaths continued into the winter, although they were thankfully slowed by the cold weather. By spring, though, the people of Eam knew that they had to start making difficult decisions, because they knew that the plague spread from person to person, although they weren't exactly

sure how, and that meant that there might be a way to stop it. Now, if you hopped into a time machine and headed back to 1666, the most educated person you'd be able to find in just about any village in the countryside, if they had one at all, was the minister. But Eam was lucky, because they actually had two of them. One, Thomas Stanley, had served the people of Eam for many years, but had been exiled three years earlier because he had refused to use the new edition of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.

So, he lived on the edge of town in a small hut, while the new minister, 28-year-old William Montpeson, served in the church, along with his wife Catherine and two young boys. But desperate times called for strange alliances, and the two ministers met together to discuss their options. They knew the plan they'd come up with was going to sound like an overreaction to most people and a violation of their personal freedom, but it was also their best chance at stopping the plague in Eam before it spread on to other communities farther north. So on June 24th of 1666, the ministers gathered everyone together to offer their proposal,

complete and total quarantine. No one who lived in the village would be allowed to leave, and no visitors would be given entry until the plague had been stopped in its tracks. To do this, they had settled on a reasonable boundary line, an invisible barrier that signaled their new tiny kingdom. The Earl of Devonshire, who lived nearby, even agreed to send food and supplies to help them get through the experiment. They also did something that was, looking back, pretty ingenious.

At various places along the boundary, they placed water troughs that were filled with vinegar, which was a much better sterilizing agent than soap. Merchants would leave goods by the troughs, and the villagers would toss their coins into the vinegar, preventing the spread of the sickness. It was an extreme sacrifice, there's no doubt about that. But after discussion, everyone who lived in Eam agreed. They would stay inside the boundaries of the village, and follow all the rules set by Stanley and Mom Pesson.

All they had left to do now, was wait. What happened that summer was the social equivalent of a soldier knocking a bystander out of the way and taking the bullets meant for them. The people of Eam suffered, and the effects were everything you might expect from a plague ridden village in Stewart, England. One of the steps that people agreed to take was the immediate burial of the dead. Folks at the time didn't have definitive proof, but they suspected, correctly it turns out, that the plague could be passed on by touching the dead and anything else they owned

or wore. So as people died, their families dragged them out into the yard and buried them right on their property, rather than across town to some sort of community grave. Some weren't so smart about it though. One man, Marshall Howe, got sick early on and somehow survived. Believing he was immune, he started looking for people who had died without anyone else to bury them, and took care of the task himself. But before you think of him as a hero though, I should mention that he was helping himself

to their belongings, which he brought home to his family. And once, while dragging a man called Unwin out into the yard for a quick burial, Marshall was frightened out of his mind when the man opened his eyes and asked for a drink. Marshall ran home, believing the dead were rising from the grave. Sadly, his wife and son would soon die from the plague as well. Historians think it's likely they picked up their infections from the stolen goods he was bringing home. The local church continued to meet, but they moved their services outside, thanks to the

warm weather and open air. They felt it was better than expecting people to cram into small pews indoors. But not everyone in the church was safe. Reverend Monpesson lost his wife after she became sick and then appeared to recover. She was one of many who tragically died that month. In fact, through August, roughly five people each day were passing away, and it was decimating families like a wildfire, a woman named Jane Hawksworth, for example, lost 25 members of her immediate and extended family.

Another local woman, Elizabeth Hancock, watched helplessly as her husband and six of her own children passed away that summer. With each death, she was forced to drag their bodies out to a hill on their property and bury them all by herself. There are stories of people from the next town over, Stony Middleton, being able to see her dig those bitter graves from a distance, but unable to approach and help, or even offer comfort. I can't imagine what that experience must have been like for her.

It's hard to call anyone who goes through something like that a lucky survivor. When the dust settled, 260 of the 800 residents of Eam were lost to the plague that summer. The final victim was a young man in his late 20s named Abraham Morton, who passed away on November 1. He was one of 18 members of his family to succumb to the sickness. That Christmas, after two months of no other deaths, they officially declared the plague over, but they did one last thing to make sure. The villagers gathered all of their belongings, their books, their furniture, and every article

of clothing that wasn't currently on their body, and they carted it out into the center of town. And then they set it on fire. The experiment almost broke them, though. Witnessing that much death, the daily burial of loved ones, the constant worry that your neighbor was next, or even worse, you. Yes, Reverend Mompesson survived his wife, a casualty of a plan he helped mastermind, but it's clear from a letter he sent to a friend that summer that he didn't have a

lot of hope for himself, and his words could have been echoed by just about every other survivor in town. I am a dying man, he wrote. I'm going to die in pain, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. But it turns out, perhaps there was. I want to say up front here that I did not go fishing for parallels between the events in EAM and the pandemic of the last couple of years. All I could do is report the things to you as I saw them in the historical record.

That said, it's incredible just how often the present mirrors the past, isn't it? I think that's where a lot of the fear of deadly outbreaks comes from. We can look back and see how devastating a sickness can truly be, and that's frightening. But my hope is that stories about people like the villagers of EAM might offer us something more powerful than fear. Hope After it was all over, the folks in the community began to rebuild. There was a lot of work to do and fewer hands to do it, but they pitched in and clawed their

way back from a dark period in their lives, and they did it together. The Reverend William Mompesson might have survived, but he would never be the same. He stayed on there in EAM until 1669, but eventually had to leave. There was just too much pain each day, in the scenery around the village, in the eyes of the people in his church, and in his own home. He moved on to another town, who hired him to be their new minister, but the transition wasn't that easy. Knowing he had come from EAM, they forced him to quarantine in a hut in the woods until

they were certain he wasn't sick and contagious. Now, one thing you might be thinking at this point is that fewer people might have died if they hadn't locked down the village. That shutting their borders served to concentrate the damage, making matters worse. But in truth, the death rate in EAM was only 32%, a far cry from the 75 to 90% that a lot of other communities experienced. It seems that their precautions not only stopped the plague from spreading northward, but also made it easier on themselves.

But that's not all. In recent years, curious researchers have begun to wonder if there was another reason for so many of the villagers' survival, and to find it, they looked deeper, inside their descendants' genetic code. And what they found was groundbreaking. Among current residents there, who are direct descendants of those who survived in 1666, they found that 14% of them had a genetic mutation that scientists refer to as Delta-32. It's a mutation that first appeared about 700 years ago, right when the first waves

of the plague spread across Europe. And it seems that it came about as a way to fight off the illness. But scientists now think they understand what happened. Among the villagers with only one copy of the mutation, meaning inherited from one parent, there was a chance they would survive, but no guarantee. Among those with two copies, one from each parent, those odds increased exponentially. In other words, the survivors of EAM were born for the mission they assigned themselves. All that said, it's important to remember that the people of EAM had no idea their

genetic code was special. They probably wouldn't have understood it anyway, even if someone spelled it out for them. No, all they knew was that victory over the plague depended on one simple thing, their courage. But there's no better way to sum things up than by quoting William Wood, a historian writing in the 1800s, about just how important the events truly were. Let all who tread the green fields of EAM, he wrote, remember, with feelings of awe and

veneration, that beneath their feet repose the ashes of those mortal heroes who, with a sublime heroic and unparalleled resolution, gave up their lives, yea, doomed themselves to pestilential death to save the surrounding country. Their self-sacrifice is unequaled in the annals of the world. There is so much we can learn from stories from the past, and forgotten tales like that of the people of EAM go a long way to helping us find hope in dark times. I hope you enjoyed the dive into their experience, no matter how painful it might have been. But we're not quite finished yet with that little village.

It seems that there are a few more unexpected details to share, and if you stick around through this brief sponsor break, I'll tell you all about them. There's a lot that can be said about the lasting legacy of the story of EAM. Their efforts in 1666 had an impact on the countryside around them, and even today, their descendants are helping scientists better understand how the plague works and how the human body can fight back. But there's more left behind than medical clues. Visitors to the village today can still see a small graveyard on the eastern edge, known

as Riley Graves. It's the location where Elizabeth Hancock dug seven graves by hand and buried the remains of her husband and six children, and in many ways, it's a concrete reminder of her loss and bravery. The water trough filled with vinegar is no longer sitting on the village perimeter, but it's been replaced with a large rock known as the Boundary Stone, and there are still buildings there that predate the plague, including George Vickers House, and the tomb of Catherine Montpeson is still there as well.

And every year on the last Sunday in August, the people there gather outside for a church service in the open air. They call it Plague Sunday, and it's held in memory of those outdoor gatherings back in the summer of 1666. One of the biggest attractions in the village is the plague cottage, partly because it's reported to be one of the most haunted buildings in Derbyshire. One common report is that visitors have seen an older woman wearing a blue smock who has a habit of approaching guests in bed at night and waking them up.

While Eam Hall was built in the decade after the plague, it has stories of its own. Among them are frequent sightings of a young girl named Sarah Mills, who was reported to have drowned in the town well. There are also stories of a ghostly man who has appeared so many times in an upstairs room that the door is now locked permanently to guests. But if there's one place where most people have reported something unusual, it's the local pub, the Miner's Arms, which has been standing there since the 1630s. Guests who have stayed there have reported a whole laundry list of odd experiences, including

mysterious footsteps in empty hallways, cold spots in an otherwise warm room, and objects that seem to move on their own. Others have noticed strange smells, the laughter of invisible children, and doors that open and shut on their own. Whether or not the building is truly haunted is something that I'll leave for you to decide, but one thing is certainly clear. It's difficult to pay the pub a visit and not feel the weight of history in every room. In the end, the village of Eam will always be haunted by the tragedy of its past, but

keeping those ghosts company is the knowledge that so many people did something so selfless, giving their lives for the greater good. And in the process, they gave us an example to imitate. And if that's not a ghost worth keeping around, I don't know what is. This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Ali Steed and music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast. There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television

show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want more lore in your life. I also make and executive produce a whole bunch of other podcasts, all of which I think you'd enjoy. My production company, Grim and Mild, specializes in shows that sit at the intersection of the dark and the historical. You can learn more about all of those shows and everything else going on over in one central place, grimandmild.com.

And you can also follow this show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.