The plague took the lives of million of Europeans from the 14^th until the 17^th century. In England, its destruction stayed mainly in the south of England concentrating around the poor quarters of London. But for one small village in England’s rural north, the plague would be devastating and historic. The case of the small village of Eyam in Derbyshire is famed throughout England and serves in the modern age of an example of the importance of self quarantine in the face of deadly disease.

It all began with the decision of the village tailor, George Viccars to purchase a box of fabric from a London dealer and bring it to Eyam to make clothes for the locals. Viccars didn’t know the box was full of fleas carrying the bubonic plague. Three days later he was dead.

The village knew plague when they saw it and drastic action was taken to ensure it didn’t spread outside of the village. The village went into self induced quarantine under the guidance of the retired vicar and the serving vicar. They asked the villagers to make this sacrifice to save the lives of everyone else. The villages made the difficult moral decision and complied.

The next few months were hard, families, men, women and children became sick and died. One woman lost her husband and six children within the space of a single week. The village lived with the disease throughout September and October of 1665, minimizing contact with each other, receiving provisions from neighboring villages who left food for them at the town boundaries and holding all public ceremonies outside to minimize the spread of the illness.

During that time, the small village of Eyam with a population of approximately 700 people lost 260 of its inhabitants to the plague. The plague affected 76 different families and wiped out a few of them forever. Many households had only a single survivor who lived to tell the tale of those terrible months.

Many people did survive and they recorded the histories and passings of their neighbors on the front of their home and these records still exist. All the villagers learned how to bury their neighbors, friends and family members. It was a time unimaginable for most of us today as these simple country folk showed a spirit of community almost gone in these modern times.

Today, Eyam pays homage to those that lost their lives in 1665 with a plague museum as well as plaques on the house of the victims. The cemetery still keeps their bones and the locals still hold testament to their title of England’s “plague village.” They may have not realized it at the time but those few deaths became famed throughout England, making their way into every child’s schoolbook and taught as an example of ill fate.

Eyam was just one small village of the hundreds affected by the bubonic plague but its history provides a glimpse into the lives of its survivors and victims, making the epidemic more than just statistics of people who live long ago but a testament of human endurance and the belief in the sacrifice of a few to save the lives of many.

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Flavio Biondo, an Italian humanist, in the early 15th Century, first coined the term “Middle Age” (”medium ævum”) to designate the period between the Classical and the enlightened Renaissance revival of classical ideas, philosophies, aesthetics. In English, Dutch, Russian and Icelandic, the plural form of the term, Middle Ages, is used, however, other European languages use the singular form (Italian medioevo, French le moyen âge, German das Mittelalter.) The popular word we use commonly today, “medieval”, is a contraction of the Latin medium ævum or “middle epoch”. Enlightenment thinkers used it as a pejorative descriptor of the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages would come to be viewed as a Dark Age during which many of the advances and achievements of the Greeks and Romans would be eclipsed by warfare and the gradual disintegration of institutions and culture that the Europeans had inherited from the Classical era.

The beginning of the Medieval period is introduced with the fall of the Roman Empire, when in 476 C.E., the emperor was driven from his throne by barbarian invaders. The dissolution of the once expansive and powerful Roman Empire allowed for the formation of tiny kingdoms throughout Europe vying for territory. There was great instability as a result of such fragmentation and ongoing invasions and infighting bewteen tribes such as the Vikings, Visigoths, and Gauls, as well as the Moors began to change the nature of European life.

A lack of centralized political power in the greater region gave the Catholic Church tremendous power and civilian life - in terms of cultural growth, education, literacy, political involvement, and commerce - was in many ways truncated by an era of conflict and unenlightened dogma. With lawlessness and warfare widespread, community became focused around small powers, nobles or kings, who established control of land and created feudal systems by which to garner work from the peasant-class in exchange for access to land and protection from marauding tribes.

Only towards the first millennium did a level of stability and security permit the Medieval fiefdoms to evolve into viable commercial centers which would allow for further growth and independence among village-dwellers. With increased security and increased trade relations came the increase in wealth for individuals living in the feudal system. The economic growth in turn would spur political changes and eventual release from the highly dependent system of the fiefdoms, opening the doors to an era of greater individual independence, educational growth, political reform, and cultural diffusion.

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The term “Renaissance”, or rebirth, was coined by historians in the mid 19th century to describe the period in Western European history that was characterized by a resurgence of ideas, philosophies, and culture from the classical period. A golden age of cultural, intellectual and ideological movements occurred between roughly the early 14th to the late 16th century in Europe that drew on many elements of classical Greek and Roman history. From the decadence of the Middle Ages and the fall of the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church increasingly exerted a dominant influence on European life and became the defacto broker of power in Europe. So it was that within this cultural setting, the dominant ideas of the Renaissance emerged from the collection of city-states in Italy and proliferated throughout Europe via the well connected commercial routes of the time.

Florence, in particular, was emerging as a powerful city-state through its commercial strength as a textile producer and banking center. Its burgeoning economy and growing mercantile class made it a focal point for the cultural transformations that would be associated with the Renaissance. The fall of the Byzantine Empire also fueled change in Western Europe as exiled Greek scholars established themselves in the west, bringing with them copies of classical philosophical texts, literature, and salvaged art works and opening to the Europeans a door to the riches of the classical Greek and Roman periods that had been lost through the centuries of internal tribal warfare and barbaric invasions.

Money from the new middle classes went towards commissioning artists and architects to create masterpieces in quantity and scale unmatched till then. Artists such as Giotto, Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Masaccio, Lippi, Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, Lotto, da Vinci, Michelangelo, to name a few, elevated art to a new level and form of cultural expression. The Renaissance began to flourish in the kingdoms to the north of Florence as well, with new ideas and momentum of change spreading along trade routes. Venetian Italy and the regions of the Netherlands also were transformed by new ideas, aesthetics, and commerce.

New intellectual movements stirred Western Europe as well. Authors such as Sir Thomas More and Erasmus of Rotterdam made notable contributions to a growing canon of western intellectual thought on humanism and the capacities of the individual to reason and contend for themselves with the depths of the human spirit. A growing intellectual need arose to balance a world image dominated and guided by religion with a concept of a mankind’s experience on earth as a breathing, thinking being exercising a measure of self determinism.

The Renaissance looked to the past, to the classical period, in order to push itself forward. A fascination with art and literature and thought from a previous era contributed to an era of new literary, artistic, and intellectual development for the Europeans.

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The expansion of European influence and power through Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas in many ways began with the flow of traders, travelers, and missionaries intent on establishing themselves in non-Western territories and strengthening their own nation’s resources. Already in the 15th century the Portuguese established trade with parts of Africa and by the 16th century the movement of European powers into foreign lands for expansionist political and commercial purposes was well underway.

The Europeans began a system of global expansion that had not been seen in the west since the fall of the Roman Empire. The presence for nearly a millennium of the Ottoman Empire in the Near East made European colonial expansion a political and cultural imperative as much as an economic one. Soon European political ambitions and their quest to find alternative trade routes to Asia during the 15th century resulted in a collision between the European and the Islamic worlds. An initial period of European extension into other territories first began as mercantile exploits that aimed to increase the wealth of European monarchies through settled commercial outposts and agricultural systems whose only purpose was to fuel and feed the European continent. The slave trade also grew out of this mercantile period as an offshoot of the desire to maximize production and profits.

A second period in European colonialism began at the end of the Napoleonic wars as European powers struggled to maintain their colonial territories. The wars in Europe depleted the strength and resources of the French, Spanish, and Portuguese particularly. In this second phase, the British also reduced their focus on their colonial outposts after their experience with the rebellion of their American colonies and the abolition of slavery in 1807. The abolition of slavery ended the once endless stream of labor that fueled the economy in the British Caribbean colonies and made them profitable.

A new phase of imperialism began in the 1880s through the beginning of World War I when a resurgence of colonial expansionism encapsulated almost all of Africa and most of Asia. In this era, the military and political problems between the European powers on the European continent manifested themselves on the colonial front. Furthermore, incentives for colonial expansion in Africa grew out of a reaction to the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism in the north and the discovery of gold and diamonds in the south. In Asia, the Europeans increased their colonial efforts mainly due to the weakening Asian regimes which made their countries vulnerable to new exploits. Following World War I and World War II, the European grip on its former colonies weakened, leading to the independence and formation of new countries made from the diverse ethnic and religious groups that were once subjugated by the Europeans. Today, these former colonies struggle to find their national identities while maintaining tenuous relations with the European nations that once exploited them for centuries.

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