LONDON, U.K. -- I checked in this week with the village of Eyam.

All those who sounded out the name as “Eee-yam,” raise your beautifully disinfected hands. Don’t feel bad. It’s one of those odd complications of Britain’s rich Anglo-Saxon heritage. What you see is not what you say.

The way Gloucester becomes “Gloster” and Berkshire becomes “Barksher.”

So if you pronounced Eyam as “Eem” you are far better read than most of us.

It’s a pretty village, planted centuries ago in the rolling hills Derbyshire—make that “Darbysher.”

Pretty in a spooky, ghostly way.

You see, Eyam is best known as the village that stopped the plague.

We’re talking about the bubonic plague here, which arrived in in a bale of donated clothing from London, in the fall of 1665. It’s a tale of unwitting generosity and rapid death.

By the way, bubonic plague still exists today and kills a few people every year.

As the story goes, a tailor’s apprentice by the name of George Viccars opened the bale of mildewed clothes and hung them out to dry. He was the first to die.

Don’t click away now; this is just getting morbidly interesting.

In those days, everybody thought the plague was caused by toxic, rotting air—miasma. But, it was really carried by fleas, and that’s what jumped out at poor George Viccars and soon spread through the village.

Here comes the best part.

The local vicar persuaded the good people of Eyam that it was their Godly duty to self-quarantine and stop the epidemic from spreading to other villages.

In other words, to accept a likely death sentence.

By the following August, half a dozen people were dying every day. Elizabeth Hancock buried her husband and six of their children over the course of eight days.

Tragic and horrific to contemplate, but it worked. By the next year the plague was gone. Many village lives were lost, but many more outside were saved.

Eyam is once again under a form of “cordon sanitaire,” dealing with a new plague, and life under lockdown.

What’s happening this time is history-in-reverse. People aren’t worried about the virus getting out; they’re worried about it getting in.

I had a good chat with Annette Bindon who used to be head of the Village Society and now spends much of her pandemic time in her large garden.

There have been a couple of COVID-19 cases she told me, but thank God, no deaths. Can you imagine the kind of wild tabloid headlines that would generate: “Death Stalks Plague Village.”

The current rector and his wife were apparently ill. Everybody else, said Annette, is more or less self-isolating, as they did in 1665.

“Anywhere that isn’t an essential service is closed.”

Eyam’s population is under 1,000 but of course during the summer, it buzzes with plague tourism. You can still visit some of the gravestones. Not this year, and that’s okay with Annette, if it saves lives.

“Early on,” she said, “there was a bit of anxiety because people from the cities were calling to see if they could still visit Eyam.”

For now, the village that stopped the plague seems in no hurry to entertain.