However, Eyam’s main claim to fame is the story of how the village chose to go into isolation so as to prevent infection spreading after bubonic plague was discovered there in 1665.

It is a dative form of the noun ēġ ('an island') and probably refers to a patch of cultivable land amidst the moors,[10] or else to the settlement's situation between two brooks.

Some of the rectors at the church have had contentious histories, none less than the fanatically Royalist Sherland Adams who, it was accused, "gave tythe of lead ore to the King against the Parliament", and as a consequence was removed from the living and imprisoned.

[14] According to the 1841 Census for Eyam, there were 954 inhabitants living in the parish, chiefly employed in agriculture, lead mining, and cotton and silk weaving.

The transition from industrial village to tourist-based economy is underlined by Roger Ridgeway's statement that, at the beginning of the 20th century, "a hundred horses and carts would have been seen taking fluorspar to Grindleford and Hassop stations.

Until recently, up to a dozen coach loads of visiting children arrived each day in the village,"[9] and as of the 2011 Census the population has remained largely unchanged at 969.

[15] The history of the plague in the village began in 1665 when a flea-infested bundle of cloth arrived from London for Alexander Hadfield, the local tailor.

[18] As the disease spread, the villagers turned for leadership to their rector, the Reverend William Mompesson, and the ejected Puritan minister Thomas Stanley.

The measures included the arrangement that families were to bury their own dead and relocation of church services to the natural amphitheatre of Cucklett Delph,[19] allowing villagers to separate themselves and so reducing the risk of infection.

Originally held in mid-August, it now takes place in Cucklett Delph on the last Sunday in August, coinciding with the (much older) Wakes Week and well dressing ceremonies.

One is the Boundary Stone in the fields between Eyam and Stoney Middleton in which money, usually soaked in vinegar, which was believed to kill the infection, was placed in exchange for food and medicine.

In his Peak Scenery (1824), Ebenezer Rhodes charges that by the start of the 19th century many former gravestones of plague victims had been pulled up to floor houses and barns and that ploughing was allowed to encroach on the Riley Graves; that the lime trees planted on either side of Mrs Mompesson's grave had been cut down for timber; that the missing piece from the shaft of the Saxon Cross had been broken up for domestic use; and that in general the profit of the living was put before respect for the dead.

Among the art exhibits there are painted copies from different eras of a print (taken from a drawing by Francis Chantrey) in Ebenezer Rhodes' Peak Scenery (1818).

[33] The rector for whom Cunningham deputised much of the time, Thomas Seward, published infrequently, but at least one poem written during his tenure at Eyam deals with personal matters.

A pioneer of Romanticism, Seward could not hide from herself the fact that the wild natural rocks she admired were daily being blasted for utilitarian purposes and the "perpetual consumption of the ever burning lime kilns", while the view was hidden behind the smoke from the smelting works.

[36] She celebrated this lost domain of happiness once more in "Epistle to Mr. Newton, the Derbyshire Minstrel, on receiving his description in verse of an autumnal scene near Eyam, September 1791".

A later visitor from across the Peak District was Thomas Matthew Freeman, who included a blank verse meditation "On Eyam" and its plague history in his collection Spare minutes of a country parson.

[40] At the start of the following century Sarah Longsdon O'Ferrall was living at Eyam Rectory and published The Lamp of St Helen and other poems in 1912.

Set in the former Bradshaw Hall in the year before the plague arrives, it includes local characters who had key roles during the spread of the disease, such as George Vicars and William and Catherine Mompesson.

The reviewer of the poem The Tale of Eyam in the British Medical Journal of 30 November 1889 comments on its poetic phraseology: "The author speaks of the pestilence and 'its hellborn brood'; and again of firebolts from 'heaven's reeking nostrils.'

Such phraseology, says the unknown author, "aptly exemplifies the mental attitude of men who lived in the infancy of modern science, when in the plague they saw the angry stroke of offended Deity, and recognised the 'scourge' of God in what we know to be only the scourge of filth.

From the dawn of the 19th century, the romanticised and sentimental accounts of events at Eyam were "largely produced by poets, writers and local historians – not doctors",[46]: 22  as is apparent from the dissenting opinions quoted above.

The 1886 bicentenary commemoration, repeated annually for close on a century and a half, is claimed by the author to be the beginning of "an overtly invented tradition" which has spawned a heritage industry to profit the village in the face its declining prosperity and population, and provided instead "a plague tourism infrastructure".