Isolation Cottages- How Social Distancing and Quarantine Helped our Ancestors Overcome Disease

Charlotte Greenham (MM Hu)

For the past year the world has been fighting a virus. We have intermittently been in an enforced isolation period in the UK since March. It has been an ‘unprecedented’ situation.

Or has it?

Throughout human history our species – like all others on the planet - has been plagued with various diseases, many taking the form of widespread epidemics. Although, the past year has been extremely testing and unusual, many of our ancestors will have gone through very similar experiences with smallpox, black death, cholera, tuberculosis, typhus, leprosy; the list goes on. I have been looking into how English society dealt with these previous epidemics when medicine wasn’t developed enough to create vaccines so quickly and when there was limited research into how these diseases spread. Our ancestors didn’t have the technology to investigate diseases like we do today, but they realised that isolation was the key to halting the spread of disease from previous experiences. Many areas were designated for the treatment and isolation of the sick, with geographical isolation being the key to success.

In rural communities, where there were no large local hospitals to take care of the sick, and pest houses were built to contain contagious persons and halt the spread of disease. The name ‘pest’ house comes from the French word for the plague: la peste, as they are believed to have first been used during one of the plague epidemics. They were situated well away from the villages, with few - or no - visitors allowed. Anyone with symptoms of a current epidemic or any contagious disease would be forced to quarantine in the pest house. Some were allowed to isolate in homes with their family to care for them, but the vast majority of cases came to the local pest house. The poor were the responsibility of the village and churchwardens, and the main body of patients tended to be the poor. Therefore, paupers were sent to pest houses, with their medical fees paid by the villagers out of the poor rates. Cemeteries were often situated nearby for the obvious reason that death was frequent. There was little care for the sick due to fear about catching the disease, and only a few brave caretakers who had been previously exposed to diseases such as smallpox (and therefore were immune) were there to care for the sick. It is surprising how much was known about disease as early as the 14th century, with immunity being understood and spread of disease via close contact being taken into account. Many pest houses had cross-ventilation to remove pathogens as quickly as possible, and partitions between patients prevented different diseases from being spread between the sick. The methods used many hundreds of years ago are very similar to how we have dealt with the Covid-19 pandemic.

In my own village, Ashbury, there is a house situated far away from the rest of the village, next to a spring for regular washing and sanitation, just like many other pest houses. It has been passed down through word of mouth that this is the village isolation cottage but there are no records that I have found to confirm this. However, a dispute in 1796 over an unlucky boy from Ashbury who contracted smallpox is recorded, and led to four different local villages being involved in his treatment. Thomas Chivers had gone to the Lady Day fair in 65

Swindon to find a job. He was hired for six months as a labourer by a farmer from a local parish, Hinton Parva. He had been there for about a month when he became ill, and after three days he became so feverish that he took to his bed. The local apothecary, Mr Williams, visited him, and told Thomas he didn’t think he had smallpox. His parents were called (without Thomas’s permission), but when his mother arrived he had a violent fever. People with smallpox were usually forced to remain wherever they were, but at this time Thomas was believed not to have smallpox so was transported back to his village, Ashbury, in the ‘paroxysm of the fever preceding the smallpox, such it turned out to be’. Ashbury had no smallpox patients at that time and requested the boy be taken to the pest house in Hinton. They were refused their plea as Thomas had not yet gained settlement status and it could be argued he had broken his six-month contract with his master, who wasn’t liable to pay for his cure. If he had had settled status it would have been illegal to remove him from Hinton. Therefore, Thomas was removed instead to the local pest house in Highworth. He survived the disease and was subsequently removed to the Wantage pest house, for an unknown reason, once the danger to him was over.

The maps show the location of the Lertwell cottage in 1910 in Ashbury (thought to be an isolation cottage) and Highworth’s smallpox house. Note their distance from the main village.

Another person who was saved by isolation in a pest house was William Heath from the town of Hungerford. In 1604/05 his house was infected with the plague. Thereupon he, his wife and his three children were ‘removed to a pest house and appointed for that purpose.’ They were cared for by a widow who, presumably having no husband to care for, was assigned to have ‘custody and keeping of him and his children’. Unfortunately, William’s wife, Elizabeth Heath, and one of his sons succumbed to the plague, but he and all his other children miraculously survived, no doubt due to being isolated in the house. This is a picture of the pest house the Heaths stayed in:

The Black Death swept through much of the world and is one of the earliest pandemics about which we know a great deal. It was spread via the trade routes from Asia through to Europe and was greatly feared by all. When it reached Britain, numerous precautions were taken to lessen the spread. Pest houses were used as a form of isolation, and burials of the dead were limited to the use of so called ‘plague pits’; meanwhile any clothes from the diseased were burned and countless remedies were sold claiming to stop people contracting the infection. However, one of the most courageous and self-sacrificial actions that was taken was by a small village in the Lake District called Eyam. In 1665, the Plague arrived in Eyam in a bundle of damp cloth containing fleas from London. When the cloth was hung up these fleas were released, and plague began to spread throughout the population. William Mompesson, the newly appointed rector, intervened, quarantining the village to prevent any further spread. Human to human contact was greatly limited, and no one was allowed in or out of the village. Boundary stones were placed around the village and you can even see the holes in which coins were placed for trading with the outside world in some:

Church services were held in the open air at Cucklet Delf, and families stood apart from each other to avoid the spread of infection, much as we are doing today with social distancing. A painting from the Eyam museum depicts one of these services:

A villager, Marshall Howe, was infected at the start of the outbreak and survived. Believing he could not be infected twice, he offered to help bury the dead, often stealing the victim’s possessions as his reward. Unfortunately, the rest of his family succumbed to the infection later on, and he was tasked with the job of burying them himself. It is possible that his family became infected from the stolen possessions of diseased corpses. The death rate was unprecedentedly high; more than double that of London. Out of between 350 and 800 inhabitants of Eyam before the cordon, 260 had died from no fewer than 76 different families in the space of 15 months. Although the villagers of Eyam suffered unimaginably, the isolation period worked, and the plague spread no further.

Isolation is tough physically and mentally. All these poor souls I have written about, from residents of pest houses like Thomas and William to all the villagers of Eyam, were isolated geographically but also psychologically. They were shunned from society in an attempt to control disease, with little help from the outside world. Their isolation was a sacrifice they were forced to take for the safety of others, and we must not forget this. Separation was by no means the only weapon rural communities used to combat disease, but it was likely to be the most effective. This has been proved in the 21st century, when isolation and quarantine have been the only way to reduce the spread of Covid-19. Although this period of enforced isolation is testing, we must learn from our ancestors who came before us. Lockdowns do work, and although it feels relentless at the moment, we will all be able to carry on with our lives in the future thanks to the huge sacrifice the world is making in the present.

Bibliography https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/medicine/bubonic-plague-first-pandemic#controlling-the-spread-of-plague http://hospitalfield.org.uk/stories-from-hospitalfield-plague-hospitals/ https://historic-hospitals.com/2020/05/02/the-architecture-of-isolation/ https://www.hungerfordvirtualmuseum.co.uk/index.php/8-places/303-pest-house https://www.thedeadhistory.com/history-of-ogdens-pest-houses/ http://hospitalfield.org.uk/stories-from-hospitalfield-plague-hospitals/ With thanks to local historian Marion Turner for her help on the history of the local villages

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