“All theis dyed of the plague”: 1631’s epidemic in Heptonstall and Ovenden

Calderdale has been no stranger to grand historical events – some exciting, some positive, and some devastating. To celebrate the end of the summer, let’s focus on one of the devastating ones – bubonic plague. What is known as the “second plague pandemic” swept through Europe over the course of the 17th Century and there were several occurrences within Calderdale. One particular bad period for deaths in Europe was 1623-1640, and two parts of the current borough, Heptonstall and Ovenden, were the primary victims.

The 1631 plague epidemic began in Heptonstall, likely having moved eastward from Rochdale and the westernmost reaches of Yorkshire, and upwards from the south. It then moved on to Erringden, and eastwards towards Ovenden. Somehow, Halifax escaped this particular bout of plague, with almost no deaths recorded during the 8 months in which it terrified the area. Don’t get smug, Halifax residents; your turn came in 1641. More on that later.

Horrible sanitation is key, as we all know from history lessons during our school years. Open sewers and drains often ran down the middle of high streets, and were used by all who lived nearby. If you think about the Shambles in York and the gutter running down the centre of all those little side streets you can imagine similar conditions in Heptonstall and Ovenden being the primary draw for both rats and for easily-made contact with “dung, offal, and dirty water”. The geographic elevation and size of these settlements provided no escape – as I said, plague is nothing to do with fresh air or closed living quarters. Even up into the late 1700s, despite advances in medical understanding of bubonic plague, there was still some uncertainty as to the cause of these outbreaks. John Watson in his 1775 “History and Antiquities of the Parish of Halifax, in Yorkshire”, writes that “I have mentioned the above disorders in this place [Heptonstall and Ovenden], as I knew not where to class them better; not however with any design to shew that the air here is in any respect unwholesome, for a few instances of this sort would not prove it.” He’s right, the air wasn’t unwholesome at all! But he also doesn’t explain how it could have taken hold and spread so easily.

Two pages in the Heptonstall register devoted to plague victims, including the minister

Heptonstall was more seriously affected than Ovenden, possibly because by the time it moved across, people were prepared to take action to avoid contagion. In Heptonstall 107 deaths were recorded in the St. Thomas burial register. Edward and Walter Walker, in 1885’s Chapters on the Early Registers of Halifax Parish Church, say that the effect in Hepstonstall of the plague was that “the towngate … became so deserted, that it grew grass all over”. Ovenden subsequently lost about 60 people. Areas nearby weren’t taking chances – schools found themselves nearly empty in Skircoat, as parents kept their children home where it was supposedly safer. In both areas, the burial registers note both burials at the parish church and also burials that took place elsewhere, often at the homes of the people who died. We can see scans of the parish registers on Ancestry. St. John the Baptist, where many of the Ovenden deaths were recorded, actually recorded plague deaths in their own section, and in one or two months the numbers were so great that they had to continue recording them sideways into the marriages and baptisms columns of each month’s page. The St. Thomas burial register instead dedicated an entire page to the deaths which were reported to them as plague deaths. As mentioned previously, we can see that they are described as “buryed att home” or “buryed near their own dwellings”. Hugh P. Kendall in his article “The Plague in Halifax Parish” published in the Transactions of the Halifax Antiquarian Society mentions that someone identified the “steep field through which the footpath leads from the top of Shay-lane to Holdsworth” to him as having been a mass grave site for victims in Ovenden.

The first mention of “pestilence” in the Halifax registers, July 1631

Halifax register for August 1631 – note the entries moving leftwards due to lack of space

Plague arrived swiftly and ran its course across the two townships within eight months – May through December. We were lucky, if less than 200 deaths can be counted as lucky; it was more widespread than this across West Yorkshire during this particular 17 year period.

So what effect did this have on those areas in the longer term? Well, ironically given what we know now, the 1630s were one of the peaks periods of building activity in the area! Because of the assumption that bad air was the cause of illness, it didn’t occur to anyone to sort out the issues of sewerage and water supply that persisted not just in these two places but across all moderately-to-heavily populated parts of the borough. Instead the intensive building continued and more people began living near each other, with ultimately predictable results. The mean age at death was still about 35 during the first third of the 18th century. Futher recurrences of plague, as well as typhoid and smallpox, all contributed to the death toll and low life expectancy of the area over the next few hundred years.

Remember when I said that Halifax could only count itself lucky in 1631? In 1641, Hipperholme, Rastrick, Northowram, Stainland, Barkisland and Shelf were all hit with an outbreak. Again, it was swiftly contained and didn’t spread to Halifax. However, 1645 was when Halifax’s luck ran out. That year, between Halifax and Northowram 529 people are recorded as dying of plague. Residents of those areas ought to have taken a leaf out of a widow of Hipperholme’s book; Kendall points us to the Wakefield Quarter Sessions of October of that year, where Eden Wilson petitions the court for compensation for keeping her children and servants quarantined on her property for the entire 15 weeks after she herself became ill with it, thus ensuring that she would not be responsible for allowing it to be passed to anyone else. The compensation she requested was not just for the cost of keeping everyone fed and watered, and for loss of income, but also for the cost of deep-cleaning her home and the servants’ quarters at the end of the 15 weeks. She reckoned the charge of all this to be around £37, or £4300 in today’s money. The magistrates granted her request for an unstated proportion of the requested cost, ordering it to be paid out of the area’s poor relief fund.

The resources mentioned here are either on the open shelves or kept in the Horsfall Turner room, but should you want to look at them in more depth, feel free to ask and browse our Local Studies department. We promise you that we keep things very clean down here…