Plagues Diseases recorded in old documents as “the plague” may not all have been bubonic plague, which is carried from rats to humans by fleas. However, the Black Death, which swept across Europe in the Middle Ages, is believed to have been bubonic plague. It killed almost half the population of England, where it was known as the Great Mortality. Outbreaks of plague and smallpox broke out at Darley Dale in the 16th/17th centuries. “Ye sweatinge sickness” claimed nine lives in six days. At Hope, many children died in 1636 from “the children’s pocks or the purple pocks and whyt hives with blisters”. This was probably measles, a killer disease at that time. A whole family died when a plague struck at Curbar. Their five initialled gravestones lie in the bracken below Baslow Edge. Read More >> More Pictures Health and Sickness Gravestones , Memorials and shrines Eyam