When the Black Death spread from London, the villagers of Yarm in Derbyshire sealed off the roads, preventing the deadly plague from continuing northward. Yarm later came to be known as the Land of Sages.
A pastor called on everyone to stay, but the decision was made by all the villagers, most of whom were miners. Since the Middle Ages, Yarm had been an important mining region in England, so the English government established the junction of the main north-south transport routes there.
Malmesbury, meanwhile, lay at the meeting point of two small streams in Wiltshire and had always been a center for learned people. The moat around Malmesbury was cleverly and sensibly laid out, but such terrain also prevented the town from accommodating a large volume of traffic, which was one reason industry there remained underdeveloped.
Moats were an important defensive measure in the Middle Ages. If the English Channel was a natural moat, then the Atlantic Ocean was a sea moat, cutting the Americas off from continental Europe and allowing them to build their ideal new nation peacefully on the virgin lands of North America.
Thomas Jefferson opposed Parliament's purchase of Louisiana on constitutional grounds, but he had not said he would object if the American people granted Parliament the authority to acquire Louisiana. Naturally, obtaining the legal right to use land nearly equal in size to America's existing territory was an excellent bargain, especially since Napoleon was so desperately short of money.
Like Dermide, William Pitt the Younger had been frail as a child, so weak that he could not attend school like ordinary children and could only invite the pastor Edward Wilson to teach him at home.
Perhaps frail children were prone to darker thoughts. The Earl of Malmesbury brought Georgiana news of Saint-Domingue. Fearing that