From 1347 to 1669, the plague was raging in Western Europe. The pandemic that was the plague claimed some 25 million victims in Western Europe in the fourteenth century alone. This was about a quarter of the population! The plague also reigned in West Brabant in a terrible way.
From about 1500 we can trace this in the archives: about every fifteen to twenty years the plague also scourged Breda and the barony. An absolute disaster year was 1603: of the entire city population, about a third, more than 1800, died. The plague also struck Alphen, one of the ten villages in the Baronie van Breda. We know this quite precisely from 1604 and 1625 thanks to the burial registers in the parish archives.
On June 30, 1604, Pastor Adriaensen van Alphen was struck down by the plague. He was buried in a kind of emergency cemetery on the heath, by order of the sheriff of Alphen, who was afraid of further infections. On October 20, 1625, Father Van den Heuvel met the same fate. He too died as a result of infection he had acquired while caring for the plague victims in his parish.
Together with about four hundred plague victims, they were not buried in or around the church, as was customary, but were buried in a cemetery on the moor, about half an hour from the village itself. During the annual visitations by the dean van Hoogstraten in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he complained that the promise to build a suitable chapel as a tribute to the plague victims had always come to nothing. Cows and sheep grazed there and the memorial cross had already fallen over….
Translated by Google •
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