Three and a half thousand years ago, the first people known to have lived in this corner of North Brabant built burial mounds - the sepulchre hillocks of the Tumulus culture. The Urnfield culture followed, and an urn full of cremation ashes turned up in a field called Schadewijk, between the modern church and the hamlet. Before the Romans arrived and renamed the region Toxandria, the Eburones - the Belgic tribe famous for ambushing a Roman legion under Sabinus and Cotta in 54 BC - lived here. Roman pottery shards still surface in the soil around the church. The Salian Franks, who took over in the 4th century, became known by the Roman name for the land: Toxandrians. When Rome receded the area emptied, and only the Franks' return around the year 700 reestablished a permanent community.

After 1203 the region became part of the Duchy of Brabant, and Eersel - sitting on the crossroads of the Leuven-'s-Hertogenbosch and Antwerp-Turnhout routes - found itself useful. Traders needed somewhere to stop, eat, sleep, and stable their horses. The old Frankish triangular court of the village called Hint expanded southward into a new oval square: de Markt, the Market. Around it grew taverns, boarding houses, stables, and a blacksmith. In 1325 Duke Jan III of Brabant granted Eersel town privileges - the right to elect its own governor - and made the town the head of a regional schepenbank covering nearby villages from Hapert to Borkel en Schaft. On 19 October 1967 the Markt and the Hint were declared a protected village, the medieval scale preserved against modern infill.

After the Middle Ages the region got poorer, and from roughly 1500 to 1800 the villages of the Kempen barely grew. But people had to make a living, so a class of itinerant tradesmen arose - the Teuten. They were not gypsies; they kept their families and their houses in places like Eersel and travelled out from them. A Teuten man might leave for months at a time as a coppersmith, a wig-maker, or - more bracingly - as a veterinary castrator of horses, rams, bulls, and pigs. Others moved pottery, kitchen utensils, bed-clothes, linen, lace, silk and other textiles across the Low Countries and into Germany. Several of their houses still front the Markt today, modest brick fronts that once held the savings of long absences.

Three buildings sketch most of the town's religious history. The Sint-Willibrorduskerk - the church of Saint Willibrord, namesake of the saint to whom Aengilbertus once gave the domain - had its first written mention in 1480, with a tower from the second half of the 14th century. Its monumental organ, restored in 1972 under realm-monument care, is a hybrid: ranks built in 1838 by Bernard Petrus van Hirtum of Hilvarenbeek combined with work by the Smits Brothers of Reek from 1852. The Chapel of Our Lady of Campina, the oldest building on the market, went up in 1464 in Gothic style. After the Peace of Munster the Protestant authorities closed it for mass and put it to bureaucratic use - as a council house, as a prison, as a fire-engine shed. It served as the town hall for three hundred years before returning to the church in 1948. The small Protestant church on the edge of town, simple barge-stone and built in 1812, has an arched ceiling that lends it surprising acoustics.

By 1900 the bush land around Eersel was being cleared and turned to farming, and a cigar industry took hold in the town. During the interwar economic crisis it was the cigars that kept unemployment manageable - hard work for modest pay, but work that did not disappear. Eersel remains one of the largest cigar-exporting towns in the Netherlands and a working presence in the international cigar trade. After the Second World War the population leapt from roughly 3,700 to about 12,500, the kind of growth most Brabant villages saw as the agricultural region modernised and commuting to Eindhoven became practical. The Markt, with its Teuten houses and chapel, looks much as it did before the boom - thanks to the 1967 protection order - even as the rest of the town stretched out around it.