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Summary
Summary
In this fresh approach to the history of the Black Death, world-renowned scholar John Hatcher re-creates everyday life in a mid-fourteenth century rural English village. By focusing on the experiences of ordinary villagers as they lived-and died-during the Black Death (1345-50), Hatcher vividly places the reader directly inside those tumultuous times and describes in fascinating detail the day-to-day existence of people struggling with the tragic effects of the plague. Dramatic scenes portray how contemporaries must have felt and thought about these momentous events: what they knew and didn't know about the horrors of the disease, what they believed about death and God's vengeance, and how they tried to make sense of it all despite frantic rumors, frightening tales, and fearful sermons.
Author Notes
John Hatcher , a leading expert in medieval and early modern social and economic history, is Professor of Economic and Social History and chairman of the history faculty at the University of Cambridge.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In an experimental narrative for an academic historian--blending some fiction with solid facts--Hatcher, of Cambridge University, offers a "literary docudrama" that looks at the lives off ordinary people during the Black Death that devastated Europe in the 1340s. Focusing on the English town of Walsham de Willows, Hatcher helps readers understand the deep terror that prevailed, including rumors of "awful omens, including rains of frogs, serpents, lizards, scorpions, and venomous beasts." He describes the plague itself, which caused coughing up of blood, carbuncles and boils on the neck, underarm and groin, and death in a few days. Especially affecting are accounts of the psychological agonies of those who, in a deeply religious age, saw their often delirious relatives die without proper confession. Finally, Hatcher notes the socioeconomic upheaval wrought by the plague, including poor people unexpectedly inheriting land from relatives killed by the plague, and a severe labor shortage as a third of Europe's population was wiped out.. While a glossary would have been helpful (will readers know what a "rood" of land or a "heriot" is?), this is a fine work that gives an intimate sense of the Black Death's horrors. Maps. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
This depiction of an English village desolated by the plague of 1349 combines fiction and fact. Hatcher, a Cambridge University historian, explains that although manorial records exist for Walsham in Suffolk, they are silent about an important personage: the parish priest. Inventing Master John, Hatcher characterizes him as a learned and pious leader to whom Walsham's manor lords and tenant peasants turn for news about a dreadful disease fast approaching, and from whom they expect explanations of God's purposes for inflicting the impending scourge. Dramatizing Walsham's responses to imminent death, Hatcher has villagers organizing a burial society and a pilgrimage, reveling, or carrying on the agricultural rhythms of feudal society. Evoking the medieval mind-set, including anxiety about composing the soul for eternity, Hatcher's fictional scenes and characters are secured to actual events in village affairs as the Black Death kills half of Walsham's inhabitants. An unusual yet unusually gripping way to capture the distant past.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2008 Booklist
Guardian Review
By eschewing "conventional academic techniques" in favour of those "reminiscent of docudrama", Hatcher admits that his recreation of 14th-century village life at the time of the black death is "a hazardous project for a professional historian to undertake". Happily, Hatcher - chairman of Cambridge's history faculty - overcomes concerns about affronting purists to explore the effects of the pestilence on individuals rather than institutions. The lack of any first-person account by a helpfully literate villein is an impediment, but by combining the records of the Suffolk village of Walsham with a wider knowledge of the age, Hatcher fleshes out births, marriages and deaths. Characters including the good priest, the terrified mother and the angry parishioners lend psychological veracity, while the sense of creeping doom, panic and rampant superstition is conveyed with a novelist's skill. The precision of the historian underpins set-pieces showing deathbed rituals or court procedures. Hatcher's Walsham might be fiction, but the fear, dread and grief he creates come with the ring of truth. Caption: article-bol;skdj.1 By eschewing "conventional academic techniques" in favour of those "reminiscent of docudrama", Hatcher admits that his recreation of 14th-century village life at the time of the black death is "a hazardous project for a professional historian to undertake". - Victoria Segal.
Kirkus Review
Wan, long-winded "docudrama" about a rural parish in mid-14th-century England devastated by the plague. In order to explore the "intimate social history" of villagers at the time of the Black Death, Hatcher (Economic and Social History/Cambridge Univ.) chose Walsham le Willows in Suffolk because of its exceptionally good local records, then filled in the gaps with a fictional narrative employing as protagonist a parish priest he calls Master John. The author moves chronologically, from mid-1345, when Walsham's 1,000-odd inhabitants struggled to subsist in a makeshift agrarian economy, through 1350, when the long-feared pestilence decimated half the hamlet, to the weeks and months after, when the survivors took stock. Each chapter is introduced by a factual prcis, then the main text takes the reader through the paces of Master John's duties in ministering to his flock, particularly in assisting the dying sinner to "a good death." As he became privy to testimonies of the plague's encroachment on England, Master John had to address his parishioners' growing panic and assure them this scourge of God could be mollified by confession, penitential processions, pilgrimages to sacred sites and Masses. Moreover, he relayed chilling missives from the bishops and King Edward III on how to save and protect the realm. Hatcher effectively portrays the collective hysteria that gripped the land; when the disease finally struck around Easter 1349, people frequently refused to go near the dying and dead. Once the plague subsided by summer, it "let loose powerful forces that threatened upheaval in the social order, affecting not just peasants and laborers but clergy and lords." It wasn't all bad news: Survivors sorted inheritances, and wages soared, offering new opportunities, especially for women. Curiously leaden, achieving neither the gravitas of history nor the liveliness of fiction. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Table of Contents
| Preface: The Nature of This Book | p. ix |
| Introduction: Walsham in the Middle Ages | p. 1 |
| 1 Master John | p. 13 |
| 2 Late Summer, 1345 | p. 21 |
| 3 Autumn 1345 to Winter 1347 | p. 35 |
| 4 Christmas and New Year, 1347-1348 | p. 53 |
| 5 Spring and Early Summer, 1348 | p. 63 |
| 6 Midsummer and Autumn, 1348 | p. 81 |
| 7 Autumn and Winter, 1348 | p. 101 |
| 8 New Year, 1349 | p. 119 |
| 9 Lent and Easter, 1349 | p. 135 |
| 10 Mid-April to Early May, 1349 | p. 149 |
| 11 Mid-May, 1349 | p. 163 |
| 12 Late May to Early June, 1349 | p. 179 |
| 13 June 10-20, 1349 | p. 201 |
| 14 Summer, 1349 | p. 217 |
| 15 Summer and Autumn, 1349 | p. 233 |
| 16 September to December, 1349 | p. 249 |
| 17 1350 | p. 263 |
| Epilogue | p. 285 |
| Illustration Credits | p. 289 |
| Notes | p. 291 |
