The Black Death: A Personal History

by John Hatcher and HATCHER John

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0306815710
• ISBN13: 9780306815713
• Release Date: June 2008
• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Length: 318 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

plodding

The book has the information of the plague but the included fiction does not make the book flow as intended. The author however state he added fiction to increase readability but...

When God thunders, "I'll show YOU!"

"Surely He shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence ... He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under His wings shalt thou trust: His truth shall be thy sword and buckler ... Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day ... Nor for the pestilence that walketh in the darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday ... A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come on nigh thee." - From Psalm 91, the comfort of Master John, as quoted in THE BLACK DEATH With THE BLACK DEATH, author John Hatcher has made an intelligent and clever approach at describing what it was perhaps like for the Average John Q Citizen to experience the pandemic outbreak of the Black Death, the "plague" caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which came out of Central Asia and peaked in Europe in 1348-50, wiping out 30-60% of the population. In the Preface, Hatcher explains the conundrum he faced. While he didn't want to compose yet another historical survey of the plague's progress across Europe - so many of such already exist - he also didn't want to create a completely fictional historical novel. Rather, to pen a narrative of the common man's personal experience with the disease - about which encounter there's virtually no contemporary description - John went to the public records as a starting point. In this case, they were the manorial court and accounts roles of the village of Walsham le Willows in west Suffolk, England, which are notably complete for the years in question. From these documents, the author populates the Walsham of his "docudrama" with people that really lived and engaged in the routine (and faithfully recorded) activities of life - marriages, births, deaths, petty crimes, personal legal squabbles, local elections, manorial court sessions, crop harvest yields, goods' prices, etc. - to thus paint a picture of the community's environment from 1345 to 1350, i.e. before, during, and after the Black Death struck in the Spring of 1349. Fictional dialogue between the characters, otherwise kept to a minimum, is inserted to flesh out the narrative and is based on reasonable supposition and what is known of the customs of the time. Walsham's records have one glaring omission; there is nowhere recorded the name of the village priest. Out of necessity, then, Hatcher introduces his only completely fictional character, John Bradfield ("Master John"), God's shepherd for the parish of St. Mary's Church. As envisioned by the author, John is a learned, compassionate, honest, unworldly, wise, and pious cleric who assiduously cares for the spiritual well-being of his flock to the point, during the worst of the plague, of exhaustion; he becomes the hero of the piece. In that respect, the Walsham of THE BLACK DEATH was lucky indeed. For those readers living in a western society where the various levels of government refrain from sponso