The Black Death A personal history

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

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

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.