This intimate history of the Black Death is focused on the village of Walsham le Willows in West Suffolk…Walsham was chosen for a number of reasons for this experiment in combining history and fiction.
In the opening paragraph of the book’s Introduction section, the author provides some very important and essential information that is necessary to understand before embarking up the narrative per se. These two lines provide the most imperative facts. One, this is not a text that attempts in any way to examine a plague which devastated an entire continent from a continental perspective, but rather narrows things down to a very specific microcosm. The second thing, of course, is that the work is a straightforwardly presented as a commingling of factual information with fictional scrutiny.
The thousands of ordinary parish priests who ministered to their flocks in fourteenth-century England have left scarcely a trace of their lives in surviving records….Master John, who is the central character in this book, has had to be entirely invented because the priests of Walsham were appointed by Ixworth priory rather than the bishop of Northwich, and not even their names have survived.
The facts of the setting have been settled. And now the fictional construct to facilitate a more efficient and truth-like tone is identified. Master John is, indeed, what should be termed the protagonist of this story were it a novel, but it is not really a novel. On the other hand, it is also not entirely an academic work of historical research. The book is hardly unique in blurring fiction and fact, but does stand in the minority for being quite open about it. And since, as the author point out, authentic historical records that might have filled in the gaps of the research are non-existent, very little is lost while much is gained as a result of the author taking this unusual approach.
The priest was unable to explain quite what a plenary indulgence meant, but Master John said that each pilgrim would receive the full divine remission of the penance due on all the sins they had committed in their life. The pope, Master John said, was able to do this because held the keys to a vast treasury, in which was stored the merit accumulated by Christ, the Virgin Mary, and all the saints, martyrs and other exceptionally good folk during their lifetime that was in excess of the quantity needed for their own salvation.
Here is a perfect example of the author’s decision to create a fictional composite figure assists in understanding some of the greater complexities associated with the plague that are not even related to the plague itself. In addition to already enjoying the status of essentially being the final word of the law throughout Europe, the Catholic Church found itself standing for something just as significant, but entirely new when the plague hit: scapegoat. It was generally accepted by nearly everyone in European Christendom that the Black Death was a pestilence delivered by God as some kind of message to human beings and if the Church was the mediator between man and God, then shouldn’t church leaders said to enjoy a personal relationship with God have something to say—if not necessarily do—about the situation? The political and economic complications of the Church at the time of Black Death certainly contributed to the rise of Protestantism and the split with the Vatican by large chunks of the population hit hardest by the plague.
Since time out of mind, the village and the manor had been run according to custom and precedent. What had always been was the prime means of deciding what should be…but in the new world custom was proving irksome and restrictive.
Or, in other words, the effects of the Black Death was a wholesale change in the existing superstructure of the economic system. Entire families who claimed ownership to existing land and property were gone forever. There was more work to be done than ever before and fewer qualified and capable laborers available to get it done which meant wages skyrocketed and power shifted dramatically. The stranglehold over the poor which the wealthy had enjoyed a matter of birthright collapsed and, as the author observes, the peasants who had traditionally “been resolute in defending customs when lords and ladies were threatening to breach it and increase their burders” now found themselves on the other side while it was the lords and ladies who were now suddenly stuck holding the fuzzy end of the lollipop. Marx was right: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” and sometimes that class struggle just needs a nice plague to wipe out a third or so of the power elite.
