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Children’s Fate, like the first three CHRONICLES, is a work of fiction. The characters come entirely from my imagination. The principal location, Meonbridge, is a fictitious village and manor, but imagined as lying alongside the real River Meon in Hampshire, just as a number of existing Meon Valley villages do, and it is loosely modelled on one or two of them.
Yet, the story of Children’s Fate is underpinned by “history”, events that really happened when and as they appear in the novel.
The principal “event”, upon which the latter part of the novel hinges, is the arrival of another outbreak of the plague in England, in the spring and summer of 1361. This occurrence of the disease was thought of as the “Children’s Plague”, because a disproportionately large number of the victims were children. The reason for this is not clear, though one explanation might be that, as the children weren’t born at the time of the previous outbreak (what we call the “Black Death”, in 1348-9), they didn’t have the immunity their parents might have acquired having lived through it and survived.
If you happen to have read Fortune’s Wheel, the first MEONBRIDGE CHRONICLE, you’ll know that the novel series begins in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death, which killed up to half of people not only in England but across a huge swathe of the world from the far east to northern Europe. The next two chronicles, A Woman’s Lot and De Bohun’s Destiny, are set in plague-free years. But, for this fourth book, I had to think about plague again.
This has been a somewhat tricky book to write. For various purely “authorly” reasons, I was already grappling a bit with the storyline I’d created. I wasn’t quite sure that it was working, even though I really liked it… But then COVID-19 came into our lives and my writing world turned upside down… Well, no, that’s an exaggeration. But it was definitely disturbed… I wasn’t of course the only writer to suffer such disturbance during those difficult months, but my particular distraction was caused by what I was writing about: The Black Death… plague… pandemic! It was rather unsettling to be writing about a pandemic, when our world was in the midst of one, but it gave me food for thought, comparing the two events.
The way that, in the first half of 2020, the coronavirus spread apparently so easily, and occasionally with such deadly effect, was frightening enough. But our doctors did at least know what coronavirus was (they understood the nature of viruses), how it spread (e.g. through coughing), had some idea of how to mitigate it (e.g. isolation) and what sort of treatment might work, developed a way of testing for the disease and began work to find a vaccine.
But imagine that you had no idea what the disease actually was, or how it spread?
In the middle of the 14th century, people had some curious (to us) notions about the causes of disease. Death was everyday – illnesses were mostly incurable, accidents commonplace, life generally subject to all manner of risk. Medieval people invariably ascribed every disaster, be it the loss of a child, dead cows, a bad harvest, or the failure of the butter to churn, either to God’s will or the Devil’s work.
If a particular disaster was considered to be God’s will, then it might follow that the reason for his anger was man’s sin, and the disaster was His punishment. This was what priests told their congregations. It does seem rather odd that immorality was held responsible for the coming of a plague. But perhaps the apocalyptic nature of it provided a good pretext for the Church to censure the masses for their sinful ways. But I wonder to what extent the average Englishman or woman believed them? How I’d love to know…
There were scientific explanations too, promulgated by learned academics, such as complicated notions about the movements of the planets, and theories about miasma, or foul air. Foul air was thought to be a cause of disease in general, and plague was no different.
But, if medieval people had some notions of the “what” of the disease (even if they were wrong), I imagine that the “how” must have been trickier to understand.
People did understand the value of isolation as a way of avoiding plague although, practically and logistically, running away can’t have been easy or even feasible for most. Boccaccio’s Decameron (completed in 1353) is based upon the isolation premise, being a collection of stories told by a group of young men and women who flee Florence to a secluded villa to escape the 1348 Black Death. And Eyam in Derbyshire is famous for going into “lock-down” in 1665, after plague invaded the village (apparently from fleas in a bolt of cloth). The plan was to prevent the disease spreading beyond the village, but a large proportion of Eyam’s population did lose their lives to plague.
So keeping oneself to oneself was certainly understood: the value of social distancing, as we now call it, was recognised. A 14th century French physician, Jean Jacmé, wrote in a treatise on the plague: ‘In pestilence time nobody should stand in a great press of people because some man among them may be infected’*.
The good doctor also mentioned the value of hand-washing ‘oft times in the day’*, though with water and vinegar, rather than with soap.
Touch was clearly to be avoided, though another physician posited that looking into a plague victim’s eyes was also risky, on the grounds that plague could be transmitted via the “airy spirit leaving the eyes of the sick man”*, which does seem rather curious.
But, something again more familiar is avoiding a victim’s “foul air” – breathing, coughing. Doctor Jacmé recommended avoiding foul smells in general: ‘…every foul stench is to be eschewed, of stable, stinking fields, ways or streets…’* The “plague doctor” bird beak masks of later centuries hadn’t yet been invented, but I can imagine that those who attended victims might well have covered their nose and mouth, albeit just with a rag, or perhaps more elaborately with a bag full of protective and sweet-smelling herbs.
What medieval people didn’t seem to know about was the role of rats and fleas, which have long been implicated in the spread of the plague. Though some scientists think the speed of spread was, in practice, too rapid and too far for transmission by rat flea alone to be viable. Others have it that the rat fleas jumped host to people, and then human fleas and lice were infected, making it much easier for rapid people-to-people transmission. But the situation is unclear. The World Health Organisation says, ‘human to human transmission of bubonic plague is rare’. Yet, the 1361 outbreak was in the summer months, in which bubonic, as opposed to pneumonic plague, was more common. Whichever it was, it spread very quickly, and was undoubtedly hideous and terrifying.
But, if doctors had some ideas of how the disease arose, and even how to avoid it, they had little notion about how to treat it. Some would probably have tried their favourite cure-all, blood-letting, or applied a variety of substances to the suffering body, from herbs and vinegar, to urine and excrement, none of which were beneficial. In the novel, I have the barber-surgeon lancing buboes, a practice that wasn’t necessarily carried out in the 14th century, but was a couple of centuries later. But I can imagine some more eager surgeons might have tried an uncommon method if it might save their patients.
Horrific as it undoubtedly was, catching plague in the 14th century wasn’t inevitably a death sentence, for some people evidently did survive – even people who had been close to, or even nursed, victims – though of course vast numbers didn’t. Terrible as COVID-19 is, the huge numbers who died of the Black Death, as a proportion of the entire population, are very hard to even imagine.
Of course our understanding of pandemic and that of 14th century people are undoubtedly very different, as I’ve already shown. But I have found it fascinating to discover also how very similar in many ways were 14th century reactions to disease and what people did to counter it, compared to ours.
Perhaps you’d enjoy a fictional visit to that long ago experience through the pages of Children’s Fate. Do give it a try!
Carolyn Hughes
* Quotes are from The Black Death, translated and edited by Rosemary Horrox. If you’d like to read more about plague in the 14th century, I really do recommend it, for it has a wealth of fascinating detail, and uses contemporary texts to reveal the thinking of the time.
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