The Black Death Hatcher's History of the Plague

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'The Black Death,' Hatcher's Remarkable History of the Plague

By SIMON WINCHESTER | June 25, 2008

This totally absorbing book presents the best account ever written

about the worst event to have ever befallen the British Isles. In the

hands of Hatcher, an English medievalist of sober and steady

reputation who has for decades been squirreled away in one of the

smaller, older, and least obtrusive of Cambridge colleges, the

extraordinary tragedy of the great plague — which wiped out as much as

60% of the population of 14th-century Europe and killed an estimated

75 million worldwide — has been brought to life in a manner rarely

attempted, and with a level of success even more rarely achieved.

" Much of life passes unrecorded, and so is all but lost to future

generations, " Mr. Hatcher wrote in the foreword to an earlier book.

" In the flood of histories of institutions, major events and long-term

processes, life as it was lived for most of the time frequently gets

left out of the picture. " This is an essential recitation of his

method in " The Black Death " (Da Capo Press, 318 pages, $27.50) — to

draw patiently from the available documents any clues, no matter how

tiny or seemingly insignificant, as to just how life was lived at the

time by ordinary people — and so to write medieval history " from the

inside, " from the point of view of the peasant and the parson, rather

than from the traditional perspective of the prince or the panjandrum.

The technique, offered here with masterly precision and for a lay

audience, makes for a history book like very few others, and a triumph

at that.

Library shelves groan under an insupportable mass of volumes about the

dreadful flea-borne pestilence that spread across Europe in the middle

of the 14th century — the number of books being equaled only by the

scores that deal with the very similar plague that killed thousands in

London three centuries later. The Black Death, the Awful Malady, the

Vast Pestilence, the Great Mortality, the plague has been called by

many names, and is in many senses a perfect topic for the lazy

historian — the subject matter is adequately horrifying, the known

descriptions are vividly readable, the social implications are

sufficiently varied to allow for the kind of wild speculations that

make for a book publicist's dream.

None can deny that the Black Death marked a historical turning point,

and brought about social changes in Europe that were both profound and

lasting — most notably the empowerment of the poor and the collapse of

serfdom. But the accounts that have resulted in the past — and four or

five more have emerged so far this decade, so commercially attractive

is the plague to the publishing industry — all seem to tell in essence

much the same story, and in the very same way: Rumors are heard of

distant illness, fear gathers as what is clearly a terrible disaster

edges ever closer, neighbors appear with lurid tales, and then

suddenly local people become afflicted. Skins turn black, huge

swellings appear in groins and armpits, blood is spat, and horrible,

hacking death sweeps in like a rainsquall and at incredible speed,

leaving thousands to be limed and buried, while stunned communities

try desperately to recover sanity and order.

That is the Black Death as sound bite, and rare is the account that

manages to take it very much further. But Mr. Hatcher has turned his

highly specialized attentions to the minutiae of the tale, and in

doing so has come up with a book — half fact, half highly informed

speculation — that can have few rivals.

In his academic work, Mr. Hatcher has immersed himself in the

documentary details of the pestilence for the better part of four

decades, and he is all too familiar with the surprisingly abundant

archival documents — court papers, parish records, sermons, later

an surveys — that allowed him and the small corps d'elite of

medieval scholars to meditate on the circumstances and travails of the

times, and to publish occasional arcana for the amusement of,

primarily, one another.

But then Mr. Hatcher took the further, bolder step. True to

Dickinson's famous mantra " Tell all the Truth but tell it slant, " he

realized some years ago that the vast troves of yellowed documents he

had at hand would allow him, if interpreted painstakingly and

carefully, to tell the inside history of the plague that had never

been written — to create, from published sources, a series of dramatic

tableaux that would give a cinematic quality to what had hitherto been

dry, or vague, or a matter of baseless speculation.

He had simply to choose a location, pepper it with carefully

delineated people — priests, noblemen, justices, and, most important,

believable ordinary folk, who would become victims or survivors of the

onrushing disease — and create what he would dare to call (to the

possible chagrin of his more severely unforgiving peers) a literary

docudrama.

He chose accordingly a village in Suffolk, in East Anglia, a

church-on-a-crossroads settlement named Walsham, a community with two

manor houses, halfway between Cambridge and the sea, which in 1345, at

the beginning of the story, had a population of a little more than a

thousand. By 1349, when the final convulsions of the plague were over,

fewer than five hundred remained.

In fine, absorbing detail, Mr. Hatcher tells the story month by month,

year by year. Each chapter opens with a rubric outlining what is

definitively known, and follows with a mélange of astonishingly

detailed but imagined reconstruction of what happened to the people of

this typical English village. His writing manages by its simple

economy to be so vivid that one feels quite acutely the leaden press

of the calamity: One wants to weep for the passing of the men and

women who fell victim, to rejoice for the courage and luck of those

who survived, and to give thanks that the community itself managed

somehow to hang on, and recover.

As recover it did — as did all of England, eventually. Walsham

survived what seemed the unsurvivable, and grew back to its former

size and strength. Seven centuries later, it is once again a pretty

little village, with one church and two manors, a nice pub, a batik

instructor, kickboxing classes, a flourishing soccer club that sports

its own Web site, and 32 gardens that are open to the public in summer

on purchase of a five-pound pass.

But more than the merely physical weathered the calamity. Historians

have long posited a bewildering array of consequences of the plague.

The reduced population made the peasantry more valuable as workers,

made them aware of their value, gave them muscle in the market, and

gave rise to social mobility. Language changed as people moved across

the land, and dialect was diluted. More land became available. Food

supplies increased. The failure of the church to offer good reason for

the pestilence weakened its hold, giving new power to skepticism and

secularism.

And the makings of the England that these changes helped fashion —

today's democratic, capitalist, and more-or-less secular England — are

all on view in the village that for the last two centuries has called

itself Walsham-le-Willows, a lovely new name for a community that once

went through a terrible time, and emerged all the better for it.

Mr. Winchester is the author of " The Professor and the Madman, "

" Krakatoa: The Day The World Exploded, " and " A Crack in the Edge of

the World. " His latest book is " The Man Who Loved China. "

http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-black-death-john-hatchers-remarkable-history/80591