Children’s Fate
How can a mother just stand by when her daughter is being cozened into sin?
It’s 1360, eleven years since the Black Death devastated all of England, and six years since Emma Ward fled Meonbridge with her children, to find a more prosperous life in Winchester. Long satisfied that she’d made the right decision, Emma is now terrified that she was wrong. For she’s convinced her daughter Bea is in grave danger, being exploited by her scheming and immoral mistress.
Bea herself is confused: fearful and ashamed of her sudden descent into sin, but also thrilled by her wealthy and attentive client.
When Emma resolves to rescue Bea from ruin and tricks her into returning to Meonbridge, Bea doesn’t at first suspect her mother’s motives. She is happy to renew her former friendships but, yearning for her rich lover, Bea soon absconds back to the city. Yet, only months later, plague is stalking Winchester again and, in terror, Bea flees once more to Meonbridge.
But, this time, she finds herself unwelcome, and fear, hostility and hatred threaten…
Terror, betrayal and deceit, but also love and courage, in a time of continuing change and challenge – Children’s Fate, the fourth MEONBRIDGE CHRONICLE.
Children’s Fate, like all the MEONBRIDGE 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 River Meon, just as a number of existing Meon Valley villages do, and is loosely modelled on one or two 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 latter part of the book hinges upon the arrival of the second wave of plague in England, in 1361. This occurrence of the disease was thought of as the “Children’s Plague”, because apparently large numbers of the victims were children and young men. The reason for this is not clear, but one explanation might be that, as the children weren’t born at the time of the previous outbreak (the “Black Death” of 1348-9), they didn’t have the immunity their parents might have acquired having lived through it and survived.
At the time, people had some curious (to us) notions about the causes of the disease, which I’ve tried to reflect in the book. In the 14th century, death was everyday – illnesses were mostly incurable, accidents commonplace, life generally subject to all manner of risk. Medieval people were “fatalists”, or rather they ascribed every disaster – 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. In the novel, I have the priests reading out a letter from their archbishop, ordering urgent prayers and processions to avert the plague. The words I’ve used for the letter come from one actually sent out by the Bishop of Winchester in 1348, when the earlier plague threatened. I suspect that a similar letter would have been sent in 1361.
I’ve often thought many people must have wondered which of their sins could be so dreadful that God would want to punish them, and especially their children, so cruelly…
One explanation for God’s especial anger, found in the bishop’s letter, was, apparently, mankind’s shocking “sensuality” – sexual immorality. “Outlandish”, fashionable clothing was cited as an example of that immorality, even though fashion was presumably the province of the rich rather than peasants. It does seem rather odd that fashion was held responsible for the coming of the plague. Or even that immorality should take the blame. But the coming of the plague was perhaps an excellent pretext for the Church to censure the masses for their bad behaviour. But I wonder to what extent the average Englishman or woman believed it? How I’d love to know…
But there were scientific explanations too. Complicated notions about the movements of the planets were one set of theories. And, also, ideas that miasma, or foul air, was the cause. Foul air was generally thought to be a cause of disease, and plague was no different.
When I was still writing Children’s Fate (in 2020), the world was plunged into chaos by the arrival of the coronavirus COVID-19. It was pretty 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 the coronavirus spread, apparently so fast and so easily, was frightening enough for us. But doctors and scientists in 2020 did at least know what coronavirus was (they understood the nature of viruses), how it spread (for example, coughing), had some idea of how to mitigate it (for example, isolation), and had a way of testing for the disease and worked to find a vaccination.
But, if medieval people had some notions of the “what” of the disease (even if they were wrong), the “how” must surely 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 on the isolation premise, being a collection of stories told by a group of young men and women who fled Florence to a secluded villa in order 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).
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” *. So close contact with a victim was to be avoided, though some apparently carried it to extremes by abandoning their relatives, and even their children, in order to save themselves.
The good doctor also mentioned the value of hand-washing, with water and vinegar, “oft times in the day” *. Touch, then, was to be avoided, though another physician posited that even looking into a plague victim’s eyes was risky, on the grounds that plague could be transmitted via the “airy spirit leaving the eyes of the sick man” *. Surely, too, a victim’s “foul air” – breathing, coughing – should be shunned. The “plague doctor” bird beak masks of later centuries hadn’t yet been invented, but I can imagine those who attended victims might well have covered their nose and mouth.
What they didn’t know about in the 14th century 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 body 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.
Of course, doctors really didn’t know how to treat the disease, though some undoubtedly thought they did. 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 surgeon lancing the buboes, a practice that wasn’t necessarily carried out in the 14th century, but was a couple of centuries later. However, I suspect eager surgeons might well have tried all sorts of methods in a bid to save their patients.
Even in the Middle Ages, catching plague wasn’t inevitably a death sentence. Some people, albeit only a few, clearly did survive it – even people who’d been close to, or even nursed, victims.
Plague left England in December 1361, though it was still in Scotland. In Hampshire, I think it would have passed on by the autumn. By Christmas, people were presumably beginning to think the time had come at last when they could move on from horror and disaster.
But, two weeks later, on 15th January 1362, came yet another cataclysm: the Saint Maurus’ Day storm, a wind – the “Great Wind” – one of the most violent extra-tropical storms ever to hit the British Isles and northern Europe. It was so strong that it toppled church spires, destroyed houses and mills, and caused huge damage to farms and forests across the south of England.
A chronicler of the time said it was “as if the Day of Judgement were at hand… no one knew where he could safely hide, for church towers, windmills, and many dwelling-houses collapsed to the ground”.
The storm was in fact much more damaging in the Low Countries, where the event was called Grote Mandrenke, the “Great Drowning of Men”. Storm surges caused sea floods that washed away towns and villages, leaving tens of thousands dead.
But, following on from months of plague, one can perhaps appreciate why some people might well have thought the end of the world had finally come.
* 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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Carolyn Hughes
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